Life in the Ring of Fire Part 17: Cyclone Funa

The months of December through March in Vanuatu are cyclone season, a potentially hazardous time when one is living on an island only slightly larger than your average Disney theme park. Combined with earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, Vanuatu sports a daunting trio of possible high-budget Hollywood blockbuster disaster movies. However, unlike in the US (or any other developed country), where tremors can bring down a high-rise or a hurricane can lay waste to a levy or a volcano can burry a town in ash, Vanuatu’s more au-natural approach to living leaves surprisingly little that can be affected by such disasters. Bamboo huts are more than happy to shake right along with the restless earth, and are easily replaced when high winds carry them off, and those living the shadow of a volcano happily accept a few bucks from tourists to take them up to have a look. Given the relatively low-impact of cyclones (and the general inability to do anything to prepare for them in any case), Ni-Vans tend to adopt an alarmingly laid-back attitude to these climatological monstrosities. As such, I was quite surprised when I received a phone call on Wednesday morning from a breathless and worried Peace Corps staffer informing me that a “tropical disturbance” capable of forming a cyclone had developed a few hundred kilometers off the coast of my island and that all volunteers were being put on alert. I looked skeptically outside my window at the light drizzle I had, up until this point, been enjoying as a welcome break from the sweltering heat that had been the norm for the past few weeks. A few kids were playing marbles in the clearing outside my hut and I could see a number of the villagers hanging out at the beach and swimming. “Really?” I asked. I was told to remain calm, which I assured them would not be huge problem, as it had been several months since I’d gotten worked up about anything and I was pretty sure I’d more or less forgotten how to do so.

I had been waiting for the rain to subside so that I could walk to Lakatoro to have lunch and check my email, but after getting off the phone I decided that, what with the cyclone and all, it would probably be raining for the foreseeable future, so I grabbed my umbrella and hit the road. After eating and emailing (where I found I’d received an email about the cyclone, which I thought was an odd way to go about notifying people of an emergency in a country where internet is considered a technological novelty), I went up to McKenzie’s house to see if she was around. “You hear about the cyclone?” she asked, as I let myself in. Apparently Peace Corps had called one of the provincial government offices and convinced them to send a truck to pick her up at her work, about a half hour walk away, and return her to Lakatoro so that she could get the weather report. A few minutes later I received another call from the Peace Corps office informing me that a standfast order had been issued meaning, among other things, that we were prohibited from leaving our current locations. Cyclones, we decided, were kind of like snow days in the US, as we were now more or less required to spend the rest of the day lying around McKenzie’s house watching movies on my laptop. Meanwhile, outside, the pleasant drizzle continued and the remainder of the country was getting on with life as usual.

Over the next few hours, I fielded probably ten calls from Peace Corps either gravely informing me of the cyclone’s progress or frantically asking if I’d seen various other volunteers who they were unable to get in contact with. During that same time period the light drizzle let up and the day developed into a pleasantly cool, if somewhat overcast, afternoon. Hence, my phone calls tended to go something like this:
“Hey Danny” (for some reason, all the Peace Corps staff have an incredibly hard time not tacking on the “y” to the end of my name) “how’s the weather?”

“Pretty nice actually, we’ve got a good breeze going so I’m not sweating too much for once”

*Polite Chuckle* “Well the tropical disturbance can now be located on square G4 of the cyclone tracking map.” (We get a map of Vanuatu with a Battleship-like grid overlaid on it which we can use to track cyclones or, more practically, play Battleship).

As the day progressed, McKenzie and I began to feel increasingly like idiots as we had to explain to everyone we ran into that we weren’t allowed to leave Lakatoro because of the cyclone. It was kind of like when the schools decide to have a snow day, but then it doesn’t actually snow, so everyone just feels really dumb being trapped in their houses because of a few flurries. This continued into the next day when the tropical disturbance was upgraded to a cyclone and thus given a name (Funa, which I thought was pretty cute), but continued to not be anywhere near us.

It wasn’t until Friday morning that our standfast order was lifted and we were allowed to move around again. I headed back to Tautu to find that my house had weathered the storm without damage, except for the fact that some of the Frisbees that I use to catch water underneath where my roof leaks were bordering on overflowing. We had been planning on making a trip to Matanvat, a village in the northwest of the island where Laura, one of the volunteers from our training group, was posted, but I asked around and was told that none of the trucks from the northwest had been able to come down to Lakatoro because the rain had made the rivers impassable. Instead, I decided to make the trip up to Lavasal to see Elin’s village and hang out with Ryan and Alyssa, who’d gone up there before the cyclone. The truck ride was about and hour and my butt hurt like nothing else by the end of it, but Lavasal was undeniably gorgeous. Unlike in Tautu, where the waterfront does not have sand, but jagged rocks and coral, Lavasal has a nice stretch of black sand beach perfect for swimming. It also wasn’t as crowded as Tautu is, and the landscape had much more of a pristine feel to it. Although UNELCO, the power company that supplies electricity to Lakatoro and Tautu, doesn’t extend as far north as Lavasal, many of the houses had generators and the village was quite decidedly rich. This point was brought home when we observed the town dressing up for church. Obviously, church is an occasion for putting on one’s finest, but in all of the villages I’d been to previously that usually translated to putting on a shirt. The churchgoers in Lavasal, however, would not have looked out of place at a (somewhat) upscale restaurant in the States (maybe a P.F. Chang’s). I doubted that I had anything in my Vanuatu wardrobe to match.

Life in the Ring of Fire Part 16: Visitors

On Monday I followed through on a promise I made to myself to try my hand at cooking some food using local ingredients. In pursuit of this goal, I headed to the market, an open-air farmer’s market type affair in Lakatoro. For posterity, I picked up a couple pineapples (I’ve probably eaten more pineapple in the last month than I have in my entire life put together. That’s a good thing), and browsed the selection. Probably the most intriguing item for sale are the crabs, which are sold live, ten for a dollar, and come tied together with tree bark rope in a sort of long string, so you see people walking around town swinging around this line of ten live crabs. I, however, decided to save the crabs for another day and focus more on the vegetable food group, which I’d been more or less neglecting for some time. Unfortunately, everything in the market comes in one size only: a crap-load. It’s kind of like shopping at Sam’s club, except none of the food is packaged, meaning that it rots in a couple of days and thus seems more geared towards those who have to cook for several battalions of soldiers on a daily basis. Being only one person, however, I could conceive of going through two, or maybe three, limes over a couple days, but definitely not a bag of fifty. Not to be deterred, however, I picked up a bundle of island cabbage (a vegetable vaguely like spinach which grows more or less like a weed around here) and decided that it was a good enough start. Slinging the mass of vegetation (which probably weighed at least fifteen pounds) over my shoulder, I headed back to the house to get some lunch going. The island cabbage turned out somewhat like kale, and was quite good sautéed with soy sauce, garlic, ginger, and chili but, as predicted, I used about 5% of the bundle and the rest promptly rotted the next day and had to be thrown to the pigs that live behind my shower.

Tuesday I got a surprise on my way stumbling back to my house from the bathroom: Ryan shouting at me from a passing truck. Ryan, a volunteer on the island of Epi, had been trying to get to Malekula for the holiday season for so long that I’d more or less forgotten that he was coming. His exploits included: walking probably close to one hundred hours total around his island looking for ships and paddling out to a yacht in an outrigger canoe to try (unsuccessfully) to hitch a ride. Although he’d called me a few days before to tell me that he was supposed to be getting on a ship that was slated to arrive in Malekula today in the morning, I’d more or less just assumed that either the ship wouldn’t come, or that it would be ridiculously late. It was very surreal having him around, as we’d hung out a lot in training and so I felt like I was back in Mangaliliu. The feeling didn’t last long, however, as on Wednesday I packed Ryan off to see Elin in the north of the island.

On Thursday, I’d been recruited by McKenzie to help out some woman who lives near her work with a computer issue. I really had no idea what I was getting into, because computer problems in this country can range anywhere from not knowing how to use the mouse to having cockroaches living on the motherboard. As it turned out, the lady had purchased some bootleg Chinese software in Vila and was having trouble getting it to work. Coincidentally, working with pirated software happens to be something that I’m pretty good at, and so I was able to get her program working and was paid in the form of coconuts. On the way back from McKenzie’s office, we stopped by a little village store and discovered, to our dismay, that they sold Snickers. Even better, they had COLD Snickers that were only a year out of date. Talk about the lap of luxury. We purchased one to split (because they cost $2 a piece) and were then faced with a dilemma: we were planning on stopping for kava on the way home and knew that Snickers would be a good accompaniment, but also knew that there was a good chance that the precious coldness would have long ago leaked away by the time we got to the nakamal. Trying to get the best of both worlds, we proceeded to book it to the nakamal, only to find that they had not finished making the kava yet. We uneasily settled on a bench, the precious Snickers bar placed between us, and began to wait impatiently. About that time, I realized that I really needed to go to the bathroom and so excused myself and went to go ask the owner where the toilet was. He pointed to a steep hill into the bush across the road from the nakamal. I made my way across the road, in the process sinking both my sandals into the huge mud banks on the side of the road, and began climbing into the bush. After about a minute I realized two things: first, that there was absolutely no way that there was a toilet up on top of the hill, and, second, that the very recent rain had turned the entire hill to mud, making it incredibly slippery. After both these realizations sunk in, I decided to cut my losses and head back down. This proved to be a lot more difficult than my ascent had been, and involved a lot of sliding on my and grabbing desperately at tree roots. I re-crossed the road and sat back down next the McKenzie who said, furiously, “Where the hell have you been?! There’s a bathroom right there,” indicating a spot about twenty feet from where we were sitting, “the kava’s ready, and our Snickers is getting warm.” I mentally flicked off the nakamal owner and went to buy a shell. The Snickers was delicious though, and still cold.

On Friday afternoon McKenzie and I had another misadventure at the market. Given how much money we’d spent on beer and wine over the holidays, we had decided that purchasing alcohol on the islands was not a luxury we could afford. Not to be deterred, however, we decided to go local and try our hand at mixing a batch of homebrew. Reminiscent of the prohibition days back in the States, homebrew is homemade alcohol made when people get desperate for any drink with a little kick to it (in Vanuatu desperation arises not from prohibition, but from the fact that no one has any money and bottles of alcohol cost upwards of $30 for half a liter). Now, unfortunately, I wasn’t around to brew moonshine back in the 20’s, so I don’t know how it was done back then, but here on the islands the basic homebrew mix is done with water, sugar, and bread yeast. You then let it sit for about a week and then enjoy. Or, as is much more likely if you were lazy and only used sugar-water and yeast, try in vain to choke it down because it will probably taste like bread-flavored rubbing alcohol. Fortunately, Vanuatu is blessed with a plethora of tropical fruits to spice up the classic homebrew recipe. When I’d come to visit Malekula back in November, my host family had made a batch with coconut water which actually tasted pretty good. At the moment, however, it was pineapple season and given that, in my opinion, pineapples are about a billion times better than coconuts, we’d decided to give pineapple homebrew a shot. With this goal in mind, we wandered down to the market and began purchasing pineapples. After buying about five pineapples, we realized that we hadn’t brought a bag or a box or anything in which to place the pineapples to transport them back to McKenzie’s house. Determined not to make another trip, however, we continued to pile on pineapples until we were both clutching precariously high stacks of the prickly fruits, trying to ignore the fact that all variety of spines were gouging their way into our arms. We struggled back up the hill to McKenzie’s house with our respective burdens of tropical fruit. Once back in the kitchen, we chopped up the pineapples into cubes and boiled them for a while to release the juice. This mixture we dumped, pineapple bits and all, into a large container to ferment. We added cold water, sugar, and yeast and put it in the corner of the house and hoped for the best.

That afternoon Alyssa, who’d heard that Ryan was coming to Malekula and didn’t want to miss out on the party and so requested that I arrange a ticket for her, flew in, which made the weekend seem very much like training as, just like in Mangaliliu, Elin, Ryan, Alyssa, and I spent the weekend mostly lying around and playing the occasional card game.

Life in the Ring of Fire Part 14: New Year's

New Year’s morning was spent sleeping in until 11am, an unheard-of record in Vanuatu. We were expecting a lot of company in Lakatoro to ring in the New Year. In particular, Jack, a volunteer from the south of Malekula, had promised to arrive with a live pig to be eaten that night. Upon waking up at such an unusually late hour, I thought I groggily remembered Jack arriving sometime before and wondered whether or not that was a dream. The reality of the situation was confirmed, however, when I opened the front door and discovered a small pig tied up in a rice bag on the porch. Jack himself appeared a few minutes later and thus we were tasked with the job of carrying the pig to my host family’s house, where my Papa had agreed to roast it for us.

The pig was surprisingly heavy, given how small it looked, and we were sweating profusely by the time we reached the LTC to catch a truck to Tautu. The killing and cooking of a pig is big news in Vanuatu, and we’d become instant celebrities during the walk. I was actually getting kind of concerned that the pig would not in fact be big enough for all the uninvited guests that would, without a doubt, be dropping by in order to mooch some pork (“What’s up, I just wanted to return the machete I borrowed from you the other month. Say, is that a pig that you’re roasting?” etc). The pig was not quite up to making the whole trip to Tautu, as was evident when it expired sometime during the truck ride. This was a mixed blessing: good because it saved us the trouble of killing it, and bad because I was actually kind of looking forward to doing a little guy bonding with my Papa over clubbing a pig to death with a piece of wood. Upon arrival in Tautu, we hung the pig up in a tree with a meat hook and skinned it. This is an important step if you don’t want bits of pig hair in your pork roast, and is done by lighting a dry coconut leaf on fire and using it to char the fur and outer layer of skin. The charred bits can then be easily scraped off with a machete. We then sliced open the pig with said machete and gutted it, driving the many village dogs which had hungrily gathered to watch the proceedings to the verge of madness.

My host uncle has a large stone oven, usually used for baking bread, which we commandeered for the roast. Now, I don’t know about you, but when I think of the word “oven” I generally think of a nice, friendly, contraption with a convenient little knob, thoughtfully labeled with temperature settings, and a little red light (and maybe even a buzzer) that goes off when it’s done preheating. Of course, the seasoned veteran of this country that I am, I’d long ago given up on this notion of an oven as something which exists only in unbelievably futuristic sci-fi movies (a fact which was highlighted when, unbeknownst to me, I purchased a self-lighting gas stove and was so amazed when, the first time I used it, it ignited, sans matches, that I immediately rushed to Lakatoro to breathlessly relate to McKenzie the wonders of this new invention). I have, of course, baked numerous pumpkin pies in this country, and so have become familiar with the Vanuatu-style oven (ie. “Death Trap”): a small metal box with burners in the bottom, which are connected to an external propane tank. To turn the oven on (these ovens have only two settings, on and off, and I’ve found, through a good deal of experience, that the “on” setting generally produces better results), you first open the gas valve, which causes the burners to start releasing highly flammable gases into the small metal enclosure, potentially producing what some scientists like to refer to as a “bomb.” Into this possible explosion-to-be you then stick a lit match, poking it through a small hole in the metal plate that covers the burners, and then trying to flick it in just the right way to ignite the flame. This is the current state-of-the-art in Vanuatu oven technology. My host uncle’s oven, however, is a few generations back on the technology scale, and hails from a time when people used to use the word “forsooth” a lot more frequently and dress up in ridiculous-looking metal outfits to play chicken from horseback using long, pointy wooden poles. It’s essentially a large stone block, about as tall as I am, with a hollowed-out portion in the middle. When you say you’re going to light this oven, you really mean it, as it requires that you first start a raging bonfire inside to heat up the stone. Once the fire dies down, you scrape out the ashes and put in whatever you want to cook.

Into the oven went the pig (you remember the pig? That’s how we got on the whole topic of ovens in the first place) and about half an hour later, the delicious smell of roasting meat was wafting through the village. Although pigs are rather abundant on Malekula, as is evidenced by the two or three I have to chase out of the way every time I want to get to my bathroom, pork is not. While it’s possible to buy beef, chicken and, of course, fish, in nice, pre-butchered, ready-to-cook, packages, the only way to get pork is to kill and dress a pig yourself. I’m not positive, but I think this is a cultural thing. Pigs are a symbol of wealth, and the act of killing a pig shows up again and again in a number of traditional ceremonies. I’m guessing that it’s because of this that the idea of sending your pigs to the slaughterhouse to be butchered is a little unappealing. The result, however, is that getting your hands on some pork to eat is a huge pain in the ass, and boy do I miss it. That night, tearing into a piece of greasy piece of meat and feeling the juicy lard dibble down my lips was the best thing in the world.

After dinner we headed to the wharf, which was conveniently located next to the only store on the island that sells beer after 7pm. When it started getting on towards midnight, we went back to McKenzie’s house, where we’d stockpiled some champagne from Vila for just such an emergency. At 12am, we all toasted and pondered that fact that, at New Year’s 2008, we’d still be in Vanuatu.

New Year’s day, the entire island was hung-over and spending the day sleeping, so we went to the beach to do the same. On Wednesday I discovered I’d become lactose intolerant (or at least not able to stomach milk in non-powdered form) when I purchased and downed a box of milk and spent the rest of the day violently ill. Fortunately, I was adequately recovered the next day, because there was a batch of beer waiting to be bottled. In a rather nice turn of events, it happened to be just after New Year’s, so there was a large plethora of empty bottles lying around the village. Unfortunately, most of them had quickly become homes for spiders, cockroaches and centipedes and so cleaning them out and making them brew-worthy was quite the adventure. Bottling took most of the afternoon and the remainder was taken up by explaining to all the villagers that stopped by my house that, even though the beer was now in bottles, it would still be a month before it would be fit to drink.

Friday McKenzie and I were invited to dinner with the chief of Tautu and after a few shells of kava at my Papa’s, we headed over. As it turned out, we were not just having dinner with the chief but his entire extended family in a big New Year’s get together involving many a lap-lap and live entertainment provided by those present under the age of fourteen. Before anything could start, however, the chief had to show up, and he was still off drinking kava somewhere. About half an hour after our arrival, his truck finally pulled up and he shouted at us out the window: “Come, we’re going to get kava in Norsup.” I looked around at the approximately fifty people waiting patiently to eat and thought that, maybe, making them wait some more so we could make another kava run was a tad rude but, hey, as they say, it’s good to be chief. When dinner did start, it was delicious. The highlight for me was octopus lap-lap which featured probably some of the tenderest octopus I’d ever had. The event lasted well into the night as the kids sang, danced, and put on skits.

The weekend was slow, as only a weekend in Vanuatu could be but, to be quite honest, all the guests coming though had worn me out, as I had been prevented from taking my usual four hour nap in the afternoon, and I was happy to have some quality time to sleep through.

Life in the Ring of Fire Part 14: Special Christmas Edition

I woke up on what was supposed to be Christmas Eve to a day that felt less like Christmas Eve than any other I’d ever experienced. It was sweaty and hot and drizzly and more or less all-around miserable. I’d stayed in Lakatoro the previous night and so was awakened at around six in the morning to the sound of Feliz Navidad being blasted full force from the store about a half-mile away. After breakfast, McKenzie and I decided to head over to the guest house in order to use the internet to send holiday greetings to various loved ones. Living in a country that closes down on Sundays, I reasonably expected that the city would be dead of Christmas Eve, with most people settling in for a nice long church session followed by the making and eating of lap-lap. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Upon exiting the house, we were greeted with what must have been most of the island of Malekula walking up and down the strip (the one road in town). Those lucky enough to have trucks were already drunk and driving petal-to-the-metal, swerving their way through the hoards of pedestrians like Frogger in reverse. All the stores were open for business and most of them were sporting large speaker systems cranking out high-voltage Christmas music. The two of us wandered down the hot, dusty (yes, I know I said it was drizzly, but for some reason this doesn’t seem to reduce the amount of dust in the air) road bordered by coconut plantations, pausing occasionally to use our shirts to wipe the sweat out of our eyes, listening to the cacophony of melded-together Christmas carols, and wondering just how many lives are claimed by wildly speeding trucks during each holiday season.

Having accomplished our mission of using the internet, we returned to McKenzie’s house. We were both wide-eyed, shell-shocked, dripping with sweat, and about ready to die of heat exhaustion. We cowered in front of an electric fan drinking water by the bucketful for a good half hour before we were able to move again. At this point we had a problem. We had arranged to eat dinner with McKenzie’s host family that evening, and had promised to bring a pumpkin pie. This required making a pumpkin pie, which in turn required both cinnamon and flour, neither of which were in our possession. Slowly the realization dawned that we would need to make a second expedition to the LTC to purchase said ingredients. Gritting our teeth, we managed the walk unscathed but were immediately greeted by a much greater challenge. The LTC, which is about the size of your average Walgreens, and usually contains only one or two people at a time, thus making it seem even bigger and emptier, was wall-to-wall with people. The building not big enough to contain them all, they spilled out into the street like grains of rice out of a ruptured bag of rice. Elbowing our way through the crowd, as one might do to get a better look at a concert; we worked out way into the store, only to discover that doing so was a grave mistake. The temperature inside easily exceeded that of the surface of the sun. I suddenly felt myself qualified to accurately describe the nature of the seventh circle of hell and wondered what sort of cardinal sins I had committed in order to deserve such a fate. Imbued with a new purpose: getting the hell out of the LTC as soon as humanly possible, I elbowed my way to the spice shelf, only to discover that there was, in fact, no cinnamon to be found. Giving it up for lost, I started making my way towards the flour, but was brought pause by one of the items on sale, a special for the holiday season. It was entitled the “Papa’s Package” and contained two liters of whisky, two small bottles of rum, three bottled, pre-mixed, rum-and-coke drinks (yes, they exist here and, yes, they are disgusting), and a can of coke. Written underneath the price was the friendly reminder: “Don’t Beat Mama!”

I was still trying to get to the flour when McKenzie tapped me on the shoulder. I turned to see that her face was ghastly white and had an expression of absolute horror. “Let’s get the hell out of here. Now.” She said. I nodded agreement. We began pushing our way back towards the exit and emerged, several minutes later into the stiflingly hot and humid outside air, which now seemed sweetly cool and refreshing, gasping like we’d almost drowned. Fortunately we were able to locate cinnamon and flour at one of the smaller (and less crowded) stores (don’t know why we didn’t try that first but, hey, it makes for a good story) and returned to the house both agreeing that the outside world is a very scary and terrible place and that it really wouldn’t be so bad to spend the rest of our lives indoors with lots of air conditioning.

The Ni-Van Christmas Eve dinner was a tad lackluster, especially given the amount of hype the holidays in Vanuatu were always described with. In fact, they basically ate exactly the same thing they always eat (lots of rice topped with a small amount of something that’s not rice). Dinner completed, I headed back to Tautu to spend Christmas Day with my host family. Upon arrival I discovered that my family also was spending Christmas Eve doing exactly what they always do, which is drinking kava.

Christmas morning I was woken up early again, this time by my host family informing me that we were heading to another village for Christmas lunch. Still half-asleep, I piled into the back of a truck and we headed south. Following the trend from Christmas Eve, nothing particularly special was done for Christmas, aside from the fact that we were spending the morning in a different village. Around 1pm the truck returned to take us back to Tautu. On the way, however, we had to stop for gas which, in Vanuatu is an all-afternoon affair. We pulled up to a village store and waited around expectantly for someone to notice us. Meanwhile, most of the passengers disembarked to smoke cigarettes. After about ten minutes, it became apparent that the waiting to be notice strategy wasn’t panning out, and so the driver took a more proactive approach by shouting at passing villagers and asking them where the guy who sells the gasoline was. Most of them muttered something about going to look for him and the wandered off, never to return. About twenty minutes after pulling up, someone finally emerged to take our money and tell us to drive around to another part of the village to wait for gas. We waited in our new location for another while before someone came out of a house, unlocked a shed, and started filling up 2-liter glass bottles with gasoline to dump into the truck. Unfortunately, they only had two such bottles, and so the actual filling up process took a good half-hour. We finally drove off, probably about an hour and a half after arriving, and I considered that fact that if Vanuatu had any such thing as an SUV, filling up its tank could easily be a week-long project. All in all, however, Christmas in Vanuatu was a quite affair, and left me somewhat disappointed and wondering if maybe I’d missed something and that Christmas was really the following day.

Thursday I did receive a late Christmas present, in the form of a house. I’d been waiting for about a month for a teacher (who’d been re-assigned) to move out of my house and it was becoming increasingly obvious to me that he had no intentions of leaving. Up to this point, I’d been living with my host family. Now, don’t get me wrong, my host family is awesome and I totally lucked out on being assigned to them, but a lot of the things I’d been planning on doing to occupy my time (building furniture, cooking, etc) sort of required a house as a pre-requisite. Also, just having some place to retreat to whenever you get overwhelmed is crucial to preserving sanity. At any rate, it seems the village had also given up on the teacher ever moving out, because I was assigned a new house in the center of the village. While not quite as nice as the house I was supposed to get by the school, it did have the advantage of being a whopping six feet from the ocean, meaning a pleasant breeze to keep the place tolerable during the afternoon. The house is half “custom” and half “permanent”, meaning it has a cement foundation and lower wall, but the upper walls are woven bamboo and the roof is thatch. I was happy for the cement floor, as it significantly cuts down on the number of 8-inch long killer centipedes over the more common coral covered by woven mat.

Thursday and Friday I spent moving in, which proved to be spectacularly difficult in a country completely devoid of furniture. Having to make do with organized little piles on the floor and things hung by nails driven into the woodwork, I tried my best to end my three month long spate of living out of a suitcase. Another one of the pluses of finally unpacking was that I got to get a good laugh in at myself at all the stuff that I’d brought that seemed so important when I was packing in the states, but now seemed downright silly: my large collection of collared shirts, for example.

Thought the week, volunteers from all over Malekula had been trickling into the greater Lakatoro area in preparation for New Years and so Saturday and Sunday were spent at the beach with our now large collection of guests.