Media Centre for Volunteer in Ghana

Bec Nicholl

Things are going really well and my Bislama is improving, although I find I can understand it much better than speak it. But even the basics make it possible to communicate quickly when people are shy.

The time we spend on the beach with the people from the village (usually three men or one man and a few older boys) is really very special. There’s lots of time waiting; either for the tide to come in or for it to get dark or for us to recover and re-hydrate from walking. You can lie back and watch the stars, the moon and indulge in the meanderings of your own mind but more often than not, this is when we get into some funny and enlightening conversations.

All the important things they’ve been busting to ask about our lives but were too shy to ask in a group, start to come out…….where do you live, do you like Vanuatu, are you married, do you have children, what is your job? And of course, we get to reciprocate with all those questions about culture and custom, village gossip and who’s related to whom, that we’ve been busting to ask.

And the turtles.....I've now seen 3 females nesting! We saw the full thing with one of them, from the time she emerged from the water to digging her nest and laying the eggs. I have named her ‘Waitem’ because when we arrived at the end of the beach, we were discussing whether to sit down and wait for a bit or head straight back in case there were Turtles coming up back near the start of the beach. Suddenly, Kalo ushered us away quickly. He had been watching over our shoulders and had seen what he thought was a rock, start moving out of the water! So, had we not waited, we would never have seen her.

We saw her outline illuminated by the moon as she paddled across the sand, surprisingly quickly, up into the scrub. We listened patiently as she flung sand into the vegetation, moving a couple of times before she found a suitable nest site.

Once Kalo knew she was preparing to lay, he allowed us up one at a time to watch her dig the hole. I was less than 1 metre from her rear end (which sounds undignified but that’s the business end in this case) as she maneuvered those ancient looking flippers with incredible dexterity, to dig a neat little egg chamber.

Once she started dropping her eggs, we all gathered around. The younger boys with us were so excited for us to be seeing all this that they shook our hands with enormous grins and gave us the big thumbs up saying ‘nambawan’, which has many meanings here, but in this case I took to mean, it doesn’t get much better than sharing something like this.

As she was filling in the nest, we measured and tagged her. Her shell or carapace was nearly 1 m in length and 75 cm across and covered in barnacles. We got to see her face and her gorgeous big eyes as we tagged her. Up close like that, you can really marvel at how simultaneously whacky and beautiful these creatures are.

The people back in the village are very supportive of the conservation project and are always keen to hear of our overnight exploits and who of the volunteers has seen the most turtles!

Some ladies who were looking after us on the weekend insisted on giving us an ‘Island dress’ (or Mother Hubbard dress) which is what they mostly wear. We wore them to the Saturday morning Bettong game (like Bocce or lawn bowls on sand) and were greeted with genuine approval by the men and women alike, along with a few laughs. The elastic under the sleeves isn’t conducive to thermal efficiency and my red, sweaty face and white legs didn’t do the blue floral any justice at all. We can't play Bettong for nuts.

I then went to help these ladies (Alice & Etta) cook lunch in their kitchen - a hot tin shed with low roof, one window and a fire!!! Still, I did learn more Bislama so it was worth it. Later I helped them make our sandwiches for the walk to the turtle beach; omelette with onion on bread smothered with peanut butter and mayonnaise; an intriguing combination which proved very satisfying after the long walk. Saturday was a big day!

Port Vila is busy today with a cruise boat in port and I'm assured the town and internet cafes will soon be filled with tourists. It's gratifying to know we can return to Tasiriki and feel we belong there.

But did I mention that people there seem genuinely happy? They seem to have all the food they need, the strong community life, music, humour and a beautiful environment and don't have to rely too much on money which they acknowledge is a great thing. It's a very enlightening experience and I’m struck by the irony of us yearning after aspects of their less complicated life with fewer possessions while these people are on the path to development which sees them yearning for, and must ultimately end with, a more complicated life and more possessions.

Much food for thought!



Life continues at a delightfully slow pace. There's much easy banter now with the villagers; chatting, games, stirring and declarations of lifelong friendship. I’m constantly filled with joy at the way people, pigs, chooks and dogs co-exist here in a sort of chaotic way which is lovely in its everyday-ness. There are small outbreaks of mayhem when some dogs chase after the chooks or pigs and adults and kids yell and chase after them to stop. One day I saw a couple of piglets chasing a dog, so there’s always some justice!

I've now seen turtle hatchlings emerging from nests and they are quite the cutest thing you ever did see. They know exactly what to do and they stumble and stagger over coral and get battered by waves but know where they're headed. It's incredible to know these little cuties will come back to lay only at this beach and no other (that’s the females, of course), no matter where they may travel for feeding (and this is what the tagging will hopefully tell us).

The main work in the past week has been digging up nests that are overdue for hatching and counting the hatched eggs (means we missed their emergence) and the bad eggs and deaduns. The capacity of the villagers to locate the nests is so superior to ours, with generations of experience of such things. It can be tricky as the nest chamber is a deep narrow hole maybe 15-20 cms in diameter and often 30-40 cms deep, which means I did lots of fruitless digging but felt purposeful anyway!

On Monday, we plan to do a reef survey (snorkeling) which should be fun. The underwater camera I bought before I left seems really quite good although choppy water makes a steady hand very difficult, not to mention the fish moving all the time! The clams are very cooperative though.

We went diving last Wednesday from the resort across the island. The dives were nice butthe highlight was seeing a Hawksbill Turtle underwater (rather than on land in the dark) and I watched it, mesmerized for a few minutes, getting to within 5-6 m before I realized I’d lost sight of the dive master. Such calm and graceful creatures underwater and so ungainly on land!