Vanuatu update 8

So at 5:25 in the morning we climbed up the hill to the ecumenical dawn service yesterday. Given we are GMT+11 it would have been one of the first dawn services anywhere in the  world (with a recognising nod to our Kiwi and Tongan friends at GMT+12). It was fine, around 25 degrees and, again, a real blessing to share with people of different nationalities and races, but common faith.

It was also good to stand with other NGO workers and worship. I stood beside Mike, the head of World Vision in Vanuatu, and could see staff from Act for Peace and other agencies around the group as well.

The whole country has come to a bit of a halt over Easter. The official stats say that Vanuatu is roughly 80% Christian, mostly Presbyterian and Catholic with a smattering of AOG churches and a lot of Mormons. I think I've seen LDS missionaries just about every day we've been here. This all means that over the Easter break the country stops.

That said, there is still a lot of strange religious practice in the islands. Pentecost Island is famous for it's vine diving (the precursor to bungy jumping) which is really a fertility ritual where the men kiss the earth to encourage crop growth. Then there is the island that thinks Prince Philip is deity! And there's Anatom, where a Christian missionary was eaten by cannibals as recently as 1974.

We've been both rested by the break, and frustrated at the inability to further some of our projects. There has been a seeming ignorance in the coordination system of the cultural significance of the weekend; I had meetings scheduled by other agencies on both Good Friday and Easter Sunday (I chose not to go on Friday and went to just the last afternoon one on Sunday).

We're hopeful to make some headway again this week and regain some momentum.

For those that have been following the blog, it's worth reporting that the water restoration project on Tanna Island has gone extremely well and we have restored water to two villages completely now. That means that for 550 people the walk to a clean water outlet is now less than 10 minutes. Not ideal, but access to good, clean water can't be minimised.