A few library pictures

My library's not so big ... but it's nice to have an extra space for classes.

Most of Class 2 can't read that well yet, but Ben can! This kid is very advanced. He's very eager to try and read new words. It's weird being a teacher and reflecting on what my teachers must have thought of me when I was in elementary school ... Oy.

Banana in Coconut Milk

This is legitimately delicious and about the easiest thing ever to cook.

Bananas in coconut milk

Sweet bananas
Coconut milk

Peel the sweet bananas. Put them in water and boil til they can be pierced by a fork (kind of like potatoes.) Then pour coconut milk on top of them.

Delicious.

Culture clash

This is going to sound crazy, but I think that, superficially, Vanuatu's culture doesn't look that different from the US. Anyone who's seen any photos is going to put up their finger and say, hey, wait a minute, so let me explain.

Vanuatu is filled with some of the friendliest, kindest, and most generous people on Earth. Ni-Vanuatu are also, coincidentally, really, really good at hospitality and being open to strangers. This is not a culture in which volunteers feel like they are constantly hitting themselves against a brick wall to try and make friends and connections. Add the fact that Bislama is very similar to English, and it's very easy (I think) for volunteers to make the transition here. You can start making jokes in Bislama and being funny, friendly, and interesting to talk to, in maybe a week or so, to start. Don't get me wrong, it takes much longer to learn how to speak it correctly, but I think the level needed for an entrance-level social life is pretty low. And everyone is so nice! 

Because of all of this, I felt like I integrated into Vanuatu very quickly. To a degree, while I think I understood on an intellectual level that Vanuatu's culture was very different, it was easy to downplay things as being differences in clothes, kastom, and food. Don't get me wrong, Vanuatu is physically quite different from America, and, of course, they don't do things on the same time or organize themselves like the States or really do much of anything exactly like America. But what I'm trying to say is that it's very, very comfortable for me to be here. It doesn't really feel like I have to exert myself too much. Like, I can just hang out and be me barefoot in some grubby clothes with my hair like a mess sitting on the ground and that's okay. I've been able to get a lot of work done, but I also feel very comfortable here. Especially now -- it's a no brainer. It's so easy to live here.

Honestly, though, the longer I'm here, the more I am able to pick out the things that I don't like, and that I'm not comfortable with, here in Vanuatu. The biggest one is, obviously, the status of women here. It's not like it's a secret that Vanuatu is a very male-dominated culture, but it's appalling how much violence against women there is, and just how blasé many people's attitudes are. I always feel a tension in this blog between the fact that I want to tell the truth and the fact that I realize I'm a foreigner in this country and I don't want someone reading my blog and saying, "Oh luk wan pis kop i stap talem ol rabis toktok abaot on man ples, olgeta oli stronghed tumas, oli no shud tok tok olsem ..." It's frustrating because on the one hand, I feel like people should know that the X on Y island did Z, especially when Z is the sort of thing that even here makes people go, Oh my God. 

It's unsettling to realize that a specific group you feel so close to puts up with some of its members behaving exceptionally, criminally, badly. They do it for a number of reasons, everything from perhaps that they don't think domestic violence is that bad to it's easier to resolve community conflict over a rape by saying that the girl (not woman, girl) is responsible too, to just I don't even know, the fact that the chiefs are all men and I've heard of exactly one female provincial councilor. I'm not really sure why it is this way, but it is. And the more I'm here, and the more I hear, I just get this intense, visceral reaction that the situation is just awful, nogud, rabis fasin blo evriwan we i gat kaen tinging olsem. 

Vanuatu ... Man, what do I say about this place? I think that living here, you really do come to love people. Ni-Vanuatu people really embrace us, and definitely I feel that love in return. At COS, we were talking about how to describe Peace Corps when we got home, and the obvious answer is that I've been getting my mind blown, my horizons widened, and my butt kicked into shape. I wanted something that was going to change my life, because I didn't like what my life was turning into back home. I felt very constrained and like I didn't have the skills or the drive or the confidence to go from where I was to where I wanted to be. And Vanuatu ... Vanuatu delivered. My friend Michelle Wong and I were discussing this recently, how we both felt like we came to Vanuatu as college kids and turned into adults. I owe a lot to this place and to the people here. It's been hard and good and weird and beautiful and boring and tough and easy, peasy, lemon-squeezy. I love it and I'm not going anywhere for now.

But it's not all smooth-sailing. I still learn new things about this place all the time, things I like, and things I don't like, too. I guess what I'm trying to say is this: Peace Corps is going to deliver something wildly out of left-field at every turn. It's not easy all the time to be an American and work in Vanuatu, because Vanuatu isn't America. Culture is an iceberg whose top quadrant is the only part visible above the water. Et cetera. 

Beautiful Downtown Port Vila

I may have, at one point, mentioned that the capital city of Vanuatu is a beautiful resort town. 

How many cities do you have water so clean that you can go swimming in it right up in the middle of downtown?

It's totally gorgeous and it all just adds to the fundamental weirdness of Vanuatu. There's such a strong differentiation--you can be somewhere in Middle Bush without cell service and feel like you've basically fallen off of the map. Or you can be at a big resort, drinking an ice cold mojito in your bikini.

Banana Pie

Banana pie is delicious and it's a shame that people outside of Vanuatu don't eat it.

Banana pie

Ripe bananas

Coconut milk

Flour

Oil

Sugar

Milk

Water

This recipe is pretty chill. It doesn't require measurements because you really can't mess it up that much. (Plus, the mamas don't cook with measurements.)

Make a dough of flour, oil, sugar, milk, and water. You want the dough to be sticky and not too liquid. Think of it like cookie dough rather than cake batter.

Spread the dough across the bottom of a cake tin. Make sure it's equal height.

Now chop the bananas up into very thin slices. Arrange the sliced banana over the dough. Follow this with a good pour of coconut milk.

Stick in oven. Bake. Take out of oven. Eat.

Tru tok about working in Vanuatu: time and disagreement

Here is some tru tok about working in Vanuatu: it's not America, it's not Australia, and when volunteers get pushy, their communities push back.

So we're volunteers, and our work is community development. But the people we work with have other things to do ... and, honestly, Ni-Vanuatu aren't as direct as Americans are. When we don't want to do things, we say so, or we make excuses about how we're busy. I've seen a lot that Ni-Vans make excuses to avoid things that they don't want, but they'll also enthusiastically agree to do stuff that they have no real intention of doing. It's not being dishonest, more like -- why, yes, it would be great if we could do this extremely complicated, time-consuming thing! I absolutely intend to do that .... at the bottom of my list of things that I want to do.

I think you see it a lot with work scheduling or meeting scheduling here. In America, we're very focused on the clock, tick-tock, tick-tock, and to show up late for a meeting is rude. It is a way that we tell other people that we don't value their time. But here, people have other things to do and we are not their first priority. So a lot of times when volunteers want to hold a meeting or a workshop, people will come late or not at all, because whatever else came up is more important to them. It's not just with us--they do it to each other, too, and they all understand more instinctively what each scheduled time really means. This takes us a while. It definitely took me a while to understand that church starts at "church o'clock" and that that is largely dictated by the amount of time it takes a family to get ready in the morning. During Independence 2013, there were all of these events scheduled to start at 9 a.m. ... that began at 11:45 or 12:30. Things just don't happen in real life the way that they do on paper.

A lot of volunteers get really angry and it's very counterproductive. You just have to understand that things are always going to take longer and start later than planned, and that sometimes, if you choose times and dates that are most convenient to you, they won't happen at all. The trick is, don't take it personally if you try to set a three day workshop in the middle of yam planting season and no one comes (personally guilty of that one). Do your best, but you have to give up on expecting things to work on American time. It's not America, it's Vanuatu, and whatever you want to get done is going to have to get done on the local schedule. 

Also, remember: people will agree to your face to do things because they don't want to disappoint you. It's part of saving face, I think. They assume that we'll understand the difference between a serious, firm, let's meet at 9 a.m. commitment and a tentative, let's try to meet sometime tomorrow before dinner but I might have to do my wash first. Even in Vanuatu, I think we're still on schedules because we feel like we need to produce to feel like we're accomplishing stuff. But 2nd goal, y'all. 2nd goal.

New signs around Port Vila

These benches are new! They're all over Port Vila. Nice, huh? The tourism board says that Vanuatu is the happiest place on Earth; obviously no way to do metrics, but this place is great. Paradaes wan taem.