2010
My first two months at site have flown by. We had the malampa province football tournament. That was fun. Those guys were really good players and there is a really steep hill next to the football field that acts like stadium seating. Every day for a week I would go out there and sit on top of the hill watch some football and then go down to where the environment committee was selling kava and help them with their fundraising. There were lots of food stalls and kava stalls. Two of the teams were from the other side of the bay so every morning they had to canoe across the water for an hour and then every night they had to canoe back. No wonder they didn’t win. Kind of an unfair advantage. Actually the home team won which was fun because the whole town came down for the game and then a few days later we had a big celebration. And another dance! I really hope these dance parties never stop.
Work’s going pretty good except I always feel like I am short on resources. Mainly the internet. Living without it is horrible. If I don’t know something I can’t look it up. If it’s really important I’ll call someone in Vila to look it up. But one of my jobs is to help Lamap attract tourists. But how can they ever keep in contact with prospective tourists if nobody here has or knows how to use the internet? Actually there is a Lamap tourism site: malekulahikingtrail.blogspot.com. It was set up and updated by the previous volunteer. So if in the future if there is no volunteer there is no contact with tourists. Not very sustainable. So I get to teach someone in my community how to use the internet and update a blog. I also will be teaching intro to computers at the rural tech school and I hope I can get internet hooked up at the local high school. Then the Internet will no longer be a 5 hour truck ride away. It’s funny how we were never taught in school how to use the Internet. We just learn because we want to download music, play games and talk with our friends. If I could get that kind of interest going here with the high schoolers, then bam, they wouldn’t need me anymore. In no time 14 year old boys would be programming video games into their graphing calculators, girls would be researching their dream colleges, and tourists could chat with the locals. Obviously it won’t happen like that but I am trying my best to show as many people as I can that computers are the best thing that ever happened to the human race. Oh and I’m also trying to help set up a trash disposal program. Until recently all waste in this area was biodegradable. Everything is either eaten by pigs or it’s burnt. But now with plastic bags, used machine parts and batteries, they need to change their disposal system. There is no place for these kind of wastes to go. So people just throw it on the ground. They sort of treat it like they would a banana peel. Except unlike a banana peel it will never go away and will wash into the ocean and kill the coral reef. Or they burn it and then you get these burnt balls of plastic lying around the beach. So the environment committee and I are trying to set up a plastic and battery disposal program. It’s funny because I’ve never cared about environmental issues that much before but this just seems like such an obvious improvement that won’t be too difficult to implement. Big dreams but I’ve got time on my side.
Christmas here was not terribly exciting but it was good. All the family including all the aunts and uncles who live all over came back to Lamap. And they brought all their kids so it was really loud. But they were really fun. We made Christmas decorations. I taught them how to make snowflakes out of paper and tried to explain that if you look really close up at snow it looks like this piece of paper. But I don’t think it translated well. They’ve never seen snow and were very skeptical. I mean it is pretty unbelievable if you’ve never seen it before. On Christmas day I went to church of course, blah. But catholic church is pretty interesting and the acoustics of the church are great which makes the singing very eerie and somehow uplifting. I like listening to all the songs they sing. Then we had a big Christmas dinner with all the family. I made pumpkin pie and sweet potato pie and they were a big hit. Then we drank Kava and watched all the guys get drunk. That was kind of annoying. All the guys were wasted and dancing like crazy which looked really fun. But all the women were sitting in the shadows making fun of all the men, which was also pretty funny. I did manage to get the women to dance a little but I felt it would be too scandalous if I drank. That was probably good plan because some of the guys were acting like drunk heat seeking missiles targeting innocent asses on the dance floor. I got my ass grabbed a few times and eventually I got sick of it and went back into the shadows. The heat seeking missiles still came around but I was standing against a wall. So when finding they could not reach their target they would stagger away. I went home at midnight but I could hear the music blasting until 6 in the morning when they had to turn off the music to start the church service. So they know how to have a good party here just not with two sexes present.
For New Years I decided to go to Santo, the island just north of my island Malekula because I had some work to do for site but mainly because I think new years eve should be spent in a bar preferably not hiding from drunk men’s grabby hands in the shadows. So I came to visit two friends who are teaching at a highschool in Santo close to town. We did a really good job of celebrating New Years with cap guns and blow horns. The next day one of the girls' dad told us “hey you guys missed the fireworks in town.” I was like “oh wow there were fire works?”. And he goes “well you know those things you use for your car in case of emergencies.” I though that was funny. So we missed the flares show but we had a really good time making trouble at a bar close to where the two girls live. It was at a hotel on a island off shore so we had to take a boat there and it wasn’t crowded but the people there were really interesting. Everyone was from a different country and everyone had a crazy story for why they were in Vanuatu. Nobody had a clock so while we were sitting around a campfire at the beach with everybody I noticed my cell phone said 00:02. So our small American envoy decided to just start counting down really loud and shooting off our guns. And then right after we counted down again for good measure. The best part is at the end of the night the hotel gave us a free room. All in all a very memorable New Years.
After we had recovered from New Years we went to the Millennium Caves. Such an amazing place and not touristy at all. There were no other tourists that day and it was a Saturday. Every place in Vanuatu is like that but it’s still such a shock to me every time because I grew up in the land of tourists. We drove there with a few other people from the school and then when the road ended we walked into the bush until we came to a village where we met our guide. He was a really nice quite guy with a big bushy beard. He was going to do the 4 hour hike barefoot (dry leg in bislama) so few of the guys and I got inspired to do the same. I didn’t regret it. Except in the cave when I couldn’t see what I was walking on but I didn’t get any major injuries. Hooray. So without too much delay we set out on our hike. The guide walked pretty fast which certainly a good work out. We hiked for about an hour and a half to get to the caves. At which point he explained that he must paint our faces with mud before we enter the cave to make sure that all the spirits of the cave welcome us, devils don’t make us sick, swallows don’t poo on us, you know the usual cave entering stuff. The cave was huge, about three stories high and it took us a half hour to walk through. It was of course pitch black since it had a stream running through it, making it impossible to see where we were walking with our dinky little torches. If I ever go spelunking again I’ll get a headlamp. Lesson learned. But honestly my favorite part of the hike came after the caves. We continued sometimes walking sometimes swimming down the river through all kinds of great swimming holes and little caves and great jumping spots. Vanuatu is full of these dangerous places to jump of high rocks into semi-deep pools. They are so much fun, but rope swings are better. Millennium Caves didn’t have a rope swing and I will never for give them for that. My favorite thing was to lie on my back and let the current take me. The river was set in a narrow canyon with waterfalls coming down the sides and stalactites/gmites forming and interesting wear that had smoothed out all the layers of rocks on the concave sides. I think actually it used to be a cave too but the ceiling fell through. After swimming for an hour we had to hike back up a waterfall to get back to the village. It looked like steep cement stairs smoothed but the constant light flow of water. But no it was just another unbelievable natural waterfall in Vanuatu. It was really tall and exhausting to climb but it helped to have a constant stream of cold water flowing over my hands and feet. When we got back to the village they had tons of bananas for us to eat. Banana’s are supposed to keep your muscles from getting to sore but yeah that didn’t really work.
Now is my last day in Santo. Just finishing some things on the internet and then back to Lamap until March or April. I’d love to hear from you. I love getting letters it really makes my day/week. I am in constant need of pop culture, music, fashion and news magazines because they don’t have those here. Just a note when sending magazines don’t say on the outside that they are magazines because porn is illegal in Vanuatu so when you tell them you are sending magazines they have to check that they aren’t porn so it slows stuff down. You can always call too. It’s $.81/min on skype and my number is 011-678-561-8096. My address again is:
Stephanie Blaufarb
Peace Corps
Lamap, Malekula
Vanuatu
South Pacific
Happy New Year! Hope all your new years resolutions come true. Mine is to work everyday to become more like a cereal box. I stole that from cassie and greg cause I saw how much it improved their lives in 2009. Merry xmas. I love you and miss you all!
