Gearing Up

(pictures: Margo's birthday at the hotel this week, sunset picture from my host village, me tagging a turtle duiring reef check week)

I'm just wrapping up a week in Vila here. Basically gearing up for site. Kind of like apartment shopping, getting all those household items. Pretty boring overall but I got a few good finds. I got a brewing kit off a volunteer who is about to leave. Even if you go to the source the cheapest you can buy a beer for in Vanuatu is about $1.75. So, many volunteers have begun to brew their own beer driving that cost down to about a quarter a beer. Plus, Tusker, the official beer of Vanuatu pretty much sucks, and you can brew stout, ginger beer, or lager here. There's no refrigeration but you'd be surprised how fast warm beer tastes good and stout isn't meant to be that cold anyway. I was also able to get some pasta and sauce at wholesale price thanks to a good tip from an older volunteer. The best find was a kilo of organic Arabica coffee for around $15 that we got ground for French presses. Something that Dom and I were told couldn't be done, hogwash!
We've also had some time to just chill out and decompress this week, which has been great. We had a fourth of July part a few days early because some were headed to site the next day. We scarfed on hot dogs, burgers, baked beans, potato salad, and good salsa and chips, awesome! I had the biggest food baby yet and couldn't do anything for a few hours. On the actual fourth we headed down to Jill's, an American restaurant run by a woman from San Diego, and I had the All-American breakfast. It hit the spot. I told someone today that I need to get out of this town before I get too comfortable. Even had delicious Indian curry the other night. Flas tumas.
By the way, I've put a few picures up on our group’s Flickr site that we all post to:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/peacecorps20a/
We should all be posting to this from time to time.
My first few months at site will be mostly storying and finding out what the community wants, what's worked well, what hasn't, and what they're capable of. Basically, me, Rob, Glenis, and Dom will be going village to village in the 16 villages that are in Nguna and Pele holding small workshops demonstrating what the MPA can do if run properly and potential benefits received if that happens. We will also be trying to identify each community's marine resource management needs.
There will be plenty of other stuff going on too. Volunteers engage in plenty of work outside their primary project. When I was in training Javier, from my group, and I talked about getting baseball teaching going at our sites. Javier even made a workshop in Emua teaching the game that many of us helped facilitate. But upon arriving in Pele, I realized that there's no field nearly big enough to play on. But...they do have a decent size sand beach area that would be perfect for OTL. For those of you that don't know, Over-The-Line softball is a game that originated in San Diego, and basically is a 3 on 3 game of ball. And it is played without gloves, perfect for Vanuatu. In San Diego every year there is a big tournament on Fiesta Island and some teams take it very seriously. If you guys want more info. on the game go to: http://www.ombac.org/over_the_line/
The rules are an icon on the left side and there's all types of pictures and links. I already got a softball at one of the Chinese shops for a buck and I know I guy in Emua who carves a good bat out of one of the local trees. I'm also thinking of setting up a couple horseshoe pits. On my island they love petangue, a French game very similar to bocce. Horseshoes is right up that alley and they sell re-bar and horseshoes in town for fairly cheap. As opposed to a petangue set, which is about $90 and only one village on my island has a set. Another idea is setting up some beach volleyball doubles tournaments. Some men and women can really play here but the style of play here is always like court volleyball and they have some interesting rules: They use rally point, can kick the ball, a set over the net is legal, and they don't fish from the net (drives me nuts).
Last week the environment group went to Epi for a mariculture workshop. Many of our Ni-Van counterparts were also flown out for the workshop. My counterpart, Charlie, and I hung out and storied quite a bit at which point I found out we're going to get along great. Charlie is freaking hilarious and has an impressive understanding of marine biology. During the workshop we made fish and invertebrate harvest and management devices out of locally available materials. Some seemed to work more than others. One that I was impressed with was the octopus shelter: an old tire cut into 3 pieces, then each piece was laced together using the two sides that touch the rim or bead of the tire. After one side is sealed with any flat solid piece of material, and the device is weighed down in the water. An octopus then uses the structure for shelter, and is easily harvested by villagers. The alternative has been people taking an axe to their reef to harvest octopus. Which for obvious reasons is not good.
We also ran through life cycles of many of the marine species as well as talked about benefits and cautions of the market for these species. Proper management was stressed for these marine species, but at a community level and on an individual community to community basis. For example, a village in Efate will have different priorities and resources than say a Banks island in the North. Overall, the workshop went really well, but I've heard many times that many Ni-Vans go to these workshops, are enthused about it, and then go back to their villages and never do anything with the info. learned.
Hmm...what else has been going on? Having a cell phone has been kind of weird. I find myself checking the time and missed messages like I would in the States. Speaking of which, the rates the phone company gave me were wrong and its cheaper for me to still call from the internet cafe (~$1/min). I was told that www.speedypin.com
has the best rates for international calling cards though, and its cheaper and easier than Skyping.

That's probably all for now, getting hungry. See ya.