02 revelations

I was calling to book a room for a friend visiting from overseas. She was at the other end of the line. Things were going well when suddenly we hit a patch of Honiara that I didn't expect to hear about...

It all started when I asked to check if men were allowed to lodge at this establishment.

Iufala letem man tu for stap? Ia mifala save letem.

I was reassured but the next question took me a bit by surprise:

Man ia save dring? Nomoa, man ia no save dring ia.

Waswe smoke? Mifala no save tekem oketa man wea dring or smok ba. Man ia, dring en smok nomoa lo hem ia. No matta swear bata hem no save swear tu!

I wasn't fibbing - my friend was a smokefree teetotaller who didn't even curse.

She was undeterred: Waswe man ia save tekem gele? Nomoa, man ia maret man ia.

No mata maret, hem save tekem gele tu?

OK this brought me down to earth. It showed in my voice I think.

Oketa! man ia no save tekem gele ia. Stret man ia.

Had I been face-to-face, I swear she wouldn't have batted an eyelid.

Staka maret man bata tetekem gele lo hostel tu ia. Kaen 02 osem...

After more reassurances, we ended the conversation. With her words and tone echoing in my mind: Staka maret man bata tetekem gele lo hostel tu ia.

It wasn't just the words, but the matter of factness in her voice. Smoke, drink and women were all brought up in a calm, almost stolid voice. This from someone who sounded in her early 20s. To a male Solomon Island stranger on the phone. All with aplomb and polite persistence that I would have found hard to keep up if I were in her place.

Her composure and the word "02" coalesced in my mind. During the famous Solomon "tensions" from 1998 to 2003, when a combination of civil war and wild-west warlordism shook the country, the term 02 was coined for the practice of keeping an additional partner to one's legitimate spouse. The term alluded to the hull number of the SI police's second patrol vessel - 02, and drew a parallel with partner no. 2.

For all that, 02 is not about infidelity.

Affairs, mistresses and unfaithfulness were not invented during the tension.

No, 02 is about the acceptability of it all. By being a handy shorthand for everday use, 02 ushered into casual daily conversation something that was previously unmentionable.

02 never existed before the tension, because it had no place in respectability. It didn't need its own space. Infidelity and unfaithfulness were just negations of the norm - they weren't big enough, deserving enough to get their own words. "Meke trabol" was both vague enough and big enough to capture the range of misbehaviour all the way from a misplaced hand right through to pregnancy out of wedlock. No more.

The misplaced hand didn't even warrant a name anymore. The teenage pregnancy was unremarkable. And infidelity became so commonplace, and so common-knowledge that we needed a new word just for it. As always in pijin, the challenge was picked up by the street. Someone made the connection, used 02 and away we went.

Someone once said naming something gives you power over it. I don't know that this worked with 02 - though certainly the young woman on the phone sounded empowered!

Bae iu go home?

Bae iu go home?
This standard end of year question isn't heard as often as it used to be. A public service leave allowance form in puts it in terse bureaucratese: "Home village". If you don't fill it out, you either don't have one (never!), or you're not going home.

Chrismas 2007 and the answer is depressingly obvious. It's 24 December 2007 . Christmas Eve. 6.05 pm by my time. People are still answering work emails. How do I know? Because they keep replying to me in real time. (don't ask me why I'm sending them at this time)

Work in Honiara on Christmas Eve would have been unheard of in 2002 even. Now it's normal. I know life is speeding up everywhere, but this is something different. It may be the numbers, it must be the youth. Somehow life has changed in Honiara.

Honiara Christmases aren't what they used to be. This is how it used to go: schools would end in November, public servants would pack up and board ships in early December and Honiara would empty and turn into a ghost town. Christmas in Honiara used to happen on a skeleton crew. Imagine 3, 4 or 5 weeks in which every day, Mendana Avenue looked like a Sunday afternoon.

Bae iu go home?
As Honiara end-of-year questions go, this is an emblem. Home of course, is not, is never merely that Honiara house you sleep in every night. It is that place where you are from. Where you are rooted and which is rooted in you. Home is a giant invisible thicket that you carry around with you in everything you do. It defines what you do, with whom you do it, how you think about events and how others relate to you. In your home is embedded who you are, who you owe, who you respect, who you fear. All these and why. Your home defines your actions and reactions in Honiara life on an almost minute-by-minute basis.

This reality of home is why the first question asked about someone in the Solomons is hem blo wea ia? - "to where does s/he belong?" As usual, Pijin reveals much more about Solo thinking than the standard English approximation "where is s/he from?". "To where does s/he belong?" is very different from "where is s/he from". Because home is about belonging - to a place, to a people, to a way of doing things, to the food, stories and laughter that flow from all of the above.

Bae iu go home?
I suppose at one time this was an unnecessary question.

Then, after it ceased being superfluous, this question became merely rhetorical. Of course bae mi go home... what else is there to do come late November? Why stay in the ghost town which Honiara becomes? So the question became an opener to a standard set of questions:

• Wat taem bae iu go home?
• Wanem sipi nao bae iu go lo hem?

and a predictable litany of compaints:

• order blo oketa lo hom ia narawe nao!
• mifala trae go eli mekem sipi no ful tumas!
  

Bae iu go home?
For so many of us, this is again an unnecessary question. But sadly for different reasons, or rather the same reasons couched in the complaints above, only amplified to an unbearable degree. The fact is, going home come December is a luxury completely out of reach for more and more Honiara dwellers.

What used to make it a viable (and looked-forward-to) possibility no longer exists. Going home at Christmas time could happen when Honiara dwellers were mainly public servants and their immediate families. The standard public servant family would receive a village travel allowance, enough for one round-trip seafare to the port-of-call nearest to one's "village of origin". Careful saving throughout the year would ensure the necessary surplus for store-bought supplies, for the extra costs of canoe fares from the port-of-call to home.

Now betelnut retailing, bonito reselling, chicken raising and security services probably support more in Honiara than does the government payroll. And none of these industries provides a steady salary, never mind a holiday allowance.

Tellingly, even those with holiday allowances can't make it. The surplus needed to prepare food, kerosene and other items for the exodus home never appears. When you have 3 families living under your roof, with occasionally more, the fortnightly paycheck is long spent by the time it arrives. So the holiday allowance gets applied for (complete with fake tickets and receipts from and insider at the shipping company), and applied to the task of a Honiara Christmas. Many of the more dedicated apply it partially to its purpose - one or two lucky kids get packed up for the voyage home. A child should never go hungry, nor be pressured for spare cash at home, so the shipfare is sufficient.

Bae iu no go home?
This question is more to the point. Hopeful, but only just. It is conversational diplomacy Honiara style - by adding the "no", its much easier to for the respondent to confirm the impossibility of the notion. Its already half there, posed by the questioner and just waiting for confirmation.

Hat nao, iufa hao?

Bae stap nomoa. Flow lo Honiara nomoa. So Honiara continues its special pace - frantic but languorous - right through Christmas time. The voices of Saba and Pagasa keep bouncing off the hills around Koa Hill and Choviri till almost dawn. The holiday allowances get eaten and drunk over the course of a night or two. Somehow Christmas gets celebrated on the thread of a shoestring.

Mifala stap nomoa. Honiara flow nomoa.

And every year, Honiara becomes home for more and more of its citizens.

Clarity after rain - but will it last?

A clear sky over Mt Austen and the central Guale mountains is a beautiful thing indeed. But make sure to enjoy it while it lasts, because the cool clarity doesn't stick around for long, nor does it makes any promises for the day ahead.

By midday the big mountains have almost always been overtaken by cloud - that much is predictable. But down by the sea, in H-town, anything might be happening, weatherwise.

Black pregnant thunderheads may be oppressing Honiara directly, somehow pressing our faces and lungs at the same time.

Or a high pasty haze might be hanging overhead, feeling like a magnifying glass for an already unbearable sun.

Or a series of squalls might be blowing in from the sea, forcing the ships at anchor to turn in unison while it flings fresh sheets of water in over the shore.

Not much good as harbingers, those clear mountains behind Honiara are always excellent at telling us about the past.

A clear central ridge in the late afternoon only happens after a ridiculous amount of precipitation. Look for it after it has been raining for days, when every piece of clothing you own has attained a uniform level of dampness and the very thought of air conditioning makes you break into a hacking cough.

Or look for clear mountains anytime of the day after a pr0longed and intense thunderstorm. The sort of thunderstorm which makes conversation indoors impossible, the sort that turns most roads in Honiara into rivers and some into ponds.

For Honiarans, the clear mountains remind us of the rough time we have just been through, and might just be a little reward for having stuck around right through it.

By all means enjoy the moment.

Just don't expect it to last.

Reclaiming the blog

Greetings all. Blogger has finally reunited me to this long lost space, and I am grateful. I look forward to many good things, starting with a repost of my most recent efforts from Honiara life 2!