Doubt

22 December 2009 Dan McGarry

Most of the opposition to movement on Climate Change is economically motivated. Simply stated, those who stand to lose the most protest the loudest. There’s nothing innately wrong with that; honestly, one would expect no less. What’s upsetting is the dishonesty of it all.

They pretend to want a dialogue, they appeal to science, but they don’t ever admit that a satisfactory answer is possible. They demand godlike knowledge, even certainty, from all-too-human scientists. They pester and pester and pester and, when the scientists finally snap at them, they howl that they’re being persecuted.

They are specifically, deliberately opposed to the very dialogue they claim to be denied.

[Originally published in Opinion column of the Vanuatu Daily Post.]

Faith. Belief. Trust.

These sentiments spring quickest to mind when we talk about what animates us, about what makes us strong and what keeps us on the moral path. We express these thoughts in terms of light and face constant imprecations to turn our back to the shadows.

I admire them all, but like objects of great value, sometimes they seem to be a little too fragile to handle, too easily sullied by circumstance. When it comes to coping with the world and its complexities, doubt is my tool of choice.

Doubt – the willingness to question every assumption – seems at first to cast shadows on everything. But every light does this, so we can clearly see the contours. True, this makes the picture more complex than it was. In that sense, doubt is subversive and troublesome. It makes our elders fret and leads the naive astray.

But it works.

ACTA Without an Audience

7 November 2009 Dan McGarry

News has leaked out in dribs and drabs over the last several months about a US-led drive to negotiate an international treaty called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA. Conducted under a veil of secrecy, these negotiations have been the source of considerable speculation and not a little alarm among advocates of online freedom.

Part of the reason for the alarm is the utter lack of publicly verifiable information concerning the content of the treaty. When US organisations attempted to gain access to a copy of the draft, their government withheld them, citing national security, of all things.

Intellectual Property expert professor Michael Geist writes, “The United States has drafted the chapter under enormous secrecy, with selected groups granted access under strict non-disclosure agreements and other countries (including Canada) given physical, watermarked copies designed to guard against leaks.”

In spite of their best efforts, however, details of the online enforcement aspects of the treaty leaked out last week, following a negotiating round in Seoul, South Korea.

The details don’t look good.

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

In spite of their best efforts, however, details of the online enforcement aspects of the treaty leaked out last week, following a negotiating round in Seoul, South Korea.

The details don’t look good.

Read more “ACTA Without an Audience”

Reason and Instinct

26 October 2009 Dan McGarry

I am a firm believer in the need to personalise issues such as education and health care. Unless we can see the effects of our decisions, unless we can put ourselves in a position where we share the burden of their costs and the value of their rewards, we are far too susceptible to error.

There is, however, a tension between the moral weight of our decisions and their practical implementation. Simply stated, public medicine is costly, time-consuming and requires significant planning and coordination. Vanuatu as a nation has fared poorly in meeting any of these challenges. Money is limited, skilled professionals are thin on the ground and coordination even inside a single hospital is often the result of improvisation, not planning.

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

Public health is a human rights issue. Medical services, though, are ultimately ruled by economics. The tension between the two will never be resolved. It will, however, shape our future in ways that are impossible to measure.

This morning over coffee, I received news that the 15 year old daughter of a friend had passed away. She’d been ill for over a month, but a full diagnosis was never made. All anyone knew was that her head ached terribly.

Within an hour of hearing this, I learned of the untimely death of Ture Kailo, MP for TAFEA Outer Islands.

Ture was well known in Vanuatu. During his tenure as DG of the Ministry of Youth Development and Training, he was a consistent champion of youth issues and a friend to many local NGOs. Many took heart when, after his politically motivated ouster from the Ministry, he announced his candidacy for national office. Everyone I spoke to expressed deep regret at his passing, noting that Vanuatu politics has suffered a real and measurable loss.

Cases like these often define the debate over national health care policy. The loss of prominent individuals like Kailo demonstrate in unambiguous terms just how much we stand to lose when we lose a single life.

But what of my friend’s young daughter? The magnitude of her mother’s loss is of course immeasurable. And who can tell what she might have achieved?

From Small Things…

18 October 2009 Dan McGarry

George Tasso and his colleagues are now actively supporting IT volunteers at four Port Vila schools, with another in the works. While there are no lack of young volunteers ready to assist the schools – one colleague has organised no less than twenty of them in the Freswota neighbourhood alone – Tasso is beginning to worry that he might be reaching the limit of his own ability to provide a supportive mentoring role to them all.

The question now is how to continue. What has to date been an entirely organic venture, expanding and changing to fit the needs of individual schools and their staff, is soon going to have to transform itself into something more organised.

[Originally published in the Vanuatu Independent newspaper.]

A number of Port Vila schools have recently begun to take the Internet seriously. Assisted by veteran and novice IT volunteers, they’ve invested their meagre computing resources in an undertaking designed to help teachers create a richer and more open learning environment.

As with all things, it started small. Circumstance threw a few IT professionals together and led them to collaborate to improve their own children’s education. One thing led to another, and now we’re beginning to see the first fruits of integration of technology with teaching in Vanuatu.

The story begins five months ago when four parents, all of them seasoned IT professionals, began to chat about how to improve conditions at Central School, where their children were enrolled. Before very long they were at the core of a group of over 30 parents and teachers, all devoted to taking advantage of computers and the Internet in order to improve the quality of education.

This may sound familiar. It’s not the first time in Vanuatu that parents have moved mountains one pebble at a time to supplement their school’s limited resources. Nor is it the first time that teachers have been able to indulge their personal and professional enthusiasm for their vocation by working with the community at large.

But there are a few unique aspects to this story.

Noteworthy, Not Newsworthy

11 October 2009 Dan McGarry

Recent events, especially last Thursday’s tsunami warning, serve as a reminder just how fortunate we are. Within an hour of the alert being issued, news agencies the world over were contacting the Daily Post. Intent on the next human tragedy, they wanted to know: How much damage? How many dead?

The answer, happily, was that only one young girl was hurt when she ran in front of a moving truck.

Had a similar area in virtually anywhere else in the world been struck as we were by 3 earthquakes in quick succession, each in excess of 7.0, thousands, even millions might have suffered.

The simplicity of our existence – our lack of development – has in many ways saved us from the worst. If we didn’t have so little, we might have more to lose.

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

A friend of mine recently completed a photography project documenting the people of Dhaka, Bangladesh. These 265 mostly candid portraits capture what I like to call the miracle of the mundane. Without editorialising, they create a compelling polemic for the inherent dignity of every human being.

They’re noteworthy precisely because they’re not newsworthy.

If you were to ask me what animates me, what makes me take on the labours of love that fill my time to brimming, I would likely point to something like this. I’ve often been accused of being an idealist, but that’s only partly true. The ideals that I aspire to are simple:

We should have the right to a peaceful, respectful existence, with all the rights and responsibilities that this entails.

We should be able to choose which dramas and adventures we become involved in. Those we can’t choose should never grow so large that we lose all choice whatsoever.

One of the most alluring and endearing aspects of life in Vanuatu is our collective ability to drift along with few cares and few (sometimes too few!) responsibilities. The machinery of government grinds and chugs on by like a smoking bus with three cylinders firing, but aside from a bit of smoke and noise, leaves us largely unscathed.

The answer, happily, was that only one young girl was hurt when she ran in front of a moving truck.

Had a similar area in virtually anywhere else in the world been struck as we were by 3 earthquakes in quick succession, each in excess of 7.0, thousands, even millions might have suffered.

The simplicity of our existence – our lack of development – has in many ways saved us from the worst. If we didn’t have so little, we might have more to lose.

Life goes on today as it did the day before. We worry about where the next bag of rice is going to come from. We ruin our sandals in the mud. We bicker and fuss our way through petty jealousies. And we laugh at every opportunity.

In a place where the worst example of anarchy we can find is a dozen children playing on the beach, where the sum of our fears extend no more than a few miles from home, where even a hurricane is more frightening than deadly, we should really consider ourselves blessed.

But that should never make us complacent. For all its manifold blessings, Vanuatu society is still fraught with imperfection. Violence may not be institutionalised, but it is systemic. Too many women and children, safe from the predations of the state, are nonetheless victims in their own homes. Family, stronger here than in most other societies, is increasingly strained by distance and economic forces.

The difference between Vanuatu and its more turbulent Melanesian neighbours is as much one of luck as anything else. We all have corruption, venality, social and economic tensions and occasional violence. But for some reason, Vanuatu always pulls back from the brink.

How is this? What exactly is it that has allowed us to avoid the worst excesses of violence, economic and social dispossession? I honestly don’t know. If I were forced to answer, I’d likely wave my hands vaguely and mutter something about how people just don’t like things getting out of hand.

During the incipient insurrection some years ago between Police and Mobile forces, a besieged Police commander delivered an impassioned speech to the throng assembled behind the VMF picket. What began as an angry peroration culminated in a series of (ultimately tearful) apologies to everyone concerned for having caused such a ruckus. By observing the rhetorical standards of public oratory, the rebel leader defused his own obduracy.

We are a decent society, therefore, because we are used to acting like decent people.

Conclusions like this are dangerous. Too often, they lead only to self-satisfied complacency. As one chief explained it to me, it’s as if we are given the gift of a lovely garden with bountiful fruit trees. With such abundance, it becomes difficult to see the sweat and the toil that went into clearing the ground, the care and attention that allowed the tiny seed to become an adult tree.

It’s far too easy as well to assume that the tree will continue to bear fruit forever.

Thursday’s tsunami warning was a false alarm. But there is another tsunami approaching whose effects will be more widespread and, if we don’t prepare for them, more devastating than anything the ocean could do.

As development continues its inexorable spread through Vanuatu society, we must ensure that our politicians and policy makers never lose sight of individual faces of the people on whose behalf they were chosen to work.

They aren’t newsworthy, but they are noteworthy. They are us.

The Coming Change

11 October 2009 Dan McGarry

The expansion of Internet use is not likely to follow the rocket-like trajectory of mobile services, but it will hit quickly and run deep. Too deep for some, I fear. Having lived on the bleeding and the trailing edge of technology (sometimes both at once), I find the contrast between the two is enough to cause a kind of cognitive whiplash.

Heaven alone knows what will happen when it reaches the village.

[Originally published in the Vanuatu Independent newspaper.]

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” – Leo Tolstoy

On Wednesday this week at a quiet ceremony in Chantilly’s Resort, Minister Rialuth Serge Vohor presented six organisations with telecommunications operator licenses. His action marked the beginning of a new chapter in Vanuatu’s integration into the wider technological world.

The Minister’s speech touched on many aspects of the technical and social challenge ahead of us, but its illuminating principle was his lifelong conviction that Vanuatu should control its own destiny. Acknowledging and applauding the invaluable assistance provided by numerous donor and commercial partners from overseas, he nonetheless displayed great satisfaction at seeing local operations moving into the spotlight.

There was an air of quiet excitement in the room as, after patient months of waiting, representatives from the six groups, along with Digicel Vanuatu CEO Tanya Menzies, strode to the front of the room to accept the newly signed documents.

At the risk of sounding like a giddy shoolchild, I wonder if everyone realises just how fundamentally this moment is going to affect our generation and the next.

Two Solitudes?

6 October 2009 Dan McGarry

Notwithstanding its strengths, French’s permanent minority status here in Vanuatu has certainly allowed the perpetuation of some of the same kinds of injustice seen in Quebec in past generations. French has often received less attention than it should. The demonstrably superior education system has not received the recognition it deserves. The use of French in law, in government services and publications is often an afterthought.

Given my personal experience living on the cusp between two cultures, I am naturally sympathetic to Education Minister Charlot Salwai’s efforts to increase the French component in the core curriculum. Having benefited from a completely bilingual education, and having experienced the consequent benefits of a more nuanced, more cosmopolitan view of the world, I can only consider his plan to be a good thing.

That said, I am vividly conscious as well of the potential for division that language issues can create. In Canada in 1970, Quebec separatists conducted a series of murders, kidnappings and bombings that resulted in the imposition of martial law and the arbitrary arrest of thousands of activists, most of whom were guilty of nothing more than caring about their culture.

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

I grew up in a border town, in a border generation. One side of the river was majority French, the other English. My elders held tight to decidedly parochial views about their respective cultures. The English felt the ascendancy of their language (and subsequent control over business, government and education) was an inevitable and unavoidable result of their conquest of French Canada in 1760. The French, on the other hand, used their language as a cultural badge of courage, an undying assertion that they had never been conquered in spirit.

During the 1960s and 1970s an intense and occasionally violent cultural revival swept the French-speaking province of Quebec. Language became a weapon, leveraging access to public and private services.

Many of these reforms were necessary, long past due. Pierre Trudeau, the bi-cultural, bilingual Prime Minister at the time, had agitated for social justice in his youth. He was, nonetheless, a strong federalist, and opposed growing cries for Quebec’s secession from the Canadian confederation of provinces.

Vanuatu and Canada’s respective histories reveal more than a few parallels. Though different in detail, many common themes emerge. In Vanuatu, French and English camps were pitted against one another in the run-up to Independence, with the largely English Lini camp charging full-blown toward freedom and numerous, largely French-speaking, elements advocating a go-slowly (or not at all) approach.

The Black Widow

28 September 2009 Dan McGarry

The man gets off scot free in virtually every domestic crisis. If he runs off on his wife and kids, people will ask, ‘What did she do to drive him away?’ If he fools around with someone else, it’s usually the wife who’s forced to find the other woman and beat her into submission. It’s the only way she can publicly demonstrate that she’s not at fault. If a man beats his wife inside his own home, nobody will do anything. Ever. Here in Vanuatu, a man’s home really is his castle. Even if it’s his wife’s money that pays for it, her labour that maintains it, and her life that suffers just so that he can feel in control.

Why should we be surprised then, if one or two desperate women feel driven to poison hubby’s evening meal? When he pauses for grace before supper, more than one husband in Vanuatu would do well to

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

I heard a fascinating tale the other day. A woman of my acquaintance, happily married with children, had apparently been married twice already. Each time, the husband had become abusive and, each time, had died suddenly, without explanation. Word was that she was adept at ‘posen’ – subtle potions that kill suddenly, hours or even days after their ingestion.

Whatever his motivation, her current husband was the model of good behaviour; he never ‘passed behind’ (the Bislama term for adultery) and looked after the children as if they were his own.

Doubtless polished and embellished in the telling, the story remains, at its core, perfectly credible. Spousal abuse is rampant in Vanuatu society, and the police, courts and kastom do almost nothing to protect women. It’s not at all beyond imagining that a woman might take matters into her own hands and act to stop her own suffering using whatever means necessary.

Gift Economy – Ctd.

20 September 2009 Dan McGarry

Last week’s column on the relationship between chiefs, politicians and public servants provoked a good deal of discussion at the nakamal over the course of the week. Nobody contested the idea that we need to stop treating core government services as gifts to be doled out to political supporters. But there was some divergence of opinion regarding what changes, if any, were required.

Perhaps most interesting of all, nobody questioned the involvement of cabinet ministers in ensuring service delivery. The question was not whether the Minister should get involved in service delivery, but how he should do so.

Students of government from overseas might find themselves squirming at the very thought of such a question. The strong separation of politics and administration is one of the basic principles of the Westminster tradition. Many – if not most – of the major scandals in Vanuatu politics since Independence have been the result of the politicisation of roles and responsibilities in public service delivery.

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

Perhaps most interesting of all, nobody questioned the involvement of cabinet ministers in ensuring service delivery. The question was not whether the Minister should get involved in service delivery, but how he should do so.

Gift Economy

20 September 2009 Dan McGarry

If the people of Vanuatu were to begin thinking about access to power, water and other basic infrastructure as their right, rather than a privilege to be bestowed pre-election from some big man or other, how would the party bag men keep a hold on their constituency?

It’s a perversely counter-intuitive situation, but it amounts to this: Vanuatu has grown exactly as it knows best, but by applying its own most effective social tools, it’s closing its eyes to certain possibilities. And the most significant of these are reliable, consistent basic services.

In fairness, it must be said that there are more than a few in high office who care quite deeply about this problem, and who would do more about it if they could. There are several projects underway to bring a modicum of predictability and reliability to public services. The most notable are the sub-projects designed to strengthen Public Works in their ability to service and maintain the new MCA roads.

But too often, our big men are content to manoeuvre within the confines of the traditional patronage

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

The chief sat down, massaged his swollen hand in its cast and regaled me with the story of how he got the road cleaned up.

Numerous neighbourhoods in Port Vila are notorious for the condition of their roads. Some become impassably muddy, some become lakes when it rains, some are worn down to rocky tracks suitable only for goats. In a few cases, the road should never have been constructed where it was. In others, years of neglect have worn away what little engineering might have gone into them in the first place.

This chief was not the first – and will certainly not be the last – individual to wage a personal campaign to see conditions improved in his neighbourhood. His approach was typical, too. He worked his way through a network of brokers, often smoothing the conversation with kava, cigarettes and other blandishments, until he finally got the ear of the Minister. A brief, impassioned appeal to the big man, accompanied by a review of voter numbers and allegiance, was greeted in the end by the assurance that something would be done.

Sure enough, within a few days, the Minister is striding through the department offices, commandeering trucks, equipment and men to the site in question and ordering them to clean things up right quick.

The chief was rightly proud of what he’d achieved on behalf of his community. I must say I admire him, too, for his patience and commitment. Others would have given up or walked away long before.

The cast on his arm, you see, was the product of a confrontation between the chief and a drunken lout who, following a public chastisement, attacked him with a club, breaking his arm in two places. That might have been enough to make a smaller person turn his back on his community.

I fear I am a smaller person than he.