the wai

There is a bit of a festival atmosphere in Luganville at the moment. I’ve only been here a few weeks, but it seems in the last 10 days there has been a noticeable increase in the hive of activity down main street, people hanging from cranes (see photo), kind of like the feel you get in a small kiwi bach town in the lead up to new years eve. Sadly, this increased hum in not a cause for celebration, and is in fact due to the evacuation of 11,000 people from the island of Ambae because of falling volcanic ash.

Keep reading

Got out with the boys this morning to hand deliver the water bills (Bil blo wota) to a few hundred residents around Luganville. There are very few road names here and no postal system, so all the bills are delivered in person by the DoWR staff each quarter.

Keep reading

I was wondering before I left, when it would actually set in that I was moving to live in Vanuatu. So far it had all felt a bit detached and like it was happening to someone else. Perhaps this was due to my generally aloof nature, or due to the process all being pretty seamless, although with quite a few boxes to be ticked. I expected that it would click when I stepped off the plane and felt the rush of humid air and took in my new surroundings.

Keep reading

I was lucky to be invited by Engineers without Borders (EWB) to the 2018 Humanitarian Engineering conference the week before my departure to Vanuatu to join the Department of Water Resources (DoWR) in Luganville. This was especially good timing, given that the Director of the DoWR, Erickson Sammy, was a keynote speaker on the day. There was also a large focus on projects in Vanuatu, which gave me an exciting taste of what lay ahead of me.

Keep reading

The name John Frum is unknown to most and an enigma to those that may have heard of him. But to a small number of villages on the island of Tanna in Vanuatu, John Frum is their yet-to-return saviour, who will one day return with a ship load of cargo, and deliver them to a better life. Sound familiar?

Keep reading

This is a strange place

You get a bit of time to think walking these Litre Metres. Now I’m lucky to rent in a pretty nice neighbourhood, and I was wondering to myself, how much do all these houses cost, that I walk around each day? So with a lil help from handy GIS, I found a number.

Keep reading