January 15th

it's friday night, we leave on tuesday (or wednesday, depending on when the ship arrives) to head into Vila for two and a half weeks for alex's early service conference. We'll spend this weekend cleaning the house and packing and tying up loose ends. we've got a lot of seedlings to get into the ground and we need to eat or give away foods that will go bad before we return (mostly the ton of cooking bananas currently hanging in our bush kitchen).

Yesterday I was helping some men at the dispensary make cement bricks, one man asked me when we were going to start working and how soon I was going to be offering workshops and said how we need to get started soon because two years was going to go by quick and such things, the Ni-vans call it talking strong, he was basically confronting me and pressuring me to do more business development work in the community. I didn't take it well, it made me a bit uncomfortable, I just sort of smiled and said that we were going to do plenty in the next two years and talked about how business development is tricky here as many people from here pride themselves in the fact that they don't need to spend any money to live well here, and at the end of the day that's not a bad place to be. We kept to small talk after that for awhile, at some point I asked him if he had a business and he said no. I wondered for a moment why all the stong toktok (strong talk/confrontation) for business workshops then? Then it occurred to me and I asked him "Yu gat wan aedia blong mekem wan bisnes?" Do you have an idea for a business? He did, and he was anxious to attend a workshop or anything to further expand his idea, hence the reason for the strong toktok. We made plans to talk about his idea after I return from Port Vila.