Hi - thanks for your website! My brother and I snorkeled most days, watched Butch Cassidy & Sundance Kid sitting on a fallen coconut tree - in the rain - because the projectionist wanted to see it too in what had been a coconut plantation. We lived in Arawa in '71-2 - just a string of houses. My dad, Del Sare, was a construction boss w/ Bechtel. He arrived in '69 over a year ahead of our family. I remember the squishy crunching of all the frogs on the roads at night under the tires of the little blue Toyota truck. The commissary grew from a small shop to a large metal bldg., the hospital w/ purple doors was completed, but empty for lack of medical personnel, a tennis court sat next to the fuselage of a B52,Tony Dianamighty (I have no idea if that was his real name) - a dynamite expert working on the road to Kieta - taught Mike & I how to eat spaghetti 'properly', there was a couple next to us form England - he had been an organist at Westminster, I worked for Les Cosh - the dentist across the 'street' and down 2 houses from us - making amalgam with too much mercury (I thought it stuck together better...sorry if I poisoned any of you), and the only other folks I recall were the Bowlings and a young Aussie couple w/ 2 adorable little kids. We went to Arovo Island - what a great adventure! I fell against the boat's exhaust pipe - 3rd degree burns - so skin grafts in Towoomba when I went there for my senior yr. of high school. I remember Joe Tac Long's store in Kieta, a small clinic that sat up on the hill - above Joe's - with a screen door to their little surgery, and when the big new Kieta grocery went in...lobster for $5 USD and Cowuna (sp.??) who cut our grass w/ a machete. There had been a 'jungle' market just past our houses where we would get the best ever oranges with green peel and little banana leaf packets of roasted nuts of some sort. One week my dad's crew had no jobs lined-up, so he had them build a palm drive beginning and ending nowhere - just outside of what was the 'town' of Arawa. I have fond memories of when the first Euclids arrived - dad was so excited - my brother and I went with him to see the new earth movers w/ the mammoth tires. Those pioneers are gone...my dad, Del Sare, passed away in 2005...he had built dams in Afghanistan, roads and ports in Borneo, Peru, Venezuela, Greenland and Saudi Arabia...our home movies and our family's friends were of a breed of adventurous men and women who took on tremendous challenge and hardship - and gave people like me a magnificent life...and as w/ so many, Bougainvillitis is indeed a welcome affliction! Thanks for for the place to remember...
Michele Sare..Montana
sare.michele@gmail.com
http://nursesfornursesinternational.com
