Vanuatu

Utopia

Love Patrol, an education and HIV awareness program taking the form of a 10-part series has been previewing and Wan Smol Bag** over the past few weeks.

I was very impressed by the digital, acting and script quality of the entire play. But, there was a certain dialogue:

Expat: I thought this place was called paradise on Earth
Police Officer: no place is paradise
Expat: Well you should call this place hell on earth *fumes off*

It was certainly a humorous exchange, but the reason I mentioned this was because I’ve been struggling with this lately. There is no (visible) poverty, homelessness or hunger here in Vanuatu; it’s very easy to jump to the automatic conclusion then that this is “almost utopia.” But it’s just a matter of scratching the surface to find out about some of the very intense and recurrent social problems. But, just because these are not visible and because they have no direct effect on me, it’s extremely hard to fight this simplification of seeing the country as “utopia.”

I guess it was best summarized by a friend who said “it might be utopia for her.” Utopia might be possible, but universal utopia might not be. So, utopia can be relative?

**Wan Smol Bag is an organization that uses theatre to address problems like domestic violence. They also have a youth drop in centre, health clinic and facilities such as a computer lab and free computer classes. They are the only organization in the entire country that are doing this kind of work. I heard that the founders of the organization were initially working on a similar project in Zimbabwe, but had to leave due to political circumstances.

posted by faa-T @ 10:45 PM