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.
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