February 17

I stayed inside and spent most of the day reading about water solutions. It's interesting, kind of. Alex and I have been told the community has a good source, which makes solutions a whole lot simpler. But it's still complicated. And the village doesn't have the resources, organization or expertise to ensure all maintenance requirements of a even a simple gravity-fed system will be looked after well. They had system installed some time ago, and it's now essentially defunct. The information I read today suggested the expected life for a water system should be ~20 years, but due to lack of resources (replacement parts, local technical knowledge or otherwise) the average life-span of a water system in rural Vanuatu is about 5-10 years. This suggest the last system was relatively fine, the local community just forgot to plan for it's replacement, so I guess that's a big part of our work as well.

The simplest solution would be for everyone just to get their own water tanks and set-up rainwater catchment systems wanwan (that's bislama for individually or each, pronounced one one). The problem with this solution is that there's (we've been told) a fairly long dry season, meaning that everyone would need really big tanks, which are sas (that's bislama for expensive).

The baby parrot sat beside me and screamed the entire day.

People giving us food in exchange for charging their cell phones with our solar panel seems to be a pretty good system that's developing organically, today we got oranges, kumula (sweet potato) and snake beans (which are really good, they look kind of like a bean but their about 12 to 18 inches long and about as fat as a half dollar coin).