Peaceful Community
Good Community Living
When we talk about development, people often refer to things like roads, bridges, schools, aid-posts, etc. We always think about big government infrastructure development, well those are part of development but they are for communal use by the general population of the district or electorate. How about the individual person, change must take place within each person so they can improve themselves and have a descent living. Each person must be living in permanent houses, they must be sleeping on a 6-inch mattress and cover tiger blankets at night. They must brush their teeth everyday, have a full bath, look after their health. Those are simple things they need to do, if they do this, then this is change. If people are not living in permanent houses, then we need to come up with strategies to help people to build permanent houses.
If people are still living in traditional thatched roof houses, we have not really developed yet. Our style of dressing has changed, we wear trousers, shirts, blouses and skirts, however our standard of living has not really improved. If all the people live in permanent modern buildings, this is real development. Our ancestors, our grandparents, our parents have all been living under thatched roof houses, and now in this generation we cannot continue to live under thatched roof houses forever, we must live in modern buildings.
To build pernament buildings, it costs money. We cannot say that we do not have money. The Tsenglap are all coffee growers and they cannot deny that. Sir Kaiabelt Diria introduced the coffee tree to the Tsenglaps fifty (50) years ago and coffee is grown by all people in Wahgi.
It is about time people should look at themselves, rather than pointing figures at the politicians. Politicians are responsible for making decisions and building government infrastructure. It is now up to the people to build up their own permanent home. Electricity (Ramu Power) has been present at Tolu for over twenty years, yet we are not making use of this by building permnent houses.
People need to change their way of living. The village councillors, village court magistrates, and peace officers must work hard to ensure village people are busy doing something, and not gambling at the market places. We are spending too much money on Bride Price and Compensation. For compensation, the individual law breaker should be face the full brunt of the law, the whole community must not support him. The culprit should sell his own house, property or go to prison
For Bride Price the village councillors must set a fixed rate of not more than K2000.00. Bride price should be set at K2000 and 2 pigs. Why should the bride price be set at K2000, simply because in this modern times marriages don't last for more than 12 months. For every first marriages that take place 90% will hand up in divorce as seen all over the world.