Photojournalist Ruth Keber has been in Vanuatu as part of the New Zealand Vanuatu Rebuild team for nearly two weeks. She shares the group's farewell with a group of people who have become close friends.
I WAKE up Thursday knowing it will be the last time we will see our friends at Sorovanga Primary School.
We arrive at the school just after midday and I wander up to the kitchen to help the women with a feast they are preparing for us - a thank you for rebuilding a part of their school.
Although we are not able to get the roof on the classroom, because the iron we need is still somewhere across the Pacific Ocean, I can see how much the school appreciates the help and has enjoyed us being part of their community.
I stand on the kitchen's dirt floor, peeling and slicing oranges as the other women frantically dish up bowls of rice, peel and slice cucumbers, and mix fruit juice in plastic containers.
Alice Keke rushes around dishing boiled sweet potatoes and manioc covered in coconut milk on to a plate while Alice Ruben stands next to me as chief fly-swat, swishing a small branch around the table of food.
The ladies and I carry the dishes down to the community's church where classes have been hosted since the cyclone, and lay out the platter.
Hungry volunteers wander in and out of the makeshift shelter, as the aroma of the delicious local food wafts through the air.
Sorovanga Primary School principal Abel David soon gathers everybody under the corrugated iron shelter and thanks us all for the work we have done over the past week and a half.
He explains to us the lunch is not only a thank you from Sorovanga but a thank you from all of Vanuatu.
Children who go to the school come from six different provinces of the island nation.
"We are very thankful you came, leaving your families, jobs, to come and help the people of Vanuatu," he says.
As I look around I can see how his words touch each volunteer.
The three women on the trip - Rebecca Manning, Kerry Farmer and myself - are then invited up into the middle of the room where the Ni-Van ladies from the community dress us in multiple sarongs, hand painted shirts and lais, and give us little island trinkets.
The Ni-Van women then move around the room and do the same for the volunteer men.
Hundreds of hugs and tears are shared.
Grace is said and then everybody tucks in to their food.
We sit around devouring the island delights while Alice Keke and her family get up and sing a few songs in Bislama and English.
After lunch Abel David says a few final words and every member of each group shakes each other's hands, thanks each other, and embraces for a last time. We jump in our trucks and start to drive off along the pot-holed roads.
Through the dust we can see our community waving and smiling back at us. After all the third world nation has been through, Vanuatu keeps smiling.