Life in the Ring of Fire Part 30: Coal

I'd gone to the gardens to secure more bamboo the previous Saturday, which meant that Monday was devoted to building more furniture. The chair which I'd started previously was easy to finish up, just by nailing some cross-beams across the frame to prhovide a place to sit down on, and then I was on to the next project: attempting to make a frame from which I could hang a hammock. My first house, although it was made half of bamboo and had a roof that leaked profusely, did have one advantage, in that all the various beams and rafters that supported the house were accessible, giving a veritable plethora of possible hammock hanging opportunities. My new house, however, had cinder brick walls covered with plaster and all the rafters were covered by plywood, which, don't get me wrong, is usually a desirable feature in a house, except that it left no good hammock nooks, thus meaning that my two hammocks had been in storage for the past couple of months, which is nothing short of a travesty. Now, I could've hung them up outside, of course, except for the fact that I live at a school which, as is often the case with schools, is completely overrun with children the majority of the time, and I didn't want my hammocks become a standard hangout for students. Not that I generally mind other people using my stuff, but I've discovered that Ni-Vanuatu are remarkably bad at taking care of things. Not just things they borrow, mind you, but everything they own seems to get run into the ground in a surprisingly short amount of time. When I came to visit Malekula in November of the previous year, I'd given my host brother, Frank, a deck of playing cards. When I returned, not a month later, the deck of cards was in complete ruin, about a third were missing and the remaining were all either torn, bent beyond repair, covered in mud, or some combination of the three. I'm not really sure how how this happened, as I have decks of cards several years old, still usable, and veterans of many a slap game, which often requires participants to play tug-of-war with the cards. Similarly, a family from Oklahoma who was visiting Tautu in November had sold Duncan their hammock when they left. When I saw it next, it was in tatters, torn in countless places and essentially useless; hence my concern for my own hammock. Thus I was trying to make, out of bamboo, a free-standing frame long enough to hang a hammock from. Things started off quite smoothly, my experience gained from my construction endeavors of a few weeks ago severed me well and in a couple hours I had a sturdy frame built. The problem came, however, in that the poles that I'd cut weren't long enough to properly hang a hammock from and, although I tried a number of jury-rigging measures, but I couldn't come up with a suitably comfortable solution, so I decided to convert the project into another bed and wait for another garden trip to get the supplies I'd need to finish it.

Not quite ready to be done for the day, however, I headed into Lakatoro to purchase some pillows to use to upholster the chair I'd just finished. Whenever you go into Lakatoro to buy anything, there's always a degree of uncertainty involved, first about whether or not the item in question will even be available, and then whether or not it will be affordable. The cost of items around here is incredibly random. What still gets me is how two stores, located mere meters apart, can carry EXACTLY the same thing, but one charge twice as much for it. On top of that, you can never be really sure if some fairly basic and cheap piece of merchandise (at least in the States) will be astronomically expensive in Lakatoro. Thus, I was almost ecstatic to both be able to find and afford pillows on this particular expedition. Unfortunately, I'd only brought one type of fabric with me from Vila, a green and brown checkerboard pattern adorned with turtles and starfish, thus meaning that my curtains, tablecloths, and upholstery were now all matching; not exactly upscale-New-York-apartment worthy, but still a step up from the previous mad-scientist-lair theme.

All in all, though, my hard work of the past several weeks was beginning to pay off and my house was starting to approach looking homey. I now had two pieces of furniture (along with a box covered with a tablecloth, which maybe counts for another half), all my windows had curtains, I'd made a couple of posters using newspaper (old copies of Vanuatu's own Independent, whose motto is “The paper for people who read,” which sets what I believe is the absolute lowest standard possible for their readership) , clear packing tape, old issues of Newsweek, and a sharpie, which now filled a lot of the empty wall space, and Duncan had come through with a couple of woven pandanas mats for me, which I used in lieu of carpeting to cover my cement floors. I still had plans for a dining table and a few chairs and, of course, the bed rooms were still all-but bare, but not a bad start. The brown mats, the low-to-the-ground furniture, and the still large amount of visible stone gave the place a sort of middle-eastern feel, which was kind of cool. I felt like I needed a big hookah or something to occupy the middle of the room, although I doubted that a hookah was an item that would be available in Lakatoro for any price.

Wednesday I headed up to the PRV cattle plantation in order to purchase meat, which I realized I hadn't eaten in a while. The PRV is, in a word, awesome. All their meat is fresh in the sense that it was probably killed just that morning, they sell almost every kind of cut imaginable, and their prices are ridiculously low. I've grown to be a big fan of the fillet, as it's called, which is a deliciously tender cut that cooks up nicely in the skillet with a little salt, garlic powder, and chili powder. To top it all off, you can cook your meat as rare as you want (I wouldn't have any reservations about eating it raw, in fact) because it's so fresh, and the various unsafe slaughter practices that require you to cook your beef so throughly in the States are non-existent here. I was walking back to Tautu, pleased with my purchases, when someone started shouting my name from behind a hedge. This is a pretty standard occurrence, and I shouted back a greeting and proceeded on my way. “Wait,” the guys shouted, stepping out from behind the hedge “I need your help with something.” I was starting to dread those words, but being a volunteer, and around to help out, I asked “What?” “I found a message in a bottle,” he answered. I got a good laugh out of this before realizing that he wasn't kidding. “Umm, OK” I said. “It's from an Englishman. He gave his email address. I wrote a response already, but I can't send it because I don't have email.” “So you want me to send it for you?” I asked, now sort of intrigued. “Yes.” “OK, just bring it by my house and I'll take care of it.” The guy thanked me and I went on my way, wondering at the strangeness of the encounter. To be honest, I was kind of curious as to how this whole thing might pan out. Unfortunately, he has yet to take me up on my offer of help, so my curiosity has remained unsatisfied.

On Saturday I went to the gardens again, further solidifying the garden expeditions as a weekly event for me. This was fine with me, as I actually generally had a good time hanging out with the guys and, aside from the large mosquito population, the garden was actually a pretty nice place, set on top of a hill that almost always had a nice cross breeze. Also, my family seemed to get a big kick out of me going. The one hitch was that I was rapidly running short on mosquito repellent, what with now needing to share it with four or five other people every week. They'd finished shelling out coconut for a while and had moved onto the next step, which is cooking the coconut meat over a large fire contained in a 55-gallon drum in order to dry it. Thus, we weren't really planning on doing anything, just sitting around tending the fire and using it to cook things to eat. In preparation for this, Duncan had brought up two kilos of chicken wings (a real treat in Vanuatu. There are a lot of local chickens running around, but they're quite scrawny, with very little meat, and, of course, the work of having to kill and de-feather them almost makes them completely not worth eating. Thus, chicken of the variety that Westerners would picture has to be imported frozen from Australia and is very expensive. Two kilos can run you upwards of $30) to accompany the usual banana and coconut garden diet. These we roasted over bamboo slats, which added a very nice, subtle, taste to the chicken.

Throughout the afternoon, as usually happens when I hang out with Ni-Vans, the conversation quickly settled me being asked various random questions about the US. This time, it started out with a question about whether or not we have mines in the US. I explained that yes, in the US we mine all sorts of things, from metal to natural gas to salt. I was then asked if we mine coal, to which I answered that we actually mine a lot of coal, which we burn to make electricity. This created quite a stir. “Don't you ruin the coal when you burn it?” Someone asked. This struck me as kind of an odd question, but I explained that coal was a fuel, whose main purpose was to be burned, similar to fire wood. “So it's not like metal?” I was asked. No, I explained, it looks kind of like charcoal. The questions about coal kept coming and, sensing an interest, I launched into a full on detailed lecture of the history and role of coal in American society, complete with descriptions of various controversies. I covered the industrial revolution and coal's important role in it, steam boats and trains, how coal is formed, strip mining, modern coal mining techniques, underground coal fires (they were really floored by that one), smog, the rising cost of petroleum and coal's possible importance as an energy source in the future, coal gasification, global warming (that was a fun one to explain in Bislama) and how increased coal usage could potentially exacerbate it, and even touching on how coal can be used as a source of carbon in the making of plastics. Everyone was dutifully impressed and, when we got back to the nakamal that night, Duncan went over some of the highlights of coal with some of the other patrons. “So when it comes out of the ground, it's black?” Someone asked. “Yes” I said. “So then you have to polish it or something to make it shiny?” “Well I guess you could,” I explained, “but there's not really any reason to. Mostly you just burn it.” “And if you bought it here, it'd be really expensive?” Someone else asked. “Well, I guess, but only because you'd have to have it specially shipped. In the US it's really cheap. It's not really something most people want.” “But why do they always talk about coal watches being really expensive in the movies?” That one brought me up short. I tried to think if maybe Coal was a company that made high-end watches, but I couldn't remember having heard of it before. Then I had a revelation. “Wait, are you asking about gold?” “Yeah,” they answered, “coal.” OH. Right. You see, in Bislama the c, k, and g are all pronounced exactly the same, and d's and t's at the end of English words are usually dropped (so, for example, “cold,” “gold,” “coal,” “goal,” and “colt” would all be pronounced “kol”). Thus, I had to retract my entire lecture about coal from before and explain that yes, gold is a shiny, expensive, metal that you sometimes make watches out of. That it was not, in fact, responsible for the industrial revolution, cannot be used to generate power, make gasoline, or plastic bags, is not a source of greenhouse gases, and cannot be ignited while still in the earth to create underground fires that can burn for centuries, and is in more or less all ways profoundly less interesting than coal.

A Life in the Ring of Fire Special Report: Kava

I don't know many of the details of the history of kava, but I do know that it has been commonly used in traditional ceremonies for a long time in Vanuatu. Back then, it was the drink of chiefs. It was made only on special occasions, such as a gathering of village chiefs, and only the chiefs, and perhaps a few others important in their respective communities, were permitted to drink, and even then only one shell (so called for the half of a coconut shell in which it is traditionally served). Today, kava has fallen from this noble role and now serves as a very literal opiate of the masses. The story goes that when Vanuatu first gained independence, there was a big problem with crime related to alcohol abuse. To combat this, and perhaps make a little money in the process, someone suggested that Ni-Vanuatu forgo the evil of the “white man drink” and instead return to the custom of drinking kava. Almost overnight, hundreds of kava bars (also called nakamals, although this name is not entirely appropriate, as a nakamal simply means a gathering place and does not, necessarily, imply that kava is served there) sprung up around Port Vila, the capital, and the trend soon spread across the country. Kava has the advantage of being made locally, and thus is significantly cheaper than alcohol. Additionally, it is a depressant, so those drunk on the brew are spectacularly docile and not prone to causing trouble.

Kava is made from the roots of a plant distantly related to the pepper, which takes three to five years in order to mature sufficiently to be used in the making of the drink. When the roots come out of the ground, they look like giant, wooden squid: a central body with lots of trailing tendrils. The first step is cleaning the root, removing the wooden exterior and any dirt to reveal the faintly yellow-ish flesh underneath. This is then chopped into small pieces, which have to be somehow ground into a pulp. The custom way of doing this is to round up the pre-pubescent boys of the village and have them chew it to a pulp and then spit the resulting mush onto banana leaves. Although this is still done, most notably on the island of Tanna, the more modern kava maker might use an electric meat grinder. A number of additional methods exist, including grinding it with rocks and pounding it with wooden poles. Many Ni-Vanuatu claim that the chosen method of grinding has an enormous effect on the taste and strength of the resulting drink, but there's so much superstition that surrounds kava as a whole that it's difficult to separate fact from fiction. Personally, I've tasted kava ground in both electric and hand grinders and pounded kava and have not been able to notice much of a difference.

Once the kava is pulped, water is added and the pulp squeezed by hand to extract the juice. At this point, the kava is ready to drink, but most prefer to clean it first, by filtering it through a cloth to remove the sediment. Finished kava looks like a river after a hard rain: water churned with mud and silt from the banks. It's smell calls to mind the oder of grass clippings from a freshly mowed lawn. It tastes a lot like it smells (ie. like eating grass), and a strong batch of kava will leave your lips and tongue numb and tingling for a few minutes after drinking. Kava has a reputation for being more or less the worst thing anyone will ever taste, but I don't think this is quite true. Granted, it does taste pretty bad, but I think most people will experience worse-tasting things in their lives. What really gets me is the anticipation of drinking kava. Every shell I drink makes futures shells all that more difficult to get down as my body tries, more and more forcefully, to rebel against my mind's choice of beverages. When I fist arrived in Vanuatu, I was able to down four or five bowls without much hesitation, but now each shell must be proceeded by a few minutes of meditation, soul searching, and mental preparation. When drinking kava, it is advisable to down your entire serving in one go, as fast as you possibly can. For this reason, it's much nicer to drink kava out of a bowl (or coconut shell), as opposed to a cup, as it allows you to drink it faster. Should you pause, hesitate, or stop mid-drink, you're finished, as the odds are small that you'll be able to continue drinking after such a disturbance. Some Ni-Vanuatu, when confronted with a larger shell than they're interested in drinking, will allow some of the kava to spill out around their lips and dribble down their chin onto the ground. I, personally, try to avoid this practice, as I want as little of my body smelling of kava as possible. The pleasure of drinking kava does not end once your bowl is empty, as it has a strong aftertaste that is persistent and lingering. It doggedly clings to your tongue and throat and no amount of water (thoughtfully provided at most kava bars) can cleanse it. Thus, loud, violent, and vigorous hacking and spitting are an ever present part of the kava bar experience. The only really effective way to remove the kava aftertaste from one's mouth is by eating a small amount of food. The nicer kava bars will sell a variety snacks for this purpose, called “wasemaot” (wash-em'-out). Rich, strong-tasting foods are the best for this. My favorite wasemaots are fish, meat, and chocolate, but these are rarely available for sale at kava bars, so I usually have to bring my own. More common offerings include bananas, papaya, some kind of bread, lap-lap, and shellfish.

“Yu harem kava?” is the question you'll get asked after drinking a shell or two. It literally means “do you hear the kava?” (there's also the much less poetic “yu drunk long kava?” -- “are you drunk on kava?”). The kava drunk is very relaxing (sometimes too relaxing, drink too much and it will put you right to sleep);b it brings about a feeling similar to settling into a deep and comfortable armchair after a long day's work and knowing that you won't be required to move for many hours. It doesn't cloud your head like an alcohol buzz does. Many Ni-Vanuatu claim that it makes you think more clearly, and a refined version of it is actually sold as an herbal supplement in the US, advertising similar effects, but I think this is stretching a little bit. Personally, I wouldn't want to make any important decisions while under its influence. What is true is that it makes you prone to getting lost in your own thoughts, and conversations between patrons of a kava bar tend to be brief and punctuated by long pauses as people slip in and out of their own worlds. More concrete, physical effects include an increased sensitivity to light and sound, thus necessitating that kava bars be kept dark and voices low. It is an appetite suppressant, and frequent kava drinkers are distinctively thin. Similar to alcohol, it degrades motor skills, so those with four or five shells under their belts will walk with a distinctive stagger, similar to a drunk, but their speech will be surprisingly lucid. It is also sleep-inducing and produces very deep and sound sleep, an effect that sometimes carries over to the next morning, leaving one lazy and lethargic. Finally, excessive kava drinking will lead to nausea and vomiting.

Much custom and mystique surrounds kava in Vanuatu. Traditionally, the kava experience is something strictly belonging to men, and women are not permitted to partake in any aspect of it, from the preparation to the actual drinking. Most drastically, women walking in sight of a nakamal were stoned and any kava that was already made was considered tainted and thrown out. Although such practices persist in the more remote parts of the country, for the most part capitalism has taken over and kava bars will serve kava to anyone who can pay for it. Even so, many Ni-Vanuatu women are still hesitant to enter a nakamal and, if they drink kava at all, will usually have someone else fill up a plastic bottle for them and bring it back to their house.

Nowadays, kava plays an important social role in Vanuatu. Much like a bar in the US, a nakamal provides an important venue for socializing. A lot of Ni-Vanuatu friends that I've made here are people that I first encountered at the nakamal. A lot of business and personal deals are also made over a few shells of kava. It's wise to buy shells for anyone you'd like to do favors for you (ie. buy a shell for the post man for faster service in the post office, or a shell for a truck driver to ensure free rides), or you can buy kava for someone you've wronged as an apology. Drinking a shell together can signify the end of an argument or dispute between two people. On Efate, I heard of a tradition in which two people in a conflict will each drink a shell while facing the setting sun, thus signifying that their grievances with each other would be over with the end of the day.

A number of guidelines describe how one should best enjoy (or perhaps tolerate is aetter choice of word, depending on your point of view) kava, the most common of which is that it should only be drunk on an empty stomach. Kava is usually served at sundown, before dinner, and some people take the more extreme stance of refusing to eat anything after noon in preparation. Others just generally try to avoid afternoon snacks. The thinking is that having a full stomach prevents you from feeling the effects of kava, but I don't think this is entirely true. Certainly, not eating beforehand will heighten the effects of kava, but I've definitely gone to the nakamal shortly after a fairly large meal and still been able to feel the kava. Everyone I've talked to has their own advice to offer on how to enhance the kava experience. Some claim that standing and walking around improves their drunk, while others swear by sitting still. Some say it's better to eat hot food after kava, some say cold. Some liking watching movies, while some say this is the worst thing you could possibly do. I've heard that excessive spitting will prevent you from becoming as drunk, that chewing on sugar cane will sober you up, and that drinking soda will make you more drunk. In my opinion, most of these claims are bogus. What is true, however, is that Ni-Vanuatu take kava very seriously and everyone has their own, personal, ceremony that surrounds it. Myself, I like to take a few moments to look at the stars before drinking each shell and spend most of the time sitting down with a nice view of either the sky or the ocean (or both). Ideally, I'd have a cold beer to go along with my kava but, this being Vanuatu, which is short on both cold and beer, that doesn't often happen.

Life in the Ring of Fire Part 29: Hail to the Ant

Monday after my class was over, I went into Lakatoro to check my mail (both electronic and conventional). It had been raining for at least a couple hours a day for the past several weeks, and so what was once a nice, level, sturdy pressed gravel road connecting Tautu to the airport and then to Lakatoro, had turned into a mud flat. The puddles had gone down significantly since the rain a couple weeks ago that had taken out the bridge, but the road had actually gotten more difficult to navigate since then. With the puddles you knew that, generally, if you stepped in one of them, you would get wet, and if you avoided them you could stay dry. Now, most of the water had soaked into the ground, creating a series of mud pits that could look remarkably like solid ground, so you never really knew if placing your foot on what looked to be a sturdy piece of road would, in fact, leave you knee-deep in muck. This had taken a lot of pleasure out of walking to Lakatoro, and so I had begun to avoid foot travel in favor of trucks. Riding in trucks, however, was no picnic either. The mud pits were just as able to suck in a truck wheel as your foot, so the truck drivers had a job somewhat akin to navigating a minefield. The safe routes through the muck changed daily, even hourly, and so trucks passing on the road would shout updated intelligence at each other (“The clump of rocks by the banana tree is no good! Take the puddle through on the left!”). Additionally, everyone riding in the truck would throw in their two cents, thus meaning that every truck had a minimum of eight backseat drivers and that every ride was a flurry of shouting, gesturing, and being tossed around as the truck swerved about wildly to avoid mud traps. It felt kind of like being in a big group of fairly drunk college students, all watching someone play Frogger: “Left! Now! No, right! OK, OK, forward, forward, LEFT! Ahh! Back up! Back up! QUICK!” Of course, there's no reset button for when you screw up, and if a truck does get stuck it means having to get out and push. The cool thing about Vanuatu, however, is that no one ever seems to get mad, or even annoyed. In the US, you'd expect everyone involved to be pissed off (“God, look what you guys did. I can't freaking concentrate with all of you SHOUTING!” “Well maybe you should trying listening! I TOLD you to go right! Now I have to push your goddamn truck!”), but here no one even says a word; they happily pile out of the truck into the knee-deep muck to push, all the while being splattered by the spinning truck wheels, and, when the truck is freed, they climb back in, covered in mud and sweat, and the shouting and gesturing continues as if nothing ever happened. I think it's just that nothing is ever easy in Vanuatu, so either you get annoyed by everything and drive yourself insane, or you just let go (there's actually a word in Bislama for this, lego – as in Leggo My Eggo, except I think Bislama came before the frozen waffles – which means to let something slide). It's also cool how un-fazed Ni-Vans are by other people getting mad at them. It's always funny to watch a tourist having a difficult time with a cashier at a store, for example, and get all worked up to the point of shouting, and see the cashier be absolutely unresponsive: no anger, no effort to hurry up, no getting flustered, no apology, nothing. It's like shouting at a piece of furniture.

At any rate, Monday afternoon we were lucky and the truck got through without need for traipsing through the mud. Getting a package is probably the most exciting thing that can happen to you as a Peace Corps volunteer, and that day I got two packages, which totally made my month (if not year). One of them was from Peace Corps, so it didn't REALLY count, but you take what you can get. It was my replacement cell phone, as my first one had fallen victim to the monsoon. As a plus, I got an upgraded model, which meant that it was probably the nicest cell phone I'd ever owned, which was sort of an odd realization to have in a place where I have to fill up a bucket with water from a rain tank to pour down my toilet. The second was from the family and contained, among other things (ie. chocolate), an LED diving flashlight which I'd requested a little while ago. I took it to the nakamal that evening to show my family and created quite a disturbance, as it was probably the brightest flashlight in the entire village. Duncan spent a good couple hours fiddling with it and demonstrating to every single person that walked in (or by) the nakamal it's capability to fully light up the top of a nearby coconut tree, and allowing them to marvel at American technological prowess. I found this sort of amusing as they'd been spectacularly unimpressed when I told them about such things as skyscrapers or the moon landing, but show them a brighter than average flashlight and they go nuts.

Every morning when I wake up I like to play a little game I call “Check Out What the Ants Have Managed to Get Into During the Night” (or COWAHMGIDN for short. It's pronounced just like it's spelled). In Vanuatu, nature is not as good at respecting it's boundaries as in the US, as evidenced by the fact that, although I feel I've made a very clear distinction between outside (nature) and my house (non-nature), it's all but impossible to keep animals from entering my domicile. Generally, when it comes to animal-proofing your house, you have to prioritize. The first priority is usually keeping the larger animals at bay (chickens, pigs, dogs, rats, etc), which can usually be done fairly effectively with such simple measures as walls and doors. Next priority is the poisonous (centipedes) and disease-carrying (mosquitoes) animals. This is a little trickier, and usually requires a concrete house, a plywood ceiling, and window screens. Not everyone gets this far in Vanuatu, but I'm lucky in that I'm living in a fairly developed area and so am pretty well covered in that regard. Lowest priority is the animals that are simply annoying (ants, geckos, cockroaches, grasshoppers, spiders, etc), and these are usually given free reign in most households as fighting them is always a loosing battle. I've heard people talk about how, after we've blown ourselves to smithereens with nuclear weapons or whatever, insects will take over the planet. This statement really couldn't be more wrong, as it implies that insects don't already own the planet, which, believe me, they very much do. And so every morning I like to take a few minutes and just marvel at the superiority of the ant as a species, as, for example, I discover them swarming my supply of sugar, which I keep stored in an airtight plastic container (you see, I'd wrongly assumed that airtight would equal ant-tight). There wasn't even an ant trail leading up to the container. It's as if they discovered this supposedly unreachable cornucopia of refined sucrose during the night, promptly invented a teleportation device, and used it to transport a few queens and some workers inside, who quickly got to work reproducing, and by morning, when I was looking to make some pancakes, there was a fully functioning, self-contained, ant colony residing in my sugar box. Sometimes it's not so much amazement as surprise at finding them swarming the most unlikely of objects (“My razor? Really? What possible nutritional value are my stray beard hairs providing you?”), but I find myself unable to question the judgment of a lifeform obviously both older and wiser than myself.

Well, I realize I haven't really told you anything about what happened to me this week, but, honestly, there's not much to report, just days spent teaching at school and evenings at the nakamal. I'll do my best to get into some more adventures next week, but that's all for now.

Life in the Ring of Fire Part 28: Adventures with Bamboo

Monday the excitement of finally having materials to make furniture for my house quickly gave way to frustration at how difficult it was. Now, bamboo is really cool stuff. It grows quickly in long, hollow, poles that can easily reach 20-30 feet in height. Poles can be as thin as your wrist or as thick as your calf. Every foot or so along a pole their's a solid wooden ring that prevents the hollow cylinders from collapsing in on themselves. Thus, each pole is naturally divided into little segments, separated by the wooden discs. Each segment is about half full of water, so if you're ever thirsty in the bush and tired of drinking coconuts, you can look for some bamboo instead. It's also surprisingly sturdy. One thin pole placed across two rocks can easily support the weight of several adults. You can also cut it to a point which is quite sharp, and bamboo cutting implements used to be used extensively in Vanuatu before the Europeans came over with metal. The problem with bamboo is that there's actually very little wood contained in a pole, as the walls are rarely more than a centimeter thick, so working with it can be a little tricky. For example, when cutting it with a bush knife, you have to be sure your knife is very sharp, and you have to use just the right amount of force; too little will produce no effect, but too much will mangle or even shatter the bamboo. It also doesn't respond very well to having nails put in it. If you're nailing close to one of the solid rings, you're usually OK, but try to put a nail in anywhere else and you will almost always split the wood. Thus, the ideal method of joining bamboo is to lash it together using rope made from the bark of a special plant which has the neat property of being soft and pliable when freshly cut, but hardening after a few days of drying. I'd asked Duncan if we could cut some along with the bamboo the previous Saturday, but he had told me that the nearest patch of it was a good half-hour's walk through the bush away, so we elected to pass. And so it was on Monday that I started work on my furniture equipped only with a small hacksaw, a bush knife, a hammer, a bag of nails, and a roll of twine. At first, I tried to eschew nailing and simply construct everything using twine lashings. However, the smooth surface of the bamboo didn't provide enough grip for the rope (and twine, unfortunately, does not dry and harden), and so the lashings had a tendency to loosen to the point of uselessness within a couple hours. Additionally, bamboo (especially freshly cut bamboo) is very fibrous and gummy and is not very amenable to sawing, and so by the end of the day I had broken two hacksaw blades and gone through a lot of twine and was absolutely nowhere.

Tuesday I changed tacks and went the nailing route. I'd already worked out that, as long as you nail near a disc, you can avoid splitting the bamboo, but this led to a whole new set of problems as I was now limited in the lengths of wood that I could use, as each piece I cut had to have a disc at both ends of it so it could be nailed. This actually proved to be more of an annoyance than a real issue, but I soon ran into another problem, which was eliminating degrees of freedom (ie. making sturdy, rigid, structures). You see, connecting two pieces of wood together with a nail creates a pin joint, meaning that the nail prevents the pieces from moving side-to-side relative to each other, but it does not prevent them from rotating. This means, for example, that if you nail together four pieces of wood to form a square, using one nail at each joint, you may think this to be a rigid structure, but it's actually not, as you can still rotate the sides in somewhat to form a rhombus. In fact, the only rigid structure you can make with pin joints is a triangle. Now, if you're working with timber, you can avoid this problem simply by putting two or more nails in at each joint (thus making it no longer a pin joint), but this doesn't work with bamboo because it can barely take even one nail, so two is out of the question. I set about trying to build a chair, trying to use a series of triangle structures to increase rigidity. Even this, however, wasn't really enough as the nails tended to wobble a bit in the bamboo, meaning that they weren't even effective at completely eliminating side-to-side motion. By Wednesday I had assembled a large bamboo monstrosity that sort of resembled a chair, and would support your weight, provided that you sat on it in just the right way and didn't move a muscle. The slightest shift and the whole thing would fall apart. Frustrated, I temporarily scrapped the chair project and started in on a bed. As I'd discovered with the chair, building the part that you actually sit or lay on is not really a problem, as you just take two long, parallel, pieces of bamboo and nail short cross pieces between them. The real problem is the legs. I was trying to use four upright thick bamboo poles as legs, but these had an unfortunate tendency to splay outwards whenever any sort of load was applied. Hoping to prevent this with the bed, I built the actual frame of the bed first and then attached the legs in such places where they could touch three or four other pieces of bamboo, thus providing lots of points at which I could nail them to the frame. This seemed to work pretty well, and the resulting bed was able to stand upright on its own without being carefully positioned in the just the right way first. As a final test, I stretched out on it. It creaked ominously, but it held. It was Friday morning, and I thought I'd finally done it: not exactly the kind of bed I'd want to be making out with someone on, but passable for sleeping nonetheless. Happy, I sat up. This, however, proved to be a bad idea, as one of the legs snapped out and dumped me on the floor. At the end of my rope, I removed the three other legs and decided to go with the much less elegant, but much sturdier, solution of simply supporting the frame on top of four cinder blocks. So, I'd spent the better part of a week and only had one piece of furniture, made only partly out of bamboo. Not really what I was shooting for.

Not to be deterred, however (and still having a lot of bamboo sitting in my kitchen, which I felt silly just letting decompose there), Saturday I started again. It was time for a paradigm shift. The board had fired most of upper management and brought in all new people. So far, I new how to build a sturdy frame, the only problem was somehow raising it off the ground. Obviously, legs just weren't going to cut it, I needed something more solid. In a sudden flashback to second grade and many hours spent at day care after school, I hit on the idea of using a sort of log cabin-ish construction to build a platform on which I could nail a frame (I spent a lot of time playing with the Lincoln Logs, you see). I started with parallel cross pieces, which rested on the floor. On top of these I nailed two parallel long pieces, and on top of these two more parallel cross pieces, etc. There turned out to be a number of advantages of using this system. First off, I didn't have to worry about cutting the bamboo to an exact length (like I needed to do for the legs), which made sawing a lot easier. Second, I didn't have to stack cinder blocks up to support pieces of my chair while I worked on it, as the log cabin arrangement was self-standing from the start. Finally, there was no danger of the legs slaying outwards and the multiple poles of bamboo nailed together right on top of each other had an effect similar to putting multiple nails into a joint, at last providing the solidity I need. The one downside was that it took an awful lot of bamboo to build up a structure of any height, and it wasn't long before I used up all my stock. I was, however, happy, to have finally mastered the art of making bamboo furniture and by Sunday morning I had a solid chair almost ready, lacking only some cross pieces to sit on, which I would need to wait and cut the following weekend. On top of everything, just as I was finishing, Duncan showed up to make sure I was still alive (I'd gotten kind of sick off of kava on Wednesday night, you see, and so since then I had not been going to the nakamal in the evenings, as I usually do, as even the smell of kava was making me nauseous) and, noting my mostly-finished chair, and some of the poles which I'd split while nailing, suggested that I cut some of the wooden rings out of a smaller piece of bamboo and slide them into the split sections, thus allowing them to maintain most of their strength, even when broken, further proving Duncan's talent for supplying very useful information almost, but not entirely, too late. This was the last piece of the puzzle that I needed, and I now felt myself to be a master of bamboomanship.

Duncan hadn't been able to procure any kava for that evening, so he, Calo, and I headed upo Norsup to drink there. On the way, I explained to them that I hadn't been to see them at the nakamal for the past few night because of my bad experience on Wednesday, which, coincidentally (I think), was a night when I'd gone to Lakatoro to drink with McKenzie. Duncan and Calo instantly picked up on this point, insisting that the kava in Lakatoro is unfit for human consumption (really, all kava is pretty much unfit for human consumption) and thus was bound to have made me sick. I thought about trying to explain the fact that I'd had plenty of kava in Lakatoro and felt fine, and that I thought it was more likely that'd I'd just had one shell too many, but I decided that this would be more effort than it was worth. Duncan went on to explain the various ways in which Lakatoro's kava was made incorrectly, shoddily, and without the necessary care and love for the work (his kava, of course, is perfectly safe and it's actually physically impossible to get sick drinking it, even if you down a whole bucketful). “And if someone offers you food at a nakamal in Lakatoro, don't eat it,” he continued. “What?” I said. That was a new one. “Because they can put something in your food.” He answered “And don't drink kava that someone buys for you, unless you see it being poured.” I wasn't entirely sure why he thought someone was trying to poison me, but I was a little freaked out. “Who would do that?” I asked. “People who use black magic.” Ah, of course, I should have known. I'm actually very interested in learning more about the various beliefs and traditions surrounding black magic in Vanuatu, so, like I always do when the subject is brought up, I tried asking more about it. The topic, however, remained an elusive one. Per usual, my questions were ignored or answered with long-winded monologues that said, essentially, nothing. I'm gonna get to the bottom of this one someday though.

Life in the Ring of Fire Part 27: Child Labor

On Monday it was still raining, not continuously anymore, but off and on for most of the day. I'd say that I probably preferred it to be raining than not, because as soon the rain stopped, the mosquitoes would sally forth from their lairs and swarm me. Over the weekend, I'd gone through a container of repellent a day. The upside, however, was that it was Easter Monday which, apparently is a bigger deal than Easter Sunday as nobody had even mentioned the word Easter the previous day, but that morning everyone I met wished me a happy Easter Monday. Needless to say, we didn't have school and so my host family and I headed down to the beach for a (somewhat rainy) picnic. There was no lap-lap, but food of all other varieties was abundant, including Duncan's attempt at deep fried chicken wings, which were a little off, but it was cool to that he had liked my fried fish enough to give the recipe a shot. Later in the afternoon, McKenzie showed up looking for some anti-malarial meds (our medical officer had been trying to send more for a while, but the mail was being slow) and we headed to Norsup for a rainy kava evening. It was funny, in that it had been raining for so long that neither of us was bothering with umbrellas or any other sort of rain gear anymore, just sucking it up and getting wet.

Wednesday I decided that it was high time to get a garden going. My house had come with a small empty plot which, I guess, the previous tenant had been intending to plant a garden on, but had never gotten around to it. I also had been putting the task off, but I was getting tired of eating papaya and island cabbage (the only two readily available food items near my house) for almost every meal, plus I was curious as to what I would be able to grow. I'd picked up a bunch of seed packets in Luganville, and I was hoping to get some lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, onions and (with luck) broccoli going. Before I could do that, however, I needed to remove a large banana tree stand that was residing in my future garden, so as to allow the sun through to my chosen crops. To me, bananas seem like sort of the dunces of the tree world. They grow quickly, but their trunks are flimsy and watery (sort of the consistency of the crunchy white part at the end of a head of lettuce), which is cool in that it means you can usually fell a banana tree with one good hack from a machete, but not very practical if your goal, as a tree, is to remain standing for any extended period of time. However, bananas, apparently, aren't terribly concerned with remaining upright, as, along with having some of the flimsiest trunks, they also bear some of the heaviest fruit: large bushels of about 30 bananas which probably weight between 20 and 30 pounds. What generally happens is that as the fruit ripens and gets bigger, the banana tree will collapse under its own weight, thus allowing the bananas to fall to the ground to produce the next generation of this incredibly ridiculous tree (or get eaten by chickens, whichever comes first). This means two things, the first of which is that bananas tend to appear in clusters of six to eight trees, and the second is that they're kind of an odd mix between tree and weed because they grow so quickly. And so, after my class was finished on Wednesday, I set to work trying to clear the banana trees out of my garden. The easy (and fun) part was hacking the trunks apart with my machete, but that was quickly followed by the much longer and much more miserable job of trying to dig the stumps out of the ground. A cluster of seven banana trees produces a monstrous structure of roots which took me most of the afternoon to remove. Fortunately, living at the school meant that I had an abundant supply of child labor at my disposal (the kids are required by school rules to do whatever work, including things like yard work, that the teachers tell them to do, and while I'm not usually one to force a bunch of fourth graders to help me with my gardening, what generally happens is that as soon as the other teachers see me doing anything strenuous, they'll send over a batch of kids to help out), unfortunately my school only goes up to the eighth grade, and while it might have been helpful to have a couple of high school seniors (perhaps members of the football or wrestling teams) at my disposal, it turns out that nine year olds are a little too puny to by of any particular use when it comes to yard work. By the time I was finished I was exhausted and drenched in sweat and spent the next half an hour sitting in front of my fan thinking I was going to pass out from overheating.

Now, Wednesday is usually sport day for the kids, which means they get the last hour of school off and one of the teachers leads them in a game (usually soccer), so that they get some exercise. This week, however, it had been decided, unbeknownst to me, that the kids would just be allowed to go home, while the teachers would be doing the exercising. Thus, I was still sprawled out on my floor from my afternoon gardening when the headmaster came and informed me that we would be walking to Lakatoro and back for exercise. I thought about pointing out that I generally walk to Lakatoro and back running errands about every other day, and thus should be exempt, but I remembered that I needed to go to the bank and wanted to use the internet, so I agreed. Ever since I'd gotten to Vanuatu, I'd tended to assume that basically all Ni-Vans were in better physical condition than me (I don't know, it's just something about them growing up in the bush, climbing coconut trees, growing their own food, killing wild boars with bush knifes, etc), which some are, but I keep forgetting that a fairly hefty majority of them spend their days lying around doing absolutely nothing and, as it turns out, teachers generally fall into this category. So, at the appointed hour, I headed out to the school yard, bankbook in hand and laptop back slung over my shoulder, to find all my colleagues decked out in work-out clothes and carrying water bottles. We set out at a pace which would have been only just fast enough to outrun a glacier, and after about five minutes I told the headmaster that I had some stuff to do in Lakatoro and thus was going to pick up the pace and meet them there when they arrived. I did the walk in my usual forty minutes, went to the bank, hooked my laptop up to the phone line to download my email and then surfed the web for a bit. I then headed to the LTC to buy some snacks and settled in on a bench outside to await the arrival of everyone else. It was about an hour and twenty minutes after we'd set out that they arrived, immediately collapsed onto the benches, and discussed the possibility of taking a truck back. This option was eventually vetoed and, after everyone had rested up a bit, we set out for home. I once again struck out ahead on my own in order to get back before dark to work on my garden some more. It was approaching dusk when everyone else got back and passed out in the school yard and declared that they would each be taking a truck back to their respective houses, some of which located just a few meters away from the school. All in all, the whole expedition had a very odd feel to it. I guess Americans aren't the only ones who need to get more exercise.

Saturday I was slated to go to the garden once again with my family, this time because I wanted to bring back a bunch of bamboo in order to make some furniture to perhaps make my house seem a little less garage-like. Having completed his copra bed the previous week, Duncan and a few others were headed up to to begin shelling out coconut to make copra to sell. The almost two weeks of continuous rain had revitalized the mosquito population at the garden, and as soon as we arrived everyone instantly began swatting frantically at the clouds of blood-sucking vermin that descended upon us. We quickly got the fire in the copra dryer going, whose smoke did a fairly good job of keeping the mosquitoes off our backs. Since we wouldn't be calling a truck to carry my bamboo back until the end of the day, I had six or so hours to kill while everyone was shelling coconuts. I spent the first couple of these sleeping on the copra bed, but after a while the discomfort of the bed outstripped my sleepiness, so I decided to give the copra-making a shot. The process starts by gathering large piles of dry coconuts to work with. Fortunately, we were in the middle of a coconut plantation, so this task was fairly straightforward. Next, you line a bunch of coconuts up on the ground and split them in half with an ax (this is the most fun part, and I spent a good hour and a half swinging haphazardly at unsuspecting coconuts). Finally, you take a bent piece of metal with sharp edge and use it to scoop the coconut meat out of the shell. All in all, it only takes about thirty seconds per coconut, but it takes a whole hell of a lot of coconuts to make a bag of copra, so we were at it more or less all day. For lunch we had bananas with coconut, which is a meal that's really starting to grow on me. I'm not a big fan of the ripe bananas (more or less like the bananas you'd find at the grocery store), as I think they're too sweet, but the lap-lap bananas (sort of like plantains) are actually really good if you chuck them in the fire for a bit. They come out tasting kind of like potatoes, with a slight, sweet, banana-y aftertaste. The real treat, however, is the coconut. Fresh dry coconut meat is delicious. The best ones to eat are just starting to sprout (sort of in between navara and a straight dry coconut, see the back issues of the blog for a description of the various stages of coconuts), as the oils and the milk start of seep out of the flesh, making it nice and oily and creamy and satisfying. Eaten together, the dry, soft, and slightly sweet roasted bananas with the greasy, crunchy coconut meat make an excellent combination.

As the sun was starting to go down, we all chopped some bamboo poles to carry down to the road and called a truck to come pick us up, and within the hour I had 20 bamboo rods stacked up in my kitchen waiting to be turned into furniture. However, the hardware store doesn't open on Sundays, so I had to wait until the following week to purchase the nails I needed to start working.

Life in the Ring of Fire Part 26: Wild Boar Hunting

That's right, you read the title correctly, I went wild boar hunting. How sweet is that? Actually, it wasn't quite as sweet as it sounds, but that's kind of the point: it sounds ridiculously awesome, so it doesn't really matter because it's an impressive story regardless. You know, like if you're chatting with some friends at a party, “So what'd you do this weekend?” “Oh not too much, hung around the house and watched TV mostly, how about you?” “Oh, about the same, except, oh yeah, I went WILD BOAR HUNTING.”

Anyway, that doesn't actually happen until the end of this blog entry, so you're going to have to wait. Just building a little suspense is all.

Monday morning I was making my way back from Lakatoro, still recovering from the weekend's St. Patrick's Day celebrations. Since I needed to get back in order to teach class, I was forced to take a truck instead of walking, as I usually do. There's a fairly large fleet of trucks that spend the day driving up and down the one road on the island connecting Norsup (north of Tautu) and Litz-Litz (south of Lakatoro). By pointing to the ground next to you, you can hail a passing truck, jump in the back, and be taken to anywhere along the route for the cost of 100 vatu (about a dollar). Now, Vatu comes in 100 vatu coins, 200 vatu notes, and a variety of other denominations. The hundred vatu piece is by far the most useful piece of currency (kind of like the quarter, it'll get you places bills and smaller coins just won't), as it's the agreed upon price for a shell of kava, a ride in a truck, and a number of items in the market (needless to say, nakamals, truck drivers, and people in the market usually don't have change). Now, I only had a 200 vatu note on me, but I reasonably assumed I'd be able to get change as the driver would only need to give me one hundred vatu coin, and there were a number of other people entering and leaving the truck who, presumably, were paying with hundred vatu coins. Thus, I was a little dismayed when the driver informed me that he had no change. I went back and forth with him about this for a few minutes, insisting that he had to be able to change a 200. He finally told me that he'd give me my change later and drove off. Naturally, I assumed I had just been scammed and went about my day feeling a bit put out. By evening however, I had forgotten the incident and was on my way to my host family's house for kava when a truck zoomed past me, screeched to a halt about 50 yards up the road, and went into a hard reverse, the wheels throwing rocks and dirt everywhere. The truck reversed to me, stopped, the driver leaned out the window and handed me one hundred vatu, and drove off without explanation. It wasn't until about an hour later that night that I remembered about that morning and I figured out what the heck had just happened.

Monday night the rain started. Up until this point I'd sort of concluded that Vanuatu's so called “rainy season” was something of a joke and that the people that had dubbed it as such were, in fact, wimps. Sure, it probably had been raining a little more than I was used to, but it tended to come in quick bursts, heavy and explosive, but short lived. If it started raining all you had to do was duck under a tree or a roof for about fifteen minutes and it would be over; basically it wasn't really something that would interrupt your daily activities. This rain was different. It was calm, patient, cunning and determined. It started as a drizzle that was little more than a delicate pitter-patter on my iron roof as I fell asleep that night. The next morning it had escalated to a light rain that continued throughout the day. It got a little heavier by Tuesday night, but I still didn't give it much so much as a second thought. Wednesday morning it was raining in earnest, but still nothing to catch my attention. It wasn't until one of the teachers came and told me that the road to Lakatoro had been washed out did the realization strike that it had been raining more or less nonstop for two and a half days. Now, the bridge between Tautu and Lakatoro isn't exactly the sort of thing you picture when you hear the word “bridge,” being a man-made contraption allowing one to cross over some sort of drop-off (river, ravine, etc). Actually, it's not really the sort of thing that you even notice, as evidenced by the fact that up until that point I was completely unaware of the fact that there WAS a bridge between Lakatoro and Tautu. Really, it's just a section of the road that has a small trickle of a stream running through a metal drain underneath it. I found it hard to picture what, exactly, could have possibly been washed out and so, as soon as my class was over, I went to visit my host papa, Duncan, and the two of us headed up the road to have a look (I mean, who doesn't like going to look at broken stuff?).

The subtle power of the rainstorm was further driven home for me when what looked like shallow puddles in the middle of the road were in fact miniature lakes with water almost up to my waist. By the time we got to the scene of the broken bridge we were soaked through and through, both from the puddles of unusually large size and the steady beating of raindrops from overhead. To my astonishment, what was once a small stream had swollen into a raging river, brown and churning with the mud of what used to be its banks. What had seemed like a large, sturdy, and formidable chunk of earth had been nonchalantly washed into the ocean, leaving a gaping ravine in its place. Never fear, however, as Malekula's finest Public Works engineers were on the job of making repairs. They were attempting to build a small foot bridge out of coconut tree trunks, but were having some problems as all the construction equipment (ie. the one front-end loader on the island) was stuck on the Lakatoro side of the ravine. Fortunately, the entire population of both Tautu and Lakatoro were lining their respective banks, helpfully shouting advice and suggestions at the top of their lungs. I imagined what a similar scene might look like in the US, with an entire neighborhood gathered at a construction site of, say, a highway overpass, trying to get their two-cents in with the construction workers. “No! Put the I-beam over THERE! And you need more steel-reinforced concrete! That's it, now where's the cement mixer?” Duncan, not to be left out, immediately joined in on the back-seat-construction-working and was soon shouting and gesticulating as wildly as everyone else. Myself, I decided to sit it out and just enjoy the unfolding mayhem. The folks on the Lakatoro side had felled a coconut tree, lined it up with the road, and were slowly pushing it forward out over the ravine with the front-end-loader, hoping, I guess, that they could push it over the 30-something foot gap without it pitching into the river and being swept into the ocean. This hope was in vain however, as before they'd managed to bridge even half the length, the trunk tumbled in and was carried off by the rushing water, taking with it a little earthen island of what was once the road that had somehow avoided being swept off up until that point. Fortunately (things always seem to work out in the most haphazard ways in this country), someone noticed that a truck with small crane mounted on it had just turned off the main road a few hundred meters back and was making its way up to the PRV plantation, presumably to do some road maintenance up there. “Hey!” everyone started shouting “come over here, we need to use your crane!” The driver reversed the truck to us and we soon had two pieces of construction equipment at our disposal: the front-end-loader on the Lakatoro side and the crane on the Tautu side. Things followed much more smoothly after that and soon three coconut trees were lying side-by-side across the ravine and people were scrambling out to nail down various boards, pieces of plywood, and whatever other random scraps of wood that happened to be around. About an hour after we'd arrived, a passable wooden bridge had been constructed and the mob thinned out as people went about their business. I suggested that we head back to Tautu for a couple beers, Duncan agreed, and we trudged back home, soaking wet, but exhilarated.

Friday was Good Friday, so I decided to put on a fish fry for my host family (actually, this was decided for me on Thursday when Duncan pulled me aside and said “So, we're going to come over to your house for lunch tomorrow”). Up until this point I'd been finding it incredibly difficult to find fish for sale, aside from the tiny, bony, mostly-inedible mini-fish that all the Ni-Vans go crazy over, especially given that I was living in a country which consisted of about 20 times more ocean than land. And so when I asked Duncan on Thursday where I could get a nice, big fish for lunch on Friday, I wasn't really expecting any sort of useful answer. Thus, I was a little surprised when he informed me that a Tautu family living just about a two minute walk up the road owns a fishing boat and sells fresh 3-4 kilo fish every day. Huge. And so when I've been asking exactly the same question basically every other day for the past four months you didn't tell me this because...? Anyway, let me tell you, having to gut, scale, de-bone, and fillet a fish yourself really makes you appreciate the fact that you can pick up a chunk of ready-to-cook fish at any grocery store in the States, even if it's not quite as fresh. In the end, however, I had a piping hot tray full of fried beer-batter fish. It went over quite well with the family and man was it nice to dig into some nice, greasy, salty, and monstrously unhealthy fried food for a change (now if only I could get some good fried chicken. I'd kill for a Church's right now. Heck, even a KFC would be awesome).

Saturday I agreed to go with Duncan to his coconut plantation up in the bush where they were putting a roof on a copra dryer. Copra is a rank-smelling concoction made by breaking open dry coconuts, removing the meat from the shell, and drying it for a couple days using a mesh bed on top of a 55-gallon drum, in which you build a fire. Basically, all of the greater Lakatoro area smells like copra pretty much all the time, and I'm getting really tired of it. It's not going anywhere anytime soon, however, as the price of copra is going through the roof (who knows why, I certainly wouldn't buy the stuff), and so everyone and their mother wants to make and sell copra. Despite my general distaste for copra, it ended up being a fun trip. We were working on a budget, so we were putting a traditional, natangora, roof on the dryer as opposed to the more popular (and much easier to make) iron roof. The natangora plant produces enormous fronds (they kind of look like coconut leaves, except a lot bigger) that can be used to make a (fairly) waterproof roofing material. To make roofing for a house, you remove the leaves from the fronds and sow them tightly together using strips of green bamboo in a process that I hear is a huge pain in the ass. Since no one was going to be living in the copra dryer, we were going the quick-and-easy route of leaving the leaves attached to the fronds and just nailing a bunch of fronds onto the roof. There were six of us, and we probably could have finished the job in a couple hours, but it turns out working in the garden really isn't about getting anything done, necessarily. Every Saturday most of the men in the village head up to the gardens for the day in order to tend their cows, get food or firewood, or shell coconuts to make copra. As I discovered, these weekly sojourns to the garden are really more of an excuse to get away from the wives and hang out with the other guys (discuss the price of copra, who just got a new truck, etc) and, of course, walk around the bush with a rifle trying to shoot things. As such, work proceeded at a slow rate, with a maximum of two people working at once, and what little work was being done was punctuated by long periods of resting. It took all morning to finish half the roof, at which point Duncan took me and my little host brother, Frank, to try and shoot narwimba (a bird common in the bush that makes for good eating. Looks kind of like your common pigeon). We struck off into the bush, descending from the hill on which the coconut plantation was located into a sort of grassy swamp. Banyan and cocoa pressed in all around and, although I never saw a single bird before Duncan shot it, we were soon carrying two narwimba. We paused for a while in front of an enormous banyan in the middle of a swampy clearing, Duncan circling the tree carefully and quietly, looking through his scope, trying to spot nests up above, me and Frank, trying to make as little as noise possible, watching him. Suddenly, the two dogs that we'd brought with us went insane, barking wildly somewhere out of sight, but close by, in the bush. Duncan turned to me, his eyes enormous with excitement. “Wild pig!” he said. He turned and faced the direction of the dog's barking. A few seconds later, the noise was right on top of us. I could hear several large animals crashing through the bush just outside of the clearing. The we heard the pig: snorting and grunting loudly, very close, but still out of sight in the bush. “Climb a tree!” Duncan shouted at me and Frank “NOW!” Terrified, I looked around for a climbable tree. The nearest to me had no limbs in arm's reach, but I ran for it, jumped, and tried to shimmy myself up the trunk. However, my mud-coated sandals provided basically no grip and I soon slid back to the ground. I booked it for nearby banyan and managed to wedge myself between it and a cocoa tree, back against the banyan, feet against the cocoa. I looked around and saw that Frank had done something similar and that Duncan was standing, gun leveled, in the clearing, turning slowly to keep faced towards the racket of the dogs and the pig. The noise skirted the clearing a little to my right and proceeded off into the distance. I spent another few minutes in the tree, breathing heavily, before Duncan told us we could come down. “When you see a pig you must climb a tree,” he explained “if you get stabbed with their tusks, you have to go to the hospital. ” I thought that this was something that might have been good to know before the start of the expedition. “We don't have enough dogs,” he continued “if we had more, they would have run the pig right to us.” I was somewhat disappointed that we wouldn't be able to walk back up to the plantation with a pig slung over our backs, as I'd hear that wild pig meat is a real treat. As it turned out, however, I did get to try some wild pig later that day. After returning from the garden, I ran into my friend, Calo, who told me that he'd killed a wild pig that afternoon and given us some of the meat. “Did you kill it with a .22?” I asked him. “No,” he said “bush knife.”