the wai

many questions, one clear answer Ko Chris tōku ingoa, no Titirangi ahau, and I'm off on an adventure to Vanuatu with Volunteer Service Abroad. I'll be working in water safety and supply in Sanma province, and here you can find out all about what I'm getting up to.

[wanderingwai]

Now I would like to refute upfront any suggestions that I was bored during quarantine, I just felt it pertinent to reiterate a very important message from our noble leader @jacindaardern on this here beat. Dre please don't sue me, I know you have lots of money. Check out the quarantine digs, pretty flash eh.

[wanderingwai]

People of EWB: Chris Hartnett

We connect, educate, and empower people through humanitarian engineering

Some non Covid news for ya! ;) I had a week story about my time in Vanuatu with the team from EWB NZ, check it out!

[wanderingwai]

This is a short instructional video on how to build a 22,500L Ferro Cement Tank. 

This tank was constructed as part of a training program for the Department of Water Resources Vanuatu. Staff from all over Vanuatu came to learn the construction techniques before returning to their islands and share the techniques with other provincial staff and communities. 

 This video was filmed, edited and narrated by Chris Hartnett who is on a two year assignment volunteering with the DoWR in Luganville, Espiritu Santo, through Volunteer Service Abroad and Engineers Without Borders NZ. 

 This tank and training program was supported by NZ Aid and Unicef.

[wanderingwai]

Finding where we are

One of the biggest challenges faced by the Department of Water Resources (DoWR) Engineers in Vanuatu is the ability to obtain good quality spatial data for developing designs of water systems. The distance from a source to a settlement is often estimated by the time it takes to walk there, or by relating to another familiar distance, but these methods often don’t translate well to accurate quantities for the purchase of pipe and fittings. Thankfully through a bit of training and practice with the various and now readily available location tracking devices, DoWR rural water officers are building skills to collect, import, then share location data with Engineers leading to better, more cost-accurate designs.

Paper still prevails for many rural water officers when recording Latitude and Longitude readings from a handheld GPS units in the field, either due to lack of knowledge of how to successfully store and export a set of points, or because of a missing USB cable. Either way, getting scribbled coordinates out of the notebook and pinned to the right place in Google Earth can be a daunting task to the uninitiated. To assist with this, Chris Hartnett (EWBNZ/VSA), has developed an Excel template, complete with instructional YouTube video (like everything these days), and provides training using it with his colleagues in Luganville, Santo. Degrees, minutes and seconds are easily entered in their own cells, and then converted to decimal degrees in a .csv file for import into Google Earth. See for yourself here and try your hand at Bislama.

Moving away from paper is also a good idea (think of the trees!), especially when water systems become larger and more complicated. This is where Michelle Knappstein has been making great progress by training DoWR officers in SHEFA and TAFEA provinces in the wonderful ways of KoBo Toolbox. KoBo provides a nifty set of tools for data collection and management that have been developed specifically for use in humanitarian aid and challenging environments (for free). Michelle regularly assists DoWR staff to collect household and infrastructure survey data on smartphones and tablets in very remote villages. Data is then synced back up to a cloud database for review on desktop and then input to designs. Michelle presented this workflow to great interest at the 2019 Pacific Water and Wastewater Association conference help in Port Vila; see the presentation here (get link from Michelle or does anyone else have?).

The unrelenting spread of the smart-device now means “most” (40% according to… Google) of the world have the world at their fingertips, including the far reaches of Vanuatu. The trick now is making sure we have the skills to use these tools for worthy tasks, and not just killing time. I’m sure “most” too would agree there are few tasks more worthy than improving access to clean drinking water. 

[wanderingwai]

This is a short documentary showing a project that we recently completed in a very remote community in Big Bay Bush, Santo.

Before coming to Vanuatu we are briefed about expectations and trying to limit these to make our experiences easier. Despite this I was holding a small hope of being able to install a new system from start to finish, and I’m very lucky to say that this goal was realised.

In a joint project between the Ministry of Health and SANMA Provincial government we were able to install a springbox to collect the water, 1.8km of HDPE pipe, two 6000L Poly storage tanks, and 5 tapstands. This was all done in a week which was pretty good progress I would say, and was a good exercise in organisation and planning as it is a very remote location. If anything was forgotten or lost, it could take a long time to find a replacement.

As has been my experience on all my travels so far in Vanuatu, the people are extremely welcoming and generous when you enter the village and I’m sure you can see by the video we had a lot of fun. I managed to make some good friends during our time in Vutkara sharing stories of music and our respective homes. It’s a real privilege to spend time in these villages as they don’t normally get many Tasale (whiteman). 

The strength of the communities and the connection that people have with their land is a real asset to Vanuatu and it’s a great insight for me to see how this can affect indigenous people all over the world. Development and globalisation moves on, water is most definitely a part of that, so things will inevitably continue to change. My interest is to see how we can embrace and promote the ways of those that  remain more in tune with nature to undue some of the environmentally and socially destructive pathways we have followed.

[wanderingwai]

Humanitarian Engineering Conference 2019

I’m very honoured to be presenting at this years Engineers Without Borders Humanitarian Engineering Conference in Auckland on 27th July. I attended last year just before heading off on my journey to Vanuatu and it was a great little primer for my first jaunt into development.

One year on and I have had a very full and fulfilling year working in rural water supply development on Santo Island in Vanuatu. On top of that I have been heavily involved with the emergency response for those evacuated from Ambae Island to Santo due to volcanic ash fall last year.

This will be the topic of my presentation at the conference, my experiences and learnings providing humanitarian aid on the side of water, sanitation and hygiene. This is one of the biggest themes in international development and I had not really been exposed to it before so needless to say I have learnt a huge amount. I will be sharing some successes and challenges with the aim of helping others when they find themselves in similar situations.

Check out the list of other amazing speakers that will be there on the day. If you have any interest in humanitarian aid or development in the Pacific, truly a day not to be missed.

[wanderingwai]

... when all is ready, I throw this switch!

[wanderingwai]

Getting into the mahi!

I was pretty pleased today to be getting into some real work, with the hands y’know. Not like typing with the hands, but like using a saw with the hands, drilling screws with the hands (using tools as well of course), and even connecting plastic pipes with the hands.

After endless months of assessments and patiently getting on with their business, the community at Manaro St, so named after the Volcano that has displaced them from their home on Ambae island, are now the hopefully soon proud inheritors of a solar water pumping system.

Complete with six x 275 W solar panels, a 1000 W submersible pump, the system is capable of a maximum of 4000 L per hour. The system will replace a small petrol generator the community has been using to fill two 6000 L tanks, that were also donated by the Chinese Embassy. The system brings water closer to home for nearly 400 residents that previously faced an 800m walk to a slow trickle at a hand pump down the road.

The systems provided by Savvy Solar in Port Vila are surprisingly easy to install for anyone with a bit of DIY skills, and so far seem to be fitting the purpose pretty well. The set up used here is the JCS Cheers 4” Screw Pump JS4-100 with a maximum head of 100 m, priced at around $4700 NZD, for anyone in the market.

Next work for us is to work with the community to install the bases for the storage tanks, place the tanks themselves and the pipework and taps, followed by facilitating the Drinking Water Safety and Security Plan workshops, which forms part of Vanuatu's strategy to achieve 100% access to clean water by 2030. Needless to say a long way to go, but these kinds of systems show a lot of merit on and island rich in groundwater, the salubrious Espiritu Santo.

[wanderingwai]

Checking in from South West Bay Malekula, a little village called Lawa where we’ve just completed four days of Drinking Water Safety Security Planning, the DWSSP, a bit of a tongue twister, but we got through the whole process. From describing the supply, looking at risks, then coming up with community and water committee actions for improvement.

There was a lot of good feedback from the participants, I met a lot of really nice people and spent a week in the community so its been a really nice time. We found out a few risks, quite big ones for the water supply in Lawa that the community wasn’t aware of but are now feeling pretty empowered moving forward in how they might be able to manage them. So really good outcome and I’m looking forward to coming back sometime to see how it’s all working out.

These workshops are a recent development in Vanuatu to help work towards the Sustainable Development Goals of access to safe drinking water by 2030.

Plenty more places to visit on the water safety planning side of things, so I’ll keep you updated.

[wanderingwai]

How to: Coconut scratching stool

Coconuts are a way of life here in Vanuatu. Eat them, drink them, milk them, cook them, they are delicious is all of their different shapes and forms. This video focuses on the milking side of things.

Coconut milk is used heavily in local cooking by scratching out of the inside of brown coconuts, adding water, then squeezing out with the hands. But to get a nice finely scratched coconut, you need a scratcher. I’ve been asking around for a while about where to find these scratching stools, but no luck. Many people have offered to make me one, but I decided to take it into my own two hands and get busy on a sunny Saturday morning.

See how it turned out and get in touch if you need any tips on how to make your own. Needless to say, the milk is now flowing, sans-air miles, sans-BPA poisoning, sans-pollution, sans-expensive.. con-deliciousness.

[wanderingwai]

Google Win

I recently transitioned to using Google Photo’s for managing photos on my iPhone as I became increasingly frustrated with how difficult it was to simply download photos from my phone. This was a time consuming process but eventually managed to get all my photos for the last 10 years uploaded to the cloud.

The Google photos set up is great for work too, simply take photos, and when you get back to WIFI, they will upload to the cloud ready to download and share. But recently I found another feature that makes this process even better.

Google My Maps is a pretty useful but somewhat hidden platform for creating your own online maps with the Google platform. After a little exploring and assuming that it must be possible I discovered you can import photos into you Google My Maps map straight from Google Photos. Assuming you have location services turn on on your device when taking photos, these will automatically geo-locate to where they were taken; generally accurate to 5 - 10 m.

Check out the map of my recent construction monitoring visit to Malo:

https://drive.google.com/a/thewai.co.nz/open?id=1sA-YvYbVzlqatKbozdXJTSCWA-giLGrh&usp=sharing

These points can then also be exported to Google Earth to get a rough idea of elevation as well. Pretty dam handy. Seems like technology is finally catching up to make these kind of things that you assume should be easy,  actually easy. 

My iPhone was recently displaced after some rather exuberant Birthday celebrations, and now the owner of a Moto G4, googles original flagship phone, which makes the process even easier.

Disclaimer: no privacy issues have been considered in this shameless promotion of Google. 

[wanderingwai]

Whatungarongaro te tangata, toi tū te whenua

[wanderingwai]

A lesson in faith

It’s just gone Saturday afternoon in Luganville, and I’ve got hummus on the brain. I’ve collected the cans of chickepeas (didn’t soak this time soz) and as I get home after a busy morning at work #volunteering, I walk around to the back garden to check for fallen lemons. We have a pretty productive tree out back, maybe every second or third time I go out I find 1 or 2 on the ground, but there is always the chance there will be none.

As I around the corner I spot two siting in plain sight. Instant relief, joy, gratification. An irrational moment of thought that somehow, in this moment especially, I have earned these lemons. Science and growing up in western society have taught me that this no link between our actions and random acts of nature, say a lemon falling from a tree. But this mantra escapes me momentarily as I feel in some small way I am being rewarded for the intentions I have put into the universe this morning.

The lads and I from the Department of Water Resources were out this morning cleaning and delivering Portaloos to an evacuation centre in Luganville. More than two hundred people of Ambae have turned the Apostolic Church downtown into a mini urban-village and have had the use of only two toilets for a couple of weeks now. I have been working with the WASH cluster, and after much number crunching and meetings, we finally got organized to actually (hopefully) deliver some relief items this week. Toilets for the church being the top priority.

Finding the lemons was a lesson in faith. That creeping curiosity that for some reason, a power greater than myself is showing favour through providing bounty. Have I joined the church? Not yet, but I am endlessly intrigued by how this kind of faith may/may not have been manipulated throughout the ages. Mother Nature is a beautiful creature and I’m looking to untrain what science has taught me that she is dictated by quantifiable actions and re-actions alone. Embrace the in-explainable, make lemons rain from the sky like raindrops. Surely it make life more interesting.

[wanderingwai]

Nava knows where it goes

This is Nava, first name Salatiel, and he is kindly pointing out where to mark a point for a new tap stand to deliver water. Nava has been working in water supply for more than 30 years in the area of Torba, so fair to say, he knows where to put a tap. The other fullas are residents of a small village in the middle of Santo, called Kororo. The village kindly invited us to stay with them one night as we did a small survey for a new water supply and consultation with the community.

The villagers of Kororo are sticking to Kustom ways in sporting the Nambas, which are the thin pieces of fabric containing the nether regions. We were treated to a big kai including pork crackling, that had been cooked inside a length of bamboo in an earth oven. Very tasty, but pretty fatty, and I could only stomach so much being someone who doesn’t eat a lot of meat. In the evening we shared a few tall glasses of kava and had a good chat with the chief over some bush tobacco. 

It was great to get out “in the field” and get a small taste of the village life. It’s crucial that these communities get good service to water so that they can maintain the custom way of life and resist the pressure of urban drift. Something that the Vanuatu government is also very interested in doing, especially with Luganville infrastructure being very stretched as it is. Hopefully we can get a good outcome and source for these people, as they say “wota blo sors blo laef”.

[wanderingwai]

Full steam to Santo

There is a bit of a festival atmosphere in Luganville at the moment. I’ve only been here a few weeks, but it seems in the last 10 days there has been a noticeable increase in the hive of activity down main street, people hanging from cranes (see photo), kind of like the feel you get in a small kiwi bach town in the lead up to new years eve. Sadly, this increased hum in not a cause for celebration, and is in fact due to the evacuation of 11,000 people from the island of Ambae because of falling volcanic ash.

While the government has officially supported for the evacuees to relocate to the island of Maewo, it is gradually becoming obvious that the majority are choosing to relocate to Santo. The reasons for this are many and vary depending on who you speak to, but Santo may provide more opportunities, and it seems many have more support here. Many are staying with family in the mid-term until they can establish new communities on land they have purchased. The lynch-pin to these plans of course being, access to water.

The influx of people is also adding pressure to the already stretched capacity of the urban water supply in Luganville, so it’s fair to say that I’ve been injected into a busy in at the Department of Water Resources.

But in reality, I’m sure things are always changing here, being so exposed to elements and changes in the natural environment that they draw their livelihood from. From the people I have spoken to so far, they are still laughing and smiling and pretty at peace to just get on with it and carve out a new life. Pretty admirable and made me wonder how the reaction would be back home, say if the population of Waiheke had to pack whatever they could fit onto small ferry’s and leave without a clear indication of ever being able to return.

So, it seems this will be quite a defining part of my work here in the first wee while, who knows how long. I’m still very much just taking in the new environment and getting to know my team, who are passionate about finding ways to help out. I’m still just sponging it all up to try and find ways I can be support as well. Smiling seems to work for starters.

[wanderingwai]

Let’s face it, life isn’t much fun if you can’t compost. Sending endless food scraps to landfill and missing a golden opportunity to enlighten the environmental ego, it really brings you down. Waste management in Vanauatu is pretty limited so haven’t seen any commercial bins for sale and even struggling to find suitable materials to make one. Then I had a rummage around the yard and spotted some tires that looked like some likely candidates. A quick youtube later and I was out there doing it myself! Here’s how it turned out.

[wanderingwai]

First field trip

Got out with the boys this morning to hand deliver the water bills (Bil blo wota) to a few hundred residents around Luganville. There are very few road names here and no postal system, so all the bills are delivered in person by the DoWR staff each quarter.

This was good fun to meet my new workmates and have a look around the town. It felt a bit mafioso-esque, rolling around in a big truck, 3 bigs guys and one white falla, serving these people with the bills. But there was always a good laugh and joke between the people and they all seemed pretty happy. Good opportunity for me to get some more of the street talk of Bislama happening too. I made a pack with my man Ezekiel to get it down in 3 months so that we can joke more.

So that was a good first field trip, should be lots more fun to have out on the road, and some work as well too of course.