Halo Long Vanuatu

Hello,
So I am in my first week of peace corps volunteer training. There are 23 of us and I am the youngest in the group. 15 guys, 8 girls, two volunteers in their 30's, a couple in their 50's. Everyone is so interesting and comes from such a diverse background. We arrived in Vanuatu on Saturday after a really long flight from LA to New Zealand and then New Zealand to Port Villa. While Vila has almost 30,000 people it is very, very small as compared to any city in Hawaii with 30,000 people. There is a huge waterfront market five days a week with awesome fruits, veggies, and prepared foods too. The bay vila is situated on is amazing with crystal clear water and lush vegetation up to the waters edge. It pretty much ridiculous. Something out of a magazine. At that the city has almost everything you can think of, Grocery stores with everything from local foods to ramen, french wine, Australian cheese, in other words it is in no way third world inside the grocery store bedsides the prices. Items that they know niVanatu (the local people) dont eat are extremely expensive. There is a hardware store, car dealerships, the like. However this week this all changes. Starting Sunday we load up in a few boats and go to a small island with one community off the coast of the main island of efate. Here we will all live with separate host familys in little bamboo huts with no sort of technology. We will collect rainwater and drink coconuts, eat from the gardens and the sea, go to class which is held at the beach under a banyan tree. I feel this is the selection period where usually 10% of volunteers will drop out. After 5 weeks of language, culture, training we have a week where we travel individually to our prospective sites and spend a week in what will become our new home. And this I mean literally. We look at the hut the community has constructed for us and talk with them about what else needs to be done before arrival. We familiarize ourselves with the community, the geography, and the schedule of cargo ships that come in and out for various transport and mail purposes. After this week it is back to the training village for 3 weeks and in these weeks I will receive my formal forestry training as well as the cross cutting health, and agricultural trainings.
All in all so far everything I have experienced and what I see for the future this whole process is like the most ultimate camp ever. We are trained so well in every aspect of everything. This weekend we learn to cook the local foods and we build an imu and roast a pig. There is a coral reef conservation group here that gives us all an in-service into reef management because part of our jobs is to snorkel and observe the fish and reefs here, this weekend we also get taken out on a catamaran for "ocean safety" and familiarity with the local marine life. I have been playing soccer nightly with the locals and they are extremely good soccer players and so friendly there is not a word to describe how friendly people here are.
Not surprisingly another volunteer brought a surf board though I did not. However he happens to be one of the "inland" surfing type and actually brought a board that is too big for him and perfect for me. He is also perfectly happy to share that board. While we have not tried to surf yet we checked out the local spot and hope to head there this afternoon.
While we start language training tomorrow many of us have started looking into it ourselves and the language is extremely comical. The favorites around the training area are Bra which translates to "basket blong titi" and Seagull which translates to "Pidgin blong salt water". While it is very English influenced in actuality it has allot of french and is definitely a real language, unlike Hawaiian pidgin.
While I have so much to say and speak of my head has too many ideas going through it all at once and thus I will tell more in my next emails before I head out to the bush next week. Hope all is well and in good health. I'll try to get some pictures together for the next email and also I am gettign new insight into the mail situation.
Until then