Affliction

14 March 2009 Dan McGarry

Something I find truly galling in Port Vila is seeing chronic, preventable conditions exacerbating the larger health threats and creating a largely un-measured drag on the national economy. The number of people suffering from boils, skin ulcers and other opportunistic infections is startlingly high. When I visit my adoptive family during the warmer months, inevitably at least one of them is so afflicted. More often than not though, most of them are.

The fevers, pain and loss of sleep brought on by these have cost more than a few days lost to illness. But equally important is their impact on the quality of life.

These afflictions are largely unheard of among those who don’t wander much into Vila’s residential neighbourhoods. That’s because they don’t have to cope with lack of sanitation, dirt floors, mud, overcrowding, inadequate or non-existent drainage, lack of proper screens and countless other shortcomings that the average resident copes with daily.

A note for online readers: As I write this, I am recovering from a systemic fungus infection that covered my entire body with a damnably itchy red rash severe enough that my physician spontaneously exclaimed in surprise when he saw it. Pockets lighter by over twelve thousand vatu (about USD 120), I am now burdened with three different medications and six more weeks of treatment before I have any assurance it won’t recur. My friend Ruth informs me that her entire community is rife with the same condition. I do not, however, have enough money to treat even one of them. They’ll have to content themselves with rubbing their bodies down with bush limes, not a pleasant undertaking, to say the least.

At the same time, my brother’s daughter (and my namesake) has only just recovered from a nasty infestation of boils all over her forehead. I can’t describe the poor child’s misery. Her father has been kept from work for over a week now with one of these nasty putrescences in his armpit. It’s so painful that he’s been walking around with his hand permanently poised against his hip like a lawn jockey. The elderly man he’s hired to look after the family kava bar has one foot rendered nearly useless by chronic infection, and his eldest boy has a permanently misshapen thigh bone, fractured by a subcutaneous abscess that was never properly diagnosed or treated.

The list goes on.

Remediating problems like these is not simply a medical issue. The causes are environmental and infrastructural in nature. There is currently little awareness – and no comprehensive statistical measurement – of the extent of the damage to society by afflictions that are simply not tolerated in developed areas. I say ‘areas’ because such problems are utterly unknown in the wealthier parts of town.

So now you know what motivated me to write the following in this week’s Weekender edition of the Vanuatu Daily Post….

Let any man who thinks humanity resides at the apex of evolution come and live in the tropics for a year or two. It won’t take long for him to realise that in warmer countries, the average human being is nothing more than an elaborately conceived buffet for a multitude of creatures too small to see.

God may love all creatures great and small, but sometimes I’m tempted to believe he likes the small ones better. I could recite a laundry list of different little creatures I’ve played host to in my years here. From tiny viruses, bacteria and single-celled plasmids to fungi and molds on up the chain to mites, ticks and worms, insects without number… I give myself the willies just thinking about them.

I suspect it’s no accident that ‘paradise’ and ‘parasite’ are so easy to mix up on the page.

Pidgin Poetics

7 March 2009 Dan McGarry

Bislama is more than the sum of its words. People ignore this lesson at their peril. A poor Bislama speaker may be forgiven, but a poor listener suffers more than they know.

More than once, I’ve had to pull some well-meaning soul aside and explain that they can’t get another meeting with some functionary because they didn’t pay any attention to what they were told at the last one. Often enough, they’ll angrily retort that nothing important was said.

[Originally published in the Vanuatu Daily Post’s Weekender Edition.]

I have a terrible confession to make: When I was young, working towards a degree in English Literature, I not only studied poetry, I wrote it too.

Now that I’ve got that dirty little secret out of the way, I can talk a little about one of the enduring delights of living in Vanuatu: The poetry of the language.

In literature and linguistics, pidgin tongues usually come across as the simple country cousin of ‘proper’ languages. That may be, but too many people seem to think that ‘simple’ and ‘stupid’ are synonymous. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Melanesian Socialism

28 February 2009 Dan McGarry

Vanuatu’s political leaders may espouse all that is best in traditional Vanuatu values, and without a doubt many of them are committed to a course of reconciliation between formal western models of governance and the un-codified body of kastom philosophy and practice. But few have managed to express a vision as simple and as clear as Melanesian Socialism.

I think it’s high time that Vanuatu took another look at Walter Lini’s vision.

[Originally published in the Vanuatu Daily Post’s Weekender Edition.]

Ten years ago last week, Father Walter Hadye Lini succumbed to illness. His passing was a milestone marking the end of the first ascent of Vanuatu politics.

Walter Lini was the first – though not the only – Vanuatu politician to elaborate the unique political philosophy of Melanesian Socialism. The term, loaded as it was with unwelcome overtones for capitalist nations, was nonetheless an apt description of the conjunction of traditional Vanuatu values with progressive western politics.

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography clarifies:

“There is little evidence… that he used socialism in the common sense of its meaning; rather, he was attracted by its emphasis on communal action and social responsibility, which seemed much more in tune with traditional Melanesian values.”

There isn’t a politician alive today who doesn’t pay tribute to kastom. Many of them take the role of the traditional chief to heart, integrating it into everything they do. One political observer once remarked to me that Ham Lini Vanuaroroa was the very epitome of the Pentecost chief, and though some outside commentators were quick to criticise his quiet, unassuming approach to governing, his own people wouldn’t have it any other way.

I think it’s high time that Vanuatu took another look at Walter Lini’s vision.

Don't Plan On It

23 February 2009 Dan McGarry

What does this (in)famous ‘V’ Factor look like? It is the best laid plans of expats and investors going awfully awry. It’s the sum of the gecko eggs in the computer case, the centipede in the sandal and the rats in the wiring. It’s the axiom that, of a truck, some fuel and a driver, you can have any two at a time. It’s the two-day-late SMS that says, “I’m waiting. Where are you?”

It’s the always-empty service desk, police who don’t patrol, the teacher who’s later than his students, the meeting that’s always one short of quorum, but never the same one. It’s the marvelously, magically receding deadline, beckoning like the endless sunset on a westbound plane.

[Originally published in the Vanuatu Daily Post’s Weekender Edition.]

Recently, I’ve come across references to a phenomenon some expats have wryly termed the ‘V’ factor. Apparently there is some magic variable Vanuatu inserts into every equation that reduces our ability to calculate a sensible output to zero.

As emblematic phrases go, the ‘V’ factor ranks somewhere between Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 and those inane office posters warning you that ‘you don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps.’

Joseph Heller penned his famous novel in an attempt to characterise the crushing, often deadly banality of bureaucratic systems. His initially humourous tone peels away layer by layer until death, disappearance and the destruction of innocence leave the surviving characters with few illusions about humanity’s true nature.

Compared to this tour de force of gallows humour, a silly-looking poster tacked onto a corkboard seems innocuous, to say the least, little more than an ineffectual, protesting squeak from a mouse in a maze.

The ‘V’ factor isn’t so harmless. Rather than explain (Catch 22-style) Vanuatu’s unique environment, it substitutes dismissive hand-waving (often accompanied by another beer) for any serious desire to adapt to the reality of the situation. In essence, it’s a quick and easy way of exculpating oneself, of refusing to be implicated in the petty, small-world inefficiencies that define Vanuatu.

The ‘V’ factor is the final excuse of someone who wants into the show, but doesn’t want to pay for the ticket.

Two If By Sea…

20 February 2009 Dan McGarry

Vanuatu has done well by satellite in the past, and the new VSAT technologies available today are great, but we should not limit our options. Direct investment in a fibre-optic link may not be an option for the government, but it’s reached the point where private sector and institutional funding can take up the slack. Costs will be lower, megabit for megabit, than any other alternative.

[This week’s Communications column for the Vanuatu Independent.]

This week, I’m going to channel the spirit Paul Revere and try to determine where the next invasion is coming from.

The invasion, of course, is the Internet, and the question is: Will we use satellite-based services to meet our needs, or an international fibre-optic cable link, or both?

First, I need to make something clear. Last week’s column looked at the fundamental issues behind financing a fibre-optic cable link to the outside world. It appears to have come across as pessimistic to some because it laid out some considerable challenges and risks.

My contention was never that fibre is a bad option. On the contrary. There are risks inherent to all projects on such a scale and I wanted to make them clear. But my point was only that the traditional role of government as underwriter or guarantor of major infrastructure projects is beyond Vanuatu’s capabilities. There’s nothing stopping us from finding other backers, though.

Last week at an ITU-sponsored conference for Pacific ministers, the World Bank presented a report on the feasibility of fibre-optic cable links throughout the region. The picture it paints is of a timely and fundamentally important opportunity for island nations, and for Vanuatu in particular.

Boom or Bust?

13 February 2009 Dan McGarry

The economic benefits of a fiber-optic connection to the outside world cannot be overstated. But it’s got to be seen as a labour of love. The benefits to be derived from the operation of the cable itself might never be great. If it’s not managed properly, the cost of failure could be high indeed. That said, the knock-on benefits to the community are numerous.

Call center services for European customers, online education, interactive tourism resources (video feed from the Nangol, anyone?), live video lectures from universities overseas, online consultations by medical specialists, offshore financial transaction processing… the list goes on and on. All of this becomes possible if we improve our basic infrastructure.

[This week’s Communications column for the Vanuatu Independent.]

We need fiber, and we need it soon.

No, I’m not talking about changing the nation’s diet. I’m talking about fiber-optic cable. Made of very long strands of glass fiber, this kind of cable has the unique ability to allow light to turn corners. This means that we can shoot tiny laser pulses into one end of it and have them emerge intact from the other end, even if it’s thousands of kilometers away.

The result? Fast, very high-capacity communications become possible. In laboratory experiments, researchers have achieved rates of up to 14 trillion bits of data per second. Current commercial implementations don’t go nearly that fast, but even a single thread of fiber a few millimeters wide can carry billions of bits every second. Just a few strands would be enough to increase Vanuatu’s total available bandwidth to a large multiple of its current capacity.

So what’s the catch? Why haven’t we invested in a fiber connection yet? Fiji has it, and so does New Caledonia. Why not Vanuatu?

The Numbers Game

9 February 2009 Dan McGarry

A single tidbit of information is nice to have, and useful, too. But when we can plot numerous points on a graph, we can begin discussing trends. And trend analysis is critical when we’re trying to understand long-running processes like the spread of communications throughout the islands.

It’s clear that Vanuatu is undergoing a historic change where communications are concerned. Our next steps will depend largely on how we understand the effects of our actions. Everyone in Vanuatu is best served by an environment of equal and open access to information.

[This week’s Communications column for the Vanuatu Independent.]

At a public meeting recently held in Port Vila, Digicel Pacific General Counsel David Dillon estimated that Digicel and TVL combined have about 100,000 active mobile subscriptions in Vanuatu. If that number is correct – and I believe it is – it means that the number of subscriptions has increased by a stunning 400% in less than a year.

100,000. Let’s think about that for a second.

In the big cities of the world, selling 80,000 new subscriptions is a modest achievement. But here in Vanuatu, simply finding that many is a herculean feat. Extrapolating from the 2001 census numbers, we can estimate that there are roughly 55,000 people living in Port Vila and Santo today. Pick any reasonable percentage of people actually using mobile phone services, and it quickly becomes evident that reaching the reported subscription level requires pretty significant penetration into places that had never had mobile services before.

Digicel, TVL and the government of Vanuatu have achieved a truly remarkable thing. This is nothing short of a communications revolution.

Nobody doubts that the effect of opening the telecoms market is a fundamental transformation in the way Vanuatu society interacts. But it’s difficult to characterise the exact nature and scope of the impact.

It would be nice to quote statistical chapter and verse, but we don’t have enough publicly available information to do so.

Two Boards and a Passion

6 February 2009 Dan McGarry

It is this natural flair for drama, performed as directly and viscerally as any Hollywood star could ever hope to do, that sparked Smolbag’s incredible growth. For two decades now, they’ve taken on contentious and difficult topics, many of them directly confronting uncomfortable tabus. Without fail, they’ve managed to engage with people, to educate them and inspire them to action.

In light of the often intransigent, conservative nature of Vanuatu culture and society, I find their consistent success at once mystifying and inspiring.

[Originally published in the Vanuatu Daily Post’s Weekender Edition.]

Before William Shakespeare penned his first words, Spanish culture was ignited by a soldier, adventurer and scholar named Lope de Vega. Considered one of the great playwrights of all time, he transformed Spanish culture by creating simple character-driven plays, written for the first time in colloquial Spanish.

One of his most enduring pronouncements was that theatre consisted of nothing more than two boards and a passion. All that is required, he said, is a platform to stand on, and a script that evokes passion – in the character and in the minds of the audience.

Vanuatu’s own Wan Smolbag theatre shows us just how true this is.

In the late eighties, a young British couple arrived in Vanuatu. With nothing more than a bag of costumes and a few passionate companions, they created a revolution. What started as a dynamic troupe of players is now a national – and regional – institution, one of Vanuatu’s cultural crown jewels.

Read more “Two Boards and a Passion”

Walk a Mile in These Shoes

1 February 2009 Dan McGarry

Attendees of this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, received an invitation from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees to ‘an event you will never forget’. The event, called the Refugee Run , is a Disneyland-style re-enactment of life in a refugee camp.

I can’t speak for the guests, but the image of champagne-and-caviar billionaires spending a couple of hours scuffing their loafers with designer dust behind artfully laid out barbed wire before returning to their luxury hotels – well, that is something I won’t soon forget. No matter how hard I try.

[Originally published in shorter form in the Vanuatu Daily Post’s Weekender Edition.]

Not that we needed any reminder of just how out of touch the majority of those living in privilege really are, but this event starkly illustrates just how great the chasm between rich and poor really is. It is an object lesson on how easy it is for even the most high-minded among us to mistakenly confuse poverty with a lack of physical wealth.

According to apologists, the Davos refugee sideshow is really an exercise in visualisation. By simulating the experience of powerlessness and intimidation most refugees feel, our captains of industry will be brought closer to them, making it easier for them to bestow their largesse on the dispossessed.

That idea isn’t utterly without merit, but I can say from experience that even a visit to a real refugee camp does very little indeed to convey the refugee experience. It’s one thing to see patience, resignation and demoralisation in the eyes of another; it’s another thing entirely to live it over a space of months, often years.

Read more “Walk a Mile in These Shoes”