november 26

It's thanksgiving day in Vanuatu, Alex and I made a pumpkin pie which turned out quite nice if I do say so myself. We went for a wokabot (walkabout) this morning and made friends with some of the village children. We walked on top of a big hill and had great ocean views. We fed some huge pigs - pigs eat a lot of coconut here. We saw lots of buluk (cows). We met a nice man, who happily climbed multiple trees to fetch us some green coconuts. And the children helped us gather firewood. We had a good time, us and the pikinini (pikinini is the bislama word for children, it's derived from the word for small in Portuguese). The children ended up stalking us for hours afterwards, but it seems as if we all survived alright.

The truck came into town today to haul some bags of cement up to the health dispensary and then it hauled a bunch of sand from the sand beach up to the dispensary as well. The sand is destined to be mixed with cement to make the floor of our house - pretty exciting. There's a big work day planned for tomorrow, for folks from the community to come work on our house, we're hoping for a big turn-out.

The health dispensary doesn't have sheets on their beds, as they don't have the money to afford them...they also don't have many other things you might expect the only health center in the area to have (like a refrigerator to keep immunizations fresh, for example). When you give birth, you lay down on a wooden table, no mattress, no fan, aspirin afterwards nomo (nomo is bislama and can translate to no more, but is also used as only, and comes at the end of a sentence usually). So, all this cement the truck hauled up this morning is for the dispensary to build a cement building for a toilet. Thing is, the dispensary doesn't really need a cement building for a toilet, in fact, I would suggest they need it as much as they need a cement basketball court. There aren't any basketballs in town, I'm sure of it, and I would guess the majority of town has absolutely no interest in basketball. The reason the dispensary now has a lot of cement to build a cement building for a toilet is because some person far, far from here decided their organization would donate money to buy supplies to build toilets for dispensaries and this person's vision of a toilet is cement-based. It's silly really. I mean it's really silly. I've never actually bought cement, so I don't know how much it costs, but I have shipped things on a boat to this island and I know how much that costs. And the money could have been much better spent on bed sheets and gas-powered refrigerators and...well I don't know because I've only been here for two weeks and I haven't asked anyone, but it's not cement buildings for toilets.

The basketball court example is referencing and actual cement basketball court I saw at a small school on a fairly un-populated part of a very rural island. There were big holes in the basketball court and it didn't seem anyone at the school had much inspiration to repair it.

And Ni-Vans build beautiful bamboo houses, that breath well; they are made from readily available, abundant natural resources; they know how to repair them and everything one needs to repair them is readily available and free.

Tomorrow is Alex's birthday...