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.
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