The fish in Vanuatu
At work, a colleague asked a faculty member in the Nicholas School of the Environment for tips about the ArcGIS StoryMaps tool for creating visual reports about places around the world. When the faculty member shared examples of what her students had produced using StoryMaps, my colleague quickly forwarded the list to me with a simple message: Vanuatu!
I scanned the list and found the link to The ‘happiest’ fishers and threats to their fisheries, a stunning report from Christopher Watt. He’s a Duke graduate student who spent nearly a year in Vanuatu on a Fulbright U.S. Student Research Grant.
Looking at Watt’s photos and reading about the changes in how ni-Vanuatu fish in the seas around the island, I thought about Noel Timante. He was my host and friend (he considered me his brother) on Paama, and he had a yellow wooden boat that he used to fish beyond the reef — when he wasn’t up in the hills tending his many gardens with Leah. Because of Noel, Erin and I enjoyed many dinners of fresh tuna and red snapper.
Noel died in 2002, a couple of years after we finished our Peace Corps service (recorded in this blog entry). I miss him. I miss sitting with him on the black-sand beach at Liro Village as the sun sets over the calm Pacific Ocean, all those unseen fish on the move up and down the archipelago.
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© Anton Zuiker