Our island home: Aussie officers reflect on seven years in the Solomons
- kirranicolle
- 3 days ago
- 8 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
BY KIRRALEE NICOLLE
Majors Robert and Vanessa Evans have been working in Honiara, capital of the Solomon Islands, as District Offers for The Salvation Army for seven years. The Salvation Army was only established in The Solomon Islands 13 years ago, so the Evanses have been some of the foundational workers in the region.
I recently caught up with them while they were in Melbourne to find out how this time has been, and what they are planning next. When we spoke, Vanessa was recovering from an illness, so Robert did most of the talking. But their shared love of the Solomon Islands, their passion for seeing communities transformed and their drive to learn and grow in their roles was obvious.
“Our three mission priorities [are] to raise up Indigenous leaders, structure financial sustainability and expand mission,” Robert said. “The mission’s expanding all by itself. It’s hard to keep up with that because [of] word of mouth. We’ve gone from 70 soldiers to 310 soldiers, two churches to 13 churches. I mean, things are just taking off.
“We’re trying to keep up with that.”
During their time in the country, the number of corps has increased from just Honiara Corps and a small mission in East Are’are, on the island of Malaita, to now 13 churches spread across the division.
Additionally, Vanessa is a national contact person for modern slavery and human trafficking, a job that regularly drives her to research and upskill. Robert has also undertaken a Master of Transformational Development during their time in the country.
The pair said they were very grateful for the ‘extraordinary generosity’ of The Salvation Army Australia, with the initial five-year pledge to support continuing into its 13th year.
“We’re immeasurably grateful to the Salvation Army Australia for their belief and their ongoing funding,” Robert said.
The recent Making it Happen project was just one example.
Through a partnership with World Vision, Robert and Vanessa have delivered a holistic training program called ‘Channels of Hope for Gender’ to address issues of gender-based violence in the Islands. Sadly, a national study from 2009 revealed nearly two in three women between the ages of 15 and 49 reported physical or sexual violence, or both, at the hands of an intimate partner.
Robert and Vanessa said that while many similar programs sought to address the impacts on women alone, the World Vision training held a key difference. They said the program had changed the attitudes of entire villages regarding the value of safeguarding women and children.
“The approach of World Vision is working with the men as well as the women, together, so that the men in the village are wrestling with the same issues about what their role should be in healthy relationships,” Robert said. “So, it becomes more of a mutual space.”
Throughout the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence, a yearly global push to raise awareness and garner support for ending violence against women and girls, Robert and Vanessa have, over the past two years, rolled out child-safe training using material from A21, an anti-human trafficking organisation established by Australian evangelist Christine Caine. The program teaches about the difference between safe and unsafe touch, how to recognise unsafe situations and be alert to danger. Last year, they also worked alongside translators from the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) to develop the materials into Pijin. The plan for the Storybooks, as they are called, is now to distribute them in schools and churches.
“It made a huge difference,” Vanessa said. “The first year we reached just shy of 600 people, and this year [more than] 900.”
Robert said teaching these fundamental safe behaviours was both powerful and disturbing, as it exposed the prevalence of child abuse.
“The Solomon Islands is a very broad and open environment where there’s very few boundaries and fences and safeguards,” he said. “Kids wander everywhere, and parents half the time have no idea where their kids are. So [we are] opening their eyes to be mindful of where the kids are and who they're interacting with.”
Robert and Vanessa are now looking to continue working alongside SIL to translate the facilitator’s manual into Pijin as well.
One woman, a leader in the program who had only a grade three level of education, has already experienced the benefits of reading the materials in her own language. The couple said that after this woman read the manual in Pijin, she commented that she understood it far more deeply and felt able to put it into practice. Robert said when he first met this woman, the wife of a Salvation Army worker, she would hide away, afraid of white people and unable to meet his eyes or talk to him. Thanks to the work of Vanessa and an education specialist, this woman has now preached her first sermon and is a great candidate for attending The Salvation Army training college in Papua New Guinea.
“She not only looks at me and engages with me, she’s cheeky,” Robert said. “She’s emerged, she’s come out of her shell. You watch her work a room – she’s mindful of what’s happening around her, and she’s engaging. Her husband’s one of our key team members, and he would've been in college a couple of years ago, but we need to bring them on that journey together because our culture in The Salvation Army is that husbands and wives train together.”
Robert and Vanessa said the education gap between men and women in the country was so large that, while they would love to have sent students to the training college much earlier, the need to educate the women first was crucial. They said this was a big reason why they were continuing on for a third term – to provide much-needed continuity and longevity.
“We want to set these women up for success,” Robert said. “We don't want to push them beyond where they’re ready to go. That means we need to be patient, we need to journey with them.”
Along the way, Robert and Vanessa have built partnerships with various organisations in the district. In addition to World Vision and SIL, they have partnered with Rotary, the International Organisation for Migration, The Solomon Cable Company, the Australian Defence Force, the Australian and New Zealand High Commissioners and multiple businesspeople.
But despite the successes of island life, it hasn’t always been smooth sailing.
They said there were deeply-held prejudices against women in the Solomon Islands, who were seen as property and described as “pencil-breaks”, a derogatory term which identified women as unable to lead or take authority in the community because often, their education was only at a year-three level.
Robert and Vanessa said the school system offered a year-six test to allocate the very limited spaces available in high school but that the chance of a girl being given the same opportunity as a boy to be educated was low. Robert and Vanessa said these issues were not due to the original culture of the islands but because somewhere along the way, something went very wrong.
“At some point, alcoholism drives it or fuels it,” Robert said. “But there’s something deeper going on there about the attitude towards women. Part of that [is] driven culturally through bride price.
“Bride price was originally about one community losing a productive member, and that bride price was actually compensating the village for the release of that member. It was reciprocal between communities. It’s now become almost like this ownership. So, [the] ability to escape culturally from an abusive marriage is very, very difficult because that money been paid over, and so you would then have to pay that back.”
For Robert and Vanessa, day-to-day life is also full of challenges.
“Honiara is one of those places that just really wears you down,” Robert said. “The infrastructure’s very, very poor, so getting around anywhere takes a massive effort.”
Robert and Vanessa said early on, they made it a goal to be in the public eye as much as possible to make their presence known, so they took all their meetings in cafes. But now, because of deteriorating infrastructure combined with an influx of expatriates and those from nearby islands relocating to Honiara, it takes 1.5 hours to drive to a cafe just a few kilometres away.
“The road conditions are so bad,” Robert said. “Driving behaviour is so bad. You have rural people trying to live in a city, and it just doesn’t work.
"Honiara represents everything that's broken politically, development-wise, economically [in the Solomon Islands]. You get outside into villages, [and] there’s a rhythm of life that actually makes sense and actually works, and while there’s poverty and hardship in other areas, there is a degree of abundance in the villages. The village life is self-sustaining.”
However, Robert and Vanessa did say that they never feel unsafe at the hands of others in Honiara.
“Solomon Islanders are very friendly by nature,” Robert said. “They’re curious, and they love to share their story. The freedom of movement we have from the personal safety point of view is phenomenal.”
But despite the safety of the city, the couple have experienced some significant low points.
As a keen adventure walker, Robert has explored much of Honiara and the broader island of Guadalcanal. As part of this, he has led groups of expatriates on 8km and 10km walks through hills, valleys and jungles on the island. On most occasions, this is a kind of break from the stressors of everyday life.
“It’s an escape from all the dirtiness and brokenness of Honiara,” Robert said. “It’s actually exposing people to some of the beauty that’s still there. It clears their heads.”
Two years ago, however, Robert encountered a pack of five dogs that attacked him, badly tearing the skin and tissues of his leg. Robert says he received proper treatment after the attack in a ‘serendipitous moment’. Robert and Vanessa aren’t usually entitled to treatment by the Australian High Commission doctor as they are not part of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade delegation. But while seeking a tetanus shot, Robert managed to see the High Commission doctor and receive treatment from a visiting surgeon, with ketamine as the anaesthetic on offer.
Robert describes this as the ‘trippiest thing of his life’ and Vanessa as the ‘most hilarious thing ever’, but the reality is also that Robert’s wounds required ongoing treatment to heal properly.
“It was brutal, nasty and scary,” Robert said.
Another aspect of their lives that frightens them a little is the prospect of the next transition – that of coming home to Australia in approximately 18 months. While Robert and Vanessa are thrilled that soon they will be back home for good with their twin adult children and new granddaughter, they are honest about their fears of leaving behind deep and lasting friendships in the Solomon Islands, work that is still ongoing and then, also settling back into a culture that now feels in some ways, foreign.
“Even when we come home on furlough, we feel culturally displaced,” Robert said. “We are coming back into the environment where we have options. We’re coming back into an environment where there’s an abundance, where there’s waste, where there’s triviality.
“Coming back full-time as Salvation Army officers into a culture that is so far removed from where we’ve been for the last nine years, I expect that's going to be a real challenge.”
However, the additional training both Robert and Vanessa have undertaken during their time in the Solomon Islands and the invaluable experience their service in the country has offered them, is something they look forward to implementing in an Australian context.
“While we are tired and we are ready to move on, it’s not going to be easy,” Robert said. “We’ve put our heart and soul into the Solomons. We absolutely love our people. Honiara may be a tough place to be, but the Solomon Islands is a beautiful place that we have grown to love. The ministry that we've been involved with [and] the opportunities [for] leadership have been unparalleled to anything we’ve had before.”
“And we’re always up for the adventure,” added Vanessa. “We know God’s got us.”
