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.
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