The Move

Not sure why I can't move these pics around, so sorry, they're all at the beginning

4 of us in the Round Island Relay

Me passing off the baton to JJ

Speech to Ekipe

L to R: Kennedy, Parra, Me , Grenly, Dick, Johnny

Joel and the new chiefs

the small chiefs lined up for the ceremony

crushed skull

Chief Joel

On the way to his doom

Joel is on the right with the kastom pig killer

All the bubu's (grandpas) sitting together


OK, I know its Christmas. 

My blogging has been infrequent and late.

for that I'm sorry

Here's some meet on a stick to make up for it

July was full of great experiences. It's amazing how much we were able to pack into this one month. After Krissy's parents left we turned our attention to spending as much time in Ekipe as we could, since we knew that at the end of the month we would be leaving Ekipe Village for the big city: Port Vila. 

Most Peace Corps Volunteers (PCV's) are placed at a site for the full 2 years of their service. For Krissy and I, this was not the case. We knew right away, while still in Milwaukee that we would be living in a rural site for the first year and an urban site the second year. This happened because Krissy has her Masters in Public Health and was picked as a replacement for another PCV with her MPH living in Port Vila. Though we were well aware of this planned move it did not make it any easier. 

About halfway through our time in Ekipe, everyone started asking us when we would be leaving, how soon it would be and if we would ever come back. This was frustrating because we were still trying to do work on various projects but all anyone could talk about was us leaving. Well the time finally arrived and we were pretty sad about it. 

Though on this very blog, I bitched and moaned about bugs, heat, food, toilets, and other physical discomforts, the amazing feeling of truly being part of a tight knit community was very difficult to let go. Neighbors who eat together, worship together, greet each other when they come back from travels, play together, work together, all surrounding you day in and day out, this situation is unprecedented in my life. The comfort and confidence and happiness that are borne from living this life are palpable. And they are hard to leave. Even with the lure of electricity, refrigerators, tv's, DVD's, music, ice cream, etc.

Fortunately we had some big events to distract us from the move. One of our host families who we ate dinner with every Monday, began preparing for their patriarch's chiefly name-giving ceremony more than a month in advance. For the month leading up to the big day, families from Ekipe made the short walk up to a satellite village called Matthiew to bring gifts and show their respect to Joel who would soon be taking his chiefly name (becoming one of the six paramount chiefs of Ekipe). 

While the village made preparations for the big shindig, Krissy and I trained for the Round Island Relay. A 10 person relay race around the island of Efate (AKA "My Island"). So since there would be all these people running around my island, I figured I better take part, lest somebody think it was THEIR island. So yeah, I trained, a little, and prepared myself for the thought of running in a race, something I have never done before. And never wanted to do before. 

Crazily, these two events coincided on the same weekend. That is, our last one in Ekipe. 

The Chiefly ceremony came first. It was beautiful, lots of custom songs, custom dress, pigs killed ceremoniously, besides the random white tourists who lucked into staying at Joel's Bungalows that weekend, it felt very traditional and authentic. What is it with living here that has made me racist against white people. Well not really white people, just white tourists. I hate it when I'm mistaken for a tourist, and it pissed me off that in our entire year in Ekipe this was the first custom ceremony we got to see, yet two kids from Oz on holiday from school got to see it on their 1 week visit. as if this happened every day! Anyway, I'm not REALLY angry, and not really racist either, I dunno, race relations here mean something totally different back home, so please excuse me if I sound insensitive...or whatever. 

Anyway, so after standing around for hours, climbing into a camion (Big flatbed truck), driving up into the hills, herding cattle, watching a couple of them get killed, and then butchered right there in the bush, pieces of it roasted and eaten while the bull was still twitching, we returned to the ceremony and stood around watching stuff for a few more hours before going home to rest up for the big race the next day.

The race was a lot of fun before hand and right at the beginning. I got to start my section in Ekipe, So I had all our friends and everyone at the ceremony there to cheer me on as we started out. We then ran through the neighboring village of Epao, which is my normal running route, so everyone there was cheering me on too. But once I got past the end of my normal route, my legs started to tell me that I had done too much standing around the day before. the grew wobbly and jelly like, and my pace slowed significantly as the hot hot sun came directly over head. Somehow I pushed through (TV on the Radio-Wolf Like Me, and Outkast- Bomb's Over Baghdad helped a lot with that) and completed my section. Our team placed solidly in the middle of the pack, not spectacular, but not too bad either. 

The next day was our last day in Ekipe. Our supervisor Linda came out to pick us up. Our replacement, Carol, and the entire village gathered outside of the New Covenent Church to say goodbye. We all gave speeches talking about our time together in Ekipe and what it meant to us. We ate good food, showed a slideshow of photos from our time there, and sadly walked around shking hands and saying goodbye. In the rain we packed up the last bits of our stuff and drove away.  After a  bumpy two hour drive as we approached Vila, we stopped at the scene of a recent accident. There were a bunch of people gathered around a van that had obviously been in a head on collision. There was a woman trapped in the front seat. Though they were trying to figure out how to extricate her from the vehicle, no one had thought to call police, or an ambulance. That's Vanuatu for you. a hundred people all standing around with cell phones, but no one calls an ambulance. So we called  and I tried to get people to give her some room and not crowd around her as we waited. Eventually the ambulance came and they were able to get her out. This all felt very symbolic of the new community we were moving to. 

I'll never forget my time in Ekipe, and even now, while still here in Vila, I frequently miss it.

Idyllic Independence Field

I had a great moment playing ball yesterday.
It was our former country director Kevin George's last game before he leaves for the States. He has been here in Vanuatu for seven years and has been playing baseball with his team of kids in Port Vila for 5 years. There happens to be a lot of volunteers in town right now because a new group just swore in and an old group is leaving. So along with the 15 or so kids we had playing we also had 10-15 Peace Corps volunteers at the game watching or playing.
So I'm standing in Left Field with my back to the descending sun. Barefoot in the grass, shouting encouragement to the kids we work with on a hot Sunday afternoon. The sky has started to turn it's peculiar Pacific Sky Blue/Purple/Pink color with not a cloud in sight. We've got White Americans, a Black American, Black Ni-Vanutu, Asian Americans, a Puerto Rican, and a bunch of "Halfie-Castes" (Which is what they call people like me who are half white and half something else) all playing baseball together on the same field: Independence Park in Port Vila, Vanuatu. I was sitting thinking about how amazing this all was and suddenly I hear "America the Beautiful" drifting on the drafts of humid air faintly into my ears. I really thought I was imagining it at first, it even sounded like an organist at a baseball game. I turned around and saw a congregation coming out of the big church across the street, and for whatever reason that Sunday afternoon, their church keyboard player was playing "America" on the organ setting. And just like in that scene from the Sandlot where they play the 4th of July game by the light of the fireworks,and Ray Charles starts singing "O Beautiful for spacious skies..." and all the kids turn around and stand mesmerized as the ball sails up into the fireworks, just like that, I stood mesmerized gazing off at the setting sun over Port Vila Harbor, and the happy laughing kids doing handstands on second base, and the Peace Corps Volunteers giving up two years of their lives to their country, all playing together on this idyllic, beautiful day.
Thank you God, for moments like this.

Port Vila Harbour on a particularly beautiful night (Thanks for the camera mom, it's doing great things)