Redefining wet (6/8/12)

 Being a desert person, moving to the pacific islands has been quite the experience. Obviously even without constant rain the humidity here is stifling. The minute you step out of the plane into Vanuatu you feel like you're breathing over a pot of boiling water. I was never too bothered by hot days in Tucson as long as it wasn't monsoon season. 100 degree dry heat really is nothing compared to 85 with humidity. This is something that after almost 2 years of living in Vanuatu still catches me by surprise at times. The first and best example being when I had first arrived on maewo I would notice that if my house had been cool through the day my bed sheets were often wet with condensation as I would climb into them at night. This happens sometimes when you're out camping and its becoming cold at night. In vanuatu this happens all well above 75 degrees farenheit. The next shocking difference was when I was away from site for a week during new years during my very first year. I came home to find all the clothes that i'd hung up in my house covered in mold. One of my tshirts was molded so badly that it became my snot rag due to how badly it had rotted in the week that it was hung up in my house. After that I realized that my clothes needed to be thrown outside in the hot sun at least once every couple weeks or so, otherwise the cotton shirts might not make it through two years.

It was a source of constant annoyance for me as a desert dweller and it wasnt until roughly the start of my second year of service that I came to an acceptance of the issue. We were having a particularly long rainy period (about 3 weeks where I didnt see the sun once) and I was running out of clean clothes so I finally did my was in the rain and hung them up under my roof to dry. The next day passed and all of the clothes were still wet enough that if I tried really hard I could still wring a bit of water out of them. The second day passed and I was re-wearing my last piece of non-washed clothes and the clothes still felt wet to the touch. The third day came and after three days straight of wearing the same clothes I finally came to accept the fact that clothes that you couldnt actually wring any water out of were going to have to be considered dry enough and worn. Acceptance is definitely the correct word choice in this circumstance because I will never acclimate to wearing damp clothing as being normal.

My most recent realization and what prompted me to post this blog was a science experiment I attempted with the year 7 students at the school. Everyone knows the classic saturate a solution with salt or sugar, hang a rope in it and leave it in the sun for the water to evaporate and crystals form on the rope experiment right? Well guess what on Maewo, it doesnt work. One gloriously sunny day, I had the students pair up and saturate a 250ml beaker half filled with water using either salt or sugar. Afterwards they wrote their names on them and sat them outside under the sun. It was a nice and toasty day so I assumed that if we left them there through the day that afternoon we'd be able to start seeing some crystals forming. The students came back after lunch and we went to check. If any evaporation had occurred it was imperceptible. Not to be let down I told the students to leave them and we'd check them each day so we could record the progress of the crystals growing. After the second day, there were still no crystals at all. The third day only of the beakers had any crystal growth evident. By the fourth day two of the beakers now had some crystal growth and since it was the end of the week, I called the experiment. In 4 days of constant sun the most water that had evaporated out of any of the beakers was 90ml. It was quite shocking to me as a single hot day of tucson you'd likely to be able to get a few liters of water evaporated, on Maewo you'd be lucky to get 100ml's evaporated.

Sorry its been so long since i posted up a story!

I feel i've neglected in my duties of putting up stories every time i've had internet. A large part of this was due to a story i wrote recently that was pretty negative and i decided not to post it and this made me not want to write for a little. I will be fairly busy travelling through new zealand for the next 10 days but i will do my best to type of some of the stories i've written over the past 4 months and post them up.

A Windy Welcome (2/6/12)

My time in the States was great and if anything it has made me look forward more to when I finally get to come home to all my friends and family, but now I was back to my island life again. And what a welcome the islands have given me. Within a day of my arrival on Maewo the rain started. It kept raining for the first four days straight, which was something i'd come to expect by now, but then the wind began picking up too on the 5^th day. By the night of the 5^th day my dad and I were taking down all of the iron roofing in the area so the wind didnt start throwing it around the village. “What's the peace corps office say? This is a hurricane right?” He kept asking me. I told him i'd ask but I hadn't heard anything. Sure enough they said just some tropical lows and depressions but no hurricanes. This weather continued on for another week. Rain being blown into my house through my walls, everything slowly becoming wet and moldy. I was really hoping to wash my clothes before I had to go back to training but it was looking like the chances of them being washed and dry before training were going away. And then on Thursday only 4 days before I was supposed to go to training the sun broke through and smiled on us. I was thinking to myself that the weather was done, i'd get some days of sun and then get in to my training just fine. Vanuatu had other plans unfortunately. Friday night it started raining again and becoming windy. This time the peace corps office did report a hurricane south of the Solomon islands heading towards Vanuatu. So resigned to likely missing my monday flight I hung out and waited through the weekend.

Sunday came and Nik showed up as we were both supposed to travel in to Vila the next day. We called the peace corps office and they said that the hurricane from the solomon islands missed vanuatu but the water was still too rough and we were all on standfast. So now Nik and I both began hanging out waiting and hoping the weather got better by wednesday so we could travel in to Vila. Monday we called the office and asked for an update. They said that there was now a new hurricane called jasmine that was currently a category 3 and headed straight for Vila out of the west so there wouldnt be any flights on wednesday. Nik and I knew now that friday was the earliest and best we could hope for to get in to Vila. Thursday came and the storms had passed and flights were resuming so when we call the office to ask about us getting in to vila they let us know that the friday flights were full but they were going to do an extra one on saturday that we were both scheduled to come in on. By this point I had entirely missed the training that they were bringing me in for anyways. Worried that maybe i'd be expected to pick up my own room at a hotel when I came in since my training was done, I talked with Sara. Luckily during this training a small part of it was about us closing our services in October which they had to talk to me about so I was guaranteed to come in either way to make sure they could talk to me. Having not even been back on Maewo for a month the weather had already worked to trap me for an extra week. Now the hope is that I will be able to get in to Vila and out again before the next set of hurricanes comes through and makes everyone stuck again. I certainly have become complacent about the weather. Last year I remember being worried every time the iron roofing in the village started rattling from wind, this year two coconut trees were knocked over by the wind before I decided that there had to be a hurricane in the area haha. On the bright side it had made what is usually the hottest time of the year a bit cooler, not to mention during the really big winds its like my house has a mister system installed.

Bearded Women (12/07/11)

The past week has been exceedingly slow as everyone is starting to take breaks from their busy work schedules (not busy at all, even the busiest people probably only put in about 15 legitimate hours of work a week on Maewo) and begun "spelling" since its almost christmas time. Going from only working on a house or something about one or two days a week to not working at all cause its christmas time, kava drinking and card playing has taken over for everyone. While i have no objections to drinking kava most nights with other people in my village, i tend to get bored of playing cards for days upon end. The only card game anyone ever plays is a game they call 7-lock which is played with a regular 52 card deck and is a bit like uno but there is minor betting involved. The game can be really fun for the first hour or two you learn it and start playing it, but here it is taken to excess, they play from the time they wake up until 1 or 2 o clock in the morning and then get up to do it again the next day at 6am.
Now you may be wondering what all of this has to do with the title of the post? I was bored as hell so i decided to make a bunch of kava drinking shells to pass my time, which led me to a trip up to one of the coconut plantations. I went with my mom and we collected 25 coconuts that are longer than normal coconuts that we would be cut and cleaning into nice drinking shells. After collecting them we passed through a lone housing area that i'd only been to a few times and for the first time since coming to vanuatu i met on of my bubus (grandmas). She is not the bearded lady of the story, but the reason i'd yet to meet her despite living about a 10 minute walk from her house for a whole year was that she rarely left her house because she can't walk due to the number of boils on her legs. So i shake hands with her and then she turns to my mom and asks in local language, "ian na fafnai?" in local language ian is he/she its not gender specific so roughly translate: he/she a woman? After hearing my bubu ask my mom this i was slightly confused because i thought she was talking about me but i was positive that i had to have misunderstood and that my bubu was just talking about someone else or something else that i was following. Finally the two of them stop talking and my mom and i are walking back down to my house so i ask my mom to confirm what i thought i'd heard. My mom starts laughing immediately and says that i had heard right my bubu was asking if i was a woman. This had to be the most surprised i've been in a long, long time. Here i am with a huge rice bag filled with 25 coconuts, my shorts are covered in mud, and i have a beard that hasnt seen a razor or scissors in 6 months. Still convinced that i couldnt possibly have been mistaken for a woman i asked my mom if her eyesight was poor. My mom said no her eyesight was fine the reason she thought i was a woman was because i had my hair in a pony tail. I asked my mom how she could see that i had a pony tail and not notice the fact that my beard is like 4 inches long and my mom shrugged and said, "sam woman penecost igat mustash olsem yu." Never in my life did i think that i would be mistaken for being a woman, much less while sporting a beard longer than the average man's head hair, but apparently on pentecost island there are woman that justify this gender confusion. Glad i live on Maewo!

Back in Cyclone Season (11/8/11)

 So cyclones are better known to most of the world as hurricanes and in Vanuatu they're not a bad weather system, they're a part of life. November being officially the start of hurricane season in this area of the pacific it becomes a regular occurrence that low pressure systems start building up and floating around bringing ridiculous amounts of rain as well as quite a bit of wind. The majority of these low pressure systems never develop into full hurricanes but the change in the weather is unmistakable. The few days before hand everything becomes still, hot, humid, and quiet as if in anticipation of what is to come. Then at some point the wind starts again and within hours it becomes a strong gusty wind and rain starts coming down in a constant drizzle. This continues to strengthen and within an hour or two the wind is blowing the rain horizontally through windows and the rain itself is starting to come down as if someone was dumping buckets of water on a movie set. It keeps up this angry weather until its spent all of its rain like a child throwing a temper tantrum. This is just a low pressure system. Welcome to Vanuatu! Just yesterday the first low pressure system of our 2011-12 cyclone season came. As the wind began to pick up I asked our safety and security officer what the weather report was. Small low pressure system south of Vanuatu, expect wind and rain for the next few days. I told her I hoped it settled down in time for the two current Peace Corps trainees to get a chance to come visit my site. Her reply was a text message that read: Vanuatu has been ranked first as most hazardous country in the world risk report of 2011 done by the U.N.. Having been here for a year now and experienced a decent share of Vanuatu's temperament, I found that hard to believe. After considering it for a while though it started to make more sense to me. If another country were regularly hit with the types of natural disasters that Vanuatu gets it would seem apocalyptic. The US is a fantastic example of this. The east coast received an earthquake that cause major power outages and millions of dollars worth of damage. The power of that earthquake is what Vanuatu gets on a monthly basis. The hurricane that flooded and ruined Queensland, Australia, payed its dues to Vanuatu before proceeding. It is a country that has developed a lifestyle aimed at existing in just the right manner to deal with all of these disasters. As it becomes more developed these rules are slowly changing and it might not be long before Vanuatu starts having larger problems with its natural disasters, but for the time being on islands such as Maewo, many people live in this way. Most people build their houses up in the jungle to avoid tsunami's, they build in areas that are concave to reduce the amount of wind that hits them during a hurricane, they build away from flood zones that the constant rains and hurricanes can cause, the build houses out of bamboo lashed together with vines that aren't the least bit bothered by an earthquake. They exist in large communities with strong ties to each other. They laugh often and live in the moment. Planning for the future is an almost alien concept with the weather unpredictable and even the islands themselves molded by storms. The weather can be hard when you have a schedule so better to just live by the weather rather than a piece of paper. It has certainly been a novel experience for me after living in Tucson, never having felt an earthquake, run from a tsunami, or hid in a house during a hurricane. One thing that all of this has taught me is to appreciate the sunny days, because you just never know when your roof might fly away!

Lost in Translation (10/8/11)

 This story starts with my return to playing soccer. I'd been wanting to join the younger men in my community playing soccer for a while now but I didn’t have my shoes until Stephanie brought them for me, and I’m too much of a wimp to play barefoot when half the men have soccer cleats on, even though lots of the teenage boys run around barefoot. After Stephanie brought my shoes, the boys stopped playing for a couple months because there were no tournaments for them to train for, so apparently that means full stop on playing soccer. Playing because its fun apparently seems like too much work here, I could be wrong though. Anyways, the boys all started playing again finally in September but due to a nice large infection I had on my ankle the doctor told me I wasn't allowed to play until it started closing up. So two antibiotic cycles later and as much babying as I could possibly do, my sore was on the mend, the boys were still playing soccer and it was time to join them. I tied up my hair into a semblance of the samurai style, grabbed my ball, and shoes an walked down to the field. It being 3 in the afternoon I was ready to start playing, but of course it being Vanuatu soccer wouldn’t start until about 4pm even though they told me they started at around 3. That was fine by me because not having looked at a soccer ball in almost a year and it having been about 3 since I played, I figured it was a good chance to try running around and kicking the ball a little bit to make sure I wouldn't horribly embarrass myself when everyone else showed up. Sure enough, I was horribly out of shape not having done anything athletic in a year and my soccer skills were just short of making me worthy to be on the St Michael's A team. As the guys started showing up and kicking the ball around with me though I relaxed because most of them were not much better than me. So the day progressed and we played 6 a side for about an hour before they started calling out last goal wins, by which point I couldn’t have sprinted if you put me in front of a lion and tied a steak to my shorts. The next morning I woke up as sore as I was after the first day I ever lifted weights in high school, and felt like I might not be able to walk down the hill to my school. After hobbling around my family's compound for about an half hour and eating breakfast I decided the best remedy to being so stiff and sore was to just ignore it. So that afternoon I donned my cleats again and stiff and sore played another couple hours of soccer on our stone and dirt soccer field. This happened again on Thursday and again on Friday. Friday is when it got interesting. As I was on my way down to the field, my legs cramping as I walked down the hill to the field my brother in law saw me and asked if I was going to play in the big soccer tournament with the boys and I laughed and said if they wanted me to I would, assuming he was just joking around with me because of how poorly I played. We played for about an hour before my brother in law came through again and stopped us playing so he could make an announcement. This was of course all in local language, so all I got out of it was, bring an 18 kilo rice bag full of kava to play in the tournament, there was a lot of money to win, and the boys had to train hard if they wanted to win. After this he turned to me and in Bislama told me. Bae I mus gat physical blo winim tournament ia, yu save helpem ol boy mo mekem training lo olgeta? Translated as literally as I took it, The team has to have physicalS to win this tournament, can you help all the boys by training them? I told him that of course I’d be happy to help train all the boys for the tournament but that if they wanted me to play with them I’d have to see if the medical office had an up to date physical on form before I could tell them if I could play or not. This got a very confused look, which I didn't understand at the time. So excited about being asked to play in the tournament with the guys I immediately sent messages to the peace corps staff asking if it was ok if I played and if they had a current physical on file they could mail me. It being the weekend they said they would check next week. On Saturday as we were sitting down talking before getting ready to play one of my dads asked me if I knew what kind of work outs and training to teach the boys to help make them more physical in the tournament. I told him I knew a bunch of them and said we could start them up on Monday, at which point he asked me, so why are you waiting on the physical papers to come from your boss? Then it hit me like a ton of bricks. They didn’t need me to get a proof of a physical to play in this tiny soccer tournament in Vanuatu... they thought that I had to ask someone at the office to mail me a bunch of work out plans or something. Here I was after over a year of being in Vanuatu and speaking Bislama almost exclusively and I had completely misunderstood what was said. In Bislama they never use plurals, so while they said it fairly straight forward that the boys would have to be physical to win the tournament I just assumed that physical was supposed to be plural hence the way I interpreted it as, we all needed physicalS to play in the tournament. Now the funny look about me saying I needed to make sure I had the right papers to play made sense! Quite embarrassed I let the office know the next day that I actually wouldn't be needing a physical. Needless to say I didn't explain to them why I had changed my request. =)

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.

Baby exchange (7/11/11)

A lot of women have been having babies in the past month or so, but this was certainly a special case. One of my mom's in the village was due pretty much any day and her husband was the not so proud father of 4 girls already. I say not so proud in the sense that he just really wanted to have a boy. I was sitting down one night at the nakamal drinking kava with him when I jokingly said that if his wife had another girl he'd just have to trade it for one of the baby boys in the village and no one would be the wiser. He laughed about it and I thought it was a great joke. Boy, was I ever wrong. About a week later he and his wife went up to the dispensary so that she could have the baby. Unbeknownst to me, at the same time another one of my distant family members was there having a child as well. Wouldn't you know, my dad Bob's wife had another girl, making him the father of 5 girls now, while my other cousin cousin cousin something's wife had a baby boy, the 6^th of 6 boys born to him. While both of the women were sleeping and holding their new born babies the dads sat down and decided that they would make a trade. Bob didnt want another girl he wanted a boy, and his cousin felt the same about wanting a girl, because he would need a girl to cook and clean once his wife got too old to do it. So it was decided and the men shook on it. The next morning they explained to their wives that they were trading babies. This obviously didnt go over too well with the women, who were quite attached to the child they had just born regardless of gender. Bob's wife Stelin was very upset (understandably) about having to give up her new born baby girl in trade for a new born baby boy that was not hers. News of this came through coconut wireless and the women were all sitting down talking about it while cooking one day when they told this story to my real mom. This of course distressed her and she came to talk with me about it. Not sure of what I could do I called a few other volunteers and asked them if they had heard about this happening in other place. Jenni came through with an answer for me. While not a common occurrence, in Vanuatu it is perfectly legal to trade children pending entirely on the consent of..... you guessed it..... the fathers. That means if I had a kid and I wanted to give it to my cousin who really has wanted a baby boy, it doesnt matter what my wife, who just had the kid wants, I can legally pass the kid off without her consent. This made me a bit sad to find that out, but if its legal I guess there isn't much I can do unless they decide to change to rule. Vanuatu seems to become progressively crazier and crazier the more you get to know it.

Parents Visit (7/11/11)

 This is a kind of long story, but I guess that is to be expected from me as most of my stories are long ones. So at the start of June I got headed to Ambae to start my trip back into town to see my parents. The trip was off to a brilliant start with me getting drenched in salt water on the crossing as is usual. Once I got to Ambae because all of the volunteers on east Ambae were out for various reasons it meant that I was going to stay with one of my dad's who works for the provincial government. I show up and as luck would have it he was gone aswell. So still unphased by all of this news I sat down with a couple of the people I knew in the village and hung out talking for a while, fully expecting that I would be offered a bed once they found that I was without a place to sleep. Sure enough about twenty minutes into the conversation I got my offer of a place to sleep but not what I was expecting at all. They talked with one of the owners of a guest house and told him that I needed a place to sleep so I had to spend 1500 vatu for a night. Not expensive really, just funny because i've become so used to always just being offered a place to sleep on Maewo. The provincial center of ambae really is a totally different place. So that adventure done and out of the way I got up the next morning and headed down to the airport and climbed on the plane. While in flight to Vila, my phone started ringing (with the small planes you don't have to turn off your cell phone while flying here) and guess who was calling my parents! I was expected it to be my mom's last minute worried to make sure everything was going to be going according to plan and was quite shocked to find out that they had missed their flight. Upon landing in Vila I wasn't sure what to do, they had told me that they would be able to come in 2 weeks, but I had only had plans to be in Vila for one day before my parents came and now it was going to be 2 weeks. So I headed into the Peace Corps office and started discussing what to do with Sara, and thank god we have her working for us in the office. She helped me plan out work related stuff I could do for the next two weeks and even invited me to a workshop about phonemic awareness that a woman from DC was putting on for some other teacher trainers.

My next problem now was finding places to sleep for 2 weeks because I certainly don't have the money to put myself up at even a cheap hotel in vila for 2 weeks. As luck would have it the other volunteer who's place I was staying at, Alexia, was totally unphased by my request to stay for an extra week after the only night I had planned to stay at her house. At the end of that week I was looking for some other volunteers to stay with but everyone was pretty full due to the health volunteers all being in town for an aids workshop. So I had plans to stay with an Aus-aid volunteer I had met in Vila before. At about 5pm in the afternoon I was unable to get ahold of her about it and unsure where I might stay I decided to call Gene. Gene is the ex-peace corps volunteer who just started a kayaking business in port vila. I'd talked with him a couple times and he Volunteered in the village just south of me on Maewo so I figured that pretty much made us family. Luckily for me Gene felt the same way and with only about an hours warning I had a spot to sleep on his couch. I told him it'd just be for a single night and he said that I was welcome to stay as long as I needed. The next day I stayed with another volunteer and was there through to my parents coming. All things considered it wasn't as hectic of a time finding places to sleep as I had expected and all of the people I stayed with were super accommodating.

So the two weeks I spent in Vila were nice, filled with regular french fries, and trips to the store for candy, while I soaked up as much internet access as I could in my free time. I was able to skype pretty much every other night with Stephanie which made me not worry about my parents coming two weeks late! One night while Steph and I were talking she said that it was a very telling thing of our relationship that we are so long distance we look forward to skype opportunities just to be able to see each other's face haha. Finally on the 21^st of June my parents showed up from their flight. We went and stayed at the little place they had found online called Vila Chaumieres and while the rooms were nice they weren't anything too exciting. We all had dinner at the restaurant, it was a tad expensive but definitely the best steak dinner I have had since coming to Vanuatu! The next morning we got up and headed to the airport. Due to my parents coming two weeks late the only days we could get flights up to Ambae to get to Maewo were the day after they landed and the day before they flew back to the states. This had me nervous because it meant that originally they were only planning to come for 4 days to Maewo and now they would be coming up for almost the whole 2 weeks of their visit. We flew up and then crossed over and got drenched by both the ocean and the rain that was coming down in Maewo. The weather persisted in being cloudy and rainy and wouldn't let up to give them any sun, but we decided that we'd try heading down to Asanvari anyways. My grandpa Basil picked us up in the boat and we headed down to Asanvari with the day still chilly and overcast. Once down there we walked around a little as it started to rain and found out about a couple places they call the “eyes of the salt water.” These are two places where standing well up in the jungle you can see the ocean through small holes in the ground. I was excited to try and see this but a little worried about hiking up to them with the weather. As we waited for my host dad to talk to his brother about showing us the place the weather got even better. The rain started coming down as a torrent and the wind started picking up. After about half an hour it felt like the start of a hurricane. About 5 minutes later my grandpa comes running into the house we had all taken refuge in and tells us we needed to hop in the boat and head back because if this weather kept up we'd be stuck in Asanvari with a hurricane. So we all hopped back in the boat and began heading back up to my village in the coldest weather I have ever experienced in Vanuatu. The rain was pouring down and the wind was howling. My grandpa had on two sweatshirts and a beanie and in order to keep his beanie as dry as possible he stuck the gasoline funnel on his head to block the rain. I wish I had the picture to show but my parents have it, so if you see them, you should ask them about it. As we were heading up the coast all of the rivers that empty into the ocean were swelling like crazy and the ocean was slowly going from crystal blue and clear to brown and murky and muddy from all the dirt and mud that was being washed down from the rains. It was quite a site to behold as the entire ocean changed colors in the middle of pre-hurricane weather. Upon arriving home we all drank some hot water and no one wanted to bathe because of how cold it was. That night when I crawled into bed I check my watch's temperature gage, 70 degrees, definitely the coldest it's been in vanuatu yet. I woke up at about 3 in the morning and had to get my sheet out because I was cold and I checked my watch again, 66 degrees, I felt like that had to be some kind of record in this country haha. Needless to say when I come back to the states i'm probably going to struggle with how cold it will be in the winter.

The next morning I got up and called the peace corps safety and security officer to ask about the weather and she told me that sure enough there was a tropical low east of northern vanuatu, but it likely wouldnt turn into a hurricane. So for the next few days we stayed around the house a lot while the sky emptied itself on us and the wind blew all of the rain through the front of my kitchen. I felt bad because of how bad the weather was but I didnt know what else to tell my parents but, “hey atleasts its not hot right?” They didnt seem to agree quite as much. I can't blame them as i'm sure cold hurricane weather was hardly what they were expecting when they planned a trip to the south pacific! Haha. Anyways wednesday came around and we got a truck ride up to Big Water. I was really excited as it would be the first time I had ever rode a truck from my place all the way north. For the longest time the trucks couldn't pass because the roads were destroyed but luckily people had just recently fixed them. So it took us about 2 hours in the truck bouncing around in the back and ducking tree branches as we made our way up to big water. Once we got to Naone, the village right next to the water falls they were having a celebration for one of the church days so we stayed and watched for about a half an hour while some of the villages dressed up ridiculously and put on some funny skits. I don't think I quite got the point of the skits they were making, but they definitely were funny. After that we hiked up to the waterfall and my mom was brave enough to jump off from one of the lower areas. We hiked up, looked around then jumped in and swam out. I have to say I wish it was closer to me because I love jumping off the waterfalls there. We spent the next few days doing small things as the weather started to die down. We walked to the villages around mine and on saturday the weather had calmed enough that we jumped into the ocean and did a little snorkeling. The water was still a bit murky from all the rains but they day was warm enough that i'm pretty sure my mom was just happy to be outside and swimming around even if we weren't able to see a lot of fish.

Finally sunday rolled around and we headed to Ambae so that my parents could stay the night before catching their flight the next day to head to Vila. Of course, we got up in the morning and the clouds were just starting to clear and by the time we got to Ambae it was a nice sunny day. My parents managed to spend 12 days on Maewo with nothing but rain and not a single day of good sun. Oh well, I guess that is just how Maewo is.

Crazy Crossing (5/31/11)

 I was on Ambae for a gender and development workshop the past week. It was busy and a nice change of pace, but Sunday came around and I was ready to get back to the island and my pace of life. The day started off with a fantastic downpour that continued while me and the Ni-Van participants climbed into the truck to return to Lolowai before climbing in one of the small boats to travel back to Maewo. The truck ride back was wet and uneventful. Once we arrived in Lolowai we quickly threw all of our stuff onto the boat hoping to keep it from getting as wet as we already were from the rain. After a short wait of about an hour for the driver of the boat to come back from the store, that is about a minute walk away from the shore, we all climbed in ready to go home. The boat started up and I looked over the luggage one last time making sure we had everything. Naturally we'd forgotten something, but the something we'd forgotten was a foam mattress about as big as me. How this girl forgot her mattress I do not know, but that mean that we had to add a little extra time to the trip to go pick up her bed. So setting out at 9:30am, I was anticipating getting to Maewo at about 11am because of the extra little trip to get the mattress. We pulled up to the beach by the school and me and one of the other boys hopped out and ran to grab the mattress and brought it back soaking wet thanks to the rain. By the time we got back to the boat the rain had gotten more intense. It was coming down so thick you couldn't see Maewo or Pentecost at all in the distance like usual. It was nothing but grey spreading out before us. The driver cranked up the engine and we started heading towards Maewo. By this point my skin was starting to get wrinkled like I'd been sitting in a bath too long because of how wet we were from the rain. Undaunted by the downpour we bravely drove straight into the rain cloud on our way to Maewo. About halfway across we managed to catch a fairly large Wahoo (king fish is what they called it in bislama I think). Once we'd dragged the fish into the boat and toss the hook back out, we could no longer see any of the islands. We kept driving on looking for Maewo through the haze of the rain. After about an hour of driving we were approaching 11am and close to the time i'd expected to be home and we still hadn't seen any sign of Maewo. We were running a bit slower than normal because the water was pretty rough and we couldn't run as fast through the large swells so I just reasoned to myself that it would probably take longer than normal due to the rough water. After another hour went by I started getting nervous. We'd now been in the little wooden speedboat for two and a half hours without seeing any sign of Maewo, and for the past two hours we hadn't been able to see Ambae as well. One of the Ni-Vans joked around that Maewo didnt want us to come back so it moved. This apparently upset one of the girls who's first time it was away from Maewo, and she said we weren't going to make it back because we were lost. I asked if anyone had a compass hoping the boat driver might have kept one with him, but of course none of us had a compass. Another half an hour went by with all of us brooding in silence as we approached our 3^rd hour of driving around in the crossing that should have taken us all of 45 minutes. Finally, the barest outline of land broke through the rain. “That's Maewo!” called out our driver. I was still dubious about his proclamation as we'd been driving in circles so thoroughly I was unsure if the driver even could tell up from down let alone east from west. Sure enough, as it became more clear, it turned out to be Lolowai. We'd driven around for 3 and a half hours only to come out turned around and right back where we first entered the cloud. As luck would have it, the same time we saw the island, our gasoline ran out. The driver had a small reserve tank, so I held an umbrella and funnel while the driver and one of the other men poured gasoline into the tank as the boat swayed in the ocean swells. About a quarter of the gasoline missed the funnel and went all over my hand and the deck of the boat as the boat rocked too hard repeatedly. Fueled back up and with an island in sight we were all starting to feel a little better when the driver told us we had to go back to Lolowai to get more gasoline if we wanted to cross to Maewo. So after refueling and getting back into the boat it was now 2pm and we were just leaving Lolowai, again. As we came out to the middle the rain cloud still sad over Maewo. The driver killed the engine not wanting to try to run it again until it cleared. So we all gloomily stared at the rain as we floated for another hour waiting for it to clear. Finally becoming worried about it getting dark before the rain cleared we angled far south almost aiming for Pentecost which you could barely see south of Maewo now. Luckily it worked, allowing us to find the southern end of Maewo through the rain, by watching Pentecost. Finally, they unloaded me and all of my bags at the beach by my village. Looking at my watch it was now almost half past five, in the distance I could see slight color of sunset on some of the clouds past the storm that was finally clearing up. Worn out, I grabbed my bags and hiked back up the hill to my house in the light rain.

Building Toilets (5/20/11)

 So with my parent's visit on its way I’ve been trying to push my dad to help me get building a bathroom to house the flush toilet that he purchased years ago, in the hopes that before my parents get here we will have the toilet built so that they don't have to use my long drop toilet. Getting anything done in this culture is a process and getting anything done quickly tends to be impossible. That being said I decided the best way to start the toilet being built isn't to ask for lots of help from the community. The best way is to just start doing enough work on your own that when other people see you they feel bad for not helping and then pitch in. I gave my dad the money to purchase the cement and told him that the next day we'd go and collect sand that would be used to mix with the cement to make bricks for the septic tank. Now, most of Maewo's beaches are black stone so finding sanding sections can be difficult. Luckily (I had thought) there was a section of sand fairly close to the school that had been created during the last hurricane. Apparently though getting sand from a location so close was out of the question. So my dad told me the best place to get sand was about a half hour walk south of my village. Unsure how we were going to get the sand back to my house he said, “easy we'll just row the community's boat down, fill it up and then row it back.” Great with a boat we could load up tons and make the trip no problem. So we set out bright and early in the morning and got down to where the sand was we were planning to dig up. While on our way the boat took on a little water, which worried me but my dad said it wasn't a big deal and he'd cut a good plug to fill the drainage hole of the boat. So while he cut the plug my sisters and filled up 20 bags of sand. Each bag weighed about 80lbs so they were a little too heavy for my sisters to lift by themselves so I got the privilege of carrying all of the bags into the water to drop into the boat. Finally, all of this done, my dad and I hopped in the boat and began paddling back towards our village. Apparently the drainage of the boat wasn't the place where water was coming into the boat, there was a small crack near the back, and now with an extra 1600lbs in the boat it was taking on water really quickly. Seeing this my dad let me know that we had to paddle fast to make it back before the boat sank. So we paddled and got back to my village with the boat about half full of water. The water was rough and we couldn't bring the boat onto the beach cause the break was too rough, so while my sisters help the boat in place just outside of the break, I lifted the now wet bags of sand out of the boat onto my dad's back for him to carry one at a time back to shore. After getting wet the bags were heavy to the point that I could barely lift them over the side of the boat for my dad to take. They had to weigh close to 100 or more pounds now. Finally all of the bags unloaded and the boat about 3/4ths full of water now we attempted to carry the boat up onto shore, but it was too heavy with all the water it had taken on. So my little brother hopped in and started bailing until the boat was light enough that we could finally drag the boat up onto the beach. All of this work finally being done, I was worn out and not looking forward to dragging the bags of sand up the hill to my house. I picked up one of the bags to start the hike and my dad told me to stop. He said that since the bags were wet, we'd empty them onto a big canvas so they could dry and then we'd fill them up again and carry it up to the house. By this point I was positive all we succeeded in doing was moving some sand down the beach, not even any closer to getting it up to my house than before we started if he'd been willing to use the sand by the school. Two days later, my dad says he still needs to rest because he's so sore from carrying the bags of sand off the boat. Haha, if you read this mom and dad, I’m sorry but I don't think the toilet will be done before you get here!

Her Boyfriend Lives in a hut. (5/7/11)

 The other night I got a late night phone call from Stephanie which was a little surprising, because of the time difference. The first thing she said after hello was, “I have a good story to tell you!” The story she told me turned out to be a fantastic one of her going out with her friends. It involved girls too drunk to walk. Drunk girls going barefoot and carrying their friends around. A handful of other drunker arguments, with the gem of them all being the comment one of her friends made. Apparently, on of the very drunk girls was complaining about the boy she had been on a date with not being at her house after they'd gone out to the bars and Stephanie's friend shut the girl up by saying this, “You can't complain! Stephanie's boyfriend lives a thousand miles away in a hut! And he doesn't have internet access! And she isn't complaining!” I found this amusing for a number of reasons. One of the main ones being that mentioning I lived in a hut was very important to describing the situation of our relationship, as well as the fact that there was no internet access in my hut obviously made the circumstances that much more dire. I have to cede to her the point of me living 1000 miles away, while it is a bit of an underestimate it certainly does help you grasp the long distance part of the relation. Haha. Needless to say it was one of the best phone call's I’d received in a while, as well as helping remind me how lucky I am to have her! I can't say I know any other girls that would bother dating a guy who lives a thousand miles away in a hut without internet access... =)

Fishing 4/28/11

Today I had my first “successful” day of spear fishing. I managed to catch 2 fish and one of them was reasonably big and I was super excited and incredibly worn out. I got up very early in the morning, before the sun was up, at 5:30am I was down at the water putting my fins on to dive. One of my dads in the village Francis was with me and one of the boys got conscripted to follow us with a canoe to hold the fish. Francis is a champion diver. He'll dive down going to depths of close to 50 feet and he regularly goes under for over a minute to wait for the fish. After watching him shoot 3 fish with his spear gun I decided that the only way I was going to get a fish with my sling was to be patient. I dove down and slowly worked my way along the bottom until I came to a large hole in the reef where I know the fish tend to hide and I waited for what felt like minutes but was probably more like 20 seconds, and finally my lungs burning a fish was dumb enough to come close enough I could shoot it with my ghetto fabulous Hawaiian sling. Having shot the fish I shot up to the surface, waited a few minutes to catch my breath and then dove down to retrieve the fish. Coming up to the surface I realized the fish i'd just shot was only about as big as my hand. After another hour of swimming around and only having shot at 3 more fish while watching Francis put the reef in serious danger of extinction with his spear gun, I decided that the only way I was going to get a big fish was to dive deep, and wait as long as I could. So I swam to the edge of the reef and went over the side, swimming fast down to about 30 feet before I had to come back up because I felt like my head was going to explode. I realized that diving quick works when you go to about 20 feet or less but to go deeper you have to equalize the pressure in your ears otherwise there's no way you can do it. So I gathered a big breath and went again. Taking my time I dove diagonally down. 10 feet, 20 feet, 30 feet, and then evened out. My ears were good having taken my time and I was still feeling pretty good about the breath i'd taken so I tried to go a little deeper and then came my golden opportunity. There was a fish about as long as my forearm and as wide as my head hiding in side of the reef. I pulled the elastic back and fired and pinned him to the rock. Again my lungs were burning so I swam to the surface, planning to retrieve the fish on the next dive. Being so excited about the fish, and worried about it swimming off with my wire still stuck in it, I hit the surface gulped down some air and dove down hard. As soon as I got down to the fish I felt like my ears were going to explode and I was already out of breath again because I was rushing, so I grabbed my wire and shot back up to the surface. I threw the fish in the canoe with a huge grin and then hung on to the side resting for a few minutes because I was light headed and my ears were killing me. I ended up not diving after anymore fish and when we got back to the shore and pulled the canoe up, in the 4 hours we went diving I managed to shoot one tiny fish and one meal worthy fish. Francis had shot 6 parrot fish that were as big around as my thigh. He proceeded to tell me because it was low tide there weren't as many fish so he he was disappointed with how many he caught. Here I was grinning like an idiot over my single “big” fish that was about half the size of all the ones he caught and I thought I’d done a good job! 

Rats and Cats (4/18/2011)

So, as is a problem in most of the houses that the locals live in, rats are everywhere. The first and only thing people tell you is that if you don't like rats get a cat. As many of you know I am not a cat person at all, but seeing as I dislike rats even more I figured I’d sleep with the lesser of two evils. Luckily for me when I first moved in my host family's cat was pregnant and I was promised one of the litter. Turns out only one survived and I named her Gizmo. She's grown up rapidly and I feed her regularly and even pet her occasionally, making me the most loving cat owner on my side of Maewo. She's now coming to the age where she is catching rats on her own, so this had me very excited as it should have spelled an end to my rats. Unfortunately, my cat realized that more rats hang out in my kitchen house than in my sleeping house and therefore she rarely comes into my sleeping house. This didn't bother me too much as I’d already taken a large number of precautions to avoid having issues with the rats. I kept my clothes on hangars so they wouldn't chew them, or urinate in them, or nest in them. I left no little areas for them to hide out in clothes. I keep all of my food in the kitchen or in tightly sealed metal containers in my house. I even make sure than I keep all empty boxes or anything they could turn into a home closed up and packed tightly away. So when I did see and hear rats in my house it never bothered me too much because they weren't sleeping in my house and the most destructive thing they'd done was steal an almost finished bar of soap. Then, during Stephanie's visit, out of the blue they decided the spines of my hardback books would make a great snack, and would wake us up in the middle of the night to loud chewing sounds as they shredded the spines of my brand new hardback books that Stephanie had brought me. This was unforgivable. The first thing I did when I found a hardware store was purchase a wicked looking mouse trap. If the cat wasn't prepared to take out the rats in my house then I’d have to take matters into my own hands, because living with me is OK, but eating my books is not! So upon returning to Maewo the first night back I placed a cracker in the trap and set it in an easily rat accessible spot and waited. The first night nothing, the second night, nothing and on the third night the cracker was missing but the trap still un-sprung. Starting to become agitated with the situation I placed another cracker on the trap, but this time I wedged it in tight so they'd have to either eat only half or actually carry the trap off in order to get the cracker out. I figured this way they'd be forced to play with the mechanism that would set the trap off. That night the trap went off at about 11pm, causing me to hop out from under my mosquito net and pick up my bush knife, excited about the prospect of gutting the little bastards who'd been eating my books. I stepped into the room I’d set the trap in and shined my light only to find my cat hiding in the corner with a panicked look in her eyes as the trap was snapped shut on her paw, the cracker missing. So not only was this cat not catching the rats in my house but she was sabotaging all of my best efforts to catch them myself. After this happened I’ve begun to question which of the two is truly the greater of the evils. In comparison: they both live in your house, they both eat your food, one is invited the other isn't, one will bite you and scratch you, the other eats your books. The more I think about it the more unsure I am as to whether I’m getting a good deal out of having the cat at all if her entire purpose was to eliminate rats and she refuses to catch the ones in my house.

Photos!

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.