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.