We are now in Lamen Bay, Epi. If you look on a map, it is slightly north of Efate. We are visiting another volunteer couple for a few days. I don’t actually know how many days since Air Vanuatu changed their flights and now there isn’t enough room on the flight for us. We are waitlisted to go back to Efate on Tuesday with tickets booked for Thursday. This is how traveling is in this country. Last week, Jason’s session on fixing computers was changed because the volunteer who was going to run it had his flight cancelled and couldn’t make it into town. And so it goes.
We are on what is called the Host Volunteer Visit. It used to be called Walkabout and they would send you to your new site to see what you need but they decided that wasn’t actually terribly functional since the trainees weren’t yet certain how to live at their site. Now, they send us to someplace that is going to be like your site and you stay with another volunteer. The volunteer shows you around and answers the most burning questions like where do I get water when the supply shuts off at night and things like that. You can also see what the volunteer considers useful and helpful in their day to day lives and decide if that is something you want to pick up in Vila or go without.
So far, we’ve been here less than a day. The computer lab here is impressive. There are 9 networked computers run by solar power. The volunteer at the site plays a lot of video games and tells us that there is enough power in the solar panels to keep the lab running until the wee hours of the morning. He regularly stays up until midnight in a country that goes to bed by 9, even in the capitol. If this is like the site they have in mind for us, we should be well set in the computer department. There is still likely to be no internet. Internet here is all dial up over the cellphone lines unless you are in one of the two major cities and even then it isn’t exactly speedy. Jason has connected our email to outlook and so we just read everything offline and reply then dump the emails when we get online again. I’ve been doing essential the same thing with the blog entries. I write them in Word and then copy-paste into the blog when I get online. Sorry for formatting inconsistencies, it is the copy paste issue and my lack of patience with the slow, slow internet. Fixing it takes way too much time.
I don’t have much else to comment on about this experience in my training. I’m sure I will have more to comment on at the end of it. I’ll probably write another entry in a few days.