Sorry, I can't get any more pictures up.

I think we find out what our site assignments will be on October 28. I'm hoping for Tanna as I've taken a liking to bush life.

On my first day in Takara B, I sat down with my host Papa and had a long chat in broken Bislama under his large mango tree. I learned more of the language and maybe more about Vanuatu in that one evening than I had during the week before. Twice a week I travel to Epau for technical training which just happens to be under another mango tree. That's not uncommon for Vanuatu so I've decided to use that concept for my web-log title.

Technical training is vague for business volunteers. Vanuatu is in a unique situation in that while it suffers from "poverty of opportunity" it also benefits from "subsitence oppulence". You can't starve on Vanuatu. Food, clothing, and shelter, are readily available and if you can't manage on your own, your extended family or village will take of you. If your a local with your own garden, a few animals, and access to the abundance of the sea and the bush, you don't need much cash just to live. If you do want or need some money, however, there's not much opportunity to make it. Money is needed to pay school fees to educate your children, to pay doctor bills at the clinic, and to buy fuel for your kerosene lamp or diesel generator if your well-to-do. There are also all sorts of nice consumer goods you can "pem" (buy) from Villa or your local store, but you can live without instant coffee and canned meat.

I think we are helping people with their business largely so they can afford adequate medical care and send their children to school. With that said, we business volunteers have been discussing a bit of a philosophical problem. Port Villa is experiencing a host of social problems that are facing Ni-Vanuatu for the first time. As young people come to Villa to make money and live the "flash life" they leave behind any community support and their own rural self-sufficiency. Some of them don't make it and fall in to poverty, prostitution, crime, or other problems.

We business volunteers are going to into rural communities and introducing efficiency, sometimes at the cost of self-sufficiency. It's sometimes hard to see why they even need us. We Americans have a had a few revelatory conversations with the Ni-Vanuatu and discovered that in rural Vanuatu, there isn't poverty as American's know it. Like I said, no one starves, no one freezes at night, and people get by. The surveys say this is the happiest place on Earth. They could benefit from some schools, inoculations, and knowledge about dengue and AIDS, but the case for the business volunteer is less concrete.

Okay, back to facts. I've started taking to local business people like the store ownere, the kava bar operator, and the bread maker. These businesses make your American Mom & Pop shop look advanced in some ways, but the Ni-Vanuatu I've met have the basics down. They have shown an understanding of basic accounting and margins, but don't seem to mind having a strained supply line or having to shut down for a few days because they just ran out of flour and haven't purchased any more from Villa yet. It's only been a few weeks though, so I am by no means an expert on Vanuatu enterprise.

My time is almost up. I've doing very well and adjusting to island life. Miraculously, we haven't lost any volunteers from my group yet, which was unexpected for a group our size. My fellow volunteers seem upbeat and happy and our biggest gripes are only that we can't get ice cream and sometimes creepy crawlies get into your room at night. We'll be fine. I'll stay in touch.

Lastly, the Ni-Vanuatu now call me Taewia. the emphasis is on "Thai", like Thailand, followed by "wee-ah". It means "good brother" in the language of Emau.

-- Daniel --