HONIARA, a city on Guadalcanal, the capital of the Solomon Islands. A boy in front of me finishes his cola and casually throws the bottle on the sidewalk. It lands in a heap of 20 more bottles against a fence. Across the street a man urinates against a building, then another and another until I see one defecating. Everyone from young boy to old woman spits betelnut juice. The sidewalk is red with it, one gives up stepping around it and just steps in it. An ancient man, his white beard contrasting his jet-black skin, sits near a shopping cart containing all his worldly possessions, staring into the dirt as if looking for his next meal. He has lost all reason to move or exist. Now he is merely here.
One of the first things one notices in Honiara are the massive Chinese building projects. The Solomons host the Pacific Games soon, so stadiums and other venues are rising out of the ground. Most are gigantic, the Chinese don’t do small, and many are near the airport and the town center where they make the biggest splash. That way, the Chinese can say “Look what we did for them!” and Sogavare can say “See what I brought you!” in the next election.
All this construction is a massive boondoggle. No matter how many athletes and journalists travel here for two weeks, the money generated by the games will never come close to paying for all this. Which means when it is all over, Honiara will be dotted with empty, useless sports arenas covered in scrub growth, and someone will have to eat a lot of debt. Perhaps the Chinese are willing to finance all this in the name of improving their reputation in this part of the world. Perhaps strengthening ties with their newest ally is worth it. History shows that when the music stops, China is rarely the country left without a chair.
Moving on, the sidewalk concrete is so badly broken up that one risks a sprained ankle so I switch to walking in the road, but it is worse. Some potholes are so large I step down into them and back up as if walking on a small staircase. When it rains, these potholes become ponds, breeding grounds for the omnipresent malaria-bearing mosquitoes. Proper road construction with grading to allow runoff would probably cut hospital visits in half.
I pass a burned-out car. There are no tires and the hood is up, revealing a hole where the engine should be. All four doors are open and I see two men inside, one in the front seat and one sprawled across the back, listening to a radio. It is their home. They live in this rusting wreck. We make eye contact and they smile, nodding their heads toward the radio as if to get my opinion of the music. I raise my eyebrows in approval and walk on.
There is a group of young girls, aged ten to fifteen, standing in a cluster as girls often do. Their clothes would look more appropriate on their older sisters, from whom they no doubt borrowed them. They look around and whisper in each other’s ears, as girls often do. Then a man drives up, one of the girls talks to him through the window, she climbs inside and they pull away.
To walk in Honiara is to experience the human condition at its most miserable. You dare not drink the water here and to stop walking is to invite beggars if you are white. Shops carry wares that were popular in other countries decades ago. The commercial part of town is like one giant Goodwill store. Many people wear sports jerseys. American baseball, Australian rugby, European football. They are mostly teams that were successful a few years ago, say Superbowl winners from the 2010s, so I imagine department stores dump their unsold merchandise here in exchange for charitable tax breaks. Half of the shops are closed and decaying. We are still too soon removed from the pandemic to see any regrowth here.
What is wrong with Honiara? Why is it such a filthy failure of a city? Matt has an interesting theory. He says that once you get away from the Honiara and out into the jungle, the villages are very clean. There is a strong sense of civic pride and everything is well kept. Each village belongs to someone, a family or group of families, so the neatness of the village reflects on them as a people. But no one owns Honiara. It is the great common ground. Since no one takes ownership of it, no one cares about keeping it up. Socialism says that common ground is where mankind finds harmony and happiness. Reality says it is where everyone dumps their trash.
Near my boyhood home there was a field whose owner, Buzz, died years ago, and title passed to a bank or some distant relative who did not know or simply did not care. A year after Buzz died, when the land had essentially become ownerless, it began to fill up with broken appliances and old mattresses. Soon everyone was dumping their large items there, things that would not fit into a household garbage can. Eventually they started dumping everything there. Why hire a trash service at all when we had the dumping field? The trash service complained that the field was hurting their business, the local people complained of the smell and the rats. Eventually the town paid to put a fence around Buzz field and post No Trespassing signs, but the trash remains. A giant pile of rubbish that bears witness to the gigantic flaw in socialism: human nature.
BC Cook, PhD lived on Saipan and taught history for 20 years. He currently resides on the mainland U.S.
BC Cook
