BY JOSES SAREN
Under the shade of a large rain tree, in the strip of land between Kon Street and the National Archives compound where a stream flows through, a man sits with a hand-rolled cigarette between his fingers. Silver rings crowd his knuckles, dark bangles stack up his wrist, and grey dreadlocks fall past a beard streaked white with age.
His name is Jack. He says he is from East Guadalcanal. What he keeps returning to, unprompted, is a number: 27 years living on the street.
Island Sun cannot verify that figure, or much of Jack’s account of how he came to be here. His answers shift, and at times his train of thought is difficult to follow. But the number has come up more than once, in the same words — a fixed point in an otherwise uncertain story.
A life on the compound wall
Jack’s shelter is built from tarpaulin, cardboard and salvaged wire mesh, set in the narrow strip of land between Kon Street and the brick perimeter wall of the National Archives, where a stream runs through. It is in that stream that Jack washes. For drinking water, he relies on the Archives compound itself: he passes his bottles through to the security guards on duty, who fill them from a tap inside and hand them back.
It is survival built into the seams of the city — a stream for bathing, a government wall at his back, and the goodwill of the guards next door for something as basic as clean water.
For food, Jack says he relies on what he can find in the rubbish bins at the Central Market.
Small kindnesses, unpredictable income
Jack has no fixed income. He says people passing by sometimes stop and give him money — on the day Island Sun visited, one passer-by left him SBD $5. He also says he sometimes goes to stand outside a bank in town, where people have given him $10, $20, even $50 at a time. There is no pattern to it, no regular support — just whatever a stranger decides to hand over on a given day.
A question no one has answered
Spending time with him, it becomes clear Jack’s thinking does not always hold together. He repeats himself. He loses the thread of what he is saying. Whether that is the toll of decades on the street, an underlying condition, or something else entirely is not for this reporter — or anyone without the relevant training — to say. But it raises a question bigger than Jack alone: what happens to people living rough in Honiara whose grip on their own story is no longer steady, and who has any responsibility to check on them?
A city growing around him
Jack’s situation sits uneasily next to the government’s own language about urban growth. Solomon Islands’ Minister of Lands and Housing told the United Nations in July that rapid urban growth is putting pressure on housing, roads and water supplies in Honiara and the provincial centres. Jack is what that pressure looks like at street level — not a line in a ministerial address, but a man living against a government wall, washing in the stream below it, and passing his water bottles through to whoever is on duty that day.
Whether Honiara owes him anything more than the coins passers-by leave behind is a question the city has not yet answered.
Photo credit: Joses Saren
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