The first days of our journey...in Port Vila

I look forward to showing you all who visit me, Port Vila…it’s a small town with all the essentials. There is even a Chinatown so my parents will love it here! Tap water is drinkable here which wonderful. The supermarket sells fantastic fruits such as pamplamoose which is similar to grapefruit and papaya, called popo. You can get Doritos for 5 bucks although, I’ve enjoyed their local snacks which are far less expensive. There’s even a “movie in the park” as known in Chicago on a couple nights with the ocean sunset as the backdrop.

A couple nights ago, a recently retired Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV)…who served a max of 5 years invited the trainees to her house where she was house sitting. It was a mansion of the house with a view and access to the lagoon. A few of us jumped in for a night swim…it was quite scary diving into dark water but we went for it. What we soon saw made it all worth the apprehension. When we waved our arms and feet around, bio lumeniscents (probably butchering the name) would glow…they were tiny sparkling lights shimmering in the black ocean water all around us. It was an amazing sight. There was a casualty…when getting out of the water I did get a few pricks from a sea urchin but the pain was brief and the stingers were out in a day. It was definitely all worth it.

Yesterday, we spent the morning and lunch at Jane’s house…she is our PCMO or Peace Corps Medical Officer, a native of Australia. Her house had an amazing garden with tomato, pineapple, passionfruit, pamplemoose, broccoli, cauliflower to name only a few, a pool and amazing view of the ocean. She had a nutritionist come to show us all the local foods we would be seeing at the markets which we will soon be preparing for ourselves. Realzing that we will not have a refridgerator, I am still trying to fathom exactly how I’ll manage.

We also learned how to open coconuts (or kokonas in Bismala)…which consists not only of the brown miniature bowling ball looking nut we all envision but it is also enclosed by a stringy wood-like thick outer shell. With a stake in the ground you plunge the coconut onto the stake and use it to pry the outer shell off. While the Ni Van’s can do this in seconds…it took us at least 20 minutes, if not more and a lot of muscle and sweat. We then learned to use a bush knife to crack open the coconut and scrape the insides to make coconut cream. This is used for cooking as much as soy sauce is used in Chinese foods.

The afternoon was sunny and beautiful as we headed to get on a catamaran for our water safety training. Mike, a dive shop owner explained some survival tricks such as putting out a fire with a can of coke and the many uses for a trash bag. After our talk, we were given life vests which PCVs are required to have with us when traveling by boat and we had to show that we could jump in correctly. We then had the rest of the afternoon to snorkel. Thanks Damian for the snorkeling practice…I felt very comfortable and was even giving some pointers to a couple beginners. The reefs here are amazing and I hope my village has access to the water. So many colorful fish and sea life…we even saw a couple of men spear fishing.
Last night trainees were invited to Voodoo club and I represented 21B and was the only one who went out…I’m thinking this is our last night of freedom so why not? There was a small dance floor and screen which showed the music videos…which kept me mesmerized…while I can do without TV, it made me realize that I’ve not had the visual stimulation for quite some time now! They played Daft Punk which I was thrilled about. We danced, sweated and the bartenders would light up the bar with flames. It was nice to get out for the last night out…we leave today for 10 weeks to our training village.

Mangelilui, our training village is where we stay with host families and are essentially adopted by our host mamas and papas. They are told to only speak Bislama to us so we can learn it quickly. We will have classes during the day…language, culture and technical training and then eat dinner with our host families. My host mama’s name is Larin and host papa is Stephen. They have two daughters and a son. During this time, we will truly get a feel for village life. We will essentially be rising and falling with the sun. The heat, humidity and rain will soon be arriving and I’ll see just how well we can handle that!