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.
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