Monday was to be an exciting day, as I was planning to give my first math exam. In order to ensure that my students had even the smallest chance of finishing it during the time allotted, I decided that I couldn’t simply write the test on the blackboard as I usually did for practice problems, as the obsessive border drawing and question copying would easily take the entire hour. Instead, I wrote out a test by hand and decided to have it photocopied. Now, my school has a photocopier which works perfectly, except it’s been out of toner since October and nobody seems particularly interested in purchasing more. The twenty-four hour copy center hasn’t quite made it to Vanuatu, and so getting my test copied turned out to be a bigger trick than I had bargained for. I finally was able to use the copier in the office of the general store, which turned out OK except for the fact that I was charged about fifty cents per page, meaning that giving my test ended up costing me fifteen bucks. Not going to be doing that again.
On Tuesday school was cancelled because of a death in the village and so I took the opportunity to try and make beef jerky. I’d discovered a little while before that beef jerky is probably one of the most effective foods at removing the taste of kava from your mouth after taking a shell. Now, I knew I could just get a fire going outside and hang strips of meat above it and just keep feeding the fire until it was done. I, however, rejected this technique as it required continuous upkeep and thus would make beef jerky production an all day affair. I was shooting more for something which I could set up before I went to bed and then come back to retrieve the finished product in the morning. This meant the construction of a smoker. Unfortunately, I basically lacked any and all materials that one would normally build a smoker out of, namely metal and stone. What I did have, however, was a lot of cloth. Now, the problem with building a smoker out of cloth is that cloth is flammable. But, having no other choice, I decided to go ahead and just hope that my smoking fire would be cool enough not to ignite my smoker. I spent most of the day digging a fire pit, cutting post poles, digging post holes, and by the late afternoon I had a wood and cloth enclosure surrounding a somewhat sunken fire pit. I got a fire going and waited for it to burn down to embers. Then I collected a large pile of green leaves from nearby trees and piled them on top of the embers; an incredibly smoky fire resulted. Bingo. I draped pieces of steak on skewers and hung them over the fire and covered the whole thing with more cloth. It was about then that the embers burned through the pile of leaves and what once was a cool, smoky fire turned into a roaring bonfire. Hacking and coughing and on the verge of passing out from all the smoke, I managed to recover the meat and dismantle most of the smoker before it went up in flame, only loosing one wall in the process. Not to be deterred, however (and being just generally pretty bored), I waited for the fire to die down again and reconstructed the smoker. I gathered another pile of green leaves and tossed them on the fire, this time finishing by draping the whole thing in banana leaves. This seemed to do the trick and I watched the fire happily smoke without flaring up for about an hour and then, deciding I was in the clear, went to bed. I awoke the next morning to find some somewhat passable pieces of beef jerky. The marinade needed some work and they probably needed to smoke a little longer, but the basic idea seemed to be solid. I decided, however, to save improvements for another day.
I only had an hour of class on Wednesday and that afternoon I was informed that there would be no school on Thursday because of a national holiday that I was unaware of. This, combined with the death on Tuesday meant that I wound up teaching only about a quarter of the class I should have that week. Oh well, it’s not like there’s some huge exam at the end of the year that my students need to pass in order to move on to high school or anything.
McKenzie and I spent Thursday, as any holiday should be spent, going to the beach. On the way back we stopped in Norsup for kava. The nakamals in Norsup have a big edge up on the competition because of the fact that they’re right on the ocean, so you can watch the moon rise over the ocean (sorry, no sunsets over the ocean, we’re on the wrong side of the island for that) and see all the Ni-Van who had come over to the mainland for the afternoon paddle their outrigger canoes back out to the many smaller islands just off the coast and thank every god imaginable that you got posted in Peace Corps Vanuatu as opposed to Peace Corps Ukraine.
Friday, February 29, 2008
Life in the Ring of Fire Part 21: Don't Forget to Bring Your Knifes to School
The second week of school saw a significant increase in the number of students in my class. I was now up to a much more reasonable fifteen (the fate of the remaining two students who should be in the class is still unknown), and was starting to get used to the somewhat haphazard nature of the school’s schedule. Anywhere from twenty minutes to an hour of my class time on Mondays and Fridays are taken up by an assembly, where all the school gathers in a tiny classroom and the headmistress recites bible passages about obedience and then lectures the students about the importance of obedience as illustrated by the bible passages. The singing of hymns follows and then a stern lecture about picking up trash around the school and not picking unripe fruit from the school’s trees. I don’t know why they don’t just schedule in the assembly in the regular weekly program, as it happens probably more predictably than class itself. Thursday is work day at the school, which means all kids have to stay for a couple hours after class to help with various chores. Most of these involve yard work, such as pruning the tress, cutting the grass, weeding, etc. Basically all garden work in Vanuatu is done with a machete (including cutting the grass. If you’re ever really bored some day, try cutting your lawn using only a large knife. It’s a treat), and apparently the school doesn’t have enough machetes to go around because on Friday during assembly the headmistress gave a very long talk about how she was sick and tired of students not bringing their machetes to class and could they please try and remember next week because it’s very important that they remember to bring an enormous knife to school on Thursdays.
Thursday was also Valentine’s Day, which I celebrated by eating stewed fruit bat (ie. flying fox – see issue 18 – trust me; a more romantic meal cannot be had). On Fridays I’m done with school at 8:30, which was good because that’s about the time of day that it became miserably hot. I spent a few hours longing for a cold beer and being tormented by the large collection of undrinkable warm brews sitting under my table before deciding that something had to be done. I loaded eight into my laptop back and headed down to the village store, which I knew had a fridge. Ever since I’d arrived, the village had been abuzz with talk about me making beer, but I had yet to unveil it to the general public. I presented a beer a piece to the very pleased shopkeepers at the store, giving them stern instructions to put it in the fridge first and explaining how warm beer tastes awful. Just as planned, they immediately told me that any time I wanted to put a few beers in their fridge to feel free. I told them that it just so happened that I had six other beers in my bag and could I please put them in for a few hours. Mission accomplished. Later that afternoon I had a good time taking down a couple beers with my host father and uncles.
Saturday I was invited to go on a picnic at the beach with my host family. Now, picnics in Vanuatu work a little differently than in the US. In the states you might set out with a basket of food and maybe a cooler and spend most of the day chilling. In Vanuatu, however, you set out with a couple machetes, a spear gun, and maybe a pan and most of the day is spent foraging for food. Fortunately, foraging isn’t that hard in this country and after about twenty minutes we had a large collection of breadfruits and coconuts. Breadfruits are goofy looking little things that sort of resemble small, green basketballs. Now, it wasn’t quite breadfruit season, so the breadfruits weren’t really ripe, so in order to eat them you have to first chuck them in the fire. You let them sit until you can easily stick a reed through them, meaning they’re soft. After you take them out of the fire, you shave off the burnt outside with a bush knife, leaving a goopy ball that looks, feels, and smells amazingly like bread dough. You then beat them with a piece of bamboo until they look like little baguettes. These you cut in half and scrape out the seeds, which can be eaten separately and taste a lot like a slightly undercooked baked potato. You then lay the resulting sheets of breadfruit in a pan and cover them with boiling coconut milk. Serve hot. It sort of tastes like raw dough, but in a good way, and it’s really filling.
The breadfruits, however, were just an appetizer and after we’d finished eating my host papa and I went after the main course. We donned snorkels and masks and my papa grabbed a spear gun and we waded into the ocean. Tautu’s beach isn’t really a beach, per se. There’s a nice white sandy part, conveniently shaded by trees, set back a little ways from the water, but the actual ocean is bordered by jagged rock, quickly transitioning to thick coral formations, making it essentially worthless for swimming, but excellent for snorkeling. I was excited because learning how to spear fish was one of my goals when I first found out I was going to Vanuatu, but as yet I hadn’t had a chance to go. However, since it was my first time, I was given the somewhat lackluster role of “fish holder,” which meant that I was given a piece of wire to tire around my waist so I could strap the fish to myself which my host papa had caught. After watching him shoot fish for a while, however, I was glad that my role was essentially observation, because I was sure that I would have made a royal fool of myself. The spear gun is an unwieldy, approximately five foot long, monstrosity that is basically a glorified bow-and-arrow. It’s actually too long and heavy to hold like a gun out of the water, as it relies on the buoyancy of the water to provide most of the support. The firing mechanism is a thick piece of elastic rope that you have to cock back after each shot. The harpoon is a long, thin, pole, slightly longer than the gun itself and about the thickness of an extension chord. It’s attached to the gun with fishing line. When you fire, the elastic propels the harpoon forward fast enough to punch straight through the bodies of most medium-size fish. You better hope you hit something, however, because reloading is a huge pain, as you have to pull in the fishing line, stretch the elastic to about four times its un-stretched length, and reset the harpoon, all while trying to stay afloat in the ocean. This fact, combined with the relatively short range of the spear gun (really only a few feet), mean that you can’t just float on top of the water and fire indiscriminately on the fish below; you really want to be essentially touching the fish with the gun before you pull the trigger. The process, as executed by my host papa, went something like this: first, swim around until you find a fish that doesn’t immediately swim away just because you’re overhead. Once you find a fish that’s not too easily startled, you take a deep breath and slowly dive down to its depth. Then, hanging on to rocks and coral, you slowly crawl towards it until you’re at point-blank range, at which point you take the shot. If the fish startles and swims off or you run out of breath, you’re out of luck. I later found out that the afternoon is generally a pretty bad time to go spear fishing, as fish are active and scare easily. Night is apparently the best time to go, as many fish just kind of sit around and make for easy targets. Despite this, however, we did get ourselves a couple of fish. As an added bonus, we saw a shark (which swam off before we could spear it, sadly), a huge ray, and an enormous eel which, my host papa warned me, is dangerous when you’re spear fishing as it is attracted to the blood of the caught fish and will sometimes bite you in order to get to it. As the guy with all the dead fish strapped to him, I felt a little worried.
The few fish we caught were combined with a collection of small fish caught with nets in the shallows and fried up for the second course, rounding out a quite fun Saturday picnic at the beach, island style.
Thursday was also Valentine’s Day, which I celebrated by eating stewed fruit bat (ie. flying fox – see issue 18 – trust me; a more romantic meal cannot be had). On Fridays I’m done with school at 8:30, which was good because that’s about the time of day that it became miserably hot. I spent a few hours longing for a cold beer and being tormented by the large collection of undrinkable warm brews sitting under my table before deciding that something had to be done. I loaded eight into my laptop back and headed down to the village store, which I knew had a fridge. Ever since I’d arrived, the village had been abuzz with talk about me making beer, but I had yet to unveil it to the general public. I presented a beer a piece to the very pleased shopkeepers at the store, giving them stern instructions to put it in the fridge first and explaining how warm beer tastes awful. Just as planned, they immediately told me that any time I wanted to put a few beers in their fridge to feel free. I told them that it just so happened that I had six other beers in my bag and could I please put them in for a few hours. Mission accomplished. Later that afternoon I had a good time taking down a couple beers with my host father and uncles.
Saturday I was invited to go on a picnic at the beach with my host family. Now, picnics in Vanuatu work a little differently than in the US. In the states you might set out with a basket of food and maybe a cooler and spend most of the day chilling. In Vanuatu, however, you set out with a couple machetes, a spear gun, and maybe a pan and most of the day is spent foraging for food. Fortunately, foraging isn’t that hard in this country and after about twenty minutes we had a large collection of breadfruits and coconuts. Breadfruits are goofy looking little things that sort of resemble small, green basketballs. Now, it wasn’t quite breadfruit season, so the breadfruits weren’t really ripe, so in order to eat them you have to first chuck them in the fire. You let them sit until you can easily stick a reed through them, meaning they’re soft. After you take them out of the fire, you shave off the burnt outside with a bush knife, leaving a goopy ball that looks, feels, and smells amazingly like bread dough. You then beat them with a piece of bamboo until they look like little baguettes. These you cut in half and scrape out the seeds, which can be eaten separately and taste a lot like a slightly undercooked baked potato. You then lay the resulting sheets of breadfruit in a pan and cover them with boiling coconut milk. Serve hot. It sort of tastes like raw dough, but in a good way, and it’s really filling.
The breadfruits, however, were just an appetizer and after we’d finished eating my host papa and I went after the main course. We donned snorkels and masks and my papa grabbed a spear gun and we waded into the ocean. Tautu’s beach isn’t really a beach, per se. There’s a nice white sandy part, conveniently shaded by trees, set back a little ways from the water, but the actual ocean is bordered by jagged rock, quickly transitioning to thick coral formations, making it essentially worthless for swimming, but excellent for snorkeling. I was excited because learning how to spear fish was one of my goals when I first found out I was going to Vanuatu, but as yet I hadn’t had a chance to go. However, since it was my first time, I was given the somewhat lackluster role of “fish holder,” which meant that I was given a piece of wire to tire around my waist so I could strap the fish to myself which my host papa had caught. After watching him shoot fish for a while, however, I was glad that my role was essentially observation, because I was sure that I would have made a royal fool of myself. The spear gun is an unwieldy, approximately five foot long, monstrosity that is basically a glorified bow-and-arrow. It’s actually too long and heavy to hold like a gun out of the water, as it relies on the buoyancy of the water to provide most of the support. The firing mechanism is a thick piece of elastic rope that you have to cock back after each shot. The harpoon is a long, thin, pole, slightly longer than the gun itself and about the thickness of an extension chord. It’s attached to the gun with fishing line. When you fire, the elastic propels the harpoon forward fast enough to punch straight through the bodies of most medium-size fish. You better hope you hit something, however, because reloading is a huge pain, as you have to pull in the fishing line, stretch the elastic to about four times its un-stretched length, and reset the harpoon, all while trying to stay afloat in the ocean. This fact, combined with the relatively short range of the spear gun (really only a few feet), mean that you can’t just float on top of the water and fire indiscriminately on the fish below; you really want to be essentially touching the fish with the gun before you pull the trigger. The process, as executed by my host papa, went something like this: first, swim around until you find a fish that doesn’t immediately swim away just because you’re overhead. Once you find a fish that’s not too easily startled, you take a deep breath and slowly dive down to its depth. Then, hanging on to rocks and coral, you slowly crawl towards it until you’re at point-blank range, at which point you take the shot. If the fish startles and swims off or you run out of breath, you’re out of luck. I later found out that the afternoon is generally a pretty bad time to go spear fishing, as fish are active and scare easily. Night is apparently the best time to go, as many fish just kind of sit around and make for easy targets. Despite this, however, we did get ourselves a couple of fish. As an added bonus, we saw a shark (which swam off before we could spear it, sadly), a huge ray, and an enormous eel which, my host papa warned me, is dangerous when you’re spear fishing as it is attracted to the blood of the caught fish and will sometimes bite you in order to get to it. As the guy with all the dead fish strapped to him, I felt a little worried.
The few fish we caught were combined with a collection of small fish caught with nets in the shallows and fried up for the second course, rounding out a quite fun Saturday picnic at the beach, island style.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Life in the Ring of Fire Part 20: Back to School
Monday I awoke to discover a potential downside to my new house: the fact that it’s located about twenty feet from the school’s bell. Now, a bell in Vanuatu is usually an old, empty compressed gas canister that some hapless sucker has to bang on with a piece of metal (I don’t know where all these gas canisters come from, I have yet to see a full, functioning one being used for its intended purpose). It makes a terrifically horrendous noise that is audible all throughout the village, but is downright painful if you happen to be in the immediate vicinity, such as at my house. The first bell rings at 6:30 every morning to wake up all the teachers and boarders, and I have yet to sleep past that hour on a school day (so I guess it works), even when I don’t have to teach class until the afternoon.
The first day of school, of course, started late as many parents had put off the task of registering their children until then, so the office was swamped with families signing their kids up for school. We didn’t actually get started until around ten in the morning (we’re supposed to start at 7:30), at which point we’d already missed my one class for the day, which runs from 7:30-9:30. This turned out to be irrelevant, however, as I was the only eighth grade teacher than bothered to show up, and so I got the class for the whole rest of the day. This was far more time than I had prepared for, and I also felt a little uncomfortable jumping into the material when my class, which is supposed to have 17 kids, totaled a whopping six that day. Having nothing really else do to, I reviewed some topics from the previous year and assigned some class work (ie. busy work, but what else was I going to do?) and let them out early. The following day was a repeat of the first, except my class size made it up to ten. I also made an interesting discovery, which is that the presence of a teacher is more or less irrelevant to ensuring classroom discipline. Unlike at the school I’d observed in Vila, where complete chaos reigned despite the presence of a teacher, or even in the US where a teacher ducking out of a classroom results in an instant party, the students at my school obediently sat at their desks and faced forward for hours while the English teacher failed to show up. They are also masters of pretending to work. No matter how many boring day jobs you’ve had where you’ve needed to learn to quickly minimize minesweeper and pull up a random spreadsheet whenever you boss walks by, you still have nothing on these kids. I’ll put some questions on the board, which require the writing of approximately ten characters to answer (ie. three yes or no questions) and could be completed in about a minute even by those with no clue about what they’re doing, and watch the class descend into furious scribbling and frantic passing back and forth of various straight edges, rulers, compasses, protractors, erasers, and white out. I’m betting I could probably let such activity go on indefinitely without a decrease in the apparent busy-ness. “What the hell are you guys doing?!” I want to shout. Finally, I throw in the towel and ask them to just turn in what they have, even if they’re not finished, and watch the whole class in unison get up to hand in their papers, every one of the complete. They are also ridiculously neat to well past a fault. Every assignment that gets turned into me is complete with perfectly straight borders (if I gave them enough time I’d probably get papers with borders decorated by flowers and vines and tiny cherubim and looking like a hand-copied bible from the twelfth century). All questions written on the board are copied down, word for word. The figures I draw are identically reproduced, crooked lines, sloppy angles and all (because, of course, I really couldn’t care less about what my figures look like, as long as they get the point across). Everything is also color-coded, with numbers appearing in black, symbols (such as the addition sign) in blue, and text in red. Every assignment I give I stress that such things are unnecessary and to please focus on the math, but secretly I’m afraid that if I do succeed in channeling such tireless and patient perfectionism into something more useful, they’ll quickly discover how to genetically engineer themselves a race of obedient super-mutants and take over the world.
Starting Wednesday most of the other teachers and students finally showed up, which made my days a lot easier as I no longer had to make up work for my half-class to do to cover for the absence of all the other teachers. However, come Friday, I was still a very tired, frazzled, and humbled man. It was actually kind of nice to have the coming of the weekend mean something aside from the fact that the bank would be closed, as it gave a lot more motivation to actually do something fun as opposed to just sitting around, and so McKenzie and I came up with an excuse to have a party. Louis, a friend of ours from Bolivia who had been hired to oversee the construction on cell towers all over the island, had been considering allowing his contract to lapse and heading home at the end of February. Thus, a goodbye party was in order (he actually decided to stay on until May or June, but we weren’t about to let that stop us from having a party). Laura and Elin came down for the occasion and we decided to pull out all the stops as far as menu was concerned: chips and guacamole (a real pain in the ass in Vanuatu as you have to first make the tortillas and then fry them to make tortilla chips) to start, followed by sushi, then carne guisada, then pepper steak and, finally, cake. Of course, everything was to be accompanied by homemade beer. Sushi turned out to be the biggest obstacle (those sushi chefs make it look so easy). We’d elected to go with tuna and California rolls, thus requiring cucumber, avocado, fresh tuna, and crap, basically the only sushi-worthy ingredients available in the country. Fresh tuna’s always easy to come by in a country where fish that’s more than a few hours old is considered rotten, and the market in Lakatoro sells crabs tied up with pandanas leaves at a dollar for twelve. However, crabs, as it turns out, are really squirrelly and not easy convinced to climb into a pot of boiling water to be cooked. This I found out the hard way when I released the first crab from his bonds and was promptly bitten, dropped the crab, and watched him wedge himself behind the oven. I spent a good couple minutes prying him out with a machete and the following ten minutes chasing him around McKenzie’s house with said machete. All the remaining crabs were dumped into the pot without being untied.
Most of Friday and all of Saturday were spent cooking, which was OK as the only other thing we had planned for that weekend was the eating of the food we were cooking, and the party, on Saturday night, was a huge success. There ended up being just seven of us: myself, McKenzie, Elin, Laura, Louis, and two of Louis’ colleagues, and WAY too much food and beer. However, this was the first time any of us had had actual food or actual beer in several months, so we weren’t about to let it go to waste and thus were up until about four in the morning polishing everything off.
On Sunday we had to take Elin to the hospital, as she’d developed some sort of painful eye infection. It was my first trip to the hospital, but my hopes weren’t terribly high as I knew from word of mouth that the nurses tended to only make one of two diagnoses: either malaria or a boil, and generally prescribed amoxicillin for both (questionably helpful for a boil, completely useless for malaria). The only reason we had decided to go was at the advice of Peace Corps’ nurse, who had heard that they might be able to perform some sort of test. Plus, it was on the way to the beach. Louis picked us up around noon, when we finally stumbled out of bed, and brought with him the remainder of the beers from the pervious night, which we promptly dug into (remember, no open container laws, or drinking while driving laws, or, really, any laws at all). We pulled up to the hospital and I was voted the most medically knowledgeable (not really sure why) and thus given the job of taking Elin in and trying to explain to the staff why she had neither malaria nor a boil in her eye. I left my half-finished beer in the car, so as to appear a more qualified medical authority, and the two of us walked into a small room occupied by two nurses. We were taken into an adjoining room, which looked kind of like something you might see playing the part of a World War II military hospital in a movie, where one of the nurses looked underneath Elin’s eyelids to check for boils. Finding none, he poked around the piles of medical supplies for a while and then wandered off muttering something about finding a flashlight. About five minutes later he returned, without a flashlight, stared into Elin’s eye again, and gave us a bottle of eye drops and a bag of antihistamine pills. I asked about the test our nurse had suggested and he told us that the guy who knows how to do it wouldn’t be in until the following week. I made a mental note to myself to try and avoid future trips to the hospital and then called back our nurse, who, when I related the events at the hospital, put Elin on the next flight to Vila.
The first day of school, of course, started late as many parents had put off the task of registering their children until then, so the office was swamped with families signing their kids up for school. We didn’t actually get started until around ten in the morning (we’re supposed to start at 7:30), at which point we’d already missed my one class for the day, which runs from 7:30-9:30. This turned out to be irrelevant, however, as I was the only eighth grade teacher than bothered to show up, and so I got the class for the whole rest of the day. This was far more time than I had prepared for, and I also felt a little uncomfortable jumping into the material when my class, which is supposed to have 17 kids, totaled a whopping six that day. Having nothing really else do to, I reviewed some topics from the previous year and assigned some class work (ie. busy work, but what else was I going to do?) and let them out early. The following day was a repeat of the first, except my class size made it up to ten. I also made an interesting discovery, which is that the presence of a teacher is more or less irrelevant to ensuring classroom discipline. Unlike at the school I’d observed in Vila, where complete chaos reigned despite the presence of a teacher, or even in the US where a teacher ducking out of a classroom results in an instant party, the students at my school obediently sat at their desks and faced forward for hours while the English teacher failed to show up. They are also masters of pretending to work. No matter how many boring day jobs you’ve had where you’ve needed to learn to quickly minimize minesweeper and pull up a random spreadsheet whenever you boss walks by, you still have nothing on these kids. I’ll put some questions on the board, which require the writing of approximately ten characters to answer (ie. three yes or no questions) and could be completed in about a minute even by those with no clue about what they’re doing, and watch the class descend into furious scribbling and frantic passing back and forth of various straight edges, rulers, compasses, protractors, erasers, and white out. I’m betting I could probably let such activity go on indefinitely without a decrease in the apparent busy-ness. “What the hell are you guys doing?!” I want to shout. Finally, I throw in the towel and ask them to just turn in what they have, even if they’re not finished, and watch the whole class in unison get up to hand in their papers, every one of the complete. They are also ridiculously neat to well past a fault. Every assignment that gets turned into me is complete with perfectly straight borders (if I gave them enough time I’d probably get papers with borders decorated by flowers and vines and tiny cherubim and looking like a hand-copied bible from the twelfth century). All questions written on the board are copied down, word for word. The figures I draw are identically reproduced, crooked lines, sloppy angles and all (because, of course, I really couldn’t care less about what my figures look like, as long as they get the point across). Everything is also color-coded, with numbers appearing in black, symbols (such as the addition sign) in blue, and text in red. Every assignment I give I stress that such things are unnecessary and to please focus on the math, but secretly I’m afraid that if I do succeed in channeling such tireless and patient perfectionism into something more useful, they’ll quickly discover how to genetically engineer themselves a race of obedient super-mutants and take over the world.
Starting Wednesday most of the other teachers and students finally showed up, which made my days a lot easier as I no longer had to make up work for my half-class to do to cover for the absence of all the other teachers. However, come Friday, I was still a very tired, frazzled, and humbled man. It was actually kind of nice to have the coming of the weekend mean something aside from the fact that the bank would be closed, as it gave a lot more motivation to actually do something fun as opposed to just sitting around, and so McKenzie and I came up with an excuse to have a party. Louis, a friend of ours from Bolivia who had been hired to oversee the construction on cell towers all over the island, had been considering allowing his contract to lapse and heading home at the end of February. Thus, a goodbye party was in order (he actually decided to stay on until May or June, but we weren’t about to let that stop us from having a party). Laura and Elin came down for the occasion and we decided to pull out all the stops as far as menu was concerned: chips and guacamole (a real pain in the ass in Vanuatu as you have to first make the tortillas and then fry them to make tortilla chips) to start, followed by sushi, then carne guisada, then pepper steak and, finally, cake. Of course, everything was to be accompanied by homemade beer. Sushi turned out to be the biggest obstacle (those sushi chefs make it look so easy). We’d elected to go with tuna and California rolls, thus requiring cucumber, avocado, fresh tuna, and crap, basically the only sushi-worthy ingredients available in the country. Fresh tuna’s always easy to come by in a country where fish that’s more than a few hours old is considered rotten, and the market in Lakatoro sells crabs tied up with pandanas leaves at a dollar for twelve. However, crabs, as it turns out, are really squirrelly and not easy convinced to climb into a pot of boiling water to be cooked. This I found out the hard way when I released the first crab from his bonds and was promptly bitten, dropped the crab, and watched him wedge himself behind the oven. I spent a good couple minutes prying him out with a machete and the following ten minutes chasing him around McKenzie’s house with said machete. All the remaining crabs were dumped into the pot without being untied.
Most of Friday and all of Saturday were spent cooking, which was OK as the only other thing we had planned for that weekend was the eating of the food we were cooking, and the party, on Saturday night, was a huge success. There ended up being just seven of us: myself, McKenzie, Elin, Laura, Louis, and two of Louis’ colleagues, and WAY too much food and beer. However, this was the first time any of us had had actual food or actual beer in several months, so we weren’t about to let it go to waste and thus were up until about four in the morning polishing everything off.
On Sunday we had to take Elin to the hospital, as she’d developed some sort of painful eye infection. It was my first trip to the hospital, but my hopes weren’t terribly high as I knew from word of mouth that the nurses tended to only make one of two diagnoses: either malaria or a boil, and generally prescribed amoxicillin for both (questionably helpful for a boil, completely useless for malaria). The only reason we had decided to go was at the advice of Peace Corps’ nurse, who had heard that they might be able to perform some sort of test. Plus, it was on the way to the beach. Louis picked us up around noon, when we finally stumbled out of bed, and brought with him the remainder of the beers from the pervious night, which we promptly dug into (remember, no open container laws, or drinking while driving laws, or, really, any laws at all). We pulled up to the hospital and I was voted the most medically knowledgeable (not really sure why) and thus given the job of taking Elin in and trying to explain to the staff why she had neither malaria nor a boil in her eye. I left my half-finished beer in the car, so as to appear a more qualified medical authority, and the two of us walked into a small room occupied by two nurses. We were taken into an adjoining room, which looked kind of like something you might see playing the part of a World War II military hospital in a movie, where one of the nurses looked underneath Elin’s eyelids to check for boils. Finding none, he poked around the piles of medical supplies for a while and then wandered off muttering something about finding a flashlight. About five minutes later he returned, without a flashlight, stared into Elin’s eye again, and gave us a bottle of eye drops and a bag of antihistamine pills. I asked about the test our nurse had suggested and he told us that the guy who knows how to do it wouldn’t be in until the following week. I made a mental note to myself to try and avoid future trips to the hospital and then called back our nurse, who, when I related the events at the hospital, put Elin on the next flight to Vila.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Life in the Ring of Fire Part 19: Cyclone Gene
Monday, my first day of school, I wandered over to the school grounds to find them completely deserted. No teachers, no students, no anybody. I waited around for a while until the headmistress showed up and opened the office. “No school today?” I asked. No, I was told. Most of the teachers hadn’t shown up yet and most of the students hadn’t even bothered to register. “When are we starting?” I asked. “Maybe next week, maybe the week after.” She gave a shrug as if to convey that it’s just impossible to know these things. I remembered back to a couple months ago when I might have felt, what, shocked? annoyed? dismayed? at such haphazardness regarding something like a school schedule, but that day I barely even blinked. I wandered over to my counterpart’s house, the grade seven and eight math and science teacher, and talked with him for a few minutes about the Christmas holidays. “So, what, exactly, do you want me to do here?” I finally asked. He suggested that I take grade eight math and science. I agreed to this and headed home. It was only a little past eight in the morning and already I had accomplished more than I usually did in a typical week.
Apparently cyclones are sort of a Wednesday thing, because Tuesday afternoon I got a call from Peace Corps informing me that another cyclone, this one named Gene, was due to pass through sometime in the neighborhood of Wednesday morning. I thanked them and headed to the beach to enjoy the gorgeously sunny day. Needless to say, I was beginning to loose some of my faith in the miracle of weather prediction. That night my host papa informed me that I would be moving to a new house, this one on the school grounds, as opposed to Tautu village proper. There had been something of a fuss made about what house I would be living in, with the headmistress telling me that I would be living in the house I was currently residing in, but with my family telling me to move into a house at the school, which was supposed to be nicer because it was a permanent house, which means it is made of concrete and metal as opposed to bamboo and thatch. Personally, I couldn’t have cared less and so about a month ago I had picked up and moved into the bamboo house on the grounds that the permanent house at the school had somebody else living in it. Apparently, however, the teacher who had been occupying it had just moved out and so now my family wanted me to move in. That meant that I had to spend all of Wednesday re-packing all the stuff I had just finished unpacking a few weeks ago. It turned out to be good timing though, as the “cyclone” came through on Wednesday (meaning that it rained a little bit), so I was stuck inside anyway.
The new house, when I moved into it the following day, turned out to be a real fixer-upper. The previous occupant had been, how do you say, a slob. Various species of insect nests lined the walls and rusty rails protruded at random angles from the plaster. Most of the screens were broken, allowing the mosquitoes free-reign of the interior, and the windows were missing most of their panes, which actually turned out to be a good thing as the headmistress didn’t show up to give me the key so I was able to just climb through the window. To top everything off, one of the rooms contained not only a small pile of unidentifiable green slime, but also a maggot-infested rat corpse (which probably died from chewing on all the loose-hanging shoddy electrical wiring). Now, I can sort of understand that if you found a dead rat in your house, say, the day before you were supposed to move out, you might just let it slide and leave it for the next tenant to take care of, but this rat had definitely been dead for at least two weeks, which means that the guy who had the house before me had been living with the thing for at good week and a half, but hey, to each their own. The house did have its upsides, however, the main ones being a nearby bathroom and its own water tank, meaning I no longer would have to haul 40 pound buckets of water all the way across the village when I wanted to cook. As an added perk, however, the house came with a garden sporting a lemon tree, lots of banana trees, a guava tree, three manioc plants, two enormous yams, and a ton of papayas.
On Friday the electric company ran out of gas for their generators so the power for the whole island went out (this also meant the cell network went down as the emergency solar panels for the towers don’t work when it’s been raining too much). This provided a good opportunity for me to redo the electrical wiring in my house, as I can’t shut off the power to my house without taking out the power for the entire school but now, with the power outage, no one was going to miss it. Electrical wiring wasn’t really something that I pictured doing a lot of in the Peace Corps, but as it turns out electricity has wormed its way into most corners of the world at this point and I’ve heard of villages on islands which get visits from ships only yearly and require eight hour walks through dense bush and up volcanoes to reach having generators to power their TVs so they can watch bootleg Chinese DVDs with titles like “Live Free or Die Hard 4” or “Desperado 2” or “The Line King.” I spent a productive morning crawling around in my attic (which, since I don’t have a ladder, I have to jump from a chair in order to grab onto the edge of the hatch to pull myself up in order to access), followed by an equally productive afternoon using my machete to scrape the various spider and hornet nests off my walls. By evening I had successfully lighted the house (or would have, if the power worked) and made one room fit for human habitation.
The rest of the weekend proceeded in similar fashion and by Sunday, I had a mostly livable house. The main component I was missing was furniture (which they’re not big on over here), so it kind of looked like I was living in someone’s garage, but that, I decided, would be a project for another time.
Apparently cyclones are sort of a Wednesday thing, because Tuesday afternoon I got a call from Peace Corps informing me that another cyclone, this one named Gene, was due to pass through sometime in the neighborhood of Wednesday morning. I thanked them and headed to the beach to enjoy the gorgeously sunny day. Needless to say, I was beginning to loose some of my faith in the miracle of weather prediction. That night my host papa informed me that I would be moving to a new house, this one on the school grounds, as opposed to Tautu village proper. There had been something of a fuss made about what house I would be living in, with the headmistress telling me that I would be living in the house I was currently residing in, but with my family telling me to move into a house at the school, which was supposed to be nicer because it was a permanent house, which means it is made of concrete and metal as opposed to bamboo and thatch. Personally, I couldn’t have cared less and so about a month ago I had picked up and moved into the bamboo house on the grounds that the permanent house at the school had somebody else living in it. Apparently, however, the teacher who had been occupying it had just moved out and so now my family wanted me to move in. That meant that I had to spend all of Wednesday re-packing all the stuff I had just finished unpacking a few weeks ago. It turned out to be good timing though, as the “cyclone” came through on Wednesday (meaning that it rained a little bit), so I was stuck inside anyway.
The new house, when I moved into it the following day, turned out to be a real fixer-upper. The previous occupant had been, how do you say, a slob. Various species of insect nests lined the walls and rusty rails protruded at random angles from the plaster. Most of the screens were broken, allowing the mosquitoes free-reign of the interior, and the windows were missing most of their panes, which actually turned out to be a good thing as the headmistress didn’t show up to give me the key so I was able to just climb through the window. To top everything off, one of the rooms contained not only a small pile of unidentifiable green slime, but also a maggot-infested rat corpse (which probably died from chewing on all the loose-hanging shoddy electrical wiring). Now, I can sort of understand that if you found a dead rat in your house, say, the day before you were supposed to move out, you might just let it slide and leave it for the next tenant to take care of, but this rat had definitely been dead for at least two weeks, which means that the guy who had the house before me had been living with the thing for at good week and a half, but hey, to each their own. The house did have its upsides, however, the main ones being a nearby bathroom and its own water tank, meaning I no longer would have to haul 40 pound buckets of water all the way across the village when I wanted to cook. As an added perk, however, the house came with a garden sporting a lemon tree, lots of banana trees, a guava tree, three manioc plants, two enormous yams, and a ton of papayas.
On Friday the electric company ran out of gas for their generators so the power for the whole island went out (this also meant the cell network went down as the emergency solar panels for the towers don’t work when it’s been raining too much). This provided a good opportunity for me to redo the electrical wiring in my house, as I can’t shut off the power to my house without taking out the power for the entire school but now, with the power outage, no one was going to miss it. Electrical wiring wasn’t really something that I pictured doing a lot of in the Peace Corps, but as it turns out electricity has wormed its way into most corners of the world at this point and I’ve heard of villages on islands which get visits from ships only yearly and require eight hour walks through dense bush and up volcanoes to reach having generators to power their TVs so they can watch bootleg Chinese DVDs with titles like “Live Free or Die Hard 4” or “Desperado 2” or “The Line King.” I spent a productive morning crawling around in my attic (which, since I don’t have a ladder, I have to jump from a chair in order to grab onto the edge of the hatch to pull myself up in order to access), followed by an equally productive afternoon using my machete to scrape the various spider and hornet nests off my walls. By evening I had successfully lighted the house (or would have, if the power worked) and made one room fit for human habitation.
The rest of the weekend proceeded in similar fashion and by Sunday, I had a mostly livable house. The main component I was missing was furniture (which they’re not big on over here), so it kind of looked like I was living in someone’s garage, but that, I decided, would be a project for another time.
Life in the Ring of Fire Part 18: When Foxes Fly
Greetings readers,
Sorry for the long delay in getting this entry together. I’m afraid I must admit I’ve been guilty of that cardinal sin of the adventurer: seeing the world as mundane and uninteresting. I’ve sort of fallen into a routine over the past few weeks, and was starting to look at the everyday goings on in Vanuatu as commonplace, boring, and unworthy of writing about. I think I’ve managed to regain at least some of my sense of wonder, and I’ll try not to let it happen again. This does mean I’m a few weeks behind, however, but I shall do my best to catch up as quickly as possible. Keep posted.
I woke up early Monday morning to catch a truck from Lavasal. A few minutes into the ride, it started to rain heavily and those of us in the back pulled a tarp over ourselves to keep dry. The ride up had been an uncomfortable, hour-long affair that had left my butt too sore to sit down, and doing the reverse huddled under a tarp was no better. I did, however, discover that I was becoming quite familiar with the island, a fact that I realized when I was able to tell where we were by picking out landmarks as they flashed by a one square inch opening in the tarp. Eventually, the truck deposited me in Tautu and I said goodbye to Ryan, who was continuing on to the airport to fly back to his island. I made my way into Lakatoro and found McKenzie and the two of us spent a sweltering half and hour outside one of the stores using their phone line to check our email, at the end of which we wondered aloud why we always elected to use the internet in the most horrendously balls-hot part of the afternoon, as opposed to waiting until the evening when things cool off considerably. We then headed back to Tautu for kava with my host-family and an evening more or less exactly the same as every other we’d spent on the island.
On Tuesday I decided I was feeling culinary and so I headed into the market to see what I could scrounge up. I’d recently been inspired to try to put in some more hours at cooking when I ran into a teacher at my school, who I hadn’t seen since I’d visited Malekula in November, who said (translated from Bislama) “Jesus Christ, Daniel, what the hell happened to you? You’re a twig.” Now, this may sounds odd from a guy who most of you know as someone who will flatten an unattended plate of cookies in minutes and will spend hours making his own mozzarella sticks as opposed to putting down the six bucks for the box of them at the store, but food is honestly such a pain in the ass here that it’s easy to let that part of the day sort of slide. Also, it’s an odd feeling for me, having gotten so used to being able to procure any food item at any time I wanted back home in the States, to have my diet entirely dictated by whatever people happen to decide to bring into market to sell on a given day. “Are there any limes today?” I asked. “No,” I was told. “How about peppers?” “No got.” “Tomatoes?” “Sorry.” As it turned out all that had come in that day were the basics, island cabbage, coconuts, cucumbers, and assorted mutant-looking roots, which, together, constitute the four pillars of Vanuatu’s cuisine. I did happen to need coconuts, and so I bought some, telling myself that one out of four isn’t all that bad. When it comes to coconuts in Vanuatu, a little bit of cash goes a long way, and the smallest unit I was able to purchase came with about fifteen coconuts and cost just a little more than a dollar, which was cool. The downside, of course, was that fifteen coconuts weigh a whole hell of a lot and so I was left to stagger my way back to the LTC to catch a truck, contemplating the fact that most of my trips to the market tended to finish this way.
Now, in America I was most familiar with coconut as a syrup flavoring, useful in the making of things such as snow-cones or pina-coladas, or maybe as a small white flake which sometimes adorns pastries. In the Pacific, however, the coconut is the king of all foods. Coconuts fall from the tree armored in hard shells and tough, stringy husks that deter all but the most determined animals from enjoying them as sustenance. Thusly adorned, they can be swept away by the tides and carried vast distances across the ocean to land on distant shores and promptly take them over in a feat of island hopping many times more far-reaching and persistent than any of its photosynthesizing counterparts. Now, as far as food goes, coconuts can be found and eaten in three forms: green, dry, and navara. Of these, you're probably only familiar with the dry variety. Green coconuts are coconuts that have not yet fallen from the tree. However, a well thrown stick or rock will shake them loose. They contain a large amount of coconut water, which is excellent for a hot and thirsty day as it is both sterile and loaded with salts and minerals (think Gatorade, except not colored neon blue and labeled with a name that, while sounding impressive, gives you absolutely no clue as to it’s flavor, like “Mountain Chill”), plus it tastes kind of like Sprite. I, personally, am totally and completely sick of coconut water and am still doggedly trying to find that coconut that breaks open to reveal a frozen strawberry daiquiri with a little pink umbrella. Once de-husked (quite the ordeal and, in my opinion, usually not worth it), the coconut shell can be cracked open with a machete, a feat that, when it was first unveiled at the airport upon my arrival to Vanuatu, I found very impressive, but has now become quite mundane. Inside, the flesh of the green coconut is very thin and soft and can be easily scraped out with a spoon and eaten sort of like jello. Dry coconuts have already fall from the tree and been allowed to sit in the sun for a bit. This causes some of the coconut water to congeal, forming thick, hard flesh on the inside. They still contain water, but it’s mostly just water at that point, no nutrients. The meat can be scraped out to form coconut shavings, like those that you can find in the grocery store. The coconut shavings can then be milked to extract coconut milk by squeezing them. Finally, if you allow dry coconuts of sit for a week or so, they begin to sprout and become navara. In the navara coconut, all of the coconut water had congealed onto the sides, meaning that the coconut is no longer hallow, but filled with a ball of very sweet and tender meat that feels and tastes kind of like balled up cotton candy. In my opinion, navara is the best coconut form of coconut for eating, but for cooking coconut milk is usually what you’re after.
I cracked open a couple coconuts and went to borrow a coconut scratcher from my host family. A coconut scratcher is a round piece of metal with, rough, sharp edges. This is bolted to a piece of wood. When scratching, you sit on the piece of wood, take your coconut half, and scour it out with the scratcher, catching the coconut flakes in a bowl. You then wring the flakes through a cloth to collect the milk. The whole process took close to forty-five minutes (which, honestly, is no time at all in Vanuatu, but it does give you an appreciation for what goes into those cans of coconut milk at the store). And, about three hours later, I had a pretty decent curry on my hands; perhaps a small step towards putting some more meat on my bones, but a step nonetheless.
On Thursday I went to leave Alyssa (who’d come down from Lavasal the previous day) at the airport. Her departure coincided with the arrival of one of our Peace Corps trainers, who was in from Vila to inspect the sites of some of the volunteers on Malekula. Being just from Vila, she’d brought with her a variety of food items difficult to find anywhere else in the country including Snickers (being given a Snickers was probably one of the best things that had happened to me in at least a couple weeks – hint, hint) and apples, a fruit whose existence I’d almost totally forgotten about. Exercising a sheer force of will at least equaling that of a recovering heroine addict turning down free smack, I decided to refrain from eating the Snickers until later that evening when McKenzie was slated to come for kava in order to be civil and share the wealth. I managed to keep this promise for a whopping eight hours, all the while being quietly tortured by that insidious hunk of chocolate, caramel, and nuts separated from my mouth by only a flimsy, thin, covering of black, white, and red plastic. In the end, I proved myself a lesser man than I had thought and had to cave in (sorry Kenz).
That night saw an unusual amount of activity at the nakamal. Several trucks were parked in the yard and my host papa along with five or six other guys were pointing up at the coconut trees and muttering to each other. I watched as one of them pulled out a slingshot and launched a pebble up at one of the trees. This startled something out of the tree, which then flew off into the night. The retort of a rifle made me jump, as the man who was carrying the gun had been concealed behind one of the trucks. Apparently my yard had turned into a flying fox hunting ground. Flying fox is actually a kind of fruit bat which is plentiful around dusk. They taste quite good and can bring in a lot of money at the market, so fox hunting is always a popular pastime in the village. The old fashioned way to do this is to find a banana tree (a favorite of the flying fox) and clear out the plants around it during the day, thus making it easily accessible. When nightfall comes, you wait by the tree with your machete and, when a flying fox lands to eat the bananas, you run up, chop down the tree (banana trees are easy to chop down), thus trapping the flying fox under the fallen tree. Needless to say, this is a huge pain in the ass, so most people prefer to use rifles when they can. Now, in Vanuatu gun control laws are a little lax, so getting your hands on a .22 isn’t really a problem. Bullet control laws, however, are the constraint, and tend to limit people to something in the neighborhood of 50 bullets a month. This isn’t an attempt at cutting down on gun-crime (of which there isn’t any; there’s essentially no crime of any kind, especially outside of Vila), but more geared towards preventing people from shooting too many flying fox and making too much noise by shooting their rifles in the air when they get drunk. A new month had just began, however, which meant a fresh supply of bullets and so a usually quiet evening at the nakamal was occasionally punctuated by gun blasts and either loud whopping or cursing, depending on the results achieved.
The weekend passed uneventfully. I had been getting a little apprehensive about the possibility of starting class on Monday, especially since no one had yet told me what it was I would be teaching, but I was assured that there was essentially a zero percent chance that school would start on time. Just to be on the safe side, however, I set an alarm, something which I hadn’t done in months, and made sure I knew the location of my clean shirt, should formal attire be required.
Sorry for the long delay in getting this entry together. I’m afraid I must admit I’ve been guilty of that cardinal sin of the adventurer: seeing the world as mundane and uninteresting. I’ve sort of fallen into a routine over the past few weeks, and was starting to look at the everyday goings on in Vanuatu as commonplace, boring, and unworthy of writing about. I think I’ve managed to regain at least some of my sense of wonder, and I’ll try not to let it happen again. This does mean I’m a few weeks behind, however, but I shall do my best to catch up as quickly as possible. Keep posted.
I woke up early Monday morning to catch a truck from Lavasal. A few minutes into the ride, it started to rain heavily and those of us in the back pulled a tarp over ourselves to keep dry. The ride up had been an uncomfortable, hour-long affair that had left my butt too sore to sit down, and doing the reverse huddled under a tarp was no better. I did, however, discover that I was becoming quite familiar with the island, a fact that I realized when I was able to tell where we were by picking out landmarks as they flashed by a one square inch opening in the tarp. Eventually, the truck deposited me in Tautu and I said goodbye to Ryan, who was continuing on to the airport to fly back to his island. I made my way into Lakatoro and found McKenzie and the two of us spent a sweltering half and hour outside one of the stores using their phone line to check our email, at the end of which we wondered aloud why we always elected to use the internet in the most horrendously balls-hot part of the afternoon, as opposed to waiting until the evening when things cool off considerably. We then headed back to Tautu for kava with my host-family and an evening more or less exactly the same as every other we’d spent on the island.
On Tuesday I decided I was feeling culinary and so I headed into the market to see what I could scrounge up. I’d recently been inspired to try to put in some more hours at cooking when I ran into a teacher at my school, who I hadn’t seen since I’d visited Malekula in November, who said (translated from Bislama) “Jesus Christ, Daniel, what the hell happened to you? You’re a twig.” Now, this may sounds odd from a guy who most of you know as someone who will flatten an unattended plate of cookies in minutes and will spend hours making his own mozzarella sticks as opposed to putting down the six bucks for the box of them at the store, but food is honestly such a pain in the ass here that it’s easy to let that part of the day sort of slide. Also, it’s an odd feeling for me, having gotten so used to being able to procure any food item at any time I wanted back home in the States, to have my diet entirely dictated by whatever people happen to decide to bring into market to sell on a given day. “Are there any limes today?” I asked. “No,” I was told. “How about peppers?” “No got.” “Tomatoes?” “Sorry.” As it turned out all that had come in that day were the basics, island cabbage, coconuts, cucumbers, and assorted mutant-looking roots, which, together, constitute the four pillars of Vanuatu’s cuisine. I did happen to need coconuts, and so I bought some, telling myself that one out of four isn’t all that bad. When it comes to coconuts in Vanuatu, a little bit of cash goes a long way, and the smallest unit I was able to purchase came with about fifteen coconuts and cost just a little more than a dollar, which was cool. The downside, of course, was that fifteen coconuts weigh a whole hell of a lot and so I was left to stagger my way back to the LTC to catch a truck, contemplating the fact that most of my trips to the market tended to finish this way.
Now, in America I was most familiar with coconut as a syrup flavoring, useful in the making of things such as snow-cones or pina-coladas, or maybe as a small white flake which sometimes adorns pastries. In the Pacific, however, the coconut is the king of all foods. Coconuts fall from the tree armored in hard shells and tough, stringy husks that deter all but the most determined animals from enjoying them as sustenance. Thusly adorned, they can be swept away by the tides and carried vast distances across the ocean to land on distant shores and promptly take them over in a feat of island hopping many times more far-reaching and persistent than any of its photosynthesizing counterparts. Now, as far as food goes, coconuts can be found and eaten in three forms: green, dry, and navara. Of these, you're probably only familiar with the dry variety. Green coconuts are coconuts that have not yet fallen from the tree. However, a well thrown stick or rock will shake them loose. They contain a large amount of coconut water, which is excellent for a hot and thirsty day as it is both sterile and loaded with salts and minerals (think Gatorade, except not colored neon blue and labeled with a name that, while sounding impressive, gives you absolutely no clue as to it’s flavor, like “Mountain Chill”), plus it tastes kind of like Sprite. I, personally, am totally and completely sick of coconut water and am still doggedly trying to find that coconut that breaks open to reveal a frozen strawberry daiquiri with a little pink umbrella. Once de-husked (quite the ordeal and, in my opinion, usually not worth it), the coconut shell can be cracked open with a machete, a feat that, when it was first unveiled at the airport upon my arrival to Vanuatu, I found very impressive, but has now become quite mundane. Inside, the flesh of the green coconut is very thin and soft and can be easily scraped out with a spoon and eaten sort of like jello. Dry coconuts have already fall from the tree and been allowed to sit in the sun for a bit. This causes some of the coconut water to congeal, forming thick, hard flesh on the inside. They still contain water, but it’s mostly just water at that point, no nutrients. The meat can be scraped out to form coconut shavings, like those that you can find in the grocery store. The coconut shavings can then be milked to extract coconut milk by squeezing them. Finally, if you allow dry coconuts of sit for a week or so, they begin to sprout and become navara. In the navara coconut, all of the coconut water had congealed onto the sides, meaning that the coconut is no longer hallow, but filled with a ball of very sweet and tender meat that feels and tastes kind of like balled up cotton candy. In my opinion, navara is the best coconut form of coconut for eating, but for cooking coconut milk is usually what you’re after.
I cracked open a couple coconuts and went to borrow a coconut scratcher from my host family. A coconut scratcher is a round piece of metal with, rough, sharp edges. This is bolted to a piece of wood. When scratching, you sit on the piece of wood, take your coconut half, and scour it out with the scratcher, catching the coconut flakes in a bowl. You then wring the flakes through a cloth to collect the milk. The whole process took close to forty-five minutes (which, honestly, is no time at all in Vanuatu, but it does give you an appreciation for what goes into those cans of coconut milk at the store). And, about three hours later, I had a pretty decent curry on my hands; perhaps a small step towards putting some more meat on my bones, but a step nonetheless.
On Thursday I went to leave Alyssa (who’d come down from Lavasal the previous day) at the airport. Her departure coincided with the arrival of one of our Peace Corps trainers, who was in from Vila to inspect the sites of some of the volunteers on Malekula. Being just from Vila, she’d brought with her a variety of food items difficult to find anywhere else in the country including Snickers (being given a Snickers was probably one of the best things that had happened to me in at least a couple weeks – hint, hint) and apples, a fruit whose existence I’d almost totally forgotten about. Exercising a sheer force of will at least equaling that of a recovering heroine addict turning down free smack, I decided to refrain from eating the Snickers until later that evening when McKenzie was slated to come for kava in order to be civil and share the wealth. I managed to keep this promise for a whopping eight hours, all the while being quietly tortured by that insidious hunk of chocolate, caramel, and nuts separated from my mouth by only a flimsy, thin, covering of black, white, and red plastic. In the end, I proved myself a lesser man than I had thought and had to cave in (sorry Kenz).
That night saw an unusual amount of activity at the nakamal. Several trucks were parked in the yard and my host papa along with five or six other guys were pointing up at the coconut trees and muttering to each other. I watched as one of them pulled out a slingshot and launched a pebble up at one of the trees. This startled something out of the tree, which then flew off into the night. The retort of a rifle made me jump, as the man who was carrying the gun had been concealed behind one of the trucks. Apparently my yard had turned into a flying fox hunting ground. Flying fox is actually a kind of fruit bat which is plentiful around dusk. They taste quite good and can bring in a lot of money at the market, so fox hunting is always a popular pastime in the village. The old fashioned way to do this is to find a banana tree (a favorite of the flying fox) and clear out the plants around it during the day, thus making it easily accessible. When nightfall comes, you wait by the tree with your machete and, when a flying fox lands to eat the bananas, you run up, chop down the tree (banana trees are easy to chop down), thus trapping the flying fox under the fallen tree. Needless to say, this is a huge pain in the ass, so most people prefer to use rifles when they can. Now, in Vanuatu gun control laws are a little lax, so getting your hands on a .22 isn’t really a problem. Bullet control laws, however, are the constraint, and tend to limit people to something in the neighborhood of 50 bullets a month. This isn’t an attempt at cutting down on gun-crime (of which there isn’t any; there’s essentially no crime of any kind, especially outside of Vila), but more geared towards preventing people from shooting too many flying fox and making too much noise by shooting their rifles in the air when they get drunk. A new month had just began, however, which meant a fresh supply of bullets and so a usually quiet evening at the nakamal was occasionally punctuated by gun blasts and either loud whopping or cursing, depending on the results achieved.
The weekend passed uneventfully. I had been getting a little apprehensive about the possibility of starting class on Monday, especially since no one had yet told me what it was I would be teaching, but I was assured that there was essentially a zero percent chance that school would start on time. Just to be on the safe side, however, I set an alarm, something which I hadn’t done in months, and made sure I knew the location of my clean shirt, should formal attire be required.
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