4 cakes?!!

Our VSO volunteer threw a small party Monday night with a bottle of wine she saved from her last trip to Vila. It was a good time – all 5 volunteers (new JICA just arrived that day) and a guy who works with the health vols. A party is almost guaranteed to be a success when the ratio of people to languages being spoken in the room is 2:1. We had dinner and wine and a banana cake with raisins in it, because the VSO house has an oven. (Pretty fancy.)

Tuesday the principal kept his word and brought a chocolate cake with chocolate icing to our meeting. Stomachache on a plate for a PCV. It was sooooo good. I had “dinner” at my host family’s house, which was really just more cake. They made two (one chocolate, one banana) because so many of my various little cousins and nephews showed up (the pikinini know where the good treats are). We had a little salusalu ceremony; they gave me a really pretty sarong. Luck was on my side – my mama forgot the baby powder so I didn’t get dusted (a Vanuatu tradition). There was also fish and taro but really we ate too much cake to eat any real food. I was sent home with the leftover cake to eat for breakfast on Wednesday. Wednesday I felt sick for most of the day. I really haven’t eaten like that since I was back in Vila in January!

U.S. weather has made radio news here. I’ve had to explain the science behind tornadoes quite a few times this week! We’ve had mostly hot sunny days and cool nights. Now that cyclone season is over, the biggest temperature change I notice is that the sun is now the biggest source of heat, rather than the air itself. I’m typing this on Thursday, and it’s been windy and rainy since late last night and I’m actually chilly. In other weather news, this week we had one of the highest full moon tides that anyone can remember. A few people that live right up against the beach were getting a little anxious at the beginning of the week. Hello, global climate change.

Birthday celebrations and rising sea levels aside, the true excitement of the week has been the upgrading of the cell phone network. They’re doing maintenance on our tower and preparing for a new tower to be built on the other side of the island. The reason this is so exciting is that hauling heavy machinery up into the bush involves helicopters. Tuesday one came in with a huge piece of something and set it down in the Center between the offices and the wharf. You know you live on a little remote island when the provincial government officials come outside of their offices to gawk at a helicopter. But hey, our island has ten pickup trucks, ten motorboats, and two twin-otter flights per week. We get excited by big machinery.

This is a 4 day weekend (Good Friday and Easter Monday). I plan to relax in my house and be totally lazy and anti-social for at least one of those days. I feel the need for a mental health day. And I don’t care that it goes against my “community integration” time. So there. Really, I’ll be with my host fam all day Sunday anyway – I heard there’s going to be kastom danis after church!

Check out the new tab on this website: A Day in the Life