A lot of people asked me before I came here why on earth I would want to go to the other side of the world, a country that no one has really even heard of and live for two years. I don’t think I really understood the weight of that question until I got to my village on Epi and for the first few days sat in a daze looking around me, asking that exact same question. Things are great now though there was definitely an initial freak out staring at the pictures of what once was my life stuck up on a wall made of sticks.
Most of what I did at first was attempt to keep the hoards of children invading my house to a minimum, sit around at the health center, and followed the malaria study around to follow up on all the cases. I didn’t actually have to do too much for the malaria study, just play a buffer between style blo island and style blo town but it was really great to ride around with them and see different places on the island. Most importantly, it gave me purpose in a life in which, if I really wanted to, I could choose to not do anything all day.
I’ll go ahead and answer a lot of the questions most people have already been asking and just get it out of the way. My village has about 120 people. I eat bananas, a lot of them. Strong banana, Chinese banana, ripe banana; boiled, roasted, occasionally with peanut butter, it’s the main food of my area along with breadfruit which is just about as easy to get sick of. My house, kitchen and swim house are made out of wild cane with a traditional natangura roof, the wood was cut too early and it gets dust all over everything all the time. I drink rainwater and shower from a bucket I fill at my host families house which is right next door. Electricity? Yeah right. Internet? Not sure why Cox hasn’t made it out here yet. Epi does have a road with a few trucks so it’s usually possible to hop in the back of one on a market day to save me a three hour walk to the bank or post office when I need to go. I cook over fire when I actually attempt to make one and usually end up having to get help from one of the pikinini, mainly my 12 year old neighbor Peter who thinks he’s my best friend.
Most families in Vanuatu live pretty much only off their garden. They find different ways to make money for school fees like selling mats, copra or food in markets but mostly during the day everyone disappears into the garden, which can make the place pretty quiet. My island also grows a lot of peanuts which can be pretty time consuming at planting and harvesting times but the gardens in my opinion are beautiful. My families version of “the office” is going off into the bush to the top of a hill where you can look out over everything, sing out to all the other people in the garden and roast yam over a fire for lunch. I cleared a garden for myself close by, more for street cred than the need to actually grow food but I’m excited to hopefully grow some stuff.
In terms of work, I have done some surveys and identified some areas of need in the community such as HIV/AIDS and NCD awareness but am planning on making what is called a Participatory Analysis for Community Action workshop where you essentially trick the community into identifying their own problems. The Ni-Vanuatu are not only a really shy but a very indirect culture. My first couple months basically served to integrate into the culture, and gain the trust of my community to work with me.
Small accomplishments so far include tricking my 5 year old brother Freddy, who used to think that the world was his toilet, to actually go to one, making a few fires of my own, and perfecting my grunt to prove to the cow I have to pass on my way to the health center that I am no longer afraid of him, even though he finds great entertainment with bucking his horns and running me off the path.
There have already been a lot of ups and downs. Life can be really interesting when you’re spearing fish on the reef and roasting hermit crabs in the middle of the night and it can be really difficult when you’re sitting in custom court or trying to connect with someone on a level which only exists in your culture. There is a lot that I don’t agree with in regards to culture here. Gender equality does not exist and I did unfortunately have to attend a court in which a man beating a woman was justified based on the laws of “kastom”. Though originally it seemed to be a desirable thing about a place I have come to learn how much some people here hide behind kastom and what detrimental effects it can have on a society.
In Vanuatu, a custom court can be held before the actual law of Vanuatu is ever consulted for a crime and in the end a fine will be given, the families involved will shake hands and they will make “good face” meaning they have all forgotten and forgiven each other for whatever happened. I was required to do this in a situation of domestic violence in which it wasn’t wrong that this man chose to beat his wife almost to the point of unconsciousness but that he did so in front of a white man. I lost a lot of respect for people in my village that night, men and women. I was so upset not just because I had never expected to see something like that in my life but because I was the only one who felt this way about it. The woman was immediately told that she wrong by men who were not even present for the altercation and the following day his actions were justified, even by other women, based on custom; because it is their “custom” that if a woman disobeys a man he has the right to hit her. This may be off topic but is just an example of how hard trying to integrate into this culture can be when you don’t agree with such a big aspect of it and you are forced to try to explain your feelings in the minimalism of pidgin English.
On the brighter side I had already applied to the Gender and Development Committee and got accepted just a few weeks after the incident, which had obviously motivated me to do some work in this area whether or not I was invited to join. The GAD committee, as we call it, was started by Peace Corps about 30 years ago and started as Women in Development, to recognize the important roles of women in societies while the process of development had typically only involved leaders, aka men. Even National Geographic has identified women as one of the most underutilized resources in development so in this country it was easy to see the disparity in opportunity and I decided to get involved. Ironically our GAD committee has just added a gender based violence component and I am now the lead on a 6 step prevention program that we have developed and will soon be piloted by some of the volunteers in the previous group.
After nearly a month in town of enjoying internet, my fellow PCV’s, and probably a few too many nights at my new favorite bar, Voodoo, I am a little nervous to go back to site and readjust to life on the island. I am also re energized however by the eagerness of my counterpart, the local midwife I have been suggested to work with, and now having some of the resources to actually get some work done.
