Life in the Ring of Fire Part 22: Who Needes School, Anyway?

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.