I don’t think there’s anything more soul-sucking than having to ask to use the bathroom. The guest house where me and the band were staying did not have a bathroom associated with it (I mean, why would it? That would just be silly) and so when I woke up Monday morning I was informed that I needed to ask one of the villagers to use their bathrooms should the need arise. This, of course, was a pleasant start to the week. Things, however, did start to look up after breakfast (Ramen noodles with bits of beef on top of rice, the same meal we were to have for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day that we were there). We trekked up into the bush on a barely-existent trail for about half an hour before coming to a small clearing. Two carved wooden still drums stood in the middle along with a colorful collection of leaves and flowers. On the opposite edge of the clearing from where we’d emerged crouched a group of boys dressed in nambas – leaves wrapped around the penis and then tied around the waist (check the back logs for a more detailed description and, of course, the appropriate jokes). Big colorful fronds of leaves had been stuck into the back of each of their nambas belts, making them all look vaguely like peacocks. Upon arrival, one of the band members proceeded to strip and don a namba as well, although he kept his underwear on, which I thought was kind of cheating, but was nonetheless glad for. The goal of the expedition, of course, was to incorporate a nambas dance into the music video.
Before coming on this trip I’d seen several Vanuatu-style music videos before and they were, without exception, fantastically bad. They generally featured a series of shots of some people singing what must have been a completely different song than the one being played in the movie because their lips synced up to the vocals about as well as in a Godzilla film. These shots were seizure-inducingly spliced together using effects that could have been achieved in a power-point presentation (ie. the slide in from the corner, the dissolve, the stripes, etc). The final product has the same sort of draw as a morbidly obese man messily devouring a plate of nachos: you know you should look away, but you just can’t. Now, of course, I was being treated to a special “behind-the-scenes” look at the making of such a music video and, I got to say, I’m surprised they turn out that well. All the footage was being taken by a camcorder whose stand nobody could find (think “Blair Witch Project”). The music was being provided by a boom box (which one of the band members had lugged along on our half hour trek through the bush), but of course such a setup would have been inadequate to capture decent audio, so what they do is have the band lip-sync along with the music as best they can (not very well) and then cut the audio out of the footage and overlay the original studio recording.
And so I was treated to a traditional Vanuatu custom dance, performed by boys wearing penis sheathes and decorated with leaves, accompanying music heavy on the keyboard synth being blasted out by a boom box being carried 80’s-style over someone’s shoulder. Thank god someone was taking footage of the whole thing. After this spectacle was completed, we set off hiking again for a custom nakamal, which was supposed to be close to a river. “Close” was a bit of an understatement, as the nakamal was actually IN the river. We showed up to see kava being pounded by wooden poles on the banks and then worked in basins in the river. The whole experience was very cool. In turn we each stepped into the river and were presented with a shell of kava (“shell” here being a literal term as the kava was served in empty coconut shells). After drinking you could sit in the river to cool off, ponder the beauty of nature, and wonder if there were any bathrooms in this joint.
After some quality pondering we were off hiking again (not an easy endeavor after a shell of kava) upstream to a waterfall, where I was forever immortalized in Vanuatu music video history by emerging, shirtless, from the waterfall, doing a slow motion hair flick, and then downing a shell of kava. By mid-afternoon most everyone in the band had had too much kava to drink to continue shooting and so we headed back to the village and all went to sleep.
Tuesday evening we put on a concert in the village that was hosting us. Concerts in Vanuatu are an interesting affair for two reasons. First of all, your given Vanuatu band (and this band was no exception) knows, on average, four songs. These songs are played repeatedly until the band gets tired, at which point they put on their CD (which, of course, has the same four songs on it) and play that until the chief tells them that everyone is trying to sleep and that they need to be quiet. The second reason revolves around dancing. The Ni-Vans are hopelessly shy when it comes to dancing. First of all, they flatly refuse to dance in the daytime (in case, I don’t know, there’s a satellite overhead that takes a picture of them and they show up on Google Earth). Even after nightfall it often takes them a good while to work up the courage, so a band will sometimes play for a good hour or two before anyone wanders out onto the dance floor (read: open patch of dirt). They, of course, love to dance and once some people have broken the ice the whole village gets into it. As soon as a song is over, however, they sprint off the dance floor to hide in the fringes to wait out the ten seconds or so between songs.
Of course for me, I’m living in a forgotten corner of the world with people who will probably never even make it off their islands, much less to the US to tell my friends what an ass I was making of myself, so, when it came to dancing, my inhibitions were all but non-existent. I thus earned myself a reputation among the band as an awesome dancer (probably the only time in my life I will gain such a title from a group of black youth), and it quickly became my job to get out on the dance floor by myself to break the ice, as it were, and get the rest of the villagers into it.
Wednesday we were scheduled to go back but that morning I was informed that this would in fact not be happening since the previous night’s concert had gone over so well and we were going to be on tour until Friday. Wednesday and Thursday nights were more or less a repeat of Tuesday night, expect in different villages. By Friday morning I was completely exhausted and more than ready to head back to Tautu. As it turned out, most of the luggage that we’d been hauling on the trip over was in fact gifts, which had been left behind, and so the return boat voyage was considerably faster, and garnered fewer fears of the ship sinking.
We were back by mid-afternoon and, after a short nap, I promptly headed into Lakatoro to try and find a white person to talk to. I was reminded of a joke I’d heard on the radio once which involved a guy driving home from work who calls his wife on his cell phone. His wife tells him that she’s watching the news and that he should be careful because there’s some idiot driving the wrong way on the highway. He responds “One idiot? There are hundreds of them!” This is how you start to feel when you’ve been out of contact with the outside world for a while. Being the one person you know of who doesn’t think that drinking coconut milk can cause malaria or that black magic can make it rain, you start to question your sanity. Initially you may be firm in your conviction that it’s everyone else that’s going the wrong way, but after a little while you start to forget that there’s a whole wide world of people out there that share your beliefs, culture, and ideals, and start to wonder if maybe you just might be able to make it rain by asking the clouds nicely. Volunteers on the more remote islands, of course, have it the worst, and it’s not uncommon for Peace Corps to fly them into Vila every once and a while to keep them sane, and I can see why: I had been away from Tautu (where I can easily find nearby volunteers to talk to) for all of a week and already I felt like I was loosing it.
After wandering around Lakatoro for about ten minutes, I ran into McKenzie (the benefits of living in a small town), who was on her way to use the internet. This proved to be a sufficiently western pursuit to restore my ability to think clearly. Saturday and Sunday were spent doing more or less nothing and I was left with the anticipation of upcoming Christmas. I had no idea what to expect for the holiday in Vanuatu, but I was interested in finding out.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment