July and August

Getting internet for the first time in 2 and a half months, I will try my best to summarize what I have been up to recently.

In terms of work, I have run a workshop with some members of my community where they work on various activities that help them prioritize their needs related to health. After the two days, we did a secret ballot priority ranking matrix and decided that NCDs (non-communicable diseases) were the communities biggest problem in terms of health. As a result, I am going to expand the cooking class that I had been previously just doing for pregnant women in order to talk about good nutrition throughout the community. I am still trying to decide on other projects to do in order to help solve this problem, but a cooking class and nutrition workshop are the only ones that I am sure of at the moment. 

There were many more cultural activities that have happened recently as well. The first thing that I will talk about was a mini 2 day cultural art festival that occurred in my village in the middle of August. The north of Maewo has a council of women that look out for many of the needs pertaining specifically to women in the area. This council was the group that organized this art festival. Their goal was to educate the community about local Maewo culture, because with the increase in technology, many adults think that the children in the area are loosing their culture. It was great! The mama's in the community went through custom cooking, dance and games, explaining and demonstrating examples of each category. We even got to taste some recipes cooked over a fire and prepared with coral tools, like roasted taro and bush cabbage.

The second thing that I wanted to talk about was the recent holidays that had occurred in Vanautu. July 24th was national children's day. This usually means that there are a few days to a week of sports competitions and a lot of eating island food and drinking kava (this is usually how all holidays work here). This year many villages met up in at a school located in a northern village called Naone. Each village would come with children from their local schools and the children would compete as a school team. They played volleyball and soccer, as well as running track. This holiday lasted for 2 days on Maewo, and was pretty fun because all of the Peace Corps volunteers on the island got to meet up when we all decided to travel there with our local schools to watch.

July 30th was independence day. This holiday was pretty similar to what was just described above except that we all stayed in our own villages and it was only one day of celebration. In my village, we had a community lunch of rice, beef and potatoes. A local nurse that I work with at the health center and I facilitated some relay race type games for the kids like tug of war and three legged races. But eventually the adults started playing tug of war too, which was really awesome and made everything more fun! After this, an elder in the community describe what the fight for independence was like, but it was in local language so I didn't end up understanding that much. Oh well, I'll just ask him later to explain the story again in Bislama haha.

I also climbed a volcano on the island of Ambae called Mt. Monaro! Below is a picture of the group of us who went while taking a truck up to the starting point. It was a tough hike and rained most of the time but in the end it was worth it! We were able to see one of it's crater lakes at the top, which was actually a pretty eerie sight. Since it was raining, the sky was cloudy and misty and all the trees were dead, black and had no leaves, all of which surrounded what seemed like and endless grey lake.