August 13, 2002

Hello from the South Pacific!

We arrived safe and tired on Monday, August 5, after a layover in Sydney, Australia, where we listened to the interesting accents, looked at every shop in the airport and said "goodbye" to riding up and down escalators (many times!). We landed in Vila, the capital city, where we were met by the brother of the school principal. We were immediately struck by the differences that have occurred in the last ten years: we used a cell phone to talk to the principal, and we used an internet café on the main street to contact Montana. Vila is noisier, busier, and more prosperous than it was ten years ago. There has been a lot of building, and a lot of people have been immigrating to the city. We spent one day in Vila, where we took care of business and renewed some old friendships. Some of these were intentional meetings with church and school officials, and some were just accidental meetings with former students: Sepeta is a bus driver, Allan is a tourism organizer, and Toa is a waitress at a café where we stopped for lemonade. It was great to know that we have not been forgotten. Sepeta drove us around the island in the school van to Onesua Presbyterian College. The bumpy old ring road, first built by the American armed forces in World War II, hasn't changed at all, especially in the roughest places where we would have most liked to see it change! And the intense colors are timeless: turquoise and deep blue for the ocean, white for the breakers on the reef, and deep green for the looming jungle. Onesua, however, has grown a lot: new meeting hall, new library, new science lab, new dorms. The campus now houses nearly a thousand people: 457 students, plus all the staff and their families. We had a teary reunion with our former next door neighbors, Robea and Leiwia, and we shared with each other the story of how the coconut tree fell exactly between our houses in the cyclone in 1993. I also had the remarkable experience of greeting former students who are now fellow teachers! I taught Micah and Rossi math in year ten, and now he teaches math and she teaches science here at Onesua. What finer reward can a teacher ask? But Sepeta motioned us back into the van, and we bumped across campus to a clearing with four new staff houses, in an area that had been jungle ten years ago. It seemed strange to us to come to the end of a journey that began ten thousand miles and four years ago, but there it was, a little house with a corrugated metal roof, cinder block walls, and orange shutters. Our house is four rooms in a row, set crosswise to the trade winds so that it stays breezy and cool. The bedrooms are on the ends of the house, and the kitchen/dining room and bathroom are in the middle. Outside the front door we have a sheltered living area like a small roofed patio, and outside the back door there is a small porch with a sink for scrubbing clothes. There is a garden including banana trees just past the clothesline. We did a little scrubbing and sweeping, unpacked, and hung mosquito nets. We were home, complete with geckoes chuckling on the walls in the night, and huge moths outside, noiselessly flapping against the screens.

I was astonished at how fast we adapted. Kinsey and Emily were over jet lag the first day, eager to look at every little beach and asking a million questions. Lora and I have had a couple of sleepless nights, due partly to jet lag, partly to worry, and partly to the medicine we take to prevent malaria. Nights can be long listening to the wind in the coconut trees, and the weird night birds crying.

We were welcomed in front of the whole community at church on Sunday morning, complete with frangipani leis (called salu-salus here). I began teaching English classes today, even though we are about to have a break between terms two and three. The whole country is having trouble with a teacher shortage, so some teachers were trying to cover two classes scheduled at the same time. Several classes have not had a regular teacher for over two months. I will teach English for grades eight (two classes), nine, and ten. Today when I came into the year nine class to begin the lesson, there were only six students there. I told them to go back to the dorms and get their friends; class was about to start. At the end of the class they said "Thank you" and some applauded. It is good to be in a place where a joy as great as ours meets needs as great as these. We feel lucky to be in this place, at this time, doing this work.

Kinsey and Emily have started working hard on their correspondence classes, and each attended French class for the first time today. Kinsey opted to attend eighth grade French (which is year two) even though she is brand new at it, so that she could make friends her own age. Her new friends Anita and Relvie are helping tutor her, and we will study hard during the vacation before term three starts. Emily has met Naomi, Elizabeth, and Rita, and she is excited about working in class alongside them. Lora is cleaning the house a bit at a time, cooking meals, reading aloud from Mossflower during the evenings, and keeping all the rest of us organized and sane.

The weather has been cooler than expected, varying between a low of 66 the first night we were here and a high of 77 today. It rains about thirteen times a day, fast little showers that may or may not catch us walking between classes. The winds have been strong and steady, keeping the sea way too rough for swimming. Lora and the girls have been cold, and have been wearing sweatshirts and coats. I have been too hot, the same as always here, but not as "too hot" as expected. The cement floors sweat, and every little bit of dust sticks to them.

Lope, another former student who (going by the name of Marak) was Brandan's friend nine years ago, has invited us to the wedding of his aunt, Lorraine, this Thursday in Vila. Weddings here are huge occasions, and we are exhilarated to be invited to attend one so soon. We stayed overnight at Lorraine's home on the island of Emau during our first visit to Vanuatu. After putting us to bed, she hiked up the hill to the next village where she had a friend with a sewing machine, made an island dress, and gave it to Bridget the next morning as a going away gift. At that time she was a nurse carrying medicines in a backpack around the island of Emau. Now she is a head nurse at the hospital in Vila.

We will be travelling to the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of Vanuatu beginning the 23rd. The assembly will be held on the island of Makira, which is about a four hour boat ride from Efate. We are alternately excited about the voyage, our first major sea trip, and worried about just how seasick we will be. In the meantime, all four of us are practicing a song that our chaplain wrote for the delegation from Onesua. The tune isn't too hard, but we are expected to memorize the words in Bislama and sing them along with the rest of the Onesua folks. That will be a challenge, but we are happy to have been welcomed so quickly into the heart of the community.

We are pleased to be able to email, and we look forward to corresponding more promptly this time than last time, but we are not able to check our email every day. We will reply as we can, and look forward to hearing from you.

Bruce and Lora