TO SCHOOL IN JOSEPH’S COAT

TO SCHOOL IN JOSEPH’S COAT

For primary school, I went to St. Michael’s Catholic Primary School at Avuvu on the Weather Coast of Guadalcanal. Most of the teachers were either nuns, or relatives – uncles, aunties, kukua’s, etc.

The other children and I would walk to school in the morning and back at the end of the day—about two miles for me and longer for children from villages further away. We carried our beho—cooked sweet potato, taro, or yam—for lunch in little kei (string bags), or wrapped in leaves.

When it rained, we used banana leaves as umbrellas, or folded our clothes and wrap them in leaves and ran naked in the rain. At the end of the day on our way home we would play, climb trees, make spears and throw them at the moss that grew on trees.

For grades five and six we boarded at school in order to prepare for the grade six exams. Boarding was difficult. Although the school was only about two miles from Haimatua, I was constantly homesick—it was the first time I had left my parents and village to live elsewhere. But I soon got used to it because I knew everybody and was related to most of the other kids at school, and some of the teachers.

At the end of the sixth grade, I was told that I was one of two students who had passed the exam and would be going to St. Josephs Tenaru to do Form 1. I was both happy and scared. Happy because I would be going on to secondary school, although I had little clue what that meant. But, I was scared because it would be the first time that I would leave my village, my relatives and my home: Tasimauri. The idea of strangers scared me.

I remember my first night in Honiara. That first night, as I lay on a mat on the concrete floor, I was overwhelmed with loneliness. Although my father was there and the people around me were from Tasimauri, I felt empty inside. I missed my home and the sound of the waves tumbling in and caressing the pebbles on the beach. I missed the mountains that tower over the northern and western skies and touch the ocean at Vahato in the distance. I missed Laovi Point that stretches out like an arm reaching towards Kora i Sahalu Island. I missed Laovi Lake. I missed my friends and everything that was familiar. Honiara wasn’t my home.

The day after, my father and I went shopping for things that I needed for school. I knew my father was spending the little money he and the rest of my family made from making copra. I helped, and knew that making copra was backbreaking while the monetary return was small, hardly worth the labor put into it.

It was my first time to own so many things: clothes, pens, a mat, a pillow, and a red wooden box that would become my suitcase. I had never owned a suitcase before and was proud of the red wooden box. It was my coolest possession.

That was until I arrived at St. Joseph's School, Tenaru, and saw other kids - especially the town kids - wheel in their expensive leather suitcases, with four inch mattresses rolled around thick pillows and expensive bed sheets and pillow cases. My bedding consisted of a mat, a pillow, and a bed sheet—the stripy, cheap Chinese-made bed sheets. The other kids also wore expensive clothes that my parents could never afford. All the things I had at school were cheap stuff, but I was proud of them. That was what my parents could afford.

I had this shirt, which my mother sewed with pieces of clothes she collected from the Women’s Club at Haimarao. I am sure she sewed it with love and pride. It was for me – her son. The shirt was a colorful patchwork. It was my favorite shirt.

But, the kids at school called it “Joseph’s coat.” That troubled me so much that I stopped wearing it.

         Now, thinking back, I wish I had kept “Joseph’s Coat.”