Thanksgivings

November 25, 2010

Happy thanksgiving everyone. Alex and I celebrated with a can of chicken meat, fresh tomato salsa and TWO onions in the burritos we made this evening. The canned chicken came from our friend Karen, whom we met in Antarctica and who served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Fiji shortly before we met.

Along with the canned chicken and many other wonderful gifts, Karen sent us pictures of her family and friends in Fiji, we showed the pictures to our friends and family here and they thought the pictures were from Vanuatu, more specifically they thought the pictures were from the northern part of Efate island. (Port Vila is in south Efate)

Our workshop went amazingly well again today, wish us luck tomorrow, Tomorrow is the big day when we ask the community to make a plan to improve their hygiene and sanitation, we are hoping they don't come up with some kind of lame plan that we have to pretend to support.

During a break at the workshop today, a few folks from the village asked Alex and I if we have developed any bad habits since we've arrived in Vanuatu. Funny question, here were some of our answers:
I don't wash my hair much any more, only when I go to town
We only occasionally wear shoes
When we went to America we used the phrases "White man" and "Black man"
We now laugh when small children cry
Our outfits rarely match, I especially enjoy wearing a button down Hawaiian shirt with gym shorts
We hit our cat more than we would like to admit
When talking to each other, our English includes a significant number of Bislama words

All of these behaviors, of course, are perfectly acceptable where we live.