Tuesday, May 5, 2015

Awareness in Laravat and Vinmavis

Yesterday my office conducted climate change, disaster, and waste management awareness sessions in West Malekula, in Laravat and Vinmavis villages.


This map comes from the OGCIO (Office of the Government Chief Information Officer) website. If you look at the west, you'll see a village called Lambumbu. Lambubu is like a company town, with a big cacao plantation. Nearby is the village of Laravat, where we conducted our first awareness. 

We organized the talk through a teacher at Lambubu school, Miller. Miller's really great. He let everyone know we were coming, and in a village of about 200 people (counting kids), we had about 45 people come. Considering that it was in the morning, when kids were at school and many people wanted to go work in the garden, I consider this an absolute success.

 [It was about a 45 minute drive from Lakatoro, made a little longer by the fact that it was muddy and had been raining all night. We went with this driver from Vinmavis called Bill. Carrying a laptop that doesn't have a battery (and must therefore be plugged into power at all times), a generator, a regulator, a projector, and a few posters.
[The community hall we used. Sorry the photos are bad--the lighting was weird and I'm not good at correcting things.]


[Laravat was a very pretty village. It was extremely clean, for a start. The houses were mostly made of local material, like you see in the front--braided strips of bamboo.]

[Syl is in the green shirt, Abelson is in the blue.]

[Somehow, Abelson only ever gets photos of me from the back. But enjoy my super patriotic outfit! Christmas 2013 from Mami Esther.]

I felt that Laravat actually went really smoothly. We started off by talking about climate change--what it is, how it is impacting Vanuatu, and practical ways people can adapt to it. Then I gave a really short toktok about waste management. Usually I give a first aid toktok, and waste is separate, but I'm trying to refocus the talks back towards disaster. My basic message was about the whole (disaster = hazard x vulnerability) thing, so how there are little water, hygiene, and sanitation things that people can do to improve the resiliency of their village. Keep pit toilets far from underground wells and other water sources. Don't leave rubbish all about. Stop burning plastics. Et cetera. Then we finished by explaining what to do during floods, cyclones, and earthquakes, since those are the three hazards that affect Laravat. Afterwards, we got a bunch of good questions about what developed countries are doing to limit climate change, and if greenhouse gas emissions are increasing or decreasing now. Close with a word of prayer, and at about 11:30 we got driving again.

We reached Vinmavis around 1:15. Vinmavis is actually not very far away from Laravat at all, but the road to Vinmavis is in poor condition, so the truck couldn't go very quickly. (We also made a pit stop at the Bible College to buy fish, so that was a little detour.) It was very bumpy. When we got there, Abelson, Sylveste and I had lunch with Sylveste's  auntie. Abelson and I had bought strong biscuits, cookies, tin tuna, and juice in Lakatoro, but Sylveste wanted to eat rice instead, so he had his auntie cook us some, and we'll keep the biscuits for later. We hung out until about 2:30, then started to set stuff up.

I didn't feel like our awareness in Vinmavis went very well. I think the difference is that in Laravat, I went through a key member of the community, but in Vinmavis, we just sent a letter announcing our arrival. At around 3:30, Sylveste's auntie, who is the nurse at the dispensary, and I went around to try and drum people up. Vinmavis is a big village--about 500 people--and we had really bad attendance. We had about 25 people show up total. We weren't aware that Wan Smol Bag had recently gone through to give a presentation as well, and all in all it was a bit of a wash.

[Local houses in Vinmavis.]

[Also very clean!]

[Picture with a few people]

We got back to Lakatoro about 7:30 p.m. Overall, I was pretty happy, but I definitely want us to talk about lessons learned. I think Abelson, Syl and I have gotten a really tight, interesting presentation together. Our first awareness toktok took about 3 1/2 hours, and that's way too long for anyone. The presentation in Laravat was about an hour and forty-five minutes, counting questions, and the one in Vinmavis was about two and a half, with the last forty-five minutes being a video show about disasters and climate change. So I don't think we need to change the format much. I do think we need to think about best practices for advertising awareness, though, so that we get good attendance.

Speaking of which--I have noticed a pattern. We get very good attendance in most smaller communities, and they seem to be more excited and invested in our arrival. Our worst attendance tends to come from larger communities, where people aren't as interested. They are less tight-knit, and also not particularly interested in having strangers come in.


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