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.
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