I want to preface this entry by assuring yufala that I loved my HVV (host village visit, like a walkabout) visit with Amy from October 16? to October 21 (so this is a bit out of order). She is an incredible volunteer and the actual visit could not have been better. I wish that was ensued on the flight back did not happen. I wish it was not part of my HVV at all. But it was and that's a reality. So first, I will tell you about the awesome parts:
Every Peace Corps Trainee in Vanuatu has a component of their pre-service training (PST) called HVV. It used to be called "Wokabaot" where you visited the site you were going to be assigned. PC staff found that didn't work well, so they changed it so that Trainees visit a current Volunteer at their site for a few days. I think I really lucked out with Amy, because she's an incredibly serene person that put me at comfort with the idea of being alone at site. Laman Island is off the coast of Epi, and you can walk around it in an hour. Small! But it has fulap white sand beaches, beautiful blue water perfect for snorkeling, and an awesome community.
To get to Laman, you take a little tiny plane and land at the "airport":
And then you take a little boat like this one, we yu stap storian wetem wan nufala man:
There's a ton of sea turtles that like Laman. We saw one poke it's head above water, and I squeaked with excitement because everyone knows how much I love turtles! And then it ducked down underwater, I got sad bakegen. Tip for all creature lovers: even if you're excited to see a creature, don't act like it.
Once we got to Laman, I soon discovered what the life of a Volunteer is.Or at least a health volunteer. Unlike the teacher volunteers, health volunteers don't really work on a schedule, especially the ones paired with a dispensary or an aid post. Community Health (CH) Volunteers working at a hospital like Wotan will be pretty regimented, but most of the time you go in when your counterpart does - and usually that's not often. So instead you sit around, storian (chat) with people, eat, and SLEEP. There's a lot of "spel smol" (nap). And there's a lot of island kakae (food). Amy has convinced herself that laplap is like pizza and curdled coconut milk is like cheese. I hope after one year into my service I can say the same. But we definitely had quite a bit of it. Her community loves her, and brings her free food all the time. I envy her life! Napping on mats, eating popo, and hanging out with Amy's AWESOME Apu man (grandpa). He's pretty funny. We kept trying to convince him to take us out on his canoe and he would just chuckle and say "Na". But it's ok - I wouldn't want to lug 4 girls across the ocean in a tiny canoe. Instead we swam in the reef, where dugons (sea cows) like to hang out, along with a few small reef sharks.
What was comforting about the visit was Amy's acceptance and comfort with boredom. That's the thing about grassroots, in-village, development. You won't be doing stuff every minute of every day. It's not how life works, and it's not function in a society such as that of Vanuatu. Your work will come out gradually, naturally. The more you storian with someone, the real needs of a person and a community come out. And it did indeed happen. A committee member asked Amy one day while we were there to help him fill out an an application for rain collection tanks. That's just how it happens. People ask sometimes, and sometimes they don't. There is no 9 to 5. But there's also no days off.
Amy also has a pretty good garden - it seems most of the volunteers have them. The interesting thing about Laman is that no one has an actual garden ON Laman. A village on the main land gave all Laman residents land to use on the main land for gardens. So most people cross over to the mainland on canoe or dingy, and climb a little mountain to their own gardens:
Laman is a pretty sweet spot, though. Amy said at first, when she saw where she was going on Site Announcement Day, she broke down because she was on a tiny island by herself. But Laman is just a 15min boat ride from the mainland where she can meet up with 4 other Volunteers. She says she sees them every few weeks. So it's isolated enough from the rest of Epi that it becomes it's own little world, but close enough to other Volunteers that if you feel like you're losing your mind, you can find some sanity with your fellow Volunteers. There's also a BEAUTIFUL spot on Epi called Million Dollar View, where you can see the Laman Island perfectly (that's the pic at the very top):
I cannot express how thankful I am that Amy took us for 6 days. We were only supposed to stay until Tuesday, but there wasn't room on the flight, so we just stayed till Thursday. Something inside tells me that happened for a reason - that the universe did not want us on that Tuesday flight and that maybe we needed to be on that Thursday flight....
Right before the flight..
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