Middle class life, Vanuatu style
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With the help of some friends, I’ve put together a little tour of a household in Freswota (pron, “Fresh water”), a neighbourhood of Port Vila which my host Dan describes as “solidly middle class” by Vanuatu standards. This household is about 200m from here as the crow flies, and houses an extended family the extent of which is unclear to me. I think around 30 people. The main guy I know there is called Jacob; he and his wife Georgeline are basically Dan’s adopted family here.
This is what you see as you come in off the road. That’s Dan in the middle of the photo. Note the electricity meter on the pole there.
If you stand about where Dan was in the previous photo, you see this: the main living space. The green hose snaked all over the place is the water supply. Water here is good and clean, and I for one will quite happily drink it without boiling or the like.
Here’s the main under-cover living space. As you can see, most of this place is built of miscellaneous lumber and corrugated iron.
(Since people have asked what the residents thought of me coming through with a camera, I should probably note that I took these photos with the permission and active encouragement of the residents. Jacob is totally onboard with the idea of showing people in the developed world how things really are here in Vanuatu.)
Up behind the open living space is a sort of terrace and a row of sleeping spaces. I haven’t been inside, but you can see here the entrances covered with cloth. I think each space is probably about 6′ square.
Another living space down here, I think, with laundry hanging to dry under the eaves. It was a drizzly, wet day the day I visited, with a cold low pressure system moving through. Also in this photo, note the power line strung across to the roof. I’m not sure what electrical stuff they run here, but I think probably just a few lightbulbs.
This is the kitchen. It all runs on wood fires. Most food is boiled in pots. Rice is a staple food, along with yam, manioc, and taro. There are various green leafy type vegetables, and chicken and beef and pork and fish, though on the whole the diet is heavy in starch and light in protein.
There are more photos over on Flickr, where I’ve put together a set of photos of Vanuatu home life.
By this stage, if you’re a privileged person from a developed country, you’re probably a little stunned by this. Well, I have to tell you a few more things.
As I mentioned earlier, this is a middle class family. The adults have jobs, the kids are in school, and they’re well placed in the community. They regularly hang out with white collar professionals, and yesterday Jacob and I went down to the local Internet cafe and spent a bit of time dinking around on Google Maps looking at stuff; he’s not very comfortable with computers, but he has had plenty of exposure to them. And he and Georgeline have mobile phones.
Although they’re not the actual people who will probably end up with the technical books we’re sending to Vanuatu, they’re the same sort of people. I could imagine, for instance, the older kids from a family like this one deciding to take a computer course and ending up working in the field.
So, this is where your books will be going. And I hope it will also serve, in part, as an answer to the frequently asked question, “Why can’t they use e-books?” The reason is that there is poor power and no landline telephone to most people’s homes, so there are no computers in the home. OLPC may change that, of course, but for now, as Jacob described to me, “Olsemia nao i gud from man i save karem buk igo long haos mo lukluk long aftanun.” (Someone would take a book home to read in the evening, then put what he’d learnt to use the next day.)
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