Finishing up in Marulaon

the "three muskateers", Pogo, Joy, and Melissa

Monday, January 4

Today, as we were busily packing inside the house, I heard Eileen's infectious laugh drifting toward me from the path that leads to the bush. When I looked out the kitchen window, I found Eileen with her youngest daughter, Foamela, both balancing parcels of kimita (long skinny leaves with spikes on the edges) on their heads.

I recognized the leaves as the kind they use to weave mats, so I asked Eileen why they were making more mats. The week before Christmas, I watched a flurry of mat making activity to put new mats around the altar in the church and to provide beds for the many people coming from other villages.

Eileen said that they were making mats for Foamela to take to school with her in a few weeks. The students who just finished Standard Six at Fly Harbour School will be leaving very soon to begin Form 1 at a school in Nukufero, also in the Russell Islands.



Last week, Melissa brought us a huge fish because she wanted some bandaids for her mom. The easiest way to cook it was to motu it, so on Saturday when Pogo came to help, she gave me some firewood, and I got to practice again in my kitchen. The stones are prepared in the same way no matter what you cook, then when the stones were good and hot, we just laid the fish on top. It smelled sooo good!

Pogo, Melissa, Joy and I went to Pogo's garden to collect some bamboo to make a sturdier fence around our garden. When we came back, this is what we found. A delicious, moist lunch with easy clean up!

Tuesday, January 5

We woke up to heavy rain this morning and discovered that the clothes hanging underneath the house were wetter than they were before we hung them up. So, we brought them in the house and draped them on the bunkbeds to dry. The shipping reports led us to believe that the Bikoi would arrive around 10:00 a.m. Very little in the Solomons happens at the appointed time, in fact, everyone jokes about "Solomon Time". At 9:00 Aaron had just started taping boxes and loading them on the porch, and I was getting ready to clean up the kitchen and bathroom when we heard the neighbor kids start shouting "Bikoi!"

Sometimes they shout just as a joke, but this time it was for real. Melissa came running up to the house and assured me that the Bikoi had just rounded the last corner and was quickly approaching Marulaon. Thankfully, God stopped the rain as a line of friends formed to help us get our many boxes down to the shore to load in Chief Leonard's canoe. The bathroom and the kitchen didn't get cleaned, but we all made it down to the shore and quickly loaded into the canoe. Through tears, we waved goodbye to our friends and headed out to catch the Bikoi while the dark clouds still witheld their rain.

Many of our friends were selling food to the Bikoi (the passengers from the Western Solomons had already been on the boat a very long time) from their canoes. They moved so we could climb on board. After we moved everything to the Bikoi, I hunted down some lelenga from one of the canoes. Our friends wouldn't let us buy it, so they just tossed three still warm parcels to us as the Bikoi began to move. The rain began again as we looked for a place to settle for the six hour boat ride. The choppy waves soon made many of us on the Bikoi sick. Joy lost her lelenga overboard, and Olivia, Katherine, and I tried to lay down and rest. Water frequently splashed in through the holes for the anchor rope and over the side (see Olivia's arm in the picture above), so we spent the first half of the trip with our feet sitting in water.

Several bags of critters to sell at market lay nearby, and Olivia and I laughed as we watched some slowly escape and crawl around our feet. About halfway back to Honiara, the seas calmed and our tummies felt much better. Thanks for praying for us as we returned. We're always torn when we leave one set of friends and return to the other. Now, we're looking forward to settling in Honiara for a couple of months.