I woke up on what was supposed to be Christmas Eve to a day that felt less like Christmas Eve than any other I’d ever experienced. It was sweaty and hot and drizzly and more or less all-around miserable. I’d stayed in Lakatoro the previous night and so was awakened at around six in the morning to the sound of Feliz Navidad being blasted full force from the store about a half-mile away. After breakfast, McKenzie and I decided to head over to the guest house in order to use the internet to send holiday greetings to various loved ones. Living in a country that closes down on Sundays, I reasonably expected that the city would be dead of Christmas Eve, with most people settling in for a nice long church session followed by the making and eating of lap-lap. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Upon exiting the house, we were greeted with what must have been most of the island of Malekula walking up and down the strip (the one road in town). Those lucky enough to have trucks were already drunk and driving petal-to-the-metal, swerving their way through the hoards of pedestrians like Frogger in reverse. All the stores were open for business and most of them were sporting large speaker systems cranking out high-voltage Christmas music. The two of us wandered down the hot, dusty (yes, I know I said it was drizzly, but for some reason this doesn’t seem to reduce the amount of dust in the air) road bordered by coconut plantations, pausing occasionally to use our shirts to wipe the sweat out of our eyes, listening to the cacophony of melded-together Christmas carols, and wondering just how many lives are claimed by wildly speeding trucks during each holiday season.
Having accomplished our mission of using the internet, we returned to McKenzie’s house. We were both wide-eyed, shell-shocked, dripping with sweat, and about ready to die of heat exhaustion. We cowered in front of an electric fan drinking water by the bucketful for a good half hour before we were able to move again. At this point we had a problem. We had arranged to eat dinner with McKenzie’s host family that evening, and had promised to bring a pumpkin pie. This required making a pumpkin pie, which in turn required both cinnamon and flour, neither of which were in our possession. Slowly the realization dawned that we would need to make a second expedition to the LTC to purchase said ingredients. Gritting our teeth, we managed the walk unscathed but were immediately greeted by a much greater challenge. The LTC, which is about the size of your average Walgreens, and usually contains only one or two people at a time, thus making it seem even bigger and emptier, was wall-to-wall with people. The building not big enough to contain them all, they spilled out into the street like grains of rice out of a ruptured bag of rice. Elbowing our way through the crowd, as one might do to get a better look at a concert; we worked out way into the store, only to discover that doing so was a grave mistake. The temperature inside easily exceeded that of the surface of the sun. I suddenly felt myself qualified to accurately describe the nature of the seventh circle of hell and wondered what sort of cardinal sins I had committed in order to deserve such a fate. Imbued with a new purpose: getting the hell out of the LTC as soon as humanly possible, I elbowed my way to the spice shelf, only to discover that there was, in fact, no cinnamon to be found. Giving it up for lost, I started making my way towards the flour, but was brought pause by one of the items on sale, a special for the holiday season. It was entitled the “Papa’s Package” and contained two liters of whisky, two small bottles of rum, three bottled, pre-mixed, rum-and-coke drinks (yes, they exist here and, yes, they are disgusting), and a can of coke. Written underneath the price was the friendly reminder: “Don’t Beat Mama!”
I was still trying to get to the flour when McKenzie tapped me on the shoulder. I turned to see that her face was ghastly white and had an expression of absolute horror. “Let’s get the hell out of here. Now.” She said. I nodded agreement. We began pushing our way back towards the exit and emerged, several minutes later into the stiflingly hot and humid outside air, which now seemed sweetly cool and refreshing, gasping like we’d almost drowned. Fortunately we were able to locate cinnamon and flour at one of the smaller (and less crowded) stores (don’t know why we didn’t try that first but, hey, it makes for a good story) and returned to the house both agreeing that the outside world is a very scary and terrible place and that it really wouldn’t be so bad to spend the rest of our lives indoors with lots of air conditioning.
The Ni-Van Christmas Eve dinner was a tad lackluster, especially given the amount of hype the holidays in Vanuatu were always described with. In fact, they basically ate exactly the same thing they always eat (lots of rice topped with a small amount of something that’s not rice). Dinner completed, I headed back to Tautu to spend Christmas Day with my host family. Upon arrival I discovered that my family also was spending Christmas Eve doing exactly what they always do, which is drinking kava.
Christmas morning I was woken up early again, this time by my host family informing me that we were heading to another village for Christmas lunch. Still half-asleep, I piled into the back of a truck and we headed south. Following the trend from Christmas Eve, nothing particularly special was done for Christmas, aside from the fact that we were spending the morning in a different village. Around 1pm the truck returned to take us back to Tautu. On the way, however, we had to stop for gas which, in Vanuatu is an all-afternoon affair. We pulled up to a village store and waited around expectantly for someone to notice us. Meanwhile, most of the passengers disembarked to smoke cigarettes. After about ten minutes, it became apparent that the waiting to be notice strategy wasn’t panning out, and so the driver took a more proactive approach by shouting at passing villagers and asking them where the guy who sells the gasoline was. Most of them muttered something about going to look for him and the wandered off, never to return. About twenty minutes after pulling up, someone finally emerged to take our money and tell us to drive around to another part of the village to wait for gas. We waited in our new location for another while before someone came out of a house, unlocked a shed, and started filling up 2-liter glass bottles with gasoline to dump into the truck. Unfortunately, they only had two such bottles, and so the actual filling up process took a good half-hour. We finally drove off, probably about an hour and a half after arriving, and I considered that fact that if Vanuatu had any such thing as an SUV, filling up its tank could easily be a week-long project. All in all, however, Christmas in Vanuatu was a quite affair, and left me somewhat disappointed and wondering if maybe I’d missed something and that Christmas was really the following day.
Thursday I did receive a late Christmas present, in the form of a house. I’d been waiting for about a month for a teacher (who’d been re-assigned) to move out of my house and it was becoming increasingly obvious to me that he had no intentions of leaving. Up to this point, I’d been living with my host family. Now, don’t get me wrong, my host family is awesome and I totally lucked out on being assigned to them, but a lot of the things I’d been planning on doing to occupy my time (building furniture, cooking, etc) sort of required a house as a pre-requisite. Also, just having some place to retreat to whenever you get overwhelmed is crucial to preserving sanity. At any rate, it seems the village had also given up on the teacher ever moving out, because I was assigned a new house in the center of the village. While not quite as nice as the house I was supposed to get by the school, it did have the advantage of being a whopping six feet from the ocean, meaning a pleasant breeze to keep the place tolerable during the afternoon. The house is half “custom” and half “permanent”, meaning it has a cement foundation and lower wall, but the upper walls are woven bamboo and the roof is thatch. I was happy for the cement floor, as it significantly cuts down on the number of 8-inch long killer centipedes over the more common coral covered by woven mat.
Thursday and Friday I spent moving in, which proved to be spectacularly difficult in a country completely devoid of furniture. Having to make do with organized little piles on the floor and things hung by nails driven into the woodwork, I tried my best to end my three month long spate of living out of a suitcase. Another one of the pluses of finally unpacking was that I got to get a good laugh in at myself at all the stuff that I’d brought that seemed so important when I was packing in the states, but now seemed downright silly: my large collection of collared shirts, for example.
Thought the week, volunteers from all over Malekula had been trickling into the greater Lakatoro area in preparation for New Years and so Saturday and Sunday were spent at the beach with our now large collection of guests.
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