Passing-Over Prawns on Easter

With my village planning a picnic for the upcoming Easter Holiday, it was brought to my attention that one of the villagers, Daniel, had plans to dump “Medicine” into the rivers to gather up prawns for the Easter holiday village picnic. Apparently the week before, Daniel had witnessed a neighboring village dumping a “medicine” into their river then, for a few hundred meters downstream, all the prawns float up to the top and children ran around picking up the prawns. Of course this sounded fishy to me and I began questioning the process and the so called “medicine”. When Daniel realized I was overly interested in this topic of conversation because I was concerned with the idea and practice of it, he countered by saying “Well it was a man US, someone from your country, who showed us how to do this in the first place so it must be something good”. This furthered my probing and questioning and by the end of our conversation I deciphered that American Mormon Missionaries had shown this neighboring village, in Daniels presence, how to use mosquito net treatment poison (heavily subsidized by aid organizations to be free to all in the fight against Malaria) in their rivers to kill all life, including prawns, for an easy harvest. This being shown to these villagers with total disregard for any of the other life in the river, the delicate ecosystems in the river, the unsustainable aspects of this harvesting method not to mention the river in question is the water source for all of the urban area here in Luganville. Thus my week leading up to Easter included many talks on the inter-connectedness of living things, why poisoning a river is a bad idea and making some compromises to stop Daniel from bringing this practice to Butmas, which after the weeks talks he agreed to. By the Monday after Easter (Easter Monday, A holiday celebrated by those in Australia, NZ and here in Vanuatu) the rivers had been spared from poison and in return I followed a group that collected prawns with masks and spears so Daniel could have his prawns at the picnic(see photo above) and I agreed to construct some traps for the village and do some research into the practice of farming prawns to try to introduce some sustainability to their prawn harvesting and river resource.

However saving the rivers was not all that happened last week. I also broke ground on a community tree nursery that when completed should have a capacity of over 2000 seedlings. This nursery is for the trees that will be planted in the 10 hectares of the agro forestry project we are working on. The nursery uses only Bamboo in its construction including the 20 foot long raised beds to try and keep the seedlings isolated from the constantly wet ground in Butmas, thus regulating the moisture of the soil. Currently we have potted 600 Sandalwood Seedlings and are planning on raising over 1500 along with some other trees with future timber value and a number of fruit and nut trees that can be used for food throughout the villagers lives and then timber when the trees are fully mature.

I hope in the next few days to be able to post the previous emails I have sent throughout my first year here and to archive them for anyone interested. Thank you for those who have written back and as always I would love to hear from everyone all the time.

Peace and Love