After volunteering on the island of Tanna in Vanuatu, Spencer Grubbe, a senior music major from Oregon, said, “The thing I learned most was how to be content with what I have. The kids down there don’t even know what phones, video games or the internet are. They have these little games in their yards they play with rocks and sticks. The adults could sit for hours and just talk to everyone. There was never a sense of disrespect or unkindness.
“A lot of people in the United States seem to be more focused on getting to know everyone just enough and what they need to know, and not really seeing them for who they are and not perfecting their relationship with them,” said Grubbe. “In Vanuatu, they make the experience as genuine and complete as possible. They are really focused on the emotions and desires of the people.”
History
According to village lore, the U.S. military recruited men from Tanna during World War II, an island from the nation of Vanuatu. The military agreed to offer protection during the war so the islanders would be safe. The people were forever grateful for the Americans’ service, and some of the chiefs in Tanna made a prophecy that one day Americans would return to their country to help their children just as the Americans did at that time.
Maklen Kapalu, a BYU-Hawaii political science alumni and native citizen of Tanna, said she believes BYUH students were helping to fulfill this prophecy by volunteering for the Kapalu Connection.
The Kapalu Connection is a non-profit organization that sends volunteers to teach in the schools of Tanna and help build stores and houses. Kapalu cofounded the organization with William Arnett, a music graduate from Arizona who served his mission in Vanuatu. A portion of the funds the volunteers pay goes to subsidize education costs and provide scholarships for children in Tanna.
Arnett originally tried to start the business by himself but was unable to because he wasn’t a citizen. Kapalu helped him start the organization with the help of her uncle, who used to be prime minister of Vanuatu.
Kapalu said she wanted to help because it is the desire of the people of Tanna. “I’ve talked to many of the people, and they are ready to have [the volunteers] come and teach their children.” She said the government is corrupt and takes the money meant to be spent on education. Because of the corruption, some government officials have called her and asked her to contest the election and run for prime minister. Kapalu said she wants to run to help change the system. “I told them I will, once we are done working here to help Tanna,” she said.
Preparing the way
In order for the business to grow, Arnett sent volunteers in April to build houses for future volunteers. Kapalu’s family cleared out the trees on a part of their land so they could build houses and a shop. Two BYUH volunteers signed up: Alecsa Hendrick, a junior exercise sports science major from Georgia, and Drew Putnam, a business senior from Texas.
On their way to Vanuatu, Hendrick and Putnam met a cyclone in Fiji. After a detour to Samoa and four days of delay because of flooding in Fiji, they finally arrived in Vanuatu. “When we finally got to Tanna, everything started to work out for us,” said Putnam.
Because of the cyclone in Fiji and a cyclone that hit Vanuatu a year ago, Hendrick and Putnam also helped with a few rebuilding projects. “We put in water tank systems for rainwater collection and built concrete buildings for stronger protection against the hurricanes,” said Putnam.
For future volunteers, Hendrick and Putnam helped the locals start building a house, a cafeteria, a shop, and a storage unit for the shop. They left for home after two months, and the villagers finished up all of the buildings just in time for the group of Kapalu Connection volunteer teachers in July.
Living on the island
Half a dozen BYU-Hawaii students went in July for a month to teach in the schools. Arnett said he hoped the students weren’t as focused on their teaching as on learning from the people and their culture.
The students lived in two parts of the island: Lenakel and Greenpoint. Spencer Grubbe, stayed in Greenpoint for most of the time and said, “It was a very tribal area. Money was not commonly used. Lots of people told us to just carry around a machete and cut down food off of trees whenever we were hungry. They didn’t have running water. There was no electricity or easy access to manufactured goods.”
Grubbe said Lenakel was more “developed. There was more technology and things going on.” Maklen Kapalu’s village, where the volunteers stayed, is located about a mile north of Lenakel in the jungle.
In both areas, students said the people live off of the land, growing their own food in gardens or cutting it down from off of the trees. In Lanakel, Kapalu’s family prepared lunch and dinner for the students, which normally included rice, chicken or beef, potatoes, cucumbers, tomatoes, and laplap, a national dish of Vanuatu made of breadfruit, taro or yam. The cost of this food was included in what the students had to pay to go on the trip.
In Greenpoint, the students stayed in a house on the local LDS branch president’s property. Grubbe lived there with Hunter Middleton, a sophomore from Arizona studying entrepreneurship at Arizona State University. Middleton came on the trip because of a recommendation from Hyram Yarbro, a BYUH sophomore from Arizona studying peacebuilding and employee of the Kapalu Connection.
The first couple of days in Greenpoint were “rough,” said Grubbe. “The first day when we got there, we went with some guys to go get coconuts. Then, we went to a custom and sat around in a circle for the whole day. The next day, we went back and did more sitting, and by the end of that day we were just walking around to break the monotony.” Middleton confirmed, “Two days felt like a week.”
Middleton said the biggest challenge was that no one spoke English in Greenpoint, whereas a few villagers spoke English in Lenakel. However, the national language, Bislama, contains some broken English words in it, so he said he felt like they “could get by.”
Sarah Precourt, a junior from Massachusetts studying communications, said some of the challenges included adjusting to the food, the living situation, and trying to figure out the culture.
Ciarra Butler, a senior from Arizona studying anthropology, stayed with Precourt in Lanakel and said it was difficult allowing the people to serve them. She said she felt like she should help out when they were building or preparing food, but the people didn’t want the volunteers to get hurt or dirty.
Grubbe said he enjoyed the lack of cellular reception and the consequential disconnection with social media and the internet in general. He said they would spend their free time talking with the locals about their cultures and history.
Both Middleton and Grubbe agreed that they were grateful for their experiences. “It was really cool to get some ‘only Greenpoint’ experiences,’” said Middleton.
The People
Overall, the students said they were impressed by how nice and accommodating all the people were. Grubbe said, “The family we stayed with did our laundry, cooked us food, did our dishes, and they wouldn’t let us help.”
Butler said she loved how happy all the people were. “My life isn’t any better than theirs because I’ve never seen anyone here unhappy.” She added, “Most of them live in houses made of palm trees. There are no roads… They thrive here with almost nothing. They have something we need, something we’re lacking.”
The group also said they were surprised by how friendly the people were when they found out the students were from America. “I didn’t realize the people of Tanna really like Americans,” said Grubbe.
“Even though they knew we don’t speak Bislama, they still try to communicate with you,” Grubbe continued. “We got asked the same basic 10 English questions over and over again because it’s the only ones they knew.”
“They were so happy that we were there, they gave us food while we passed by. One guy stopped us and talked to us for a while, and then he told his son to go get some sugar cane for us.”
Precourt said, “Coming here, I was scared I was going to do something that would offend them, but then getting here you realize there’s really nothing you can do to offend them except for very small things.”
Teaching experiences
Precourt decided to stay in Lanakel to teach at Isangel Central Primary School, one of the only schools near Lanakel where students learn English. She said children understand English at a “pretty young age.” She said the hardest part was teaching pronunciation. However, she said some progress was made. “They became more comfortable with the English. My first day, we had to slow down and take a lot more time.”
Some of the difficulties included “correcting some of the English problems people have when they’re typing or writing,” said Precourt. “So they’ll be writing things, and they don’t understand that a letter can completely change a word sometimes. One time, there was a sixth grader who was supposed to be typing ‘thick bush on the mountain’ and they said ‘dick bush on the mountain.’ I saw that and stopped and tried so hard not to laugh because the kid had made such a huge mistake. I was trying to figure out what he was trying to say,” but then she noticed he had written the same wrong word “in all the sentences before too.”
She said children in Tanna are just as like children in America. “They’re like normal American kids and are super energetic and excited to learn. They love having different teachers, whether we be from the States or from somewhere else.”
Butler taught in a kindergarten where the students learn “the mother language.” She was impressed at how the little children learn to speak so many languages, including each individual village’s language.
Middleton and Grubbe expressed difficulty teaching in the kindergarten at Greenpoint. The children spoke no English and after the first day of class, the teacher stopped showing up. They found the most effective way of teaching was to sing songs. They sang songs about the alphabet, days of the week, etc.
<b>Sight-seeing</b>
Part of the group’s itinerary and fees included seeing some of the main landmarks of Tanna. They said their favorite was Mount Yasur, the world’s most consistently erupting volcano, according to the local tourist hub.
Middleton said, “It was hard to believe we were watching it. You’re looking past the shooting lava and there’s the ocean and the sunset.”
Precourt said, “If it was somewhere like America, they would stop you at the first checkpoint where you could see part of it. You [wouldn’t] see anything. I’ve been to the national park on the Big Island and you’re about a good mile away from the crater and just see smoke. [In Tanna,] you could see inside the crater. You could feel the sulfur. You could even taste the sulfur… that was not fun, especially when you’re trying to stay up and not get blown over by the wind because you’re bending over and choking because you’re dying. But besides that part, it was fun.”
Grubbe said, “There are some experiences that you ... see in pictures and videos and think, ‘That’d be something cool to see.’ Then you go the world’s most consistently erupting volcano and you just see lava spraying up every 30 seconds. There’s nothing I can say to do the experience justice.”
Butler paid to go to the volcano a second time. “I would do it again over and over. There’s just raw power.”
Middleton said it was “weird” because they were around other white people – tourists. “We were living here in Tanna and then we go to a tourist attraction where people are here just to visit and travel. It was kind of interesting seeing everyone so clean and… I don’t know… that part I wasn’t a big fan of, but the volcano itself was awesome.” Butler agreed, “It was kind of a disadvantage that it was in a tourism place rather than [a representation] of the true culture.”
The group also visited a local attraction known as The Blue Hole, a cave only accessible by swimming underwater.
Grubbe said, “I had seen pictures of [the Blue Hole] and just thought, ‘Cool, it’s a cave in the ocean.’ But then there’s so many different things to see – the waves, the sunlight, the very specific blue the water was…”
Precourt said, “The Blue Hole was probably one of the coolest things for me because I’m an ocean person. To be able to swim and see all the different fish they had… swimming inside and seeing how blue it was… I was trying to describe it in my journal and realized I have no way of describing this. I couldn’t even describe the blue. It was this navy, aqua marine blue but even then it wasn’t those. It had turquoise and all these brilliant shades of blue.”
Butler said it was beautiful. “It wasn’t as outwardly fantastic as the volcano but it was kind of a quiet assurance of beauty and power of the water,” she said.
“Seeing the volcano and the blue hole was the pinnacle of all earthly power. It was fire and water, the mecca of the earth,” said Butler. “If you want to learn how small you really are in a world of big forces, come to Tanna.”
The group also visited the Great Banyan Tree, which according to the local tourist organization, is the largest banyan tree in the world.
Kind of Tourism
The students said they loved being able to experience the culture and live like the people, rather than stay in a hotel. Precourt said, “We got to live with one of the chiefs and his family in their village. We got to hear straight from their mouths about the stories, the culture, their food, and all the things they’ve experienced first hand. It’s better than just having it on a PowerPoint on a slide being taught from a teacher who’s never been there and got it from a textbook.”
Butler said she has a “love-hate relationship” with tourism. “It brings money and jobs to a place, but I don’t think you’ll ever get the pure, raw culture or get the same empathy for people through tourism. When you really live with the people and you have the same dirt in your fingernails and you drink the same water and you eat the same food that came out of their garden that they tilled with their own hands, you just gain a certain understanding.”
“You almost feel like this is your home,” Butler continued. “When you live with the people, you do what they do, and you spend time with them, I think you gain more raw human feeling on every level, be it good and bad. There are more struggles, but I think you learn more about people and about yourself instead of just throwing money into a country and leaving with less money.”
Looking Back
Relieved after a month of constant stress of managing all the people involved in the Kapalu Connection, Arnett said he appreciates the lesson he gets when he visits the people. “You don’t need anything to be happy. [You only need] a family and the gospel, or at least some belief. Life is to be enjoyed and not worried about. You need to try to be good, to do good and to love the earth, God, and everyone around you. Sounds kind of hippie, but it’s true.”
All of the students said they think more students should go. Butler said there is something for everyone in Vanuatu. “This program is very new, so I don’t know what it will be like in the future, but I do strongly think that there’s something here for everyone. Just in our group alone, there are people who love soccer, who love music, who love teaching, who love people, who love the ocean. There’s something for all of us to find ownership for and a place. If you’re looking for adventure, Tanna’s a great place to come. If you’re looking for tourism, come for a week.”
All of the students said future volunteers should bring comfort food. “Bring cheese if you want,” said Middleton. The students constantly spoke about all the different kinds of foods they missed, noticing that most of the foods contained cheese.
Middelton also said, “Honestly, you don’t need to pack a lot of clothes. Just be ready to wear the same pairs of clothes over and over again, because that’s what the people here do. You don’t need to change. No one judges you for the clothes you wear. You don’t have to look pretty. This is jungle; it’s the bush.”
Butler concluded,“Just come and make it what you want it to be, because it’s possible.”
Writer: Josh Mason