Where Have I Been?

I’m in Vila! Woohoo!! After 5 months and 6 days in the Banks (but who’s counting?) I have come back to the land of supermarkets, ice cream, and terrifying traffic. During the next three weeks, I hope to enjoy fresh fruit, meat, and dairy products (really just everything that’s not rice and beans) without ending up super sick (cross your fingers for me). My family arrives on Tuesday!

We no longer had internet up north for a while. Well, technically we did… we still had a solar panel hooked up to a satellite plugged into a wifi router… but the guy who’s ultimately in charge of it is a little angry with some people (I may or may not be included in this group…) and has turned it off at the administrative level. I think that’s all the more I can publicly say. But we had some IT guys in from the Ministry of Ed all week and they made an office network then passed a wire up from the satellite in front of the government building. So not only do I have internet now, but I have internet at my desk. Bye bye productivity.

Anyway, that’s why you haven’t heard from me in a month. So. What’s new?

My first trimester Volunteer Reporting Form is complete. The thing that sucks about the first one is that it looks like you haven’t actually done anything because you’re too busy starting everything you’re going to do. Kerry assures me that the second one will look much better.

I taught the entire office staff how to play Mahjong on the projector during our weekly IT training. Human Capacity Building! Skill Sharing! Man, I should have put that in my VRF. During that Mahjong session, one of my coworkers asked me (sincerely) if dragons exist. Like, not the Komodo dragon kind, but the flying, fire-breathing kind.

Mama sent Jephline and Dorina to board at the school because they’re in Year 10 and there are big exams at the end of the year. By boarding, she hopes to cut their distractions. I don’t know that moving them into a 1-room dorm with a bunch of other teenage girls is going to help with that, but more power to her for trying. Boarders are allowed to leave the school during the afternoons on weekends, so they’ve chosen my house as the Saturday afternoon refuge for the past couple weeks, which has been fun.

My metabolism has evened itself out and I didn’t have any major digestive ailments between March and the end of June (don’t ask). Thus, I’ve reached my summer 2010 weight again. In Vanuatu it’s socially acceptable to tell someone they’re “fatfat.” So since everyone in Sola is used to seeing me 2kg lighter, guess what I get to hear every day? There’s a certain irony when a woman twice my size tells me that I’ve put on weight. (And before you go on a tirade about how it’s a compliment in some cultures… it’s NOT in this one.) I don’t actually know if I’ve really gained weight or if I’ve normalized. That’s one problem with wearing elastic waisted and/or drawstring skirts every day.

The increased number on the scale, however, has not decreased the number of yangfala (15-25 yr old males) attempting to discreetly take pictures of me with their camera phones (an extremely recent novelty to reach Torba). Yeah that’s right. I’m Britney Spears.

In other digestion news: at summer camp we had hourly water breaks. In the Peace Corps, we have semiannual de-worming breaks. Pop those Mebendazole tablets, kids!

My first bottle of cooking gas emptied. Luckily though, I ran out the same week we had a ship in the area, so I just had to wait for it to do its rounds of the islands before coming back to our bay to finish up. Nicole fed me for the 36 hours that I couldn’t cook for myself. I felt bad at first, but then I realized how much she was loving it. Her whole family (including 4? kids, ages 9-20) lives on Santo, and she’s stuck in Sola living by herself just because she has a good job. She was so excited to cook for someone besides herself she went out and bought chicken wings (again, lucky the ship was in). Then she showed up on my doorstep at 6:30am with freshly boiled water, because heaven forbid I can’t have a cup of coffee before work. She wouldn’t let me help cook though because she said I would burn myself on the fire. (No, she didn’t know she was talking to a pyro.) I’ve attempted to explain summer camp before… but there’s nothing even relatable here. “It’s like school during school break where we teach children how to live outside, including how to cook over a fire [along with being leaders, team players, etc etc].” I get a lot of confused faces and questions like, “How is ‘living outside’ different from everyday life?”

I started my weekly English grammar training sessions at the school. I invited every teacher from both primary and secondary, both Anglophone and Francophone. For the first session I had nine attendees. Rock on. It felt SO GOOD to actually teach, which I haven’t done in over a year. And then a student asked for homework. Only in the Peace Corps.

Last month Eba closed her 2-year service and headed back to Japan. I’m now the senior-most volunteer on the island, out of four. (“The Highest White Man!” says Lucy.) It’s always weird when somebody goes home. At the beginning, it’s like, “Oh man I’m so jealous of so-and-so because they get to go home. Within two weeks they’ll be hugging their mom and drinking Dr. Pepper and showering and eating ice cream and driving a car…” But then you remember that the 2-year-service is a process. You realize that at this point, you couldn’t go home. It’s not time to go home yet. You’re not done yet. And then the volunteer who’s leaving starts sobbing because she is done but she doesn’t want to leave, and then you realize, “When I leave, that’s going to be me. Sobbing.” Like I said, it’s weird.

Somebody asked me when my contract was finished, and I said, “November of next year,” and he said, “oh good, you have a long time yet.” And I said, “yep, a year and a half.” And then a couple seconds later it dawned on me… I don’t even have a full year and half left. Weird.

I’ve started mixing my languages, even on the phone with Americans. (I told my sister, “Yeah, be [but] I texted Mom finis [already].”) This family visit is going to be entertaining. My English class was fun too. “So, Subject hemi mekem wanem long Object? Yes, Verb! Gud.”

Neko has graduated from pouncing on inanimate objects (and my feet) to pouncing on, killing, and eating flies, moths, and the occasional tarantula. Unfortunately, he got distracted during our first mouse hunt and let it get away even though I practically handed it to him on a platter. Hopefully he’ll get it figured out. Also unfortunately, he won’t touch the slugs, which have multiplied exponentially with the recent cool weather. Numbus ran away while Lucy was in Vila for two weeks. We think it was a combination of being cooped up in the house too much, and being cooped up in the house without Lucy that did it. I’m a little nervous about leaving Neko for three weeks, but I think my neighbors will take care of him.

We had a random winter “depressive low.” Apparently the storm gods missed the memo when cyclone season ended on April 1. After five days of horrendous wind, my roof is looking pretty pathetic, has two small leaks (I have pots in strategic places on the floor… Plink! Plink!), and will probably need reinforced for the cyclone season in a few months. It was bad enough (and cold enough!) the first night that I let my little fleabag sleep in my bed with me until I heard the rats come in. Then I put him on the floor to go chase them, and he proceeded to jump into my dirty clothes basket, curl right back up and go back to sleep. Such a useful cat.

So the plan is to eat, shop, and internet till Tuesday morning, then pick up my family at the airport. A week in Vila, then a few days on Tanna, then a couple more days in Vila which will probably be ridiculous because we’ll be moving into Independence-Day-week, then see them off on another Tuesday morning. Then I’ll fly back to the Banks on Friday the 29th. Or that’s the plan, anyway. But since nothing ever goes as planned here, don’t hold me to it.