Malekula

So, it has been a little bit more than a month since I last updated my blog. My sincere apologies...when you're living the island life, chilling on the beach, drinking coconut juice and plotting the extermination of mosquitoes, updating a blog is the last thing on your mind.

What has happened in the past month? Well, I am officially a peace corps volunteer. We had our swearing in on the 5th of November and the president of Vanuatu came to the ceremony ad gave a speech which was cool. I got to shake a president's hand, which funny enough has been on my list of things to do for a while now. Funny how things work out.

I am based at a secondary school on Malekula Island. There I will be teaching computer studies when school starts back up next January. I live in the singles quarters of the school and have two rooms to myself. One serve as a bedroom and the other will serve as a small living room. There a communal bathroom and a communal kitchen. So far I lucked out and I have a fridge, a pretty decent gas stove and a shower. Among the other peace corp volunteers I am living in the lap of luxury. In fact sometime in the future I am going to make an MTV cribs - Malekula version, then y'all will see how I'm really living.

The lab I am going to work in has solar panels so the computers can be used anytime which is actually really great.  Most places in Vanuatu do not have electricity, so most schools have to use generators for electricity. As anybody who has ever used generators know, it eats up a lot of gas or diesel and they are expensive in Vanuatu, about 3 dollars per liter. Because of this, schools only turn on the generator three hours in the morning and sometimes three hours in the afternoon. This makes a  computer lab not all that useful because people can only use the computers briefly and students do not get nearly enough time on the computer to become really comfortable and productive on them. However, my situation will be different because of the 24 hour power supplied to the computer lab. So here's hoping that I am a good teacher.

I think I have rambled on enough. Asta luego.