November 30

It's monday night, almost 7pm. Alex is taking a shower, technically she's washing herself off with a bucket of water and a bandana, but we call it showering, actually we call it 'swim' - the bislama word for showering. Today we spent a few hours storion (storying on) with alex's counterpart/supervisor. Afterwards we went to the store to buy eggs and then hung out at our house the rest of the day. We are going to try to bake brownies tomorrow as people are coming together to work on our house on Wednesday and we want to have a special treat ready to help bribe them.

The health dispensary has a small produce stand and anyone can put items at the stand to sell. 20 vatu (about $.20) of each sale goes to the dispensary, a fundraiser of sorts. The produce stand is pretty small scale, we're talking one to five fruits/vegies per day. Everyone here has a garden and there's not really a lot of disposable income around to buy something because you don't feel like walking to your garden today. Alex's supervisor talked to us today about expanding the produce stand, growing some veggies that aren't commonly grown here and offering some cooking classes and nutrition classes and maybe even starting chicken flock to sell meat and eggs (as folks here don't get enough protein).

They have three food groups here - givim paowa, bildemap bodi and blokem sik. Givim paowa (give power) is carbs, which the folks here get plenty of, as it's mostly a root vegetable based diet. Bildemap bodi (build up body) is proteins, there's a few types of nuts, one kind of bean, families of fisherman eat fish, the wealthy/educated eat eggs and powdered milk, and on special occasions they'll kill an animal (chicken, pig or cow), but that's about it. Blokem sik (block sickness) is vitamins, folks eat tropical fruits seasonally (papaya and banana are the only ones that grows year-round) and there's island cabbage - it's similar to chard and grows year around. People eat island cabbage but many times I think they boil it down to nothing nutritional and I suspect they probably don't eat it often enough as they aren't overly concerned with the three food groups.

It's also pretty common for people to use msg as if it were salt. I'm no expert and there's no google available as I type, but I think this might be a really bad thing. And there's kava, which I'm not convinced is good for the diet either.