for that day

I have had a garden here for about a month now, but now, finally, I've actually got something growing in it!! The two gardeners gave us some plants and their expertise!! These are little bok choi plants with these cute little tents made from leaves to provide them shelter from the devastatingly hot sun! The fence is to stop the chooks from indulging in my little plants.

But that's not the point of my blog today. Last night we went to youth group because the youth had put on a culture night. They had split into groups to present dance and costumes (and quirky facts) about other 16 different cultures. I was amazed at how much they could do with the little they had. It really was a dessert for the vision - a Japanese lady, walking sedately, fanning herself accompanied by a ninja! A Maori woman doing a poi dance with a warrior doing the haka (as a kiwi this was very fun to watch!). Dancers from Tonga, Papua New Guinea, Kiribati, Fiji, Vanuatu, all clothed in various types of grass skirts or flowing gowns, but all showing their unique differences. A tea-towel headed Saudi Arabian man with his completely shrouded wife. A Kenyan woman, tall, brightly coloured, with all the regal splendor that comes with a African nations. The rappers from the USA and the giggling girl in jeans. It was amazing seeing how these Solomon Island youth from our church transformed themselves to dress and dance like other cultures.

There were two things that really struck me that night, apart from the wonderful performance.

After each pair from the different cultures came in, they showed a few slides with information about the flag, the population/language/currency, what the country is famous for, what their religions are and what their prayer needs are. What a novel thought! Praying for a country. Can't say I'd really thought about that before. I mean, not just prayed for the persecuted people in a country, but prayed, about a problem in a country. Anyway, the thing that struck me is this. That of the sixteen nations that were represented, most of them (apart from Saudi Arabia and Japan, I think) had high percentages of "Christianity". Solomon Islands was 97%. Other Pacific Islands had similarly high percentages. USA was 70 something, NZ 40 something percent. Now I don't know where they got the numbers from and it's obvious that none of them are accurate. You can't look at how many people tick "Christian" on a poll and say, well that's the percentage of Christians. I mean, why would I be in the Solomon Islands if 97% of the people were faithful, God-fearing Christians?!! In addition I highly doubt if NZ even has 20% of people who are faithful to God.

One of the locals had told me that a New Zealander had told her recently that NZ is predominantly Christian. Well, you've got to be pretty blind to think that's true! We might have some kind of lose Christian historic heritage, we might have public holidays on Easter and Christmas, but you ask anyone on the street (let alone look at their lives) and you can bet on the dirt underneath your boots (not that we bet...), they won't be living a life that honours Jesus as their Master. The closest they may ever have come God is going into a remodelled church building that has become a classy cafe,

My point is that it just struck me how easily we accept those stats, or how easily we think, I live in a Christian country when there are so many people blindly walking to an eternal fate of damnation! I think those statistics lull us into thinking that the problem is not that bad. Anyone would believe the world is predominately Christian and yet it is painfully obvious that this is not so. Maybe it's one of Satan's tactics to make us lazy. There's no work to be done - everyone's already a Christian! Little do we know...

Secondly, and more hopefully, at the end of the individual country displays, each of the representatives of the cultures came on stage and dramatised a song about how one day on that day, when Jesus returns, people of every culture and race will gather together praising their King. What an inspiring message that was - seeing those people dressed as Tongans and Africans and Indians and Arabs and Asians joined in a dance depicting the way we will all bow down in praise and adoration of our King. (It also reminded me of how deluded we can be to think that most of the Church today is white... I can't remember the facts, but I think there are more Asian Christians than white ones!) Oh what a glorious day that will be, when our cultural differences don't separate us because we will truly be one people of God. It made me long for heaven, again, and filled me with joy at the prospect of bowing before God, in utter, sheer amazement, together with everyone else in God's kingdom, of different colour or culture, but now to find our unity in the Kingdom of God. Will every country be represented on that day? will every city in every country be represented? Will every family be represented in that city on that day? Lord of harvest send forth reapers!

This week I read that Martin Luther had only two days on his calender. Today and that day. "I want to live today for that day".

plated hair and malaria

This is going to be a random blog - one which outlines some more of the random normal things that have happened lately. As I write, Laki is whining, so I whine back, trying to communicate to him to be quiet. I told him no one else is going to come to his pity party. But he doesn't seem to get the point!! He also doesn't understand the phrase "be quiet".

Anyway. A lot of the locals around here have been getting their hair plaited recently. It looks pretty sweet and I'm sure it's a lot cooler for them. They do it really quickly, which I was surprised at considering how curly their hair is! Anyway, Jair wanted to give it a go...

I think it looks pretty cool! So he sported that look for a few days, before it got fuzzy!

We went out for a day trip with Machi and a local Occupational Therapist to visit a school out in the bush. The road there was 4wd driving quality, so Jair was pretty stoked, sliding and skidding around in the ute on the mud. Thanks, once again, to the National Diaconnate Committee whose donation made it possible to help purchase a hardy Toyota Hilux!

Our mate Michael goes fishing as his favourite pastime, so he gave us a fish which we cooked. I've only dealt with fillets before so cooking a whole fish was news to me... But boy did it taste delicious!! I think I feel another episode of "Dinner at the Duinkerke's" coming up.

We had another crab visitor. While cooking the fish, I spied Laki sniffing curiously by the generator shed. He was checking out this whopping big crab (the other one disappeared... or maybe grew up). So I dutifully took a photo. No doubt someone would have found it by now and picked it up and cooked it and gobbled it up. Crab is a delicacy here!

I'd like to introduce you to two handy kitchen tools. That's right, the mortar and pestle, for crushing biscuits for my apricot fudge slice (mmmmm....). You can't really go wrong with a tomato sauce bottle (except for the hollow in the centre underneath - the crumbs kind of skirted inside and didn't get crumbed very quickly...) and the plastic container (from which rained out a large amount of crumbs). But the slice was good.

On Saturday, Jair took a roof panel off and replaced it with "plastic copper" - a sheet of corrugated clearlite. So now, we don't have a dark dismal lounge but a nice bright one. It rained on Sunday and the new roof piece didn't even leak. Good job Jair!

They even celebrate ANZAC day here, well, not with a public holiday. But a whole lot of Ausie and NZers (and interested Solomon Islanders) gather around the cenitaph for the dawn service. AUSAID funds the bacon and egg breakfast afterwards so we made sure we didn't miss out on that! First time we've had bacon for months!

After that, I felt awfully sick. I just thought it was because I was tired from the early morning for the dawn service. Achy. Fever. No appetite. Felt like spewing. Or fainting! Well, Monday morning I went to get my blood checked.... and I've got Malaria. Kevin shook my hand and said, "Congratulations! You're now officially a missionary here in the Solomon Islands!" ;)

Su'u: part tu'u

The second part of our adventures at Su'u at Easter weekend (which now, admittedly, was a long time ago) will take a different angle than our first. You see, there were alot of things we thought about and observed at SWIM, but then there was the actual experience of being thrown into the world outside Honiara, the capital of the Solomon Islands. So this is the story, how we felt it.

We woke up very early on Good Friday to go to the wharf and catch a ship. You must understand that it was only on the Tuesday that we actually firmly decided to go, so it was still all a bit new. We certainly didn't know quite what to expect. We did have breakfast, but it's hard to eat quantity at 4am! So anyway, we jumped on the ship (an ex NZ catamaran) and got to Su'u school at about 10:30am. When the whole group and all the materials for the tiling job had arrived, we had some "tea" with "biscuits". I learnt that biscuits are actually hard navy crackers, and to make them palatable, you've got to let them bathe in your tea so that you can bite and chew them. I think this is a fairly common Solomon Island breakfast. We were under the (wrong) impression that it was morning tea. Ahh, we had so much to learn...

Then the leader said, "well, we won't have time for lunch today; so we'll meet back at dinner." Well, this got me worried. I mean, what about afternoon tea? Let alone lunch! So we tried to eat as much 'biscuits" as we could and prepared ourselves for the long haul. That first day was quite hard. Not only was Su'u run down, nobody explained things like how to get water (it didn't come out of the tap - I don't think it occurred to them that this was new to us, that we come from a place where water always comes out of a tap), where to shower, go to the toilet, when food would be, how to shower, what to do. We thought there'd be tonnes of work and so I (Lauretta writing) felt bad for napping in the afternoon, but then, most people were...

Around "dinner time" we were starving, but we first had to do a play practice... but the women had already eaten. Well, in our western eyes it seemed so rude! Eventually we ate our dinner but there was no prayer, no sense of fellowship and being together while enjoying food. You just get your massive plate of rice and eat. It's part of Solomon Island culture that you eat at dinner and talk afterwards; but we realised our culture was different - dinner was a time when you talked and ate simultaneously!! So it opened our eyes to our culture and theirs.

After dinner eventually (everything takes a while), we went to the main dining hall, they had a bit of a Good Friday service with the students. Jair got an instant migraine because he was a bit dehydrated. The group we were with performed their easter play. More singing. More speeches. I started getting just a tad restless and tired! I mean, it was coming on 10:30 and the principal was still going full speed ahead! After it finished, we dragged our feet to bed and collapsed on our thin mattresses, looking up at the gigantic hole in the ceiling, hoping that the rats wouldn't come through in swarms, listening to the laughter and talking of the Solomon Islanders sharing the house with us.

Saturday didn't start much better. We were (rudely) awoken at 5:45am with the beating of the drum to tell the students to wake up. Well, after that there was a series of drums at different intervals. We didn't get out until 7ish and had our breakfast of "tea" and "biscuits". There weren't really any jobs for the women, apart from preparing food, but there were plenty of women. It all kind of came crashing in. We felt so out of place - everything was different. The eating patterns were different, the daily schedule was different - wake up early, nap in the afternoon, stay up late. Water and electricity were intermittent and you never quite knew when it would be on. Lunch and Dinner were always rice with noodles, taio (tuna) and slippery cabbage on top. Every meal was the same. Despite this being a country where fruit and vegies grow well, they didn't use that many fruit and vegies. So on Saturday morning, we were pretty lonely and culture shocked and sad and disappointed, missing our home and our people and our way of doing things. One lady said to me, "oh, you're probably finding this difficult, aren't you?" I couldn't have said it better.

I was almost hoping that a ship would be going back to the relative civilisation of Honiara!

But....

then we started talking to people, finding out about their lives, sharing ourselves with them, learning about their families, their experiences, their difficulties, appreciating their efforts. We spent more time with people, relaxing and working and we started appreciating them for who they are and their culture for what it is.

On Saturday morning, Jair was hard at work with the tiling and I went with a bunch of other youth to buy some chickens for the Saturday Feast that they do at Easter.

The chicken train...

So we went "wokabaot" to a village nearby. They instructed me that I was walking too fast; that I had to do the Solomon walk, slow, relaxed, gentle strolling. The scenery was so beautiful, walking close to the sea, through the jungle.

Five chickens soberly waiting in line to attain the same fate as the one at the back

In the afternoon I watched and talked to the women as they prepared the food in a motu. A motu is kind of like a hangi except that it's above ground. They light a fire and then let it die out a bit (I think) and then put rocks on it, then layers of banana leaf, then all the food, often wrapped in banana leaf, then they put another layer of banana leaf on top with bits of wood to hold it down. And it just cooks. In the end, when we ate it at the feast, it tasted great (although it can be a bit dry). The tables were laid with these dark red leaves. It was really quite festive.

Saturday night feast

Sunday we had two church services. It really poured down with rain while we were in there. We walked to the river on Sunday but it was too dirty to swim in because of the rain. Monday we played sports. Jair joined the boys playing soccor and I joined the girls playing netball. Many Solomon Islanders are short, so I had a bit of an advantage with my height.

Even netball is different here

Even the netball is different. No concrete court. We played on grass, with etchings of dirt to mark the boundaries! Before we went to Su'u everyone told us that the river was so nice to swim in, but every day so far it had rained so it was dirty. Well, on Monday, after netball, we went down and swum in the river. It was beautiful! Clean, fast flowing but still shallow. You swim against the current and it's like going on a breast stroke treadmill! In the late afternoon I went for another swim (and everyone said I was so strong, to be able to go for two swims a day... I still don't know what they meant...). The word "swim" in pijin usually means washing yourself (I wonder what people think we do at SWIM?!?), so I had two baths that day. I must say, there's nothing better than lathering yourself up, washing your hair and then sitting on a rock, leaning back and letting the water run over you. So refreshing. We had a "Solomon walk" back home as the sun set on the sea behind us.

Tuesday morning we were up even earlier than Friday - 3am this time. It was dark when we got to the wharf and I reveled in the still, calm night sky. Other people slept on the way over, but to me, what's the point in getting up at 3am and not staying awake to see the sun come up. It was just exhilarating. This photo only captures a slice of the beautiful colours rolling through the sky. I think this photo nicely finishes off our adventures - in the end, even in the middle, we had a great time. We may have had a bumpy start but we adjusted and learnt to appreciate these beautiful people of God!

This was worth waking up early for...

So Su'u

It's difficult to describe our experiences at Su'u school in just one short blog. What should we say? Do we talk about the purpose of the institute? The sobering message white missionaries can take from the history of Su'u? Do we write factually about what we did there? or how we felt when we were there? And how do we do all of this without boring you, our audience? I'm not at all sure, but I think I'll have to do this in two parts - part one: Su'u school.

Su'u school has been running for quite a few decades now. It is a Christian boarding school for boys and girls and is also a National Secondary School in the Solomon Islands (there aren't very many). It is near the coast on the island of Malaita. At the moment there are just under 300 students there but at its peak there were close to 700 (apparantly). Fees are comparatively high, so its privilege to attend as long as it is affordable for you.

Originally, there were many white teachers at Su'u who came over as missionaries to teach. It was founded by kiwis back in the 60s. Discipline was strong. The site was well managed. The "old boys" who were there in that time look back with fond memories. Among this group of early students are some important people in this nation - politicians, doctors, businessmen, university lecturers. Many people have gone through Su'u school and have gone on to make a big impact in their nation.

I think anyone would be saddened to see Su'u now, but this sadness must be acute for the people who spent their lives setting it up and those who first went through. We were sad to see the state of Su'u. Most of the buildings are dilapidated and decrepit. Many will certainly fall down in the next few years. The roofs are so dirty and rusty that people get sick drinking the rain water that is caught in rat infested gutters. The fields, once filled with cows, chickens, vegetables, fruit trees, now lie dormant, filled with grass so high you can't walk through.

The water system is lacking, with only running water 2-3 hours twice a day. Your can imagine the state of the bathrooms when the water hasn't been flowing for a few hours!

We managed to locate a reliable and clean flushing toilet at Su'u (I think this is a secret - it's only for staff but we snuck in and used it...). Horticulture at Su'u means trees growing in the gutter. Machinery breaks and is left to rust. Rats scurry through the houses and through the fields. The ablution blocks are septic - algae growing on whatever that liquid was on the ground. Squat toilets are overflowing. The wood is rotting on buildings that are still used. The chronic electrical system that has already claimed one life.

So this is Su'u. It's certainly sobering to think that at one stage it was a paradise, a hive of activity (they actually had bees and sold the honey as income), clean neat paths, maintained buildings, students involved in growing their own vegies. It certainly begs the question, how did it get like this? Why did it decline? How can we make sure that things we do as missionaries, ex-pats, don't fall to waste? I think the answers are long term answers. We're too young and inexperienced as missionaries to hazard good sound solutions. Then again, as someone once said, everything is bright at the beginning of the project. It's in the middle that most of life takes place and it's in the middle that it's the hardest.

So, Su'u is in the middle. In the middle of being after when it was established and whatever is in the future. What is being done in the middle?

Well, the old boy's association organises some projects, such as the purchase of the truck, or the building of the chapel (which is what we were involved in). The board, as ever, are working at improving things. Different short term mission teams come over at times to do small jobs. But it's hard to look at the place and do a small term job. Where do you start? How do you hold up the building that's falling down while you erect a new one?!

In a way, we're just keen to see what we can do to try get the tractor going so that they can cut the grass, plough the field and start growing their own vegies. The students aren't very healthy, living on rice, taio (tuna) and noodles but there is an enormous agricultural potential at Su'u. Huge untaped resources at their fingertips but they buy in 90% of their food. Aargh!

In fact, there's a lot of potential at Su'u in many avenues. But Su'u tells the story (at least we think it does) of people coming in, doing their bit and leaving. And then it's left to its own devices again. So Su'u cautions us to be wise in the way we give. Giving can hurt. You can't throw money at a problem and expect it to go away. What are the answers? We're not sure. We're only just finding out the questions.