TANNA ISLAND, Vanuatu — When her roof started collapsing during the cyclone, Christine Iakangem felt she had no choice but to grab her 1-week-old baby Angeline and start running.
On another part of the island, Kelson Hosea and his family crammed themselves into a shelter that he had just finished building.
Not far from him, village chief Philip Kasamu gathered his people into a cyclone-proof hut while wondering if their bickering had provoked nature’s wrath.
Tanna Island in the southern part of the Vanuatu archipelago was one of the hardest hit when Cyclone Pam tore through the South Pacific nation early Saturday. The cyclone’s 270 kilometer (168 mile) per hour winds pummeled lush tropical forests on Tanna into a brown jumble of broken trunks and strewn branches.
Among the island’s 30,000 residents, however, there were just five confirmed deaths, a testament to their experience in dealing with cyclones as well as some narrow escapes.
Tanna is a place that civilization has only lightly touched. Dirt roads from the airport lead past small stores and women washing clothes in the ocean. Inland, many of the Melanesian people live as they have for generations, in wooden huts with roofs thatched with coconut leaves.
Now that the winds have passed, people on Tanna are worried about how they are going to survive.
Food and water are a big problem on Tanna and other islands; UNICEF estimates that nearly 5,000 people across Vanuatu have no access to drinking water. The cyclone broke Tanna’s water pipes and decimated vegetable patches. Around the volcano, people say the problems are compounded by the volcanic ash which the winds spread everywhere and which they say kills the plants.
Iakangem and her baby remain with dozens of others in the concrete store, with little to eat. Aid is being distributed to the island, but she says that while she met one aid worker assessing needs, she has yet to be given food.
Others are slowly piecing their lives back together. With no functioning kitchen, Hosea set to work building another open-air hut, using bits of old wood and tin. He finished the project in a day, and can now eat there, the volcano looming above.
