November 23

hello everyone
alive and well in vanuatu. Peace Corps gave us a high frequency radio to use in case of emergency. Not that an HF radio is that exciting, but it came with a solar panel and battery, which is super exciting. I found the time today to hook them up and learned that peace corps sent us off with a fully-charged battery! Thanks Rodney! We recharged the Ipod, flashlight batteries, and the computer and are now working on the cell phones.

Twice weekly Alex and I and a decent portion of the village's population go and watch the ship (which comes twice a week), packages and people come and go, it's really fairly exciting to watch, today about 100 bags of cement came, sadly, our missing things did not arrive as of yet. We are still hopeful. We lost a lot of things in the package that didn't arrive, most notably, many books and a frying pan Alex and I literally spent hours walking all over Vila looking for, and the cutest cooking pot you've ever seen!

Alex and I are now official owners of an 'antap karen'. This island is essentially a hill and everyone has garden on top of the hill, alex and I have one now too! We planted pumpkins today and cleared some more space. I think we are going to try to plant some corn tomorrow. We are hoping to have a herb garden (karen is the bislama word for garden) near our house and the big karen on tap with sweet potatoes, pumpkins, corn, tomatoes and such things.

The issue with alex's papa turned out not to be an issue, I just explained to him that going to the near-Catholic church made us feel like we were at home a bit and it's important that we don't get too homesick. He seemed to think that was fair enough.

Today Alex is wondering if our time could be better spent having babies instead of hanging out in Vanuatu. We decided we'll talk about it in a year's time.