21 August 2013
APTC training helps promote Wogasia spear festival
Every year on the island of Santa Catalina they celebrate the lunar new year with the festival of Wogasia. The spear fighting festival.
Hundreds of spear fighters face each other on the shallows of the sea to hurl a spear as a sign of the ending of tensions and the beginning of a peaceful new year.
After a flight from Honiara so Santa Ana, the tour guide for the next four days is Ted Blessing Makaa, or just Blessing for short.
“This is my first time taking tourists to Santa Catalina,” he says. “I have studied the history of the festival and all its rituals and I hope I can give you a great experience. One you can tell your friends in Honiara about.”
Blessing and his colleague David have both just finished their tourism training through the AusAID funded Australian Pacific Technical College (APTC) in Samoa. The six month course has allowed them to come back to their island, armed with a professional skill.
“It was such an amazing experience,” Blessing tells me. “To be able to experience another culture and be able to study a tourism course like this can really change my path.”
Blessing comes from a village on the island of Santa Catalina, where the infamous spear festival is held. His father, Silus is the vice president of the town’s development association.
“This festival has been very helpful for our community,” he says. “From the income we earn from the last three years of tourists coming here we’ve been able to improve our sanitation, buy water tanks as well as a new outboard motor for our boat.”
“I’m so proud that through Blessing’s study he can bring such fortune to our community.”
“It’s important that people come and experience Wogasia and our culture for themselves,’ he says. “It’s not enough to just read about it or hear other people’s stories, we have a unique culture here, an ancient one and they should witness it for themselves.”
“And now, with my training, I can make that happen,” said Blessing.
Since the APTC began in 2007 to increase skilled workers in the Pacific and improve job opportunities, more than 500 Solomon Islanders have graduated from APTC courses from Fiji, Samoa, Vanuatu or Papua New Guinea campuses in range of disciplines in hospitality, community services, tourism and trades. The APTC also recently launched a partnership with Honiara’s Don Bosco Technical Institute to offer in-country training in Solomon Islands.