Monday, my first day of class at site, I awoke to the sound of people beating on empty metal gas canisters, the first bell, signifying that school was to start in half and hour. For breakfast I had freshly baked bread, which I was to discover was made by my uncle in a large stone oven. The oven was about as big as I was with a small opening for baking. The interior is filled up with hot coals, which they let burn out, thus heating up the stone. Then they scrape out the ashes and put the bread in to bake. It comes out quite delicious, and I was definitely looking forward to swinging by ever y morning during service to score some hot bread. After breakfast, I made my way to the school, which was only a 5 minute walk away. It wasn't long before I was put on the spot: the entire school had been gathered in one of the classrooms for an assembly. I was introduced and asked to give a short toktok (speech). This went over fairly smoothly. To be honest, I don't think it would have mattered what I said. After the assembly I went to observe year 8. The Ni-Vanuatu education system is weird. Anyone who can pay school fees is welcome to attend years 1-8. However, after year 8, there is a national exam. Students that do well enough on the exam can go on to years 9-10, where they must take another exam to get into years 11-12, where they have another exam to get into year 13, where they sit a final exam to go on to University. If a student fails one of these exams, they're out of the school system. They are not offered to chance to make up the grade and then re-take the test. To be fair, however, the school system really does lack the resources necessary to accommodate students repeating a grade. In any case, the year 8 exam was only a week away and so the kids were having a review week. This was more or less the worst time for me to come observe, as all that was happening was that the kids were taking practice tests. Unfortunately, the year 7 class was also doing a review because, even though they weren't sitting a national exam, they still had a school-wide test. I would later learn from another volunteer that teachers will often use the excuse of doing review to get out of teaching.
The school itself was very surreal. The buildings were mostly made of bamboo, with cement floors and tin roofs. Most of the cement floors, however, were cracked or contained large holes. The tin roofs also meant that the building heated up like nothing else during the afternoon. I made a mental note that when I was teaching we would be having class outside as frequently as possible. The photocopier at the school (well, I guess at least they have one) was out of toner, and a new cartridge wouldn't be in until January, so the teacher had to write test questions on the board for students to copy onto their papers and then answer. Ni-Van students are obsessed with copying. From my time observing class in Vila, I had gathered that most of the early grades consisted entirely of copying material into notebooks from the board, so I guess by the time they get to year 8 they're really good at it. I saw the whole class spending all kinds of time painstakingly making pen borders for their papers, copying the figures and text perfectly and neatly, and then not answering the question. Talk about taking “neatness counts” to the next level. Unlike in Vila, however, the students in Tautu school all suffered from crippling shyness. The class was usually very quiet, and calling on a student to answer a question usually prompted them to very purposefully look at the floor and mumble.
Since there was nothing being taught, I didn't get a chance to teach a class, but the year 8 teacher did ask me to write up some practice test questions about perimeter, area, and volume. I came up with about 15 questions and wrote them up on the board. The students dutifully copied my crooked figures (I decided neatness doesn't count for teachers) onto their papers, drew their borders, and got to work. After about an hour, everyone handed their tests into me. I looked over them and graded them quickly. Out of fifteen, I think the highest score was 3. Obviously something had gone wrong somewhere. I looked through the papers again and saw what the problem was: most of the figures that I'd given them to find the perimeter, area, and volume of usually weren't fully labeled. That is, I didn't specifically write down the side lengths of each side, but left some sides blank to be deduced from properties of the shape (ie. I drew a square and labeled the length of only one side). What had happened was this: to find perimeter the kids added together whatever numbers I had happened to write down, and for volume and area they'd multiplied them. I was at something of a loss for words.
When the year 8 teacher came back, I handed him the tests and asked him “Do the kids speak English?” (all classes are given in English). “Some do, but not very well.” Right. The teacher looked over the scores of the students and proceeded to scold them for their poor marks and not working hard enough. That was probably the worst I'd felt in a long time. “It's not their fault!” I wanted to shout, because it obviously wasn't. They were being tested on something which they had not properly learned. The point that had been repeated so many times in training about not jumping in and starting to do things too quickly was finally driven home. For the rest of my time in Tautu I refused all requests to make up test questions.
After school I went down to the cool of the beach to read before heading back home to socialize at the nakamal. In stark contrast to Mangaliliu, where a swarm of people would follow me wherever I went, I was more or less left alone as I sat on the beach. It was a very nice experience, and I hadn't realized how much I missed it, but it also left me somewhat concerned that maybe everyone else had run inland to avoid a tsunami or something and had forgotten to tell me and that I was about to be washed away by some enormous wave.
On Tuesday I went to school in the morning, but left after the lunch break because I was getting really bored of watching kids take tests. I walked up to the town of Norsup to get a look at the hospital and the cattle plantation that was supposedly nearby and was rumored to sell beef for $3 a kilo (BBQ, here I come). On the way, I ran into the French Army, who had apparently decided to come on over from New Caledonia in order to build a branch on the University of the South Pacific on Malakula. There did indeed seem to be some sort of structure under construction, but to be honest it looked more like I'd wondered onto the set of a porn movie. There were a large number of well-muscled Frenchmen wandering around wearing shorts that extended maybe 2 inches down their legs, and no shirts. I even saw a couple cowboy hats. Most everyone was carrying around a hammer or some sort of construction implement, but no one really seemed to be doing any actual work. It was all I could do not to point and laugh. I would later hear about the French at the nakamal. Some of the villagers in Tautu had been hired to cook for the soldiers and were criticizing the French for constantly complaining about the food they were served, and always demanding something different. Even those villagers who had not been hired to cook were generally annoyed that the French would never even try to respond to them when they greeted them on the road (keep in mind that because of the joint colonial rule of both the French and English, a good number of them do, indeed, speak French). As I cleared the Army base and continued up the road to Norsup, two kids came up to me and asked “Are you one Army?” “No,” I said, “I'm Peace Corps.” We're more polite and our shorts are longer.
On Wednesday I went with my host mama to a nearby town to see a wedding. This wedding was honestly one of the most depressing things I'd seen in a long time. A lot of marriages in Vanuatu are arranged, and it was obvious that both of these (it was a double marriage) had been. Both couples acted like awkward middle-schoolers at their first dance. When they were sitting next to each other, they looked very painstakingly in opposite directions. Their vows were said in a whisper, all while avoiding eye contact. Needless to say, there was no kissing. After the church ceremony there was the exchanging of the yams. In order to get married in Vanuatu, the groom must “buy” the bride from her family. Traditionally, this is done with a combination of either woven mats, pigs, or yams (although the more modern man might pay currency, or even phone cards). These families had decided to go the yam route. Now, when you picture a yam, you no doubt image the small, potato-like tuber you regularly encounter at the grocery store. Sure, it's a little goofy looking, maybe a little longer and pointer than the average potato, but it's something that's definitely recognizable as having originated on Earth. What they don't tell you, however, is that these are domesticated yams. House yams, if you will. These yams have been to several weeks of obedience school and have properly learned how to heel and not poop on the floor. In Vanuatu they have wild yams, and wild yams are about as similar to domesticated yams as Alaskan timber wolves are similar to those little fur-puff dogs that yap a lot. When I exited the church and went to explore the village I, for the first time, witnessed the awesome power of the yam. This yam was so huge (no joke) that it rested on the shoulders of no less than 8 grown men. It had also long ago decided to leave behind the all-to-constraining basically-cylindrical shape of the basic yam and branch out with a large number of enormous bulbous protrusions that looked like some sort of alien egg-pod from which, at any moment, a small yellow creature would emerge, latch onto my face, and slurp my brains out through my nose like a 7-11 slushy. A complicated bamboo support structure had been constructed around the yam to provide support to these protrusions so they would not fall off during the transport process. It was probably the most intricate and impressive piece of engineering I'd seen since entering the country.
Still recovering from my close encounter with The Yam, I took a seat under a tree with Andy and David and sampled some Ni-Van wedding cake which was, I gotta say, not very good. We watched everyone shower the unhappy newlyweds in talcum powder, because, I guess, they'd used up all the rice making the wedding lunch. After lunch (which consisted of rice, and not much else) we dropped off Andy at the airport, as he was going to visit a girl he'd met in Luganville. The plane, we were informed, was late, so we headed over to the waiting room, which was the beautiful sand beach directly across the road from the airport. Aside from the risk of firebombings, I think I can learn to love Ni-Van airports.
On Thursday, I had my first opportunity to observe a science class. The class was mysteriously titled “Basic Science,” which was helpful in that it gave absolutely no hint as to what would be taught. They, of course, were doing review tests, but I took the opportunity to look through the course books while the students copied from the board. The lesson books were literally packed full of experiments that the students were supposed to perform. Some of them were simple enough, but many required materials that were clearly not available at Tautu school, if even in Vanuatu. One experiment called for dry ice, another for a variety of glass lenses. “Do you have the materials to do these experiments?” I asked the teacher. As expected, he told me that, no, they did not. I asked him how they dealt with this. “Well, we just have the students memorize the experimental setup and the results that you would get if you were to do it.” I had to check to make sure my mouth wasn't hanging open. I was almost tempted to try and explain that this completely missed the point of science as a discipline (that, in fact, this was almost the opposite of science), but I remembered my experience with the practice test I'd written and so I kept quiet.
Friday was my last night in Malakula, and I was not feeling very excited to go back to training. After being kept on a tight leash for almost two months, it was such a relief to be cut loose on my own, if even for a week. In celebration of my departure, however, my host papa broke into a freshly brewed batch of home brew. Home brew, which, I guess, is basically moonshine, is the alcoholic drink of choice in Vanuatu, considering how expensive store bought alcohol is. Some home brew is simply sugar water into which bread yeast has been dumped and then let sit for 2 weeks. My host papa, however, had taken things up a notch. He had used actual brewer's yeast (bread yeast home brew, I'm told, tastes disturbingly like bread) and coconut water to add some flavor. I'd heard from other volunteers that pineapple and mango also make good additions. I had been warned against the awful taste of home brew, and so I was pleasantly surprised when it did not, in fact, taste like ass. It actually probably tasted about a thousand times better than kava. I made a note to myself to look into making my own home brew for my time at site.
Saturday I met up with Laura and McKenzie, the other two volunteers that had flown in with me, and we went through the same haphazard airport procedures as we had on our outbound journey, except made all the more ridiculous by the fact that they were taking place in a building which had been firebombed and never repaired. Instead of collecting the luggage that we were checking, we were instructed to place it ourselves on the luggage cart to be taken to the place. The plopped my bag down and was instantly rewarded with a lot of violent squawking. It was then that I realized that someone on the flight had decided to check a burlap sack full of live chickens. Thus intrigued, I took a closer look at what other passengers were checking and discovered a large number of yams (nothing like The Yam, of course, but yams nonetheless), and a number of kava roots, which look kind of like yams, except they smell a lot worse.
It was raining, so we were all glad of the concrete runway when our plane was actually able to take off somewhat on time. Back in Vila, the “big city,” if you will, we headed back to the Peace Corps office. Some other volunteers were already back from walkabout and while we waited to head back to the village more trickled in. I felt pretty lucky that I had enjoyed my time at my site. Some people looked mighty shell-shocked, and some people even looked to have lost a good deal of weight. That night, Ryan, Alyssa, and Evelyn invited me to stay in Vila with them to recover before heading back to the village on Sunday. I didn't really feel like I had anything to recover from, but I took them up on it, and it was good to have one last night of cold beer before returning to the prohibition zone of our training village. Sunday we got a ride back to Mangaliliu and, after talking briefly with my host family and other volunteers that I hadn't managed to run into yet, I slept most of the day. Over dinner, one of our number was telling us about his experience in middle-bush Tanna. Middle-bush Tanna is one of the few places in Vanuatu where traditional life still prevails. People still follow their old customs, live off the bush, and have little need to currency or other niceties of western civilization. Upon his arrival in Tanna he was instantly given a custom name, because, obviously, his western name of "Noa" would not fly in middle-bush. Thus, the people of his village proudly dubbed him "Tom."
One of the staff informed us that we were a record breaking group: all of us made it to walkabout on time (ie. no flights were canceled) and only one person was still stuck at site, Elin, whom we all felt sorry for and looked forward to seeing on Monday.
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