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Written by Seuamuli Des Bentin
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Thursday, 01 May 2008 |
During one of our conversations about love, life and tropical cyclones, my father asked me why I did not go to church any more. He had a habit of jumping outside the unwritten and unspoken boundaries of the current subject and topic of discussion, which had perhaps lost its effectiveness to ambush the truth out of my thought processes, because I had come to expect it of him.
I had done a few ‘management’ training courses paid for by my employers at the time which, although 99% hogwash, had taught me that the best form of defense, and attack, is the truth. So I told him that I believed that “the Lord is my Shepherd”, who I had direct access to via a well-known, readily available and very affordable medium called prayer, and therefore did not need a middle man.
“But can you imagine how unruly and uncontrollable people would be without organized religion in Samoa?” he asked. I think we had a glimpse of what he meant last Friday when some young people turned the streets of Apia into a peasant battle ground of rock throwing hooligans.
If you see the glass as being half-full when it is clearly a gulp away from being bone dry, then you would undoubtedly say that things could have been a lot worse but for the existence and role of organized religion, pastors and churches in controlling the behavior of their flocks.
Those of us who see a half-empty glass as time to order a refill tend to wonder if maybe the churches and organized religion had lost the ability to keep members of their flocks in line by either teaching them respect, discipline and all those good Christian values, or scaring the crap out of them with the eternal fire story. Either way, it ain’t working!
The poor Police always get roasted whichever way they respond to cases of public disturbances. When they locked some Samoa College students up by mistake, they got jumped on, and justifiably so too. When the Police were heavily outnumbered and pretty ineffective at last Friday’s embarrassing rampage through town by some brain dead idiots, I heard members of the public describe the police as being useless. When they tried to provoke members of the PASS organized protest march to parliament a few weeks ago into a confrontation so that they could try out their new crowd control and riot gear, I thought that anybody with half a brain could have fun manipulating them and pushing their buttons!
Secretly, I wish I was the Police Boss so that I could order them to go after the students involved in last Friday’s brawl (how many laws did they NOT break?)and take them in for questioning making sure that “they resisted arrest”! I would call up Barainimarama for some pointers on how to get out of being charged if some unruly citizen died while in custody, unless we could claim that it was covered by the same bit in the RHD Bill that says the government is not liable for any deaths, accidents, etc resulting from a lot of people driving on the wrong side of the road. If people are no longer scared of the fiery pit of Hell, then maybe banging a few heads together would do the trick.
But seriously, we are going through a transition period when we have to discard the old ways though to satisfy the new gods of the WTO global community called good governance through accountability and transparency, the Rights of Children and Chocolate Fish to be implemented pronto, as well as a host of United Nations MDG’s that the morally and intellectually challenged will struggle with. Things always get worse before they get better.
A lot of people have identified modern technology as the key to Pacific Island countries raising the standard of living for their people, and I totally agree. It is still very expensive for some small businesses to get basic communications and information technology services like a PABX or computer network. Somewhere along the line, there is more than one middle man. They add to the costs of hardware and software but the main cost I see here is the very high charge out rates by installation and maintenance companies. I think this is mainly due to the very appallingly low levels of technical knowledge in our technical personnel. Fault finding and diagnostic skills are quite shocking. So even though the installation is pretty basic and could be done by a good technician in a day, a company will submit a very high quote to allow for the abilities of their staff. A basic fault that should have been repaired in an hour usually takes two men four hours.
People go into business because of many reasons as well as to make a living. How comfortable a living they would like determines the amount they charge for their services and expertise. With the drive for modern technology to be available and affordable for everyone, prices have come down markedly for hardware and software. If the support services had the personnel with the skills, the costs would come down even further.
It is not uncommon for some companies to reject a much cheaper quote which was based on good technical skills and ability to carry out the work at almost half the time quoted by other competitors. Most hardware such as PABX’s are almost identical in functions and features as well as price. It is only the labor costs that is making it just that bit too expensive for every small to medium company and home user to have access to the technology that together with a Right Hand Drive, will raise their standard of living. Have a nice one folks!
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Please be informed that the prayer-metric spectrum transmitted by the apexes of the all the churches in Apia has an interference sector located behind the Savalalo market and also where Magik cinema is. This void in coverage allowed satan and his minions to wreck havoc with the poor innocent church going souls who were unable to resist his temptations and treachery last Friday. I propose an extra transmitter optimally placed to cover this with receptors handling about 40-100 prayers for coverage and power supply. The theory is that this should work, because the field manual says so... and the field manual never lies.