Lomiki: Need more formalities in my Bougainville basket

Leonard Fong Roka

In the midst of hundreds of Papua New Guineans, Bernard Lomiki, was one of the tiniest fractions of Bougainvilleans from the northern Solomons to graduate from the Divine Word University main campus on the 3 March 2013 under the merciful sun of Madang.

Mr. Bernard Lomiki

 The Siwai man from Hiruhiru village, flew back home, to Bougainville, with a jubilating heart and a Diploma in Health Services Management that he attain through DWU’s Faculty of Flexible Learning  (FFL) after enrolling in 2011. As a father, he had something positive to bring home to his five children and a supportive wife back home.

Born in 1964, Mr. Lomiki did not go through the formal education system or the classrooms. Rather, he made his way through the much expensive College of Distance Education (CODE) system (then College External Studies (COES)) and passed with a mere letter of attainment and not a certificate in 1986 back in Arawa.

With a certificate of attainment and no formal job, the Bougainville war for independence engulfed this South Bougainvillean in an air of nothingness. But the stability created by the New Zealand peace effort brought him hope to seek some sort of employment in the unpredictable post-conflict Bougainvillean environment.

From 1994 to 2009, he was employed by the Monoitu Health Center in Siwai where he served his people as a Community Health Worker. A job he said he enjoyed and dedicated himself to in order to advance. At the end of 2009, he secured a position at the Buka General Hospital where he was serving in the Pharmaceutical Department distributing medicine throughout Bougainville and it is from here, his life changing moment caught him unprepared—he did enrolled in the FFL of DWU under the sponsorship of the Bougainville Traditional Herbal Association (BTHA).

For Lomiki, his graduation day was one of the greatest moments in his 49 year old life. ‘As my name was read,’ he chuckled at me with too joyful complexion, ‘I was carried away. I was proud looking back at my past of misfortunes in academia. I have reached something after years and months of struggle that sometimes does not go well with my family’.

In 2012 he quit his job to enlighten the workloads and to concentrate in his studies. ‘You know,’ he laughed it out; ‘an email from the lecturers shocked me when they asked me for my assignments. I knew I had done nothing so my ego set me working a strategy and that was, I should quit my job and sacrifice for a diploma from a recognized higher learning institution’.

He has a motive to go back to Bougainville and contribute to the development of Bougainville. He longs to see a Bougainville people with high living standards of living in terms of health. A Bougainville with healthy people and communities is his aim.

‘Our people have long struggled for self determination and we have paid for that with our blood and tears,’ he said. ‘Now is the time that we all work together and invest in education for our island’s future. We have proven to the world that a big country like Papua New Guinea cannot hold back our years if we set up a good political system and a sound economic engine and say: ‘Let’s go Bougainville!’ the Papua New Guineans will be shocked because they know if they sent their military there, we will kick them out’.

‘If our people are committed to change through education and our government, the ABG, supportive by bringing tertiary institution right to Bougainville, in terms of development this Papua New Guineans can fall back. The PNGeans are celebrating the LNG and so on, but all are exploitative industries that at the end of the day, the investor walks away dancing with the resources owner fight each other because little they should has being sucked by corruption’.

With his first born son working after graduating from the Madang Technical College in 2010, Mr. Bernard Lomiki, has applied for application form to come back to Divine Word University to pursue a degree in Rural Health in between 2014 and 2015.

‘Bougainville is looking forward to deciding its political future in the referendum between 2015 and 2020,’ he told me, ‘and I am looking forward to contribute something to the making of a new Bougainville instead of being a free rider’.