Perspective

A couple of years ago, the child bride and I took a short holiday to Vanuatu. I won't bore you with a long list of things we did or places we saw. As much as these things contributed to our happy holiday, the thing that really made it enjoyable was seeing life through the eyes of another culture.

In Vanuatu, there is only one rule to become a taxi driver. You must own, or have access to, a vehicle. If you have a sedan you can become a bona fide taxi driver by painting the letter "T" on the front of your number plate. If you have a people mover and want to become a bus driver, then it is the letter "B" that must be painted instead. As a result it seems that every vehicle owner on this small island has entrepreneurial aspirations. I don't recall seeing a single vehicle that did not have the obligatory letter added to the number plate. 

This means that you meet the real people who live on the island, not some trained and approved representatives. We found them all very friendly and very informative, and very frank. 

We were being taken somewhere one day and struck up a conversation with the driver. We commented that we often saw men walking around the roads of the island with large machetes in their hands. We asked why this was so. The driver explained that the jungle grew so quickly that the paths needed to be cut back on an almost constant basis. The island did not have council workers that maintained these paths, so the locals did it each time they used them.

My daughter commented that in Australia, if we saw a man walking around with a machete, we would call the police.

The bus driver was silent for a moment and then said, "Oh, if we saw a white man with a machete, we would call the police too."

Ah, perspective. It changes everything.