Installment 26; Locking them away

Another Thursday study group has passed. This time the lesson was on ‘disability’. The question for the student’s essay was ‘do you think people with disabilities should be locked away where other people can’t see them?’, ‘Why or Why not?’. Agnus and Alice were not sure. Alice said that her sister has a boy with a disability, but that she had never met him. “Why not?” I asked, “Oh, she keeps him in a room; he doesn’t come out” Alice replied”, “Does he go to church?” I asked, (quite sure that there wasn’t a living soul on the island who would be able to dodge church), “”No”, Alice replied a little louder, “He is locked in the room all the time, otherwise people would see him” “How old is the boy?” I asked. “16”. We read the article. It said that people with disabilities had rights. ‘The right to freedom’ I translated the best I could into Bislama. There is no word for ‘rights’ in Bislama, and so the English word is used. There is no concept for it either, as far as I could tell. I gave an example of a pilot having the right to go in the cockpit because he was a pilot. No one else has the right. Then I said people have rights, things we should get, just because we are human. God gave to them to us. The penny dropped. We read on.  ‘The right to mainstream education’, this five words took twenty five minutes to translate. After I finished Agnus jumped up and said “my brain has opened up” “It has changed, the people with disabilities should be let out, let out at once”, “and into the schools” she added. “We must let them in to our classes”. Agnus was standing up by now and leaping about my balcony (arms up and down, bursting with joy). When we had our closing prayer, Alice said, “thank you god, that Bridget is the same as Jesus, god she lives in the image of you” Agnus wailed her agreement. I felt a little guilty, almost as I knew God might beg to differ, (knowing all and everything). Right as they were both wailing this, I opened my eyes a little and saw my new Australian landlord standing on the bank watching us. I closed my eyes and took the opportunity to thank god that my landlord couldn’t understand their Bislama.

The model kindy has been moved. There are a lot of land issues here, and nobody has pieces of paper to say they own the land they live on. Now the government is trying to go through the process of getting land titles for everyone, and before you can build on the land you need to make sure you have one. The problem is, as soon as you apply for your land title, everyone and their big brother says that’s actually their land, and they want it back. So Susie Jane applied for her land title so we could build the model kindy, that we got funding for. But some random chief disputed it wasn’t really Susie Jane’s grandfathers land (land that the family has always lived on), he said his family lived on it before Vanuatu was independent and so it was his land. In the midst of this dispute, the deadline for completing the project loomed closer, and just eight weeks before, frightened if the kindy was not built I would have to send the money back to New Zealand, I pulled the plug on her, and decided to move it. Now the kindy will be held at Kamewa school. Kamewa school is where Fleur works, the hot leaking tin shed by the ocean. If anyone deserves a new kindy, Fleur does. We had some emergency meetings with the head of the school, and I got the cash out of my bank account and handed a whole used plastic bag of it over in crumpled brown rotting notes. We arranged a second meeting for Friday afternoon, so that I could get the receipts from everything she has purchased. When I turned up at school, school was closed, so I found a child to show me to the heads house. The head, in her pajamas, had not done anything yet, because it had been raining all week and she didn’t want to go out in it. You don’t have to go to work in Vanuatu when it rains. You don’t have to turn up at meetings, no matter how important. The first four or so meetings I attended in the rain, I attended alone. I sat their for a bit, a little confused, maybe I had got the day?. After this I learnt my lesson, until this meeting.  As I walked home on Friday, I made a decision never to leave my house, when it was raining, ever again.