In Bislama this means rumors or unsubstantiated facts, but, in this case, these facts are substantiated by my first-hand experience. No one ever told us what the roads were like before we go to Maewo. As I have stated before, coming in, we knew that getting to our site involved a two-hour hike after getting to the truck road, but beyond that nothing was really described. Additionally, the “two-hour” part was more of an understatement, lending more to the abilities of locals and people who know the road well. As I came to learn there are many more roads that lead into and out of Naviso-going to different parts of Aelan Maewo. The roads differ in difficulty and a lot depends on the weather. As well, I learned that a Ni-Van’s idea of difficulty greatly differs from my idea of “what is difficult”. Basically the level of difficulty can be broken down into four categories: Sop Mud (soft mud), Glis (slipperiness), Size of Hills, and Length of Road.
“Trak Rod”
When the Government of Vanuatu first attempted to build a truck road to Naviso, they managed to reach about a thirty-minute walk outside of Naviso before the machinery, apparently, broke down. This means that at least to Ngota you have a run down, non-maintained, fossil of a truck road, and then after that you have a massive downhill hike into Naviso, that becomes very technical climbing from rock to rock once you reach the point where construction stopped. To summarize the difficulty of this road comes from “Glis” and the Size of the Hills (short mud and Length don’t really factor in).
“Tufala Rod lo Telise”
The next roads that I took to and from Naviso were the roads to Telise Vilej (Central Maewo), where Nic Thiltges makes his home above Sulua School. These are not truck roads or even attempted truck roads, these are bush roads. Every road I talk about now will be a bush road because the road to Naviso in Berterrara is the only attempted truck road to East Maewo. Now the two roads to Telise are described by the people of Naviso as the one that follows the river (Folem Krik ia i go) and the one that goes up the huge hill (go lo bigfala hill). Now the people of Naviso know these roads suck, they’re not oblivious to this fact; they can just walk them because they were born doing it. They realize how tough they can be, but they just laugh it off because, well, what else can you do? The bad part about the two times I took these two roads the weather was horrible. Meaning that it had poured rain the previous nights and that just means it’s going to suck on these roads. The first road I took I walked up the “bigfala hill” because we couldn’t follow the river because it had rained too much and the river was too big (not dry enough) to follow; that should have been my first indication not to go. Basically, the hill is about 90-minutes uphill and steep enough that while standing up straight I would be looking directly into the hill. Lucky for me, it was slippery enough that I kept feeling like I was going to fall backwards down the hill and I had to scramble on hands and knees to keep making forward progress because I kept slipping backwards in the mud. And, of course, about 70% of the way up, I get a mad cramp in my hamstring. Once we finally got to the top, I was reminded that we still had two-hours to get to Telise and now was the downhill part, where I slipped and fell on the “Glis” a number of times. All in all, the hill road difficulty can be categorized (in my “non Ni-Van” estimation) as “Glis” and Size of Hills (that’s not going to be a theme-I just hate “Glis”).
Now, the time I followed the creek I was going back to Naviso. It had poured rain the night before and my Host Papa greeted me with a wonderful, knowing smile, the morning of, as he already knew the road was going to suck. In the first fifteen-minutes I lost both my sandals in “Sop Mud” and fell up a hill and then down it as we realized we had gone the wrong way. “Following the river” doesn’t actually mean “following alongside” like I thought it did. It literally means walking upstream in knee-deep to thigh-high water. The nice thing about this road is that you don’t walk up a huge hill; you just follow the river through the valleys and then have to walk downhill. Unfortunately for me, the downhill portion was a nightmare that involved me falling, pretty dramatically, numerous times and one time sliding down the hill about ten to fifteen feet. I would, personally categorize the difficulties of this road as Short Mud and “Glis”. Additionally, I believe this road deserves the benefit of another award for difficulty. I would throw in the “Walking upstream on slippery rocks” category.
“Rod lo Norovorovo”
Now the last road I have taken out of Naviso and back (there is one other road that I have just learned about that goes north and follows the saltwater to Lalaone, a village next to the airport in Naone). This road takes you south to Norovorovo, approximately a thirty-minute walk south of Telise. This road is somewhat easier, the hills are much smaller going up and down, but the real difficulties arise before the hill and after the downhill. To take this road you walk south from Naviso and follow the saltwater which means walking along the stones of constantly changing size. These stones go from pebbles to stones the size of large grapefruit to stones the size of a large dog. The grapefruit stones are the most annoying because they constantly shift and move as you try to walk (like soft sand).
Once you get close to the hill you come upon the part that actually, truly presents a danger to your life. On one side you have a sheer rock face and the other side the changing tides of the South Pacific Ocean. While it’s raining or if has just rained you have the problem of rocks falling on your head from the sheer rock face. The other worry is the ocean waves that can reach the rock face during certain times of the day. If this is the case, unless you plan on waiting, you must run from place to place in between waves hoping you reach a place where you can avoid getting hit by a wave. This has not yet worked out for me yet and I usually come out soaking wet.
Now that you have some background knowledge about the roads to ad from Naviso, I can go into what this means for every Man Naviso.
The Mobile Connection
The Two Towers
Using a mobile in Naviso isn’t possible. Coming to site I was told that you could in fact use a mobile in Naviso, even though the site identification sheet spoke to the contrary. Once arriving in Maewo I learned the truth and, more explicitly, what “around the saltwater” and “on top of the hill” meant for mobile “hotspots”. In order to use a mobile in Naviso you must either walk up the road to Ngota (following the “Trak Rod”—“folem road ia i go-wokbaot antap maontan ia”) about 60 minutes to 75 minutes uphill. This is a rather new option as they just recently built a tower in the north (seems like a good idea to have that for the airport). Basically, you walk to the top of the hill and sit in a certain place where you have a clear view to the tower in the north. The other, older option was take the road to Norovorovo and you can get service right before the downhill portion from the tower on East Ambae; this is approximately a two-hour to three-hour trip. Simply put, you must become a mountain goat before you can talk regularly on a cell phone in Naviso.
Hurricanes, Flooding, and a River Runs through It
Coming from the Pacific Northwest, I am use to pretty docile weather. Yes, Oregon is wet. That does not mean the same as tons of water. In Oregon it might rain everyday for a month, but we might only get 4 or 5 inches, but while I was in Boston it rained 6-8 inches in 72 hours. That’s a vastly different experience; Vanuatu is much more like Boston, but mixed with the always wet part of Oregon (only a little though). It doesn’t rain here all the time, but everything is constantly green, so it keeps a good balance. Other than that, Vanuatu has Hurricanes (or Cyclones in this part of the world). I never really experienced hurricanes before I came to Vanuatu. Moreover, I experienced flooding a little in Boston, but not overmuch. In Vanuatu, I have experience a number of hurricanes and various “bigfala” storms. The most recent hurricane left a lake (knee-deep) in front of my house. Additionally, all the roads in Naviso become raging rivers which makes walking around a real great time. The best part of the hurricanes is the fact that we are stuck in Naviso and, of course, our one form of the communication, the Satellite Phone (SAT Phone), died in December and we had no consistent way to charge it.
The EAP, Satellite Phone, and the Three Separate Deliveries of our Solar Set-up
The EAP (the Emergency Action Plan), which we don’t actually have a copy of, depends on our ability to communicate and receive information via the SAT Phone and keep the phone charged. This is highly dependent on our access to a power source; a solar set-up was supposed to be sent to us early, but due to a change in technology the order was delayed. Then the Peace Corps Office learned that we had no way to power our SAT Phone and it was about to die, they decided to send us another solar set-up to use while the other one came. Of course, to get the solar set-up to us fastest, they decided to fly the set-up into Maewo instead of putting it on a boat: that was the first mistake. The plane to Maewo comes once a week, only if the weather is good, and all baggage has to transit through the airport on Espirtu Santo.
One day I was over in Telise and was told a “solar” came for the Peace Corps in Naviso. When I was brought to the “solar” I discovered that it was one part of three and the other parts (the regulator and battery) were still in Santo because not all the parts could get on the plane. This means I will have to come over to the other side again at some point to get the other two parts. The next time I am on the other side I had gone to Berterrara and had heard that Nic Thiltges was at Gambule visiting the Youth Challenge volunteers, so I headed down there and while there ran into Paul Wren Tari (who I will talk more about later). Paul told me that a package for me was at Ron’s house, one of the truck drivers and “Doti Waetman of the Not”. When I came to his house I found the regulator, which was addressed to go to Telise and Nic Thiltges, but because Ron lives in the north and only happened to pick up the package for me, it never got past his house. After two weeks in Naviso, I ended up walking over to the north and then down to Telise, where I discovered that the battery did not reach Berterrara or Telise. After calling the Peace Corps Office I learned that the battery had never actually left Port Vila and that’s why it never reached Maewo. All in all, after three months we still don’t have all three parts of the solar set-up and after the first four months at site, we still have no way to charge the SAT Phone consistently. Oh, the inconsistencies of mail when living on an island. The moral of this story: while ships might be slower, packages on planes to Maewo are inconsistent in so many ways that the ship will always be the better route. Period.
No comments:
Post a Comment