That said, I’ve managed to (more or less) keep up the same level of production for print. So today I’m going to post a bunch columns that have been patiently waiting for my attention. Your RSS might not like me for it.

ABOUT THIS SHOW: 40 Dei plays at Wan Smolbag Haos in Tagabe on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays. The show starts at 6:30 p.m. Tickets are 50 vatu for adults, students and children. Because of its popularity, attendees should arrive at least one hour before show time to be guaranteed seating.

The thematic heart of 40 Dei (40 Days), Wan Smolbag’s powerful new play, is the story of Jesus’ 40 days of suffering and temptation in the desert. With Satan constantly at his side, Jesus fasted, contemplated and steadfastly resisted the Devil’s threats and inducements. Even in the extremities of suffering, he accepted his humanity, refusing assistance either from above or below.

As the New Testament tells it, Jesus embarked on this pilgrimage of suffering immediately after his baptism. It was, in a sense, his preparation to enter into the world. We first meet Matthew, the protagonist in Jo Dorras’ stark, deeply probing script, as he emerges from his own moral desert, a wasted youth of faithlessness, drinking and violence.

Lying on the roadside, bloody, filthy, half-clothed, Matthew presents a repulsive figure. Only Lei, a pastor’s daughter, sees him for what he is – a lost soul. Ignoring imprecations to leave this filth, this ‘doti blong taon’ where he lies, she instead recalls the parable of the Good Samaritan to her father.

Matthew awakes from his stupor to a vision of love – a beautiful young woman beside him, joyous music and light emerging from a nearby chapel. He is transformed, and decides at that moment to leave his errant past behind, to seek redemption and salvation.

But as with Jesus in the desert, the Devil is always at his side. And Matthew is human, all too human. Beset by difficulties, he tries to navigate the narrow passage between hypocritical moral rectitude and the nihilistic, hopeless existence of his young friends.

Like all of Wan Smolbag’s productions, 40 Dei is a powerful, provocative show, acted with conviction and world class talent by its cast. It reminds us again and again that there are no easy answers, that Christian kindness demands more than many – most – are willing to give. Its characters find themselves tested repeatedly. Events conspire to probe the limits of their ability to forgive, to embrace others regardless of their path in life, and to withstand the temptation to trade their fundamental humanity for worldly privilege.

Nobody wins. Dorras’ script is too honest an evocation of mundane human weakness to pretend that our world is populated only by angels and devils. Sinners are not always saved, and the devout are not always as unblemished as they first seem.

Where others fall prey to petty ambition, moral weakness and, in one starkly moving sub-plot, to madness, Matthew is almost alone in his willingness to confront the difficulties he faces. More often than not, this means that things go harder for him than for the others. He sacrifices friendship, even love, to his sense of duty. But in the end, his decision to show kindness to his outcast comrades proves to be his greatest test.

Anybody who’s opened a newspaper in the last few years will recognise the characters and events portrayed here. Smolbag’s greatest gift to us is its ability to show us our own world. The play is populated by the same reprobates, righteous hypocrites, prostitutes, politicians and just plain folks as we find in any neighbourhood in Port Vila.

We all walk with the Devil at our shoulder. Without surrendering to dogmatic, moralistic finger-wagging, 40 Dei confronts us with the knowledge that the most insidious enemy to Vanuatu society lies within it, not without. Until we recognise that there are no easy answers to the complex afflictions of a society in transition, until we accept that prostitutes, prisoners and penitents alike are all our family, until we recognise our own weakness in the face of venality and ambition, we will never completely be whole.

In the words of the immortal Walt Kelly, “We have met the enemy and it is us.”

I can’t recommend this play strongly enough. Those who have never wandered far from Vanuatu’s shores might not realise what a remarkable thing Wan Smolbag’s contribution to the national dialogue really is. Its painful, sometimes tortured honesty, its willingness to forego simplistic moralising and to grope for the deeper causes, and its stubborn refusal to accept the easy answers stand it in good stead with some of the most notable theatre companies working today.

I sincerely hope their consistent excellence doesn’t make us complacent. As a lifelong devotee of the theatre (and one-time participant), I can testify to the immense effort and sacrifice that this courageous troupe gifts us with in every performance.

If their efforts are to bear fruit, we too need to engage in the dialogue they offer. We need to recognise our own weakness, turpitude and occasional hypocrisy. We need to resist the urge to cast out those who fall by the wayside. We need to live with the difficult, complicated and discomfiting knowledge that we are – all of us – one people.

This week, I feel I didn’t have nearly enough time to do a completely satisfactory job of mapping a morally, legally and ethically complicated landscape. While I feel I covered most of the main themes in the thousand or so words allowed me, much more needs to be said.

What follows is a somewhat lengthy consideration of what I chose to say – and chose not to say – in this column, and why I did so….

I wouldn’t have been able to write anything useful at all were it not for the patient and generous assistance of Daily Post staff and journalists, who shared their extensive notes and insights, and who talked me back from a more illiberal (and likely less accurate) piece. Even with their own deadlines looming, they bore the countless interruptions patiently and with grace.

Others with whom I discussed the issue were helpful to the extent they felt they could be, but there’s an atmosphere of intimidation, a natural animal caution, in the air right now. More than one individual said they’d love to help, but couldn’t afford to be seen talking to me. Given the threats and physical violence that have accompanied prior reporting on the issue of violence against prisoners, much of my time was spent corroborating facts and triple-checking the language of the article. I expect that some will still find it provocative.

The evening before my submission deadline, I talked for about two hours with a chief from John Bule’s island of Paama. I was interested to know how such an affair would be dealt with in kastom. The chief replied emphatically that these events simply could not have happened in the village.

I can’t replicate here the nuance and indirection of formal Bislama rhetoric. A poor translation will have to suffice:

Two generations ago, said the chief, John Bule would never have been allowed to stray as far as he did. According to the chief, a serial transgressor like Bule would have faced an escalating series of fines and penalties, authorised by the chief and enforced by the young men of the village. The alternatives painted by the chief were these: Bule would either have been intimidated sufficiently to come back into the fold, where he would have been welcomed, or his execution would have been ordered. Either would have occurred long before his final arrest, detention and unsanctioned death.

Two conclusions were offered:

1. Bule reached this point of deadly crisis because a gap has appeared in society, where neither kastom nor the law operate as they should. The distance from island to town, the newfound mobility affecting Vanuatu society, has left so-called ‘town’ chiefs with little power to enforce their views. While many chiefs – this one included – serve a useful and active role in their communities, that role has become more advisory than authoritative.
2. Because he’d passed beyond kastom’s ken, the chief felt there was nothing he could do but wash his hands of the whole unfortunate affair. “Bule i mestem rod long taem finis,” he told me. By ignoring the counsel of his family and his community, Bule had arrived in a place where helping hands could no longer reach him.

The chief refused to be drawn into a discussion of the propriety of the actions of those who arrested Bule. That, he said, was the Law, and had nothing to do with kastom.

While caution was the byword during the composition process, some people encouraged me to state plainly that the key problem highlighted by this tragic sequence of events was that the VMF, Vanuatu’s paramilitary force, was acting beyond its authority. They’d been instructed to assist with the search and return to jail of all escaped prisoners, but, I was told, there was no reason for them to hold Bule for ‘questioning’. Given that Correctional Services staff have been present at the temporary detention facility in the VMF barracks, some said, Bule should have been handed over immediately. They went on to say that even if questioning were necessary, that was the Police’s role.

Similar implications were drawn from the arrival in hospital of runaway criminal Jacky Saul, who was photographed being escorted back to Port Vila following his attempted escape to Southwest Bay on Malekula island. (The local community cooperated with authorities and facilitated his peaceful return to custody.) The photos show Saul, apparently unhurt, walking handcuffed between two individuals in plain clothes. Some time later, he was reported to have arrived in Vila Central hospital with both legs and one hand broken.

In a moving article that appeared in the same Daily Post issue as my column, Saul’s father appealed to people’s sense of humanity, denouncing the VMF’s actions as immoral and unlawful.

Opposition leader Sato Kilman made a statement this week decrying what he characterised as an undisciplined and unlawful atmosphere permeating the VMF.

But here’s the thing: The people who arrested John Bule were in plain clothes. The vehicles they used were not positively identified as belonging to any particular government agency. The unsigned statement issued from the Prime Ministers Office spoke only of ‘officials’ detaining and questioning Bule. The VMF themselves have not yet commented publicly. Neither have the Police or the Correctional Services department.

Despite the strong circumstantial evidence and vehement protestations from some informed sources, I was cautioned not to make any direct allegations of VMF involvement in this affair. Because no one was willing to go on the record, and there was no hard evidence supporting these assertions, I had no choice but to accept that advice.

If and when the findings of the Commission of Inquiry into last year’s prisoner protest are made public, I am told, one of the key points will be the involvement of the Vanuatu Mobile Force in acts of violence. Allegations have been made that prisoners were removed from Correctional Services custody when most of these alleged acts occurred, then returned, injured and in obvious distress. We can only hope that the Minister of Justice will make the report public sooner than later.

But until that time, we have to avoid jumping to conclusions, no matter how clear they may seem.

My greatest concern in this apparent spiral of violence, escape and retaliation is that people will find themselves in a position where they feel they have nothing to lose. It seems clear that many – if not all – of the prisoners currently being held feel this way. They are reportedly conducting a mass hunger strike as I write this.

But I worry about what will happen if and when people are actually charged with assault, battery, manslaughter or even murder against a prisoner. Surely they’ll feel that, with current facilities as they are right now, incarceration is as close to a death sentence as makes no difference.

This is precisely why we have to have some truth-telling; it’s why we have to short-circuit the cycle of violence that seems to be engulfing us. I don’t so much want to see someone ‘pay’ for what they’ve done; I want to see it stop.

The old chief from Paama was right in one regard: Until people come back of their own volition into the arms of their community, they are beyond our ability to help them. I only hope that everyone – captor and captive alike – reflects carefully on that.

I should be back on track in time for next week’s 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?)

• Greg Ross’ delightfully intelligent Futility Closet features a very interesting map. Memorising it should be a pre-requisite for any technology discussion. Understanding it should be a criterion for sainthood.
• Jan Chipchase is exploring that map. He’s a poster boy for the the new geek chic: rambling around the world, finding out how people live their lives, then trying to find ways to make technology that fits. I’d be more condescending about his rock star status, but hey, that’s mostly what I do, too. If he’s the rock star, then I’m the wandering minstrel. I suppose each of us is good for the other.
• I say it below, but I need to set the proper emphasis here: Mobile communication devices are the application platform for the rest of the world. Power, cost, literacy, localisation and different approaches to network management (i.e. more entrepreneurial space in newborn networks than in established ones) all contribute. 2G, 3G, NG are all great, but think about SMS interfaces first. There’s a huge opportunity space there.
• Digicel launched their mobile phone service  last week, making a bigger splash than anything I’ve seen since I arrived here.
  • Photos of the mad queuing (and a couple from the party) here.
  • They’ve done admirably in the first 90% of the job, which was getting the network up and running. Let’s see how they do on the other 90% – keeping it running.
  • I bought myself a 2000 vatu (USD 20) phone and a separate SIM card for my Motorola in order to test the service. I’d been using the Digicel service for barely two days, and when I ran out of credit, I swapped in my TVL SIM (with nearly 4000 vt credit in it) and had an important call fail 5 times in a row. I immediately put my Digicel card back in and stumped up another 1000 in credit. In less than two days, I’d come to assume that calls would actually work. This in spite of the fact that I’ve been using TVL’s services (and working closely with them on occasion) for years. I should have been inured to their level of service and surprised by the improvement that Digicel provided, but the opposite was true. Lesson: We only think about the network when it’s not working.
  • I heard rumours that Digicel had to fly a replacement generator to Ambae by helicopter on their first full day of service. The story might be a case of the Coconut Wireless running a little hot, but if it turns out to be true, I would be interested to know whether the machinery died of natural causes or of bush knife. There’s a whole article in here, but briefly stated, here’s the equation: A radio tower is of no value until it’s turned on, so nobody objects to its existence until the service starts up. From that moment on, people have something they can hold hostage, so however generous the initial agreement, there’s almost always a re-negotiation, usually with a metaphorical knife to the throat.
  • Update: I’ve also got reports of an outage in Tanna in the South. How does it go again? One is an accident, two is incompetence, three is enemy attack. Or heck, it could just be birthing pains.
  • Double Update: Turns out it wasn’t outages, per se; it was delays commissioning some of the systems. Sources with a clear view of the proceedings told me that Digicel could not have turned up their service at all even a few before the launch date – that’s how close to the wire things got. To be clear: This doesn’t reflect poorly on Digicel at all. Quite the contrary. I’ve seen projects that were trivial in comparison lose months (even years) because of minor technical or logistical problems. The fact that one or two of the generators weren’t 100% ready on the day does nothing to diminish the fact that they increased communications coverage nationally by an order of magnitude; and that, to my knowledge, is unprecedented anywhere in the Pacific since 1942.
• On Monday at 09:00, I presented a talk to the Pacific Network Operators Group (PACNOG) at the Sebel Hotel. It’s titled ‘Network Effects: Social Significance of Mobile Communications in Vanuatu‘. It explains Network Effects and how they manifest themselves in village life, then looks at some obvious and not-so-obvious implications for network providers in the Pacific. Briefly, my point is that village life features very tight communication loops from which no one is exempt. The one-to-one (but not the one-to-many and many-to-one!) aspects of village communications will be enhanced by mobile comms, and smart network operators should do what they can to enhance this effect. The result will be that our island geography (and gestalt) creates more value per user than traditional business analysis might lead us to believe.
• The telecom licensing regime will be opening up a little further some time before the end of the year. I need to find a way to convince local operators to take advantage of this opportunity. It won’t be easy because:
  • There are a bunch of better-funded outsiders who want in, and are willing to sit on losses in order to get market share; and
  • Capital investment for Vanuatu companies can be really, really hard. Most companies here live hand to mouth, so asking them to amortise any kind of investment is a huge demand.
  • Hopefully, the Universal Access Fund will help mitigate the problem. It’s not clear yet how it will be administered, and there will be a lot of flies buzzing around that particular pot of honey, so I’m not willing to get enthusiastic about the opportunity just yet.
• Now that we’ve actually got the beginnings of truly nationwide communications, we need to deal with power generation. The toughest part will be hardware. See, we’ll never generate enough power to run a desktop computer in every house, and community telecentres are expensive and of limited usefulness, so we need to see how suitable things like the Asus eEe, OLPC and smart phones are to use in the islands.
  • On that front, Wan Smolbag Theatre will be getting about 25 XO laptops soon for their young people’s literacy project. Yay! They’ve also sent an eEe up to their youth center in Loltong on Pentecost island for evaluation.
  • The Mac Minis we first sent there performed in a less-than-stellar fashion due primarily to hardware problems. Even trivial problems (like a stuck CD) can take weeks or months to resolve.
  • The biggest challenge we face is the assumption that being in the tropics means we have lots of sunlight. Uh, maritime climate, anyone? Jungle? Mountains? Solar panel not work good on cloudy day under tree with no flat places. Okay, there are places in Vanuatu where solar power is fine, but unfortunately, it’s least reliable right when you need it most (e.g. hurricane season).
  • One way to mitigate power requirements (and decidedly non-trivial UI/literacy issues) is to leverage SMS-based apps as a computing platform. See above. There’s a lot of work going on in this area in India and Africa. We need to do more here. See this and this for previous rants on the subject. Must find more sponsors….
• UNDP has finally released funds for the Vanuatu leg of the People First Network. Only 5 years late. (Yes, you read that right: 5 years.) I’ll be doing a little consulting to try to re-frame the project to reflect the changes that have occurred in the last half decade.

Somewhere in here, I eke out a living, write 2000 words a week and try to have a life. I’d love to be a rock star just like Jan and find a Daddy Warbucks to take all my mundane worries away, but I’m not starving, so I can’t complain.

I had the privilege this week of being asked to take some photographs at the Vanuatu unveiling of the Pacific Economic Survey. The event was attended by two Australian Parliamentary Secretaries and by a number of fairly senior individuals in Vanuatu. The photos I took will be collected here.

I was proudest of the photo above. It’s of two veteran politicians whose approach and presentation could hardly be further apart.

I don’t know much about Duncan Kerr, the Parliamentary Secretary for Pacific Affairs. Indeed, I’ve not so much as chatted with him. Those who did this week spoke of a warm, quite likable and very switched-on individual. It’s clear that in the photo he wants to do away with distance, to present himself with real, if practised, warmth and to make himself accessible. One imagines working with him in a spirit of comity and fraternal respect.

Chief Boulekone is one of the founding fathers of the nation. He was integral to the successful drafting of Vanuatu’s Constitution, worked as a politician for many years, and has since become one of the more prominent observers of Vanuatu politics. He is respected all the more because he made the choice to exit politics when he saw the process becoming corrupted, yet distanced himself only enough that he could comment without ever being accused of partisanship or self-interest.

There are few politicians in Vanuatu who have not been compromised in some way, shape or form. Chief Vincent is one of them.

What struck me most about the photo at the top was the stark contrast between the two individuals. Kerr does his best (authentically, I don’t doubt) to create the appearance of friendship. Boulekone’s air is exactly what a chief is supposed to have: authority and a stern impassivity.

And that, my friends, pretty much sums up the difference between Australian and Vanuatu politics. The one thrives on alliances, the other on individual respect.