Now onto what has happened in the past weeks since my last blog. One thing I forgot to mention last time was the ridiculous chicken killing incident for our community lunch. One of our activities in training was to prepare a lunch for the community. The lunch included making Simboro and roasting a local chicken. Of course, in my ever-glorious ex-vegetarian fashion I volunteered to kill the chicken. Now, I was expecting to cut the head off or something of that nature, boy I was wrong. Apparently, the volunteers in the other village did something similar in nature to cutting the head off or whipping the chicken into a wall (mind, Animal Rights issues don’t apply so much here; I should also add a disclaimer that you should probably skip this section if you have issues with Animal Rights). So, the Mama of another volunteer is holding the chicken and tells me to firmly grip the neck and hold on until the chicken is dead. I am a little surprised, but since I volunteered I was willing to accept whatever they threw my way. So, I start choking the chicken (yes, the pun is intended and I will continually use it throughout the rest of the story) and slowly watched this chicken’s eyes roll into the back of its head. Now, they never told me to cover the chicken’s nose (I didn’t know chickens had noses or very much at all about chicken anatomy) or that choking a chicken is difficult because of the very small windpipe. So, about 5 minutes later when my grip is becoming difficult to hold and the chicken is still alive, I am starting to think that I might fail to choke the chicken. At this point the Mama tells me “it’s dead” and I’m like “it’s dead?” and she tells me again “it’s dead” and I say “you sure?” and again “it’s dead”. So, at this point I loosen my grip on the chicken’s neck and to my unfortunate luck, the chicken comes alive and starts flapping like crazy and I immediately throw the chicken to the ground. After this failed attempt to choke the chicken, the villagers then show me what they normally do and hang the chicken from the roof. The end.
Sorry for the graphic brutality of that story, but it was an experience like none other and I did have a fear the next few days that the chickens in the village were plotting my demise. Fortunately, if they were, it never amounted in my untimely demise. In the same vein of “Aelan Kakae”, I was fortunate enough to try the rather expensive Coconut Crab. Now a Coconut Crab is a very large crab that has been overly hunted in Vanuatu and can be hard to come by in the southern island, but can be found predominantly in the northern islands (the Banks and Torres islands). Now, this crab is about the size of a tire and can break a person’s leg/arm with its claws. When I first ate it at my Tia Phoebe’s house, I thought she said “Bol”, but I assumed she said “Bel”, because I wasn’t quite sure which part of the crab we were eating. A few days later, to the delight of my family and the frustration of Robert (who made it a point in his life to not eat something like this), I learned the part of the Crab we ate, was in fact the “Big Bol”. As you have probably guessed, that does translate to the one big testicle of the Coconut Crab (a delicacy in Vanuatu). For the rest of training the ongoing joke with my family was reminding Robert that “yu bin kakae big bol blo crab”. Hah!
On to the next story: my visit to the island of Epi for my host volunteer visit. Epi is just north of Efate and Kara and I visited Jared in Malvasi Village close up to Lamen Bay (about a 20-30 minute drive) and the airport. Epi was beautiful and the sunsets were amazing. Also, from Jared’s beach I could see Malekula and Ambryn, more specifically the volcano on Ambryn. I am hoping to climb the Ambryn volcano sometime in April. We will see if that hope actually amounts to action when April comes around. I also learned in Epi that my flatland running in North Efate has not helped me with the hills that I will encounter on the outer islands. I thought I was going to die running up these hills and my hips and butt hurt so bad the following days that I had trouble walking. I guess I will have plenty of time to work the hills when I go to site: running up a mountain everyday with, apparently, horrible footing, because of the fact that it is always raining and wet on Maewo. Hopefully I will come back “man blo bus” be mi no save gud yet.
My next island visit took place when Robert, Neil, Daniel, and I went with my Tia and Pua (roughly grandma and grandpa) Phoebe and Roger to Emao off the coast of Efate close-up to my training village. I can tell you it is an experience taking a speed boat over the rough waters of the South Pacific. The boat bounces up and down and by the time the 30-40 minute trip was done, we were completely soaked. The trip was a lot of fun though. We ate lunch over there and they roasted a pig for us. After lunch in Wiana, we walked to the primary school in Lausake, one of the other three villages on Emao (the other two are only accessible by boat). After this we took the momentous trip back, where I ingested a good gallon of salt water. Now, I can mark off another island from the list of 75 inhabited islands in Vanuatu. I’ve got three so far and soon to be more, depending on how I make my way to Maewo.
Well, we are all in Vila now, before we all depart for our respective islands and we just celebrated Halloween last night at The Saloon, a bar on the outskirts of Vila. It feels kind of chaotic right now, trying to think of everything we need to do before leaving for site and figuring out how to get to site (with all my stuff). It has been a lot of fun to talk with the other volunteers though. The ones completing their first year and the ones “COSing” (COS=Close of Service). When I asked one especially cool volunteer what he does to roll his own cigarettes on the island, he explained to me that after he finished reading the bible (just for kicks) that he figured he would use the pages to roll cigarettes and that the best way to smoke local leaf is with bible pages, because notebook paper just doesn’t cut it. He also explained that, after reading it, he discovered the Qu’ran just doesn’t smoke well. Ah, the things you learn when cooped up on an island. I’ve got my Language Proficiency Interview this afternoon, so I have to turn on the Bislama part of my head now. I think my next blog entry will not be until I get back from my first three months at site, so unless I blog during this week bakegen ko kasem nekis taem, ale!
