Camp GLOW

GLOW (Girls Leading Our World) is a global Peace Corps program that teaches leadership, life skills, and reproductive health to young women. (The equivalent program for boys is BILD--Boys In Leadership Development).

My absolute, very last, final, in-person project on Tongariki was to run a GLOW with the girls at Coconak School aged 12-17. Every day after school for three weeks, I had an hour session, with three half-day sessions thrown in. It was an absolute blast.

Collages

I did most of the leadership and life skills sections by myself. The program starts with talking about leadership styles, why you should love yourself, and tells girls that they need to think about their goals and dreams. We did a lot of talking about future goals -- what the girls want to do and where they want to go. Some of them want to be teachers or nurses and some of them want to live on the island and work in the garden. The point wasn't to tell them that they all need to go to USP (the university), but to get them thinking. How many children is it good to have? How much money do you need to have to live the kind of lifestyle you want? (Nowadays, pretty nice living on Atong is when you have a DVD player, a solar set up, a phone, enough nice clothes, and the money to buy things like biscuits and tin without worrying.) The point was to get them to think about how they can take control of their life. If they want to run a small store out of their house, they need to think about how to do it.

We also talked a lot about managing projects, and how women leaders have a really important role in the community. In America, 20% of senators and 18% of representatives are women. Women have a role as mayors, county commissioners, school board leaders ... In Vanuatu, there are 0 women MPs. I have heard of a woman in Tafea province who had some elected position in the province -- but that's it. Women leaders are more common in the church, and there are some women who play an active role in committees. But just because there's a place that is reserved for a woman doesn't mean that the woman who takes the position acts as a leader. The point was -- you have a right to be heard, to have a responsibility (if you can) to stand up for other people who are too afraid to speak up. 

Tie-dye

This was a program for young women, so we talked a lot about healthy relationships, too. I did these sessions with the help of my counterpart, the wonderful Elsie Daniel. We were talking to the girls about things like -- when is it good to have a boyfriend? How should you treat your boyfriend? How should he treat you? What is a normal fight, and what is abuse? The highlight was a Jenga game in which you had to add or remove blocks, depending on situations written on sheets of paper. The situations were like : Mom wants to use a condom, and Dad agrees, because they have enough children already. Dad hits Mom. Mom sends the kids to buy matches, but the kids just play and never go to the store. Mom cheats on Dad. Mom is sweeping the house, so Dad washes the clothes. Mom and Dad go to the garden, so Big Sister watches the little kids. Even the other teachers were looking at the situations after the students went home (definitely helped that this was on a day with a severe weather warning!)

Card sorting

The last section was adolescent reproductive health. In America, we teach youth about puberty and sex early, and build up it every year in health class. Vanuatu's curriculum has puberty in class 6 and sex ed in class 10. Many teachers are embarrassed, because this is a very conservative culture, and they'll skip it. Also, a lot of kids don't make it to class 6, forget class 10.

Luckily, Elsie was there, and she's the headmistress, so it was all a go. I am really proud of this week. Out of the 25 girls who took part in the sex ed section, only 3 said that their mothers or aunties had told them in depth about what sex is and how you get or avoid pregnancy. 

We started by talking about puberty. Step 2 was doing body ID cards, in which they had to put names to pictures of male and female reproductive systems. Then we did card sets that showed sperm production, the menstrual cycle, and how sex and fertilization work. (The cards are the best things in the entire world.) The last day was talking about family planning -- what it is, how it works, and who should use it. We told the girls that it's not just about limiting the size of your family but about spacing children and timing them as well, making sure that they understood that family planning is good not only for young couples who don't want children yet, but also for new mothers with smolsmol babies and for women who already have four or five children and feel that enough is enough. Many women in Vanuatu have five or six children, which is fine, but our point was to go back to the beginning, about what they want their lives to be like. It's great to have ten children if your husband is a big man and has lots of money and can build you a big house and hire a house girl. It's pretty crummy to have ten children if you all sleep in a kitchen and you can't pay school fees for any of them. As a young woman, you have to think about these sorts of things. We can have babies from our mid-teens to our mid-to-late-40s, in some cases, so it's not cool for embarrassment to block girls from getting the knowledge that they need.

The day before I left, last day!!

I feel really proud of my GLOW. It was a labor of love and I hope that the girls can use some of that information in the future. 100%, I want to do another one or two on Malekula this next year. It's just such a great program -- the Gender and Development committee run by PCVs here is absolutely stellar. The stuff they produce is so perfect for Vanuatu, and it makes it so easy for volunteers. I never would have thought I could teach a fun and interactive session -- about the sperm cycle. On my own, it would have been some boring lecture that would have been about as uninformative as possible. A round of applause to GAD! 

Goals 2 and 3

The mission of Peace Corps is

To promote world peace and friendship by fulfilling three goals:
- To help the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women
- To help promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served
- To help promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans.

I think the biggest misconception that people have about Peace Corps is that we're a development organization. We are ... and we're not. Peace Corps is a service organization that also is an intercultural exchange that focuses primarily on development. But the point is: world peace and friendship. Work is important, but what's also important is how the work is done.

Projects can be fantastic, but they are also just things. Sometimes projects go perfectly and all of southeastern Zambia now engages in backyard tilapia farming. Sometimes projects fail, and a beautiful aid post falls into disuse. Volunteers come and go. Projects can be well or poorly designed. There might be a war or a natural disaster or people in a village might just have other priorities that take precedence over what you wanted to do there.

I just feel like volunteers need to remember goals 2 and 3, and not exclusively focus on goal 1.

In a way, PCVs are like mini-ambassadors about America. When we're friendly and interested and have gud fasin, we lead our communities to think positively about America and Americans. In Vanuatu, most people won't meet an American who is not a PCV (and, besides, we're still riding strong from World War 2), but that's not the case everywhere. I think in many countries around the world where people have greater access to news media, there is a prevailing view of America as a place of violence, a place that causes wars or a place that interferes. I think in countries where people have a negative view of America and Americans, it's even more important for PCVs to remember goal 2. 

And as far as goal 3 goes -- before I moved to Vanuatu, I couldn't have picked this country out on a map. I knew nothing about Vanuatu in specific and very, very little about the South Pacific in general. From reading Jared Diamond books, I had some vague idea about chiefs and pigs. I had read kids' version of Robinson Crusoe and Swiss Family Robinson. I think I knew that there would be coconuts. My ignorance really was astounding. And, to be honest, one of my real goals in this blog is to try and tell anyone who reads it a little more about Vanuatu and about life down here. It's good and bad and weird down here, and I wish more people in the States and around the world knew that there are countries like this.

Women's rights = human rights

It's become increasingly clear to me, by living in Vanuatu, just how successful the American women's movement has been. When you read about society and gender roles in the States, you can tell that we have a ways to go before we live in a nation that's 100% fair and equitable. But we've gotten so far, seriously, and that's something we should celebrate. We're arguing over who should pay for contraception rather than whether a woman should be able to access contraception. We're talking about whether men do enough child care rather than assuming that that's a woman's role. We assume that our daughters should be educated for the workforce, rather than thinking that they're just going to get pregnant and stay home, so what's the point? We don't value our sons over our daughters.

I love Vanuatu. I really do. But one thing about Vanuatu that I think is bad--that I think is very, very, very bad--is the status of women, particularly when it comes up against rape or sexual assault. It really sneaks up on you, because the people of Vanuatu are genuinely friendly and kind, especially to strangers. Vanuatu is not a country where you walk around scared that you're going to get jumped; it really is a place where you feel you can trust the kindness of the people you meet on the road. But it is a place that, when push comes to shove in a difficult way, seems to always value men over women.

I heard a really horrible story yesterday involving a 9 year old girl. It was probably the worst story I've heard here, but it had a lot in common with a lot of other stories I've heard. Especially in cases of rape or sexual assault when the victim is especially vulnerable -- a child, a disabled woman, a teenager who had previously been selling sex to her chief, a young mother off of her island--everyone just wants to brush it off under the rug. Even when they know exactly what happened--and in a small community, everyone does know exactly what happened--no one seems willing to get their head out from under the sand and actually do anything about the fact that a crime took place. I do understand, partially, that the men are family, too, and that it probably is much easier to downplay everything and to blame the victim. But it's so wrong.

I think it comes out of way too much respect in this culture and too much emphasis on communal harmony. It's like everyone wants to get along so much that even when men (and usually it is men) do really insane things, everyone just wants to brush it off and return back to normal. Like on my island, a man who was removed from the truck committee got mad, went down and spoiled the road so that the truck couldn't run down to the passage that week. He got a little side eye and some complaining, but everyone just carried their parcels up the hill and fixed the road. No consequences. Or three times I can think of on Tongariki, I've had men do these totally insane things--refuse to take no for an answer romantically and just make a total ass of himself, request to come to a workshop in Vila and just get drunk the whole time instead of attending, and grossly misrepresent the scale of a project then blame me for not getting 5x the number of tanks as we'd agreed. Every time it was "Oh, that's just how he is, fasin blong hem nao." It all slides away in the face of the fact that in a small community, you have to keep living together, and to do that, you have to ignore or purposely try to forget the things people have done. Most of the time, I don't think this is the worst strategy in the world.

When it comes to rape and sexual assault, though, it's really bad. If it's just a case of someone being a jerk or being unreliable, that's one thing. But there's so much victim blaming that goes on here and the police, both village and government, do not do what they ought to. I know of a case where a report was made and police straight-up refused to make an investigation. It doesn't help that, somehow, the police never have the money to make the rounds, so many times if a complaint is made, the complainants have to pay the price of the police visit. Depending on where you are in Vanuatu, that might be as much as 100 or 200 dollars, which is impossible for a subsistence farmer. Can't afford the boat charter, and the cops just won't come. 

And with victim blaming--so I led a workshop on Gender Based Violence. It went over really well, and I was very impressed with what everyone had to say. One session that did, I think, fail, was a session on how to prevent rape inside of a community. The way it worked was that it was one of the later sessions in the workshop, and I was listing their suggestions on a sheet of butcher's paper. There were lots of ideas of how a woman could prevent rape--stay close to your house, don't go walking anywhere alone, don't flirt with boys and give them the wrong idea, don't drink alcohol, don't wear clothes that will spoil a man's thinking, always stay with family--and, I think, two suggestions for how men could prevent rape. The first was "don't smoke marijuana", a drug which in Vanuatu has a reputation for making people violent and crazy, as opposed to lazy and prone to skipping Intro to Anthro. The second was "don't watch blue (pornographic) movies". As an American, I think we would say different things, like "ask the girl/woman if she wants to have sex with you" or "no means no." It's just a totally different attitude in which women have to behave within a certain very narrow set of parameters or else, well, that's what you get. And especially considering the extremely high rate of sexual abuse that happens within families and at schools (largely between students but also teacher-student), I can't say I can identify any one particular place that is universally safe.

It just makes me really angry. I know that at a certain level I am outraged because I am a woman and so I take these stories perhaps more personally than some other people. Women's rights = human rights, though. And here, in some cases, it's just so straight forwardly against what we in America view as proper and appropriate that it boggles me.

What's Going On In My Life Right About Now

I just wanted to make a quick post to explain what's going on in my life right now. There have been a ton of changes, but I feel like if I just wait around, I'll never get to typing it.

The biggest change is that I finished my service on Tongariki. This was my last month on that island. It's really strange for me that now I have to think of Tongariki as that place I lived on, and not that place I live on. I had a really busy, exciting last month. I applied for a shipment of story books from Darien Book Aid and just got notification that they've been shipped. I co-wrote an AusAid grant asking for a water tank for the kindy--fingers crossed, notification goes out in about ten days. I wrote a 45-page community profile, which was about the longest and most complicated thing I've written since I graduated. The health committee and I opened our water tank project -- thanks USAID! Ol smolsmol aelan blong Shepherds i gat wan bigfala nid blong saed blong wota, be yu yu givhan bigwan long mifala! I also held a Camp GLOW, which was absolutely the most satisfying workshop series I've ever done. GLOW is a girls' leadership and life skills program. It focuses on all the usual suspects--goal setting, leadership style, healthy relationships, adolescent reproductive health--but it was just a blast. In Vanuatu, sex ed isn't taught until class 10, which is such a terrible idea since A) most children do not reach class 10 and B) many of the students who do reach class 10 might be as old as 20, and thus well beyond the critical learning years. I left my camera cord in Vila, but my GLOW was just great. It was so much fun it felt like my birthday present to myself.

I also got ready to leave site ... and that was so hard. In Vanuatu, we have these feasts called last kakaes that most communities hold to say good bye to their PCV. My last kakae was the saddest thing imaginable. I was hoping to try and keep it together, but the second I got into the room and they started singing hymns, I started to bawl. I don't think ever in my life I've left a place and known, without a doubt, that you can never go back. I know I will go back to Tongariki, but I don't live there anymore. The greatest thing that Peace Corps does is let you come to love people who aren't anything like you. And especially on Tongariki -- as a volunteer, it was just me and my little village and my little island. The chairman of the chiefly council gave a speech, as did the health committee chair and the school committee chair, and two of the pastors, too. When I gave my speech, I was just crying the whole time. There's a certain way to give speeches here -- you have to address everyone, ol chief, ol mama mo papa, ol pikinini--and it was hard to get those words out. I told them that they treated me like family, that I consider living on Tongariki for these two years to have been one of the greatest blessings of my life, and that when I'm an aged grandmother I will think back to them and remember them always. The students sang a song and I accepted a bunch of presents, did a kava ceremony, had lunch. I had cried so much I felt sick for the rest of the day. It is devastating. 

I had about one more week on the island. I finished my GLOW, sold all of my things, and cleaned my house up. I also had the swellest birthday party ever. Last year, my birthday was pretty sub-par, but this year, I wanted to have a party. After a lot of asking, I bought a goat for 40 bucks. My papa helped me kill it (!!) and then he and the other men in the family butchered it. We made a big pot of soup and invited everyone in the village and all my good friends from around the island. It ended up being (happy) speeches, (happy) church hymns, and then (happy) kava drinking and (happy) dinner. I had also bought a bottle of "spirit drink" (sounds high quality, right?) and it was just a lot of fun. A lot of people came to celebrate, and it was just a really nice time. My party was on 16 October, even though my birthday is 18 October, because ....

I was waiting for a cargo ship. So, originally I'd thought I would try to put my stuff on a ship and then fly out, or just take a small boat charter to North Efate. But plans change, and Jo-Ellen 2, the newest cargo ship, was coming to pick up delegates for the Central Island Presbytery meeting. Long story short, I spent my 25th birthday sleeping on a sack of kava, and I got into Vila at 3 in the morning.

So here's the big news which I haven't written here. I have moved to Malekula island, in Malampa Province, to the north a bit. Starting in January, I will be living in Lakatoro (the provincial center) and working at the provincial disaster office. I'll be doing awareness about climate change, disaster risk reduction, and first aid, as well as liaising with other offices to further their disaster work in the province. I've been pretty sure that this is what was up since about July, but it's been a while in the making. I'm so excited about this! I love love love Vanuatu and don't want to leave just now. It's a big change but I'm thrilled. It's a new adventure for 2015.

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.

Thanks USAID for the water!

A few months back I applied for a USAID SPA grant. SPA means Small Project Assistance and it's for projects related to climate change. Here in Vanuatu, it really makes sense to do water projects with it. I applied for roughly 10,000 USD in order to get 6 water tanks, and I got it!

[Thank yu USAID ... NBV gave me my money in a manila envelope. Those would be 5000 vatu notes right there. I don't know why Spider Man is there.]

So I run around Vila with my money in an envelope. Roughly 6500 at the tank place, 2500 at the ship's office, and the rest over at the hardware store. 

Everything goes on the ship, whereupon...

 So the approved way to get water tanks to shore is ... to throw them off the side of the ship.

Here are people trying to maneuver over to the shore. 

Push push push.

On top!

So now Tongariki has 21,300L of extra water tank space. Thanks USAID! This is going to make a nice difference -- the population exceeds the water storage space that we already have. Climate change is going to affect Pacific islands probably more than anywhere else on Earth. Luckily, Vanuatu is volcanic and it's not atolls, so, unlike with Tuvalu, there's no threat that we'll go under the water. But it's so hard to live out here and if there's not enough water during the dry season more and more frequently, this is going to make life even harder than it already is.

Library Project

I did a big library project. So when I got to site, they had books stuffed in this little room that was like a closet. The books weren't sorted or leveled, and many of them were inappropriate or in extremely poor shape. Like racy romance novels ... outdated Microsoft Office books ... and even just dirty, molding books that with half of the pages stuck together. Students weren't getting books out of the library, teachers weren't really using the books, either, and it was just messy.

The project that I do here, VITEL, focuses on improving literacy teaching here in Vanuatu. We're supposed to work with teachers to get them to do learner-centered instruction, phonics, word wall, sight words, etc. One of the other big parts, though, is that we're supposed to help schools find materials for instruction. One of the most obvious ways to do this is by setting up or improving school libraries so that teachers and students have access to these materials. I think we don't think in America about how utterly surrounded we are by English language print: books, advertisements, even just labels on food products. On my island, honestly ... Most families do not have books apart from Bibles, and no one is rich enough to eat lots of food from stores. In class, they're mostly looking at the textbooks. The textbooks here aren't terrible, but they are not sufficient for getting kids to really experience English.

I was pretty lucky and this project went over really well. I got about 800 books shipped to me by Rotary in January of 2013. Later, I got about another 60 books shipped by a yacht charter and found some more new books hidden behind the sports materials. (This is a big issue at a lot of schools: sometimes you have the materials where you are but no one knows where it is.)

I went through all of the books that we currently had and tossed everything that was useless or really dirty. My theory in trashing books was that I wanted to be on the generous side with the library; if a book was just a little dirty or had a bad spine, I used tape to repair books, but if it was just totally trashed, time to go. Kids can even use an expired atlas, if push comes to shove, but it has to be clean and neat.

Then I sorted the fiction books into four levels, putting colored stickers on the spines. Each color got its own shelf. I didn't bother to do a card catalog because the library is still small enough to scan the shelves. Nonfiction got its own color, and then I separated out teachers materials, School Journals (NZ school magazines), Vanua Readers (Vanuatu-themed stories) and other Vanuatu-related materials.

Clean up, clean up...

Olive (my super cool Class 2 teacher)

Oh luk, not dirty anymore

Unfortunately, these walls are actually really against glue tack. I need to just buy some super glue and make them properly stick.

Steve, Me, Charlie, Kiki, Tommy, on the morning of the library opening. We had a little program -- cutting open a ribbon, toktoks, and some snacks.

Elder Marang opens the library.

So flas.

So the library isn't normally a classroom, but it works as one too, sometimes. This is from earlier this year when I was substitute teaching class one. There are chairs and tables in the back and sides, but the front part of the library has mats and the kids can work off of the black board. It's also a space for kids to study and to do their work, especially for the kids in Class 4/5. That class is huge -- like 30 students -- and if they try to do group work, they really need more space.

Things I learned from this project:
1. Lending libraries are a ton of work. As the responsible teacher, you have to chase students down ALL THE TIME. Don't do it. Reading rooms are the best.

2. Make it incredibly, incredibly, incredibly obvious where the books go. I originally did not put stickers on the books, and students slowly reshuffled them out of their mix. Also, straight up write grade levels on the front of books.

3. The easier it is to find a suitable book, the more likely a teacher or a student will actually go grab a book. It has to be really, really easy, like, go to one book shelf and grab a book. You can't ask a student to try and judge a book if they're not used to reading a lot.