Life in the Ring of Fire Part 2: Village Life

Initially I was skeptical that Mangaliliu, which is a mere 15 miles or so away from Vila, would take almost an hour to get to by truck, but one look at the mud road that shot up straight up a cliff and seemed more suited for mountain goats than for vehicles quickly put my doubts aside. We chugged upward, feeling every bump and pothole in the road, and wondering when our luggage, which was strapped precariously to the top of the truck, was going to tumble out and go rolling back down the hill. In the end, we did make it with no casualties, human or otherwise. We were deposited on a grassy field in front of a pink cement house with a tin roof and told to wait while the chief prepared to meet us. The weather was gorgeous, sunny and warm with a light breeze to cool things down. So far I had seen no sign of the supposed oppressive heat and humidity. After about 15 minutes we were taken down the main road towards the entrance to the village. Walking through the gate to the village, we were ambushed by a group of men wearing grass skirts and sporting big wooden clubs and escorted the rest of the way. The village community center is a row of benches underneath a big mango tree and there we sat while various village elders and then the chief gave speeches. The chief and Kevin George, the country director, exchanged mats, which is kind of the equivalent of bringing wine to a party back in the US.

The chief's spokesman read out each of our names so we could each stand and meet our host families. My host mama and papa (all married women are "mamas" and all married men are "papas") took me to sit with them and more speeches were given. All the volunteers drank/choked down a bowl of kava with the chief and then we ate. After dinner I went with my host family to what would be my house for the next 2 months. It's a 4 room cement house with a tin roof. There's a big porch area out front covered by a palm-leaf roof. There's a separate kitchen shack, outhouse, and shower-hut. I have my own room with a small table, bed, and bench all lit by a kerosene lap. We do have a generator and electric lights, but petrol is expensive and they only run it for special occasions (like if we want to watch TV). I have 2 host brothers ages 10 and 19 and 3 host sisters, only one of whom lives with us as one is married and one goes to boarding school in Vila. I was also given a "kustom nem" (custom name), Kalmala, which everyone in the village calls me. According to my host papa, it is a type of hawk, and apparently a pretty popular name because Dennis, another volunteer, was given the same one. The village itself is very nice. The living conditions are somewhat primitive, but it's right on a beautiful beach were we go swimming in the morning before class and before dinner. Just a short swim out from shore there's a nice coral reef with some good snorkeling and lots of fish (the area is taboo for fishing). Coconut trees are abundant along with bananas, papayas, and mangoes. Our training center is a wall-less palm leaf roof structure just a few yards from the beach. The Peace Corps does have an office building in the village as well but, for obvious reasons, we don't really use it.

I actually have somewhat flush accommodations compared with the rest of the village, as most houses are made with local materials as opposed to the more expensive cement and metal. A “kustom” house, as they are called, is made with a dried woven leaf roof and walls. The floor is covered with crushed coral covered by woven mats. There are upsides and downsides to each type of house. The raised cement floors mean much fewer insects, as centipedes and other critters like to hang out underneath the mats in a kustom house. They're also sturdier and less likely to leak. Conversely, having four cement walls is somewhat of a drag and the kustom houses I've seen are definitely more homey. Also kustom houses are supposed to stay cooler during the summer, although so far the heat has not been a problem. My toilet is a long-drop, which just means a deep hole that you let loose in, which actually doesn't take as long to get used to as you might think. My shower is a patch of coral with four wooden posts driven into the ground to wrap a tarp around. I have a big orange bucket which I fill with water and spoon over myself with a bowl. There's no roof on the shower, and so I asked what you do if it's raining. “If it's raining, you don't need the bucket.” Of course. Bucket showers actually work better than you might think. You boil a pot of water and empty it into the bucket. Then you top off with cold water until you get the desired temperature. I've found that it's best to stand inside the bucket, that way when you scoop water over yourself, most of it falls back into the bucket for re-use.

My Papa is a village elder and used to work at a resort, which means we're fairly well off (hence the cement house and the generator). All the “wealthier” villagers either have regular jobs in Vila or have small vans and work as bus drivers in Vila. We'd had occasion to experience the bus system during our time in Vila, and I gotta say, it's pretty amazing. Registered buses all have a B in front of their license plate numbers, making them easy to spot. Nod, glance at, wave at, walk close to, or wiggle or toes at any bus and it will instantly screech to a halt in front of you, completely disregarding all other traffic on the road. Hop in and tell the driver where you want to go. Going anywhere in the greater Vila area costs about a dollar and you're dropped off right at your destination. The only catch is that if the driver has other people to drop off you might be in for a tour of the city before finally arriving at your requested location. If you really need to get there on time you can hail a cab, but it's never necessary to get anywhere on time in Vanuatu, so I really can't see the point. Interestingly enough, Vila is dotted with bright blue “Bus Stop” signs, which seem to be more or less ignored by all bus drivers in the city.

Most people in the village, however, don't have regularly paying jobs, and their main source of income is selling vegetables or fish in Vila. Needless to say, this is not a terribly lucrative business. Vanuatu is sort of in an interesting place right now with regards to its economy. The majority of the population of the country is self-sufficient, able to live indefinitely off of food grown in personal gardens. Additionally, outside of Vila very few people have access to currency. For the most part, this isn't really a problem because there's not really anything to buy anyway, and trading goods is a fairly common means of commerce. It becomes an issue, though, when it comes to things like paying school fees. A lot of families, that otherwise would have no pressing need for currency, have to try to scrape together money in order to send their kids to school. A lot of times this just isn't possible and kids simply stay home. On the upside, the largely traditional economy of Vanuatu means that there isn't really any unemployment. A lot of people don't have jobs, but basically everyone can support themselves. Homelessness is also non-existent, as everyone has at least thirty relatives that would be willing to take them in and set them up with a house in their village. It's actually kind of surprising initially that a lot of social issues that are big problems in the US simply don't exist in Vanuatu because the culture doesn't allow for them. Sprawling extended families with close ties and a strong sense of responsibility provide a “safety net” a thousand times better than anything the US government can offer. House blown over in a cyclone? Your entire village will turn out to rebuild it. Low on food? Just head over to your brother's house for dinner. Teenage pregnancy? No worries, there will be at least fifteen people more than willing to look after the baby. Sometimes it's hard to believe that these are the people we've been sent to help. You see a community living on a beautiful piece of land right on the beach with lots of local fruits and vegetables lying around and plenty of fish and seafood in the ocean, with people who are always friendly, where crime is minor and almost non-existent, and everyone is always willing to help out with anything, and you wonder if maybe we really should fly some of them over to New York or LA so they can show us how things ought to be done. It's true that the somewhat idyllic exterior does mask major problems (inadequate medical services -- Peace Corps volunteers are basically the best equipped and trained medical personnel in the country, substance abuse, hap-hazard education and opportunities for youth, repression of women, and of course, over-development has the potential to destroy a lot of natural beauty and traditional culture, which often times seems like the only thing that's holding the place together), but it does make you think.

I've been doing my best to learn Bislama, but it's still frustratingly difficult to communicate with people. My papa speaks English, but tries not to so I can learn. No one else in the family speaks English. My host parents usually talk slowly and carefully enough for me to understand them, but with anyone else in the village I'm pretty much lost. When the Ni-Vans speak in Bislama, it sounds like a real language, but when I speak it I feel like I'm a cowboy trying to talk to an Indian in a bad western movie and feel silly saying things like: "Me like-em mango", which means exactly what you think it means. I think the trick is all in the accent and speed with which you talk, but I haven't gotten it down yet.

I Wednesday we were all driven into Vila in order to do classroom observations of some of the local school, and my God was that an eye-opener. The word chaotic does not even begin to describe the school that I went to. I was sent to observe a 7th grade math lesson. I think they were learning about how to read coordinates off a compass, but I honestly can't be sure because I couldn't hear the teacher over the deafening din of the classroom. There were probably about 35 students in the class, and maybe 5 of them were paying attention. The rest were running around, wandering outside, hitting each other, throwing things, or just talking with one another. The teacher seemed rather un-phased by his disorderly classroom and quietly continued his lesson up front as if nothing were amiss. After his lesson was over, he walked out of the classroom, leaving the students completely unattended, and gestured for me to follow him. “The French teacher didn't show up today,” he explained, forcing me to lean in closer to hear him over the sound of kids slapping each other with rulers. There doesn't seem to be much of a sense of responsibility for the kids in the schools. The teachers give their lessons but don't really think of themselves as needing to take care of the kids.

The weekend was a lot of fun. We went to Survivor beach, which, as the name implies, is where the survivor Vanuatu series was filmed. It was a pretty nice beach, and there are still some survivor artifacts lying around, such as the nicely marked and labeled parking lot in the middle of the dense bush. The whole Survivor saga, I think, is hilarious. First of all, forget about being on a deserted island, as the show likes to suggest. Efate is the most populous island in the country, and the beach is about an hour drive from Vila and a 20 minute walk from the village of Mangaliliu. A lot of the villagers got hired to work security, which was essentially making sure the contestants didn't kill themselves. The catch is that they couldn't be seen by the contestants, so they had to be prepared to hide behind a tree or something if one of them got too close. Now, not only is Vanuatu an incredibly rich place when it comes to food, with edible things literally littering the ground, but Survivor beach is conveniently situated right next to the village gardens, so there were some nicely planted and maintained gardens for them to wander into. Talk about contrived. However, the beach was quite nice, although all the beaches around here are coral, which is a bit tough on the feet so you have to wear sandals all the time. On the way back from Survivor beach we were told about a waterfall near the trail and got the brilliant idea to get a closer look at it. Unfortunately, there's no trail that goes there so we pulled out our machetes and started hacking away. We were guided by a couple 8 year old boys from the village and I felt like I was in the movie "Jurassic Park" or something and that at any moment a T-Rex was gonna start chasing us. Long story short, almost an hour and a lot of sweat later, we get a good enough look at the waterfall to realize that there's no water running down it. Perfect.

Sunday was church day, and more or less the entire village of Mangalilu was crammed into the small community center for the mass. We sang hymns in the local language, which is completely incomprehensible, so that was interesting. The service itself was very short, but a lot of time was devoted to making various announcements about village events. At the end of mass they had all the new volunteers stand up and introduce themselves. The village actually has 3 masses on Sunday, and you're supposed to go to all of them, but most of our families told us that the service we'd already been to was the more important one, and so packed us all off to another beach for the day. The beach is called Mangas, and is under consideration as a world heritage site by UNESCO because it is the site of the famous chief Roi Mata's village, who supposedly unified and brought peace to the island of Efate. The story goes that he called together all the major families on the island for an island-wide potluck, and then whatever food item each family happened to show up with, that became their tribe (ie. everyone that brought coconuts were part of the coconut tribe), and the law became that if you wanted to get married, you had to marry someone not of your tribe, and that the kids would be the same tribe as their mother, thus all the feuding families on the island were forced to intermarry. There isn't much left of the village, just a few "tabu stones" which are large stones that are supposed to have magical properties and be used when making spells. Unfortunately, the method and ceremony of these traditional magics has been lost. In any case, the beach was very nice and there was a huge mango tree growing right on the shore that creates this nice shaded clearing where we threw down our mats and napped out the heat of the day. Man, village life is tough.