Luganville, Santo

I had the opportunity to come to Luganville to do part of a workshop/conference for the provincial kindy (pre-school)coordinators of Vanuatu. There are six provinces so six coordinators plus 4 women from the central office in Vila. The conference will last all week; I only get one afternoon. Tomorrow afternoon, I will be doing a very brief presentation on literacy activities for kindy classes with an emphasis on phonics. I spent most of last week trying to translate all of the material into Bislama and then Fred and I (Fred is the coordinator for Penama province) spent all of Friday making corrections to my Bislama. I spent part of my day with my host family writing down a custom story in the language of East Ambae, dictated by my host father and will spend this evening turning that story into a book made with cardboard boxes. It's so nice to have a project!

I arrived in Santo this morning, without a ticket (the Ambae airport had run out of paper tickets), unsure of where the conference was being held, without a specific date for my presentation (Monday afternoon or Tuesday afternoon?), and without a copy of my plans (the office printer/copier is broken so Fred had to carry a digital version to Santo early to print and make copies). However, I now have an . . . OK place to stay and a semi-definite presentation time. Progress.

Luganville is much smaller than Vila and most of the shops were closed for lunch when I started walking around but other volunteers have told me that you can still get a lot of things here--faux cheese, pasta, canned vegetables, etc. The really nice part is that you can arrange to have one of the stores here send you groceries via cargo ship without having to come in person. I'm hoping to get the details about that while I'm here. When things are sent from Santo, it's same-day delivery too! (i.e. the cargo arrives the same day that the ship leaves, not the same day you buy or order supplies)

I don't have a lot of new pictures but I do have some from the Tanna trip that are pretty great. I will try to get those posted while I'm here.

Bon Karea