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Robea and Leiwia, our next-door neighbors, have been amazing.
Robea is a social studies teacher, but like all Ni-Vanuatu, has
also spent plenty of time in the gardens. He looked at our downed
banana trees and decided which ones could be replanted and which
must be pruned back. The first new bunch of fruit is already poking
out of the straggly leaves left after the storm. He recruited
about 40 students with bush knives, and they hacked out the tall
grass, the tangled brush, and all but the biggest trunks of downed
trees. Every evening Robea lights a fire, and burns the slash
from the afternoon’s labor. Then the next day Leiwia and
Lora plant new seeds. “Our” garden is now about four
times the size it was before. We have cabbages, corn, tomatoes,
cucumbers, and lettuce already up. The carrots won’t be
far behind. We have a whole nursery full of brave little papaya
seedlings, about a thousand of them. Most important right now,
we also have a lot of cuttings of “island cabbage”
(sort of a local spinach, but a perennial) up and going. We can
start browsing on those leaves as soon as we wish. It has been
fascinating to work alongside Robea, though I can’t keep
up with him. His combination of knowledge and hard work is an
inspiration.
Michael, the school farm manager, has been equally busy. It turns
out that not all of the school’s root crops were ruined.
Some were, but there is enough manioc to last a while. It turns
out that staggered planting was very important. The taller plants
were shredded by the storm, and their roots were spoiled by the
movement of the stems, but they served as windbreaks for the smaller
plants, which will provide us with food. Michael says that the
size of the field helped, too. It was large enough that the edges
gradually piled up into windbreaks that helped protect the interior
of the planting. The school lost about two-thirds of its crops,
but it will be fine until other arrangements are made.
The mosquitoes have been bad. We have four lines of defense:
keep the grass around the house cut back, keep the window screens
in good repair, sleep under mosquito nets, and take the anti-malarial
tablets recommended by our doctor. For three of us, there is a
fifth defense: sit next to Emily. Mosquitoes love to bite her!
The country as a whole is just sort of holding its breath and
wondering what comes next. The southern islands were hit harder
than the rest of the country; the storm was still gaining strength
as it went over us. (That one is hard to imagine!) The Presbyterian
Church of Vanuatu has already applied for help from the PC(USA)
hunger fund. The leadership will meet this next week, hear reports
from each school and presbytery, and will probably apply for more
disaster relief through the PC(USA) as well as other partner churches.
A lot of international aid resources went to Tonga, Samoa, and
Niue recently for cyclone Heather (also called Hetta) so no one
knows yet exactly how much help will be available. There have
already been several shipments of Red Cross supplies to Vila to
help tide over the urban population, and there have been helicopter
deliveries of tarps for shelter and fresh water filtration units
to the outer islands. The U.S. government sent 11,000 mosquito
nets. Please call your senator or representative, as well as your
local Red Cross, and say “thanks!” There is no telling
how much suffering those gifts averted.
We heard on an international radio report that there were 24,000
people homeless in Vanuatu. That may have been true on the morning
after the storm, but I suspect that 23,000 of them are “homed”
again. When I took pictures of storm damage in Takara Village,
for example, I took some photos of damaged houses, but also of
some with their roofs already replaced. That was on Saturday,
two days after everything blew down. Thatch goes down fast, but
it goes up fast, too. Housing is not the issue, except in the
squatter settlements around Vila. Food is the issue.
Yesterday the government announced that four of the six provinces
of the country have been declared disaster zones. Under Vanuatu
law, people in disaster zones are exempt from paying school fees.
This makes sense because a family has no way to earn money when
the gardens are decimated. The system has worked fairly well in
the past; when one province suffers, the others ship food to them.
Cyclone Ivy, though, ruined almost every garden in the entire
country, so now things will get very interesting for the school
financially. There is no provision for what a school does to fill
in the gaps when school fees are waived, and the government has
no money to take up the slack.
Yesterday Lora and I walked to Takara Village for the first
time since the Saturday after the storm. We sat in the Presbyterian
Church that had sheltered the people so well, and chatted with
Elder Albert. He told us about life in the village since the storm.
They were without water for four days. Boats sailed back and forth
from the island of Emau, carrying containers of water until the
well ran salt-free again. There was so much run-off from the heavy
rains of the cyclone that the hot springs ran over, and flooded
the main road to the village with boiling water. That small flood
killed every plant in its path, but has now evaporated or run
back underground. The cyclone also was hard on birds; the wind
was so strong that it broke their feathers. The villagers captured
several lorikeets who could not escape and have put them in cages.
They handle them each day, and when the birds are tamed they will
be sold as pets in Vila. The chore of rebuilding the village houses
is complete except where pieces of corrugated metal were smashed
beyond use or blown out to sea. The villagers might start to rebuild
their school and kindergarten soon. On the other hand, the people
are looking tired and disappointed. There is some talk of sending
the kids to relatives in other villages, or on Emau, so that they
don’t miss too much school. Why is it that the poor people
always have to make the hardest choices?
Again, food is the issue. Elder Albert estimates that they have
about two weeks of produce left that they can salvage from the
gardens. After that, there will be no garden produce until about
the first of May. The people are hopeful that aid will come through.
I gave Elder Albert a print of the photo of the little girl with
the washpan of fruit, and told him the story of her offering me
some windfall fruit. (Please see letter 19.) He walked Lora and
me across the village and introduced us to the girl’s mother,
who listened to the story and accepted the photo shyly. I told
her that I hoped that she was proud of her daughter, who had helped
teach me about sharing. It turns out that the girl’s name
is Erlyn, pronounced “Air-LEAN.” She is in the fourth
grade.
Lora and I visited the new village co-op and paid our membership
fee to join. Most of the food is from Australia and past its expiration
date, but Takara sees the co-op as a step toward the future. Like
the captive birds, it’s a small effort toward building a
better life. We walked home at sunset, thinking of how strange
the world is. We live on a planet where an injured bird might
buy the gift of food, where one culture’s rubbish represents
the dreams of another.
After Lora came back from Vila last Friday, she took some toilet
paper over to Robea and Leiwia’s. A girl visiting from their
village struck up a conversation.
“Emily is wearing glasses now. Why is that?”
“She reads a lot and has been getting headaches lately.
We took her to the doctor, and he thinks that these glasses will
solve the problem.”
“So you just bought them today?”
“Yes. The doctor looked at her eyes in the morning and
finished the glasses in the afternoon.”
“Emily is very lucky. She can get glasses when she needs
them.”
We agree. We are lucky to have the things we need provided.
We are grateful for our neighbors here in Vanuatu, as well as
for all of you across the world, who have been faithful in your
concern for us as well as in your prayers.
Love and peace,
Bruce
The 2004 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p.
101
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