Residents don’t wait, start own recovery programme

Teina Bishop listened to the rain on the roof of his Aitutaki house Thursday night, smiled to himself and went back to sleep. His restful slumber came from the knowledge that most of the other island’s residents were also safely under cover.
But Bishop, an MP for Aitutaki, also knew, had the rain come any earlier, it would have added an extra degree of misery to a people still scrambling to recover after Cyclone Pat hit in the early hours of Feb. 10.
Bishop was on Rarotonga Friday and, despite the fact it was nearly 10 days after the storm wreaked havoc on Aitutaki, he was still seeking answers as to why, despite the wide-spread destruction, it had taken several days for aid to arrive.
Even after a planeload of MPs visited the island on Feb. 11, a day after Prime Minister Jim Marurai declared a State of Disaster, it was left to Bishop and other members of the island’s business community to take the initiative. It was their effort, in the form of a letter sent to Julie Affleck, Secretary to the New Zealand High Commissioner in Rarotonga, that was the first official request to New Zealand for much-needed assistance.
“In the end, we decided that we were not going to wait because no one could see any sign of help arriving,” Bishop said. “It was just meeting after meeting. I didn’t want to go to any more meetings. I’d rather spend time working with people.”
Bishop may have taken some heat for his comments about how long it took Government to finally get around to making its own request for aid, but he’s not about to back down.
“I’m going to defend my views, even if I have to talk to the prime minister of New Zealand,” he said. “If you don’t live there, you don’t know that every hour without an immediate response is like a day. It drains people. People were waiting to hear the sound of the (Royal New Zealand Air Force) Hercules. The sound of the Hercules was the sound of hope, the sound of help.”
Bishop and others eventually decided to just get on with their own recovery programme. A timber importer, Bishop dipped into his own stock to deliver the beams used to nail down tarpaulins on houses where roofs had been damaged or blown off completely.
“My priority was to get these homes covered because, under that ceiling, is their personal belongings,” he said. “I’ve just recorded the amount of timber and got the people to sign. It’ll be my job to find out later how we’re going to get the funds to pay for it. If nobody gives me a hand, I’ll work for it.”
With roofs now covered, and the essentials of water, power and telecommunications nearly full restored, Bishop said Aitutaki’s residents are well on the road to recovery, even if they did have to do most of the heavy lifting themselves.
“At the moment we’re doing what we can,” he said. “And if Government comes with help, that’s a bonus. But we are up and going. Aitutaki will be better than before.”