On Sustainability

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

On Sustainability:

It doesn't take long in Vanuatu before you notice that some odd words have crept into the language. Bislama is starting to sound like a combination of local words, French, English, and NGO-ish. I've had subsistence farmers with elementary school educations toss out terms like “grassroots level”, “economic development”, “stakeholder”, and of course “sustainability”. Just like most buzzwords, it doesn't seem to have taken long for these terms to have spun around the island and been used often enough dilute their meaning. Sustainability, though, is something you can see with your eyes.

First, the story of the grass cutting. I can get a pretty good idea of feelings of ownership on Epi by just looking at the grass. The grass around family homes is cut the most often. Next come the churches and nakamals. In my village, the churches are maintained almost better than the homes, while the nakamal is looked after when it will be needed in the next week or so. That's not surprising since in my villages the churches seem more important than the village council or the chiefs. If you ask who owns what or just take a guided tour, you'll here people say “that's my house, our church, and the village's nakamal.” They all look like someone cares about them and looks out for them to varying degrees. Then there's the road. It's just the road, not the village's or ours. It was built by the French before independence and now as far as most people seem concerned it belongs to the Shefa provincial government. When the rains come and ruin the road, the villages ask why Shefa doesn't send someone to fill the holes in the village road with sand and coral.

There are other stark examples. Laman island has a few Australian built water tanks. There is a sense that AUSAID built them and gave them, but it's not the locals business to deal with them. Four of the five are broken and will probably never be repaired. There's a cooperative store that everyone is happy to tell me was started by a former volunteer. It's empty and abandoned. I've given up trying to find out whose store it is, or who was responsible for it. It's the Peace Corps' store, I guess.

So, I could probably restart the store. I could probably get new water tanks. I could probably even build a tiny bamboo library. But, I probably won't. They'll just fall into disuse, disrepair, and be yet another unfinished or broken monument to some visiting do-gooder. Unless, that is, the village wants them. That's not the same as wanting a new shirt or thinking “gee, I want a solar panel”. That's freebies. That's charity and I'm not here to do charity. They have to want to own the project. So, the trick for me is to help people get what they really want, not just the fleeting idea of the moment, and to make absolutely sure everyone has “skin in the game” so to speak. That's the challenge for year two.

-- Daniel --