Yesterday

Woke up to another one of those mornings where its just impossible to rise and face the day…the ocean outside is taking it easy today and a calm breeze is telling me to relax and stay in bed. So I do.

I reckon I deserve a bit of a sleep in, to be honest. Yesterday was quite stressful: I was enlisted to help in addressing 1.3 billion kina worth of outstanding claims from the Crisis, and was informed that one of my projects could put lives at risk.

Goes without saying, then, that I was pretty fucking on edge when I sat down to have a rare beer after work yesterday. The location was Kuri Lodge and we (the VSA crew) were meeting to have dinner with Lloyd Jones, author of Mr Pip. Luckily my friends were spared my anger as one of the new AusAID advisers, Luther Smith, saw me first! Cheers Luther, I did sleep on it and will sort it out this morning.

Most of you will have heard of Mr Pip, or at least the kiwis will have. Lloyd Jones is a former journalist and was here covering the conflict in 1998. The people he met and the events must have inspired him, because he wrote what has become a very popular work of fiction, so popular that a film is going to be produced (they are casting already).

Lloyd was a really nice guy and shared some pretty cool stories. While chatting away he made the point that we are living in history; Bougainville is a nation in the making, and we should be recording the events and moments we experience here.

I have to say, he has a point. Change is all around us…there is a new President, and he is doing a good job of pushing for progress in achieving peace across Bougainville. The Panguna area, central to the conflict, has recently opened up to government services. The Morgan Junction road block, symbolic of the unwillingness of some to accept peace, may be dismantled this year. Both positive signs that Bougainville is moving forward.

I think it will be good for me to note some of this stuff down, and perhaps you might enjoy reading it as well. So I am going to make more of an effort to record what I am experiencing here. I'll even attempt to write every day, as Lloyd recommended. Gotta be good for me, right?