Summary: Dennis reflects on a memory from his two years as a PCV in Vanuatu
Author: Dennis Mello
It would be impossible to capture what my Peace Corps service meant to me in one blog post. So instead, I’ll share a story about something I know was special for so many PCVs in Vanuatu, the smolhaos. As newly arrived PCTs we were informed that each host community had committed to providing their PCV with their own private toilet. And that many of us would actually be getting brand new VIP toilets. We quickly learned that this acronym stood for ventilation improved pit toilet (although having a private VIP toilet was in fact quite VIP in the sense that we had previously known those three letters).
Our smolhaos was located, a couple hundred feet from our house, just at the edge of the bush. In those first few weeks after moving to our new home on Vanua Lava we were still getting used to walking out into the dark, often in the rain, to find our bathroom. In fact, my wife and I would often make these nightly journeys together. One of us would take our headlight into the smolhaos, while the other waited outside, winding the rechargeable flashlight to provide some white noise privacy. Village life after dark got extremely quiet.
On one particular night, as I stood there relieving myself into the keyhole cut in the concrete slab, I had a tiny visitor. A fieldmouse crawled under the thatched bamboo wall, and in its panic, ran to the closest shelter it could find – straight up my pant leg. Being new, it took quite an effort not to scream. Instead I started trying to shake it off, while finishing the business that took me into the smolhaos in the first place. My wife heard the commotion and saw the light from my headlamp flying around in all directions and worried I was having a medical emergency. Fortunately, the mouse found its way back out of my pants and ran out of the smolhaos without either one of us falling down the longdrop.
Over our two years in Peace Corps, our smolhaos saw other visitors – a few mudcrabs, lots of cockroaches, spiders, and plenty of lizards. Thankfully, none of them ever crawled up my pant leg. In truth, I almost never wore pants after that, partly out of fear and partly because it was just too hot.
Despite the initial shock, using our VIP smolhaos became routine very quickly. So did cooking over fire, having no access to internet, phone, or electricity, and not seeing other Americans for months at a time. We dove headfirst into living in our community. And it was amazing. It would take me so much more space to share all of the ways in which our lives were impacted by our service, the friends and family we gained, and the ways in which we all grew together. So I’ll leave you with this picture of our smolhaos, our very own VIP toilet on the edge of the bush.