The World Changes Every Day

When living life at village pace, without electricity, it's pretty natural to go to bed early.  9:00 pm was a late night, I was often in bed by 8.  This leads to waking up early, a great thing when your morning trip to the latrine takes you past a beautiful white sand beach with an unobstructed view to the east over the ocean.  It became my routine on Pele to sit under a coconut tree next to the ocean for one or two hours each morning, watching the sunrise.  Gypsy, the family dog, would come and sit with me - more often than not, she'd try to climb up on my lap.  For some of the time I'd be alone, but at least one or two people would come and sit next to me and chat - going to sit next to the beach to look at the ocean in the morning was a very normal thing to.  Never before in my life has watching the sunrise been a regular part of my routine.  Each sunrise was different.  As the sky got light, activity would start on the beach - the village mot...

My first couple days on Pele were the weekend - no classes, nothing to do but adjust to village life and talk as much as I could in my broken Bislama.  I think it was my second or third day, I was alternating between chatting, napping, and reading my Bislama textbook, and the day was starting to drag.  "Hmmmm," I thought, "I remember this feeling.  Just like last Peace Corps."  But then - "Guess I'll go snorkeling!!!"  My village, Launamoa, was right on the ocean.  I swam at least once a day, and the snorkeling right in front of my house was pretty great.  I saw all kinds of neat fish, including a group of clownfish hanging out around a rock covered in sea anemones.  Some of my snorkeling adventures were farther afield, though.  One time after lunch I complained about the heat to Terry, our language traininer.  "Ok", he said, "Why don't we go swimming?"  He guided us to a place where the reef drops off and the ocean gets deep -...

More photos and stories of Pele to come.  But as of yesterday, I am officially a Peace Corps volunteer again!  I once again swore to uphold the constitution of the United States and to defend my country against all enemies, foreign and domestic - and learned that repeating that oath in unison with just one other person is much more challenging than with a group of 60.  With 60 people everyone's voices blend together, but with two, every little slip up is obvious - but we got through it, and I now have a cool Vanuatu-USA Peace Corps friendship pin to go with my Benin-USA one.  Our swearing in ceremony was nice, most of the office staff and a few volunteers were there and we got to talk about our favorite memories from training - I shared a fantastic sentence we came up with in language class.  "Kasem" in Bislama can mean "to understand", "to reach", "until", and "to pour."  So "Bae yu no kasem kasem yu kasem Port Vila mo kasem ...

I've been blessed with many wonderful families in my life.  Of course my own family, Mom, Dad, and Nathan are great - and I feel their support just as tangibly when I'm thousands of miles away as when we're together in person.  It's a great gift.  Over the course of my travels, I've accumulated several wonderful host families as well.  As an exchange student in Finland, I lived with the Ahos, and Heikkilas, and the Wahlrooses.  In Benin, I spent training with the Azagbas in Porto Novo and then lived with Banna, Delegue, and their wonderful family at my post in Peonga.  While in Kenya this summer, I expected to spend my two months living in a hotel - only to be spontaneously offered the chance to live, free of charge, with the Nyende family in their apartment at Kibabii University.  I may have a pretty strong wanderlust, but I'm also a homebody in that I love putting down roots and being with family (new or old) - so these people have all been such gre...

I've just returned to Port Vila, Vanuatu's capital, after a wonderful ten days spent on a small island called Pele.  Along with another new Peace Corps Response volunteer, I lived on the island with a host family and had lessons in Bislama, Vanuatu's national language.  Bislama is a creole language in which most of the words are based on English with some French influences, but the sentence structure and grammar have connections to local island languages.  Vanuatu happens to be the most linguistically dense country in the world, as far as how many languages are spoken here per the population size - there is somewhere around one language for every 2,000 people, well over 100 languages.  Because of this linguistic diversity, there wasn't much of a way for people from different islands or even different parts of the same island to communicate.  When Ni-Vanuatu (the word for people from Vanuatu) were "recruited" (often forcefully) to work on sugar plantations in ...