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.
Friday, December 28, 2007
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Life in the Ring of Fire Part 12: Too Many Hours in a Day
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.
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.
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Life in the Ring of Fire Part 11: Service Begins
Monday was another busy day of scurrying around Vila. The first stop was the bank, as most of us had used up our cash over the weekend on food and drink. Apparently this was true for the entire population of Vila as well because we arrived to find a line out the door. Like a crowded bar, bouncers were posted outside to ensure that not too many people were allowed inside at once. It took the better part of an hour to withdraw cash, after which we proceeded to the stove store, where we were informed that they didn’t have any gas hoses, followed by the post office, where we were informed that they were out of stamped envelopes until the following year. The highlight of the day, however, was visiting the local grocery store’s wholesale department, where we could purchase such necessities as peanut butter in opulent bulk. I went to town like a kid in a candy store, and before I knew it I was the proud owner of, among other things, 6 liters of sweet chili sauce and 60 packets of curry flavored Ramen. Weary after spending so much money on food, and because it was about a billion degrees outside, I retreated to the air-conditioned haven of our hotel and slept for most of the afternoon.
Tuesday was to be my last day in Vila with my group before heading out to site, and I woke up feeling awful. Up until that point, I don’t think I’d once doubted my upcoming two year commitment. I’d had many an adventure which, really, when you got right down to it, was what I was wanting out of the whole thing anyway, and generally been happy with my residence in Vanuatu. I woke up that morning, however, with only one thought on my mind: What in God’s name am I doing? This sentiment, I think, was almost entirely due to the fact that I was faced with the eminent prospect with leaving my training group. Ragtag band of misfits that we were, we’d all been through what was probably the craziest experience of our lives together, and that made us family. “Shit,” I muttered to my pillow, “this is going to suck.” I took a deep breath and gave myself a second to pull myself together before striking out on a busy final day in Vila. I’m still not sure how, exactly, I pulled it off, but I managed to finish my shopping and packing all neatly before dinner in preparation for a last party that night. A few of our number had left the previous day, but the majority of our group was intact, and a large chunk of us were slated to leave Wednesday morning.
It was a fun night and, reminiscent of our first few nights as a group back in LA, we all crowded into the hotel pool and made way too much noise until the early hours of the morning. As a said goodbye to people as they headed off to bed, it was weird to think that, despite the fact that we would all be inhabiting the same, small, island country, I would probably not see some of them until our all-volunteer conference, a good six months away. When I turned in at last, I was looking forward to a solid three hours of sleep (a volunteer once told me that she’d never once arrived at her site not being sleep-deprived and hung-over and so far neither have I) before me, Laura, and McKenzie had to take our luggage down to the wharf for it to be shipped to our sites.
Getting things from place to place is very difficult in Vanuatu. The country has a small collection of passenger planes that run between the islands, but no cargo planes to speak of. Devices such as U-Hauls or mini-vans, which one would usually use to transport one’s stuff when moving to a new home in the States, are also obviously ineffective. In addition, given the size of the passenger planes and a mutual desire among all the passengers to actually be able to take off, each passenger is allotted a scant ten kilograms of luggage, with excess accruing a charge of about $3 a kilogram. Thus, in order to transport my somewhat large array of possessions to Malekula without spending thousands of dollars, ships were the only option. There are about twenty or so cargo ships that meander their way through Vanuatu’s islands, following routes and schedules that are more or less random. Moving at a pace that only just outstrips that of a person swimming, provided that the person has no arms or legs, Vanuatu’s ships are a sure way to get your belongs delivered to you in a timely three or four months. Really, the absolutely only advantage of sending something via ship is that it costs only $3 per box, regardless of size or weight. Unfortunately, you get what you pay for.
We’d arranged for one of the Peace Corps drivers to deliver us and our stuff to the docks so that we could place our things on the Northern Star which, miraculously, was planning on going straight to Malekula, as opposed to following its usual random course, and was slated to arrive there on the coming weekend. The driver, of course, was late, leaving us all very annoyed as we had promptly arrived at the office at 7am, when we could have leisurely slept until 9. Down at the wharf, we handed off our things to a very bewildered looking ship’s hand who, in the US, I probably wouldn’t have trusted with my order at Burger King. I gave my boxes a 6% chance of reaching me during my Peace Corps service. I had, however, reserved some key items to carry with me on the plane and I reckoned that I could survive alright with just them for two years if worst came to worst.
Upon arrival in Malekula, I was cheerful greeted by my host family and then promptly went to sleep. That evening, I kicked off my service by going to kava with all the Malekula volunteers who happened to be in the area and wondered how long it would be before the place started to feel like home.
Thursday morning McKenzie and Laura came to make beer at my house, which was really so preposterously easy that I wondered why I used to get charged $9 for a beer in New York. I was a little concerned because I knew sterilizing the equipment would difficult in a country which considered dishes to be clean once they were dunked in a bucket of water, and I didn’t want our beer to go bad. In a first exercise in using available resources, however, we made good use of the hydrogen peroxide in my med kit and hoped for the best. When the beer was finished and moved to my room to ferment we found we had nothing better to do and so headed for the LTC.
Basically all human life on Malekula is laid out in a long line following the island’s only pressed-coral truck road running from north or south. Tautu, my village, is .kind of in the middle, but more towards the northern half. Being in the more developed part of the island, the three mile or so stretch of road near my village sports about five general stores, a bank, post office, Air Vanuatu sales office, an airport, and a large number of kava bars. The largest of these general stores is the LTC (the Wal-Mart of Malekula, if you will), is a popular hang-out for more or less everyone who lives in the area and doesn’t have anything better to do (i.e. more or less everyone who lives in the area). It’s kind of like hanging out at the mall, except there’s no arcade, the AC doesn’t work, and the food court is somewhat limited. During my visit to site a few weeks before, I’d joked with McKenzie about how long it would be once we got to site before we too were hanging out at the LTC all day as well. The answer turned out to be approximately 14 hours.
Friday morning I was woken up by my family who told me that the Northern Star was arriving and I needed to go to the wharf. I found this somewhat hard to believe, but I headed to the wharf nonetheless. The ship, of course, was not there, but the wharf turned out to be a nice place to hang out, and was significantly cooler than the village. Later in the afternoon I met up with McKenzie, who’d also been sent to wait for the ship, and the two of us sat and watched the ocean stay stubbornly ship-less. Around dinner time we ran into a group of New Zealand volunteers who were working to build water tanks in the northwest of Malekula, and got invited to dinner. In the middle of dinner, a girl living nearby breathlessly rushed to inform us that the ship had come. To be quite honest, I was shocked. It was only twelve hours late. We got a ride back to the wharf, where the ship indeed was, and pushed our way through a mass of people, boxes, and luggage until we found the cargo master. He cheerfully pointed to a small pile of boxes sitting on the concrete, all of which had my name on them. They were my purchases from the grocery store wholesale, which I’d visited on Monday. “Where’s the rest of our stuff?” I asked. “It’s still in Vila,” he explained “we’ll bring it when we come next week.” Ah yes, of course. I shrugged. My raingear might still have been in Vila, but at least I had sweet chili sauce and Ramen packets.
On Sunday I got up early to go to the airport to welcome another new volunteer to our ranks in Malekula. Elin, who’s from my training group, but had had her site switched to Malekula at the last minute, had finally be able to get a flight in. Before leaving for the airport I decided to check the beer fermenting by my bed and was saddened to discover a thick white scum on bacteria floating on the top. Not entirely surprisingly, our somewhat haphazard efforts as sterilizing our equipment had not worked and the batch of beer had to be tossed. Unfortunately, the materials we needed to give it a second go were still in Vila and would not be arriving for about a week.
I met up with some other volunteers at the airport to welcome Elin, after which we ate breakfast with her before she was whisked off to site by one of the Peace Corps trainers, who had come on the flight with her, with a slightly bewildered expression on her face. That evening we were having a farewell party for one of the Malekula volunteers who would be leaving shortly, and so I elected to spend the afternoon in “town,” as it were. I did go out to do some snorkeling, but, due to the heat and the sky-darkening swarm of mosquitoes covering the area, I spent most of the day sleeping inside. No one can do a lazy Sunday better than in Vanuatu.
Tuesday was to be my last day in Vila with my group before heading out to site, and I woke up feeling awful. Up until that point, I don’t think I’d once doubted my upcoming two year commitment. I’d had many an adventure which, really, when you got right down to it, was what I was wanting out of the whole thing anyway, and generally been happy with my residence in Vanuatu. I woke up that morning, however, with only one thought on my mind: What in God’s name am I doing? This sentiment, I think, was almost entirely due to the fact that I was faced with the eminent prospect with leaving my training group. Ragtag band of misfits that we were, we’d all been through what was probably the craziest experience of our lives together, and that made us family. “Shit,” I muttered to my pillow, “this is going to suck.” I took a deep breath and gave myself a second to pull myself together before striking out on a busy final day in Vila. I’m still not sure how, exactly, I pulled it off, but I managed to finish my shopping and packing all neatly before dinner in preparation for a last party that night. A few of our number had left the previous day, but the majority of our group was intact, and a large chunk of us were slated to leave Wednesday morning.
It was a fun night and, reminiscent of our first few nights as a group back in LA, we all crowded into the hotel pool and made way too much noise until the early hours of the morning. As a said goodbye to people as they headed off to bed, it was weird to think that, despite the fact that we would all be inhabiting the same, small, island country, I would probably not see some of them until our all-volunteer conference, a good six months away. When I turned in at last, I was looking forward to a solid three hours of sleep (a volunteer once told me that she’d never once arrived at her site not being sleep-deprived and hung-over and so far neither have I) before me, Laura, and McKenzie had to take our luggage down to the wharf for it to be shipped to our sites.
Getting things from place to place is very difficult in Vanuatu. The country has a small collection of passenger planes that run between the islands, but no cargo planes to speak of. Devices such as U-Hauls or mini-vans, which one would usually use to transport one’s stuff when moving to a new home in the States, are also obviously ineffective. In addition, given the size of the passenger planes and a mutual desire among all the passengers to actually be able to take off, each passenger is allotted a scant ten kilograms of luggage, with excess accruing a charge of about $3 a kilogram. Thus, in order to transport my somewhat large array of possessions to Malekula without spending thousands of dollars, ships were the only option. There are about twenty or so cargo ships that meander their way through Vanuatu’s islands, following routes and schedules that are more or less random. Moving at a pace that only just outstrips that of a person swimming, provided that the person has no arms or legs, Vanuatu’s ships are a sure way to get your belongs delivered to you in a timely three or four months. Really, the absolutely only advantage of sending something via ship is that it costs only $3 per box, regardless of size or weight. Unfortunately, you get what you pay for.
We’d arranged for one of the Peace Corps drivers to deliver us and our stuff to the docks so that we could place our things on the Northern Star which, miraculously, was planning on going straight to Malekula, as opposed to following its usual random course, and was slated to arrive there on the coming weekend. The driver, of course, was late, leaving us all very annoyed as we had promptly arrived at the office at 7am, when we could have leisurely slept until 9. Down at the wharf, we handed off our things to a very bewildered looking ship’s hand who, in the US, I probably wouldn’t have trusted with my order at Burger King. I gave my boxes a 6% chance of reaching me during my Peace Corps service. I had, however, reserved some key items to carry with me on the plane and I reckoned that I could survive alright with just them for two years if worst came to worst.
Upon arrival in Malekula, I was cheerful greeted by my host family and then promptly went to sleep. That evening, I kicked off my service by going to kava with all the Malekula volunteers who happened to be in the area and wondered how long it would be before the place started to feel like home.
Thursday morning McKenzie and Laura came to make beer at my house, which was really so preposterously easy that I wondered why I used to get charged $9 for a beer in New York. I was a little concerned because I knew sterilizing the equipment would difficult in a country which considered dishes to be clean once they were dunked in a bucket of water, and I didn’t want our beer to go bad. In a first exercise in using available resources, however, we made good use of the hydrogen peroxide in my med kit and hoped for the best. When the beer was finished and moved to my room to ferment we found we had nothing better to do and so headed for the LTC.
Basically all human life on Malekula is laid out in a long line following the island’s only pressed-coral truck road running from north or south. Tautu, my village, is .kind of in the middle, but more towards the northern half. Being in the more developed part of the island, the three mile or so stretch of road near my village sports about five general stores, a bank, post office, Air Vanuatu sales office, an airport, and a large number of kava bars. The largest of these general stores is the LTC (the Wal-Mart of Malekula, if you will), is a popular hang-out for more or less everyone who lives in the area and doesn’t have anything better to do (i.e. more or less everyone who lives in the area). It’s kind of like hanging out at the mall, except there’s no arcade, the AC doesn’t work, and the food court is somewhat limited. During my visit to site a few weeks before, I’d joked with McKenzie about how long it would be once we got to site before we too were hanging out at the LTC all day as well. The answer turned out to be approximately 14 hours.
Friday morning I was woken up by my family who told me that the Northern Star was arriving and I needed to go to the wharf. I found this somewhat hard to believe, but I headed to the wharf nonetheless. The ship, of course, was not there, but the wharf turned out to be a nice place to hang out, and was significantly cooler than the village. Later in the afternoon I met up with McKenzie, who’d also been sent to wait for the ship, and the two of us sat and watched the ocean stay stubbornly ship-less. Around dinner time we ran into a group of New Zealand volunteers who were working to build water tanks in the northwest of Malekula, and got invited to dinner. In the middle of dinner, a girl living nearby breathlessly rushed to inform us that the ship had come. To be quite honest, I was shocked. It was only twelve hours late. We got a ride back to the wharf, where the ship indeed was, and pushed our way through a mass of people, boxes, and luggage until we found the cargo master. He cheerfully pointed to a small pile of boxes sitting on the concrete, all of which had my name on them. They were my purchases from the grocery store wholesale, which I’d visited on Monday. “Where’s the rest of our stuff?” I asked. “It’s still in Vila,” he explained “we’ll bring it when we come next week.” Ah yes, of course. I shrugged. My raingear might still have been in Vila, but at least I had sweet chili sauce and Ramen packets.
On Sunday I got up early to go to the airport to welcome another new volunteer to our ranks in Malekula. Elin, who’s from my training group, but had had her site switched to Malekula at the last minute, had finally be able to get a flight in. Before leaving for the airport I decided to check the beer fermenting by my bed and was saddened to discover a thick white scum on bacteria floating on the top. Not entirely surprisingly, our somewhat haphazard efforts as sterilizing our equipment had not worked and the batch of beer had to be tossed. Unfortunately, the materials we needed to give it a second go were still in Vila and would not be arriving for about a week.
I met up with some other volunteers at the airport to welcome Elin, after which we ate breakfast with her before she was whisked off to site by one of the Peace Corps trainers, who had come on the flight with her, with a slightly bewildered expression on her face. That evening we were having a farewell party for one of the Malekula volunteers who would be leaving shortly, and so I elected to spend the afternoon in “town,” as it were. I did go out to do some snorkeling, but, due to the heat and the sky-darkening swarm of mosquitoes covering the area, I spent most of the day sleeping inside. No one can do a lazy Sunday better than in Vanuatu.
Monday, December 10, 2007
Life in the Ring of Fire Part 10: Volunteers
Over the weekend, a tropical depression had formed just north of Efate and had dumped rain by the bucketful on Mangaliliu, turning the village into one enormous mud pit. Although dirt roads do have a certain quaint appeal, especially in nice, dry, weather, I have to say that whoever came up with concrete certainly deserves a pat on the back. I longed for Texas’ soulless concrete highways as I squelched my way down to the community center Monday morning, immensely glad that I was wearing Tevas and opposed to flip-flops, as they are less likely to be suctioned off one’s feet by the muck.
We’d finished class last week and all we were left with now to do was wrap up some formalities. Chief among these was the establishment of our bank accounts so we could be paid during our service. Peace Corps had arranged for each of us to have a National Bank of Vanuatu (NBV) account opened into which they could deposit our living allowance. NBV’s slogan, “Vanuatu’s Own Bank” to me, is vaguely reminiscent of that “very first” line of toys you used to see at Toys-R-Us, as in “My Very First Camera” or “My Very First Microwave,” and seems to convey a sense of wonder and surprise that they were actually able to pull this bank endeavor off. There was, of course, a lot of paperwork to fill out, but Peace Corps had kindly done most of it for us, including marking down Texas as my “Home Village” and USA as my “Home Island.”
After we were done with banking, we had language proficiency interviews to ensure that we had successfully mastered the 25 words which make up the entirety of Bislama’s vocabulary. We were then free to participate in Vanuatu’s official national pastime: sitting around. By this point, we’d played so many rounds of Hearts, Spades, Poker, and even Bridge that the mere sight of a deck of cards was enough to induce a gagging reflex. Conversation too was somewhat tiresome, as it seemed we’d already talked into oblivion every conceivable topic of discussion. I wondered if this was how the ancient Greeks felt, so engulfed by boredom that they had no choice but to philosophize wildly about whether or not the world was just a bunch of dancing shadows on a cave wall.
On Tuesday we had exit interviews with our country director, preceded and followed by more sitting around. Having no particular concerns about my site, my interview was over quickly and the rest of the day was spent doing nothing in particular. Wednesday followed in similar fashion and a general feeling of sadness had fallen over the group as we knew we were approaching our last days together.
Thursday I awoke to my host brother banging on my window and ordering me to breakfast. I stepped outside to see a vast collection of biscuits (in the British sense of the word), bread, cakes, and fruit dotting the table and most of my extended host family waiting expectantly. Before I could say anything, I was doused in talcum powder, wrapped in various colorful pieces of cloth and drenched with spray-on deodorant. I’d witnessed a similar scene at the wedding I’d gone to in Malekula, and I’m still not entirely sure what significance of it is. I’ve asked several people about it and have simply been informed that it’s a custom. I, however, have a hard time picturing the ancient cannibals of Vanuatu’s history, adorned only in penis sheaths, celebrating special occasions by slathering themselves in baby powder and aerosol deodorant. But maybe my imagination is simply lacking.
After breakfast I was presented with my swearing-in garb, which was a wonderful mismatch of two of Vanuatu’s customs. In lieu of pants I was given a woven grass mat, about 6-inches wide and not *quite* long enough to completely wrap around my waist. With this, I was to wear an island shirt, the official costume of Vanuatu, being a completely preposterous Hawaiian-type shirt, heavy on the bright pink and yellow. Vanuatu simply abounds with shirts made with such similar fabric; in fact it’s really the only fabric that’s available for purchase on the islands. I’m not really sure how the retailers go about ordering these fabrics from the mainland (“Hello, I’d like a thousand rolls of your most ridiculous cloth please.”), or why they don’t have them ship over some, say, plain white fabric while they’re at it, but there you go. Unfortunately, as I was informed later in the day, not enough of the host families had gotten around to weaving grass mats for their volunteers and the uniform was changed to island shirts and pants, so we ended up looking merely silly as opposed to outright absurd.
Our swearing-in ceremony started out with water dancers from The Banks Islands (a group of outer islands in Vanuatu that are remote, even by Vanuatu’s standards), which was probably one of the most amazing things I’d seen since coming to country. A group of about ten women wandered out into the ocean and proceeded to use it as an instrument. Using their hands to manipulate and slap the water, they were able to create astonishingly loud and hauntingly eerie music. The whole thing had an inexplicably magical feel to it and I honestly expected that at any moment a huge sea monster would come crawling out of the depths and begin undulating in time with the dancers.
After the performance, the speeches began. In such a laid-back country, I find it odd how seriously everyone takes speeches. There we were sitting on the beach, in front of a stage constructed entirely out coconut-tree products, sheltered from the rain by a series of ragged traps flapping wildly in the wind, wearing outfits best suited for a beach-themed college frat party, and listening to a speaker delivering a speech with all the solemnity of the Pope addressing a congregation at St. Peter’s. After a few hours of this, we all shared a shell of kava (no ceremony is complete without kava), and ate. I’d been hoping that our swearing-in was a big enough event to warrant the roasting of another pig, but apparently it was not, so I had to make due with chicken. After dinner the party began. It’s something of a tradition in Peace Corps Vanuatu that the night of swearing-in the volunteers stay up absurdly late dancing and making fools of themselves while all the villagers watch and laugh at us. It being Vanuatu (and due to the fact that most of us had already sent our stuff to Vila in preparation for moving out), we only had one CD at our disposal, which we played on infinite loop for most of the night. In addition to a few numbers that those Princeton people in the audience would have recognized from The Street, the CD included a couple gems from a band called Blue Lagoon, which I suggest checking out as they’re quite fantastically bad and have kind of become the theme music of our service. All in all, it was a fun time but, for reasons that I will not go into, I did not stay for the whole party. I do know, however, that when I was woken up at 6am the next day, the music was still playing.
Dazed and half asleep, I stumbled down to the community center for the last time for our final goodbye to the village of Mangaliliu. My fellow volunteers soon emerged in similar condition and we all stood by while the population of the village lined up to bid us farewell. Goodbyes in Vanuatu are always tearful and the scene probably could have been confused with a funeral. One by one, each of us walked down the line and was tearfully hugged and kissed by each of the villagers. Afterwards, we all boarded buses and were driven to Vila. Nominally, the plan was for us to get into Vila early in the morning so that we could have time to start shopping in preparation for site. However, due the events of the previous night, most of us were in no condition to do anything except collapse on the floor and go to sleep. This I did until lunchtime, when I ventured down to town with McKenzie and Laura, who were to come with me to Malekula, to get a burrito and a beer-making kit, which, I decided was my top priority. The burrito was delicious, as always, and I bought the store out of all their beer-making supplies.
That night we decided to celebrate our first night in Vila by going to Vanuatu’s only sushi restaurant. This turned out to be a bad call as, like everything else in Vila, sushi was ridiculously expensive and I ended up dropping around $30 for a meal that left me aching to go to Burger King afterwards in order to get something more filling. Saturday I had planned to do some shopping, but this was quickly abandoned in favor of going to Iririkki, an island resort, to go swimming and buy mixed drinks. I’d heard rumors that the resort also sported a game room with both foosball and ping-pong, and I longed for some quality fooz Princeton style. Unfortunately the game room was a trifle disappointing as the foosball table was apparently built with midgets in mind, being about two feet tall, and thus forcing you to squat in order to play. The humidity had gotten to the ping-pong balls as well, which bounced about as well as an over-ripe tomato.
Sunday I tried to make up for my laziness the previous day by browsing Vila’s plethora of Chinese shops (the only stores in Vila which, sometimes, are open on Sundays). Fortunately, a cruise ship had just come in, and so most of the stores were open to cater to the sudden influx of tourists, who would probably spend a grand total of two hours in Vila before returning to their mobile island. Cruise ship patrons are a frequent sight in Vila, and they always seem excited to be visiting the city, but, quite honestly, I can’t imagine why. Vila has all the charm of a Florida retirement community, except with fewer good restaurants. One group of tourists, noticing my large collection of shopping bags and mistaking me for a ship passenger, asked me where the good shopping was. “Well that depends on what you’re looking for,” I replied “if you’re looking for some quality Tupperware, I’d try the store down the street. There’s a place just at the end of the block to the right with a good selection of machetes, but if you’re in the market for a bucket you’re gonna want to go to the store at the top of the hill.” I can’t decide whether it’s a good sign or not that I’m finding it increasingly easier to have a pleasant conversation with the Ni-Vans in Vila than with the tourists. Given the large number of white people to be found in the city, it’s a nice feeling to almost always be picked out as, and well-regarded as, Peace Corps by the locals. People on the street we’ve never seen before stop to strike up conversations, shop keepers offer us discounts. Villagers from Mangaliliu in town for the day shout greetings from passing buses and dash across busy streets to shake hands.
After enjoying my new found celebrity, I called it a day and headed back to the Peace Corps Office to use that marvel of modern technology, the internet. I’d put off a lot of my shopping and packing in favor to goofing off, and so I had a busy Monday slated for the next day.
We’d finished class last week and all we were left with now to do was wrap up some formalities. Chief among these was the establishment of our bank accounts so we could be paid during our service. Peace Corps had arranged for each of us to have a National Bank of Vanuatu (NBV) account opened into which they could deposit our living allowance. NBV’s slogan, “Vanuatu’s Own Bank” to me, is vaguely reminiscent of that “very first” line of toys you used to see at Toys-R-Us, as in “My Very First Camera” or “My Very First Microwave,” and seems to convey a sense of wonder and surprise that they were actually able to pull this bank endeavor off. There was, of course, a lot of paperwork to fill out, but Peace Corps had kindly done most of it for us, including marking down Texas as my “Home Village” and USA as my “Home Island.”
After we were done with banking, we had language proficiency interviews to ensure that we had successfully mastered the 25 words which make up the entirety of Bislama’s vocabulary. We were then free to participate in Vanuatu’s official national pastime: sitting around. By this point, we’d played so many rounds of Hearts, Spades, Poker, and even Bridge that the mere sight of a deck of cards was enough to induce a gagging reflex. Conversation too was somewhat tiresome, as it seemed we’d already talked into oblivion every conceivable topic of discussion. I wondered if this was how the ancient Greeks felt, so engulfed by boredom that they had no choice but to philosophize wildly about whether or not the world was just a bunch of dancing shadows on a cave wall.
On Tuesday we had exit interviews with our country director, preceded and followed by more sitting around. Having no particular concerns about my site, my interview was over quickly and the rest of the day was spent doing nothing in particular. Wednesday followed in similar fashion and a general feeling of sadness had fallen over the group as we knew we were approaching our last days together.
Thursday I awoke to my host brother banging on my window and ordering me to breakfast. I stepped outside to see a vast collection of biscuits (in the British sense of the word), bread, cakes, and fruit dotting the table and most of my extended host family waiting expectantly. Before I could say anything, I was doused in talcum powder, wrapped in various colorful pieces of cloth and drenched with spray-on deodorant. I’d witnessed a similar scene at the wedding I’d gone to in Malekula, and I’m still not entirely sure what significance of it is. I’ve asked several people about it and have simply been informed that it’s a custom. I, however, have a hard time picturing the ancient cannibals of Vanuatu’s history, adorned only in penis sheaths, celebrating special occasions by slathering themselves in baby powder and aerosol deodorant. But maybe my imagination is simply lacking.
After breakfast I was presented with my swearing-in garb, which was a wonderful mismatch of two of Vanuatu’s customs. In lieu of pants I was given a woven grass mat, about 6-inches wide and not *quite* long enough to completely wrap around my waist. With this, I was to wear an island shirt, the official costume of Vanuatu, being a completely preposterous Hawaiian-type shirt, heavy on the bright pink and yellow. Vanuatu simply abounds with shirts made with such similar fabric; in fact it’s really the only fabric that’s available for purchase on the islands. I’m not really sure how the retailers go about ordering these fabrics from the mainland (“Hello, I’d like a thousand rolls of your most ridiculous cloth please.”), or why they don’t have them ship over some, say, plain white fabric while they’re at it, but there you go. Unfortunately, as I was informed later in the day, not enough of the host families had gotten around to weaving grass mats for their volunteers and the uniform was changed to island shirts and pants, so we ended up looking merely silly as opposed to outright absurd.
Our swearing-in ceremony started out with water dancers from The Banks Islands (a group of outer islands in Vanuatu that are remote, even by Vanuatu’s standards), which was probably one of the most amazing things I’d seen since coming to country. A group of about ten women wandered out into the ocean and proceeded to use it as an instrument. Using their hands to manipulate and slap the water, they were able to create astonishingly loud and hauntingly eerie music. The whole thing had an inexplicably magical feel to it and I honestly expected that at any moment a huge sea monster would come crawling out of the depths and begin undulating in time with the dancers.
After the performance, the speeches began. In such a laid-back country, I find it odd how seriously everyone takes speeches. There we were sitting on the beach, in front of a stage constructed entirely out coconut-tree products, sheltered from the rain by a series of ragged traps flapping wildly in the wind, wearing outfits best suited for a beach-themed college frat party, and listening to a speaker delivering a speech with all the solemnity of the Pope addressing a congregation at St. Peter’s. After a few hours of this, we all shared a shell of kava (no ceremony is complete without kava), and ate. I’d been hoping that our swearing-in was a big enough event to warrant the roasting of another pig, but apparently it was not, so I had to make due with chicken. After dinner the party began. It’s something of a tradition in Peace Corps Vanuatu that the night of swearing-in the volunteers stay up absurdly late dancing and making fools of themselves while all the villagers watch and laugh at us. It being Vanuatu (and due to the fact that most of us had already sent our stuff to Vila in preparation for moving out), we only had one CD at our disposal, which we played on infinite loop for most of the night. In addition to a few numbers that those Princeton people in the audience would have recognized from The Street, the CD included a couple gems from a band called Blue Lagoon, which I suggest checking out as they’re quite fantastically bad and have kind of become the theme music of our service. All in all, it was a fun time but, for reasons that I will not go into, I did not stay for the whole party. I do know, however, that when I was woken up at 6am the next day, the music was still playing.
Dazed and half asleep, I stumbled down to the community center for the last time for our final goodbye to the village of Mangaliliu. My fellow volunteers soon emerged in similar condition and we all stood by while the population of the village lined up to bid us farewell. Goodbyes in Vanuatu are always tearful and the scene probably could have been confused with a funeral. One by one, each of us walked down the line and was tearfully hugged and kissed by each of the villagers. Afterwards, we all boarded buses and were driven to Vila. Nominally, the plan was for us to get into Vila early in the morning so that we could have time to start shopping in preparation for site. However, due the events of the previous night, most of us were in no condition to do anything except collapse on the floor and go to sleep. This I did until lunchtime, when I ventured down to town with McKenzie and Laura, who were to come with me to Malekula, to get a burrito and a beer-making kit, which, I decided was my top priority. The burrito was delicious, as always, and I bought the store out of all their beer-making supplies.
That night we decided to celebrate our first night in Vila by going to Vanuatu’s only sushi restaurant. This turned out to be a bad call as, like everything else in Vila, sushi was ridiculously expensive and I ended up dropping around $30 for a meal that left me aching to go to Burger King afterwards in order to get something more filling. Saturday I had planned to do some shopping, but this was quickly abandoned in favor of going to Iririkki, an island resort, to go swimming and buy mixed drinks. I’d heard rumors that the resort also sported a game room with both foosball and ping-pong, and I longed for some quality fooz Princeton style. Unfortunately the game room was a trifle disappointing as the foosball table was apparently built with midgets in mind, being about two feet tall, and thus forcing you to squat in order to play. The humidity had gotten to the ping-pong balls as well, which bounced about as well as an over-ripe tomato.
Sunday I tried to make up for my laziness the previous day by browsing Vila’s plethora of Chinese shops (the only stores in Vila which, sometimes, are open on Sundays). Fortunately, a cruise ship had just come in, and so most of the stores were open to cater to the sudden influx of tourists, who would probably spend a grand total of two hours in Vila before returning to their mobile island. Cruise ship patrons are a frequent sight in Vila, and they always seem excited to be visiting the city, but, quite honestly, I can’t imagine why. Vila has all the charm of a Florida retirement community, except with fewer good restaurants. One group of tourists, noticing my large collection of shopping bags and mistaking me for a ship passenger, asked me where the good shopping was. “Well that depends on what you’re looking for,” I replied “if you’re looking for some quality Tupperware, I’d try the store down the street. There’s a place just at the end of the block to the right with a good selection of machetes, but if you’re in the market for a bucket you’re gonna want to go to the store at the top of the hill.” I can’t decide whether it’s a good sign or not that I’m finding it increasingly easier to have a pleasant conversation with the Ni-Vans in Vila than with the tourists. Given the large number of white people to be found in the city, it’s a nice feeling to almost always be picked out as, and well-regarded as, Peace Corps by the locals. People on the street we’ve never seen before stop to strike up conversations, shop keepers offer us discounts. Villagers from Mangaliliu in town for the day shout greetings from passing buses and dash across busy streets to shake hands.
After enjoying my new found celebrity, I called it a day and headed back to the Peace Corps Office to use that marvel of modern technology, the internet. I’d put off a lot of my shopping and packing in favor to goofing off, and so I had a busy Monday slated for the next day.
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