How a petty insult led to missionary's violent death

By MARY-LOUISE O'CALLAGHAN Herald correspondent

Lance Gersbach's tomatoes should be ripe next month.

The first crop in a flourishing patch planted soon after the Australian missionary arrived at the remote Seventh Day Adventist outpost in February, the galloping beans, sweet corn and still-green tomatoes remain one of the more vivid testaments to the quietly spoken, hard-working man brutally and inexplicably beheaded in the wilds of the Solomon Islands Malaita Province a week ago.

There are others.

Memos litter the noticeboards of Ato'ifi Hospital, some of them signed by the mission's new business manager, Gersbach; most of them relating to a tough new wind which had recently blown through the corridors of the mission to rein in a financial situation which some church officials felt had started to get out of control.

While his wife, Jean, assumed the unpaid part-time role of the mission's mathematics teacher and his daughters, Louise, 11, and Anita, 8, settled into their routine of home schooling and playing with the mission kids, Gersbach appears to have applied himself with a missionary fervour to the urgent job of increasing the self-sufficiency of the mission, its 80-bed hospital and adjoining Adventist nursing school.

Fit and meticulous, Gersbach would start his day with a dawn run before dividing his time between supervising outdoor maintenance work and administrative tasks in a spartan office on the second floor of the two-storey hospital building.

His predecessor had left in a hurry. Even now the exact reasons for this are unclear. So, without any proper handover, Lance Gersbach, an accountant who left his own practice just outside Newcastle in New South Wales to take up the post at Ato'ifi, appears to have wasted no time in his task of "straightening out the books" at the 3000-strong mission station, as his brother Maurice Gersbach put it this week.

From April 1 a new surcharge of SBD$10 was to be levied on each air ticket for the flights which left the mission airfield three times a week. The tiny fee was to offset the cost of paying workers to keep the growth down on the grass strip.

From the same date, a new charge of SBD$20 an hour for work done on tools or other items in the mission workshop was also to be levied. Cost of materials used in any repairs would be extra.

Small fees, petty details it would seem except that, after his death, Gersbach's brief work and life at Ato'ifi have assumed a greater significance as his family, church and the broader Solomon Islands community have struggled to fathom what may lie behind his brutal execution.

Five days before Gersbach's death, a local man, Silas Lesilamo, approached one of the more senior Solomon Islanders working at the mission, Lester Asugeni, who is acting chief executive officer.

A member of one of the country's last remaining pagan hill tribes which surround the mission hospital, Lesilamo had just returned by plane from the capital of the Solomons, Honiara.

Upset that a local mission worker, following Gersbach's strict new financial regime, had refused him passage on a ship chartered from the capital earlier in the week because he claimed not to have money for the fare, the agitated 20-something Lesilamo warned the mission had just five days to make amends for what he considered a grave insult.

Asugeni says he took the man, who was well-known to him, into his office, counselled him and gave him SBD$20, thinking no more of it until he saw his business manager dead.

On Thursday, Solomon Islands police arrested Lesilamo, and flew him to Honiara where he was remanded in custody for 14 days on a "holding charge" of murder.

A second suspect, Lesilamo's cousin, known only as Nasusu, has a history of mental illness. Police are hopeful that he will be brought in from the bush by local East Kwaio chiefs within the week. Both men deny they killed Gersbach, but if the chiefs and police are proved correct in court, then his death will have revealed that the last throes of an ancient clash between Christianity and animism, between the rule of law and an older, swifter, more personalised justice, is still playing out in the wilds of Malaita province.

Within a few hours of Gersbach's death, local chiefs from East Kwaio gathered at the mission, fetched by runners carrying news of the execution into the surrounding hills and coastal villages.

While many patients fled the mission hospital and others openly wept for the quiet man they had seen working steadily around what they consider to be "their" mission, the leaders among them, who understood only too well the implications of what had happened, moved into damage control.

Rapidly 100 of the strongest and most reliable young men from both pagan and Christian villages were assembled and given the task of providing security for the mission, its local and expatriate staff as well as its patients.

Identified by white cloth headbands, their ID numbers scrawled in red marker pen, and armed with bows and arrows, clubs and the same kind of machete - a local, long-bladed implement, known in Solomons as a "bush knife" - that is believed to be the murder weapon, these men have provided a 24-hour guard around the mission and its surrounds ever since; a silent and unpaid testimony to the pride and respect the local communities have for the hospital and its missionaries.

"Why anyone would want to do this to such a gentle, hardworking man, we just can't work out," says Philip Foloto, shaking his head and voicing a universal opinion at Ato'ifi.

It was Foloto, a teacher at the local primary school, who raised the alarm just after 2pm nine days ago, when his young daughter, Ester, a friend of the Gersbach children who had been playing nearby, woke him from a lunchtime nap gasping that "our manager is dead".

At first he thought it was a childish prank, but when he went to investigate he found the body of Ato'ifi's new business manager in the mud of the building site's pit where only moments earlier Ester had witnessed him digging on a ledge above it, a metre from the mission's main road.

Now all that was on the ledge was Lance Gersbach's shovel, wedged up tight in the soil, beside his severed head.

A slash of red clay amid the tropical green, the building site seems an unlikely spot for a premeditated execution. Exposed by Gersbach's own maintenance directives, it was the beginnings of a new trade store, long wanted to replace the smaller one housed on the ground floor of the hospital which requires the local community to track all the way up a hill to the hospital simply to make a purchase, sometimes obstructing the entrance.

Gersbach had made its development an early priority of his year at the mission.

They call it the Supreme Sacrifice; death in the service of the Lord.

But beheading by ungrateful pagans is not even in the lexicon of the new breed of 21st-century missionaries; death, not really what a modest if committed Seventh Day Adventist from New South Wales expects when he decides to volunteer a year of his family's life to the Pacific people of the neighbouring Solomon Islands.

Gersbach's family were divided last week as to whether he would have been prepared to die for his church.

"He knew it was unsettled out there," Gersbach's brother, Alwyn Gersbach, told an Australian newspaper. "But I don't think he would have expected what happened to him otherwise he probably wouldn't have gone."

The weekend before his death Lance Gersbach took his family and two visiting Australian Adventists out in a speedboat on a snorkelling trip.

Diving in the aquamarine waters of Uru Harbour that surround the At'oifi Mission, such a violent death must surely have been one of the last things on his mind.