Commodore
August 23, 2025

Sunday 24 August – welcome ceremony for political candidate took up most of the day

We got a visit from a gentleman who had a hand written message for us from the chief and an invitation to join a welcome ceremony for a political candidate which would start at 1pm. The note requested 4 tins meat, 4 bags rice and 4 packets of biscuits, all things we gave him yesterday! We obliged and sent him a message back with the goodies. His writing was amazingly neat, he said the American missionaries had taught him. This island and the next are both catholic, the two churches on this island have Philippine Catholic priests. A lot of the Solomon Islands were Seventh day Adventists and the only good thing about that was they don’t allow the chewing of beetle nut, which is a really sad habit, destroying their teeth let alone any other ghastly side effects

We got a mountain of laundry done in the morning and then joined the Profasea crew at the village for the ceremony. We were greeted by the chief on arrival along with the hordes of kids, only to discover the political candidate was running late. We decided to go for a walk, Agneta’s sister Marla who is a school teacher joined us and showed us around. We walked along the other pass into the atoll, this is too shallow for yachts. Both sisters are without men, Marla has two kids but she no longer lives with their father, they live with their parents. Their house was on the far side of the island, a nice walk through the forest to the village. They had a lovely garden, and all live in traditional houses, some have corrugated roofs but not many. Marla took us to her little school where she teaches 6-7 year olds before they go across the water to the primary school for 8-12 year olds. There are 3 class rooms, so sad they are all volunteer teachers, as they come under the Bougainville territory which is semi autonomous, PNG will not pay teachers fees. They rely totally on hand outs, it is incredible what they can do with not much. We were really impressed.

Kary on Profasea is also a primary teacher, from the minute he landed he was off like a pied piper with the kids. He has brought loads of little rubber bands and created shooting competitions with the rubber bands. That was before Rowan and I went for a walk, when we got back an hour later he was still playing games with them. When the candidate finally turned up at about 3:30 Karey opted to be with the kids telling them stories and playing more games with them. A much better option as the political ceremony was very slow to get going and then various speeches by the chief and some other guy. They welcomed us in English and then continued in Pigin English. Amazingly we could understand quite a bit of it, once you get your ear tuned. The candidate droned on for ages, basically they all want autonomy from PNG, he gave a long list of detailed corruption in the PNG government. We were rather disappointed that there was no singing or dancing, just a lot of sweet black coffee being handed around to the men. By 5pm we decided to leave, which Marla said was fine. It was a long time to be sitting on the ground. It was amazing to see so many people, the village has 263 people in it, loads of children running about, and nobody getting stressed at all.

Agneta had filled our boat with coconuts and veg, in exchange for all the goodies we took in to trade. It was a relief to finally get back to the boat and read the Sunday papers!