Life in the Ring of Fire Part 5: Fire Dancing

I'm going to kick off this blog entry with a few words of praise for chocolate. Chocolate is awesome. Occasionally one of the lecturers that come to talk to us bring chocolate to hand out to win our love and affection. We swarm a bag of fun-size snickers bars like ants attacking a cake crumb. In what's undoubtedly a sad state of affairs, Vanuatu has quite a number of cocoa plantations. In fact, it's one of their main exports. Unfortunately, it's not refined in country, so all chocolate candy has to be imported and thus is ungodly expensive. So yeah, chocolate is awesome. Especially ENORMOUS amounts of it. Incidentally, my mailing address is:

Daniel Moser, PCV
Peace Corps Vanuatu
PMB 9097
Port Vila
Vanuatu, South Pacific ;-).

Up to this point, I'd been quite lucky. Aside from a minor cold when I got to country, I'd been in more or less perfect health. That night I finally got what was coming to me. I woke up at around 1 in the morning knowing that I was about to hurl. I booked it out to my outhouse and let loose. I gotta say, as unappealing as the thought of throwing up into an outhouse might sound, it does make it a lot easier to get everything out in one go. The next day, Monday, I had a fever and was nausea and so spent most of the day sleeping. I felt a lot better by evening and by Tuesday I was more or less 100% again. I'm not really sure what set me off, but if I had to guess I'd say it was probably the fried Spam I'd been given for dinner Sunday night (no joke).

Tuesday Kevin George came out to give us a talk, which was a welcome change as he is actually good at giving presentations. He started off by reminding us that we shouldn't be afraid to talk to him if we were having second thoughts about our service (so far no one in our training group has bailed). This prompted one of us to ask “Are you getting worried because none of us have left yet?” “Yeah, kinda.”

Kevin's lecture was about law (or the lack thereof in Vanuatu). Police really only exist in Vila and Luganville and so the power of the central government is somewhat limited. On the outer islands, disputes are generally settled by the local chiefs. This actually works surprisingly well. He told us one story though about how Peace Corps needed the police to make an arrest on one of the outer islands, and so they had to pay for the airline tickets of the officers to fly out there. Not only that, but they also needed to book an extra seat on the return trip for the convict. He also talked about the prison in Vila. He described the building and we realized we'd walked by it several times while we'd been in the city. The fences around the prison only come up to about waist height and so one could easily hop them. Apparently a little while ago there was a mass walk out where 80 or so prisoners just strolled on out. Fortunately, they were all apprehended a short time later at a nearby kava bar. You see, they weren't actually trying to escape, they were just going for a kava run.

On Wednesday I went into Vila to teach another couple lessons at Pango school. We pulled up to find all the kids out in the schoolyard playing various games. I walked into the office and one of the teachers that I'd been working with previously greeted me. “We have a small problem today. That's why all the kids are outside,” she said. Apparently feeling like she'd fully filled me in on the situation, she instructed me to sit down in the office and wait. I did as I was told and she wandered out of the office. A few minutes later the word had gotten around that I was at the school and most of the kids in the class that I'd taught the week before showed up in the office and started talking to me. I asked them why they weren't having class. They explained that the day before one of the teachers had hit one of the students. The kid had gone home and told his family about this. His parents, obviously, weren't happy, but being mature adults they decided that the best course of action would be to have the father go punch the teacher in the face. The teachers, obviously, weren't happy about that and so they decided to go on strike until the family decided to apologize. “Does this happen often?” I asked. “Third time this year.” Ah.

The kids invited me to play soccer with them and I took them up on it. We played for about a half and hour and then the bell was rung calling the students together. They were arranged in lines according to class and made to sit down outside. A very angry looking woman who I'd never seen at the school before came out and started to talk to them. You know the old saying that you shouldn't scowl otherwise your face will freeze like that? Well, that actually happened to this lady. I honestly don't think she would have been capable of smiling if she'd wanted to. She gave a fairly long speech in Bislama, which I was actually quite proud of myself for understanding most of. She went on an on about how hard it is to be a teacher and how much they were trying to help the community and then started scolding the students for taking their problems with their teachers home to their parents – where, according to her, they get blown way out of proportion -- as opposed to coming to talk to the headmaster. It was all very strange. If I'd been giving the speech I think the take home message probably would have been “can we please stop hitting each other?” But this point didn't really even seem to be covered at all. Lizzie, the other volunteer at the school with me, talked some with the teacher she'd been working with and discovered that these strikes can sometimes go on for weeks, with both the teachers and the family being to stubborn to apologize to each other.

Thursday I finally got a chance to break out my machete. We were tasked with clearing a patch of bush in order to start a community garden. The entire area was covered with thick creepers and the occasional small tree. The clearing process goes something like this: someone grabs a stick and uses it to tug up a patch of creepers, exposing the roots. A second person hacks at the roots with a machete until they come loose. You continue doing this until you have a huge pile of loose creepers, which you discard. You repeat the process until all the desired bush has been cleared. If you encounter a tree, you let loose with a machete somewhere close to the base until it falls over. It was actually a lot of fun, even if it did tear up my hands. After the bush was cleared, we needed to put posts to make a fence. I was sent out into the bush to fell trees with my machete. Needless to say, I felt quite the bad-ass. We set about building the fence, ramming the posts into the ground with brute force and lashing cross beams to them using the bark of a local tree as rope. An hour or so in, we realized that we didn't have enough wood to complete the project. It was getting late and we were all for putting it off until tomorrow, but the two Ni-Vans who were supervising wanted to finish that evening. They did a quick appraisal of the situation and concluded we needed 8 more cross-pieces. They struck off into the bush by themselves. We settled in to wait for a while, but a short 20 minutes or so they both returned, each carrying 4 perfectly straight, perfectly shaped, logs. I took a look around at the assortment of crocked, haphazardly-sized logs that we'd been using and had to laugh. I guess experience counts for something.

Friday was to be our last Friday in Mangaliliu before we all headed out to walkabout to visit our sites for a week, so we decided it was time for a party. It being Peace Corps, we had to kick things off with a round of yoga. It was actually pretty cool. It was a nice, clear night on the beach with a brilliant full moon. We were sitting on mats in a circle in the sand, each with our kerosene lantern in front of us. It was quite the scene. The yoga mood was all but ruined, however, when someone let loose with a huge fart during meditation and we all cracked up. We got a huge bonfire going and two people did fire dancing with pois, which are chains with burning brands on the ends that you swing around in cool patterns. I ended up staying up until 3am hanging out, a first since coming to Vanuatu.

Saturday afternoon was spent sleeping at Mangas, our beach of choice, and recovering from the night before. Mangas is definitely the nicest beach that we've found in walking distance, and it's an excellent place to sleep out the heat of the day. The one thing that bothers me about going to Mangas, though is that there are no bathrooms. Now, I have no trouble peeing in the woods, no, the problem arises more from the fact that the beach drops off into an archaeological site, the remains of the village of chief Roi Mata. Unfortunately, all the artifacts, be they taboo stones or remains of the ancient wall that used to encircle the village, look, at least to my ignorant western eyes, more or less like rocks. So I can never really be quite sure that the rock that I'm pissing on isn't in fact some powerful artifact, imbued with black magic capable of traveling up my urine stream and turning me into a coconut crab, like some hapless bum getting electrocuted by peeing on the third rail in the New York subway.

Sunday was another slow day playing cards on the beach. In the evening however, the DVDs of Survivor: Vanuatu were finally found (they had been on loan to somebody or something for the past few weeks) and we were all eager to watch it. It was hugely entertaining. In the opening scene a lot the villagers from our village paddle out in outrigger canoes to meet the contestants. They were all decked out in kustom garb and generally scared the shit out of the contestants. “They're actually really nice!” I wanted to shout out “And most of them speak English!” Another funny aspect is that they kept splicing footage from other islands into the show. They'll show everyone doing there thing out on the beach, and then pan inland and suddenly a volcano some hundreds of miles away will appear. It's also just awesome to see them trying to deal with island life: trying to open coconuts, complaining about the rain, drinking kava, eating island cabbage, because we've all done all of that at this point. And the Survivors only have to put up with it for 39 days. What wimps. Although we do get treated a little nicer. I guess there's something to be said for coming to a country to help out as opposed to trying to win a million dollars. Anyway, if any of you all get the chance, I'd suggest checking it out. All the beaches were the contestants live, the tribal meeting place, and the games are all within walking distance of my village, Mangaliliu. The volcano they keep showing is actually on Tanna, and a lot of the shots of the wildlife are also from different islands because most of the wildlife around here has already been hunted out.