We returned from Florida with a more positive image than either of us had ever held of the state, mainly because it got us out of frigid weather and we started seeing the logic of living in warmth year round. A delightful weekend in Philadelphia visiting friends, playing chamber music, and revisiting my old haunts followed, and that seemed to be the end of our travels, until we learned that our contacts from Mongolia would be in New York for a meeting of the UN Human Rights Council in which the Mongolian government was to answer questions from civil society and NGOs posed last October in Geneva.
The lawyer who had been working there for the ABA since September, , had organized the workshop and wanted outside help with it. This stone is the centerpiece of the very moving Guadalcanal American Memorial overlooking Honiara. The entire history of the battles, tributes to Australia, New Zealand, and other allies, as well as to the Solomon Island coast watchers and scouts who worked with the allies as part of Australian intelligence, are carved in stone.
We looked into flight options: Los Angeles to either Brisbane or Fiji. Fiji sounded romantic and exotic until we learned the price for me , and so settled on Brisbane. This proved fortunate because I have a cousin living in Brisbane whom I caught up with via email in Bali. More importantly, he importuned us to get malaria prophylaxis before we arrived in Honiara.
More on Australia after the Solsβ¦. The Solomon Islands were discovered by Europeans on February 7, by Alvaro de Mendana, a Spaniard living in Callao, Peru, who had heard from the Incas of islands of gold to the west. We thought this a good ruse to get rid of some Spanish concquerers. I would love to be able to tell you more about the book, but I left it in my seat pocket on the USAir flight to Los Angeles and no one turned it in, so this is all I know. I am much chagrined to admit that this is the first time in my life I have had to replace a lost library book!
The British declared the Solomon Islands a protectorate in , and granted it independence in Major ethnic violence between indigenous tribes of Guadacanal and of Malaita, a neighboring island, erupted on Guadacanal, where many Malaitans lived, in the early s. A country regional group comprising military and civil service personnel called RAMSI Regional Assistance Mission Solomon Islands , dominated by Australia, oversees the law and justice, military, and economic development spheres for the islands.
