Uncategorized

Why a School?

/ Jared Waipouri

V2 Life began as a Christian mission founded on YWAM values to equip and empower young adults for Christian mission work. We wanted to prepare and send Melanesians into long term missions with a robust relationship with Jesus, a solid understanding of the bible, a character which could withstand tough times, and vocational skills which could bless those in need.
Our plan was to run 6 month Discipleship Training Schools (DTS) in which students and staff spend 3 months living and learning together at our base on Efate Island, before taking what they’ve learnt into practice on a 3 month cross-cultural field trip. We were planning to compliment this DTS program with vocational courses studying the bible, safe water technology, farming, and disaster resistant building.
We did those things, and for the first few years our base was a hive of activity. But in our third year, something happened which pushed us to expand our vision: our neighbours asked us to start a primary school. In prayer, our leaders felt it was a “God idea,” so after running a kid’s club then kindergarten, in 2019 we opened Teouma Christian Academy. The thoughtful and analytical spectator would point out that primary education is not necessarily a comfortable fit for a campus focussed on young adult training, so why have we continued?

Here are 3 reasons:
1-Literacy opens the doors for opportunity
There is widely held view that across the Pacific region the deepest “poverty” felt is the poverty of opportunity.
This idea can be explained by pointing out that because of the very real isolation experienced by communities across the “blue continent” and the immense cost to deliver anything at all to these communities, a large number of people suffer from a lack of opportunity. While almost everyone has food to eat, somewhere to sleep, and clothes on their back, they cannot access mainstream universities, polytechnics, or vocational schools . They cannot readily seek out a new job in an industry unless it is already on their island. They rarely have access to the resources to start a new business. Improving access to satellite internet is helping to open doors for training by distance.
Still, to train by distance demands that potential students can speak, read, and write in the language of instruction. For most of the pacific, this has traditionally been English or French – though Chinese languages may be growing in influence now.
To be able to read, write, and communicate effectively is an essential element of equipping pacific island students to access and utilise as much opportunity as possible. In compliment to that is numeracy, not simply a nice to have skill but vital in almost every opportunity one might imagine.
Education equips pacific island rural students to learn, seek out, find, and take hold of a far wider range of opportunities than their illiterate and innumerate peers.

2-Critical thinking grows solid faith
Across the history of religion, there are many stories of individuals and groups being mislead, mistreated, and misused by some faith leader whose word was not to be questioned.
But the Christian bible, as the core text of our faith, invites (and in my view stands up to) scrutiny, claiming that God can, and will, defend Himself .
As V2 Life seeks to train believers for service in God’s kingdom, we spend a lot of energy teaching young adults that comparing what we’re told to the bible and reaching our own decision, is not just good, but essential. The value of the ability to seek out answers when in mission service, remote from a church leader to ask, is worthy of its own article. The difficulty we face with our adults though, is that they often find it much harder to break old habits and develop new thought processes: we become accustomed to accepting certain things as fixed, and never reconsidering.
Children on the other hand, are far more open to new ideas. So primary school, a place where we are learning so much, is a perfect opportunity to encourage both learning and respect. It is possible to discover the wonders of the world, to test boundaries, to try new things, while still respecting elders and our cultural history. As education providers we can nurture habits of critical thinking: who told me what I believe to be true, are they trustworthy, does this information stand up to scrutiny?

3-Jesus commands His disciples to love children
Jesus told His disciples to let the children come to Him. He was, by extension, telling them that children are just as valuable as their parents. In its time, this was ground breaking.
As we teach everyday, our actions of fairness, kindness, love, reliability, consistency, and integrity, express the love of God to each child. As a christian school we choose to show the simple love of Jesus through our actions, we teach skills which equip each student to grab opportunity, and we encourage them in prayer.

I should point out that while we’re passionate about the transformational power of Jesus in our lives, we don’t teach doctrine at Teouma Christian Academy. Because while we want each of our students to have a life-giving relationship with Jesus, doctrine is for the nation’s pastors to teach in church. Our priority is to share Jesus’ love and sacrifice with every child in a safe, caring, and nurturing environment where they get the highest possible quality of education too.
Our students are Vanuatu’s future leaders, farmers, educators, business owners, and sports stars. We must give them our best.

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.