The Solomon Islands might seem like an island paradise, but beyond the crystal waters, not everyone has always felt they belong.
Locals with disability are working through stigma to forge their own path towards a brighter future.
The bus pulls in five minutes before they're due on air.
The rhythmic chirp of the morning cicadas is smothered by the engine, as the bus lurches through the gate.
The driver is still trying to park when Jabez Manaika jumps out. He hurries up the tiled steps and through the glass entry, his hands trailing the walls until he finds the door he needs.
Finally inside, the man, who is vision impaired, uses his hands to navigate to his desk.
His co-host George Ho'atamauri is hot on his heels, turning on lights, cursing the broken air conditioning.
It chimes 6am. Show time.
The pair thrusts on headphones, ready to rouse the sleeping city.
"Good, good morning and welcome back!" George says to the airwaves.
Since they started hosting breakfast radio together, Jabez and George have been a hit with listeners, and the audience text line is running hot.
"It's good to see people engaging with us, George. We're not alone in the studio," Jabez says.
Listening to the pair go live from the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Corporation (SIBC), you'd have no idea one of them is making history.
Darkness be my friend
At the age of nine, Jabez woke up to formless shapes and strange blobs of light.
Why was everyone awake in the middle of the night, he asked his mother. Because it's not the middle of the night, she told him, it's the middle of the day.
After years of deterioration, Jabez had completely lost his sight.
"It was a shock for my mum. I remember her crying," he says.
At school, his teachers tried to accommodate his needs; seating him at the front of the class and printing off the lessons in large font.
But with no formal special education training for the teachers or proper resources to support students with vision impairment, once Jabez's sight was completely gone so was he.
The best solution for your kid is to stay home, the school told his parents.
Confined to his house on Bellona island — a remote atoll just 10 kilometres long and a few kilometres wide — Jabez chose to teach himself.
"I had to put my life back together," he says.
There was no TV, no internet, no mobile phones.
But he did have church and the radio, so over the next six years he used both to teach himself guitar, to sing, and to learn the local Pidgin language.
And, to put his faith in something bigger than himself.
"Music was very important to me. It gave me a sense of peace, it was the only way to express how I was feeling," he says.
"You can be left out, thrown out, kicked out because you are not good enough, but God has the best plan for each of us."
But his new routine was a lonely one.
"[I was] very depressed, especially when you hear your classmates going to school and playing sport," he says.
"I looked at myself as a failure, as not good enough to be part of anything going on around me.
"It's still a big embarrassment for the families of kids with disability. They think it will bring shame to the family."
According to the Solomon Islands National Statistical Office, 16 per cent of men and 17 per cent of women live with disability.
But only 2 per cent of children with disabilities attend primary school compared to 66 per cent of children overall.
If it was not for a chance medical trip to the capital, Honiara, when 16-year-old Jabez was asked if he wanted to go to a school for students with disability, he might not have had an education at all.
"For me, it was a miracle," he says.
While there has been progress since then, many children with disability who do go to school still face significant barriers — dilapidated roads, expensive transport, out-of-date resources, and long-held prejudice that leaves them feeling judged, locked away or forgotten.
A woman with disability herself, Naomi Tai has worked at the peak advocacy body People with Disabilities Solomon Islands for seven years.
She agrees overcoming stigma remains one of the biggest challenges.
"Our organisation is trying to remove those barriers," Naomi says.
"Especially the attitudes and the discrimination of people with disabilities in communities and even some of our workplaces."
Mainstream schools aren't ready
A few hundred metres down a pockmarked dirt road, surrounded by an arc of banana trees and frangipanis, lies the Special Development Centre (SDC).
The school sits as a cluster of old hexagonal classrooms surrounding a main hall in Honiara.
Every day at 9am, students in maroon-checked uniforms gather on a small stage and wait for their principal, 53-year-old Jiope Iputu, to slide a guitar over his shoulder and lead them through prayers and song.
Some children use their voices, others use their hands, communicating through Australian sign language (Auslan).
The Red Cross Society opened the SDC in 1977 to offer children with disability a place to learn. Thirty years later, it was rebuilt in a new location.
Since then, the buildings have deteriorated.
Behind the classrooms, a frail wooden frame is all that remains of a house meant for the principal. Snapped awnings dangle from the outside of the hall, splintered and ready to fall.
The toilets do not flush, and the only running water is via outdoor tanks.
Inside, there is one ageing braille machine for five students with vision impairment, and one sewing machine shared between 10.
Paper, pencils and coloured pens are rationed, and the lights and fans in the hall usually remain off to save on electricity costs.
The school tries to transition students into mainstream education. But over the past decade, just two have done so successfully.
"The [mainstream] schools aren't ready for the students," Mr Iputu says.
Mainstream schools lack the teaching resources, infrastructure and, perhaps more importantly, the will to help a child with disability to succeed, he says.
While many students at the SDC take part in literacy and numeracy classes, providing them with hands-on experiences is key to giving them independence.
It is why the school offers life skill classes.
The children grow taro and yams, they learn to raise chickens, learn to sew, to cook, and master the basics of hygiene and table manners.
"So they can be self-reliant when they are in their houses when their [parents] are not there," Mr Iputu says.
"They can cook for themselves and fix their clothing".
But one of the biggest struggles is getting children to school in the first place.
Today, only 30 of the almost 90 students have turned up because the bus has broken down.
For some families, just getting to the bus stop is hard, so their children have stopped going to school altogether.
For others, the stigma and shame of their child being seen in public are too grave a concern, and they are sadly not trumped by the benefits of education.
"There are parents who do not want to send their children because of attitudes from others," Mr Iputu says.
That's something that breaks Louisa Dora's heart.
She's been a teacher at the school for 17 years, learning to teach while on the job. It's tough, she says, but she could never work anywhere else.
"I just want to help the students. They came here to learn just like other children in regular schools.
"All of us teachers here, despite the limited resources we have, we are just grateful and we improvise, and we just have to have a plan," she says.
So when the children can't come to school, the plan is to bring the school to them.
At 15 years old, Rendesh Risau has grown too big for his mother to carry him to the local bus stop.
His wheelchair sits broken atop the steps of his family home, perched on stilts in the foothills outside Honiara.
Today Mr Iputu has come to check on him as part of the centre's outreach program to either get children back to school or provide resources so parents can help their children thrive.
Rendesh, living with both intellectual and physical disabilities, is eager to return to the classroom and reunite with his friends.
His mother, Helen Malau, says she doesn't like how isolated her son has become, but her hopes for him are painfully simple: She wants his wheelchair fixed so he can navigate the rugged terrain independently, and she wants him to be able to access fresh water from the nearby well.
For families like this, education sometimes feels like a pipedream.
'All my schooling has come to nothing'
Despite the trying conditions, SDC students have dreams just like other kids — of becoming chefs, nurses, builders.
But beyond the four walls of a classroom, some dreams come up hard against reality. Eddie Babanisi has felt that many times.
"My parents didn't overprotect me," he says.
"One thing I always remember is that I didn't know I was blind up until the age of three … they didn't lock me up in the house."
With his parents' support, he was able to study in Fiji and graduate with a law degree.
But once qualified and back home in the Solomon Islands, he struggled to find work.
"I have noticed that most firms, as soon as they see a person with a disability applying they tend to not accept [them]," he says.
"I think they look at their disabilities rather than their capabilities and their abilities
"I really feel that all my hard work, all my schooling has come to nothing."
Even though life hasn't turned out the way he planned, he's still happy with what he does have; a wife, three children, and a purpose.
Like many others with disability in the Solomon Islands, he's forging his own way. He has created his own organisation to build a path for change.
"I advocate for children who are blind so that they will have a [better] future, meaning that they will be able to access education, an inclusive education," he says.
Eddie knows unwinding ingrained prejudices is like holding back the sea with a broom: slow, arduous, and often met with resistance.
But as more locals with disability strive for an inclusive future, he believes the tide is turning.
From phone lines to radio waves
Jabez Manaika seems to represent that future.
After attending the Special Development Centre, he made his way through vocational college, university in Fiji, and 18 months in Japan on a scholarship before returning to Honiara.
Initially, he worked as a receptionist for SIBC, but was quickly offered a presenting role when a senior colleague noticed he had a voice "built for radio".
He began interviewing musicians and artists during the afternoon slot and occasionally voiced advertisements. And by doing so, he made history as the first blind radio presenter in the country.
Then, two years ago, he joined forces with George Ho'atamauri to revive the breakfast show.
Jabez loves his job, but it isn't without its challenges.
"It's not easy, especially for someone who is vision impaired," Jabez says.
"I just do the talking because we don't have the technology to enable blind people to do the same work as other colleagues."
That technology exists; screen readers and advanced audio technology have enabled people with vision impairment to listen to and then repeat news scripts on air. But the Solomons Islands Broadcasting Corporation studio doesn't have that equipment yet.
Despite this, Jabez maintains his upbeat disposition and energy, to which he also credits his success.
"Sometimes we aren't in a good mood but we just come on air and pretend we are having the best day of our lives," Jabez says.
And while he never intended to become a role model, that's exactly what's happened.
"I realised I have the power to motivate others by telling my story," he says.
For all the obstacles he's faced, Jabez isn't slowing down.
He knows his story is still being written.
Credits
Reporting: and
Digital production and photography:
Editor: Paige Mackenzie
