Green & lush and lush & green and green & ...

Things have been a bit slow at work recently. There has been no budget made available in 2006 for any trainings, nor for transport to visit the Area Council Secretaries to make a so called Training Needs Analysis. The Area Secretaries of the Areas that are situated relatively close to Lakatoro or which have good transport connections have been able to come to my office. They are friendly intelligent and capable men, and I am actually starting to get the impression that training is not exactly what they might need right now. However, as I have not been able to meet with all of them no final conclusion can be drawn.


I was really pleased therefore when Kate invited me to go along with her and two of her colleagues for the yearly road inspection tour of Malekula. Kate is a fellow VSO volunteer who works for the department of Public Works in Lakatoro. Public Works (Publieke Werken!) is responsible for the roads, water supply, wharfs, government buildings, bridges and what have you in Malampa Province. Every year the Head of Public Works, Jimmy, and the senior fore-man, Atis, make a tour in order to make an inventory of the projects they will tackle next year. What repairs to make, resurfacing to be done etcetera. For me a splendid opportunity to tag along and first of all see large parts of Malekula (that is to say, the parts that actually have roads...), secondly to interview a couple of those Secretaries that have not been able to come to Lakatoro, and thirdly to take some pictures to show you what this place looks like. GREEN, GREEN and more GREEN, is probably the best way to describe it. Or as the saying goes: a picture paints a thousand words...:


This is your basic Malekula road-side landscape. I could fill my blog with a thousand pictures similar to this one, and still have the larger part of Malakula left to photograph. But I hope you get the general idea anyway. By the way, this is a stretch of National Road you are looking at - as in the rest of the pictures. In general the roads are not in bad condition, like this one.


There is no asphalt anywhere in Malekula, except on the landing strip at Norsup airport, close to Lakatoro. There are other airports ofcourse, but they look something like this. I have great admiration for the pilots. And for the brave passengers - one of which is me every now and then when I go to Port Vila.

On our way south we passed this primary school. It must have been around lunch-time as there are a few children on the playground waving at us. Only a couple of trucks a day pass by on this road, and when you are age 7 this constitutes an event worth waving at. On the left, outside of the picture, behind the school is the sea.


Most of the surveying could be done from within the car. Just as well; we drove for three days covering on average 100 kilometres a day which took us 5 to 6 hours. But in some cases measurements were needed and Jimmy, Atis and Kate got busy. While I tried to look busy taking pictures of them.



In other cases however it was not so much measuring as contemplation and discussion that were needed. For instance over this particular bit of National Road, clevery disguised as sea-side rubble. Here is Kate thinking: "How on earth are we going to repair this particular piece of road, so that it won't be destroyed by a cyclone again and again...". Incidently, the road continued on after this part, as did we. Which is why God invented four-wheel drives (which you already knew from the previous post) and the EU to donate them and put their "Look-what-we've-given-these-poor-people-sticker" on. My office is full of them.