Life in the Ring of Fire Part 25: Ships, Planes, and Whiskey

I was booked on an afternoon flight back to Malekula, leaving me with some time Monday morning to run around Luganville, picking up some key items I wanted to take back with me. Actually, two key items really: an electric fan and several bottles of Jameson Irish whiskey. McKenzie’s house, when she moved into it, had been equipped with a small fan which had been left behind by Caryn, the volunteer she was replacing. It was quickly discovered that this fan was the one and only thing that made being inside tolerable during the heat of the afternoon and was in fact the key to being able to sleep past seven in the morning. Needless to say, I instantly decided to procure one for myself. Unfortunately, Malekula is not a major electric fan supplier (read, there are no electric fans on the island), so I’d been waiting for this opportunity for a while.

As far as the whiskey goes, Vanuatu levies essentially no taxes (I know that doesn’t really seem relevant to whiskey at the moment, but stay with me). There’s no property tax (people wouldn’t be able to pay it), income tax (most people don’t make any income), or sales tax (no way to enforce it), and so the government makes more or less all of its money charging ridiculously high import duties, especially on alcohol and tobacco products. This means, for example, that a liter of cheap, imported liquor might go for upwards of $40 in Vila or Luganville. This price is, of course, marked up substantially when the product hits one of the outer islands, such as Malekula. Thus the bottom line for us is that, unless you’re a wealthy plantation owner, you’re not drinking imported booze. Fortunately, a company called Vanuatu Beverage (VB for short) tries to pick up the slack by peddling locally produced liquors (they also make soft drinks called Splash, or Splashe, depending on who was printing out the labels that day, that come in your standard flavors, such as Cola or Orange, but also flair out into the somewhat more exotic, such as Squash Lemon, which I’m pretty sure is just a typo, but you never know. Unfortunately, all Splash(e) drinks somehow manage to taste warm and flat no matter how long you put them in the freezer for), which try to mimic popular imported brands with names like South Pacific Comfort (a knock off of Southern Comfort), or Sctoch Whiskey, or Mele Ruhm. The fine folks at VB have also branched into the pre-bottled mixed drink market; hence, it’s possible to pick up a bottle of pre-mixed Rum & Cola or Gin & Tonic at the LTC (and no, I haven’t had the courage to go there yet). I think it’s fair to say that, without exception, basically everything produced by VB is gross and overpriced. It’s kind of like how movie theaters sell disgusting, expensive popcorn because they know people will buy it as you can’t bring in your own food. Anyway, this is all a very long-winded way of saying that when I saw bottles of Jameson going for $33 at a Chinese store, it seemed mighty appealing, and I promptly bought several.

I’d arranged to fly home on Monday because I’d already missed teaching two of my classes, and I couldn’t really afford to miss any more. McKenzie, however, was staying on for another day or so to do some work for her non-profit and had decided to try for a ship back (you know, because that worked out so well on the way over). She had her puppy, Bruiser, with her, who had been acquired several weeks before when she and Elin had gone to Matanvat to visit Laura. Elin had decided that she wanted to take home a pair of puppies from one of the village dogs that had just had a litter. This decision was quickly regretted, however, when she realized what a pain in the ass it is to look after puppies. When she left on a trip to Vila, she left the dogs with McKenzie. One promptly got worms and died, but the other got along fairly well and Elin gave up ownership of it to McKenzie when she got back from Vila. Since she didn’t want to take the dog on a ship, McKenzie asked me to take him back with me. For reasons that escape me at the moment, I agreed.

Now, those of you that know me well know that I’m not much of an animal person and tend to be of the opinion that most animals are useful only in that they can be turned into delicious cuts of meat which can then be grilled. Fortunately, Vanuatu is a country that more or less agrees with me on this point. Here, animals tend to be categorized into one of two groups: food (to be killed and eaten) and pests (to be killed and not eaten). There is no SPCA or PETA equivalent around these parts. You see, most animals may be cute and lovable in theory, but when you have to live in close proximity to large numbers of them on a daily basis (and try to keep them from eating your food, for example), your opinions of them tend to go toward the negative. Dogs are sort of a special case, in that they fall into both categories; most people don’t want to be near them (hence, pests), but they’re eaten in some parts of the country (hence, food). Additionally, they're somewhat useful in and of themselves and most families keep at least a couple around as guard dogs and for running wild chickens and pigs, but they're never allowed in, or even near, the house during the day and they mostly eat the garbage that the family throws away. Ni-Vanuatu tend to think of Westerns as somewhat nuts for keeping dogs as pets and pampering them as much as we do (think of that crazy old person who thinks pigeons are cute and always sits on park benches feeding them bread crumbs -- that’s what you look like to a Ni-Van when you pet dogs and give them food off your plate). Vanuatu is utterly chocked full of dogs, who become objects of abuse of all varieties, ranging from kicks to thrown rocks to (sometimes) being hacked at with machetes. When you live here, you quickly fall into the habit of giving a dog a good kick whenever one gets in your way and, in some places around Lakatoro, it's all but necessary to carry a large rock at night to throw at any dogs that try and bite you. I heard a story from Amanda, who'd just gone home to the US a couple weeks before, that the first thing she did when she got back to her house was give her mom's new dog the boot for blocking the door. Needless to say, this did not go over well.

Despite having lived here for almost six months now, however, it's still a little disconcerting to be walking down the road, puppy happily trotting along in tow, only to watch as someone, very purposely, walks up and punts it into the bushes. This happened more or less daily while Bruiser was staying with me, and, to be honest, I wasn't entirely sure whether to laugh or get angry. In the end, I decided the little guy needed to toughen up at some point, so I let it slide. I also instituted a strict no urine and feces policy in the house, which I enforced by making him mostly an outside dog. All in all, the whole experience was significantly less painful than I had initially anticipated. As it turns out, animals are pretty damn good at looking after themselves. Who would've thought?

McKenzie ended up being stuck in Luganville until Wednesday night due to the sporadic-ness of the ships. What's frustrating about trying to catch a ship is that it's more or less impossible to know when one's going to come. There's no set schedule and there's no toll-free hot-line you can call for information, you just have to show up at the dock at the same time as the ship and then get on it. Of course, you don't want to just wait at the dock, because you might be waiting for days, so you generally end up having to rely on asking Ni-Vans whether or not they've heard of a ship showing up. The problem with this is that Ni-Vans are notoriously difficult to get a straight answer out of. You've probably heard the expression: “ask six different people the same question and get six different answers.” In Vanuatu, if you ask six different people the same question, you're lucky to get six different answers, as each person will most likely give two to three (often contradicting) answers to a question during a single conversation. So, ask around about a ship and you'll discover that:

1) The ship is arriving in the afternoon

2) The ship is at the dock

3) The ship is coming tomorrow

4) The ship came and left already

5) The ship is going to Port Vila and not coming to Luganville

6) The ship is broken

7) The ship is in New Caledonia

8) The ship has been sunk by German U-boats

While some answers can be easily discarded as outright lies, you're still left with three or four plausible, yet mutually exclusive, possibilities (this doesn't just happen when asking about ships, of course, and I've gotten to the point where I just ignore about %60 of what people tell me). This means a lot of running back and forth to the docks to check for ships and a lot of waiting impatiently and wanting to strangle people. Then, of course, after you've managed to catch a ship, there's the uncomfortable eight hour ride at half a mile an hour to deal with. Thus, when McKenzie finally made it back to Lakatoro to collect her dog, she looked like she'd spent the week wrestling with a lot of very large and incredibly ferocious crocodiles. Needless to say, I was eager to give ship travel a shot myself, but I knew I'd have to wait until a school break as I couldn't afford to be missing that much class.

That weekend was St. Patrick's day, which is as good an excuse to have a party as any (actually, a better excuse than most, if I do say so myself), and it somehow worked out that almost every volunteer on the island was in Lakatoro, which was pretty cool as I there were a couple of the more remote people in the south that I hadn't met yet. As an added perk, one of the volunteers was on his way back from Vila and so a request was put in for a few cans of Guinness. They go for about seven dollars a piece, a luxury item by any definition of the word, but it was good to enjoy a beer that one actually might choose to purchase in the States for a change. Green food coloring (which, fortunately enough, is the only color of food coloring stocked in this country) was also procured from Luganville for the occasion. To top everything off, Jack, a volunteer from our group posted down in the south, decided that he was in intense need of chicken wings and so purchased 4 kilos, which were then deep fried and enjoyed by all. Not a bad way to spend a weekend.

Life in the Ring of Fire Part 24: Hail to the Chief

Mondays suck as a teacher, as it’s the day you have to walk into class, put some problems on the board and see just how much your students have managed to forget over the weekend. I’m not really sure what they do over the course of two days that causes them to forget that, under normal circumstances, three is not, in fact, larger than five but whatever it is I’d like to try it because it’s just got to be out of control. Monday also represented my fourth consecutive week of trying to teach my kids how to round which led me to wonder how, exactly, I was going to have them doing algebra by the end of the year in time for the national exam. So basically, I think I’m going to have to give Monday an overall thumbs-down.

By Tuesday I was already ready for the week to be over, so it turned out to be a lucky break that Wednesday was a public holiday, Chief’s Day (kind of like father’s day except, you know, for the chief). McKenzie and I decided to celebrate the occasion by purchasing a two liter jug of cooking wine to drink along with the usual kava on Tuesday night (yes, I know it sounds disgusting, but, believe me, once you’ve lowered your standards enough, it’s not bad at all). The morning of Chief day I spent helping McKenzie switch out the music on her iPod Mini, as she was slowly being driven insane by listening to the same 200-ish songs over and over and over again (note: readers, I’m also suffering from the same problem, although to a lesser extent because my collection is larger, so if anyone out there wants to send me some CDs loaded with MP3s – or movies, actually – they’d be my hero. And if you send me CDs AND chocolate, well, I’ll see what I can do about getting someone’s kid named after you – no joke, they’ll name kids after ANYTHING around here. There’s a boy who lives near McKenzie whose name is Jet Li. There’s also a Chuck Norris living in Lakatoro and I know probably three Bob Marleys).

The night of Chief’s Day, people in the village are supposed to prepare a feast for the chief to honor him, which is a pretty good deal, if you ask me. I was informed by my family, however, that we would be having our own feast, separate from the main village one, to honor my host uncle (who’s the chief of our clan, or tribe, or whatever you want to call it) since we aren’t originally from Tautu, but rather another village somewhere to the north, which we were driven out of sometime back in the 20’s due to a dispute of some kind. I kind of felt like maybe it was time to let go and start calling Tautu home, but that’s not really how people roll around here. I went with my grandfather down to my uncle’s house in the village and waited for the feast to commence. When we first arrived, we were the only ones there, but as we waited people started creeping in out of the night, each one with an enormous lap-lap in tow. By the time we were ready to start, there were eight lap-laps lined up one after the other going down the patio, each one with a small collection of people gathered around it. I was seated at the first lap-lap, but I wondered if it would be considered rude to switch lap-laps should mine prove to be sub-par. After a brief speech during which it was noted that: 1-the feast had been prepared to honor my uncle and 2-my uncle would probably not show up because he was drinking kava, the lap-laps were unveiled and we dug in. As it turned out, I was already sitting at the best lap-lap (banana overflowing with flying fox meat) so my question about switching was moot. I stuffed myself for a good half an hour before, like the previous Sunday, sprawling out on the ground and deciding that Chief’s Day was a pretty sweet holiday.

McKenzie and I had been planning on going to the island of Santo for the past few weekends, but the timing had never really worked out as far as there being a ship available to take us, so Thursday we decided to give up on the ship idea and just book flights and be done with it. Ale, another volunteer on Malekula, decided to join us as well and so the three of us boarded the early morning flight on Friday and fifteen minutes later we were in Santo (you see, Santo is actually really close to Malekula, it’s just impossible to get there without shelling out tons of money for an airline ticket). The Santo airport was quite deluxe, complete with a roof (lacking in Malekula), a café, and even an intercom system which incomprehensible announcements are made over. We caught a taxi (that’s right, they have taxis in Santo too, not just pickup trucks that you can jump in the back of. I was impressed) into the town of Luganville, which was connected to the airport by an honest-to-god paved road. Luganville had he same only-one-street layout as Lakatoro, except the street was much more densely settled and they’d worked past the general store concept and branched out into more specialized stores (ie. stores where the bread isn’t located right next to the bush knives), and even restaurants. We spent Friday wandering up and down the town, marveling at such things as ATMs and liquor stores that sell more than one kind of beer. There was even a fire station, which would have been a lot more impressive were it not located directly next to a burned down building (as we were told, the fire truck was too big to fit in the driveway and so the building was unable to be saved, despite its proximity). It was a nice weekend to recharge our American-ness by dining on hamburgers and milkshakes, taking showers way too many times a day, and buying Snickers at every opportunity.

Life in the Ring of Fire Part 23: Farewells

Monday evening McKenzie and Rodrigo and Alex (two of the Bolivian contractors working with our friend, Louis) came to Tautu for kava and the unveiling of one of my new concoctions: a home brew made from bananas, lemon juice, sugar, and bread yeast. I elected to call it “banana wine” as I thought this sounded a little more distinguished that “banana moonshine,” which would probably be a more accurate description to apply. Shockingly, it turned out pretty well. Unlike McKenzie and I's attempt to make alcohol from pineapples, which tasted a little too much like watery bread, the banana flavor was strong enough to drown out the taste of the yeast, yielding an entirely drinkable beverage. After the nakamal ran out of kava, the three of them came back to my house for more banana wine. It was the first time I'd had guests in the new house, and I realized it looked more like a mad scientist's lair than a residence. The garage-like cement floor and stained walls combined with the remnants of my various cooking projects – drums and buckets of bubbling substances covering the floor and the tables dotted with a collection of reused glass jars containing strange-looking liquids with stranger-looking solids floating in them – nicely recreated the air of a dank and dirty basement lab inhabited by someone who regularly walks the fine line between genius and insanity. I made a mental note to myself to clean the place up a bit the next time I was expecting people over.

On a somewhat sadder note, Rodrigo and Alex told us that Louis had been flown to the US for medical treatment and that they were unsure if he was coming back. Sometime last week Louis had gone to Vila because of a chronic problem he'd been having with unexplained pains on his skin and apparently the doctors there had been unable to help him. Ironically, it seemed, the going away party we'd thrown for him a few weeks earlier had been more appropriate than we'd initially thought. It was disappointing to hear that he'd gone, as he'd been around as long as I had and so I'd come to think of him as something of a fixture of northern Malekula. I'd often run into him two or three times a day, driving up and down the coast of the east of the island to check in on and oversee the various sites where cell towers were being built, always with a beer and cigarette in hand and usually shouting in Spanish into his cell phone. His jet-black double cabin pickup was always a welcome site driving up behind me on a hot day during a long, dusty, trudge between Tautu and Lakatoro because he would always give me a ride and usually had a few cold beers to spare in the back seat. He had a violent aversion to walking and would insist on driving both McKenzie and I to our destinations, even if they were just a short walk away. We'd run into him once at the LTC after he'd come back from a trip to another island and had not yet been re-united with his car. Rather than walk the five minutes to the mechanic's, where the truck was, he had resigned himself to sitting outside the store drinking coke and waiting for his truck to be delivered to him. He considered cooking to be wizardry and was always in awe when McKenzie and I would cook using local ingredients purchased from the farmer's market. “WOW!” He'd exclaim, “you guys turned this into FOOD!” As if some miraculous feat of transubstantiation had just occurred. He'd often drink kava with us in the evenings, but was very particular about where he'd sit, only lurking in the darkest corners of the nakamals. He could not abide a conversation that did not somehow involve him and had absolutely no qualms about interrupting someone mid sentence to turn the topic of discussion to Bolivia, or obscure wine terminology, or the precise details of what had happened to him in the previous few days. On some weekends McKenzie and I and whoever else was in town would go over to the room he was renting behind the LTC to drink beer and rum and cokes. Louis refused to drink mixed drinks out of coffee mugs (usually the only cups around in Vanuatu), insisting that the vessel bearing his beverage be clear and made of glass, even if the only thing in the house fitting this bill was an old baby-food jar. These evenings usually ended with drives to Litz-Litz at all hours of the night to get more beer, sometimes necessitating the waking up of the store owner who would climb in the back of the truck and be driven to the store where Louis would buy beer and then drive him back to his house, followed by trips to the airport where we'd drive up and down the runway for no reason, really, except that we could.

On Tuesday I learned that Amanda, a volunteer posted near me on one of the islands off the coast of Malekula had decided to go home, and would be leaving in about a week. I also got a call from Elin, who was still in Vila, informing me that Chris, one of our friends from training, had just heard his Grandma had died and so was flying in from Tanna and was considering a trip to the States for the funeral. Ryan was also in Vila and was also considering going back for a friend who'd been diagnosed with cancer. Going back to the US for a visit seemed, to me, to be a somewhat dangerous undertaking as I knew it would be hard to pull oneself away from all the comforts of a home in the States and return to Vanuatu. It felt weird to hear about so many people either leaving or thinking about leaving all at once, like watching as everyone but you abandons a sinking ship. The good news, however, was the Elin was coming back to Malekula after an extended stay in Vila (she had actually been considering leaving as well because of an incident revolving around a break-in at her house in Lavasal when she was down in Lakatoro), and would be flying in on Thursday.

Wednesday my host papa very enthusiastically informed me that he had purchased an ice box (freezer), which had just come in. I was excited and headed over to his house to check it out. At some point during the walk, I realized that it was somewhat odd to get so worked up over something like a new freezer. In Vanuatu, however, absolutely anything cold is a rare and precious treat, and my host family purchasing an ice box was good news for me as I now could slip my own items in it for cooling whenever I wanted, potentially opening up a whole new world of opportunities for frozen delicacies. Part of the motivation for the purchasing of the freezer, however, was that my host papa was interested in starting to sell homemade beer. I'd agreed to lend him the equipment so he could make it and sell it at his nakamal provided, of course, that I could come over and grab a free cold beer every one and a while.

Thursday morning, as promised, Elin arrived and the two of us went into Lakatoro after I was done teaching to see McKenzie so that she and I could yell at Elin for almost going home and try to ensure that she didn't try any such nonsense again. As an added bonus, Elin had received a package in her absence, which we opened to reveal a large collection of assorted hard candies. We spent most of the early afternoon eating nerds and sweet tarts. A bit later things took a turn for the strange when Meli, a Ni-Van who, in my opinion, is completely nuts, but is friends with Amanda, showed up lugging a small TV and DVD player, which she set up and began playing episodes of “Sex in the City” on. I later concluded that the reason for this was that her pre-paid electricity card at her house had run out, and she didn't want to buy another one (meaning, of course, that she had no power), and that needed an excuse to use the oven at McKenzie's house.

On Sunday I went over to my host family's house for lap-lap sur-sur. My views on lap-lap have done something of a 180 since coming to Malekula. As it turns out, lap-lap isn't half bad, the problem before was more that the villagers in my training village didn't know how to cook it. Lap-lap sur-sur is a Malekula specialty and it differs from standard lap-lap, as the center of the lap-lap is filled with meat before it's put underground to cook. This means that all the juices from the cooking meat leach out into the lap-lap, making it moist, greasy, salty, and pretty darn good. After you take the lap-lap out of the underground oven, you fill in the hole created by the meat with hot coconut milk, which you then use to dip your pieces of lap-lap in. Six of us sat cross legged on the ground around the banana-leaf platter that contained the lap-lap, waiting impatiently as grace was said and the lap-lap was cut. We then went to town, flattening about ¾ of the lap-lap in about ten minutes, no mean feat considering how dense lap-lap is. Then we all passed out, sprawled across the concrete floor, sweating profusely and none of us particularly eager to move for the rest of the day. This was not possible for me, however, as McKenzie, Bill, Ale (two other nearby volunteers), and I were preparing a last meal for Amanda that evening. And so I said my thank-yous and goodbyes and caught a truck to Lakatoro. We were going for a Mexican theme, and Amanda had somehow procured two packages of pre-made corn tortillas from the States. These we cut up and fried to make tortilla chips which were used to make nachos. Tacos with fresh flour tortillas were also on the menu, making Sunday, all in all, a very good food day. After the meal, we took Amanda for a last shell of kava, and then I headed home. It's always sad to see volunteers leave, even ones I don't know particularly well. Being Peace Corps makes you family and it's always sad to see family part ways.

A Picture Takes A Lot Longer to Upload Than a Thousand Words: Second Photo Edition

Greetings readers, and welcome to another photo edition of "Life in the Ring of Fire." I'm in Luganville at the moment (one of the two "cities" in Vanuatu) and thus have some bandwidth at my disposal. Enjoy

Myself with a bunch of goats at my favorite nakamal in Lakatoro

Me with my host family: brother, father and grandfather

Malekula volunteers along with Louis and my host mother and sister

McKenzie and I with my host brother at my family's nakamal

The LTC: one stop shoping in Lakatoro Myself and Laura posing for J Crew Vanuatu at the Tautu bus stop
The guys of PC Group 20B in island dresses
My office at the LTC (ie. where these blog posts come from)
McKenzie, Laura, and Elin with the Bolivian Contractors
McKenzie, Elin and I at the beach

McKenzie and I

McKenzie, Elin, and I before Louis' going away party

That's all I have for now folks, sorry. More posts and photos later.