Make it stop, please make it stop

I can sum up the past few weeks with one word, hot. The kind of hot that won’t let you sleep at night. That makes you sweat when you’re sitting in the shade, makes you sweat when you eat, and makes you sweat when you’re trying to fan yourself with whatever you can find. That hot humid miserable heat that melts gum and makes it feel like somebody has already chewed it before it’s been in your mouth. What I wouldn’t do for a pile of snow, even if it would only last a few minutes.
And then there’s the rain. The buckets of rain falling for days on end making every trail a river of mud. The mud swallows up your feet, making it impossible to wear any kind of shoe, which isn’t so bad except when you share the trail with pigs. The mud and pools of stagnant water are also much appreciated by the many mosquitoes, not to mention the flies and various other small insects. Now being that I enjoy my bugs a great deal more than most people, you would think I would be happy about this. But the constant buzz of bugs in your ear, stuck to your sweaty face, or swallowed while panting in the heat gets old.
Now given the weather the past few weeks, or maybe months, you can understand why I am slightly lacking in motivation. Things like working on my garden or cutting my grass by hand become monumental tasks. Even something as mundane as using the telephone can be unpleasant. Last week I sat inside all day as it rained, waiting for a hint of blue sky. I got the break I was looking for and set off toward the phone. Fortunately for me it’s only a little over an hour away. After that, there isn’t another one within six hours. I hiked my way down to a stream and followed the foot steps ingrained in the banking rocks, impressions left after possibly hundreds of years of men using the same trail. After some splashing around to cool down, I climbed back out onto the other side of the valley. After winding through fields of wild cane towering over my head, passing gardens and banana trees, villages, and the one road in all of North Tanna, I arrived at the phone sufficiently hot and sweaty. I sat outside the crude phone booth, which is simply a few pieces of wood supporting a rusted tin roof, and waited for my turn.
The phone system here is not what you are used to. Since only one person can use the one phone at a time, you often have to wait a few hours before that phone becomes available for your use. Once it’s your turn to use it, you often realize that the phone line is busy even though no one is even on the phone. ‘How could this be?’ you might ask. If anyone else is on a phone somewhere else on the island it can make your phone busy too. So then you wait some more. While waiting, I sit down to rest. The flies are relentless, and swarm to all of my cuts and scrapes. They mostly ignore the ones covers in dirty mud though, but I don’t know if that’s bad or good.
A woman and an old man approach me to storian. In typical Tanna fashion the woman is nursing her baby while talking to me. The baby is covered with sores from scabies, drawing even more flies to our area. There’s another child next to me. He’s leaning over and vomiting heavily. Everyone chooses to ignore him though; kids take care of their own problems. Through all of this, the sun is beating down on me, and all I want to do is use the stupid phone. I kill time answering questions, the same questions that every other person in Tanna asks me everyday. ‘Where are you from? Are you from the north or south? (Since Tanna is broken up into north and south, they think of every place as only having a north and south. If another Peace Corps volunteer has told them they live in the north too, like in New York, they think that we live close together and that I know him.) How many brothers do you have? (They’re dumbfounded when I tell them none since they all have about 10 siblings) and How long will you live here for?’ (Always reminding me that I have more than a year to go). So after an hour of this I’m happy when it’s my turn for the phone. I call the person I need to reach who doesn’t answer. I call another person, no answer. A few more tries, and then I sit down and wait some more. Repeating this process for the next five hours, I successfully make contact, talk for a few minutes, and then the phone cuts out. I laugh to myself in frustration and walk back home through the dark, 8 hours after I left that afternoon. The rain comes and doesn’t stop for the entire walk. All for a few minutes on the phone.