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Vanuatu kids are playing in the city park.  Escapade is on a mooring a few hundred yards away.  We really liked the Vanuatu children.  They always seemed to be smiling and having fun.  And they were always polite to us.  The last photo and this one were taken during the big national independence celebration.  The motto, which was on t-shirts and signs everywhere, was "20 yias stret!" (20 years straight, meaning 20 years of independence).  Vanuatu has its problems, for sure.  They were comprised of hundreds or thousands of totally independent groups with their own chiefs living on dozens of islands and now they're trying to work together.  Corruption is part of life.  But they're doing ok, we thought, and they're very proud of their country.  And they're nice to visitors.  We never felt threatened although we spent a lot of time in some very remote places knowing that there were no police to help if anything went wrong.