El Nino

Right now, Vanuatu is in the middle of an El Nino. El Nino Southern Oscillation is when the ocean in the eastern South Pacific, near Peru and Chile, gets warmer. From where we’re standing, in the western Pacific, the southeast trade wind becomes much weaker. The cloud system in this region, the South Pacific Convergence Zone, drifts away to the east. As a result, Vanuatu is in the midst of an extended dry period that is turning into a drought.

The drought is pretty serious. I haven’t seen rain in a few months, although there was a little rain in the southern islands over the weekend. In general, throughout the country rain water tanks and cisterns are running dry. There’s just not enough water anywhere. It’s only been in the past few weeks that it seems like everyone’s started paying attention to what’s going on, because we are coming to the end of what should be the dry season. Usually every year, October is about the time when the rains start to come, so that crops can grow and water tanks can fill up. But this year, since there’s not going to be a lot of rain, it’s going to be much harder.

From where I’m standing, in Lakatoro, the main thing I notice is dust. There’s dust everywhere. When I walk around, I have to wear sunglasses because there’s so much dust thrown in the air from trucks. When I ride in the back of pickup trucks, my hair, clothes, and face get covered in dust. It feels really gross to travel and then touch my hair—it’s so dry and sticky. There’s a new trend of women wrapping their hair up in cloth, sort of like African women do, just to protect it from all of the dust on the truck ride. I’ve been told by friendly strangers on a truck that I should start carrying some cloth myself to cover my eyes when a big cloud of dust roars towards us.

Water is also running low in Central Malekula. It’s not as serious as in some other areas, but the rain tanks are all dry. I am connected to the water supply system, which means that I have piped water in my house. But the water is changing. It’s always tasted bad but the taste is getting stronger. A friend told me that it’s because there’s some algae growing in the big tank at the top of the system where the water comes from the source. (Not sure if that’s true, but it definitely tastes bad.) In the past two weeks, the water supply has started to be turned off at certain hours in the afternoon and night. I think it’s to conserve water and make sure that there are no leakages anywhere in the system. It is, however, very inconvenient since there’s no public posting of when the water turns off. I’ve already had a moment when a friend and I got back from kava and wanted to shower (dust!) but couldn’t.

The market is also getting bad. There are lots of vegetables available right now but very few fruits or root crops. This is because there just aren’t a lot of fruits or root crops available in any of the gardens; they haven’t been growing. This is the time of year when everyone should be eating lots of mangoes, and there aren’t any for sale yet. People are eating a lot more rice and flour than they usually do because the price of root crops is increasing. In a few months, I think the market is going to get really bad because the crops are getting burned by the sun out in the gardens.

Other parts of Malampa Province are facing these same problems but on a more serious scale. Some schools are going to have to end the school year early because there’s no water for the children to drink. I have a friend who brought her dirty clothes in town with her last week to wash at my house because she has no water to wash in at her site. On Ambrym, some people have chartered boats to get water from the north, where there's a system, or from Lamap, the biggest village in South Malekula.

It's supposedly even worse in areas that were really struck by Cyclone Pam. I don't know what's true and what's not true, because we don't get a newspaper up here. I have heard, though, that a child died on Tanna of malnutrition. I've also heard that there are families on Tanna who want to put their children up for adoption to areas with more water and food. I don't know what's true and what isn't. It looks like this is shaping up to be another disaster, though, so quickly upon the heels of Cyclone Pam. Many parts of the country are not yet recovered from that damage, so this is really going to have a horrible impact on many people's lives. It's estimated that El Nino will end in March 2016, which would leave only a month or two of rain before the next dry season is expected to come. My friend who works at UN Women told me that the government is reactivating disaster clusters--like gender protection, water and sanitation, health, et cetera--because they're expecting this to get a lot worse.