We booked our flight from Mumbai to Abu Dhabi with a stop in New Delhi based on the fact that it would save us quite a bit of money. What we didn't plan on was that the flight we were scheduled to be on out of New Delhi was canceled weeks before due to lack of demand and that Delhi would be facing some of the worst fog of the year when we were trying to transit through. As a result we got to spend a solid 13 hours in the New Delhi airport waiting for our flight that finally did take off around 1am.

Lots of delayed and canceled flights on the New Delhi departures board.

Abu Dhabi looked very similar to when I was there in 2005. Some of the old places we really liked were gone, some where different and there were plenty of new places. There were still lots of US chain restaurants-like Fuddruckers.

Here the sun is setting beside the Emirates Palace and some new towers under construction. Sandra and I at the Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan Grand Mosque.

We arrived in Mumbai around 1pm and had 10 hours to kill before our train ride to Goa. We took a photo outside the Victoria Terminus (apparently the second most photographed building in India) and then walked about.

We made it onto the train and found our comfortable-ish sleeping berths. Perfect for anyone under 5'-11" tall. 12 hours later we arrived in Goa. Saw lots of old Portuguese buildings and churches and a great warning sign. I can assure you we did not misuse the holyland.

Finally, the beaches. This time of year you share the beach with everyone. Cows, Russians, Brits, Aussies, Israelis, it's a madhouse. The crowds thinned out a bit after new years and we've enjoyed some really nice days at the beach. Really just trying to make up for lost beach time in Vanuatu. When we were told we'd be living in the south Pacific on a small island we thought we be getting to the beach a lot more often than we did.

Not really sure what she's doing.

I heard last night that the different ruins of Angkor cover about the same area as Manhattan. Of course, sometimes it's a 30 minute drive between one temple and another with not much other than a couple villages in between, but that's still a big area. Below are a few of the hundreds of photos we've taken over the last week.

Bantay Srei Temple

A pile of stones waiting to be sorted and maybe put back.

Angkor Wat - the areas that get touched most often look darker and almost polished.

A few of the faces at Bayon temple. One of my favorite places here.

Mister, you buy postcard, ten for one dollar. Lady, you like cold water? Cold water, soda two for one dollar. You buy one. Maybe later. You go to temple come back you buy water from me, okay? You remember me, I have white shirt. I remember you, you have green shirt. Where you from, sir? USA, capitol Washington DC, population 300 million, major cities New York, Angeles, Chicago. You like scarf?

And so goes the chorus greeting every visitor to every temple in Angkor Wat. We've been in Siem Reap for two days now after taking the six hour bus ride from Phnom Penh. Phnom Pehn was great. It was hot, dirty, it smelled and you always felt like you might get hit by a guy and his family on a motorcycle, but it all seemed to work and made it a great place to visit. The people we met were always ready to smile and laugh and there was lots of great food. Siem Reap is a city built around tourism and Angkor Wat. Not all bad, but can get a little old. Of what we've seen so far it was well worth the trip here. Six more days here. We'll tour some more on bicycles and on foot and then we'll head to Bangkok for Christmas.

Chiang Mai, the tourist capital of northern Thailand. We arrived here Saturday night after a 12-hour train ride from Bangkok. The train made it's way slowly but surely northwards from 8:30 am to 8:30pm. We passed loads of temples, ruins, rice fields, villages and towns in our three car 2nd class train. The seats reclined a bit and we were given lunch and two coffee breaks included in the price of our ticket. As we started climbing in elevation out of the lower plains we passed through bamboo forests and more small villages. It reminded me a lot of Vanuatu, except that every station we stopped at had electricity, a phone and a nice building, no matter how small it was. The last two hours of the train ride were the toughest. We had been sitting for 10 hours and no longer had any scenery to look at. So when we arrived at the station in Chiang Mai we were more than ready to get off.

We walked out of the station past the guys asking if we wanted taxis or tuktuk rides into the city. We then quickly realized that they were our only hope of getting anywhere and asked one to take us into town. He first asked for 100 baht, which we knew was a ripoff, so we tried to bargain. Now, after living in Vanuatu where it is considered rude to try to get things for a discount, Sandra and I both hate bargaining. But I was able to get it down to 70 baht. I was happy, he was happy and we got to our hotel. It turns out the ride should've been about 50 baht, so we ended up paying about $0.60 too much. Not a big deal.

Chiang Mai is the tourist capital of the north like I said before. There are tourists from all over Thailand and all over the world. Add onto that all of the expats who live here and it's almost a 50/50 mix of local to foreigner. People come here mainly for the extreme sports and jungle trekking. You can hire a guide and head off into the bush for 2 or 3 days where you stay in small villages, eat local foods and take bucket showers. Something that maybe we would've liked to do had we not done that exact same thing for the last two years on Vanua Lava. So we've been mainly walking around the old part of town and eating street food.

Today we went to an all day Thai cooking class outside of town. There were 12 people in our class (Austrailians, Canadian, Americans, Dutch and Spanish folks) and we each got to make 5 different dishes. We took a trip to the local market to buy the ingredients then went to the organic farm where they have the school set up. We mashed our own curry paste, cut our own veggies and all cooked on our own. We made a ton of great food that we couldn't finish no matter how much we wanted to. I think I made Vegetarian Green Curry, Thai big noodles stir fry, pumpkin in conconut milk, and prawn soup. We returned to the hotel about an hour ago full and ready for a nap. After a bit of a rest we're all going to meet up for drinks tonight. We'll be in Chiang Mai for another day or two before starting our trip to Laos. More later.

Bangkok. Hot and humid. More people on one street than on the island of Vanua Lava. Loads of great food being cooked on every street. Air conditioned 7-11s everywhere. And lots of temples. Great trip so far.

At the moment i'm in an internet cafe across the street from our guest house. I'm surrounded by school kids playing internet games and laughing.

Four RPCVs in Sydney

Dennis and Evan relaxing in the park

Australia has everything you could ever want in hundreds of different varieties. Well, that's the case in Sydney and Melbourne. Both busy, crowded cities like San Francisco full of tourists and people from all over the world.

We've been out of Vanuatu for only about a week and I already miss it. Well, I miss some things. I definitely miss the buses in Vila. Get on anywhere and the driver will take you anywhere. Here you have to think about where the stops are and which line will take you where and then the fare depends on how far you're going. And the most difficult thing for me is that you can't get the information from the driver. No, you've got to read the instructions and figure it out for yourself. Maybe I've been living in the jungle for too long, but city life seems more complicated than it needs to be. I tried setting up a prepaid mobile phone account and thought I'd be able to start using my phone right away, like Jason Bourne does in one of his movies where he slips the phone into the guys pocket and then calls him on it so the CIA can't listen in on the call. Well, it's nowhere near as easy as Jason Bourne made it look. You have to call and activate it and talk to a recording for about 10 minutes before they activate it.

Anyways, lots of things about city life are great, and lots of things will take some getting used to again. We're here for a few more days and then off to Bangkok. That should be interesting.

We did it. We completed two years of Peace Corps service on the island. We packed up our things, said goodbye to our families, friends and pets and left the village. We caught our flight off the island on the 23rd of October and made it back to Vila that afternoon. We had four going away parties over the last two weeks and we got lots of gifts and even more flowers. At the party at our school, each of the kids gave us a flower necklace or a bouquet.

........................ ....................................................................

Our families walked us to Sola for the last time and we stayed for a couple of days to finish up work at the Provincial Education Office and to say goodbye to the family there. We got a little bit of rain the night before we left and our parents said the young kids would have to stay in the village. But as this was their big chance to go and see the plane for the first time, they refused to stay home and came with us. Fortunately the weather dried up and we had an easy walk.

.....................................................................

We had to wait a couple hours at the airport so we did what we usually do when we're bored and played with the kids. Took lots of photos and tried not to think about the fact that we were saying goodbye for who knows how many years.

We arrived in Vila around 3pm dirty, tired and hungry. A nice hot shower took care of the first problem, but here in Vila it's not very easy to find a restaraunt open between lunch and dinner hours. So, instead of going to the store and buying food we decided to wait a couple hours and then head to the top of the nicest hotel in town (the Sebel) for their happy hour drinks and free appetizers.

The view from the top of the Sebel looks out west over Port Vila Harbor and around 5pm it is spectacular. As we sat there watching the sunset and drinking wine on empty stomachs we thought about how different Vila is from the rest of Vanuatu. Now, granted, we lived in a very remote village in the far north of the country. But, as we listened to the ex-pats at the table next to us talk excitedly about their matching nose jobs and upcoming liposuction and thought about how my sisters had just seen an airplane for the first time and just the day before had used a 'white-man toilet' for the first time (which by the way she thought was a pretty cool invention) it really sunk in that while physically and legally Port Vila is part of Vanuatu, in reality it's like another planet.

Anyways, two years down, six days to go. We will finish our last work this week and fly out of Vanuatu on Saturday. As we told everyone in the village, we will come back, but we don't know when. My papa said that was fine and the kava I planted the week before we left would grow and wait for me to come back. He'll look after it for 6 or 7 or however many years and when we come back, I'll pull it out and we'll grind it and drink it. Nambawan.

During our last few weeks at school we finally started and completed our hand painted flag of Vanuatu. Every student and teacher was able to put two or three hand prints on the wall. We had to deal with some rain and running paint during the process, and a lack of ladders, but we made it work.

Our trip back home is going to look something like this: Port Vila - SydneyNovember 7 - Get haircut, buy jeans, tshirts & shoes. See Opera House. Sydney - MelbourneNovember 11 Go to museums, bars and cafes. Melbourne - BangkokNovember 15 - We'll start in Bangkok and then move north. From northern Thailand we'll travel into Laos and then south. We'll cross back into Thailand at some point to visit Ubon Rachatani, where my dad was stationed during the Vietnam war. After that we'll head into Cambodia and then back to Bangkok for Christmas. Bangkok - MumbaiDecember 29 - We'll stay mostly in western and northern India. As far south as Goa and as far north as Amritsar. We'll go to the Taj Mahal and lots of other temples and if we've got the time and the energy we'll try to head to Darjeeling in the north east.New Delhi - Abu DhabiFebruary 1 - In Abu Dhabi we'll meet up with a friend of mine who I worked with while I was in the Air Force. He's a Jordanian engineer who's working for the company that's building the palm tree islands. Abu Dhabi - NYCFebruary 12 - Back to NYC in time for Valentine's Day. This is shaping up to be a family reunion in NY. So if your name is now or ever has been Mello, Fitzgerald or Marshall (or if you know someone who has one of those names) then you better make your plans now to be in NYC that weekend. NYC - North Carolina - San DiegoFebraury 25 - The last leg of the trip...see the family on the east coast, visit my grandparents in Fayetteville and then back to California. And just because it only says San Diego doesn' t mean that we won't be spending time in San Francisco, Marysville and Portland among other places.

Tanna Island is the second most visited island in Vanuatu after Efate. It's active volcano, Yasur, has been known by the rest of the world ever since Captain Cook came through Port Resolution in the late 18th century. Today the volcano is probably about the same as it was back when Cook first saw it, although it's now much easier to get to the top.

We flew from Vila to Tanna last Monday morning in a Norman-Britten Islander. A 10-seater, including the pilot and the chair next to him. We made a stop on Erromango to drop off two passengers and picked up three more . About 30 minutes later we had landed on the west coast of Tanna and began our trip to the other side. After a stop in Lenekal (a small town straight out of the old west) where the owner of our bungalow picked up supplies for the week we began the 2 hour truck ride to Port Resolution. Monday was market day so we passed lots of stalls set up on the side of the road selling local produce, taro and kava. I bought some kava and we continued on our ride.

I won't try to describe the beauty of the volcano rising out of the ash plain or of Port Resolution itself. If you want to hear about that, i'll refer you to my friend Dan Moser's blog. He's a much better writer than I and he has much more time to spend on his blog as he has managed a way to have internet service in his village on Malekula.

But I do want to share two things. First, my experience of chewing kava with some man-Tanna and second, the visit to the top of the volcano. Okay, chewing kava. These days, kava in Vanuatu is normally prepared but cleaning the roots, cutting them into small pieces, putting through a manual meat grinder, mixing it with water, and then straining. Another way that is less common is by stone grinding the kava. Here's a photo of me doing this with my host papa.

(you may notice the bandage on my index finger which was covering up a gash I had just made with my knife...even after being here for two years I'm less competent with a knife than my 8 year old sister) Stone ground kava is prepared by cleaning and cutting the kava, then grinding it in your hand with a piece of coral. This method is more common to the northern islands and can produce stronger kava. Note that in both of these methods, the kava is mixed only with clean water and the mashed up roots.

The traditional way of preparing kava in the southern islands, including Tanna, is by chewing. Basically, instead of using a machine or a stone to mash the roots, you use someone's mouth. Actually, you end up using more than one mouth. Before I go any further, let me describe the setting. It's about 5pm. The sun still has about another hour, but it's already well below the tree line. We (me, evan and the guys from the village) are sitting on some pieces of wood underneath a banyan tree in a cleared and cleaned area that makes up the nakamal. Since the kava is here no women are allowed to pass by this area - very taboo. We're sitting around a big pile of ash that is evidence of the many fires that have been made here. And it's not long before the fire is lit again to provide light, some warmth and a way to light cigarettes.

A friend from the village, Naru, is preparing our kava and in return he'll drink with us. He cleans the kava and then takes a bite of the root. Then he takes another and another. Pretty soon he's got a mouth full of kava that he's grinding for us. Evan and I decide to help out and take bites for ourselves. Not only do I want to try chewing the kava, I figure that I should get some of my spit in the mix. It's kind of like taking a bite of a dry, tough, bad-tasting apple. You chew it, careful not to swallow too much of it, and then spit it out on a leaf. Once there's a good pile, about the size of a burrito, you strain it with some bark from a coconut palm and some water. Then it's ready to drink. And often the boys from the village will be flagged down on their way home from the beach and told to come help chew the kava. They're mostly around 9 or 10 years old, have just been through their circumcision ceremony and are old enough to chew, but no to drink, the kava.

So we drink one and then two big shells, sit around and chat around the fire. And, really, it doesn't seem that big of a deal to take a big drink of this dirty root water that's been chewed by two or three different people.

Now, the volcano. The video does not do justice to the sense of terror we experienced on the top of Yasur. Although you can't see the pool of lava in the volcano, you are standing on the top of the rim watching it erupt and shoot large pieces of molten rock through the air towards and around you. In some of the photos you can see the stones in the air after the explosions. They are large. I think the one that landed closest to us was about 100 yards away. The guides tell you that when it erupts, don't run. Look at the rocks and track them like an outfielder...except that at the last moment you want to get out of the way instead of catching them.

Well, that's it for now. We head back to Vanua Lava tomorrow for our last 4 weeks in the village. We'll have some sad goodbyes, some last kakaes and lots of kava (stone ground, not chewed) over the next few weeks. We'll try to wrap up our projects and pass them on to the teachers at our school. It hasn't yet sunk in that we'll be leaving here for good in about 6 weeks, but it will soon enough.

Well, the kids at our school sure do. Sandra and her art students from 7th and 8th grade made puppets, wrote plays, drew background scenes, practiced and then performed their plays for the school and their parents. It was a lot of work and it turned out to be a lot of fun.

This is a video of our trip to Pentecost Island in May.

A video from the Vanua Lava Days Cultural Festival held the first week of September. Me playing along with the Amba Boys.

Doralyn modeling her new school uniform shirt sewn up by Sandra.

Right after being picked up at the airport in Sola our driver Ben told us we had a flat tire. Nothing else to do but to take turns pumping it back up.

Is that cow sleeping inside out? No, it's just an early morning butcher shop in my parent's kitchen. I think it was about 8 am and there were at least 20 people sitting outside waiting to buy meat at about a dollar per kilo. We ate a lot of meat over the next three days.

These may be the first photos that we've ever posted of us doing our 'real' job-teacher training. Some of these are from last year, and some are from this year. They show us doing small training 'workshops' for the teachers at our school. About half of our 9 teachers have gone to the Teachers' College and received their teaching certificates. The others are volunteer teachers from the community.

Working on a handwriting lesson and Sandra leading a classroom management workshop.

Making the classroom a little more fun with some play activities for center time.

During the two week school break in May we traveled to Pentecost to see the Nagol. Nagol is the local language name for land diving - Jumping off huge wooden towers held together by vines. It's like bungee jumping except that you tie vines around your feet and they are not very elastic. Oh, that and the goal in land diving is to actually hit the ground.

Why do people do this, you may ask. Well, as far as we could find out, it's a lot like the reason why people do bungee jumping. The materials are there, the young men are bored, and they want to show how tough they are. That's pretty much it. There's no deeper spiritual meaning or custom meaning, no matter how much visitors want to assign one. Regardless, it's an intense experience and it was great to be able to experience it in person.

Our new friends...Zee the cat and Noche with her puppies.

The school library under construction. The top three photos are from last year. The bottom ones are from the new and almost opened library.

The Sewing Club and their finished products. And a group of Sandra's art students making the sign for the Library!

It's July. Dennis is now 31. Sandra will soon be 30. And Vanuatu will soon be 29. In less than four months we will be completing our Peace Corps service and will begin our trip back to California.

This year has been busy so far. Visits from family and friends. Visits to other islands. And lots of work at our school and in our community. Our dog had puppies, we got a cat, and now our dog is pregnant again. Sandra's been busy teaching sewing and jewelry classes to women in the village. We've also been attending a 'custom school' that just started in our village where we've learned to do some weaving, carving, and a bit of dancing.

At school we've been working on organizing the new school library. We just received a large shipment of books from a couple who came through on their yacht a few years ago. Those, combined with the books we already had, have made our library start to fill up.

We've also been involved in some other random projects like monitoring measles vaccinations. We took a trip around our island and surveyed all of the families with children between 1 and 5 to make sure that they had been vaccinated by the Measles Eradication Team. The WHO and the Vanuatu Ministry of Health are working towards 100% coverage to eradicate the disease. Our trip turned out to be a great way to see parts of the island that we hadn't visited before and to do some work at the same time.

We've been in Vila for a week now running errands and going to meetings. We head back north in about two hours. This trip, like most others, began with us receiving shopping lists and money from lots of people in our village who don't get the chance to travel to Vila. It took about 5 days to complete all the shopping, but we did it. Shoes, knife files, t-shirts, school supplies, underwear, plastic fuel pump, jewelry making kit and supplies, soccer cleats, candy, stickers, flash lights, electrical tape and more.

We'll be back in the village for about 6 weeks before coming back into town for our close of service conference. After that we'll go back to the village for four weeks and say goodbye. We'll be back in Vila the last time in November before heading home. We'll probably leave Vanuatu around November 7th and then begin our trip home via Australia, South East Asia and India. I think the last few months here will go by pretty quickly.

Thanks for all the emails, letters and care packages. We'll try to put up some more pictures and videos on this site. If you get a chance, send us an email and let us know how things are going at home.

We were walking back from a Sunday barbeque in Kerebeta when my brother asked if we could take a photo overlooking the gardens.

These are the uniforms that we wear to school on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Only the teachers wear them, we don't have enough money or fabric to have them for the students. The headmaster is standing to the left of me and Noche is at the far right.

So we just finished our second of three school terms. Everyone is now enjoying the two week holiday between terms. We took this class photo on one of the last days of the term in between exams and work. Our class is combined 6th and 7th grades because we don't have enough teachers at the school to have one for each class. We're hoping that will change next year. There are 10 students in class 6 and 10 in class 7. In the background of the photo are two of our three old school buildings. There is a new double classroom building that is almost complete. We're going to move 7th and 8th grade into those classrooms sometime in the next term.

We're spending one week of the break here in Vila and the second week back on the island. We were asked to come to Vila to attend a training workshop so that we can work as trainers of the new group of volunteers that arrives next month. The fact that the new group is almost here marks the arrival of our one year anniversary in Vanuatu. Pretty wild.

The second picture was taken outside of my uncle's house in of Port Vila. We spent yesterday afternoon with him and his family and some others from Vanua Lava who are living here. Most people tend to stick in neighborhoods made up of people and relatives from their home island. So it's great for us since we can be in town but still have some family to go and hang out with and talk about the island.

More later.

Well, instead of sending an email from Vila two weeks ago, I an sending this update by mail and my dad will post it online for me, three weeks from now (depending on when I can make it to Sola to mail this). I really should have sent this in an email from Vila, bit was distracted by all those things available in the big city: electricity,, indoor plumbing, refrigeration and restaurants.

Since I last wrote in March Sandra and I have spent a lot of time at school and a lot of our free time doing projects around the house. When we were in Santo last, we bought a hand saw and some paint, which have both come in extremely handy. We cut a back door into our house, we built the frame with old lumber carried up from the school on our shoulders. We also did some "remodeling" of our kitchen. We rebuilt our kitchen table and built two stools. The little projects are great because they take our minds off things and both ended up rally improving our daily live. More light in our house and more comfortable place to eat.

At school things have been going well. The second term has started and I have one math class (combined 6th and 7th grades) and Im teaching PE three time a week. Sandra is working with the teachers of classes 1-5 and is also getting ready to do a phonics workshop/training.

The other big news, this is quite possibly the best news, is that our summer is over and the weather has finally started to cool off. When we got back to our island from Vila at the end of May, the weather at night was cool enough to wear a blanket. Once it got as low as 68 deg and everyone was staying bundled up and close to the fire. Mostly it just gets down to 78-80 deg, which is very comfortable. That combined with the drop in humidity has made it a lot easier to be here. We're hoping now that it starts to rain less, but that hasn't been the case. We should be moving into the dry season, but everyone here says it's been raining more and more the last few years. I saw some data from the Meteorological Office in Vila and in the 1970's the average rainfall on our island was 4.2 meters or about 12ft of rain. I thought that was a lot until I saw the figures for the last few years- over 6 meters abut 18ft of rainfall. This is definitely becoming a wetter place. Climate change caused by global warming? Most people think so. It's good for some crops but very bad for others and terrible for the grass airfield.

I think I've said it before, but we've never been so attuned to the weather or so much at it's mercy. Alot of that has to do with the infrastructure on our island. In Vila or Santo, the rain won't close the airport and if lightning strikes a phone tower, it's replaced in a day or two. We heard yesterday that the phone lines in our group of islands have been down for almost two weeks, meaning all communication is being done by 2-way radio.

One of the most interesting things we learned at our All-Volunteer Conference in Vila was how different everyone lives are on the different islands in Vanuatu. There are almost 100 Peace Corps Volunteers in the country, but only 9 that are as far north as we are. Many of the other volunteers have mild weather, access to electricity, refrigeration and are close to other volunteers. While their lives are easier in some respects, they are harder in others. For instance, we can go weeks in our village without spending $20. But others to through that much every day. We also have a lot of very good food (fresh root crops and seafood), whereas others are eating only rice and canned tuna(which we eat too, fairly often).

Aside from all the hardships, I am very glad we live where we do. Our adopted families are wonderful and we are really starting to feel at home. We are slowly picking up the local language but it's quite difficult. I'll explain the language situation again to clear things up. The two official language's in Vanuatu are English and French (thanks to a joint colonial government) That means all government work and all public schools are either English or French or both. The national language of Vanuatu is called Bislama. It's pidgeon language that combines French, English and local languages. Nearly everyone in Vanuatu speaks Bislama, because most people leave school at the 6th grade and are not fluent in English or French. Everyone also has a language local to their island or village. In Vanuatu there are somewhere around 112 local languages.

So at school we teach in English. We speak to our families and others in the village in Bislama and we are trying to learn Vures, which is the language that everyone in the village speaks to each other. Most people have have started to speak to us first in Vures and when they get a blank stare back (quite often) they say it again in Bislama. So by next year we hope to be able to speak in Vures.

A quick story to illustrate how different life is here. Last Friday, Sandra and I came to school late because we don't teach on Fridays. We arrived about 10am to see all the students outside getting ready to work. The headmaster had told all the students that the rest of the day classes were cancelled and that they were all going to bring sand and coral gravel up from the beach. At the school, there is a new building being built, funded by the EU. They fund most all the materials, but the sand and gravel must be supplied by the village. The building is delayed by a few months and the village has been slow about bringing sand and coral up the hill from the water. So instead of class the students all carried bags of sand up the very steep and slippery hill form the waters edge. In the US most parents wouldn't even let their kids walk up and down this hill by themselves. If that wasn't enough, on Tuesday, the building crew was running short on cider blocks so class was cancelled again and all the students and teachers carried cinder blocks up the hill. The smaller ones carried one block on a stick between the two of them. and the very small ones just carried sand. And they all loved it. They were tired but they felt like grownup to be helping with the school.

That's it for now. I should mail this today from Sola. We are taking a break on the road right now, waiting for a truck to take us the last hour.

Today is June 6th.

Thanks everyone,who has sent letter and care packages. We love getting mail.

Dennis

Hello again,

If the internet comes back up here on santo, thismessage will come to you all as an email with somevideos attached. if not, then i'll just print this,mail it home and have my brother post it on our blogsometime in march. either way, i wanted to tell you alittle bit more about our lives out here over the lastcouple months. it's hard to know which stories to tell because somuch has happened. so i'll start with our trip tosanto. that will give you a good idea of how we live. on thursday morning last week, sandra and i finallygot permission from Peace Corps in Vila to travel to Santo. Cyclone Gene was far enough to the south of usthat it was deemed safe for us to go. i spoke with my papa and he said it was too late to make the tripto Sola that afternoon, so we would wake up before dawn and start the hike. Our village is on the westside of Vanua Lava and is connected to the provincial capital, Sola, by a bush trail about 8 miles long. wewent to bed around 9pm (pretty normal for us...it'shard to stay up too late after the sun goes down, lack ofelectricity and all.) my mama came and knocked on our door at a little past3am to ask what time it was (not too many clocks or watches in the village) and to tell us that my papawas ready to go when we were. we said we wanted to sleep for another hour and then we'd go. so at 4am wewoke up, had some coffee and got our bags ready. we locked up the house and said goodbye to our dog,noche, and then hit the trail. we hiked for the firsthour with flashlights and by about 5:45 it was lightenough to put them away. the trail to Sola crosses 6or 7 streams and rivers, two villages (keripeta and mosina)and through some pretty spectacular scenery. after coming down from the hill where our village sits, weparallel the coast for most of the walk. about 3/4 ofthe way there the foot path turns into a crushed coraltruck road. much easier to walk on and occasionallyyou get lucky enough that a truck comes to carry you thelast hour. we weren't so lucky this time, so wearrived in sola at about 8am. as we passed the village ofmosina, we came to the house of one of my grandma's. my papa called out to them and they came out with waterand fresh doughnuts for us. it was great. once we made it into sola we rested a bit at my uncle's house,had some tea and then made our way to the airport. the airport is really just a grass strip with a smalltwo room concrete building that serves as the airtraffic control tower, ticket counter, security, check incounter and restaurant. after about 20 minutes oftalking on the radio with santo and vila, the ticket agent wasable to confirm that we did have seats on the flightand checked us in. two other peace corps volunteers werecoming back to sola on the morning flight, so we got to see them and talk for a while which was reallynice. we said goodbye to my papa. he planned to head backto our village and then come back to meet us at the airport on wednesday. by 11am we were on the planeand headed to santo. sandra had to avoid the coconut crabs that were tied up under her seat but wewere really excited to be on our way.so now, after a few days of relaxing and shopping insanto, we're getting ready to head back to vanua lava. santo is an interesting town. one main road with afew dozen shops and about a dozen restaurants. you can still see kwanzat huts that the US Army builtduring there stay here in the 1940's. there's also anumber of mostly ruined boat ramps and docks. and in a fewplaces you can see the remains of cars, trucks and tanks that were dumped into the water before the USleft. at the restaurants you can hear australians andkiwis talking about developing land they've justbought and you can see their enormous new homes being built. there are a lot of changes taking place, butit's still a very quiet town far away from the rest ofthe world. okay, that's it for now. sorry for the long email. but this is my last chance to write for the next twomonths, so i figured i should put as much in as icould. i will try to send some more videos in aseparate email.thanks again for all the emails, letters and packages. we miss you all.

love, dennis and sandra

Hello Again,

We've made it back to Santo after almost a week where we were sort of stranded on our island. Last Wednesday we were scheduled to fly from our island toPort Vila for a meeting with Peace Corps and a little break. We left our house around 5am, hiked for about an hour before the sun came up enough to put away our flashlights, and were in really good spirits. The weather stayed dry until we were about an hour away from Sola. The rain came and didn't stop until we made it into Sola. We found out as we made it into town that the flight had been cancelled because of the rain. We were worried that that might happen, but had been holding out hope. So when we tried to find out if we could get on Friday's flight to go to Vila, we were told that there was no longer a reason for us to come because we would miss the meeting anyways. Thankfully we were allowed to come into Santo for a resupply trip. Well, it ended up that Friday's flight was overbooked,so we had to wait for Monday's flight and hope that itdidn't rain on Monday. As word spread around Sola that we hadn't gotten on the Friday flight, everyone started trying to help us get on Monday's flight. The woman who runs the bungalow we stayed at called her son in law, in Vila who works at the Air Vanuatu flight scheduling to ask him to check and make sure we were on the flight. It's one of the plusses of being in such a small country where pretty much everyone knows everyone else. So we made it on the flight and arrived in Santo on Monday afternoon.The last two months have been pretty eventful. School started in the middle of February. The students spent the first week back cleaning up the school grounds and classrooms. Some of them helped Sandra and I organize the piles of books into a small library. Sandra was nominated as the librarian for the school by the other teachers.

Sandra and I are in Port Vila for the day. We went to the Vanuatu Cultural Center this morning to help celebrate Cutural Day and then went to the Stad (Port Vila's soccer stadium) to watch Vanuatu and New Zealand play in a World Cup qualifying match. We left at the half and Vanuatu was up 1-0. It was a lot of fun but too hot.

We've got about two more weeks as trainees, then we become actual Peace Corps Volunteers! After that we'll be heading to Vanua Lava for good. More later.