The future? - Vanuatu IV

I wrote in Vanuatu III about the changes that we noticed from eleven years back and commented upon the increasing overseas investment in the tourism infrastructure.

Along the same lines, there is another change in that same sector which I want to look at in this post.

Talking with resort staff, taxi drivers, even stall holders in the Vila Market, we were struck by the number of people from outlying islands. The greatest numbers seemed to be from Melaluca and Tanna, with a smaller number from Santo in particular.

That of itself should not be a major worry, until we asked one Tannese taxi driver how often he saw his family. “Once a year, at Christmastime, for three or four days.” He had two children, aged three and two months. He is hoping to save enough that he can bring his family to Vila. I hope that he can as well.

But there are two other factors developing at the same time. Both of these are of far greater concern looking forward.

The first of these is the development of three (that we saw and noted) separate “residential estates”. Sounds quite grand said like that. The problem is that the buildings that are being erected are long, concrete, barrack like lines of very small flats. We asked about one and was told that they are intended as “single mens’ accomodation”. They looked for all the world like the “kamps” built in South Africa during the apartheidt years to form the accomodation suburbs of Pretoria and Jo’burg.

The second was a comment made to us by two people, one Melanesian the other white, that there was never any trouble in Vila. Well, not until all those men started arriving from Tanna looking for work.

That brought me up very short. It is exactly the same kind of feeling that brought the “trouble” in the Solomon Islands with the exodus of the Melaita peoples to Honiara. That exodus started with the twin pressures of seeking a working income and the sale of Melaita land to foreign interests – for tourist resorts. The compound effect of the latter was that it displaced far more people than could be employed by the resorts.

The recent volcanic eruption, and the displacement of people that will cause on Ambae is not going to help in the short term. In the longer term there are three islands where just that one factor could play a major part in the population drift to the main island of Efate.