Siviri Village, Efate Island

It's been said that when you have everything you need provided by Mother Nature, you must develop challenges so your men have ways to prove themselves. Well, in Vanuatu men must acquire pigs so they can throw feasts in order to keep the people who eat at the their feast beholden to them. The women work really hard tending to the men, the children, and especially to the pigs. Most of the islands don't have electricity , so they struggle to prepare food and to keep their families clothed, fed and clean. They work as a group, outside the male bastion.

The children are responsible for the younger ones. They are safe in the villages, and their endless play trains them for later life. I watched a toddler with a bush knife, an ankle biter leaping from boulder into a pool, a preschooler with a baby on the hip.

Families share their children, raising nephews, sending their own to life on a different island, adopting a teenager. It makes a network of brothers, fathers, aunts throughout the islands.

Each village is a group of extended family members, their small houses set around a nakamal (mens club house). Before the sun rises, the wives light the family's fire, food is prepared and then family members to to the gardens, and the young children to school. Teenagers leave the village to attend boarding school, or live with maternal uncles perhaps. Some young people head to Port Vila, but so many move back to their traditional homes - where they can grow food, hunt pigs and there's no crime.

Life could be bliss: women in the gardens, men discussing matters in the nakamal over kava. But then there is school fees. A secondary education is expensive, so cargo boats go around the islands collecting copra (coconut shell) just before for the school fees are due every three months.