Tribewanted: Vorovoro

Last night, I went to Jone Namu’s village and spent the night at his house. We left the on boat from Vorovoro and caught the bus in Malau to his house. When we got to his house, everybody started yelling “Bula!”, and once again, just as before, I said A LOT of “Bula’s!” and shook a lot of hands. I saw some of my old friends that I met on my last visit, and also made some new ones. Jone has a lot of relatives visiting for the holidays, so there were more people there than usual. Lots and lots of little kids running all over the place, screaming! Seeing all my old friends was awesome (but not the little kids screaming!).

Not long after we got to Jone’s house, I started to feel sick, so I laid down on the bed for about an hour, reading. My stomach started feeling a little better, so I sat down with Jone for an early dinner before going out to meet some friends of his for grog. We had rice, tuna, pineapple, noodles, and Coke. After dinner, we walked down the road to Jone’s friend’s house, me wearing Noah’s (his step-father) comfy coat because I didn’t bring mine.

When we got there, I said hi to everybody, then started drinking grog. I only had two bilos because I’m so young. The room we sat in was completely rigged with surround sound – it had small speakers mounted around the ceiling. None of them were very loud, but it gave great background music – it was awesome! They wanted some stories from home, so I told them about the time that all of our friends got together and we mixed up some powdered kava to show them what a grog session was like. The faces they made when they tasted the grog were SO funny! After talking for a while, I got tired, so Jone walked me back to his house so I could go to bed.

In the morning when I woke up, it was still dark out and I didn’t want to be awake, so I laid in bed for about an hour waiting for the sun to come up. When it finally came up, I laid in bed for about another half an hour, pretending to be asleep while the little kids came up and poked me, then I would make faces at them and they would scream and run all over the room and cover their eyes. It was a fun game.

When I finally got up, I brushed my teeth and had a small breakfast of tea, cake, breakfast crackers, and pineapple while I waited for Jone to get up. Then I read my book some more and talked with the kids. Then I brought out the water balloons I had packed. They went NUTS! They loved the water balloons. I would keep filling them up until every single kid had one, even the tiny ones, then as soon as I had one and walked outside, they would all run out and throw them at the wall – it was LOUD! They never got tired of them, but eventually we ran out so I filled the last few with only a tiny bit of water and we started up a game of catch. But oh horror! One of them found a yellow one and I filled it up for Steven, one of the oldest kids there. It had a whole in the side so he filled it again and again to use as a water gun – he soaked us all and it turned into an awesome game of chase.

Finally, Jone woke up! He got ready to go into town while I played ball. After Jone ran to his friend’s house to get his phone he left the night before, we caught the bus into Labasa. There we met up with my mom at a café, and from there we did some shopping and then onto Vorovoro.

This time I only stayed one night (I wasn’t sure about staying longer) but next time I want to stay the whole weekend!

This week I am looking forward to Christmas – I have an extra special gift planned for my dad that I will tell you about next week!

Moce!