Here are a couple of pictures to show you I'm having a wonderful time in tropical paradise. A little sarcasm, sorry. It's not all fun and games, but New Years was fun and the first picture shows what happens when a bunch of volunteers gets together to celebrate. We went to the volcano first and saw a fireworks show before heading back to the treehouse bungalow and starting our tribute to the new year. We got started around 11:00pm so we had to catch up pretty quickly. Around 2:00am I decided it was time to go home, rounded up my host brother, Samson, and started walking back. It's only about 3 miles and usually takes about an hour. Little did I know that one can get more drunk the more they walk. I do know a straight line is the shortest distance between 2 points, however, it took us about 1-1/2 hours and I can only attribute that to the fact that we did not walk a straight line. When we got back to the village, everyone was singing bonani (kind of like choraling at Christmas) and Samson went in search of his wife, again not in a straight line. I thought it was best to get to bed. Not a typical new year's but it was a lot more interesting than last years.
The other picture is my current abode: Nipikinamu, tail of the fish. It was taken from the hill on the other side of the bay a couple of days after the party when me and a few volunteers went hiking to see the places where steam comes out and paint our faces with multi-colored hot clay. The volcano may be 8 miles away, but the entire hill is hot - hot on the feet, hot air, hot sun - really hot. And no, we don't think about what that means in terms of danger. It's hot and that's it.
Well, that's the fun part of living here. On the work front, I'm extending which means I'll stay until around June of 2010. Why? Well, my projects are coming along very slowly just like everything here. I feel if I left now I'd leave them half finished and I plan on concentrating on finishing them and then making them sustainable after I'm gone. Kind of like putting icing on the cake. I'm also learning to play the guitar.
I hope I’ve told some wonderful stories and given everyone an idea of what life is like in Vanuatu in my previous posts. I don’t know what you all think about what you’ve read, whether this adventure is romantic or idealistic or altruistic or unbelievable and surreal or unnecessary and pointless. I’ve been here long enough to have forgotten what it was like to learn how to live here without electricity, running water, cleanliness, or anyone to talk to who knows what life is like in the US. I take for granted the things I have to do just like I did in the States. So the other day I started looking at what I do just to live here that was not related to some kind of work or building and cherishing relationships with people. Here’s some things I found:
I walk across the village and say something to everyone I meet. It is pretty much the same thing: I’m going where? And they are going where? A ten minute walk to another village can take half an hour and while I’m there, it may take two hours before I leave because I sit and talk with first one person and then another and sometimes a group of people. If I need to go see someone in my village, it may still take two hours. A group of women may be sitting under a tree weaving, eating, washing or just talking and I’ll sit down with them for a short time. There is always something to talk about and when there isn’t, I listen and practice learning the local language which they enjoy teaching as well as laughing at me. Sometimes, I walk about just to visit with whoever I run into. Most of the children are no longer afraid of me and they sing out “Sandla” as I go by so everyone knows I’m coming.
Charging batteries for the flash lights, radio, camera, clocks with a small portable solar panel is high on my list. It only takes about 8 hours to fully charge 4 AA batteries. Then there’s charging the laptop, mobile phone and MP3 play using the village’s 60 watt solar panel. While this only takes about 2 hours for each one, it does cost me about 500vt (or $5/week). No light switches, and the cost of electricity is around $20/month. Water needs to be carried from the standpipe every 3rd day for drinking, cooking and dish washing – that’s about 12 gallons at 8 pounds each for a distance of only 150 yards. Since I also like to bathe every day, sometimes 2 or 3 times in the summer, I also carry a bucket with about 3 gallons a little bit further to my toilet/swim house each time. Sometimes there is no water and I go to one of the pumps about ¼ mile away and then boil my water for drinking. I used to be proud that I could get by on 900 gallons of water a month in Santa Fe. Now, I wonder how I could use so much.
The coconut leaf house is slowly being eaten by termites which leave these little itty bitty grains of something (wood?) scattered like around like someone has taken a handful of sand and poured it in one place. So every day, I use a broom made from coconut leaf spines to sweep the floor and veranda of the house. But, before I make the bed and before I go to bed, I also sweep the bed. Sometimes, I even sweep the bed in the middle of the night after I come back from the toilet. I light the kerosene lamp around the time the sun goes down. Don’t really need it for light because I have a head lamp, but it’s almost like having a real lamp. Sometimes I light a candle, but the risk of burning down the house is real and if I’m very tired I won’t because I’ll forget to blow it out before I fall asleep. Well, comfortable lighting is comfortable lighting regardless of the locale, candles are a potential fire hazard any place, but where is that termite exterminator guy???
No one wears sandals in the house, but that doesn’t mean the pandanas leaf mats are clean. Sometimes I wonder why I wash my feet because 2 minutes after I walk back into my house the bottoms are black again. No carpet cleaners and water ruins the mats, so sweeping is the only thing that can be done – and learning to live with dirty feet.
There is no hot water unless I boil it. If I’m cold, I’ll do that for my bucket bath, but most of the time cold water is fine. Dishes are always washed and rinsed in cold water. It works fine so why do we insist on water so hot it almost scalds the skin? I keep wash bowls covered tightly to keep the cockroaches and rats out. I think it affects the integrity of the wash water a little bit more than I think acceptable. Speaking of roaches, they generally don’t bother me except when I get up in the middle of the night to use the toilet and have to shoo them away from the small chair-like thing I sit on. Rats haven’t big too big a problem because my cat is VERY good, but I check the house every morning to make sure she hasn’t left a half-eaten one under the bed where it will lay forgotten until an unpleasant odor permeates the house. How do I know this? Experience! Again, no exterminators and learning to live with dirt. It helps to take everything out of the house once every 3 months or so and put it in the sun. It really dries out the mats and gets rid of the mildew smell. And, since I came back from Australia, I realized I haven’t seen a single ant. Maybe the massive quantities of glow-in-the-dark spiders have something to do with it.
Washing clothes takes me about 3 hours once every two weeks. About normal except that I hand wash everything, use a scrub brush and hang everything in the sun. I usually choose a day when there is little chance of rain, but the weather changes pretty quickly sometimes, so I have moved the wash to my veranda and waited as much as 2 days for everything to dry. No washer, no dryer but I think my clothes actually come out cleaner.
You can set your watch by some things in the village too. Since most people don’t have watches, they watch the sun. So about an hour before the sun sets is kava time. Almost every man in the village disappears and if I have been trying to find them all day I have to give up about a half hour before kava time begins. Sunday afternoons are reserved for practice by the soccer and volleyball teams. It’s a great way to start the new week spending a couple of hours watching them play. When the village fills up with children it means they are either on their morning break (check the sun), lunch break (check the sun) or finished for the day. The chickens really start crowing around an hour before sunrise, but it is a myth that they signal the rising sun. One or two always are crowing at some time during the night. So, no watches or clocks to be watched to make sure everything gets done before the end of the day. And no pressure to achieve more than is possible because there is always tomorrow.
Throw out time and still get people together to make some work? They know about the meeting, but they come when they are ready and have finished other things that need to be done first, not when the clock says 8:00am. I go and sit under a tree along the edge of the soccer field with a book, pen and notebook and wait. Somewhere around 2 hours after I arrive, enough committee members have joined me to have the meeting. Oh, I don’t arrive at 8:00am either. It depends on what I need to get done too. Sometimes I’m not the first one.
If you ever find yourself wanting to plant a banana tree – don’t! They are such dirty trees which have to have their dead branches cut every 2 weeks. They fall down on things – like my toilet – and break them. Their leaves shade the roof of houses making them rot quicker. They’re just way too heavy to carry easily when their fruit is ready and you have to hack them to pieces to move them. There is also this tree with a small red berry that the children love. They spend hours climbing through the braches searching for fruit, first one group and then another. The trees don’t seem to mind. I think trees are pretty much the same around the world – they are food providers, make a mess and give children some place to play. There are just different trees here.
Gardening – did I mention the garden is about 2 miles away? It is a lovely walk through the bush and one I enjoy. It is a long way coming back with a full basket or a rice bag full of manioc or corn though. Needless to say, there are NO grocery stores – the garden in the grocery, the variety is limited and you really, really must want something to work that hard to get it back to the house.
I chase chickens out of my kitchen. I chase my host mama’s cats away from my cat’s food. I put leftovers in my house at night to keep anything from opening the saucepan and eating it. By the way, food keeps for about 12 to 24 hours without refrigeration just fine as long as it doesn’t have mayo, coconut or fish in it. If it smells, I don’t eat it. I’m still amazed at how long some things keep and haven’t gotten sick by following the smell rule. Have all of the nutritionists, FDA, etc. been lying to us all of these years? Why is my blood pressure lower, my heart rate slower, and I can eat those recommended 2500 calories and still lose weight? Although a freezer and microwave sure would help when I’m dead tired and need to spend 2 hours cooking before I can eat. Oh well, there is always boiled dry manioc or white rice with a can of tuna and salt.
A lot of my day and energy is spent just living. Maybe I’ve said all of this before as part of the stories, but being in Australia makes me once again see the vast divide between our way of living and that of the people here. I see that we in the US have a lot more than the people here, but we exert just as much effort to live; it’s just different. We are healthier, better educated and have a higher standard of living. Are we happier though? I also see how much I’ve changed and what is important to me is still changing. It was hard getting used to the idea that the kinds of things I wrote about here were just as important as “working”, that spending time with people just talking was “working” even when we didn’t talk about any project, and that it was ok to read a book or draw or play the guitar to just take care of me. And, well yes, there is a time and a place for all work and I’m learning find it’s place too.
Last, I hope you all don’t think there is any complaining going on in this post. There isn’t. This is the way it really is and I guess I just want you to see it clearly. It is hard. I’m amazed and proud at being able to do this. Can you see yourself here, if only for a few moments, to try and understand what it is like?
The other picture is my current abode: Nipikinamu, tail of the fish. It was taken from the hill on the other side of the bay a couple of days after the party when me and a few volunteers went hiking to see the places where steam comes out and paint our faces with multi-colored hot clay. The volcano may be 8 miles away, but the entire hill is hot - hot on the feet, hot air, hot sun - really hot. And no, we don't think about what that means in terms of danger. It's hot and that's it.
Well, that's the fun part of living here. On the work front, I'm extending which means I'll stay until around June of 2010. Why? Well, my projects are coming along very slowly just like everything here. I feel if I left now I'd leave them half finished and I plan on concentrating on finishing them and then making them sustainable after I'm gone. Kind of like putting icing on the cake. I'm also learning to play the guitar.
I hope I’ve told some wonderful stories and given everyone an idea of what life is like in Vanuatu in my previous posts. I don’t know what you all think about what you’ve read, whether this adventure is romantic or idealistic or altruistic or unbelievable and surreal or unnecessary and pointless. I’ve been here long enough to have forgotten what it was like to learn how to live here without electricity, running water, cleanliness, or anyone to talk to who knows what life is like in the US. I take for granted the things I have to do just like I did in the States. So the other day I started looking at what I do just to live here that was not related to some kind of work or building and cherishing relationships with people. Here’s some things I found:
I walk across the village and say something to everyone I meet. It is pretty much the same thing: I’m going where? And they are going where? A ten minute walk to another village can take half an hour and while I’m there, it may take two hours before I leave because I sit and talk with first one person and then another and sometimes a group of people. If I need to go see someone in my village, it may still take two hours. A group of women may be sitting under a tree weaving, eating, washing or just talking and I’ll sit down with them for a short time. There is always something to talk about and when there isn’t, I listen and practice learning the local language which they enjoy teaching as well as laughing at me. Sometimes, I walk about just to visit with whoever I run into. Most of the children are no longer afraid of me and they sing out “Sandla” as I go by so everyone knows I’m coming.
Charging batteries for the flash lights, radio, camera, clocks with a small portable solar panel is high on my list. It only takes about 8 hours to fully charge 4 AA batteries. Then there’s charging the laptop, mobile phone and MP3 play using the village’s 60 watt solar panel. While this only takes about 2 hours for each one, it does cost me about 500vt (or $5/week). No light switches, and the cost of electricity is around $20/month. Water needs to be carried from the standpipe every 3rd day for drinking, cooking and dish washing – that’s about 12 gallons at 8 pounds each for a distance of only 150 yards. Since I also like to bathe every day, sometimes 2 or 3 times in the summer, I also carry a bucket with about 3 gallons a little bit further to my toilet/swim house each time. Sometimes there is no water and I go to one of the pumps about ¼ mile away and then boil my water for drinking. I used to be proud that I could get by on 900 gallons of water a month in Santa Fe. Now, I wonder how I could use so much.
The coconut leaf house is slowly being eaten by termites which leave these little itty bitty grains of something (wood?) scattered like around like someone has taken a handful of sand and poured it in one place. So every day, I use a broom made from coconut leaf spines to sweep the floor and veranda of the house. But, before I make the bed and before I go to bed, I also sweep the bed. Sometimes, I even sweep the bed in the middle of the night after I come back from the toilet. I light the kerosene lamp around the time the sun goes down. Don’t really need it for light because I have a head lamp, but it’s almost like having a real lamp. Sometimes I light a candle, but the risk of burning down the house is real and if I’m very tired I won’t because I’ll forget to blow it out before I fall asleep. Well, comfortable lighting is comfortable lighting regardless of the locale, candles are a potential fire hazard any place, but where is that termite exterminator guy???
No one wears sandals in the house, but that doesn’t mean the pandanas leaf mats are clean. Sometimes I wonder why I wash my feet because 2 minutes after I walk back into my house the bottoms are black again. No carpet cleaners and water ruins the mats, so sweeping is the only thing that can be done – and learning to live with dirty feet.
There is no hot water unless I boil it. If I’m cold, I’ll do that for my bucket bath, but most of the time cold water is fine. Dishes are always washed and rinsed in cold water. It works fine so why do we insist on water so hot it almost scalds the skin? I keep wash bowls covered tightly to keep the cockroaches and rats out. I think it affects the integrity of the wash water a little bit more than I think acceptable. Speaking of roaches, they generally don’t bother me except when I get up in the middle of the night to use the toilet and have to shoo them away from the small chair-like thing I sit on. Rats haven’t big too big a problem because my cat is VERY good, but I check the house every morning to make sure she hasn’t left a half-eaten one under the bed where it will lay forgotten until an unpleasant odor permeates the house. How do I know this? Experience! Again, no exterminators and learning to live with dirt. It helps to take everything out of the house once every 3 months or so and put it in the sun. It really dries out the mats and gets rid of the mildew smell. And, since I came back from Australia, I realized I haven’t seen a single ant. Maybe the massive quantities of glow-in-the-dark spiders have something to do with it.
Washing clothes takes me about 3 hours once every two weeks. About normal except that I hand wash everything, use a scrub brush and hang everything in the sun. I usually choose a day when there is little chance of rain, but the weather changes pretty quickly sometimes, so I have moved the wash to my veranda and waited as much as 2 days for everything to dry. No washer, no dryer but I think my clothes actually come out cleaner.
You can set your watch by some things in the village too. Since most people don’t have watches, they watch the sun. So about an hour before the sun sets is kava time. Almost every man in the village disappears and if I have been trying to find them all day I have to give up about a half hour before kava time begins. Sunday afternoons are reserved for practice by the soccer and volleyball teams. It’s a great way to start the new week spending a couple of hours watching them play. When the village fills up with children it means they are either on their morning break (check the sun), lunch break (check the sun) or finished for the day. The chickens really start crowing around an hour before sunrise, but it is a myth that they signal the rising sun. One or two always are crowing at some time during the night. So, no watches or clocks to be watched to make sure everything gets done before the end of the day. And no pressure to achieve more than is possible because there is always tomorrow.
Throw out time and still get people together to make some work? They know about the meeting, but they come when they are ready and have finished other things that need to be done first, not when the clock says 8:00am. I go and sit under a tree along the edge of the soccer field with a book, pen and notebook and wait. Somewhere around 2 hours after I arrive, enough committee members have joined me to have the meeting. Oh, I don’t arrive at 8:00am either. It depends on what I need to get done too. Sometimes I’m not the first one.
If you ever find yourself wanting to plant a banana tree – don’t! They are such dirty trees which have to have their dead branches cut every 2 weeks. They fall down on things – like my toilet – and break them. Their leaves shade the roof of houses making them rot quicker. They’re just way too heavy to carry easily when their fruit is ready and you have to hack them to pieces to move them. There is also this tree with a small red berry that the children love. They spend hours climbing through the braches searching for fruit, first one group and then another. The trees don’t seem to mind. I think trees are pretty much the same around the world – they are food providers, make a mess and give children some place to play. There are just different trees here.
Gardening – did I mention the garden is about 2 miles away? It is a lovely walk through the bush and one I enjoy. It is a long way coming back with a full basket or a rice bag full of manioc or corn though. Needless to say, there are NO grocery stores – the garden in the grocery, the variety is limited and you really, really must want something to work that hard to get it back to the house.
I chase chickens out of my kitchen. I chase my host mama’s cats away from my cat’s food. I put leftovers in my house at night to keep anything from opening the saucepan and eating it. By the way, food keeps for about 12 to 24 hours without refrigeration just fine as long as it doesn’t have mayo, coconut or fish in it. If it smells, I don’t eat it. I’m still amazed at how long some things keep and haven’t gotten sick by following the smell rule. Have all of the nutritionists, FDA, etc. been lying to us all of these years? Why is my blood pressure lower, my heart rate slower, and I can eat those recommended 2500 calories and still lose weight? Although a freezer and microwave sure would help when I’m dead tired and need to spend 2 hours cooking before I can eat. Oh well, there is always boiled dry manioc or white rice with a can of tuna and salt.
A lot of my day and energy is spent just living. Maybe I’ve said all of this before as part of the stories, but being in Australia makes me once again see the vast divide between our way of living and that of the people here. I see that we in the US have a lot more than the people here, but we exert just as much effort to live; it’s just different. We are healthier, better educated and have a higher standard of living. Are we happier though? I also see how much I’ve changed and what is important to me is still changing. It was hard getting used to the idea that the kinds of things I wrote about here were just as important as “working”, that spending time with people just talking was “working” even when we didn’t talk about any project, and that it was ok to read a book or draw or play the guitar to just take care of me. And, well yes, there is a time and a place for all work and I’m learning find it’s place too.
Last, I hope you all don’t think there is any complaining going on in this post. There isn’t. This is the way it really is and I guess I just want you to see it clearly. It is hard. I’m amazed and proud at being able to do this. Can you see yourself here, if only for a few moments, to try and understand what it is like?
1 comment:
Great blog, Sandra!! It was great to meet you and I hope we can see each other again!
Ruth (from our river adventure!)
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