Georgina Kekea writing in the Solomon Times Online at the weekend wrote a piece saying a village elder of Riva community in South Guadalcanal had said he was quite impressed to see villagers working together in community projects.
Quoting the article, Georgina added.
Speaking to Solomon Times Online, elder Francis Ibi says even the children are willing to help out which he sees as very impressive.
“Our community here is quite small. When the kids were on holiday, they also helped out in community work towards the building of our church building”, Ibi says.
In the South Guadalcanal constituency, Member of Parliament (MP) Rollen Seleso has embarked on building churches and community halls for the community. Currently more than 30 buildings are being built across communities in South Guadalcanal.
“It is the people’s request for me to build these buildings for them”, MP Seleso says.
The church buildings are for the denominations of SSEC, Wesley United, Catholic, SDA, Revival and Apostolic churches.
For the Riva community, most of the residents are Catholics. They live closer to the mountains and were able to access the forests of South Guadalcanal easily. Because of this, they are the suppliers of timber for all the other communities with their church buildings and community hall projects.
Most of the timber for the other communities is usually transported down the Riva river.
“We have timbers for the other communities still here. We will have to wait for the water to rise a bit before the villagers can float with it down the river and then transfer it to the boats to go to the other communities”, Ibi says.
“This week we are cutting timber for the SDA church and then next week, we will be cutting timber for the SSEC group”, Ibi says.
He says they are supplying the timber free.
“So we have allocated two days a week to do work for the church. Tuesdays and Fridays are the days allocated for church work. We have stopped a bit while waiting for more materials”, Ibi says.
The people of South Guadalcanal are very strong Christians and are very happy with the new church buildings.
“Because of the virus we were not able to do much work last year. We are hoping that this year things will be different so that we can complete our church”, Ibi says.
The church buildings and community halls for South Guadalcanal are a project of the current Member of Parliament. The projects were implemented with support by the government from the Constituency Development Funds (CDF) through the Ministry of Rural Development.
End of quote.
Yours sincerely
Frank Short
