Nambatri

I realised we hadn’t said very much about where we are living. We have a one bedroom flat in a small peach coloured block called flamingo apartments. Our flat is in the part of Vila called Nambatri, it took me until I saw our local shop (pictured) down the road to realise that nambatri follows on from numbatu and nambawan - don’t you love bislama? These parts of town are named after world war 2 US radar stations.

Our flat is fine, basically like a holiday flat with tiled floors and wicker furniture (and very blank walls). For the first month we didn’t have hot water which wasn’t much of a problem as we are hot and sticky most of the time and it also made us feel like we didn’t have it all so easy and we could share a bit of solidarity with our VSO friends (and John's sister in gloucestershire) who don’t have electricity and are having to filter their drinking water. Anyway now we have hot water which is rather nice. A plumber came round last week and fixed the boiler. He is from Leicestershire (obviously!). He came to Vanuatu with VSO in 1985 to do water access projects, fell in love with a ni-van woman and married her. It made me quite jealous to be a plumber – what an evidently useful thing to do and how much easier to explain than being an advocacy adviser! Our neighbours include a fijian indian couple on one side who arrived from Fiji about the same time as us (and are lovely they stop and pick us up when they see us walking anywhere!), a ni-van family upstairs and a couple of north american mormon missionaries on the other side. I am a bit offended because they havent been round to proselytise yet.

what are we doing cont...

It is nice to have finally got started, although as hannah said there are a number of frustrations that you have to studiously try and ignore. I had been informed that a computer would be waiting for me to use at the Department of Foreign Affairs and rightly enough it was, although it was unplugged and sitting on the floor. I was informed that I couldn't set it up and that something would be sorted out. Two days later a brand new computer arrived and was placed on my desk, however they did not have the right lead to plug it in (rather worringly the "IT" guy called it a "rope"). So, for the next three weeks I stared whistfully at the computer on my desk and then at the computer on the floor and then went back to good old pen and ink whilst numerous people stuck their head round the door and said "hi, I've sent you a quick e-mail, let me know what you think" and before I could explain, they were gone, and as I am new I don't know their names yet or where they sit. I'm just hoping that one day I can read their e-mails and track them down. Anyway this last friday action finally took place - after two days of drilling, banging and hammering it started to look as if I would be plugged in and ready for action. By 4pm, 12 holes in the wall, one lost screwdriver, one broken printer (someone dropped a hammer on it) and one big electric shock for the guy doing the drilling, my computer was up and running. Unfortunately I have been out of the office all this week so haven't been able to use it, but I am looking forward to getting back to work next week.
In terms of what I am doing, I am effectively advising the department of foreign affairs on international law with a particular focus on human rights, with a view to developing a specific department that will be self sustainable over time. Having been there for a month it would appear that a lot of the initial work is organising processess for complying with international commitments and trying to set up some sort of system of understanding of international human rights with a view to focusing on the main international conventions. For those of you who are still awake, I will provide more details later.
The only thing to add is the working style - somewhere between laid back and didn't quite make it into the office today!

So what are we actually doing??

Well after over a month here we are beginning to know a bit more about what we are meant to be doing. VSO in all the pre-departure training do really try hard to explain that the placement documentation you get in the UK may bare little or small resemblance to what happens once you arrive in country. They also try and prepare you quite a lot for all the possible frustrations you may face; from practical issues like a lack of computer or electricity etc to a lack of support or interest from your employer, colleagues. Quite a few of the volunteers we've met here are pretty cynical some legitimately so, some not. Anyway at the moment we are feeling very excited and enthusiastic - long may that feeling continue...
What I will be doing as an advocacy adviser is working with various different groups (women, youth, rural groups etc) to help them change/ influence policy, increase funding.. that sort of thing but I think it might be a bit of a case of making it up as we go along... The first project I will be working on is a short ActionAid funded project to work with local women, women's groups and health professionals to see how vanuatu could better focus its STI/HIV work to better serve/protect women. There's only about a 25% rate of condom use here, a masssively high STI rate and at the moment an almost non-existant HIV rate but its not clear if thats because of lack of testing or they are just lucky.... I think it will involve research, interviews, focus groups etc with a view to influencing the activity of the department of health...Im having to get to grips with a lot of HIV related acronyms. I'll let john explain what he thinks he's doing...

island life

OK this is me rocking the Vanuatan 'island dress' look kindly given to me by our lovely host family. This is me with my 'pappa' who also happens to be the chief of the village. Below is a photo of john in his new 'island' shirt with our village 'momma.' Contrary to how it might look I am not pregnant and John has not become a pimp.

We got back on sunday from a 4 day trip to the island called Pele on the north coast of Efate. The village stay is part of our induction activities to experience life in the way that 80% of ni-vans live, eat, socialise etc. It was a pretty amazing trip. John and I were staying with the chief and his wife, son and daughter in law, three grandchildren and a couple of randomly selected cousins. The island is barely two miles long, it took about three hours to walk around it and i think there are about 400 hundred inhabitants. I think there are about 40 villagers in our village Piliura but it was hard to tell because all the islanders had congregated in Woliaru (just down the beach) because of a death the day before we arrived. The other reason it was hard to tell is that my bislama is rubbish and I'm not sure I understood what was going on most of the time. I can identify the nouns in most sentences (when they are the same word as english) but other than that I didnt have a clue. So someone says something about kakae (which I know is food) but i had no idea whether what was being said was, do you want some? will you make some? have you had some? we'll be eating over the road...you get the picture. I am pleased to say that not only did I 'scratch some coconuts' (thats a food preparation thing james), i also helped make lap-lap and tuluk (dont bother) - about three hours of work to make something which makes a veggie burger taste like a steak.

Anyway we had a fascinating time, it was a real privilege to experience life with a ni-van family who really couldnt have been more welcoming. It gave us a lot to think about..for example understanding the gender roles which we had been told are very prescribed in vanuatu and the women did spend a massive amount of time making lap-lap, and the men made the trips to town, did a lot of sitting around talking to each other, but at the same time the men also got involved in the domestic tasks helping to prepare fish, looking after the children etc. And the question of poverty is really difficult...on one hand the island has an amazingly plentiful supply of bananas, paw paw, clementines, yam, fish, a few chickens and the ubiquitous pigs for special occasions, the children (from about 2 upwards) have the safety of a whole (beautiful desert) island to play in... on the other hand they have to cook on wood fires, the children run around with gashes in their legs being feasted on by flies (the little girl who became my best friend on the island had to spend two weeks on a drip a couple of years ago after her leg got infected from a small cut) and they have very little access to cash when they need to pay for school fees and medical equipment. We didnt see an awful lot of the ceremonial/ kastom side of life as we werent invited to the funeral feast (quite glad as that would have meant watching a pig being battered to death) although the chief did make a speech when we left, I am very proud to say that John gave a smallfella speech (in bislama) in return. It was a really beautiful place and the people were lovely - I'm hoping we might be able to visit again at some point.

Night-time celebrations

Last night, just before 2am I was woken up by the sound of dozens of cars driving past, honking their horns, full of people shouting. We live by the main road into town which can be quite busy but tends to be pretty quiet after about 7 or 8pm. I woke John up in a panic and went to look out at the road which was almost a traffic jam of cars going down the road towards town. A couple of police cars with their sirens blaring and lights flashing drove through the traffic. It went quiet after about ten minutes leaving me awake for an hour or so imagining scenes of fighting and civil unrest and a repeat of the state of emergency that took place in March.
Anyway this morning I asked Juanita, a ni-vanuatan woman who works for VSO, what had happened. Last night at about midnight the Vanuatan under-12's football team arrived back from France where they had been taking part in the U12 'Danone' football world cup. The team are being treated like conquering heroes after beating england, brazil and germany, finishing 19th out of 40 teams. They were greeted at the airport by the President and the foreign minister who made speeches. Then the crowd who had been at the airport took off around the town in a victory parade. Hard to imagine a less sinister reason for celebration...