Vila Shock

I’ve been in Port Vila for 15 days now. When I got here, I had the expected initial reactions:
“A paved road?!”
“Electricity means lights, so we can stay up late!”
“There are so many cars!!”
“This A/C is freezing!”
“ICE CREAM!!!”

After a week I went to the grocery store. Jenni left me in the produce section and came back two or three minutes later, her basket half full, to find me still standing there with an empty basket just staring at the produce. Luckily, she was able to solve the problem: “Let’s start with lunch. What do you want to eat for lunch?” The second time I went by myself and ended up with a basket full of Coke, chocolate, and Crunch’N'Munch. I probably need supervision in the future.

But now being here is starting to wear on me in different ways. Because we’re here for a training, that means a lot of people are here. There are 15 education volunteers in my group, plus 10-ish from the other group (2009-11) who have been trickling in as they get ready for their training at the end of the week. My group is in training all day and we go into the resource center (a small room with couches, the mailboxes, a couple of computers, and wifi) during our breaks. The sheer amount of people in such a small space would be bad enough, but think about the fact that most of us are in Vila Shock, we’re not feeling very well from overindulging on everything we can’t get at site, and we all have very strong personalities (um, hi, we’re PCVs). Today was Day 6 of training, and people were starting to piss each other off (more than usual).

My patience level (which is normally not very high for people over age 10) is pretty much non-existent. I have a splitting headache. If I have snapped at you in the past 72 hours I would like to apologize now. I’ve almost developed a sort of paranoia in social gatherings. It’s really weird. Sunday I literally felt like everyone was out to get me, like every word I uttered would attract some kind of attack as a response. (Whether or not that’s true is debatable, but in any case that’s how it felt).

The air smells (rotting trash, burning trash, car exhaust), the water tastes horrible (tap), it’s hot, it’s expensive (we actually have to buy stuff), and life here is just generally stressful. Plus, while internet is nice to have, it also allows for hours upon hours of facebook stalking, which leads to homesickness/depression/other unkind emotions.

We’ll see how it goes for the rest of the week, but I will NOT be disappointed to fly back to the Banks on Monday. This actually makes me legitimately worried about going back to the States. Mom said she’d bring a bubble to put me in (along with the parka and down comforters, since it’ll be November).