Vanuatu Week One: Mangaliliu and Chasing Roosters

The day I went to Vanuatu for the first time started early and finished late. The easiest way to find a group of volunteers going to an island nation is to look for the people with long skirts, pillows, a large amount of carry on and, in my case, a ukulele.

The moment I stepped off the plane in Port Vila, I was slammed by a wall of hot and humid air. There were a lot of people we had to line up behind for customs. I later discovered that we could have been in the residents’ line because of our visas.  We all trooped out and were met by the New Zealand and Canadian volunteers, along with our coordinator, Terry and his wife Esline. Our first encounter with ni-Van culture was nothing short of the standard. We were hugged as soon as they could get their arms around to us.

Along with the 18 other volunteers, I stayed in Mangaliliu Village outside of Vila. We drove up a winding hill, through a jungle and then there was a village there. We were all immediately adopted by some of the local families. After a ceremony that involved having flowers put around our necks, we had our first lot of island kaekae (food). I was so impressed  by the spread that had been put out, there was so much food. What I hadn’t expected was not to like the taste of anything that was put out for aside from rice and biscuits. After the feast we were shown our new homes. My mama lives next door to her sister, so I stayed at Mama Louise’s with Tyler, another volunteer. Ni-Vans are now mostly Christians and this shows in their everyday life, Tyler and I would be sleeping in the same room. We were given a lecture by our papa about us being siblings, that he was a father to both of us and my mama was Tyler’s and vice-versa. We assured him that we understood completely. We had a lot of siblings, so we taught them uno, they all go to a francophone school, so it took a little bit.

The next morning, like all the others I would spend in Mangaliliu started with tea and bread of some sort. The day was spent learning Bislama and about the culture. Our classes were held outside under an enormous mango tree that provided the most amazing amount of shade. The roots were gnarled, like something from a story book and looking up into the branches made the tree’s height seem endless.  Passing children would giggle. We also had a few lessons down at the beach, the cyclone safety one was really short because they hadn’t had a big cyclone in years.

We all spent the afternoon at the beach from what I remember. All the local kids were excited to go swimming with the white people. Shoes had to be worn in the water because of the coral, it is rather sharp. I kid you not, the sea did sparkle, it was like living in a nature photography shoot. The pikinini (children) spent the whole time laughing; some of the guys would throw them into the deeper water which they thought was fantastic.

One day we went into to Port Vila for medical and safety briefings. The medical one was pretty gross in places and made me very wary about a few things, it seemed pretty easy to get sick in Vanuatu. Port Vila was unlike any other capital I had been to. It’s pretty much a big town, two real main streets with roads full of potholes. The centre of town is the Mama’s Markets, which sell fresh produce. I bought a drinking coconut, not to be confused with a coconut for eating, and then walked through the town looking for Air Vanuatu’s office drinking it. I failed to drink all the coconut water inside, I swear it was an endless supply. I didn’t like Vila as much as the village because it was far less pretty, definitely more westernised but the vibe was very friendly and the only time I didn’t feel 100% safe was when I had to cross the road.

Trying kava was something I knew I would have to do. I was intrigued by it. Kava is a plant, the root of which can be used to make a drink. The drink itself is a narcotic of sorts and slows you down and makes you happy for the most part. It’s much better for communities than alcohol in terms of violence but as with everything, it has its downsides. For me, the downside was the entire experience. It’s like drinking muddy water with random herbal medicine thrown in, gag inducing, but I managed to down my whole shell in one go. The strangest thing about it was eating pineapple afterwards and being able to taste but not feel the fruit in my mouth. The volunteers seemed to fall in two groups, those who like kava and those who do not like it at all, don’t bring that stuff anywhere near me thank you.

We spent Friday morning at a local school, doing some practise teaching. Courtney and I did word searches, played bingo and wrote sentences with the kids who ended up in our “classroom”. They were gorgeous kids, although they were super shy. We ended up doing a very intense of heads, shoulders, knees and toes. We did it forwards, backwards, with words missing, fast, faster, superfast and with our eyes shut. I was exhausted afterwards, we were drenched in sweat and it was only before lunch. That’s what you get for playing in direct sunlight.

The last night in Mangalilu was interesting to say the least. The afternoon was spent learning about island kaekae and helped cook a feast for that night. It took all 19 of us to chase down two roosters, my proudest moment in that was nearly catching one of them, the bird got away though. The people who did catch them deserve a prize. Two of the guys had to kill and feather them when they were caught. I couldn’t watch that but I did help with preparing the manioc for simporo rolls. Manioc is a tree root which has to be peeled to remove the bark. We then washed and grated it. The white slime is plopped onto island cabbage leaves and rolled up like a rice paper roll. Island cabbage is nothing like cabbage. We ate a lot of coconut that afternoon because we had to grate them to milk them.

That first week I really did not like island kaekae. It might have been because I wasn’t used to the flavours, perhaps it was the texture, but whatever it was, it just didn’t set right. I ate a lot of rice that week, something I now regret because most island kaekae I love. The other thing that was difficult that week was the hygiene situation. The toilet we had did flush but you needed to pour water into the bowl for it to work. The door didn’t lock and I was always worried about being walked in on because it was in the middle of my family’s area. The family had a shower but somehow I spent a lot of time going to shower and discovering other people had beat me to it. So my mama lead me away from the houses and to a small stream and that was where I washed, skirt pulled up to my shoulders, gasping at the cold.

Aside from the feast, two things happened on the last night. We were all given island dresses or shirts made from the same blue flowered fabric. Our mamas had made them without us knowing, without taking our measurements and they were perfect. Mine has been worn so much the fabric is fading and wearing out. The other was far less pleasant and featured in many an English class. I slept in a room that had an open window above my bed and one above Tyler’s. We’d put our mozzie nets up, so we were not getting malaria. One the last night I heard this sound outside the window, tapping and footsteps. We had learnt about creeping, which is when a guy or girl will hang around someone’s house because they are interested in them. This had me terrified and I was freaking out. It took me half an hour of lying in the dark, listening to what I thought was a person outside, before I managed to get out of bed and wake Tyler up. We shone torches outside, the noise stopped for a bit and then it started again. Tyler went outside, I locked the door, and he walked around our room. He came back thinking that the footsteps had headed for the stream. He went back to bed and I spent the night smack bang in the middle of the floor, which earned me two sore shoulders, sore knees and not a lot of sleep, along with a visit from a coconut crab and a cat.

I would later discover that what had kept me up all night was a pig. I still cannot believe I lost sleep over a pig. That being said, I lost a lot of sleep because a lot of critters but those are stories for later.

Love from Me and My Backpack 

Vanuatu: Preparation

Hi there,

As most of the posts on this blog mention, I went to Vanuatu, in case you didn’t know that before, you do now. I kept a journal while I was over there of the things that happened to me on a mostly day to day basis. Now I’m home for awhile and thought I could use all my tiny detailed notes to share my Vanuatu with other people.

A blog post will go up about Vanuatu regularly. For the most part, each post will be about one week in Vanuatu, in a week one through to week whatever it was style. There will be some posts that break this trend because some events are just too big to be sharing a post with others. I’ll try to include photos, funny stories, things that you think really can’t happen to you and anything else that comes to mind while I’m working on them.

I suppose I should start with an introduction to how I got to the point of me and my backpack getting on a plane bound for a tiny island nation I knew very little about. At some point in year 12, I woke up one morning and decided that I could not go through with my life plan to become a vet. Years of dreaming about this job and knowing exactly what I was going to do with my life suddenly seemed useless and I had no idea what on earth I was going to do with myself after graduation. My mum and I went to the careers office and long story short; I decided to take a gap year.

I had never considered a gap year before but I knew one thing, I didn’t just want to be at home for my gap year, I wanted to travel, but I also wanted to help people. I went looking for ways to do that and was given some information about Lattitude Global Volunteering. Lattitude had programs in different countries that sent volunteers off to do different things, some placements were teaching, some were sports coaching and others helping with medical care. There was a pretty big list of countries to choose from and I had my heart set on teaching in India. One of the things that might have helped me make that decision was that I love the way Indian women dress and I would have a really good reason to wear such beautiful clothes.

So, I filled out the forms and went to an interview. Turned out there were problems with getting visas, the guy I met at the interviews warned me they might not be able to send people to India and took down other preferences. Vanuatu wasn’t a place I knew much about, I knew it was near Fiji, was tiny and that French was one of the official languages. Everything I knew, I had learnt from the Wikipedia page. I speak French and the opportunity to use it made me list Vanuatu as a possibility.

Several weeks later, I was at the careers expo with my friends, trying to find myself a new university course to pursue and eating free jelly beans when my phone went off. I had a text that said something along the lines of “Congratulations, your suggested country is: VANUATU”.  I was excited at the time; I now knew what I was doing once I finished school. At the moment, I didn’t realise just how much that tiny country would change my life, or how much was going to happen to me in the next year. That one text message may have been the thing that started my mad adventure that ended with me crying for half an hour on a flight away from an island without power and running water for the general population.

The next few months were spent preparing to go to Vanuatu. I had to get a full medical and my injections were up to date, get anti malaria tablets, make sure I had enough medical supplies for a small army and that the clothes I was packing were culturally appropriate. Somehow I managed all of that, finished year 12, had my appendix out and not get completely overwhelmed with everything.

I thought I was ready. I’d talked to my placement partner, Courtney from New Zealand, and we had done some plotting for when we got to Level Mission Primary School, which we were fairly certain was in the middle of the middle of nowhere. I had skirts in my backpack, soccer balls in my carry on and a ukulele under my arm. I felt like I knew what I was in for. I was not as prepared as I thought. Life has a funny way of getting you all settled and pulling the rug out from under your sandals.

Vanuatu really changed that for me and taught me a lot. I am now proud to call Vanuatu one of my homes and a lot of the lovely ni-Van people family. Stay tuned for what happened when I got there and just how different things were. Here’s a hint, there were rats and nothing can prepare a person for some of the toilets I have seen.

Love From Me and My Backpack

Homesickness

Long time, no blog, I get it. I have been rather busy, travelling the world and keeping an extraordinarily detailed journal. My Europe trip covers five notebooks. I've been home in Australia for a week and a half now and it's absolutely lovely to see my family and my friends. I'm mostly back in the swing of things, already working again and doing things I have neglected while I was away. My backpack is hulking in the corner, there's a pile of woven baskets in another and life continues as "normal".

When I say I'm home, I mean I am home to the people who raised me and have loved me my whole life, I'm back in the city and country I grew up in, around people I have known for a long time. These are people I love in a place I know quite well. The tricky thing about travelling though is that you can create more than one home for yourself, so even when you are at what most people will call your home and you call home, you can still be homesick. It's something I didn't know was possible until I went to Vanuatu.

Vanuatu for me is also a home. There are people there who love me and are my family. As much as I joke about it, those people "re-raised" me. They taught me how to follow their way of life and live in their home. As the old saying goes, it takes a village to raise a child, except here the villages were given an adult who is already grown up for the most part and still managed to teach her something new. They taught me a lot.

Homesickness cannot be limited to one place and one set of people. One day, I will miss my Australian family, my real parents and blood family, the friends I went to school and youth group with, another day, I might not miss them but I miss my Level family, the people who taught me to use a bush knife and kept me safe in a cyclone. Other days, it'll be the Atavtabanga family, who spent far too much time laughing at my reaction to rats, giving me lots of tea and teaching me to cook. Some days I don't feel a huge absence of any of them and some days, when I am away from all of the people I call family, it hits me more that the humidity does when you get off the plane in Vila.

As much as feeling like that sucks, it makes me realise how lucky I am to have that many people to call family, that many mums, dads, brothers and sisters. I think it's a rare thing to be loved by so many people in so many places just because I was there. My families are all different, they follow different religions, they are from different backgrounds and lead different lives. That does not affect the way they love though, nor does it change how I love them or how much I do.

Homesickness is a strange beast, never to be tamed I guess, and maybe it shouldn't be. Some times we need a reminder of where we have come from and what we have to go back to. Whether we are homesick for a person, a group of people, a place or a mixture of the three, it means that there is something special that we might be apart from in person, but it's never far from our thoughts. I think that is pretty special.

Today, I am home in one place and missing another, which is a strange feeling. Love to all of my families who have made so many places home for me.

Love From Me and My Backpack

Sachenhausen Concentration Camp

Today I went to a concentration camp. The Sachenhausen camp is in Oraienburg, just by Berlin. The camp was operational even before the war and the Soviets then used it as a special camp. There were Nazis stored there in the end.

Before I even reached the camp, I was following in the inmates footsteps. Once they got off the train at the Oraienburg station, they were marched through the town to the camp, the same path I walked today. It seemed a nice town to me but arguably, there were no guns pointed at me and I have no coloured patches sown to my sleeves. Once I reached the camp, I walked down Camp Street. The wall surrounding the camp reminded me of the Berlin Wall but what was slightly shocking was just how close the houses were, and still are, to the camp. Backyards border Camp Street. The wall had a few stories of people who had been prisoners at the camp from when it was opened until its liberation by the Soviets.

Just outside the gates is a building that was used by SS troops for training and also as a barracks. Directly opposite the building are the camp gates. The first in the concrete wall, the second below Tower A. Between the gates is the house belonging to the Commandt and the command headquarters of the camp. Now there is also a strip of memorials. The two gates stand at the centre of the camp's baseline. From Tower A, the whole camp can be viewed.

Sachenhausen had prisoners from many different walks of life, over 200,000 people suffered in it. It didn't house that many Jews, when all the Jewish people were moved to Auschwitz, there were only 49 (I think) who had to be relocated. The majority of prisoners were political prisoners and Slavs. There was also a group of homosexuals and other undesirables.

Tower A now houses a museum about some of the victims and perpetrators. The men in charge of the camp were ruthless. One of the displays was of the weapons they used for beatings on a daily basis. The men wielding these weapons were capable of killing with a whip, a crop or even just the boots they were wearing. If they were feeling particularly nasty, they would give the whip to one prisoner and tell them to beat another. They would also give certain prisoners a rope and tell them to hang themselves or face the guards, in the end, suicide was far less painful. It is true that the entire camp can be seen from the tower. It was a desolate place today, mostly empty and with an overcast sky, it was greyer than I imagine it is in the summer.

The second gate is made of wrought iron. When the camp was in use it was just iron with white words painted on it. Now the words are part of the gate, "Work brings freedom".  A quote on a neighbouring wall said "Above the gaping gateway in the sinister grey building, thick black letters announce: Sachenhausen Protective Custody Camp. White lettering in the iron gate proclaims: Work brings freedom. Behind us, somebody whispers: Yes, in crematorium number three.'" (Franz Balhorn, in his diary entry for December 16, 1940). There is also documentation of guards telling prisoners that "There is a way to freedom, but only through this chimney!" whilst pointing at the chimneys of the crematorium. My skin was already feeling cold before I walked through the gates.

Directly inside the gates is the roll call area, a semi circle of packed dirt and the occasional tuft of grass, today so empty. It used to be surrounded by barracks, all but a few have been demolished now, rock pits mark their location. Directly across from the gates are where the gallows used to stand. If standing for hours during roll call two or three times a day in any weather wasn't already cruel enough, hangings were carried out at the times. Prisoners couldn't avert their eyes and were often forced to play the role of executioner.

Along the edge of the camp wall was the security system. This, much like at the Berlin Wall, had a good deal of barbed wire and also a death strip. They even had an electric fence at the camp. Getting too close to the wall was deadly, people were killed for less. Surrounding the roll call area is the shoe testing track. Prisoners were used to test new army boot materials, particularly those who needed punishing. The track is created from a variety of surfaces from sand to large, sharp rocks. If you had the misfortune of testing shoes, you were forced to march the track for the equivalent of 40km, loaded with a heavy pack and guards yelling and beating people at the same time. The idea of the track seemed laughable until I realised just how harsh it was to work on it. There is a point where even the most bizarre things are no longer funny.

The camp had a small camp in it, rather imaginatively named Small Camp. They mostly kept Jewish prisoners there until they were shipped to Auschwitz. Two of the old barracks are still standing there, even after an arson attack in the early 90s. Half of one of the buildings was full of stories of Jews who had been at the camp, either before or during the war. The other half was set up as though it were still in use. The dormitory was cramped with three tier bunks, barely space between them. People would be forced to share this narrow bunks and towards the end people slept on the floor too. Not even the worst hostel was anything like that set up. There were lockers in the common area but there weren't nearly enough and they didn't lock, if a person had anything of value they kept it on them. Maddy and I dubbed the bathrooms and storeroom something from Hell. Guards would drown people in the wash basins, pack people into the rooms and lock them in all day in summer, wearing winter uniforms. Even empty, they were grim, unclean and slightly spooky.

By the Jewish barracks was the prison. Yes, there was a prison in the camp, it was run by the Gestapo. The prisoners in it were either camp inmates who had broken the rules, or those arrested by the Gestapo. If the concentration camp was a nightmare, the prison was that of the highest degree. Terror, murder and secret keeping were the pillars of the prison. The cells now have the names of the people who were held and died in them, there were a British flags in there. The beds were hessian and straw, not at all comfortable looking and I imagine they were crawling with plenty of nasty bugs.

Sachenhausen had 68 barracks in total, the Jewish ones are the only ones still standing. They fan out from the roll call area. I shudder at how full they would have been, especially before the death marches. As I walked between where they stood, I was hyper aware of high the possibility that someone had died were I was standing was. Every inch of the ground must have had someone fall at one point or another. It made the thin grass, rocks and odd purple weed look slightly odd, knowing what had happened there.

Just outside the camp wall in the back corner is a gate that leads to what became a Soviet special camp. It had two zones but only one has above ground remains today. The barracks have a far more medieval take in bedding, bunks more like the ones you see in the dungeons of French castles were used. Prisoners here were originally people who had been charged with war crimes, boys from Nazi werewolf squads. One boy was 16 when he received a ten year sentence. The Soviets held about 60,000 people over the time their special camp was open, for various reasons, including ministers from churches and people who didn't share their political views. Children were born and raised in the camps but they didn't suffer as much as the actual inmates. There is a mass grave for 7000 of the dead from the camp just beyond the wall. Prisoners used to hear the dead being buried at night.

Back inside the wall, I walked to Station Z. It is one of the few times I will be ungrateful for something having a Z in the name because of its horrid story. Station Z was not a big building but it saw a lot of death. It had a gas chamber, which was far smaller than I imagined it would be, four cremation ovens, assorted examination rooms and a room that was specially designed so the people could be shot in the neck. 13,000 Soviet POWs were killed in the Autumn of '41 at Station Z. They were lead in under the pretence of a doctor's examination and then were taken to a room where they were shot in the back of the neck before their bodies were burnt. Around 600 bodies were reduced to ashes a day. The burial grounds that have been uncovered near by are several metres deep and full of tonnes of ashes. This helped me to put into perspective just how many people died because I know that one human doesn't become a lot of ash. The whole operation ran all day, every day, although sometimes the ovens were stopped if they started spewing flames.

The gas chamber, particularly the mobile units, were actually first tested at Sachenhausen before they were spread through the Germany territory for the purpose of genocide. Every time I think about how the process worked, I feel sick to the stomach. Carbon monoxide poisoning and suffocation are not things I want to dwell in but I know enough that they are extremely painful ways to die. The people who suffered that way were treated as less than human, I could not wish that fate on anyone.

Possibly the most shocking thing I leant today was not in the figures of the dead, the sites of the mass graves or the appalling living conditions. No, in the infirmary barracks was a small exhibit about the doctors, Nazi doctors who deliberately killed patients and carried out grim and pointless experiments on them, as well as the inmate doctors. Those were things I knew about, there was something I didn't. Sachenhausen Concentration Camp had had a brothel. Female prisoners from Ravenbrük were used as the prostitutes. The brothel was open every evening and on Sunday would open earlier, a visit was a reward for good behaviour and men were given twenty minutes with a woman. Female prisoners who saw the others return to Ravenbrük could only describe them as broken. Only Jewish prisoners couldn't earn the chance to go to the brothel. One woman was shot when they found out she was pregnant. I think it shocked me because I was caught so off guard by the idea that that would happen in a concentration camp. The woman were much like the trafficked people today and that hurts me all the more. No one should be subjected to that, I had to leave the building before I was sick from the stories.

Today was a hard day. I knew that it would be, a concentration camp never does promise to be fun but I had underestimated just how hard it would be. It makes me realise just how atrocious they had been and how the people had been treated. It also showed me that the guards and people in charge really thought they were doing the right thing or they had really long vicious, cruel streaks. I am very to lucky to live where I do in the world and in this time. Everything that happened in that camp happened less than a hundred years ago, it's very recent history. Perhaps the worst part is that even though it's not happening in Germany anymore, it is happening in other places in the world. Wars are still being fought, innocents being killed, genocide is on the news quite often, refugees are kept in detention centres. People didn't know what happened in concentration camps, not to the full extent of the violence, I can see the similarities to how we treat and view dentention centres today. Humans look back at World War Two and condemn the actions of the Nazis, their camps, their methods and what they stood for. It makes me wonder how people will judge us in 100 years, what will they remember us for, what kind of historical sites will be visited? Is it futile to hope that war can ever end and that people will all be treated as equals? I have to believe that it can and they will.

Hi, this is taken directly from my travel journal. I visited Sachenhausen on Sunday the 18th of October 2015. This is my reaction as I wrote it down on the day. The only editing I have done is to correct my spelling, everything else is the same as the original writing. Thank you for reading it.
Love from Me and My Backpack

Going Back

Hi Everyone,

Hope you're all having a good day. I definitely am! This time next week I'll be back in Vanuatu!! I found out just over a week ago that I would be able to go back to keep teaching.

Originally I was placed at Level Mission Primary School. It's in central Pentecost and as far as damage to placements goes, we were the worst hit. The big water tank was damaged, the gardens flattened and trees and buildings were down everywhere. This means I won't be able to go back to Level. I absolutely love all of the people there but going back would be a burden on the community and would be completely irresponsible, as they are struggling with food as it is.

My new school is a four and a half hour walk north of Level at a place called Atavtabanga. It rhymes with cowabunga. I'm going back with a different placement partner, because Courtney will be going back to Level later this year, something I can't do. Ally, my new partner, and I will be at Atavtabanga for ten weeks. Ally was placed there in February but came home for a little while after TC Pam.

Atavtabanga wasn't hit at all during the storm. It's one of two placements that is viable on Pentecost right now, so I am extremely lucky to be able to go there. I'm fairly certain that I'll be teaching primary school again, although there is a high school as well, so I'll just have to wait and see.

Moving placements means I'll be up to at least five mamas in Vanuatu. I'm probably going to need to start using my toes when I count how many sisters I have. The Ni-Van are amazing in the way they just adopt people they've never met before. It's an incredible thing to arrive in a new placement and have a horde of kids introduced to you as your siblings, while your new parents smile.

As you can imagine, going back means that this little blog isn't going to be a very interesting place for a while. There's no internet on Pentecost. I'll be putting some links to places you can get information about Vanuatu and what I'm up to up in the next few days.

Now, if you'll be so kind as to excuse me, I have to go and pack!

Love From Me and My Backpack

"Travel isn't always pretty. It isn't always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts. It even breaks your heart. But that's okay. The journey changes you - it should change you. It leaves marks on your misery, on your consciousness, on your heart, on your body. You take something with you... Hopefully you leave something good behind." -Anthony Bourdain.

An Island Home

Hi Everyone,

I mentioned Vanuatu briefly in my first post. At the time, I was a bit preoccupied with the insurance company. I went to Vanuatu as a volunteer teacher. My placement was five months long and I taught at Level Mission Primary School.

The first week in Vanuatu, I stayed in Mangaliliu Village on Efate. I discovered just how beautiful Vanuatu is. As clichéd as it is, the sea actually sparkled and there were so many plants and flowers I'd never seen before.

More than the physical place, it was the beauty of the people that won me over. In Australia, I have one brother. The first night in Vanuatu, I was introduced to at least five brothers and sisters, I had two mamas, one papa, I'm not sure if the second one is around and the community itself adopted me and the other eighteen volunteers as their own.

I spent the next week getting a crash course in island life. We had medical and safety briefings, introduction to bislama classes, the shortest talk on cyclones, a history lesson and more bislama classes.

Our last night at Mangaliliu, we learnt to cook island kakae (food). We chased down two roosters which some of the boys then killed and plucked. We grated manioc, rolled it in island cabbage leaves and soaked them in coconut milk to make simporo rolls. I learnt to grate the coconut and how to open one without a knife. It's as simple as dropping a very big rock on it. It was a pretty awesome last night feast and everyone's mama had outdone themselves by making us island dresses or shirts. They didn't measure us and we didn't know they were making them. We looked absolutely fabulous.

The next day, we were got on a plane to Santo, the biggest island in Vanuatu. Then, after waiting around for several hours, we got on a Twin Otter, which sits 19 people, and flew on over to Pentecost. I did not enjoy the flight as I was scared the whole time but flying over the island before we landed was pretty sweet. We landed safely and were greeted by someone from our new community.

Courtney, my placement partner, and I were greeted by one of our host dads and the truck driver. Level School is a 2 hour truck ride from Sara Airport, it's a 12 hour walk. One of our uncles met up with us in a nearby village and for the next hour and a half, we had the greatest time ever, riding in the tray of a ute on a dirt road is awesome. Of course, it rained for the last half hour so we arrived, soggy, cold and slightly travel sick. Waiting for us were our host families. I have two mamas, two papas, nine sisters and three brothers in that community. Plus Courtney, who is referred to as my sister. Then there's grandparents, aunties, uncles, third cousins four times removed who stay for dinner, I'm related to at least one child in every class at my school.

I should mention, I am not a professional teacher, the qualifications I have are in swim teacher and a CPR course, so I was thrown in the deep end here. And that's what I'd signed up for. I teach year five and year six for an hour each in the morning, then year and two with Courtney for an hour and fifteen minutes. There are 45 kids at the school, most of them are in year one and two. For the first week and a half, we taught nothing but maths. The other teachers were doing maths too, somehow everyone was a bit confused and thought term 1 curriculum was maths only. Thankfully we discovered otherwise and we taught English from then on. My year five class loved grammar, the year sixes wanted to learn to write stories and we taught year one and two songs and the alphabet. I am super proud of my french speaking students, who had no English and were totally confused by the alphabet because just before I left, they wrote the whole thing by themselves!

Aside from teaching, I did a lot of learning. I learnt to use a bush knife the length of my calve, to open coconuts and eat sugar cane, how to wash my clothes in a bucket, which leaves make good tea and which ones are good for toilet paper. I learnt a new language, to not worry too much, that sometimes all you need is a ukulele and a smile to have a good day.

Sure, a rat ate my clothes, a dog barked through the night and the cows started mooing at five in the morning. Yup, I got sick and Courtney got sicker. And yes, it's true that we were generally weird by ni Van standards but we had fun and we were loved by the people there. At the end of the day, Vanuatu is a second home to me, and the "bad stuff" pales in comparison to all the good stuff that happened. The good stuff breaks the scales.

Love From Me and My Backpack

"You get a strange feeling when you leave a place, like you'll not only miss the people you love, but you miss the person you are at this time and place because you'll never be this way ever again"
- Azar Nafsi

The Backpack, The Insurance Claim and I

Admittedly, I didn't plan on blogging about this year. That may have had something to do with the fact that for five months I was meant to be living in a bamboo house on a remote island with no Internet. Things, rather evidently, didn't go to plan.

But perhaps, I'm getting ahead of myself. Hi, I'm Zoë, I'm an Australian and 2015 is my gap year. The original plan was meant to be teaching at  Level Mission Primary School on Pentecost, Vanuatu for five months, from February until July. After that I was coming home for a whole ten days before flying to Scotland, staying with family for three weeks, give or take, before visiting 16 countries in 16 weeks with one of my friends.

I made it to Vanuatu and everything was going well, I absolutely loved it, even if teaching was sometimes a little frustrating, then we had a run in with Cyclone Pam and things went downhill pretty quickly. The long story short here is that after a week of being "missing", I was emergency evacuated in a helicopter from my school to Port Vila. A little over a week later, I was on a flight back to Australia.  Now I'm trying to get back there.

Love From Me and My Backpack started because I'm on the phone with my insurance company because I have to put a claim in, somehow my backpack survived the cyclone and the aftermath, only to have the attachment nicked off it on the way home, you can talk to me about irony later. We're up to 20 minutes on hold for this call. I'm not sure I'm ever going to get to talk to a person.

Depending on what happens in the next few days, there'll be posts about what I did in Vanuatu the first time around, what's going on with planning for Europe, and if the stars line up and the gods are kind, what happens when I get back to my bamboo hut after I've been there again. Stick around for the ensuing hilarity, tales of bush knifes and island food, and of course stories from my backpack.

Love From Me and My Backpack

"When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back"- Rebecca Solnit