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Tag: Vanuatu

  • Tweety’s last tweet.

    Tweety’s last tweet.

    Once upon a time, in a land far across the sea, two little girls gifted my daughter a tiny bird.  The little bird had been caught in the rain-forest near their village and  a piece of grass was carefully tied to its little leg to keep it captive.  My daughter loved this little bird and named it “Tweety”. 

    Tweety loved to eat insects.  While my daughter and her brother sat on their bed doing their home-schooling work, he would hop around the little hut eating spiders and other tiny insects.  Tweety would never encounter the huge cockroaches that roamed about at night poking their feelers out of the cavities in the concrete block-work. Tweety was murdered in his bed that night. 

    The murderer was a huge, hairy bush rat that entered our hut from the roughly hewn timber rafters that held up the corrugated- iron roof.  The rattling of the fishing rods first woke us, announcing that he was coming down to ground level.  We fumbled for our torches and aimed the beam towards the corner of our concrete room.  As soon as the light hit him, he would scamper back up and peek at us from above.  He was relentless. He was determined to carry Tweety away.  Something had to be done. 

    Clad in my pyjamas, I would hold the torch steadily while my husband held his spear gun in readiness.  At the appropriate time the elastic band was released and the barb impaled the rat.  The children were told that Tweety died of a heart attack. They believed this. They were eleven and nine.  The next morning, the same man would bury Tweety in a shallow grave alongside his murderer’s body. 

    This wouldn’t be the first time our family encountered a home invader in a Vanuatu village.  In one guest house, we would set traps to catch the rodents and would sleep with an overhanging mosquito net tucked around our mattress on the floor.  In another place, our sleep was interrupted by the sound of a rat gnawing on soap on our dresser before it scampered around our room that night.

    At no stage, did we fear for our lives. However, our possessions were not safe.  No muesli bar or piece of chocolate was safe from these nocturnal raiders. If we were not careful, the invaders would make a forced entry to steal these items.   While many lived another day, another did fall under the hammer of a trap.  We slept much easier knowing that while we slumbered one less Vanuatu bush rat was terrorising Australian tourists and their possessions.

    “Tweety” 2001 R.I.P.

     

  • Remembering my Dad and the days ordained

    Remembering my Dad and the days ordained

    My Dad would have been 83 years old this week.  He died over 3 years ago; five months short of his 80th birthday. 

    Dad once said to me that he had already lived three score year and ten and that “any more was a bonus”.  Using this logic, he had nine bonus years. 

    The day Dad died, I saw his Ute filled with his rubbish bins pass by my house.  I was at the kitchen window.  I knew that I could expect him later for a cup of tea and instructions for the care of his place while he was away for a few days.  Instead I had the police at the door advising me he had passed away suddenly and was found in his Ute, with his dog at his side parked at the face of the rubbish dump. His doctor had declared him dead from a list of possible old age conditions.

    As sad as this was and still is,  my thoughts go back to 2009; four and a half years earlier when I thought he would die.  Dad had travelled with me to spend a week in a village on a remote island in Vanuatu with my family and our friends that lived there.  He became seriously ill on his last day there.    

    Two nights before our flight off the island was due we were guests of honor at a banquet. I was fussing over him staying up late and he sent me off to bed telling me “I’m a big boy!”  Less than twenty-four hours later, Dad was very pale and lay on a rough wooden bed inside the village hut’s guest bedroom. We did not know at the time, but his diabetes had complicated his body’s response to a tropical infection on his lower leg. Never before had I felt so aware of this small village’s isolation from medical care and faced with the possibility that my Dad could die.

    My Dad survived this serious infection and enjoyed the attention of private medical care in Port Vila and two Australian public hospitals before his release six weeks later.  Getting him there felt like an eternity though, as we painstakingly transported him on a thin mattress in the back of a utility nine kilometres up a steep and windy rain-forest dirt track to the airstrip one hundred and sixty metres above the village.  Our luggage, our family, slabs of fresh fish plus many other Ni-Vans joined my Dad on the back of the utility, making the slow journey even slower as we chugged up the mountain in the island’s only vehicle. 

    Providentially this was our scheduled flight off the island although the only flight due that week.  Intravenous insulin, saline solution and an overnight stay in the capital’s whitewashed private hospital cost him one thousand dollars and provided him with the medical release that allowed him to fly home on our scheduled flight the next day and into the care of the Royal Brisbane Hospital.

    Not only did Dad survive this trip overseas but my sister and I accompanied him on a two-week guided tour of China, culminating in a visit to the Great Wall. Since that trip to Vanuatu, he struggled with circulation in his affected leg and had also had a stent placed in his heart.  Towards the end of the holiday angina had hindered his steps and his feet were swollen.  He survived a Chinese foot massage by a skimpily clad masseuse in tiny shorts and enormous heels; and hired a strong man from Tibet to push him in a wheel chair through Tienanmen Square and the Forbidden City of Beijing.  He did not quite manage to walk the Great Wall but he did step foot on it. Three months later he was gone.

    Dad and I had spoken about death some years earlier. He believed that his days were numbered by God.  It seems miraculous that he survived his illness in Vanuatu and yet he died doing a chore he routinely did for over 30 years. 

    As much as I miss him, I take comfort that he too believed as the psalmist did that “…all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” (Psalm 139:16)

  • My friend Mary

    My friend Mary

    I met Mary in this village nearly seventeen years ago.  We were a little family of four on a faith adventure in Vanuatu and she was working for her provincial government in partnership with an NGO. We found in common our faith, our love for the people of Vanuatu and an interest in enterprising solutions for the nation.

    We kept in touch by sporadic emails. Mary’s internet service was ad hoc and dependent on her employment. Ours’ back home in Australia was brilliant in comparison.  We spent a week with Mary and her husband in their home on the neighbouring island several years later and Mary visited our home in Brisbane.  I met up with Mary again last year, when she was in Australia on a speaking tour with ActionAid.  It was as if nothing had changed, and yet it had. 

    Mary was now a widow.  I already knew that from her correspondence.  We were both much older and so were our children.  Mary was now a grandmother; me, not yet.   I was in full employment and Mary was hopeful. 

    Mary has communicated with me-and with others, that she faced many challenges as a widow in her culture. She chose to do something about this. She found her voice. 

    Tanna Island, a large southern island of Vanuatu, is Mary’s home. Tourists know Tanna for its live volcano called Mt Yasur. I am a rather proud -and in hindsight a somewhat crazy, tourist who climbed it and eyeballed it’s molten depth!  Mary’s home is on her husband’s family’s land but she is vulnerable to family pressures to relinquish it.  In spite of being amongst family, I recall Mary’s anger when as an early widow, she was propositioned by some of the married men she knew.   

    In recent years, Mary has sought to speak up for women and especially widows in her region. She has many ideas, but little funding or support. One of her desires is to train the women in the provinces to help them package, preserve and sell their produce. She also wants to empower these women in leadership. As a part of her journey, Mary ran for provincial government.  

    Mary’s political journey started nine years ago when she sought endorsement to contest the provincial elections. Her article for the Pacific Institute of Public Policy called The Long Journey-Political Acceptance of Women, outlines the challenges she met as a possible candidate. I found it especially sobering to read of what happened to women who considered voting for her.  

    I love the women and men of Vanuatu.  Our family counts amongst our closest friends ni-Van families that live in the Capital Port Vila, Erromango Island-where this photo was taken, and Tanna Island. Our first few visits to this tropical archipelago were as tourists. Our latter is simply to visit our friends. My husband, son and many male friends would add ‘and for the fishing’!

    Recently, I have been confronted to read formal documents of support for our Pacific neighbours highlighting the sexual abuse against girls in Vanuatu as one of the highest in the world. The inequity in women’s leadership in this Pacific nation has not gone unnoticed either. 

    I thank God for women like Mary who won’t be silenced and is speaking up for the women of Vanuatu.  My question and prayer is, what more can I do?