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GIZO, Solomon Islands: As the death toll from the
Solomon Islands tsunami keeps rising, many here blame a local
tradition of helping relatives first for delays in getting disaster
relief to those in need.
Aid agencies are reluctant to
talk about how it has affected relief efforts, putting the slowness
of the emergency response down to the region’s remoteness, but
privately they acknowledge it is a major problem.
Under the tradition of wontok—pidgin
for “one talk” or those who speak the same local
language—locals are obliged to help their relatives and clan
members first.
“Wontok is always an issue,”
said one senior aid official who refused to be named. “It’s a
way of life over here.”
The death toll from last
Monday’s 8.0-magnitude quake and tsunami has risen to 39 and an
estimated 6,000 have been left homeless in the remote western region
of the impoverished South Pacific archipelago, aid officials said.
Devastated local residents are
scathing about the impact of wontok on a relief effort already
struggling to get aid to affected populations scattered on the
dozens of islands in the west of the Solomons.
“This wontok system is a very
bad thing, I think someone needs to fix it because we are getting
nothing,” said fisherman Lau-rence Walter from the village of
Pienuna on Ranongga island.
Aid agencies were yet to reach
the island when AFP visited on a chartered motorboat Saturday, a
full five days after Monday’s disaster.
Walter said Pienuna’s
population of about 450 people fled from the shoreline after the
quake and were still camped in the hills, short of drinking water
and proper shelter.
He was angry about the lack of
contact from the regional capital Gizo, where the international aid
effort is based, and believed wontok was responsible.
“You make some noise in Gizo
about getting help to Ranongga,” he told AFP. “Or maybe we will
have to go to Gizo ourselves and make a big noise.”
In Titiana, a village on Gizo
that was wiped out by the tsunami, locals also blamed wontok for a
lack of aid in the days immediately after the quake.
“We are second-class black
people to Honiara because of wontok, we don’t have the people
there to get us supplies quickly,” a villager said this week
before supplies reached their temporary camp.
Like most in the region, the
people of Titiana have been sheltering in hill camps as aftershocks
continue to shake the ground, making villagers afraid to return to
what is left of their coastal settlements in case of another
tsunami.
Large stockpiles of food and
relief supplies have been arriving in Gizo since Thursday and UN
disaster assessment coordination official Peter Muller said the next
step was to get it out to those in need.
 --AFP
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