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Monday, 13 August 2007

The sea seen through pawpaw...

Saturday 30.11.03: Sasamuqa - the trouble with traditional knowledge

Sasamuqa village

A string of hamlets

Sasamuqa village is a string of co-joined hamlets occupying the narrow strip of flat land between hill and sea. This is a large village, the houses a mix of the traditional leaf type and 'permanent' buildings of plank or fibro walls and iron roof.

The long, narrow road behind the beach is the thoroughfare that links one end of the village to the other. The traffic is pedestrian plus a single tractor that once or twice a day pulls a trailer along the road. This, supposedly, is for freight but there appears to be little of that in Sasamuqa. The trailer is more often occupied by young boys.

Beside this road, near the small hospital - at present without a doctor - is the Sasamuqa email station, a curiosity in a village far from power and telecommunications grids. Built in 2003, the station is a recent arrival and derives its power from the hospital's solar-electric panels. Email is transmitted via high-frequency radio.

I had been here before, back in 1997. Then, I came to assist with a train-the-trainer course with a local non-government development organisation, Kastom Garden Programme. Funded by the Austraian government's AusAID (Australian Agency for International Development), the programme provided training in sustainable agriculture as a means of improving nutritional health, the productivity of subsistence farms and of introducing agricultural techniques that improved soil fertility and reduced soil degradation. The programme worked through local trainers, usually women (who do most of the subsistence agriculture in the Solomons) who have standing in their communities.

The priest's house

It is early afternoon when we arrive in Sasamuqa and a small group is waiting on the beach. I had met one of the women during the 1997 visit and she is to be our go-between with the people Steve and I are to to gather information from for the books that I am to write.

Accommodation is a room in the house occupied by the United Church priest, his wife, three daughters and a young child. They live in three rooms, the remainder usually occupied by hospital staff (the hospital is supported by the church).The building is a large, rambling, U-shaped structure that wraps around a courtyard where a few shrubs grow in the sandy soil. A kitchen occupies the end room of one of the arms and the bathroom is next to it. This contains a bathtub with a shower rose, however this has not worked for quite some years and the family has resorted to the more reliable method of washing from a bucket while standing in the bathtub. The process is simple - pour water over yourself, soap-up, then wash it off by upending the bucket. What comes as a shock is the coldness of the water - it's such a contrast to the heat of the day - but you soon get used to it. After sundown, a kerosene lamp provides the only light in the bathroom. The other rooms are equipped with electric lights powered by the hospital's solar-electric array.

The priest's house is an old fibro and iron building surrounded by a vegetable garden

I take my kit into a room at the end of the verandah on the seaward side. It is fitted out with the basics - a bed, a cupboard built into a wall, a chest of drawers, a cane chair and two large, louvred windows covered by once-white, filmy curtains with a red hibiscus flower print. A bare light bulb hangs from the ceiling. Simple, I think, and basic... all you need. The sea is visible through the pawpaw trees that grow in the household's vegetable garden and the view is to the sandy road and over the sea.

I am to spend quite a few hours in this room and soon discover that it has a couple disadvantages. First, the bed is the hardest and most uncomfortable I have ever slept on. No chance, here, of sleeping in on Sunday morning. I recall that these are religious people and wonder if the bed had been deliberately made uncomfortable to encourage the occupant to get up and go to church. My second discovery is made in the afternoon... when the sun moves around and slants through the seaward window, the already-warm room becomes extremely uncomfortable. There is no escaping the humidity... the sweat just pours off.

I open the louvres in hope of finding relief in this hot, sticky climate, but this is futile until a light sea breeze comes up late in the day. On the days this gentle breeze blows, it passes through the fronds of the coconut palms that line the shore and moves the curtains ever so gently. At this time I sit in a cane chair, feet on the window sill, trying to take advantage of this inadequate but welcome movement of air.

On a clear day you can just make out the distant, hazy peaks of Vella Lavella - or is it Treasury Island? - that protrude above the horizon. Occasionally, the silhouette of a fisherman in a hollowed-out canoe appears in the bay. There is little traffic on this sea, only the occasional motor canoe moving along the coast, but even these are rare. Nothing of larger capacity is seen. Otherwise, there is just the flatness of the sea all the way to the horizon.

The verandah around the courtyard is the coolest part of the house and serves as living and dining room to the family. It is here in the evenings that the family sometimes sing religious songs - not surprising in the home of a priest, I suppose. Their unaccompanied voices are so melodious and in such perfect harmony that there is almost something sacred in the sound alone.

The singing, the shared family meal on the verandah, the slow pace, the simplicity of the house, the weekly cycle of life that revolves around the food garden, the community, the church... it calls up images of what I imagine to be times past in my own country, but this may only be imagination, not reality. It is so different, I think... so different to life in our cities... yet people here are happy with living at this materially basic but socially sophisticated level. Am I succumbing to the romanticism that people from modern societies feel when confronted by contented people living in materially-simpler societies? No, I am sceptical of that yet, I wonder, have we lost something in our acquisitiveness?

Romanticism - a delision

Ask anyone in the cities of the modern world what images come to mind when you say 'South Pacific' and they talk of swaying palms, thatched houses, tropical fruit, the sea, the beach, surfing and an easy-going life.

These are all true but they are not the whole story. They are stereotyped images, the product of the motion picture, travel and publishing industries, but they exert a powerful hold on the imaginations of those in developed countries. The images are selective and ignore the reality of the Pacific's tawdry towns of rusting, galvanised iron buildings, its dusty streets, poor sanitation, a growing problem with waste and of isolated settlements heavily influenced by the modern world.

The imagery arose with the voyages of Captain James Cook and other navigators from England, Spain and France who first explored this region. They were perpetuated by writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson and James Melville and by the likes of French Impressionist artist, Paul Gauguan, many of whom adopted the Pacific as home. Then there were the stories brought back by traders and sailors in the earlier decades of the Twentieth Century, later, by Australian soldiers returning from the Pacific campaigns of World War Two, those for whom the beauty of the region somehow remained visible through all the horror. A popular culture informed by the movie factories of Hollywood was already painting an idealised portrait of the Pacific by the 1930s and continued to do so into the 1960s with the likes of Roger and Hammerstein's musical, South Pacific, and series like Adventures in Paradise which was broadcast on Australian television. For young people becoming aware of the world at the time, these were formative images.

Despite these selective and sometimes illusionary images, life and travel in the region can be an exercise in romanticism for adventurous individuals if they accept the distinctly unromantic elements as part of the package. I recall an American I met in Honiara who spent as much time as he could in-country, going down to Australia when he needed to top up his funds and returning as soon as he had enough. His was a simple life on the coasts, a life spent wandering... one pioneered by earlie generations of misfits and adventurers from the developed world. He liked snorkeling, he told me, and would consider marrying a local woman if she was from a coastal village that had an offshore reef suitable for diving. HIs appeared to be a good life, in part because he held no unrealistic illusions about island living and accepted its trying elements - the malarial mosquitoes, transportation difficulties, the sameness of village food and the like - as part of living there.

Day of rest

Morning... through the louvres I watch as families dressed in their best clothes make their way to church. Men and women with large, heavy-looking red or black-bound Bibles pass along the track beside the vegetable garden, talking quietly as they go. It is a pattern repeated all over the Solomons in this heavily-Christianised culture.

Sunday in the day of rest when people attend the main churches - the United and the Catholic. There are smaller congregations of Seventh Day Adventists for whom it is Saturday when religious observance takes place, and South Seas Evangelical Church. In Sasamuqa, a new United Church was being built on a hill above the village the last time I was here. It has now been completed, an imposing structure dwarfing all other buildings in the village.

Religion is serious stuff here and it is hard for people to comprehend that visitors might not belong to a particular church. A church, in the Solomons, is something that comes with birth; you are born into it just as you were in Australia, right up to the 1950s. In these islands, the clergy have an influence their Australian counterparts could only envy... not yet has modernism eaten away their credibility, science their basic tenants and corruption their public standing. The churches remain a reference point through life. Although rationalists might say that this represents nothing more than an allegiance to superstition, the influence of the church lends society and the individual a certainty now gone from modern cultures.

The priest must be a busy man because I do not see much of him, but one evening he wanders out to where I sit on the front verandah watching the light of day slowly fade.

He speaks good English and we talk about the churches in the village and the situation of the church in Australia. I explain how the mainstream churches in Australia are attracting smaller and smaller congregations.

"I think this will happen in the Solomons too," he says as he gazes seaward, as if accessing information about the future. "People are only interested in money these days".

Given the well-entrenched position of the church in Solomons society I find this hard to believe, yet I know the attractive power of modernism with its promise of money and material goods can undermine traditional societies very rapidly. The conversation is a short one and this is the last time I see the priest. The next day he will go to his bush garden and by the time he returns, Steve and I will have left.

Planning the days

Sunday evening. It is close to sunset that we are called to the dining room where food has been arranged for us. Like the room I have been allocated, this room looks over the sea through louvred windows.

We are presented with more food than we could possibly eat - large plates of sweet potato and yam, fish, boiled white rice, tomatoes and greens to choose from. It will be the same over coming days although the quantity will slowly decline to more realistic but still too-large servings.

Like me, Steve is far from home. He is a Malaitan whose home island lies in the south-east of the Solomons. His village, Takwa, is a five hour ride in the back of a truck over winding, bumpy roads that get slippery in the wet. Both of us are strangers here in the far north-east. We talk as we eat.

"I visited Takwa for a few days in 1997", I tell Steve. "We were doing some agricultural training, running a two-day workshop and staying in the old nun's house near the Catholic church at the top of the village". Steve agrees that the old nun's quarters, reportedly built of planks and galvanised iron brought in from New Zealand, is quickly crumbling.

"It was during the El Nino drought of that year and we did some information collection to identify which crops were doing well in the drier-than-normal conditions. We thought village farmers would be able to plant these varieties if drought returned.

"It took hours to travel to Takwa by motor canoe from Mana'abu village on the northern tip of Malaita", I said. "Coming around the northern extremity the canoe had to be steered carefully between the coral clumps... I think the route is only navigable at high tide. Then we were in the wide lagoon along North Malaita's eastern coast and reached Takwa just after nightfall. I remember the artificial islands that people have built out in the lagoon and the phosphorescent plankton in the sea".

Steve looks around the room. "I think this house must have been built in the 1970s", he says. I think it was quite a bit earlier. The iron roof is well rusted and the fibro aged and stained by years of weather and neglect. If I was to guess, I would place its construction well back in the 1960s, even before that. Not that it matters. It will stand here until white ants of a cyclone damages it beyond repair. This culture is not conscientious when it comes to maintenance.

Meantime, the building is home to a happy family who enliven the nights with their talk and singing.

The priest's house - the sea seen through pawpaws

Knowlege, perhaps, not so traditional

Traditional knowledge - the information held by communities and cultures about the materials in their environment and how they are used - plants, animals, food and so on - is an ideological battleground. All around the world, politically aware communities in developing countries are attempting to lock up this knowledge, fearful that corporations from the industrial world will take it and turn it to profitable use without compensating them.

This is no idle fear. Traditional knowledge has been lost in this way after being documented, often in the name of science rather than profit, by anthropologists and ethnobotanists. Traditional peoples see themselves as victims in this worldwide search for new materials and cures.

I feel sympathy for villagers who see their knowledge collected and commercialised but I balance this with the knowledge that commercialisation, especially of plants and animals of medicinal value, stands to benefit many more people. Why cannot pharmaceutical companies treat traditional knowledge as any other business input and pay the knowledge holders for its use? Why should it be a free good, a subsidy from developing country peoples to business? But even were traditional knowledge to be paid for, what guarantee is there that the funds would get back to the communities? Would not the governments keep the funds themselves? This is a complicated issue and it is into it that I have walked.

The meeting

All Monday I wait for Peter, the man whom I am to talk with about obtaining the information I have been sent here to collect for the agroforestry and pig farming handbooks. I understood that he would come by the priest's house around ten in the morning. It is early afternoon and there is still no sign of him, nor do I know where I can find him.

Steve had wandered off, something I learn is a bit of a habit. It is inconvenient because only he knows the contacts who I am to meet with. Keeping in touch is possible only when he returns to eat. It is not until lunch that I get the chance to ask him about the meeting. In the afternoon he goes off to find Peter but it is not until he returns for dinner that I learn Peter will come by tomorrow morning. A day gone in waiting.

Solomon Islanders do not follow the same clock as does the modern world. Times arranged for meetings are only indicative. It is now late on Monday afternoon and there has been no meeting or visits to agroforestry sites or to pig farmers to gather information for the handbooks. The more the meeting is put off, the less time there is to gather information and the less the prospect of finding a motor canoe to visit farmers in nearby villages.

The villagers, as does much of the country, operate on 'Solomons time', not the 'Japanese time' we of the industrial world know. Solomons time can be annoying for visitors who, for example, do not realise that ten o'clock really means sometime in the morning, perhaps. The only way to cope with Solomons time is to adopt it yourself by discarding time as measured by a clock and treating your schedule loosely.

I regret having left my book - John Simpson's News From No-Mans Land, a thickish little volume - in Honiara. All I have is a copy of Wild magazine picked up at a newsagent at Brisbane airport. This I read into the late afternoon, the stories of walking in Tasmania's cool temperate mountains seemingly a world away, as they are.

It is Tuesday morning, and, exactly at eight, Peter turns up. He explains that family business prevented his coming by yesterday. We sit on the long bench in front of the window in the dining room. Peter seems hesitant, I realise, and I get the impression that something is wrong.

He listens as I explain the purpose of the handbooks and what I would like to accomplish in my few days in Sasamuqa. He listens without interruption, then tells me that he had been given little warning of my visit. Otherwise, he explains, he would have written something for me.

"I support the handbooks in principle", Peter says in his accented English. "But information about agroforestry is traditional knowledge and I have to talk with other farmers before I can tell you".

This really is news to me. Information about agroforestry is widely available and the species used are similar wherever it is practiced in the Solomons. Whatsmore, I was already privy to traditional knowledge about the bush foods found in the forests of Choiseul, especially those of the Sasamuqa area, having participated in an earlier project to document the dying knowledge of this resource.

It soon becomes clear that there is a subtext to Peter's non-cooperation. I realise that traditional knowledge is being used as a blind for other issues in the village, issues that could perhaps affect his standing. Peter intimates as much. "This is a very political village. There is also my position as principal of an agricultural training centre that I start in January. People watch me and I have to be careful what I do".

It is clear that the doors behind which the information is kept are closing rapidly and, as far as the agroforestry information is concerned, it looks like I might leave empty-handed. This is a pity because, as a former botanist with the country's department of environment, Peter has a lot of knowledge that would be useful to trainees participating in the livelihoods programme of the aid agency that has commissioned the handbooks. I find it intriguing that local politics are allowed to stand in the way of helping young people develop livelihoods. I try to salvage the information.

"I understand your concerns about sharing the information", I tell Peter. "How about you talk to the other farmers and get their permission to share the information? I will contact you by email, now that Sasamuqa has an email station, and you can send me the information that way".

This, fortunately, is an acceptable compromise. It gives Peter time to consider the issue and produce the information while covering his back. And this is where we leave the agroforestry information, however there is still the information about pig farming that I need. That, surely, will be unproblematic.

How wrong I am.

Pigs become the issue

Wednesday. My third day here and still nothing to show for it.

Steve Amasi in the agroforest

"There is a meeting of the seed network at eleven", Steve tells me. "We can go to it. There will be two pig farmers there and they will talk to you about pig farming after. They will send someone to find me before it starts". It seems something might be salvaged from this trip apart from sweating away a few slow days in a village.

I rise early, as usual in the Solomons, and am ready to go, notebook and camera in my pack, well before the appointed hour. Eleven comes. No sign of Steve. Twelve. Still no sign. I begin to feel just a little despondent, a little frustrated, almost ready to resign myself to leaving empty handed. Steve wanders in at 12.30.

"What about the meeting?", I ask.

Steve shrugs his shoulders: "I don't know", he replies. "Nobody came to find me."

His attitude of resignation is a little disappointing.

"It is at Lucy's place. We can go there now", he says.

Lucy is a Sasamuqa woman whose husband left long ago. She lives in a traditional grass house where she has successfully brought up her three children. She cooks in the traditional way in a separate kitchen building made of palm frond.

We set off along the track behind the houses, then turn off along a narrow trail through the trees. The trail leads into a long, narrow valley that runs at a right angle to the coast. Soon we are approaching Lucy's leaf house and, just as we reach it, Peter and three men step out. These men, I learn later, are the pig farmers I was to talk with. "You missed the meeting", Peter says before walking on.

Lucy calls us in, hands us each a cup of water and tells us about the meeting. Just like agroforestry, pig farming is now considered traditional knowledge and not to be shared openly. Interesting how a seed network had suddenly grow to encompass pig farming, I think, feeling frustrated at these barriers thrown in my way. It is a conspiracy of silence, a deliberate move to prevent me obtaining any information at all, it seems.

There is definitely something political going on below the surface and it is shutting down my sources of information. I realise now that my journey to Sasamuqa will produce little of value. It is now time to move on, to get out of Sasamuqa.

We walk past the houses of her brothers and their families, past the boy's house shared by adolescent males and start to climb a muddy slope made slippery by yesterday's afternoon rain. Here, on the seaward-facing slopes, Lucy has planted a collection of Cut Nut from different provinces of the Solomons as well as mango, guava, bamboo and a range of local fruits such as the 'sandpaper' tree with its edible fruit and leaves. Much natural vegetation has been left as has the canopy of coconut palm. One of her sons has planted a grove of the valuable hardwood species, teak, the logs of which will yield income in the future. We return by way of her bush garden with its plantings of sweet potato, cassava, pineapple, banana and pawpaw that occupies steep land immediately above the house.

With a couple kitchen gardens close to her house where she grows tomato, Chinese cabbage, shallot, capsicum and slippery cabbage - the indigenous edible leaf, Hibiscus manihot - and with the bamboo chicken house nearby, Lucy has created a complete food production system for her family that is supplemented only by fish from the lagoon and the staple grain, white rice, from the Australian Riverina. Even if crops are damaged by cyclones there will still be enough food to sustain the family, especially with the carbohydrate-rich root crops of sweet potato and taro in the bush garden.

Bamboo, nuts, fruit and other species thrive in the agroforest

Clearly, not everyone in the village agrees with this 'traditional knowledge' business. Lucy's willingness to take me through her agroforest clarifies that traditional knowledge was an excuse for political business going on below the surface of village life. She confirms as much.

Long waiting for a small boat

The morning of another day. It is cool by Solomon standards and I sit in the cane chair looking to the sea. I lean back, fold my arms behind my head and put my feet on the window sill. Mixed emotions come to the surface... there is calmness at being in this place, disappointment at the way village politics has intervened in my plans to collect information and happiness that I have, after all, collected something of use and have taken photographs. With a lot of time at hand I have developed an outline for the agroforestry handbook, written quite a bit of content and drawn roughs of illustrations that Steve will refine into artwork.

I feel fortunate that I got to visit Lucy's agroforest and speak briefly with a man who is making an agroforest in the next village south - he is planting much the same range of species as Lucy. The journey has not been completely unsuccessful yet I feel uneasy about the money it has cost the project to get Steve and I here. Not to mention the hassles of actually getting to Sasamuqa given the irregularity of flights and the waiting for a motor canoe. Now in reflective mood, I console myself that set-backs and missed meetings are all part of development work and it is best to take the philosophical view that accepts such things as inevitable.

Even if you lack a schedule you know when your mission is complete, when you have done what you intended to the best of your ability, when it is time to move on. It is not a simple adding up of accomplishment or the lack of it; it is more a sudden realisation that your work is done. Now, our work at Sasamuqa is at an end and there is no point in hanging around. All Steve and I have to do is find a motor canoe ready to make the journey to Ghizo. When I see Steve at breakfast, he announces that he will go look for one. I anticipate packing and being underway early tomorrow morning.

Lunch time, and Steve comes back empty handed. Canoes, he discovers, are scarce. Again he wanders off to see what he can find one... no, the health service canoe we had come over on is not going back until next week. Neither, it seems, is any other canoe. This is typical of the vaguaries of travel between the more remote villages of the South Pacific. There are no scheduled services and travellers have to wait until someone is ready to make a voyage, then negotiate a place and a price for the journey.

A brief thunderstorm brings relief from the late-afternoon heat. Heavy rain pounds on the iron roof and cools the air. Looking through the louvres, the sea appears through a moving grey veil, grey water below grey sky. All too soon the storm passes and the humidity returns, though not quite as intense as earlier. People stroll towards their homes... nobody rushes here... the day is winding to a close in its usual, slow way. Just how long we will be here I do not know but it looks as though it could be some time. Solomons time.

I have made use of what what has been a languid day by working on the agroforestry handbook. Now, far out over the sea, the day signals its closure with a pink-purple sky the colours of which reflect from the sea's still surface. I am pessimistic about finding passage tomorrow as Steve has still not brought news of a canoe. Again, he disappeared for most of the day. I know that if we have not found a canoe by early tomorrow morning, passage will be unlikely that day.

The prospect of being stranded in Sasamuqa would throw our schedule, loose as it is, into chaos. There is not only the crossing to Ghizo but waiting in Ghizo for a flight to Honiara. Seats, Steve and I know, are scarce this close to Christmas, a situation worsened by the unreliability of the Solomons Airlines schedule due to fuel shortages in the provinces. Arrangements have been made to collect information on Malaita island next week and with the partial closing of the information doors in Sasamuqa, to miss that by being stranded here could throw the production of the books into doubt.

Lucy calls me for the evening meal. I wander into the dining room and make small talk before she returns to her family. Still no sign of Steve, he has not turned up for dinner and it looks like the usual oversupply of sweet potato, greens and rice will be mine. I start to help myself when he bursts in. "Russ", he says in the upbeat, excited tone that I have learned signals good news, " ...there is a canoe leaving in the morning. We should be ready to leave at eight".

Our spirits rise with the prospect of leaving Sasamuqa. Not that there is anything distasteful with being in a Pacific island village with little to do, a roof over our heads, our food supplied and a lagoon a few metres away, however there is a tension between the attractions of being stranded and the urge to get the job done.

I tell myself to be less task-driven, to talk to people and relax, but it takes a long time to rid yourself of the urge to be busy all the time. When we come to places like the Solomons we bring this restlessness with us and it takes time to slow to the pace of local life. It is easy to become frustrated by trying to get things done when the locals do not share our haste. It is also easy to become dissatisfied with the sameness of daily life in rural villages, calming though this sameness can be. In the city we are so used to the constant stimulation that is missing here.

Dinner eaten and my offer to clean up once again politely rejected by the priest's wife - gender roles in the Solomons remain strong - I go back in my room and gather all my things together, packing as much as I can. This I start doing by the light of the kerosene lamp but at 7.30 I flick the switch to find that the solar power system has been turned on.

In the Solomons I have learned the value of packing the night before when preparing to travel early the next morning. Once when leaving Takwa, the truck we were told was to arrive at seven in the morning came to pick us up a little earlier, at 5.30. Luckily, we had packed all that we could so did not have to fumble around for our possessions in the dark.

Pack loaded and the few other items to go into it in the morning stacked nearby, I make it an early night. They have all been this way, I reflect. I climb under the mosquito net happy with the prospect of being on the move again.

Again, on the sea

Packing could have waited. As on every other day I wake early and am up by six. Breakfast - the usual dry, crisp biscuits ('Hard Navy' brand) and a can of strawberry jam awaits us in the dining room. I would have been just as happy with the usual Solomon Island breakfast of sweet potato, but maybe biscuits and jam is what they think we in Australia start our day with. They have never heard of Corn Flakes, Weet Bix, meusli or toast.

Steve wanders over, we eat and he asks me if I have packed. He is clearly anticipating an early departure and I take his sense of preparedness as a positive sign. I get my kit and we say farewell to the priest's family and wander down the road.

Here, at the southern end of the village by the headland, close to where the road comes to an end, a crowd of thirty or so have gathered in the shade of large, spreading trees where we are to board the canoe. As they await kick-off in an inter-village soccer match, the MC raves excitedly, telling people that the game starts promptly at nine.

A few youths kick a ball around the uneven field and nine o'clock comes, but neither the soccer game nor our canoe appears. Finally, a motor canoe putters up to the beach. I grab my pack.

"This one is not ours", says Steve. I put the pack down and sit on it, reminding myself that patience is a quality highly desirable in this type of work. We are on Solomon time, after all, and our departure time is therefore only approximate, but I cannot stem the feeling of pessimism that starts to grow. Ten o'clock. Still no canoe. Pessimism grows stronger.

Time passes slowly... then - a canoe! Yes, it is heading towards us. And yes, it is running up onto the beach in front of us. Hope rises. Should I be optimistic enough to pick up my pack?. "They will have to get fuel", says Steve. "It will be a little while before we go".

I look out to sea and notice that it is calm. There are a few scattered cumulus but nothing that presages rough weather. The sky remains blue, the sun hot. Perhaps we will have a smooth and dry crossing.

The driver and his mate carry the red plastic tanks to the shed where the fuel is securely locked up. Then, more waiting. The man with the key to unlock the shed has not arrived. It is something like 30 minutes later that he saunters over and begins to laboriously hand pump the 90 litres needed for the crossing into the tanks. Another hour passes before we really are to leave Sasamuqa.

Finally, we stow our packs in the bottom of the canoe, the owner starts the engine after only a couple attempts and we motor carefully through the lagoon, then out onto the open sea. He points the canoe westward and opens the throttle. The bow lifts and we start our four hour journey.

Out to sea I look back. Sasamuqa disappears behind a headland as Panarui, a village to the south, comes into view. Panarui is easily identifiable by the white church atop the headland and I recall standing there, outside the church, four years ago. The last of the waterfront houses on the Sasamuqa headland fade from view. Who knows how long it will be until I see that white church or the cluster of dwellings that makes up Sasamuqa again? There is regret tinged with anticipation of making the crossing to Ghizo and awaiting a flight down to Honiara. There, we will prepare for our next excursion - to Malaita.

We move beyond the shelter of the island and the sea becomes choppy. The canoe cuts across the swells and comes down with a solid bang. The hours drag by to the accompanyment of the outboard's hum as the thumping makes my backside sore and the hot sun gives me a bad case of sunburned legs.