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.