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Rights Holder and Contact
Skinner-Jones, Ann
Description
The local clinic was staffed with Mewun women trained as nurses and other health workers. A training school for nurses operates alongside the hospital in Port Vila, and the clinic also recognizes uses of custom medicine. Family planning posters in the women's ward of the Boyd Memorial Clinic at Wintua point out the toll babies take on their older sisters, to whom much of the infant care falls. Another poster supports breast feeding. In the 1980's, health workers regularly carried family planning information to other Mewun villages, and their audience was typically entirely male with women listening through the bamboo walls of meeting places. The most convincing argument against numerous children during these meetings was the health of married women. Every man dreaded losing his wife because there was a chronic shortage of women in South West Bay. Melanesians tend to have more male than female children and the gap between the genders is wider than the global norm. Research from a census of Mewun suggested this statistic was not caused by female infanticide or benign neglect of girls. Even at the beginning of Anthropologist Joan Larcom's field work in 1973, clinic health policies didn't favor women. For example, no woman was allowed to discuss family planning with medical staff without their spouse present. Whether this was ni-Vanuatu or colonialist in origin, men definitely welcomed many more children than did their wives. In a community with no roads, more kin meant a larger production unit, or more laborers ready to bring crops to the coast where they could be sold to the cooperative society or a passing ship. UC San Diego Library, UC San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0175 (https://library.ucsd.edu/dc/contact)
Type
image
Identifier
ark:/20775/bb3076565k
Language
No linguistic content
Subject
Health Medical care Cooperative societies Family planning services Posters Women Oceania Melanesia Pacific Islands South West Bay (Malakula, Vanuatu) Wintua (Malekula, Vanuatu) Influences of Outsiders Women at Work
Place
Oceania Melanesia Pacific Islands South West Bay (Malakula, Vanuatu) Wintua (Malekula, Vanuatu)
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