Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Good Afternoon,
Hello world. It seems as though I'm emerging from a cocoon and blinking at my surroundings again. For the short of attention, here's what's happened. Ready?
I'm supposed to work with these Area Secretaries on Epi island, but they've either been on extended Christmas break for most of my time on Epi or they have been in the process of (maybe) getting their contracts renewed by Louis, the District Administrative Officer and my main counterpart. I try to work with the Secretaries, but there's hasn't been much for us to do together since late November. So, I've been spending my time “integrating” like I'm supposed to. I walk about to the other villages, chat with people for hours at a time, go to Saturday services with my host family and meet the other Seventh Day Adventists that come to visit.
I've got a small garden growing, but my corn won't be ready until June or July. The lettuce is dead. We built an outrigger canoe which I use to go fishing with my uncle and to take the occasional 45 minute canoe trip to Laman Bay. After spending Christmas in my village and seeing hardly any recognition of what is supposedly the biggest holiday in Vanuatu, I decided anything would be better than nothing and spent New Year's Eve in Laman Bay and Niku with the other volunteers on the island. There was cheap Chinese fireworks, torches all along the bay, and matching bonfires on Laman island making a huge of ring of fire. At 3:00am in Niku, the roosters were just starting to crow when we got to sleep, but some men were still pounding kava in the nakamal.
I eat a lot of bananas. A chicken lived in my house and laid eggs for me until she decided to start guarding one and hatched it on Christmas Day ('twas a miracle!). We stopped getting along after that and Papa intervened and kicked her out of the house. I hacked steps into the side of a coconut tree during an approaching hurricane so I could climb up, chop down really heavy leaves and help put them on village roofs to keep them from blowing away. The word for ten in one of my villages “local languages” is actually just the word for “two” followed by “five”. They couldn't tell me the word for eleven, but supposedly my grandpa in another village might remember.
Did I mention the cups before? Using a tea cup, a flash light, and a small globe, I was able to answer questions about why the moon has phases and how eclipses work. As a joke, we sometimes call tea cups “moons” now.
Numeracy skills here are not as high as I initially thought. Talking about something like price setting or a break even point is a slow process, but it's those talks where I'm probably doing the most to help.
I'm healthier, have longer hair, still shave, and am currently not diseased. This last issue is a big point of pride for me as this last two weeks may be the longest I've gone without at least monitoring a cut or tending to what could be athlete's foot. Jared, another volunteer wanted to catch a flight to Port Vila at Laman Bay and asked if I would take him by canoe. I did, but we had a bit of a shipwreck. My camera broke. The next Saturday was my time to come to Port Villa and I've been here for just over two weeks now. We had two weeks of training, Monday to Saturday, with a little time in the late afternoon for me to run around like a maniac trying to take care of things before going back to the bush and away from most contact with the capital or the US. During that time, I discovered that I'd gone a little lactose intolerant over the past four months. It's tragic.
Then, the third hurricane hit and we were all put on “standfast”. I'll finally be going back to Epi tomorrow. In a way, I'm glad the hurricane came as it gave me more time to do my taxes, find a buyer for Epi soap, and meet with Charles, a value-added agriculture products businessman. Turns out Epi's ubiquitous peanuts don't make good peanut butter and there wouldn't be a market for that after all.
My birthday was on February 13 and I got to think about where I've been living in Februaries past: Ballston, Rosslyn, Pentagon City, West Foggy Bottom, just south of Washington Circle, across from the State Department on Virginia Ave, Eye street, and Bel Air Place in Minot North Dakota. I made pancakes for the other volunteers at this motel in the morning. Fellow business volunteer Brian came over that evening and we sat on a balcony eating a litre of mint ice cream while listening to the Fijian choir singing in the Assembly of God church across the street and talking about those high minded development concerns that bother us volunteers that don't give medicine to babies or teach people to read. The Ring Road on Efate is the most obvious and maybe effective demonstration of US development policy in this country and that was Whitney and her USAID friends, not me. Reconsidering our purpose here is not an uncommon or idle exercise.
It's hard for me to know what's newsworthy in the States right now, but Peace Corps is going through a bit of a reorganization right now in case you haven't heard. Part of that entails axing the business program in Vanuatu. Unless something changes, mine will be the last incoming group of business volunteers in this country. We've been promised full support while we're here, though, and I don't see how this change will significantly affect my own term of service. The joke here is that the new comers could extend their service, dragging out the end of the business program for another four years if we were particularly stubborn.
The airplanes are flying again even if shipping is still halted so tonight is my last night in Vila. I'm ready to go. It was great to see the other volunteers again and find out what does and doesn't work on their sites, but Port Vila rubs me the wrong way. I'll probably head out for a last shell of kava with the crew before disappearing for months again. I'm currently fighting with the internet and listening to the crazy Katamari music Richard Kelso gave me. It is, unfortunately, not angry enough for my purposes at the moment. It's been a belief of mine for sometime that computers and networks maintain some level of sympathy and respond to my fury positively.
There. Yufala evriwan i save gud langsaed blong evrisamting nao? That's not close to everything of course and I'm not sure what else to tell. Please excuse the continued jumbled nature of these missives. Most of this information could just as well be bullet points:
I'm fine
bananas!
There should be one more web-log post before I leave and I'll try to respond to the comments and collected e-mail messages.
Daniel -
just to clarify...i myself did not build this amazing road...but I am sure my friends did :)
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