I know what you all out there are thinking. You're thinking "Man, I have all this cool stuff to send to Dan, like lots of Chocolate and maybe some bottles of Tequila, but I'm wondering if his address has changed now that he's at site." Well, it has. Mail sent to the address I posted a while back will still get to me, eventually, but my new address at site is:
Daniel Moser
Peace Corps Volunteer
P.M.B 33
Lakatoro, Malekula
Vanuatu, South Pacific
Monday kicked off with a slow start to a slow week. A teacher was still inhabiting the house that I was supposed to be moving into and most of my things had failed to arrive on the ship last week, and so I was left with very little to do to occupy myself at site. My week went more or less like this: At 7am or so I got woken up by my host mama shouting at me to come eat breakfast (bread and very weak tea). After breakfast I retired back to my room to either read, write, or go back to sleep. At about 10am I was forced out of the house by the fact that the temperature had risen to approximately infinity degrees (Celsius). On a big day at this point I would head into Lakatoro to my office at the LTC to use the internet and possibly purchase a cold drink. My office consists of a garbage can in front of the store on top of which I can precariously perch my laptop. An old phone line hangs down from the ceiling nearby, to which I have never seen a phone connected, but thankfully it still works. This line I plug into my computer. I can then use a dail-up internet account which I set up in Vila to connect to the internet at a speed so glacially slow that it's really only good for pushing the "check email" button on my email program. God forbid I try to visit a website, because it would take hours. At this point in the process a huge crowd usually gathers to look over my should because, honestly, some dude using a computer is probably the most interesting thing that will happen in a given day.
After a hard day at the office, I head back to Tautu and go to the beach, where a nice breeze keeps the place at a more or less tolerable temperature, and either read, play harmonica, or sleep. When four o'clock rolls around I head back to my house to help my host papa make kava. Making kava is a long fairly long and also fairly disgusting process. Raw kava roots are purchased from the local market and look kind of like giant wooden, underground, octopuses. The roots are then peeled and cut up into little cubes using a machete (thus releasing the decidedly unpleasant kava aroma, which anyone who's ever consumed kava knows and dreads). The cubes are put through a meat grinder, thus turning them into a disgusting brown paste that smells even worse than the cut kava. A handful at a time, the paste is put into a rice bag (a sort of a plastic burlap bag which is porous) and the bag dunked into a dish of water, allowing the water to seep through. The bag is then rung out back into the dish, producing a brown liquid that looks like mud, but smells worse. Once all the paste has been rung through the bag, the brown liquid is strained through a piece of cloth and is ready to drink. There are several variations of the kava recipe found throughout Vanuatu. The use of the meat grinder is, obviously, a more modern method. More traditional ways of making kava paste include grinding it with stones, placing it in a wooden tube and then pounding it with a wooden pole, and finding some hapless sucker to chew it into a paste for you (which often makes the gums bleed, and, in very traditional villages, is the role of pre-pubescent boys).
If I haven't been completely disgusted by the making of kava, I'll then drink some kava, sit around and talk, eat dinner and go to sleep. Now, I'm sure that most of you reading this are, somewhat reluctantly maybe, holding down the standard nine to five job and really don't want to hear some guy tell about how difficult it is to sit around on the beach and do nothing all day, but here's the thing: doing nothing is only fun when there's something you SHOULD be doing. Procrastination is all about that guilty feeling of knowing that you're skipping out on doing something important, and probably unpleasant. On the other hand, if you're doing nothing because there is, in fact, nothing to do, the novelty soon wears off.
Fortunately, the monotony of the week was broken up on Friday because both Laura and Elin came down from their villages in the northwest for a visit. We decided that we were all in the mood for some non-Vanuatu food and so we decided to make fajitas. Towards that end, we headed to the beef plantation near Tautu, where I tried, very unsuccessfully, to explain to the butcher what was skirt-steak was in Bislama. In the end, I more or less chose a cut at random (all the signs were in French). Most of the rest of the afternoon was spent wandering Lakatoro collecting various needed ingredients. It's surprising how long it takes to get shopping done when you can't just go to one store for everything (and the stores are sometimes placed half a mile apart). We had just finished shopping when I received a call from my host papa telling me that the Northern Star had once again come. This was something of a problem because Elin had shipped all of her stuff on the ship, but had not yet paid and would need to do so before they would give anything to her. Having just gone on a shopping spree, not a single one of us had enough cash and so me and McKenzie went to the bank while Laura and Elin went to the docks to try and stall the boat.
Now, every other Friday is government payday, which means that basically every government employee on a given island rushes to the bank in order to withdraw their salary (the idea of a bank account is kind of lost in Vanuatu, it's more just seen as something that stands between you and a wad of cash). When we'd walked by the bank earlier that day, we'd seen a line out the door, but the afternoon crowd was considerably less and so we gamely got in line. After about twenty minutes (not bad at all), I stepped up to the counter and was informed by the smiling bank employee that they were out of money, but were expecting more to come in about half an hour. I wondered how, exactly, more money was going to make it to the bank in half an hour (speedboat? airdrop? carrier pigeon? photocopier?), but, having no other alternative really, we grabbed a bench outside and settled in to wait. After about ten minutes most everyone else had left the bank and so we moved inside so as to be sure to be first in line when the cash arrived. I walked in to see the teller cheerfully counting out 1000 vatu notes to another patron. Apparently telling us that the bank was out of money was just a ploy to thin out the line.
Cash now in hand, we caught a truck for the wharf and arrived just in time to see our ship pulling away. Laura and Elin were nowhere to be found. "Did you see two white people come through here?" I asked on of the people on the wharf (one thing I do like about Bislama, it makes no show of political correctness), and was informed that they'd already caught a truck back with a bunch of stuff. Before I had time to wonder how they'd gotten our stuff off the ship, I heard them shouting at us and turned to see a small truck, piled high with our boxes and Laura and Elin crammed in the back, doing a sharp U-turn on the wharf. "Hurry up," they called at us "We can't slow down too much or the truck won't be able to start." We both dashed for the truck and jumped aboard, unhinging the door to the truck bed in the process and leaving it to flap noisily as we bounced down the road back to town. We stopped at McKenzie's house first to unload her stuff and then were informed that we'd have to push the truck to get it started again. On the third or fourth attempt we managed to push the truck far enough down the road to send it careening down a hill. Fearing to be left behind, we all quickly dived head-first into the back and we were off again. The truck managed to make it to Tautu to drop off my stuff and then back again to Lakatoro so that we could get dinner going.
Saturday I had to get up early because I'd agreed to go and shoot a music video with my host uncle and his band in the south of the Malekula. Me along with ten or so other guys, most of which I'd never seen before, piled into the back of a truck and set off southwards. The road, however, did not go straight through to our destination so after about an hour we arrived at a dock where a small motor boat was waiting for us. We squeezed ourselves and our stuff into the tiny boat and set off, riding very close to the water and going at a rather pathetic pace. It had all the feel of a summer road trip with a bunch of friends in a compact car. Further completing the analogy, one of the band pulled out a camcorder and began filming everything going on. It was a long two hour boat ride, cramped and uncomfortable with the water frequently washing over the almost-submerged hull., before we finally pulled up to a beach and hopped out. The group made a beeline through the village at which we'd arrived and I followed them to the outside of someone's window, where everyone waited expectantly. "What are we doing?" I asked. "Buying cigarettes," I was told, "we're about halfway there." Great.
It was dark by the time we got off the boat again. We'd arrived in a large bay surrounded by dense bush. Fires dotted the crescent of the bay denoting small villages and making the whole scene look like something from a Pirate movie. "This is a very backwards part of the island" one of the band told me "no roads come down here, and very few ships." We pulled up to a beach and disembarked. It was nothing more than a fifty foot wide strip of sand that ended in a steep hill into the bush. A men met us at the beach and one of our number went off to talk with him. He came back and told us to wait. We all sat down on the beach. I was exhausted and soaked through and looked forward to some dry clothes and good night's sleep. After ten or so minutes of waiting three men emerged from the bush, one carrying an enormous sub woofer (about as big as he was) and the other two giant speakers. We put these in the boat and climbed back in. I was surprised to see that the boat was still afloat. For the next hour we motored from fire to fire across the bay in similar fashion collecting a mixing board, another speaker, and an electric bass guitar.
We finally arrived at our destination, a strip of beach with a fire on it, almost exactly like the other four we'd stopped at. We unloaded the boat and struck out into the bush with our luggage and stereo equipment. We were shown to the guest house, which was thankfully full of foam mattresses for us to sleep on, and I passed out.
Sunday started off with a trip to church, where we were welcomed to the village and then recruited the pastor and congregation to be filmed for the video. After church we got into the boat again where I was told we were going to check out a lagoon that they wanted some footage of. We motored down the coast for a bit before the driver turned us into a tiny inlet that quickly disappeared into the hills and bush. We motored up the inlet for a few minutes when it opened up into an enormous lagoon, almost the size of the bay which we'd driver around the previous night. The place was at once beautiful and ominous. Thick, muddy, banks quickly disappeared into dense bush and then steep hills. All along the water banyon trees hung low, their branches growing down towards the water instead of up and out, like wooden tentacles reaching out to ensnare unsuspecting boats. Island bush has a decidedly different feel to it than the woods of the US. American forests have a sort of noble and wise character to them. From the skinny, straight, and tall Birch, the bushy pine, and stalwart oak of the northeast to the momentous redwood of the west, our woods bring to mind aging scholars, both old and knowledgeable and eager to enlighten us students who venture into their domain. The bush, on the other hand, is young, lazy, and mischievous. Trees grow haphazardly at all angles and are covered by sloth-like drooping vines. It's as if Vanuatu's rich volcanic soils don't provide enough of a survival challenge to its adolescent woods, leaving them bored and eager to wreak havoc on unsuspecting visitors. I felt like I was in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," navigating a river choked on both sides by menacing foliage.
We pulled up to a dock, which was a strip of piled rocks that jutted out violently from the mud, and got out. A steep concrete stair led up to a village hidden in the bush. Looking down on the lagoon, we were treated to a spectacular view, and I immediately saw why the band had wanted to shoot there. We spent about half and hour taking footage and then motored back home. On the way, we stopped for kava at a plantation house owned by a New Zealander who was conveniently out of town, allowing the plantation hands use his yard as a nakamal. The house was locked, of course, but it was a disgustingly opulent sight to see in such a place. It was probably about twice the size of my house in the US, made entirely of cement. Through the big bay windows that lined the front, it was possible to see a large collection of nice mahogany furniture, crystal and, of course, a huge plasma screen TV. A hundred meters or so back into the bush were the houses of the workers, constructed entirely out of woven bamboo with dirt floors and local thatch roofs made from banana leaves. Vanuatu is a country of contradictions.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment