Life in the Ring of Fire Part 17: Cyclone Funa

The months of December through March in Vanuatu are cyclone season, a potentially hazardous time when one is living on an island only slightly larger than your average Disney theme park. Combined with earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, Vanuatu sports a daunting trio of possible high-budget Hollywood blockbuster disaster movies. However, unlike in the US (or any other developed country), where tremors can bring down a high-rise or a hurricane can lay waste to a levy or a volcano can burry a town in ash, Vanuatu’s more au-natural approach to living leaves surprisingly little that can be affected by such disasters. Bamboo huts are more than happy to shake right along with the restless earth, and are easily replaced when high winds carry them off, and those living the shadow of a volcano happily accept a few bucks from tourists to take them up to have a look. Given the relatively low-impact of cyclones (and the general inability to do anything to prepare for them in any case), Ni-Vans tend to adopt an alarmingly laid-back attitude to these climatological monstrosities. As such, I was quite surprised when I received a phone call on Wednesday morning from a breathless and worried Peace Corps staffer informing me that a “tropical disturbance” capable of forming a cyclone had developed a few hundred kilometers off the coast of my island and that all volunteers were being put on alert. I looked skeptically outside my window at the light drizzle I had, up until this point, been enjoying as a welcome break from the sweltering heat that had been the norm for the past few weeks. A few kids were playing marbles in the clearing outside my hut and I could see a number of the villagers hanging out at the beach and swimming. “Really?” I asked. I was told to remain calm, which I assured them would not be huge problem, as it had been several months since I’d gotten worked up about anything and I was pretty sure I’d more or less forgotten how to do so.

I had been waiting for the rain to subside so that I could walk to Lakatoro to have lunch and check my email, but after getting off the phone I decided that, what with the cyclone and all, it would probably be raining for the foreseeable future, so I grabbed my umbrella and hit the road. After eating and emailing (where I found I’d received an email about the cyclone, which I thought was an odd way to go about notifying people of an emergency in a country where internet is considered a technological novelty), I went up to McKenzie’s house to see if she was around. “You hear about the cyclone?” she asked, as I let myself in. Apparently Peace Corps had called one of the provincial government offices and convinced them to send a truck to pick her up at her work, about a half hour walk away, and return her to Lakatoro so that she could get the weather report. A few minutes later I received another call from the Peace Corps office informing me that a standfast order had been issued meaning, among other things, that we were prohibited from leaving our current locations. Cyclones, we decided, were kind of like snow days in the US, as we were now more or less required to spend the rest of the day lying around McKenzie’s house watching movies on my laptop. Meanwhile, outside, the pleasant drizzle continued and the remainder of the country was getting on with life as usual.

Over the next few hours, I fielded probably ten calls from Peace Corps either gravely informing me of the cyclone’s progress or frantically asking if I’d seen various other volunteers who they were unable to get in contact with. During that same time period the light drizzle let up and the day developed into a pleasantly cool, if somewhat overcast, afternoon. Hence, my phone calls tended to go something like this:
“Hey Danny” (for some reason, all the Peace Corps staff have an incredibly hard time not tacking on the “y” to the end of my name) “how’s the weather?”

“Pretty nice actually, we’ve got a good breeze going so I’m not sweating too much for once”

*Polite Chuckle* “Well the tropical disturbance can now be located on square G4 of the cyclone tracking map.” (We get a map of Vanuatu with a Battleship-like grid overlaid on it which we can use to track cyclones or, more practically, play Battleship).

As the day progressed, McKenzie and I began to feel increasingly like idiots as we had to explain to everyone we ran into that we weren’t allowed to leave Lakatoro because of the cyclone. It was kind of like when the schools decide to have a snow day, but then it doesn’t actually snow, so everyone just feels really dumb being trapped in their houses because of a few flurries. This continued into the next day when the tropical disturbance was upgraded to a cyclone and thus given a name (Funa, which I thought was pretty cute), but continued to not be anywhere near us.

It wasn’t until Friday morning that our standfast order was lifted and we were allowed to move around again. I headed back to Tautu to find that my house had weathered the storm without damage, except for the fact that some of the Frisbees that I use to catch water underneath where my roof leaks were bordering on overflowing. We had been planning on making a trip to Matanvat, a village in the northwest of the island where Laura, one of the volunteers from our training group, was posted, but I asked around and was told that none of the trucks from the northwest had been able to come down to Lakatoro because the rain had made the rivers impassable. Instead, I decided to make the trip up to Lavasal to see Elin’s village and hang out with Ryan and Alyssa, who’d gone up there before the cyclone. The truck ride was about and hour and my butt hurt like nothing else by the end of it, but Lavasal was undeniably gorgeous. Unlike in Tautu, where the waterfront does not have sand, but jagged rocks and coral, Lavasal has a nice stretch of black sand beach perfect for swimming. It also wasn’t as crowded as Tautu is, and the landscape had much more of a pristine feel to it. Although UNELCO, the power company that supplies electricity to Lakatoro and Tautu, doesn’t extend as far north as Lavasal, many of the houses had generators and the village was quite decidedly rich. This point was brought home when we observed the town dressing up for church. Obviously, church is an occasion for putting on one’s finest, but in all of the villages I’d been to previously that usually translated to putting on a shirt. The churchgoers in Lavasal, however, would not have looked out of place at a (somewhat) upscale restaurant in the States (maybe a P.F. Chang’s). I doubted that I had anything in my Vanuatu wardrobe to match.