Peace Corps Journals

2012

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

2012-02-10 00:17:58

This post was written in several parts, between 31 January and 5 February. So, I’m pretty sure the apocalypse has started. It is 2012 now, after all. In the past two weeks, we in Vanuatu have had three “tropical lows” move through the country, a 7.1 earthquake, and ridiculous flooding (in Sola, at least). At [...]

jasmine.

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu whomever you are with

2012-02-09 02:00:00

we had this coming at us as of monday and were expecting to get slammed by wednesday morning. a level 3 cyclone.

but we didn't.

instead, we celebrated gene's birthday with a pizza party at carla's house.

1-19 How to make a kava shell

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu Vignettes from the Adventures of two Volunteers in Vanuatu

2012-02-07 21:04:00

Half a coconut shell, ready to be cleaned up.

We've mentioned a few times that parts of the coconut plant are used for almost everything. Other than coconut milk curry, my favorite use is the shell as a drinking vessel. Here, it's just kava that is drunk out of the shells. I intend to bring a number back and drink other things out of them as well. Of course, I will also have to keep a couple for the powdered kava I'll be drinking when I get nostalgic.

Scraping the fuzz off the outside of the shell.

Still too rough to drink out of.

In order to get the shell ready to drink out of, first it must be husked as previously described. After that we break the shell open by whacking it with the dull side of our bush knife. Then we scratch the meat out (which means we get to have something with coconut milk, yum!) with a special tool (one of the only specialized tools in this country.) We scratch out most of the meat to milk and then continue scratching the last scraps onto the ground (they contain more shell than meat.)

Sandpaper that sucker down.

Next, we have to thoroughly clean the fuzz off the outside. This starts with either a bush knife or a piece of glass.

Having access to sandpaper, we then use that to get it really smooth and ready to drink out of.

All ready for drinking!

We don't seem to get them filed/sanded down quite as much as they do but they should be quite serviceable.

2-2 Maorip Tae Kwon Do Karate Klub

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu Vignettes from the Adventures of two Volunteers in Vanuatu

2012-02-07 21:09:00

Our guide up next to some HUGE bamboo

We went antap to a community named Maorip in January. Shortly after Christmas, one of the men in the community had asked us if we were willing to come up and discuss the possibility of training a group of men there. We agreed with all sorts of red flags going off in both of our heads.

Let me try to explain the multitude of red flags. First, we don't know these men. We've been seeing a lot of domestic violence and unnecessary violence recently and don't want to teach men how to better his their wives and children. We don't know what these men are like or if they will follow a rule about no hitting people. Second, they claimed to have previous training. To me, that sounded a lot like “We like to fight,” or it sounds like the guys who box who just sort of flail at each other and have very little discipline or control. Third, they live close to two hours away from Melsisi which is an hour away from Vansemakul where we live. How are we supposed to train a group of men that far away? Fourth, when we said I would be training to, the man who brought this up to us seemed confused. When we set up the day to go discuss this, he assumed it would be just Jason going, not me. I pointed out I want to train other women and he had absolutely no response. He was flabbergasted by the idea.

In short, we had some reservations. We went up anyway, at the least it was a chance to go see another part of Central Pentecost.

We walked up the hill after a downpour, which is always fun. The rain makes the road slick and increases the humidity making it a sweaty, slippery walk straight uphill for two hours. We made it to the first house and got fed lok is or banana laplap and crab. We continued to the nakamal where all the events of the day would be happening. We showed up and they were not ready for us. This is normal and not at all cause for concern. We hung out and ate more banana laplap and Jason's got chicken wings.

After a few hours we got started on the welcome ceremony. They did a short demo, in which it turns out that despite the name “Tae Kwon Do Karate Klub” they do Kung Fu. Go figure. Though the name is a confused thing, they didn't seem to be. They actually knew something and had put together a decent demo. There were hitches, but when aren't there hitches? In this case, it had more to do with the very small space and having three men swinging sticks.

The view from antap as we got closer to the village

After the demo, Jason and I did a short demo. We hadn't prepared anything, we didn't realize that we should. We did white belt form in unison, I did brown belt and Jason did blue sash. Then we each did three or four techniques and called it a day. For having no warm up and no demo practice, we pulled it off. They were impressed anyway.

Jason talked about non-violence and the importance of using training to make your body and mind strong, not to train to hurt someone. As Jason was saying this, one of the men was nodding and all of them were listening. I told them that they had found brothers for Jason to train with but now i wanted them to find me sisters. We'll see what happens.

I got sent away to go hang out with the women while the men ground kava. I caused quite a stir by trying to weave a little girl's basket. She got bored and didn't feel like weaving anymore. The basket she was weaving is the second pattern children learn. I've learned the first, so clearly, it made sense for her to give me the second to try. I had a group of about 10 women and girls watching me figure out how to weave. I got saved by a man coming to get me for kava. Actually, I was a little disappointed. I was having fun.

We drank kava. The awesome part about drinking kava is the atmosphere and the conversation. As a woman, I am often stuffed in the corner and can only talk to one person at a time. I sat and chatted with one of the men who had done the demo for over an hour. We talked about how non-violence is important, how using violence in the place of teaching through words and actions is the cowards way out. We talked about how important it is for women to train too, for both self-defense and for confidence building. He told me that if we come to teach them, they will have to “become like children again” (his words) to learn a new style. By the end of the conversation, most of my red flags had collapsed into little piles of dust or maybe a more accurate statement would be piles of kava makus.

We left the next morning carrying sweet bananas, sugar cane, taro and leftover pig. We'd set a date to come back to Maorip and do a full day workshop-style training. If all goes well, we'll be training with them once a month and doing demos around the island to help various groups raise money. The first one they want us to do is a school fundraiser in a village where there is another Peace Corps. Cross your fingers for us, maybe we'll have people to play with.

1-19 How to wear a loincloth

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu Vignettes from the Adventures of two Volunteers in Vanuatu

2012-02-07 19:47:00

A while back, pictures were posted of me in a loincloth. I've since continued to wear it around the village, especially around kava time. I've actually come to enjoy wearing it, especially in this ridiculously hot season. In case any of you want to try a loincloth yourself this summer, here is how they work.

First, acquire two pieces of cloth. One should be a thin strip to make a belt with. The other wide enough to fold in half and still be the width of your hip bones and long enough to hook under your “personal bits” with some length on either side.

Put on the long strip as a belt, tying it on the side.

Pull one end of the bigger cloth through the front of the belt with enough length for the flap in the front.

The other end of the big cloth goes between your legs. Pull it over the belt and back through underneath. Then loop it back around itself. No, you don't need to tie it or anything, it will hold just fine as is.

That's all. Enjoy a wonderfully cooling breeze!

Eventually, I will find a tsip (red mat) which is the kastom loincloth and try that one out. Don't worry, there will be pictures.

Three Earthquakes and a Cyclone

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu Prakasha II: The Freedom To Go

2012-02-07 06:23:00

I am currently in the capital of Port Vila for a Peace Corps training. Here, I have been able to obtain many tools I need to work on my house on Malekula which are not available there, including acrylic paints, a smokeless stove that works by building a fire inside of it, a stereo that operates from a cell phone battery, various spices, a tea kettle and pot for loose tea. Vanuatu was recently struck by three earthquakes, but sustained no damages. I was awoken by one at midnight one night that frightened me so much I ran outside in a towel. Vanuatu is also being hit by a cyclone tonight, so the Peace Corps has told us to take refuge in their office. We have moved our mattresses from the hotel into the office so we can sleep there, and will hopefully have access to Internet and electricity during the night. Hopefully, we will be permitted to return to our hotel tomorrow. Thankfully, it is not expected to be too dire.

Scared and Excited

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu edge of the blue

2011-10-05 18:24:00

Okay. As promised, I've finally gotten around to setting up a blog, so I can write about my time in the Peace Corps, and you lovely people can read it (or ignore it, it's all good). I'll keep this simple for now, as I leave tomorrow and still have approximately a million things to do. On that note, apologies to anyone I didn't say goodbye to in person; having left stuff til the last second, it's been a pretty busy time. Also, I really didn't want to say anymore goodbyes. It's a pretty hard thing to do. And you'll all be writing me anyway, right? Right?

A quick recap for those who haven't heard me blathering about the Peace Corps for the past few months: I'm going to Vanuatu, a small country consisting of 80-odd islands in the South Pacific. I'll be living there for 27 months, working as a primary teacher trainer (meaning I'll help train elementary school teachers, primarily in teaching English). Exactly what my job will entail, I'll learn more about once I'm there, plus I'll doubtless be working on my own side projects (translation of Star Trek into Bislama? Perhaps!). I've been wanting to do this for a long time, and I'm so excited, but of course, also nervous, and sad about the people I'm leaving for a while.

My internet access will be spotty at best, so don't count on frequent updates, but I'll write when I can. Pleeeeease feel free to e-mail me! I may be slow in replying, but I'll always appreciate hearing from people. Even better, write me a letter! (It rhymes, so you HAVE TO DO IT) You can write to me at:

Rosemary Sheets

Peace Corps/Vanuatu

PMB 9097

Port Vila

Republic of Vanuatu

Seriously, if you sat down right now, wrote me a silly letter, and sent it, I'd get it in a few weeks while in the thick of culture shock, and I would be a happy happy girl. Just sayin'.

Finally, my schedule for the forseeable future: I leave Houston tomorrow for Los Angeles, where I'll meet up with the other new people going to Vanuatu. The next day, the 7th, is a day of workshops/training sessions, then that evening we fly out to Vanuatu. I'll lose the 8th crossing the International Dateline (time wizardry!) and arrive in Port Vila on the 9th. I'll be in training (so, living in a larger town with a host family, near other volunteers, learning language/adjustment skills) from October 9th to December 9th, after which I'll find out where my site (village I'm living in) will be, and go there! At that point I'll get a new address, but the address above is for the Peace Corps office, and you can ALWAYS send me mail there.

Alright, that's all I've got for right now. I'm excited to start living in Vanuatu, and can't wait to share what it's like over there! (Also, finally find out what a breadfruit is like.) I'll miss everyone over here!

Staging

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu edge of the blue

2011-10-07 04:41:00

Why, hello again.

I'm now in L.A., where I've met up with the other 29 volunteers going to Vanuatu (mostly an even split of English education and community health volunteers, with a smattering of IT educators). We started hanging out in the lobby as we trickled in, then turned in our forms and became-- trumpets, please!-- Peace Corps Trainees. Yes, I am an official Trainee. Have to complete training and swear in before I'm a real Volunteer.

Tomorrow is a full day of pouring information into our heads before we fly out at night. I'm definitely starting to feel more alone and scared than before, but that's to be expected. I'm still very excited and very committed to doing this. Also, the other Trainees in my group (Group 24, officially, being the 24th group of volunteers in Vanuatu) seem really fun, and already we're getting along great.

So that's your update on where I am now. Not a lot more to say-- still excited, still nervous, still sad to be away from people and happy to be going to meet new people.

I have a million things to say

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu edge of the blue

2011-11-02 22:26:00

Here I am, with internet access for the first time in forever! And it ain't gonna last, either, and I'm not sure how well posting blog stuff is gonna work. So I've been typing entries in a Word document on my laptop, which I'm now gonna copy and paste in its entirety and post as one big chunk. The formatting will probably be weird, and there'll be spelling errors, but whatever. The most recent stuff I've written is at the bottom.

Sunday the 16th of October, 2011, 8:24 PM

I'm sitting on a bed in a small room, in a small but very nice home, in a small town called Tanaliu, on a small island called Efate, in a small country called Vanuatu. My name is Leipanga.

Maybe I should back up.

I've just spent a week living with the other 28 trainees in Peace Corps Vanuatu Group 24 at a campground near Pango Village, where we recieved extensive introductions to the local pidgin language Bislama (where everything is similar to English, except when it isn't), cultural background (one shell of kava, no more, please), health issues we'll face here (I am now prepared to self-adminsiter a malarial blood test and instructed to routinely deworm myself every six months), safety and security (protip: the rockfish will get you before the sharks do), and more. Today, we packed up our belongings plus the equpiment issued to us by the Peace Corps (mosquito net, life jacket, health kits, solar lantern, etc), and split into two groups: VITEL (Vanuatu Intelligence Technologies and English Literacy, aka the people saying “’S’ goes ‘ssssss’!”) and CH (Community Health, aka the people suggesting that you wash your hands and use condoms). The CH group departed for Mangaluliu, while we VITEL folks headed to Tanaliu, a very small town about an hour's drive from the capitol city Port Vila. Although Mangaluliu has hosted PC trainees six times before, this is the very first time trainees have come to stay in Tanaliu.

Tanaliu is a beautiful, small, rural town. We walked up the road to a small field (perhaps you've noticed that the key word here is "small") where we were met with a welcoming ceremony. A string band played in the background-- string bands are the local music here, and sound a little bit like Southern rural string music with an island flair. Women in island dresses (google "Mother Hubbard dress" and you should see what I mean) lined the road, placing salusalus over each of our heads (you would see it as a plastic lei, but here, it's a salusalu). We sat down under a tent where a crowd of locals waited, watched by smaller groups of people from the sides. While dogs played nearby and roosters crowed in the background, we were welcomed with short speeches in Bislama from various men-- the organizer, the local man who is a member of Parliament, the chief of the village, and (my favorite) the elderly man who explained in the best oldfala (old fellow) style the history of Tanaliu and Americans in WWII (we maintained a base there, and there are still ruins from WWII nearby; as he put it, "Americans came before and built roads and brought much development, and now they have come back again for the very first time. God bless America!").

After the speeches, it was time for each trainee to meet their host family. The families lined up, and as each trainee was called forward the organizer announced the kastom (custom) name our family had given us. When my name was called, I walked up to a warm hug from a middle-aged woman and her husband, Leisale and Hamish, who placed another salusalu around my neck and told me my new kastom name was Leipanga. We then sat down for a picnic of island food (taro, manioc, laplap, cabbage, and more), and my host mama Leisale started introducing me to everyone around, explaining how I was related to them.

In Vanuatu, relations are extremely important, and to the uninitiated, just as complicated. It's pretty telling that the language has basically one preposition (long) and almost no adjectives (good is gud, as is beautiful, or cute, or nice, or wonderful, or pleasing, or tasty, etc), but a plethora of pronouns describing exactly how many people you're talking about, and who you're talking to, and whether or not the person you're talking to is included in the group you're talking about (mifala, mitufala, yumi, yumi tu, yufala, yutrifala, olgeta, and on and on). There are rules to relations here. My mother's sister is also called my mother, but her brother is called my uncle. My father's brother is also my father, but his sister is my aunt. So my mother's sister's husband is my father, and my father's brother's wife is my mother. So anyone that I call mama or papa, their kids are my bratas mo sistas (brothers and sisters), but oddly enough, the children of those bratas and sistas are called my smol angkels (small uncles), regardless of gender. The children of anyone I call aunt (anti) or uncle is my cousin (kasen), but their children call me mama. Got it? Cause I'm still struggling with it.

Suffice it to say, I was quickly introduced to several mamas, many aunts, two sisters, one grandpa (the oldfala from the history talk, I was pleased to note!), a handful of fathers (one of whom is the member of Parliament), and my son. Yes, I have six month old son, apparently. He can't talk, but if he could, he'd call me mama. I also found out that I'm now related to almost all of the other trainees. This was all complicated by the fact that many of these new relations were introduced by their kastom names, which for women always begin with "Lei" (meaning woman or girl in the local language-- not Bislama), and that my mama began trying to teach me the language names for my new relations as well as their Bislama names ("language" is used to refer to the local langauge, of which there are many in Vanuatu, varying between villages). It was fun, but I'm going to have to make a family tree to understand it all. No, seriously. That's my homework.

Mama Leisale also explained to me the meaning of my kastom name, Leipanga. I've already mentioned that "lei" means woman or girl, and "napanga" is the name of the banyan tree (look up pictures-- they're huge and gorgeous). So "Leipanga" means "girl of the banyan tree." My mama's name, Leisale, means "woman of driftwood." We had a very quintessentially Peace-Corps-y talk about why she gave me that name. Like the banyan tree, I will start as a very small seed, but grow and grow, putting down roots and spreading branches, so that the pikinini (children in Bislama-- I know it's a word with racial overtones in America, but that's what kids are called here) can come to rest and learn under my branches, eating my seeds of wisdom. Yeah, I know, slap some hemp on me and start playing "Kumbaya," but it was a really heartfelt conversation, and I'm extremely touched by how important my, and the Peace Corps', presence here is to her and the people of Tanaliu. It was an amazing welcome to our homestay village, where we'll be living and training (still full days of class) for the next two months.

After we'd eaten, Mama Leisale and Tati (dad) Hamish took me to my new home, which was approximately 20 seconds away (seriously, like I said, small). They have a beautiful garden (karen long floa nomo-- garden of only flowers, as just "karen" means somewhere you grow produce) and house, which is a small central room with two couches, and four smaller rooms that open of off it. Two of their sons still live at home, but being 16 and 19, I got only the obligatory "Olsem wanem?" (how are you?) before they slunk off to watch the rugby game at the chief's house (apparently he has a TV and generator). My home doesn't have electricity or running water, but I get the impression that my family is one of the more well-off ones in the village. The kitchen and bathroom are small separate structures, but right next to the house. The bathroom (smol haos-- small house) has a Western style toilet that you flush by pouring water down it (I will master this skill at some point) and a big barrel of water you dip into to shower (swim-- yes, the word "swim" means shower; to say swim as Americans mean it, you say "swim long solwata," or "swim in the ocean"). I haven't seen much of the kitchen yet, but I've made Mama Leisale promise to teach me to cook, so I'll know more soon.

My host mama and tati could not be sweeter or more welcoming. Of course, it doesn't hurt that my Bislama is really growing quickly. Hamish works as a ship's pilot, so he's leaving tomorrow and will only be here some weekends, so it'll be mostly me and Leisale, who speaks language, Bislama, and French, but not really English (though she understands a good bit). This means I'll have to practice, which is great! She and Hamish are both really good at speaking to me like an adult, but still slowly and carefully, and correcting me without being intrusive. We spent the evening stap storian, which I could translate poetically as "to story," but will more accurately describe as "shooting the shit." Storian is a huge part of the culture in Vanuatu, and includes everything from gossip, to talking about plans for the next day, to telling stories about what happened to you-- everything, basically. Storian. We storianed, then we walked out back to the next house where another trainee, Karla (Leipopong, now), is living with Leisale's son (I think-- like I said, I'm slow at the relations thing), and storianed with them for a while. It was really enjoyable, and I'm pretty proud of my Bislama skills. Then we came back and storianed out in the karen lo floa nomo some more ("long" is often shortened to "lo"). Leisale and Hamish are both very intelligent and caring, and talking to Leisale, I was encouraged to realize that she really does understand that I need to learn everything about island life, from cooking, to cleaning, to lighting hurricane lamps (kerosene lamps). Like I told her, "Mi olsem wan pikinini frum se mi no save mekem nating, no toktok, no mekem kakae, nating" (I'm like a child because I don't know how to do anything, I can't speak, or make food, anything), but like she told me, "Bae yu save" (You will know). She told me that I'm her child now, the same as her sons who live here, and that I should feel at home, taking whatever food I want, asking for anything I need. She sincerely appreciates us trainees coming to Tanaliu, just as I deeply appreciate her and Hamish so generously welcoming me into her home. Plus, she stencils cool designs on fabrics, and after I showed her a shirt my mom made for me, I'm going to teach her to reverse tie-dye (like normal tie-dye, but intead of colored dyes, you just put the thing in bleach).

Now I'm in my small room, in my small home, in my small town, in my small country. My name is Leipanga, and I am surrounded by family. I'm going to end here and go to sleep, as it is 9:30 and that is pretty much my bedtime these days, but I couldn't feel better about where I am, or who I am, or what I'm doing. Lukim yu bakagen (see you later).

10/26/11 8:30 PM

Here are three kastom stories my mami told me.

Here in Tanaliu, there is a freshwater spring up in the hills, in the inland area called the bush. We use the water to bathe, to cook, and to drink. Now, the water is plentiful, and everyone can take it and use it. But before, things were different. The water trickled from a crack in the stone, no more, and it didn’t trickle all the time. Suppose a man was hunting in the bush and grew thirsty; if he went to the spring and wanted to drink, first he had to cry. Only once the man cried could he fill his cup and drink. He couldn’t share the water with another man, either, drinking only half and giving the rest to a friend. No, each man had to come, and cry before the stone, and only then would the spring give him water. The spring wouldn’t give water to women, either, because the spring itself was a woman, and so it only cared about attention from the men. If a man wanted water for his wife, he had to come and cry on her behalf to get water for her to drink. That’s why the stone where the spring comes out is called Stone Crying. But then white men came, missionaries, and they went and talked to the spring. They told it that it was being bad, and that it should stop making men cry before it gave them water. The spring relented, and now it gives water to everyone, whether they’re men, women, or children. My mami first told me that the white men also moved apart the rocks to let more water out; later, she said it might have been an earthquake that shifted the rocks and allowed the spring to flow freely. The lesson of the story, she told me, is that if you really want something, you must work for it, just as the men had to cry for their water. (The end of the story seems to kind of undermine that moral, but whatever.)

This is a story about the birds of Vanuatu. Once, in the time of our grandparents, all the birds were going to a wedding. They were all very excited, and because they wanted to look their best for the ceremony, each decided to paint himself in beautiful, bright colors. Now, at this time, Parrot and Flying Fox (what bats are called here) were best friends. So they decided to paint each other for the wedding. First, Flying Fox painted Parrot, coloring him with bright reds, greens, and blues. When he was finished, Parrot said, “Ok, now I will go look at myself in the mirror!” He flew to the river and saw his reflection, and thought that he looked very nice indeed. “Ok,” said Flying Fox, “Now, you paint me.” But when Parrot painted Flying Fox, he painted him black, all black from head to toe, save for a yellow scarf painted around his neck. “I’m done!” said Parrot. “Now you go look at yourself in the mirror.” So Flying Fox, he flew to the river and looked at his reflection. But what he saw didn’t please him at all. “Hey!” he said. “You’ve painted me all rubbish! I’m black, black all over. You’ve given me a yellow scarf and no more.” Flying Fox was ashamed of how he looked. Not only did he not want to go to the wedding in his black clothes, but he was so ashamed to be seen that now he only flies at night, when no one can see him. That’s why Parrot and Flying Fox are no longer friends, and Parrot flies during the day wearing bright colors, while Flying Fox flies at night wearing all black, save for the yellow scarf around his neck (apparently the fruit bats around here have yellow necks). So you must always be careful when choosing your friends, and think carefully before trusting them, because sometimes they are not good friends at all, and will do things to make you feel very bad.

This is a story about two good friends, Bluefly and Firefly. The men had all gone fishing, and caught far too many fish, so, wastefully, they piled the leftover fish up on the shore. The fish began to rot and stink. Bluefly has a very long nose, so he could smell the fish from far away. He flew to the beach to look, and after, returned home to fetch his friend, Firefly. “Come!” Bluefly told his friend. “Let’s go eat from the fish on the beach.” So Bluefly and Firefly flew together from their home in the bush to the beach, and feasted on fish. After some time, Firefly said, “I’m full now, let’s go home.” But Bluefly said, “No, wait a while longer, I want to eat more.” So Firefly waited, and Bluefly ate. Later, Firefly said again, “Bluefly, let’s go home. It’s getting dark.” But Bluefly said again, “No, wait a while longer, I want to eat more.” So the two stayed on the beach. By the time Bluefly was ready to go, the sun had gone down, and it was very dark. As the two flew home, Firefly had a light, and so he could see the way and knew where to go. But Bluefly had no light, and soon, he flew full-speed into a coconut tree. His long nose crumpled, and he fell to the ground. “Hey!” said Firefly, coming back to check on his friend. “Are you alright?” “Yes, yes,” said Bluefly. “Let’s go.” So they took off again. After a while, as Firefly flew on with his light, they passed a papaya tree. Firefly easily skirted around it, but Bluefly had no light, and so once again, he flew right into it. His nose broke, and he fell to the ground. “Hey!” said his friend, Firefly. “Are you alright?” Bluefly wasn’t alright; his nose was quite sore. But he lied, “Yes, yes, let’s go.” So the two flew on. Soon, they passed by a banana tree. Once again, Bluefly flew into the tree and fell to the ground. “Hey!” said Firefly, “are you alright?” But this time, Bluefly didn’t answer, because he was dead. My mami says she told this story as a parable to the children in church last Sunday, finishing by telling them that the Bible says Jesus is the light of the world, and just as Firefly used his light to get home safely, so we must use Jesus’s light to guide our lives. When she told me the story, however, it quickly took on a much more practical bent, as she told me that I always needed to keep a flashlight in my bag in case I ended up walking around at night. Now we call my headlamp my firefly.

10/30/11 7:50 PM

I've been in Vanuatu now for three going on four weeks, and staying with my homestay family in our training village for two. Time has become a very strange concept for me; a week can fly by without my noticing, while a single day can feel like an entire year. My personal sense of time has never been quite so fluid. So on the one hand, I feel like I have way too many things to talk about to ever fit it into one (reasonable) blog post, while on the other hand it's almost hard for me to know what to talk about-- things that struck me at first as exotic are now everyday. What, you don't drink coconuts daily and swim in the Pacific when you're bored? Weird.

So this is gonna be a kind of info-dump, trying to catch you all up on where I've been, what I'm doing, and what it's like here. I'm gonna try to organize it, but I'm sure that'll get away from me at some point. If anyone reading this (friends or strangers, whoever) has any specific questions, definitely ask me by e-mail or comments! My internet access is extremely sporadic, but I'll answer when I can. Right now, I'm gonna focus mostly on my experiences. I am learning a bunch of cool stuff about the history of this country, which I'd love to tell you as the online resources on Vanuatu are veeerry limited, but I'm going to hold off on that for now.

A brief recap of my time in Vanuatu so far: all 29 new trainees in Group 24 met up in L.A., after which we flew out to Vanuatu together, arriving October 9th. The airport is in Port Vila, the capital city located on the island of Efate (and one of the only two real cities in this country). We then drove to Pango Village, a small village about 10 minutes drive outside of Vila, and stayed for a week at a campground just beyond Pango. I recapped that first week a little bit in my earlier post (which feels weird to say cause as of now, I'm writing all this in a Word document on my laptop). I told you about the classes we took, but what I haven't tried to describe yet is what it's like to be here. That first day we arrived at the campground, I walked straight out into the ocean in my clothes, not even bothering to change into the knee-length boardshorts and t-shirt that are my "swimsuit" here. I've never been in water so blue or so clear. This place is stunningly beautiful.

Now we've been living in Tanoliu. I still love my host family, especially my mami. She's so friendly and welcoming, and I feel genuinely at home in her house. Our classes here still include Bislama and practical stuff like medical/safety issues, but now we're also getting a lot of information on teaching literacy to young children, as that's going to be my main role here.

Okay, I'm already losing focus. My brain wants to tell you everything all at once. Let me try breaking this into sections.

Family: When I'm hanging out at home, I mostly chat with my mami, Leisale. My tati (daddy) is off on the island of Santo, and will probably be there most of the time I'm in Tanoliu. I also have two brothers, 15 and 19, who live at home. They're both very nice, but I don't spend much time chatting with them-- sometimes I pepper them with questions about life as a young person in Vanuatu, but aside from that, I think we're unsure of what to talk about. My older sister Annie also comes over a lot, with her three kids, sometimes her husband, and often their family's adorable puppy. Annie's very smart and fun, and also speaks fluent English, so whenever I have a question that I can't wrangle into Bislama I go talk to Annie. Her two youngest kids are about 6 and 7, and are very energetic. Her older daughter, Ashley, is about 11 or 12, and absolutely awesome. She carries herself like a much older girl, and is a blast to talk to. Ashley's kastom name is Leipanga, like me, so sometimes my host mom calls me Ashley without thinking, which I find pretty amusing. I've since established that Ashley is Panga 1 and I'm Panga 2. Whenever we're near a banyan tree, I point to it and yell, "Panga 3!" Fulap pangas plesia (Lots of pangas around here). I've also got two married uncles who live right near my house (I could throw a rock and I'd hit them), who also have PC trainees staying with them. Plus, you know, I'm related to basically all the village. That's how it works here.

Food: Let's face it, the first thing we ususally want to know about other countries is what they eat there, right? My diet here is extremely healthy. Aelan kakae (island food) is really good for you generally; it's mostly fruits, root vegetables, and greens. My mami in particular is very health conscious (thanks in part to previous Peace Corps health volunteers coming to give talks!), choosing to not use too much oil, or sugar, or eat too much rice (rice being the one part of the staple diet that isn't grown here). A typical breakfast for me is tea, bread with peanut butter or jam, papaya (called popo-- you eat popo ALL THE TIME here. Have you ever seen a papaya tree? It's like a fruit machine, and it's in season year round), bananas, sometimes mangos, sometimes biscuits (cookies-- a lot of British English terms here), sometimes eggs. A typical lunch is rice, soup (the catchall term used for vegetables cooked with extra water to make some broth, sometimes punched up with a can of tuna thrown in) (veggies here may mean string beans, or bok choy, or cabbage, or carrots, etc), some boiled manioc or taro or cassava (all root vegetables), and some lettuce and tomatoes. A typical dinner is pretty similar to lunch, but usually somewhat smaller. Chicken wings are pretty popular, too. The healthiness of my meals, while not atypical, isn't necessarily the norm here; one girl, for example, gets banana pancakes for breakfast that are literally dripping with oil. So far, one time my mami and I made a rus, or roast, by building a fire, setting a metal grill on top of it, and cooking sausages and chicken wings in oil in a saucepan. One time we also made laplap, a local special-occasions kind of food. To make laplap, you grate banana or one of those root veggies (we did yams) into a thick goo, which you pour into banana leaves. Then you squeeze coconut milk all over it, lay some island cabbage (a local, spinach-like green) on top, wrap the banana leaves over it and tie it into a neat packet, and bury it in heated rocks for a few hours. The rocks you heated on a fire. There are a lot of variations on laplap, but that's the kind I made. When it's done you unwrap the leaves and cut the laplap into pieces; it's really tasty, with a smooth, slightly chewy texture. I'd say the one general complaint about food here is that it can tend to towards the flavorless, and is all pretty soft-- cucumbers are the crunchiest thing on the menu. I really like the food, though I am looking forward to living on my own and experimenting more. I did have a brief moment of panic the other day when I couldn’t remember the name of my favorite greasy-burrito place in Portland for a good 30 seconds (Super Torta, I miss thee! Another trainee made me tell her the name so she could remind me the next time I forgot). But overall, I'm growing quite fond of aelan kakae.

Language: Bislama. Bislama is fascinating. It's a very young language, and developed out of necessity when traders, plantation owners, missionaries, and assorted white men came to the islands, and everyone had to develop a common language to communicate. I'm picking it up very quickly, which is awesome. I'm already comfortably conversational, and can joke around in Bislama, which for me is pretty crucial for social interactions. On the one hand, I have it easy, because it is a pidgin English and therefore a lot of vocabulary is familiar (although some things can be slightly tricky; "samting" means a thing, "samsamting" means “something"; "stap" means to stay, be, or live, except when it's paired with another verb, then it becomes a present progressive, so "emi stap singsing" rather counterintuitively means "he is singing" instead of "he stops singing"). On the other hand, Bislama can sometimes be frustratingly simple. It's pretty evident that it developed out of a strict need to communicate rather than, say, to write academic papers or poetry. Pretty, beautiful, lovely, cute, handsome, gorgeous, stunning-- all translate as "nice," "wei nice," or "wei nice wei nice," depending on just how emphatic you want to be. "Gud" and "no gud" are catchall adjectives that describe, well, everything. Not a lot of synonyms or shades of gray. You are fatfat or bonbon. If you want to be specific about something, don't do it in Bislama. Nonetheless, I really do enjoy this language, and it has a lovely cadence, and can be really effective for telling stories (or in Bislama: Me likem langwis ia tumas, mo emi gud tumas, mo emi save gud blo storian). It may not work the best in written form, but its simplicity really plays into the oral culture thing—with such a limited vocabulary, everything is highly contextual, and encourages a lot of gestures, facial expressions, miming, etc. For funsies, I will pass on the lyrics to the first verse of “Where is My Mind?” in Bislama, which we translated in one of my language classes:

“Wetem hed blong yu long ea/ Mo hed blong yu long graon/ Traem trik ia mo spinim/ Hed blong yu bae I brokdoan/ Be i gat nating long hem/ Mo yu askem long yu wan/ ‘Wem tingting blong mi?’/ Long wei long wata, lukim i stap swim?”

Clothing: Casual but modest. Here on Efate, the rules are a little looser, and plenty of women wear spaghetti strap tops, or skirts that hit a little above the knee, or knee-length shorts. Still, you don't show too-too much skin, especially if you're an American who doesn't want to get a bad reputation her first month in-country. At church on Sundays, I (and most women) wear island dresses, the aforementioned Mother Hubbards. Extremely spacious, colorful, and with poofy sleeves and frills and all sorts of weird frippery. I feel more than a little silly when I wear one, but it could be worse. Which brings me to...

Church: Vanuatu is very Christian. Remember when I mentioned missionaries earlier? Well, the Ni-Vans (Ni-Vanutatu: adjective for a person from Vanuatu, often shortened to Ni-Van) did kill some (the missionaries also did some killing of their own), and did eat some, but not all (yeah, cannibalism used to be a thing here, but it hasn't happened since, like, 1969. That was an isolated incident, I think; it was basically gone since the 1900s, I think). But clearly some missionaries got through, cause they got fulap church here (fulap means a lot of, remember. I'm probably gonna keep saying that). My family asked me what religion I am in the U.S., and when I told them I didn't have one, they laughed and told me that now I'm Presbyterian. So, now I'm Presbyterian. We say grace before every meal, and I go to church on Sundays. Today I even gave a reading in Bislama. Sometimes the conversations about Jesus can start to get a litle overwhelming, but it's all sweet, love-thy-neighbor, trust-in-God, so it's all good.

Let’s see, what am I missing except for a million things…oh, amenities. Okay.

Electricity: Some houses have generators (the PC office does, so that’s where I charge my cell phone/iPod/whatever). My house doesn’t. At night, we use kerosene lamps (called hurricane lamps here) and solar lamps to see by (and I use my little headlamp for reading/writing). Kerosene lamps have a lovely orange light, and also I feel pretty cool using them, not gonna lie. Solar lamps, which are small lanterns you place in the sun during the day to charge, give off a soft blue light, and are also pretty great. I sometimes still instinctively reach for a light switch when I walk into my bedroom at night, but really I don’t miss electricity (which is easy to say when I can still charge my electronics with no hassle nearby).

Water: We drink rainwater. There are spigots throughout the village that are hooked up to a freshwater spring in the hills, and that’s the water we use to cook and bathe (my family uses a hose to fill several barrels in our yard). They drink that water too, sometimes, but I still can’t—my system isn’t used to the little dudes living in it. Unless it’s been boiled, of course, which my family does for me when we run out of rainwater. Uuum yeah, like I said I shower with a bucket and flush my toilet with a bucket. And do my laundry in a bucket. Buckets: very important.

Okay, there’s a million more things to say, but I’m gonna stop for now cause…it’s just too much, you know? I hope that gave you some idea of what my life’s like right now. On a less informative and more personal level, I’m doing really, really well here. I’m happy, I like the people, country, and the other trainees in my group, I like my trainers and the PC staff, and I feel like my classes are getting me well prepared to go to site and work in a primary school. Sure, there are times when I feel lonely, or stressed out, and just want to be home, not having to process stimuli constantly, but those times are brief and not overwhelming. I haven’t for a minute regretted being here. So if you picture me, picture me in clear blue waters, swimming with friends by a palm-lined beach. Or picture me sitting with my host family at the table in the backyard, lit with the warm orange glow of a kerosene lamp, eating laplap and rice while the sounds of a nearby string band practicing float in the background. Or picture me sitting in the sun, sweating, shooing flies away from the cuts on my feet while I try to think of a practice lesson plan for teaching phonetics to first-graders. It’s all good; any one of those times, I’d be happy.

Here we go again

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu edge of the blue

2011-12-04 02:47:00

This morning, we packed up our stuff and left the training village! We're almost done. Now we have a week here in Port Vila, staying at a hotel, having a few more classes, and buying stuff to take to sites....cause in a week, we go to our sites! I'll put up another post about that in a sec (hint: I'm veryvery excited). But first, here are some random thoughts I've been accumulating while in the training village. Be prepared for another infodump.

This place is beautiful, and I will eat all of it

It was low tide, and the water was no more than shin deep as I carefully waded out over the coral. It was small coral, young and half-dead, but I still winced to feel it crush beneath my feet. Waiting for me at the edge of the shallows was a group of men, a trainer with a few locals. We were having a break in our interminable classes, a chance to look at the marine protected area off the shore of the village where the community health trainees are staying. One man offered me his diving mask and snorkel, and I put them on and stepped off the edge of the shallows into a deeper pool of water. I swam out and under the water, and...I don't even know how to describe it without slipping into cliché. I was suspended in an underwater pool, surrounded by walls of coral of all different colors and textures. Below me, on the sea floor, were giant clams, each one as big as my arm. Their shells looked like gray rock, but inside the scalloped edges of their mouths were iridescent glowing colors, moss green and electric blue. Our trainer warned me not to touch them, that they would quickly shut on my hand and trap me under water. I took him at his word. After, I swam out further in the water, over the expanse of reef. The coral flourished upwards from the seabed, creating a landscape of reaching branches, rounded hills, deep valleys and caves. Fish darted everywhere in an amazing variety of colors and shapes, from smaller than my thumb to the size of my hand. Every color was glowing: yellow, indigo, blue, green, silver, red. It was another world, something I'd seen in pictures and on T.V. but somehow had never believed was real. When I swam to the edge of the reef, the ocean floor dropped suddenly below me, and I looked out into the deep blue that stretched on and on, pulling away into a haze. The ocean seemed incomprehensibly big. I felt strange, floating there in the water, looking at the overwhelming colors and life of the reef, at the bright edges of refracted sunlight gliding over my arms, out at the impenetrable blue of the ocean deeps. I was giddy, exhilarated by the unfamiliar beauty around me, and awed by my presence in this alien, seemingly infinite environment. Gazing out into that enormous blueness I felt something almost like fear; I felt how small I was, and how much I was not in my own world. At the same time, in a strange way, I felt at home. I guess feeling alien as always felt a little like home to me. Then I turned, and swam back over the reef, amazed to be there, to be seeing the color and light and movement around me, to know that, for now, this is my world. When I finally came back on shore, I couldn't stop grinning, and when two other trainees asked me how it was, I could only manage something gleefully unintelligible about colors.

A few days later, we went to Hat Island (thus named because it looks like a hat). There, some of us went fishing with spear guns (not gonna lie, I sat that one out—the thought of harpooning a fellow trainee wasn’t super appealing) to catch those same pretty fish I’d seen swimming on the reef. As a pile of exquisitely colored reef fish began to grow on shore, I learned how to scale and gut one. I used a piece of coral from the beach to scrape the rainbow-colored scales off a parrot fish, sliced it down the stomach with a knife, and reached inside to scoop out the guts. Then I impaled it on a sharpened stick and held it over a fire until it was deemed done by the Ni-Vans who accompanied us. I grabbed a leaf, put my fish on it, and dug in. Not too bad, really. In one week, those beautiful reef fish have gone from being something I thought of as appearing only on documentaries and in the aquariums in dentists’ offices, to being an everyday part of my world, to being lunch.

TIV

Speaking of, let me introduce a phrase we’ve begun throwing around: T.I.V. This is Vanuatu. When something bizarre, or frustrating, or just delightfully odd happens: well, TIV. I think my favorite example of a TIV moment came second hand, heard from another trainee who heard it from a volunteer he visited on another island. The volunteer was flipping through a magazine from the States, and came to an advertisement for a flat screen TV. The TV was displaying an image of a tropical fish to demonstrate just how crystal-clear its definition is, and the volunteer’s host sister reached over his shoulder, pointed to the fish, and said, “Oh, that one’s tasty.” TIV.

Small town girl

For the next two years, the country I call home is one that you’d probably never heard of until I started talking about it. I certainly had to Google Vanuatu before accepting my Peace Corps invitation—and to be honest, there isn’t even much information on the internet about this place (what there is largely comes from the PC itself). I’m rapidly learning a creole language only spoken here and (in a similar form) on other islands in the South Pacific. The South Pacific itself is a fairly alien concept to most Americans; we can picture clichés, outdated postcards, and settings from movies, but as a whole I think we don’t have much of an understanding of the South Pacific reality. In short, I am, in some ways, on another planet. At the same time, for all that I’m in a country that America hasn’t heard of, speaking a language that America doesn’t understand, eating food that America would consider exotic (so many coconuts, so so many, and I’ve tried shark, also I totally ate a pig heart the other day, btw), my new life can be described pretty accurately in a very familiar way: I’m a small town girl (and my world is certainly sometimes lonely, although damn if there’s a single train in this country, let alone one going anywhere at midnight). I live in a little village. The majority of what I eat grows within a mile of where I live, if not within eyesight. I drink rainwater. I cook with my mama on a fire, and wash my clothes by hand. Free time involves a lot of hanging out and chatting. An unfamiliar dog wandering past is topic for serious conversation (“Do you know that dog?” “I dunno, is it the one with a spot over its eye?” “It’s got a spot but I don’t think it’s that dog.” “Huh.”). On the weekend, if we’re feeling real antsy, we’ll walk forty minutes or so down the road (and I do mean THE road) to the big-ish store and get an ice cream (by big-ish, I mean a store you really walk inside of, rather than one where you just go up to the little window and tell them you need matches). Local music involves acoustic string instruments and the tropical equivalent of a washtub bass (bush bass). Kids literally play kick-the-can. Sometimes I have to chase piglets out of our garden, or chickens off the porch. I eat all my meals outside. Really, I only come inside to sleep. I hitch rides in the back of pickup trucks. Everyone knows my name—and every move I make. There are no secrets in a small town. Gossip is serious business. I wear long skirts all the time, and shoes only sometimes. My feet are always dirty. At night I refill our lamps with kerosene and light them. I say grace before every meal. On Sundays I put on a fancy dress, one with lace or frills, and go to church. I’m a country girl, now. Sure, that country is Vanuatu, but it ain’t so different, at least not in every way.

Drawing

I’ve been drawing a lot, here. Partially that’s cause there’s quite a bit of downtime, but also it’s been a fun way to interact with my family and the community. I used to wish I was musical, like my sister, because that’s so conducive to socializing; bust out a guitar and people can sing with you, or at least listen. Art has always seemed to me to be more inherently solitary. But it doesn’t have to be. The other night I sat at the table in our backyard, surrounded by a group of small children, hastily scribbling to keep up with their excited demands for drawings of mermaids, sharks, dolphins, and dugongs (manatees) to color. I have drawn a LOT of mermaids over the past month or so. This led to the interesting moment when my host aunt (she’s my mom’s sister, so actually I call her Mom, or in language, Tet) turned to me and said, “Now, Panga, I want to ask you something. These mermaids, I’ve seen a lot of pictures of them; do you think there’s really anything like them in the world?” She’s an intelligent, lovely person, and I don’t mean to belittle her; let’s face it, she’s probably seen any number of patently unbelievable things in pictures or on TVs only to learn that they’re real. But I had to explain that I was reasonably sure that mermaids are just a story.

Lady VaVa

Speaking of patently unbelievable, I just finished having dinner with my mom and another trainee, where, somehow, I ended up explaining to my mom that Lady Gaga is a pop singer in America who once wore a dress made out of meat to an award ceremony. The look on my mom’s face was priceless. “Meat? Like, from a cow? Sewn together? True?” She paused to process it. “Didn’t she smell bad? Didn’t all the dogs chase her?”

Black magic

Black magic is a Serious Deal here in Vanuatu. Hemi wan Bigfala Samting. Like everything in this country, it varies from island to island, town to town, and person to person, but I’d say it’s safe to generalize and say the vast majority of people firmly believe in black magic. In a devoutly Christian country, there’s a certain logic there; what’s Jesus if not the ultimate white wizard? And if you got good magic, there’s gotta be a flip side. So I’ve received plenty of warnings about the black magic I need to be on the lookout for. Some of this is fairly solid: don’t eat or drink anything a stranger gives you, because it might be poisoned or have a love spell on it. Okay, we got cyanide and rohypnol in the States, too. That love spell (which we tend to hear a lot about) is called sweet mouth; sometimes the person puts something in your food/drink, but more generally they rub some sort of leaf on their mouth, then whistle at you or something, and then you fall madly in love with them. Now, we’re getting into the less credible territory. You’ll notice that my instructions for sweet mouth are pretty vague, and that’s cause everyone here is incredibly vague on how, exactly, all this rampant black magic is being performed. It always involves “some sort of leaf,” but damn if anyone can point out which tree is imbued with all these powers. Some sort of leaf. You know. One of them. Pretty much anything bad that happens is blamed on black magic. Got some sores on your foot? Someone put black magic poison in your shoe. Something get stolen? Black magic. Bit by a shark? It was probably a man using black magic to disguise himself as a shark. My tone is light, but you can see where there are serious repercussions to a fervent belief in black magic. The most detailed description I’ve gotten was from a man on Epi, who told me that if you kill a black cat, and put a bone from it above the door of someone’s house, that night you can go into their house and they won’t wake up, no matter what you do. He says this magic is used to steal or rape people. See the problem? If someone gets raped, well, that was black magic. We’re not looking for evidence of who did it, we’re not looking for a way to stop the problem. It was black magic. If a cyclone is coming, the people might not listen to the radio and move to high ground, because someone’s already worked some black magic to ensure that the village will remain safe (yes, black magic is also sometimes used for good). This goes for the medical stuff, too; my host mom told me that last year, all her hair fell out, because someone put black magic poison on her towel (it grew back after a pastor prayed over her). Well, if you write that off to black magic, you could be overlooking a medical condition, right? So while part of me wants to be culturally respectful, and acknowledge that there are valid belief systems other than my own scientific one, it’s hard, when I can see so many negative outcomes from a belief in black magic. Understanding cause and effect seems like the only way to address a problem.

A lighter note on black magic: on Epi, I heard that they have a black magic version of zombies there. If you’re walking around at night, the people will warn you, do not, do NOT, carry bananas or banana laplap. Cause see, zombies? They freaking love bananas. It’s all they want to eat. And they will waylay you, and eat all your banana laplap, and then you will be very sad. Don’t fear the zombie apocalypse, Americans. The undead simply want your potassium-rich fruits.

Sense of scale

The other night, my cousin and I were looking at my world map together, and I showed her Houston and Portland. “Ok!” she said, moving her finger over to the sprinkling of color that is Vanuatu on a world map. “Let me find Tanoliu.” I had to explain that our village was not going to be on the map; the island of Efate, and the capitol city of Port Vila, would be the closest we could find. It can be hard sometimes to answer questions about the U.S., because it’s difficult to really convey the size of the States, and what that size implies. “Do you have coconut trees in America?” someone will ask, and I’ll have to explain that some places do, and some places don’t. Some of us live in huge cities, some in more rural areas. Some of us live close to the ocean, some of us live miles and miles away. Some of us are used to heat, some of us to snow. In some places, there’s a lot of racial diversity; in some places, not so much (the black trainees in our group have their own share of interesting experiences trying to explain that yes, they really are from America, not Africa, and no, they are not related to Obama). The sheer diversity of our country, in every way, is astounding. Hell, the other day I was chatting with a trainee from Chicago who has no idea what a hipster is—to someone in Portland, that’s like meeting someone who’s never heard of a squirrel. Of course, in some ways, Vanuatu has just as much diversity packed into an astronomically smaller space. Language on one island isn’t the same as on another. It may not be the same in two different villages on the same island. Custom varies from island to island. As my sister (straight, not host) charmingly asked in a letter, “Are you on a Jesus Freak island or a recently de-cannibalized wiener leaf island?” referring to the differences in religion and dress (to put it a touch more academically). Weather and climate vary (somewhat) from island to island. Vanuatu is by no means homogenous, but it can be characterized by generalizations. The U.S., god knows, has its fair share of monoculture, but it’s also got a staggering variety of people, places, and cultures. And a side note on monoculture: there is not a single McDonalds or Starbucks in this country. Hell yes.

Thrive

In this hot, wet environment, everything thrives. Things grow everywhere. You can start a garden by tossing out the papaya seeds from breakfast. Everything is lush and green. At times, Vanuatu looks remarkably like a scene from Jurassic Park, sans dinosaurs (full up lizards, though). The downside of this: everything thrives. Including bacteria. Scrapes, cuts, bug bites, runny noses, even hair follicles—there are endless ways to get infections here, and I’ve already garnered a handful of minor ones. This is an environment that is extremely conducive to life, be it the delicious mangos I eat, or the boil I’m pretty sure is developing on my leg right now (I know, ew. Just you wait till I inevitably get worms and describe it to you in great detail, then you’ll be begging for tame stories about my boils again).

We'll end on that note, for a moment.

Girl Tanna

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu edge of the blue

2011-12-04 02:54:00

BIG NEWS: We've had site announcements, meaning I now know where I'll be living for the next two years. Wheee yay fun! I'm going to Lakoutai Primary School on Tanna. Baisc overview: I win at site placement. Details: Tanna is one of the southernmost islands in Vanuatu. It's also got the most custom out of pretty much all of Vanuatu, which is to say that tradition, ritual, ceremonies, and beliefs are still very prevalent there. It is, for example, the epicenter of the John Frum movement, Vanuatu's cargo cult (check Wikipedia for details), as well as the group that worships Prince Philip of England. Don't get me wrong; Christianity still dominates there, as it does all over Vanuatu, but that Christianity goes hand-in-hand with custom. So that's awesome! I'll get to learn about all kinds of custom stuff, and see the big ceremonies, and all those anthropoawesome things I like. Tanna's also known for being one of the more conservative islands when it comes to gender, and certainly that's something I'll have to be aware of, but I'm in a pretty central part of the island (population-wise, not geographically; geographically, I’m 10 minutes walk from the ocean), which is waaaay different than being in the bush on Tanna. Meaning I'll actually be allowed to wear long shorts, and stuff, no biggie. So let me go into a little about my specific new home:

I WILL HAVE 24 HOUR ELECTRICITY. I know, I know, it's pretty hard to wrap my brain around. I'll be living in a small concrete house on the school grounds (but it's very close to the village, and the headmaster/other teachers also live on grouds), and my house is on the freaking grid. I'm not even using a generator. I'm wired. That is extremely unusual for a volunteer in Vanuatu, and I'm not quite sure how I got so lucky. I will be pooping in a hole and carrying my water with buckets, but have electricity 24/7 (but my poop hole is apparently brand new and very deep, so yay!). I'm also a 20 minute walk from another new volunteer, Laura, who is awesome and will be great to have around when I'm having a "what-the-hell-am-I-doing-here" moment. I'm also a half-hour walk from Lenakel, the provincial center on Tanna (also known as "Black Man Town" because all the shops there are owned by Man Tanna, not by Chinese people, which is the case in most places in Vanuatu) (also "Man Tanna" is what they call people from there, or "Woman Tanna." Goes for all the islands, really: "Man Malekula, Man Ambrym," whatever). Provincial center means: internet. I'm a half hour walk from internet. Shit is CRAZY. Definitely not what I was expecting. I'm close to internet, shops, a few restaurants...I mean, don't get the wrong idea, this is still all very basic, limited stuff. But in Vanuatu terms, I'm sitting pretty. I can buy peanut butter within walking distance, for instance. I’ll have cell coverage (no need for a satellite phone, hooray). I'm replacing a volunteer who just left in October, who set up what sounds like a very nice library at the school, so one of my projects will be trying to increase the sustainability (and water-proofing) the library. I'm also going to be improving literacy of primary students, and hopefully doing some teacher training in terms of teaching phonics and reading. The volunteer who I'm replacing wrote me a letter and put it in the file I received when I got my site assignment, and she sounds like she did a really great job. So that's actually a littttle intimidating; I've got some shoes to fill. I think I'm up to it, though. The school and community are both apparently very supportive and great; my host family is apparently awesome (I won't live with them, but they're my first point of contact/integration in the community, so I'll be chilling with them a lot). And I've got a (by PC standards) super fancy setup. Posh Corps, as they say. Part of me is maybe a little regretful that I'm not way out in the bush, in a thatched hut, working in a tiny village where they've never had a volunteer...but really, I know I have no room to complain, and really the important thing is the work I'll be doing. And on those lonely nights, I know that being able to charge my laptop and watch a movie will be a lifesaver.

Anyway. I'm leaving out all kinds of things, I'm sure. But long story short: I'm extremely pleased with my site assignment, and am very lucky.

Today we just left the training village, now we're all staying at a hotel in Vila for a week, and then on Sunday, I believe, I will be hopping on a plane to Tanna!

I'll write more later this week-- I'll actually have internet access this week! For now, gonna try and get my e-mail to actually load. Internet is sloooow here.

Swearing In

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu edge of the blue

2011-12-07 22:25:00

So far, this week in Vila before we head to site has been very exhausting, but a whole lot of fun. Coming from living for two months in rural villages, and knowing that soon we're heading out to our sites for two years, means that we're all a little like Amish kids on Rumspringa. Sample all this decadent availability of ice cream and beer and internet while you can. We've also been cooking a lot of family-style meals together, which is awesome; last night we coordinated a taco night for about 30 people, and amazingly enough it actually worked. Now, I can make tortillas!

Now we've finally come to the big day: Swearing In. Today, I will raise my hand in the air, and repeat after the U.S. Ambassador (to several Pacific Islands; Vanuatu doesn't have it's own ambassador, obvs), swearing to protect and uphold the U.S. Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Indiana Jones meets James Bond, right? Really, I'm just hoping there aren't too many extremely long speeches, cause I'm gonna be wearing an island dress, and those suckers are TOASTY. Once I've taken that oath, I'll officially move from PCT-- Peace Corps Trainee-- to PCV-- Peace Corps Volunteer. Hooray! So if you get a chance sometime today, imagine me with a mohawk, in a Mother Hubbard dress, hand in the air, swearing a very dramatic oath. And then partying at a place called the War Horse Saloon. Life's pretty interesting.

12/14/11

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu edge of the blue

2012-01-06 02:53:00

I’m sitting in a small bedroom, in a small house, at a small primary school, next to a small village, on a small island called Tanna. My name is Nabubo.

I suppose I should, once again, explain. (No, is too much. Let me sum up.)

Today is Friday. On Monday, I boarded a plane in the capitol to fly to the island of Tanna, one of the southernmost islands in Vanuatu, and one of the more prominent tourist destinations due to its active volcano, Mt. Yasur (and I do mean active, as in spitting-out-fireballs kinda active), and the abundance of kastom, or custom, or traditional culture that still thrives here. At the airport I was met by the ZCA (Zone Curriculum Advisor) for this area, who gave me a friendly welcome and drove me to the school. I had mango and pineapple with some of the teachers and mamas from the community, was given the new custom name Nabubo (pronounced Nah-boo-bow), then went to my house to settle in.

My house is small and turquoise, with a concrete floor and wood walls (or drywall, or particle board, or I’m not sure what, really). I live on the school grounds, as do other some teachers and the headmaster. My house consists of my bedroom, a spare bedroom (which contains tons of books as my house is the unofficial PC Tanna library, for which I’m very grateful), and the “sitting room” which is the main room with a table, two chairs, and a cabinet for storing food.

Right next to my house is my kitchen, a small structure made out of tree branches and metal siding. Once I get some pieces of rebar to balance over the two cinderblocks already inside, I can build a small fire and cook (my neighbors say they’ll drop by with some iron and firewood tomorrow). I could opt to buy a gas stovetop in the nearby provincial center, but I want to try the fire thing, first. It’s not like I don’t have the spare time to cook over a fire.

Behind my house is another small structure made out of branches and metal siding, divided into two parts: my toilet and my swim house (“swim” means to shower, remember). My toilet is a long drop, which means, well, it’s a concrete slab with a hole in it, and everything drops a long way. I am perpetually nervous that I’m going to drop my flashlight/glasses/keys/something vital down there. My swim house is a little enclosed area where I can take bucket showers. My first night here, I went out and encountered two centipedes in the toilet; they were small, not the terrifying six-inchers I saw on Efate, but regardless of size we’ve been warned that those suckers are poisonous, and their bites really hurt. So I had to kill one, and only half-smashed the other, then used my long drop as I watched it slowly drag its mangled body towards me, bent on revenge. I am ever so slightly afraid of my toilet at night, now, though I’ve yet to see another centipede.

My water comes from a spigot on the other side of my kitchen; I’m lucky because my school recently got electricity, meaning we have an electric pump, meaning I don’t have to pump my water by hand. I only need to feel so Little-House-On-The-Prairie, you know? There are tons of delicious fruit trees around my house, the one that is currently most exciting being the huge mango tree by the school gate. It’s mango season, and that sucker just RAINS fruit all the time. If I want to eat a mango I just stroll out my front door and grab one off the ground, and let me tell you, I want to eat mangos as often as possible. I’ve been averaging 4 or 5 a day, because I CAN. Yeah, I may not have your fancy running water, and I may poop in a hole, and I might currently be listening to rats fight in my ceiling, but I will tell you something about my life, American friends: it is December, and I have constant access to all the free mangos I can eat. Also, a crab is walking across my wall, its little legs finding purchase on God-knows-what. That is unrelated, but it is pretty entertaining to watch. Or maybe I’ve been without TV too long.

I have a new host family now, a lovely couple in their 40s (?) with four kids: three boys ages 18, 13, and 12 (roughly—people don’t really keep track of birthdays or ages here), and one girl, who’s 2. They live in a little community of 4 or 5 households (all related, I believe—though I think everyone’s related in this country) just a minute’s walk down the road. Although I don’t live with them, obviously, I’ve been eating with them until I get a little more sorted out, and they take me to social events in the area, and are basically my first point of cultural integration. They seem great, and I’m really glad to be…their daughter. Huh, that’s weird to say. Ale.

So my school, and my house in particular, are right on the main road. It’s a dirt road, meaning fulap dust all the time, but it’s not really a problem. Also it means it’s really easy for me to get around, because even if I don’t catch a ride in the back of a truck, I can just walk, and even I can’t manage to get lost. Walk 20 minutes one direction, and I reach the school where my friend Laura, another new volunteer, has just moved in. Walk 30 minutes the other direction and I reach Lenakel, the provincial center, where I can use the bank, mail a letter, get on the internet (but I won’t be doing that super-often, I don’t think), buy basic food and household supplies, and on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, take my pick of produce at a pretty awesome market.

Currently, school is out for the holiday, meaning no pikinini around, obviously, and also a lot of the teachers aren’t here right now. So I don’t have much to do in the way of actual teaching work, right now; it’s really all about integrating, acclimatizing, not-freaking-out and getting my bearings.

So those are the basics of my setup here in my new home for the next two years. Now let me get to the other stuff: what I’m doing and feeling and generally dealing with all this. It’s a huge change, moving from training to site. I may have been in Vanuatu two months already, and I may have learned a lot about the language and culture in that time, and I may even have been living with a host family before but…it’s very different. It’s extremely challenging, I’m not gonna lie. One of the hardest parts is my absolute inability to blend in. Being white, I am conspicuously different, even from far away. I draw attention; a lot of attention, really. People stare, not in an unfriendly way, but it can still be exhausting to deal with sometimes. In moments where I’m feeling upbeat and energetic, it’s no big deal; I grin and say hello and embrace the weirdness. In moments where I’m feeling a little more down, it’s a struggle to feel the weight of constant attention, and can make me want to avoid little things like going to the store across the street, or sitting on my front porch to read a book. Another something is the language issue. I’ve picked up Bislama quite quickly, and can converse easily, but while people here do speak Bislama (excepting some of the older women), they primarily use language. “Language” is the word people throughout Vanuatu use to refer to their region’s specific native language; language is extremely different from island to island, and according to locals, also from region to region within one island (although some volunteers have said it seems more like a dialectical difference) (I feel like I’ve already written about that on my blog, but I’m not sure; whatever, brace yourselves for plenty o’ repetition). On Efate, in our training village, only the adults still spoke language. The kids understood it, but didn’t really speak it. Here on Tanna (and from what I gather, on most islands), language is still very strong, everyone is fluent, and understandably, it’s used all the time. So I often sit around in conversations where I don’t understand a word that’s being said, even though I can tell, from hearing my name and words like “Peace Corps” or “America” that I’m the object of discussion. It’s not that anyone is saying something bad (when I ask what they’re talking about, it’s always something like “We were saying you’re eating a mango!” “He says you’re American!”), but it can still be unnerving.

Basically, these are early days yet. Everything’s still as unfamiliar to me as I am to the people around me. I feel homesick a lot, and unsure, and anxious, and uncomfortable. I also sometimes feel guilty for feeling these things, even though I know they’re normal and expected. Some moments (every day is a hundred years long and I’m at least thirty different people over the course of each, so it makes more sense to talk about “moments” than “days”) all I want is to go home. Some moments, the best I can hope to feel is bored. And some moments, I feel happy and excited; if I don’t feel at home, exactly, then I feel at home in the determined, breathless thrill of adapting to the unknown.

Miss Rosemary’s Bislamish Primer for Americans

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu edge of the blue

2012-01-06 02:54:00

Bislama, being a pidgin/creole, is in some ways pretty close to English, and that means it’s becoming increasingly hard for my brain to separate the two, at least when it comes to speaking my native tongue. Bislama just slips into the way you talk, creating a creole-within-a-creole I like to call Bislamish. I keep having to edit my blogs and emails and letters to take out or explain the Bislama, so instead, I’m going to give you a brief primer of words I’ll probably end up throwing around.

Fulap = full up, a whole bunch, lots and lots

Kakae = food, or, to eat; there are only four verb tenses in Bislama, and they’re communicated with helping verbs, not by changing the stem (“Mi bin kakae, mi stap kakae, mi kakae, bae mi kakae” I ate, I’m eating, I eat, I will eat), but when you’re speaking Bislamish you tend to take the Bislama verb and conjugate it English style, thus producing a language that no one understands. Hooray! Example: “I kakaed fulap mangos yesterday, now I think my skin is turning orange.”

Tumas = too much, very, extremely, a lot. Example: “My neighbors like this stringband song tumas. Seriously, if they play it one more time, I will have to put centipedes in their beds.”

Spel smol = take a small spell, eg rest, nap. I am forever being encouraged to spel smol. In a culture where there’s not really a sense of hurry, and it’s very hot outside, any mild physical exertion warrants spelling smol. Another volunteer told us a great story of the first time her host mom told her to spel smol, and the volunteer just stared in confusion, then said, “S- M- A- L- L.” Example: “He drank tumas kava last night and now he needs to spel smol.”

Krangky = pronounced “cranky,” means crazy. Pretty simple.

Nomo = no more, only, just

Swim = to shower/bathe/wash oneself. If you mean in the ocean, be specific: “Mi swim lo solwata,” I swim in the salt water.

Ale = OK. Not as in, “Everything’s OK,” but as in “OK, yes, for sure, totally, totes, alright.” Pronounced “ah-LAY.”

Pikinini = little kids

Samting = as in “something,” but in one of those fun Bislama quirks, this actually means “thing.” Therefore in order to say “something,” you have to say, “sam samting.” Yup. I knew I was getting used to the ambiguity of this language when my host mom told me that she “Got a thing so I could make a thing,” and I knew exactly what she went. In Bislamish, you usually say it English style, as “something,” but use it to mean “thing.” “What’s that something over there?” “I need to find some something to cover up my food or else it’ll be covered in flies.”

Bakagen= along the lines of “samting,” this is said like “back again,” but just means “again.” Yup, you guessed it—in order to say “back again,” it’s “bakbakagen.” So now, in English, when I mean to say “again,” I catch myself saying “back again.”

Wanwan = as in “one one”; means individually or infrequently. So, “Everyone will go up to collect their own baggage wanwan,” or, “I’ve kakaed shark wanwan time.”

I stret = (pronounced ee straight) it’s straight, which means, “it’s cool, it’s great, it’s alright, okay, got it, sounds good, no problem, you’re welcome, for sure, sweet, etc.” Very multipurpose. A good one to know. “How’s it going?” “Stret nomo.”

Numbawan = number one! As in, “This ice cream cone is numbawan.” Also a brand of toilet paper here, amusingly enough (surely numbatu would be a more appropriate name?).

Storian = to story, as in, to shoot the shit. Wan bigfala samting lo plesia.

12/21/11

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu edge of the blue

2012-01-06 02:55:00

Two days running now, I have successfully built and cooked over a fire, all by myself. This is not a point of pride for locals—that would be like an American being unreasonably self-satisfied for operating a microwave—nor does it probably seem like anything special to the woodsier of my friends back home (damn you, woodsy friends and your useful mountain-man skills!). I, however, am quite chuffed with myself, as the Brits would say. I built a FIRE. By MYSELF. And made food on it! Sure, it still takes me, ahem, rather a long time, a lot of matches, and paper to build (I’m using my PC training schedule to light fires, which gives me great satisfaction), but I don’t give up and I get it done, with only marginal smoke inhalation.

The other day I cooked dinner with my aunts, and we made Tanna Soup. Tanna Soup is brilliant. The recipe: take everything you have. Put in in a pot. Boil it. Boom, Tanna Soup! All your root veggies, maybe a little meat if you got it, some island cabbage, pumpkin if it’s sitting there, salt recommended, curry powder optional—anything. Into pot, boil. “They don’t make this on other islands,” my aunts confided in me. “They don’t know how. It’s for Man Tanna only.”

It’s good that I’m fine with laughing at myself, and am more than willing to admit when I’m bad at particular skills, cause hoo boy do I lack a lot of particular skills in this country. Chopping vegetables, for instance. I thought I had that one under control—I can cook, really, I can cut up onions or tomatoes or what have you, no problem. But holding a rock-hard yet elusively slippery taro root in one hand and effortlessly thwacking off chunks of it with a knife, as the mamas do, has proven to be a challenge. There have been a few close calls with my fingers. And then there was the amusement when I switched to a kumala (yam) instead, and hit it with my full-taro-force, only to discover that kumala is quite a bit softer when my knife whizzed through, narrowly missing my fingers, and loudly hit the edge of the saucepan. The good news is that this kind of hopeless incompetence provides pretty good conversation topics (“Haha, I am terrible at this!” “Yes, but you’ll learn. Don’t cut off your fingers.”). Luckily, after we cut up root veggies (SO MANY ROOT VEGGIES), we switched to rolling simboro. Simboro is grated manioc rolled up in island cabbage (a broad, leafy green) then boiled in coconut milk. They look like those little stuffed grape leaves you get in Greek restaurants, basically, although of course are nothing like them in terms of taste. The rolling technique is akin to making a tiny burrito, so naturally, I was a pro. My simboro-rolling skills were much complimented.

It’s funny, though, when I think about my lack of applicable living skills here. Everyone is very friendly and helpful, of course (“Don’t worry! You have two years, you’ll learn!”). At the same time, I find myself justifying it internally. I know, of course, that my dependence on stoves and cutting boards and washing machines, etc., wasn’t entirely so I could laze about the house eating bonbons (it was so I could laze about eating nachos, natch); I, like many Americans, have spent a large portion of my life studying and learning. I would say school has been my principle occupation up to this point. But how do you explain academia to subsistence farmers? For that matter, how do I justify the pursuit of academia to myself? It’s a hard thing to make sense of, chopping kumala in a small thatched kitchen in the South Pacific. When people ask me what I studied at university, I answer, “English,” and people easily accept that, but of course it doesn’t quite translate. How do you study your native language? If I say I studied books, well, what does that mean, exactly? I studied the meaning of books. I studied the significance of books and language within a culture. I wrote a very long something about science fiction and David Bowie, a man who wears very tight pants and sings songs. People in my community accept my first answer, “English,” without hesitation. It’s me who keeps trying to explain it to myself.

This morning I ate an entire pineapple for breakfast. I sort of felt like I should stop halfway through, but told myself, “It will just get flies and ants if I leave it!” and thereby convinced myself that by eating the whole pineapple I was in fact being economical and wise. “Economical” is perhaps the wrong word, seeing as how the pineapple was given to me for free, and would have cost about 30 cents otherwise. I was being resourceful. I was using all the parts of the buffalo. I was luxuriating in the fact that I had an incredibly delicious pineapple and nothing I needed to do that would impede my lazing about for a while feeling satisfied and vaguely ill, afterwards.

In addition to such moments of fruity indulgence (a phrase which reminds me: there is an ice cream bar in Vanuatu called “Golden GayTime.” But I digress), when I eat dinner with my host family, they inevitably load up a plate full of food, then tell me, “Here’s just a little bit at first,” after which someone else comes over and puts a plate of pineapple in front of me, after which (not to be outdone) someone else sends a kid over with about five boiled kumalas for me. It’s not that I have to finish it all to be polite; I would die if that were the case, and it’s more than acceptable for me to eat what I want and then pawn the rest off on other people. There is no scarcity of food in Vanuatu; people don’t go hungry, and so “wasting” food isn’t really a big concept here. But it’s delicious, and I inevitably eat too much. What I’m saying is, I don’t know if it’s possible to really get fat off of eating fruit and boiled and roasted vegetables, but if it is, it will happen to me. Fun side fact: in Bislama, “fat” is “fatfat.” They’re big on the repeated words here. Fatfat, bonbon, laplap, salu salu, lava lava, tok tok, gogo, wanwan. You can also do the repeated word thing to emphasize a continual action; “fall down” is just “foldaon,” but if, say, you’re drunk and stumbling, then you might “folfoldaon.”

And of course also, people bring me food all the time, usually fresh produce from their gardens. There’s a little pattern to this exchange. Someone will show up at my door, smiling, and say hello, holding a plate or a handful of greens or a big sack. After greeting me, a worried look will steal over the person’s face. “Do you eat rice?” he’ll anxiously ask. Or, “Do they have corn in America?” Or, “I don’t know…do you eat pumpkins?” When I reassure them that, yes, I will kakae everything under the sun (true—I’m hoping to try dog, cat, and bat while in Vanuatu; but I suppose false, cause I think I’ll exclude any endangered/protected species I may encounter), the person will look relieved, and offer me a big plate of rice and soup, or whip a pumpkin out of the sack. It’s awesome. Although this pumpkin is larger than my head (and I’ve got a pretty big head), and I’m pretty sure my saucepan is not big enough to cook the whole thing. May have to do it in two shifts.

12/23/11

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu edge of the blue

2012-01-06 02:55:00

Hey, I’ve got a joke. What did the Peace Corps Volunteer get for Christmas?

Giardia!

Just a little festive toilet humor for you guys back home. But seriously, giardia. Heh, could be worse; could be worms! Or elephantitis. Pro tip: do not idly browse through the medical handbooks the Peace Corps gives you; you don’t want to know about the bizarre, rare tropical diseases you could theoretically catch (no, mom, I promise, I am not going to get elephantitis). No big deal, I took the medicine and already feel less inclined to rush to my smolhaus (aka small house, aka toilet, aka hole in the backyard) every half hour or so. Anyway, enough about my bowels! Let’s talk about today. Cause today was AWESOME.

The adjusting-to-life-in-Xanadu is still an ongoing process. It’s definitely an upward trend, but with plenty of low moments. The low moments aren’t jump-in-the-ocean bad, it’s more a pervasive melancholy that comes when I wake up feeling unsettled, and don’t know what to do with myself, and start to think about home. I miss all you guys a whole, whole bunch. I miss Portland, too. I love it when it rains here partially cause it reminds me of Portland. I found a book in my in-house library called “The Book of New Games,” a book published in the 1970s with a bunch of goofy, hippie-friendly games that you can play in a large field, with maximum laughing and hugging involved. I love this book for its photos. When I start to miss Portland, I grab this book and leaf through its images of happy-go-lucky 70s hippie types: shaggy hair, aviators, plaid shirts, mustaches, granny dresses, jumpers, oversized glasses. Hipsters! It’s full of hipsters! It’s like looking at Portland, I swear, except with more racial diversity. This book is immensely reassuring to me.

But I’ve wandered onto another tangent. My point is that I’ve still been working on feeling upbeat and at home here (hasn’t even been two weeks, so obviously, it’s a work in progress), but the past day or two were a little rough (definitely due in part to the giardia, which made me just want to lie in bed and stare at things on the wall, like geckos) (on the plus side, there are interesting things on the walls, like geckos). But today! Today was a just a really great day. I woke up and walked into town to go to the market. Tomorrow I’m going to the other side of Tanna to visit the business volunteer who lives there; a handful of other vols are also coming from various islands to meet up, so I will have a Peace Corps-filled Christmas, which is going to be really fun. I went to market to grab some stuff to bring with me, and felt pretty comfortable the whole time. Lenakel was fulap man because it’s both a market day and the day before Christmas Eve, so plenty of people had come to do shopping (and wander, and storian, and sing Christmas carols, and so on). In the large crowd, I felt a little less conspicuous, but was still gathering a fair bit of attention. But today, I guess I was just in the mood for it, cause it didn’t make me feel shy and nervous. Well, only a little. And I ran into people I know, which is a great way of feeling like you belong somewhere. One of the people was one of my fellow teachers, who told me that I should come by her house later, because they were having a custom celebration for her daughter. So I bought my kumala and eggs, earning a pleased laugh every time I said “Tankyu asul” instead of “tankyu tumas” (asul means tumas/too much in language, so people are stoked when I use it), and headed home. I caught a ride in the back of a pickup for the last bit, which is another fun way of knowing I’m starting to settle in: people recognize me and give me a lift.

After I got home, I headed over to fellow teacher’s home. My mom had mentioned it the night before; the teacher’s daughter had just gotten her period for the first time, and according to Tanna custom, that means time for a celebration! Interestingly, periods are not at all a hush-hush thing here like they tend to be in the States. In addition to having big first-period parties, when it’s that time of the month, women aren’t supposed to make food or touch any food utensils used for other people. Granted, this stems from the idea that women are unclean when they’re on their periods, which is not the most egalitarian concept out there, but as it’s practiced now, it seems to be seen more as a chance for women to take a break from preparing food and washing dishes for the whole family. The upshot of this, as I see it, is that you basically freely announce to your family (which means extended, here, as they’ll all be your neighbors in your little housing compound) when you’re on the rag. Come to think of it, both periods and circumcision (another big custom ceremony) are discussed very openly here, no blushing or furtive giggling involved. I like it.

As I walked up to the house, I saw teenagers and kids running around, hurling things at each other and laughing. A promising start. I went in and was welcomed by a group of mamas who were sitting around making more laplap than I’ve ever seen in one place. They, like the kids I’d seen coming in, had large patches of drying ooze all over their heads and shoulders. The day was basically an extended food fight, I learned. The ooze was the same stuff we make laplap out of; grated banana, in this case. So I sat on the heaps of banana leaves, while a grandmother beside me rubbed banana up and down a rough stick to grate it, and I helped pour grated root veggies onto banana leaves, festoon it with bits of raw pork (some with hair still attached, yum), and fold and tie the bundle securely with more banana leaves. Seriously, there were tons of mamas and grandmas there, and there was enough grated root vegetable to construct a decent-sized moat. They were all extremely friendly and welcoming. Folding up the laplap, I asked the mama nearby if I was doing it right, because, as I said, “Me no wantem spoilem laplap blo yufala” (I don’t want to ruin you guys’ laplap). She assured me I was doing it well, and then corrected me, “Yu no wantem spoilem laplap blo yumi” (You don’t want to spoil our, as in hers as well as mine, laplap). People here take being part of the family very seriously, and I’m part of the family, I guess.

After, I wandered over to another part of the family compound, where yet ANOTHER group of mamas and grandmas were making yet more laplap. I’m not kidding, we are talking about epic quantities of laplap here. They had to build two very large fires and heat tons of rocks to cook it all. I got to chat with more mamas, as well as some of the grandfathers who were chilling. We discussed (as always), my family back home, and how I’m finding Tanna, and how we don’t have laplap in America. They really like that we come to stay with them and learn about their way of life; they seem to think the States could use a fulap dose of Tanna livin’ (I tend to agree). I also got goopy banana smeared all over me by a young man who was perhaps a bit too enthusiastic with the smearing, so I matched everyone around me.

Once all the laplaps got put on the coals and covered in hot rocks, it was time to head down to the saltwater (ocean) to wash off. This was the best part of it all. As the whole crew—we’re talking a bigfala group of people of all ages—trooped down the winding dirt road to the beach, round two of delightful playfighting broke out. People hollered and chased one another, smearing handfuls of banana on anyone they could catch. I saw one elderly grandmother, missing most of her teeth, pounce on a matronly mama from behind and grind a half-eaten mango into her hair. Two men ran up to a young woman, conscientiously took her 3 month old son from her grasp, then pinned her arms and dumped food ooze over her. At one point a youngfala (young man) came leaping out of the trees in a surprise attack, a cut-open papaya at the ready, which he hurled merrily at the fleeing, shrieking children. Lots of people also had taken chunks of banana tree, or the stems of taro leaves (think elephant ears, if you know what those are), and shredded the ends into a kind of wet, pulpy whip, which they used to thwack the legs and butts of everyone around. Being, you know, the obvious newcomer, people were hesitant to flat-out assault me, but I did get thoroughly covered in banana ooze and gently whipped on the legs a few times. It was the funniest, happiest, coolest thing I’ve seen in a while. I LIKE this custom.

When we reached the beach, everyone went into the water to rinse off all the banana ooze. Again, this whole time, everyone could not have been sweeter or more welcoming. Not only were they friendly, but they seemed to understand my shy hesitations, and openly helped direct me as to where to go, welcoming me to come sit down by them, chatting with me, explaining all the custom stuff that was going down. I was especially taken aback and pleased by how friendly the young women were; up til now the young women I’d talked to had seemed a little standoffish, I think because they feel as shy around me as I do around them, but then, it’s hard to feel shy around someone when you’re both dripping with grated fruit. Once I’d gotten all the banana out of my hair (a pretty easy task, given how little hair I have right now), I sat with some young women and their mom, who unfolded a banana leaf of leftover grated coconut from making all the laplap. “Use some coconut!” they encouraged me. I watched, puzzled, as they rubbed handfuls of it into their skin and hair, until it clicked: coconut oil. Of course. I’ve seen countless body lotions touting the coconut oil they include; this is just the fresh thing. So I grabbed some coconut and rubbed it thoroughly into my skin and hair, which, just like all those lotions claim, made me feel smooth and smell fantastic. I felt so comfortable, and happy, and welcomed.

Back at the house, the girl of the hour was bedecked in grass skirt, leaf armbands, a Vanuatu flag tied around her chest, and several plastic salu salus (leis) and Christmas-style tinsel garlands. Long feathers were tucked into her hair, and orange and yellow paint lined her cheeks and eyes. A handful of other girls were dressed similarly, but with a little less flash. Another young woman called me over, and under the wide-eyed stares of several pikinini nearby, painted orange and yellow onto my cheeks as well. Her mom settled a grass wreath on my head. Like I said, part of the family. I get the feeling that people here really get a kick out of sharing their customs with others, and they certainly got a kick out of seeing me in custom paint!

After that, it was time for several speeches given by the girl’s grandfather and grandmother (and some crying on the part of her mom and other relatives, because she’s no longer a little girl; open shows of emotion are part of the culture here) and the presentation of large mounds of ceremonial gifts, given by family members and others in the community. Baskets and mats woven from dried leaves, calico (this means cloth, here), bread, root vegetables (have I mentioned they’re a big deal?), and laplap (some of the laplaps made earlier were special ones, to be given as gifts). We then spilt off into several groups, where laplaps sat waiting on mats. We peeled back the still-steaming banana leaves to slice up the laplap inside, and everyone just sat around eating. I was given one of the woven baskets (think purse) from the gift pile, as were the other women present; apparently the gifts are re-given out to the attendees. After that, I understand people were going to start dancing. My host mom pulled me away to go bathe (I think she wanted a break), and I intended to come back afterwards to dance, but the sun goes down quickly here, and people had already started drinking perhaps a bit heavily, and I decided that walking around an unfamiliar place at night with a bunch of intoxicated people around was perhaps not the best idea, so I called it a night. Well, an evening—the sun goes down pretty early here. But it’s just as well, as I am actually still feeling a bit giardia-ish (facing a huge piece of laplap full of chunks of pork fat was a challenge; luckily they already knew I’d been feeling sick, so it wasn’t too hard to pass off), and anyway, I had to come home and type this enormous blog post that says so much but still fails to communicate exactly what was so great about today.

Okay, here goes: what was so great about today, I think, is how normal it was. I realize that this probably sounds exotic in so many ways. Unfamiliar food cooked in banana leaves, grass skirts and face paint, rubbing coconut into my skin after swimming in the Pacific, people throwing fruit at each other and hitting each other with branches. But if you were here, you’d feel it: superficially, it’s foreign, but when you’re in the thick of it, you realize it’s just a damn good way to have a party. It’s a lot of fun. It’s family and friends, hanging out and cooking a huge amount of food, acting silly and cutting loose. I don’t know if I can explain it any better than that. As one of the grandfathers and I agreed when talking about how good it is to travel and learn about other places, “People are people.” Sure, there are differences. Big ones. Ones I’ve bumped up against, and ones I haven’t encountered yet. But at the end of the day, people are people. And one thing unites all people, no matter their nationality, or age, or color of their skin: we all think it’s hilarious to throw food at someone else’s head. Gotta love the human race.

12/28/11

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu edge of the blue

2012-01-06 02:56:00

I was a little worried that I’d feel lonely over Christmas. It’s never been a huge thing for my family, less so as my sister and I have gotten older, but still, if there’s any time of year that can make you feel homesick, it’s Christmastime (especially when you’re sweating in the tropics and your neighbors choose to play “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” at top volume). As it turns out, I did not need to worry. I had an absolutely amazing Christmas.

Laura (other new volunteer who lives close to me) and I went to go see Jake for Christmas. Jake is a volunteer who’s been here for a year already, and four other volunteers visiting from other islands were already at his place. While the two of us live on the coast, close to Black Man Town, Jake lives in a small village inland, close to the active volcano, Mount Yasur (which means “mountain.” Yup). Basically, Laura and me are city slickers, while Jake lives in the bush. On the 24^th, we hitched a ride in a truck taking some tourists to go see Yasur. I got to ride in the bed of the truck, which was fun. It was about a 2 hour drive over a very rough road. The coolest part was when we approached the volcano. Surrounding it is a huge ash plain, a wide, flat expanse of gray where no trees grow. After becoming accustomed to the abundant vegetation of Vanuatu, seeing that weird desolation was like looking at another planet. It would be a great place to film a few sequences for a fantasy movie. A little ways past the volcano, we got dropped by the side of the road, the driver pointing us down a narrow path that wound into the thick trees. Laura and I trooped into the bush, and after a while were met by Jake, Kathy, and Dan, who had come to make sure we didn’t get lost (also to give us each a mango). After crossing a creek and scrambling up a hill, we reached Jake’s village. At this point, it had just started to rain, which would let up only occasionally for the next few days.

Jake’s village is beautiful. It’s deep in the rainforest, green and lush and wet. Because it’s so close to the volcano, the earth is full of volcanic ash, so it’s incredibly soft. He lives in a custom house, which is to say the walls are woven, the roof is thatched, and the floor, which rests on a raised platform, is just lengths of palm trunk. Between us and the four visitors already there, it was a bit crowded, but luckily Jake had a little tent that we pitched for Laura and me to sleep in. As we finished setting up the tent, Kathy and Matt came out of the kitchen (a separate building with a dirt floor) and gave us pirogues they had just made, which were amazing. It seems like most volunteers become excellent cooks while they’re in country, and I was lucky to be around a few such people, who made me lots of tasty food. That night, we drank kava (women don’t drink at nakamals on Tanna, but we got a bucket of it brought to his house), delicious homebrew, and sat around a fire in the kitchen. It was quite cozy.

The next day was Christmas! I woke up and listened to the birds and the rain dripping on my tent, and could only inanely think, “This sounds like a ‘Sounds of the Rainforest’ CD.” As we ate pineapple and fried kumala pancakes in the kitchen, I made everyone listen to “The Bells of Dublin” by the Chieftains, which is the best Christmas album ever. Matt wore a Santa hat. It was quite festive. Then we girls got into our island dresses, and we went to church. The service wasn’t super long, and was interesting because the preacher was of the YELL VERY PASSIONATELY ALL THE TIME school, which makes for engaging preaching, I gotta say. Then everyone went back outside, and we all sat and watched as kids and young people came up to sing, dance, and perform skits. This was very much like any sort of community recital you can imagine; lots of self-conscious teenagers performing choreography that’s big on the hand gestures (talk about Jesus—point to the sky; talk about swimming—move your arms). It was long, but really fun to watch. We discussed how we should go up and do something, too, so Jake and Laura went to get Laura’s iPod, but by the time they came back, the program was finally closing. Oh well, we all thought, I guess we won’t have to embarrass ourselves after all. Not so. Jake was on a mission, and, unnoticed by the crowd at first, he went to the center, put on “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey, and began to passionately lipsync. As everyone’s attention went to him, we realized we couldn’t sit this out, and ran up to join him. Thus began an epic four minutes of five white people, three of them in island dresses, one in a Santa hat, dancing, singing, and air guitar-ing their hearts out in front of an audience of bemused but enthusiastic Ni-Vanuatus. It was ridiculous and amazing and probably the best thing I’ve ever done on Christmas. The crowd loved it. Hell, I loved it. That song has found a new place in my heart.

The next day was Family Day! Family Day is, in fact, an international holiday, so it was Family Day for you guys, too, except of course in the States no one celebrates it. They do here, though. In the morning we (and by “we” I mean “two other people”) made two big pots of soup to contribute to the community potluck lunch. This was just right by Jake’s house, just the people from his little area of the village, maybe 30 altogether. We all went down and ate with everyone. The centerpiece of the meal was the sea turtle, which had arrived, enormous and dead, in the back of a truck the day before (it has only just now occurred to me to wonder how that truck got to the village; there must be some other road besides the one I walked in on). Yes, that’s a protected species, and it is an illegal, fineable offense to kill one, but…it ain’t like there’s a lot of cops patrolling Vanuatu, especially in the bush on Tanna. As a Peace Corps Volunteer, I believe I am not supposed to eat a protected species, so I can tell you that I didn’t eat any, but if, hypothetically speaking, I had, I imagine it would taste remarkably like chicken, except for some parts, which taste a little like pork, but with an amazing flavor that seems like some kind of seasoning, except it isn’t (or so I imagine; I didn’t eat any, remember?). So everyone ate, and afterwards, they played music, and a few groups of kids did more dances. Of course, given our epic Journey performance the day before, we were now expected to perform something again. Luckily we were prepared; Jenni and I had spent the morning choreographing a dance to Michael Jackson’s “Black or White,” which our group busted out for the crowd. Again, it was a thoroughly ridiculous and amazing experience. There is, in fact, a video of this performance, and once I get a copy of it I’ll do my damndest to get it online somehow. You guys deserve to see this.

That evening we drank kava again, and I got to watch them working it (the term used for making it). Being Tanna, it’s done custom style here; with chewing, not electric meat grinders. They cut up and skin the kava root, then young boys chew the root for about twenty minutes, until it’s pulped. Custom dictates young boys do it because women spoil kava, so it has to be boys who haven’t yet slept with women. It’s also kind of a chore. I tried chewing some to see what it’s like, and it’s pretty rough; it tastes gross, and makes your mouth numb (in a burningly unpleasant kind of way), and makes you salivate a lot. The boys didn’t seem bothered, though. After, they put the masticated root into a piece of cloth, and pour water through it, into a coconut shell. Then Rosemary takes the shell of muddy, opaque green water, that smells like dirt and peppers, and downs in in one go, because that is the only way to drink it. Usually afterwards you’ll eat a cracker or something to get the taste out of your mouth; this is called “wasemout,” as in “wash it out” or “wash your mouth.” I like kava; it varies wildly in strength, so sometimes one shell will make you feel pretty drunk, sometimes just pleasantly relaxed. This was the latter kind. It was very calm, sitting in the light rain at night, in a small village in the rainforest, drinking kava and gazing at the stars visible in the breaks in the clouds.

I had an incredible time visiting Jake’s village. I was damp and dirty basically the whole time (dirtier than usual, I mean). I slept on the ground and drank kava every night. I danced like a wonderful idiot in front of a village. I had an amazing Christmas (and Family Day, of course). In addition to having a great time, it somehow made me feel more at home on Tanna in general. It was something about being so happy, and spending time with people who have adapted to life here, that seems to have made me a lot more confident and sure of myself here. It was also really interesting to see the way of life in the bush, custom-style, because while the area where I live is more developed and different from Jake’s village, it still evolved from a setup much like his, and I feel like my own situation makes more sense after having seen his situation. Where I live, I have a house with solid walls and floor, electricity, constant water access, and live right next to a fairly smooth road that leads to a place with numerous stores. All of these amenities aside, the way of life here—how people think, interact, and live—grew out of smaller, more rural villages like Jake’s and now that I can see that connection I feel like I have more insight into the way of thinking and living here. If that makes sense. No matter how I explain it, I do know that since coming back, I’ve felt far more at home here than before, and far more comfortable and at ease. I’ve had a stretch here of really good days. I feel happy and excited. Things are good. Bit by bit, Nabubo is becoming Woman Tanna.

1/6/11

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu edge of the blue

2012-01-06 02:57:00

Well, I’ve got about 12 pages of stuff that I’ll be posting when I walk into town, soon, so I guess I won’t write another hugely long entry to add onto the top of it just yet. Suffice it to say, I’m still doing well. Have my up days and down days (well, up moments and down moments), and there are times when I feel pretty lonely and melancholy and anxious, but there are also a lot of times when I feel excited and happy, or at the very least, comfortable. I have moments when I think, “There’s no way I’ll actually be able to do this for two years,” and moments when I think, “Maybe I’ll want to extend my service a third year.” Mostly, taking it one day at a time. One hour at a time. One pineapple at a time (but seriously, I need to lay off the pineapple for a bit; I think citric acid has cauterized half my tastebuds). And of course, it helps that, as ever, the people in my community are unfailingly friendly, and generous, and sweet. I’m getting better at cutting rock-hard root vegetables and starting fires. I’m becoming accustomed to getting out of bed to sweep a stray crab out the door. I’m learning to be comfortable approaching people to chat about nothing in particular, or even just sit next to them aimlessly staring at the sky. I’m learning a few more words in local language. I’m more at ease being stared at on the street, and, at the same time, am stared at less and less.

New Year’s Day I spent on the beach, with my host family and people from their church (Seventh Day Adventists). We built fires, cooked food, ate. Then I spent about two hours in the ocean with kids, teaching them how to squirt water out of their hands, clamshell-style (can you believe none of them had ever seen it before?). Then we ate more food, then chilled, then went home. It was a lovely way to start the year.

I think I’m now officially at the point where it’s the longest I’ve ever been out of the U.S. Pretty cool.

Miss you all. Hope everyone is doing well, and would love to hear from you in letters or e-mails. Gonna reiterate my address, ahem…

Rosemary Sheets, Peace Corps Volunteer

Loukatai School

Care of Lenakel Post Office

Tanna

Republic of Vanuatu

South Pacific

(That “South Pacific” at the end isn’t technically necessary, but apparently it can’t hurt, since letters send to volunteers have reportedly been routed through Africa or Vietnam before as postal workers try desperately to interpret what “Vanuatu” means)

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu edge of the blue

2012-01-06 03:02:00

Okay, posting pics is new to me. Let's see if I can label these rights. First is my host mom, showing me the vanilla beans my family grows. Next is a grandma unfolding and cutting laplap. Then we have a shot of my host family at a kastom party celebrating the first time my brother John (in the middle) shaved his beard (it's a kastom thing, here). Mom, grandpa, lil bro Lesly, big bro John, Dad holding baby Elian, cousin Brenda down there on the ground, lil bro Nixon...AWOL. Next is me with John and Lesly; I made him a cake for the party, on which I made a beard with cocoa powder. First time baking over a fire! I think it went pretty well. Last pic is the crew from the kastom party...and if this all appears very exotic to you, let me just remind you that the other family members were also all whipping out digicams to snap photos. Not so foreign, really.

Deep in the Heart of Tanna

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu edge of the blue

2012-01-12 04:18:00

Here we have my lovely blue house, an inside shot of my "sitting room" (I've flown that Texas flag every place I've lived from college on, and damn if Vanuatu is gonna be the first exception!), the view from my front door (that huge tree to the left is my beloved mango tree), my little kitchen (most kitchens here are larger and more house-like, but...oh well), and my swim house/toilet.

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu edge of the blue

2012-01-12 04:30:00

Here we have three of the common elements of my life here: adorable child, pickup truck, and bananas. After is a picture I took while sitting in my aunt's kitchen; lastly is a crab scuttling along my wall above my "Mi Laekem Vanuatu Tumas" picture. Previously, the word "crab" only had connotations of food or VD. Now I can add "household pest" to that list.

1/13/12 Day of the Ded

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu edge of the blue

2012-01-30 05:50:00

Today I went to a funeral, or, as they call it here, a dead. That’s “ded” in Bislama. A wedding, similarly, is called a married, or “maret.” That means that the movie “Four Weddings and a Funeral” would be, in Bislama, “Fo maret mo wan ded.” See why I like this language so much?

This was the last day of the mourning period. On Sunday, the man (the deputy mayor of Lenakel) was buried. Every day this week, people have gathered at his house to make food, eat, and mourn. I can’t give a whole lot of info on what that was like, because I wasn’t there, but I know that it involved a lot of laplap. As did today. My family and I left today around 6:30 AM, hopping into the back of a truck and catching a quick six or seven minute ride down the road to the man’s house, just outside of town. For all that this was a funeral celebration, it wasn’t very, well, funereal. As I understand, the previous days involve a lot more displays of grief, but today was almost picnic-like. We sat down on banana leaves with my aunts, cousins, and others from my little family compound, and started preparing laplap. We were surrounded by at least a hundred other women, all preparing laplap as well. Kids ran everywhere, as kids are wont to do (in the States, though, they usually aren’t waving knives), and the men sat further away, preparing meat (and just chilling; the bulk of the work definitely falls to women here).

First I did my damndest to help peel the manioc (aka tapioca). You take the root, hack off both ends, and then the peel comes off quite easily, like a little jacket. Well, I could not thwack that knife into the root hard enough to get the ends off, no matter how many times my little cousin Raio urged me (with a what’s-wrong-with-the-white-girl look on her face) “Yu mas katem strong!” So my mom took to just hacking off the ends and passing me the manioc to peel, which I was quite good at, as was my one-year-old sister Elian (yup, I’m relegated to the same work as infants). Then we started grating the roots, or as it’s called here, “rassrass.” I rassrassed away, with my mom and aunts warning me multiple times, “Go slowly or you’ll cut yourself!” Yeah, I did end up rassrassing my finger pretty good, but I lasted at least an hour and a half before one of those slippery tubers lurched out of my hand, so I deserve some credit. They spread grated manioc into my scrapes, saying it would help. Maybe it stops the bleeding? Couldn’t see the harm in it, anyway. At some point in all this, an adorable, wizened grandma wandered through the crowd, delightedly kissing every mama there. And that’s when an old lady kissed me on the lips. Good morning! “She’s a very happy woman,” the women told me. “Yes, I can see that,” I replied.

After spelling small for a bit (remember, that means to rest), I started scratching bananas with my cousin Joanne (scratching = rassrass = grate). I spent a lot of the day hanging out with Joanne and Raio (Joanne’s a high schooler, Raio’s in fourth grade) (not that grade level is really indicative at all of age here), who were really fun. We decided to make our own mini-laplap of manioc with spring onions and bullock (all cows here are called bullocks, sort of like how all rodents are called rats, and all birds are called pigeons). After making a hundred million laplaps (I know I’ve talked about mass quantities of laplap before, but seriously, this occasion put all the others to shame), Joanne, Raio, a trio of other small girls, and I all went down to the ocean. I’ve got to get some photos of the water up here; it is exquisitely, fantastically beautiful. There was a long expanse of volcanic rock reaching out over the water, sharp peaks and craters among pools of water full of starfish, sea cucumbers, and tiny fish. Past the volcanic reef, waves broke, big and blue. We picked our way out over the sharp rocks and wandered around on the reef for a while (I guess it’s not technically a reef, because it wasn’t coral, but they all called it that). Gorgeous as it was, I was extremely wary of losing my footing; falling on those jagged edges would have been seriously bad news. Luckily, I had a few close calls, no more. Lots of other people, most of them pikinini, were out playing in the water as well. On the way back to shore, Raio pointed out the tide pools where women were washing the guts of pigs slaughtered that day to make laplap, leaving the pools red with blood. This gave me extra incentive to be careful on the way back, because if anything would be worse than falling on those rocks, it would be falling on those rocks into a pool of pig blood and offal.

Back on top at the ded, the laplaps were all cooking under layers of hot rocks, leaves, and dirt, and the mamas were just hanging out. I was encouraged to nap, and gladly took them up on the offer. So I dozed for a bit, sprawled out on a mat. Shortly after I woke up, three women came through the crowd, wailing and sobbing: the dead man’s wife and two other relations. Grief here is a very public, almost performative thing, involving a lot of exaggerated crying and lamentation, and none of the shame or discomfort that it provokes in the States. I don’t mean to suggest that these women’s grief was in some way faked, just that culturally it’s expressed differently here. They came through and threw the dead man’s clothes onto a fire, then retreated.

One of the other teachers from my school came over to sit down and chat with me. Mary is a really great woman, and I’m so glad I’m going to be working with her; she’s very sharp, motivated, and speaks excellent English. After we spent some time talking about the school and what kind of work we hope to do, I went down to the water with her to help her wash her dishes and pots (we’d all eaten Tanna soup earlier for lunch). We sat at the edge of the water, scrubbing pots with handfuls of sand, and she talked to me about Tanna. This woman is a goldmine of helpful information, and even more importantly, she seems very understanding about what kind of things I won’t know, being a newcomer, and what kind of things I should know. When we were done we waded out into the water and talked some more, which consisted mostly of me peppering her with questions about village structure, local politics, and stuff like that.

Went back up to the group, and spent some more time just hanging around, idly chatting or staring at the fire. By and by the laplap was done, and everyone began the process of pulling them out of the fire, unwrapping, cutting, and eating. As usual, there was far more laplap than we could all eat; mamas take big dishes of it home to fry and eat for days after. Then my mom took me over to show me the grave. People here tend to be buried at their houses, usually in raised plots adorned with lots of fake flowers. This one, being new, was surrounded by a small fence hung with cloth (all cloth here is tropical print, it seems like), covered in fake flowers, and, as it was then getting dark, lit from behind by a single fluorescent light. We stood and looked at the grave for a while, as did a crowd of others. The man’s daughter stood by the headstone, sobbing. Unlike in the States, no one went to comfort her. It seems understood that crying is just what you do. I can see the logic to a highly culturally-regulated grieving process like what they seem to have here; you have a week-long event where people come every day, you’re encouraged to cry loudly and ostentatiously, and at the end of that, it’s time to let go. You’ve done what needs to be done. You no longer mourn. Although they do have another big feast about a month afterwards, and then one more a year afterwards. I don’t know, I can’t really speak to the cultural implications of funerals here, because this is the only one I’ve seen and I observed it so superficially, but that was my impression.

Then we jumped in a truck with our five hundred pounds of leftover laplap and headed home. I washed off, because I was covered in dirt and manioc, and came inside to drink a cup of cocoa and write this post. I spent, all told, about thirteen hours at the dead today. I really enjoyed it. It was a long day, but I felt very comfortable, whether I was making a fool of myself cutting manioc, singing “Deep in the Heart of Texas” to a group of girls by the ocean, or just sitting and staring at the smoke as it swirled through the light. It’s been a great week, actually; I spent a lot of time playing with my little brother and his friends, met more kids from the school, and felt very at ease going over to my family’s house to say hi and eat dinner. I feel really content right now. I think it’s time for another cup of cocoa.

1/18/12

I was born in Virginia and grew up in Texas, southern states near the Atlantic Ocean. When I was a kid, my family would sometimes drive the short distance from Houston to Galveston bay, on the Gulf of Mexico. The Atlantic, as I experienced it, was murky and muddy, warm and opaque. The beaches are low and sandy. Hot and humid. The water was, then, often clogged by banks of prickly seaweed; now, it’s stained with oil. Then I went to college in Portland, Oregon, on the other side of the country. There, I could drive with my friends to the Pacific. Gray and chilled, windy and wet. The Pacific, there, is long white beaches lost in the mist, sand flung stinging against my rain-soaked face. The Pacific is high rocky cliffs, evergreen trees, tangles of dunes. The sun glows, diffuse and pale, through endless white mist. Now, I’ve come to live in Vanuatu, a tiny smattering of islands lost in the water. I’m on the same ocean as before, but it’s very different. The Pacific here is blue and glittering, shades of aqua and cerulean. It seems incomprehensibly vast, ready to absorb the tiny islands on which I live. Its beaches are sand and rock, crushed coral bleached in the sun, stretches of reef. The sun beats down through palms. When I swim out into the water, I don’t need a diving mask to see the brilliant fish darting around my legs. Land here seems happenstance, an odd accident, tenuous and fragile. Earthquakes and volcanoes remind me how capricious land is. The ocean is vaster and stronger and older than any solid ground. I’ve never stopped to think about how close I’ve lived to oceans, all my life.

1/23/12 Banana bread and human reproduction

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu edge of the blue

2012-01-30 05:54:00

Yesterday I made banana bread with two girls from the area, one of whom is the daughter of the awesome teacher Mary. They showed up with bananas for the bread, as well as a huge bag of lemons, two cucumbers, and two papayas. Apparently the ZCA (zone curriculum advisor; he’s the former headmaster and still lives on campus, and is a great guy) told all the kids that if they come to my house to visit or play games, they have to bring me food, which is sweet, but also apparently scared these two. “Tell him we brought you food!” they anxiously ordered me. I think they were also wary of other kids seeing them there baking with me, I guess because they wanted me all to themselves; when an older girl came by to discuss a potential scholarship application with me, they told me not to tell her about the banana bread. I said they were being silly and told them to stop hiding behind the door. Cross-cultural differences plus early teenage weirdness can lead to some confusing situations.

Anyway, using my Nalgene as a measuring reference, we whipped up a double batch of batter and baked two loaves in a saucepan over the fire. Loaves? I guess they’re not loaves if it’s just poured into a greased saucepan…rounds? Two rounds of banana bread. They turned out really well, actually, which amazed me. Hell, I made banana bread a lot in the States, with measuring cups and an oven, and what I made yesterday with a Nalgene and a fire is some of the best I’ve ever baked. Then we made lemonade and enjoyed the fruits (breads?) of our labor, while listening to Lady Gaga. Just like the kids I worked with in the U.S., they find my music collection disappointing. Only four Britney Spears songs? Sorry, guys. They asked me whether Shakira, Beyonce, or Rhianna was my favorite. Hell, they’ve seen music videos by Katy Perry that I didn’t know existed. Two thirteen year olds on a tiny island in the South Pacific are hipper to American pop culture than me! I’m not surprised.

After, they were looking through the books in my in-house library, and came across one called “Where Did I Come From?,” a kids’ book designed to teach children about human reproduction. Having been published in Australia in the ‘90s, there are some photos in there with pretty incredible hair and outfits, so I’m really not sure if this book ended up in PC hands as an aid for health volunteers or purely for humor’s sake. Anyway, while it does briefly touch on the topic of sex, it’s extremely tame and these girls are fairly old (I mean, one of them is the girl whose first-period party I went to, so I know she’s at least that mature) so I wasn’t worried about them flipping through it. Then they came to a magnified photo of sperm cells clustered on an egg cell, and threw the book away, shrieking, “What is it! It’s scary! I don’t like it!” Laughingly, I explained the photo. “This is an egg cell, it’s inside you and me.” “IT’S INSIDE ME?!” “Well, yeah, all women, but they’re so tiny you can’t see them. It’s how all babies begin! It’s something from God!” “It’s SCARY!” Then they discovered in-utero photos of fetal development, and the shrieking began again. “WHAT IS IT?!” “It’s a baby! That’s how babies look when they’re inside you.” “I DON’T WANT IT!” I appear to have discovered the perfect form of Ni-Vanuatu birth control. Perhaps a reproductive knowledge and health workshop is something I could look into organizing at one of the secondary schools; having grown up with a mom who worked at Planned Parenthood, the idea of not knowing what a fetus looks like is as alien to me as that photo looked to the girls.

In a week I fly back to Port Vila for G24’s Phase II Training, which is another two weeks of more specific, technical training (actually I’ll be posting this from the PC Office there, so by the time you read this I’ll be in Vila). Although I’m really enjoying being at site, I’m also looking forward to seeing the other education volunteers in my group again. It’ll be a lot of fun to have a beer and trade stories about the weirdest/funniest things that we’ve encountered so far. Also, for the first few days, our counterparts from site are also coming to Vila for joint trainings, so I’ll get to spend some time with the grades 1 and 2 teacher from my school doing workshops together (so I will probably avoid being tipsy for that part, of course) (I’m not an alcoholic, I swear; it’s just that as a small-town teacher and librarian [and contributor to Sabbath School, last week] the thought of drinking a beer and swearing freely is more intoxicating than all the booze in the world).

Sabbath School: I can elaborate on that a bit. My host family here is SDA, or Seventh Day Adventist, meaning that I don’t go to church on Sunday, but on Saturday, the Sabbath (except that sometimes I’ll go to the Presbyterian church on Sunday instead, to put in an appearance). The basic principle of the SDA church, as far as I can tell, is to follow every single rule in the Bible just in case. So they go to church on Saturday, the original holy day, and don’t eat pork or any sea creature without scales (a much bigger burden to bear in the South Pacific than in other parts of the world, one would think), or a whole list of other foods (again, this is one of the few places in the world where the Biblical prohibition against eating bats actually means something). Don’t drink alcohol or kava, either (I think SDA people generally also avoid caffeine, but people in Vanuatu don’t seem to be aware of what caffeine is; they’re always confused when I tell them that if I drink tea at night I’ll have trouble sleeping). They’re also more hardcore about keeping the holy day holy than other Christian denominations here seem to be. When they say they don’t work on Saturday, they don’t work on Saturday. Friday night my host mom cleans everything and makes laplap to eat the next day, since she can’t do any cooking on the holy day. Saturday morning we walk down the road to church. First is Sabbath School. The adults stay in the church for Bible discussion, while the kids go to the kindergarten house next door (colloquially called the kindy) for what is basically Sunday School. This past Saturday I went along with the kids, because I’d made a coloring sheet based on that day’s lesson about Joseph and the Coat of Many Colors (also because singing silly songs with small children is preferable to Bible discussion). After Sabbath School is the service (during which men and women sit on opposite sides of the church), which is usually about an hour and a half or two hours of preaching and a LOT of hymns. People here have gorgeous voices. I don’t know the tunes, and even if I did, my voice is…less gorgeous. So I do a lot of lip syncing. Afterwards we go outside and get into little family huddles to pray again (in case the first round of praying didn’t stick?), and then everyone sprawls out on mats to eat a picnic lunch of laplap and fruit. Well, I say everyone, but I mean all the women and kids, because all the men sit on benches in a clearing on the other side of the church, eating from plates of food ferried over by the pikinini. I kakae good at Saturday picnics, let me tell you. After eating, the mamas usually storian and then nap, while the kids run around playing (I can’t tell you what the guys do, since it’s probably not talking about football or work). Yup, folks stay there on church grounds all day long. Gotta keep it holy. Some people leave after service, of course, and I usually go home after lunch (most of their chatting is done in language and not Bislama, so I can’t really keep up). Sometimes I’m done with Jesus for the day, sometimes I go back in the evening for closing service. Before sundown, they gather again for more hymns and another, shorter service, and wait until the sun sets, at which point Sabbath is officially over and people go back home. When I first got to Vanuatu, I found lengthy church services pretty excruciating; now it’s just a part of my weekly routine, no big deal. I actually really like the SDA church here; it’s a small congregation, and the kids are fun to play with, and I like the picnic lunch (why yes, I will eat a pile of pineapple, thank you very much) (also there are about 500 mango trees all around the church, and when you hear a rustling overhead everyone ducks to avoid getting brained with delicious fruit). It really feels like a tight-knit community, which I appreciate. Still, a whole day of worship is rather a lot; I think I’ll generally do just a morning of worship.

It is interesting being an agnosto-atheist in a devoutly Christian country; I’m still working out how I feel about it, and I’ll write about it in greater length some other time. Currently, when people ask about my religion, I’m honest and nonspecific. “I don’t go to a church in the States,” I tell them. “My family doesn’t have a church. But here, I’ll go to all the churches.” “So…in the US, you pray at home?” “…Sure.”

1/26/12 Madame Librarian

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu edge of the blue

2012-01-30 05:57:00

I cook over a fire now without thinking twice. Well, that’s not true. I still get a kick out of it, every time, and feel proud. But I’m also the girl who routinely congratulated herself for being a genius every time she made chocolate chip cookies at college, which was often, so self-satisfaction for basic skills isn’t exactly a new thing for me. I can build a fire pretty easily. A week ago I made spaghetti with green beans and tomato sauce and garlic bread for me and three friends, all over a fire. Yeeeah!

I feel pretty comfortable here now. No more weird anxiety over walking to town, over the stares I still sometimes get. A lot less stares now, though. People recognize me. They say hi, offer me rides, give me fruit (a lot of fruit). Kids come to my house to play cards and stare at my drawings (they LOVE my drawings). I know the teachers and have ideas for how to work with them. I’m really excited for school to start, excited to start co-teaching phonics and reading, to start running and developing the library. The other day I swept a million dead centipedes (not the dangerous bitey kind) out of the library with a broom made out of bundled palm twigs (that’s the omnipresent broom here). It made me think of the pushbroom from Ainsworth Elementary with longing. Then I thought of the endless safety regulations at Ainsworth and laughed out loud. There, kids had to sit down to eat, had to sit “on their bottoms” rather than kneel on the benches, had to “keep their bodies to themselves,” couldn’t go anywhere alone. Here, a three year old can wander off into the bush with a chunk of laplap in one hand and a knife in the other, while her brothers nearby pummel the shit out of each other, and it’s pretty much par for the course. I think I prefer the Ni-Vanuatu style.

In Vanuatu, the government decides where teachers will work, and seems to change these postings year-to-year (even though teachers are supposed to stay at least two years at a given school). It’s a weird concept for me; the government can tell you, with only a month or two of notice, that you and your family have to move to a different island. They also don’t really take any notice of special skills; last year, the previous PC vol trained one of the teachers to act as librarian, and she was apparently doing a great job. Now, though, she’s being sent to another school, which may not even have a library. How do you create a sustainable project when the people involved can be shuffled around without a moment’s notice?

Our school’s enrollment has apparently gone down some for this coming year, so we’re only going to have three teachers (one of whom is also the headmaster) for grades 1-6. Yeah, every teacher will be teaching two grades simultaneously. This is obviously less than ideal, because the teachers are overworked and stressed out, and there’s no opportunity to focus on individual students’ needs or help those lagging behind. So I’m planning on doing reading groups and remedial after-school classes. I’m also going to be the school’s librarian, which I’m excited about. However, one of my goals here is to develop the library’s structure enough, and produce enough guidelines, that it can eventually be run by the teachers and not need a Peace Corps volunteer present. Sustainability, yo. But it’s hard to see how that will be achievable when every teacher is already teaching two classes at once. The library is far too small to have more than about ten kids in it at once, so if every grade is around 20 kids, I can reasonably have them come one grade at a time, have an activity for half to do while the other half find books, and then switch. That wouldn’t be possible if I weren’t here. The teacher can’t bring two grades—probably between 25-35 students—and successfully monitor everyone while some are in the library and some are doing another activity. So I’m really not sure how I’m going to work out a system by which the library can be run just by the school’s staff, excluding me. Guess I’ve got two years to figure it out.

Moments when you realize you are in a different world

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu edge of the blue

2012-01-30 06:00:00

A thirteen year old girl was asking me if people from America will come visit me, and I explained that while my mom and sister will definitely come, my friends probably won’t have enough money to fly all this way. “Why don’t they just go to the bank and get money?” she asked. I explained that you have to earn the money that you put in the bank, and that most young people don’t have jobs that earn very much money, but she didn’t seem to understand. “But why can’t they just go to the bank?” she asked again. “That’s what you do, right?” Later, she asked if she could buy my iPod for five dollars.

My host mom asked me about education, telling me how here in Vanuatu, the church and the educational system are both relatively new arrivals, and that she still doesn’t totally understand them. “Where does education stop? Is there something after university?” So I explained that after graduating from a four-year university, some people go back to graduate school to earn Master’s degrees, doctorates, and other degrees. “Ok,” she said, “so, Master’s. That’s where it ends. And then you know everything, and can get any job.” Well, no. You don’t know everything, you just know a lot more about one subject. And it doesn’t end, because as long as you have money and time, you can theoretically keep learning forever. And it certainly doesn’t guarantee you a job; lots of people in the States, especially right now, have advanced degrees but are unemployed. “So, what job do you do with a Master’s?” Well, it really depends. But it’s not like you’ve learned a vocation; you’re technically qualified to be considered for more jobs, but it’s not necessarily one specific job, like “pharmacist” or “accountant” that you are now eligible for. Education here is still viewed in that very 1950s American way, where you get educated for a specific job or career, and start that career, and that’s it. How do I really explain that now, in the States at least, you need an undergrad degree to get even the most menial of jobs, even though what you’re doing will likely be completely unrelated to what you spent four years learning? I tried to explain that, in my view at least, part of the point of education isn’t just what the degree, job, or concrete outcome is, but rather to improve your and worldview. Of course, in Bislama this is, “Tingting blo mi i se, education hemi wan important samting blo improvem tingting blo yu, mo janis ol samting we yu luk mo ting.” (My thinking is, education is something important for improving your mind, and changing the way you think and see things.) My mom agreed, but still, how the hell do you explain an educational system that even you don’t understand?

My host mom asked me if the stories in the Bible take place in America. Who can blame her? It’s all a bunch of country and city names she’s never heard of, and every Bible picture is excruciatingly Caucasian (it makes me cringe to see the Sabbath school full of beaming blue-eyed Jesus cradling all the little blonde Aryan kids; thanks, missionaries, for bringing all your imagery, but maybe you could show this all-loving God of yours loving some of the little black kids, too). I said they were in the Middle East, and we looked at my map and I pointed out Israel and Egypt. But then she kept saying, “Ah, yes, in Asia!” And pointing to Asia. Not sure why. But at least we did establish that, contrary to what David Bowie might say, God is not an American.

Geo-political terminology and borders are generally confusing to people here. I told a girl I was from America and she said, “I thought you were from the U.S.!” So I explained that the two words mean the same thing (sorry, Mexico and Canada, but it’s true). In Sabbath School the teacher read a story from South America and told the kids, “This takes place in Nabubo’s country.” Continent, region, country, state, city—unfamiliar concepts. My little brother refers to the States as my “island.” I gave my mom the analogy that country means the same thing (Vanuatu = U.S.), state is roughly similar to island (Tanna = Texas), and city is like village (Loukatai = Houston), which is more or less correct, but still…not. People also seem convinced that we don’t have stars in America (we do, you just can’t see as many of them in the cities), and that I couldn’t walk to get places in the States (actually I walked a bunch to get places in Portland, although that’s not true of every city).

I’m routinely referred to as “missus” here. Not addressed, like “Missus Rosemary,” but in the third person, like, “Ask the missus if she wants some pineapple,” or more often in language so it’s just, “ missus .” (They are, on these occasions, always amazed that I can tell they’re talking about me; sometimes I even psych them out by saying something like “Hemia nao,” or that’s right, and pretending that I understand language.) This is because in Vanuatu, “missus” means “white woman.” Yup. Being called “missus” therefore makes me uncomfortable on two levels; for one thing, I don’t like being generalized as “white woman,” as I tell the kids, “You know my name.” I’m not a white woman, I’m this particular white woman. Let’s not make me any more foreign than necessary, shall we? Secondly, it’s so obviously a remnant of colonial culture that it’s just too loaded to ever feel comfortable with. Still, I guess it’s better than what the white guys here are called: “master.” Remember, Vanuatu was, in the weirdest colonial move ever, jointly ruled by England and France until 1980. Two judicial systems, two educational systems, two national languages—is it any wonder that government here is still a muddled mess? The Lonely Planet guidebook informs me that, while the British prisons were reportedly more humane, the French ones had better food.

The educational system here is still split—there are Francophone schools and Anglophone schools—making this country’s whole Tower of Babel thing even more complex. Everyone speaks the language specific to their particular area (sometimes a very small area; there can be many languages on one island). And then at school, some people learn English and some learn French (and some, of course, barely learn either). This really reinforces dependence on Bislama; if you want to be able to talk to anyone else in your country—hell, sometimes anyone else on your island—hell, sometimes your spouse—you have to use Bislama, a pidgin language developed through interaction with traders and pirates.

Some Reflections Upon the Nature of the Squat Toilet

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu edge of the blue

2012-01-30 06:01:00

I have had ample opportunity, over the past day or two, to consider the implications of the outdoor squat toilet. Certain conclusions were obvious after even my first week of using one; for example, the benefits of never needing to flush weighed against the omnipresent odors; for another, the unpleasantness of looking down to see not only one’s own accumulated waste, but also a number of insects who apparently find one’s waste much less unpleasant, countered by the arguable advantage of never having to know, for certain, whether or not one has acquired intestinal worms. By and large, using an outdoor squat toilet is no hardship. True, venturing out to use it last night before bed did result in my battling a cockroach and a large crab, but these are not insurmountable challenges (I threw a rock at the roach and sidestepped the crab). That my bathroom’s door is only a hanging piece of cloth was initially a problem, but one I have solved by tying two large pieces of coral to its bottom corners to weigh it down; now, only the stiffest breeze can put me at risk of indecent exposure to passerby. In a country where indecent exposure can consist of baring my thighs, I take the matter seriously.

However, since yesterday I have been suffering from what is sometimes referred to locally as “sit sit wota”—literally, “shit shit water,” or diarrhea. This is not especially unusual, but has led me, once or twice, to think wistfully of the convenient, indoor, porcelain thrones of America. The advantage of having gastrointestinal issues in the States—a particularly bad hangover, say, as giardia and parasites are somewhat less commonplace—is that one can comfortably loiter near or even in the bathroom so as to not have to rush when the urge to be sick strikes. We have phrases that refer to this, saying that we “camp out in the bathroom,” or “hug the toilet.” With facilities such as those I have here in Vanuatu, this is not really an option. Camping out near the bathroom is far too similar to actual camping, with its abundance of dirt, insects, and weather, and hugging the toilet is simply not possible when the toilet is in fact a keyhole-shaped opening in a cement slab. Indeed, should one need to visit the bathroom with frequency, one has no choice but, every time, to go outside, thus making it relatively clear to one’s neighbors that all is not perfectly well in IntestineTown.

There is also the squatting position to be considered, a pose that has colonic health and strengthened quadriceps to recommend it, but which is perhaps not the easiest or most pleasant to maintain when one is feeling ill. On occasion I have hunkered long enough that, upon standing, I have nearly lurched sideways on my sore legs and tumbled into the wall. The individual using a squat toilet does not relax. Compare this to the United States, where our chair-like facilities are so conducive to repose that we often provide reading material to peruse while enjoying our respite upon the commode. For that matter, think of the very word “commode,” which must share some roots with “commodious”—ample, roomy, and spacious. Contrast that with the adjective “squat,” and you will have some idea of the cultural differences in plumbing that I have observed. Western-style toilets are so accommodating that in America, there are those who sleep, pass out, and even die while perched in the bathroom. Although I can’t cite statistics, I imagine this to be a far less common occurrence in Vanuatu, where, no matter how much whiskey or kava one has consumed, one is hopefully never so far gone as to keel over—most likely sustaining a blow to the head in doing so— and lie prone on the dirty cement next to a pit of feces, roaches, and rats. Surely even Elvis, were he to have chosen Vanuatu as the scene of his final show, would have had the presence of mind to stagger back into his hut before expiring.

Kangaroo Meat, McDonald's, Cider, and Museums - Sydney Australia

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu Peliroja in the South Pacific

2012-02-04 05:12:00

I can finally say that I have been to Australia - the trip was amazing and well worth it. We managed to eat, drink, and do pretty much everything that we planned to. My dad and step mom came and hung out with us for a few days... always good to see the family from time to time.

My good friend Jennifer made a great video, so I'll go ahead and share that we you all. Click on the link - Australia!

that might be fear in my eyes.

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu whomever you are with

2012-02-04 03:23:00

last christmas i got really sick from kava.

so every time i try to drink, my face still looks like this.

rough.

Barbra Streisand.

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu Moonlit Wenis Crinkles....Abroad!

2012-02-03 01:33:44

Despite appearances, we did more than just drink adult beverages on our vacation. But it seems I had the most photos of our pretty, smiling faces on days where we actually did strange things like showering, putting on faces, and styling our hair. Set to one of the house music songs we heard several times while in OZ.

seismic waves

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu whomever you are with

2012-02-02 22:55:00

this is at jake's on tanna around christmas.

a 6.9 earthquake woke me from my slumber last night! 6.9 i tell you!

glasses were rattling, my bed kept shaking, and by golly, it was frightening.

each time, though, when an earthquake is over and i know everything is alright, i can't help but smile.

those little bursts of released energy from the earth's crust are pretty cool.

p.s. i, and everyone else as far as i am aware, am/are completely fine.

mustachio

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu whomever you are with

2012-02-01 05:46:00

i am, and probably always will be, a huge facial hair advocate.

i think i would look downright smashing with a little 'stach.

how fortunate that i found a red bearded man who would grow one out, just for me.

spoiled rotten, this girl.

spoiled rotten.

you all are so sweet

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu whomever you are with

2012-01-31 05:06:00

i've been getting lots of wonderful mail lately.
i am the luckiest girl!

surprise late christmas notes and packages from friends that feel like family, secret post cards from my favorite big sister at this place, a HUGE box of everything a peace corps could ever want from my buddy abby (who did peace corps in kazakhstan...so she certainly knows).

thanks so much for every single thing. it makes me feel so loved.
and i hope you know that the feeling is mutual.

Got eyes for Bondi.

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu Moonlit Wenis Crinkles....Abroad!

2012-01-31 22:48:32

It all started in Vanuatu. There was this Kiwi named Blair who was traveling in Vanuatu and soon to start a job in Sydney. Being excited by this interesting hotel stranger, Melissa, heather and I took it upon ourselves to share our wealth of Kava and Vila knowledge with this poor guy. We drug him along to a local [...]

Trains, Continued.

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu Moonlit Wenis Crinkles....Abroad!

2012-01-31 05:13:33

I celebrated my birthday on New Year’s Day, which is my brother Manuel’s birthday as well. he is a big 3 years old now. My papa found us a coconut crab to eat. My sister Clenda powdered our head. I was stuffed, smelling of a baby booty and feeling good. Only a few days later I had to [...]

i still have the bite marks to prove it.

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu whomever you are with

2012-01-30 23:01:00

i got bitten by one of these when i was in saama village last week visiting danielle:

my friend michael took this picture. that thing is as fat as my finger.

a giant, poisonous centipede. it was pretty uncomfortable.

luckily, danielle is a great nurse and had water boiling immediately to draw out the poison and an ice pack ready to keep down the swelling.

and i think it earned me a few tough guy points, too.

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu Peliroja in the South Pacific

2012-01-30 11:14:00

My Peace Corps Partnership was finally approved and has been posted on the PC website. If you are feeling in the giving mood, feel free to donate to my project. If not, that's ok... take a look anyway and read about my project and my school. Cheers!

https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=donate.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=461-052

Gardening

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu Prakasha II: The Freedom To Go

2012-01-30 05:32:00

I have begun working on my garden, which has proven to be more of a project than I've anticipated. After the last volunteer at my site left, a tremendous amount of weeds invaded my back yard. Eradicating them has taken several days, but is almost completed now. I was delighted to learn that two pineapple trees are growing there (see top photo), since the pineapple here is the best I have ever had. I will never purchase canned pineapple again after this experience! Also growing are papaya, island cabbage, and nalailas, the green vegetable I ate with the su-sor (see bottom photo). The women in my host family have been extremely helpful in the weeding process. The men, however, have not. This is common in Vanuatu. Women are forced to conduct much, if not most, of the work while men are lackadaisical. Vanuatu has very little of a women's rights movement at this time, but my hope is that the influence of the Peace Corps will change this.

Birthday Su-Sor

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu Prakasha II: The Freedom To Go

2012-01-30 04:58:00

Two children's birthdays were celebrated last week with two different cakes and a dish that is unique to Malekula: Su-sor. Su-sor entails cooking mashed yams within banana leaves over an open flame with hot stones and green vegetables called nalailas. After the yams are cooked, coconut milk is squeezed over the hot stones and the greens. Small strips of yam are dipped into the coconut milk and eaten with the hands. I made me realize how resourceful the people of Vanuatu truly are and what they can create with very little tools at their disposal. I found it very difficult to believe that it was accomplished without the help of any real modern technology. I also enjoyed eating with my hands—except for the sticky quality of the su-sor I was left with after eating it. Eating with one's hands is also the custom in India, where I lived for six months in 2006, so I surprised everyone by being accustomed to it. My favorite part, however, was the nalailas soaked in coconut milk, and was delighted to learn it is growing in my garden.

Coconut Wireless

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu Prakasha II: The Freedom To Go

2012-01-30 05:09:00

This week I also attended a more traditional wedding than the previous one I attended. It included an exchange of gifts of mats, meat, and money between the families of the bride and groom. It began with Christian prayers and I was asked to offer a Buddhist prayer. I chose the Turning to the Tathagatha prayer, a prayer that beseeches the Lord of Compassion within all beings to bless us with awakening and loving-kindness. Since it was situated in the Presbyterian side of my village, it also included indulging in kava and tobacco. Being in my village is reminiscent of Prohibition to me, a time when people had to escape to dangerous, Mafia-infested neighborhoods in order to indulge in alcohol, since I cannot consume or purchase kava in the Seventh-Day Adventist community in which I am situated. I have heard stories of a Mafia presence in Vanuatu as well: From China. Mostly in the political and economic capital of Port Vila, I have heard many stories of the Chinese Mafia attacking anyone who competes with their business interests. The supermarket chain Au Bon Marché, despite its French name, is supposedly run by Chinese mobsters who will break the legs of anyone who tries to compete with them. I have also heard of a secret prostitution rink being run by a group of Ni-Vanuatu women who sell fruit, fish, and other produce in markets known as “mamas markets.” (Sometimes even bats are killed and sold there for human consumption, which is considered a Melanesian delicacy.) All these stories circulate the country through a gossip network between islands and villages known as “coconut wireless.” Nothing is too mundane, too scandalous, too petty, or too private to flow through this network, and Peace Corps Volunteers are prime targets, since we are essentially celebrities here. Whenever I do drink alcohol or kava (which is infrequent these days), I find the knowledge of it spreads like wildfire and becomes the latest village gossip. Everyone asks me how much I've had and how inebriated I've become. I find it somewhat invasive and judgmental. Even though nobody outright tells me not to engage in any activity, I find myself wanting to tell them, “I'm an adult. That's none of your business.” However, in Vanuatu, everything is their business if it spreads through coconut wireless. Some of what is included in coconut wireless is not even accurate, and discerning fact from fiction is not always easy. One Volunteer suffered the scandal of a false rumor that he was the father of an illegitimate child about to born to his community. Now I know how celebrities in American tabloids feel!

Trains and planes.

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu Moonlit Wenis Crinkles....Abroad!

2012-01-29 12:48:14

I’m on a train. I was looking forward to spending Cristmas and New Years AND my birthday in my village. It’s a good thing it is time for ‘spel’ or holiday because the heat and humidity have been atrocious. I can barely stand walking the 10 feet from my sleep house to my kitchen house. [...]

1-19 The State of the Work

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu Vignettes from the Adventures of two Volunteers in Vanuatu

2012-01-27 12:31:00

Despite what this blog reflects, I am actually in Vanuatu to do a job. That job is a little unclear most days, but I am here to do it. My job description translates to something like “Improve the health of the area.” It is up to me to determine what that means.

PHAST in action, discussing toilet improvements for the community

I like these parameters. I am a self-starter and I work best with minimal supervision. (Its a nice way or saying I don't like authority.) Most of the time, this works out great for me. However, there are days it is kind of rough. There are days I want nothing more than to show up to a job and be told to go take care of something that I can then proceed to ignore or half ass until the end of the work day when I can go home and feel like I did my eight hours. I don't do that here. Even on the days I feel like slacking, I have to motivate me to go do work.

This conundrum has been challenging for some Community Health volunteers. It is hard work to go make yourself a job every day. For some volunteers, their last year of service becomes a year of watching time pass. They've run out of steam to find work and are just waiting to finish their contracts. I'm at the point right now where I can choose to sit back and play with my cats and go swim in the ocean or I can make the choice to keep working hard and searching out things to do and people to do them with. Those of you who know me know which choice I've made, but that doesn't mean it is easy.

Here is what I'm doing and how it is going.

After a four day PHAST workshop, we did a group picture

Toilets

I did a lot of workshops about hygiene and sanitation. In them, the community chose a project to improve their hygiene and sanitation. I chose these workshops based on surveys in which the community members told me there is a lot of trouble with toilets. So, the community chose to build water seal (dump a bucket to flush) toilets. I agreed to help them write a grant. That was over six months ago. The grant is still incomplete, though it is under consideration by the funding agency. The community contribution was due over a month ago and I haven't seen or heard of anyone giving their portion of the money. The person I was working with has forgotten to show up to talk about this twice in a row. In a continuing effort to not give up, I went to the chief to discuss this state of affairs. We'll see if there is any change in the coming month. If not, I will strongly consider pulling the grant out of consideration.

Children's Sanddrawing workbook

There are beautiful sand drawings that have meanings and stories that go with them. The stories and even the drawings themselves are disappearing as the oldfala die or become to senile to show them to people. There are a few people who are interested in preserving this art form. I am trying to work with one of them to create a small workbook/coloring book for kids that include how to make about a dozen of the drawings and the stories that go with them. If I can pull it off, I'd like to stories to be in Apma, Bislama, French and English. Literacy, here we come! Of course, the last three times I've tried to meet with the oldfala, something has made us not connect. I still don't have the drawings or the stories so I can't even start to type them up and create a layout for the book, much less look for a publisher or funding to publish it. Sigh.

Weekly Health toktok

I want to get my counterpart involved in doing more health outreach as well as learning more about health and medicine herself. She is interested in going to nursing school in the future. I thought we could do weekly or bi-weekly lectures of an hour or less about one or two topics each week. It would give the two of us a chance to discuss health topics and hopefully increase her knowledge while doing some basic education within the community. We set a date for the first one. She cancelled it the night before. We set a second date. She cancelled it. I went to her about a third date, she cancelled it. I tried a fourth date, she cancelled in the morning of. I think I'm done trying on that plan.

High School Health Class

In Jason's classroom, mine is up the hill with chalkboards, not computer.

I was teaching the high schoolers health. By health I mean sex ed. This is one of the places I can say I've been successful. I've increased the knowledge of STIs and STI prevention among the 14-17 year-olds in the area. I know they are using condoms because I keep finding the condom wrappers hidden in dark corners. When we did Sex Jeaopardy on the last day of class, there were only a few questions that stumped them. I'll be teaching in the school again this coming school year, though I may try to expand from sex ed to include nutrition and basic first aid.

Children Hygeine and Sanitation Transformation

It isn't a success yet, but its getting there. I'm working with some other PCVs to create a toolkit of pictures to teach hygiene and sanitation to first through fifth graders. We're ready to do a beta test of it when the new school year starts, I'll tell you if it goes anywhere from there.

At the Training of Trainers for a GLOW/BILD.
Next step: run a GLOW/BILD

Camp GLOW/BILD

These are youth leadership and empowerment camps that are really encouraged within Peace Corps. We went to a Training of Trainers last May. We left with every intention of running one in our community. Since then, the girl who came with us left to get married on Santo, one of the boys got married and is too busy and the other one hasn't showed up to talk to me about it. We may try to do a long weekend instead of a full week sometime in the next few months. Again, it seems like the momentum is lost and it will take some serious effort to build it back up.

Adolescent Reproductive Health Curriculm

This is another project to try to give Peace Corps more resources for the future. I'm basing it on my experience teaching last year. I haven't done a lot yet, but again, I have high hopes. I always have high hopes.

I have a few more ideas of things I want to do before I leave. I'd like to do a AIDS/STI workshop in the community. I may try to make it a really big deal over two or three days and do a tournament and hire the band to play or watch AIDS related videos in the evenings. We'll see. I'd like to do a maternal and child nutrition workshop with the mamas. I'm going to talk to someone about that today. We'll see what other work I can find to do. I'm good at coming up with ideas for work, anyway.

9-3 (yes, last year) The Land of Overgrown Houseplants

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu Vignettes from the Adventures of two Volunteers in Vanuatu

2012-01-27 13:02:00

I really think Vanuatu is the land of the overgrown houseplants. There are plants that I have seen people trying to grow in greenhouses, on windowsills and through the long, cold Minnesota winter that are weeds here. Basically, its like Jurassic Park, except without as many large, ravening dinosaurs trying to eat us.

Here are some pretty pictures of plants that you may recognize:

We call this one natangura here, but I have no idea what it is called in English. Anyone who knows feel free to comment. My dad has a few in his house, except they are about chest high, instead of tree sized.

The plant is the palm-looking thing over on the right of the photo, behind the rock.

This is something my mother calls “Wandering Jew.” I don't know if that is the right name for it or not, but it grows as a house plant and an annual around the Minneapolis area. Here, it takes over sections of the bush.

I don't know how many plants have the same name, but this one grows everywhere there are rocks to climb.

This is something my grandmother calls a Croton, we call it a flower. My grandmother has been trying to get these things to grow with minimal success for longer than I've been alive. Here they are trees. They are one of the few “flowers” that the cows won't eat. They grow all over.

Its a tree. Seriously, tree.

At home, Poinsettas are a small, seasonal, potted plant. Here, they are rampant bushes. Both the white and red varieties grow with no attention by humans. In fact, the students in Melsisi decided to line a path with them by ripping of a couple of branchs and shoving them in the ground. They all have new leaves now.

That's Jason's grandma. She's doesn't speak Bislama but she smiles a lot.

I don't have a good picture, but I've seen something that looks a lot like a plant I think is called Mother-in-Law's tongue or some other equally awkward name. Long stalk leaves coming up from a central base that are white in the center and green on the outside.

There are more, but my botany is not the best. Overall, the plants here grow to ridiculous sizes. The castor beans average around 10 feet tall, my tomato plant is taller than me and my basil is shoulder high. Everything likes to grow here.

1-19 Denizen's of Chez Gaea

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu Vignettes from the Adventures of two Volunteers in Vanuatu

2012-01-27 12:24:00

A short collection of the inhabitants of my house.

They are brothers, though they only admit it while
getting kitty hairs all over my clothes.

Melvin, also known as FBI. He is in charge of internal defense against rats, lizards and other pests.

Melvin at work

Goldy, or our CIA. He walks about to quell the threat of a rat invasion based in neighboring houses.

It is important to keep other organizations (or your brother) on their toes.

Our spider friends. She was one of the bigger ones I've seen in my bathroom. But she wasn't the only one.

The white thing is an egg sac. Gross smol.

There is no door on my kitchen. The chickens hold the communal belief that this makes it a chicken coop. I objected at first, until they started laying eggs. We've reached an agreement, they get to play in my kitchen if I get to steal their babies.

I wanted to see how many eggs she had.
She wasn't really happy with the operation.

Chicken housing crisis: Insufficient nest space leads
to overcrowded nests and really warm eggs.

More eight-legged roommates. They keep the mostiks down.

This is the yellow-butt spider. The thick part of the web is really sticky.

Life in Vila

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu From Jersey to Vanuatu

2012-01-20 22:46:00

Hey all,

So today's the 21st and I've been here (Port Vila) since the 2nd when they flew me in for the broken toe. I'm going back tomorrow to site which is good because I've been away so long. So what have I been doing here for so long you may ask? Well not much, in the beginning I couldn't walk too much and crutches really hinder your shopping abilities by needing two hands. Just enjoying the electricity, watching Mad Men (I'm almost done with season 3 and started when I got here.), a bunch of movies and really enjoying downloading new music for my ipod! Also I got my new kindle which is great news! One Peace Corps guy Nic was visiting the states and my parents sent the kindle to him so he brought it over for me, I just re-uploaded all my books so now I'm super happy to be able to read again. I've been hanging out with some of the volunteers from the other group and got to see some people from my group who are on Efate. Not too much has been going on but here are some photo updates since I've been here too:

A few of us spent the day at a nice resort (Le Legan - look it up if you want to stay here it's really nice!) And yes that's some serious sunburn haha

Another beautiful sunset in Vila

My hotel room for almost a month!

Hot plate - yes!!

Rockin' the crocs for toe defense!

Real shower and toilet...so amazing!

My "view"

Well that's about it for now, I'm going back to Ambae tomorrow for about 9 days and coming back to Vila on the 30th of January for Phase II Training with the rest of my group so it should be a great time, ale lukim yu fala afta!
Ta ta

Alligator Hunting

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu Fasin Blong Bankis

2012-01-20 04:43:51

Saturday my papa took us alligator hunting. Vanualava is the only island in Vanuatu with alligators – they were brought down by Bishop Patteson and live in a river (Alligator River) and a swamp near Port Patteson (settled by said bishop). Sometimes they sunbathe on the beach, sometimes they swim out to the tiny uninhabited [...]

Here we go again

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu womanmaewo

2012-01-17 01:21:57

I’m very sorry that I have not posted any new blogs since I left the states. After being spoiled with high-speed internet for 3 weeks, I found the internet in Vanuatu to be even slower than it was before I had left. Plus, surprisingly enough, I was pretty busy getting my grants ready, which required me [...]

the Tribulations of Body Fluctuations

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu womanmaewo

2012-01-17 01:52:50

This is an article that I sent into the Vanuatu volunteer magazine so that I could share my story with the newbies and anybody who might be dealing with similar issues. Its good for them to know that they are not alone. Its cheesy and little pathetic, but its meant to be funny. I find it funny and completely [...]

A Short Introduction to My Introduction

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu Adventures of an Idealistically Realistic Dreamer

2012-01-16 22:05:00

On December 15th, 2011 I left the bustling “city” of Port Vila and arrived on the southeast side of Ambrym, my new home. My first thoughts were: 1) HOLY CRAP THIS IS HOME FOR THE NEXT TWO YEARS!!! 2) Whoa, the ground is black! 3) I think the entire village is here waiting for us at the airport?! My cat was not impressed with flying. I have a few new scars to prove this. While the whole village did not actually meet us at the airport, a good number of them did. My new host mama, Wendy (I have really good luck with people named Wendy) presented me with a new island dress and my papa shook my hand and talked and talked and talked about, well, I don’t really remember what. Then, after we shook hands with somewhere around a hundred people, learned and promptly forgot all of their names and relationships to us, we were seated in the airport. I use the term “airport” loosely. It is a concrete building with no windows and no doors and a big sign that says “ULEI.” It also has a grass runway, so during heavy rains no flights can arrive or depart. I have a feeling there will be a blog post sometime in the future about how I got stuck either in Vila or on my island due to this issue. So. We waited for the truck for at least 2 hours. They had to go to the port to find all of our luggage, which we had put on the ship the week before. Then, once they got it, something mechanically went wrong with the truck so we sat… and we waited… and generally just storied with our new mamas. Then, finally… we headed out to the village. My village, Endu, is about an hour drive from the airport down a washed-out dirt road. That particular trip, we had about 15 people plus all of Sam’s (other PCV who lives on the other side of the same village) and my stuff, plus my cat. All trying to fit in a single cab truck bed. It was nuts! We dropped Sam off at her house first… dude, her house is huge… and then we went to mine, on the other side of the village. Mine is… very small. But it’s super cute and I have made it my own. It is ridiculously close to my host family’s house which means the fishbowl effect is pretty intense, but it’s also nice because they feed me. :) That night they welcomed us into the community with a huge ceremony. Everyone in the village (300 people, it’s a large village) came and brought food. We were walked in by my host dad to a song that the string-band had written to welcome their two new “pis kops” and I actually almost cried. Then they did a kustom dance and the chief gave a speech, gave us new custom names (mine is Wova but they call me Matalo, or white girl, because when my one-year-old host sister first met me she looked confused and asked “matalo taree?” or “white sister?” It stuck :D) the elder prayed and I had to give a short thank-you speech. In Bislama. Woot. Then it was… a KAVA ceremony. OF COURSE, did you expect anything different? Gah, I hate the taste of kava. But I drank the entire shell and they were impressed. I know, I know. This is a really short introduction to my first couple weeks. But I failed at being able to concentrate long enough to write a whole blog post and now I have to go catch my taxi to go to the airport. So I will leave you with this bit of humor: When I first got here they told me that I am half-man. I can climb into the back of pick-up trucks without assistance, I can carry my own luggage, I can use a bushknife, I can use a hammer and put nails in my own walls, I can work in the garden, I can walk three hours each way to check my mail, etc. They are shocked that I can do all of this, but I can also cook and wash clothes. Crazy! :) I promise, Mom… I’ll write a couple more posts about the first few weeks at site and about my family, about Christmas and about the huge birthday party they threw me. These will go up in February!! So until then… to be continued…

yessir, yasur

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu whomever you are with

2012-01-14 12:37:00

somehow, seeing spewing lava reminded me how small of a creature i am. it was an incredible trip to the top of the volcano.

if you ever get the chance to see an active volcano, don't pass it up. i promise it is worth it.

100 books finished!

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00

Vanuatu Moonlit Wenis Crinkles....Abroad!

2012-01-13 22:27:35

Updated Reading List. **Denotes recommended reads November continued: She’s Come Undone- Wally Lamb** December: The Sweet Potato Queens’ Book of Love- Jill Conner Browne Conan the Barbarian- Michael Stackpole The Tenth Circle- Jodi Picoult Paradise- Toni Morrison** Ender’s Shadow- Orson Scott Card** Shadow of the Hegemon- Orson Scott Card Shadow Puppets- Orson Scott Card [...]