the fear

The baby was seven days old.
Seven days - not weeks or months...
Category 5 Severe Tropical Cyclone Pam (March 12-14, 2015), after forming in the Coral Sea, rat-fucked the Shepherd and southern islands of Vanuatu as it barreled almost directly from north to south , smashing Éfaté [90% of buildings in Port Vila were either destroyed, damaged, or otherwise bagarup] at 260kph.
Pam then went on to devastate the island of Erromango, before utterly destroying the isolated island of Tanna, at wind speeds estimated to be more than 280kph, until slowly dissipating over open ocean , with the after effects of heavy rain also hitting the north island of New Zealand.
Have you ever seen a Formula One car starting to roar down the main straightway in driving rain?
I have, and it's very scary.
It's a miracle that only 16 lives were lost, while the damage bill was put at about $US300M.
And yet, the largest island of the archipelago, Espiritu Santo, 275km to the north-west of Éfaté, was virtually unscathed, just a little stronger breeze than usual there.
Six months later, with all crops, foodstuffs, the airstrip and telecommunications gone, and water in critical short supply, very serious consideration was given to evacuating the entire population of Tanna to Éfaté, but that was averted when a small supply ship arrived to save them from literally starving to death.
Excuse my French, but they were completely fucked.
The only thing they had left was the most active volcano on earth.
Tanna lost 80% of their coffee trees, the island's main cash crop and export, after kava.
Coffee takes years and years to mature.
One day we dropped by the ramshackle Tanna coffee roasters outside Vila; before the cyclone they were roasting 80 tonnes of Tanna coffee per year, after the cyclone it fell to 15 tonnes, and they were hoping to get 35 tonnes this year.
Never mind the tremendous cost of destroyed infrastructure, the psychological scars run very deep, and will for a generation,
I was sitting with Glenn...on the trunk of a fallen coconut palm tree...looking out towards his home island of Nguna, which would be only a few nautical miles away across a shallow straight at low tide to the fringing reef with breakers to his village which is in an eastern cove.
Also nearby were the islands of Kakula, Pele, Emao, and in the distance rising above the horizon is the almost perfectly conical outcrop of Wot Rock.
A spectacularly beautiful scene.
We were waiting for our lunch outside a dinky little local restaurant [mornay fish in clam shells, local steak escalope in red wine sauce, rice and local greens] and I told him I had noticed plenty of still unrepaired cyclone damage - two years on - all up the west coast of Éfaté, and asked him if he was here at the time.
"I was at home. The baby was seven days old".
There was pain in his eyes and then he looked down as ni-Vanuatu do when they talk of unfortunate business:
"I was lucky, my daughter now is two years old. We put the baby under a strong table with blankets and I only lost the roof of my house. I have been looking for it, but I have never found it. I don't think I will. My family was not hurt. Where the village is, we are in that cove there, you can see there at the bottom of the island, so we were sheltered a bit by the mountain. Very lucky"
"that is an extinct volcano there?"
"yes, dormant for many many years now".
"the wind always blows from the south-east", he said, "what they call the 'trade winds', but after the cyclone, we now fear the north - the north. Terrible."
He was quiet, slow and measured in the delivery of his words, so I was surprised by the sudden emphasis he placed on the word "fear".
"It was the worst night of my life, but I was lucky. Many many others, not so good. Even today, on some islands, people do not have enough to eat".
He told me the cyclone went bang! about five o'clock in the afternoon and by three or four the next morning it was all but gone, taking much of the countryside and everything on it with it.
"We had no choice but to stay".
I asked if the baby had been born in the Central Hospital in Vila.
"Born at home" he said.
He then went on to tell me how important it was that the Govt. was slowly rolling out a program that would have a nursing station, "ditric medikal", near every main village just for primary health care.
There are no ambulances outside the capital.
On leaving Vila for Sydney, I noticed a small display in the corner of Bauerfield International Airport [named after some US Marines colonel who had the airstrip built from scratch and operational for military aircraft in 28 days] and there was a copy of the original flight paths and instructions on how to land a plane there.
Under weather it read: "May-Oct: Sou'East trade winds. Nov-Apr: Variable. The New Hebrides is in the hurricane zone".
For a long time now the boffins down the weather bureau have been talking about how the extremes of climate will get more extreme and more frequent, as global warming begins to really ramp up.
The ni-Vanuatu know that climate change will eventually see their string of islands become known as "cyclone alley", now they have the fear, real, genuine, fear.
They never ever want to experience another cyclone like Pam again in their lifetimes, but they know deep down the chances are, they will.
No one voluntarily tells you about it, but if you ask in a correct manner, everyone you meet has a Cyclone Pam story.
We drove past miles and miles and miles of cyclone devastated coconut palm plantations, that would have been dense and rich with palms, but was now like a moonscape, flat eroded ground with some clumps of palm trees still standing, but most of them were busted off at he base by winds - the amount of damage has been enormous - and two years later only the stumps are covered in second growth vines and weeds - just stumps everywhere.
There are still fancy signs that say "Éfaté Coconut Plantation Company", but the place has been abandoned.
There has been no attempt at replanting.
Occasionally you will see a single coconut tree standing, but twisted and bent permanently at a 40 or 50 degree slant, after being smashed by the terror of the arse end of the cyclone.
We ran into a water tester on Children's Day.
He was a small nuggety type of white man dressed in a khaki shirt and shorts [you wouldn't catch a ni-Vanuatu man dressed in shorts in town, they all wear trousers].
Fran spotted him on the end of a boat pontoon off the sea wall with what looked like a large underwater microphone on a long cable attached to a thing that looked like an iPad.
She said "that must be a water tester".
He was dropping the thing to the bottom of the harbour and then hauling it up and having a look at the computer screen.
As he walking up the gang plank I said "are you testing the water?"
"yes".
"what are you testing for?"
He then reeled off a list of scientific terms that meant nothing to me.
Turns out he was an Australian working for some kind of private oceanic company on contract to the Govt.
"what's the results showing?"
"ah, dunno yet, we'll work that out when we take these numbers back to the lab".
"are you testing for micro-plastics?"
"no, not here. but we have a limited program going on some of the outer island for micro's, we hope to get the funding to expand it, because they're going to be a problem".
I then airily waved towards one of the two islands in Port Vila harbour, Iririki, which was long ago turned into condo's and a four star tourist resort.
"I suppose there wouldn't be any sewerage out there on Iririki, all septic tanks?"
"what do you mean?" said the water tester "there is no sewerage of any kind anywhere in Port Vila".
"well, there's a problem for you, right there".
"look, I'm sworn to secrecy on this and I'm not meant to say; but i wouldn't swim in it".
He wished us a good day and said "gotta go and check out what my colleague's doing along the way there" and he disappeared into the crowd.
A little further along was another pontoon obviously built for swimming with three levels of wooden decking, and there were dozens of kids of all ages having a great time splashing, screaming, doing water bombs and somersault dives into the harbour and having a ball, and, of course...swimming...
Vanuatu is the only country in world with a Minister for Climate Change which ipso facto must mean they have a Department of Climate Change.
That's as well as the usual portfolio's of Environment, Water, and Agriculture.
Vanuatu has too many coconuts, we were told - even with hundreds of thousands of trees gone in the cyclone - and it was explained that now that the arse has fallen out of the copra market, a small generator has been built which runs on the extract of coconut oil for power generation, in the hope of completely replacing diesel sometime in the future, for when things get really dire.
Bottled Origin labelled gas imported from Australia is everywhere, but in front of the Mama's Market in Vila you will see great stacks of firewood neatly bundled up into large faggots at 500vt a faggot, so there's still plenty of demand for firewood for cooking, even in the capital.
Driving up the west coast of the island I noticed that about every third power pole was virtually brand new after being shattered by Pam, but the power-line suddenly stopped as we reached the north of the island, so I asked Glenn how they got their electricity.
He said there is one almighty diesel generator that powers the whole of Vila, while some little solar panel farms and wind turbines that we'd seen, power the west coast [so they only have power during the day and when the wind blows at night], then it runs out, and the entire east coast remains un-electrified.
There are some fairly large cattle ranches inland from the villages out there, but no power.
There is talk of building a small thermal power station to bring electricity to the east coast, but that would all but destroy the black sands and thermal pools forever and bagarup the ecosystem and there is no real call for it anyway - when you are a subsistence farmer, fisherman and hunter with a family history going back centuries, there aint much use for it, and who would pay for it anyway?
Everyone complains about how expensive electricity is.
Thermal will be an ongoing debate for years to come, not the least of which will involve highly complex kastom land arrangements, capital investment and who gets the profits [if any].
Glenn had a look of "they're dreaming" in his eyes.
We hired a car one day to go back to Havannah Harbour [named after the ship some grandee missionary arrived in there], the most gorgeous spot in Éfaté; can hold a hundred ships of the line, deep water with the islands of Moso and Lelepa sheltering the harbour, which is a rain shadow anyway.
We went back for lunch and to snorkel again.
First time in the water, we saw many fish but only dead, bleached coral and it was the same the second time around off the pontoon at the laid-back fisherman-owned Wahoo Bar.
Admittedly we did not go out on the "turtle" tourist boat to the fringing reef off-shore in the national marine park or the dugong sanctuary, so I have no idea what it is like out there.
But it reminded me of 2012, when we spent a day snorkeling off Atauro island near Dili in East Timor, where it was like swimming in the most extraordinary tropical aquarium that you could possibly ever imagine - walk 20 yards off the shore and you are among incredible beauty in the coral gardens.
Blew my socks off, and still does today, but our next swim was near the Low Isles in the Great Barrier Reef, which even then, was a wasteland of bleached coral in comparison to the starting pristine waters of East Timor.
"We used to eat turtle, yes. It was very good, but now, no longer, finis - very bad fine, big fine, from the Government now for killing turtle", we were told.
With Vanuatu being volcanic in nature with a fault line just to the west, there are tsunami warning signs, in Bislama, English and French everywhere in Vila.
There are three tsunami warning colours, yellow, orange and red, and the signs have detailed topographical maps of the "safe zones", and the quickest & easiest escape routes when the balloon goes up and Radio Vanuatu stars broadcasting "run for the hills! run for your lives! head for the hills!"
We were staying on the absolute waterfront, so the joint had it's own evacuation plan that read something like this: "Leave the property immediately. Go to the entrance and turn right on the Pango Point Rd, walk for about 100 metres, then turn left up a dirt track, and walk 35 metres. Remain there until you are told it's safe".
What does it matter that the last really big tsunami came through Vila in the 1927 completely flooding what would then have been a really small colonial outpost, and fark me, why are you banging on about it, and what has tsunami warning signs got to do with climate change, I hear you ask?
Who knows?
The Shadow knows.
Ask the gypsy what the future holds.
But the sea level is slowly rising, that's the truth, no doubt about that - just ask those living in Kiribati and Tuvalu - and Vanuatu is also just about as vulnerable to natural forces as you can get, and they know that when we finally cover the planet with our own shit and everything really goes arse-up and pear-shaped, they'll be the first ones with their backs up against the wall.
They know.
In the grand scheme of things, when the earth starts to return to primordial slime, because my generation did nothing about it when we were told that "something's going on" - an island nation in the middle of nowhere, with a population of little more than a quarter of a million, all living at sea level, is not that hard to wipe out.