Read and Weep (or Laugh)

I just thought i'd inform you on what an average week is like for us on Tanna, Vanuatu:

Monday- We wake up somewhere between 6:30 and 7:30 - sometimes as early as 4 if a cow is having a baby, the roosters have congregated outside our window, or the boys are chasing the chickens, trying to catch them for eggs. I don't think they quite understand that a chicken has to lay the eggs first. (My brother says, "First I gotta catch the chicken, then I gotta SQWEEEZE it till an egg pops out!")

Monday is when three girls are on food detail. Monday can sometimes be an adventure. (Blind-mans kamala will never be forgotten. Especially since the kamala was actually a giant yam.) This happens to also be market day, so at about 6amish Mom realizes that once again she has forgotten to go to the bank, and starts collecting money from her kids. She will repay us the next day or later when the bank is open. On Monday its also bread day.
Mom gets to run frantically from store to store trying to find enough bread to feed 10 people for five days. At the store they say, "Maybe we have bread at 9:00?" Then at nine, "Maybe we have bread at 3?" at 3:00; "Maybe at 4:30?" ya.. It gets pretty exciting. Its okay tho', 'cause mom has usually bought out the market of all their bananas, so we can make banana bread. Since the only other market day is Friday, we really stock up when we go. It takes a lot of trips from the truck to the house to get it all in the house. On average we buy 10 long loaves of bread or more, 30 grapefruits/pamplemousse, all the pineapples, literally 20 -30 tomatoes, 19 cucumbers, 17 avocados, 4 pumpkins, 4 sour sops (big huge spikey strawberry-looking green pina colada in a fruit (mushy pinapple texture), passion fruit (if theres any) 3 bags of carrots, one root full of peanuts, 2-3 strings of coconuts (15 or so on each string), a whole lot of susuet (do we have that in Canada?), yams the size of small children (which we got mixed up with a kamala which is a small twisty purple potato) and, to our devastation, sometimes we get like 5 popo/papaya/diaper-fruit (they smell really bad). Usually Monday is a relatively relaxing day compared with Sunday nights. (But we are saving best for last.) Also this is
all completed before 11:00am while half the kids do school. We make a predictable lunch, (guacamole, tomato , cucumber, sandwiches with basil).
I forgot to also say that along with the market mom scouts out the little shops for unusual-for-Tanna items like oil, eggs, chocolate. Once we find something exciting we buy all of it. 'cuz who knows when the next ship will come in. Like last week we bought about 20 cans of coco powder. We learned how important it is to buy all you see while you see it when we were without mazut (gas for truck) for three whole weeks. It is still rare to find some but it does exist now. But we'll also tell more about that in the Sunday section.

Tuesday- So once again we wake up between 4 and 7:30 depending on the chickens and cows. The 3 older girls are still on making all meals. Menu is basically the same as Monday : Breakfast - grapefruit and fried bread (we put butter on both sides of bread and fry it in frying pan, this is the only way to consume the flavoured, dyed wax they put in the butter containers). Lunch is guacamole, tomatoes, cucumbers and bread with basil. Dinner is rice and sauce,
with susuet in it - and coconut cream, Amalie spends at least half hour opening coconuts with the machete then grating them and squeezing out the cream. No meat on our days - no way we are touching the hunk of warm stuff in a bag that was on the table beside the cow's head and legs. We spend the rest of the day going to the beach, meeting locals, playing volleyball, reading underneath of the fan and that kind stuff.

Wednesday- Wednesday is a prepare-for-Thursday day (at least Dad likes to think so). The older 2 boys and my sister are on making meals. This is a non-vegetarian day. My brother enjoys spending at least an hour cutting the 'delicious meat' while my sister complains about having to cook with the boys and my other brother avoids the kitchen. Wednesday night we make lunch for Thursday and try to get sleep to prepare for adventures.

Thursday- Remote Village Volunteer Day- We wake up as early as dad can convince us to, then we all pile in the back of the truck with lunch, bug repellent, sunscreen, a shovel, wood, mats, pillows and of course.
We then prepare our minds for excitement and fear. We often have to drive for 2 hours or more finding the volunteer village of the week all the while hoping the co-ordinator got the schedule and will actually be there. The roads are amazing, especially when the ruts are so deep that you bottom out. Or when you can't see them 'cuz they actually look more like a bush. The last two volunteer village visits were near the volcano and so we decided to stop there on the way back. Last one we also had a ni-van (native Vanuatuan) show us were the old volcano was, we got to walk through old lava tubes till we got to a whole bunch of bats, flying fox ones, or flaeng fokis. Oh yah, and we also stopped because there was a big rock wall from an earthquake about 40 years ago.

On volunteer village days we also tend to collect local children without meaning to - they follow us on our adventures. Last time, on the way to the lava tubes I had to lean in the back window to tell Dad that there was a bunch of kids on the bumper who didn't speak English and who didn't
seem to be moving. After awhile up the road and almost falling off they jumped in. We usually get home right after dark at around seven when my older 3 siblings will make dinner. It always feels more like ten o'clock than seven. Thursday is pretty exhausting!

Friday- Friday is market day again and by this time we have absolutely NO FOOD in the house. NONE! ("We always have none fooooodddddd...!!" says my youngest Brother.) So we walk or drive down to the market (depending on whether we have Mazut.) The walk down the hill is 5 to 10 minutes, but the walk up is always a little longer. Nothing else to special is on Friday, besides just the normal - snorkelling, hiking around, you know.

Saturday- No school, sleep in, random adventure day, get extra sleep for Sunday day.

Sunday- OK, so first is church: Wake up, walk or drive there depending on mazut, we arrive at a different part of church each time since everyone in our unit walks there and they just sorta start the meeting whenever they get there. First we have Sunday school. Oh, by the way, we are sitting in a woven hut on mats with about fifteen- twenty other people. The teacher is standing at a pulpit precariously balancing on three uneven legs. Sunday school is however long ummm.. the spirit whispers I guess, anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour. And then if the missionaries aren't already there we wait for them to finish at the other units. They are the only priesthood holders besides Dad, my brothers and one other 15 year old boy, Sano. They conduct every week. There is usually one spiritual thought (2-5 minutes) and two testimonies. The people don't really like speaking in front of others so the testimonies are about 30 secs and you can't hear them even though you are only about 7-ten feet away. Last Sunday the girl saying the closing prayer went up and put a cloth over her mouth, muffling every noise that came out. You sorta have to try and just sense the spirit speaking instead of listening to the actual voices. Well, after the meetings, we sometimes drive another family to their
hill, just next to ours. When we get home, we start dinner since we always have company (except this last Sunday, cause 4 of us were sick with different diseases.) Lots of times the power goes out around 6:00pm so company gets interrupted. I think someone has given the power company our schedule of dinner guests. But the best part is when the guests go home and we are just settling down for a good night's sleep and BAM - an emergency is here!

Sundays have seemed to be pretty exciting every time we have company over so we have stopped having company on Sundays. It's worked so far, but that was just once.

Things that happen most every day (or every second day):

Laundry- the laundry never ends, we only have a washer not a dryer so we have to leave drying clothes to the wind. It actually does pretty good. The one problem with it is we seem to have a laundry monster. Every time Heather washes a load she seems to lose something. She figured that part of the problem might be the laundry putter awayer after she caught one of the kids pulling her underwear out of the cloth drawer to clean something up with.

Water- A couple times a week we run out of water.

Electricity- The electricity, as I said earlier, loves to go out when we have company.

Reading- Almost every night dad reads a part of a really good story to us.

Mail-We check the mail hopefully. We haven't received many real letters yet. But we know more are coming very soon....

Bread Hunt- Like we said earlier, we have to go searching to all the different stores for any bread.

Sandwich- Every day we eat guacamole tomato and cucumber sandwiches.

Bugs- We watch hundreds of these miniature cockroach-ish thingys gather on our ceiling and we clean out hundreds of weevils from our rice and pasta. Oh, and we get to shake earwigs from our banana bunches.

Shower- We race for the shower and try and get warm water, all we have is what the sun warms up during the day, usually we don't have any in the morning and if it isn't sunny we might not have any at all. So we all try and get it before someone else has used all the hot water.

Scenery- We have the most amazing view of the ocean and the sunset every night. It is the most gorgeous thing I have ever seen! Literally! And it is different every night, the most beautiful thing in the world.

Exercise- Every night while Dad is reading me, my brother and sometimes oldest sister, Heather or Mom do the most coolest exercises! I am getting SOOO strong.

Sunshine- We enjoy the beautiful sun on the beach, oh and of course, we tan!

The Fog Horn- Almost every night without fail right after my sisters and I go out to our little house dad blows his fog horn (nose). It is so.... Lovely.

Animal Symphony- Okay, so I think I've figured it out almost exactly (and I promise this is not exaggerated) at about 4am the roosters sneak up to our windows, (there are about eight of them) and then start cockadoodldooing. They keep it up till about 8-9am. Around 5am the cows join in, they sound like they are all giving birth, they keep doing it all day long usually. At 5:30ish the birds join in, hundreds of them, and the weirdest sounding ones I've ever heard and sometimes at 6am we will have a little goat join in (there are
about ten of those in the field by our house). I am so glad the pigs don't join in! Oh yah, and these start after the cockroaches finish - they (the cockroaches) start as soon as it gets dark at around 6pm and go till 4am when it gets light. Sometimes dogs join the cockroaches in song. Sometimes when one neighbourhood dog starts they start going off all over Lenakel, but that is only a rare and special treat.

Medicine- We all take our doxy-cyclone or something, to
protect us from malarial mosquitoes.

I Pray- Not everyone does this for the same reason as me, but everyday I pray that we won't die while we are on the volcano! So far my family has dragged me up there THREE times!!!!!! They always say I can wait in the truck, but yah right, I am not gonna sit around while they all kill themselves, practically. I have to go protect them! So far all ten of us are still among the living.

Life here is pretty much amazing!

tonz of luv! or lav yu! (in bislama)

Rachael