Life in the Ring of Fire Part 14: New Year's

New Year’s morning was spent sleeping in until 11am, an unheard-of record in Vanuatu. We were expecting a lot of company in Lakatoro to ring in the New Year. In particular, Jack, a volunteer from the south of Malekula, had promised to arrive with a live pig to be eaten that night. Upon waking up at such an unusually late hour, I thought I groggily remembered Jack arriving sometime before and wondered whether or not that was a dream. The reality of the situation was confirmed, however, when I opened the front door and discovered a small pig tied up in a rice bag on the porch. Jack himself appeared a few minutes later and thus we were tasked with the job of carrying the pig to my host family’s house, where my Papa had agreed to roast it for us.

The pig was surprisingly heavy, given how small it looked, and we were sweating profusely by the time we reached the LTC to catch a truck to Tautu. The killing and cooking of a pig is big news in Vanuatu, and we’d become instant celebrities during the walk. I was actually getting kind of concerned that the pig would not in fact be big enough for all the uninvited guests that would, without a doubt, be dropping by in order to mooch some pork (“What’s up, I just wanted to return the machete I borrowed from you the other month. Say, is that a pig that you’re roasting?” etc). The pig was not quite up to making the whole trip to Tautu, as was evident when it expired sometime during the truck ride. This was a mixed blessing: good because it saved us the trouble of killing it, and bad because I was actually kind of looking forward to doing a little guy bonding with my Papa over clubbing a pig to death with a piece of wood. Upon arrival in Tautu, we hung the pig up in a tree with a meat hook and skinned it. This is an important step if you don’t want bits of pig hair in your pork roast, and is done by lighting a dry coconut leaf on fire and using it to char the fur and outer layer of skin. The charred bits can then be easily scraped off with a machete. We then sliced open the pig with said machete and gutted it, driving the many village dogs which had hungrily gathered to watch the proceedings to the verge of madness.

My host uncle has a large stone oven, usually used for baking bread, which we commandeered for the roast. Now, I don’t know about you, but when I think of the word “oven” I generally think of a nice, friendly, contraption with a convenient little knob, thoughtfully labeled with temperature settings, and a little red light (and maybe even a buzzer) that goes off when it’s done preheating. Of course, the seasoned veteran of this country that I am, I’d long ago given up on this notion of an oven as something which exists only in unbelievably futuristic sci-fi movies (a fact which was highlighted when, unbeknownst to me, I purchased a self-lighting gas stove and was so amazed when, the first time I used it, it ignited, sans matches, that I immediately rushed to Lakatoro to breathlessly relate to McKenzie the wonders of this new invention). I have, of course, baked numerous pumpkin pies in this country, and so have become familiar with the Vanuatu-style oven (ie. “Death Trap”): a small metal box with burners in the bottom, which are connected to an external propane tank. To turn the oven on (these ovens have only two settings, on and off, and I’ve found, through a good deal of experience, that the “on” setting generally produces better results), you first open the gas valve, which causes the burners to start releasing highly flammable gases into the small metal enclosure, potentially producing what some scientists like to refer to as a “bomb.” Into this possible explosion-to-be you then stick a lit match, poking it through a small hole in the metal plate that covers the burners, and then trying to flick it in just the right way to ignite the flame. This is the current state-of-the-art in Vanuatu oven technology. My host uncle’s oven, however, is a few generations back on the technology scale, and hails from a time when people used to use the word “forsooth” a lot more frequently and dress up in ridiculous-looking metal outfits to play chicken from horseback using long, pointy wooden poles. It’s essentially a large stone block, about as tall as I am, with a hollowed-out portion in the middle. When you say you’re going to light this oven, you really mean it, as it requires that you first start a raging bonfire inside to heat up the stone. Once the fire dies down, you scrape out the ashes and put in whatever you want to cook.

Into the oven went the pig (you remember the pig? That’s how we got on the whole topic of ovens in the first place) and about half an hour later, the delicious smell of roasting meat was wafting through the village. Although pigs are rather abundant on Malekula, as is evidenced by the two or three I have to chase out of the way every time I want to get to my bathroom, pork is not. While it’s possible to buy beef, chicken and, of course, fish, in nice, pre-butchered, ready-to-cook, packages, the only way to get pork is to kill and dress a pig yourself. I’m not positive, but I think this is a cultural thing. Pigs are a symbol of wealth, and the act of killing a pig shows up again and again in a number of traditional ceremonies. I’m guessing that it’s because of this that the idea of sending your pigs to the slaughterhouse to be butchered is a little unappealing. The result, however, is that getting your hands on some pork to eat is a huge pain in the ass, and boy do I miss it. That night, tearing into a piece of greasy piece of meat and feeling the juicy lard dibble down my lips was the best thing in the world.

After dinner we headed to the wharf, which was conveniently located next to the only store on the island that sells beer after 7pm. When it started getting on towards midnight, we went back to McKenzie’s house, where we’d stockpiled some champagne from Vila for just such an emergency. At 12am, we all toasted and pondered that fact that, at New Year’s 2008, we’d still be in Vanuatu.

New Year’s day, the entire island was hung-over and spending the day sleeping, so we went to the beach to do the same. On Wednesday I discovered I’d become lactose intolerant (or at least not able to stomach milk in non-powdered form) when I purchased and downed a box of milk and spent the rest of the day violently ill. Fortunately, I was adequately recovered the next day, because there was a batch of beer waiting to be bottled. In a rather nice turn of events, it happened to be just after New Year’s, so there was a large plethora of empty bottles lying around the village. Unfortunately, most of them had quickly become homes for spiders, cockroaches and centipedes and so cleaning them out and making them brew-worthy was quite the adventure. Bottling took most of the afternoon and the remainder was taken up by explaining to all the villagers that stopped by my house that, even though the beer was now in bottles, it would still be a month before it would be fit to drink.

Friday McKenzie and I were invited to dinner with the chief of Tautu and after a few shells of kava at my Papa’s, we headed over. As it turned out, we were not just having dinner with the chief but his entire extended family in a big New Year’s get together involving many a lap-lap and live entertainment provided by those present under the age of fourteen. Before anything could start, however, the chief had to show up, and he was still off drinking kava somewhere. About half an hour after our arrival, his truck finally pulled up and he shouted at us out the window: “Come, we’re going to get kava in Norsup.” I looked around at the approximately fifty people waiting patiently to eat and thought that, maybe, making them wait some more so we could make another kava run was a tad rude but, hey, as they say, it’s good to be chief. When dinner did start, it was delicious. The highlight for me was octopus lap-lap which featured probably some of the tenderest octopus I’d ever had. The event lasted well into the night as the kids sang, danced, and put on skits.

The weekend was slow, as only a weekend in Vanuatu could be but, to be quite honest, all the guests coming though had worn me out, as I had been prevented from taking my usual four hour nap in the afternoon, and I was happy to have some quality time to sleep through.