Friday, October 8, 2010

Everybody Run! The French Are Invading!...again



This huge French ship came with a hundred soldiers and apparently they are coming back next year for a whole month next march to do some service projects. Cool.




My little recycling poster boys. We did some fun workshops with these kids on recycling and disposing of rubbish.




Throw your rubbish away in the 'ol' but batteries must be thrown away in a 'cemen ol'

Wednesday, October 6, 2010

One Year Has Passed Already?!

Well actually a year and a month. Which means around this time next year I’ll be getting on a plane back to the states. I can leave as early as October 5th but I think I’ll stay as long as I can without missing Halloween. That is a long ways away still and I need to enjoy the present instead of dwelling on the future (which is surprisingly hard ‘cause, well, if you know me you know how obsessed I am with planning the future).



Speaking of the present, today happened. I was supposed give a talk to a bunch of elementary school kids about the environment but then when I woke up I found out that it’s a public holiday and school was canceled. Constitution Day, like Vanuatu needs another excuse not to go to work. Nobody’s been getting much done here recently because of a couple deaths. When someone in the family dies the entire extended family has to take 10 days off work and stay together with the body (don’t worry they bury the body the first day (It’s hot here, ew)). So there was one death and then when those ten days finally passed and everyone was allowed to go home there were two more. And everyone is extended family so basically the whole town’s been shut down for three weeks. But hey gotta respect the dead.

So when I heard that I had my morning free I decided to go visit my favorite cafe, probably the only cafĂ© on the island of Malekula. It’s only reliably open like that because it is the front porch of a handicapped man and not quite obese woman. They never leave the house so they are always open. They’re great fun and they have good food and they are also the only place that sells fresh vegetables. Anyway stocked up on the fresh veges, then made some pumpkin bread and some fake Tabasco sauce.

Then my tech savvy friend, who always has technology problems for me to fix and I never know how to fix them but he keeps coming back for more, showed up. Today he brought me a fake iPhone he’d just bought. It’s called ‘Phone’ and on the back it says, “Designed in America by Phone a Assembled in China”. It looked so cool but was totally worthless. He’d never heard of an iPhone before but then I showed him online what a real iPhone is. He got so excited and now he has to have one. I know that is not surprising to most people reading this but I think anyone who’s lived in Vanuatu would be surprised because most Ni-Vans either don’t give a crap about technology or are afraid to try it. I’m always telling people how much easier computers will make their lives but it’s actually a surprisingly hard sell sometimes. They’re like ‘OK so it can type letters? Why would I want to type letters and pay 40 cents to print them when I could just put my pen to the paper here?’ So when this guy is getting really excited about an iPhone I’m like I know I totally want one too! iPhones, building bridges across cultural cleavages. Maybe instead of getting Palestinian kids and Israeli kids to play soccer together they should just get them talking about how badly they want the new iPhone. Tell them if they come up with a way to stop the fighting they’ll all get iPhones. Problem solved (Go American Capitalism!).

Then my friend, feeling grateful to me for enlightening him about iPhones, says he wants to do something for me.
“Stephanie, you used to fight will you fight again when you go back to the US?”
“Yeah I’ve taken like 6 years off from karate but I really do want to get back into it when I go back to the states”
“Yeah when I used to live in the Capital I used to always fight. I used to always drink vodka and fight. One day 28 men chased me down and they kicked my ass from here over to that house over there. Then I got kastom medicine [black magic] put on my bones so that they’re stronger. After that if I punched a man one time he would go down. I got them in my feet too and my elbows. You look at these cuts too. I think only my family knows the secret. It’s the bones of my grandfather [and/or ancestor]. I put his bones in my bones so I have double bones now. They can’t break and they’re really heavy to throw a punch. You could get it done too so when you go back to fight in the US you’ll have double bones too. If you hit someone they’ll go down in one punch”

So now I’m seriously contemplating getting double bones, I mean yeah I want double bones that would be awesome. I just have to find out more about the procedure, like how deep are the cuts and where do the grandfather/ancestor bones come from? I asked him, “well if he’s not my ancestor why is he going to want to help me out? I mean if I’m not from here would it work on me too?” He assures me that it doesn’t matter, that it works the same on everybody. There never seems to be any logic with magic. I guess it doesn’t really matter anyway because I don’t really believe in black magic but man I’d love to try it. And if nothing else it’ll be a story, so I’ll keep y’all updated.