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Reflections - Our last week in Vanuatu

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Our time in Vanuatu has been an eye opening, educational, and complex experience. The incredible beauty of the clear aqua blues of the ocean, to the beautiful loving people and the contrast of the complicated social issues has been life changing. The last few weeks have been filled with a lot of “lasts”, goodbyes, and “see you on the other side”. We have finished up housing inspections, visited with the young missionaries, worked on getting two solar systems to meeting houses on other islands, taken care of various responsibilities and just the winding up process of moving our life from here on the islands preparing to go back home. Missionaries in a village called Teouma We got a call from missionaries in the deep bush on the island of Tanna saying that they had not had water for seven days. Someone had cut the line in the village to their house and so they have been getting by with buying water to drink, and getting enough water from a neighbors tank to have a bucket shower once that...
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A Different kind of October :)

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It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. So much going on here on the islands of Vanuatu! Bed bugs on two different islands, dogs attacking rubbish cans spreading garbage, broken washing machines with no replacement parts, worms in water tanks for drinking, power and water being cut off, mold in missionary housing… and that is only this week.  The Meyers are new missionaries here. We actually worked with their son on the Mongolia project when we were on our last mission. Small world! We finished the new water well at the Mele village chapel property! Worked with the stake president who lives in the village of Mele with a new well for his house, helped someone build a new roof that had multiple holes in it, (the family was rained on during storms which is almost daily), renegotiated housing lease contracts, and made some good headway on the other issues listed above. Roof "before" pictures. This is a piece of rusted out metal that was part of the roof. It was pouri...
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September breeze

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WATER from the new well. It’s been a flurry of activity, going from one big project to the next. Our assignments are interesting from the standpoint that while we are taking care of missionary housing it also enables us to do some other things that would be considered humanitarian type of projects like water wells, and helping to get bush church buildings repaired, etc. There was this one bush chapel on the island of Malekula that was so bad, people didn’t want to go to church because there were so many holes in the natangora roof (thick durable banana leaves weaved) that the patrons would get soaked from the rain while sitting in church. Most of you reading this, would never even have the thought that you could get soaking wet in the 85-degree intense humidity during a church service. That is the reality in many places in Vanuatu. Before the rebuild. Joe worked with Brother Vianey, who lives on Malekula and has some skill. He wanted to get set up to work as an independent contractor f...
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