That weekend we collected supplies, hopped a truck, and headed down to South Santo to stay with Cole and Caroline. They live at Ebenezer School, about an hour from Luganville. The drive down was incredibly beautiful! We got to one of the drop off points for a few of the passengers to cross over to a small island. One man sharing the truck bed with us had one arm – the other one had been bitten off by a shark 7 years ago in that harbor. And I think riding in the back of the truck with two arms is hard, but he makes one hand look like a breeze.
We arrived at their cute little cottage and settled in. Cole and Caroline are at a remote site, but one with luxurious bonuses. They’ve got running water, an indoor toilet, and a shower! And a super cool wild cane built-in kitchen. We went down to the sand beach to watch the sunset (getting there through a cave, no big deal) and then came back for tacos and a movie. The rest of the weekend was a combination of eating delicious meals, playing in the ocean, and laying in the shade. We had dinner with her host family and they cooked a ridiculous meal. Maybe the best island kakae I’ve ever tasted.
Monday morning we got up early and dropped Cole off at the airport for a trip to Vila. We met Hannah (another Luganville pcv) and Katie (Maewo volunteer) at a gem of a Chinese restaurant for ladies lunch.
Hannah works at a primary school where a JICA volunteer works, too. Mai held a Japanese cultural week at their school and we attended her toktok that she held for the teachers on the atomic bombs. She showed us a pretty heavy video and talked to us about what happened. I’ve learned about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but Mai did a great job giving us a raw telling of the events. As many times as I’ve heard the stories, I had never seen pictures of the victims or the eerie shadow-like marks some left behind. It was a powerful afternoon and I’m really glad I went. She also taught us how to make paper cranes and she’s sending them back to the paper crane project in Japan.
Right down the hill from Kate and Bryan’s school lives the Livestock Office. If you go in here in the early morning and drop off empty water bottles, you can pick them back up filled with fresh milk. Fresh, fresh, non-pasteurized, still warm milk! A cold glass of this goodness is one of the best things I’ve ever gulped.
Every Monday and Wednesday, there’s a game of ultimate frisbee happening at Kate and Bryan’s school. It’s been a Santo volunteer tradition for a long time- everyone gets together and gets a bit sweaty. Frisbee is fantastic. It’s no contact, non-competitive enough to keep it light, and you get to run around with friends. There are a handful of really good Frisbee players in Peace Corps Vanuatu that played competitively in college. Bryan’s one of them, Kate’s really good, Grace on Ambae is great and just participated in a tournament while roaming around New Zealand. The Santo group that gets together is a mix of pis kop, missionaries, locals, ex pats, and beyond. It’s always a good time and we get to play under a beautiful sunset!
I ran around Santo collecting materials for the solar dryer I’m building for the market house. More on that later!
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| hello rah! |
So it came to that time to travel once again. Heading north to the Banks Islands! I flew to Mota Lava where Jessie Rae met me. We strolled the whole 3 hours back to her site playing catch up and just excited to be hanging out. At the end of the road, you walk along the beach for 45 minutes then you reach little Rah Island. Jessie Rae (Jessie Rah, as I now call her) calls this itty bitty island home. It’s what you picture when you think crystal clear blue water, white sand beach, remote tropical island. Before we crossed over, I met a baby named Alison. This was a good omen because it’s the only other Alison human I’ve met in Vanuatu! To get from Mota Lava to Rah, you can walk across during low tide or you can take a canoe taxi ride for 10 vatu (10 cents). We got to the island and I shook hands/kissed the cheeks of the majority of her community. They came out of the wood works! We got to her house and her family greeted me with a salusalu and lots of fruit. They are such kind and generous people, she’s lucky to have them as her host family. They are also very musical. The whole country is, really. I’ve seen a ridiculous amount of people pick up a guitar and comfortably play a song or add in a layer on the drums as if they were born to do so. Jessie showed her family the Sound of Music and they loved it. Loved it so much that they know all of the songs and we sang them together throughout the week!
The first night there I helped out with Jessie’s toktok with the yungfala boys. Every week she shows them a movie, but this week they asked her to talk to them about safe sex. So we gave them a little sex education, passed out condoms, and answered the predictable and unpredictable questions. The most interesting was, “Is it true if you have sex with an older woman when you’re young, you’ll stop growing and be short forever?” One of a volunteer’s main jobs is dispelling myths, one question at a time.
A yummy Banks kakae is called Nasau and her family prepared it for me while I was visiting. You take a not yet ripe pawpaw, cut open the top like you would a pumpkin, and spoon out the seeds. You crack open a bunch of nangae nuts and mush them into a paste. Then you mix them with saltwater and fill up the seedless pawpaw. You fit the top back on, wrap it in laplap leaves, and leave it to bake in the earth oven over night. The next day you’ve got a hellofa treat.
We got some really good lounge time in. We took our hammocks into the bush one day and relaxed. The bush on Rah is so small, open, and breezy, especially compared to Ambae’s sauna jungle. Caroline gave me the book Eat Pray Love to flip through while I was up north. It’s one of those books that I’d heard about plenty of times (and there was a movie right?) but I thought it’d just be one of those whatever books. Nope! I loved it! I love the tune her writing takes on and I very much love what she has to say. It was thought-provoking and inspiring and has motivated me to, among other things, attend a 10-day meditation retreat while I’m in Southeast Asia next year after service. I’ve spent a lot of really good time with myself during my service and I feel like a silent week and a half may be just the thing to help decompress and sort out my thoughts. She has a good TED talk, too! Elizabeth Gilbert.
There’s a place on Mota Lava with an incredible view called Sleeping Mountain. We hiked up there with some guides and got the full experience. There is a kastom story behind Sleeping Mountain. When you get to the top, they blindfold you and walk you out to the overhang. Then they take off the leaf and you take in the view. It was awesome, using the true expression of this word. It was really so overwhelming beautiful. What a lovely little place we’ve got here, this Earth of ours!
I love Halloween. And this Rah-loween, I convinced Jessie to dress up as a clothesline with me! It all started when I was chatting with my friend from home Ellis while in Santo. He had a show and was trying to think of costumes that wouldn’t make him too sweaty, but still make him look like a super cool rockstar. I suggested a clothesline (good smelling dryer sheets! undies!) and I haven’t had a chance to see if he went through with it, but I commandeered the idea and ran with it all the way up to Rah island. We were quite the spectacle, as expected, and had a great time going into folks’ yards and acting like a clothesline. One oldfala gave us corn for our trick or treat. We gnawed on that as we watched the sun drown.
Rah has a guesthouse where you can come and get the “real remote island experience.” The guesthouse is right on the beach and the bungalows are darling. The guests that were there during my visit were more of the traveler variety than tourists, so it wasn’t shameful to be of the same category of “not from here.” This is sometimes the case in Vila where all “white man” are grouped together. Oh, you’re white. You must know this other white person. The squawking preteens in belly shirts, those are your cousins, right?? You’re probably friends with the rude man we just served, even though he’s 53 and from Australia. Anyway! A bamboo band came and played some music and we got to join the fun. They are called this because they play on bamboo as instruments. We bounced around for a bit and then out came the Banks sea snake kastom dance. It was all a wonderful way to spend the evening.
Also inhabiting this small island is a family of bible translators. They’ve been there for a few years and the parents are fluent in local language, which is mandatory for translating a bible, but badass nonetheless. They are building a house and are planning on staying on the island for another 10 or so years. The woman is an excellent baker and shared with us some delicious treats.
On Sunday we went to church on Mota Lava. Jessie’s family members belong to a church called Pillar of Fire which makes it sound much scarier than it was. It ended up being one of my favorite church experiences in country! No pulpit, no benches, no long sermons. Just a wooden box in the middle with a bunch of people beating on it, some guitars, and a church full of people dancing and singing. I’m not making this up. Let me repeat, this was still considered church, just sans all the church stuff. The guesthousers came, too, and we were all welcomed with a song. The hour long service went way too quickly – believe me, I can’t believe those thoughts came out of my brain, either.
In the bush there’s some boulders called the rock of Rah. On my last day, we climbed those and sat on top for a while. Another great view! We swang from some vines and enjoyed the breeze. Her family had a last kakae for me with, surprise, a goodbye song and too much kakae. It was a great trip. I was surrounded by such awe inspiring beauty and got to spend time with a dear friend.
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| another alison! |
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| drying copra |
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| halloween skull coral |
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| commuting to church |
