Vanuatu Week Four: Alphabets and Feasts

A lot of people are not fans of Mondays, particularly that morning struggle to pull yourself together and get to work or school after a week. This Monday morning was a bit harder, not because I didn’t love where I was and what I was doing. No, after the wretched dog barked all night. The cows started mooing at 5. At assembly it was revealed that if they’re on school property, we are allowed to kill them. Jeffery’s dad’s bullock needed to watch himself because my mamie had plans involving a bush knife and a feast.

Monday afternoon was spectacular! Courtney and I watched Sorina and Lavi while their mum taught class five. We made sweet rice, ate fruit, coloured and scrubbed some pots. When school let out, the sisters came and collected us. We were off to the garden for the first time. I have major respect for the gardens and their owners, the sheer amount of food that comes out of them is incredible. It took half an hour to walk there, barefoot up and down the hills sliding in the mud, bush knife in hand. We dug taro, collected bush cabbage, picked island cabbage and devoured sugar cane. I loved the garden, as you go down into the valley there is so much greenery hiding the actual gardens. It’s like walking into a secret, as though the place might be forbidden for some reason, it is so beautiful.

In class one and two we ended up with four English groups. I still had the top level Pineapples, but I also had the Soursops. Soursop is a fruit that smells nasty but is delicious, it was the only fruit we could think of in a pinch. The Soursops were 5 francophone transfers who no idea what was going on. Their main goals were learning the alphabet and writing their names. They really needed a confidence boost too. It looked like it was going to be an uphill battle. On Tuesday, Familla and Jerine, two of the soursops, managed to write the whole alphabet out between them. It took an hour and a half but they did it! I was so proud of them!

Reading was my planned activity for Tuesdays in classes five and six. I had no other explanation for that disaster other than God testing my patience. I got totally blank looks for the hour I spent with each class. It didn’t matter who I asked to read, how slowly we went through the work, it just didn’t work. Why anyone would write a book about a Mexican walking fish called Pepe who looks like a banana is beyond me. In class five, I kept repeating the word banana. Lavi walked into the classroom, handed me a banana, smiled so big her tiny face nearly split in half and left again. She didn’t say a word. Everyone in my class looked at the banana, looked at Lavi, looked at each other, looked at Miss Viran, looked at me, looked at the banana, looked at where Lavi had gone and then we all burst out laughing.

Tuesday was also Mamie’s birthday. Courtney and I spent the afternoon with Wawa (Auntie) cooking. We made banana laplap and while it was cooking we had to keep running out of the kitchen, eyes streaming because of the smoke. It made splitting the cabbage take a very long time.  Birthdays mean feast in Vanuatu. Mamie’s birthday was no exception. We had laplap, noodles, rice, bread and cake. There was cordial as well. I never claimed that the food I ate was healthy but parties really were all about the carbs. We played uke and cards, two things I was getting very good at. There was singing too, there is always singing though.

It was a food week because on Wednesday, we were hanging around before breakfast when Dad and Daddy Presley showed up carrying a whole pig. Well, half a pig each which they had already gutted. It certainly explained the barking we woke up to. Breakfast was the eight shaped donuts, except not eight shaped and real bread. I had some of my bread a s a snack later. We had island cabbage and namumbah at lunch. Namumbah is a kind of nut that you cook at eat. It’s not particularly flavoursome but it is tasty. Then the school was having a fundraiser after classes so we had baked taro and pork at 4:30. This was after I had eaten a simporo roll that was actually really good. The day was polished off with more pork and taro for dinner. I have never had food baby quite as spectacular.

It was a good thing it was sports day as well. The whole school played Cat and Mouse and Seaweed, which started people laughing. Then while the big girls played volleyball and the boys played soccer, we taught the year 1/2 girls the hokey pokey. The whole body shake had all the parents laughing. We also played left, right, under, over which was designed during maths week and duck, duck, goose. No one could stop laughing and when I almost rolled down the hill we were playing on, I had to agree.

On Friday I opened a coconut all by myself! I popped a blister but I was still super pleased with myself. We also got to use our little kitchen for the first time. We made soursop and orange tea to celebrate and didn’t burn ourselves. We then invested in a box of matches and a bag of sugar. Phil and Terry were due to visit us that weekend, so we taught year 1/2 the choruses to “Our God” and “10,000 Reasons”, they could sing the song but they liked to do it in an echo. They’re funny kids.

Love from Me and My Backpack

Vanuatu Week Three: Rain and Good Food

After the weekend from hell, Courtney and I were both functional again but got into the habit of taking a siesta. My phone ended its holiday and I got a stack of messages which definitely helped me feel better. Things were looking up, one of my friends was coming to visit us around Easter and we were back in contact with the outside world.  

Monday saw working practise again. The idea behind this is that the students will be better prepared for adult life. Work practised includes clearing the school ground, helping with building repairs, grass and plant cutting. Sometimes it includes a group of girls being told to go and get the “Missises” dirty clothes and washing them. I have never seen little girls run so fast towards the river, red calico bags streaming behind them, laughter bubbling up from inside them, as that Monday when they had to take our clothes from the sick weekend.

The tanks had emptied out on the Monday, it looked like dry season had come early. We tried tempting the grey skies by hanging our washing out, that didn’t work. In a last ditch effort we put the buckets outside and went to bed. The Small Devil (Shakey the dog) barked during the night and I was about ready to go and shout at her when it started pouring with rain. The rain was so heavy that on Wednesday classes were cancelled and all of the water tanks and buckets were full. Good news for everyone. Or so you’d think.

We had a roof down at the big kitchen made of a green tarp, with pockets for water so that the water could be used for washing. The strain from the water captured was too much and a week’s worth of water came spilling out. Faster than I could process, Kae and Kerina had grabbed the tarp and held it up while the rest of us scrambled for every empty container we could find. Fifteen containers later, we’d stopped the flow and emptied some of the other pockets for good luck.

That night, the sunset was spectacular, purple clouds, pink edges and the sun burning orange at the centre of it all. The trees were dark silhouettes framing the whole thing. It went quite well with punir we had for dinner. It was made from taro, bush cabbage and fish, baked in coconut milk. I think I had found my favourite island kaekae. We also had hard boiled eggs because Courtney had found them lurking in the office. The miniature feast ended with hot powdered milk and crackers and I was really proud that I could and would eat anything put in front of me now.

I started teaching English instead of maths and it was a constant test on my patience. Class six were a united front, class five was divided and class one and two was a bit of shambles. It was the biggest class we taught and so we split the students into groups based on their ability. We had three groups that week, ranging from no English to understand the vast majority. Some of the students were transfers from French schools so I tried speaking French to them to see if they understood. I’m pretty sure they were just as confused, poor things. This was on top of bullying because they really had no idea and were considered easy targets. I felt so bad for them.

Market days happen on Thursdays at Level. The local mamas come up to the school at lunch time and trade for other types of food. Market and school events meant one thing for me and Courtney. Lots of food. We ate eight shaped donuts, which are made from fried bread, there was fresh meat! Fresh meat was always exciting because it tastes so much better and there aren’t tiny little bones in it. Somehow, we also ended up showing everyone our photos that we’d brought with us. We explained who are friends were, our family, what different relatives were called, what a formal was, all the good things. The astra I drove before I left was in the background of one of the photos and I explained that it was my “small truck”. The thing that got the most laughs was my sisters flipping to a photo of me and my boyfriend and then telling whoever we were talking to who he was. Like any family, my sisters found something to tease me about and then they did.

Friday was an important day. Aside from being a public holiday, Courtney and I cooked banana pie with cooking bananas. They’re thick and straight, yellow on the inside and really hard to peel. The best thing was that we were given bush knifes. The machetes we had are about the length of my calf and I wasn’t really sure what I was meant to be doing with it. One thing was for sure, nothing was getting into our little house, even if they made it past The Small Devil.

I ended up at church on Sunday which I was still totally confused by because of the languages but the main messages consisted of “Get behind me Satan”, “Take up your cross and follow Me” and something about Vanuatu’s independence. The ni-Vans definitely know how to sing though.

It poured down on Sunday after church. This was a slight set back as we had just finished all of our washing and had run out of room on the line. We had put some string up inside to hang the last of our clothes up. The line snapped and all of our clothes ended up on the dirt floor. We threw them outside, rinsed them off and stretched them out on the grass for an extra wash. Then we danced around in the rain like hooligans, washed our hair in the downpour and laughed until we were soaked to the skin. Turned out we had very few clean and dry clothes after that and I ended up wearing shorts which was a bit weird and Mamie kept rolling the ends of them down for me.

All of our spare time was spent playing ukulele, reading and just hanging out with our family. Getting a big family all of a sudden is quite an experience but I wouldn’t trade them for anything. We taught them go fish and they taught us island life. We spent more time laughing than anything else. My Mamie and Courtney kept trying to set me up with Roger who was a bit funny around us. I loved being around my family, it was both easy and challenging at the same time but in the best ways. That and they didn’t seem to mind my off-key singing or questionable ukulele playing.

Love from Me and My Backpack

Vanuatu Week Two: Throw Me In The Island Deep End

One week after I arrived in Vanuatu I started teaching. I walked into class five and my carefully laid lesson plan abandoned me. Everyone at our school thought that we were only studying maths in first term. That’s right, all maths, all the time. We tried to get in contact with other volunteers to ask what they were teaching and Mamie Colin tried to call the curriculum office.  I really felt like I had no idea what I was doing and if I made any semblance of a plan it never really happened. In the end, I just had to go with what I had and make the rest up.

I taught year five and six for an hour each every morning and then Courtney and I teamed up to teach the year one two class for an hour and fifteen minutes. It was an interesting week figuring out how to teach maths with limited resources and to kids of all different ability levels. Thankfully some of the previous vols had left books to help us out. I ended up teaching multiplication and division, checking addition and subtraction and trying to make it fun. In class one and two the maths was simpler, learning things like up and under, left and right, thing that you forget that you had to be taught because they are just part of everyday life.

Homesickness slammed me that Monday. Living on school station meant that it was a very short distance from my front door to the class six room. The shower was diagonally behind our house, a teacher lived just behind us too and was using our tiny kitchen as hers wasn’t quite finished yet. From the kitchen, you can see straight into the shower. I took to washing my underwear in the bucket after I showered because it’s pretty easy to run out of clean underwear and students were told to wash our clothes as part of working practise on Monday afternoons.

For all the homesickness, I was able to see how beautiful everything was around me, to start with the pit toilet had a concrete floor. The Level School Station is beautiful, grassy hills surrounded by trees and topped off with open skies. At night all you can see is stars and the sunsets are magnificent. 

Sitting outside my front door and watching the sun go down was an extra special treat. The children were gorgeous too. The ones who I lived with all the time appeared much healthier than some of the village kids but a snotty nose didn’t detract from the smiles. They loved being around us to the point that even if I was reading or writing, they were watching.

Island life took a bit of getting used to; squat toilets are something you have to get used to.  I won’t forget the time Courtney reappeared from the toilet exclaiming that she’d nearly fallen in because a cow had given her such a shock by mooing next to the little building. Bucket showers are cold at the best of times and freezing at others. Island kaekae is the thing that takes the longest time because your body has to figure out how to deal with it. I spent a lot of time trying to get the food into my body. The Wednesday I was victorious at dinner, having eaten all my taro, canned meat and corn and I managed to wash it down with a biscuit or two. Lunch was still not my favourite because it was always steaming hot.

We had an earthquake that week, something I had never experience before. About 20 minutes before it happened, the dogs started barking and the chickens went a bit nuts. I obtained a dog that day, we referred to her as Shakey because of the earthquake. She’d belonged to the other volunteers, her name was really Pumba which I didn’t find out until I came home. Either way, that dog was more trouble that she was worth more often than not. She was the cause of a lot of lost sleep.

My favourite visitor in the first week was little Lavi. Lavi is Mr Kelly’s middle daughter, all of about three and she’s an expert at getting dressed at 6 in the morning and having removed all of her clothes by 7, much to everyone’s amazement. She would appear whenever she wanted to play with the beach ball we had or thought she needed at bandaid. Her biggest achievement so far is her round belly, gained through eating two rounds of each meal every day. She’ll finish eating with her parents and then race down to the big kitchen to get a second plate. She and her sisters, Sorina and Krystal, are going to grow up to be stunning.

After a week of putting away all my island food, I was excited that the boys were going prawn diving at the river. Dinner was going to be awesome and we were keen. We had prawns and shells for dinner. The shells are the kind you pry off rocks at the beach with the tiny creatures inside. The squishy bits are hooked out with an orange needle and taste a lot like dirt. We ate all that was put in front of us, feeling pretty good about the whole set up.

What followed can only be described as the weekend from hell. I may never eat prawns again and what I got was mild to Courtney. I managed to keep all my food down, barely, she was so sick. There was a moment when I was sitting outside and our family was coming up the hill while she yelled at me to keep them outside. I couldn’t stop laughing at that point because it was that or cry and I wasn’t going with that. Everything hurt and the wretched dog would bark all night that weekend. The two of us spent the weekend in hiding, sleeping and I would remove myself to the empty kitchen to play ukulele when I felt halfway decent. Mamie kept trying to feed us the prawns again; she didn’t believe that was what had made us sick. If memory serves, we ended up eating breakfast crackers and drinking tea.

Being sick in a different country with people you’ve just met is an interesting experience and I wish it was the last time I was sick but it was the last time we were that sick. I really hope I never reach that point again.

Love from Me and My Backpack 

Vanuatu Weekend One: The Best and Worst of Travel

After the incident with the pig, the 19 of us and our co-ordinator Terry piled into two mini buses the next morning. Leaving anywhere in Vanuatu means hugging your way through a village. Everyone, mamas, papas and siblings, lines up to say goodbye and you are paraded down the line, shaking hands and having your cheek kissed.

Baggage has different meaning to both the Ni-Vans and Air Vanuatu. None of us were travelling light really, we all had at least one hiking pack equivalent and a backpack, with a large number of us having second bags, all full of school supplies and other such goodies. The locals who were on the flight to Santo, in comparison, had maybe a basket or a cardboard box. Amusingly, bush knifes are allowed in carry on.

At Santo the six girls who were off to Ambae had a quick flight change and were gone barely after we landed. I still think we looked like a school group in our blue island clothes, that dress is one of my favourites. The next few hours passed with us reading books, looking at photos and talking.

Our flight to Pentecost was on a Twin Otter. Twin Otters have exposed propellers on the wings, seats 19 and the front row seats are basically in the cockpit. To get the 13 Pentecost volunteers and all our gear on board that week’s mail was apparently left off the flight. It was loud on board and for the whole half hour flight, my knuckles were white. We were flying so low I could see the islands and the ocean beneath us. I thought that flight was going to be the scariest thing I would do in Vanuatu. Looking back, it’s not that scary at all.

Coming into Pentecost was a sight to behold; we circled the airfield twice, blue ocean below, amazed by the natural beauty of this island. I imagine the islanders were amazed when we all got off the plane. Our bags were dumped straight off the plane into the mud and we had arrived. Courtney and I pulled ourselves together, grabbed our bags and lugged the three big ones over to the concrete building that serves as an airport in one hit. Super human effort really. Our dad was waiting for us, not that we knew who he was at the time.

We were loaded into a truck and pulled out of the airport. In my journal I wrote “We rode in the back of a ute yesterday! Standing up, holding onto the bar behind the cab going at questionable speeds given the condition of the roads around the place. We laughed most of the way.” Riding in the back of the truck is one of the best things I did. I loved it, it feels like flying, your skirt streams behind you, your hair is a mess, branches have to be ducked, leafs and twigs slap and catch on you. The only thing that is not fun about truck rides is having to sit down when you get travel sick. The last half hour of our trip took place in the rain and cold and by the time we arrived at the school, I felt like throwing up.

Every child on the school station was there to greet us. They all watched with big eyes and the adults talked and talked. Now is a great time to introduce my family. I’m lucky enough to have two. The family I ate with consists of Dad Michael, Mamie Colin (said Colleen), my sisters Kay, Virana, Nellie and Musiro, the adopted brother Leona and assorted kids who board at the school, Jineth, Faylina, Kesia and Basil. There was also the year two teacher, Kerina and the year three teacher Roger. My family who lives in the village is Daddy Ben, Mamie Annick, my brother Hensley, my sister Firenze and my baby sister Nikki. She’s named after one of the first volunteers to Level.

All of that mad family watched us unpack our bags. There is nothing like being watched while you unpack your knickers to get to know the locals. Excellent family bonding if you ask me, you have nothing to be ashamed of after that.

We ate in the big island kitchen, sitting on raised seats, surrounded by people. We had corn, freshly picked and cooked, my first run in with taro which I described as “tastes good and is kinda like a potato”, along with beans and meat. I didn’t know that I would fall madly in love with taro and the like that day, but it was only a matter of time.

There was a thunderstorm that night. The thunder was so loud I could have sworn there was a cannon next to my bed, the lightening light up my bamboo house brighter than the sun. Dad Michael came and checked on us in the middle of the storm but we were so tired that aside from that, the two of us slept like logs.

Sunday morning, bright and early, we headed up to church, sliding everywhere. Church was hard to understand as it was in three languages, only one of which I spoke at the time. I got a few of the Bislama words but the language part of the service was lost on me. Courtney and I were given flowers and shook hands with everyone again. The church service saw me sitting on wooden plank with some sisters while my backside went numb.

We spent the afternoon walking down to the river pack Wosak Village, where my Mamie Annick lives. She gave Courtney and me these beautiful fans, woven diamonds with some of the strips dyed pink and purple. They served us well. Our sisters, and little Sorina, the daughter of Mr Kelly, went to the river with us, feeding us nuts and shouting to the village kids about us. The river was beautiful and cool, although the climb back to the station was hard work and I think I might have been sweatier when I got back up the hill than I was before I went down there.

The first weekend at Level was not truly what I expected, but then again I don’t know what I expected. It was fun, after I had warmed up and gotten over my disgusting travel sickness.

Love from Me and My Backpack

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