Alice and Milliana washing up after cooking lunch for the NZVR team and local workers.
Alice and Milliana washing up after cooking lunch for the NZVR team and local workers.
Bay of Plenty Times photojournalist Ruth Keber has joined New Zealand Vanuatu Rebuild in helping repair the shattered island nation and meets a generous Ni-Vanuatu who is rebuilding her family’s life after Cyclone Pam. This is the story of Alice Keke.
Alice Keke wanders up to me with her great-nephew trailing behind.
Dressed in a ripped grey T-shirt, with faded pink floral skirt and worn-out thongs on her feet, she shakes my hand.
She tells me her name, and that she is here to help us work for the day andcook the New Zealand Vanuatu Rebuild team lunch, showing me a bunch of old green bananas in a plastic bag.
We quickly start gossiping on the side of the muddy road, like the many other locals wandering by, when she asks me where I am from.
"I have been to Te Puke, Ohope and Opotiki for the kiwifruit. The first time in 2009 for five months, the second in 2013 for only a month and a half. New Zealand is a very beautiful land," she says.
Keke, 45, was born in Sama Province on the small island of Aora.
About 10 years ago, she moved her family, including her husband Johnny and three children - Revanah, 30, Dan, 26, and Lino, 23 - to Port Vila on Vanuatu's main island of Efate for a better life and schooling for her children, and now her growing number of grandchildren.
Her husband, when at home in Port Vila, drives a local taxi or bus, bringing in about V$50,000 a month (about $607 ).
But he flew to New Zealand last week to pack kiwifruit for the 2015 season, his third trip away from home but first without his wife.
She does not know when she will see him again because the work depends on the industry.
"I really miss him," she tells me, with tears building up in her eyes.
Keke has never been able to find a proper job in her home country but is a dedicated mother, grandmother, housewife, friend and gardener.
Alice Keke runs to her grandson in her garden.
Her quarter-acre land block is situated between her and her sister, Milliana's, homes where they, and another sister, work the land together to provide for their extended families.
But the garden only contains small green shoots popping out of the ground. Cyclone Pam ripped through it, destroying her family's main food source.
Taro, sweet potato, corn, green onion, island cabbage, yams and pineapple have all been replanted and will take about three months to grow in the rich volcanic earth, she tells me as we walk to her house, about a 10-minute walk from where the New Zealand Vanuatu Rebuild team has started building at Sorovanga Primary School.
The banana plants are about waist height when I glance around her front yard.
"No, they will take about a year to come back. The last ones I had from my garden I gave to you at lunch," she replies.
Alice and Milliana washing up after cooking lunch for the NZVR team and local workers.
I am stunned. She gave me her last bananas? I remember back to the bowl of green bananas we all tucked into after a cook-up of rice, tuna, olives and tomatoes.
I had two and they were some of the sweetest I have tasted.
Her generosity humbles me.
Like many other homes in the Sorovanga community, her corrugated iron home was flattened by Pam.
Keke, one of her daughters, her son, his wife and their children took shelter for a week in Sorovanga Primary School during the cyclone. Her husband had stayed at home, aimlessly trying to salvage pieces of it as it blew away.
In the days after the storm, the family literally picked their home up from around the roads and paddocks which surround it, and slowly started piecing their lives back together.
As we walk back to the school from her home, we chew on fresh sugar cane picked from her garden. The juices spill down our chins. Raindrops fall from the sky.
Keke pulls out her rusty blue umbrella and holds it up high so it shelters me as well.
She looks me in the eye and tells me: "To fix Vanuatu, everybody has to work together and look after one another, including the two of us."
We walk back in silence, side by side, as the skies open up.
