On Cat Tossing

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

On Cat Tossing:

We are continually surrounded by animals. Just my little corner of the village has two to four dogs depending on the day, probably twenty chickens, and one recalcitrant cat. My neighbors Robinson and Sesie adopted a small black cat a few months ago and gave him a name that in local language means “up” or “on top”. He's a climber you see. His name is Mao.

The little chairman is a worthless ratter, but he likes people plenty, especially when you're eating. Once he even climbed onto my shoulder while I was having lunch and then just took a nap there. Not everyone takes to his antics as kindly as I do. It's fortunate for little Mao that he's such a climber, because the easiest way to get rid of an obnoxious cat is to fling him onto a roof or into a tree. He'll land up there perfectly every time and then whine at you for several minutes until finding his way down. It's gotten to be a bit of a game.

Papa Daniel, however, is not a patient man with the stupid cat. After eating supper one night, he was laying on his back on a mat on the ground and we were all talking. Mao, for some reason, kept pacing in a wide circle around Papa. After his fourth circuit or so, when Mao was just passing the man's head again, Daniel snatched out his hand and catapulted the furry bugger out the open kitchen door, narrowly missing a post, and into the dark bushes. We were cat free for the rest of the night.

-- Daniel --

On Funerals

Monday, August 8, 2011

On Funerals:

A funeral, or “ded”, is perhaps the most emotive occasion I've witnessed in Vanuatu. Some of our volunteers think they are false showings of socially mandated grief while others talk about legitimate and culturally appropriate expressions of communal loss. Maybe. Here's what I've seen.

The first was in the village of Malvasi. That was close enough to my village to make attendance a social obligation for me and my host family. The church's elder had died the night before and word quickly spread. He had died at the hospital on the North end of the island and the body was taken back to Malvasi by truck in late afternoon. I had seen a truck loaded with crying people pass by, but at the time didn't know what to make of it. That evening we received word about the death of the important man from Malvasi and we knew that we would be going over there in the morning.

After breakfast, people in the village put on their nice church going clothes (trousers and collered shirts for the men, island dresses for the women) and we started a small parade down the road. Most people, including me, carried a folded pandanus mat or some cloth that would be given to the family of the deceased. We walked over to the other village, our group growing a little as we went and based on the chatter and even laughing you wouldn't have guessed we were headed toward a mourning ceremony. As we got closer to Malvasi, I began to hear the wailing and the talking in the group from my village died down.

We arrived at about the same time as the delegation from another village and began to walk towards the back of Malvasi were the wailing was coming from. There is sort of a “zone of mourning” at these events. As we began to approach the house of the dead elder, we saw small groups of people, mostly men, not too distant and it was only polite to shake hands with them. The body was wrapped in mats and cloth and laying on the ground just outside of the dead man's house. A tarp had been erected for shade and underneath was a swarm of seated wailing women.

You would have thought it the end of the world, the racket that was raised. Our visiting group and the delegation from the other village approached the body and the circle of seated mamas when people just started crying... loudly. Loudly enough, in fact, that anyone nearby would be sure to take note of just who had come to pay their respects. The mats and calico were placed on a growing pile of gifts for the family or sometimes into the hands of a crying mama seated near enough to toss them onto the heap. After five to ten minutes, most people, especially the men, peeled off from the group and sat around the village. Their crying ceased, but the general tumult at the house of the deceased continued.

Then, we sat aound, which I'm getting increasingly good at. I talked with men who were perfectly affable now, having finished shedding tears and crying out loud just a few minutes prior. So, we chatted and waited.

Eventually, we moved to a crowded church where the crying ceased long enough for the minister to give a sermon. The crying and wailing promptly started again and the body was carried to a recently dug grave on the edge of the village. The man's brothers, uncles, and other male relatives buried the mat wrapped body and family members each through in a handful of dirt before the men set to finishing the job with shovels. By now, the crying had mostly ceased with the exception of some very earnest and heartfelt crying from the widow.

We went to the village nakamal were food was to be distributed to the village delegations. First, the burial squad had to march down to the ocean to wash their hands, feet, and shovels in the saltwater. After, thanks were given to those who had traveled to show their respect and piles of food given to them to see them on their way.

With minor variation, that's the pattern I saw a few more times. Having arrived to the office one day, my counterpart told me that a woman about forty minutes' walk South had passed away. The morning's work in the office would have to wait until after we had gone to “show our faces”. We did and my counterpart managed some spontaneous tears for a few minutes near the body, but then we headed back to the office in time for lunch and started our work.

In case I sound a bit unfeeling about all this, let me tell you what it was like when someone in my extended host family died. I had an “apu man” or grandfather in Wenia. When passing by the village, I would try to stop by and say hello to him and we got along well enough. Although I didn't understand enough of his language and he didn't know enough Bislama for us to converse much, he had heard that I was to be his grandson for two years and treated me like one. He was a nice man who took the time to see any visitors despite being sick and always liked to give his grandchildren roasted peanuts when he saw them.

I was sad to hear one day that he had died. My host family and I walked the hour and half to Wenia on top of a steep hill and this time we were the one's under the tarp receiving visitors. Of course, I wouldn't be going to work for the next five days as I would be making daily trips to Wenia. My host father would spend the nights there with some of grandpa's other closest relatives. Although Apu was burried the day after he died, for five days villages came to pay their respects and cry at the man's house. For my own part, I tried to be respectful, but unobtrusive, trying not to be a tourist intruding on my host family's grief, but also fully aware that this man I liked was not really my grandfather.

Five days having passed, we were allowed to shave and wear clean clothes again and my host papa returned to stay with us. He had been busy cooking, seeing to visitors in Wenia, and taking care of the surprising amount of details that attend any funeral. On my daily pilgrimages, the most I could really do to help was fetch water for the cooks.

After thirty days, there was one more trip to Wenia, but mourning is finished. There will be a last visit at the one year mark and that's it.

On the occasion of a funeral, things just stop. There was a death of an important minister in Northern Epi and the opening ceremony of a new nakamal in a nearby village was postponed so as not to conflict with the dead man's five days. A cooking competition in Laman Bay was canceled because everyone would be too busy attending the mourning of a boy who had died. He died on far off Tanna, but was from Laman Bay and had family members there so locals came to them to cry. Mourning may be compulsory depending on distance and importance of the dead person. But, after the designated time, it's finished and life moves on and everyone smiles again.

-- Daniel --

Hello World

Sunday, August 7, 2011

Hello World.

After six months at site, I've been called back to the capital. Airplanes only come to the Laman Bay Airport on Epi twice a week so while I had to get here yesterday afternoon, I have a couple days to rest before our little conference begins. That means there is time to see the other volunteers trickle into the motel. It turns out that most if not all of them have been back to Port Vila since my last trip in February. Some make the trip regularly. So, I get the privilege of being a rather exotic item, the possibly crazy volunteer who disappeared into the bush.

The kava bars, restaurants, and especially the grocery stores all seem tempting, but I fell “funny” in Port Vila. After just a day in “town”, I already feel used to taking showers and having electric lights, but I'm frustrated at having to pay so much money for everything. Indeed, paying money at all is a little different. More than the money though is the anonymity. Since arriving at site last November, I've been a very different, colorful fish in a very small pond. It's gotten so that I now have to travel a few villages away to meet a stranger and even then they aren't a stranger for long. With only a few thousand people on the island, word gets out about the visiting white man fairly quickly and there's little fear in asking me just who the heck I am and what I'm doing.

There will be time enough to get reacquainted with being treated like a stranger, a customer, or someone just not worth talking to. There was time this morning to have a cup of tea, some bread with marmalade, and get good and clean. It's time to let my family and friends in America know just what I've been up to.

Firstly, I'm well. Little sicknesses come and go and there are work and personal frustrations, but I'm finding that the things that really bug me in Vanuatu are generally to be found in North Dakota or Wahington, DC as well. Generally, physically, emotionally, and mentally, I'm fine. With that out of the way, though, I'm not sure what else to say. Over the next few days in the capital, I'll try to write a little every day. About what, I'm not sure yet. If there's anything you'd like to know, please ask.

Before getting into all that, though, I would like to thank those of you who have written to me over the past year. I've enjoyed writing back to you almost as much as reading your letters. Through my friends and family I've been kept abreast of happenings in the world and I've received pictures and stories to share in the village that make me seem a little more human and less like some alien fallen from the sky. And I've been able to know a little bit about what you are all up to, whether it's what you feel about a book store closing, who's writing a new baseball web-log, who got or is getting married, or what you had for lunch. It's more interesting that you may suspect and it is greatly appreciated.

As far as I know I've written back to everyone who has sent a letter. Sorry to the rest of you, but I don't have your address. You'll have to satisfy you interest for all news Daniel through this log for the next few days.


-- Daniel --

Going back to site

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Good Morning,

I’m in a hurry so let’s get my excuses and apologies for writing quality out the way right now.

There’s this thing called “aelan taem”. It’s not what I was told it would be. Arriving in Port Vila over two weeks ago, I had a list of little things to take care of in my spare time; pay taxes, send letters, load photos, talk to business owners, tell the world I’m all right. Some of those things didn’t happen.

There’s this thing I was told before joining the Peace Corps. Everyone said I should bring lots of books and that I would have lots of time on my hands. Service is not what I was told it would be. Lest you think I’m complaining, let it be known that I’m thriving in this and much of it is by choice. Vacation time will come later. I blame it on not having a well defined job description and being allowed to let my imagination dictate my goals. The result is running around Vila for two weeks talking to shop owners, visiting libraries, and getting dictionaries from the Rotary Club. Sorry if I’ve neglected you.

In the villages on Epi, there is always time enough for talking, but not necessarily for work. “Aelan taem” means I can’t rush the projects I think are important. It means I can’t work at my own schedule because I need everyone else involved. It means I wait for the locals. It does not mean islanders sit around eating fruit all day (even though I’ve done that a few times). The villagers make me feel lazy. My work gets pushed back not because we’d all rather rest just another day, but because the villagers are already working. I’ve never seen such a hot bead of activity as a tranquil island village, but it took me a month or two to see it. How can my little savings account workshop compete with yam planting season or filling the next order of hand woven mats?

It’s infectious. So, when I come to the capital I don’t see why I should stop trying to help just because it’s the weekend or the sun has gone down. Papa is still up at five AM moving cattle around. Island time means it takes half a day to wash clothes and another half to gather firewood and food for tomorrow so my crazy Peace Corps ideas like lessons on price setting or value-added goods will just have to wait.

Now, on to some of the questions and comments I’ve gotten. I’m more or less fluent in Bislama as are many of the volunteers. This is a pretty easy accomplishment for English speakers. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always make communication entirely transparent. Bislama is everyone’s second language and sometimes their third or fourth. It’s a language of necessity, born out of trading and slavery and it does not carry the nuances of English, French, or the local languages of Vanuatu. I suspect it never will except in that it seems to be adopting more English words like “profit”, “vaccine”, and “how”. So, I may be speaking Bislama, a language of maybe a hundred words with innumerable combinations. The other conversant may be speaking it back. But it will still take a long time for us to understand each other. We use a lot of metaphors and analogies. We talk in circles around a subject so that everyone eventually gets it. We have to be patient.

Epi has about five local languages, two of which are present in my village along with a language from Malekula spoken by some of the mamas who married into the village. I’ve picked up greetings, questions, and some basics from one of the local languages, but I’ll probably never be very conversant. People just switch into Bislama for me so I lack an incentive.

The biggest challenges to communication are those related to culture and background, though. “Sharing” means something slightly different here, but I can’t figure out what. Teaching for the sake of teaching also seems to be a little different. I was given a few fish by different people before finding someone willing to teach me how to catch them. Asking what time I should plant my corn resulted in word getting out and corn arriving at my house. Then, there’s “business”. I think I’ve figured out the thought process that goes through people’s heads when they ask me what kind of work I’m supposed to be doing. I say that I’m on Epi to help with business. “Business” seems to equal retail store, which equals community cooperative project. Farming as a business, handicrafts, value-added goods, corpa, kava, and the host of other products and activities that make up the majority of people’s meager income are not considered “business” no matter how much I try to argue. When I finally do that management workshop they’ve been asking for, it will be a challenge to get people who don’t own shops to show up, much less realize that things like scheduling and cash flow apply to farming as much as selling peanut butter and soap at the village store.

Yes John, it’s my island. There are other volunteers there, but it’s mine. You can visit if you’d like but please bring tribute. No pigs.

The villagers love to see me attempting to integrate and do work. I love that they no longer think I’m the frail waetman who will collapse if he walks around to much. Now that the canoe is finished, the garden is planted, my skin is a little darker, my clothes are stained and I eat a steady diet of aelan kakai, I get jokes that other Americans won’t recognize me. They say I’m “man blong ples” or “man Epi” now. I doubt I ever will be nor is it my intent to become completely integrated, but it’s nice to hear regardless.

When two or more volunteers, be they Peace Corps, VSO, or otherwise, gather in the name of international development, the specter of development philosophy seems to appear. Those sentiments have crept into my scattered messages before so I won’t belabor the point for long. Some volunteers feel that we are on the opposite end of the development spectrum from USAID. Both parts seem necessary if for no other reason than that aid agencies seem to like it when local volunteers are involved with grants and projects. We volunteers (perhaps with just a touch of arrogance) think we’re so special because we live in a village for two or more years, speak the language, make friends, and go out of our way to get the locals to announce what they really want. I wish USAID or AUSAID or NZAID or JICA would pave the road on Epi and fix the old wharf. The impact from that would be immediate and beneficial, but I think my inexpensive, personal approach helps too.

So, what’s new with you? What did you do for Thanksgiving? Christmas? New Year’s Eve? Shrove Tuesday? Is it true that North Korea launched missiles at a South Korean island and Justin Bieber one some sort of celebrity basketball event? Is Virginia the same as ever after two monstrous winters? Is North Dakota tut-tutting at those silly Easterners who can’t seem to handle a few inches?

My flight to Epi is at 12:30 today. It’s back to bananas, roosters, my family, my counterpart, and bucket baths. There hasn’t been any word yet on whether cyclone Atu did any damage to the island, but the mere fact that flights are going there so soon is a very good sign. The roof of my house was still weighed down with heavy coconut leaves before I left so it should be fine.


- Daniel -

Information Dump

Remember, if you send an e-mail message to to volunteer@vu.peacecorps.gov and put my name in the subject line, it will eventually get printed out and forwarded on to my site with the rest of the mail. This saves time and postage. Please include your mailing address so I can write back to you.

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 -

Aelan Recipes

Good Afternoon,

My life here is so bafflingly different that I'm not sure how to even begin describing it. That's why I've been posting pictures instead of telling stories. I'm still not sure what to do so I'll start with something simple. Here's what I eat. The following recipes for "aelan kakai" can be easily prepared in your home if you'd like a little taste of the islands.

First, a word on ingredients. The people of Epi, and I think much of Vanuatu, use coconut milk like classic French cooking uses butter. To obtain coconut milk, find a dry coconut. The brown, furry, pre-husked coconuts you can find at the grocery store are dry coconuts. Hold the coconut in your hand on it's side so that the little face holes of the shell are at your thumb. Whack the coconut with your machete until it cracks open. It takes some practice to get it to open into two half spheres with clean edges. Next, scratch out the insides of the coconut. We use a "rass-rass" to make coconut shavings like those you would find dried in a bag in the baking section of your supermarket. Most recipes need two or three coconuts, scratched out. If you've managed to save the coconut water after opening, add that to the bowl of shavings. You can use a little water instead if you've made a mess of things. Squeeze the shavings with the water to get them to soak it up. Then, take handfuls of wet coconut shavings and squeeze them over your food. The white coconut milk will come out.

Alternately, I suppose you could buy the stuff in a can at the grocery store, but what's the fun in that?

Secondly, aelan cabis (island cabbage) is a broad leafed vegetable that resembles big green maple leaves growing on bushes. It's like a really strong spinach that retains it's shape a little better when boiled.

Basic Epi Breakfast

This is what we commonly eat in the morning if their aren't leftovers.

Boil a pot full of bananas in the skin. You can use strong bananas that have the consistency of plantains, taste like potatoes, and look like really fat bananas. You can use small sweet bananas the length of your finger. There are "Chinese bananas" that I think are the Cavendish bananas we have in the states. Then, there's a few others that all look the same.

After boiling the bananas, skin them and serve. If you'd like, milk some coconuts and poor the milk onto the peeled, cooked bananas, or boil the milk a bit and it will thicken.

Do this everyday for a few weeks.

Basic Epi Supper

Skin a pile of manioc (cassava), kumala (sweet potato), taro, or yams (sorry, I've never seem them in the states and no, that can of "yams" you ate at Thanksgiving was actually sweet potatoes).

Chop the skinned root crops into giant pieces and boil them. Don't use too much water, just enough to cook them or you're just wasting firewood. Just before serving, milk a few coconuts into the sauce pan with the root crops and serve.

If you have it, throw some aelan cabis in there and boil it too. Feel free to mix and match root crops at will or eat the same one everyday for a week.

Do this every night for a few weeks.

Bush Lunch

If you've gone to the garden with the family, why walk the hour or two back to the village fro lunch when you're surrounded by food. Dig up some wild yams, find some strong bananas, or knock down some breadfruit. Build a fire. Through the unskinned food onto the coals and roast them. Remove the burnt skins with your bush knife or scratch it off with a piece of broken glass. Wrap the food in a banana leaf so you don't burn your hands and eat. Get your little sister to climb a coconut tree and knock down some green coconuts to drink.

Simporo

So, you've got some time and energy and you don't want boiled food? Make Simporo. Skin a root crop or strong bananas. I prefer yams. Use a wooden board with a length of nail-perforated metal on it to scratch out the food into a mush. Place a de-stemmed aelan cabis leaf on one hand and use the other to grab a half handful of the mush. Put it in the middle of the leaf and roll it like a mini-burrito. Store the stuffed leaf cigar in a sauce pan and just keep stacking them in there until you've made thirty or so. Put an inch or two of water in the pan and steam the whole thing over a fire.

Lap-Lap

If there's a wedding, if it's Saturday, if there's a celebration of any kind, then there must be lap-lap. Dig a shallow pit, fill it with black stones and make a bonfire on top of them. While the fire is burning, scratch out buckets of bananas, manioc, or yams. This will take a long time if your feeding a horde of villagers. When the fire has burned out, sweep out the ashes with a tree branch covered in green leaves that you just cut down. Using split poles as giant tongs, remove half of the hot stones from the pit. Cover the remaining stones with lap-lap leaves. Lap-lap leaves are like banana leaves but bigger, stronger, and largely impervious to fire. It's like baking with oiled parchment paper. Poor the mush you're made onto the lap-lap leaves making a big disk like an inch thick wagon wheel. If you've got aelan cabis, put a layer on top of the mush. Wrap the leaves on the edges around the disk and put a few more on top. Put the hot stones you removed on top of the whole mess and leave the lap-lap to cook for a few hours or over night. After, remove the stones, unwrap the cooked disk, cut, and serve. If you've made banana lap-lap, you may notice that your local Peace Corps volunteer is suddenly absent eating with the neighbors. If you used manioc, he will suddenly be very friendly and hang around your kitchen.

Bread Fruit lap-lap

It's not really lap-lap, but I don't know what to call it. Pick some breadfruit that are ripe, but not mushy yet and roast them over hot coals. Remove and skin the breadfruit. Cover the palms of your hands in coconut milk (it can do anything) so that they won't burn, grab a skinned breadfruit in one hand and beat the hell out of with a stick held in the other. Turn the breadfruit while doing so and remove any exposed seeds or the core and you mercilessly pound this innocent vegetable. After pulping it into something like bread dough, give it to your grandma who will add it to the pile and spread the smashed stuff out on a big wooden tray. Milk a coconut over the weird breadfruit pizza dough you just made. Cut and serve.

Pumpkin Rice

There are pumpkins about, but the only acceptable ways to serve them are to chop and boil them like root crops or to chop and boil pieces of pumpkin with rice. Then mash the pumpkin about so you have orange rice. Kids love it. Do not attempt to make pumpkin soup or pumpkin pie no matter how delicious as the children will simply stare at it and wonder why you would waste a pumpkin like that and can they just eat more manioc with coconut milk, please?

Lemon Leaf "Tea"

Boil a very large kettle of water. Add the boiling water to mugs and add four to five tablespoons of white sugar per mug. If you have a Peace Corps volunteer present, remember that he likes his tea, unsweetened so only add two or three giant tablespoons of sugar per cup of water.

Oh, sometimes you can add a handful of lemon leaves to the boiling water, but this step is largely unnecessary.

------

I'm surprised, but that's about it. There's wedding day beef soup, but the above list is 90% of what we eat on Epi. Chop up whatever fruit is in season and serve on the side. The occasional fish or snake bean can be tossed in the boiling water when you make root crops, but that's about it. There you have it, my diet on Epi. It's obscenely healthy, I get just enough protein, though very little meat, and I get my vitamins from the aelan cabis and fruit. The strangest part is that I like it. In fact, I'm going to cook some snake beans tonight that I purchased from some mamas on the side of the road. After a long day of traveling to talk about business or working in the bush, I look forward to eating roasted wild yams.

Daniel

E-mail and Videos

Good Afternoon,

Vanuatu is weird and wild and wonderful and I don't know where to begin. First, some administrative details. I can be reached through the Peace Corps address I'm mentioned before, but letters can be sent to me directly on Epi. I'm not supposed to put my address in this blog, but ask around and someone will have it. If you'd like to save on postage and cut out a week or two of mail delivery time, however, you can send an e-mail message to volunteer@vu.peacecorps.gov with my name and island in the subject line. The person who checks that in-box will print out the letter and include it with my other mail. Please send me a letter, but be sure to include a return address so I can write back.

I will be in Port Vila until Saturday, February 19 and internet access will be spotty at best. After the 19th, it's back to Epi where there I have no internet, no electricity, and slow moving mail. If you have a question or just want to chat, now's the time. If you're trying to call me, however, know that my mobile phone was lost in the salt water when Jared and I capsized the canoe near Laman Bay, but that's a whole different story. I'll have a new Digicel phone soon and I think the same number.

It is likely that I will be in Port Vila for a week or two again before the end of the year, probably in late August. Just like now, though, I'll spend most of my time either attending to things at headquarters or running around Vila trying to take care of business before going back. Sorry I haven't been more communicative on the log, but I'm going to try to remedy that this week.

Wikipedia has an article on Epi: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epi_(island)

John Karp pointed me to some videos of the island. The first is a video of landing at the Laman Bay airstrip: http://video.google.com.au/videoplay?docid=-9019154185975805492# If you haven't landed in a small prop plane on a muddy patch of grass snuggled between the ocean and a forbidding wall of coconut trees, then you haven't known the terror of landing on Epi. Fortunately the airport agent is good at keeping the wire fence mended to that cattle don't wander onto the runway.

The second video is a compilation someone made of scenes of Epi. It's not mine, but it will show you where I live. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tai0sOAnQEM

The music you here at the beginning is some of the ubiquitous string band music beloved of everyone else in Vanuatu. I'd like it too if I didn't have to hear the same dozen songs over and over again. The Chinese family that lives across the alley from my motel room was playing some classical Chinese music last night and it was such a relief to here something different.

The video starts with a landing at Laman Bay airport followed by a little tour of Laman Bay. Yes, they water in the bay is that blue. Sometimes, people catch tuna out there.

There's a picture of an outrigger canoe that looks just like mine at about the 1:10 mark.

At 2:06 you can see what the road looks like on a good day. Now, during the rainy season, there are big holes in it.

At 2:24 you can see one of the many nakamals dotting the island. Most villages have one.

At 2:38 there's an expanse of wide beach leading to a piece of landing jutting out. I think that's the same beach I trekked across with Marco, Robinson, and Michael in order to catch a boat to Ngala during out November business trip.

At 3:00 you can see some of the coral I see when I go fishing in the canoe. This video doesn't give a good idea of how colorful the coral can be.

At 4:15 notice how close the houses in the village are. Most of the villages seem that way because we're all hemmed in by the steep hills.

The last video is a tourism promotion video from Shefa province. This is a "cleaner" view of Epi, but it's close enough to real life: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj8chB9ryVo. I don't live in a situation that is at all similar to the tourist bungalow depicted nor do I eat food that looks like that. The view is the same.

I'll try to post more pictures soon.

Daniel