Leonard Fong Roka
The Avaipa area is landlocked by ranges that sprout west
from Bougainville’s main backbone, the Crown Prince Range in the Panguna area. It
consists of six major villages namely Kosia (near and borders Avaipa to
Panguna), Sipuru, Mainoki, Sirovai, Siuema and Kaspeke before the Bougainville
crisis but today it is dotted by hamlets.
Geographically the area is all plain that is sourced from
the Banoni coast of South Bougainville but protected by the Crown Prince Range
to the north, the Kosia ridge to the east and the Piruo Mountains further west
towards the Karato area. It was not linked by a road even though it was just
near the multi-million kina Panguna mine that promised Bougainville so much and
gave nothing.
The center of activity for the entire area is the Paruparu
Catholic station (sub-parish of Deumori), primary school and health center. Popular
during the peak of the Bougainville crisis as an educational facility for
training health workers and so on, the peace on Bougainville demised it as it
pulled people towards the cash economy.
The Australian Panguna mine for funding PNG gave nothing to
Bougainville’s Avaipa area as usual. To access government services the Avaipa
people walk kilometers across rivers and mountains for hours to Tumpusiong in
the south-east or Borumai in the north-east.
But it is the post crisis Bougainville, a Bougainville
without a multi-million dollar Panguna mine, that finally blew a wind of change
to the people; their hours of shouldering wet-bean or fermented cocoa bags,
will be history; stretchers for their sick and death back home will no more
because of the newly constructed road from the Tumpusiong Valley into Paruparu.
The road was first dreamt of by the 2005-10 Autonomous
Bougainville Government (ABG) house. This government funded a survey from
Borumai and over the rugged Crown Prince Range into Paruparu that cost some
K100 thousand in 2009. The surveyors, however, upon completion discovered that Paruparu
was so close to Tumpusiong and a road from Tumpusiong would be less costly than
what they have done from Borumai.
Thus, the surveyor with local community leaders then did
another surveying from the Tumpusiong’s Pingnari section where one of the local
leaders, Wendelinus Bitanuma, had his home at a rough cost of another K100 000
of public money.
The surveying team made up of members from the Arawa area of
Kieta and Siwai in South Bougainville were rich with two rounds of surveying
within 2009 and early 2010. But land related conflicts on the areas the road
would run through created by community leaders between the innocent and
development needy landowning villagers scared the ABG away and the project was
called off; and the village leaders also were not to be seen.
However, in mid 2012, the national MP for central
Bougainville, Hon. Jimmy Miringtoro came to the rescue. He allocated some
millions for the death project and it was revived to the joy of the people.
The surveyors came back to life with another round of
surveying. Groups of people from Avaipa cleared the jungle trail they had used
for ages now for the bulldozers to employ to dig up the top soil for the trucks
to dump gravel from the Tumpusiong’s Panguna created tailings.
The contract was awarded to Kompaini Transport, a local
company from the Koromira area of central Bougainville. They did not waste time
when the funding was delayed, but use own money to start the work to liberate
the Avaipa people from being slaves of own survival and the state later
reimbursed them.
By the Christmas of 2012, transport vehicles were already
visiting the Pangtaresi ridge (photo a
vehicle on Pangtaresi) that is a center point on the Tumpusiong to Avaipa
trail. Situated high on the ridge, walkers rest here having a cool view of both
the Avaipa area to the north-west and Tumpusiong Valley to the south-west
before continuing their journey neither way.
Rumors also are wide spread that a few Avaipa people and
groups were gearing to purchase vehicles that once they had no choice for there
was no safe place to keep since their homes were kilometers away in the bush.
Thus the road could be said of as a road of change to the
Avaipa people and those peoples surrounding them.
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