conference junkie/ junket #2

The all day seminar I went to this week was at the 4* Sebel hotel (very ugly high-rise, new hotel, on the harbour) and wasn’t directly relevant to my work but was a really interesting event. The title (by which I guess they were trying to put people off coming) was the Regional information seminar on the EU Economic Pacific Partnership Agreement. Vanuatu is one of the 77 ACP (African, Caribbean, Pacific) countries which ‘enjoy’ special trading arrangements with the EU. At the moment these preferential trading arrangements are based on the Cotonou Cooperation Agreement (which took over from the Lome accords if you're up on this kind of thing) and function under a WTO waiver. The WTO waiver expires on the 31st December this year, and the EPAs are the successor to this agreement.

The EPAs raise the bar and suggest a higher level of trade liberalization than these countries have had to face from the EU before. As a result many of the EPAs which have been negotiated for the past 5 years are still to be signed by ACP countries from around the world. Vanuatu is refusing to sign up to the Pacific Region EPA.

It was a really interesting day and not for the first time I wished I had more of a clue about economics as a lot of the discussion went over my head. I think the argument for trade liberalization as the best way forward for sustainable development was not really at issue, the disagreement, with the EU delegation at one end and the Oxfam rep at the other end, is how fast this liberalization is made/ allowed to happen. The main concerns of Vanuatu and other ACP countries are loss of fiscal resources (Vanuatu doesn’t have an income tax but relies on import taxes for massive amounts of its revenue), protection of local businesses and competition from EU countries. The EU representative from the Trade Unit in Brussels was very polished and pretty persuasive as the ‘guy who is just trying to help,’ but the fact that Vanuatu exports very little to the EU (kava or a mat anyone?) and imports 4 times as much as it exports (imports are mainly electronic goods, processed food, cars and clothes etc) from Australia, NZ, China, Japan and the EU makes me think Vanuatu has less to gain from the arrangements than Jacques might think. He made an interesting point about the new make-up of the EU (with all the new eastern bloc accession countries) which meant that the attitude of paternalism and ex-colonial responsibility of countries like the UK, France, Spain etc is being diluted by countries in Eastern Europe not a great deal richer than some of the ACP nations and without the post-colonial guilt.

The whole question is actually irrelevant to Vanuatu at the moment as it is currently classed by the UN as an LDC (least developed country) meaning it gets preferential treatment under LDC rules anyway. This meant the Trade Minster could remark that “no EPA at all would be better than a bad agreement.” True for the time-being but Vanuatu’s status as an LDC is under review because of its growing GDP, some of John’s foreign affairs colleagues were making the case for Vanuatu remaining on the LDC list at the UN last month. If anyone is still reading at this point and has any suggestions on something like a duffer’s guide to global economics that would be great.

conference junkie/ junket

I’ve come to realize that in Vanuatu you can spend large chunks of your life in one of the 4 smart hotels in Port Vila attending conferences or workshops of one kind or other. Having managed to avoid attending any of these events until recently I’ve been to two in the last two weeks. I’m not sure why the concentration of these events is so great I guess it’s just the smallness of Vila/ Vanuatu that makes it feels like it is being swamped and that there seems to be some conference or other taking place pretty much every week.

So last week I spent the first three days of the week at the 4* Meridian Hotel (quite smart, on the lagoon, bit anonymous) at the CEDAW (UN Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women) Sub-regional implementation workshop which was useful not only because the content of the conference was directly relevant to my work but also because it meant I would be able to buttonhole a couple of the women I haven’t been able to track down.

There were 4 country delegations at the conference, from Fiji, Samoa, Cook Islands and Vanuatu. All of them there to discuss the recommendations handed out to each country by the UN CEDAW committee. The discussions were organized over 4 issues which are pertinent to all 4 countries; violence against women, women’s access to healthcare, women and employment and women’s participation in politics and government. I sat with the Vanuatu delegation and there was some interesting discussion but nothing that hasn’t already been written, said or agreed to several times. It was really unfortunate that there wasn’t a session where the delegates got to discuss the issues in detail with the delegates from the other countries as these countries are always being told to work together as a region, it seemed a bit of a stupid missed opportunity and was really just another talking shop.

unwelcome visitor

Feeling a little tired at work this morning. I was woken last night by a feeling like a bee sting on my arm. I turned on the light to find a little bloody mark on my forearm. I was a bit confused and couldn’t work out how I had managed to scratch myself on something so I turned the light off. But it was so sore, to John's annoyance, I turned the light on again and made him get out of bed so we could check underneath – nothing, and pulled the sheet back to find an 8 inch, shiny, black millipede at the end of the bed. We were so freaked out it managed to scuttle away before we could kill it, so then we spent the next hour unsuccessfully looking for it. You can imagine we didn’t get much sleep after that.

My arm went a bit pink and swollen and when I showed a colleague this morning and told her what had happened she gave me a bit of local knowledge; as its getting wetter we’ll see more millipedes (great), apparently its lucky to have been bitten by a big millipede (smaller ones have a nastier bit) and the best thing to apply to a bite is to rub on a few drops of ‘pis-pis.’
So now you know.

'Thrilla in Port Vila'

well thats maybe stretching the truth a little ...whilst some eyes might have been on Israel v Russia on Saturday the main game in the international football calender was the world cup qualifier here in Port Vila - Vanuatu v New Zealand. Games don't come much bigger than this round here.

However it very nearly didn't go ahead, approval from FIFA on the Municipal "stadium" came only two days before the game after round the clock work putting right some minor flaws, such as putting some grass on the pitch, providing toilet facilities for players and fans and providing the ref and linesmen somewhere to change other than the home team dressing room. But in the end, and thanks to some money from the New Zealand High Commission to help with the repairs, the place looked great.

It wasn't a sell out but this was principally because many people decided against shelling out 500 vatu (2.50) in favour of a nearby roof or paw paw tree. By the time the players ran out the place was going wild - which we could largely assume to be in appreciation of the Vanuatu kit which was the flag made into a shirt. Reasonable enough but on eleven players it looked more like the tour de france than a football match.

The game itself was a cracker. Against the run of play, a ball over the top and the Vanuatu No.9 Jean Nako Naprapol skipped round the keeper and thumped the ball into the back of the net. The place went wild. It got even wilder moments later when the Vanuatu keeper made a miraculous triple save. It was 1-0 at half time and expectation running high. But then almost straight from the kick off the All Whites equalised. The next forty five minutes were a see saw - Vanuatu hit the bar, New Zealand missed an open goal. And then ten minutes before the end the brilliant Vanuatu keeper was carried of injured, his replacement arriving to rapturous applause.

The game drifted into the 94th minute when a cross came in from the New Zealand left wing. Never before has their been such a feat of human propulsion as the Vanuatu keeper flew out to punch the ball away. Unfortunately, he missed by several metres and landed somewhere near the penalty spot just in time to see the ball loop off the head of Scunthorpe United utility man David Mulligan and into the net. So, 2-1 the final score. But it didn't seem to deter the crowd who, slightly strangely, cheered for all they were worth at the final whistle. I asked a colleague at work about this the next day and she said that the Vanuatu fans just enjoyed the excitement of the game. I am sure we can expect the same reaction from the England fans when Croatia score a last minute winner against England on Wednesday.

Spel mo storian…

Having driven round the island last weekend, we were back up on the north of the island again this weekend – this time without the aid of a little hire car. We had decided to go up to Pele and Nguna, two islands just north of Efate, in order to go and see a couple of Peace Corps guys we have met who work up there and also to show Peter, a (relatively) new VSO something of life outside Vila. Pele is the island where we went to stay in our first month so it was an opportunity to say hello to our host family in the village of Pilliura.

The women from the market in Vila tend to head back to their islands on Saturday mornings and we were able to hitch a lift in the back of the truck with the Pele mamas heading up to the north of Efate and from there get a boat across to Pele. We stopped for a few hours on Pele and had some lunch, but the main reason for the trip was to go across to the island of Nguna which is only a short boat-ride away. It is a much bigger island than Pele and rises steeply from the beach up into “highlands” with an extinct volcano.

We stayed at a very sweet little guest house near the beach and just after the sun had gone down we hacked around a couple of the villages looking for somewhere to drink kava. This is always made slightly more difficult as the default setting for a Nakamal is very quiet and dark, so they are not the easiest places to find after dark. But, we found one just as they were making a new bucket and we had a couple of shells before going back to the guest house. Over the past couple of weeks the weather has started to get really hot and by the time we went to bed any breeze there had been had completely disappeared so it was a bit like sleeping in warm tea.

Sunday morning was hot and absolutely stunning and we headed off to hike up “on- top” (of the island) to visit the other Peace Corps who is living up there: Dominique. She and Seth are working on a marine conservation project around these two islands. Despite the fact that most of the forty minute climb was in the shade of the bush I think we were all about 3 stone lighter by the time we got to the top. But the compensation was seeing Dom’s very sweet village and the stunning views from the top of the island.

There are two expressions you hear over and over again in Vanuatu and they are “spel” which means find somewhere shady and rest , and “storian” which means find somewhere shady and sit and talk, or very often, just sit. A very large amount of time is spent doing one or both of these and so, after our arduous climb up and then back down to Dom's village we decided to spel on the beach for a couple of hours and then take the boat back across to Pele where we had time for a nice snorkel and storian just as the sun was setting.

After a night listening to torrential rain and cockerels we were up at 5.30am to hitch a ride on the boat back across to Efate and then a truck back into Vila just about in time to go to work on Monday morning.

A trip round the island

We have been planning for some time to hire a car and drive round the island (Efate) but kept getting thwarted by the England rugby team. We obviously had to stay in town to watch the games and that meant one very late Saturday night and two very early Sunday mornings which got in the way of our plans.

The late Saturday night was spent in a posh hotel bar with a load of very loud and abusive pissed aussies who got quieter and quieter as the game went on. The following Sunday we were up at 5am to watch the England v France game in the French Embassy. They were very friendly and gave us free coffee and croissants even while their team lost. And then the following Sunday we were up again at 5am to watch the final in an aussie bar with the only four South Africans in Vanuatu.

There was an air of despondency with defeat but we were pleased to finally be able to leave for our trip round the island. We went to Discount Rentals and hired ourselves a little hot hatch and motored off at a mighty 50km/h. This quickly dipped to a more sedate 20km/h as we came off the only tarmacced piece of road that runs for about 2 miles either side of Port Vila. We decided to go anticlockwise around the island purely on the basis that we weren’t sure our little car would get up Clem’s Peak – the very steep hill to the west of town.

The road around the island is about 130km, hugging the coast all the way. It was lovely to be out of Vila and to see the rest of Efate. The east coast in particular had some spectacular beaches and we stopped at a place called Eton for a swim and some lunch. It has a large natural swimming pool that is protected from the ocean by tall reefs across the front of the bay and a pure white beach. There were a number of villages all round the island but we were quite surprised by how few people we saw. A large majority of people live in and around Vila and there is an ongoing problem with urban drift. Outside of this one coast road, the centre of the island is largely uninhabited and made up of low lying mountainous jungle: large parts of which are covered in a rapid growing weed that the Americans brought over in the second world war to use as camouflage and kindly left to spread its way all over the island. The south and east parts of the island are pretty flat and full of coconut plantations and cattle grazing, a lot of it looks more like English parkland than a tropical island.

We have been thinking of planning a cycle trip round the island at some point and we were pretty happy about the idea until we were about 40km from home when suddenly the lovely level dirt track turned into an endless rollercoaster of steep hills with massive potholes – I think if it had been raining we almost certainly would not have made it round in our little car.

On Sunday we drove half an hour out of Vila to a beach which was spectacular, your perfect south pacific island beach, pretty much to ourselves, and with amazing coral to snorkel round. We had to pinch ourselves a bit, and hope none of the other outgoing VSOs we met back in the UK check our blog from their placements in Mongolia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda etc…

So it was a lovely weekend and a real treat to have a car for a couple of days. The trip around the island on bikes is currently under negotiation.