The road less traveled

There is no bookstore in Vanuatu. One of the grocery stores keeps a stock of about 20-30 books and the American restaurant has a bookshelf with a 'take a book, leave a book' system (which, by the way, seems to be a system that degrades to a bookshelf of second-rate books). Peace Corps Vanuatu maintains a small library, mostly just books that volunteers have brought into the country and then left behind when they returned home (also degrading). You can typically find a book worth reading, but sometimes you have to look for a while, kind of like shopping at a bad used book store, only much smaller. Alex picked up this book called 'The Road Less Travelled' while we were in Vila. It's not a book or author that she had read previously, but she had heard of it before and I think someone in our village had asked her to keep an eye out for it.

The book is fine but that's not the point of this blog. Here's a quote from the book that Alex read aloud to me:

"Pure communism, for instance, expresses ... namely that the purpose and function of the individual is to serve the relationship, the group, the collective, the society. Only the destiny of the state is considered, the destiny of the individual is believed to be of no consequence. Pure capitalism, on the other hand, espouses the destiny of the individual even when it is at the expense of the relationship, the group, the collective, the society. Widows and orphans may starve, but this should not prevent the individual entrepreneur from enjoying all the fruits of his or her individual initiative."

I have written about communism and capitalism several times since arriving to the island. It's something we end up thinking about more than you would expect and talking about with our Ni-Vanuatu friends regularly.

Our district (and much of the developing world, I suspect) is somewhere between the two. Communism roots from before are still strong, and capitalistic initiatives are common. It's a strange place to be, and a hard place to be, and in many ways a sad place to be - trying to find a way to have the best of both worlds without the negatives of either world - And not being able to find that way.