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The government station has been established at the airstrip on West Rennel. 
and there a British officer has been in residence and a small school with about 
40 students is functioning. However, the officer has recently left and a 
Solomon Islander administrator is now there. The Japanese have all pulled out 
pending settlement of their contract, which settlement involves the percentage 
of profits that will go to Rennell itself and that which will go to the BSIP as 
a whole. The Solair plane continues to land once weekly on . 
It would have been fine if we could have had a week or more on these shores 
of Lake Tengano. Everyone in our group wants it. The people are cooperative 
and are bringing us many medical complaints, and in a leisurely week of work we 
could see many chronic complaints which will not show up for consultation on 
such a rushed visit as this. As it is, by spending tomorrow and the next day at 
West Rennell off Lugugl Bay, we will have only two days on Bellona. The whole 
youthful community here is very gonorrhea conscious and boys of 12 to 25 often 
describe recent or current dysuria and pyuria. They use the term "gonorrhea” 
for their complaints, and confuse malarial medication with medication for their 
urethritis. I often am not sure whether the young boys are bragging or telling 
the truth as they describe their penile pain and pus. Often they show nothing. 
Erik, however, has a very large pendulous chronically edematous prepuce, 
residual after a recent bout of dysuria and pyuria which he calls gonorrhea. He 
has more homosexual than heterosexual contacts, but enough of each to be right, 
although I am not sure that his symptoms are gonorrhea or simply frictional 
problems. 
Everywhere people want us to give them bottles of "malaria medicine", 
"aspirin", and "medicine for gonorrhea" often asking for "quinine" for the 
"gonorrhea". No one presents anything like syphilis, and I have seen no 
convincing acute pyuria or urethritis. Not even any pus to examine. I suspect 
many are right, however, and that the promiscuous nonprohibitive sexuality of 
Rennell and Bellona is little match for the introduction of VD by outsiders from 
Europe, Asia, and elsewhere in BSIP, who now arrive more frequently than ever 
before. 
Japanese words creep into the boys' talk, and at times Japanese profanities 
and vulgarities. 
Charlie (12 years), Davis (17 years), and Lucy (10 years) of Tengano 
accompanied me to Hutuna and back, gossiping, joking, playing, and teasing me 
along the long track. We stopped several times to lounge on the rough coral 
along the trail, and after reaching the gardens and coconut plantations of 
Hutuna, they stopped to climb coconut trees and fetch coconuts for us all to 
drink. Although I have not been taking the care I should of steadiness or 
selection of subject matter, I have shot 500 feet of cinema of Lake Tengano 
today, over 300 feet of it on my trip to Hutuna. The wide expanse of the lake 
Itself, with the distant shore hardly visible, and the beautiful fairy tale-like 
offshore islands, often with the wide dugout canoes sliding by, continually draw 
my camera to the lake. 
