THE VANUATU VOLCANO

A couple of days after John and Shona came for their visit the volcano on a small island north of the main island of Espiritu Santo became very active. It had been smoking and threatening for quite some time, but now it began to spew mud and ash and caused the local rains to turn acidic.

We were able to get approval for an emergency relief project to help the villagers who had to be evacuated. The Vanuatu Disaster Management Office (DMO) decided that the villages in danger would have to be evacuated. Their plan was to have each relocated family hosted by another family on the opposite side of the island which shared the same ethnic and cultural beliefs. This “one family at a time” approach took a lot of extra effort, but it proved to be a very successful plan. Each evacuee family was matched up with a host family. The government then allocated additional land to the host family so they could plant more crops to support their family and the hosted evacuees. Detailed census information was collected for each host family and for each evacuee family. No one was lost or left out. All were accounted for and taken care of.

In addition to providing emergency relief food to assist in tiding them over until their new gardens can begin to produce, our emergency relief project also provided farm and gardening tools for the evacuees, and water storage tanks for the host villages. We have been conducting regular conference calls with our in-country contacts, church leaders, village leaders, and others to coordinate the needs and resources of the evacuees and the host families. The situation is beginning to stabilize now, so we won’t need to contact them again until next week.

This is a picture of the beautiful island of Gaua under normal conditions.

This is a picture taken by someone else of the Gaua Volcano as it started to increase in activity. (See credit of photo)

Here are the local members of the LDS Church who assisted us in distributing food and supplies to the evacuees.

This is a picture of our local relief workers with some of the evacuees.

More evacuees with their host families, some of whom were also LDS relief workers.

These are members of the LDS Church on the island of Gaua, Vanuatu.

These men are the priesthood leaders of the Gaua Branch of the LDS Church.

Here we are delivering a water storage tank to one of the host villages. With the additional village members (evacuees) they need to be able to capture and hold more rain water.

These are the village chiefs from both the east and the west sides of the island. They met to work out the evacuee/host-family details.

This is a picture of the headquarters for host-family coordination.

Here are some evacuees waiting to see an airplane land and take off. They don’t have a landing strip on their side of the island.

This is a picture of the Red Cross and Vanuatu Disaster Management Centre. We coordinated all of our relief work with this group.

Smoke and ash billowing from the volcano.

This is a picture of some volcanic ash that built up on a leaf.

Finally, a picture of the LDS Church branch president collecting census information from members of the church who were host families. The information he gathers is turned into the DMO.