Adventures of an Idealistically Realistic Dreamer

Well, I only have 15% battery power left on my laptop. But I seriously hate writing out blog posts (or anything else for that matter… sorry about the utter lack of letters, folks) by hand so I’ll just type quickly and see where this goes. Today is January 28th. It is more than a little late to be catching everyone up on my Christmas, especially when you consider that this post won’t even go up until late February. However, it should be documented because it was a crazy, almost unbelievable holiday season. Here goes. I told you guys finis about my welcome. Or at least I gave you the minimal run-down. My one regret is that I didn’t take my video or even my still-photos camera. Damn. The kustom dance and the welcome song that the string band played were so awesome. The kava…well, y’all already know how I feel about kava. (If you don’t, the kava consumption thought process goes like this: “oh… gag… the smell… gag…. ok. I can do this. I can do this. Breathe in… but try not to smell it… breathe out… breathe in… GO… oh God. This stuff is horrendous. I think I’m going to throw up. Gag. MUST… NOT… VOMIT…. Good. Done with one shell. *spits* Oh, this feels… nice. Kava’s not so bad after all…. I barely remember how bad it tasted…”)

The few days after my initial welcome was just a series of seriously culture-shocked blurriness. I had been living in a village on Efate for 9-10 weeks. One would think that I would not have to repeat the extreme feelings of unpreparedness that I had felt in my very first weeks in country. BUT, village life in the bush is very different than village life in Efate. On the big island, people have daily or weekly access to Vila where life is definitely not Westernized, but has far more influence to Western culture (mainly Aussie, Kiwi or Chinese) than do the outer islands. Don’t get me wrong, my village is actually surprisingly organized and up-to-date on modern technology for bush villages, but the first time I realized that they don’t sell toilet paper or dish soap in the local store I knew that I was definitely not in Kansas anymore. (Metaphor. I have only been to Kansas once. I will never go back.)

My village does have two “stores.” You can buy about 15 different varieties of tin fish or tin meat, all of which I would feel somewhat guilty feeding to a cat, but the Ni-Van folks love them. Here on the island, all food is free. You grow it, you share it, everything is communal. (This will probably prove to be a problem when my own garden close up to my house starts to produce veggies like lettuce and tomatoes and okra, since I’m the only one here to grow them and everyone will want to eat them.) Never mind the fact that we have an abundance of fresh, delicious sea food available for free not a hundred yards from my house, but the mindset here is that if you have to buy it then it must be special and great and wonderful! Oh, tin fish. How I despise you. The high chief of the village is my host dad’s brother, which makes my papa a small chief. Right away I have realized the perks of being related to the chief. He has a generator, for one thing. When I want to charge my computer or my phone, I run to the store and pem benzine for about two-seventy a liter. Then I go make nice for awhile, usually eat with them, story on about all different samting and THEN… I get to go home and watch episodes of Big Bang Theory, 30 Rock or How I Met Your Mother. Awesome. To be truthful, there are a few other families in the village who also have generators but its fun to say that this is a perk of being related to a high chief. :)

My host family is ridiculously great. My biggest problems with my family are that my host mom sometimes steals my laundry from the bucket in my house and washes it for me. Or that my little almost-two-year-old sister always runs into my house looking for candy. So its really not their fault at all that my first few weeks of stress were related to my selfish need for personal space. The communal lifestyle is much harder to get used to than I had anticipated. This was especially true since I came the week of Christmas and there was one community/family event after another. We walked to the beach for the day (it’s a couple miles away… the ocean outside my house is black rock cliffs with huge crashing waves. Beautiful, but deadly should you try to swim). We went to a wedding in Sameo, where I also have to go to check my mail or go to the bank, a three hour walk away. We spent the day at the garden preparing for Christmas meals. I didn’t even get to really unpack my stuff or set up my house until after the holidays. But like I said, my adjustment issues were just my inability to slow down and process everything as it happened. It was extremely overwhelming at times and only now am I starting to feel really comfortable as I get used to the daily routine and rhythm.

My computer is down to 8%. Got to keep going while I have some motivation left to write. One day after I arrived I was talking with the kids about their ages. Most of them don’t know their birthdays or their exact ages, they just use their year in school to approximate it. In fact, once they leave school it is usually pretty hard for them to figure out exactly how old they are, but they all wanted to know how old I was because, well… I’m a paradox. I must be ancient because I’m traveling alone and am brave enough to move to another country without my parents, but I must be really young because I’m not married. Haha! So I told them that I would be 23 the following Friday, and unexpectedly my mama got super excited. It would seem that at one time she saw an American movie in which there was a birthday party scene, and sadly she’s never gotten to experience that in person. And thus…. I became the first person in Endu to ever be thrown a birthday party. It was a huge event. Not only is the matalo Pis Kops new and still-newsworthy, now she’s having a party! This is how a birthday party that was intended for my family and Sam’s became a party with seven extensions of my family and a few of Sam’s. There was lots of food. There were balloons (where in the world they found balloons I will never know). There were streamers made from the toilet paper they got out of my bathroom. There were fresh flowers. Someone brought a generator and hooked up the Chief’s speakers they use for church events, which are about three feet tall each… and then there was extremely loud island music. My papa gave a short “happy birthday” speech to his new white-girl daughter and the elder, another one of my uncles, prayed that I would be happy here, that God would bless my work and… wait, did he just pray that I’d get married this year? Uh-oh… :) Then all of my mamas each gave me a new dress or skirt that they had sewed up for me, so I can now wear a different island dress to church each Sunday for a few months.

Christmas was, sadly, not quite as fun. While I did have a birthday party and we went to church for Christmas, I was still attempting to push from my mind the fact that I was missing Christmas back home. It did not help that Christmas is one of the few times a year when Ni-Van men decide that it’s a good idea to drink alcohol instead of kava. And of course it is also the one time when they decide that something homemade must be better than store-bought. Ergo, they home-brew extremely strong alcohol from local fruit and coconut trees. Now, for you to imagine the scene you must also consider that until recent generations, Ni-Vans had never had access to alcohol nor did they know that they could make it on the island. Kava was consumed heavily, but never alcohol. So when the white-men arrived (missionaries?) and introduced them to alcohol it was even worse bad news. Islanders have never developed the ability to process alcohol. So imagine if you will, that person we each all know who cannot hold their liquor. Now multiply that by 10, because Ni-van men drink home-brew. And then multiply it again because they drink until they literally are falling on the ground, trying to fight the dirt because they can’t stand up enough to fight each other. Then they often pass out where they lay and wake up the next day just to do it all again. I don’t think Peace Corps will appreciate me saying all this, but it is the truth in most villages throughout the South Pacific. Christmas and the day after, “Family Day” were great for hanging out with the mamas, cooking and eating, but then Sam and I decided it would be best to barricade ourselves in my house for awhile and avoid the gross display of drunkenness. We’d also heard stories from other volunteers about these notorious/infamous few days and were a bit wary about being out and about in the village. So my Christmas was spent hanging out with the mamas or watching entire seasons of sitcoms on my laptop. Exciting. I’m looking forward to next Christmas though, since I have plans to travel New Zealand for a month and have one of my favorite-ever people come visit from the states!!

Down to 2%…. better call it a day on updating this (can you call it updating if you’re over a month late? Catching up?). So I will leave you with these two last points: By now, if you follow Facebook you will have seen that, thanks to the new cell phone my family sent me for Christmas (thanks Mom and Dad!!) You will also know that my cell phone reception is, how shall we say, not entirely reliable so I do not depend on it to work. It also gets expensive. So don’t you guys think for a second that I do not still want letters! I got five in the mail today and it made me so happy that it motivated me to work on my blog! So… if you want future blog posts…. heehee. Also, I am really, really craving good coffee. Even semi-decent coffee… ie. Starbucks via ready brew individual instant coffee packets… just sayin’.

Secondly, these are things I have recently decided to invent:

Battery powered keurig

Solar panels work in the rain/clouds

Portable ac units

On December 15th, 2011 I left the bustling “city” of Port Vila and arrived on the southeast side of Ambrym, my new home. My first thoughts were: 1) HOLY CRAP THIS IS HOME FOR THE NEXT TWO YEARS!!! 2) Whoa, the ground is black! 3) I think the entire village is here waiting for us at the airport?! My cat was not impressed with flying. I have a few new scars to prove this. While the whole village did not actually meet us at the airport, a good number of them did. My new host mama, Wendy (I have really good luck with people named Wendy) presented me with a new island dress and my papa shook my hand and talked and talked and talked about, well, I don’t really remember what. Then, after we shook hands with somewhere around a hundred people, learned and promptly forgot all of their names and relationships to us, we were seated in the airport. I use the term “airport” loosely. It is a concrete building with no windows and no doors and a big sign that says “ULEI.” It also has a grass runway, so during heavy rains no flights can arrive or depart. I have a feeling there will be a blog post sometime in the future about how I got stuck either in Vila or on my island due to this issue. So. We waited for the truck for at least 2 hours. They had to go to the port to find all of our luggage, which we had put on the ship the week before. Then, once they got it, something mechanically went wrong with the truck so we sat… and we waited… and generally just storied with our new mamas. Then, finally… we headed out to the village. My village, Endu, is about an hour drive from the airport down a washed-out dirt road. That particular trip, we had about 15 people plus all of Sam’s (other PCV who lives on the other side of the same village) and my stuff, plus my cat. All trying to fit in a single cab truck bed. It was nuts! We dropped Sam off at her house first… dude, her house is huge… and then we went to mine, on the other side of the village. Mine is… very small. But it’s super cute and I have made it my own. It is ridiculously close to my host family’s house which means the fishbowl effect is pretty intense, but it’s also nice because they feed me. :) That night they welcomed us into the community with a huge ceremony. Everyone in the village (300 people, it’s a large village) came and brought food. We were walked in by my host dad to a song that the string-band had written to welcome their two new “pis kops” and I actually almost cried. Then they did a kustom dance and the chief gave a speech, gave us new custom names (mine is Wova but they call me Matalo, or white girl, because when my one-year-old host sister first met me she looked confused and asked “matalo taree?” or “white sister?” It stuck :D) the elder prayed and I had to give a short thank-you speech. In Bislama. Woot. Then it was… a KAVA ceremony. OF COURSE, did you expect anything different? Gah, I hate the taste of kava. But I drank the entire shell and they were impressed. I know, I know. This is a really short introduction to my first couple weeks. But I failed at being able to concentrate long enough to write a whole blog post and now I have to go catch my taxi to go to the airport. So I will leave you with this bit of humor: When I first got here they told me that I am half-man. I can climb into the back of pick-up trucks without assistance, I can carry my own luggage, I can use a bushknife, I can use a hammer and put nails in my own walls, I can work in the garden, I can walk three hours each way to check my mail, etc. They are shocked that I can do all of this, but I can also cook and wash clothes. Crazy! :) I promise, Mom… I’ll write a couple more posts about the first few weeks at site and about my family, about Christmas and about the huge birthday party they threw me. These will go up in February!! So until then… to be continued…

This is it. This is why I’m here. This is the reason I applied, said so-long to my family and friends, the reason I cried my eyes out at the airport and why I’m missing my nephew’s first milestones at home. This is why I endured 9 weeks of intense training. This is the moment of truth, when I find out if the sacrifice might just be worth it, if I can potentially make an actual difference, and if I would do it all again.

In 8 hours, I will be loading up the remainder of my belongings into a bus and heading to the airport.  In 11 hours, I’ll be on a 10-seater, single engine airplane headed for the island of Ambrym.  In 12 hours, I’ll be landing on a grass runway where I will (hopefully) be greeted by the family who will be adopting me for the next two years of my life.  In 13-14 hours, I will be arriving in a new village out in the bush, where I will spend those two years both learning and teaching, embracing the culture of this amazing country and giving back everything that I can.  

This week in Vila was wonderful.  I ate fulap (lots of) pizza, had a little fun, soaked up a little sun, relished my time on Skype and Facebook and bought that everything I possibly could haul to site.  I learned how to figure out what ships go where and how to negotiate getting my stuff on said ship, for a good price, and delivered to my island.  I learned that the people on my new island are awesome, because when said stuff was delivered to my island, locals loaded it up for me and drove it to my new house where it is supposedly waiting for me.  I met my host uncle by chance, when I snuck into the pool of a 5 star resort and learned that because of family ties, I am now welcome to go to that pool whenever I so desire, so long as I drop my “family” name.  I figured out which store has the best price on pans, which is the best place to go for “white man” kakae (food) and how to talk the guy at the post office into releasing my package from customs quarantine.  I was given suggestions on how-not-to-puke when drinking kava, can take a bus wherever without getting lost and found out that Pacific Paradise is indeed the best place to stay for 25 bucks a night.  I got to download 15 free kindle books, some TV shows and movies and loaded up my bags with free books from the Peace Corps office.  

But the most important thing that I learned is this:  I am not in Vanuatu for a week in Vila. There are Peace Corps volunteers in Vila and that is great for them, but I signed up for the Peace Corps for what will happen tomorrow and for the next two years:  moving to the bush, integrating into village life in a new culture, new language and new way of life entirely. 

So yes, this is it.  Tomorrow is the day.  I’m ready, I’m nervous, I’m excited, and I’m stressed.  But I know without a doubt, that whether I love it or hate it (probably both on different days), I will learn something.  I will be a stronger person for it.  And though it may be one of the hardest things I ever do, I embrace it.  

That being said, should anyone want to send me a package, I will always want/need/hope for instant mac & cheese, chocolate and burned dvds of new music.  :)  But most importantly, send me letters.  Not only do they come quicker, I love knowing about what’s going on in the developed world.   

I think I’m crazy…. kranki tumas.

According to Wikipedia, the name “Ambrym” means “here are yams” in local language. Captain Cook named it that because he found lots of yams there.  He was a super creative guy. (He also named Tanna because he pointed to himself and said his name, then pointed to the ground, asking for the name.  Tanna means “ground.”)  It’s a miracle he wasn’t eaten.

On Ambrym, I have a host family with 3 children.  My host papa is the headmaster and his name is Moses.  I’m excited about my host mama.  Her name is Wendy, and thus far… I have only had good experiences with people by that name.  :D  The kids range in age from 13 to 1.  Yay!

My information says that I have a kastom haos.  Like this one that I stole from an RPCV’s blog:

It’s one room, so I’ll be hanging up some fabric I bought to make a room divider.  I will also have a table and chair in the front area.  Traditionally, you have a separate small house to cook over a fire, which is great unless its not well-ventilated.  I have one right by my house and it even has a locking door.  If only that kept out the rats….  

I will also have a separate shower house (with a running water tap that they have made into a shower for me… I hope it works!!!!!) and a separate toilet house.  Ok, long-drop.  VIP toilet. (Not VIP as in Very Important Person.  VIP as in Ventilated Improved Pit latrine.) It is supposed to be better than a regular long-drop.  Like this one:

That’s going to take some practice.  But I’m going to have amazing thighs in two years.  :P

I’ll be working with the Village Health Worker at the dispensary, or the government-funded first-aid center.  (In Vanuatu you have Aid Posts (small, not government funded, where most community health PCVs work, can only provide very limited health care) to dispensaries (slightly bigger, since they’re government funded, can occasionally provide health care like pre-natal health or select deliveries, immunizations and very basic health care) to health centers (maternal health and deliveries, most significant health care) and hospitals (there are only 5 in country).  There are NO Ni-Vanuatu doctors in the country.  There are some trained nurses, but even their education is limited.  The only time there are doctors at the hospitals is when there’s a volunteer visiting it from another country.  There are supposedly a few Ni-Vans in Cuba right now being trained to be doctors, but they won’t be back for a few years.  There’s a huge human resource shortage in this country, from lack of education.

So what will I be doing?  Whatever my community and the local health center a few hours away (walking) needs!  Maybe workshops on non-communicable diseases, maybe teaching health classes at the school (from reproductive health to general hygiene skills) or tok-toks (talks) with the mamas about pre-natal and maternal health and family planning.  Really anything that relates to health, I could be helping with.  I may be helping my counterpart learn to write grants, or get the training she needs.  I could end up helping with baby weighings or teaching about nutrition.  We’ll just all have to wait and see.  Hemi depend.  :)

Oh, and after next Thursday… I’ll only have internet whenever I come back to Vila or take trips to other islands.  There’s no internet on Ambrym.  It may be 2 or 6 months in between times of internet access.  Sad day.  So send me letters (they get here faster than packages) with photos of home, of your lives.  I’d love to hang them on my wall and share them with my community.  But mainly I just want to stay informed about the people I love back home!  I also welcome packages, but will have to be patient about when I receive them.  My friend Allegra is also moving to Ambrym and will live about five minutes from the airport, where all of our mail comes in.  But the Vanuatu mail system is NOT AT ALL like the American one and is HIGHLY UNRELIABLE.  I’m in the most accessible city in all of Vanuatu now and I STILL am waiting for packages that were send over a month ago.  You never know if it will be 2 weeks or 5 months before you receive one.  But that just makes it all the better when you finally do get to open one.  :)

Enough for now.  I’ll update you on my week in Vila soon!