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Llast month in the small village of Mele Maat, just outside Vanuatu’s capital, Port Vila, Alice Howell was preparing lunch when the ground began to shake. She cowered on the dirt floor as giant boulders flew past the kitchen from the hill above, sending a rock the size of a small car crashing through the thatched roof of a house, narrowly missing the bed where her grandmother slept. When it was over, the landslide had carved a huge scar into their property, and Havel heard cries of, “Mom, mom.”
She crawled outside to find her son Samuel, 3, buried up to his chin in the rubble. She and her niece Kendra, 8, dug it; when she held him close, he miraculously only had a few scratches on his back.
Now, a month later A magnitude 7.3 earthquake in Vanuatu has killed at least 14 peopleinjured more than 200 and left thousands displaced, without basic infrastructure and water supplies, they are left with only nightmares. “He’s scared, he says, ‘Mom, the earthquake knocked me over,’ and he’s worried that the dirt will cover him again,” says Havel. “I can just hug him and tell him it’s going to be okay.”
As aftershocks continue, the true cost of the devastation wreaked on the tiny Pacific island nation of Vanuatu by the Dec. 17 earthquake is beginning to emerge. Tend to natural disasters and especially vulnerable to climate breakdown, for a developing country of approx 300,000 folks, this is the third major disaster in two years. Fear continues to ripple through this tight-knit population, who climbed under buildings to try to dig up buried relatives or picked up their babies and ran as the ground rocked beneath them. In a politically unstable nation still struggling with a post-Covid tourism decline, on collapse of Air Vanuatu last May, tropical cyclones and an ongoing teachers’ strike, disruption is the new normal. “This was supposed to be the good year,” said Port Vila tour operator Philip Ayong, who has two children and an elderly mother to support but no clients. “But it never seems to end.”
The strong quake was centered 30 kilometers west of Vanuatu’s main island of Efate and took less than a minute to rip through the ground. Roads and bridges were torn up, buildings collapsed, and landslides buried cars and houses with debris. The government has estimated that rebuilding will cost 29 billion vatu ($237 million; £192 million), which includes repairs to infrastructure and schools. More than 260 buildings in the central business district are assessed for damage and many will have to be leveled. The waterfront, a mecca for tourists on the cruise ships that usually dock here, is empty.
Across the island, thousands of homes and vegetable crops, the main source of livelihood for many, have been damaged or destroyed. Half of the villages still have no drinking water, and flu and skin diseases are on the rise. Severe damage to at least 45 schools means many children will not be able to return when classes were due to resume for the year. Among the hundreds who have lost their jobs, women are the worst affected – craft markets in the city center are scattered as police say gender-based violence is on the rise from the earthquake.
But with stretched finances, lack of skills and an an uncertain political environment, recovery efforts are expected to take years.
Vanuatu Recovery Operations Center chairman John Ezra could not say when the city center would reopen – it depends on negotiations between insurance companies and building owners and the availability of demolition crews.
“It’s not safe right now,” he says, “but we’re moving into the rebuilding process, structural assessments and how to support citizens, many of whom have been put out of work.”
Aid agencies, including Save the Children and the Red Cross, are working with the government to deliver water systems, food and hygiene kits to devastated villages. Australia, New Zealand and Japan are helping with safety and demolition assessments to see where it’s safe to rebuild, Ezra says, but more help is needed.
“We need more help because we haven’t fixed this yet.”
In the tourism-dependent capital, people are worried about the future.
“We don’t know what the plan is, we don’t know the timelines, we don’t know who is making the decisions,” said Ivan Oswald, who runs the Nambawan Cafe. He runs a small staff of two from a mobile cafe where he previously employed up to 24 people, many of them women. “This is usually our busiest time of year.”
High anxiety and signs of PTSD
As the physical damage is slowly being repaired, the emotional toll of the disaster is deeper.
In the quiet of downtown Port Vila, lawyer Mark Hurley clears out his office, eerily untouched next to a giant pile of rubble and glass, the remains of the building that once housed Australian surf brand Billabong. Volunteers worked through the night to free seven people from the two-story structure, but were unable to reach at least four others, including a 13-year-old boy. This boy had his hand stuck on the roof of a car from an awning that collapsed. Hurley had passed under this awning an hour before the earthquake struck.
Vanuatu is full of “what if” stories like this. Volunteer Troy Spahn was the first to crawl under the crushed building and led the effort until an Australian team – trained in this type of rescue – arrived 27 hours after the quake. Spann recalls throwing the trapped boy a rope that he could pull to signal he was still alive. The boy initially spoke, telling rescuers where to find his mother. Local engineers arrived with cranes and forklifts, helping to calculate the weight of the concrete and predict the movement of the debris.
But after 10 hours the rope died. Spahn says his crew, which was not trained for this type of situation, did their best but was ill-equipped to make the rescue. With better tools and equipment, he believes the outcome could have been different.
“He was so brave and the fact that we couldn’t save him kills us.”
A psychological trauma team from the Pasifika Medical Association in New Zealand participated in the earthquake response, assisting Vanuatu’s only psychiatrist.
“We’re seeing a lot of anxiety, people not sleeping, signs of post-traumatic stress disorder,” says the team’s leader, Antonio Filimoejala, comparing it to trauma seen after the 2011 Christchurch earthquake. They have reached over 500 people, including in the earthquake-damaged village of Erakor. When the Guardian visits, local children play duck, duck, goose while their parents rebuild their houses. “It felt like the last days were coming,” said Merriam Naboudi, 13. “We still run outside if a truck passes us.”
In Black Sands, as he helps his grandfather put together an aid package, 10-year-old James Ephraim says he still can’t sleep. “I thought the ground was going to crack.”
“At least I can make them feel safe”
For children, ongoing trauma and disruption to education are the most pressing issues.
At least 4,000 children will start school this week in Unicef-provided tents during the hottest time of the year, cyclone season. Education authorities say they are prioritizing recovery – but with many able Ni-Vanuatu workers absorbed by Australia and New Zealand’s skilled visa schemes and a lack of funding and expertise, there are fears progress will be slow.
“There’s never enough money to rebuild these schools or enough people,” says Save the Children Vanuatu director Polly Banks, who lives in Port Vila and is struggling to find construction workers and is liaising with the Australian government to send more tents.
“If the funds don’t come, children could end up in overcrowded classrooms for years. You cannot have a comfortable education in a wet, hot, cyclone-prone climate in a tent. It’s better than nothing, but not suitable in the long run. The country simply does not have the wealth to rebuild.”
At the prestigious Malapoa College, desks are buried under piles of debris. Gifted by the Chinese government for about 1.2 billion vat (A$15 million) in 2018, the school is now uninhabitable. “I feel sad and relieved that the kids weren’t here when it happened,” said acting vice principal Frankie Tureleo, who must tell the parents of 600 children they can’t return to school this year.
Meanwhile, in Etas village, teacher Esselina Maltungtung stands under the shade of a tree as she surveys what remains of her Etas Grace School. Her daughter Celine Ken, 13, who would like to be an English teacher like her mother, has no classroom to start the school year in; at least six rooms are unusable and may have to be demolished. “There is no drinking water, there are cracks in the walls of my house, and now this,” she says, pointing to where shards of glass and iron litter the playground.
Her family occasionally sleeps outside. The terror of another earthquake keeps her awake. But when the bell rings on Monday, she will have done her job, teaching the most needed quality here now: resilience.
“I’ll go slow, keep the kids calm, give them instructions on what’s going on,” she says. “I’m not sure how to solve these problems, but at least I can make them feel like they’re safe.”
