Within two months of arriving, we settled in our beautiful home, my husband found a job and my five children in Kinder, Childcare and Primary school. I had no close relatives nearby, let alone any friends. Luckily, my husband and I have a strong background of sports and culture, so we kept our sanity by organizing mini sporting outings with families. This lead me to an idea. I did some research around my local community and had found that there were many Pacific Islander families, who like myself had migrated from NZ, Samoa, and Tonga. Many of them, only knew each other in passing but not by name. In my research I had found that all shared the common interest in Sport – Rugby, Volleyball, Netball and Touch. This inspired me to venture into incorporating a non-profitable community business called PASIFIKA SPORTS ASSOCIATION INC. Our organization started in March 2010, holding once a month a Sports night event at RMIT Bundoora Sports Centre. It’s purpose was to solely unite all the Pacific Islanders around the community through sports, and because of the huge success, we’ve now had to hold the Pasifika sports nights twice a month. Our board are made up of 11 dedicated and honorable Pacific Islanders from within the local community who purely give up their family time to help me and my husband fulfill and share the same vision.

We will be holding our first big sporting tournament in August 2010 – Social Volleyball Tournament and encourage all Pacific Islanders who enjoy Volleyball to participate in this golden opportunity. Our goal is to rotate around surrounding communities to hold sporting events abroad for Pasifika families who live outside our local area. This way our organization will assist all around Melbourne Areas and will continue to form unity and belonging for all Pacific Islanders through sports and culture.

We settled in an outskirt community behind Honiara where my father had engaged an uncle to build a three bedroom house for us while we were still on Malaita.

My father was a primary school teacher and although I pretty much hate it, he was never stationary and year after year we would be toasted here and there in different villages just to allow him to do his work.

When we came to Honiara in 1997, the trend continued unstoppably. Although that wasn’t new, I had a hard time chewing it because Guadalcanal would never be Malaita and I need a lot of adapting at that time cos even pidgin was still a tongue twister for the country boy who spent all his childhood years grazing with the Kwara’ae language.

My father’s first Guadalcanal post was at Ghaobata Primary School-a 10 minutes drive towards the sea away from the then CDC 1 SIPL substation now called GIPPOL 1.

Isolated and laid back as it was, I came to learn of what to expect from my dad before we moved in for he went there by himself during the first few days to see where we’d be staying.

Getting to bath from the well wasn’t a strange thing at all cos we were forewarned by dad. And it took no time at all for us to be acquainted. We mastered the art of pumping water from the ditch to keep life going for the family in just days-a trade which we all shared enthusiastically as a family.

The school lies beside the flowing Ngalibiu River and is home to students from the surrounding grass covered areas as far as Koli Point.

The Guadalcanal planes gave birth to a wonderful piece of flat landscape for the well arranged Guadalcanal school. As we drove into the school’s green driveway on our first day, the piece of cement housed by a locally thatched roof besides the road snapped my attention.

What possibly that could be was my adventurous thought. It was not long when dad offered us that much needed orientation.

“This school had sprouted from the American’s World War II base,” said dad as we entered a galvanized-covered house, which looks to be tattering in age and looks but which would be ours for the whole of 1998.

I missed my rural Malaitan life already but childhood ego got me into discovering and it was from there that I came to know the story of the big piece of cement that stunned me earlier.

A close gaze saw two openings beneath the platform which then was merely a store of coconut husks and a breeding place for mosquitoes. It wasn’t at all anything of little significant, although my childish mind then wasn’t able to come to that term.

As we piped inside, someone told me that it’s an underground hideout for US soldiers back in the war days when they were in full force securing their airfield known as Koli Field just across the road but which by then was overgrown by grasses already.

As I piped over, a half cylindrical wear out steel depicting something like a house,which seemed to stand all the tests of times, remianed upright among the swaying grasses in the cool welcoming Galekana (pidgin version of Guadalcanal) breeze.

Small strips of butamen marking the Koli field could still be visualized back then and while it stood there aimless and seemingly unworthy to most, its treasure was made known to me one day by an adventurous tourist. He came on a bike to the school and requested my dad if he could take a look at the field which seemed to stress as far as Koli point where the sea was.

We followed him noisily as he enjoyed a ride through the beautiful grassland much to our innocent delight.

According to history the airfield was built for b-24 Liberator heavy boomer operations, primarily by the Thirteen Airforce. The single strip run approximately NE to SW (parallel to Carney Airfield) and had several taxi ways off both sides. Surfaced by butamen with metal, Marsden Matting-like material for heavy aircraft it was completed in the middle of 1943 and was an added aid to America’s campaign against the Japanese on Guadalcanal.

When we left at the end of the year, my childish mind was happy to escape the weird environment where not much was happening around to entertain a growing child. But now when I look back into history, I am more than glad to have a little bit of taste of what WW II remains look like.

I’ve slept on the very concretes laid by the 1940 soldiers (remember the school houses were just built on top of the original WW II concrete slaps. Not much has been done to change their shapes and sizes) and had come to see some of their neglected animations which then were obtainable in the coconut plantations.

Whether Ghaobata has seen some sort of changes lately or not is but a thing which is beyond my reach to confirm now. I however wonder whether the locals in the area have ever taken any steps to preserve the historical sites for the future children to see because that’s history in a making!

Visit my blog to read more of my articles. Here’s the link http://iroasi-maesulia.blogspot.com

She sat inside this house sheltering with her husband Nobel Pakoti while the cyclone hit in the early hours of the morning, tearing her 3 month old roof apart and losing most of her personal belongings.