coming home

the United Arab Emirates

2010-06-28T07:15:00.000-07:00

We booked our flight from Mumbai to Abu Dhabi with a stop in New Delhi based on the fact that it would save us quite a bit of money. What we didn't plan on was that the flight we were scheduled to be on out of New Delhi was canceled weeks before due to lack of demand and that Delhi would be facing some of the worst fog of the year when we were trying to transit through. As a result we got to spend a solid 13 hours in the New Delhi airport waiting for our flight that finally did take off around 1am.

Lots of delayed and canceled flights on the New Delhi departures board.

Abu Dhabi looked very similar to when I was there in 2005. Some of the old places we really liked were gone, some where different and there were plenty of new places. There were still lots of US chain restaurants-like Fuddruckers.

Here the sun is setting beside the Emirates Palace and some new towers under construction. Sandra and I at the Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan Grand Mosque.

India - Mumbai and Goa

2010-01-08T02:59:00.000-08:00

We arrived in Mumbai around 1pm and had 10 hours to kill before our train ride to Goa. We took a photo outside the Victoria Terminus (apparently the second most photographed building in India) and then walked about.

We made it onto the train and found our comfortable-ish sleeping berths. Perfect for anyone under 5'-11" tall. 12 hours later we arrived in Goa. Saw lots of old Portuguese buildings and churches and a great warning sign. I can assure you we did not misuse the holyland.

Finally, the beaches. This time of year you share the beach with everyone. Cows, Russians, Brits, Aussies, Israelis, it's a madhouse. The crowds thinned out a bit after new years and we've enjoyed some really nice days at the beach. Really just trying to make up for lost beach time in Vanuatu. When we were told we'd be living in the south Pacific on a small island we thought we be getting to the beach a lot more often than we did.
Not really sure what she's doing.

Temples of Angkor

2009-12-19T23:02:00.000-08:00

I heard last night that the different ruins of Angkor cover about the same area as Manhattan. Of course, sometimes it's a 30 minute drive between one temple and another with not much other than a couple villages in between, but that's still a big area. Below are a few of the hundreds of photos we've taken over the last week.

Bantay Srei Temple

A pile of stones waiting to be sorted and maybe put back.

Angkor Wat - the areas that get touched most often look darker and almost polished.

A few of the faces at Bayon temple. One of my favorite places here.

Siem Reap, Cambodia

2009-12-18T00:43:00.000-08:00

Mister, you buy postcard, ten for one dollar. Lady, you like cold water? Cold water, soda two for one dollar. You buy one. Maybe later. You go to temple come back you buy water from me, okay? You remember me, I have white shirt. I remember you, you have green shirt. Where you from, sir? USA, capitol Washington DC, population 300 million, major cities New York, Angeles, Chicago. You like scarf?

And so goes the chorus greeting every visitor to every temple in Angkor Wat. We've been in Siem Reap for two days now after taking the six hour bus ride from Phnom Penh. Phnom Pehn was great. It was hot, dirty, it smelled and you always felt like you might get hit by a guy and his family on a motorcycle, but it all seemed to work and made it a great place to visit. The people we met were always ready to smile and laugh and there was lots of great food. Siem Reap is a city built around tourism and Angkor Wat. Not all bad, but can get a little old. Of what we've seen so far it was well worth the trip here. Six more days here. We'll tour some more on bicycles and on foot and then we'll head to Bangkok for Christmas.

Chiang Mai

2009-11-23T02:26:00.001-08:00

Chiang Mai, the tourist capital of northern Thailand. We arrived here Saturday night after a 12-hour train ride from Bangkok. The train made it's way slowly but surely northwards from 8:30 am to 8:30pm. We passed loads of temples, ruins, rice fields, villages and towns in our three car 2nd class train. The seats reclined a bit and we were given lunch and two coffee breaks included in the price of our ticket. As we started climbing in elevation out of the lower plains we passed through bamboo forests and more small villages. It reminded me a lot of Vanuatu, except that every station we stopped at had electricity, a phone and a nice building, no matter how small it was. The last two hours of the train ride were the toughest. We had been sitting for 10 hours and no longer had any scenery to look at. So when we arrived at the station in Chiang Mai we were more than ready to get off.

We walked out of the station past the guys asking if we wanted taxis or tuktuk rides into the city. We then quickly realized that they were our only hope of getting anywhere and asked one to take us into town. He first asked for 100 baht, which we knew was a ripoff, so we tried to bargain. Now, after living in Vanuatu where it is considered rude to try to get things for a discount, Sandra and I both hate bargaining. But I was able to get it down to 70 baht. I was happy, he was happy and we got to our hotel. It turns out the ride should've been about 50 baht, so we ended up paying about $0.60 too much. Not a big deal.

Chiang Mai is the tourist capital of the north like I said before. There are tourists from all over Thailand and all over the world. Add onto that all of the expats who live here and it's almost a 50/50 mix of local to foreigner. People come here mainly for the extreme sports and jungle trekking. You can hire a guide and head off into the bush for 2 or 3 days where you stay in small villages, eat local foods and take bucket showers. Something that maybe we would've liked to do had we not done that exact same thing for the last two years on Vanua Lava. So we've been mainly walking around the old part of town and eating street food.

Today we went to an all day Thai cooking class outside of town. There were 12 people in our class (Austrailians, Canadian, Americans, Dutch and Spanish folks) and we each got to make 5 different dishes. We took a trip to the local market to buy the ingredients then went to the organic farm where they have the school set up. We mashed our own curry paste, cut our own veggies and all cooked on our own. We made a ton of great food that we couldn't finish no matter how much we wanted to. I think I made Vegetarian Green Curry, Thai big noodles stir fry, pumpkin in conconut milk, and prawn soup. We returned to the hotel about an hour ago full and ready for a nap. After a bit of a rest we're all going to meet up for drinks tonight. We'll be in Chiang Mai for another day or two before starting our trip to Laos. More later.

Bangkok

2009-11-17T00:23:00.000-08:00

Bangkok. Hot and humid. More people on one street than on the island of Vanua Lava. Loads of great food being cooked on every street. Air conditioned 7-11s everywhere. And lots of temples. Great trip so far.

At the moment i'm in an internet cafe across the street from our guest house. I'm surrounded by school kids playing internet games and laughing.

Australia

2009-11-11T22:33:00.000-08:00

Australia has everything you could ever want in hundreds of different varieties. Well, that's the case in Sydney and Melbourne. Both busy, crowded cities like San Francisco full of tourists and people from all over the world.

We've been out of Vanuatu for only about a week and I already miss it. Well, I miss some things. I definitely miss the buses in Vila. Get on anywhere and the driver will take you anywhere. Here you have to think about where the stops are and which line will take you where and then the fare depends on how far you're going. And the most difficult thing for me is that you can't get the information from the driver. No, you've got to read the instructions and figure it out for yourself. Maybe I've been living in the jungle for too long, but city life seems more complicated than it needs to be. I tried setting up a prepaid mobile phone account and thought I'd be able to start using my phone right away, like Jason Bourne does in one of his movies where he slips the phone into the guys pocket and then calls him on it so the CIA can't listen in on the call. Well, it's nowhere near as easy as Jason Bourne made it look. You have to call and activate it and talk to a recording for about 10 minutes before they activate it.

Anyways, lots of things about city life are great, and lots of things will take some getting used to again. We're here for a few more days and then off to Bangkok. That should be interesting.

Off the Island

2009-10-31T16:43:00.002-07:00

We did it. We completed two years of Peace Corps service on the island. We packed up our things, said goodbye to our families, friends and pets and left the village. We caught our flight off the island on the 23rd of October and made it back to Vila that afternoon. We had four going away parties over the last two weeks and we got lots of gifts and even more flowers. At the party at our school, each of the kids gave us a flower necklace or a bouquet.
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Our families walked us to Sola for the last time and we stayed for a couple of days to finish up work at the Provincial Education Office and to say goodbye to the family there. We got a little bit of rain the night before we left and our parents said the young kids would have to stay in the village. But as this was their big chance to go and see the plane for the first time, they refused to stay home and came with us. Fortunately the weather dried up and we had an easy walk.
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We had to wait a couple hours at the airport so we did what we usually do when we're bored and played with the kids. Took lots of photos and tried not to think about the fact that we were saying goodbye for who knows how many years.

We arrived in Vila around 3pm dirty, tired and hungry. A nice hot shower took care of the first problem, but here in Vila it's not very easy to find a restaraunt open between lunch and dinner hours. So, instead of going to the store and buying food we decided to wait a couple hours and then head to the top of the nicest hotel in town (the Sebel) for their happy hour drinks and free appetizers.

The view from the top of the Sebel looks out west over Port Vila Harbor and around 5pm it is spectacular. As we sat there watching the sunset and drinking wine on empty stomachs we thought about how different Vila is from the rest of Vanuatu. Now, granted, we lived in a very remote village in the far north of the country. But, as we listened to the ex-pats at the table next to us talk excitedly about their matching nose jobs and upcoming liposuction and thought about how my sisters had just seen an airplane for the first time and just the day before had used a 'white-man toilet' for the first time (which by the way she thought was a pretty cool invention) it really sunk in that while physically and legally Port Vila is part of Vanuatu, in reality it's like another planet.

Anyways, two years down, six days to go. We will finish our last work this week and fly out of Vanuatu on Saturday. As we told everyone in the village, we will come back, but we don't know when. My papa said that was fine and the kava I planted the week before we left would grow and wait for me to come back. He'll look after it for 6 or 7 or however many years and when we come back, I'll pull it out and we'll grind it and drink it. Nambawan.

2009-10-25T13:41:00.000-07:00

During our last few weeks at school we finally started and completed our hand painted flag of Vanuatu. Every student and teacher was able to put two or three hand prints on the wall. We had to deal with some rain and running paint during the process, and a lack of ladders, but we made it work.

2009-09-19T20:53:00.000-07:00

Our trip back home is going to look something like this:

Port Vila - Sydney
November 7 - Get haircut, buy jeans, tshirts & shoes. See Opera House.

Sydney - Melbourne
November 11 Go to museums, bars and cafes.

Melbourne - Bangkok
November 15 - We'll start in Bangkok and then move north. From northern Thailand we'll travel into Laos and then south. We'll cross back into Thailand at some point to visit Ubon Rachatani, where my dad was stationed during the Vietnam war. After that we'll head into Cambodia and then back to Bangkok for Christmas.

Bangkok - Mumbai
December 29 - We'll stay mostly in western and northern India. As far south as Goa and as far north as Amritsar. We'll go to the Taj Mahal and lots of other temples and if we've got the time and the energy we'll try to head to Darjeeling in the north east.
New Delhi - Abu Dhabi
February 1 - In Abu Dhabi we'll meet up with a friend of mine who I worked with while I was in the Air Force. He's a Jordanian engineer who's working for the company that's building the palm tree islands.

Abu Dhabi - NYC
February 12 - Back to NYC in time for Valentine's Day. This is shaping up to be a family reunion in NY. So if your name is now or ever has been Mello, Fitzgerald or Marshall (or if you know someone who has one of those names) then you better make your plans now to be in NYC that weekend.

NYC - North Carolina - San Diego
Febraury 25 - The last leg of the trip...see the family on the east coast, visit my grandparents in Fayetteville and then back to California. And just because it only says San Diego doesn' t mean that we won't be spending time in San Francisco, Marysville and Portland among other places.

2009-09-19T16:02:00.000-07:00

Tanna Island is the second most visited island in Vanuatu after Efate. It's active volcano, Yasur, has been known by the rest of the world ever since Captain Cook came through Port Resolution in the late 18th century. Today the volcano is probably about the same as it was back when Cook first saw it, although it's now much easier to get to the top.

We flew from Vila to Tanna last Monday morning in a Norman-Britten Islander. A 10-seater, including the pilot and the chair next to him. We made a stop on Erromango to drop off two passengers and picked up three more . About 30 minutes later we had landed on the west coast of Tanna and began our trip to the other side. After a stop in Lenekal (a small town straight out of the old west) where the owner of our bungalow picked up supplies for the week we began the 2 hour truck ride to Port Resolution. Monday was market day so we passed lots of stalls set up on the side of the road selling local produce, taro and kava. I bought some kava and we continued on our ride.

I won't try to describe the beauty of the volcano rising out of the ash plain or of Port Resolution itself. If you want to hear about that, i'll refer you to my friend Dan Moser's blog. He's a much better writer than I and he has much more time to spend on his blog as he has managed a way to have internet service in his village on Malekula.

But I do want to share two things. First, my experience of chewing kava with some man-Tanna and second, the visit to the top of the volcano. Okay, chewing kava. These days, kava in Vanuatu is normally prepared but cleaning the roots, cutting them into small pieces, putting through a manual meat grinder, mixing it with water, and then straining. Another way that is less common is by stone grinding the kava. Here's a photo of me doing this with my host papa.

(you may notice the bandage on my index finger which was covering up a gash I had just made with my knife...even after being here for two years I'm less competent with a knife than my 8 year old sister) Stone ground kava is prepared by cleaning and cutting the kava, then grinding it in your hand with a piece of coral. This method is more common to the northern islands and can produce stronger kava. Note that in both of these methods, the kava is mixed only with clean water and the mashed up roots.

The traditional way of preparing kava in the southern islands, including Tanna, is by chewing. Basically, instead of using a machine or a stone to mash the roots, you use someone's mouth. Actually, you end up using more than one mouth. Before I go any further, let me describe the setting. It's about 5pm. The sun still has about another hour, but it's already well below the tree line. We (me, evan and the guys from the village) are sitting on some pieces of wood underneath a banyan tree in a cleared and cleaned area that makes up the nakamal. Since the kava is here no women are allowed to pass by this area - very taboo. We're sitting around a big pile of ash that is evidence of the many fires that have been made here. And it's not long before the fire is lit again to provide light, some warmth and a way to light cigarettes.

A friend from the village, Naru, is preparing our kava and in return he'll drink with us. He cleans the kava and then takes a bite of the root. Then he takes another and another. Pretty soon he's got a mouth full of kava that he's grinding for us. Evan and I decide to help out and take bites for ourselves. Not only do I want to try chewing the kava, I figure that I should get some of my spit in the mix. It's kind of like taking a bite of a dry, tough, bad-tasting apple. You chew it, careful not to swallow too much of it, and then spit it out on a leaf. Once there's a good pile, about the size of a burrito, you strain it with some bark from a coconut palm and some water. Then it's ready to drink. And often the boys from the village will be flagged down on their way home from the beach and told to come help chew the kava. They're mostly around 9 or 10 years old, have just been through their circumcision ceremony and are old enough to chew, but no to drink, the kava.

So we drink one and then two big shells, sit around and chat around the fire. And, really, it doesn't seem that big of a deal to take a big drink of this dirty root water that's been chewed by two or three different people.

Now, the volcano. The video does not do justice to the sense of terror we experienced on the top of Yasur. Although you can't see the pool of lava in the volcano, you are standing on the top of the rim watching it erupt and shoot large pieces of molten rock through the air towards and around you. In some of the photos you can see the stones in the air after the explosions. They are large. I think the one that landed closest to us was about 100 yards away. The guides tell you that when it erupts, don't run. Look at the rocks and track them like an outfielder...except that at the last moment you want to get out of the way instead of catching them.

Well, that's it for now. We head back to Vanua Lava tomorrow for our last 4 weeks in the village. We'll have some sad goodbyes, some last kakaes and lots of kava (stone ground, not chewed) over the next few weeks. We'll try to wrap up our projects and pass them on to the teachers at our school. It hasn't yet sunk in that we'll be leaving here for good in about 6 weeks, but it will soon enough.

Who doesn't like puppets?

2009-09-12T20:02:00.000-07:00

Well, the kids at our school sure do. Sandra and her art students from 7th and 8th grade made puppets, wrote plays, drew background scenes, practiced and then performed their plays for the school and their parents. It was a lot of work and it turned out to be a lot of fun.

Pentecost Land Diving

2009-09-12T18:09:00.000-07:00

This is a video of our trip to Pentecost Island in May.

Vanua Lava Days Cultural Festival

2009-09-12T14:25:00.000-07:00

The first week of September was our annual cultural festival for west Vanua Lava. It started about 5 or 6 years ago as a way to transfer knowledge of custom (dances, songs, games, etc) to the younger generations as well as a way to share custom with tourists. This year we had 14 yachts come into the bay for the festival and everyone on the boats loved it.

On three of the four days I was asked to play with the Amba Boys String Band. It was probably one of the happiest moments of my service.

Here are some of the girls from the village waiting to dance and then mid dance. Notice the 'devil' with her head covered. The photo on the right is of a custom game that only the chiefs are allowed to play, although I don't think they play very often.

This is the snake dance which is only performed in the Banks islands of Vanuatu.

This giant 'devil' was made just for their 15 minute dance during the festival. The men who learned the dance and carved the devil had to sleep in the bush while they were making it and practicing and could not be seen by anyone until they performed their dance.

Life on the Island

2009-09-12T13:27:00.000-07:00

Doralyn modeling her new school uniform shirt sewn up by Sandra.

Right after being picked up at the airport in Sola our driver Ben told us we had a flat tire. Nothing else to do but to take turns pumping it back up.

Is that cow sleeping inside out? No, it's just an early morning butcher shop in my parent's kitchen. I think it was about 8 am and there were at least 20 people sitting outside waiting to buy meat at about a dollar per kilo. We ate a lot of meat over the next three days.

Teacher Training

2009-07-18T20:50:00.000-07:00

These may be the first photos that we've ever posted of us doing our 'real' job-teacher training. Some of these are from last year, and some are from this year. They show us doing small training 'workshops' for the teachers at our school. About half of our 9 teachers have gone to the Teachers' College and received their teaching certificates. The others are volunteer teachers from the community.

Working on a handwriting lesson and Sandra leading a classroom management workshop.

Making the classroom a little more fun with some play activities for center time.

Some pictures of Sandra's art classes

2009-07-18T20:28:00.000-07:00

Mosaics using old newsweek magazines and tissue paper flowers.

Pentecost

2009-07-18T19:38:00.000-07:00

During the two week school break in May we traveled to Pentecost to see the Nagol. Nagol is the local language name for land diving - Jumping off huge wooden towers held together by vines. It's like bungee jumping except that you tie vines around your feet and they are not very elastic. Oh, that and the goal in land diving is to actually hit the ground.

Why do people do this, you may ask. Well, as far as we could find out, it's a lot like the reason why people do bungee jumping. The materials are there, the young men are bored, and they want to show how tough they are. That's pretty much it. There's no deeper spiritual meaning or custom meaning, no matter how much visitors want to assign one. Regardless, it's an intense experience and it was great to be able to experience it in person.

2009-07-18T18:43:00.001-07:00

Our new friends...Zee the cat and Noche with her puppies.

2009-07-18T17:54:00.000-07:00

The school library under construction. The top three photos are from last year. The bottom ones are from the new and almost opened library.

2009-07-18T17:33:00.000-07:00

The Sewing Club and their finished products. And a group of Sandra's art students making the sign for the Library!

Updates from Vanuatu

2009-07-16T18:31:00.000-07:00

It's July. Dennis is now 31. Sandra will soon be 30. And Vanuatu will soon be 29. In less than four months we will be completing our Peace Corps service and will begin our trip back to California.

This year has been busy so far. Visits from family and friends. Visits to other islands. And lots of work at our school and in our community. Our dog had puppies, we got a cat, and now our dog is pregnant again. Sandra's been busy teaching sewing and jewelry classes to women in the village. We've also been attending a 'custom school' that just started in our village where we've learned to do some weaving, carving, and a bit of dancing.

At school we've been working on organizing the new school library. We just received a large shipment of books from a couple who came through on their yacht a few years ago. Those, combined with the books we already had, have made our library start to fill up.

We've also been involved in some other random projects like monitoring measles vaccinations. We took a trip around our island and surveyed all of the families with children between 1 and 5 to make sure that they had been vaccinated by the Measles Eradication Team. The WHO and the Vanuatu Ministry of Health are working towards 100% coverage to eradicate the disease. Our trip turned out to be a great way to see parts of the island that we hadn't visited before and to do some work at the same time.

We've been in Vila for a week now running errands and going to meetings. We head back north in about two hours. This trip, like most others, began with us receiving shopping lists and money from lots of people in our village who don't get the chance to travel to Vila. It took about 5 days to complete all the shopping, but we did it. Shoes, knife files, t-shirts, school supplies, underwear, plastic fuel pump, jewelry making kit and supplies, soccer cleats, candy, stickers, flash lights, electrical tape and more.

We'll be back in the village for about 6 weeks before coming back into town for our close of service conference. After that we'll go back to the village for four weeks and say goodbye. We'll be back in Vila the last time in November before heading home. We'll probably leave Vanuatu around November 7th and then begin our trip home via Australia, South East Asia and India. I think the last few months here will go by pretty quickly.

Thanks for all the emails, letters and care packages. We'll try to put up some more pictures and videos on this site. If you get a chance, send us an email and let us know how things are going at home.

Out for a Sunday Hike

2008-08-31T01:54:00.000-07:00

We were walking back from a Sunday barbeque in Kerebeta when my brother asked if we could take a photo overlooking the gardens.

School Uniforms

2008-08-30T22:37:00.000-07:00

These are the uniforms that we wear to school on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Only the teachers wear them, we don't have enough money or fabric to have them for the students. The headmaster is standing to the left of me and Noche is at the far right.

Class 6 and 7

2008-08-30T18:33:00.000-07:00

So we just finished our second of three school terms. Everyone is now enjoying the two week holiday between terms. We took this class photo on one of the last days of the term in between exams and work. Our class is combined 6th and 7th grades because we don't have enough teachers at the school to have one for each class. We're hoping that will change next year. There are 10 students in class 6 and 10 in class 7. In the background of the photo are two of our three old school buildings. There is a new double classroom building that is almost complete. We're going to move 7th and 8th grade into those classrooms sometime in the next term.

We're spending one week of the break here in Vila and the second week back on the island. We were asked to come to Vila to attend a training workshop so that we can work as trainers of the new group of volunteers that arrives next month. The fact that the new group is almost here marks the arrival of our one year anniversary in Vanuatu. Pretty wild.

The second picture was taken outside of my uncle's house in of Port Vila. We spent yesterday afternoon with him and his family and some others from Vanua Lava who are living here. Most people tend to stick in neighborhoods made up of people and relatives from their home island. So it's great for us since we can be in town but still have some family to go and hang out with and talk about the island.

More later.