Pentecost Land Diving

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

Vanua Lava Days Cultural Festival

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

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

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

Mosaics using old newsweek magazines and tissue paper flowers.

Pentecost

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.

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