Earthquake, Earthquakes

I regularly get concerned messages from friends and family back home whenever Vanuatu gets another earthquake. I find it a little humurous that vanuatu so regularly experiences such strong earth quakes and i never feel any of them on my island, but in the span of the week i have been in Vila i have felt 4 earth quakes and not received a single worried message haha. I have no idea of how strong the earth quakes are though, but its always kind fun feeling everything shake!

Culture of Confusion

So today i felt the biggest impact of the original condominium government as i went grocery shopping. There are really only 2 big grocery stores in the capital city, Leader Price and Au Bon Marche. So the first one has a completely english sounding name, the second one sounds very french. I decided that i'd give Leader Price a try first because many of the volunteers talk about how cheap it was but they warned that all the products were in french so they didnt know what certain things were. So as i entered the store all of the signs on the outside were in English, saying exit, entrance, Leader Price, etc... upon going into the shop every product and description of them as well as tags with prices was completely in french. Une kilo de bouef fume 750 vatu. After wandering around a while looking at all the exciting food, i left buying only a single box of chocolate petals cereal, because without refrigeration there wasn't much point in me purchasing a large amount of food. I stood in the check out line listening to white women speak to each other in french, then men behind me spoke in bislama, the woman at the check out counted out the change in french and then told me the total in english and followed it up by telling me to have a nice day in bislama. I was still laughing by all the languages as i headed in to the Au Bon Marche because Leader Price's toilet paper was sold out. So Au Bon Marche is completely an english run super market. Everything is in english and almost all of the products are from Australia with a few coming from the US. Again i went walking through and saw a woman speaking in french to the deli counter about the fish, a pair of women were speaking a local language i didn't understand, a chinese man was on his phone speaking chinese, a store attendant asked me in english if she could help me find something which i responded to in bislama, and finally when i did my check out the woman start off speaking french to me and tried to comply but she realized my french was poor she switch to english which i laughed about and told her we should just stick to bislama. I left the store laughing to myself about how crazy language is in this country. The fact that even in the capital city people don't have a straight language to speak to each other boggles my mind some days. I can't imagine growing up speaking a local language, then learning bislama as i got older only to be schooled in english while i take french classes occasionally.

Substitute Teaching Vanuatu

In Vanuatu teacher absenteeism is a regular problem so if i was filling in everyday that a teacher decided to just take a single day off i'd most likely find myself stepping in to teach 3 or 4 days a week. Knowing this i made it my policy that i will not step in to replace teachers that have decided not to teach as i am here to build up their capacity to teach and filling in for them constantly only build dependency. In Vanuatu they take any holiday or celebration they can have very enthusiastically. Schools days are cancelled, every government thing shuts down, and no one works in anticipation of need plenty of time to celebrate. The 30th of july is vanuatu's independence day. This unfortunately occurs during the middle of our second term of school. So the week leading up to the 30th of july the school finished on a wednesday so that people could get ready to party. Two of my teachers left back to their home island of Ambae. Going in to the weekend i had a bad feeling about this because travel can be a pain and teachers are notorious for coming late at the start of terms. Sure enough the 30th of july came and went and come monday morning the teachers were not back yet. My headmaster tried calling both of them and after he was unable to get a hold of them he approached me and asked if i'd be willing to take their class until they showed up. A bit leery about doing it i asked what materials the teacher had so i could pick them up to follow his lessons to continue where he left off. Turns out he didnt have any! So i told the head master i would talk to the students, find out what they were learning and then the next day actually run a lesson in the instance that the teacher didnt come by the end of monday. Sure enough monday night rolled around with no teachers in sight so prepared my lesson and taught math the next day. Tuesday finished no teachers, Wednesday finished no teachers, Thursday finished no teachers, Friday finished and what do you know the teachers showed up! So after having started the term two weeks late because of the teachers not coming we also had a week of school that would have not happened at all during the middle of the term. It makes it hard to feel hopeful about all the teacher training work i do if the teachers don't even show up to teach.