If Kevin and Judy were family members, they would be the ones who never received an invitation to family functions. If by some strange chance they did, they would arrive empty handed. If they did bring something Judy’s promised “salad” would comprise of a small container of supermarket coleslaw and Kevin would bring five cans of warm Joseph Kuhtze well passed its expiry date. They would leave with enough food to feed them for a week and with two dozen Corona and a nice bottle of pinot noir pilfered from the garage. Worse still – they would bring their snotty nosed, ill-behaved children of questionable intelligence to rampage through your house. The boy would be around ten and his parents would attribute his “energy” to his inquisitive and curious nature. Everyone else would attribute it to foetal alcohol syndrome. They would force you to listen to their daughter Summer Brook, (who, if weight was a criterion, should have been named Winter Torrent), aged around fourteen and “an extremely talented singer”, deliver a rendition of “Halleluljah” which would strip the paint off walls and cause the dog to go into hiding. At lunch, Judy would release an enormous fart accompanied by the words “Better out than in” and Kevin, always one for the witty one-liner, would reply “Jesus, love – what crept up there and died?” I would then say “I imagine that it was your hopes, dreams, dignity and what remains of your self-respect, Kevin” which would receive a blank stare in return, because Kevin is terminally stupid.
Anyway, you get the drift. Judy and Kevin arrived in Vanuatu one after the other and caused major damage to a country which least needed it. For those of you unaware of this piece of trivia, Vanuatu is officially the most disaster-prone country in the world. Judy was a category 3 cyclone but developed into a 4 (highest rating is 5), and hit Port Vila on the evening of Tuesday, February 28 and Kevin, which followed directly on her heels on March 3, was a 4 which developed into a 5 by the time it hit the island of Tanna due south from Vila. It was very confronting and even though Maria and I had experienced cyclones previously when we were up here in 2016/17, they were nothing like this. Maria had just been up for a week and flew out on the previous Saturday. Good one Maria!! As usual, her timing was impeccable.
Thank you to all who enquired about my welfare. I appreciated the contact. There is more that you can do though, by donating alcohol. I have found it a huge source of solace over the last couple of weeks and have even got to enjoy the taste of a lukewarm G & T. By gifting one bottle a week (premium spirits only please), you can relieve the suffering of a bewildered, tubby, middle-aged man.
The NZ High Commission are great in these situations and keep in touch with everyone. They have failed miserably however in the donation of alcohol. The advice provided was to purchase enough perishable food for a week, tape up solid glass windows and doors and install cyclone shutters, roll up carpet rugs and place them on the top of beds, move mattresses against windows and fill your bath with water. I wondered why it was necessary to have a bath before a cyclone and had a wee chuckle to myself before days later appreciating the seriousness of the message when we ran out of water! Fortunately, I had taken some precautions in that regard and we weren’t without water for any lengthy period.
At The Terraces, where I am staying in an apartment, heavy duty cyclone boards were bolted in over all of the windows, shutting out most natural light. When Judy arrived, it was confronting to hear the roar of the wind which caused the boards to flex incredibly and to a point where, on a number of occasions, I thought they were going to be ripped off. For a whole lot of good reasons, you are not permitted outside. The only respite came when the eye of the cyclone hovered over us with a peacefulness and stillness which can lure you into a false sense of security. Judy lasted a day and when she had gone it appeared that most of the damage was to trees and vegetation. Power lines had been brought down which had meant that we were without power from Wednesday, March 1. The problem with that is that it is bloody hot up here and following the cyclone it was very still, so no breeze to cool you down. Sleeping becomes a real issue as you basically stew in your own sweat. The swimming pools are off limits because they are full of vegetation and have to be drained to avoid becoming a mosquito breeding centre.
On the Tuesday evening with Judy developing, I had called in to see Shane and Steph who are in one of the other apartments. Shane is with the NZ Army and they are here on a three-year project. They were with Mark and Jenny who had come down from Santo for the weekend and ended up having to stay for nearly two weeks! Mark is a NZ police officer also here on project work. We were joined by Steve, another NZ police officer working here in Vila on a project. His wife, Kim flies in and out. We clubbed our food together and with the undoubted benefit of alcohol started developing a strategy to deal with the two impending cyclones. I’ve been in some strategy meetings, but it would be hard to beat this one. It went long into the night and at the end of it I had no idea what our strategy was. At some point Steph poured whiskey into my red wine. At a point shortIy after that, I drank it. Life-threatening situations make people do crazy stuff. But I got back to my apartment (eventually) and spent the night sleeping well, despite the attentions of Judy which ramped up the following day.
I remember thinking to myself – I’m pleased I didn’t fill the bath up with water. It was immediately prior to the water being cut off. So much for that. No real problem though as the local supermarket was open (once things had died down) and you could get water if you needed it. The fridge was the only real problem and I found myself wondering how long the extraordinarily expensive yoghurt in my fridge would last before turning (NZ$17 for a 950gram tub of Anchor yoghurt). Four days as it turned out, although I was operating on very tiny health risk margins by that stage (should yoghurt be that hairy and what’s that funny smell?) Then along came Kevin. Kevin was displaying all the pent-up rage of a man for whom life just hadn’t worked out. If he wasn’t a cyclone he would have have been a recently fired postal worker in the US who decided to turn up at the local shopping mall and take his anger and inadequacy out on everyone around him with a semi-automatic weapon. Kevin was another level altogether and definitely a very serious situation. The noise was fierce (so fierce I could hear it over the sound of my own whimpering), and my apartment was literally shaking for a lot of the night.
As day dawned, it was clear that Port Vila had suffered some real damage. Big trees snapped in half, the ceiling of the open-air reception area at our complex blown out, two thick glass balustrades above the tennis court ripped out and smashed on the court below. All in all, though not too bad. At work, two tree trunks had smashed holes in the exterior walls of my chambers and there was a bit of minor flooding. In town there was property damage everywhere. In some places it was like a bomb had gone off amongst the vegetation and where there had been lush green foliage now there was only brown.
The Kiwis formed a work crew to help clean up some of the mess at the complex. I then went over to Mangailiu for a couple of days to help our friends Scott and Darlene clean up their property which had suffered severe damage. They have a beautiful boutique resort which they have built from the ground up. Darlene had done a magnificent job developing beautiful gardens. We were there when the building commenced, and when Maria was here, we went out to lunch there. As we drove home, we were laughing about just what a great time we had, listening to stories that you could only hear from people who had lived here for a long time. There were two other couples there and we enjoyed a beautiful lunch in the newly built nakamal (open air meeting house) and ended the day lolling about in the ocean at the bottom of the garden, drinking wine and swapping yarns. Maria and I had had our photo taken on a reinforced concrete seat which was part of a beautiful wall they had put in between the beach and buildings. We sat around in the comfortable chairs on the bar deck swapping stories. It was heart-breaking to go back there to see that the wall had been completely smashed and then consumed by the sea, which had encroached about 60 metres up into their section and with it had taken the bar deck, the deck off their house, a massage cabana and had demolished the nakamal. Water had flooded through the bar and kitchen and their home. Fortunately, they had moved further up the section as the storm grew worse so physically, they were okay.
I spent the first day with them lugging a water pump over to a creek to divert water into a water tank and cutting down trees and vegetation. It was like working in a sauna. As we were doing this, Scott said “So, a judge an accountant and a sexologist walk into the bush….” Scott is indeed an accountant and Darlene is a sexologist. And I know what you’re thinking – what the hell is an accountant doing there? The ability to demonstrate humour in those circumstances was incredible – but they are incredible people. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so useful and useless at the same time. The following day we had a crew of about ten clearing the flooded buildings of debris. The power of the ocean is stunning, demonstrated by one very large piece of concrete foundation having been hurled in through their bedroom ranch sliders. In the photo below, taken only six days before the cyclone, the white reinforced concrete wall we are sitting on has completely disappeared as has the deck and roofing attached to the building behind us. The sea swept through that building.
On the upside, I got to wield a machete and cut up trees and vegetation. People here carry machetes like we would carry a handkerchief back home. And watching the locals use them is watching an art performance. Up trees in jandals, lopping branches off. Not an orange cone or hi-viz vest in sight. All good for the soul. It’s impressive stuff. But there is a limit, and I was not permitted to go up a tree in my jandals and have a crack. There had been enough mayhem already.
Scott and Darlene are an amazing couple and the way they were able to deal with the situation has been inspirational. I have no doubt that they will bounce back with a bit of time. The number of people turning up to help is a tribute to the sort of people they are.
While the power was off, I took to having cold showers at 2am to try to cool down. Or trying to sleep on the tiled floor of the apartment. We got a generator operating after four days which enabled us to operate fans and lights in our apartments but not a fridge, microwave, toaster or kettle. The generator was switched on between 7pm and 7am. Better than nothing. Infuriatingly, some parts of Vila had full power restored after a week and despite the fact that we had underground cables, our power was not restored until Monday, March 13, almost two weeks after we had lost it.
In the interim, ants decided to invade the apartment and take over all rubbish bins and the fridge. Millions of them. They have been fought with a vigorous rear-guard action which has seen me claim victory (for now). They have become my new nemesis! It is much worse at work where there are literally millions and they have been joined by those big-arse tropical cockroaches. They are the sort of insects who would steal your car if you let them! They travel in groups, swapping gang signs and wearing balaclavas. All part of the fun. You really do have to admire their work ethic though. And while you can go about slaughtering huge numbers of hard-working ants with gay abandon, you kill one giraffe and all hell breaks loose. Go figure.
And bloody Kevin just didn’t steal the two dozen Corona and a bottle of pinot. He also managed to bugger off with my TV aerial which meant that I also had no internet or TV. Oh, the indignity!
Regrettably, power has not yet been restored to the court administration block where our chambers and the registry are located and until a day or so ago was not restored to the courtrooms which are located at a different site. It has meant that work has come to a halt which is now a source of major frustration. I have tried to make myself useful by attending a court clean-up morning and getting on the end of a broom and then coming in each day to conduct a full review of every file on my docket. The time you can spend in the office is limited because of the heat. It didn’t surprise me to find a number of files where conferences had been allocated for me by my predecessor, Stephen Harrop, but which hadn’t made it into my diary and, oddly enough, had not been the subject of any enquiry by any counsel! My files are now completely up to date and I shall spend some time tomorrow grappling with a 51 page application based on alleged breaches of the Constitution by various government agencies and for various remedies. See – this job can be fun. I’ve also dug out a box ominously labelled “Land Appeal Case”, the significance of which will be appreciated by any judge who has served time here. Frankly, the power can’t be turned on quickly enough for me and, with a month to go it’s going to be something of a mad scramble.
On the plus side we are back rowing and on Tuesday rowed in a quad as the rain poured down from the heavens – beautiful, warm rain. As we headed up the lagoon under the guidance of our stroke, Karl, a former Royal Marine (and looks as though he could still be one), a magnificent rainbow appeared and a turtle popped up beside the boat to check out what was going on. On mornings like that you wouldn’t be anywhere else.
Don’t worry Maria – I’m sure things will be back up and running by the time you get up here!