Author: Jared Waipouri

So what do you DO? (COVID edition)

/ Jared Waipouri

When I wrote “Becoming a chicken farmer and other unexpected developments” we were one year into COVID19 border closures in Vanuatu, and hopeful that borders would soon reopen. How wrong we were, in hindsight it was another a year before Vanuatu began opening up.

With borders closed our ministry operations had transformed dramatically: outreach teams scheduled for 2020 had cancelled within weeks meaning the evaporation of thousands of dollars of cashflow, and more seriously, the loss of a chance to share V2 Life’s stories, sights, sounds, and smells with scores of young people. More personally, as I became a chicken farmer, I was trying to work out how I fit into the picture without yachts to organise and teams to host.

I did what every good missionary should do when they know that they are where they should be, but not what to do. I looked around, saw the most immediate needs, and set about giving my best efforts.

As you may have read, aside from our founding vision of encouraging and equipping young islanders for a life of Christian mission, V2 Life also runs a small chicken/egg farm and a primary school – Teouma Christian Academy.
So although a big chunk of our training and outreach ministry was on hold thanks to COVID restrictions, there was still a school to run, chickens to feed, and eggs to sell.

I’d had involvement with the chickens before the borders closed and this became a core part of my routine: each morning the chickens had to be fed, and each afternoon the eggs collected, cleaned, and packed for sale. A few days a week I was off to town selling eggs to our most loyal supporters.

On top of that part-time farm responsibility, in 2020 we made the decision to upgrade the ministry bookkeeping system, moving from offline legacy software to online cloud based accounting. Being full of willingness and ready to learn and grow, I spent a fair portion of time on that. By the end of 2020, I’d settled into a new routine: the COVID19 routine, it went something like this:

Get up early for breakfast and quiet time. Kiss my wife and walk the 300 metres from our container house to the office. At 0715, join the teachers’ devotional time, led by our founder and school principal, Roger, before a quick chat with him at 0730.
By 0800 I’d be at my desk checking bank balances and emails. For the next hour or two I’d focus on recording payments and donations received by bank transfer, receiving cash payments from school parents, recording expenses we’d incurred in the previous few days, and responding to emails of various kinds.
By mid morning I would have switched to more tricky work like resolving bookkeeping errors, updating or fixing website issues, or chasing up other weird and wonderful administration in a small charity.
By late morning I’d be fed up with the office, so after a brief check-in with the boss, I’d go and get a bag of chicken food. Feeding the hens is not a very complicated task, which makes it something of a relief from the brain intensive office work, but it can be very smelly.
By midday, with the chicken feed topped up, most of the eggs had been laid so I’d collect those and take them to the kitchen for cleaning and sorting. Broken and cracked ones would go into the fridge to be used for ministry consumption, while the rest were packaged for sale. By now I was sweaty and smelly so I’d wander home for a shower and some lunch.
On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, after a brief lunch it would be off to town to sell eggs. Far from simply selling eggs, these trips often included banking school cash, dropping off equipment for repairs, shopping for school lunch supplies, and visits to various government offices.
On Tuesday and Thursday afternoons life was a little more varied: I might have a group visiting for some training in chicken farming, some days I’d be found repairing damaged fencing, others cutting grass, and others still at home doing study or a home improvement project.
There were plenty of days during this season when stopping for lunch became secondary to the many tasks I had hoped to achieve that day.

One thing is certain: COVID19’s Vanuatu border closure did little to ease our workload, nor encourage us to slow down: it was full steam ahead.

Now that border closures have been firmly assigned to history, teams have begun to visit again and it is time to reconsider how we work. I may not have been the most logical person to run our bookkeeping, though finding a self funded missionary to take up the role is no simple thing. Yachts are back on the radar, but years of not having any around dented my confidence, both in my capacity and my certainty that I’m the right person to nurture that dream.

What do we “do” now? Well, we’re still missionaries in Vanuatu. And V2 Life is still the ministry we call home. Exactly how our days look may be different, but one thing is for sure: if you show up to see us, you’ll find us working at Kingdom business.

(Not so) Idyllic Island Life

/ Jared Waipouri

If an outsider were to visit an average village in the South Pacific and spend only a brief time, they might conclude that it is an idyllic life to be envied. In many ways they would be right because time is flexible and things happen slowly. On the way to hang the laundry, one might stop to chat with a neighbour or relative. After breakfast one might read for an hour, or lunch might be followed by a nap. Life is simple and inexpensive: dinner might consist of some taro and a soup of one of the half-wild chickens and spinach. It is cooked over an open fire with wood cut from your nearby forest. One might eat by the light of a solar light or candle. Once a home is built, on-going costs don’t include foreign luxuries like land tax, grid electricity, water bills, or rubbish collection.
But to stop there is to live in fantasy devoid of reality. To hang the laundry demands hand washing for hours at a time down the hill in the river. If it has been raining upstream and the river is dirty, that may not be possible. But because the rain upstream didn’t reach this home, the rainwater in the tank is only for drinking, so clothes washing is skipped until the river runs clean again. With villages small and each person connected in some way, that chat with the neighbour must take into account who they are, how we are related, and how a comment might travel through those connections. One mustn’t offend for fear of dividing village loyalties. While reading after breakfast is certainly an option, he who does not work does not eat, so it is more likely that one will be in the garden early before the day’s heat becomes oppressive. Perhaps the garden is under control, so feeding the pigs is the lucky draw for the day. With a walk of hours each way, tending or harvesting the food from the garden is no small undertaking. Cooking over an open fire has a certain romantic appeal, at least for this author, but to keep it going in the rainy months, most are kept in poorly lit thatch huts. For the predominantly female cooks, this can mean a lifetime of respiratory problems. Sanitation must be mentioned: running water is a luxury few villages enjoy, and those with it rarely have indoor plumbing. At best, there might be a tap in the kitchen. For the many without, large piles of dishes make a daily migration to the aforementioned river to be washed.

This is daily life for a vast number of people, and this author notes that by a wide margin the hardest working in the picture are the grandmothers, mothers, daughters, and granddaughters. The women and girls spend an inordinate portion of each day tending a cooking fire, weeding, harvesting, washing, and cooking meals. When all is said and done, the “idyllic” part of village life might equate to a brief nap after lunch interrupted by the squeal of a child, perhaps related, looking for some love.
And what of the men? Perhaps they’re at work in the garden or the local sawmill. Perhaps they have a job in town or they’re overseas picking fruit to ensure their children get through school. Perhaps they are community or church leaders, often called away to a meeting or event. No doubt whatever occupies them, a great debt of gratitude is owed to their mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters who keep the village in order while they are away.

Becoming a chicken farmer, and other unexpected developments

/ Jared Waipouri

This post was inspired by my answer to a bachelor’s party quiz: “if this season of your life had a title, what would it be?”
At the end of 2018 I arrived back in Vanuatu having declared that I would work on getting more boats reaching the remote island communities of Melanesia. As somewhere I’d facilitated boat outreach for a few years already, Vanuatu seemed like a great perfect starting point. I had no idea how the coming 2 years would expand my priorities. I was full of vision, passion, and a little caution as a result of the challenges I encountered in the Caribbean, but I was confident that my friends and mission colleagues would encourage me. I was more than a little surprised when just a few days after getting back my good friend Roger suggested that I bring my vision for boat outreach along and join his team at V2 Life. My surprise was was less in his support for my vision, but that he’d be willing to welcome all of the risk and liability of being associated so closely with a new effort, when his ministry was so comparatively established.

But he welcomed me, asking for help to grow what was, at the time a youth training ministry, into a fully-fledged primary school. At first, things were as I imagined: I spent a few days a week onsite working on whatever challenges I thought I could help with, and the rest of the time was dedicated to doing whatever I could to get boats of every kind recruited to carry help and hope to the remote parts of the country.

My problem is, whether I’ve been asked to or not, I almost always feel a need to fix problems when I see them, even if they’re just marginally within my realm of responsibility; I tend to naturally pick up on responsibility once I catch a vision. So as I worked on the myriad challenges facing V2 Life, I identified more and more with the underlying vision: to equip children and young adults with relevant skills they can use to transform their communities. With such a deep sense of responsibility, each new issue became a challenge to face head on. I worked on updating the website, I looked for fundraising opportunities, I created publicity documents, I coordinated volunteers building a new dormitory building.

Amid all of those important things were three really big events.

The first big event was succeeding in organising volunteer yacht outreaches using S/Y Rendezvous and S/Y Hapai. It was immensely exciting for me to see our concept come together. We pulled together a small collection of normal people willing to jump on a boat with glasses, medical care, and bibles to the Island of Emae. Though simple, this outreach confirmed what I’d suspected: that it is not only possible to run outreach on sail vessels, but that for some island communities of Vanuatu they are far superior to large missionary boats. Why? Because with lower overheads and smaller teams, we could slow down, take time to meet each person, understand what’s happening and adjust to meet the needs we see, not just the ones we are expecting and planning for.
Don’t get me wrong, larger vessel, large team outreaches are amazing, and the ability to deliver care to hundreds of people a day far from any significant infrastructure is nothing short of a miracle. But quite often in the hubbub of trying to make sure everyone gets seen, it can be easy to miss a mother who is exhausted from trying to care for a disabled child without tools or support; or the elderly gentleman who despite his huge difficulty walking hangs back to let the younger patients get seen first.
When we’re on a small yacht outreach with just four or five people we can’t hope to see hundreds of people in a day, but we can search out the people hidden in their homes because of shame and disability. We can take the time to listen to the needs a little more, we can respond when we find something special, something which might otherwise be left undone.
This ability to respond was best seen when our team on S/Y Rendezvous discovered a little boy lying on his family’s concrete floor in a pool of his own waste. He needed a wheelchair, his mother needed encouragement, support and tools. There was nothing available on the island, and very few qualified to help in the nation. A few months later we’d pulled together the resources: a custom wheelchair, an occupational therapist, a doctor; loaded on S/Y Hapai we returned to help this family. We spent a week, custom fitted the wheelchair, gave mum and son hope. We discovered how the little boy’s condition was limiting his communication, and we helped his mum learn to care for him better. The day we left, there was hope. Hope for a dignified life, for community life. We’d taken a week for one boy and his Mum, and shown that they were loved and cared for by a God who is totally willing to send a bunch of strangers to give them what they needed, what could not be found on the island.

The second big event was less glamorous: with Roger and his family away, I was confronted by a big stack of eggs sitting in our kitchen: our ministry chickens were laying really well, but the eggs weren’t selling. Naturally I saw a need to sharpen how our farm was operating. This could improve overall sustainability, our ministry’s access to protein, and our training options. So in I jumped, selling all of the excess eggs and beginning to put the profits aside for feed, upgrading the cages, and new hens. A few months in with a serious chunk of change saved, we built additional hen houses and runs, giving us the ability to keep more hens, raise more chicks, and (in theory) start to put some profits into our now flourishing Primary School. We ordered more hens, and our egg farm was back to being a serious part of our ministry.

The third event was, by all accounts, the most transformative: I got together with Joyce. Now my wife, we started our relationship with lunch on a Sunday in October. The following day I got on S/Y Hapai for the outreach to Emae Island mentioned above. Every day was a full effort, with many things to keep my attention, but each evening messages were flying back and forth as Joyce and I learned how to communicate as a couple, as we allowed ourselves to start falling in love. Within months it was clear that we both had the same end goal in mind, to marry someone whose heart is for the Lord, for missions, and unafraid of travelling to the far-away places. Late in the year Joyce’s dad came to visit from the Solomons to check on this Kiwi fella who was showing so much interest in his daughter. He gave his fatherly blessing and by January we were engaged to marry.

None of us could have predicted what would happen next. With our newest hens growing toward laying eggs, and wedding preparations underway Joyce and I went off to New Zealand for a wedding and to meet and greet my family. During our visit we began to hear about some kind of virus in China. With my standard level of minimising, (the kind which gives someone the ability to sleep through a category 5 cyclone) I brushed off this “coronavirus” as a storm in a tea cup and returned to Vanuatu to start ordering more layer chicks which we would need in a few months. To my surprise, by the time they were supposed to arrive in March, I was being proven very, very wrong as borders closed and import of live animals was no longer possible.

In no time we’d been forced to postpone our yacht outreach plans for the year, as well as all of the other volunteer teams we were expecting to host. Facing closed borders Joyce and I postponed our wedding by a month in the hope that things might come right. My brother found himself stranded and lent a hand with completing the little container house I was building, but soon even the joy of having his company came to an end when he was evacuated to New Zealand on an airforce Hercules.

With borders closed, there would be no yacht outreach in the foreseeable future, Joyce and I were facing a wedding day without family present, and my chicken farming efforts were facing a pretty serious hurdle. I could do nothing about the borders and our family coming for the wedding…but I could do something about the chickens.
Without further ado, and with a borrowed rooster, we commenced a very experimental breeding program. Though we did get some imported chicks in early 2021, our hopes to raise our own layer hens came to fruition a couple of months later when our first batch of cross bred hens began laying regularly. Despite challenges with reliable incubation, we’ve started to consistently hatch chicks in the hope of one day being completely independent of imported layer chicks.

The season is exactly what I wrote in the answer to that question in my bachelor’s party quiz: “If this season of your life had a title, what would it be?”

Becoming a chicken farmer, and other unexpected developments

What would you call your current season of life?

Postscript: Joyce and I have now been married for a year, and our hope is to be able to visit our families as soon as we can when borders open. Yacht outreaches are still in limbo as we wait for the COVID restrictions to ease enough to allow visiting vessels to enter the nation more freely.

Strenuous House Life

/ Jared Waipouri

A few years back I read a series of blog posts arguing for the strenuous life. They took examples from historic figures like Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill to argue for living life assertively. The author argued for not simply allowing life to happen “to” us, but for grabbing life by the short-and-curlies and getting proactive in our drive towards something of substance. Those familiar with Roosevelt or Churchill won’t find it difficult to see an argument for strenuous life being made with these two as examples: from leading cavalry charges, to being prisoners of war, taming wild nations, leading nations to form the modern world, both took life by the neck and insisted that they get their lot out of it at the earliest possible opportunity.

At the I first read these articles, I didn’t necessarily consider that I was leading a particularly strenuous life. My day-to-day rarely involved being more than a few kilometres from home, didn’t require a raised heart rate, and definitely didn’t seem to place life and limb even remotely at risk. But hindsight is often a much better judge of a situation than we consider in the moment, and in retrospect I think there’s a argument that my life was a bit strenuous.

An average day was an outreach hosting one. Here’s a run down:

0430-Alarm rudely awakes me. Stumble out of bed to the outdoor shower…wash quickly, the water is frigid.
0500-Climb into the truck and drive to the nearby bakery. Patiently wait to buy bread while internally cursing other customers who are being rude, yelling, not waiting their turn.
0530-Arrive back at home. Boil kettle. Must have coffee ASAP to reduce anger caused by irritating bakery customers.
0545-Prepare breakfast for 10-20 young people. Pancakes or french toast, scrambled eggs, fruit.
0630-A groggy half-awake helper arrives to prepare lunch stuff. First coffee finished, begin second cup.
0700-Outreach teams begin to surface for breakfast and to pack lunches. Sit down and join everyone for a few minutes, wolfing down some food and perhaps a bit more coffee.
0730-Transform into some kind of weird circus master as the entire hoard of people rush about cleaning, washing dishes, tidying and sweeping.
0830-The teams are ready to goto wherever they are doing ministry today. Often that means driving them somewhere in our truck.
0930-Back at a very quiet and fairly clean house I settle in to the office for some time checking emails, catching up on bookkeeping, planning future menus and whatever else I need to do in the office.
1100-It’s time to head to town and try and get some banking done and bills paid. If I work it right, I’ll manage to do things before offices close for lunch…if not, it could be a slow day. On the days I don’t need to do banking, I’ll catch up on grocery shopping.
1400-I’m back at the house putting away the groceries, filing whatever documents I collected in town, and getting ready for the afternoon.
1500-I start preparing food for dinner. We’re feeding hoards, so it needs to be filling, reasonably healthy, and if possible not the same as what we ate already this week.
1630-A helper or two arrive to do final preparation of the evening meal while I sneak back into the office to complete whatever I didn’t complete earlier.
1730-Dinner is served to weary, hungry, sweaty team members who’ve spent the day doing their best to share Jesus’ love.
1900-Dishes are washed by the team members as I begin to wind down.
1930-I’m ready to go and hide for the remainder of the evening as the teams sit together and tell stories of their day.

Usually by the end of 6 weeks at this pace, I was rarely sad to see the teams depart. Though there is a lot of joy in hosting teams of life-filled young adults, it’s safe to say that the pace is tough.

My friend Armin once commented that “the extraordinary life seems ordinary to those living it,” and looking back on those Grace House days I think I’m justified in claiming the same for strenuous life. We often look at the life of others and feel that they are doing better at whatever metric we are measuring, and maybe they are. But when I look back at that season, I’m forced to realise that maybe I was trying to measure my strenuous life with the wrong scale.

How do you measure your life? Is it strenuous? Should that change?