Monday, April 4, 2011
Saturday, April 2, 2011
April 1, 2011
Lamkail’s Little Readers
Happy April Fool’s Day Everyone! My April fool’s joke was that I fell down my longdrop….it really is one of my biggest fears. I’m sure you guys have seen that part in Slumdog Millionaire where the kid is stuck in the longdrop and can’t get out….that just haunts me.
Anyway I just wanted to update everyone on my library progress. I have successfully received 23 boxes of primary level books from my church back home!!! They only took about a month to arrive and the fact that they all made it is a miracle. The best part however is that I managed to get a couple of free rides to my school and didn’t end up paying much on transportation at this end.
Happy April Fool’s Day Everyone! My April fool’s joke was that I fell down my longdrop….it really is one of my biggest fears. I’m sure you guys have seen that part in Slumdog Millionaire where the kid is stuck in the longdrop and can’t get out….that just haunts me.
Anyway I just wanted to update everyone on my library progress. I have successfully received 23 boxes of primary level books from my church back home!!! They only took about a month to arrive and the fact that they all made it is a miracle. The best part however is that I managed to get a couple of free rides to my school and didn’t end up paying much on transportation at this end.
March 30th, 2011
Digicel I No Tuf Tumas
Digicel is one of two cell phone companies in this beautiful Country of Vanuatu. I learned yesterday that it is actually an Irish Company based somewhere in the Caribbean (I think) and is overtaking the South Pacific at a speed that no other cell phone service provider has been able to match. My phone service has been quite limited at my house this past year as Lamkail School is far from any Digicel tower here on Tanna. But this shall be no longer….I spent a weekend away from site and came back to find that about 26 paces from my front door and about 5 from the school gate was the beginning of a Digicel tower. Now I am no environmentalist nor do I know much about these towers and their effects on their surroundings but I do know that I have never seen a tower built so close to a village (let alone a school). I mean this thing is literally in someone’s backyard (if there was such a thing as backyards here).
As weeks passed more and more men started showing up to work on this ugly looking thing. Every time I walked to my host family’s house or to town I had the luxury of walking by about 30 young men who were not ashamed to tell me how they felt about me walking by…awo Man Tanna. On the bright side, this tower project became quite the entertainment for my neighbors. Instead of coming home and turning on the television, we finished school and set mats outside to watch how “island construction” is done. I don’t think I had ever seen a man shimmy up a tower like it is a coconut tree. I had also never seen this intricate system of ropes and trucks and part of a crane to get the parts to the top. Talk about prime time television here! I’ll try to post a few pictures next time so you can see folks enjoying watching this whole affair.
Here are the pics:
Digicel is one of two cell phone companies in this beautiful Country of Vanuatu. I learned yesterday that it is actually an Irish Company based somewhere in the Caribbean (I think) and is overtaking the South Pacific at a speed that no other cell phone service provider has been able to match. My phone service has been quite limited at my house this past year as Lamkail School is far from any Digicel tower here on Tanna. But this shall be no longer….I spent a weekend away from site and came back to find that about 26 paces from my front door and about 5 from the school gate was the beginning of a Digicel tower. Now I am no environmentalist nor do I know much about these towers and their effects on their surroundings but I do know that I have never seen a tower built so close to a village (let alone a school). I mean this thing is literally in someone’s backyard (if there was such a thing as backyards here).
As weeks passed more and more men started showing up to work on this ugly looking thing. Every time I walked to my host family’s house or to town I had the luxury of walking by about 30 young men who were not ashamed to tell me how they felt about me walking by…awo Man Tanna. On the bright side, this tower project became quite the entertainment for my neighbors. Instead of coming home and turning on the television, we finished school and set mats outside to watch how “island construction” is done. I don’t think I had ever seen a man shimmy up a tower like it is a coconut tree. I had also never seen this intricate system of ropes and trucks and part of a crane to get the parts to the top. Talk about prime time television here! I’ll try to post a few pictures next time so you can see folks enjoying watching this whole affair.
Here are the pics:
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