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.