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.