April Showers Bring May… Flooding?

So much for “dry season.”

My bathroom drain is flooded. I think the pipe is plugged. But also, my neighborhood is built on a swamp and the land is not draining properly. I’m actually really lucky though – everything is still going down the toilet. My neighbors have the opposite problem – their drains are fine, but their toilets won’t “flush” so they have to use their bush toilets (hole in the ground with a concrete slab over top with a small hole over which to squat). Being in a brand new house, I do not have a bush toilet. If my toilet stops up, I’m screwed. Nobody believes me that the pipe is clogged… after all, their toilets aren’t working (plus they don’t have my hair). Until they either come up with a system for unclogging it (I can’t find anyone with a plunger) or it stops raining, I’ve just moved my bucket outside near the water tank and wear a sarong around me when I wash. Not too big of a deal, but the fact that this started the same week I got creeped has me a little paranoid.

OH YEAH, I got creeped.

I am now officially a statistic in PC Safety and Security. Ironically, some ridiculously high percentage of security incidents in Vanuatu take place in the volunteer’s first or last six months of service. The dude made it into my first six months of service by four hours. (Or maybe it’s “first six months at site” in which case he cleared it by a couple days). The conversation went something like this:

“Amanda, Amanda, Amanda, Amanda, Amanda, Amanda,…”
“Oooo!” (What?)
<something I didn’t understand>
“Yu hu?” (Who are you?)
“Mi Joe.”
“Hu??” [Liar, the only Joe I know is currently in New Zealand]
“Joe.”
“Yu mekem wanem?” (What are you doing?)
<no answer>
“Yu go!” (Go away!)
“From?” (Why?)
“From se mi no interes!” (Because I’m not interested!)

Meanwhile, Numbus is meowing up a freakin storm. Cute little guard kitten.

“Joe” interrupted my How I Met Your Mother marathon, which I felt was extremely rude. On THAT subject, I would like to note that I think it’s hilarious that in Season 1 Episode 12 Barney uses the Peace Corps as a pickup line. In my experience, it’s more of a deal breaker. But, we all know sitcoms aren’t real life.

Going back to Numbus being “cute little guard kitten,” I would like to take back the adjective “little” as he is probably the fattest kitten in Torba. Having the two kittens in the same house was fun, but Numbus eats and eats and eats, and Neko is quite slow with just about everything, so Numbus usually managed to eat Neko’s food before he could get to it. He seriously looks pregnant. So, we separated them. The first night poor Lucy was up half the night with Numbus’ meowing, while Neko was fairly confused about the food left on the tray after he was full. Numbus will be better off at Lucy’s anyway. He started hissing and spitting at the neighborhood dogs, which have tried to attacked me four times now, so who knows what they’d do to him.

Other recent events:

I ran out of unread books. Well, that’s not entirely true. I still have All the Pretty Horses and The Boxcar Children books 1-7. But (1) Cormac McCarthy apparently never learned about punctuation in grade school, and (2) no children talk like the Boxcar kids! Even in the 60s! (Mom, back me up here?) Luckily, by the time I finished the 1st Boxcar Children and somehow reached page 50 (run-on sentence #254?) in All the Pretty Horses, Kerry had sent three books over on the boat from Mota Lava.

When my house was being built, the office ordered a solar panel system. It was lost. (Surprise.) Last week it was located!! And shipped, and set up. I have lights now. It’s SUPER weird. It’ll be nice though; this time of year the sun goes down at 6 so evening activity is quite limited and I get bored so I go to bed early. Then I wake up at like 10pm and have ridiculous insomnia for the rest of the night. (And insomnia sucks once the dim little solar lantern runs out of juice and the island is out of candles. Hence the How I Met Your Mother marathons.) Now it’ll be easier to force myself to stay awake until a more appropriate bedtime.

One morning recently I woke up at 6am to the sound of the village pickup truck – an entire neighborhood family was loading into the bed with calico and washbasins, and 9-month-pregnant mom was crawling into the cab. It’s a boy! With a healthy set of lungs. The village truck driver is the grandpa. The dad works in my office, and their house has the best view of my bedroom windows so he said next time the creeper comes, play nice and make conversation while texting him so he can come over and see who it is. “It’s not like we’re sleeping much at my house anyway!” Humiliation (even just being discovered by someone other than the person they’re trying to creep) is usually the key to stopping a creeper.

The mail came!!!!! First letters since Valentine’s Day! I got 14 letters/birthday cards and 4 packages. Thank you!!! I guess you can decide whether to send things to the Sola address or the Vila address. It appears that large envelopes get opened much less often when addressed to Sola, but the mail bag apparently only comes every 2+ months, whereas the PC mailroom lady in Vila sends our mail out to the islands once a month. But THEN it’s more likely to get lost/stolen because it’s airfreighted from Vila on passenger flights. You decide.

Last week I dreamed about fresh fruit. It was some kind of event – I don’t remember what – and there were tables and tables of fresh October Michigan apples, ripe peaches, and papaya. Why those three fruits would ever be in the same place at the same time, I have no idea. But I took the dream as a sign that it might be time to get off the island.

The other sign was when I made naked spaghetti with butter, salt, and garlic powder, dumped a can of peas on it, and thought it was delicious.

But the GOOD food experiments of the month have been:

Flatbread – I got sick of breakfast crackers and the store wasn’t selling bread for a couple weeks (and if you recall, my only way of cooking is a 2 burner gas stove) so I started playing around with an Indian chapati recipe. I’ve made it now with salt (which is in the recipe), sugar, cinnamon sugar, and peanut butter. The peanut butter experiment was a bust, but I think that’s because I was using PB out of the Au Bon Marche 1kg jar, and I need to try again with higher quality PB (i.e. one in which the main ingredient is actually peanuts). Next test is Milo.

Red Snapper Burgers – The PEO has teenage sons who go diving (spearfishing) on the weekends, and sometimes when there’s extra, Annie sends over a fish. The last one she sent was a massive red snapper, so first I texted Lucy to inform her she was coming over for dinner, and then I threw it in a pot of boiling water. Unfortunately, I took it out and started taking the meat off before it cooked all the way through and I had to salvage it somehow so I finished boiling the rest of it, took the rest of the meat off, put an egg, onion, and some flour into the mush of fish meat, and fried the patties. DELICIOUS. Served on rice, topped with ketchup.

And the future experiment is with a block of cheese Brenda sent from Vila… It’s so processed you don’t have to refrigerate it until AFTER you open it. Not sure what we’re going to do with it yet. I was thinking cheese and crackers, but Lucy’s talking some kind of cheesy pasta bake… flas.

Note – My bathroom drain was repaired between writing this blog and posting it