March 2004 - Paul Jeffries

Hi all. Here we are in April and I am starting to feel the cold.

I returned from my eighteen days working in Malampa Province Vanuatu in 38 degrees to a chilly 12 degrees in Auckland. A Ni-Van friend of mine says, "Why do you live in such a cold place Paul?" I'm starting to wonder that also.

As I mentioned in the last report my time this month was spent in Vanuatu building two 20,000-liter water tanks. We also cleared a container of building and medical equipment (including a 4x4 vehicle) and attended meetings with Ministry of Health representatives.

Our first tank in Vanuatu this trip was erected in the village of Rori. A remote village where the villagers only supply of clean water is five kilometers away. This meant that women and children would spend the whole day walking to and fro with water containers for the local supply.

Ray Badger, Leo Bourke and Phil Curin from Bridges in Cambridge accompanied me on this trip as volunteers. It was a great feeling to expose these men to the plight of the locals and to see the difference we made after building the tank. The village people came out every day to assist with the labour and to learn new skills. The local Chief organised his men and within a few hours we had a well-melded construction team. Others supplied us with a steady stream of fruit including pompamouse (like sweet grapefruit) coconuts and bananas.

Women and children would stand, watch and laugh at these crazy white men working in the heat and sweating profusely. Phil even had time to play soccer with the kids and left them a new soccer ball, which went down a treat. After the first day it was hard to get the kids to let Phil come back to work, as they wanted him to show them his skill and ball handling tricks.

The funniest thing though was communication. My French is negligible and although my Bislama is improving we had a lot of laughs getting our message across. We have been nicknamed "The Tankmen of Vanuatu". The word is getting around on the bush telegraph and we were being addressed in other parts of the country as the "Tankmen". Our second tank was at Norsup hospital, where we fixed an old tank, built twelve years earlier that always leaked.

After eighteen days we had built and fixed a total of 60,000 liters of water storage. Our total in the last two trips now exceeds 100,000 liters. What a difference.

Paul

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