leaving kakai

I was obviously pleased to be invited to VNCW for a leaving lunch although slightly worried about the possibility of having to eat some island kakai. Ive really got to the stage where I have tried it enough to know i find it bland at best and more often than not its disgusting. Eight of us had lunch in the office (not including Priscilla's new baby Sylvie Latifah), it was also the leaving lunch for the CEO who has been at VNCW since 2001. We were both given a present, mine was a lovely woven bag from Futuna and I think I did rather better in the present stakes because Jenny was given a very kitch framed picture of Jesus complete with 1970's style dreamy hair. We all gave a 'smol tok tok' before we ate, most of the women started to sob when they spoke (I think that was due more to Jenny leaving than me). Many Ni-Vanuatu I have met seem to hold their emotions very close to the surface and its not unusual for occasions like this to end in tears. I managed to hold it together though and even managed to swallow a fair bit of lap-lap.

South pacific paradise?

As we are leaving in less than a month I thought I’d write about the beauty of Vanuatu and some of the issues facing people here. Our local beach is about a mile away about an hour’s walk south of our flat on a peninsula called Pango. After being here for a while now we have to make sure that we don’t start taking the stunning natural beauty for granted. Walking along Pango point reminds us how lucky we are. Some days the sky is bright blue and cloudless, the dark green trees hang with ridiculous numbers of coconuts, pawpaws and grapefruit; frangipani, bougainvillea, hibiscus line the hedges visited by giant butterflies, and birds and geckos provide the only noise. The beach is called honeymoon beach, it has a much nicer name in the local language, epangtuei, it’s a pretty perfect pacific beach. There is even a blue hole with a beautiful ring of coral and fish and an incredible drop-off a hundred metres off shore.

So why are we leaving? The main reason is that whilst we have hopefully both been able to provide some support and expertise to our colleagues - sharing skills in VSO parlance - we are not sure how much we would add by staying on for a second year. It’s a beautiful place and the ni-vans are lovely people and whilst it’s a pretty great place to spend some time we didn’t volunteer to sit under a palm tree (nice as it is). We’re not sure VSO would be getting the best return on their investment by continuing to fund us being here and personally for us am not sure remaining here is the best use of our time. Its been a fantastic experience and I would recommend doing VSO (and might do it again at some point) its been a joy and a privilege to experience life in a country I’d never even heard of and where some of its people are still living in the same way they have done for hundreds of years.

Vanuatu’s development is complex because whilst it is relatively not that poor, its classed as 120th on the UN Human Development index (just below Guatamala and above South Africa) as a middle income country but confusingly it is still a member of the world's 50 Least Developed Countries because of its extreme physical vulnerability on the pacific ring of fire(ie earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes) and remoteness from large markets (and expense in accessing them). The super fertile land means hunger (although not malnutrition) is unknown, but its geography (83 islands) means it is difficult to develop any decent infrastructure and very expensive to deliver basic (health and education) services (a quarter of 6-13 year olds are not attending school and a quarter of heads of households have received no schooling) and the small population means there is a serious shortage of human capital (only producing a handful of graduates a year). Vanuatu has the same problems as other pacific island nations and Australia, New Zealand, China, USA, Japan and the EU all have their own development agendas in place to support Vanuatu with varying levels of self-interest. It’ll be interesting to watch what happens to Vanuatu in the next ten, twenty years maybe slightly anxiously. In so many ways its not really ready to join the rest of the world with all the preconditions that requires but global trade, increasing tourism, and a growing population who are more and more aware of the world beyond Vanuatu are forcing its hand. I feel like I’ve learned a great deal about development particularly in the context of small island nations but still don’t have any idea about the right answers for Vanuatu, and feel like I have seen starkly how western ideals of progress might not be so appealing. Vanuatu is already struggling to protect itself; most of the coast of Pango has now been sold to Australian developers who are gradually building their houses obscuring the beach from the locals. Its true that the crap infrastructure has done a great deal to impede Vanuatu’s development but its also probably true that improved air, boat, road transport will be exploited as much by ex-pats and tourists than will bring benefit to the average ni-Van.

There’s also the small matter of being 10,000 miles away from all our friends and family, (so far we've missed 4 weddings and 1 funeral) which did slightly influence our decision to come home…

underwater life

This is a lionfish. we saw a lot of lionfish last weekend when we went diving off moso island. we had bought an underwater disposable camera and took a lot of photos (of a moray eel, a stonefish, beautiful bits of coral) that all look like the photo below, so I have to admit to this not being the exact lionfish we saw but one belonging to another google user with a better camera.

The reef and the fish were beautiful but maybe the best thing about the dive was the water - it is so incredibly clear (not to mention warm) that it does actually look like the top photo, the visability was so good you could almost forget you were underwater. We also dived off Eretoka known as Hat island. A very important chief called Roi Mata was buried on hat island about 400 years ago but unfortunately it is tabu to step on the island without permission from the local kastom chief so we couldnt look around. Vanuatu are hopeful that the island might be listed as a world heritage site in the next couple of years.

meet judy...

...our new dog! no not really. We are house sitting for three weeks for some friends shaun and whelma, and Judy comes with the house.

She is in Shaun's words a daft dog but she is very sweet, with a slightly out of proportion head and tummy (rather like annie). I think she was partly acquired as a guard dog, a role in which she is useless, but she and the house are very nice. It is lovely to be living like real grown-ups (rather than volunteers) with a house with windows we can open, a garden, a proper shower and a TV. The TV is currently not working, it is meant to start working tomorrow, Shaun mentioned that ESPN sometimes screens champions league games which was enough to convince John to move in. I think if the football appears he wont be moving out.

Full House (almost)

Well, after three months of preparation here we finally are: parliament is sitting. Courtesy of my counterpart I have the luxury of listening to it on the radio in my office, or at least I have the luxury of listening to a large amount of French easy listening music which is played in between the official and unofficial breaks in the parliament schedule. And here is the rub when trying to get things done. Parliament sittings are like the snow leopard. Officially parliament sits on two occasions each year, each of those for two weeks. So a mammoth four weeks a year are taken up with parliamentary business. But don’t panic because its not all work, work, work: they don’t sit on Wednesday mornings and they finish early on Fridays and start late on Mondays and there is a two hour lunch break and by the amount of French easy listening music a bountiful supply of weak bladders. And so getting anything done can be somewhat difficult. Last November Vanuatu signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the work since then has been to prepare things for the presentation of the domestic bill in parliament by the minister of foreign affairs and the full ratificaiton of the convention. The only problem: the Minister of Foreign Affairs went awol. Apperently he went to his home island last week and has gone to Turkey! this week. So with no Minister of Foreign Affairs we thought the bill would not go through and then, lo and behold, whilst we were sitting in our office listening, the Minister of Trade stood up and started presenting the bill. No-one knew that he was going to do this so it came as something of a surprise. So, despite strong opposition from a member of the opposition (who, just out of interest, was a former Prime Minister of Vanuatu who was jailed for corruption and then pardoned and released by the President) the bill was voted through by parliament. The French easy listening music doesn't sound quite so bad now.