Woman Ambae:
A Tale of Peace Corps in the South Pacific

I'd like to start this off with a little shout out to some of my amazing friends from the states that I've received a lot of support and encouragement from as of late, especially in the form of letters and care packages (you know who you are). I just recently received a fabulous care package, packed full of all kinds of goodies including Taco Bell hot sauce and Cap 'n' Crunch cereal, from one friend in particular, my old friend Melani from community college (PCC! what up). I was surprised to find yet another treat from her waiting for me at the post today, and wanted to share a part of her letter that especially hit home (wherever that may be, these days). Regarding her ability to find time to send me such thoughtful things while balancing a marriage, a toddler, work and school:

"I may be busy, but so are you and every other person in this world. Whether it be facebooking, blogging, shopping, exercising, serving in Vanuatu or picking your nose... people will always make time for the things they want to make time for. And I want to write to you, not only because I miss and love your guts, but also because I support you 100% for serving in the Peace Corps!"

Our ability as a species to entirely transform another person's day with the smallest of gestures, whether it be a heartfelt letter or a smile across the way, will never cease to amaze me. Anyway, with the end of the school term and the first batch of classes under my belt, I suppose you might refer to me as an “experienced” health and environment teacher now. Although even that might be a generous proclamation of skills to which I’m still in the process of developing. Development work is funny like that; the giver and receiver become blurred in a series of cooperative exchanges that more or less resemble one great melting pot of knowledge and experience, to which both parties benefit equally, or so it seems in this case, anyway.

I continue to forge ahead with my projects, which as time progresses become characterized by a more trial and error based approach than any other remarkable methodology of development I might dazzle you with. By and by truly the most remarkable instrument of behavior change (as is where most development work herein lies apart from policy and infrastructure) appears to be no more than one’s aptitude for flexibility and procurement of limitless patience. I say, throw caution to the wind and hold impromptu workshops in your skivvies if you must; and I can speak on this from personal experience as on more than one occasion I have found myself in this situation, with all the patience and humility I can muster, encouraging aspirin seekers of all ages that beating on my windows in the wee hours of the morning will not get you medical treatment, aspirin is not actually a treat-all, cure-all miracle drug and the consistent misuse of medicine results in one’s eventual immunity to the aforementioned drug and therefore really causes more harm than good ( hasn’t anyone around here read the story about the boy who cried wolf?), also that most human beings have basic privacy needs… I suspect this one was over their heads but isn’t the real crux of the matter, anyhow. Nonetheless, a rose is a rose by any other name, or I suppose a hibiscus in this case. And so I continue to toil away; and by toil I mean bounce back and forth between wanting to rip all of my hair out from frustration and call it quits for want of a latte, shopping mall and interstate to drive on, to wanting to jump for joy for every student or community member I’ve noticed the slightest bit of marked difference in and hide out in bush forever playing futbol with the kids, making laplap with the mamas and debating island hearsay (topics ranging from best ways to roast a pig’s entrails over fire to the extinction of dinosaurs) with the elders. Not to worry though mom, Starbucks and a pedicure will beckon me home sooner or later.

Term 2 just started back up again at the school, and I’ve managed to hammer out my curriculum for year 7 and 8 for the rest of the year. I’m still working on year five and six… right now I’m kind of just winging it as I go but they don’t seem to notice. Next week’s lesson: the respiratory system, i.e. balloon and straw induced mayhem. Stay tuned.

Environment curriculum for year 7 and 8 is as follows:

-Habitat loss and degradation: destructive logging and land use

-Human population growth: family planning and the “population explosion”

-Endangered species: over-fishing and the wildlife trade

-Waste and pollution: the trouble with rubbish and urban sprawl

-Climate change: global warming and sea-level rise

-Resource management: tools for the future

-Sustainable practices: planning for the future

-Taking action: current environmental issues in the Pacific and personal sustainability pledge

-Culminating project: this will be up to the class; I’m thinking something along the lines of a re-planting project, compost project, community clean-up, or a combination. I’m excited to see what they come up with!

I’ve taken more of an issue-based approach with the older years rather than a more scientific based approach as I have with the younger years. The goal is to encourage the older years to think sustainably and recognize the effects of human behavior on the environment, whereas with the younger years I’m focusing on how our environment works as a whole, particularly the connections between living things. Interestingly enough, the government just released an article in the paper regarding the implementation of global warming and climate change in schools’ curriculums. Sea-level rise is hairy business if you live on a small island, and I’m pleased to see the government taking initiate and even more pleased that my students are now ahead of the game.

Health curriculum for year 7 and 8 is as follows:

-Sexual changes and reproductive health: the male and female reproductive organs and menstruation

-Sexuality and decision-making: influences on values and responsible decision-making

-Sex and gender: traditional gender roles and gender discrimination

-Becoming sexually active: risks and consequences, pregnancy and contraception

-Sexually transmitted infections: understanding, transmission and prevention

-HIV/AIDS: myths and facts, transmission, treatment, global and local significance

-Safe relationships: assertive communication, talking with parents, talking about condoms and protection from sexual abuse

-Substance use: alcohol, kava, tobacco and drugs- health risks, social effects and how to say “no”

-Your health and your future: setting goals for a healthy future

Are you sensing a theme here? This is essentially a youth empowerment and adolescent reproductive health project that I’m carrying out using the guise of a class. Clever, I know. Also a very delicate matter given the culture and I’m interested to see the results. While I hope for a more affluent, if not inspired generation, I realize that, even if I were that good of a teacher, I will probably never see the bulk of this project’s results while in service. Nonetheless, as with the environment classes, I’m taking an issue-based approach with the older years with issues specific to their age group, and focusing more on general health with the younger years, body systems, hygiene, disease prevention and oodles of other fun things. I’ve discontinued cumulative weekly lessons with the younger years (1-4) as retention was blatantly low. Instead I’ve planned a series of small lessons to be carried out with them at various times for the remainder of the school year:

-Germs: how they make us sick and how to stop those little devils

-Hand washing tutorial: everything your mother told you and you promptly ignored

-Basic nutrition: tri kaen kakae (their food groups here: meat (mostly tin), veggies/fruits (mostly bananas), root crop. Oh, the variety)

-Tooth brushing tutorial: how to prevent your teeth from rotting out of your head

-Basic first aid: what to do when a bush knife goes astray

-Disaster preparedness: because we live on a volcano, after all.

So there you have it, a tried and true “teacher” among you. I’m also still working away at my water project, this is turning out to be a monster of a project, which is all as well I suppose because it seems to be a monster of a problem in this area. I’m in the process of training a co-facilitator from the village to run the PHAST (participatory hygiene and sanitation transformation) workshop with me, which examines the relationship between poor hygiene, poor sanitation, water and disease transmission and will hopefully elicit behavior change to alleviate the aforementioned because the water here is very, very unclean, as I just found out after a recent water audit and sanitary inspection of the area. Using H2s tests from rural water supply in Port Vila, which identity if a water sample is contaminated with bacteria, I discovered that 7 of 8 primary drinking sources in the community are highly contaminated and unsafe for drinking. Naturally, I followed this news with an urgent community meeting, urging for chlorine treatments using household bleach and boiling water before drinking (which is my method of defense). Initially the black samples (the samples should remain clear if uncontaminated, light gray is slightly contaminated) seemed to frighten the community into action by way of boiling, but things seem to have returned to life as usual and day by day different community members fall prey to severe stomach cramping and diarrhea. Here’s to hoping the PHAST workshop helps tackle this problem, it’s scheduled for the end of this month and will run the course of a week. Afterwards I’m hoping to submit several grants for additional water sources (especially for the dispensary and school, which at present are without any form of water source… not even a contaminated one) and run a follow-up workshop on rainwater harvesting maintenance and management (since rainwater is the only potable water source in the area). Volunteers on different islands have reported an array of frustrations (noted, dually anticipated) and a myriad of encouraging successes with the PHAST workshop and I’m looking forward to trying my hand at it.

In other news, I seem to be making waves in the Peace Corps world. Or I suppose ripples, waves just has a nicer ring to it and boosts my ego a little more. I recently had the opportunity of hosting the Asia-Pacific regional manager in my village for the day, a first time Vanuatu visitor. I’m proud to report I filled her full of laplap, gave her what I’d like to consider an expert village tour and sent her away with a hand-painted mat weaved from palm leave by my very own host mama. If you see me popping up on Peace Corps propaganda in the near future, don’t say you weren’t warned. Monica, if you’re reading this, I hope you enjoyed your trip to Ambae and that the mat helped fung shui your new pad.

Additionally, I just returned from the big city where we held a week long HIV/AIDS training with village health workers throughout the islands. Traditionally, village health workers are unpaid community members with little experience, so training in HIV/AIDS is an imperative step towards prevention for the country as a whole. During the closing ceremony the director of public health was asked to give the closing speech. With the event set on a white sand beach just outside of Port Vila, fittingly enough, he thanked the participants for all of their hard work, emphasized the need for HIV/AIDS education for prevention and tugging on heart strings high and low, attested to the top notch development work of the Peace Corps, after which he began to speak of a blog he had recently read of one volunteer in particular, working in Lovunivili, East Ambae… your shock is as great , if not greater, than mine. Believe you me, between this incident, reviewing my monthly blog stats and hearing from my mother that I have quite the following from the hospital I worked at prior to service (and by this I mean a constant, “Kara, update your blog… so and so on 3 North wants to know what happened after the glitter) I am quite frankly dumb-founded at my apparent publicity. Nevertheless, I promptly introduced myself after the closing speech, found that we are of the same island (which tends to instill a certain kinship among us islanders) and drank a shell of kava with my new found fan, white sand underfoot, palm trees a swaying.

As far as less moving matters go, at ten months into service I find myself in due time for the medical staff’s highly recommended bi-annual de-worming; only a little more than a quarter overdue, anyway. Working out several digestive issues as we speak, which might otherwise render most in the Northern Hemisphere unfit for duty, I blog on, with unwavering diligence, because if I have learned anything in the Peace Corps it’s that some small child in Africa is inevitably suffering more than me and that whatever doesn't kill you only makes you stronger, or a more "seasoned" volunteer at very least. "Seasoned" referring to those whose medical kits have been sacrificed to the island gods by way of mold. When a Peace Corps volunteer is faced with the dilemma of ailment by intestinal worms or questionably safe means of eradicating said ailment, does one balk in the face of a little unsightly green fuzz, a little malodorous eminence? Not in Peace Corps Vanuatu anyway. I did what any soldiering volunteer on a distant island would do… I called the medical staff and asked for replacement medication to be put on the next available flight. Here’s to hoping Air Vanuatu comes through in a timely manner, because if de-worming isn’t a romantic way to spend ones weekend, then I just don’t know what is; to think, I once marked my weeks end with a pair of stilettos and a of couple cocktails…

Speaking of romantic, the cockroach problem persists. Although happily so less in quantity and frequency. My catchment system (coconut shell + large rock) appears to be fairly effective at keeping the beasts at bay, although upon removal and thus exposure of my shower drain, which I learned the hard way during a minor flooding incident of my casa proper is pretty necessary while heaving buckets of cold water over yourself (I don’t have it in me to refer to this as “showering”), all hell breaks loose yet again. However, I have learned in my grisly trials of woman versus wild that when one is expecting a terrible thing, one is benefited by an adequacy of preparation in meeting said terrible thing. It is frankly almost disturbing the amount of pure satisfaction, often mounting on joy, I take from the demise of these lowly beings. It has become a thing of sport, and one that I find myself rather gifted at; on more than one occasion my service has been requested by a fellow volunteer in pest induced distress. My method is as follows: paralyze with multipurpose insect killer, smash with nearest blunt object. I just so happen to have a collection of many such things in my bathroom, namely empty shampoo bottles, for this explicit purpose; to think, I once required a battalion of every masculine force my given quarters had to offer at the mere sight of a pin-sized spider…

And speaking of spiders, I might as well end with some heartwarming photos of year 5 and 6’s end of term field trip to the bush for their much anticipated ecosystem scavenger hunt. I have never been so charmed to hear, “Miss Kara! Miss Kara! Come look at my spider!”, “Miss Kara! Miss Kara! Look at this huge worm I found!” and countless other creepy ,crawly things you could only expect a bunch of 12-year-olds to dig up in the jungle.

Note to reader: I've switched to Flickr for uploading/hosting my photos as Blogger has proved unfit to handle the amount of megapixels my Nikon is packing. For your viewing pleasure, of course: please note exceptional photo clarity.

These are a few photos from Megan's birthday (the volunteer closest to me, posted at the provincial hospital in Lolowai, where I coincidentally steal wifi from in order to bring you this very blog). What better way to celebrate than with a couple of Tuskar (Vanuatu's national beer, or 'bia' in Bislama) on the beach with a killer view of Maewo across the way and one of the neighborhood boys as a sidekick (nobody panic, no Tuskar for him). This was of course followed by a night of kava bar hopping throughout Saratamata (the provincial center) with a few other volunteers, although no photographs of that as I was too busy enjoying my muddy root water. But take it on good authority, a good time was had by all.





They got hops



I nearly shot Tuskar out of my nose when I looked over and saw this, totally unsolicited. Quite the charming sidekick



Hanging out with my host mama, Mommy Oli, one of my favorite village pikinini, Shania (isn't she a doll?) and Mommy Adline- the French teacher at the school who tutors me. Which reminds me that I've neglected to mention, je parle Francais :)



And lastly, banana pancakes I whipped up for the women in the village on Mother's day, topped with fresh papaya and a hibiscus, naturally. It's mind blowing to me how hard these women work to support the community and how little they're thanked for it.