‘Survivor’ story: TV crew meets Vanuatu villagers

by Bruce Whearty
PC(USA) mission worker

VANUATU — When our family first heard that the “Survivor” show would be shot  here in Vanuatu, we tried to guess exactly where it would be filmed. There are some very rugged, very remote areas in this South Pacific archipelago, and my wife, Lora, our two teenage daughters and I each had our favorite candidate for the locale.

      It turned out that the shoot was on our island, just down the road from the Presbyterian boarding school where Lora and I have taught for the past two years. Most of the places where the shooting was done are not untouched jungle but village gardens in the fallow phase of slash-and-burn agriculture.

      The TV crew paid local villagers not to fish on the reefs and not to sail their canoes from the offshore islands to the main island. This is supposed to look like wilderness, so there can’t be islanders, the Ni-Vanuatu, in the background going about their daily business. Men wearing camouflage and carrying radios patrolled the area.

      When the “Survivor” crew first arrived, some hard feelings were created. Villages still run on a gift economy — you ask a favor and it tends to be granted, but you incur an obligation in return. The crew was slow to adapt to such local customs.

      American contracts do not allow a lot of flexibility, and the villagers didn’t understand. When the first scheduled food deliveries were late, for example, the Americans cancelled the contracts and imported all their supplies, even eggs and vegetables.

      Another issue was Vanuatu’s oral culture: you sit and talk about everything before you even start to get down to business. A local newspaper columnist wrote: “People in ‘Survivor’ are acting as though they own the place. They should be told this is Vanuatu and not the U.S.A. They have advised the Tourism Office that if local media want to get any news or interviews, we will have to pay for it. Talk about arrogant.”

      The front page of the July 3 newspaper carried an editorial cartoon in which a crewcut, sunglasses-wearing director says, “In order to win that one million dollars, you ‘Survivor’ contestants must survive 39 days without electricity, running water, hot showers and telephones — completely cut off from the modern world!”

      In the background, a Ni-Vanuatu woman says, “What’s so special about that? We island women live every day of our lives that way!”

      This could give a person a whole new perspective on “reality” TV. What’s real? The carefully edited contests on the show or the daily lives of the people living here? When contestants are voted off the island, they go back to the land of hot showers and shopping malls. I think there are a lot of villagers who would love to be voted into a life of luxury.

      And if a contestant were ever hurt seriously, they would be evacuated to modern medical care. The Ni-Vanuatu should be so lucky.

      The TV producers could have created a more useful reality show. Why not have contests in making cement blocks and building a new clinic? Why not see which contestant can learn the largest local vocabulary or the most intricate traditional dance? Why not compete in teams of illustrators/authors/translators to produce the best textbook for the local primary school? That would be reality TV. I could cheer those heroes.

      There was nothing in the contestants’ games as challenging as this whole cultural contrast was for the villagers. They try to understand a world where frivolous wastes of wealth exist side by side with people who could use those wasted resources. Maybe we could ponder that, too.

      As the filming wrapped up, the relationships between the TV people and the Ni-Vanuatu improved a lot. Film crew members granted free interviews to the local newspaper and were perceived as friendlier.

      They finished shooting sooner than they had planned and had thousands of dollars worth of left-over food. Rather than ship it all home, they donated it to Vila Central Hospital. It was so much food that it wouldn’t even fit in the hospital’s storage rooms, so the film crew negotiated with a local market to store the extra food, including 250 cartons of frozen foods. Patients will be fed for months from this act of generosity.

      “Survivor” crew members said goodbye to Vanuatu in marvelous style. They left behind local people who earned a lot of money, and already the wages they earned for driving taxis or working as security officers are showing up in paid-up school fees, bright new clothes, strong new cinder-block houses (cyclone proof!) and even a new church.

      “For most of us, life will never be the same again,” said one villager. The crew also donated piles of supplies, such as paper and pencils, for the local primary schools, as well as the promised cash payments for each village.

      More important, though, was the feeling that the “Survivor” crew left behind. “The film crew was very kind,” said one man. “We had our meals together and they just shared what they had with us, even though we were working for them,” said another.

      Fiona, a young mother from the village of Lelepa and a friend of ours, agreed. “They were a real blessing to us,” she said. “At the farewell feast everybody cried, the ‘Survivor’ people and the people of the island together.”

      The film crew was generous with praise for the villagers, thanking them for their cooperation and apologizing for any inconveniences, exactly as they should in this culture.

      Two of the villages working with the “Survivor” filming had been involved in a land dispute long ago, when both villages claimed a certain garden area. The film crew gave each village a radio so that the security guards could talk to each other. The chiefs got interested in the gadgets, and quite by accident talked to each other for the first time in years.

      They compromised on the land ownership issue and shared a farewell feast with the film crew and each other. Peace through a walkie-talkie! Can there be a better gift?

      Fiona shook her head wistfully as she said, “We will miss them, all of them. Maybe they will come back to visit us someday, and see all the new things they helped us build.” She smiled and added, “That would be nice.”

Information about Presbyterian Church (USA) mission personnel around the world as well as correspondence from them about their ministries can be found on the web site: www.pcusa.org/missionconnections.