3 Hardest Things about Our Village Living with POC

First, let me take the time to distinguish between living in the village and Village Living with POC. The Pacific Orientation Course is a training course for survival and success in the Melanesian region. This is culminated in a "practical exam", where they drop you off in the village for a month, and hope to hear you're alive at the end of it. (Just kidding, they care more than I made that sound.)
But for a month stay, we were hardly set up in the Hyatt.
But it wasn't so much the quality of the accommodations (although, I have already mentioned the house layout) as it was the nature of the beast when considering the limited cargo we were advised to bring. When we get to bring what we want (/can afford) to bring, these problems likely won't be problems and we'll have to generate a new list!

1. Limited Resources
   I touched on this in The Top 10 Things I Really Really Appreciate about Town Living. But there were three killer limited resources: water, power, and internet.
• James' "sister" would haul water for us. We had three water buckets: 7, 5, and 3 gallons. We could normally get by for three days, being very conservative. But on the third day… Hopefully Jenipa hadn't gone to the garden or hopefully it had rained the night before and there was water in the missionary of yesteryear's tank. And our Berkey water filter, while amazing, filtered very very slowly. So if we filled up the head tank before we went to bed, and kept topping up throughout the day, we were normally fine. But woe to us if we had forgotten. And added woe if another family came a-visiting on such a day and asked for water. There were hours where Jacob and I sat in thirst, having given the last of the clean water to James, waiting for the enough drips to fall from the filter to satisfy our thirst. It was an oversight we didn't make often. It was the sort of thing where if an hour after going to bed, we realized we had forgotten, we would get up and get it sorted.
• We had a small solar charger. When it's battery was full, it could charge my cell phone from dead for a few days in a row before running out. But even on the sunniest day, it could get enough solar power to replace what we used each day. So going out fully charged, it wouldn't be many days before it was dead and so were all of our phones. But my phone is my camera, so even on flight mode, it was anxious making to have it just dead. The phones are also our alarms. Our malaria medicine day got pushed back a day because we woke up and realized that with the phone's dead, we had forgotten. (We found out about half way into our stay that a friend had an impressive solar panel system and he would recharge our battery when we got low.)
• In times when power wasn't scarce, internet was. We occasionally got better than 2G data. Guys. No internet is better than slow, unreliable internet. Shrugging and saying, "Better find something else to waste my life on" is way lass frustrating than "YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO WORK SO DO IT!" Though I think I was still in the village when I discovered that Instagram uploads pictures way better than Facebook. That was happy making.
   
2. Brevity of Time
   I am problem solver, not a wallower. At 12, I read Wizard's First Rule by Terry Goodkind, and one thing that always stuck with me is the wizened old grandfather character's admonition, "Focus on the solution. Not the problem."
   So there were a bunch of little "problems".
• My bed was on the floor so I had to sit up, tuck myself under the mosquito net, then hoist my pregnant belly into a squat before standing up from a squat. Luckily we're only talking 2nd trimester here.
• The walk down to the water was really too ridiculous for me to manage, so I would take a cup bath in my room. Towering over a 2 foot wide basin and hoping to catch the water I pour over my head in it was ridiculous.
• The place was a chaotic mess because there were no shelves, no places to put things.

Little problems with obvious and simple solutions, but we were only there for a month. Which was enough time to be bothered but not enough time to warrant fixing the problems. And that was the hardest thing of them all: having a solution to a problem but not being able to execute the solution because it wasn't worth it.

3. The Proximity of the Rents
   No offense to all the parents out there, but we all know that there's a brief window of time when it's cool to crash with your folks. That window ends at 16 and you have to endure at least until 18. And moving back in is almost always really difficult. They're just there. All the time. And you have to interact with them. And coordinate life together. Instead of just being autonomous.
   Our wasfemili lived 10 feet from our front door. Given that our room was an oven, and our veranda was a veranda, and our hauskuk's door was outside our house, we pretty much lived in the same house. Just a very drafty house that had a tendency to rain between our living quarters and theirs.
   But they were right there. All the time. We couldn't walk to the hauskuk without having to exchange pleasantries. We couldn't go to the outhouse without having to exchange pleasantries. And sometimes, some days, you don't want to deal with that. I might even be so bold to say most days, you don't want to deal with small talk en route to the loo.
    

So when we get out to the village where we'll be living (TBD), we'll bring a water tank of some caliber, a solar panel system powerful enough to manage our power needs, a bed frame, that plastic thingy you line a shower with, and stuff for shelves, and we'll have more than enough time to solve problems.
In fact, I've told Jacob, I might be that person who slowly edifies and perfects a house until at the end of our term, we're like, "why bother with an Americanized house? Let's just lay a concrete foundation and call it a day." As long as the bones of the house are quality, it will really take no effort to tear down the woven bamboo walls when I tire of them and replace them with paneling.

We'll have to see how feasible that is, but I certainly like the idea!

Stay Tuned for the 5 Best Things about Village Living!