a day trip to parliament

Well after the excitement of Tanna it has been back to the relative calm of everyday working life in Vila. Last week I had an outing to parliament as I was invited to a presentation ceremony there. It is a very nice new building (courtesy of the Chinese) that has a fantastic view over the bay. The event was the presentation of the consolidated laws of Vanuatu, which was something that a former VSO volunteer had been involved in. Most of the great and the good were present which gave me an excellent opportunity to meet both the prime minister and the president.

As with a lot of things in Vanuatu, ceremony is very important. This is particularly true when it comes to meetings and public speaking. There is always a prayer before any meal or meeting and when it comes to speeches the etiquette, as far as I can work out, is to acknowledge pretty much everyone who is in the room, then give the contents of the speech and then acknowledge everyone else all over again. As you can imagine this can make for quite a long speech and, in the event that there are a number of speeches, quite a long event – but quite a good game of Guess Who?

So, the meeting started with a speech from the Attorney General:
“Mr President mo mises” (and your wife)
“Mr Prime Minister mo mises” (and your wife)
“Mr Speaker of the House” (he didn’t appear to have a wife)

And so it went on – fortunately, of the 150 people invited only about 60 turned up. Eventually the Attorney General handed over to the Minister of Justice (who is also his brother and looks very similar) and the whole thing was repeated. The president also gave a speech and by the end I felt I knew everyone.

Amazingly for this event and for events in general in Vanuatu, it finished before the scheduled close, and so we had an interesting hour where we all stood outside waiting for the food to arrive: never a more appropriate time to wander up to the two most important people in the country and have a quick chat. Whether they understood what I was saying in my broken bislama – which I guess you could probably call pigeon pigeon – I will never know, but they both smiled nicely and nodded and said welcome (mo mises).