Margaret Atkin

Frigate Birds (eBook, ePUB)

Forty Years With the Solomons

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Ayoung New Zealand nursing student is lunching in her college café in 1975 when an unknown 'Black man with a halo of corkscrew curls' sits uninvited next to her.

Within a year, she marries the stranger in a traditional Solomon Islands' ceremony near the beach on which he was born, midway through his mother's four-hour walk to the clinic.

Naked children and bare-breasted women greet the couple's arrival by canoe. She is the sole European at her wedding. Her only present is a shell.

She discovers their home is a fibreboard house perched on stilts in a sea of mud on a muddy road. They bathe in a stream and fetch water from the river. The sea is the toilet.

For most of the next forty years, this is her world - and the setting of the incredible story she reveals in Frigate Birds.

Standards of health, nutrition, welfare and education are woefully low. But limited experience and basic knowledge are no deterrent as the young newlywed resolutely sets about improving the health and welfare of the islanders.

She battles politicians, lawyers and health authorities. At home, she copes with bankruptcy, divorce and the birth of two sons.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Sid Harta Publishers
• Seitenzahl: 338
• Erscheinungstermin: 5. April 2023
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780645787221
• Artikelnr.: 67735905

Autorenporträt

Frigate birds live on rocky islands and emerge during high winds and storms to ride the currents. Carved on the prows of canoes, they watch out for enemies and spirits and provide inspiration for Solomon Islanders. In this deeply Christian country, they are found in many churches. Like them, much of my family's experience in the Solomons has been stormy; but, like them, we have learnt to ride the currents. George Atkin and I were married in 1976 in Tawatana, Makira, after meeting at Wellington Polytechnic. He was studying journalism, while I was a nursing student. It was a profound shock to arrive in the village by canoe to be greeted by naked children and bare-breasted women. We washed in the stream, fetched water from the river and toileted in the sea. I was the only European at our wedding and our only present was a shell.Quite rightly the Solomon Islands Nursing Registration Board decreed I was too inexperienced to register so I returned to NZ to obtain more experience and a midwifery diploma. George subsequently joined me.