Transcript
TIONE CHINULA: As somebody who lives in Mont-Dore, south of Saint Louis, Saint Louis is known as a trouble spot because there's a minority of, I guess, young disenfranchised men who will sort of jump at any excuse to go and block the road, and burn tyres, and throw stones at cars going past. And so over this last weekend, the road has been closed again and they're burning cars so nobody can get past, so for safety precautions the police have closed off the road.
JAMIE TAHANA: What effect has this had south of the road blocks?
TC: Well the population is really just sick of it because most people living out this way have to go into Noumea for work and for everything, really. So basically what's happened now is that the city council has set up sort of like a ferry service for emergencies so people are being ferried from a wharf here south of Saint Louis to another wharf which is just north of Saint Louis but, you know, they don't have enough boats - I think there might just be one official boat - so all the other ferry services are being run by volunteers, just people living this way who have boats.
JT: What about fuel, food supplies and things like that. Has that been able to get through?
TC: No, well fuel no. But food supplies, there are a couple that have been set up just for people to keep each other informed and I was looking at that this morning and I saw a boat arriving with bread to replenish the supermarket stock out this way. There's one supermarket, I haven't been there since yesterday, but I know that what happened last time is that they ran out of a lot of stock, so all the sort of basic necessities and we also ran out of gas for cooking. So we ran out of that last time and I'm not too sure what the situation is now, whether there are stocks available or not.
JT: So this one skirmish is affecting quite a large population to the south of Noumea.
TC: Yes, yes I think there are 12,000 people, I believe that's the population of everyone living south, so basically it's affecting quite a major part of the population. All the primary schools out this way are closed. There's a junior high school that's open, my daughter goes there but we decided just to keep her home this morning because half the teachers come this way from Noumea anyway so there wouldn't be many teachers there. Also the baccalaureate, which is the high school leaving exam, they started today in Noumea but there were quite a few students on this side of Saint Louis who couldn't make it there so the education department set up at the junior high school an examination centre. But this morning only about 10 of about 600 students had turned up. So, obviously it's having a big effect on families and people.
