December 15th, 2nd post

A lot happens around here, not really a lot relative to the life most of you are living, but a lot of small things that aren't really that significant other than they are a very new experience for us.
All peace corps volunteers get a host family. Alex and I have different host families. My host papa is a fisherman and the family lives on the sandbeach. We went to the health dispensary and see my host mama and host papa have a new born baby. We ask them "what's the baby's name?" and they tell us they haven't named him yet. Hours later we are storying on with the nurse and we tell her we like the name 'Tobias', that we have talked about naming a child Tobias. A day or two later was Alex's birthday, for her birthday her host papa gave her a yangfala man faol - a young male chicken - we decide to name the chicken Tobias.
Next day we are storying on with the nurse again and ask if my smol host brother has a name yet. He doesn't (it's probably been four or five days now). We get on the topic of names again and she ask us if Tobias has any meaning. We new it was an old testament name and I happen to be reading a book about the bible, so I looked it up in my book - Tobias was a fisherman, he caught a magical fish that cured is father's blindness and his friend's rabis fasin (rubbish fashion - that's how you say someone doesn't act right here). Couple day's later my host papa and I (and many other men from the village) are working on Alex and I's future house, we asked him if he's named his child yet and he says that yes and that his name is Tobias.

We ate from the biggest cucumber I've ever seen in my life. We made two meals from about a third of it and gave the other two thirds to two different families.

They are building a new Anglican church fairly close to the health dispensary, it'll probably be our home church (assuming their doctrine is in line with the other Anglican churches in the area). This will make 3 Anglican churches within a 10-minute walk of each other.

People bring Alex and I food all the time - it's really sweet - this morning we were sitting in our bush kitchen (since you cook by open fire, you have a separate building that's just for cooking, this building is called your bush kitchen) and this lady brings us a big, beautiful pineapple. Yesterday, someone brought us four stalks of corn. Later, someone else gave us cooked taro and bush cabbage. It's been weeks since we last collected coconuts, but we use them in our cooking most days - sometimes we'll just walking into our bush kitchen and there will be new food sitting there, we don't even know where it comes from sometimes.

There's a legend on the island of a spirit man who carries a musket and deals harshly with any man who tries to take things from the island (like coal).

Just so many stories...