Need Husband to Bring Home Milk? – Call the Radio Station

On By Norbert HauptIn Need to Know, Today I Learned

When browsing Reddit today I learned something about how people communicate with family in remote parts of the world. Here is a girl from Australia that grew up on a very remote island in the Solomon Islands (tropical islands east of Papua New Guinea). Here is her account:

We don’t have phones but we do have battery powered radios. Normally if we are coming we have to tell that station to broadcast our arrival. What will happen is at maybe 6 I think, they have a messages segment. If your family is lucky, they will hear that you’re coming on so and so date and prepare for your arrival. Funny story about this. My sister and her husband traveled there and the radio host got the wrong date. So my sister and her husband arrived but there was no one there to pick them up. They were lucky enough to catch a ride with some other people but we were very surprised when we saw them walking up the shore.

Then somebody responded from Manitoba, Canada, not so far away from us at all:

Oh my god, that’s the exact same system we use on the reserve here in Manitoba, Canada. If you need your husband to stop and buy milk before he comes home, you call the radio station and they stop the music to broadcast your message. Need the kids to come home now that it’s dark? Call the radio station. So crazy to think we’re similar in some way to a tiny village in a rainforest. That’s what happens when your community is small and intimate, I guess. And poor.
I am going to call KPBS now and tell them about this.

Leave a Reply