Our second workweek in Banem Bay was less labor intensive than the first week. After we got the water up and running, we found out that the increased water pressure was more than the water pipe could handle in places. Most of this second week was spent patching the water line where leaks had sprung due to the new high pressure. The old pipe is well past its prime and is brittle in many places because it was never properly buried. We found all the weak spots during the week because they kept springing leaks to let us know where they [View Full Entry]

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Friday morning before the standard morning meeting, Tom Dalton took me aside for a small chat and I knew something was up because he didn’t look like his usual freewheeling self. “I want to get the water to Lambul,” he told me, “The people there haven’t had water for years and their village is just around the corner from Sason.” Now before you can really understand the weight of Tom’s simple statement, you need to understand the situation. Lambul village is not exactly “around the corner” from Sason, it’s quite a ways away actually. Y [View Full Entry]

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Wednesday came with a light drizzle, a few aches and pains, and more work on the agenda. Two obstacles needed to be overcome on this day: 1) we needed join two 50 mill feeder pipes into a 90 mill receiver pipe, 2) we had to unclog a blockage that had formed in the pipe. The first problem was a foreseeable obstacle that we knew we’d have to overcome. The clog, on the other hand, was our own fault due to a mix-up in communication. During the re-routing of the creek and the construction of the dam wall we churned up a [View Full Entry]

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The waterfall was nice, but come Monday morning it was time to do some heavy lifting. After the morning meeting where we laid out goals and plans for the day, the whole gang broke up into three different teams. Mark and Tom were to go up to the water source in the creek and start mapping out a way to divert the stream around the dam location, Peter Schieny was going to head up the Yacht Club team, and the third team was to do the offloading of Alvei plus delivery of goods to the right places. In my original plan [View Full Entry]

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Banem Bay turned out to be a raging success. Thanks to an amazing pack of donors, volunteers and the indispensable crew of the Alvei we surpassed all our expectations and accomplished far more than our original goals. As usual there were complications and delays but the team conquered all obstacles in the path like true champions. After the hassle with our cargo delivery we finally decided to cut our losses and give up on waiting for it all to arrive. We were nearly a week late in our departure as the original plan was to be in Banem Bay (or be [View Full Entry]

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Well everyone, I’m sorry for the lack of communication on my part but things have been very busy here in Vanuatu. For the past two months I’ve spent most of my time in the very remote regions of the islands and therefore haven’t had access to internet. With the expeditions wrapping up for the year, I now have a few brief moments to catch everyone up. First off, it was July of this year that I left the States again to join the Alvei in Fiji. I was returning to the South Pacific for three reasons mainly: 1} to sail on [View Full Entry]

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August 4th, 2008 Port Vila Harbor The past few weeks in Port Vila have been quite an adventure in logistics. After arriving so much earlier than planned, I had some time to survey they scene before diving headlong into purchasing supplies. The time proved to be invaluable. Most of the industrial supply shops here in town sell the same general items for about the same general prices. Certain stores have certain specialty items, so hunting for what you need takes a lot of trips to a lot of places. In the first week of our time here I must have met [View Full Entry]

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July 22, 2008 Port Vila, Vanuatu I’m sorry to be so slow with the updates. It’s just that my time here doesn’t belong entirely to me. There is a major time crunch with the purchase of supplies and I find myself with little time to upload photos. To catch up a bit… There we were in Fiji. Lautoka turned out to be smaller than Suva but equally as dirty. It’s an industry town with a container ship pier. One of Fiji’s greatest exports is sugar and the country’s largest refinery was there in Lautoka. The smell of factories left much to [View Full Entry]

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