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Description

The storyteller in this episode is a woman that lost her husband, leaving her with young children to raise as a single parent. Her husband's family, of different island origins, became estranged over time, threatening her son's future access to his ancestral lands passed down through his late father. The story emphasizes the pronounced vulnerability of women in Vanuatu when it comes to indigenous lands as discovered in official statistics on housing and food production. As important as it is to wellbeing, indigenous land access is fragile and dependent on several factors, including type of traditional tenure system used to transfer land rights, marriage status, adoption status, amount of time spent on the land, knowledge of boundaries, and how well the surrounding community associates an individual with their lands, to name a few.