Vanuatu: Graduation

Today was graduation day -- fourteen nurse practitioners and nine midwives.
They are all experienced nurses who have taken 10 months out of their lives, leaving families behind to sleep in dormitories and having to learn a huge amount from malaria to dental problems to how to run a budget.

Now they are finished and are having a celebration to commemorate the event. They designed their own gowns and had them made up by a tailor. First they gathered to wait for the Minister of Health. He arrived, was given his salu salu and led in by Pentecost custom dancers. He was in Santo for 2 weeks and had a huge entourage of chief advisory assistants to the assistant chief advisor.

Speeches were mercifully short and we soon came to the presentation of certificates. It was an excellent mixture of formality with the formal presentation by the Minister and then the relatives crowded round to put salu after salu on their good boy/girl. Some even got dusted with the customary baby powder. There were many bright dresses and the younger woman were wearing more fashionable dresses.

Then came the individual prizes with Steven Nako getting the academic prize (he finds it difficult to take praise), .... and Lolita getting the prize for most improved. (She had been a nun and had worked in an old peoples home in France before taking up nursing. A joyous bubbly person who needs just a little of Steven Ns organisation!) Seven then gave a blistering speech about the poor living conditions, the lack of supervision and the desire to have more doctor input and more time. He was completely right nut not a man to make friends!