We kicked off the week with a lesson in chicken killing. Personally, I think it was just arranged just to give the rest of the village a chance to laugh at us. In Vanuatu, you don't keep your chickens in a pen or anything, you just let them wander around. This means that when you want to catch them, you have to run them down. This is a lot harder than it seems. I always had this mental image of chickens as fat stupid birds which had somehow narrowly avoided the evolutionary chopping block. This lesson quickly dissuaded me of that notion, because, while in the US chickens that you see may be fat and dim, wild chickens are FAST, and they can fly. Yes, chickens can fly. You guys may already be aware of this, but I certainly wasn't. They can't fly very high, or very far, but they can certainly fly over your head as you try to corner them against a house. So, imagine 23 Peace Corps volunteers running around the village chasing some frantically squawking chickens and failing miserably at catching them while all the villagers stood by doubled over in laughter. We had about 3 false starts where our chickens got completely away from us and booked it for the bush and we had to wait for them to wander back. Finally, some of the village kids took pity on us and caught them for us. Next obstacle was killing the chickens. When I first heard about this exercise, I was a little doubtful of my willingness to kill a chicken, but a few days prior I was trying to walk to class and was attacked by a chicken that got it my way. It was screaming and flapping its wings and trying to peck me and I instantly lost all sympathy for chickens. It also doesn't help their cause that the roosters wake me up every morning at 5am. Anyway, I actually did pretty well killing my chicken, unlike some members of my group, and after one good smack against a tree it was over. One particularly unfortunate volunteer tried to break his chicken's neck with a windmilling motion but he didn't do it hard enough or something, so he ended up with a squawking, flailing, bleeding ball of feathers that escaped and had to be re-run down. I de-feathered mine, which was an enormous pain, but I missed the gutting process as I had to go to my placement interview.
During my interview I learned that I am almost certainly going to Malakula, to a little village called Tautu near Norsup, which is where the island's main airport is. While my village may not exactly be NYC, it's a short (and cheap) truck ride into a nearby small town, which has a bank, post office, internet cafe, and supermarket. My village even has cell coverage. I'll also have 24 hour electricity at my school. I'll be living the first 2 months with my host family, the mother of which is the headmistress of the school where I'll be working. They live sort of on the outskirts of town, but after the first 2 months I'll be moving to a house close to the school and more in the main village. There will be at least one other volunteer less than 1/2 hour away from me, and there are about 10 volunteers total on the island, and getting around to everyone's sites is supposed to not be too big a hassle. I've met some of the current Malakula volunteers and they're all very positive about it, so I'm feeling very good about my site. Going in, I was kind of hoping for a more rural experience where I could learn the ways of the bush and how to hollow out tree trunks to make outrigger canoes. During my first few weeks here, however, I gained a new appreciation for a few modern niceties, especially grocery stores. As I mentioned before, Vanuatu does sport a plethora of fruits and vegetables, some of which are quite delicious, but I'm definitely excited to be able to have easy access to things like cheese, meat, and cold drinks. On the other hand, I'm hoping my site won't be too city-like, as I still want to be able to do such things as go bushwhacking, plant my own garden, and learn how to make cool stuff, which are experiences which volunteers posted in the capitol miss out on. I'm optimistic that my site will be a good mix of the modern and the rural.
Tuesday was the 5th day after the volunteer death and, according to the custom of our village, it was the end of the period of mourning. On some islands, mourning can last up to 100 days after a death, but Efate cuts things a little short. According to custom people are not supposed to work, shave, or bathe during the mourning period, so for some of the longer waiting periods you can image things can get a little rank. Anyway, the end of the mourning period is cause for a feast, and thus we were able to experience our first pig roasting. Me and a couple other volunteers took a quick break from training to go to the chief's house and watch them kill the pig. It wasn't pretty, as they clubbed it to death with a log, and then de-haired it with a machete. We cooked the pig in the traditional style with hot rocks in an underground oven, much like a Hawaiian luau. It was REALLY good, and a welcome break from the usual tinned fish and corned beef that all too often passes for meat in the village. Unfortunately, although many people fish and hunt and raise animals, the fresh meat is usually sold in Vila to get money to buy imported canned goods. Also, while meat is a common additive to many dishes, it's only rarely that you get just straight-up meat, or a predominately meat dish, and I was really starting to miss my animal flesh.
On Wednesday I got to teach my first class. It was at Pango school, which is where I've been observing classes every Wednesday for the past few weeks. Like I've talked about before, school here is shockingly haphazard. Teachers will wander in and out of classrooms without a second thought about the kids. I told the headmaster that I wanted to team teach part of a class today and he told me “Great,” handed me the lesson book and told me to get to it. I was reminded of School of Rock, when one of the parents asks the principle "do you just let anyone walk in off the streets and teach here?!" In Vanuatu, the answer is yes. Anyway, instead of getting to do a 15 minute lesson or something I got recruited to teach for 3 hours to cover some other teachers that weren't there. I taught 7th grade English and Math. In English class I taught a lesson on tourism and in Math I gave a lesson on lines of symmetry. It was a very rewarding experience and the kids really seemed to like it. My teaching style I think was something of a shock to them, as most teachers here just put stuff on the board for kids to copy or make them do exercises out of activity books. They're also very passive and don't raise their voices or try and control their classrooms. Just speaking in a loud and assertive voice was enough to keep the class in line and the kids seemed to really like something as simple as having them come up to the board to draw lines of symmetry or answering questions out loud. Granted of course, I'm new (not to mention white) and thus something of an object of interest and that probably gave me an easier time that I would have gotten otherwise, but I did feel very positive about the experience.
Towards the end of last week we saw our first tropical depression. It formed over the Solomon Islands and dumped a lot of rain on Vanuatu all through the weekend. We were all kind of hoping/fearing that it might develop into a cyclone and we'd all get to weather our first cyclone together, but this was not to be. The storm fizzled into a tropical breeze and it just rained a lot. On the plus side, however, this meant that our weekend trip to one of the volcanic islands off of Efate was able to proceed as planned. I was a little skeptical waiting, shivering and soaked, under my umbrella for a truck that was several hours late to pick us up and take us to the wharf, but the trip ended up being a lot of fun. When the pickup finally pulled up, we all piled into the back, which had been outfitted with a metal cage covered in a tarp that made the whole affair look something like a troop transport. We barely all fit in, with a few people having to lean out the back, hanging on precariously. The benefits of us being under a tarp, and thus being protected from the rain, were soon outweighed by the fact that the temperature inside soon exceeded a bajillion degrees. We had the driver stop and remove the covering, which actually made the rest of the ride a lot more pleasant, as we had a nice breeze working through the back and we could lean out the sides and try to pull our heads back in before they were smacked by trees.
The truck ride took about an hour and a half and then we were deposited on a concrete wharf. Two small motor boats were waiting to carry us across to the island. The sea looked threateningly ominous, as if it had already eaten several such small boats earlier that morning and was eagerly awaiting a second helping. The Ni-Van boat drivers seemed unconcerned, however, and urged us all to pile in. We set off at a good clip and apparently the seas weren't nearly as rough as I thought because I spent most of the ride taking a nap. We pulled up on a beach some 45 minutes later and the boats departed. The wind had picked up considerably since we'd struck out and we all had to shout at each other to be heard. The volunteer that was hosting us took the lead and lead us up a path away from the beach. The word was handed down that the village was about a 30 minute walk up the hill. Although the rest of the people in my group will probably want to kill me for writing this, it was actually a pretty nice hike. The wind was nice and cooling and the rain had let up, and so I was able to use my umbrella as a walking stick. It wasn't terribly steep or terribly far and I got up it without even having to breath hard. Apparently I still have something left from my AT trek and haven't been completely ruined by weeks of sitting on the beach.
The village we were to stay at was quite nice. It was a lot cleaner than our training village, where people more or less just chuck their trash to the side whenever they're done with it. And it had a lot of nice grassy areas to hang out. We were welcomed to the village and given leis and then lunch was served. For the first time since I've gotten to Vanuatu, I got to have pineapple, which I was very excited about. It was wonderfully delicious, but unfortunately I was only able to nab one slice since we were splitting a pineapple between all 20 or so of us. It was nice to spend the afternoon hanging out and doing nothing. Granted, this is generally what we do in our training village as well, but it was good to get away from our host families for a bit and let our culturally-sensitive guard down and just hang out with Americans.
That night we had a barbecue, which, to be honest, was the only reason I'd signed up for the whole expedition. Like I mentioned, I was missing my meat. We grilled up chicken wings with ginger and soy sauce and steak with barbecue sauce (think a couple cuts below Masterpiece, but I wasn't about to complain). It was all wonderfully delicious and for only the second time since I'd gotten to training village I ate myself to contentment.
That night it stormed like nothing else, and I was quite glad they we'd all elected to stay inside the community center instead of setting up outside, as was our other option. I'd brought my hammock and managed to string it up between two rafters, but quickly discovered that trying to sleep in a hammock is monstrously uncomfortable. It would be natural to conclude that, since hammocks are good for stretching out in to relax, they should be good for sleeping as well. The fact is however, that if you move at all in our sleep you will get hopelessly tangled and wake up to discover that your dream about being caught in a giant spider web was closer to the truth than you would have thought possible.
The next morning was rainy and dreary. and we had the option of climbing up to the summit of the volcano. Our host advised that it would probably be really windy and cloudy and thus that we wouldn't be able to see much, and so I opted out in favor of trying to catch up on some sleep that I had not gotten the night before in the hammock. Around noon the volcano away team returned and we all headed back down to the beach. The return journey was more or less the mirror of the outbound journey: bumpy boat ride to bumpier truck ride. I got back to the village and crashed out, thus drawing bringing my fourth week in Vanuatu to a close.
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