Vanuatu cyclone: Why have we been abandoned, ask islanders

A LITTLE slice of Pacific paradise, the Vanuatu island of Tanna looks like a community destroyed since Cyclone Pam passed ­directly over the island.

Katheen Nawioe, with her daughter Windy, on the beach at Lenakel yesterday as islanders continue the clean up. Picture: Stuart McEvoy

A LITTLE slice of Pacific paradise, Tanna looks like a community destroyed.

All communication with the rest of Vanuatu has been cut since Cyclone Pam passed ­directly over the island on ­Saturday.

There is no power or running water. Villages have been flattened. Everywhere, snapped trees bear the white-raw gleam of fresh-split timber.

Reports of the extent of deaths and injuries in the storm vary, largely dependent on the small population’s ability to send news from village to village. Some say three “just in this area”. Others say they’ve heard there have been 10 deaths island-wide. Agencies admit they have no idea of the true scale of the calamity.

MAP: Where Cyclone Pam struck

In the small roadstead hamlet of Lenakel, squarely on the ­island’s west coast and in essence the government and mercantile centre of the island, residents and visitors from outlying vil­lages gather, wanting to know one thing: why have we been abandoned?

Fijian immigrant Ropate Vuso, 67, shakes his head at government inaction in the days since the ­disaster, although he concedes the warnings given ahead of the category-5 storm were probably ample. “When people heard that it was coming, they gradually gathered together,” he says. “Schools, church buildings — we all helped out one another.”

That coming together has been the common theme of this disaster, which without doubt has set the archipelagic Pacific nation square on its haunches.

The speed at which people have leapt in to rebuild each other’s properties, and lives, has been phenomenal — with or without official support.

And on the fringe of Lenakel, a spectacular sight proves the resilience of community. Walk along the prettily named Jennifer Street and in the late afternoon there are dozens of young children frolicking on a pebbly beach, sunbaking, rough-housing with each other and defying the gentle waves of the Pacific that so terrified them just days ago.

Katheen Nawioe, 27, who has come with baby daughter Windy from their village of Lenmoue, 10km away, says it’s a daily occurrence, and watching the big laughing gang it can be tempting to imagine this is a ritual stretching back countless generations.

That it may be but, as Katheen is quick to point out, they’re also doing it “because right now we have no fresh water”.

It is a very self-sufficient ­society: one man describes Vanu­atu as “true organic” because so much produce grown in people’s backyards is what goes on the ­nation’s tables. But that also means an event like Pam, even when it doesn’t inflict a heavy toll in lives, requires fast action to ­recover from.

“We rely on our gardens,” says Maxon Sam, the 27-year-old father of a young boy. “We have nothing else, and last time there was something like this the people went hungry. We have to hope that doesn’t happen this time.”

At the other end of Jennifer Street, and at the top of a steep hill, nailed to a giant, ancient banyan tree sits a hand-painted memorial sign to a similar cyclone in 1956.

Graphic waves drawn on the sign demonstrate that its brutal force reached as high as the tree. Pam came nowhere close to doing that, a couple of older locals point out.

Cyclones are part of the communal memory here; men and women can recite the major ones they have lived through: the ­details of 1956, 72, 87 and now 2015 are recited like footy grand finals.

So, too, is picking up and building all over again part of communal reality. The sound of hammers on corrugated iron marks the rhythm of life in Lenakel now.

One man proudly shows how he has almost finished fastening a new roof to his house.

In the capital, Port Vila, rebuilding is also the primary ­activity.

Certainly, there are still roofs torn off, and sagging building structures. At night, there is the enveloping darkness of an almost city-wide power outage. By day, the felled electricity lines snaking across roadways make clear why that is.

But also along every roadside in the capital are piles of roughly chopped tree trunks and other vegetation, dragged away from the homes and shops they overwhelmed by volunteer clean-up gangs. Storm shutters are being removed from glass windows, tiled floors mopped clean of the mud that covered them.

New horrors may yet be ­revealed in Vanuatu’s deeper south, but in Vila, and in this section of Tanna, at least, life goes on.