Colombia y su participación en pruebas internacionales para el área de

Permission was sought from the Vanuatu Cultural Council late in 2011 to conduct research in Southern Vanuatu. This was granted in February of 2012. Two main sites were chosen for investigation: the urban area of Port Vila including its peri-urban surrounds, and the west side of Tanna Island (some further research was undertaken in Epi and Nguna for specific clarifications). The choice of sites was influenced by two main factors. Firstly, I had both worked as a secondary school teacher in 2002-2003 and carried out Masters Field work in 2006 in West Tanna, giving me familiarity with the inhabitants. Secondly, I would have preferred to have engaged with people from all of Tanna but the cost was prohibitive. In an ironic twist on Robert Chambers’ (1997) “four wheel drive bias”, access to a 4WD vehicle on a regular basis would have made for easy travel all over Tanna Island, which is approximately 550 square kilometres, but I conducted nearly all my research on foot. This influenced the decision to take a “census” approach to one part of one island in the expectation that the findings would be transferable. A further reason for the choice of Tanna was that it was,

68 _{In just two instances the non-recording was due to technical or logistical failure; in three instances due to} relevant ethical judgements. For example in one case the employer wanted to share his home brew which he claimed to be only 3% alcohol but I decided that if any alcohol was involved I would make notes afterwards provided in my judgement the interview quality was not compromised. Those interviews which were sound recorded were fully transcribed.

alongside Ambrym and Efate, subject to previous quantitative studies by the World Bank, which offered possibilities of triangulation.

Semi-structured interviews in peri-urban areas

Thirty-two RSE workers were interviewed in Port Vila and its surrounding areas. The core questions for these interviews are shown in Appendix 3. The decision to make these the primary source of worker perspectives on the New Zealand experience led to the adoption of a similar, but not identical, process to that being followed for the employer interviews. All these interviews were conducted in Bislama, which I speak fluently, with notes taken in Bislama during the interviews, without audio recording. When translating these into English, each interview was written as a statement or story from the respondent’s point of view.

It became obvious within days of arriving in Port Vila that the urban setting had been a heavy recruitment area for the RSE. I wanted to see first-hand if workers had been recruited from the poorest areas of town, so an early decision was made to visit all the major indigenous communities in Port Vila and to try and find one respondent or more to talk to within each community. These communities are largely unknown to real estate agents and not all are recognised by the Municipal authority. Hence the “people’s” map presented in Chapter 7 is a first of its kind. In the process of visiting all these communities I made notes on the nature of each community and categorised them. Some interviews resulted from business cards which I left in strategic places and some from personal contacts, and some from simply walking within the communities and making enquiries of

storekeepers or small gatherings of people. Recognised suburbs with a predominance of colon or expatriate housing were not investigated. Neither were the handful of suburbs which are largely public service housing, as the point of this approach was not to test for corruption but to ascertain whether people were being recruited from the poorer areas of Port Vila.

The majority of respondent interviews took place with people in their home surroundings, and although it was not possible to control the presence of other people at the interviews, in all cases it was clear who I was interviewing at any one time. On one occasion two respondents were

interviewed one after another at the same location, each taking turns at slapping my legs to prevent mosquito bites while the other answered questions. Interviews with key informants were sound recorded in Bislama and later transcribed into English, with two exceptions involving English first language speakers.

Fact Finding

Several visits were made to government and quasi-government bodies such as the Reserve Bank of Vanuatu and trading banks in an effort to triangulate existing information on remittance levels, relative benefits to the Vanuatu economy, with varying levels of success. For example two banks were able to share sufficient information to add usefully to a growing body of information on remittance levels, but a similar level of assistance would have been needed from all banks to reach more conclusive findings. Other organisations visited included the family disputes section of the Vanuatu Police Headquarters, where discussions were held with senior officers involved in mediation where family disputes had arisen following RSE misadventures, the Tourist Department, where information was gathered on the comparative impact from tourism on the macro economy, and the Employment Services Unit (ESU) where detailed discussions were held on the monitoring of the RSE within Vanuatu. This aspect of the field work was purely investigative.

Village level studies

I arrived on Tanna Island in mid-August 2012 and stayed for two months carrying out village level studies. Two broad field work options were considered. One was to focus on a small number of villages and use Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) techniques (see S. Kumar, 2002) to examine the impacts of RSE labour within the single village community. One difficulty with this approach was the lack of time to carry out the kind of prior survey I would need to choose villages with a view to either the representativeness or transferability of the findings. The second option, eventually chosen, was to use the whole of West Tanna as the case study.

To a limited extent, the work of de Vletter (2007) and Basok (2003) was replicable in this part of the project. For example de Vletter used the technique of noting permanent housing and other physical wealth indicators in villages in southern Mozambique to obtain a measure of the impact of migrant work in South Africa. Using mid-level data, I was able to glean considerable evidence on who was being recruited and how the Tannese way of life was affected by the programme, but did not gain as much information as I would have liked on the effects of the scheme at household level. There is a strong justification for this approach which relates to the arguments developed in Chapter 3. The culture of the island is relatively well understood having been studied by Bonnemaison (1984), Guiart (1956), Lindstrom (Lindstrom, 1985, 1992; 2006 et al.), and Rockell (2007) among others. A key observation is the high level of interaction among the communities and the small size of most hamlets. The way the RSE programme interacted with the island culture was of equal importance to a close up view of any one village.

I visited 97 village communities on the West side of Tanna Island, walking about 15 km each day. It was not a matter of planning precise movements, but surrendering control of this process to the cultural norms of the island. A guide chosen by a village leader would often escort me to the next two villages and then his place would be taken by another. I had the benefit of having taught the children of many of these villages, and in the course of this leapfrogging arrangement several of my former students acted as guides, escorting me to the higher altitude villages. The island is divided into discrete territories (see Chapter 8) and I visited 14 of these territories moving from south to north, usually beginning at sea level within each territory. I mapped every village I visited in order to have a highly accurate picture of the housing, water facilities and other physical resources, and this information was used to triangulate population data as well as indicate wealth levels.

It would be misleading to describe the work on West Tanna as simply a survey. In most villages informants were found, often chosen by the village leaders, who were comfortable having a detailed discussion. While still in the first of the territories, I identified some standard lines of questioning, however the process that was followed was more open than a census. Part of the conversation elicited information on topics such as village demographics, level of involvement in the RSE, livelihoods, and other information detailed in Chapter 8. In a few villages the single informant was replaced by larger meetings, where more wide ranging discussion was held on the benefits and difficulties encountered with the RSE. All discussions were held in Bislama, with the exception of a discussion with one key informant who speaks exceptionally good English.

Exact records were kept of the numbers of RSE workers from each village alongside population estimates, and various measures were used to indicate modernisation levels (see Chapter 8). Correlations were then taken between levels of involvement in RSE work and indicators of modernisation. Notes were also taken on the needs of each territory (tan) from a livelihoods

perspective. The levels of participation in the RSE were noted territory by territory to see if there was any sense in which the RSE was responsive to development needs at territory level. The nature of these territories is explained in Chapter 8.

I was not looking only for statistical correlations but for associational indicators, mainly through qualitative analysis. Issues here included the role of Christianity on the island, especially the role of Seventh Day Adventism, the place of English literacy and the role of custom (kastom). Specific experiences which went beyond the process of surveying and required interpretation of text were noted as they arose. Field notes were taken of observations which added to or triangulated previous findings on matters such as skills transfer and ways in which remittance money was spent.

In addition to the focus on West Tanna, two further explorations included three village communities in the White Sands area of East Tanna, and in late October a single week on the island of Epi for specific purposes. The majority of workers from West Tanna had worked in the Bay of Plenty and the South Island, whereas one Hawkes Bay employer I had interviewed recruited from White Sands and it was an opportunity to examine the experiences of those workers.

The Vanuatu Labour Commissioner had indicated that a different approach was being taken in Epi which paid closer attention to development needs than in other islands, and I wanted to see how things were done there. One of two communities visited was Lamen Bay, which has been subject to research by other students of the RSE (including R. Kumar, 2012). Some of the interview material from Epi was included with the worker interview material in the final sweep (see later section on interview analysis).

The time in Tanna was also used to gather material for a second edition of a history booklet previously written on the Lenakel area (Rockell, 2011). This project was originally a part of the undertaking I made with the Vanuatu Cultural Council when conducting Masters research in 2006. This research was complementary to the rural research because the history informs an

understanding of the culture of Tanna Island, which I have argued to be of pivotal importance in understanding the effects of the RSE.

Masters studies I carried out in 2006 provided a baseline to examine a number of economic

indicators concerning the size of the cash economy of Tanna Island as a whole and the impact of the RSE compared with that of tourism. The culture of the island was examined in those studies with particular emphasis on land tenure (Rockell, 2007) and it was possible to examine the interaction between the increased use of cash and modernising influences and how this related to the cultural norms of the island. These results are explored in Chapter 8.

Four months in total were spent in Vanuatu, of which approximately half the time was spent in Port Vila and half in outer islands (mainly Tanna). From these four months I gained detailed knowledge of sources of participation in the RSE in two important settings, the relationship between the RSE adventure and the village community, and open discussion about the experiences of RSE workers in New Zealand. Ideally a longer time would have allowed a more thorough investigation of the micro level impacts, but this was not commensurate with meeting the needs of my own family.