Lighthouse at Irue

Since Irue is near the point of land that juts out, it could cause problems for ships at night, especially since there is also reef surrounding the land. Because of this, many years ago a lighthouse was built there. During the Bougainville crisis, the solar panels for powering the light were stolen and the lighthouse hasn’t been operating since then, so it’s not helping ships these days!

Anyway, when we were visiting Irue, we went for a walk to the point and saw the lighthouse. It’s not like the usual brick lighthouses that you usually picture. It’s just a tall steel structure with a light and whatever else at the top.

Some of the young people who walked with us enjoyed climbing up the lighthouse.

“Light for safe navigation Stay away”. Clearly this sign isn’t heeded. I guess it doesn’t matter since the lighthouse isn’t operational these days, although certainly there's safety issues with climbing it!

Climbing back down the ladder:

Lighthouse as seen from a bit further away:

Village views

Irue, the village I mentioned a couple of blog posts ago, is always in view from Hiovabon (unless there are thick clouds). Here is a photo which shows the stretch of land that Irue is on, leading to ‘the point’. To give you a sense of distance, it took only 9 minutes to get there by motor boat.

From Hiovabon, we don’t have a very big view of open ocean to watch ships sailing past, only a small bit between the point and Teop Island (on the right in the photo below).

We could see Hiovabon from Irue too. In the photos below, Hiovabon is circled, with an arrow pointing to it (in case you can’t see the circle).

Teop Island is the land mass on the left in this photo.

First visit to a distant village!

The Teop language is spoken by many villages on mainland Bougainville, not just Teop Island. The village we live in, Hiovabon, is one of those villages and we are able to walk to and visit many of the other villages, but some are too far away and we haven’t been able to visit them and develop many relationships in those places.

Irue beach:

We wanted to personally meet pastors to invite them to the church leaders meeting that we had in May, so we arranged a trip to Irue, where we had never been before, to see some people there. We travelled there by boat from our village.

Irue beach:

One of the local traditional customs is when a person goes to a village for the first time, the local people pour water over their feet and this happened to us at Irue. It wasn’t as soon as we got off the boat; we had been there for several hours before they did it. I don’t know what the meaning behind the foot washing is however.

Irue village:

Shortly after we arrived, we went for a walk along the beach to the ‘point’ (the end of the peninsula) and we saw the lighthouse. I will post about the lighthouse later, but here’s a picture of us walking along the beach.