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

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

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

Updates from Vanuatu

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

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

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

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.