James Rowlinson

It seems a long time ago when I was standing on Mona Vale headland calling friends to ask if I should take a role with Engineers Without Borders in Vanuatu.

Conversations of this nature are funny. Deep down I’d already made a decision that my thoughts weren’t yet privy to, so while the conversations were framed for advice my consultative friends saw through my maybes long before I did. Of course I wanted the gig – resumes are only updated with motivation for change and things going well triggers an ennui that begs reckless decisions. Besides, the day after hearing about the job I met someone at a housewarming party who worked on the same project! You can’t argue with serendipity – the universe demands adventure.

From here lay six months of life admin, having a heartfelt farewell every second weekend and dutifully studying Disney’s Moana. With a departure date of early February, no one was spared the stoke onslaught in the lead up to deployment. Commutes to work were spent in aggressive research of my home-to-be and picking the brains of any friend that’s done similar. “Bring extra pairs of pants”, my friend from the Peace Corps in Uganda advised, “You never know when you’ll get your brown badge!” Duly noted.

I’m at risk of continuously comparing life in Vanuatu to Uganda but navigating the benevolent chaos of customs and arrivals line felt like putting on an old pair of jeans and finding $20 in the pocket. Coronavirus fears created a mangled quarantine check where our arrivals cards were handed on mass to officials who then couldn’t work out which card belonged to which traveller and handed them back to the passengers and asking us to redistribute. As holiday makers scratched their heads while we waited on the tarmac, I grinned patiently and studied the green mountains on the horizon while mentally marking valleys which might form a river deep enough to scrape down in a kayak. The customs line had an agonizing queue for tourist visas and, due to corona, anyone who looked slightly Asian, but off to the side empty velvet ropes for permanent residents beckoned. A couple of holiday makers tried their luck but were sent back to cattle class. As I strutted past them, they passed on the lesson from their mistake, “This one’s residents only mate.”

Cue insufferable stoke a very punchable grin and a triumphant flick of my freshly stamped visa letter. “I know!”

Welcome to Vanuatu, home for the next year.

Twelve volunteers gradually floated in, all maximising their baggage allowance with ocean faring toys or a well thought out collection of homewares difficult to come by on a small island. We crammed it all into a mini-bus and spent the twenty-minute trip into town alternating between excited introductions and gluing our eyes to the windows collectively soaking in our new homes.

Even downtown, Vanuatu is a strong contender for the most colourful place I’ve ever visited. Fruit markets adjoin major intersections under the shelter of floral and tribal fabric, with tables stretched out in a fractal mosaic of unrecognisable fruit and veg. Emerald tree canopies hang over the road dangling flowers like red fairy lights next to another tree that sports flowers that look like those circus pinwheel toys. Fences aren’t a thing here – instead a rapidly growing hedge is planted on property boundaries that erupts in even more red flowers that old dudes pluck and place behind their ears.

The ocean, visible from any street in Port Vila, glows postcard-blue against the impenetrable green that only a tropical jungle can give. In an environment so vivid, it makes sense that the Sydney smart casual didn’t make it across the pond. Island uniform is the short-sleeved button up piercingly decorated in elaborate tribal patterns that would be fitting a light show of a Pink Floyd concert.

[ The locals call these Christmas Trees due to their seasonal blooming and I think that’s rad ] — [ *The locals call these Christmas Trees due to their seasonal blooming and I think that’s rad ]*

To maximize exhaustion, we had a meet and greet that night. We rocked up bright eyed and bushy tailed, if battle weary from a day’s travel, and met far more people than my memory bank could deal with. Nevertheless, it was a great opportunity for a chinwag and a chance to meet some new friends. The more established volunteers eyed us with the mild bemusement of an old family dog just introduced to a new puppy but patiently fielded our enthusiastic, or panicked, requests for information about the new world we’re about to wake up in.

The next ten days heightened our symptoms of information overload with the In-Country-Orientation-Program. Here we learnt that Vanuatu holds the impressive title of “Most at-risk country of Natural Disasters” and we better come up with a plan to deal with one when, not if, we get hit. Vanuatu forms a crucial 1000km join-the dots of the Ring of Fire, with most mountains either still active or recently dormant volcanoes. With such tireless geological activity, we can expect an earthquake once every six weeks to keep us on our toes. Cyclones take a tour of the Coral Sea a few times a year and all low-lying land is dotted with signs that direct you where to run in case of Tsunami. There are also foot long centipedes that bite you while you sleep. This was the take home point for most of us. I confess that on numerous occasions I leapt out of bed with adrenaline coursing through my veins ready to fight a balrog, to realise that I just scratched my leg in my sleep. It was a false alarm tonight, but when it happens, I would be ready.

[ You would have time to read this in an emergency ] — [ *You would have time to read this in an emergency ]*

Each day started with a four-hour crash course in Bislama. Known as “Wan Tok” (One Talk) in Vanuatu, it came from a need for all members of different tribes have a common tongue. This need was a response to Australia’s suspiciously unpublicised history of early settlement slave trading. As brought to light in the recent ABC article,Ni-Vanuatu were ‘blackbirded’ from beaches across the 83-island archipelago and brought to Australia for indentured servitude on fruit plantations. Vanuatu has another honour of the world’s highest language density per capita, with 110 different languages scattered around its 83 islands. As the Ni-Vanuatu were taken to Australia from all over, it was impossible to converse in their native languages, so a new language was fashioned. Despite its grisly origin story, Vanuatu is fiercely proud of Bislama, and we were very grateful for the crash course to avoid looking like orphaned cruise ship pelicans.

Bislama is a fun one to learn. Vanuatu, at the time called New-Hebrides, was simultaneously colonised by both the French and the English so Bislama’s vocabulary is based on phonetic English, but sentences are strung together with French grammar. This seems an advantage at first, but it’s cancelled out by the locals’ tendency to speak at warp speed. It’s strange that a language based on English can be as incomprehensible as it seems on first listen, especially given you hear an English word punch through every couple of sentences, but the language has a very satisfying wing it approach. As one of our classmates put it, “in the Vanuatu spelling bee, everyone is a winner”, words are spelt in any number of different ways so long as the message gets across. While I’ve mostly been spruiking some of the hilarious phrases for English words (check out this video to find out what Mix-Master Jesus Christ is referring to), my favourite part is the slang. Slang has such an important role in language. It proves once and for all that it’s not what you say but how you say it and it cuts through basic communication to a nation’s culture and sense of humour. While you could say “I’m wandering around aimlessly” it’s more fun to say, “I’m spearing the public road” and get treated to howls of laughter. Other favourites include “the tide is out, can you give me a slippery pencil” to mean “I have no cash at the moment, can you give me a credit” and “the road is small” to describe the sensation of having too much kava and stumbling home in an inefficient zig zag as you’re unable to stay your course along the street.

Kava is another cultural phenomenon Vanuatu prides itself in, having the impressive claim of the strongest Kava in the Pacific. It’s made from a root crop, traditionally by a circle of dudes chewing it up and spitting it into a communal banana leaf before straining the liquid out for consumption. Thankfully, nowadays the roots pass through a grinder and are mixed with water to be served at Kava bars, or Nakamals. This root-juice forms a dense grey liquid that looks like old differential oil or a concrete washout bucket. Depending on who you speak to, it has an earthy peppery flavour or tastes like drinking from a puddle. Both will tell you to drink it as fast as possible and most locals can scull a shell faster than a uni student. What follows is a race to purge the flavour as fast as you can by vigorously spitting or eating a slice of fruit or “Wasimout” – Wash mouth. Aside from an instantaneously numb mouth, the effects are subtle. It puts the body in a relaxed place, as if ready for a night on the couch with a glass of wine, while seeming to leave the mind alert. As a side effect, Kava makes drinkers sensitive to bright lights and loud noises. So, while western bars are full of flashy lights and obnoxious music, Nakamals are shrouded in darkness and near silent once you learn to tune out the constant spitting. It apparently works like anti-anxiety medication, with the result of people having calm, quiet, but excited banter in the corner as they watch the colours drain from the sky.

One of the main motivations for choosing Vanuatu was the potential for outdoor adventure. While I was originally concocting a mass scouring of the islands for uncharted rapids, what that took me by surprise here is the quality of the surf. I’m committing a heinous crime by plastering this on the internet, but hell they’ll need the tourism soon, and from six weeks there I’m amazed it’s not seen on the same level as Indonesia or Fiji. Just outside Port Vila lies the town of Pango, right in the swell window sweet spot from behind New Caledonia. There are three makeable reef breaks accessible from shore, each of a different difficulty so you can tailor just how much you want to charge that day.

It’s a different beast paddling above coral. It’s gorgeous to look beneath the surface to see the line-up teeming with fish life but the clarity of the water makes that sharp n spiny coral look real close to the surface when waves start crashing onto dry reef. Fortunately, you adapt quickly, and your benchmark rock for ‘too low to go out’ gets more and more lenient. Living in Pango, the tide started to play a major role in life. Given it moves forward by an hour a day, you have one glorious week with two high tides each day, which mandates spending every spare minute of daylight in the water. There’s a flipside to this coin, and the off-week when ol solwota i drei is harder to bear. But peaks and troughs and swings and roundabouts, in these weeks you actually see your non-surfing friends and if you’re completely stuck there’s always the Nakamal across the street to cater for your every social need.

It’s probably time I spoke about my job. I did have one, I promise, it wasn’t all surfing and kava. It’s a tricky org chart, but here goes: I was hired through Engineers Without Borders, with my role funded by the Australian Volunteers Program through DFAT, and seconded into a local Non-Government-Organisation (NGO) called Live and Learn,who focus on conservation and Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) in the Pacific and South-East Asia.

Engineering in the private sector is very different to engineering at a developmental NGO. In the private world – time is money, you never exceed the scope unless you’ve scored more money or you’re trying to score brownie points for the project’s phase 2, and upskilling the team is a great side effect of getting the job done. As a volunteer seconded to an NGO – my time is free, the scope changes faster than my living arrangements of the past month and the primary goal is upskilling the team.

There’s a reason for this. While the immediate goal may be “get water from A to B”, the long-term goal is that the developing country doesn’t need to fly hyperactive Australians to the jungle to do this on their behalf. As a result, our official role is a mentor, and our value add is coaching so the team to do this on their own later, or at least trying to creatively drop fresh Bislama slang to boost morale. The buzzword for this is ‘capacity building’ but I prefer to think of it as the “teach a man to fish” philosophy.

There’s another crucial difference in the developmental world – the amount of community consultation required. Again, in the corporate world you write into the proposal “you will have one (1) workshop, and then two rounds of feedback. Any more than this, please have a squiz at our handy table of charge out rates which will be applied at a 1.5x multiplier” But things don’t quite work like that out here. In Uganda, there was a classic example of a project that went to hell following a lack of community buy in. It started with a well-meaning, if misguided, chap who saw the misery that malaria was having on communities. Obviously, the solution was mosquito nets, so he bought a bunch and handed them out willy-nilly with no training on how to use them. Before long, these nets sure looked like they would be great for fishing. All of a sudden, the unintended consequences of intervention were seen: fish stocks were depleted due to the small mesh size catching babies, the local net weaver is low on sales, and people were still dying of malaria. Even then, we played a game of “what’s the weirdest use of mosquito nets you’ve seen?” and we saw them used at the back of soccer goalposts. In Vanuatu, a colleague described a water supply pipeline in an outer island that serviced multiple villages of different traditional tribes. Even now, mounds of leaves are gathered on top of the HDPE pipeline downstream of some of the villages in attempts to burn it. It wasn’t clear if this was a deliberate middle finger to the downstream neighbours, or just kids being kids, but the end result is a broken pipe, a lack of water and all the complications that brings. So consultation, community buy in, and ultimately the community taking ownership of the project is key. I’ll admit, I could probably do these things a little better, but hey early days right?

But back to immediate goals, Live and Learn was at the tail end of a project called WASH in Schools and I was to take over the last school’s improvements. Due to a few curve balls no one saw coming (my team evaporated), finishing off this gig would be my last at Live and Learn, with plans to move me to the Department of Water. I would be based on Tanna, a remote island South of Efate with minimal English speakers best known for having the most accessible active volcano in the world. Cue insufferable stoke and punchable grin once more - I’m gonna get to rough it and need to take active measures to avoid my brown badge.

This meant that WASH in Schools had to be finished up in 3-4 weeks or so. This wasn’t an unreasonable goal and was a great chance to get the hang of engineering out here with the safety nets of peers and English to fall back on.

The purpose of WASH in Schools is pretty simple: improve water, sanitation and hygiene facilities at schools while giving school staff all the operations, maintenance and management training necessary to ensure the improvements hold their value over time. In practice, this meant a site survey and condition assessment of some of the gnarliest toilets I ever did see, develop a prioritised scheme of as many easy wins within the budget as possible, and work with the trio of school handymen – Randy, Fred & Wawaw – to build it all and keep it snazzy when it’s done.

My first course of action was to google “how to plumbing, basic, guide”, and after reading a 150 page manual by a guy in Connecticut I was an expert and ready to venture into the world of toilet maintenance. Fortunately, this school didn’t have a supply problem – it met Vanuatu’s newly minted Sanitation Guidelines as far as toilets per person goes – but what facilities they had were in dire need of maintenance. It was common for toilets to be missing doors, cisterns or lacking a water supply. Concerningly, a urinal was filled with concrete to prevent drainage, while it was very much still in use leading to a backflow onto the floor followed by draining onto the main walkway. There was no evidence that any of the septic tanks had been emptied in the last twenty years and walking around the back of the blocks made it clear the flow was going somewhere else. And, maybe it’s been a while since I’ve seen a teenage boys’ toilet block but holy dooly it would surprise you what graffiti the kids come up with these days. Meanwhile, kids’ handwashing after business was very good, but there was none observed prior to eating which is vital for breaking the faecal cycle as well as stopping species-threatening pandemics.

While it may sound like things were in disarray, there were plenty of easy wins to get things back on track. The lads and I scoured the water supply lines for potential tapstand locations; developed and completed something of a toilet parts audit; and we made preparations to empty the septic tanks. There was an argument to leave them be and build new ones - “it’s soil now”, as it were. However, modifying a faulty tank is about 70% cheaper than installing a new one and avoiding all the existing pipes in the ground is easier said than done. Anyway, prepping a septic tank for a sucker truck feels like opening a sarcophagus except Tutankhamun is twenty years of poop, and I think that’s pretty cool.

Giving a safety talk is always fun – there couldn’t be a drier topic and if you’ve ever ignored the airline safety briefing, you’ll know how much people like to block out this stuff. The fun isn’t in the content but lies in throwing enough humour into the mix to make sure people listen without distracting from the message you’re trying to convey. If you truly want to play this game on expert mode, give the speech in another language. My Bislama needed a challenge, and now seemed as good a day as any.

I crushed it, frankly. There were giggles at the right moments, nods of appreciation at the sombre points, and a deliberate effort to ensure their glasses and gloves were fitted properly after excluding the area around the pit to crack open this mummy.

* ominous chanting & inexplicable gusts of wind *

Minutes after what I thought was a stellar briefing, the sucker truck operator showed up and stuck his bare hand into the septic tank to check consistency. At least Randy, Fred and Wawaw were still wearing their goggles and gloves. Fortunately, everyone eagerly washed their hands afterwards when I threatened them with corona virus. Assuming they get around to closing their borders before anymore damn cruise ships come in, Coronavirus and the handwashing practice it triggers could be the best thing to happen out here from a WASH perspective.

Meanwhile, the prospect of Tanna took me out of the first 3 weeks of stability I’ve had in 7 months and threw me back into limbo. Not that I didn’t want this - I couldn’t be more stoked - but limbo is a tiring beast. Your mind’s torn between the present and viciously prepping for what the next step may or may not be. Like the “I’m moving to Vanuatu” phase of July to January, the “I’m moving to Tanna” phase required constant excited chitchat about all possibilities while furiously working out how on earth you’re going to pull it off. Thanks to the ever benevolent if surprisingly all-knowing members of the Coconut Wireless, there was no shortage of advice on where to stay, what to do and exactly how much fun I was going to have. Before long I had a list of people to hang out with, a spreadsheet full of life information and advice on how to do all the tourist stuff without paying for it. Between knocking off WASH in Schools and the obligatory sunrise/sunset surfs of the blessed high tide week; I was checking out cars, calling every accommodation provider in Tanna and doubling down on Bislama lessons so that I could function as a human without English. Limbo is tiring, but when the possibilities are as exciting as they seemed, it’s worth it to find the joy in the uncertainty.

“Life in limbo needs faith,” my WASH colleague and Brazilian surf bro Daniel offered between sips of Tusker Bitter one Sunday evening, “trust the universe my friend.” Sage advice always sounds more genuine from a foreign accent. We watched another unmakeable barrel courtesy of Tropical Cyclone Gretel heave its way along the dry reef, officially marking the beginning of Low Tide Week. The surf had been remarkable the past seven days. Between the friendly dugongs that roamed the take-off zone and the rainbows that shone in spite of Gretel’s menace on the horizon, it had been a particularly great high tide week. With the wide-eyed conviction of a college kid talking about Joe Rogen, every morning I frothed to my housemates over bananas and pawpaw that today was the best surf it had been since I got here.

Maybe she was angered at being ignored, but Gretel wasn’t going to have her thunder stolen any longer. Port Vila was sitting at the edge of a Category Two cyclone, yet sixty knot winds were bowling shutters open and filling our bedrooms with pieces of thatch roof. The house creaked to avoid being turned inside out, in a reminder that this is half the wind speed Cyclone Pam boasted when it directly hit Vanuatu five years ago. As the rain pooled on my balcony and threatened to spill into my room, my phone started blipping with a distant apocalypse.

It wasn’t that Corona fear wasn’t a thing here, but Vanuatu had a unique vantage point to watch the world burn. It’s only accessible from a handful of countries, it’s isolated in the pacific, and has a handy internal border of even more ocean between its islands – Vanuatu has a sturdy natural defence system to stop it getting here. Once it is here, it would be a different story. There are no in-country tests available (everything gets sent to Melbourne), and there are only 18 ICU beds in the country with no ventilators. Combine this with twelve-person minibus transport, communal living arrangements and people spitting every ten seconds at the Nakamals – once it gets here it would be the pathological equivalent of Australia’s bushfires. But it felt like all we could do is hope they stop those stinky cruise ships, bring our own coconut shells to the kava bars and get on with our lives but with a lot more handwashing. Corona hadn’t made it here, but at the cost of stopping my friends from visiting, a trade off that seemed bearable to me. In my selfish mind at least - corona was a problem for the rest of the world, and my game plan of move to Tanna to smash out some pipelines and let this whole thing blow over was as exciting as it was bulletproof.

There are a handful of moments that are so impactful that people recall them vividly, even if the details fade to a blur. Boomers speak of cramming into a room and sitting on the carpet round the cathode ray telly to watch the moon landing. Millennials can tell you exactly what 4thgrade class they were sitting in when someone broke the news of 9/11. For a group of 60 Australian volunteers, it was getting thatbloody email that told us we were to be evacuated within the next 14 days. Our group chat started frantically blipping and blended with the sound of the rain battering the windows. I instantaneously went through all 7 stages of grief - angry, cranky, frustrated, irked, pissed off, miffed, grumpy and finally quarrelsome – before replying to the offending communication with an aggressive piece of my mind that no doubt solved the problem. With that out of the way and the crisis averted I dutifully set about emptying my remaining two septic tanks. The lads were counting on me and we needed to finish WASH in Schools before I moved to Tanna.

It would turn out that my campaign to overrule the CEO’s decision was unsuccessful. Through one of the most rapidly changing situations I’ve lived through – our staged fourteen-day deportation timeline became 7 days from now, then 5, then tomorrow night, then an email came through an hour later while we were frantically packing to say the plane would leave the day after tomorrow. To quote one Peace Corps volunteer who was also pulled out the same week, few weeks can be as stressful and tiring as dealing with the fallout of being “fired, evicted, and deported in one afternoon.”. After a mandatory night on the Tuskers to commiserate we all set about trying to undo all the life admin that we laboriously set up only a few weeks ago. Fortunately, this time we had Bislama on our side. I cracked jokes about Kava as I disconnected our utilities account and bantered with an Auntie at Air Vanuatu to get on the last direct flight to Sydney, and it suddenly seemed that putting this much effort into a language I’ll only use for six weeks was the strongest loss I’ll feel. I booked one last lesson with my Bislama teacher knowing that it might be the last of his income for the next four months and asked him to teach me some swear words.

Isolation is a great time for reflection but can be a minefield for overthinking.

Why was leaving such a sting? Leaving six weeks after spending six months preparing is an anticlimax, but too easy an answer. Getting a glimpse of what life could be like but never getting to try it feels like getting a nice steak dinner, but the waiter took it back to the kitchen just as I got my knife and fork out. Failed trips leave you feeling cheated; they’re far from the ride you signed up for. I can understand the bean counter’s perspective, even if I’ll never vocally support it – an evacuation now is much cheaper than an evacuation when all international flights have halted. Is it from a diplomatic sense that I’m pissed? Were I a Vanuatu official who saw Australia pull out at the first sign of bad weather, I’d mark them as that mate who wouldn’t help you move house but would happily drink your beer at the housewarming next weekend.

But I don’t think diplomatically, I’m far too selfish for that. From a background of Surf Life Saving and extreme sports; dealing with crises is something I get a kick out of. Calling an emergency ‘fun’ would be insensitive, but assuming they’re successful they often are in hindsight. A health emergency places an increased demand on water and wastewater systems, surely if there is ever a dire need for water engineers it would be now? Rising to a challenge is a habit, but so is backing down from one – is pulling out saying I couldn’t cut it? Does admitting I couldn’t cut it make my frustrations purely driven by ego? Would I rather be a burden on an under-staffed health system or acknowledge that I’m not the right tool for this job? Is my role now just to sit on the bench while the A-league players finish the game, and am I ok that all I can do is rest while my team-mates finish this round? Is retreating to my established health system just falling back on my western privilege that I’m trying to alleviate by being on this assignment in the first place? Why do they call them fingers, but you never see them fing?

[ Welcome to Sydney, stay home for the next 6 months ] — [ *Welcome to Sydney, stay home for the next 6 months ]*

I don’t know what the way is from here. We’re all repatriated and approaching the end of mandatory quarantine. Workplaces around the country are announcing redundancies if their industry hasn’t already disintegrated. Two months ago, Australians were over-donating to bushfire relief agencies until charities begged them to stop because they had nowhere to store the groceries. Today people brawl over bog roll and you’re encouraged to dob your mate in for a $10,000 fine if he goes for a surf. It feels an ugly time to be home.

I’m one of the lucky ones. I’m quarantining at a friend’s farm that was ransacked by bushfire and spending the days trying to heal the burns of the summer gives plenty of time to be outside. At least, that’s what I call dicking around with a chainsaw on a property full of dead trees. It’s surprisingly zenful, if you ever give it a try. You remain very present - that rotating blade doesn’t care about the past but it can sure mess up your future. Plus, there’s something satisfying about making a half-truth-half-joke that when the world went to hell I went to the woods and retrained as a lumberjack.

There isn’t a satisfying ending to this story available yet – which hopefully means it’s still going. This low tide week has gone on for much longer than it should, and it isn’t peak low yet. There’s a positive to cyclical arrangements though; whether it’s the tide, the stock market or hospital inundations. Eventually the tide will come back in, bae hem i hapen.

Hope this string of yarns distracted you from the rest of the nonsense going on out there. It certainly gave me something to do and this highly technical paper will be a good source of CPD hours.

Vanuatu has just been hit by Category 5 Tropical Cyclone Harold, all but destroying Luganville and the remote communities of Santo, Pentecost and their surrounding islands. This couldn’t have happened at a more logistically challenging time, as the isolated nation strives to maintain zero corona contamination while co-ordinating an aid response. Without being a donation hound, you can support the recovery effort through CARE Australiawho are on the ground and launching a full scale emergency response.

Engineering, Life and Ocean Faring in the South Pacific

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