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…