NUI HAOS BLO MI...

... Does not exist - yet.

It is Peace Corps policy that by the time you are sent to site your village will have built or provided for you a home. Due to several factors that hasn't been the case with me.

The Coffee Organization of Vanuatu (COV), a charitable organization that built and operates the coffee factory, and the primary organization for whom I'll be working, has been working with the owner of Tanna Coffee, the sole contractual customer of the COV, to get funding to build a "factory manager" house from the New Zealand High Commission. If that sounds a little confusing rest assured that it's even more confusing than you can imagine. The short end of the tale is that these things take time and no one got on the ball soon enough. Part of the problem is that too many people are sharing responsibility to the point that for a while no one was really in charge of making things happen. And, or course, a bigger part of the problem is simple bureauracracy.

Normally Ni-Vans can throw together a custom house - like the one I lived in for 10 weeks during training - in less than a week. And this would be fine with me. But Terry is planning for the future and wants the house to be good enough to act as partial compensation for a future factory manager - not a bad idea. Therefore, he wants concrete floors, half-concrete walls (topped with bamboo) , glass windows, a built-in kitchen and flushing toilets, tin roof with water-collection system, electricity and running water. The plans he submitted also included furniture like a desk, 2 beds, gas stove, small fridge and some other stuff that pushed the costs over vt 1 million. Herein lies the big delay. Turns out that if the quote for all the supplies can be kept under vt 500,000 then this will qualify for speedy approval. vt 500,000 is equal to about $5,000. So he's been removing items and re-submitting the quote... which takes more time.

In the mean time Peace Corps policy would be to keep me in Vila until a house gets built - and indeed, it's a testament to the intentions of the village that requested me in the first place to have built a house before my training was complete. Peace Corps' first thought is why haven't they just built a custom house while we wait for the funds to come through? well... if I have a custom house then how do you convince a charity of the need to build another, better house? So somehow Terry was able to convince the Peace Corps director that the funds would be approved and the house would be constructed within the month. With that in mind, Peace Corps went out on a limb and agreed to put me up in a bungalow, at a steeply discounted rate, for ONE month. One week has gone by, the quotes haven't been approved, there is still debate about where exactly to build the house, and the next meeting of the board of the COV isn't for another 2 weeks. Nothing can fully be decided until then. so.... there is no way in hell my house will be built before the end of the month. It simply can't happen.

Last I heard from the Assistant Peace Corps Director was that if the house wasn't built soon they would send me to another site on another island - Ambrym. He seemed pretty serious about it.

Ugh.