Islanders Help Themselves To New Homes

Solomon Islands

Larry Writer reports on a unique scheme to repair the ravages of Cyclone Namu.

CYCLONE NAMU ravaged the Solomon Islands in May 1986. By the time it had roared on its way, Namu’s winds and rain had laid waste to much of the Solomons’ central region. The provinces of Malaita and Guadalcanal suffered most. In Malaita, 7500 or 49 per cent of homes were destroyed; in Guadalcanal, 1600 or 22 percent.

Today the reconstruction of housing in these areas is all but complete, thanks to a remarkable exercise in self-help where the dispossessed villagers were encouraged to rebuild their own houses.

The aid scheme with a difference was born after the Solomon Islands Government announced it could not follow other aid programs, supplying the materials and building the houses for the villagers. Consequently, a consortium was set up. It worked out a system by which it would supply vital materials to allow the villagers to rebuild the roofs of their own homes. (The frames are built with local timber.) But to receive the aid, the villagers would have to pay SSSO toward the cost of each house and had to be in a sit-

uation where local materials were unavail able due to cyclone damage.

The consortium comprised the Euro pean Economic Community, New Zea land, Canada, the Netherlands and the United Nations Development Program based in Suva. The consortium would also send advisers to the villages to demon strate how to construct houses to better withstand cyclones of the future.

The EEC’s Allan Kitchener, manager of the Rural Housing Reconstruction Pro ject, reports from his Honiara base that the project is nearing completion and has been a success ... despite the earlier skepti cism of “experts” in Europe who pre dieted that the project would be scuttled by corruption and wantokism.

Kitchener says this has not happened because care was taken to closely super vise every stage of the program and to carry out a public education campaign com prising leaflets, radio broadcasts and teams of experts visiting the villages.

“Also, village people themselves have the final say in who actually receives the materials not some bureaucrat sitting

in Honiara (me) who does not understand the social and political complexities of life in the stricken areas,” says Kitchener.

In the Solomons, most houses are built using unsawn timber for the foundation posts, roof purlins, rafters and wall frames, Split betel nut palms are fashioned into floors and sago palm leaves cover the roofs and walls. Villagers use traditional lash ing techniques with vines and bush ropes as well as nails and screws to put together structures that will last up to 10 years (un less it’s hit by another cyclone), Families qualifying for the roofing aid were each given 22 sheets of roofing iron, a quantity of ridge capping, 12 kilograms of roofing nails, two kilos of ordinary nails and four kilos of binding wire enough to make a roof for one house for each fam ily. The materials were manufactured overseas, then shipped to Honiara and distributed to each village ward, Allan Kitchener adds that the element of self help has caused the villagers totake the project more seriously than if they were given the aid with no strings attached and everything done for them. □