St Martin’s Residential Training Centre

We produce crops, which we sell at the Central Market in Honiara. At our centre we also farm chickens, honeybees, and pigs. The pigs we sometimes sell live, or slaughtered for meat. Our commercial activities earn us about $ 300.00 per week. The community assists us by buying our produce and helping us secure our centre.

We have permanent buildings, electricity supply, and good water and sanitation facilities. We have vehicles, a tractor, and a lawn mower. We try to be self-sufficient by selling produce, and the EU helps us with money too, but we are not yet self-reliant.
Our centre, with 7 staff members, accepts students between the ages of 17 and 20, who must be from Guadalcanal Province. We can take 40 students per year. We have a good soccer team that competes regularly with Don Bosco’s students.

The site we use, originally belonging to Catholic Printing Press, was converted into a RTC in 1977, to give practical skills to young men in Agriculture, Woodwork, Carpentry and Mechanics. Big expansion occurred in 1980 under the supervision of Brother George van Zant, who later transferred to Stuyvenberg RTC in Makira province. Women and girls were included from the late 1990s. Some looting occurred during the ethnic tension, but was limited by the presence of the Marist brothers living nearby the centre.

Our mission is to teach people vocations that will make them responsible citizens, able to earn a living and contribute to their province. We would like to broaden out to accept also female students and young married couples in the future, but are somewhat hampered by a lack of adequate funding.