Life in the Ring of Fire Part 13: Musical Escapades

I don’t think there’s anything more soul-sucking than having to ask to use the bathroom. The guest house where me and the band were staying did not have a bathroom associated with it (I mean, why would it? That would just be silly) and so when I woke up Monday morning I was informed that I needed to ask one of the villagers to use their bathrooms should the need arise. This, of course, was a pleasant start to the week. Things, however, did start to look up after breakfast (Ramen noodles with bits of beef on top of rice, the same meal we were to have for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day that we were there). We trekked up into the bush on a barely-existent trail for about half an hour before coming to a small clearing. Two carved wooden still drums stood in the middle along with a colorful collection of leaves and flowers. On the opposite edge of the clearing from where we’d emerged crouched a group of boys dressed in nambas – leaves wrapped around the penis and then tied around the waist (check the back logs for a more detailed description and, of course, the appropriate jokes). Big colorful fronds of leaves had been stuck into the back of each of their nambas belts, making them all look vaguely like peacocks. Upon arrival, one of the band members proceeded to strip and don a namba as well, although he kept his underwear on, which I thought was kind of cheating, but was nonetheless glad for. The goal of the expedition, of course, was to incorporate a nambas dance into the music video.

Before coming on this trip I’d seen several Vanuatu-style music videos before and they were, without exception, fantastically bad. They generally featured a series of shots of some people singing what must have been a completely different song than the one being played in the movie because their lips synced up to the vocals about as well as in a Godzilla film. These shots were seizure-inducingly spliced together using effects that could have been achieved in a power-point presentation (ie. the slide in from the corner, the dissolve, the stripes, etc). The final product has the same sort of draw as a morbidly obese man messily devouring a plate of nachos: you know you should look away, but you just can’t. Now, of course, I was being treated to a special “behind-the-scenes” look at the making of such a music video and, I got to say, I’m surprised they turn out that well. All the footage was being taken by a camcorder whose stand nobody could find (think “Blair Witch Project”). The music was being provided by a boom box (which one of the band members had lugged along on our half hour trek through the bush), but of course such a setup would have been inadequate to capture decent audio, so what they do is have the band lip-sync along with the music as best they can (not very well) and then cut the audio out of the footage and overlay the original studio recording.

And so I was treated to a traditional Vanuatu custom dance, performed by boys wearing penis sheathes and decorated with leaves, accompanying music heavy on the keyboard synth being blasted out by a boom box being carried 80’s-style over someone’s shoulder. Thank god someone was taking footage of the whole thing. After this spectacle was completed, we set off hiking again for a custom nakamal, which was supposed to be close to a river. “Close” was a bit of an understatement, as the nakamal was actually IN the river. We showed up to see kava being pounded by wooden poles on the banks and then worked in basins in the river. The whole experience was very cool. In turn we each stepped into the river and were presented with a shell of kava (“shell” here being a literal term as the kava was served in empty coconut shells). After drinking you could sit in the river to cool off, ponder the beauty of nature, and wonder if there were any bathrooms in this joint.

After some quality pondering we were off hiking again (not an easy endeavor after a shell of kava) upstream to a waterfall, where I was forever immortalized in Vanuatu music video history by emerging, shirtless, from the waterfall, doing a slow motion hair flick, and then downing a shell of kava. By mid-afternoon most everyone in the band had had too much kava to drink to continue shooting and so we headed back to the village and all went to sleep.

Tuesday evening we put on a concert in the village that was hosting us. Concerts in Vanuatu are an interesting affair for two reasons. First of all, your given Vanuatu band (and this band was no exception) knows, on average, four songs. These songs are played repeatedly until the band gets tired, at which point they put on their CD (which, of course, has the same four songs on it) and play that until the chief tells them that everyone is trying to sleep and that they need to be quiet. The second reason revolves around dancing. The Ni-Vans are hopelessly shy when it comes to dancing. First of all, they flatly refuse to dance in the daytime (in case, I don’t know, there’s a satellite overhead that takes a picture of them and they show up on Google Earth). Even after nightfall it often takes them a good while to work up the courage, so a band will sometimes play for a good hour or two before anyone wanders out onto the dance floor (read: open patch of dirt). They, of course, love to dance and once some people have broken the ice the whole village gets into it. As soon as a song is over, however, they sprint off the dance floor to hide in the fringes to wait out the ten seconds or so between songs.

Of course for me, I’m living in a forgotten corner of the world with people who will probably never even make it off their islands, much less to the US to tell my friends what an ass I was making of myself, so, when it came to dancing, my inhibitions were all but non-existent. I thus earned myself a reputation among the band as an awesome dancer (probably the only time in my life I will gain such a title from a group of black youth), and it quickly became my job to get out on the dance floor by myself to break the ice, as it were, and get the rest of the villagers into it.

Wednesday we were scheduled to go back but that morning I was informed that this would in fact not be happening since the previous night’s concert had gone over so well and we were going to be on tour until Friday. Wednesday and Thursday nights were more or less a repeat of Tuesday night, expect in different villages. By Friday morning I was completely exhausted and more than ready to head back to Tautu. As it turned out, most of the luggage that we’d been hauling on the trip over was in fact gifts, which had been left behind, and so the return boat voyage was considerably faster, and garnered fewer fears of the ship sinking.

We were back by mid-afternoon and, after a short nap, I promptly headed into Lakatoro to try and find a white person to talk to. I was reminded of a joke I’d heard on the radio once which involved a guy driving home from work who calls his wife on his cell phone. His wife tells him that she’s watching the news and that he should be careful because there’s some idiot driving the wrong way on the highway. He responds “One idiot? There are hundreds of them!” This is how you start to feel when you’ve been out of contact with the outside world for a while. Being the one person you know of who doesn’t think that drinking coconut milk can cause malaria or that black magic can make it rain, you start to question your sanity. Initially you may be firm in your conviction that it’s everyone else that’s going the wrong way, but after a little while you start to forget that there’s a whole wide world of people out there that share your beliefs, culture, and ideals, and start to wonder if maybe you just might be able to make it rain by asking the clouds nicely. Volunteers on the more remote islands, of course, have it the worst, and it’s not uncommon for Peace Corps to fly them into Vila every once and a while to keep them sane, and I can see why: I had been away from Tautu (where I can easily find nearby volunteers to talk to) for all of a week and already I felt like I was loosing it.

After wandering around Lakatoro for about ten minutes, I ran into McKenzie (the benefits of living in a small town), who was on her way to use the internet. This proved to be a sufficiently western pursuit to restore my ability to think clearly. Saturday and Sunday were spent doing more or less nothing and I was left with the anticipation of upcoming Christmas. I had no idea what to expect for the holiday in Vanuatu, but I was interested in finding out.

Life in the Ring of Fire Part 12: Too Many Hours in a Day

I know what you all out there are thinking. You're thinking "Man, I have all this cool stuff to send to Dan, like lots of Chocolate and maybe some bottles of Tequila, but I'm wondering if his address has changed now that he's at site." Well, it has. Mail sent to the address I posted a while back will still get to me, eventually, but my new address at site is:

Daniel Moser
Peace Corps Volunteer
P.M.B 33
Lakatoro, Malekula
Vanuatu, South Pacific

Monday kicked off with a slow start to a slow week. A teacher was still inhabiting the house that I was supposed to be moving into and most of my things had failed to arrive on the ship last week, and so I was left with very little to do to occupy myself at site. My week went more or less like this: At 7am or so I got woken up by my host mama shouting at me to come eat breakfast (bread and very weak tea). After breakfast I retired back to my room to either read, write, or go back to sleep. At about 10am I was forced out of the house by the fact that the temperature had risen to approximately infinity degrees (Celsius). On a big day at this point I would head into Lakatoro to my office at the LTC to use the internet and possibly purchase a cold drink. My office consists of a garbage can in front of the store on top of which I can precariously perch my laptop. An old phone line hangs down from the ceiling nearby, to which I have never seen a phone connected, but thankfully it still works. This line I plug into my computer. I can then use a dail-up internet account which I set up in Vila to connect to the internet at a speed so glacially slow that it's really only good for pushing the "check email" button on my email program. God forbid I try to visit a website, because it would take hours. At this point in the process a huge crowd usually gathers to look over my should because, honestly, some dude using a computer is probably the most interesting thing that will happen in a given day.

After a hard day at the office, I head back to Tautu and go to the beach, where a nice breeze keeps the place at a more or less tolerable temperature, and either read, play harmonica, or sleep. When four o'clock rolls around I head back to my house to help my host papa make kava. Making kava is a long fairly long and also fairly disgusting process. Raw kava roots are purchased from the local market and look kind of like giant wooden, underground, octopuses. The roots are then peeled and cut up into little cubes using a machete (thus releasing the decidedly unpleasant kava aroma, which anyone who's ever consumed kava knows and dreads). The cubes are put through a meat grinder, thus turning them into a disgusting brown paste that smells even worse than the cut kava. A handful at a time, the paste is put into a rice bag (a sort of a plastic burlap bag which is porous) and the bag dunked into a dish of water, allowing the water to seep through. The bag is then rung out back into the dish, producing a brown liquid that looks like mud, but smells worse. Once all the paste has been rung through the bag, the brown liquid is strained through a piece of cloth and is ready to drink. There are several variations of the kava recipe found throughout Vanuatu. The use of the meat grinder is, obviously, a more modern method. More traditional ways of making kava paste include grinding it with stones, placing it in a wooden tube and then pounding it with a wooden pole, and finding some hapless sucker to chew it into a paste for you (which often makes the gums bleed, and, in very traditional villages, is the role of pre-pubescent boys).

If I haven't been completely disgusted by the making of kava, I'll then drink some kava, sit around and talk, eat dinner and go to sleep. Now, I'm sure that most of you reading this are, somewhat reluctantly maybe, holding down the standard nine to five job and really don't want to hear some guy tell about how difficult it is to sit around on the beach and do nothing all day, but here's the thing: doing nothing is only fun when there's something you SHOULD be doing. Procrastination is all about that guilty feeling of knowing that you're skipping out on doing something important, and probably unpleasant. On the other hand, if you're doing nothing because there is, in fact, nothing to do, the novelty soon wears off.

Fortunately, the monotony of the week was broken up on Friday because both Laura and Elin came down from their villages in the northwest for a visit. We decided that we were all in the mood for some non-Vanuatu food and so we decided to make fajitas. Towards that end, we headed to the beef plantation near Tautu, where I tried, very unsuccessfully, to explain to the butcher what was skirt-steak was in Bislama. In the end, I more or less chose a cut at random (all the signs were in French). Most of the rest of the afternoon was spent wandering Lakatoro collecting various needed ingredients. It's surprising how long it takes to get shopping done when you can't just go to one store for everything (and the stores are sometimes placed half a mile apart). We had just finished shopping when I received a call from my host papa telling me that the Northern Star had once again come. This was something of a problem because Elin had shipped all of her stuff on the ship, but had not yet paid and would need to do so before they would give anything to her. Having just gone on a shopping spree, not a single one of us had enough cash and so me and McKenzie went to the bank while Laura and Elin went to the docks to try and stall the boat.

Now, every other Friday is government payday, which means that basically every government employee on a given island rushes to the bank in order to withdraw their salary (the idea of a bank account is kind of lost in Vanuatu, it's more just seen as something that stands between you and a wad of cash). When we'd walked by the bank earlier that day, we'd seen a line out the door, but the afternoon crowd was considerably less and so we gamely got in line. After about twenty minutes (not bad at all), I stepped up to the counter and was informed by the smiling bank employee that they were out of money, but were expecting more to come in about half an hour. I wondered how, exactly, more money was going to make it to the bank in half an hour (speedboat? airdrop? carrier pigeon? photocopier?), but, having no other alternative really, we grabbed a bench outside and settled in to wait. After about ten minutes most everyone else had left the bank and so we moved inside so as to be sure to be first in line when the cash arrived. I walked in to see the teller cheerfully counting out 1000 vatu notes to another patron. Apparently telling us that the bank was out of money was just a ploy to thin out the line.

Cash now in hand, we caught a truck for the wharf and arrived just in time to see our ship pulling away. Laura and Elin were nowhere to be found. "Did you see two white people come through here?" I asked on of the people on the wharf (one thing I do like about Bislama, it makes no show of political correctness), and was informed that they'd already caught a truck back with a bunch of stuff. Before I had time to wonder how they'd gotten our stuff off the ship, I heard them shouting at us and turned to see a small truck, piled high with our boxes and Laura and Elin crammed in the back, doing a sharp U-turn on the wharf. "Hurry up," they called at us "We can't slow down too much or the truck won't be able to start." We both dashed for the truck and jumped aboard, unhinging the door to the truck bed in the process and leaving it to flap noisily as we bounced down the road back to town. We stopped at McKenzie's house first to unload her stuff and then were informed that we'd have to push the truck to get it started again. On the third or fourth attempt we managed to push the truck far enough down the road to send it careening down a hill. Fearing to be left behind, we all quickly dived head-first into the back and we were off again. The truck managed to make it to Tautu to drop off my stuff and then back again to Lakatoro so that we could get dinner going.

Saturday I had to get up early because I'd agreed to go and shoot a music video with my host uncle and his band in the south of the Malekula. Me along with ten or so other guys, most of which I'd never seen before, piled into the back of a truck and set off southwards. The road, however, did not go straight through to our destination so after about an hour we arrived at a dock where a small motor boat was waiting for us. We squeezed ourselves and our stuff into the tiny boat and set off, riding very close to the water and going at a rather pathetic pace. It had all the feel of a summer road trip with a bunch of friends in a compact car. Further completing the analogy, one of the band pulled out a camcorder and began filming everything going on. It was a long two hour boat ride, cramped and uncomfortable with the water frequently washing over the almost-submerged hull., before we finally pulled up to a beach and hopped out. The group made a beeline through the village at which we'd arrived and I followed them to the outside of someone's window, where everyone waited expectantly. "What are we doing?" I asked. "Buying cigarettes," I was told, "we're about halfway there." Great.

It was dark by the time we got off the boat again. We'd arrived in a large bay surrounded by dense bush. Fires dotted the crescent of the bay denoting small villages and making the whole scene look like something from a Pirate movie. "This is a very backwards part of the island" one of the band told me "no roads come down here, and very few ships." We pulled up to a beach and disembarked. It was nothing more than a fifty foot wide strip of sand that ended in a steep hill into the bush. A men met us at the beach and one of our number went off to talk with him. He came back and told us to wait. We all sat down on the beach. I was exhausted and soaked through and looked forward to some dry clothes and good night's sleep. After ten or so minutes of waiting three men emerged from the bush, one carrying an enormous sub woofer (about as big as he was) and the other two giant speakers. We put these in the boat and climbed back in. I was surprised to see that the boat was still afloat. For the next hour we motored from fire to fire across the bay in similar fashion collecting a mixing board, another speaker, and an electric bass guitar.

We finally arrived at our destination, a strip of beach with a fire on it, almost exactly like the other four we'd stopped at. We unloaded the boat and struck out into the bush with our luggage and stereo equipment. We were shown to the guest house, which was thankfully full of foam mattresses for us to sleep on, and I passed out.

Sunday started off with a trip to church, where we were welcomed to the village and then recruited the pastor and congregation to be filmed for the video. After church we got into the boat again where I was told we were going to check out a lagoon that they wanted some footage of. We motored down the coast for a bit before the driver turned us into a tiny inlet that quickly disappeared into the hills and bush. We motored up the inlet for a few minutes when it opened up into an enormous lagoon, almost the size of the bay which we'd driver around the previous night. The place was at once beautiful and ominous. Thick, muddy, banks quickly disappeared into dense bush and then steep hills. All along the water banyon trees hung low, their branches growing down towards the water instead of up and out, like wooden tentacles reaching out to ensnare unsuspecting boats. Island bush has a decidedly different feel to it than the woods of the US. American forests have a sort of noble and wise character to them. From the skinny, straight, and tall Birch, the bushy pine, and stalwart oak of the northeast to the momentous redwood of the west, our woods bring to mind aging scholars, both old and knowledgeable and eager to enlighten us students who venture into their domain. The bush, on the other hand, is young, lazy, and mischievous. Trees grow haphazardly at all angles and are covered by sloth-like drooping vines. It's as if Vanuatu's rich volcanic soils don't provide enough of a survival challenge to its adolescent woods, leaving them bored and eager to wreak havoc on unsuspecting visitors. I felt like I was in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," navigating a river choked on both sides by menacing foliage.

We pulled up to a dock, which was a strip of piled rocks that jutted out violently from the mud, and got out. A steep concrete stair led up to a village hidden in the bush. Looking down on the lagoon, we were treated to a spectacular view, and I immediately saw why the band had wanted to shoot there. We spent about half and hour taking footage and then motored back home. On the way, we stopped for kava at a plantation house owned by a New Zealander who was conveniently out of town, allowing the plantation hands use his yard as a nakamal. The house was locked, of course, but it was a disgustingly opulent sight to see in such a place. It was probably about twice the size of my house in the US, made entirely of cement. Through the big bay windows that lined the front, it was possible to see a large collection of nice mahogany furniture, crystal and, of course, a huge plasma screen TV. A hundred meters or so back into the bush were the houses of the workers, constructed entirely out of woven bamboo with dirt floors and local thatch roofs made from banana leaves. Vanuatu is a country of contradictions.

Life in the Ring of Fire Part 11: Service Begins

Monday was another busy day of scurrying around Vila. The first stop was the bank, as most of us had used up our cash over the weekend on food and drink. Apparently this was true for the entire population of Vila as well because we arrived to find a line out the door. Like a crowded bar, bouncers were posted outside to ensure that not too many people were allowed inside at once. It took the better part of an hour to withdraw cash, after which we proceeded to the stove store, where we were informed that they didn’t have any gas hoses, followed by the post office, where we were informed that they were out of stamped envelopes until the following year. The highlight of the day, however, was visiting the local grocery store’s wholesale department, where we could purchase such necessities as peanut butter in opulent bulk. I went to town like a kid in a candy store, and before I knew it I was the proud owner of, among other things, 6 liters of sweet chili sauce and 60 packets of curry flavored Ramen. Weary after spending so much money on food, and because it was about a billion degrees outside, I retreated to the air-conditioned haven of our hotel and slept for most of the afternoon.

Tuesday was to be my last day in Vila with my group before heading out to site, and I woke up feeling awful. Up until that point, I don’t think I’d once doubted my upcoming two year commitment. I’d had many an adventure which, really, when you got right down to it, was what I was wanting out of the whole thing anyway, and generally been happy with my residence in Vanuatu. I woke up that morning, however, with only one thought on my mind: What in God’s name am I doing? This sentiment, I think, was almost entirely due to the fact that I was faced with the eminent prospect with leaving my training group. Ragtag band of misfits that we were, we’d all been through what was probably the craziest experience of our lives together, and that made us family. “Shit,” I muttered to my pillow, “this is going to suck.” I took a deep breath and gave myself a second to pull myself together before striking out on a busy final day in Vila. I’m still not sure how, exactly, I pulled it off, but I managed to finish my shopping and packing all neatly before dinner in preparation for a last party that night. A few of our number had left the previous day, but the majority of our group was intact, and a large chunk of us were slated to leave Wednesday morning.

It was a fun night and, reminiscent of our first few nights as a group back in LA, we all crowded into the hotel pool and made way too much noise until the early hours of the morning. As a said goodbye to people as they headed off to bed, it was weird to think that, despite the fact that we would all be inhabiting the same, small, island country, I would probably not see some of them until our all-volunteer conference, a good six months away. When I turned in at last, I was looking forward to a solid three hours of sleep (a volunteer once told me that she’d never once arrived at her site not being sleep-deprived and hung-over and so far neither have I) before me, Laura, and McKenzie had to take our luggage down to the wharf for it to be shipped to our sites.

Getting things from place to place is very difficult in Vanuatu. The country has a small collection of passenger planes that run between the islands, but no cargo planes to speak of. Devices such as U-Hauls or mini-vans, which one would usually use to transport one’s stuff when moving to a new home in the States, are also obviously ineffective. In addition, given the size of the passenger planes and a mutual desire among all the passengers to actually be able to take off, each passenger is allotted a scant ten kilograms of luggage, with excess accruing a charge of about $3 a kilogram. Thus, in order to transport my somewhat large array of possessions to Malekula without spending thousands of dollars, ships were the only option. There are about twenty or so cargo ships that meander their way through Vanuatu’s islands, following routes and schedules that are more or less random. Moving at a pace that only just outstrips that of a person swimming, provided that the person has no arms or legs, Vanuatu’s ships are a sure way to get your belongs delivered to you in a timely three or four months. Really, the absolutely only advantage of sending something via ship is that it costs only $3 per box, regardless of size or weight. Unfortunately, you get what you pay for.

We’d arranged for one of the Peace Corps drivers to deliver us and our stuff to the docks so that we could place our things on the Northern Star which, miraculously, was planning on going straight to Malekula, as opposed to following its usual random course, and was slated to arrive there on the coming weekend. The driver, of course, was late, leaving us all very annoyed as we had promptly arrived at the office at 7am, when we could have leisurely slept until 9. Down at the wharf, we handed off our things to a very bewildered looking ship’s hand who, in the US, I probably wouldn’t have trusted with my order at Burger King. I gave my boxes a 6% chance of reaching me during my Peace Corps service. I had, however, reserved some key items to carry with me on the plane and I reckoned that I could survive alright with just them for two years if worst came to worst.

Upon arrival in Malekula, I was cheerful greeted by my host family and then promptly went to sleep. That evening, I kicked off my service by going to kava with all the Malekula volunteers who happened to be in the area and wondered how long it would be before the place started to feel like home.

Thursday morning McKenzie and Laura came to make beer at my house, which was really so preposterously easy that I wondered why I used to get charged $9 for a beer in New York. I was a little concerned because I knew sterilizing the equipment would difficult in a country which considered dishes to be clean once they were dunked in a bucket of water, and I didn’t want our beer to go bad. In a first exercise in using available resources, however, we made good use of the hydrogen peroxide in my med kit and hoped for the best. When the beer was finished and moved to my room to ferment we found we had nothing better to do and so headed for the LTC.

Basically all human life on Malekula is laid out in a long line following the island’s only pressed-coral truck road running from north or south. Tautu, my village, is .kind of in the middle, but more towards the northern half. Being in the more developed part of the island, the three mile or so stretch of road near my village sports about five general stores, a bank, post office, Air Vanuatu sales office, an airport, and a large number of kava bars. The largest of these general stores is the LTC (the Wal-Mart of Malekula, if you will), is a popular hang-out for more or less everyone who lives in the area and doesn’t have anything better to do (i.e. more or less everyone who lives in the area). It’s kind of like hanging out at the mall, except there’s no arcade, the AC doesn’t work, and the food court is somewhat limited. During my visit to site a few weeks before, I’d joked with McKenzie about how long it would be once we got to site before we too were hanging out at the LTC all day as well. The answer turned out to be approximately 14 hours.

Friday morning I was woken up by my family who told me that the Northern Star was arriving and I needed to go to the wharf. I found this somewhat hard to believe, but I headed to the wharf nonetheless. The ship, of course, was not there, but the wharf turned out to be a nice place to hang out, and was significantly cooler than the village. Later in the afternoon I met up with McKenzie, who’d also been sent to wait for the ship, and the two of us sat and watched the ocean stay stubbornly ship-less. Around dinner time we ran into a group of New Zealand volunteers who were working to build water tanks in the northwest of Malekula, and got invited to dinner. In the middle of dinner, a girl living nearby breathlessly rushed to inform us that the ship had come. To be quite honest, I was shocked. It was only twelve hours late. We got a ride back to the wharf, where the ship indeed was, and pushed our way through a mass of people, boxes, and luggage until we found the cargo master. He cheerfully pointed to a small pile of boxes sitting on the concrete, all of which had my name on them. They were my purchases from the grocery store wholesale, which I’d visited on Monday. “Where’s the rest of our stuff?” I asked. “It’s still in Vila,” he explained “we’ll bring it when we come next week.” Ah yes, of course. I shrugged. My raingear might still have been in Vila, but at least I had sweet chili sauce and Ramen packets.

On Sunday I got up early to go to the airport to welcome another new volunteer to our ranks in Malekula. Elin, who’s from my training group, but had had her site switched to Malekula at the last minute, had finally be able to get a flight in. Before leaving for the airport I decided to check the beer fermenting by my bed and was saddened to discover a thick white scum on bacteria floating on the top. Not entirely surprisingly, our somewhat haphazard efforts as sterilizing our equipment had not worked and the batch of beer had to be tossed. Unfortunately, the materials we needed to give it a second go were still in Vila and would not be arriving for about a week.

I met up with some other volunteers at the airport to welcome Elin, after which we ate breakfast with her before she was whisked off to site by one of the Peace Corps trainers, who had come on the flight with her, with a slightly bewildered expression on her face. That evening we were having a farewell party for one of the Malekula volunteers who would be leaving shortly, and so I elected to spend the afternoon in “town,” as it were. I did go out to do some snorkeling, but, due to the heat and the sky-darkening swarm of mosquitoes covering the area, I spent most of the day sleeping inside. No one can do a lazy Sunday better than in Vanuatu.

Life in the Ring of Fire Part 10: Volunteers

Over the weekend, a tropical depression had formed just north of Efate and had dumped rain by the bucketful on Mangaliliu, turning the village into one enormous mud pit. Although dirt roads do have a certain quaint appeal, especially in nice, dry, weather, I have to say that whoever came up with concrete certainly deserves a pat on the back. I longed for Texas’ soulless concrete highways as I squelched my way down to the community center Monday morning, immensely glad that I was wearing Tevas and opposed to flip-flops, as they are less likely to be suctioned off one’s feet by the muck.

We’d finished class last week and all we were left with now to do was wrap up some formalities. Chief among these was the establishment of our bank accounts so we could be paid during our service. Peace Corps had arranged for each of us to have a National Bank of Vanuatu (NBV) account opened into which they could deposit our living allowance. NBV’s slogan, “Vanuatu’s Own Bank” to me, is vaguely reminiscent of that “very first” line of toys you used to see at Toys-R-Us, as in “My Very First Camera” or “My Very First Microwave,” and seems to convey a sense of wonder and surprise that they were actually able to pull this bank endeavor off. There was, of course, a lot of paperwork to fill out, but Peace Corps had kindly done most of it for us, including marking down Texas as my “Home Village” and USA as my “Home Island.”

After we were done with banking, we had language proficiency interviews to ensure that we had successfully mastered the 25 words which make up the entirety of Bislama’s vocabulary. We were then free to participate in Vanuatu’s official national pastime: sitting around. By this point, we’d played so many rounds of Hearts, Spades, Poker, and even Bridge that the mere sight of a deck of cards was enough to induce a gagging reflex. Conversation too was somewhat tiresome, as it seemed we’d already talked into oblivion every conceivable topic of discussion. I wondered if this was how the ancient Greeks felt, so engulfed by boredom that they had no choice but to philosophize wildly about whether or not the world was just a bunch of dancing shadows on a cave wall.

On Tuesday we had exit interviews with our country director, preceded and followed by more sitting around. Having no particular concerns about my site, my interview was over quickly and the rest of the day was spent doing nothing in particular. Wednesday followed in similar fashion and a general feeling of sadness had fallen over the group as we knew we were approaching our last days together.

Thursday I awoke to my host brother banging on my window and ordering me to breakfast. I stepped outside to see a vast collection of biscuits (in the British sense of the word), bread, cakes, and fruit dotting the table and most of my extended host family waiting expectantly. Before I could say anything, I was doused in talcum powder, wrapped in various colorful pieces of cloth and drenched with spray-on deodorant. I’d witnessed a similar scene at the wedding I’d gone to in Malekula, and I’m still not entirely sure what significance of it is. I’ve asked several people about it and have simply been informed that it’s a custom. I, however, have a hard time picturing the ancient cannibals of Vanuatu’s history, adorned only in penis sheaths, celebrating special occasions by slathering themselves in baby powder and aerosol deodorant. But maybe my imagination is simply lacking.

After breakfast I was presented with my swearing-in garb, which was a wonderful mismatch of two of Vanuatu’s customs. In lieu of pants I was given a woven grass mat, about 6-inches wide and not *quite* long enough to completely wrap around my waist. With this, I was to wear an island shirt, the official costume of Vanuatu, being a completely preposterous Hawaiian-type shirt, heavy on the bright pink and yellow. Vanuatu simply abounds with shirts made with such similar fabric; in fact it’s really the only fabric that’s available for purchase on the islands. I’m not really sure how the retailers go about ordering these fabrics from the mainland (“Hello, I’d like a thousand rolls of your most ridiculous cloth please.”), or why they don’t have them ship over some, say, plain white fabric while they’re at it, but there you go. Unfortunately, as I was informed later in the day, not enough of the host families had gotten around to weaving grass mats for their volunteers and the uniform was changed to island shirts and pants, so we ended up looking merely silly as opposed to outright absurd.

Our swearing-in ceremony started out with water dancers from The Banks Islands (a group of outer islands in Vanuatu that are remote, even by Vanuatu’s standards), which was probably one of the most amazing things I’d seen since coming to country. A group of about ten women wandered out into the ocean and proceeded to use it as an instrument. Using their hands to manipulate and slap the water, they were able to create astonishingly loud and hauntingly eerie music. The whole thing had an inexplicably magical feel to it and I honestly expected that at any moment a huge sea monster would come crawling out of the depths and begin undulating in time with the dancers.

After the performance, the speeches began. In such a laid-back country, I find it odd how seriously everyone takes speeches. There we were sitting on the beach, in front of a stage constructed entirely out coconut-tree products, sheltered from the rain by a series of ragged traps flapping wildly in the wind, wearing outfits best suited for a beach-themed college frat party, and listening to a speaker delivering a speech with all the solemnity of the Pope addressing a congregation at St. Peter’s. After a few hours of this, we all shared a shell of kava (no ceremony is complete without kava), and ate. I’d been hoping that our swearing-in was a big enough event to warrant the roasting of another pig, but apparently it was not, so I had to make due with chicken. After dinner the party began. It’s something of a tradition in Peace Corps Vanuatu that the night of swearing-in the volunteers stay up absurdly late dancing and making fools of themselves while all the villagers watch and laugh at us. It being Vanuatu (and due to the fact that most of us had already sent our stuff to Vila in preparation for moving out), we only had one CD at our disposal, which we played on infinite loop for most of the night. In addition to a few numbers that those Princeton people in the audience would have recognized from The Street, the CD included a couple gems from a band called Blue Lagoon, which I suggest checking out as they’re quite fantastically bad and have kind of become the theme music of our service. All in all, it was a fun time but, for reasons that I will not go into, I did not stay for the whole party. I do know, however, that when I was woken up at 6am the next day, the music was still playing.

Dazed and half asleep, I stumbled down to the community center for the last time for our final goodbye to the village of Mangaliliu. My fellow volunteers soon emerged in similar condition and we all stood by while the population of the village lined up to bid us farewell. Goodbyes in Vanuatu are always tearful and the scene probably could have been confused with a funeral. One by one, each of us walked down the line and was tearfully hugged and kissed by each of the villagers. Afterwards, we all boarded buses and were driven to Vila. Nominally, the plan was for us to get into Vila early in the morning so that we could have time to start shopping in preparation for site. However, due the events of the previous night, most of us were in no condition to do anything except collapse on the floor and go to sleep. This I did until lunchtime, when I ventured down to town with McKenzie and Laura, who were to come with me to Malekula, to get a burrito and a beer-making kit, which, I decided was my top priority. The burrito was delicious, as always, and I bought the store out of all their beer-making supplies.

That night we decided to celebrate our first night in Vila by going to Vanuatu’s only sushi restaurant. This turned out to be a bad call as, like everything else in Vila, sushi was ridiculously expensive and I ended up dropping around $30 for a meal that left me aching to go to Burger King afterwards in order to get something more filling. Saturday I had planned to do some shopping, but this was quickly abandoned in favor of going to Iririkki, an island resort, to go swimming and buy mixed drinks. I’d heard rumors that the resort also sported a game room with both foosball and ping-pong, and I longed for some quality fooz Princeton style. Unfortunately the game room was a trifle disappointing as the foosball table was apparently built with midgets in mind, being about two feet tall, and thus forcing you to squat in order to play. The humidity had gotten to the ping-pong balls as well, which bounced about as well as an over-ripe tomato.

Sunday I tried to make up for my laziness the previous day by browsing Vila’s plethora of Chinese shops (the only stores in Vila which, sometimes, are open on Sundays). Fortunately, a cruise ship had just come in, and so most of the stores were open to cater to the sudden influx of tourists, who would probably spend a grand total of two hours in Vila before returning to their mobile island. Cruise ship patrons are a frequent sight in Vila, and they always seem excited to be visiting the city, but, quite honestly, I can’t imagine why. Vila has all the charm of a Florida retirement community, except with fewer good restaurants. One group of tourists, noticing my large collection of shopping bags and mistaking me for a ship passenger, asked me where the good shopping was. “Well that depends on what you’re looking for,” I replied “if you’re looking for some quality Tupperware, I’d try the store down the street. There’s a place just at the end of the block to the right with a good selection of machetes, but if you’re in the market for a bucket you’re gonna want to go to the store at the top of the hill.” I can’t decide whether it’s a good sign or not that I’m finding it increasingly easier to have a pleasant conversation with the Ni-Vans in Vila than with the tourists. Given the large number of white people to be found in the city, it’s a nice feeling to almost always be picked out as, and well-regarded as, Peace Corps by the locals. People on the street we’ve never seen before stop to strike up conversations, shop keepers offer us discounts. Villagers from Mangaliliu in town for the day shout greetings from passing buses and dash across busy streets to shake hands.
After enjoying my new found celebrity, I called it a day and headed back to the Peace Corps Office to use that marvel of modern technology, the internet. I’d put off a lot of my shopping and packing in favor to goofing off, and so I had a busy Monday slated for the next day.

A Picture Takes A Lot Longer to Upload Than a Thousand Words: The First Ever Photo Issue

So, now that I've left Mangaliliu, I think it's finally time I post some pictures of the place. Enjoy

My Host Family (Thelma and Wari are the parents. Coco is my older brother, Samuel is the younger, and Susan is my sister)

My House

Dining Room

Shower

Toilet

I'll add some more to this post shortly, but uploading takes forever, so it will have to wait for another day.

Life in the Ring of Fire Part 9: A Brush With Death

Sometimes it's hard to remember when I didn't watch the sunset over the Pacific Ocean every evening. On Monday my life had pretty devolved into that of a beach bum. Class had let out early because the people teaching us were as sick of it was we were. I spent a solid two and a half hours watching the sun's slow plunge into the ocean. It was a somewhat cloudy day, which always leads to better sunsets. Rays of sunlight wormed their way out of holes in the clouds, breaking free in fabulous multi-colored bursts. A rainbow was visible along the horizon, and as the sun neared the end of the journey it lit up low-hanging clouds like a Halloween jack-o-lantern. There's a tourism advertisement in Vila that I walk by every time I go in. It reads: “So many call it paradise, we call it home.” Paradise, I think, is a relative term. It's a place we can read about in travel books and sometimes visit for a few days when finances allow, but if you try to move in it inevitably turns into something of a drag. While watching the sunset, my gaze kept wandering back to the small coral road that separates the beach from the rest of the village. Like a thirsty man seeing mirages in the desert, phantom taco trucks kept passing in front of my eyes, dispensing greasy barbacoa tacos piled high with salsa and enormous glasses of iced tea.

As swearing-in approaches, training has taken on that listless feeling of the last week of class before summer vacation. We complain about being bored while at the same time resent being given anything to do. There's a general feeling that nothing that's going on is really going to count, like when you figure that the material covered in that very last class will probably only be worth one or two points on the final. I've come up with all kinds of elaborate plans of things to do once I get to site, few of which, I know, will ever become reality. On Tuesday, the village began constructing a stage for our swearing-in ceremony down on the beach. This seemed rather unnecessary, as there's already a rather nice shelter a mere ten feet away, where we've been having class ever since coming to the village.

On Wednesday we were slated for another trip into Vila to visit the teacher's college. However, only one bus showed up to take us, and so me and a few others had to ride in the back of the Peace Corps pick-ip truck. Now, by this point I'd ridden in the back of many a pick-up and was pretty well acquainted with the usual discomforts and dangers of traveling in the truck bed. I climbed in next to a big stack of luggage that other volunteers were having carried into Vila in preparation for next week's move-out. The truck was about to move out when we had to pick up a few more passengers that couldn't fit in the bus. “Danny,” said one of my trainers (Ni-Vans have a hard time with names not ending in vowels, so my name tends to devolve into Danny a few minutes after I introduce myself to anyone), “climb up on top of the luggage to make some more space.” I looked dubiously at the precariously tall stack of bags, just barely shorter than the roof of the cab of the truck. Being a good sport, however, I clambered up. “No, no,” said another one of the trainers, casually swinging himself into a seat on the roof of the cab, “sit up here with me.” Already in too deep, I climbed up on the cab with him, carefully noting the nice, smooth surface of the roof and the lack of anything, really, to keep me from being swept off the speeding truck, should, God forbid, the driver decide to make a turn. Or slow down, or speed up, or perform any of the activities that one normally associates with driving. Now fearing for my life, I clamped down on the metal bar which framed the back window of the cab with all the strength and determination of a main character of a bad action movie who is forced to cling desperately to the outside of a flying helicopter to prevent the evil-doers from making off with his sweetheart.
Fortunately, the driver handled the truck with the patience and care approximately equivalent to that of a teenager given permission to drive his father's Porsche on the autobahn, and the road connecting Mangaliliu with Vila only had slightly more craters and potholes than the surface of the moon. “Ow.” I said, as I was clocked by a low-hanging tree branch a few seconds after setting out. It was the only noise I was to make the entire journey, as I needed all the concentration I could muster to will myself not to die. Facing backwards as I was, I was torn as to whether or not I should keep an eye out over my shoulder on the road ahead. Doing this afforded me the benefit of seeing where we were going, allowing me to duck at the appropriate moment to avoid further trees. The downside, of course, was that I could see where we were going, and my brain definitely did not always appreciate being informed of the fact that, for example, we were descending the Hill of Death, a section of road almost steep enough to require ropes and harnesses, and that the truck was currently not showing any signs of possessing brakes. In the end, however, I did arrive at my destination, unharmed except for the fact that it would prove difficult for me to unclench my hands for several days.

At the teacher's college we sat in on a workshop being given by JICA, sort of like a Japanese Peace Corps, on early math education. The audience was mostly made up of current Ni-Van teachers. The main focus of the workshop was math teaching techniques, but it was obvious that a lot of teachers present also needed training in basic math. The most striking example of this was when they were covering perimeter. The presenter drew up a 3-4-5 right triangle and labeled the lengths of two of the sides, but left the third to be deduced. He asked the class what the perimeter of the triangle was (12). The class which, keep in mind, was composed of current math teachers, started shouting out random answers, ranging from 3 to 18. To solve this problem you need to know the Pythagorean theorem, which a lot of the teachers obviously didn't. That, however, wasn't what was surprising about the situation. The Pythagorean theorem is, after all, just a formula, something that you either happen to know or not. What was somewhat disturbing was the fact that most of the teachers didn't realize that they didn't have enough information to do the problem. Someone just piping up and saying “I don't know how to find the missing side” would have been a huge improvement over random guessing. Also, a lot of guesses just didn't make any sense. Guessing 3, for example, is obviously wrong as the sides whose lengths were given already added up to more than 3. All in all, a very interesting experience.

After our observation, we headed back to the Peace Corps office. The following day was Thanksgiving which, like Halloween, obviously isn't celebrated in Vanuatu. Also like Halloween, we decided that we were going to put on our own Thanksgiving party. I'd somehow been talked into volunteering to make the pumpkin pie along with Laura and McKenzie, and so I headed over to the supermarket to get supplies. A couple minutes after entering the store, I realized that it was going to be a difficult undertaking. A lot of key ingredients were missing, including, for one, pumpkin. There are a lot of things which are called “pumpkin” in Vanuatu (it's kind of like the generic name for all squash) and a selected a couple that looked vaguely like what I would call a pumpkin back home, hoping that them having an appearance similar to pumpkin would translate to them having a taste similar to pumpkin. Pie crusts were also lacking, and while I new that one could make them from scratch, I had no idea how to do this. Instead, we purchased a lot of danish butter cookies and a lot of margarine, hoping to make something similar to a graham cracker crust (there weren't any graham crackers, of course). There also weren't any pie dishes to be had which, I decided, would have to be a bridge we would cross when we came to it. Whipped cream deemed unnecessary, mostly because it cost about $10 a can, and these pies were already costing us about $40, mainly due to the fact that evaporated milk was $6 a can.

After class on Thursday, we set to work trying to craft a pumpkin pie. Class had gotten out early, which was good, because it quickly became clear that our cooking project was going to take forever. For starters, we needed to steam about 3 pounds of pumpkin over what amounted to little more than a camp stove. The crust also took a while, although it turned out pretty well, except for the fact that we ran out of margarine and had to borrow some from McKenzie's host family, making me feel somewhat bad about mooching things off of villagers in an underdeveloped country. The search for pie pans was also abandoned in favor of the more plentiful roasting dishes, meaning that our pumpkin pie would be rectangular. After the pumpkin was done steaming, we skinned it and mashed it. The recipe that I'd downloaded from the internet suggested using a Cuisinart for this, but we had to settle for forks. Finally, the batter was done and the pies were in the oven (a generous term for a small box with a butane burner in it), which didn't pack nearly enough of a punch because the pies were still good and liquidly a good ½ hour after the suggested cooking time had elapsed. Progress was also temporarily halted half way through as the oven ran out of fuel and we had to switch the operation of Ryan's family's oven. In the end, however, something similar to pumpkin pie (if a little undercooked) was produced.

That night's feast was awesome. I'd kind of forgotten what it was like to be in the presence of more delicious food than I could possibly eat. In lieu of turkey (only in America, sorry) one of our number had prepared an enormous rid-roast which, because a lot of our group are vegetarians, I got to eat most of. Nachos were also present which, being topped with both olives and guacamole, were probably the best thing I'd tasted in several months. After eating myself into oblivion, we watched “Charlie Brown Christmas,” which is always nice, and then hit the sack.

On Saturday, we took a field trip to Hat Island, which is a small island just off the coast of Mangaliliu, and is the last resting place of the infamous Roi Mata. According to custom, you're not supposed to make any loud noises on the island or else you'll either get permanently lost in the bush (an impressive feat on an island that you can walk across in less than 5 minutes), or the Ocean will become so choppy that you can't get back to the village. Someone must have been shouting up a storm the night before, because we woke to a rainy and windy morning. Now, in the US you might associate the words “rainy” and “windy” with the word “cold,” however, in Vanuatu this is not the case. As we are all learning, it is entirely possible for a day to be rainy and miserable and hot as all hell at the same time. At any rate, after a baking boat ride over to the island (how can it be baking if the sun's not out? I really have no idea, but it happens here), we paid our respects at Roi Mata's grave and then hit the beaches. Me and Dennis elected to go crab hunting along the coast with some of our Ni-Van guides. Crab hunting works as follows: you get a group of 8-year-olds to run along the rocks by the ocean and another group to follow along in the surf. Running along the rocks scares the crabs, causing them to scamper into the surf where they can be picked up and put into a rice sack. Me and Dennis' role in the whole thing was a little unclear. While the kids were quite adept at picking their way through the surf, trapping crabs underfoot and deftly nabbing them off the rocks, most of my energy was focused on trying not to slip on a rock and fall on my face. I think I probably was able to catch a grand total of two crabs during the whole hour-long expedition, but our guides came back carrying two bulging bags full.

While I'd been busy crab hunting, some others in our group had gone spear fishing and had brought in quite a haul. I was instructed to go get my pocket knife in order to learn how to scale and gut a fish. This turned out to be a lot easier than I expected, and soon we had a large pile fish ready for cooking. We made a fire on the beach and our guide demonstrated two fish-cooking methods. The larger fish we speared through the mouth with sticks and placed near the fire, kind of like roasting marshmallows. The smaller fish we wrapped in leaves and tossed in the coals. Limes were thoughtfully provided by the nearby lime tree and, although I definitely could have gone for a garlic or onion patch or something, it was probably some of the best fish I'd had since entering the country. For a place completely surrounded by ocean, I'd been eating a shockingly large amount of canned tuna.

Upon returning from Hat Island, we discovered that we were down another man. Dale, who'd been down with a bad infection for the past few days, had decided to call it and had been moved to a hotel in Vila until he was well enough to catch a plane home. I don't think I'll ever get used to people in our group going home. The speed at which Peace Corps gets people packed and out of here has such disturbing finality to it. It kind if makes me feel like a contestant on Survivor, anxiously waiting to see who's going to be voted off next.

On Sunday we all chartered a bus into Vila to say goodbye to Dale but, as usual, the bus was late in coming to pick us up and so we were left with some free time in the “city.” I can tell I'm starting to go local because every time I go into Vila I feel like I have less and less I want to do there. At the beginning, I'd spend hours on the computer and almost as long in the grocery store considering what snacks to buy. Now, I go head out to a restaurant for a quick burger and fries, quickly download my emails, and grab a couple bags of chips. The whole process probably takes me less than half an hour, and I'm left sitting idly around the Peace Corps office looking for something to do.

Upon our return from Vila, we were informed of the presence of a tropical depression in the area when the sky opened up and an almost biblical amount of rain was dumped on Mangaliliu. The roads quickly turned into muck and I arrived back at my house looking like I'd fallen into a very muddy lake. The tin roof of my house was pleasantly waterproof, but translated the falling rain into a deafening roar over which it was almost impossible to hear anyone talk. I'd just settled in to watch a nice Chinese bootleg DVD with my host siblings when Ryan appeared in my doorway, shirtless and soaking, to inform me that his family was throwing him a going-away party and that a plethora of cheese-garlic bread, pasta with tomato sauce, French fries, and Champagne (which, we later learned, Ryan's host papa had to bribe a shopkeeper into selling him on a Sunday) was available for our consumption. It was quite the night, listening to nature vent its fury while eating wonderful (at least, relatively speaking) American food and drinking Champagne. I had no idea what was on the slate for the following day, but I prayed it wasn't more class.

Life in the Ring of Fire Part 8: First Casualty OR There's a lot of Important People Here, Could you Please Put on a Shirt?

Monday training switched up a bit. We were now in “technical training week,” during which we were supposed to be learning practical skills. I'm not entirely sure why we weren't doing practical skills from the beginning, but whatever. We started off the morning with everyone talking briefly about their sites. It was cool to hear what everyone had to say about their walkabout experiences. As it turned out, I had a pretty deluxe site. Twenty-four hour electricity alone was a rare commodity. The week after walkabout, we were told, is generally a time when a lot of people re-assess their ability to do Peace Corps, and some people go home. There were certainly some volunteers in our group that had had a tough time. Boredom was a common complaint. We'd all thought that life on Efate was pretty damn slow, but compared to the pace of things on the outer islands, Efate moves at a break-neck pace. The two volunteers who had gone to Tanna were particularly hard-hit by this. Like I've mentioned before, Tanna is a very traditional island, where people still live off the land more or less like they've been doing for the past few thousand years. Also, since Tanna is a volcanic island (as in, it still has an active volcano on it) the soil is ridiculously rich and thus living off the land doesn't take much effort. “People in my village literally do nothing.” Chris, one of the Tanna volunteers, told us. It's difficult, especially for Americans, who are used to hectic lives and often would jump at the chance of doing nothing for a while, to anticipate just how trying boredom can be on a person. It's something we've all dealt with somewhat since coming here, and I think we've all more or less come to the conclusion that doing nothing is only fun when there's something that you should be doing.

Another volunteer had come back literally covered with mosquito bites, to the point that one of the Peace Corps nurses suspected that she'd caught chicken pocks, and was determined not to return to her site. At first, I though this was something of an extreme response to a mosquito problem, but then I remembered back to some stretches of the AT that I'd been through where I was being swarmed by mosquitoes and wanted nothing more than to book it out of there.

After debriefing, we split into our assignment groups. The Vanuatu education project has three branches: Teacher Trainers, Math and Science Teachers, and Rural Trainers (kind of like vocational school teachers). I am one of three math and science teachers, which put me in a group learning various math-teaching techniques led by a volunteer who's been teaching here for a year and uses the f-word at least once per sentence. These math-specific classes were a little more entertaining and potentially useful than a lot of trainings that we'd had, which was good. That night me, Ryan, and Alyssa stayed up waiting for Elin, the last of our number, to return from site. Flights off her island had been canceled indefinitely because nobody wanted to cut the grass on the runway, and thus it had become unusable. She ended up having to take a boat to another island and a plane from there back to Efate. She didn't get back to Mangaliliu until 9 or so at night, but had managed to bring home 10 beers from Luganville. Of course, lukewarm beers are a crime against humanity, so we still needed a source for ice, but at least we were halfway there.

I'd received a few mosquito bites while in Malakula, and I had made the mistake of scratching one open. While, normally, this might not be that big a deal, you have to remember that bacteria, like people, also need a place to go on vacation, and Vanuatu is one of their favorite spots. The tiniest cut or nick, if not soaked in iodine and smothered in antibiotic ointment, will quickly turn into an enormous, gaping, pussy, fly-infested hole that takes weeks to close up. We're actually issued oral antibiotics in case we contract blood infections from scrapes. This is, we were told, not that uncommon an occurrence. At any rate, my tiny mosquito bite had blossomed into such a monstrosity, and so I lathered up in iodine and squeezed out the contents of several ointment packets before heading to class. I think we'd all started counting down the days until swearing in. I was getting tired of being stuck in the limbo of the training village and took to occupying my time by planning out home improvements, culinary exploits, pastimes, and hobbies to try once I got to site. The first two months after swearing in, December and January, are school holidays and are supposed to the be the most mind-numbingly boring times we were to encounter, so I figured I'd need some entertainment ideas at my disposal.

On Wednesday Ryan's host papa was headed to Vila, and so we arranged for him to purchase some ice and more beer for us, so we'd have a good collection of cold beer for Thursday night (and yes, planning parties for Thursday nights still reminds me of Princeton). On Thursday afternoon, however, we suffered out first casualty. Samantha, who'd been attacked by mosquitoes on walkabout, hadn't been able to convince Peace Corps to change her site, and so decided to head back to the states. In a surprising turn of events for Vanuatu, Peace Corps was shockingly efficient at getting her out of the village and on a plane as soon as possible. We cost them money every day we're in country, so I guess they don't want us hanging out any longer than necessary once we've decided to call it quits. They had her packed up and headed to Vila before lunch, and she was slated to fly out on Saturday. We all said our goodbyes, had a group hug, and went through the other standard niceties. The whole thing was actually surprisingly depressing. We'd all developed a pretty strong sense of family within our group, and seeing someone go got a lot of us down.

Thursday afternoon our village had a taboo ceremony. A variety of sea slugs, giant clams, and other assorted ocean mollusks were being released on the reef just offshore of Mangaliliu and the chief was declaring the whole area closed to fishing (taboo) until they had a chance to repopulate. A bunch of chiefs from a variety of nearby villages came to give speeches, as well as representatives from various sea-related government ministries and organizations. I was sitting on the beach with Ryan, watching the proceedings. One of our trainers wandered up to us. “There's a lot of important people here today,” he said, addressing Ryan, “could you please put on a shirt?”

In addition to giving speeches, an important part of any ceremony in Vanuatu is killing a pig. It's kind of like how no agreement in the US is official unless everyone has signed the contract. Here nothing is official unless a pig has been clubbed over the head with a wooden mallet. Needless to say, if you're a pig, Vanuatu would definitely not be the place to raise your children. Also an integral part of any ceremony, kava and food were served and we all partook. After dinner we headed over to Ryan's house to enjoy some frosty brews. It's amazing how something as simple as frozen water can seem so wondrous and amazing. Like taking a hot bucket shower on a cold morning, drinking a cooler full of frosty beers represented an almost criminal-seeming defiance of the second law of thermodynamics, for which I expected to be reprimanded by the entropy police at any moment.

Saturday we were slated to go into Vila for a cultural festival and to watch a FIFA World Cup qualifier match between Vanuatu and New Zealand. Unfortunately, this meant we had to catch a bus into Vila at 7 in the morning, which was starting to seem earlier and earlier as I got more and more used to sleeping through the roosters and dog fights which take place in the early hours of the morning. The cultural festival involved a display of custom dance and dress, and, surprise, surprise, the killing of a pig (our chief's second pig of the week), and kava. Given Vanuatu's heinously hot and humid climate, “custom dress” is usually more or less equivalent to “naked.” Those of you who've been to Disney World have no doubt noted the peculiar European tendency to wear slacks and long-sleeved shirts no matter the circumstances, as it is always possible to pick out the tourists from Europe in the sweltering south Florida sun by the in appropriateness of their clothing. One can image their reaction when they came to Vanuatu and saw the scantily clad natives. “But of course!” They said, slapping themselves on their foreheads, “When it's HOT we can wear LESS clothing!” However, rather than admit this rather embarrassing centuries-long oversight, they decided instead to use their cannons to force the hapless Ni-Vans to share their mistake. Probably the most infamous member (no pun intended) of the Ni-Van custom dress code is the “namba,” which is a woven grass tube that men use to cover their penises. These are fastened to the body using grass rope around the waist. Another grass rope is used to secure the namba to the stomach, permanently in the up position. Apparently the penis was the only body part deemed necessary to cover, as all other clothing is lacking aside from the namba and two pieces of rope (try that one out for “Three Pieces of Clothing Night”). On Malakula, variation in namba size led to the creation of two quarrelsome tribes: the “Big Nambas,” or “Overcompensaters,” and the “Small Nambas,” or “Those Comfortable with Their Manhood.” Over the centuries both tribes gained reputations as fierce warriors, despite their relative nakedness, and were responsible for the consumption of many a missionary and slaver.

After the festival, we headed over to the stadium for the game. One of our number had taken the opportunity to stock up on wine to take back to the training village and was carrying it around with her in her backpack. At the gate, our bags were searched and she was told she couldn't take her wine inside the stadium. “I won't drink it inside,” she promised. “Well, OK,” said the security guard. I love Vanuatu. To be honest I was surprised they even bothered to hire security. Not going to lie, I was a little disappointed to see the Vanuatu national team wearing regular soccer jerseys. I was secretly hoping that instead of the standard polypropylene jerseys, that they'd be decked out in matching Hawaiian shirts (the style of choice for Vanuatu) with their numbers in acrylic on the back. Vanuatu put up quite a good fight, but ended up loosing 2-1 in the last five minutes of the game. To be honest, however, both team's play was a little disappointing, nowhere near as fluid, organized, or impressive as soccer I was used to watching. I guess that's what you get when you only watch the world cup games.

Two of our group had birthdays on Saturday, so that night we arranged to stay in Vila for dinner and cocktails. A good time was had by all and we wrapped up the night with our usual bonfire on the beach. We only had a few weekends left together as a training group and we had to live them up. Sunday I slept until 10:30, a record for me in Vanuatu and spent most of the rest of the day laying in my hammock. All in all, a weekend well spent.

Life in the Ring of Fire Part 7: Malakula

Monday, my first day of class at site, I awoke to the sound of people beating on empty metal gas canisters, the first bell, signifying that school was to start in half and hour. For breakfast I had freshly baked bread, which I was to discover was made by my uncle in a large stone oven. The oven was about as big as I was with a small opening for baking. The interior is filled up with hot coals, which they let burn out, thus heating up the stone. Then they scrape out the ashes and put the bread in to bake. It comes out quite delicious, and I was definitely looking forward to swinging by ever y morning during service to score some hot bread. After breakfast, I made my way to the school, which was only a 5 minute walk away. It wasn't long before I was put on the spot: the entire school had been gathered in one of the classrooms for an assembly. I was introduced and asked to give a short toktok (speech). This went over fairly smoothly. To be honest, I don't think it would have mattered what I said. After the assembly I went to observe year 8. The Ni-Vanuatu education system is weird. Anyone who can pay school fees is welcome to attend years 1-8. However, after year 8, there is a national exam. Students that do well enough on the exam can go on to years 9-10, where they must take another exam to get into years 11-12, where they have another exam to get into year 13, where they sit a final exam to go on to University. If a student fails one of these exams, they're out of the school system. They are not offered to chance to make up the grade and then re-take the test. To be fair, however, the school system really does lack the resources necessary to accommodate students repeating a grade. In any case, the year 8 exam was only a week away and so the kids were having a review week. This was more or less the worst time for me to come observe, as all that was happening was that the kids were taking practice tests. Unfortunately, the year 7 class was also doing a review because, even though they weren't sitting a national exam, they still had a school-wide test. I would later learn from another volunteer that teachers will often use the excuse of doing review to get out of teaching.

The school itself was very surreal. The buildings were mostly made of bamboo, with cement floors and tin roofs. Most of the cement floors, however, were cracked or contained large holes. The tin roofs also meant that the building heated up like nothing else during the afternoon. I made a mental note that when I was teaching we would be having class outside as frequently as possible. The photocopier at the school (well, I guess at least they have one) was out of toner, and a new cartridge wouldn't be in until January, so the teacher had to write test questions on the board for students to copy onto their papers and then answer. Ni-Van students are obsessed with copying. From my time observing class in Vila, I had gathered that most of the early grades consisted entirely of copying material into notebooks from the board, so I guess by the time they get to year 8 they're really good at it. I saw the whole class spending all kinds of time painstakingly making pen borders for their papers, copying the figures and text perfectly and neatly, and then not answering the question. Talk about taking “neatness counts” to the next level. Unlike in Vila, however, the students in Tautu school all suffered from crippling shyness. The class was usually very quiet, and calling on a student to answer a question usually prompted them to very purposefully look at the floor and mumble.

Since there was nothing being taught, I didn't get a chance to teach a class, but the year 8 teacher did ask me to write up some practice test questions about perimeter, area, and volume. I came up with about 15 questions and wrote them up on the board. The students dutifully copied my crooked figures (I decided neatness doesn't count for teachers) onto their papers, drew their borders, and got to work. After about an hour, everyone handed their tests into me. I looked over them and graded them quickly. Out of fifteen, I think the highest score was 3. Obviously something had gone wrong somewhere. I looked through the papers again and saw what the problem was: most of the figures that I'd given them to find the perimeter, area, and volume of usually weren't fully labeled. That is, I didn't specifically write down the side lengths of each side, but left some sides blank to be deduced from properties of the shape (ie. I drew a square and labeled the length of only one side). What had happened was this: to find perimeter the kids added together whatever numbers I had happened to write down, and for volume and area they'd multiplied them. I was at something of a loss for words.

When the year 8 teacher came back, I handed him the tests and asked him “Do the kids speak English?” (all classes are given in English). “Some do, but not very well.” Right. The teacher looked over the scores of the students and proceeded to scold them for their poor marks and not working hard enough. That was probably the worst I'd felt in a long time. “It's not their fault!” I wanted to shout, because it obviously wasn't. They were being tested on something which they had not properly learned. The point that had been repeated so many times in training about not jumping in and starting to do things too quickly was finally driven home. For the rest of my time in Tautu I refused all requests to make up test questions.

After school I went down to the cool of the beach to read before heading back home to socialize at the nakamal. In stark contrast to Mangaliliu, where a swarm of people would follow me wherever I went, I was more or less left alone as I sat on the beach. It was a very nice experience, and I hadn't realized how much I missed it, but it also left me somewhat concerned that maybe everyone else had run inland to avoid a tsunami or something and had forgotten to tell me and that I was about to be washed away by some enormous wave.

On Tuesday I went to school in the morning, but left after the lunch break because I was getting really bored of watching kids take tests. I walked up to the town of Norsup to get a look at the hospital and the cattle plantation that was supposedly nearby and was rumored to sell beef for $3 a kilo (BBQ, here I come). On the way, I ran into the French Army, who had apparently decided to come on over from New Caledonia in order to build a branch on the University of the South Pacific on Malakula. There did indeed seem to be some sort of structure under construction, but to be honest it looked more like I'd wondered onto the set of a porn movie. There were a large number of well-muscled Frenchmen wandering around wearing shorts that extended maybe 2 inches down their legs, and no shirts. I even saw a couple cowboy hats. Most everyone was carrying around a hammer or some sort of construction implement, but no one really seemed to be doing any actual work. It was all I could do not to point and laugh. I would later hear about the French at the nakamal. Some of the villagers in Tautu had been hired to cook for the soldiers and were criticizing the French for constantly complaining about the food they were served, and always demanding something different. Even those villagers who had not been hired to cook were generally annoyed that the French would never even try to respond to them when they greeted them on the road (keep in mind that because of the joint colonial rule of both the French and English, a good number of them do, indeed, speak French). As I cleared the Army base and continued up the road to Norsup, two kids came up to me and asked “Are you one Army?” “No,” I said, “I'm Peace Corps.” We're more polite and our shorts are longer.

On Wednesday I went with my host mama to a nearby town to see a wedding. This wedding was honestly one of the most depressing things I'd seen in a long time. A lot of marriages in Vanuatu are arranged, and it was obvious that both of these (it was a double marriage) had been. Both couples acted like awkward middle-schoolers at their first dance. When they were sitting next to each other, they looked very painstakingly in opposite directions. Their vows were said in a whisper, all while avoiding eye contact. Needless to say, there was no kissing. After the church ceremony there was the exchanging of the yams. In order to get married in Vanuatu, the groom must “buy” the bride from her family. Traditionally, this is done with a combination of either woven mats, pigs, or yams (although the more modern man might pay currency, or even phone cards). These families had decided to go the yam route. Now, when you picture a yam, you no doubt image the small, potato-like tuber you regularly encounter at the grocery store. Sure, it's a little goofy looking, maybe a little longer and pointer than the average potato, but it's something that's definitely recognizable as having originated on Earth. What they don't tell you, however, is that these are domesticated yams. House yams, if you will. These yams have been to several weeks of obedience school and have properly learned how to heel and not poop on the floor. In Vanuatu they have wild yams, and wild yams are about as similar to domesticated yams as Alaskan timber wolves are similar to those little fur-puff dogs that yap a lot. When I exited the church and went to explore the village I, for the first time, witnessed the awesome power of the yam. This yam was so huge (no joke) that it rested on the shoulders of no less than 8 grown men. It had also long ago decided to leave behind the all-to-constraining basically-cylindrical shape of the basic yam and branch out with a large number of enormous bulbous protrusions that looked like some sort of alien egg-pod from which, at any moment, a small yellow creature would emerge, latch onto my face, and slurp my brains out through my nose like a 7-11 slushy. A complicated bamboo support structure had been constructed around the yam to provide support to these protrusions so they would not fall off during the transport process. It was probably the most intricate and impressive piece of engineering I'd seen since entering the country.

Still recovering from my close encounter with The Yam, I took a seat under a tree with Andy and David and sampled some Ni-Van wedding cake which was, I gotta say, not very good. We watched everyone shower the unhappy newlyweds in talcum powder, because, I guess, they'd used up all the rice making the wedding lunch. After lunch (which consisted of rice, and not much else) we dropped off Andy at the airport, as he was going to visit a girl he'd met in Luganville. The plane, we were informed, was late, so we headed over to the waiting room, which was the beautiful sand beach directly across the road from the airport. Aside from the risk of firebombings, I think I can learn to love Ni-Van airports.

On Thursday, I had my first opportunity to observe a science class. The class was mysteriously titled “Basic Science,” which was helpful in that it gave absolutely no hint as to what would be taught. They, of course, were doing review tests, but I took the opportunity to look through the course books while the students copied from the board. The lesson books were literally packed full of experiments that the students were supposed to perform. Some of them were simple enough, but many required materials that were clearly not available at Tautu school, if even in Vanuatu. One experiment called for dry ice, another for a variety of glass lenses. “Do you have the materials to do these experiments?” I asked the teacher. As expected, he told me that, no, they did not. I asked him how they dealt with this. “Well, we just have the students memorize the experimental setup and the results that you would get if you were to do it.” I had to check to make sure my mouth wasn't hanging open. I was almost tempted to try and explain that this completely missed the point of science as a discipline (that, in fact, this was almost the opposite of science), but I remembered my experience with the practice test I'd written and so I kept quiet.

Friday was my last night in Malakula, and I was not feeling very excited to go back to training. After being kept on a tight leash for almost two months, it was such a relief to be cut loose on my own, if even for a week. In celebration of my departure, however, my host papa broke into a freshly brewed batch of home brew. Home brew, which, I guess, is basically moonshine, is the alcoholic drink of choice in Vanuatu, considering how expensive store bought alcohol is. Some home brew is simply sugar water into which bread yeast has been dumped and then let sit for 2 weeks. My host papa, however, had taken things up a notch. He had used actual brewer's yeast (bread yeast home brew, I'm told, tastes disturbingly like bread) and coconut water to add some flavor. I'd heard from other volunteers that pineapple and mango also make good additions. I had been warned against the awful taste of home brew, and so I was pleasantly surprised when it did not, in fact, taste like ass. It actually probably tasted about a thousand times better than kava. I made a note to myself to look into making my own home brew for my time at site.

Saturday I met up with Laura and McKenzie, the other two volunteers that had flown in with me, and we went through the same haphazard airport procedures as we had on our outbound journey, except made all the more ridiculous by the fact that they were taking place in a building which had been firebombed and never repaired. Instead of collecting the luggage that we were checking, we were instructed to place it ourselves on the luggage cart to be taken to the place. The plopped my bag down and was instantly rewarded with a lot of violent squawking. It was then that I realized that someone on the flight had decided to check a burlap sack full of live chickens. Thus intrigued, I took a closer look at what other passengers were checking and discovered a large number of yams (nothing like The Yam, of course, but yams nonetheless), and a number of kava roots, which look kind of like yams, except they smell a lot worse.

It was raining, so we were all glad of the concrete runway when our plane was actually able to take off somewhat on time. Back in Vila, the “big city,” if you will, we headed back to the Peace Corps office. Some other volunteers were already back from walkabout and while we waited to head back to the village more trickled in. I felt pretty lucky that I had enjoyed my time at my site. Some people looked mighty shell-shocked, and some people even looked to have lost a good deal of weight. That night, Ryan, Alyssa, and Evelyn invited me to stay in Vila with them to recover before heading back to the village on Sunday. I didn't really feel like I had anything to recover from, but I took them up on it, and it was good to have one last night of cold beer before returning to the prohibition zone of our training village. Sunday we got a ride back to Mangaliliu and, after talking briefly with my host family and other volunteers that I hadn't managed to run into yet, I slept most of the day. Over dinner, one of our number was telling us about his experience in middle-bush Tanna. Middle-bush Tanna is one of the few places in Vanuatu where traditional life still prevails. People still follow their old customs, live off the bush, and have little need to currency or other niceties of western civilization. Upon his arrival in Tanna he was instantly given a custom name, because, obviously, his western name of "Noa" would not fly in middle-bush. Thus, the people of his village proudly dubbed him "Tom."

One of the staff informed us that we were a record breaking group: all of us made it to walkabout on time (ie. no flights were canceled) and only one person was still stuck at site, Elin, whom we all felt sorry for and looked forward to seeing on Monday.

Life in the Ring of Fire Part 6: A Change of Pace

My last week in Mangaliliu kicked off, as usual, with class. By this point, all of us had gotten quite sick of going to class and really wanted to either get to site or just hang out in the village. We were, however, given an interesting lecture (there's usually one really good one a week) about land in Vanuatu. When Vanuatu gained independence, all land in the country was supposed to return to its “custom” owner. Meaning the village, tribe, family, etc. that had owned it before the colonial government. The problem with this, as you might be able to guess, is that it's often not easy to figure out who the custom owner of a piece of land is. All history is oral history and is thus prone to the usual inaccuracies or has been forgotten. Because of this, almost all court cases currently under consideration in Vanuatu are with regards to land. There has even been some violence around Vanuatu related to land disputes. To me, however, what's more troubling is the growing problem of development. Land developers are starting to push pretty hard, especially on the island of Efate, to buy up land from the Ni-Vanuatu. Developers will often offer something on the order of $20,000 for a stretch of beach. This is a huge sum of money for most people and sadly, this has tempted many Ni-Vans to sell their land. We're actually in the middle of such a land crisis right now in Mangaliliu. There are developers pushing to try to make a resort down by Mangas beach, our favored weekend getaway and historical site of Chief Roi Mata's village, as well as up by Survivor beach. This involves both cutting large roads near Mangas as well as through many of the villager's gardens. The potential destruction of an important cultural site aside, I personally would be quite upset to see such a nice and peaceful stretch of beach turned into a resort. Fortunately, the chief of Mangaliliu has block land sales. Unfortunately, some of the developers have been trying to go behind his back and get people to sell anyway. In one such incident, an Australian got one of the villagers good and drunk in Vila and talked him into selling the island on which Roi Mata is buried. Oops. On Monday one of the villagers was driving through town showing off his new truck, the obvious conclusion being that he'd sold some land in order to be able to afford it.

It's a difficult road to walk, because many Ni-Vans welcome the opportunity to sell their land in order to buy cars, generators, TVs, etc. and it's not really our place to tell them that they shouldn't. On the other hand, Vanuatu sometimes seems like a house of cards ready to fall over. The selling of land breaks up village communities as people move to the cities. However, it is the strength of village communities that holds back problems such as hunger, poverty, and homelessness. The influx of money into a community from land sales often also disrupts the power of the local chiefs. However, in the absence of any law enforcement, Vanuatu relies on chiefs to maintain order in the outer islands. To me, it seems impossible that unchecked development can continue without causing major problems in the country, possibly leading to instability such as that found in Fiji, The Soloman Islands, or PNG. I sometimes feel stuck in the classic “the grass is always greener” problem: Ni-Vans envy the amenities and luxuries of a more developed country, while I envy the peacefulness and freedom of their life.

On Wednesday we got our final site announcements. Granted, I'd pretty much known where I was going for several weeks, but it was nice to get it in writing. My next two years are indeed slated to be spent on the island of Malakula, the second-largest in the country. Those of you familiar with romance languages can probably recognize the peculiarity of this name: “mala” meaning “bad” and “kula” meaning “ass.” Why would you name an island “Pain in the Ass?” you might ask. The story goes that French missionaries arrived on the island and began preaching to the natives. The natives, however, did not appreciate this very much and rather wished that the French would leave. However, they considered it rude to ask visitors to leave, and so they took the passive-aggressive route. They tricked the missionaries into using poisonous leaves as toilet paper, giving them all nasty rashes on their butts. The French left, cursing the island and giving it its name. Granted, this story is widely believed to be apocryphal, but even if it's not true, it certainly should be.

Aside from having an interesting name, Malakula is also known as the island where the most recent incidence of cannibalism took place, back in the 1960s. The implication of this fact, of course, is that there's a possibility that some of the people present at this nefarious cook-out might still be around and thus I might get the opportunity to ask if people do indeed taste like chicken. Cannibalism, like many of Vanuatu's customs, was something the missionaries decided had to go, if not from personal distaste, then at least over concerns for personal safety, as visiting Europeans were often the ones that went into the cooking pot. I gotta say, it is pretty tempting to side with the missionaries on this one. However, given that the diseases brought over by Europeans would eventually wipe out something like 80% of the native population (a loss which Vanuatu's population has yet to recover from), and that Ni-Vans were routinely taken as slaves to work on plantations in Australia or PNG, maybe the natives had the right idea on this one.

Wednesday was also Halloween, a holiday which is very much non-existent in Vanuatu. However, given that Wednesday was Vila day and we weren't back in the village until late, we decided to postpone the whole affair until Thursday, which was actually kind of fitting because (due to the ever-confusing international dateline) it was still Wednesday, and thus Halloween, in the US. While in Vila, I took the opportunity to stock up on chocolate and purchase a pumpkin from the outdoor market. Unlike in the US, where one must traipse through a hot, dusty, picked-over, pumpkin patch looking for that perfect pumpkin, only to discover that it costs upwards of $20, in the market pumpkins were littering the floors and cost about an average of a dollar a piece. Interestingly enough, at the French supermarket in town they also sell pumpkins, which they purchase from the outdoor market and resell a mere 100 yards away for several dollars more. Having procured my pumpkin, I noticed that something wonderful had happened: pineapple season had begun. The market was absolutely crawling with pineapples. I immediately purchased the biggest one I could find (it was probably actually bigger than the pumpkin I bought), and struck out for the Peace Corps office, an enormous piece of produce clutched precariously under each arm.

Thursday afternoon, we led the village kids in pumpkin carving in which, just like kids in the US, they quickly lost interest. The mamas, in turn, seemed very perplexed as to why you would want to do anything with a pumpkin besides eat it. I was forced to concede that this was indeed something of a valid point. More interest was garnered by the pinyata and the trick-or-treating, thus proving the fact that eating chocolate and hitting things with sticks transcend cultural boundaries. One of the more crafts-y members of our group rigged up a pinyata with cardboard and starch paper. It was a little overly reinforced, however, and proved to be resistant to the best attempts of all the village children as well as the chief, the Peace Corps country director, and other prominent community members. The village children were probably even more desirous of candy than kids in the US, if this is possible, and the ground was cleared of candy mere milliseconds after we had to rip the pinayta open. For trick-or-treating, we all set up mats around the community center, taught the kids how to say “trick-or-treat” and, of course, “thank you,” and had them make the rounds collecting candy. They quickly discovered what every American kid eventually discovers: that if you can hit house two, or even three, times you can vastly increase your candy haul. Unfortunately for them, this doesn't work too well when there are only about 20 kids in the village and they're all trick-or-treating in an area about the size of a soccer field. We decided to humor them, however, and everyone had good time. Tomorrow morning we heard reports that many kids, and even some mamas, had earned themselves horrible stomach aches from eating too much candy the night before.

Friday, tensions in our training group were palpable as people were more or less done with classes and anxious to get out to site. The day seemed to drag on forever, but finally we wrapped up and I threw some items into my hiking bag to take with on my week long expedition. Me and some friends spent our last night hanging out at Ryan's house playing spades (card games get a lot of face time in the training village). We were going to call it a night, it being around 9:30 and well past our bedtime, but, out of the blue, Ryan's host papa showed up from Vila with 10 cold Tuskers (the national beer of Vanuatu, named after the infamous twisted pig's tusks which are a symbol of wealth) and a bag of ice, both precious commodities in Mangaliliu. Thus, I ended up not getting home until midnight, which was nice considering I had to wake up at 4am the next day to catch my 6:45 flight.

Checking in for a flight in Vanuatu was a real treat. I handed them my ticket in exchange of a small slip of paper on which was scribbled a few incomprehensible words. This, it was explained, was my boarding pass. My luggage was weighed, and then I was motioned on to the scale. I saw a clerk carefully writing down the weight of everything going on the plane. I guess every ounce (or, should I say, gram) counts when you're flying a plane about the size of a SUV. I sure hoped the scale was accurate. There was a security check, which consisted of a guy handing out blue tags with the word “SECURITY” printed on them, which we were instructed to attach to our bags to show that they had cleared the security check. The plane took off more or less on time, which was kind of shocking considering how long everything takes around here, and landed a short 45 minutes later. I say short because, of course, I slept through the entirety of it. The airport in Norsup was very modern, by Vanuatu standards, meaning that it had a paved runway. This will definitely be a plus in the future when I'm trying to travel and won't have to worry about flights being canceled because the runway (ie. field) is too muddy, or some guy was too lazy to get out and mow the grass. The airport building also looked fairly modern, being a reasonably-sized concrete structure with a metal roof. It probably would've looked nicer, however, if it didn't have the appearance of being recently firebombed. A lot of the roof was missing, most of the walls were covered with scorch marks, and some walls had big holes in them. Later on, I was to find out that the reason that the airport looked like it had been firebombed was because it had been firebombed. By the chief of my village. Or possibly the guy who owns the electronics store, as part of a land dispute. We (I shared a flight over with 2 other volunteers who will be posted near me) were greeted by some of the current Malakula volunteers at the airport and taken to a pickup truck, where I met my host papa. We piled into the truck and were driven to our respective sites.

My site is situated more or less between Norsup, where the hospital and provincial education office are located, and Lakatoro, where the general store is. My village is called Tautu which, together with Lakatoro and Norsup, sort of forms a tri-village area in north-central Malakula. The whole area is covered in coconut plantations, as the main cash-crop is copra, a coconut derivative. There's a large dirt and coral road which runs up and down the eastern coast, and it is pretty big and well-maintained. Tautu is a fairly large village, and has such deluxe amenities as cell phone service (stay posted for my cell number) and 24 hour electricity. The village is very pretty and, although it is sweltering hot, there's a nice breeze coming off the ocean pretty much 24-7 which cools things down nicely. The general store in Lakatoro sells cold beer and cheese, the two staples of life, and is a short $1 truck ride to get to.

My host family had a fairly nice house, although it wasn't fully finished yet, so all the walls and floors were bare cement. The crowning glory, though, was that I walked in to find three ENORMOUS pineapples sitting on the dinning table. I instantly felt at home. After eating pineapple, I slept for most of the day, and actually slept through the tour of the village my papa had offered to give me. I woke to the sounds to kava being made outside. As it turned out, my papa runs a nakamal and sells kava. Now, this is both good and bad. The plus side is that my house is more or less like a bar, and if I want to meet people and get to know the community it's no more difficult than chilling in my front yard. The downside, of course, is that drinking kava is a gastrointestinal feat of endurance that my green American stomach is not yet really up to. I do, however, get free kava, as my host papa was quick to inform me that the kava business is in the family and that I should never attempt to pay him.

That night, in addition to a lot of random community/family members, I met the chief (who seemed really nice, all allegations of firebombing aside) and Andy and David, two Americans from Oklahoma who were actually brother and father, respectively, to a past Peace Corps volunteer and who came to visit Vanuatu and were never really able to leave. My host papa filled me in that they'd been spending about half their time in Vanuatu for the past few years. It was definitely nice to have some other English speakers to talk to, and I also had an opportunity to show off my Bislama, as Andy and David had been in the country for a good deal longer than me, and yet I had picked up more of the language.

Sunday I headed to church, where I stood outside the door and shook hands with about a billion people after the service. Much like Sundays in the training village, me and my family spent most of the afternoon by the beach, where I read a lot. I also got to take a look at my house-to-be, which was about 20 feet away from the beach. I was very excited to see the house. It had a raised cement floor, which is always a plus as it keeps the bugs out, but the walls and roof were made from local materials, which are a lot cooler during the daytime than the more “deluxe” tin roofs. I also have legit power outlets, not just the more typical power strips hanging precariously down from the ceiling. There's also theoretically running water because some guy from Israel came through a few years back and offered to install and electric pump and plumbing system if the village made him a chief. This seemed like a pretty good deal to the people of Tautu, so they let him kill a pig (the official chief-making pastime) and he, as promised, installed the water system. The only problem is that the electric pump, of course, runs on electricity, a lot of electricity, and the village soon racked up an electric bill in the tens of thousands of dollars. Obviously, they couldn't pay the bill, so the power company cut off service to the pump until the outstanding bill is paid. According to the villagers this should happen sometime in December, maybe before I come back, but based on my experience in Vanuatu I'm gonna go ahead and guess that it will be more around the time our sun collapses, sending billowing clouds of hot gases outwards, burning the surface of earth to a crisp, and making the whole issue moot. Not that I'm becoming cynical. Fortunately, I have a rain cistern to hold me over until them.