February 16

dear blog
I'm laying in bed and listening to the bislama rap CD. Alex is out in the living room, reading about pilates. We had bell peppers with a sweet chili sauce and bread with tomatoes and basil for dinner. I think we've eating for bell peppers for at least the last six or seven meals, not that I'm complaining, mitufala likim kapsikam bitim fulap narafala aelan kakae.

When we were in Vila last week I downloaded a bunch of reading material off the internet and onto our computer for our reading entertainment. One of the articles I downloaded was about how farmers in africa use chile peppers to keep the elephants from trampling their crops. Among other things, the farmers crush the peppers, mix them with engine grease, and smear them on their fences, When elephants touch this substance, it greatly irritates their skin.

Reading the article re-emphasized to me how relatively remote alex and I are, as we have neither fences nor engine grease.

We're on a fairly small island, a full [24 hour] day's boat ride from the capital city of a country with a population of ~200,000. Yesterday I explained how banks make money by charging interest on loans to a fairly influential community leader, he had no idea. We can rarely buy flour locally. There's no refrigeration or freezer in the area. As far as I'm aware, Alex and I have the only operating propane stove.

There are generators, and a television and a DVD player. I've seen Finding Nemo 2, The Karate Kid, a movie about the life and times of Mike Tyson and a Billy Graham Christmas sing-along. There's also a truck in a village an hour's walk from our home, so, technically we could get engine grease. And technically speaking, there is a barbed wire fence keeping the cows in the coconut plantation. And there's at least one chainsaw, so we could cut some timber and make some fairly substantial fences to keep the elephants out.