Help pours in for Vanuatu

Courtney Tilby-Price, left, and her mum, Kerri Tilby-Price, say the donations of Tauranga people will mean the world to the Vanuatu people. Photo / Andrew Warner

A Tauranga family gave up eating meat for a week so they could afford to donate a box of groceries to the people of Vanuatu.

Another couple spent an entire weekend at garage sales searching for the specific items the Ni-Van people needed most desperately.

Tauranga woman Kerri Tilby-Price has been collecting donations to fill a shipping container to send to Vanuatu since her daughter returned from the country she called her second home.

Strangers from across Tauranga have turned up at her door with bags and boxes, giving everything they could spare. It was that kind of generosity that moved Mrs Tilby-Price to tears several times during the past fortnight.

Daughter Courtney Tilby-Price was volunteering as a teacher on Pentecost Island when Cyclone Pam hit and was evacuated about a week later, having to leave behind her Ni-Van family.

Now mother and daughter have collected more than enough supplies to fill a 6m shipping container.

Mrs Tilby-Price said they were blown away by the generosity of people in Tauranga. "There [have] been so many times over the past few weeks I've just wanted to cry because of how much people have put themselves out."

The aid was an essential lifeline for the Ni-Van people, she said.

"All the stuff that's going over is genuinely needed. They have no other way of getting these things."

The container would go this month, and thanks to Tauranga Rotary, which bought and donated it.

It would stay in Vanuatu and most likely serve as a health clinic in the Ohlen Esqal community.

"When we told them, they were crying on the ... phone," Mrs Tilby-Price said. "They couldn't believe it. That's a building for them."

Courtney said the Vanuatu people would cherish everything donated and use it to help everyone in their community. "If we give rice to a family who already has a bag of rice, they would give it to another family who didn't have any.

"If we gave one family 25kg of rice ... they'd use it to feed the whole village."

Courtney and her mum will travel back to Vanuatu in July.

Some of the items donated
•More than 300 tools
•More than 500 sheets of roofing iron
•More than 300kg of rice
•130 blankets
•250 towels
•"Boxes and boxes" of medical supplies