adventures in vanuatu: visitors and the big apples of ambae

Training part 2 for the health volunteers fell right before ours. The folks on Maewo are all health vols, minus Steve, and they came through Ambae on their way to Vila town. I went into Saratamata for the day to hang out with everyone and spent the night with Jessie Rae and Nathan.

They shared stories from Maewo and their category 4 sites. Maewo is very bush so all of the sites are cat 4, meaning remote and without access to many resources. My site falls between 2 and 3 because I don't have running water or electricity, but I am only an hour truck ride from Saratamata and Lolowai. Maewo doesn't have its own airport and only a couple of trucks that brave its unkept road. I am hoping to visit Maewo later on in the year! And eventually make it to Alexis and Steve's site in Naviso - hours away from everything else. <- just found out that end of January, some of the staff are traveling to Ambae and Maewo and I was invited to come along for the ride to Maewo for a week! Naviso, here I come!

It was fun trading stories and meeting their counterparts. We cooked a big spaghetti dinner with fresh meat and garlic bread for everyone, it was delicious! It was the first time the counterparts tried spaghetti and their reactions were hard to read. Ours were easy to read – if you could make them out between bites. Everyone stayed at the guesthouse in Saratamata and I went back with Jessie Rae and Nathan to their home. I love their company and am always finding myself learning new things from them.

When I was in Vila, I saw in the Daily Post that there was a double suicide on Maewo. The newspaper reported that a man and a woman were caught in an affair and the village came together to decide the punishment. The next day the two bodies were found at the bottom of a cliff - the man and the woman couldn't deal with the guilt and jumped. Both of them had families they left behind. We were shocked to hear about it because suicides aren't too common here, or atleast not commonly made public.

Katie, one of the Maewo vols, lives in the village where this happened and her counterpart was the man who died. She told us more about the situation and how it spooked the community. "Deds," as funerals and mourning rituals are called here, are very intense and last a long time.

For the past couple of weeks, Katie's diet switched from primarily taro and manioc to basically only meat at every meal - the community sacrifices many cows and pigs at deds. Because of the nature of the deaths, the community used many kastoms to rid the village of the bad spirits. No one would go with Katie as her counterpart to the training because they believed that the devil would follow her there in place of Williamson, the man who passed away. They chose an olfala (a village elder) to accompany her to ward off the demons. Amos is a sweet old man who loved his first taste of spaghetti, and the three helpings afterwards. I hope that when she returns, things are a bit easier for her at site. I really can't imagine losing a counterpart or dealing with the situations that inevitably occur when black magic and kastom are involved.

Here are some shots of the big city on Ambae!