The Native Iowan

Monday here. The day is dawning late, grey, cold.

Its another one of those mornings… One of those mornings where I get the call telling of a death in the universal family…

My old buddy, Peter Pabulu, known to all as “Patu”, has passed across the great void to the “other side”.

Patu and I built things. Anything, everything we needed built was built by Patu and I… Throughout the 90s Patu and I did a lot of building. All up we built, in chronological order… The Rosewood house on Gizo Hill, the Mbumburu house renovations, the Gizo Depot refurb in 1994 (a very big job), the Tasahe compound was a 2year project where we built 7 houses. Plus lots and lots and lots of little projects on the side.

For the Rosewood house we first built a large workshop, then went out buying trees and milling timber. It was a good workshop with great machines, We rough sawed the large lumps of timber into planks, then machined them to dimension. That part took a couple years.

In all of this Patu built boats. Worked for others, built the Gizo Hotel’s big leaf houses. He was a master joiner and taught me how to do dovetailed joints.

One funny thing about Patu was his “sticky fingers”… he’d laugh about it and agree that, yes, he had a habit of “borrowing” tools. When ever we got a big project I would buy all the tools required and “give” them to Patu, the tools were his, when the project was complete… There would be a dozen hammers, shovels, chisels, nail guns, drill drivers, etc, etc… All were Patu’s, when the project was complete.

And we never lost a tool.

If the tools were “Mike’s”, it’d be a different story. The workshop we built to build the Gizo house was his after the project was complete. We built the shop on his land.

Patu was half wild… he was a skinny, slight built guy that could climb like a possum. He could lead a crew of 20 carpenters, keep them busy and happy and productive. Very highly skilled in many ways. Very good at figuring things out.

Been a few years since we’ve seen each other. After stroke a few years back Patu lived in a wheel chair. I am told he recently got sick, contracted pneumonia and passed last night.

Here’s a tale from one of our trips into the Morocco Lagoon where Patu’s home was…

Smiles through the tears