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.