Loss of hope for islands

Front pages from 1987, 1999, and 2010.

Journal 10/30/1987

P1 Back to TT ‘pork barrel’ days
Is there something that legislators, magistrates and other elected officials in Micronesia see that the rest of us are missing? This may explain why many of those charged with overseeing development funds under the Compact are busily appropriating this money for seawalls, community houses, docks and other pork barrel projects as if these were still the Trust Territory days to the 1970s. Possibly these leaders have simply abandoned any hope of any real economic productivity and have resigned themselves (and their people) to perpetual dependence on a Western power. —Fr. Francis X. Hezel, SJ

P5 Big bucks
Have you seen some guys walking out of Bank of Guam and into RRE with brown paper bags full of dollar bills this week? This week the Four Atoll people got paid their quarterly 177 payment. I heard the figure for the Bikinians is $1.25 million for 1,446 people, for Enewetak $812,500 for 904 people, for Rongelap $625,000 for 1,475 people, and for Utrik $375,000 for 778 people. You can always tell when the Four Atolls are getting paid: Bank of Guam runs out of big bills. —Grant Gordon

Journal 10/22/1999

P1 Our man at the UN
As his wife Cathy Relang held the Bible, new RMI Ambassador to the United Nations Jackeo Relang took the oath of office from Judge H. Dee Johnson during a ceremony at the capital Monday.

P1 Big money shipment arrives next week
The Nuclear Claims Tribunal will pay out nearly $2.3 million in compensation to nuclear test-affected Marshall Islanders next week. The payment will bring the total paid out since the Tribunal began compensation payments in 1991 to $39,428,415. It is being paid out to satisfy 1,650 claims.

Journal 10/29/2010

P1 Life-saver
RMI and Taiwan political leaders unveiled the new Dialysis Center at Majuro Hospital Friday. Ministry of Health officials have had to hustle to get facilities for the dialysis equipment set up over the past two months after receiving notice from National Taipei Hospital of the surprise donation. The Ministry of Health has not yet looked at the financial costs of operating this treatment, set up policies and protocols for treatment of patients in Majuro and completed staff training on the service — the main factors why the services will not be rolled out until early next year.

P12 Three claps for Aqorau
It isn’t every day that you see something we saw with our own eyes in Majuro Friday. In fact, come to think of it, in our many years wandering around the Marshall Islands and to its Pacific neighbors, we have never seen what transpired Friday. To wit, we ambled into the Lanai Club for a ceremony and some food involving fisheries and foreign affairs type folks. Clustered over in the corner were several notable personages, including MIMRA Director Glen Joseph, business guy Almo Momotaro, MIMRA second boss Samuel ‘Batti’ Lanwi, and Transform Aqorau, who hails from the Solomons and runs the PNA office here. Transform was busy with a bowl and a small cloth towel. On closer inspection, he was whipping up a batch of kava. But what made this modest ceremony unprecedented in the history of kava making in the western Pacific was Transform’s attire. Now we’ve seen people in various stages of undress making kava — grass skirts, no shirts, loincloths and a necklace. More common in places like Pohnpei and Vanuatu, which are loaded with commercial kava bars, is to see a guy in jeans, a T-shirt and zorries mixing buckets full of kava (or squeezing the tasty goop from the pepper plant root, to produce Pohnpeian-style sakau). But Mr. Aqorau was resplendent in a white dress shirt and a red necktie as he went about the task of mixing the kava at the Lanai. Like we said, an unprecedented event in the annals of kava making in the Pacific.

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