From Panama to Penama

Here goes: the first post in a new volume for this journal. I'm back as a freshly sworn-in Peace Corps Volunteer, this time in the South Pacific island republic of Vanuatu. If you google it you'll find us out on the Coral Sea, eastward from Australia, but suffice it to say, it's half a world away from the U.S.--and from Panama for that matter. Still, it feels quite familiar to me in many ways--ways that make me glad for having made the decision to seek and accept the invitation to serve here for the next two years.

  I've been in country for ten weeks now and just completed pre-service training out on the small Island of Pele, a place of stunning tropical beauty where the local villagers instantly adopted all of us as family. People there live in very humble conditions, but the way they opened there homes and hearts to us was deeply affecting. It humbled me and inspired me to redouble my commitment to give it my all in trying to make a difference during my Peace Corps service here. 

 We started right in with training in Bislama, the pidgin language that is the lingua franca here in Vanuatu. Among the eighty islands that make up the country, there are over one hundred distinct dialects spoken, so Bislama provides a common language that bridges the many gaps.

  We had Bislama class down along the beach every morning and it's been fascinating to study. Thanks to the overlap with English and our excellent local teachers it hasn't been an insurmountable task.  Bislama deserves a post on this blog all it's own, but for now I'm happy to report I comfortably passed my pre-swear-in evaluation and am conversing in Bislama with surprising ease. 

  Our host families also taught us a lot about local traditions like the weaving of mats which play an important role in Vanuatu culture. My host aunty was making this mat for a newly engaged nephew who needed many mats along with a number of pigs to present to his future in-laws as a sort of dowry.

  The bananas, fish and root crops that are the basis of the diet here are familiar, but the Ni-van techniques of cooking are quite different from what I was used to in Panama. The very popular laplap is made with grated manioc or taro flavored with coconut milk and layered with cabbage leaf

Everything is wrapped up between banana leaves... 

then laid on a bed of coals with hot volcanic stones placed on top to roast it.

  In the later weeks of we got to put into practice some of our training--building a pour-flush toilet, doing home-to-home visits for community health surveying and presenting a health workshop to the village mamas. 

  About half way through training we found out our site assignments and traveled out to visit for a week. I'll be living and working on the island of Maewo (MY-woe) for the next twenty-four months. Right now I'm out of time now because I've got to get some last minute shopping and packing done to be ready to fly out tomorrow morning. I've already put most of my things on a cargo ship to be delivered in a few weeks because the flight is on a tiny eight-seater. So I'll save talking about Maewo for now, except to explain the title of this blog post. The names Vanuatu's provinces are derived from the first letters of the names of their principal islands. Our islands are Pentacost, Ambae and Maewo, hence the name of my province Penama. Seems like an auspicious site assignment, eh?