Email Update

Hello all,
Sorry it has been quite a long time since an update has been sent out but at least this one will have pictures! So as far as the last month an a half, my house is finally finished and things are starting to slow down, well at least in terms of getting everything established in the village. Since then I got to travel to a few custom ceremonies in some of the bush villages and keep working with the red tape of bush politics. Below the first two pictures are of one of the feasts and some of the girls in their everyday custom dress. The custom ceremony I attended was about a 4.5 hour walk 2 hours being on the road and the next 2.5 through bush trails. The village was rather small and consisted of a single extended family with 6 or seven houses, a nakamal (meeting house) and gardens in the surrounding vicinity. So over about 24 hours the village filled up with about 150 people sleeping in one of these six houses. The sleeping arrangement consisted of coconut mats spread along the walls of each house with fires set up between each pair of mats for warmth during the night. A custom in the bush is that when a close family member dies a family member gives up a certain food for some extended period of time and then there is usually some kind of ceremony to follow. So this three-day feast was for a woman who had given up eating yams after her father had died and so daily they made huge feasts of not only yams but taro, cassava and for protein killed 2 pigs daily as well as a cow the first day and about 15 chickens daily as well. Kava started the first night and continued on 24 hours a day for the entire three days. On the second night the men took part in a custom dance/singing ceremony that lasted from sun down to sun up that involved carrying a shaker back an forth between one of the houses and the nakamal while singing and dancing the whole time. Definitely an interesting experience.
Then as most of you know Melanie came to visit on October 3rd. She flew in to Luganville and after a couple brief days in town we headed up into the bush to stay in Butmas for a couple weeks. Upon entering the village the family who is like my host family in Butmas had decorated my house in preparation for Melanie's welcome ceremony. We arrived (Melanie in her island dress, basically the same as a Mumu in Hawaii, one of the many culture-curbing introductions of the missionaries) and the chief adopted Melanie into his family and the village also took this to formally welcome me finally and make the ceremony they never had a chance to previously. After a some small eating the village then proceeded to do what would be most culturally acceptable which was to "block" Melanie. This entailed making a small laplap (traditional food prepared by pulverizing taro and then cooking it on heated stones) and presenting it to the chief and then sharing a big meal afterward. This deemed it culturally appropriate for Melanie and myself to be walking around together, talking and her staying at my house as two people who are not married. However during this Melanie was accompanied by my counterpart William and his wife colleen and as in the ni-vanuatu culture there is no dating or mingling between the sexes, they translated the blocking ceremony to Melanie as an engagement. So as you can imagine with me in the house of my adopted family and Melanie in the house of the chief being told she was getting customly engaged when I finally was able to see here again after 2 hours her jaw was hanging as in "what is going on and what didn't you tell me". But luckily she is rather open minded and flexible to everything that was going on.
We stayed in Butmas for two weeks and Melanie helped me brush my garden, weed and plant seeds around my house, and observe the ins and outs of everyday life. What I really enjoyed was her company and an outside, fresh perspective of my life, work and Vanuatu. But I'll leave her thoughts for an email she is planning on sending, which she wrote and then lost on the peace corps computers so now it may be until she gets back to the states before she can get it out.
What I really enjoyed about her visit was having someone to share what I have been working on for the last three months. A big observation I made while Melanie was here is how much the women of the village and community would benefit from having a female to share their ideas and concerns with. While Melanie was not able to speak their language there was a gravitation of women to her and it was obvious that they would be much more open and sharing with a female than they are to me. One day in a walk to a neighboring village where one of the women is from an outside community and had schooled in English she immediately took Melanie aside and wanted to talk with her and in no time brought up issues of birth control and child bearing customs and wanted advice on such things. Hopefully I will be able to have another female volunteer from the area come up and host some workshops targeting the women of the village and the surrounding villages. Lastly I think her visit gave her a first hand experience of what I am going through so it will be easier to relate to her in our written communication in the future months.
After two weeks in the bush we came back down to town as Melanie was ready for cheese, ice cream and the sort. We came down and the second night in town went and spent 24 hours on one of the small islands with all inclusive meals and activities and relaxed near the ocean for the first time during her visit. After too brief of a time the Peace Corps was all over the country's communication because hurricane Xavier was threatening the north of the country. So we jetted out of Santo on quick notice before the travel ban was imposed on the country by Peace Corps headquarters. Thus since Tuesday we have been in the capitol, Port Villa, making good meals at our guest houses kitchen, spending two days and one night on Lelepa island with my training host family and waiting for this weird weather to pass so we can get to the beach. As for my next plans, Melanie heads back to the states on Halloween and then I am on the first boat up to Santo. Currently I am trying to find some resources to engineer a water system at site as well as continuing on with the other endevours I have set out on with the village. Hope all is well back in the states or whereer one might be and look forward to hearing from you all.