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January + February

Hurricanes

A little background on cyclones and Vanuatu. Cyclones are what the locals here call hurricanes. They start off as tropical lows which cause mild winds and LOTS of rain and then slowly build up into cyclones which range in power from 1-5, 5 being the worst hurricanes. In the past 5 years Vanuatu has experienced 13 tropical lows and 1 cyclone in their cyclone season, as best as I could find out from asking the locals. This cyclone season we’ve had 5 tropical lows and 3 of them have already become cyclones. The first one was only a category 1, the second one was a category 3 and the one that just came through was a category 3. The first one came through and spoiled Tanna a little and dumped a bunch of rain but overall left Vanuatu in good shape. The second one came through the northern islands and did little damage, but quickly went to destroy Queensland, Australia. The most recent one though is the first one I got to experience first hand. Friday morning a teacher told me there was a cyclone north east of Maewo, I hadn’t heard anything yet from the peace corps but I figured I’d check in on my way up to my house at lunch time. Sure enough there was a tropical low reported north east of Maewo. I went up and ate lunch, read a little and listened to the wind pick up intensity. Later on at about 4pm, it was starting to break some of the smaller tree branches so I went down the hill to call peace corps and find out what the deal was now. I was informed that the tropical low had now developed into a category 2 cyclone and that all of penema province was on yellow alert, the cyclone was in H-5 on the tracking map and  expect winds of up to 70 kph. Upon getting to the top of the hill I told my family the news and my dad camly let me know that H-5 was Maewo on the tracking map. Surprise! Haha. I ran into my house, put a dry change of clothes in my bag, made sure all my electronics were well put away safe and then grabbed my knife and raced out the door, expecting to run down the hill to avoid the storm. The rain was starting to torrent down, but my dad told me we’d go buy a kilo of flour from one of my aunties so we would have some dinner to eat down at the school while we waited out the storm. We hiked up through the wind and the rain to my aunties house and purchased a kilo of flour, patiently waiting for her to weigh out exactly 1 kilo and go to her house to get change because I’d over paid her by 10 cents. Afterwards we went down the hill and got to the school, looking back up from the calmness of one of the classrooms I could see all of the palm trees bending and one fell over in the wind. “Good thing you and I got down the hill quick,” my dad replied. Yeah! Luckily we stopped to get flour and then ran afterwards, I cant imagine what would have happened if we had decided to cook the flour into bread before coming down…. Being morbidly curious I asked my dad why it was good that we came quickly and he let me know that when the wind got that strong it could blow you off the trail that lead down to the school. Luckily we were down at the school with our kilo of flour and no way of cooking it haha. The storm continued dropping trees and the sun set leaving us to just wonder about the damage it was causing. After a few hours I got tired and not having anywhere else to sleep I rolled up my backpack for a pillow and crashed on one of the tables in the classroom. One of the windows wasn’t bolted well and would occasionally slam waking me up, but otherwise I slept pretty well, it was the first time since coming to Vanuatu that it had been below 70º farenheit so I was pretty happy about that. The next morning my dad and I went outside, it was still very windy but it had settled down a lot. We made our way up the hill working our way around downed trees blocking the trail and got back to the houses. Branches and trees were down all round us but nothing had broken my house luckily. My family lost a section of their roof though. On going inside I found that everything was soaking wet because the wind blew the rain through the bamboo walls of my house. I came outside to see my dad with a big smile letting me know how lucky we got off. At first I was grumpy, not having slept well and having everything in my house soaked, but after a moments pause, I too was smiling. I’d just been through a category 3 cyclone and my biggest problem was a wet mattress.

The first day of school?

Just kidding… So the first day of school came, and went with no teachers around, the second well about 40 students showed up and the head master came through. So I asked what the deal was with us not starting yet and it was explained to me that the first week of school was usually a week the teachers and students all showed up and just registration was taken care of. So I shrugged, not wanting to try and change their ways and explain that the first day of school, classes should start, and walked down to the beach and read. On Wednesday the headmaster and one other teacher decided that they should start the classes and asked me to teach the 7^th and 8^th graders. I agreed as long as it was just for the week and they assured me it would be. So I made all the students draw a name tag and on the backside try to cover the page in everything they could remember learning last year, turns out, not much at all. Apparently they’d lost everything they knew over the course of two months, or were just too scared of me to write any answers down haha. Thursday I showed up ready to give them some small assesment tests to find that no teachers were there. At about 10am, two hours after school should have started, a parent came in to the school and told me that there was going to be a community meeting so the teachers werent coming in to school today. So I sent all 140 students home and told them no school for the day. Apparently in this country a PTA meeting warrants a day off school. Friday came through and I went down again at 7:30. By 9 o clock the first teacher came through and let me know that there wouldn’t be any school today due to the cyclone that was located north east of Maewo. So school didn’t start on the first day of school, or even the first week, and since Monday is a public holiday... Well as it turns out, school officially started March 1st! a whole two weeks and one day late. We're still missing a grade 1 and 2 teacher and the school's french teacher, but atleast the rest of the students are given something to do now! Haha

My favorite Ni-Van (so far)

So the last Sunday everyone went down to church, I opted not to go, citing that I needed to take care of some serious “whiteman” work down at the school since school would be starting the next day. Everyone of course understood because white-people make all kinds of serious work that black people don’t understand. (Exactly how the people here always talk about it, I kid you not) I went down to the school and proceeded to type up a few blog entires, listen to music and eventually getting around to writing me classroom management workshop. After about 3 hours of sitting infront of the computer typing I was both hungry and incredibly bored, so I figured I’d try to integrate a little and just invite myself over to lunch with some of my family in the village. After wandering through Talise I realized no one was going to be around everyone was up at church, so I turned to head back up the hill to my house when I head the twang of an acoustic guitar. Curious about who would be down by themselves at the beach playing an accoustic guitar while everyone else was up at church I went down and found one of my dads (not straight dad, my dad’s male cousins are also my dads) sitting in a plactic backyard chair strumming his acoustic guitar. He was playing Hotel California perfectly. I grabbed a seat next to him on the rocks of the beach and we began talking. Turns out that his straight father was the first man to become a pastor on Maewo, and he himself “mi no wan man blo pray” as he put it. So we spent the afternoon hanging out on the beach and ate bannanas his wife had cooked before going to church. As the after noon wore on he decided I had to see the eels he fed in the river by his house so he grabbed his .22 rifle and we went hunting for Nawimba, an oversized pigeon look-a-like. After about an hour of wandering around the bush we had shot 2 of them and went back to his house to clean the birds and feed their organs to the eels. We fed the eels, fried up the birds, which we didn’t eat because we were waiting to drink kava and continued chatting. He doesn’t like stringband, unlike every other male in Vanuatu, he likes good old classic rock and roll. When he was a youngfala, (20’s something) he had got into a fight with a drunk man and was thrown in jail in Santo. He was in jail for 3 months, but as he had know-how in carpentry, every morning he got up and an officer drove him around, making him do repairs to all of the police officer’s houses. At the end of the 3 months Francis didn’t want to go home, and the head of the police, sad to see him go bought him a nice bottle of whiskey as a good-bye present. That night he finished the bottle and bought a pack of cigarettes for everyone in the jail, returned that night, passed out cigarettes, stayed the night and then the next morning followed a boat back to Makila. He is full of great stories and he’s always ready to laugh about the style of living of people in Vanuatu. At the end of the kava drinking I was headed home feeling good and just as I was leaving, Francis let me know that all of his kids were off in school so he was a youngfala again and we should hang out every Sunday. I fully intend to ditch church and hang out with Francis every Sunday until he gets bored of me haha.

Spear fishing without a spear gun

While I was back in Vila I went to one of the local fishing / dive shops and was perusing their selection of spear fishing equipment, looking at all of the different price tags and wondering, if I purchase that gun for 79 dollars will I really use it often enough to feel that I made a good purchase? After a while I decided that since my snorkeling gear had just shown up and I hadnt even had the chance to snorkle on Maewo I’d hold on out a big purchase such as the spear gun and opt for a cheaper one until I decided whether I like it or not. This cheaper method involves a wire, basically a long metal rod sharpened at one end, and a two foot length of medical tubing they use for elastics. The purchases were cheap and upon returning I was ready to spear fish with my dad, confident that with my fitness and brains I’d be bringing in bucket loads of fish by the end of the first week. I was so very wrong, and to emphasize how wrong I was, in a week of spear fishing with my ghetto version of the Hawaiin sling, I had caught a grand total of zero fish and managed to bend my wire in one of my diving attempts. I had seriously underestimated how hard it was. In order to be a good spear fisher with the wire you had to have a number of things going for you, prior knowledge of the area, so you know where to wait for the bigger fish, the ability to hold your breath while swimming for atleast 30 seconds, and a good chunk of luck. On an average day of diving I would shoot at 100s of fish, I even managed to hit them every once in a while. I would  dive down until my ears felt ready to burst and then start cruising along, peering into all the holes in the reef until I saw a fish big and dumb enough to have tried hiding instead of running from me, then I would shoot it, and lungs burning speed my way to the surface. After a few seconds of recoup, dive again and collect my wire, fishless again. The first time I actually shot a fish I was so excited to get it to the surface to show my dad that I accidentally yanked the wire out of it and it swam off. Another time I shot one of the fish I had to surface because I was running out of breath and when I went back down the fish had swam a good distance away before my wire fell out of it. All in all, im glad I waited to purchase a spear gun because when I do I’m going to be so grateful for it, and you better believe I’m going to get one, and make all the fish in the reef rue the day I did.

Escapism

The other day in my spare time I was thinking about why it is that I don’t miss video games as much as I, or anyone else, had anticipated. Sure when I’m around all of the computers and some of the other peace corps volunteers are playing video games in Vila I get the itch to play, but when I’m out on my island I never seem to experience much urge to play. After much thought and consideration I decided it is simple. I enjoy escapism. My enjoyment of video games is the same reason why I like outdoor activities, or why I enjoy living on a tiny island in the pacific. I enjoy the adventure I experience while crawling through a cave, the rush of winning a battle, the sense of isolation a tiny pacific island provides, the fear when your foot slips rock climbing, the accomplishment of finishing a long journey and the sense of pride in being able to do what others don’t. This constant want for escapism worries me sometimes because I wonder when I come back to America, will I be happy to pick up a 9-5 job and just grind away at it day in and day out? I think not, I think my biggest challenge in life will be finding something I love doing, that provides me with all the escapism I want, but is also something that someone will be willing to pay me for. Any ideas? Haha