Santo Spel

So it was time for the academic spel which means that the kids have off for two weeks (but they never come back on time so it’s more like three or four weeks). GAD (Gender and Development) is a PC committee which is all about, well, gender and development. Every year they host a youth leadership camp to teach us and a Ni-van that we bring how to run a camp back on the island. So a bunch of us got sent to Santo for the first week of spel and we all had to bring a counterpart of sorts and have a week long camp on how to run the camp so we can do it when we go back to our sites. It was a good time, we had activities to do every day and had a different sport every day which lead to us introducing Ultimate Frisbee to Vanuatu which was great. Eventually one day we did tie dying (sp?) and I made a pretty sweet shirt. After that, as some of you may have seen on Facebook, I decided why stop at shirts when you can do your hair? So we soaked my hair in purple for a while and the result is below (pic). Luckily that lasted less than a week because I was given the name of Purple Flame who is a… super villain of sorts.

Anyway once the camp was over I decided to spend some days in Luganville for some Internet, ice cream, the usual things you can’t get on my island. Had some fun, went to the Blue hole (pics below) which was pretty fun, it also had a rope swing which was really awesome. After a few days in town I was ready to go back to site and all the teachers also had to go back because we had to start teaching. I, along with some gap and PC vols were preparing to board the efate queen (passenger ship) to take back to our islands. So what I’m about to describe is just typically how things work around here. Boarding time for the boat was 10:00pm and it was supposed to go out at 12:00am. Since Ambae is the closest island to Santo theoretically the trip should take four hours which would put me back to site at 4:00am. Unfortunately, things don’t exactly work on time in this country and we didn’t leave until about 3:30am. The thing with the Efate Queen is that actually has air conditioning. Normally that would be a good thing, but the only times I’ve been on the E Queen is at night and it’s not really necessary. The other thing with the AC is that it only has one setting, and that’s max. When I say max, I mean it’s like a meat cellar - ambaeleavably cold. So I can’t actually stay inside the area that has AC because my poor fingers and toes can’t take it so I go to the outside deck area but the seas were pretty rough so unless I wanted to get drenched with water and slapped with wind all night I had to suck it up and stick with the freezer inside and somehow throw all my clothes on me to make some sort of blanket. We eventually made it to Ambae and west Ambae (my place) is the first stop, so that’s excellent. I brought my torch with me thinking I would have to walk back to my house from where the boat dropped me off in the dark but because it was so late I arrived in the fully glory of the sun rise and not being able to sleep all that night I got to my house and passed out on my bed for the rest of the day.