A year ago today, Zoe Marshall woke up terrified.
Not that she’d had much sleep. The Canberra teenager was three days into post-cyclone life on the devastated island of Pentecost in Vanuatu.
Cyclone Pam, the fatal storm that tore through the island nation with wind gusts up to 320km/h, had struck.
The room Zoe had been living in had completely collapsed and the school where she’d been volunteering was destroyed. Food was running out, the vegetable gardens they lived off had been flattened and the village’s one water tank that survived the storm was running dry.
Disrupted by bouts of sudden illness that would intermittently sap the university student of all her energy and leave her periodically bedbound, she and a Kiwi colleague spent hours cracking coconuts and filling water bottle for survival.
She reckons it was even worse for her parents who not only saw the pictures of the devastation via 24 hour news coverage of the disaster, but had the worry of not knowing where their daughter was, not even knowing if she’d survived, to deal with.
Today, the now 19-year-old woke up in a comfy bed to blue skies and everything was normal, but she said it felt kind of weird.
“I’m not in shock about it any more, I’ve sort of had time to think about it and it was hard to get my head around it,” she said.
“Especially recently with the cyclone in Fiji being so similar, it definitely made me think back to it. It’s not something I would ever repeat, but it’s an experience I’m happy to have had.”
Zoe’s disappearance captured a worldwide audience when her desperate mother shared the excruciating text messages her daughter sent to her before the devastating storm hit — the last she would hear for her for more than a week.
Eventually, the Canberra student and the rest of her group were spotted by an Australian Defence Force helicopter and winched to safety.
To the relief of her family and the legion of supporters she was surprised to discover had been praying for her survival, Zoe was OK, but 16 people died in that storm and more than 200,000 were affected.
Homes and structures were blown apart by the devastating winds and crop fields were gutted — about 90 per cent of the country’s crops destroyed.
A 2015 report put the financial cost at $590 million and estimated recovery efforts would last years.
Following the devastation of the storm, the country has been hit with El Niño driven drought that continues to compound the destruction of Cyclone Pam.
Vanuatu government minister Cliff Luke this week told ABC some areas of Vanuatu were “basically drinking mud” a year on from the disaster.
“The leftover water in those creeks is what people are using now. There’s no more running water,” he said.
The Australian government is continuing to assist in the country’s recovery, continuing a $35 million package of assistance to support long-term recovery over three years, including the repair and rebuilding of critical public infrastructure, restoring health and education facilities, and support of social protection.
Zoe went back to Vanuatu around six weeks after the cyclone for another 10 weeks and participated in recovery efforts on Pentecost island — one of the hardest hit areas and the place she called or the six months she lived there.
From Canberra, she’s been collecting books, supplies, and donations to be sent over there, while the hard-to-post stuff she’ll bring over herself.
She still keeps in touch with her host family and friends over there, and is planning another trip with her father, Rob, this coming July.
“Once it falls off the news it’s hard for people to keep up with, I know, but it’s obvious there’s still heaps to do because it’s such a mess,” she said.
“The village where my school was, they’re still recovering. They’ve managed to build a new building, their garden’s regrowing, but there’s such a long way to go.”