first Vanuatu update!
Greetings from Vanuatu! I arrived in Port Vila on 9/12 with 41 other volunteers. It took quite awhile to reach Vanuatu with a three hour flight from Seattle to Los Angeles, 13 hour flight from Los Angeles to Auckland, New Zealand and 4.5 hour fight from Auckland to Port Vila (this flight was delayed a bit because of a luggage mix up). It was kind of eerie flying out of LA on the 10th and arriving on the 12th, since we crossed the International Date Line we essentially did not experience 9/11 because we lost that day in travel. All of us new volunteers (the 23rd incoming group to Vanuatu) met in LA first for a few days of what PC refers to as staging. After a slew of paperwork, introductions and activities pertaining to the PC core expectations/goals we were off. We were greeted at the airport in Port Vila by PC Vanuatu staff, volunteers of group 21 and 22 and a whole lot of other people excited to shake our hands, welcome us, place a sarong (what they call a “lava lava” here) and flower necklace (which are only referred to as leis in Hawaii) on us and offer us a coconut to drink. Immediately after we climbed onto a couple buses, jet lagged as ever, and headed off to a camp site about 20 minutes outside of town in a village called Pango.
The first week spent at Pango was an interesting experience; I think it was Peace Corps’ way of easing us into the culture. Slowly but surely island food (a LOT of root crops, cabbage, tin meats, fresh fruit and rice) became the norm, cold showers weren’t so uncomfortable, spiders the size of your hand seemed manageable and electricity until 9 PM seemed good enough. Bislama classes and safety trainings filled our days and we were able to socialize with each other at night. That first week passed achingly slowly and looking back seemed incredibly surreal. Shortly thereafter, still standing, we boarded buses yet again and were split up and sent to five different villages on North Efate (the main island where Port Vila is located) for eight weeks of community based training. Myself and three others were sent to a village right on the water called Takara.
Arriving in Takara we were greeted by the entire community and a huge island style lunch they had all prepared for us. We were then introduced to our host families and have been living the village life and speaking broken Bislama ever since. My host mama and papa’s names are Peter and May Albert. My papa works at a Presbyterian school about 20 minutes down the road called Onesua and my mama cooks, cleans and takes care of the children (amongst many other things, she’s a very talented woman). My family here is enormous! Family structure here is a lot different than in the states, all of my cousins are referred to as my brothers and sisters and my uncles are referred to as my papas too. So I have a ton of siblings and papas and several sets of grandparents, it’s difficult keeping everything straight and it seems like I’m related somehow to the entire village. Families here usually all live together, it’s customary to live with your siblings and parents long into adulthood until your parents pass away. My pua (the father of my host papa) is the chief of Takara, so I am of a chiefly family. He gave me the custom name of Leitau (pronounced Lay-tao, tao like meow) so no one here really calls me Kara anymore and if they do it’s pronounced car-uh… if you know me, you know that I’m very firm in the pronunciation of my name as care-uh, but alas they do not have the “air” sound in their language.
Language here has been a tricky thing. The national language of Vanuatu is Bislama (along with French and English) and thus is what we’re learning, but Vanuatu is one of the most culturally diverse countries in the world, so most speak Bislama on top of a distinct local dialect (there are about 200 here). Many of the children here don’t speak Bislama and only speak their local language and my family uses their local language to speak to each other and only use Bislama when speaking to me. Being that I only have about three weeks of language training on Bislama and still don’t understand it fully and definitely don’t understand anything in their local language other than how to say good night or good morning, it can be very difficult trying to figure out what’s going on. Bislama is an interesting language to learn as it is form of Pidgin English. Speaking exclusively in Bislama and then trying to quickly convert back to English can be quite challenging because the two are similar, but very different. For example, to say you do not have something in Bislama you would say, “mi no gat.” A lot of words are modified English words that don’t really sound English anymore and are spelled phonetically. To say good afternoon you would say, “gud aftanun”, government is “kavman”, news is “nius”, surprise is “sapraes” and so on. They have a lot less sounds and letters than English and have words that are very commonly used but mean a vast array of things. Like blong and long, for example, they are used for everything! Blong can be used to indicate possession, indicate a function, indicate a reason for an action or describe the identity of a person and long can be used to point to a location, to describe something, or can be used as a preposition. Getting those straight has been a challenge. To say “my name is Kara and my custom name is Leitao. I’m from Seattle and I’m a Peace Corps Volunteer in Vanuatu currently living in Takara” I would say “Nem blong mi Kara mo kastem nem blong mi Leitao. Mi kam long Seattle long Amerika blong mi wan voluntia blong Pis Kop long Vanuatu. Mi stap long Takara naoia.”
I’ve been living here for nearly a month now and have participated in many cultural activities. My mama showed me how to weave a basket out of dried palm leaves and I should be learning to weave a mat and a fan soon. I helped make laplap last weekend, which is the signature Ni Van dish. It’ s essentially grated yam, banana, or manioc mixed with coconut milk to make a sort of paste and then wrapped and cooked over an open fire in banana leaves. I like banana laplap in moderation but am not too keen on the others. My papa likes to take me to drink kava at the nakamal on Friday nights. Kava is all the rage in Vanuatu and a big part of Ni Van culture. It comes from the root of a kava plant and is ground up (usually by the younger village boys or the “yungfala”) into a liquid and served as a drink in coconut shells. It tastes absolutely awful, like grass and dirt. You’re supposed to drink your shell kind of how you take a shot, although a coconut shell is much larger than a short glass so that’s pretty difficult. I usually plug my nose. Drinking kava is kind of like the nice buzz you get from drinking alcohol, and interestingly enough the more you drink kava the more it affects you, which is the opposite with alcohol. To drink kava people gather at the nakamal, which is a usually a covering or clearing and in Takara’s case is a small covering right by the ocean. Kava is usually only consumed at night as it’s said bright lights, as well as loud sounds, disrupt the effect. So nakamals are quiet and dark and a little bit creepy in my opinion. I also went to the garden with my mama to plant manioc and cut banana leaves for laplap. Turns out the garden here is about a 30 minute hike into the bush (or gnar gnar jungle as I would call it back in the states) and after working away for a little while I got pretty dehydrated and my mama shouted “wait small!” and scaled an enormous coconut tree in a matter of seconds to get me some fresh coconuts to drink. I wear island dresses that look similar to muumuus every Sunday to church where my papa preaches and we sing hymns in Bislama about “Papa God”. This week the volunteers in Takara prepared a traditional island meal for lunch, which involved catching, strangling, de-feathering, gutting and roasting a local chicken. I’ve also done a bit snorkeling and came face to face with a moray eel the other morning. My uncle wants to teach us all how to fish using a piece of string and a bottle soon.
My living quarters here are very nice by Ni Van standards. My family lives in a sort of compound with several rooms and small houses that we sleep in surrounding a central dining area/kitchen and cook house. Bathrooms are separated into one small space for bathing and one for the toilet. Mine are both surrounded by aluminum with a thatched roof. My toilet had a rickety wooden door, dirt floor and is essentially a hole in the ground surrounded by a small mound of concrete with a plastic lining, typically referred to by expats in the developing world as a “squatty potty”. In order to flush you fill a bucket with water and dump it down the hole after your business. My toilet is usually swarming with geckos during the day and cockroaches at night. My shower is built the same way but with a piece of fabric as the door/curtain and a cement floor with a small hole in the center for draining. My fabric door blows open on occasion, which is always a humbling experience. In order to shower you fill a large bucket with water and use a smaller bucket or bowl to dump water on yourself. I’ve been heating up my water via the cooking fire to make it warm. Suffice to say cold bucket showers are not very pleasant. A lot of crabs seem to find their way into my shower, and there are ants living in the walls of both my toilet and shower. Most houses in Vanuatu are made out of local materials like bamboo and palm trees, but given Takara’s relative proximity to Port Vila a lot of structures are made out of cement and aluminum. My room is cement and my cook house and dining room are made out of local materials. My room is a pretty good size and my bed is decently comfortable, although sleeping in a mosquito net is a bit of a hassle… especially when you wake up in the middle of the night with crazy anti-malarial induced nightmares and find yourself trapped in a heap of scratchy material. Since malaria is present in Vanuatu, Peace Corps requires all of us to take anti-malarials which have a long list of nasty side effects like crazy, often disturbing dreams.
Living without electricity and running water thus far has been a life altering experience, to say the least. There is one running tap near my house shared by many others but the water is not safe to drink, is usually full of strange things and often doesn’t work for no apparent reason. My family has a gasoline powered generator that lights our kitchen and charges my electronics but we only turn this on about once a week. Time here is driven by the sun, we get up early when the sun rises and go to bed shortly after the sun sets. At night we use kerosene lamps.
The weather here has been difficult for me to adjust to. It’s very hot and very, very humid. Unlike in the states, there is no escaping the heat with electric fans or air conditioning. In order to stay cool you find a mango tree to sit under (notorious for being the coolest of the trees here), sit by the ocean where there’s a constant breeze, or furiously fan yourself with a fan weaved out of palm leaves.
Perhaps one of the most difficult things for me to adjust to here is the role woman play in Ni Van culture. Gender equality in Vanuatu is much different than in the states and leaves me feeling very frustrated. Typically, women here fulfill similar roles to that of women in the states several decades ago. The role of a woman is customarily to cook, clean and take care of the children/family. It is taboo for women to wear pants or shorts and many villages have what’s called a “trouser fine”. One of the other training villages has this and charges $3,000 vatu (about $30 USD) to a woman if she is caught wearing pants in public. Even when swimming or playing sports, shorts/pants are usually covered with a sarong or lava lava. Spaghetti straps and sleeveless tops are also taboo, and typically the shoulders are covered. A few islands still have arranged marriages and all islands pay what’s called “bride price”, which is exactly what it sounds like. If a man marries a woman from the same island/village he will pay that woman’s family around $30,000-40,000 vatu ($3,000-4,000 USD), if they are from different islands the price is about $80,000 vatu ($8,000 USD). Usually bride price also includes items like woven mats and pigs, which are considered valuable in Vanuatu. A man’s wife is referred to as “woman blong hem”, meaning “his woman”, and sometimes this means of reference is used instead of the women’s name. There is no word for “her” or “she” in Bislama, there is only the masculine “hem”. Several assignment sites request male volunteers because at some locations men are much more respected, and in more extreme cases, community counterparts will not work with women.
I’ve encountered an array of other challenges over the past few weeks. I became very ill my first week in Takara and thought I would have to be transported to a clinic in Vila, but luckily I was able to pull through. Adjusting to the climate and food here can take a heavy toll on your health. There also isn’t a whole lot of soap around here. Sanitation seems to be a pretty prevalent issue… I foresee facilitating many a sanitation workshop in my two years of community health service to come. I’ve had rats terrorizing my room the past couple of nights. Rats here are the size of opossums in the states and make sounds I can only describe as the sounds I would anticipate a demon to make. They’ve been crawling in through my windows (which lack screens) at night and knock everything off of my desk looking for food. The mosquitoes also terrorize me at night. I slather myself in bug spray and sleep in a net, but still, they find me. I’ve never been covered in so many bites and suffice to say I take my anti-malarials religiously. The whole “fishbowl” concept has also been frustrating. Everyone in the village knows who I am and seems to know what I’m doing before I even do.
There are a lot of great things about pre-service training thus far as well. I love my proximity to the ocean, it is literally my backyard and I can hear the waves crashing at night. We have our Bislama classes on the beach every morning. The fruit here is unlike any other fruit I’ve tasted, it’s the freshest of fresh. The papaya, coconut, bananas and grapefruit are to die for and I haven’t even tried all Vanuatu has to offer yet. Living a life of moderation and forgoing all of the excess and luxury being an American has left me accustomed to has been a very difficult but undoubtedly amazing experience and is definitely one that has changed me already and will probably continue to do so throughout my service. I do however miss internet tremendously, I feel very disconnected from the world. I am very lucky to have a cell phone though. Mobile service was just made available to most of the islands and my group was the first to receive mobile phones. So I can text and call home but it is very expensive, it ranges from 50 to 80 cents a minute, I’m not really sure how it works and none of the volunteers seem to be able to get a straight answer so I usually just talk on my phone until it beeps at me and runs out of minutes. I have to buy what are called “top up cards” to purchase minutes, they’re like little scratch card with codes you enter into your phone that put however many minutes the card was worth onto it. It’s tricky finding these cards, a lot of the small road vendors carry them and you basically have to wander along the main road saying “Digicel” (the mobile company) until you find someone that sells them and isn’t sold out already. I am very grateful to have this phone though! The people in Vanuatu are very friendly and welcoming, everyone waves at everyone. Every car that passes you on a road will wave and it’s customary to wave back, and likewise almost every person you pass will greet you. It’s nearly impossible to walk down the main road in Takara and not be received with smiles. I say nearly because some of the much smaller children have never seen white people before and are either very frightened by us to the point of tears or stare like we’re aliens. My two year old brother finally stopped screaming and crying at the sight of me. I absolutely love learning another language and culture and hope I will get the opportunity again sometime in my life.
I’m very excited to finish training and get to my site so I can begin my community health work. We don’t get to know our site assignment until right before the swearing in ceremony and I’m very nervous and anxious to see where I will go. Currently, health volunteers stay in the Shefa and Penama provinces. I’m hoping to stay near Port Vila but we’ll see what happens.
So anyway, I think this covers most major topics. I’m alive and well and trying to take it one day at a time. I miss everyone back home (especially my cat) and would love to receive some snail mail and emails!
The first week spent at Pango was an interesting experience; I think it was Peace Corps’ way of easing us into the culture. Slowly but surely island food (a LOT of root crops, cabbage, tin meats, fresh fruit and rice) became the norm, cold showers weren’t so uncomfortable, spiders the size of your hand seemed manageable and electricity until 9 PM seemed good enough. Bislama classes and safety trainings filled our days and we were able to socialize with each other at night. That first week passed achingly slowly and looking back seemed incredibly surreal. Shortly thereafter, still standing, we boarded buses yet again and were split up and sent to five different villages on North Efate (the main island where Port Vila is located) for eight weeks of community based training. Myself and three others were sent to a village right on the water called Takara.
Arriving in Takara we were greeted by the entire community and a huge island style lunch they had all prepared for us. We were then introduced to our host families and have been living the village life and speaking broken Bislama ever since. My host mama and papa’s names are Peter and May Albert. My papa works at a Presbyterian school about 20 minutes down the road called Onesua and my mama cooks, cleans and takes care of the children (amongst many other things, she’s a very talented woman). My family here is enormous! Family structure here is a lot different than in the states, all of my cousins are referred to as my brothers and sisters and my uncles are referred to as my papas too. So I have a ton of siblings and papas and several sets of grandparents, it’s difficult keeping everything straight and it seems like I’m related somehow to the entire village. Families here usually all live together, it’s customary to live with your siblings and parents long into adulthood until your parents pass away. My pua (the father of my host papa) is the chief of Takara, so I am of a chiefly family. He gave me the custom name of Leitau (pronounced Lay-tao, tao like meow) so no one here really calls me Kara anymore and if they do it’s pronounced car-uh… if you know me, you know that I’m very firm in the pronunciation of my name as care-uh, but alas they do not have the “air” sound in their language.
Language here has been a tricky thing. The national language of Vanuatu is Bislama (along with French and English) and thus is what we’re learning, but Vanuatu is one of the most culturally diverse countries in the world, so most speak Bislama on top of a distinct local dialect (there are about 200 here). Many of the children here don’t speak Bislama and only speak their local language and my family uses their local language to speak to each other and only use Bislama when speaking to me. Being that I only have about three weeks of language training on Bislama and still don’t understand it fully and definitely don’t understand anything in their local language other than how to say good night or good morning, it can be very difficult trying to figure out what’s going on. Bislama is an interesting language to learn as it is form of Pidgin English. Speaking exclusively in Bislama and then trying to quickly convert back to English can be quite challenging because the two are similar, but very different. For example, to say you do not have something in Bislama you would say, “mi no gat.” A lot of words are modified English words that don’t really sound English anymore and are spelled phonetically. To say good afternoon you would say, “gud aftanun”, government is “kavman”, news is “nius”, surprise is “sapraes” and so on. They have a lot less sounds and letters than English and have words that are very commonly used but mean a vast array of things. Like blong and long, for example, they are used for everything! Blong can be used to indicate possession, indicate a function, indicate a reason for an action or describe the identity of a person and long can be used to point to a location, to describe something, or can be used as a preposition. Getting those straight has been a challenge. To say “my name is Kara and my custom name is Leitao. I’m from Seattle and I’m a Peace Corps Volunteer in Vanuatu currently living in Takara” I would say “Nem blong mi Kara mo kastem nem blong mi Leitao. Mi kam long Seattle long Amerika blong mi wan voluntia blong Pis Kop long Vanuatu. Mi stap long Takara naoia.”
I’ve been living here for nearly a month now and have participated in many cultural activities. My mama showed me how to weave a basket out of dried palm leaves and I should be learning to weave a mat and a fan soon. I helped make laplap last weekend, which is the signature Ni Van dish. It’ s essentially grated yam, banana, or manioc mixed with coconut milk to make a sort of paste and then wrapped and cooked over an open fire in banana leaves. I like banana laplap in moderation but am not too keen on the others. My papa likes to take me to drink kava at the nakamal on Friday nights. Kava is all the rage in Vanuatu and a big part of Ni Van culture. It comes from the root of a kava plant and is ground up (usually by the younger village boys or the “yungfala”) into a liquid and served as a drink in coconut shells. It tastes absolutely awful, like grass and dirt. You’re supposed to drink your shell kind of how you take a shot, although a coconut shell is much larger than a short glass so that’s pretty difficult. I usually plug my nose. Drinking kava is kind of like the nice buzz you get from drinking alcohol, and interestingly enough the more you drink kava the more it affects you, which is the opposite with alcohol. To drink kava people gather at the nakamal, which is a usually a covering or clearing and in Takara’s case is a small covering right by the ocean. Kava is usually only consumed at night as it’s said bright lights, as well as loud sounds, disrupt the effect. So nakamals are quiet and dark and a little bit creepy in my opinion. I also went to the garden with my mama to plant manioc and cut banana leaves for laplap. Turns out the garden here is about a 30 minute hike into the bush (or gnar gnar jungle as I would call it back in the states) and after working away for a little while I got pretty dehydrated and my mama shouted “wait small!” and scaled an enormous coconut tree in a matter of seconds to get me some fresh coconuts to drink. I wear island dresses that look similar to muumuus every Sunday to church where my papa preaches and we sing hymns in Bislama about “Papa God”. This week the volunteers in Takara prepared a traditional island meal for lunch, which involved catching, strangling, de-feathering, gutting and roasting a local chicken. I’ve also done a bit snorkeling and came face to face with a moray eel the other morning. My uncle wants to teach us all how to fish using a piece of string and a bottle soon.
My living quarters here are very nice by Ni Van standards. My family lives in a sort of compound with several rooms and small houses that we sleep in surrounding a central dining area/kitchen and cook house. Bathrooms are separated into one small space for bathing and one for the toilet. Mine are both surrounded by aluminum with a thatched roof. My toilet had a rickety wooden door, dirt floor and is essentially a hole in the ground surrounded by a small mound of concrete with a plastic lining, typically referred to by expats in the developing world as a “squatty potty”. In order to flush you fill a bucket with water and dump it down the hole after your business. My toilet is usually swarming with geckos during the day and cockroaches at night. My shower is built the same way but with a piece of fabric as the door/curtain and a cement floor with a small hole in the center for draining. My fabric door blows open on occasion, which is always a humbling experience. In order to shower you fill a large bucket with water and use a smaller bucket or bowl to dump water on yourself. I’ve been heating up my water via the cooking fire to make it warm. Suffice to say cold bucket showers are not very pleasant. A lot of crabs seem to find their way into my shower, and there are ants living in the walls of both my toilet and shower. Most houses in Vanuatu are made out of local materials like bamboo and palm trees, but given Takara’s relative proximity to Port Vila a lot of structures are made out of cement and aluminum. My room is cement and my cook house and dining room are made out of local materials. My room is a pretty good size and my bed is decently comfortable, although sleeping in a mosquito net is a bit of a hassle… especially when you wake up in the middle of the night with crazy anti-malarial induced nightmares and find yourself trapped in a heap of scratchy material. Since malaria is present in Vanuatu, Peace Corps requires all of us to take anti-malarials which have a long list of nasty side effects like crazy, often disturbing dreams.
Living without electricity and running water thus far has been a life altering experience, to say the least. There is one running tap near my house shared by many others but the water is not safe to drink, is usually full of strange things and often doesn’t work for no apparent reason. My family has a gasoline powered generator that lights our kitchen and charges my electronics but we only turn this on about once a week. Time here is driven by the sun, we get up early when the sun rises and go to bed shortly after the sun sets. At night we use kerosene lamps.
The weather here has been difficult for me to adjust to. It’s very hot and very, very humid. Unlike in the states, there is no escaping the heat with electric fans or air conditioning. In order to stay cool you find a mango tree to sit under (notorious for being the coolest of the trees here), sit by the ocean where there’s a constant breeze, or furiously fan yourself with a fan weaved out of palm leaves.
Perhaps one of the most difficult things for me to adjust to here is the role woman play in Ni Van culture. Gender equality in Vanuatu is much different than in the states and leaves me feeling very frustrated. Typically, women here fulfill similar roles to that of women in the states several decades ago. The role of a woman is customarily to cook, clean and take care of the children/family. It is taboo for women to wear pants or shorts and many villages have what’s called a “trouser fine”. One of the other training villages has this and charges $3,000 vatu (about $30 USD) to a woman if she is caught wearing pants in public. Even when swimming or playing sports, shorts/pants are usually covered with a sarong or lava lava. Spaghetti straps and sleeveless tops are also taboo, and typically the shoulders are covered. A few islands still have arranged marriages and all islands pay what’s called “bride price”, which is exactly what it sounds like. If a man marries a woman from the same island/village he will pay that woman’s family around $30,000-40,000 vatu ($3,000-4,000 USD), if they are from different islands the price is about $80,000 vatu ($8,000 USD). Usually bride price also includes items like woven mats and pigs, which are considered valuable in Vanuatu. A man’s wife is referred to as “woman blong hem”, meaning “his woman”, and sometimes this means of reference is used instead of the women’s name. There is no word for “her” or “she” in Bislama, there is only the masculine “hem”. Several assignment sites request male volunteers because at some locations men are much more respected, and in more extreme cases, community counterparts will not work with women.
I’ve encountered an array of other challenges over the past few weeks. I became very ill my first week in Takara and thought I would have to be transported to a clinic in Vila, but luckily I was able to pull through. Adjusting to the climate and food here can take a heavy toll on your health. There also isn’t a whole lot of soap around here. Sanitation seems to be a pretty prevalent issue… I foresee facilitating many a sanitation workshop in my two years of community health service to come. I’ve had rats terrorizing my room the past couple of nights. Rats here are the size of opossums in the states and make sounds I can only describe as the sounds I would anticipate a demon to make. They’ve been crawling in through my windows (which lack screens) at night and knock everything off of my desk looking for food. The mosquitoes also terrorize me at night. I slather myself in bug spray and sleep in a net, but still, they find me. I’ve never been covered in so many bites and suffice to say I take my anti-malarials religiously. The whole “fishbowl” concept has also been frustrating. Everyone in the village knows who I am and seems to know what I’m doing before I even do.
There are a lot of great things about pre-service training thus far as well. I love my proximity to the ocean, it is literally my backyard and I can hear the waves crashing at night. We have our Bislama classes on the beach every morning. The fruit here is unlike any other fruit I’ve tasted, it’s the freshest of fresh. The papaya, coconut, bananas and grapefruit are to die for and I haven’t even tried all Vanuatu has to offer yet. Living a life of moderation and forgoing all of the excess and luxury being an American has left me accustomed to has been a very difficult but undoubtedly amazing experience and is definitely one that has changed me already and will probably continue to do so throughout my service. I do however miss internet tremendously, I feel very disconnected from the world. I am very lucky to have a cell phone though. Mobile service was just made available to most of the islands and my group was the first to receive mobile phones. So I can text and call home but it is very expensive, it ranges from 50 to 80 cents a minute, I’m not really sure how it works and none of the volunteers seem to be able to get a straight answer so I usually just talk on my phone until it beeps at me and runs out of minutes. I have to buy what are called “top up cards” to purchase minutes, they’re like little scratch card with codes you enter into your phone that put however many minutes the card was worth onto it. It’s tricky finding these cards, a lot of the small road vendors carry them and you basically have to wander along the main road saying “Digicel” (the mobile company) until you find someone that sells them and isn’t sold out already. I am very grateful to have this phone though! The people in Vanuatu are very friendly and welcoming, everyone waves at everyone. Every car that passes you on a road will wave and it’s customary to wave back, and likewise almost every person you pass will greet you. It’s nearly impossible to walk down the main road in Takara and not be received with smiles. I say nearly because some of the much smaller children have never seen white people before and are either very frightened by us to the point of tears or stare like we’re aliens. My two year old brother finally stopped screaming and crying at the sight of me. I absolutely love learning another language and culture and hope I will get the opportunity again sometime in my life.
I’m very excited to finish training and get to my site so I can begin my community health work. We don’t get to know our site assignment until right before the swearing in ceremony and I’m very nervous and anxious to see where I will go. Currently, health volunteers stay in the Shefa and Penama provinces. I’m hoping to stay near Port Vila but we’ll see what happens.
So anyway, I think this covers most major topics. I’m alive and well and trying to take it one day at a time. I miss everyone back home (especially my cat) and would love to receive some snail mail and emails!
1 Response to first Vanuatu update!
I LOVED reading this and hearing about your experiences! Isn't fresh-off-the-tree coconut delicious?! I know we don't really talk much, but I'm really excited for you. I hope the mosquitoes start biting you less and the bad dreams happen disappear soon.
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