Monthly Archives: July 2008

Rebuilding the Nasara

[This week’s Communications column for the Vanuatu Independent.]

About a month ago, I gave a talk [Powerpoint File] to telecommunications network operators from all over the Pacific region. It dealt with the social aspects of Vanuatu’s communications revolution. Many of the themes I touched on will be familiar to readers of this column.

In a nutshell, I talked about Digicel’s approach to so-called marginal markets and how they relied on Network Effects to generate traffic where there had been none before. Once you have more than a certain percentage of the population using a particular means of communication, everyone else is compelled to join them, simply because everybody is using it.

Mobile telephone services significantly enhance one – and only one – important aspect of Vanuatu culture. They enable family members and friends to stay in touch with one another much more easily than they could before. This has the effect of strengthening some of the bonds that keep small groups together. As such, it should be viewed as a positive reinforcement of many of the things that we hold dear.

But in Vanuatu society, there’s more to communication than conversations between family members. We’ve so far succeeded in re-creating the kitchen conversation by electronic means. But we have no nakamal, no nasara. We have no meeting place we can truly call our own.

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The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

[Originally published in slightly different form in the Vanuatu Daily Post’s Weekender Edition.]

NOTE: Two days after this article was published, the Daily Post front page story is of a 25 year old woman who was picked up in town by her common-law partner, taken home and beaten over the head with a piece of firewood. The man then proceeded to inflict knife wounds on her feet before severing her right arm close to the elbow and cutting her left hand so badly that only the thumb remained intact. It unimaginable that her neighbours didn’t hear her screams. The assailant was arrested 2 hours after these events took place.

When president Kalkot Mataskelekele announced that he would refer the Family Protection Act to the Supreme Court, he undertook a perilous task.

The Act, which has been crawling its way through the legislative process for nearly a decade, was passed in the final session of Parliament before elections later this year. Now, the president’s desire to ensure the constitutionality of the Act might have the unintended consequence of killing it outright.

It may be that if the Supreme Court responds with anything less than unequivocal affirmation of the Act’s constitutionality, they will leave it in legal limbo. Even the tiniest change would force it to be reintroduced as new legislation when the new Parliament is convened. This leaves the justices caught between the devil and the deep blue sea: Their only options, effectively, are to strike it down outright or accept it in its entirety.

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Rural Internet Comes to Vanuatu

[This week’s Communications column for the Vanuatu Independent.]

This week, Ian Thomson, project coordinator for the SPC’s Pacific RICS project, came to town with some eye-catching gifts in hand.

Pacific RICS, which stands for Rural Internet Connectivity System, is the result of the Pacific Islands Forum’s Digital Strategy, itself part of the Pacific Plan. The AusAID-funded project offers Pacific Island nations access to dedicated satellite communication services using simple, easy to install and inexpensive equipment. This project is designed to dovetail with the Oceania One Laptop Per Child initiative, which aims to ensure that all children in the region get their own low-cost, durable laptop.

During a public presentation on Tuesday, attended by Ministers Edward Nipake Natapei and Joe Natuman, Santo MP Sela Molisa and many others, Thomson outlined how combining affordable Internet access and invaluable learning tools like the OLPC’s XO laptop could revolutionise life in rural areas of Vanuatu.

A sample satellite system was set up in a single afternoon at Club Vanuatu, and Minister Natapei demonstrated how easy it was to use it to connect to the Internet.

Expressing his excitement about the projects, Thomson said, ‘I feel like Father Christmas! I get to give out laptops to children – who could say no to a job like that? Not only will it help them learn, but it will also help all community members to engage with Internet technology and get connected to the global network.’

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No Circus

[Originally published in the Vanuatu Daily Post’s Weekender Edition.]

“The People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions – everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.”

The Roman poet Juvenal wrote these lines in his Satires a little over a hundred years after the birth of Christ. He accuses the people of Rome – at the time the most powerful empire in the world – of losing sight of their civic responsibilities, giving everything up in exchange for gifts of grain and public entertainments.

People are always quick to draw parallels between modern USA and ancient Rome in its decline. But we can draw a more direct lesson from Juvenal’s tirade: Whether through a lack of concern or naïveté, our own choices have led us to the apparent security crisis we face today.

At least the Romans got free food and entertainment out of the bargain. Here in Vanuatu, we don’t even get that. We relinquish our societal responsibilities to others, and receive only danger in exchange.

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Aversion

[This week’s Communications column for the Vanuatu Independent.]

Let me be frank: Vanuatu is, in most ways, a backwater when it comes to technology. There’s no point sugar-coating it. We’re limited by numerous factors, some of them environmental and institutional, but the biggest problem we face is one of perception and imagination.

One of the most difficult aspects of high tech is that it’s intangible and therefore difficult to visualise. It’s everywhere around us, but when you ask the average person to explain what it does or how it works, they’d just give you a perplexed look and move on. We see the icons on the screen, and we know that with the proper incantation they can be made to do certain tasks, but we never really see it working.

A car motor may be incomprehensible to most, but at least it’s visible. We can watch the fan belt spinning and the drive train turning, we can hear if the engine coughs or sputters, we can see the exhaust and tell at a glance if something’s wrong.

Things aren’t quite so clear in high tech. Sure, it’s easy to see when the computer slows down, or when a sheet of paper gets stuck halfway through the printer. But consider this: most of us aren’t even aware that we’re interacting with high technology almost all of the time. We don’t think about the radio, the cash register, the DVD player, the bank machine or the mobile phone as different heads on a ratchet set. But that’s effectively what they are: interchangeable cogs in the same notional machine.

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Power Play

[This week’s Communications column for the Vanuatu Independent.]

Now that we’ve got the beginnings of truly nationwide communications, we need to deal with power generation. We’ll never generate enough power to run a desktop computer in every house, and community computer centres are expensive and of limited usefulness, so we need to see how suitable things like the emerging class of micro-laptops (like Asus’ new Eee PC or OLPC’s XO laptop) are for use in the islands.

Smart phones and even plain old vanilla mobiles also have a critical role to play in rural access to communications. There are any number of very simple information services that can be deployed via text messaging.

But in order to do this, we need to power these devices. A mobile phone uses very little electricity, to be sure, but in a village with none at all, even a little is a lot.

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A Strong Foundation

[Originally published in the Vanuatu Daily Post’s Weekender Edition.]

I’m often asked for rental advice by visiting volunteers and consultants. My default response is to say, “Before you decide on a place, look around you.” With only one or two notable exceptions, relatively rich expat housing developments are surrounded by jerry-built shacks constructed of cast-off lumber and a few sheets of corrugated metal.

Housing in Vanuatu

Experience shows that more break-ins happen in places where the greatest disparities exist between expatriate and ni-Vanuatu housing conditions. But the problem of inadequate housing runs much deeper than that.

The majority of houses in Port Vila and Santo have dirt floors. This is not just a cosmetic problem. Scabies, lice, boils, fungal and bacterial infections resulting in ulcerated sores are all commonplace among children in our municipalities. More common, in fact, than they are in our villages.

In Vanuatu, you have to live with the rich to be poor.

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Signal to Noise

There’s no Communications column this week. Or rather, there’s no new Communications column.

Two weeks ago, my column was pre-empted by more pressing news. We agreed to publish the same piece later, as it wasn’t particularly time-sensitive. The week following, however, Digicel launched their service, and it would have been remiss of me to let that pass unremarked. So this week, The Case for Openness is finally appearing in the Independent. Which means that I get a week off.

(That makes 47 columns in the last year or so. Who would have thought there was so much to talk about?)