Travel Outward: Solomon Time: Village Life in the Solomon Islands

Bird's-eye view of the Solomon Islands

Author’s note: The Solomon Islands extend in a southeasterly direction from Papua New Guinea, in the South Pacific. The third largest archipelago in the region, the Solomons consist of over 900 islands, and encompass over 1.35 million square kilometers of sea. The islands are covered with dense rainforest and are surrounded by narrow fringes of coral reefs, lagoons, and mangrove swamps, which are among the most biologically diverse in the world. I had an opportunity to live and work in the rural community of Baraulu, in the Western Province of the Solomon Islands, for roughly six months over the course of a two-year period, while doing doctoral research in marine science. Following is the second part of a two-part series on village life in the Solomons. Part 1 of "Solomon Time," published in the January 2003 issue of Travel Outward can be found here.

Day in and day out, the village is full of laughter and chatting, chewing of betel nut and smoking tobacco, but it’s most romantic at night when there’s calm in the air, the stars shine bright, and there are no artificial lights to drown the detail of the night sky. The stars are amazing--the Southern Cross, in particular--as there are no bright cities for hundreds of miles. People visit each other, sit on porch stoops and in kitchens, and tell stories. Everyone has red teeth from the betel, and I am still amazed at how they can talk and talk for hours. One house in Baraulu owned a generator, with a TV and a VCR. Until last year, they’d show monthly dime-store action movies; then a family member took the VCR to Honiara, where he went to work... Now it’s back to story telling.

Solomon Islander from Baraulu

As a westerner, it was difficult at first to not pass judgment on the community and their way of life. Although most want money, and some are clearing the mainland to grow endless plots of teak, Solomon Islanders generally are content with their life and they prefer living in the village to life in the city. A household typically consists of extended kin, and can range in size from 4 to 30 consisting of one to five separate nuclear families. Everyone in the Solomons is "related" to one another; that is, everyone calls each other "my cousin." For example, if I am walking with Selina and we run into Ole, who is really her mother’s sister-in-law’s mother’s cousin, Selina will refer to Ole as her cousin. And because they are related, if Ole has betel nut, tobacco, or has money and is drinking beer, Selina will be able to have some of Ole’s betel nut, tobacco, or beer. Family ties...

During the recent civil unrest, many Solomoners moved back to the villages where they could live off the land. Baraulu, like all villages in the Solomon Islands, is caught between two fundamental economic states: a subsistence economy and a market economy. The villagers are not completely subsistence-based--they need money for kerosene, rice, school (tuition, uniforms, paper, and pencils), laundry soap, and more. Many households survive in Baraulu because of "remittances" (or payments) from relatives with wage labor in Honiara, Fiji, or Australia.

Schoolhouse in the Solomon Islands

I am most concerned about the next generation of Solomon Islanders because of their lack of education. Many argue that this is a Western ideal and that our formalized education has facilitated the breakdown of many traditional social institutions and a loss of community. I agree that children must be taught about their own environment in order to maintain the social legacy, but further avenues of education are important as the Solomon Islanders become more entrenched in the global economy. The children face many obstacles to achieving an adequate education. For instance, many of the teachers lack the proper learning, themselves, to teach others. (Prior to the recent instability, many schools had Peace Corp volunteers who have now gone elsewhere.) Also, the schools lack supplies: teachers are not given paper, chalk, or textbooks; homework is handed out on paper cards, which have been used for years and have the answers scribbled on them. The country charges a fee for tuition, but many households simply don’t have the money and so are not able to send their children beyond primary school. In addition, the secondary school system is composed of a number of understaffed boarding schools that will only admit a small group of students per year. Thus, the students must each take an entrance exam, which most are unlikely to pass. Beyond this, the government lacks the resources to pay teachers sufficiently and regularly, and the system of payment is odd as the teachers have to travel a great distance to pick up their paycheck in town every second Friday, which means the schools must close on that day so teachers can get paid, and sometimes their checks aren’t even there.

Munda village store

But for all of the economic disorder in the Solomon Islands, there are forces that help institute order and organization. One of these is the church. At the turn of the twentieth century, missionaries arrived in droves at the Solomon Islands. In Roviana Lagoon, the charismatic leader Reverend J.F. Goldie rapidly built a Methodist congregation. The Seventh-Day Adventist Church soon followed, though their foothold grew stronger near the Marovo Lagoon.

The late 1950s saw a breakaway movement from the Methodist Church and the formation of a third denomination--the fiercely independent, communally based, and highly syncretistic Christian Fellowship Church (CFC)--founded and led by the prophetic Silas Eto [known as the "Holy Mama" (mama, in New Georgian languages, is an affectionate term for "father")]. The church formally broke with the Methodists in the 1960s, and now nearly 100 percent of the Roviana Lagoon belongs to the CFC religion. The church has become a powerful force in western Solomon’s economy and politics, and its leaders are involved in shrewd, profitable, and often legally suspect business ventures.

Children in the Solomon Islands

The CFC religion dominates village life in an odd, yet beautiful manner. Imagine, it’s before dawn on a Sunday morning and you’re asleep on a mat under a mosquito net in your thatched house. You awake to singing--children’s voices and sticks drumming against the ground--and you go outside to hear. The stars shine bright in an otherwise black, velvety sky, and you notice the flickering light from kerosene lamps in the houses across the central village field. You look at your watch and decide that 4:30 A.M. is too early to rise, so you go back to bed and fall in and out of sleep until the voices start getting closer. Then you wrap a sarong around your legs and go to the porch to sit and wait. The choir marches around the village field, past your house. The children are now accompanied by women and men--all of them dressed in their finest white church clothes, carrying red, white, and blue banners and flags, and they march and sing as they pass, while houses full of people clap their hands ritually (much like after the speeches I described in Part 1), which, for the CFC congregation, is equivalent to a Christian saying "amen."

In fact, every day starts with singing like this, but generally later and up at the school. The voices can always be heard like a blanket over the village. This distinctive "parade" occurs only on Sunday mornings, and Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday evenings at dusk. The clapping, however, happens all the time--at the start and end of a journey (e.g., when one boards and disembarks a boat, which is as constant as getting in and out of a car in our society), before and after a meal,

Traditional islanders' dance

when the village bell rings, to introduce a visitor to an area, a hundred or so times during the four hours of Sunday church services, and so on. The sound of hands clapping becomes pervasive and over time it offers great comfort--like a companion, a constant in island life that leaves a harsh void in its absence.

The structure of the CFC is interesting--almost ironic considering where I was and where I came from. During World War II, the Holy Mama was greatly impressed with the American army, which subsequently influenced the rituals of his religion. During a church service, the congregation marches, flags wave, and members salute one another. Also, the church insists that all villages are modeled after military bases, with one central public area, surrounded by village residences; and all the houses are built beside one another in an orderly fashion.

When the Holy Mama died, he was succeeded by his son, known as the "Spiritual Authority." The equivalent of the Holy Trinity, for followers of the CFC, is the Father, Son, the Holy Mama, and the Spiritual Authority. Situated around the village are "presence sensors" for the Spiritual Authority; these are rods or wires that are said to move when the Spiritual Authority is near, and while I was raised to believe such mysticism is a hoax, I have witnessed them in action: one day the Spiritual Authority came to visit my village (chewing on betel nut, his gold chains and Rolex drawing attention to his many business "conquests") and the wire started waving like mad. I can offer no reasonable explanation for it.

Roofing a house

Still, as amusing or incredulous as many of the religious rituals and beliefs are, and as corrupt as the church might be in its business practices, the CFC does have a positive influence on the community--it brings structure, solidarity, and services to the villages, where the government alone cannot. For example, the villagers participate in church-sponsored community workdays once or twice a week, during which they repair the school house, clear community forest land, plant teak in the community forest, fix the water line, help build houses, and more. Plus, per CFC dictum, no one works on Sunday. The church is the center of community festivals and it prohibits drinking (Solomon Islanders typically love to drink, are bad drinkers, and will drink until all their money is gone). And these are just a few of the plusses of the CFC’s influence on Solomon communities.

Books

Solomon Time: An Unlikely Quest in the South Pacific
by Will Randall

But for me, all of these positives are reinforced by one more thing: I would never interfere with the CFC religion, for I believe that constant sound of clapping represents a strong and vital community--unified, it keeps me safe during my journeys throughout this troubled jewel of the South Pacific.

Editor’s note: Check out Part 1 of "Solomon Time" and more photographs from the Solomon Islands.

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