Feb 4, 2008

Hello again,
If the internet comes back up here on santo, thismessage will come to you all as an email with somevideos attached. if not, then i'll just print this,mail it home and have my brother post it on our blogsometime in march. either way, i wanted to tell you alittle bit more about our lives out here over the lastcouple months. it's hard to know which stories to tell because somuch has happened. so i'll start with our trip tosanto. that will give you a good idea of how we live. on thursday morning last week, sandra and i finallygot permission from Peace Corps in Vila to travel to Santo. Cyclone Gene was far enough to the south of usthat it was deemed safe for us to go. i spoke with my papa and he said it was too late to make the tripto Sola that afternoon, so we would wake up before dawn and start the hike. Our village is on the westside of Vanua Lava and is connected to the provincial capital, Sola, by a bush trail about 8 miles long. wewent to bed around 9pm (pretty normal for us...it'shard to stay up too late after the sun goes down, lack ofelectricity and all.) my mama came and knocked on our door at a little past3am to ask what time it was (not too many clocks or watches in the village) and to tell us that my papawas ready to go when we were. we said we wanted to sleep for another hour and then we'd go. so at 4am wewoke up, had some coffee and got our bags ready. we locked up the house and said goodbye to our dog,noche, and then hit the trail. we hiked for the firsthour with flashlights and by about 5:45 it was lightenough to put them away. the trail to Sola crosses 6or 7 streams and rivers, two villages (keripeta and mosina)and through some pretty spectacular scenery. after coming down from the hill where our village sits, weparallel the coast for most of the walk. about 3/4 ofthe way there the foot path turns into a crushed coraltruck road. much easier to walk on and occasionallyyou get lucky enough that a truck comes to carry you thelast hour. we weren't so lucky this time, so wearrived in sola at about 8am. as we passed the village ofmosina, we came to the house of one of my grandma's. my papa called out to them and they came out with waterand fresh doughnuts for us. it was great. once we made it into sola we rested a bit at my uncle's house,had some tea and then made our way to the airport. the airport is really just a grass strip with a smalltwo room concrete building that serves as the airtraffic control tower, ticket counter, security, check incounter and restaurant. after about 20 minutes oftalking on the radio with santo and vila, the ticket agent wasable to confirm that we did have seats on the flightand checked us in. two other peace corps volunteers werecoming back to sola on the morning flight, so we got to see them and talk for a while which was reallynice. we said goodbye to my papa. he planned to head backto our village and then come back to meet us at the airport on wednesday. by 11am we were on the planeand headed to santo. sandra had to avoid the coconut crabs that were tied up under her seat but wewere really excited to be on our way.so now, after a few days of relaxing and shopping insanto, we're getting ready to head back to vanua lava. santo is an interesting town. one main road with afew dozen shops and about a dozen restaurants. you can still see kwanzat huts that the US Army builtduring there stay here in the 1940's. there's also anumber of mostly ruined boat ramps and docks. and in a fewplaces you can see the remains of cars, trucks and tanks that were dumped into the water before the USleft. at the restaurants you can hear australians andkiwis talking about developing land they've justbought and you can see their enormous new homes being built. there are a lot of changes taking place, butit's still a very quiet town far away from the rest ofthe world. okay, that's it for now. sorry for the long email. but this is my last chance to write for the next twomonths, so i figured i should put as much in as icould. i will try to send some more videos in aseparate email.thanks again for all the emails, letters and packages. we miss you all.
love, dennis and sandra

Back in Sola Mar 25, 2008

Hello Again,
We've made it back to Santo after almost a week where we were sort of stranded on our island. Last Wednesday we were scheduled to fly from our island toPort Vila for a meeting with Peace Corps and a little break. We left our house around 5am, hiked for about an hour before the sun came up enough to put away our flashlights, and were in really good spirits. The weather stayed dry until we were about an hour away from Sola. The rain came and didn't stop until we made it into Sola. We found out as we made it into town that the flight had been cancelled because of the rain. We were worried that that might happen, but had been holding out hope. So when we tried to find out if we could get on Friday's flight to go to Vila, we were told that there was no longer a reason for us to come because we would miss the meeting anyways. Thankfully we were allowed to come into Santo for a resupply trip. Well, it ended up that Friday's flight was overbooked,so we had to wait for Monday's flight and hope that itdidn't rain on Monday. As word spread around Sola that we hadn't gotten on the Friday flight, everyone started trying to help us get on Monday's flight. The woman who runs the bungalow we stayed at called her son in law, in Vila who works at the Air Vanuatu flight scheduling to ask him to check and make sure we were on the flight. It's one of the plusses of being in such a small country where pretty much everyone knows everyone else. So we made it on the flight and arrived in Santo on Monday afternoon.The last two months have been pretty eventful. School started in the middle of February. The students spent the first week back cleaning up the school grounds and classrooms. Some of them helped Sandra and I organize the piles of books into a small library. Sandra was nominated as the librarian for the school by the other teachers.