It's a small world after all

The weather has turned a little sour here in Vanuatu. It's still lovely and warm, but it's raining and very humid. Still, it's nicer than cold.

Yesterday Pastor Allen took the four of us around the island of Efate. We started off a bit late because he had some difficulty getting the bus, so we ended up heading off around 12 o'clock, but that wasn't particularly a problem. We went anti clockwise around the island, starting off with some truly terrible roads. Apparently the US government supports Vanuatu with aid in the order of $63M a year because they like that Vanuatu has a very stable democratic government. So that money is being used to build a road around Efate (using contractors from NZ). We saw some evidence of that in the northern parts of the island, but it hasn't quite taken hold in the east and south bits yet, so it was quite bumpy. There are quite a lot of tourist developments along the coast, quite a few of which are still being built. Once the road comes full circle they should be able to do a roaring trade.

We found out that there are 14 parishes in the presbytery of Efate (and six presbyteries in the whole of Vanuatu), and Pastor Allen seems to know about half the people on the island.

About halfway around the island we had a toilet stop at a Pastor's house. I was overcome by the smell of the toilet, but even more overcome by the welcome we were shown and the lovely conversations we had with Alice, the Pastor's wife, Max, her son, and their dog Blacky. We were entirely unexpected but they welcomed us with open arms. We told Alice where we were from, Sydney Australia, and she told us she's spent 3 weeks at Alan Walker College in Parramatta doing an “Empowering Women for God” course. We were quite amazed. Pastor Allen spoke very highly of Max, it seems he's a well spoken young man who has finished his theological course and he's about to go back to college to do some more training on the island of Santo.

The rain cleared a bit as we went around the top half of the island and were were able to see some beautiful scenery. Then as we headed into Villa we went down some of the steepest road I had ever seen. It was very clear why we had to go anti-clockwise around the island because there was no freakin' way we could have got up that hill. I'm thinking they will modify that road a bit when they make the road around the island, but I could be wrong.

We returned to the hotel, by that time it was raining again. We had Pastor Allen around for a drink and had a short chat about the plans for the rest of the week. Pastor Allen kept saying we should take things one day at a time. We're meeting with some Pastors tomorrow, and I'm particularly looking forward to meeting the congregation of Paama tonight. We do seem to be developing good relationships, but sometimes the pace is strange, mostly, for us who are used to scheduling everything to the half hour, it's frustratingly slow. Please pray that the path will start to become clearer for us as we develop more relationships over the next few days.

Margaret and I are now more than half way through our visit, and we have a free boat ride that we probably should have taken a few days ago, I'm not that keen on taking it now that it's raining a lot. Oh well, we've got lots of excellent reasons to come back next time.

Katherine