here it goes again

5/24/13

Well, another break has come and gone, and now we’re just finishing up our first week of term 2. Have I ever explained the school year, here? Term 1 goes from February through April, then there’s a 2 week break. Term 2 starts mid-May and goes until mid-August, then there’s another 2 week break. Term 3 is September through November, and then school lets out for the big holiday, which is December and January.

Over the 2 week break, the Gender and Development Committee, which is made up of volunteers, came to Tanna to run their annual training of trainers for Camp GLOW/BILD (Girls Leading Our World/Boys In Leadership Development). The camps are designed to teach life skills to youth (leadership, decision-making, reproductive health) and every year the GAD committee goes to a different island and invites Peace Corps from all over the country to come, bring someone from their communities, and learn how to run the camps. So for 5 days I and about 50 other people, many of them volunteers, lived at a nearby school and went through a 6 AM to 9 PM daily schedule of workshops and activities.

It was exhausting, but gave me the opportunity to demonstrate condom use on a piece of sugarcane, teach everyone how to tie-dye, and sing “Kumbaya” around a bonfire, so I came out of it feeling very, well, Peace Corps.

And before that happened, my mom came to visit! It was great. We spent a few days hanging out in Port Vila, and about 5 days here on Tanna, at my school. It was wonderful for her to finally get to see my home and meet my community.

This school term will be interesting. I have some fun plans for projects I want to start outside of the school day—painting a map of Vanuatu, doing a hygiene workshop with the kids, and starting a Girls/Boys Club based on the stuff I learned at the training of trainers. Of course, we also have 2 teachers starting maternity leave, and only one substitute coming in. Remember how at the beginning of the year, I was excited that only class 3 and 4 were sharing a teacher, unlike last year where every 2 classes shared a teacher? Yeeeah looks like that’s not gonna last. Class 1 and 2 will each have their own, but 3 and 4 will share, as will 5 and 6. It’s hard on the teachers, unfair to the kids, and puts me in a weird position—I feel guilty not stepping up and just taking on one of the classes, but that’s not my role here. My job is to work WITH the teachers, not do their work FOR them, and if I took on a whole class—say, class 4—that would mean I couldn’t keep working with classes 1, 2, and 3. And that’s not happening, because those are honestly my favorite classes to teach.

Let’s see. I guess my final piece of news is that Toilet Crab, the little purple crab who lives in a hole next to my toilet, is still alive and well, and frankly bolder than ever. Every time I go in there he’s staring up at me with his beady yellow eyes, and if I toss a pebble at him, he no longer runs away, but tries to eat the pebble. I feel like he’s the mascot for my service. Weird, a little gross, but determined and in his own way, admirable.

Now that I’ve poetically compared myself to a crab that lives in a toilet, I should probably stop.

Six more months of service. And then it’s time for the wallop of reverse culture shock that is America. I’m guessing you guys don’t have friendly crustaceans living in your bathrooms. 

Oh look, I'm not dead!

4/1/13

I’m writing this on April 1^st. My last blog post was in November of…last year. So clearly, I have been slipping. Honestly, I’m probably going to continue to be bad at updating. The thing about my second year of service is, I’m suddenly busy. I’m working more at the school, I’m getting more requests from other local schools for workshops and assistance, and I’m doing some work preparing new training materials for Peace Corps. And on top of that, I’ve agreed to teach a group of students the dance to Shakira’s “Waka Waka,” which I need to teach myself…tonight. Like I said, busy!

Life is going on the islands like it always does. Hot and rainy, hot and sunny, sometimes even hot and rainy and sunny all at once. We had a four-day weekend for Easter, and I hitched a ride over to the other side of the island to visit Jake and Zack. The volcano was especially active this weekend. Sitting outside a small thatched house in the middle of a rainforest, hearing the roaring boom of the volcano, feeling the earth shake. Drinking muddy-gray kava out of a coconut shell, after having watched a young man obligingly chew up the roots to make it. When you drink kava, you spit, a lot—it tastes bad, and makes you salivate, and anyway is just sort of part of the whole experience. When we were drinking kava, I had brief moment where I thought, “Everyone is spitting everywhere, I should really go put on my shoes.” Then I realized I was drinking a shell of root juice that a guy had chewed up for me, literally drinking his spit. I should probably not be grossed out by getting it on my feet.

Speaking of which, I’m getting really bad at wearing shoes. I’m much clumsier in them. Which is fine and all but I’m not sure how it’ll play out when I eventually arrive back in America in December. I’m going to look like a crazy homeless person, wandering the streets barefoot in a sarong and huge jacket.

It’s avocado season and I have an avocado tree right next to my house. It’s also grapefruit season; grapefruit here are enormous and super sweet. And today marks the start of yam season, which is a big deal here; yams are a staple crop and hold a lot of cultural significance to the islanders. Me, I can pretty much take ‘em or leave ‘em—generally they’re just another starchy root vegetable, although it is exciting when they’re purple—but there’s this one kind called wailu that you can grate and fry like a pancake and it is AMAZING. I’ve told everyone that’s my favorite about a million times, so hopefully I’ll be given some wailu…(I will totally be given some wailu, my neighbors are awesome about giving me produce.)

Teaching is going really well this year. My school, which last year had 3 teachers for 6 classes, now has 5 teachers and 1 assistant teacher! The difference that makes is HUGE. And the class 2 teacher is my Aunt Ruth, who is an awesome lady. I’ve been teaching English to a different class every day of the week, and it’s going great. I also get an ego boost from the teachers telling me how advanced the kids I taught last year are. Last year I taught class 2 every day, and all but 3 of my students moved on to class 3. The class 3 teacher has said she’s really impressed at how good their English is, and laughed because when she has them read aloud, they all pronounce their Rs like Americans (people here tend to say much softer R sounds, like Australians). I notice it too, when I teach class 3—my students from last year have really great speaking, reading, and writing skills, are well-behaved, and maybe most importantly, are very confident. I have them do Show and Tell, and these kids ROCK it. Compared to class 4, who are very reluctant to speak and need constant prompting, I can really see the effect I had from the work I did last year. Yay!

Okay. My million mosquito bites are distracting me, so I’ll stop there. Hopefully this won’t be the last blog post for another 5 months! I mean, dang, I only have about 7 more months of service. Hopefully I can manage at least 7 more posts…

Carol Night

Fried giant praying mantis

I ate this. Well, one of these.

Kastom Dress

Myself, fellow Tanna PCV Laura, and our former Director of Training and Programming Sara, who just recently moved to another PC Post and will be sorely missed. We're all at a custom celebration together, looking our face-painted-finest! Later we also put on grass skirts and danced, by which I mean jumped up and down for hours. It was a blast. (Sara and I are rocking the glasses-and-paint combo I like to call "Warrior Librarian.")

12/13/12 A sense of community isn't always a good thing

12/13/13

When people talk about life in developing countries versus life in the U.S. or other highly developed countries, we often talk about community versus individual, or connection versus isolation. Often we talk about that sense of community as something that we’ve unfortunately lost in America. We don’t have the close relationships, physically and emotionally, with our extended families as people often do in developing countries. We don’t have the support of a small, tightly-knit community. It takes a village to raise a child, we say, and in the U.S., we no longer have villages. In contrast, Americans are often more isolated. We may not know even our neighbors, and much less are our lives intimately interwoven with theirs. It’s not uncommon for even nuclear families to live great distances apart—parents divorced, children living far from home—and extended families may rarely interact. Sometimes this sense of distance is blamed for the loneliness and unhappiness that many Americans feel. We need to regain small communities, many people seem to think. We need to return to the village.

In Vanuatu, village life is everything. Family and community play a hugely important role in personal identity. Isolation is virtually impossible, even if you wanted it. It’s true that I can see a lot to admire in this strong sense of familial and village community. I see a joy, and comfort, and generosity that I think would be wonderful to reintroduce in the U.S. But I think we often overlook the negative side of community. There can be definite repercussions to a system in which the family or village unit is seen as more important than individualism or self-interest. 

There was just recently some fighting on Tanna that escalated precisely because of the paramount importance of community in Vanuatu. Man Tanna has a bit of a reputation for fighting, and unfortunately, sometimes they earn it. The story was somewhat hard for me to get straight, as I heard it all just from rumors and gossip, and in the extremely imprecise language of Bislama (example: killim, or to kill, can mean anything from lightly slapping to actually killing—it took me a while to figure out that in fact no one dies in this story).

It goes like this: some guys from Tanna are living in Vila, the capitol city on Efate. Two of them start to fight over a girl, and one hits the other one. Possibly someone also hits the girl. These boys are from different parts of Tanna, and so their friends join in the fighting, with men from the south versus men from the west. Sporadic fighting continues to break out over the next few days. Then, some of the men from the west get on a cargo ship headed for Tanna. They come down and go into Lenakel, our little town where all the shops are closed because it’s Sunday. They break into the shops that they know are owned by men from the south, cutting electrical cables and slashing open all the products. Finally, extra police and some of the VMF (Vanuatu Mobile Force, or army) are sent down to the island to make reports, and hold a big meeting with the chiefs and all the men involved in the fighting, and—reportedly—everything is put to rest.

Did you see what happened there? Because sense of identity is so closely bound up in one’s community, a fight between two guys on another island migrated to Tanna and turned into a bunch of men from the west trashing the stores belonging to men from the south. That wouldn’t happen in America. If Guy A and Guy B were in a bar and started fighting over some girl, maybe their friends would jump in and throw a few punches, but then it would end. Guy A wouldn’t go home and rally everyone in his apartment building to go drive a few hours and loot a store belonging to another guy who went to the same high school as Guy B. It would be absurd. Yet that’s not too far off from what happened here.

(Interestingly, what community causes, community must fix: in spite of the impressive presence of the VMF, holding semi-automatic weapons that I’m not entirely convinced weren’t Chinese-made plastic toys, I don’t doubt that it was the chiefs’ discussions and interventions that laid the matter to rest, not the official authorities. Part of the reason there are so few police on the outer islands—in some cases, no police—is because they don’t actually have much authority. Power doesn’t lie with the centralized government. Power lies with the communities, which is to say, with the chiefs.)

Sometimes the downside of community is less dramatic and more complicated. I have a friend in my village, a woman in her twenties, like me. She’s smart, funny, and not afraid to speak her mind. She has a job, and is forward-thinking and determined. She wants to go back to school, or maybe go live with a family member in Vila who might be able to find her an even better job. But she can’t do these things. She lives with her father and is the main caretaker of five children. The youngest child, a small boy, is hers. If she only had to look after him, she could probably pursue other opportunities. But she’s also obligated to care for the four children who belong to two of her sisters. Her sisters were single mothers like herself, until they found new men that they began relationships with. They left their children with my friend, their sister, and went off to live with their new men—presumably because the men had no interest in living with a child that was not their own. And it’s just expected that my friend will take care of these kids.

I know that this isn’t so unusual; there are plenty of people in the U.S. taking care of children of family members. What strikes me about my friend’s situation is that no one seems to think it’s in any way remarkable. No one ever comments on how much she’s doing. It’s just expected of her. Family and community come before the individual.

Community can be very powerful, and positive. But it can also have a downside. And it can sometimes prevent individuals from acting in their own self-interest, or stepping forward, or trying something new, or leading, and that can wind up harming the community itself. 

12/10/12 Eating Bugs

12/10/12

Laura and I spent the weekend at Jake’s site. He’ll be going back to the States for Christmas, so we won’t see him for a while. It was a good visit; we the entire time reading, napping, cooking, or playing Scrabble (I won three of four games, no big deal). It’s great living where I do in terms of convenience—I’m close to town, the airport, the ocean, have electricity—but it’s really fun to go to Jake’s side of the island for a while and enjoy being bush. Swimming in a river beside the black palm trees; watching huge fruit bats wing their way across the pink sunset; looking at the red glow of the volcano through the trees, with the Milky Way lit up overhead and tiny phosphorescent bugs flitting through the darkness, like stars drifting loose from the sky; these are the perks of Peace Corps service on a tropical island.

Also, we ate giant praying mantises, fried with salt. They were pretty hard to bite through, but the taste wasn’t too bad, as is true of most anything fried with salt.