Nov 2006

We have taken a trip to escape the daily grind of our tropical paradise. We’re celebrating our 10th wedding anniversary in another tropical paradise in south Epi, at Epi Guest House.

Great company, excellent food, space to sprawl, and cute Aussie cattle dog all included. We highly recommend it!

As cushy as that sounds we have made it a kind of working holiday by stopping along the way at the schools down here to talk to the head teachers. I’ve offered to bring the teacher workshops, which I developed at Nikaura, to their schools next year and they were very enthusiastic. I’ll write up the details and send them to the schools in question in a letter – still the easiest way to communicate here! Nic is also looking at the tourism side of things and how they have it all running here – a sort of “industrial espionage” (don’t tell our hosts, Rob and Alex!)

The gardens at the Epi Guest House are exceptional. Here is just one of the many Hibiscus.

Oh, how lucky we are to grow our own vegetables, and how lucky to have so much help. A local pig was kind enough to help us harvest our kumala (sweet potatoes) and asked only a small payment – the said kumala – for her efforts. She also thinned out the pumpkin leaves for us, which were getting totally out of hand and hiding all the pumpkins. Thanks, pig!
The family who own the gardening pig heard of her efforts and decided that her fee was a bit too high so they reimbursed us with a table load of food from their gardens.

This “reimbursement” is, in fact, a local custom known as a “sorry ceremony” and is used for all manner of smoothing the waters when a wrong has been done. It can be much more complex than this, of course, involving payment of slaughtered pigs and kava. In our case we didn’t feel that the lost kumala was that significant but the people of Nikaura felt it was important to repay the “debt”. Of course, we were most happy to accept the offered goodies (and if you check the number of bananas on the table, the $ amount is probably well into the 100s! Possibly enough to repay our mortgage!!!)