Anyway, they have a special place in my heart, so they deserve a special entry.
My host parents are Kaloat and Elsy. They are both in their early 60s, and that's pretty much the life expectancy out there, due to all the manual labor and overall conditions. These two are still very active and work in their garden on a daily basis. My mother cooks, cleans, washes, takes care of grandchildren, and had enough patience to teach her newest addition, yours truly, everything about surviving in Vanuatu.
They have five children: Albert, William, Ruth, Naomi, and Manuel. Then I was considered their 6th child. I fit in age-wise too, as their oldest is about 34. They don't really keep track of their age in Vanuatu, but we figured out that William and I share the same birthday. All of my siblings have children, and 4 of them are married. So I loved all my nieces and nephews, and if you read my other post, I named the latest one myself (Jonathan).
The house where I lived was surrounded by three other homes, one belonging to my parents, the other to my brother William with his wife and son. The third house had other relatives, Tom and Helen with their five boys.
So what made this host family so special, you ask? Well, my dad is a chief of a neighboring village, and a pastor for the church in front of my house, Assemblies of God. And we had mass for two hours every Sunday, and Monday nights we had family worship and singing. Other than having to wear those excruciatingly hot island dresses for mass, I truly enjoyed going to church. First off, 3/4 of the people in church were my family members, and I learned their songs fairly quickly and sang along (some even included dancing).
Then my brother William was also an aspiring pastor, and him and two others played the guitar to accompany our singing. Some songs were in Bislama, while others were in English. And they always read from an English bible, so I actually knew what we were praying about.
My family was also vital in my Bislama language acquisition. They listened to me butcher their language and gave gentle hints and corrections as needed. When they talked the local dialect (which was already a miracle that I could decipher when they were!), I kindly asked them for translations, and later, as I got more comfortable around everyone, I just said that it's rude to talk smack about me in front of my face, and they cracked up and spoke Bislama once again. I will post a separate entry about Bislama, that language is something else.
Here are some other things they taught me, in no particular order of importance or chronology:
- how to catch and kill chickens
- how to dive in the ocean and harvest clams
- how to plant various crops
- how to start a fire in the jungle and not burn the place down
- how to make laplap, simborro, and bat stew (yes, I ate bat, just once, eww)
- that you can eat shark
- that you can walk barefoot all the time
- that you can give little kids big knives and they won't chop off their fingers
- that big spiders are good to have in the house (I don't think so!)
- that you can't kill those awful centipedes with the machete, just pour boiling water on them
- that you don't need money to live in Vanuatu
- that you shouldn't date someone, just make out in the jungle secretly, then get married
- that you shouldn't open the door when someone whispers your name at your window in the middle of the night (they're trying to get you to go to the jungle with them!)
- that kids always have runny noses, and that's just the way it is
- kids won't die if they work, and walk through the jungle for hours to get to the garden
- even the happiest place on earth has domestic violence and animal abuse
- kava tastes horrible, and even though young boys sometimes chew it to make it, you still end up drinking it and pray you don't get strange diseases
- that even in the other side of the planet, they believe in the same God, and thank Him for all the blessings in their lives
I could go on and on....i will make another post or I foresee people never reading this stuff if it's too lengthy.
The picture is of some of my nieces and nephews posing for a movie I was trying to put together. They are not really violent like that, hahahah.
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