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Last month in the small settlement of Mele Maat, just outside Vanuatu’s capital, Port Vila, Alice Hawel was preparing lunch when the ground began to shake. She cowered on the dirt floor as giant boulders flew past the kitchen from the hillside above, sending a rock the size of a small car crashing through the thatched roof of one house, narrowly missing the bed where her grandmother slept. When it was over, the landslide had gouged a huge scar through their property, and Hawel heard the cries: “Mummy, mummy.”
She scrambled outside to find her son Samuel, 3, buried up to his chin in rubble. She and her niece Kendra, 8, dug him out; when she clutched him to her, he miraculously had only a few scratches on his back.
Now, a month after the 7.3-magnitude earthquake in Vanuatu that killed at least 14 people, injured more than 200 and has left thousands displaced, without basic infrastructure and water supplies, they are left only with nightmares. “He gets scared, he says ‘Mummy, the earthquake pulled me down,’ and worries the soil will cover him again,” Hawel says. “I can just hug him, and tell him it will be OK.”
As aftershocks continue, the true cost of the devastation wrought on the small Pacific island archipelago nation of Vanuatu by the 17 December quake is now beginning to emerge. Prone to natural disasters and particularly vulnerable to climate breakdown, for the developing country of about 300,000 people this is the third major disaster in two years. Fear continues to ripple through this tight-knit population, who scrambled beneath buildings to try to unearth buried relatives, or picked up their babies and ran as the ground bucked beneath them. In a politically unstable nation still grappling with a drop in tourism after Covid, the collapse of Air Vanuatu in May last year, tropical cyclones and an ongoing teachers’ strike, disruption is the new normal. “This was meant to be the good year,” says Port Vila tour operator Philip Ayong, who has two children and an elderly mother to support – but no clients. “But it just never seems to end.”
The violent shake had its epicentre 30km west of Vanuatu’s main island of Efate, and took less than a minute to splinter the earth. Roads and bridges were torn apart, buildings collapsed, and landslides crushed cars and houses with debris. The government estimated the recovery would cost 29bn vatu ($237m; £192m), which includes the repair of infrastructure and schools. More than 260 buildings in the central business district have been assessed for damage and many will need to be flattened. The waterfront, a mecca for tourists on the cruise ships that would usually be docking here, is empty.
Across the island, thousands of homes and vegetable crops, the main source of sustenance for many, have been damaged or destroyed. Half of villages still have no drinking water, and influenza and skin disease are on the rise. Severe damage to at least 45 schools means many children won’t be able to return when lessons were scheduled to resume for the year. Among the hundreds who have lost jobs, women have been most affected – downtown handicraft markets have dispersed, while police report gender-based violence has been on the rise since the quake.
But with stretched finances, a lack of skills and an uncertain political environment, the rebuilding effort is expected to take years.
Vanuatu’s Recovery Operations Centre chair, John Ezra, cannot say when the city centre will reopen – it depends on the negotiations between insurance companies and building owners, and the availability of demolition teams.
“It’s not safe at the moment,” he says, “but we are moving into the recovery process, the structural assessments, and how to support the citizens, many who 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 broken villages. Australia, New Zealand and Japan have been helping with safety assessments and demolitionto see where is safe to rebuild, Ezra says, but more aid is needed.
“We need more help, because we still have not fixed this.”
In the tourism-dependent capital, people are worried about the future.
“We don’t know what the plan is, we don’t know timelines, we don’t know who is making decisions,” says Ivan Oswald, who runs Nambawan cafe. He’s running a skeleton staff of two from a mobile cafe, where previously he would employ up to 24 people, many of them women. “This would usually be our busiest time of year.”
High anxiety and signs of PTSD
As work slowly takes place to repair the physical damage, the emotional toll of the disaster runs deeper.
In the quiet of downtown Port Vila, lawyer Mark Hurley clears out his office, eerily untouched next to a gigantic pile of rubble and glass, the remains of the building which once housed Australian surf brand Billabong. Volunteers worked through the night to pull seven people out of this two-storey structure, but could not get to at least four more, including a 13-year-old boy. That boy had his arm trapped on the top of a car by an awning that collapsed. Hurley had walked underneath that awning an hour before the earthquake struck.
Vanuatu is full of “what if” stories like this. Volunteer Troy Spann, the first to crawl underneath the crushed building and who led the effort until an Australian team – trained for this kind of rescue – arrived 27 hours after the quake. Spann recalls throwing the trapped boy a rope he could pull on to signal he was still alive. Initially the boy spoke, telling rescuers where to find his mother. Local engineers arrived with cranes and forklifts, helping to calculate concrete weight and predict debris movement.
But 10 hours in, the rope went still. Spann says his team, who were not trained for this type of situation, did their best but were ill-equipped to carry out the rescue. With better tools and equipment, he believes the outcome could have been different.
“He was so brave, and the fact we couldn’t save him is killing us.”
A psychological trauma team from the Pasifika Medical Association in New Zealand formed part of the earthquake response, helping Vanuatu’s only psychiatrist.
“We’ve been seeing high anxiety, people not sleeping, signs of PTSD,” the team’s leader, Antonio Filimoehala, says, comparing it to the trauma seen after the 2011 Christchurch earthquake. They had reached more than 500 people, including in the quake-stricken Erakor village. When the Guardian visits, local kids play a game of duck, duck, goose while their parents rebuild their houses. “It felt like the last days were coming,” says Meriam Nabaudi, 13. “We are still running outside if a truck goes past.”
In Black Sands, helping his grandfather collect an aid package, James Ephraim, 10, says he still can’t sleep. “I thought the ground would crack.”
‘At least I can make them feel safe’
For children, the ongoing trauma and disruption to education are the most pressing concerns.
At least 4,000 children are set to start school this week in Unicef-provided tents during the hottest time of the year, in cyclone season. Education authorities say they are prioritising rebuilds – but with many capable Ni-Vanuatu workers sucked up by Australia and New Zealand’s skilled visa schemes and a lack of funding and expertise, there are worries progress will be slow.
“There’s never enough money to rebuild these schools, or enough people,” says Save the Children’s Vanuatu country director, Polly Banks, who lives in Port Vila and is struggling to find construction workers, and liaising with the Australian government to ship more tents.
“If the funds don’t come, kids can end up in overcrowded classrooms for years. You can’t have a comfortable education in a wet, hot, cyclone-prone climate in a tent. It’s better than nothing but it’s not suitable long-term. The country just doesn’t have the wealth to rebuild.”
At the prestigious Malapoa College, desks are buried under piles of debris. Gifted by the Chinese government for about 1.2bn vatu (A$15m) in 2018, the school is now uninhabitable. “I feel sadness, and relief that the children weren’t here when it happened,” says the acting deputy principal, Frankie Tureleo, who has to tell the parents of 600 children they can’t return to school here this year.
Meanwhile, in the village of Etas, teacher Eselina Maltungtung stands under the shade of a tree as she surveys what is left of her school, Etas Grace. Her daughter Sailyn 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 torn down. “There’s no water for us to drink, there are cracks in the walls of my house, and now this,” she says, indicating where shards of glass and iron litter the playground.
Her family has been intermittently sleeping outside. The terror of another earthquake keeps her awake. But when the bell rings on Monday, she will do her job, teaching the quality most needed here now: resilience.
“I’ll go slowly, keep the children calm, give them instructions about what is happening,” she says. “I’m not sure how to solve these problems, but at least I can make them feel like they’re safe.”
