I never saw it coming.

I was with my adoptive brother Frank, his wife Marie-Anne and some friends, sitting on the porch one Saturday evening, chatting and sharing a little kava. Some other family members were hanging about in the compound. A dog barked once, punctuating the silence.

I didn’t see Jerry’s wife arrive, nor did I notice when she began her whispered tirade against him. So when he leapt up and cut her down with a right hook, I sat frozen, lightning-struck. He kicked her once in the ribs, picked her up, threw her full force into the cement wall. He hit her with two more right hooks before I could intercede.

His wife never made a sound.

Jerry is in his mid-twenties, an amiable layabout who enjoys his kava and an occasional beer. He’s built like a longshoreman, which likely contributed to the fact that no one intervened at first. His cousin and tawian quickly followed me into the fray, but that was to protect me, not to stop Jerry from using his wife as a punching bag.

I’m no fighter. I wouldn’t last ten seconds in the ring with… well, anyone. When I stepped into the melée, I trusted that Jerry’s drunkenness and my privileged status would create enough cognitive dissonance to give him pause. Speaking in calming tones, I put a hand to his chest and began to gently back him away.

It took him a full minute to realise that he could have brushed me aside with a flick of his hand, but it was time enough for his wife to retreat to the relative safety of the house.
Heart still pounding, I rejoined my friends on the porch.

“That was weird,” observed Marie-Anne, after a pause.

“Yeah,” I replied, the master of understatement.

“No, I mean that’s the first time I’ve seen Jerry actually win. Usually his wife has a tree branch ready when he comes home drunk.”

On Thursday, Parliament at last ended more than a decade of indecision and passed the Family Protection Act. For the first time in Vanuatu history, victims of domestic violence have comprehensive protection under the law. The bill was passed by a divided house, with members of the opposition storming out before the vote, ostensibly over a lack of due process.

The plain fact is that too many women and children in Vanuatu live in a culture of low-grade, perpetual violence. Often, the incipient threat is enough to keep them quiescent, but too often hard words are followed by blows. Too often, the very men required by kastom and the law to protect their families are the perpetrators of violence.

Just yesterday as I walked through the streets of Freswota, I spotted two women with black eyes. I passed the house of a man who, neighbours whisper, banished his wife to the spare room in order to make room for his 13 year old daughter.

Will the Family Protection Bill end all this? Not immediately. But it achieves one critically necessary objective: It recognises – at last – that every member of every household in this country has a right to live in safety. How the law is actually enforced remains to be seen.

Security in the home is a fundamental requirement for social and economic development. Children who are properly nurtured and respected are better students, better workers, and consequently better members of society. Adult victims of household violence miss more work, are less productive and in generally poorer health than those who live in security. The US Centers for Disease Control rightly classify household violence as a public health issue.

Researchers note that there is consensus in the international community that freedom from fear and violence is a universal human right to be accorded to all human beings, regardless of gender, ethnicity or nationality. Nobel prize winning economist Amartya Sen rightly argues that gender based violence exacts tremendous and irrevocable economic costs. Economic development in Vanuatu can never reach its potential while 50% of the population is forcibly kept out of the productive domains of society.

But this is precisely what many – if not most – of Vanuatu’s women experience daily.

The stifling effect on women was startling to me when I first arrived. It’s taken years of patient effort to get to the point where the women in my adoptive family feel they can speak freely with me. However kastom may be construed today, I cannot accept that this is what our bubus intended when they told us that our households should be run cooperatively, and that no man acts alone.

Anyone who consistently uses violence to assert his will inevitably silences those around him. He diminishes himself, cutting himself off from the love and support of those closest to him. Vanuatu society has yet to adequately recognise the cost exacted by this culture of casual violence. Passing the Family Protection Act is a first step toward recognising the riches that can be reaped in a society truly based on mutual respect.

I don’t often talk about my motives. Newspapers, in my opinion, make lousy confessionals. I’ll make an exception today, because it helps make a point.

I recently experienced a curious moment. I’d spent a sunny Port Vila Saturday at the office catching up on email, news and whatnot. There were a couple of stories in the local newspaper about communications companies setting up shop here, there was a link to a story about ‘eternal’ airplanes – unmanned spy planes that never have to land. There was a story about spy agencies listening to our Skype calls. One about radio tag implants for everyone, so we can be tracked more easily.

I locked my screen, turned off the lights, and headed out of the office. The sun was westering, drifting almost level with the bay. An acquaintance happened by and invited me for coffee.

I found myself curiously disoriented. It’s happened before, and will no doubt happen again. In the course of a few steps, I’d traveled from an echoing data chamber to a sleepy village where strangers don’t exist.

My friend and I talked about trends in communications and IT. Both of us were from the same city, and both of us have worked for years in high tech. He worked the marketing side, and I on the technical side. Now, here we were in Vanuatu, trying to make things better for people.

This guy comes from the world of big things. Big money, big business, big trends. He worked for several large corporations, and even had a stint as an analyst for the Gartner Group.

I like Big Things, too. I tend to find them in small things, though. Rather than read reports containing in-depth, detailed survey results covering Leading Indicators and such, I prefer to watch how people do things and then sit back and wonder ‘So what if everyone did that? Or what if no one did that any more? Or what if they did it this way? Or what if they did this too, as well as that?’

So we chatted. I told him about how cheap and easy it would be to roll out wireless Internet in Vanuatu. Prices for really cool gear have fallen to commodity levels, and enthusiasts have developed some very funky software. As he began to see what I was getting at, he interrupted me and said, ‘You know, you could get tons of funding for that sort of thing.’

Thinking he meant donor money, I nodded and explained that we’d likely need a proof of concept first, and besides, it might be easier to simply fund it one village at a time by developing small-scale commercial services, like a pay-per-use community email service.

He replied, ‘Yeah, but how do you scale that? Just think – you get a mining company to subsidise the roll-out, because it would mean they could control their operations way more easily, right? Then, you bring more industry on board, and… then you sign a licensing deal with Google or Microsoft, who give you a nice fat chunk of cash for opening up a new revenue stream for them. They’d love to lock into something like that.’

I carefully put my coffee cup down. Ignoring how nutty his idea was, I said, ‘It’s true that you could make a decent chunk of money like that, but you’d basically guarantee that the network would be closed to the poorer people.’

‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘but you could make a fortune.’

I’d like to report that that was the point when I beat him over the head with a chair. I’d like to, but I confess that I honestly thought that somehow he didn’t understand. I mean, this guy was a volunteer, working for peanuts in a developing nation. And yet the merest whiff of cash was enough for him to unabashedly disavow everything he’d worked towards these last two years.

Perhaps too gently, I asked him what would be the point of creating something so plainly designed to make the rich richer by keeping the poorer folk down. From the look he gave me, I’d just as soon have asked him why math works.

‘Dude,’ he said, ‘you could make a fortune.’

The problem, quite frankly, is that I don’t want to make a fortune like that. If I did, I’d never have left my old job.

But these days, I look at the increasing control that the Powers That Be are gaining over that wonderfully anarchic appendage of modern culture that is the Internet, and I am immediately nostalgic for the 1990′s, a time when they just didn’t get it, but it didn’t matter, because we geeks did, and we could do anything with it.

Well, the 1990s are just about to start in Vanuatu. And I want to live them again. And maybe, just maybe, change the outcome just a little. At least a little. At least here.

It’s nostalgic and foolish, I know. But I really just want us to be free.

Digicel and TVL will very soon be providing us with a level of service that we’ve only dreamed about before. But their job is not to be exciting and innovative. Their job is to be solid, reliable and stable. Both of them have large-scale corporate underpinnings that guarantee the product they provide.

Having two players at the communications table is vastly better than having only one. Especially when the second player is Digicel. Reports coming from the Caribbean, PNG, Samoa and elsewhere indicate that they will make an aggressive play for control of as much of the market as they can get. They are not complacent; they do not compromise or accommodate others unless it serves their goal of market dominance. Their business strategy is to provide better coverage at lower cost than anyone else, and to leverage that into a dominant position in every market they enter.

To be clear: Most observers agree that Digicel’s strategy in Vanuatu is not to keep TVL honest, nor is it to share politely with them. Digicel wants the entire market, and will do what it takes to earn it.

That’s excellent news for Vanuatu. In the short term, we can rely on competition to create a ‘beauty contest’ atmosphere, with each player offering more and more services for less and less cost. It will be exciting to watch, and even more exciting to participate in, especially as we take advantage of these new tools to bring kastom into the information age.

But let’s not pick up our pompoms just yet. First let’s be clear about what we want. The best possible outcome for Vanuatu is a knock-down drag-out fight between the incumbent and the newcomer that goes on more or less forever without a clear winner.

We already know what happens when a company becomes complacent about their services, and starts thinking more about the fortune they could be making and less about the services they could be providing. It will take a while, but that time will almost certainly come again.

Through careful management and regulation, the government of Vanuatu can make sure that such complacency is a long time coming. Above all, Vanuatu needs an environment of continual exploration, not exploitation.

The inflammation subsided, and the boy was able the sleep again for a while. The infection, however, didn’t disappear. Once the under-strength antibiotics had run their course, it came back with a vengeance.

To look at the boy, there wasn’t much wrong. A little swelling around one eye and nostril, but otherwise nothing. What you couldn’t see was the constant, excruciating pain as the infection moved into his sinuses and began to press against his brain.

Nathan brought his son back to hospital. There was still no doctor, and Nathan himself had to go back to work. He left the boy there with his wife to wait for the doctor, who actually wasn’t a doctor at all, but a medical student from overseas getting a bit of practice in a place where mistakes don’t count as much.

Much was lost in the translation from Bislama to English and back, and Nathan’s wife was more than a little intimidated, so all the ‘baby doc’ did was prescribe another course of antibiotics and more bed rest.

The boy was back in two days time, burning up with fever and hardly conscious. Finally he was flown to the district hospital on Espiritu Santo island, his mother at his side. On arrival, they were shuttled into an overflowing ward and told to wait for the doctor to come. Once again, language and timidity meant that the little boy was largely ignored. The doctor saw nothing but a sleepy child with a bit of a swollen nose, and the mother would never dare gainsay an expert.

The boy drifted into a coma, and it took hours before people realised that he wasn’t simply sleeping. By the time the med-evac plane arrived in Santo, he was already dead.

Shortly after the news of his son’s death reached me, I encountered Nathan in the space outside his office. In the Vanuatu fashion, I offered my condolences quietly, with few words. Nathan just stood there in front of me, rudderless, smiling as people do when there’s nothing to be said, nothing more to be done. His own life, his future, was gone.

Dead of a boiler. Dead of nothing at all.

Death is everywhere in Vanuatu. Not that it’s more common; it’s more – shall we say, present than in societies where family has shrunk to sub-atomic proportions. It’s unusual here for anyone to go a month without being at least peripherally affected by someone’s passing. Everyone knows their duty at such times. The one hundred days of mourning are respected and understood by all.

To an outsider, it’s wildly incongruous to watch the mourners as they approach the deceased’s house, chatting quietly, even laughing amongst themselves as if on some innocuous errand. The only clue about their destination is a cloth draped across one shoulder, to wipe the coming tears.
At the very instant they reach the gate, the wails begin. They are contrived, it’s true, but utterly heartfelt. The display of pain and sorrow at a funeral is more than most people of European descent have ever seen. To hear women moaning and weeping during the vigil and the burial is an uncanny and deeply moving experience. Though ritualised, the depth and sincerity of the emotion is starkly undeniable.

And then, as quickly as it begins, it is done. Life goes on, there’s food to be cooked, children to be tended to, and laundry to be done. The laughter, the scolding and the storian start up again, as they always do.

Everyone in Vanuatu understands the place of things, and the need for everything to be in its place. Respect for public display and private observance of all of life’s events is universal. If someone smiles and jokes with his friends and colleagues just days after his first-born son has died… well, that’s as it should be. The funeral is over, and though there will be other opportunities to look back and mourn over the next hundred days, life goes on, whether one wants it to or not.

Nobody needs to mention the emptiness behind the smiles, the agonising gap between life and living. They know it’s there. Many – too many – have felt it themselves when loved ones died of illness or accident. But the life of the community takes precedence over all else, and its joy, its happiness is paramount. So we smile and laugh and live life lightly.

I can accept the necessity, even the appropriateness of this. What I struggle with every day, however, is that our acceptance of the form of things keeps us from actually doing anything about the problem.

Nathan’s boy died of nothing. But the shape that custom places on events never allows our anguish to transform itself to passionate fire. The loss of a loved one is felt as keenly in Vanuatu as anywhere, but the sense of time and place forces us to tolerate that such suffering and loss will happen again.

Intolerance of tragedy requires that we change, and change exacts a price from the community. As a result, those who have devoted their lives to achieving change in Vanuatu have little choice but to hide their candle under a bushel. There are countless such heroes throughout the country, doing what they can in their own small way.

There may yet be upheaval and radical social transformation in Vanuatu. But when change comes from the inside, it comes quietly, unnoticed by many. Most of us, we just accept that our children will die of nothing. And once the hundred days are over, only the angels will cry for them.

Re-worked from an older post for this week’s Daily Post Weekender edition. ed.

Ever since I arrived in Vanuatu almost five years ago, I’ve woken every morning to the rhythmic shushing of the scrub brush as the women in the neighbourhood do the morning wash. It’s often the last thing I hear before sundown as well.

Anyone who’s ever washed their clothes by hand knows just how arduous the process is. Most 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 my tawian Marie-Anne 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 her little girl full-time. I tossed out an idea or two, but nothing I suggested seemed very compelling. Marie-Anne 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 10,000 vatu (about US $100), with amounts increasing as the borrowers demonstrate their ability to ‘remain faithful’, as Marie-Anne 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.

Marie-Anne 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 20,000 vatu more than we had budgeted. 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 electrical bill 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 perfectly 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. Those that have used one rarely use it to wash their own clothes.

I showed Marie-Anne and her rather nervous husband James 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. Marie-Anne 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.”

Marie-Anne 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, central Pentecost, 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 Port Vila’s version of the Algonquin Hotel, 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.

Women here face so many challenges that it’s sometimes hard to see where to start. Wan Smolbag Theatre Company’s heart-breaking play Las Kad (Last Card) summed up the situation for most women in Vanuatu when an angry husband responds to accusations of abuse with a simple, brutal assertion: ‘Mi pem hem finis!’ (“I’ve paid for her!” – a reference to the Vanuatu custom of paying a bride price, implying that women are chattels.)

Faced with this level of understanding, it’s sometimes hard to remember that the road to equality for women the world over is achieved as much through the reduction of housework as it is through human rights legislation and adequate prosecution of rape and spousal abuse.

Consider the prospects of a woman abused by her husband, worried about the future of her children and what the community will think about them if she leaves. Now keep her busy from before sunrise until late at night, and it’s no wonder at all that she is more prone to remain silent than to protest. She simply doesn’t have time for that.

Late in the afternoon yesterday, Marie-Anne’s husband watched her 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.

The attack happened last Monday in the afternoon. It didn’t last long, but it left her with a concussion and a broken collarbone.

She was in her apartment, had been for a little while. She settled herself down at her laptop to write up some workshop notes. She heard a noise from the front bedroom, empty now because her friend had left precipitately after no one listened to her fears. She stood, not sure whether to investigate or flee. A man appeared in the doorway, and knocked her down hard as she started to scream. The broken bone immobilised her, so all she could do was scream as loud as she could. Her assailant fled within seconds.

And nobody came.

In the end, she called her boss at work, and she called me. Then she called the police. We all arrived more or less at the same time. The police were ineffectual, to say the least. Faced with a woman whose Bislama was not strong, and having little English, they asked me to take her victim statement. The intruder had pulled the air conditioning unit out of the wall, climbed in through the hole, and waited in the front bedroom until she arrived. I later asked two of the local cleaning staff if the police had questioned them, and if they had seen or heard anything. The response to both was the open and unequivocal no of someone who knows exactly how complicated and dangerous knowledge can be.

I stayed that night, and all of the next day, and the next.

Since Christmas, someone had been prowling around the apartments in that area. When my friend got back from holiday, she learned of this and promptly made a report to the police. She also notified her volunteer organisation, as well as the New Zealand and British High Commissions. Liz at the New Zealand High Comm had some suggestions. Everyone else was less than receptive.

A bit surprising, really, considering that there had been a serious attack on a female volunteer just the week before. The first one resulted in a woman being beaten and held down in her bathroom while an accomplice stole whatever he could carry. She’s in Sydney now, getting her teeth repaired, and considering whether or not to return.

There had been another incident, too. The country director for our volunteer organisation woke up in the middle of the night to find a man standing over her bed. He’d bent the bars on one of the windows, slipped inside, and walked past the laptop and the wallet lying on the living room table, straight to the bedroom. He fled when she started screaming.

So why, then, did this same country director pat my friend on the shoulder in apparent sympathy and tell her, ‘Maybe you just weren’t cut out to be a volunteer.‘ The dangers that my friend outlined should have been vividly clear.

After this most recent attack, things catalysed. Peace Corps had just issued a letter decrying seven recent incidents of harrassment against female volunteers. The Japanese, with characteristic thoroughness, had already submitted twenty-four incident reports to the police. Without waiting for results, they hired round-the-clock security for each of their Port Vila residents. All the volunteer-sending agencies met jointly with the Commissioner of Police, a well-intentioned man with the unenviable burden of being named Robert Diniro. He was told, perhaps not in so many words, that it would be a shame for Vanuatu if the volunteers and the aid money just stopped coming.

The fact is, the police can’t do much. Recently, someone who had subdued and apprehended a man attempting to rape his house girl had been told that the police could not come, as there was no car available to take them. The CID has no finger print catalogue, and no means of creating one. Typically, the only people who get arrested are those who get caught in the act and held until the police arrive.

That didn’t stop the volunteer sending agencies from badgering them to do more. They agreed to meet again in one month to review progress.

With all the to-ing and fro-ing, nobody bothered to walk 50 metres down the road to talk to any ni-Vanuatu members of the community. Nobody thought to ask the local chiefs to help. Nobody asked whether others might be experiencing the same thing. One night at the local nakamal, I sat and listened as every person there took their turn telling me of the time they had been broken into, the time they had been attacked. The time one of them chased a ‘steal man’ down the dark street and, having captured him, discovered that it was a close friend of his.

The local council of chiefs announced in the newspaper that they would be holding a public meeting to address the issue. One white person attended. By default the representative of the volunteer agencies, I found myself standing in front of the room, explaining to them what had happened to my friends. It was everything I could do not to rail at those who chattered about the need for community building but who couldn’t drag their sorry selves to a meeting with the only group of people who were willing and able to catalyse this very process.

I’ve never been particularly blind to the liabilities of Development, the inherent arrogance that accompanies anyone’s offer of guidance. And I’ll confess to a slight cynicism when I consider my own motives for coming here. I’ve rolled my eyes at the news that a certain Asian financial institution was busy feeding training facilities money and resources and blithely ignoring that there’s no demand for the skills they’re instilling. I’ve clucked bitterly at the fairly overt Howard-ism of the Australian efforts here.

So why should I be surprised that the staffing arm of one volunteer agency is so blithe about the problems as to simply suggest to one concerned young woman that she should keep a tin of hairspray by her bedside? And why am I surprised when their reaction to people being injured is to announce to their hosts that things are getting out of hand now that it’s not just ni-Vanuatu who are suffering from the violence, and that they’d better fix things up chop chop or master would be mad and take away all the nice money?

Well, if I was surprised before, I promise not to be any more.

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.

Most of my family stayed with me last night, five of them in my house and about eight more in the storage shed across the yard. None of us wandered far, electing instead to fill up a plastic jug with kava and sit in my house watching movies.

To anyone not attuned to life in Vanuatu, things would appear perfectly normal, if a little cosy. Kids were being kids, the women prepared supper and chatted amongst themselves. A few of the men wandered off into the night, but most hid under the eaves, joking quietly and looking off into the rain.

The story goes like this: A Tannese woman died, apparently poisoned by her husband and his brother. The person who supplied the poison was a practitioner of nakaimas from Ambrym. Whether he was coerced or paid depends on who is telling the story.

Once the killing came to light, chiefs from the Tanna community in Vila ordered the execution of the two conspirators and the Ambrymese man who provided the ‘leaf’, as it’s called. Attempts to intervene and negotiate a settlement only led to further problems. It was claimed that the Ambrym chiefs were organising their men to forcefully oppose the Tannese, and the house of a chief in the Namburu neighbourhood in Vila was attacked.

Tannese men overran the grounds, killed the chief’s two sons and severely wounded the chief himself. His house was burnt to the ground, as were all the vehicles in the yard. Another house elsewhere in town was attacked and burned, leading to fears of widespread violence between the Tanna and Ambrym communities.

So far, two people have been killed and six more seriously wounded. They are being kept under guard at Vila Central Hospital. Political operatives and other so-called Big Men have been working around the clock to try to rein in the violence, but fear and distrust have so far prevailed.

The practice of Nakaimas is something for which the people of Ambrym are widely feared and mistrusted. There are, people say, certain men whose intimate knowledge of plants in Vanuatu allows them to kill quietly and without a trace. It’s told that they use shape-changing magic to get close to the victim, and the tiniest dose of one of their potions is invariably fatal.

As evidence of how seriously this is taken, I have been told on numerous occasions to be careful never to accept a kava shell passed to me by hand. What would seem a common courtesy anywhere else is viewed with the highest suspicion here in Vanuatu.

Is Nakaimas real? Without a doubt. There have been many cases of poisoning. But other afflictions also result in sudden death. For example, stroke caused by clots of bacterial infection is common. It can fell an otherwise healthy person in minutes. In Vanuatu as in many societies, there is a common belief that nobody dies without a reason. And the commonplace reasons are never as compelling as the suspicion that someone wanted someone dead.

Jacob’s mother was from West Ambrym, and the ground he and his extended family occupy is known as a place blong man Ambrym. To make matters worse, Jacob has been taken under the wing of a well-known healer, and tutored in the use of medicinal plants.

The danger is obvious and quite real. Tannese people have a well-deserved reputation for dealing with things decisively and thoroughly, which is not to say equitably or well. They are the least afraid of violence, and the most capable of organising themselves when they feel they are in danger. I tread carefully in all my dealings with the Tannese.

As far as I can tell, the only solution to this will come with the passage of time. The long weekend will pass, cooler heads will prevail, and eventually things will return to normal. We’ve got one more day to get through, because – ironically – tomorrow is Chief’s Day, a national holiday.

It’s also my birthday. So tonight I’m throwing a party. My standing in the community, as well as that of several of my friends, should be enough to keep anyone from interrupting the festivities, and it gives me an excuse to keep everyone close. My biggest fear is that it will rain, as it has done every day for the last two weeks.

Vila is quiet, and if all goes well, it will remain that way.

Imagine the worst storm you’ve ever seen. Double it. Double it again. Make it last 14 hours at its highest intensity. That’s how Typhoon Ivy was for us. The wind stayed consistently in excess of 50 knots from mid-afternoon of the day before yesterday (the time of my last post) until late into the night. It gusted far above that.

There were four of us staying in a very small house. We made light of things as best we could, but it was a little hard to be entirely glib when the door blew off the front of the house, taking the sheets of masonite covering the windows with it.

Three of us manhandled the door back into place, and while Mick (the biggest of the bunch) held it in place, John and I ran off into the storm to find the necessaries to keep it there. Some men were sheltering in the workshop adjoining the provincial offices, and they helped us find a hammer, some nails, and some 2×10 planks. We stood in the rain for about 10 minutes, nailing the planks and the masonite into place.

By the end of it, all of us were drenched to the skin, and stinging from the lashing rain.

I suppose we did as countless people have when faced with a phenomenon that can’t be altered. We made the best of it. All four of us are fairly good-natured people. We chatted by the meager light of a hurricane lantern, joking as best we could, making every effort not to flinch when something large hit the roof.

Late in the afternoon, I stepped out into the lee of the house to smoke a cigarette[*]. As I huddled by the edge of the building I watched two consecutive gusts of wind tear branches thicker than my waist from the mango tree beside me. What frightened me most was the fact that it happened so quickly. This was no Hollywood slo-mo, where the branch creaks ominously, giving the rescuer time to shout to the trapped child, put the asshole fire chief into his place but good, recant his recent infidelity to his new love, give her a passionate, lingering kiss, then race into the storm, leaping headlong to pull the frightened, sassy-no-longer child to safety. Nope. Gust. Crack. Boom. Five hundred pounds of lumber have just landed underfoot. It was hard not be be shaken.

Until the roof ripped off the nearest kava nakamal and flew onto the road 20 metres away. I took a photo of it, more pro forma than anything else, as the light was terrible, and the visibility low. The gouts of water pouring down in streams from the corrugated roof never hit the ground. The wind whipped them straight back upwards into the air. Rain was flying horizontally, crossing the fifty metre open space in front of the offices in less than a second.

The day transitioned from murky grey to truly dark. We prepared and ate supper by the light of the lamp, and cussed our luck afterward when we realised that everyone thought the other had brought playing cards. A neighbour had brought a ‘hurricane gift’ to the house – a strangely shaped bottle of Russian vodka with a whole ginseng root inside it. Mick solemnly inspected the Cyrillic characters on the label. He said, ‘Hmmm…. It says Chernobyl Fetus.’ We were ready to laugh at anything.

As the wind reached its peak, the house started leaking. The rain was being forced upwards under the eaves. The toilet and my bedroom each had about an inch of standing water in them, but aside from making sure nothing stayed on the floor, there was little we could do but stick cardboard in the windows and peer helplessly at the dripping ceiling by the light of a kerosene lamp.

Shortly before I finally turned in, I went outside for one last cigarette. Lightning flashes strobed the night at a fantastic rate. I was unnerved and frightened by the fact that I couldn’t hear the thunder. The wind and the ocean nearby drowned it out.

We stayed up later than usual, because between the basso profundo voice of the sea, the shrieking wind and the constant percussive impact of flying objects against the walls and the roof, nobody was going to sleep well. I practiced transference. As I lay in bed I found myself imagining where a drenched and confused centipede would be most likely to seek shelter and solace. I didn’t move a muscle.

By morning, the wind and the rain had subsided sufficiently to allow us to go outside. The four of us wandered out to assess the damage. Like many others, a tree had fallen within a foot of the house. A little closer and the thing would have taken out the corner of the building. Surprisingly – luckily – nobody’s home was severely damaged. One building made of local materials withstood a direct hit from a falling coconut palm. I was impressed, though on reflection not surprised, that three thousand years of living here had taught people a thing or two about construction methods. The tightly woven natangura thatching that they used actually fared better than many a corrugated tin roof.

We spent the morning trying to assess the damage. Saratamata is the de facto provincial capital, so it has some responsibility for communicating with the other islands and villages in the province, for reporting damage to the disaster management folks, and for expediting assistance where required. It would be nice if they could have done so, too. Someone had forgotten to lower the province’s teleradio antenna before the storm, however, and it had blown down in the wind. We could listen, but we could not transmit beyond line of site. If you’ve looked at the topography of the islands in this group, you’ll know how much that limited us. It’s all mountains.

The morning meeting, scheduled for 09:00, was delayed until 10:30 due to the difficulty of gathering people in one place. The acting Secretary-General hemmed and hawed for the few moments, then announced that we would all be detailed to cleaning up our own places first, then we would meet again in the afternoon to coordinate a road-clearing and damage assessment effort. Rank brooks no argument here, so everyone dutifully set about their work.

Mick, John and I all obtained bush knives from neighbours and started clearing the yard. My bush knife had a split handle and a very sharp blade. I was surprised at the ability of these knives to slice through a couple of inches of hardwood with a single swing. I was also impressed at the speed with which that handle raised blisters on my city-softened hands.

The work was drudgery, mostly, a matter of scrambling through the entangling mass of fallen branches, cutting away at them bit by bit in order to expose the trees that lay underneath. Anything that was too big to cut or move was left where it lay; the children helped us carried away the rest. We stacked the useful wood in the field in front of the provincial offices (putting it on public land makes it free for the taking), and left the detritus in a pile in front of the house.

That afternoon, we walked down to the Lolowai, a village about three kilometres away, in order to buy supplies and to see how things were with them. We clambered over four huge fallen trees blocking the road. The hospital is located in Lolowai. I guessed nobody was going there any time soon.

Lolowai is – was – one of the most picturesque places in Vanuatu. It’s a natural harbour hidden from the ocean by a volcanic headland rising several hundred feet straight into the air. Two jagged rocks, each with a single straggly tree atop it, protect the mouth of the harbour. Ashore, lava flows lead down to black sand beaches. The wind and water were still extremely rough, and spray was dashing over top of the fifty foot high protectors in the harbour mouth.

We turned to face inland. The prospect was a dismal one. The wind had funneled up the bay, and left the hillside above stripped of its greenery. Remember, this is tropical rain forest we’re talking about. Now, it looked like Ottawa after the ice storm, or Viet Nam after a visit from Agent Orange. The eye had passed to the other side of Ambae, so most of the trees had managed to stay standing. Every one, though, had lost all of its leaves and many of its branches.

As we were exiting the co-op with the small supplies we had managed to obtain, we were shocked to see the province’s truck pull up in front of us. Roger, the disaster coordinator, smiled and announced that he had done a long circuit ‘on top’ that is, well inland, and had followed the roads all the way around to Lolowai again. We gladly accepted his offer of a lift. To my surprise, he headed up the road we had come in on.

The drive went in stages. We caught up with a work crew from the hospital, clearing the road before them as they went. Our progress home consisted of driving a few hundred metres, climbing out and hauling away the massive logs and branches that the chainsaw crew had cut, and depositing everything on the roadside. My blisters had already opened, so their was nothing for it but to grin and bear the discomfort as we hauled the wood away.

Many hands make light work. In a surprisingly short time, we had cleared the last of the obstructions and drove the rest of the way back to Saratamata. Radio, telephone and power were still not working, so Mick and I teamed up to make a hacked-together Pad Thai, featuring Mick’s sauce derived from the back of a noodle packet, some local vegetables and large, meaty nuts reminiscent of firmer, dryer water chestnuts, dried shi’itake mushrooms and a tin of tuna in oil from the Solomons. Amazingly, it was really tasty. John dubbed it Pad Vanuatu.

That night, they finally got into the vodka. Which meant, of course, that we were doomed to talk politics. American politics, in deference to the host. Abby bowed out early, leaving the men to vie for the ‘Most Tendentious‘ medal.

Yesterday, John and I conspired to get the radio working again. The only technical problem was that the cable supporting the antenna had broken. The real challenge, however, consisted of convincing people that this was not a problem for someone else to fix, but that we could jury-rig a solution ourselves. This required that I pretend to be an expert in radio transmission technology. I looked that the fallen antenna, inspected the length of the cable, and announced that it would work fine if we just re-strung it. We recruited a young boy to climb the very spindly orange tree in which the suspension cables had become entangled, and after twenty minutes of very delicate footwork on his part, had the cable cleared and ready to be re-strung.

The radio antenna is hung more or less like an industrial strength clothes-line. It consists of two cables running parallel to one another from a three-metre pole in the back yard of the province to another fifteen-metre pole about thirty metres distant. Needless to say, the thing had snapped on the high side.

I considered how I would make the ascent. The pole was studded with removable foot- and handholds, but several of them had fallen out, and most of the others were locked in place by corrosion. I asked one of the provincial staff for a two metre length of nylon rope in order to create a makeshift climbing harness. He disappeared, returning a few minutes later with quarter-inch nylon twine. We chuckled ruefully and made do. I doubled the twine, then doubled it again, and tied the resulting loop around the pole with a double prussic knot. A prussic knot slips one way only, so each of the knots would push against the other, tightening the bond as weight was put on it. I climbed up two metres, and tested, then re-tested my harness. Finally satisfied that it would hold my weight, I climbed up.

I wasn’t too concerned about the climb, in spite of the missing steps. It’s a fairly easy thing to shinny up a pole, and it was something I’d done more than once in my mis-spent youth. The trouble would come when I needed both hands free to heft the thirty metres of steel cable to a proper height.

After a little to-ing and fro-ing in the breeze, I managed to get myself set. I fed the free end of the re-spliced cable down to the men on the ground, and relying on them to take up the slack, I began to tug. I put what weight I have against the harness and heaved for what I was worth. It was gratifying to watch the antenna rise slowly above the trees. With the assistance of a well-positioned cleft bamboo pole, we managed to lift the antenna higher than it had been before. Last I heard, they had managed to contact Mota Lava, an island a few hundred miles to the north in the Banks group, as well as the neighbouring islands of Maewo and Pentecost.

It feels good to earn one’s keep.

*****

The first plane arrived this morning in the middle of a moderate rain shower. Even as it touched down, though, the sun began to push through the clouds. I chose to take it as a sign. I’d been scheduled to go out today, but given that I haven’t completed even half the work I came to do, I’ve made arrangements to travel back to Vila on Wednesday.

As I sat here writing this last paragraph, a truck drove up outside the window and beeped at us. The driver made a few hand signs and asked for a thumbs-up. John deciphered the message and tried turning on the overhead fan. It began to spin. We have power again.

Come Monday, things should be more or less back to normal.

*****

Ivy’s path led it straight down the length of the Vanuatu archipelago. It hit every island south of Torba – the northernmost – province. Port Vila was directly in the eye, as was the tiny island of Erromango, where we’ve been told there’s been at least one death. News is still very spotty, however.

Ivy’s current position is well south of Vanuatu. Having missed New Caledonia completely, it’s only really a danger to ships now. The average winds in a fifty kilometre radius is 110 knots, with gusts to 150. There are doubtless some in peril on the sea.

*****

Everyone’s taking the damage in stride, making light of it when we can, but the thing that makes us nervous is that every single garden in this area[*] has been flattened. Yesterday one man observed that it will be a year before anyone tastes banana again. Mango trees suffered greatly, being brittle, high-standing things. Pamplemousse and orange trees fared poorly as well. A woman on the road yesterday observed, ‘Bambae i gat plenti man we i hongri.’

[*] Having looked at Ivy’s route, we can assume the same for almost everyone on Vanuatu.

John, my host here in Saratamata, works for the Rural Economic Development Program. The sign outside his building reads ‘REDI five year development program’. It lies at an odd angle now, and is spattered with mud and fallen leaves. As we passed it this morning, John shook his head and said, “‘Five’? Make that ‘seven’”.