By my second week in the village, as these things tend to go, my life was settling into a routine. Every morning I get up at around 5:30 or 6 to the sounds of roosters crowing. Now, it is a common misconception that roosters crow at dawn. This is patently untrue. Roosters crow whenever the hell they feel like it. This can be in the middle of the afternoon, when it was largely unnoticed, or it can happen in the middle of the night. For some reason, whenever one rooster crows, all of them need to crow, so one rooster will usually kick off a crowing session with a bunch of others following suit a little later. It's actually kind of funny when this happens in the middle of the night, because the crows sound noticeably unenthusiastic. One rooster will wake up and let out a drowsy crow and a chorus of tired crows will follow. You can almost hear them mumbling. “Oh God, Jimmy's out there crowing again.” “You've gotta be kidding me, what time is it?” “Christ, it's 3am!” “Well, nothing for it, we gotta join it.” “*Sigh*, well here it goes.” Around 5 or so the sounds of the roosters are joined by the sounds of the many village dogs beating the stuffing out of each other. The village is literally crawling with dogs, all of whom hate each other and love nothing better than to frequent the ultimate dog fighting arena which is located right outside my window. Needless to say, it's impossible to sleep in in this country. After getting out of bed, I head down to the beach to go for a morning snorkel with a couple of other volunteers. I go back, get dressed, eat breakfast, and head to class. We have 2 hours of Bislama lessons in the morning followed by (for the most part) boring and/or irrelevant lectures throughout the rest of the day. At lunchtime we get a game of Ultimate Frisbee going. On Tuesday it was funny because a group of Australian faith healers showed up at the village pedaling their wares. They seemed quite shocked to find 12 or so Americans playing Frisbee right out front of what they'd expected to be some primitive tribal village. One of them offered to heal a cut one of the volunteers had on their foot. Sadly, we had to inform them that faith healing was not a Peace Corps approved medical treatment. I invited them to come back some lunchtime so we could get a Peace Corps vs Australian Faith Healers Ultimate game going, but so far they haven't taken me up on the offer. After class finishes, I usually hang out with whatever volunteers are around down by the beach and then head home for dinner. I "storian" (hang out and talk) with my family for a while and then go for a small walk about around the village and hang out with whatever Peace Corps people are still up. We usually turn in around 9 or 10.
We had a very surreal moment during class this week. One of the volunteers pulled out a travel solar panel and hooked it up to his battery charger to charge some camera batteries. He put the panel out in the sun on the beach and let it sit. A few minutes later one of the village dogs wandered over. It sniffed at the panel for a bit, lifted a leg, and proceeded to urinate all over it. I totally lost it. There was just something so perfect about the image of a mangy dog taking a leak on some expensive piece of technology. Only in Vanuatu.
Wednesday we headed into Vila again for another school observation. I went to the same school as the previous week and observed the same scene of disorder. I was slated to teach a lesson the next week and wasn't really sure about my ability to deal with such a chaotic classroom. We'll have to see how that goes. The plus side of doing classroom and observation and teaching every Wednesday, is that it usually only goes until around 11am and we never head back to the village until around 6, leaving us lots of time to get things done in Vila. I felt like a rugged frontiersman, only able to access the niceties and services of civilization once a week and forced to make the most of every opportunity. Every volunteer has different priorities for their time in Vila. There's always the obvious: email and internet, that most of us take advantage of. Some go shopping for things that they'd found lacking in prior weeks at the village, some head to the cafes and take down some cold Tuskers (the national beer of Vanuatu). We're prohibited from having alcohol in the training village, and cold beverages are non-existent, so cold beers are always a valuable commodity. Personally, my priorities in Vila generally revolve around food. Village food, or “island kakae,” is pretty bland, and it's not really because they don't have spices available. Wild onions and ginger grow well here, but I guess the tradition just isn't there. Plain white rice is a very popular dish because is has to be imported and thus is kind of a status symbol if you can serve a lot of it. I've been eating a lot of rice and manioc/yam/taro (I can't tell the difference myself), bananas (you can guess how much I've been digging that), and coconut. The national dish of Vanuatu is lap-lap. It's made by mashing manioc, yam, taro, or banana into a paste, maybe adding some water of coconut milk, and baking it wrapped in leaves until it turns into sort of a congealed goop. I can't stand lap-lap. It tastes kind of like plain oatmeal that you've let sit in the bowl overnight and has turned into a squishy oatmeal brick. It's the sort of thing you eat because you know, in the back of your mind, that you need to eat in order to sustain life, but at the same time you keep reminding yourself to be sure to double check that fact on Wikipedia next time in Vila, just in case. I'm not sure if this has been made official yet, but in my experience burning lap-lap is the national smell of Vanuatu. I've come to dread the stench of roasting lap-lap, especially in the vicinity of my house, as it inevitably means that I'll be soon be forced to eat lap-lap. What's worse is that a lot of people here have wood burning fires to cook lap-lap over, and whenever I catch a whiff of wood smoke I keep thinking I'm in Lockhart and about to get some delicious, greasy brisket, before being cruelly yanked back to reality. I've also been missing really greasy barbacoa tacos and frozen margaritas. I'm actually kind of looking forward to cooking for myself in a few months because I can actually experiment and find things I like instead of just eating what my family makes. Hence, when I come into Vila, scoring some real food is high on my to-do list. I've found Jill's American Cafe is always a good choice. They do good hamburgers and chili dogs, which are epically satisfying and, more importantly, not at all like lap-lap. After lunch I like to head to the supermarket to blow my weekly spending allowance on snacks to take back to the village. I try to hit the four basic food groups: chocolate, cheese, crackers, and cookies.
On Thursday, things took a turn for the somber. For the first time in Peace Corps Vanuatu, we had a volunteer death. A volunteer stationed on the outer island of Erromango was hit by a falling tree while working in one of the community gardens. Because we'd just arrived, my training group had never had a chance to meet him. Regardless, given that they are only about 80 Americans in the entire country, most of them Peace Corps, you get something of a sense of family. On top of that, our training village had also hosted the training group of the volunteer that had passed, so many of the villagers knew him. We were all taken into Vila on Saturday for the funeral. Ni-Vans are very intense at funerals. Most of the mamas wailed, which involves a lot of crying and screaming. It was actually probably more distressing watching them grieve than the actual funeral was. However, the service was quite nice. The President and Prime Minister as well as Kevin George gave speeches. Lots of Ni-Vans turned out for the service, at it was actually really touching to see how well everyone thought of Peace Corps in Vanuatu. While we were walking around Vila after the funeral, all the bus drivers and store owners that we talked to knew about the incident and gave their condolences (people can usually tell we're Peace Corps because we're the only white people that smell bad and at least try to speak Bislama).
Sunday I went to the village of Lelepa with my family, which is just off the coast of Efate, about a 30 minute boat ride. Mangaliliu is actually a offshoot village of Lelepa, founded just a few decades ago because there wasn't enough water on Lelepa for the growing population and because of some kind of land dispute. Anyway, the Presbyterian church there was having a "green kakae" (literally, raw food) sale to raise money for an upcoming event. It was kind of like a church bake sale in the US, where everyone donates something to sell and then buys stuff that other people have donated, except that instead of everyone bringing baked goods, they bring fresh fruits and veggies from their gardens. My mama bought us a bag of fresh mangoes, which were awesome. Now, as you all may know, I've never been much of a fan of the organic food movement in the US, and the food here just makes the whole things seem laughably absurd. Both "organic" and un-organic foods in the US are so far removed from how foods actually grow naturally in the wild that the difference between organic and un-organic is negligible. Not only are things like pesticides, herbicides, and chemical fertilizers literally unheard of here, but people don't even water their gardens. You plant something and then come back a few months later to pick the fruit. I'm not sure if this is because everything is grown naturally, or simply because all food is basically eaten right after it is picked, but everything is just so much more flavorful here. Local mangoes, papayas, bananas, etc, just make the ones sold in the US seem bland and tasteless.
While we were on Lelepa, my papa gave me and some other volunteers a tour of the cave on the island, which was quite spectacular. The floorspace of the cave was probably about the size of 3 or 4 houses in the US, but the ceiling was upwards of 40 meters high. You could literally throw a rock as hard as you could and not graze the top. The coolest thing though, was that the whole cave seemed to be made out of sand. You could rub your hand along the walls and just scrape off material; it seemed to be as fragile as a sand castle.
Another week gone by in Vanuatu. Despite the fact that the days move so slowly, the weeks seem to fly by.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment