Hitting Torpedos with Machetes is a bad Idea :)

I'm at the midway point of my final week of training. By this time next week I'll be an official PCV, Peace Corps Volunteers. Also by this time next week I'll be preparing to let down my inhibitians in honor of the unique and beautiful customs of Yap. With one week left, my afternoons are filled with practice, practice, practice for my bamboo dance that i'll be performing sans top. It's all really exciting and at the same time somewhat nerveracking, after about 2 1/2 months training is coming to an end and my new life as a village PCV is about to begin. From that point on I will no longer be surrounded daily by other trainies and Americans, instead I'll be in my village, my little gem of a community on the far end of Gagil, where I'll be trying my very best to be a helpful addition to the school and the people there. My daily visits to telecom (where I use the internet) will stop and I'll probably make it into Colonia (town) about once a week to check the mail and do any necessary shopping. Things will be really different and it's both exciting and scary.

The past couple mondays there have been holidays, and this weekend we finally got to have a long weekend also, which was nice to spend extra time with our community.
FUN FACT: Last Monday this country celebrated it's Independence Day ...it was officially still two years younger than I am (1986). Strange thinking I live and serve in a country that I'm actually older than!

So, with a long weekend, I enjoy such wonderfully Yapese things as hiking stone paths, hearing myths (about a boy who lost his fathers fish hook, went to live underwater to get it back, and upon returning forgot to put green coconuts in his canoe so he turned into a stone...moral of the story...don't forget your coconuts??),I had a friend come to the beach with me for some relaxation, barbeque, thatch making, and pig slaughtering. Totally normal right?

The torpedo thing came about from our hike through the stone paths and trails deep in the far end of my village. My friend and I went with my host mom and another village woman to get taro, and we stopped to rest at this area very close to an old japanese wreck from WW2. It was basically just a lot of rust and metal, hardly recongnizable, but still interesting to see. When we started hiking again my host mother took down her machete and beat it against this thing and said, "Look Metal" My friend and I were wide eyed as we saw the "metal" was in the shape of some type of old amunition... I'm no military expert of course, but movie and tv have put certain images of what missiles and ammunition looks like, and this old rusty metal thing next to the WW2 wreckage, was most certainly shaped like something we felt probably shouldn't be just hit with a machete. (kinda small torpedo..ish shaped) At this point my other trainee friend and I just laughed.... well... that certainly is a "metal thing." Only in Yap, only in Yap. I should add that moments before pointing out the metal thing with the machete, my nina actually killed a mosquito on her arm with the same machete with out even blinking.. Oh I love her and one day I hope to also be so good at using a machete that even mosquitos know to stay away. I love Yap!