Blogs from Malekula, Vanuatu, Oceania - page 3

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 were. We had set out to increase the water pressure enough to feed villages further on the water line but we had done too good of a job! We had accomplished the goal of getting ... read more

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 lot of dirt from the riverbed. It was arranged by walkie-talkie when to put the pipe in and out of the creek so that the village could have water at peak hours, but the pipe ... read more

Vanuatu, formerly the New Hebrides under British and French joint rule until independence in 1980, is a small Pacific island country about 2000km east of Northern Australia. My interest in it lay in the fact that it has a very large number of tribal groups and the highest concentration of languages of any country in the world - 120, spoken by a population of 175,000. The national language is Bislama, a form of Pidgin English that developed as a means of communication between different tribal groups and their white masters when they were working on the British sugar plantations. Some of these groups now live in towns, their members becoming politicians, businessmen or engineers. Others live in villages where life continues much as it always has, with the exception that they have converted to Christianity, wear ... read more