When we first heard that the show would be on location here, we tried to guess exactly where it would be filmed. There are some very rugged, very remote areas in Vanuatu, and we each had our favorite candidate for the locale: the ash plain on Ambrym, the crater lakes of Gaua, the rocky cliffs of Futuna. It turns out that the shoot is on our island, just down the road! We have friends at the villages which own the chosen sites, and we drive past them every time we go to the capital city for shopping. We think that perhaps the show tends to exaggerate the wildness of the sites chosen. (The alternate explanation is that Onesua is a lot more remote than we thought!) During the two months of shooting, the cast and crew will spend five days on Tanna, where the volcano scenes will be shot. The rest of the film will apparently be from Efate Island, where we live, and two little offshore islands, where we have visited.

The places where the actual shooting is being done are not untouched jungle; they are village gardens in the fallow phase of slash and burn agriculture. Of course, they look like jungle to Americans, since the bush just grows up wild. When you see the show it will probably give you a good idea of what our area looks like, but you should remember that you are seeing the Pacific equivalent of stubble in a wheat field.

There have been some hard feelings created. Villages still mostly run on a gift economy; you ask a favor and it tends to be granted, but you incur an obligation in return. America does not share this approach, and evidently the Survivor folks didn’t really bother too much to adapt. They struck deals with the local villages, including paying them not to fish on the reefs and not to sail their canoes from the offshore islands to Efate. They didn’t want the film to have Ni-Vanuatu in the background, going about their daily business, so the agreements were signed and that was that. American contracts do not allow a lot of flexibility, and the villagers don’t understand that. “Survivor” evidently tried to benefit local businesses by contracting food supplies with them, but when the first delivery was late, they cancelled. All supplies are now being imported, even eggs and vegetables, and the local people are not earning the income that they had expected, but they are still required to keep from fishing or going to market.

Meanwhile, security is very tight. The area is patrolled by men wearing camouflage and carrying radios, and they are enforcing a no-go zone, which was quite illegal at first, since they didn’t go through the proper channels of giving advance notice for shipping. Some New Zealander friends of ours, just as obnoxious and confrontational as Americans are, made a point of sailing a flotilla of yachts into the bay in the middle of filming, just to protest the point. ‘Survivor’ responded by getting everything properly announced and publicized, and the yachts went on their way.

Another issue has been the fact that this is an oral culture, where you sit and talk about everything before you even start to get down to business. A local newspaper columnist writes,

“People in Survivors are acting as though they own the place. They should be told this is Vanuatu and not the USA. They have advised the Tourism office that if local media want to get any news or interviews we will have to pay for it. Talk about arrogant.”

The front page of the newspaper of July 3 carried a political cartoon where a crewcut, sunglasses-wearing director says, “In order to win that one million dollars, you “Survivor” contestants must survive 39 days without electricity, running water, hot showers and telephones – completely cut off from the modern world!” In the background, a Ni-Vanuatu woman says, “What’s so special about that? We island women live every day of our lives that way!”

This could give a person a whole new perspective on ‘reality’ TV. What’s ‘real? The carefully edited contests or daily lives? In my opinion, there will be nothing in the contestants’ games as challenging as this whole thing is for the villagers. They try to understand a world where frivolous wastes of wealth exist side-by-side with people who could use those wasted resources, and they try to reflect on a world where cultures clash.

There is some monetary benefit for Vanuatu from the American money being spent here for these two months, and there may be some long-range benefit in increased tourism from the publicity. I’m not sure that it will offset the ill will caused by the filming. Vanuatu is a great place to be an American, since we saved the islands from slavery by stopping the Japanese offensive in World War II. The New Hebrides, as Vanuatu was called then, was a major staging area for the critical battles of the Coral Sea and Guadalcanal, and thousands of US soldiers were stationed here. The old people remember American friendliness, American generosity, and American sacrifice. That is a nice list of values to export! The current generation of Ni-Vanuatu, thanks to “Survivor,” is getting a very different picture. I’m afraid that they see us more like millipedes [a big nuisance in Vanuatu].

Go ahead and watch the show if you like. Maybe it’s fun entertainment. But maybe it would be better to think about the real issues involved, side-by-side with the villagers. The TV producers could have done a lot better job; why not have contests in making cement blocks and building a new clinic? Why not see which contestant can learn the largest local vocabulary or the most intricate traditional dance? Why not compete in teams of illustrators/authors/translators to produce the best textbook for the local primary school? That would be reality TV. I could cheer those heroes.