Education Vital In New Hebrides

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31973, 28 April 1969, Page 2

Education Vital In New Hebrides

Education is the main concern of the people of the New Hebrides. They see it as a stepping stone towards economic security and towards taking a hand in the running of their own affairs, according to Mrs Helen Holmes, of Christchurch, who visited the islands with ' a film team from the Presbyterian Churches of New Zealand and Australia.

Unfortunately, there was a tendency to consider “white collar" jobs the only “polite” ones, Mrs Holmes told 300 members of the Christchurch Presbyterial at their annual country day, held at Oxford.

Jobs in Government offices were highly sought in the New Hebrides, but few were available.

Housing conditions in the towns were appalling, she said. Recently, a syndicate from the United States had bought a large plantation at Hogg Harbour, which it planned to develop with full housing and vacation facilities. Productive coconut trees were being cut down, at a meagre compensation, to make way for roading, and this was causing concern to leaders of the community. From talks with New Hebridean leaders there emerged a picture of a sensitive people. Intelligent, polite, and grateful to Europeans for all that been done by missionaries and Governments in the past, said Mrs Holmes. j Own Destiny Yet, the islanders were conscious of their need to take responsibility for their own affairs. There was a willingness to shape their own destiny. The isolation of the islands, not only from the rest of the world, but from each other, accounted for much frustration. People were unable often to communicate with others on adjacent islands because they did not understand each other's dialects.

Travel between islands was difficult. Students at the Tangoa Training Institute, where the team stayed, made their own outrigger canoes, which sat low in the water and had to be handled skilfully through heavy seas in sharkinfested waters. While Mrs Holmes was there, the chief of one island had about 30 pigs killed,

dressed, and prepared for sale. He transported them by outrigger canoe to another Island, where a taxi was to have been waiting to take the meat to the boat. The taxi failed to arrive and there was no way of getting another taxi in time to eatch the boat. With no outlet for the meat, all the labour of raising the pigs—worth half a year's income—was lost.