Back in Nauru*, I was waiting one day for a parliamentary session to start. It turned out to be a four-hour wait, but I had a chance to speak with a few people who were sitting out in front of parliament waiting to speak with their MP about some issue or another. It was a couple, a chatty, cheerful and chubby Nauruan woman and her much quieter, almost somber husband, who is from the Solomon Islands but recently got his Nauruan citizenship. As dour as he might have seemed at first, he brightened when we started talking about his old home. His English wasn’t great, but he told me that the Solomon Islands are so named because the islands were so rich with minerals and gold that they were likened to King Solomon’s mines. Unlike on Nauru, the man explained, they don’t want people to mine there; they like their islands and their simple village life just fine.

What he said rings true. The Solomons, a chain of 992 (!) islands (347 are inhabited) dribbling off the eastern end of Papua New Guinea into the Pacific are known to have commercially viable deposits of phosphate, bauxite, gold, silver, copper, nickel and manganese. The only mining operation in the entire country, which is the third largest island group in the South Pacific, was a single gold mine that recently closed. Logging and fishing are currently the islands’ biggest industries. So unlike Nauru, where a cash economy replaced a subsistence lifestyle with pretty disastrous results, most of the 410,000 Solomon Islanders have kept a largely rural, village-based, subsistence lifestyle involving fish and small agricultural plots and tree plantations. While the logging is an environmental concern, many of the islands are still heavily forested and there is amazingly diverse (and scientifically important--I’ll explain in another entry) animal and plant life. Before I left, I spoke with Chris Filardi, a researcher at the American Museum of Natural History who has done extensive work in the Solomons; it is his research on island wildlife I’ll discuss later. But he explained that I should go to the Solomons, even though the country was not on my original itinerary, for just that reason—as a counterpoint to places like Nauru and Tuvalu, a place where a different model of development, one that is slower, more traditional and more in touch with the land, is occurring.

Unfortunately, I will not have time to get to many or any of the outer islands where these villages lie and won’t have the time to try to see how they are developing and judge the value of this model. With my limited time, I am going to try to see and photograph as much of the capital, Honiara, as I can, and hopefully do some diving on the local reefs and WWII shipwrecks. Honiara is really sort of in the middle of the island chain, but I’m told that some of the best diving is out in the Western Province (one of the country’s nine). Another time, perhaps.

I write all this as a New Year’s party goes on downstairs in the bar and restaurant of the hotel. It seems like it is for Aussie expats and the cream of Honiara society, but it is a crowd composed entirely of families who know one another and Japanese tourists. For the buffet dinner, I was seated alone, and there was a ring of empty tables between me and the rest of the party. I’m sure it wouldn’t be so isolating if I went down and struck up a conversation or two, but I’ve always liked the idea of sleeping through New Year’s, and I think I might give it a try. But my room is near the restaurant, so it’s going to be a little loud.

They are playing the Stone’s “Paint It Black” right now. Odd choice.


* Now that the travel saga and all the anxiety are over, I can cease the bitch-fest and go back to writing about more interesting things than my fragile hold on my temper. Thanks kindly for your patience.

One last Nauru story. I found out this morning before I left that I had been a topic of discussion in parliament the day before. A little background. The Nauruan parliament is now mostly relatively young members who ran in their districts on an anti-corruption reform platform last year. There are still two people in parliament from the old guard, one of whom is an old man named Rene Harris. Harris was the last president of Nauru and widely credited by the new government as the worst in its history. To hear it from them, every one of their current problems--insolvency, losing the plane, the decline of the mining infrastructure--can be traced back to his incompetence, corruption, cronyism and criminal hijacking of the island’s economy. At any rate, so many horrible accusations had been leveled at this fellow that I thought it only natural I should try to speak with him. So I called him up, he made a sort of gruff, non-committal answer and I told him I would call in the next day or two. I phoned him the next afternoon, after a spending a couple of hours at Air Nauru trying to get my travel sorted out. No sooner did I say my name than he started yelling at me on the phone, swearing about how he had waited all day for me to call. Before I could respond, apologize or say a single word, he slammed down the phone (people have since warned me retroactively about his volcanic and arbitrary temper). So the next day in the parliament session, he apparently formally confronted the current president, Ludwig Scotty. Something like, “What the hell is an American journalist doing walking around the island, talking to people and taking pictures of rubbish heaps? Who the hell let him in?” Scotty knew that I was there, but since I had not spoken with him directly he had no specific knowledge of what I was doing or how I had gotten in. Looking back, I’m not so sure how I got in either. Ministers I spoke with, including the one who is supposed to approve all media visits, were surprised I got in and was getting interviews. I’ve asked a friend there who is close to the government and who heard the whole thing on the radio about getting a transcript or a recording of the actual discussion.