"Big Wota"

This big cascades waterfall on Maewo is a 2 hour walk away from my site in a village called Naone. It is a great place to go swimming and relax on hot days. 

Good Suprises

One of the other PCVs here in Vanautu received a package from a stranger yesterday. The note explained that the women who sent it was a mother of a RPCV who also served in Vanuatu, who, after hearing that the Peace Crops was not going to be providing feminine products to its female volunteers anymore, decided to help us out here in the South Pacific and send us some herself. She also added some treats like macaroni and cheese (always a good package item), as well as some colored pencils and toys to give to the local children.

Surprises like this make us Peace Corps volunteers feel great, not even because of what is sent to us in the package, but because someone else is thinking about us when our daily job is to be thinking about other people. It just seemed like a great way to pay it forward.

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.

Phase Two Training

The past two months I have been living at my site: Kerepei, Maewo. My goals thus far have been to make a community profile and integrate into the community, using these strategies to figure out the main health problems in my village. I really love my village! Though I was originally hesitant about going to a bush site, I think that my village ended up being a good fit for me. The community and my counterpart are very supportive of me. I think that it is also just bush enough where I get no internet and the such, but I have a few stores close by to buy food basics and spotty cell phone service.

But now the Community Health group is back in the Capital for phase two training. This training is designed to teach us more about how to apply for grants and how to better work with our counterparts at site, in terms of making projects together.

The health center that I work in coordination with helps people in several villages. This means that I really have to prioritize the projects that I want to get done, and that has been hard to do. However, I plan on making a workshop that allows the community members to prioritize their own needs. Through this workshop I will be able to empower the people to figure out their own problems, and in the end, come up with the sustainable solutions themselves.

Training in Brief (sorry I'm running short on time today)

Training is officially over and we have learned a lot. During the first month Community Health volunteers lived in Epau village in north Efate with our first host families. We learned a lot about Vanuatu culture and much more about health in Vanuatu. STDs, NCDs and Malaria are just a few of the health problems the wonderful population of Vanuatu are dealing with.

For a week in the middle of these past 2 months we got the privilege of going to our specific sites for a week and checking out our new homes. Kerembei, Maewo is beautiful, filled with lush landscapes. I am living in my own concrete house next to the health center that I will be working in conjunction with.

me outside my new home :)

Maewo is the island of water because it rains a lot and there are plenty of rivers and waterfalls. But this water means that there are also a lot of mosquitoes, so I will be bringing plenty of bug spray.

The second month of training we switched with the Education volunteers and lived with a second family in Sunnai, Moso, an island that is a 10 minute boat ride away from Efate (Efate is the island where the capital is located). We got to swim a lot while on this island which was amazing! It is like swimming in a post card and we swam almost every day.

The only time we weren't able to swim was for a few days when a cyclone passed through Vanuatu. It wasn't too bad - just a lot of wind and rain but we had to make sure to stay in/around our houses because walking around/swimming in cyclones is dangerous. We learned even more about culture in Sunnai though, weaving baskets, making local food and having plenty of time to talk to our families and ask questions. The last week we were in this village we also learned how to make a VIP toilet (VIP meaning ventilated improved pit latrine).

VIP Toilet in progress

Cheers Volunteers!

Group 26 Peace Corps Volunteers in Vanuatu 

           On Wednesday we were all sworn in as Peace Corps Volunteers, so cheers :) Training is finally finished and we couldn't be more excited to start working on our individual islands. Most of leave on Monday morning and are either flying or taking boats to our site with a massive amount of luggage. We're basically bringing everything we need for the next 2 years. Talk about a stressful week of shopping! But we are also celebrating this weekend in Port Villa as a whole group because we won't necessarily see each other again for about 3 months. In June and July we are all coming back to the capital again for Phase 2 Training, which is something nice to look forward to!

Stay tuned for a longer post about our training!

pre training training...

We arrived safe and sound in Port Vila, Vanuatu's capital. They gave us coconuts at the airport and then drove to the place where we would begin training. It's dorm style housing on someone's land right off of a beach :) We have been giving some basic health, language (Bislama) and behavior training. We have also had free time to explore the beach that is so close to us. As time goes on, all of these training's will get more and more intense.

We have also gotten phones! I can receive calls for free if you call 678-538-4678 (this includes country code), but can't always be sure that I will have reliable service. Just try anyway haha (the time zone is 16 hours ahead).

Last night we had a kava (Vanuatu's alcohol) info session. We were told all about the culture of kava and how it's made. Men drink a lot of kava here! Therefore, it's acceptable for men to drink kava, but it's only sometimes OK for women to drink it. It is even considered acceptable if the married male volunteers leave their wives at home at night to go drink kava with other men. But whoever's drinking it, it is ground, strained and then drank like a shot. The difference though is that you are supposed to drink the shot by yourself in a corner, and then after it is drunk, you can join the rest of your group and continue to talk and hang out. After this lesson we got to try it and continue to get to know each other. 

Today we spent the day on Port Vila's main strip at the Peace Corps office. We got our malaria meds and learned more about malaria in general. There are a lot of mosquitoes here and there is apparently a Dengue fever outbreak, but we have a lot of information, medicine and bug spray in order to steer clear of these illnesses. After we got our meds we had free time to use the internet here and wander around Port Vila to get food and buy anything we might need. I went with a few other volunteers to the "Mama's Market" - the open air market run by a lot of mothers and families. We ate lunch there and bought some snacks for later, also talking to a man sitting next to us while we ate in order to practice our still basic Bislama.

Later today, we're going to have a swimming safety lesson! I am so excited about being here with this amazing group of people and can't wait to see what every day has to offer. I plan on meeting a lot of 5 am sunrises with yoga, meditation and a content mind :)