Paddle power

ANNE Le Gassicke looks at the photograph of a group of Solomon Island villagers standing together on muddy earth and shakes her head.

"They call the islands the Happy Islands because the people are always smiling but I've never seen them look so miserable," she says.

The people in the photograph have plenty of reason to feel glum. On April 2, a tsunami struck the Solomons - a chain of islands in the South Pacific, north east of Australia. It didn't make headlines like the devastating tsunami of 2004, but nonetheless, it wreaked its own misery, killing 54 and leaving 9,000 - about one in 60 islanders - without homes.

Anne knows many of the families in the photograph because, for six months of the year, the Solomon Islands are her home. Husband Simon works for a sustainable forestry company at Ringi on the tiny island of Kolombangara in the Western Solomons. Anne splits her year into quarters, alternating every three months between her prefab house in Ringi and her stone semi Coxwold, near Thirsk, close to where her two teenage sons are boarders at Ampleforth.

Anne and Simon were safe in Coxwold when the tsunami struck, sending a five-metre-high wave crashing over the coastal villages of the low-lying archipelago, sweeping away homes and possessions in minutes.

When Simon returned, he found the Red Cross at work, providing islanders with tarpaulins for makeshift tents. Anne wanted to help, so she asked Simon what they needed. There was one simple answer: canoes.

"Canoes are the way they get around," explained Anne. "Everyone lives on the coast, no-one lives inland because the terrain is bush and forest and you need a bush knife to walk through it. They grow vegetables in their gardens and get around from village to village by canoe, which they also use for fishing. The children even use canoes to get to school."

Without canoes, Anne added, the job of rebuilding their lives would be harder. "They build their homes from sticks and pandamas leaves, but they need canoes to transport the materials."

But buying a canoe is a big investment in for islanders, whose main source of income comes from selling fish and vegetables or logging.

Anne said: "It costs about £60 for a new canoe, which is a lot of money in the Solomon Islands - probably about a year's school fees for a primary school child."

So Anne has joined forces with two other friends from the village, Georgie Netherwood and Joy Plaskitt, and set up the Coxwold Needs Canoes campaign, to raise funds to ease the islanders' plight.

They are hosting a fundraising day in the village on Saturday and hope to raise enough money to buy ten canoes.

The event promises to be fun packed, with something for all the family. It will run from 11am to 3pm and there will be a tropical theme, with activities such as floral-garland making, treasure trails and guess the weight of the treasure chest competition. There will also be a barbecue at the village pub, The Fauconberg Arms, and a prize draw. Anne is returning to the Solomons the following week, and will be able to give all the money raised from the event to the stricken families.

Georgie said: "What's so great about this appeal is that we know that every penny raised will go directly to the people in need, because we know that Anne is taking the money back there herself to buy the wood and get a skilled craftsman to make the canoes."

Anne said any extra money would be used to buy new pots and pans, which were swept away by the tsunami. She said: "The villagers don't have pumped water, they collect the water from the river to drink, but use pots to boil it in."

She said pots weren't used for cooking. Instead, islanders made open fires with hot stones and coconut husks. "They wrap their fish and vegetables in banana leaves then cook them on the hot stones," said Anne. "It's great - afterwards there is no washing up and they throw away the banana leaves, which means there is no rubbish either."

Life is a very simple affair for islanders, said Anne, unlike in the UK. There is no doctor on Kolombangara, and patients need to take a boat and a plane to reach hospital. The local shop's stock can be chalked up on a small blackboard and people live off a limited diet of fish, fresh fruit and green vegetables, sweet potatoes and rice.

Anne said: "I have bread and fruit for breakfast, probably lunch too, then fish cooked in coconut or with rice or sweet potato and green vegetables for dinner. I enjoy it."

There is no bakery on the island, so Anne bakes her own bread using flour imported from Australia. Unlike islanders, Anne has a gas oven in her home. "The locals only have bread on special occasions, because it is expensive to buy flour," explained Anne. "They cook it in big oil drums which have been converted into ovens."

Anne has lived in many countries, including Tanzania, Malawi and Borneo, and says the difference between life in the UK and that in the developing world seems to be broadening all the time. "I notice changes in England every time I come back, particularly how materialistic we have all become and how people worry about things that are so trivial," said Anne.

Although she says she doesn't suffer from culture shock', she admits to being rattled on a recent visit to the supermarket.

She said: "I wrote to Asda in the end about the number of cheeses on sale. In the Solomons there is just one cheese, but at Asda, all I wanted was some cheddar and I had to walk up and down the aisle for ages trying to find it.

"In the Solomon Islands, they live just simple lives and don't require a lot of things. The one thing they do need are canoes. Without them it's like being stranded without car where there is no public transport system. And without them, it will take so much longer to rebuild their lives."