The current delay of allowance faced by Solomon Islands students studying at the university of the South Pacific (USP) has raised concern over the student body (SISA). It is now week 3 however, the students have never received their monthly allowances.
Students are faced with real issues that without money, it will continue on. Those residing off-campus have been chased off by their landlords for non payment of monthly rentals. Most of the rentals are for the months of June, April and August. Besides that, others manage to stay on since their landlords are too lenient but have difficulties with electricity and water bills. Others even do not have cash to pay for their empty gas. Apart from those residential hiccups are the classroom ones. Approximately 99.8 % of the students are without text books. Most attended tutorials without knowing which questions the tutor refers to when he/she said, turn to page 115 exercise 7 for instance. The minute the tutor picked a student to answer the question, situation get worse and so embarrassed when the pick was a Solomon Islands student. Most get fired when they could not answer the question. The usual response was, "we do not have text book that is why we cannot answer the tutorial questions". Learning in such an environment without having proper learning materials is indeed very difficult. From the general observation, most SI students are still roaming around the campus without stencils like pen, text books ,exercise and tutorial books.
A recent meeting organized by the SISA aimed to find ways to settle the issue was not attended by the majority of the student. Although the agenda of the meeting was to find resolution to end the issue, the SISA body finds it pretty hard to submit formal report to NTU since the quorum is not met. However, SISA will still pursue the issue until it reaches NTU.