14 May 2015
Sometimes when I'm just sitting in my house, thinking about the things I encounter in my everyday life, I find myself laughing a bit to myself. In the grand scheme my daily routines are generally the same: wake up, drink coffee/read, go to school, cook, eat, fetch water, cook, eat, sleep. When going through these routines I can easily dismiss the funny nuances but eventually will realize that the folks at home might not think some of these things are as easy to deal with or as common place as I, and in turn will be entertained by my talking about them. Ale...enjoy.
Buckets—In a world where it takes 10 minutes round trip for
a bucket of water, having two buckets has been a very important thing to me. I
always go for two buckets at a time because, why not? It cuts the trips to the
pump in half and gives me a balanced workout on both arms. I wouldn’t think it was
weird if everyone didn’t comment, every time, about how I was carrying two
buckets. My attachment to two buckets made it all the worse when I woke up
after the Big Nambas Water Fight of 2015 to find that the bucket I had grabbed
for the fight was gone. I didn’t realize it for about a week but the stealing
of buckets is also part of the big nambas tradition…but it was not one I could
get behind because I really needed my buckets. It was raining more frequently
which just amplified the importance of having two buckets. Two buckets = double
the ability to catch run off ran = far fewer trips to the pump.
Luckily I at least knew the culprit and could annoy him
about brining my bucket back because he drives a service truck into Lakatoro
most days. While this should have helped me get my bucket back in a timely
manner, it took about three weeks to finally get it back. Now I’m toting two
buckets once again but unfortunately the rain has stopped. However, as I write
this I’m shocked at my attachment to something like a bucket and hope I don’t
sound too crazy in writing this. Let it only be a reflection on my adaptation
to life in the bush as well as slight laziness because of how many fewer times
I have to walk back and forth through the plantation for water.
River wash—While my village is not located anywhere near a
river, there are many rivers, large and small, along the road from Lakatoro to
Matanvat and beyond, as well as throughout the rest of Malekula. While
sometimes these rivers make transportation difficult during the rainy season,
especially for trucks without snorkels, they also provide the perfect spot for
a car wash. I love being on a truck and crossing rivers to see other trucks
pulled off to the side of the road (yet still in the middle of the river) and
the drivers dumping buckets of water into the bed of the truck to clean out the
mud and other dirty that accumulated along the road. Sometimes the passengers
will also take this opportunity to swim and you’ll see a whole truck load of
people swimming in the river before continuing on their way home for the night.
Makes perfect sense – you get home, having already bathed, eat and sleep. The
next morning you wake up and your truck is already clean so you hop right in
and drive into town. Killin so many birds with one stop.
Digicel I no kat—While to you out there it might seem like I
have very low connectivity to the world, however, though my mobile phone I have
had relatively consistent access to other volunteers as well as family in the
US. The mobile coverage in my village has always been shaky and would cut out
for days at a time but we have now come to a condition much worse than this.
After returning from Sydney the mobile coverage took a
couple weeks to be usable at all. It would come back for a day or two and
disappear for 5 and then maybe come back for a few hours and be out for a week.
During this time my family and I got used to weekly/bi-weekly treks out to the
end of the reef to use the coverage coming from a tower on Santo that was
working well. Another week or so went by and things got even worse. For the
first week I figured it was just after effects of the cyclone damage but later
found out that it was a much more exciting, and sad, story than just that.
(warning: this story is the product of a collection of
coconut wireless transmitted accounts of this event and therefore may not be
completely accurate)
Apparently a group of young thieves thought it fine to
maximize their own utility by screwing everyone else’s over. The mobile network
towers are run on solar panels, which are a pretty hot item but also totally
necessary to run the tower and provide coverage to hundreds of people. This
group of young thieves forgot about how much they enjoyed calling random people
on their phones and decided to steal the solar panels. Once the Malekula
Digicel worker found this out he brought a generator up the hill that the tower
is on and here began weekly group hikes to fill up the generator with benzene.
However, one week, one of the boys going to help fill the generator up saw an
oldfala man he knew on the side of the road and asked the digicel guy if they
could give him a ride. Digicel guy said sure but they had to fill up the tower
first. The group got out of the truck on the main road and the oldfala man
offered to help carry a container of benzene up to the tower. Digicel guy said
no, he didn’t seem strong enough to make the climb, he should just wait down by
the road until they were done. The man said alright and laid down in the shade
to rest. The group went up and came back down for another round when they
noticed that the oldfala man wasn’t breathing. He had died in his sleep at the
bottom of the hill.
Confused, scared and intimidated by black magic, digicel guy
and the other boys put the oldfala man’s body into the bed of the truck and
made for Lakatoro. Once they got to Lakatoro they went to the police station to
tell their story. The police listened but were skeptical of digicel guy so they
held him there for a while asking questions. A little while after a friend of
digicel guy came to persuade the police that his friend didn’t have anything to
do with the man’s death. Finally the police let digicel guy go but they had
intimidated him so much that he was on a flight to Vila the next day. Since
this time, over a month has gone by without anyone to drive a group of boys to
pour benzene into the generator and therefore, without any network. Every
Sabbath afternoon I trek out to the reef with my tawis, where the sun really
shines (and burns), and get in touch with the world a little. It’s good enough
for now but has definitely gotten me out of the habit of knowing where my phone
is. While I don’t say this as a negative thing in relation to my need to be
connected, I would prefer to keep track of my phone in the event that network
ever returns to the regularly inconsistent status it once held.
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| this is the reef i walk out to in order to make phone calls. you can see the island of Malo off in the distance |
We be YAMMIN'—I believe I’ve already mentioned this, but I love yams.
Yams are a big part of the culture in my village and the surrounding areas.
They are also the tastiest root crop in my opinion (they aren’t like yams in
the U.S. which are more sweet like sweet potato, they have a simpler taste and
a texture similar to a potato) and are highly coveted during their season
because they take so long to become ready. When the yam leaves are finally dry
and the yams are ready to be dug up, everyone is excited to lego banana for a
few months and just get yammin. My favorite yam is waelu because it has a
simple flavor and you can prepare it lots of different ways. It’s the best for
laplap sosor because its soft after you cook it. Its also good for just boiling
because it gets nice and soft and goes great just with coconut milk. You can
also boil it then fry it and make yam fries, however, these are dangerously
delicious and even more so when I had the white truffle oil that Dane left me.
Yams are also an important part of custom marriages. During
bride price ceremonies and marriages, countless yams are shared between
families in order to represent a joining of families and good luck for the future
of the couple. There are some yams that can stay good for years. There are also
yams I’ve seen that are almost 5 feet long!
The last thing I’ll share about yams is that one of my best
friends and fellow Peace Corps Volunteer, Monica, thinks I love yams a little
bit too much. Anytime we go somewhere I know she’s just waiting for someone to
bring up yams, or for me to bring up yams, and then for me to just keep going
and going about the yam season and which types of yams are ready and how I’ve
been preparing my yams and so on…just so she can make fun of me for talking
about yams. She does it with all the love, of course.
Awoooo Children’s Day. Definitely one of the best days of the year
and one of my favorite public holidays. In the U.S. we have Mother’s Day and Father’s
Day and a whole collection of ridiculous ________’s Days, but how do we not
have Children’s Day?? In Vanuatu the day is spent cooking and eating and
playing and, at least in my village, every family of kids, and sometimes every
individual kid, gets their own cake! My nephew Ensly was born two years ago on
Children’s Day so Children’s Day in our family is a super-sugar charged day of
celebration. His sister Elsa’s birthday was at the beginning of the month too
so Children’s Day is also double birthday party!
In Vanuatu, we don’t waste time filling up on food before
cake time—we go right for the cake. There were seven cakes in total, a huge
bowl of popcorn, a bowl of Skittles (also provided by first Laura) and a big
container filled with juice. Everyone got their own plate with a slice of each
cake and additional treats on it, meaning that most of the kids really only had
sugar for dinner and had no room for rice and soup or the delicious laplap
sosor, which is fine, because it just meant the adults could eat all the sosor
we wanted. Of course, it was impossible not to eat any of the cake first so,
while I generally go back two times for laplap, I was limited to one by the
slowly increasing pain in my stomach. 
After everyone was full of sugar and yam, we sat around
storing for awhile. I laid down on tawi Taini’s lap and she braided my hair
while I drifted into a food coma induced smol sleep. Everyone storied for
awhile but eventually we all got up and gave into our sugar high crash and went
home. I got back to my house, brushed my teeth, changed quickly and basically
fell right asleep. It’s sad to think that I may not be in the village for
Children’s Day next year but I did plant a yam earlier this week and will need
to dig it up in about a year so who knows, maybe it will fall on or around the
24th of July.
