wishing you a very ...

Hopefully you can read the message we wrote you in the sand when we went for a christmas BBQ picnic at the beach on Sunday with a few VSO friends. It’s hard to believe its Christmas in a few days and that we’ve been here for six months already. It doesn’t feel very like christmas as its been about 30° for the last couple of months. The lovely tree below is called a Christmas tree – doesn’t look quite like the Christmas trees we’re used to but there are loads of them here all covered with hundreds of bright red flowers, really beautiful.

We are off to New Zealand on Saturday to stay with Kate and Grant who have handily just moved to Auckland in time to look after us for Christmas. We’re planning to travel around New Zealand for a couple of weeks so we’ll probably not be blogging or emailing that much. But we will be thinking of you all and missing everyone over christmas and we'll be in touch in the new year. Lots of love H&J.

WAD mo IVD

We haven’t emailed or blogged much for the past week partly because the phone bill didn’t get paid in my office so VNCW have lost the internet again, and partly because we’ve been off work for a couple of days because of a run of international awareness days and our annual VSO conference. (hopefully the internet will be back soon and I can catch some of you on skype or messenger to wish you a happy christmas – my skype name is hannah.vanuatu)

Last Friday was World AIDS Day and in Vanuatu a sort of workshop meeting had been planned in the Chief’s Nakamal. I had to give a small tok-tok (speech) as part of the opening session about the research I wrote earlier this year which suggests that women in Vanuatu are at greater risk of contracting HIV & AIDS than men (mostly because women are quite often unable to decide when they have sex and to use contraceptives.) I’m not a very confident public speaker so I was quite relieved that there were only about 30 people at the meeting although when each of the speakers stood up to talk a dictaphone and camcorder were pointed at us and we were recorded for TV Vanuatu and Radio Vanuatu. Luckily we don’t have a TV so I didn’t have to bear the shame of watching myself on TV, although one of our colleagues heard someone called Anna Perch talking on the radio later on. My Ugandan colleague said I sounded like the Queen and has started calling me Elizabeth….not sure that’s a compliment.

Then Wednesday was International Day of the Volunteer. So we all assembled in the car park in town; about a dozen of us from VSO and also volunteers from the other agencies here (Peacecorps, JICA, Australian Volunteer International) (the photo is me with some colleagues from my work) and followed the band on a parade through town. It would have been embarrassing if these types of parade didn’t happen practically every week although it was slightly unfortunate that the band were playing Onward Christian Soldiers as we walked down the high street. We marched to Independence Park where the President of Vanuatu – Kalkot Mataskelekele made a small speech in which he thanked volunteers for being angels of mercy (think that may be overplaying our part a bit but it was very nice of him to say so.) Then we were meant to have a couple of hours of inter-agency football and volleyball matches but it was midday and about 32° so that only lasted about half an hour before we went for a swim.

And then Thursday and Friday last week we had our annual VSO conference for staff and volunteers. I had organised it with another volunteer who ended up leaving last week so I felt quite responsible for making sure it all ran smoothly which it did, although I was a bit tense for the first hour on Thursday morning because none of the volunteers, staff or speakers I had arranged turned up quite on time or really anywhere close to being on time. But after that initial panic it all went really well and we had a good couple of days of talks, and “sharing sessions” and a vicious game of water polo. On Saturday we finished off our get-together with a 4 hour walk along the coast followed by a picnic (actually something called buña in which a ton of manioc, taro, island cabbage, chicken and bananas is cooked underground encased in banana leaves) followed by a trip across the lagoon in a dug out canoe.

Its not all about the beaches

Apologies for the lack of entries over the last few weeks: we have both been a bit busy. But hopefully this week there will be a few more just to let you know what we have been doing.

Despite a number of blog entries showing pictures of beaches, trips round the island and diving, we are actually doing some work aswell, and some of it is actually bearing fruit!

As I mentioned when we first started here, a part of the work that I am doing is advising the government on human rights issues. One particular area that I have spent quite a lot of time working on is the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. This is one of the foundation pillars of international human rights law which, along with the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights codifies the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The ICCPR sets out the civil and political rights of individuals, such as the right to life, prohibition of torture, freedom of movement, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, the right to family life etc. Vanuatu was one of only 27 of the 192 UN member countries that had taken no action to sign up to or become a party to the convention. Given that the Vanuatu constitution already recognises many of the rights set out in the ICCPR and it is also one of the few countries of the 27 that does not have the death penalty it raised the question of whether there was any reason why Vanuatu could not look to take steps to recognise these issues internationally.

After several months of research, briefings, meetings and consultations it was felt that there was no reason and so the minister of foreign affairs put forward the proposal that Vanuatu sign the ICCPR. The Council of Ministers, which is the Executive limb of government, approved the proposal and on Thursday 29th November Vanuatu signed the ICCPR in New York, becoming the 166th country to have taken action on it. (And only the second country in the Pacific to have done so.)