Last Update from Aneityum

A year has come and gone so quickly I can hardly believe it! September 16th, I read through my journal over a deliciously fresh lobster and a bottle of red wine, reflecting over the ups and downs, the joys and frustrations, the achievements and the failures. Lobster and red wine…I know..im not sure how many Peace Corps Volunteers can say that. To be a PC Volunteer in the South Pacific does have its perks.
There is always so much to write about, but really I’m going to skip a lot.

INDEPENDENCE DAY- July 30
Independence day was great and very different from my usual fourth of July experience. There were no fire works, well only local ones (bamboo sticks banging together sending sparks everywhere). But we did march to the National Anthem and raise the flag on a bamboo flagpole. There was an island-wide soccer tournament for the men and a volleyball tournament for the women. People from all over the island came together here in Analcauhat to celebrate. Dancing, food, music and....dry palm-a homemade brew the men make with yeast to get drunk... which always leads to fighting..and one guy broke his hand this year. Better than last year though, where 2 men died...
The highlight of the day was the 6foot, 160kg+ marlin one of my smol Papas caught. He set out on a small 16ft fiberglass boat, with no fishing pole, and a homemade lure made of chip wrappers twisted together and tied around a hook. Once it took the bait, Papa Neyo worked it for an hour and a half, then managed to pull the thing into the boat with his bare hands. How’s that for deep sea fishing?
That night I met up with 3 Mamas for kava and a fish feast. We drank way way way too much kava (2 Mamas puked) and that killed our appetites so we hardly even got to enjoy the marlin steaks, but the kava experience was memorable enough. We laid in the grass at Wanarei’s house, dazed on kava, mesmerized by the stars, and made small talk.

SCHOOL
Work at the school is slow and frustrating to be quite honest. The teachers hardly come to school and when they do, they come with absolutely no preparation. The day the teacher knows I’m coming to do an observation, they plan a lesson, but when I make an unannounced drop in, there is never a lesson going on. So, the kids are getting one 1hr English lesson a week… the rest of the time they draw… I have worked on lesson planning with the teachers and set up timetables, but its really hard to overcome their inertia. Plus, they get paid no matter what; nobody is here checking up on them from the Ministry, so without being intrinsically motivated and committed (which, unfortunately they are not), there is no driving force to get them to come to school on time and prepare lessons. It is what it is, and Im doing what I can in the situation. How does the saying go… you can bring the horse to water but you can’t make him drink? Yea.. that’s how I feel.
We did our literacy week and that went well. I introduced a “storybox” activity that targets reading comprehension and vocabulary building. That was the afternoon activity for Literacy Week and the students enjoyed it.
The library is working well. I trained 3 teachers to work it so that when I am gone, all the hard work we have put into it doesn’t just go to waste. We’ll see. I also worked with the library at the secondary school. The peace corps volunteer before me set up a nice library there, but unfortunately, the students have no idea how the books are arranged and organized, so now after 9 months the books are all over the place. A local woman—Weitas—and I organized the books again as they were and I helped her come up with some library activities to get the kids working on respecting and take care of their library.

OTHER WORK
Third term, I worked a lot on building confidence and teamwork through various activities. The culture here is so shame-driven that most of these kids have zero confidence in themselves, their abilities, their potential. So we did small activities like a School Talent Night and a girls’ soccer league. The school talent night will give kids an opportunity to explore their artistic side, work together in groups, and overcome their shyness by performing in front of a crowd. The soccer league builds teamwork, confidence, and is a chance to throw in some life lessons on health and fitness.
I also did a bit of work in the health sector. The government did a national measles campaign to vaccinate all kids under 5yrs old. They asked Peace Corps to do the monitoring—to go around and check to make sure every kid was vaccinated. A PC volunteer friend from Tanna came down to Aneityum and we spent 2 days walking around the island surveying. The walk was amazing, though ill get to that. There were only 2 kids that weren’t vaccinated so the campaign was a success on our island. I also did a Peace Corps Awareness tour around the island and have laid the groundwork for a health volunteer to go to the other side of the island next year and help out. Every time a volunteer comes to Aneityum island, they always end up in Analcauhat, so the development is heavily skewed in our favor at the expense of the northern half of the island (collectively called Port Patrick).
The water project is not going to work. The island politics are too strong and family feuds have got the project in a headlock. Instead, we are just working on fundraising to buy piping to cut into the main water supply that comes to Analcauhat and do a branching system of pipes to a couple houses on the west coast. It works, but its not a stable or reliable source compared to what the water project would have provided. Plus, the man who is behind the water grant, the funder, said he won’t give any money to any Aneityum project until they complete the last project—a youth center he helped fund 2 years ago. The community still has not built the youth center although all the materials arrived 2 years ago. I’ve re-mobilized the youth committee to get them moving on the building, and as of today, it’s now ½ built.

OTHER NEWS: FIRE AT THE SCHOOL!!!
We had some drama at the school not long ago; A fire broke out and burned down the Headmaster’s house and almost took his life. He was at the nakamol with the men drinking kava, and his wife had just put their 2 kids to bed (2 and 4yrs old). The wife then went to cook dinner for the headmaster so when he got back from kava, he had something to eat. She left a candle burning in the house, that was tragically too close to the 4yr old girl’s mosquito net. The net caught fire, which led to the fabric on the walls catching fire, and eventually the entire house. The little girl woke up in time and got her younger brother out, both unharmed. As the community stood outside watching the house burn (with lots of valuable school materials and records inside), the headmaster came back from the nakamol, drunk on kava, and lacking a clear mind. Someone said they heard a child crying and he ran into the burning house. The house was 100% in flames, and he barely made it out. He got 3rd degree burns all over his body, the soles of his feet melted off. Luckily, there was a flight out of Aneityum the next day, so he flew to the hospital in Port Vila where he has been for 2 ½ months recovering. He will be ok, after dozens of skin graphs and lots of time, but the situation was quite tragic. The government has now put a ban on candle use on all Primary School Grounds.
With the headmaster out, we have an acting headmaster…my host mom.. to make matters worse, two teachers are pregnant, both 3 months, which means next year we are going to automatically be 3 teachers short off the bat. Plus, another teacher is moving to Efate and will not be here, so that makes us 4 teachers short; we have 3 teachers for next year… we’ll see how it goes.

COMMUNITY PROJECTS
As I mentioned, there is the youth center that is now being built. We also have plans to rebuild the teacher housing at the primary school in light of the recent fire. We have also started collecting the materials to rebuild the health center here (we have carried 100s of bags of sand to the site of the new building for making cement). There is also a project in the works by a former Peace Corps Volunteer to bring windpower to the island…though we have yet to see any tangible work on it yet. We’ve got a lot going on, and to be honest…it’s good and it’s bad. It’s great that we are getting all of these projects on our list of priorities and addressing some of the larger community needs—youth development, health, infrastructure building—BUT put all these projects in the cultural context and problems come up.
I’ve already talked about the molasses-like pace at which all things happen in “island time”… and the youth center that has been “ in the works” for over 2 years serves as an example. With so many projects underway at the same time, there is too much going on here. There is strain on the labor forces here with too much to do, plus…the people here just…well..what we would call lazy. There is nothing in the world here that could make them rush to do anything. Time is not money. Time hardly exists to them in our sense of the word. Seriously… so while we have gotten all these projects on our TO DO LIST, I could come back here in 20 years and I guarantee you they wouldn’t be finished with them. Ive tried to get some of the leaders together and get them to look at this To Do List, do some prioritizing and planning, but prioritizing and planning are foreign of concepts as the internet and email…



Anyways, that’s a brief update on events and work. The interesting stuff comes in the next blog: Around the Island in 10 days. Ive heard more custom stories than I can remember or you’d care to hear im sure; the people are more colorful and exotic than ive ever met; the waterfalls full of mysticism and wonder. Read the next blog to hear about the trip.

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