Vanuatu Recovery

23.03.2015 17:00

Behind the News

To Vanuatu which was hit really hard by a cyclone recently. Seventy percent of the population there is now homeless, and every school has been either badly damaged or destroyed. Emma found out how the country is getting back on its feet.

EMMA DAVIS, REPORTER: When Cyclone Pam hit Vanuatu, it ripped up trees, destroyed buildings and flattened whole towns. Amongst all that was nine year old Sharna. She stayed in her house with her family but the rain caused it to flood.

SHARNA: During the cyclone I was right here. (How did you feel?) I feel scared.

Vanuatu is here, in the South Pacific. It's made up of about 82 islands. Vanuatu is known for its warm, tropical weather and it's these conditions that help create cyclones. Here's how:

If the surface of the sea gets above 26.5 degrees Celsius, water starts to evaporate. This warm humid air then rises into the sky. As it moves up through the atmosphere it releases heat and water, making thunderclouds. This process can kick-start a chain reaction, evaporating more water and making bigger clouds. The last ingredient needed to make a cyclone is the rotation of the Earth which causes the clouds to spin around faster and faster.

The middle of the cyclone is called the eye. It's actually nice and calm. The walls of the cyclone are totally different. Here, the wind is the strongest and it's these wind speeds that help experts classify cyclones. There are five different categories of cyclone. Category one is the lowest and category five, with wind speeds of 280 kilometres an hour or more is the highest. Cyclone Pam's wind speeds were more than 320 kays an hour.

Sharna's house was damaged by the storm.

SHARNA: The light-post broke in two and fell in our yard. Then the rain rained hard so a bunch of windows shattered and it got open so my mum had to move me to another bedroom.

Sharna lives on the main island of Efate but a lot of the country's smaller islands have also been really badly damaged. The only way to get to many of them is by boat so relief workers, like these ones, haven't been able to travel there to see if everyone is ok.

SHARNA: There's no light, we're living in dark so we light candles at night

Near Sharna's s home a lot of people don't have any power or running water so aid groups like World Vision are working hard to give people food to eat and fresh drinking water.

JONNY, WORLD VISION: Of course cooking and food are of absolute paramount importance so we provide kitchen sets, basic utensils for cooking for boiling water to make use of food provided by other agencies.

Evacuation centres have also been set up so people without a home can stay somewhere safe. And kids can't go to school because almost all the schools in Vanuatu were damaged or destroyed by the cyclone.

SHARNA: I can't go to school because the Prime Minister said no school one week. Because of the cyclone I think.

It's a bit early yet but World Vision are hoping to get a temporary school set up eventually so that kids like Sharna can start to recover from this disaster. It's going to take a very long time for everything to get back to normal but the people living here love their home and they want to work hard to make Vanuatu beautiful again.