Public commentators in Vanuatu don’t write nearly often enough about Wan Smolbag. Even when they do, their description of the work and its effect tend to fit them into the ‘development NGO’ straitjacket. That’s not entirely inaccurate, of course; Smolbag is a development NGO. But such descriptions are incomplete.

Woefully so, in my opinion. Once understood, the reasons for this misperception explain a great deal about the failures of many formal development programmes. (That’s programmes, mind you, not projects. But that’s an essay for another day.) The problem, ultimately, is our human incapacity to quantify, or even adequately to analyse, certain cultural inputs.

Now, given that Smolbag has been working with the softer tools of drama, dialogue, understanding and community awareness for twenty years, they’ve got the issue pretty well sussed. At least innately. If there are still tensions between what they want to do and what donors are willing to fund, they’re manageable, and it must be said that, from top to bottom, Smolbag staff know what they’re about. They’re are as good at demonstrating the value of their work to donors, partners and the public as anyone I’ve encountered in a couple of decades of part- and full-time advocacy work.

But the preceding is really just a digression – I need to say a few things about Wan Smolbag as an artistic institution, and the only way to get there is to indulge in a deliberate bit of hand-waving that runs the risk of belittling the dozens of non-theatrical activities they manage. There’s a small mountain of data out there expressing in very finite terms just how effective this group is.

My point, I guess, is that no matter how good that makes them – and they are very good indeed – there’s more to it than that. And that’s what I want to write about today.

I’m not going to attempt to structure this in any useful way. This really is as much a personal exercise as a public one: If I succeed in conveying a sense of what makes Smolbag unique to you, I might understand it better myself….

Sometimes you have to write aimless jumbles like this just to get to what you really wanted to write in the first place.

Dialogue

Jo Dorras is one of those rare writers who appears to effortlessly traverse the language barrier. (I say ‘appears’ because every writer knows that no good writing is ever effortless.) The language in her scripts is almost perfectly transparent to a local audience. The wit, word play, intonation and cadence of her dialogue manages that tenuous balancing act between remaining natural enough that the audience absorbs it without effort and having her characters say the things we wish we had.

Following one production, I complimented her facility with Bislama (a deceptively difficult but deeply poetic language). With characteristic humility, Jo quickly attributed most of the coruscating, rapid-fire exchanges that typify her work to rehearsal-time ad-libs inserted by the actors. There’s some truth to that – and more on them in a moment – but the fact remains that she does what every playwright dreams about. Without indulging in self-conscious theatricality, her simple, constantly driving narratives are composed of those deftly structured scenes, those often alarmingly direct crises and confrontations that make stage drama worth watching.

I, for one, am hopelessly jealous.

I feel terribly ambivalent when I see her gift in action. I find myself wishing there were some way to translate it back to English, to make the world see just what a wonderful thing it is. But the poetry is sure to get lost in translation. Some of Smolbag’s regional work – the Love Patrol television series, for example – is acted in English. There’s still a great deal to admire in it, but the fact remains that the actors simply cannot bring their full fluency and adeptness to bear on what, for most, is their third or even fourth language.

It’s probably wrong of me to say it, but I occasionally get the impression that Jo feels constrained by English, too.

Acting

To all those with whom I worked in Canadian theatre lo! those many years ago: I wish I could transport you all here, just for one night. I wish I could show you just how good Smolbag’s actors are.

There isn’t one of you wouldn’t walk out of the theatre at once humbled and inspired. These men and women have virtually no prospect of fame, fortune – or even recognition as artists. Their work is their career, and they are almost universally respected for their contribution. But… ah, if only you could see. Just one show. Then I wouldn’t have to belabour myself to express so inadequately what a natural facility for drama they have, how fluent they are in expressing themselves.

This faculty is not at all a universal talent here in Vanuatu, but I do suspect there’s something in the water. I’ve never seen such a consistent capability for spontaneity, such an unquestioning willingness to let the action take them where it needs to. Western actors spend years practising, versing themselves in a craft so unforgiving that only a tiny percentage ever reach any real proficiency in it. There are, at any time, at least half a dozen truly remarkable actors working at Smolbag.

I don’t want to understate the time, energy and sweat Smolbag’s actors invest in the effort, but consider: What city of 200,000 could consistently produce dozens of superb actors, any one of whom could carry an entire show in Toronto, New York or London? Now spread that city over a thousand miles of ocean and tell me how such a thing could be.

One sees a similar phenomenon whenever music ‘fires up’, as they say here. I’ve seen people find the second or third harmony of a song they’ve never heard before within about a dozen bars. For someone to whom nothing creative comes easily, I find it downright intimidating.

I suspect it has something to do with Vanuatu being a nation without mirrors. It’s not that people aren’t every bit as prone to preening, vanity and the natural tropes of beauty, it’s just that they don’t seem to be as self-conscious about it.

I worry as I write this that I might be creating the impression of a nation of prodigies. I’m not really comfortable with that, for numerous reasons, not the least of which is the danger inherent in all generalisation. The fact remains though: This troupe is consistently superior, and some of them are legitimately world-class performers. They’d be stars in any other country.

One particularly compelling example: 40 Dei features something new for Smolbag drama – a character who undergoes what’s often facilely characterised as ‘a journey’. It would be a career-making role anywhere else, a young reprobate who exudes that sense that something’s not quite right about him, nor has it ever been. He’s always a touch too angry, a touch too cynically clear-sighted for his own good. Following his imprisonment for murder, though, he undergoes a transformation. The casually brutal, occasionally fatal prison environment causes him to unwind completely. Watching the young man playing Ben throw himself so unreservedly into this near-impossible role was, for me, utterly transfixing.

This is ground-breaking work. You have to remember that Vanuatu is a fundamentally static society. The very idea that one could be transformed by events creates an entirely new understanding – in Vanuatu, at least – of our frailty in the face of overwhelming circumstance. I can’t think of more than four of five actors in the world who would stand a chance living up to such a startlingly original role as this.

Drama

Vanuatu sometimes reminds me of Ireland. Its tightly – sometimes crushingly – enmeshed society makes drama almost a natural state. Opportunistic greed, petty rivalry, tempestuous behaviour, occasionally brutal outbursts, and the insatiable desire to discuss them all endlessly, make even the smallest events compelling. Life in Vanuatu is very much defined by the individuals one meets. Anonymity is not an option, and privacy in all things is almost impossible to maintain.

In addition, it punishes individual ambition. Nothing seems to excite more glee than gossip that positively luxuriates in the foibles and weaknesses of those who would elevate themselves. Except perhaps watching them inevitably being taken down a notch.

On top of all that, Vanuatu is a society in transition between village life and existence in a much wider world. In spite of the positively nimble adaptability of most of its residents, there exists a pervasive tension between kastom’s natural conservatism and some of the more subversive aspects of modern Western culture.

Most of Smolbag’s stories are thinly veiled accounts of local events. I don’t want to take anything away from Jo’s remarkable ability to distill these into theatre, but it bears mentioning that Vanuatu provides ample fodder.

What’s really remarkable, though, is just how much Smolbag gets away with. Theatre has always been an innately irreverent, subversive medium, and there’s something about that fourth wall that allows things to be said onstage that could get you lynched under other circumstances. But given the almost complete lack of distinction between formal events and very direct action here, I remain impressed that audiences in Vanuatu innately grasp that the role of theatre is often to speak the unspeakable.

(That’s not always the case, of course. Peter Walker recounts an episode in which a village production resulted in flaring tempers and near-violence on his blog. Go read it. It’s eminently worthwhile, an honest, often agonisingly – to me, anyway – familiar account of the triumphs and tribulations of directing a full-scale theatrical production. It’ll give you a better insight into Wan Smolbag than I could ever hope to do.)

I am even more impressed, though, by the courage of these people in appropriating what is, fundamentally, a foreign influence and making it so much their own that their audiences find themselves transported beyond their own inclinations.

I sometimes worry that Jo might be losing hope. Every one of her scripts tackles difficult – and deeply disturbing – social issues. As I mentioned, most of them are drawn from life. This only makes the plots, which detail the rampant brutality, sexual and spousal abuse, corruption, venality and loss of restraint that punctuate life in Vanuatu, all the more affecting. But in the last two shows I’ve sensed that her stubborn distaste for moral bromides and facile conclusions is being tinged by a loss of patience. It could be that 20 years of working for such tiny increments in societal change has begun to tell.

Of course, it could be that my perspective is changing, that my own optimism and faith in humanity is waning and that I’m just projecting it onto Smolbag’s shows because… well, because they render everything that I most love and loathe about Vanuatu so clearly.

Effects

I took some of my adoptive family to the theatre last week. Some of them had never seen a play before in their life. I can’t tell you the gratification I felt at seeing them sit there, rapt, transfixed by the action onstage. Even little Daniela, not yet three years old, was entranced.

We talked about the play for hours afterward. My tawian (sister-in-law) Georgeline, especially, was touched by the plight of Lei, an intelligent, too-sensitive young woman forced into a loveless marriage. I’ll just say that, for her, art imitates life and leave it at that.

But I’m troubled nonetheless. Troubled that, for all its force, there are some aspects of Vanuatu society that are particularly intransigent. Violence against women and children, for example, is endemic, so common that people often report it with less concern than they express over the football score. It would be a worse than tragic if there weren’t someone brave enough to stand up and address such issues, and for that the entire country is in Smolbag’s debt.

(They are not the only ones showing such courage, of course, but there’s a quantum difference between talking about something and showing it happen onstage. And I’m writing about theatre’s particular effects, not about the social issues generally.)

Nonetheless. Nonetheless. I worry that there’s some aspect of the human psyche that is so pliant that it can witness such events acted out and, in the full knowledge that this is happening all around, right now, still blithely move along exactly as it has done other every day of its existence. I worry, in other words, that a society in which accommodation of others’ shortcomings is a cardinal virtue might not want to change. Or even know how to if it did.

I know that’s not true. I see evidence of it everywhere, in the young men and women openly holding hands where even a few years ago any overt sign of affection was punished. I see it in the devotion of parents to their children’s education, the compelling desire to see them achieve more than they.

Again, I’m fairly certain that this is a case of my own bias coming into play. It’s easy to get tired, to begin to lose one’s sense of optimism when the best one can hope for is tiny, incremental gains, measured like grains of sand in a desert. It’s not really like that.

And just to remind myself that it’s so, I’m going to leave off writing now, and go sit down at the family nakamal in Freswota and laugh and josh and explore the day’s tiny melodramas with whomever shows up.

Update: … A few additional notes after further reflection…

Music

I don’t know how I could have meandered so far without once mentioning Smolbag’s musical work. Rather than go on at length talking about it, though, I’ll just point you to one of their songs. It’s a very rough cut, from the sound of it, recorded ‘live on the floor’ by the actors clustering as best they can around a few mics. When you listen to it, close your eyes, filter out the distortions, and just imagine this scene:

As the actors, still in character, come out for their curtain call, this music is playing. The voices add themselves one by one and few by few until the tiny theatre is brimming with their voices. The lyrics speak of the troubles in this world and wonder if they will ever diminish.

“There’s too much trouble in this world / God help me…”

Most striking of all, a prisoner who’s been beaten mercilessly stands silent, face sheathed in blood, staring straight into the audience as the music rises. He says nothing for the first half of the song. One of the more effective pieces of stagecraft I’ve seen in a long time.

The Director

At the heart of the operation is the theatre’s founder and director, Peter Walker. His efforts animate the entire operation, providing a place where dozens of promising talents from all across the nation can find their own potential.

But there’s no need for me to attempt any explanation. I’d only fumble it anyway. Go read his blog. It’s worth it.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s April 30 arrival in Honiara, Solomon Islands marked what everyone hopes is a historic beginning of a new era in Solomons – and Melanesian – politics.

When the Nobel Laureate first posited the idea of Truth and Reconciliation, it was, for South Africa and much of the world, a startling, even revolutionary approach to dealing with societal and political conflict. The idea that an entire nation could dispense with winners and losers was unorthodox, to say the least. Enlightenment thought, based as it is on the rights of the individual, ranks justice higher than all else, making it the very measure of democracy.

Not so in the Solomon Islands, nor in the bulk of Melanesian society. Thousands of years of largely static village life have built into the Melanesia consciousness a tendency to focus more on peace-making than on justice per se. Put simply, retribution doesn’t make for good neighbours. If the person next door has wronged you, you’ve got to measure the merits of retribution against the knowledge that the two of you are going to remain neighbours for your – and your children’s – lifetime.

Good relations are more important than anything else, even if it means ignoring past slights.

In a 1997 article for the Australian Financial Review, journalist Ben Bohane[*] suggested that the key to re-establishing peace in war-torn Bougainville lay in the much-derided kastom movements that animated much of the conflict. “Cults of War” traces the roots of Melanesian kastom movements and cults to the spiritualisation of a fundamental desire for equality between indigenous peoples and their colonial masters. Although expressed in a simplistic mix of metaphor, legend and charismatism, the cargo cult movements that took root throughout PNG, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu are a clear expression of the desire for a more equal distribution of wealth.

Had Karl Marx been born in the South Pacific, he might have phrased things in much the same terms.

One hopes, therefore, that Desmond Tutu’s message will fall on fertile ground. Of all the regions in the world, Melanesia is most sympathetic to his philosophy of social reconciliation at the expense of individual justice.

The Solomon Islands are far from healed. The armed RAMSI patrols were welcomed by everyone I encountered during my last visit to Honiara. Every person I spoke with shared the opinion that without this overt imposition of discipline and restraint, the Guadalcanal natives (or Guales) would fall back to fighting the increasingly numerous Malaitans.

As with their neighbours in Bougainville, many members of the loosely-coordinated Isatabu Freedom Movement (IFM) were united mostly in their adherence to the back-to-roots philosophy of Moro, a spiritual leader who, it is claimed, died and was reborn in his spiritual role back in 1957.

The vast majority of commentators on kastom movements such as this (for example the John Frum movement on Tanna island, most recently mocked, albeit fondly, in the BBC documentary ‘Meet the Natives’), treat these beliefs as signs of a benighted, backward people searching naively to understand technology so advanced that it’s indistinguishable from magic.

Were people to listen a little more sympathetically, they would see that unrest and dissatisfaction lie intertwined at the very roots of such movements. But scattered amongst them are the seeds of reconciliation.

Democracy in Melanesia has proved a difficult, not to say intractable, mechanism of governance. While few politicians or societal leaders would discard it entirely, there isn’t one who won’t admit that some aspects of it simply don’t mesh with the millennial traditions that make up so much of village life.

Throughout the Melanesian Arc ranging from West Papua, across the Pacific to Fiji and down to New Caledonia, issues of democracy, representation and social justice remain unreconciled. While some nations, most notably Vanuatu, have managed to maintain a modicum of stability and growth, the majority have not flourished.

Most Melanesian countries are coming to the end of their first full generation of independence. Many lessons have yet to be fully learned, but a new crop of politicians is entering the scene with a distinctly more nuanced understanding of the world. Unburdened by the onerous, unforgiving task of carving out democratic vehicles acceptable to their erstwhile colonial masters, they have begun to reflect on the steps necessary to reconcile the competing priorities of individual justice and societal peace.

Archbishop Tutu’s visit should not be a one-off event. Nor should his message be ignored by other nations in the region. If it does nothing else, the nascent Melanesian Spearhead Group would do well to take some momentum from the renewed peace process in the Solomons and sponsor research, advocacy and education that seeks a reconciliation between the clear-cut mechanics of Western democracy and the subtle, oblique and generally non-confrontational lessons of kastom.

If they do, they will help to arm the next generation of leaders with the knowledge and understanding they need to avoid the conflict, ineptitude and venality that have tainted the efforts of even the most well-intentioned leaders during Melanesia’s first generation of Independence. Their sons and daughters can – and must – do better.

Yesterday I wrote about the need for the development of a coherent and unifying political philosophy in Vanuatu. Today, I feel I should explain why the development of such a vision is a difficult – not to say intractable – problem.

This is Chief Kalori of Clem’s Hill. One of the young turks in Efate’s francophone population at the time of the Independence movement of the 1970s, he presided over a community responsive to the French argument for a go-slow approach. As members of a large, distinct minority, they felt they had every reason to fear being overwhelmed and shouted down by the largely Anglican/Presbyterian leadership of the Independence movement.

The French at the time were much more conservative in their approach to Independence. They are presently the last colonial power in the region that hasn’t utterly divested itself of the trappings of overt rule. In the 1970s, the French quietly and not-so-subtly provided assistance to anti-Independence political parties (eventually united under the familiar mantle of the Union des Parties Modérées, or UMP) and supported rebellions on Santo and Tanna.

Picture Kalori, a young man of rank and potential in the 1970s, watching his fathers become isolated and shifted out of power, while young, foreign-educated firebrands radioed political speeches from hiding places in the bush only a few kilometres from his nasara.

The young lawyer who preached, Castro-like, over the bush radio is now President of Vanuatu. Chief Kalori remains in his village, very much the injured lion. He is quick to reprove the country’s founders, men he – not entirely without reason – considered under-educated and ill-prepared for the demands of ruling a newborn nation.

While Kalori is alive, there will be another view of Independence: not undesirable, but in the 1980s untimely and rash. He feels that everything that has transpired since then, the venality, pettiness, lack of political coherence or cohesion… all of this can be laid at the feet of some brash young men who lacked the education and the wisdom to take a more patient tack.

Father Lini did little to ingratiate himself with the francophone population at first. He sent colonial police to deal with the Tannese insurgents, and brokered an agreement with Papua New Guinea’s Prime Minister to bring the Nagriamel leader Jimmy Stevens’ Bow & Arrow Rebellion to an abrupt and somewhat violent end.

Even after the violence was ended, he was not beyond expressing his pique by kicking out the odd French diplomat.

Some years ago, I spent an afternoon listening to a francophone chief from Tanna regale me with the history of cultural tensions in his area. His story culminated in the imprisonment of all the area’s leaders and ultimately the death of the most senior. He paused at the end and said to me in Bislama, “I’m glad you’re French Canadian. What I have said to you today, I could never tell to an anglophone.”

(Apologetically and as tactfully as I knew how, I later disabused the chief of his mistake. He never spoke directly to me again.)

Unity doesn’t come naturally in Vanuatu. As with many cultures, affiliations are complex, beginning with family and radiating from there to include village, island, language and religion. The most closely kept – and contested – are those closest to you, but external threats can quickly make them disappear, at least until the threat subsides.

One remarkably simple and transformative political fulcrum is the externalisation of conflict. It’s infinitely easier to unite against an external threat than against an internal one, let alone for any positive reason. In the 1970s the near total disenfranchisement of the ni-Vanuatu population was sufficient to bring virtually everyone together. Even those opposed to Independence argued against the timing, not the goal.

I often find myself wishing I had met Father Lini, so I might have some inkling why his presence in the political field was enough to hold things together for as long as he did. But lately I’ve come to suspect that had he remained healthy to this day, he might have found himself in his younger brother’s shoes: only one of the larger dogs in a very large, snappy pack.

Popular support and party unity were already diminishing at the time of his fateful stroke following a prayer breakfast with US President Reagan. Some have even speculated that the stroke was not an accident. Perhaps, they say, the mere mention of the word ‘socalism’, albeit in its benign, uniquely Melanesian usage, was enough to excite interest among Langley’s shadowy denizens.

In any case, politics in Vanuatu is very, very personal. While men like Kalori live, grievances live unaddressed. Jealousies are compounded by a sense of missed opportunity, an inversion of ‘there but for the grace of God…’, that continues to animate actors at all levels of Vanuatu politics.

And when that passes, only the venality, the opportunistic pursuit of the quickest, shortest gain, will remain. And that is why it is more important than ever to find something (dare I say anything?) that will allow the new generation’s leaders to elaborate a coherent picture of a future for all of Vanuatu.

I doubt they’ll succeed, but I feel that someone ought to try.

I spent a couple of weeks last month in Timor-Leste, the world’s youngest nation. I’d gone to lend a hand to civil society there, to apply a few of the lessons learned in Vanuatu to the communications needs of this nascent nation.

The lessons learned were mostly mine.

Five years of immersion in the day-to-day ritual of mundane, incremental development makes it difficult to keep perspective on the big things. True, we’ve had a few red letter days in the recent past, among them the roll-out of Digicel’s new mobile network and Telecom’s massive slashing in Internet rates. But seen from so close up, the magnitude of these events is sometimes hard to grasp.

Take a few steps away, though, and things spring into focus. Timor-Leste is in a similar situation to Vanuatu when I first arrived in 2003. The government is just now developing the awareness and capacity to think comprehensively about communications. Internet use among civil society organisations is limited almost entirely to the capital, and it what little occurs is mostly between NGOs and outside agencies. There is little domestic inter-organisational communication, virtually none using anything more advanced than a telephone.

Timor is beginning to bloom now like the bougainvillea one sees amid the dust, glowing in the desert light. From one week to the next, the street I stayed on saw new shops opening, or re-opening. Timor is experiencing a quickening of the pulse.

I’m a big fan of pushing pebbles – that is, of finding timely, useful and achievable things that will add to the general momentum, helping larger events happen. This, I am beginning to believe, is Timor’s time. They’ve got the will, the people and the money. Lots can go wrong, but this time, they might just go right.

I had the same sense about Vanuatu, lo! those many years ago when I arrived. I’d read up on what history I could find, and it was clear that Vanuatu was emerging from a regrettable – not to say dark – period of its brief history. Slowly, the tools of governance, formal and informal, were being re-forged and put to use. The situation was decidedly imperfect, but improving in noticeable increments.

And look at what we achieved. Here’s what I wrote about it some months ago:

“When I first arrived in 2003, my job was to improve ICT capacity at the grassroots level. As part of that work, I toured around the NGOs operating in Port Vila. Almost every time, I found the same thing. A single computer had Internet access. It was used intermittently to check a single email account, which nobody really used because… well, nobody used it.

“Computer problems were rampant, but nobody got too fussed about them, because… well, nobody relied on them. PCs weren’t much more than glorified typewriters. People printed everything out, so if the drive went to hardware heaven, nothing was really lost.

“At that time, Internet was really too expensive to use at all. This was because the service was being sold by the minute. Whether it was intended to or not, the pricing effectively discouraged demand, thereby reducing revenues and inhibiting investment.

“But some time in 2003, TVL announced a flat-rate dial-up scheme. Once that product became available, it was possible to create small office networks with shared access to the Internet. Staff were given individual email addresses, and before long, if the Internet connection dropped for more than half an hour, I’d get a half-dozen irate calls asking me what was going on.

“If I could go back in time to 2001 and tell NGO directors that they would be doing the majority of their work online, that Internet-based communication was going to be one of the critical factors to the success of their work, they would have laughed at me.”

Nobody’s laughing now. From Canberra to Apia to Dili, Vanuatu’s leadership and example are being recognised. Breaking ground is a lot of extra work, but when it goes well, many benefit.

Perhaps most notable among Vanuatu’s many achievements these last few years is the degree to which these changes have reflected its national character. There have been heated moments, to be sure. We’ve all felt frustration from time to time. But the fact of the matter is that most – if not all – important changes were achieved through consultation, discussion and, ultimately, cordial entente.

With a few notable exceptions, members of Vanuatu’s online society have demonstrated a more consistently collegial and supportive attitude than I’ve seen anywhere else.

There’s an old, rather painful joke we grey-hairs like to tell about discussion groups of the pre-Web world. It used to be that every September a new crop of geeks would enter university and discover the Internet (private ISPs didn’t really exist back then). These ‘clueless newbies’ would rush forth into every online forum, showing all the tact and consideration of a whale in a wading pool. Older, more urbane members of the community would roll their eyes and gently guide this newest generation of users toward a sense of decorum and manners.

But in 1996, the number of people signing up to online services like America Online had reached such a flood that, as one Internet veteran wryly observed, September never ended.

I propose a new formulation. Vanuatu’s online community is exemplary in its ability to discuss even the most contentious issues with restraint and politeness in the proper measure. I suggest that in the same way we use ‘Eternal September’ as a nostalgic reminiscence on lost decorum, we should begin to refer to the best examples of online comity as ‘just like Vanuatu’.

I’m being a little glib, it’s true, but there’s a very serious point to be made: While Vanuatu’s development experience has been imperfect, and is far from complete, it is nonetheless a solid example for other nations, both in the region and further afield.

Every one of us working in Vanuatu should pull our heads out of our work from time to time and take a proper look at how the others are doing. If experience is any guide, the added perspective will be gratifying and rewarding.

This is especially true of ni-Vanuatu professionals who have devoted their lives to improving this country. The mundane venality of local politics and the more trying aspects of Vanuatu society sometimes serve to cloud one’s perception of all that’s good in this country.

I think a pat on the back is in order.

Lest we get complacent, there’s nothing magic about our progress. We don’t deserve all this praise simply for being who we are; we deserve the praise because we recognise who we are, warts and all, and we figure out how to make things work for us.

There’s a new cabinet in place, and it’s possible that renewed skulduggery could undo much of what we’ve achieved during the last half-decade or so. But looking from the outside in, I find I’m more confident now than ever that Vanuatu will find a way to continue to lead the region in development.

Anyone who’s ever washed their clothes by hand knows just how arduous the process is. Most of the women in Vanuatu have extremely well-defined arm muscles, and many of the older women on the islands are built like wrestlers. Laundry is one of the reasons why.

When Georgeline approached me some time ago with the news that she’d begun participating in a micro-finance scheme, I encouraged her to do so, and immediately began wracking my brains for an activity that would allow her to earn money and still take care of little Daniela full-time. I tossed out an idea or two, but nothing that seemed very compelling. Georgeline was patient with me, and waited for me to wind down before telling me that she already knew what she wanted to do. She wanted to buy a washing machine, and charge the local women to use it.

How very stupid of me not to have thought of it before.

There were some steps that needed to be taken first. The initial money invested by the micro-finance group is about USD 100, with amounts increasing as the borrowers demonstrate their ability to ‘remain faithful’, as Georgeline put it. We worked through a couple of months of buying biscuits and such and selling them at a small profit – enough to cover the principal and interest. But this was just a stopgap until we could borrow enough to get within striking range of our goal.

We held a fund-raising to move things along, but it rained on the day. I made sure they didn’t lose money, and was a little humbled by the number of our (soaking wet) friends who arrived regardless of the downpour, but it was – forgive me – a complete wash-out.

Georgeline and I went window shopping and identified the best machine, balancing efficiency, load size, quality and price. But Vanuatu prices being what they are, the only decent option was about USD 200 more than we had budgeted. For reference, that’s about a month’s salary here in Vila, if you have work.

Last week, I got a little money that I’d given up on ever seeing, so we were able to move the schedule up a bit. On Friday, I arrived home to find a brand-new Simpson washer sitting in my tiny house. (We had decided to store it there because I have an actual building to secure it in, and because I’ll be paying the power to start with.) I was surprised at how good it felt to see it there.

Yesterday, we put it through its paces.

Before I go on, I need to be clear about something: Most women in Vanuatu are aware that washing machines exist, but the majority have never seen one except through a window or in a store, and a very few have actually ever used one.

I showed Georgeline and a rather nervous Jacob how to get the machine outside, hook it up to the tap, get the exhaust organised, set the settings that needed setting, and then how to distribute the clothes to balance them properly.

Then I pressed the button.

The machine chugged quietly along, gurgling like a contented child. Georgeline looked at me askance.

“What’s next?”

“That’s it,” I replied.

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“Oh, right. We have to wait until this part’s done.”

“No, that’s everything.”

“Wash, rinse, squeeze, everything?”

“Yep. Just take the clothes out and hang them, and you’re done.”

Georgeline swore.

I never realised just how revolutionary automation actually is, until I started dealing with practical examples like this. (Another scheme of ours is to buy a horse for the family in Lalwari, but that’s a story for another day.) More to the point, though: automation is widely accepted and used in areas of transport, construction, even entertainment. But it’s still almost non-existent for cooking, washing, gardening, collection of firewood, etc.

We discussed this today at our little Algonquin, the Café au Péché Mignon. I found it interesting to watch how people reacted to the observation that automating chores was more revolutionary than women wearing trousers or even having jobs.

Late in the afternoon yesterday, Jacob watched Georgeline complete another load. Still bemused, he came inside, plunked himself down in front of the DVD player (Ocean’s 12) and whistled softly. “White people….” he said, shaking his head.