First Week in Melanesia

After one week at Solomon Islands I decided to make this blog, so all the staff I consider as interesting will be written down here. I guess it is better than just screaming into facebook darkness my wild status updates. As I have a lot of friends who are not Czech and my Czech friends are mostly well educated students, I think it's only fair to make everybody happy and write in English [if somebody has some problem with this, I will be very happy to give you translation of my words here in Czech, or my long time not used Italian via email].

Now let's get back to the point.

I left Prague 23rd of August 2011 and with one day stop in Brisbane I finally managed to arrive to Honiara on August 25. Next day I was supposed to come to the Ministry of Provincial Governments and Institutional Strengthening (MPGIS) and Provincial Governance Strengthening Programme (PGSP). The fact that they were supposed to have workshop on capacity development turned out to be very useful for me as well as this way I could participate and so get to know most of the people I will be dealing with in upcoming months. What more, the workshop was concluded with the official dinner where I could shake my hand with minister of MPGIS. Who would imagine better start of my internship - I'm talking about the free food of course?

First weekend in Melanesian style I spent with Doubravka (my sister), Lada (her husband) and little Jonas (their hypercute son). This way I could experience the beauty of local beach on Saturday and wild nature of rain forest on Sunday. There I could as well see the direct impact of logging activities on the island, rich on natural resources.This week I spent at the MPGIS, where I was supposed to get to know how does the ministry functions, before I start with my duties at the Guadalcanal provincial government. So far I could see a lot of incredible facts, which pull this country behind. With it's natural resources those 500 000 people living here were supposed to be rich, enjoying the sun and money. Instead of that the reality is a lot different. Especially the story about one of the Islands [Rennel and Bellona - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rennell_and_Bellona], where because of foreign aid people forgot how to catch the fish, or make the oil from coconuts and so they wait for the plain to arrive with those commodities they need instead of doing anything. Full dependency on external factors and giving up all the agricultural, not mentioning industrial activities. One week and I've heard enough to have some broader idea about how should I address the problems and questions in my master thesis.

After one week I even got used to the fact that everybody around is black. Very weird feeling to be only white person walking on the street, or sitting in the bus. We live on the hill and so I have to go every day down to the sea side, where I take my minibus. On my way down every second person says hello, good morning, or good afternoon when I go back home later. I don't know to what extent are people here so polite and to what extent it's just the fact that I'm white and that means exotic to them. In the bus you need to do weird sound with you mouth if you want to stop which I will probably never really learn and so I just passed the stop where I wanted to leave my bus first couple of times. Now I somehow whistle, or do whatever makes them to realize that this guy maybe wants to get out. And it works...

On the street most of the people walk barefoot. Very popular here is local drug betel nut [http://www.wikihow.com/Chew-Betel-Nut-in-Papua-New-Guinea], which leaves teeth of it's users nicely brownish. Chewers of betel spit everywhere around red liquid, which looks like blood on the ground. But what I find extremely interesting was the black albino lady I met today on the street, which looks pretty awesome.

I hope somebody got to the point to actually read it till the end. For those who did congratulations, I'm proud of you. For those who didn't there wasn't probably enough pictures, so you just got back to facebook - but don't worry, I will try to do something with it and I will add some picture in the near future.