Life in the Ring of Fire Part 16: Visitors

On Monday I followed through on a promise I made to myself to try my hand at cooking some food using local ingredients. In pursuit of this goal, I headed to the market, an open-air farmer’s market type affair in Lakatoro. For posterity, I picked up a couple pineapples (I’ve probably eaten more pineapple in the last month than I have in my entire life put together. That’s a good thing), and browsed the selection. Probably the most intriguing item for sale are the crabs, which are sold live, ten for a dollar, and come tied together with tree bark rope in a sort of long string, so you see people walking around town swinging around this line of ten live crabs. I, however, decided to save the crabs for another day and focus more on the vegetable food group, which I’d been more or less neglecting for some time. Unfortunately, everything in the market comes in one size only: a crap-load. It’s kind of like shopping at Sam’s club, except none of the food is packaged, meaning that it rots in a couple of days and thus seems more geared towards those who have to cook for several battalions of soldiers on a daily basis. Being only one person, however, I could conceive of going through two, or maybe three, limes over a couple days, but definitely not a bag of fifty. Not to be deterred, however, I picked up a bundle of island cabbage (a vegetable vaguely like spinach which grows more or less like a weed around here) and decided that it was a good enough start. Slinging the mass of vegetation (which probably weighed at least fifteen pounds) over my shoulder, I headed back to the house to get some lunch going. The island cabbage turned out somewhat like kale, and was quite good sautéed with soy sauce, garlic, ginger, and chili but, as predicted, I used about 5% of the bundle and the rest promptly rotted the next day and had to be thrown to the pigs that live behind my shower.

Tuesday I got a surprise on my way stumbling back to my house from the bathroom: Ryan shouting at me from a passing truck. Ryan, a volunteer on the island of Epi, had been trying to get to Malekula for the holiday season for so long that I’d more or less forgotten that he was coming. His exploits included: walking probably close to one hundred hours total around his island looking for ships and paddling out to a yacht in an outrigger canoe to try (unsuccessfully) to hitch a ride. Although he’d called me a few days before to tell me that he was supposed to be getting on a ship that was slated to arrive in Malekula today in the morning, I’d more or less just assumed that either the ship wouldn’t come, or that it would be ridiculously late. It was very surreal having him around, as we’d hung out a lot in training and so I felt like I was back in Mangaliliu. The feeling didn’t last long, however, as on Wednesday I packed Ryan off to see Elin in the north of the island.

On Thursday, I’d been recruited by McKenzie to help out some woman who lives near her work with a computer issue. I really had no idea what I was getting into, because computer problems in this country can range anywhere from not knowing how to use the mouse to having cockroaches living on the motherboard. As it turned out, the lady had purchased some bootleg Chinese software in Vila and was having trouble getting it to work. Coincidentally, working with pirated software happens to be something that I’m pretty good at, and so I was able to get her program working and was paid in the form of coconuts. On the way back from McKenzie’s office, we stopped by a little village store and discovered, to our dismay, that they sold Snickers. Even better, they had COLD Snickers that were only a year out of date. Talk about the lap of luxury. We purchased one to split (because they cost $2 a piece) and were then faced with a dilemma: we were planning on stopping for kava on the way home and knew that Snickers would be a good accompaniment, but also knew that there was a good chance that the precious coldness would have long ago leaked away by the time we got to the nakamal. Trying to get the best of both worlds, we proceeded to book it to the nakamal, only to find that they had not finished making the kava yet. We uneasily settled on a bench, the precious Snickers bar placed between us, and began to wait impatiently. About that time, I realized that I really needed to go to the bathroom and so excused myself and went to go ask the owner where the toilet was. He pointed to a steep hill into the bush across the road from the nakamal. I made my way across the road, in the process sinking both my sandals into the huge mud banks on the side of the road, and began climbing into the bush. After about a minute I realized two things: first, that there was absolutely no way that there was a toilet up on top of the hill, and, second, that the very recent rain had turned the entire hill to mud, making it incredibly slippery. After both these realizations sunk in, I decided to cut my losses and head back down. This proved to be a lot more difficult than my ascent had been, and involved a lot of sliding on my and grabbing desperately at tree roots. I re-crossed the road and sat back down next the McKenzie who said, furiously, “Where the hell have you been?! There’s a bathroom right there,” indicating a spot about twenty feet from where we were sitting, “the kava’s ready, and our Snickers is getting warm.” I mentally flicked off the nakamal owner and went to buy a shell. The Snickers was delicious though, and still cold.

On Friday afternoon McKenzie and I had another misadventure at the market. Given how much money we’d spent on beer and wine over the holidays, we had decided that purchasing alcohol on the islands was not a luxury we could afford. Not to be deterred, however, we decided to go local and try our hand at mixing a batch of homebrew. Reminiscent of the prohibition days back in the States, homebrew is homemade alcohol made when people get desperate for any drink with a little kick to it (in Vanuatu desperation arises not from prohibition, but from the fact that no one has any money and bottles of alcohol cost upwards of $30 for half a liter). Now, unfortunately, I wasn’t around to brew moonshine back in the 20’s, so I don’t know how it was done back then, but here on the islands the basic homebrew mix is done with water, sugar, and bread yeast. You then let it sit for about a week and then enjoy. Or, as is much more likely if you were lazy and only used sugar-water and yeast, try in vain to choke it down because it will probably taste like bread-flavored rubbing alcohol. Fortunately, Vanuatu is blessed with a plethora of tropical fruits to spice up the classic homebrew recipe. When I’d come to visit Malekula back in November, my host family had made a batch with coconut water which actually tasted pretty good. At the moment, however, it was pineapple season and given that, in my opinion, pineapples are about a billion times better than coconuts, we’d decided to give pineapple homebrew a shot. With this goal in mind, we wandered down to the market and began purchasing pineapples. After buying about five pineapples, we realized that we hadn’t brought a bag or a box or anything in which to place the pineapples to transport them back to McKenzie’s house. Determined not to make another trip, however, we continued to pile on pineapples until we were both clutching precariously high stacks of the prickly fruits, trying to ignore the fact that all variety of spines were gouging their way into our arms. We struggled back up the hill to McKenzie’s house with our respective burdens of tropical fruit. Once back in the kitchen, we chopped up the pineapples into cubes and boiled them for a while to release the juice. This mixture we dumped, pineapple bits and all, into a large container to ferment. We added cold water, sugar, and yeast and put it in the corner of the house and hoped for the best.

That afternoon Alyssa, who’d heard that Ryan was coming to Malekula and didn’t want to miss out on the party and so requested that I arrange a ticket for her, flew in, which made the weekend seem very much like training as, just like in Mangaliliu, Elin, Ryan, Alyssa, and I spent the weekend mostly lying around and playing the occasional card game.