THEY REALLY AREN'T KIDDING

Your tax dollars at work. Get a load of this flow chart - click the image to enlarge and then guess how long it took for us to realise that it really wasn't a spoof of government bureacracy bullshit. Needless to say, it took a long time. Especially since we had just spent 10 weeks isolated on a remote south pacific third world island. And then they hand us this.

This chart tracks the progress of a submitted trimester report from the time we, the PCV's in the field, submit them, until the time they get reviewed by members of congress holding our purse strings. It hurts my eyes just to look at it. Gives me the heebie-jeebies. I mean, what the harry-hell were they thinking when they put this thing together? First of all, there is no earthly reason for them to give US this information. Look at some of these boxes: "PA photocopies report", "PA sends photocopy to APCD", "APCD carefully reads report" . "carefully"?

And look in the bottom right corner. The box that's completely underlined. What's the name of that newsletter? who's idea was that? I can't wait to read all the pupu in that newsletter.

In fairness, though, I think the idea was to let us know how important the field reports are and how they come to end up in the halls of congress where rich, white men will maybe read the report and decide whether or not all this hippie, feel good stuff is a still a good idea or if they could better spend the money on a mega-million dollar Alaskan bridge that will benefit about 68 people.

Ohhh, but now I sound cynical. The truth is that the US Congress has always held the Peace Corps in high esteem - on both sides of the aisle - and recently voted to increase the budget at the presidents request. Yes, it's true. George Bush actually did ONE good thing. ONE. Never mind the fact that the entire budget is still, after 45 years, only about $300 million - less than the price of one failed Star Wars Anti-Ballistic Missle test.

We have people from our group, including me and Matt, that will not have acceptable (by Peace Corps standards) communication access to PC HQ in Vila. In a country prone to natural disasters at a rate higher than most others, it's imperative that people in HQ can quickly communicate information to us when needed. Not to mention emergency messages from the States. Not to mention us communicating with them should an emergency happen on our end - like... help me lord I've gouged myself with a bush knife and the locals want to stuff my leg with leaves and do a sacred dance to heal my wound please send a goddamn plane quickly. Why don't we all have satellite phones or radios? 'cause they cost a couple thousand each and they only have a handful so they go to the poeple, deservedely so, that are the most remote. Matt and I, assuming it's not the bush knife scenario or the erupting volcano, can walk 90 minutes to the nearest working phone if need be. I also just found out that as a cost-saving measure we are all getting dumped onto the rusty, archaic cargo ships that will haul our luggage to our respective islands. Previous groups took planes (1 hour to Tanna) and then greeted the cargo ships at a future date (10 hours to Tanna assuming a direct trip, but one should never make such silly assumptions in this land).

But no matter - this is all just part of the fun.

(ps - I may eat these words, but i'm really not too worried about the phone situation. My site has several cyclone worthy structures I can run to in under 5 minutes, and we have, ahem, a hospital within an hours walk. although we've been forewarned that just 'cause they call it a hospital doesn't mean that it will have doctors!! - and if the doctor is in, we are told to only see the australians)