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.
No comments:
Post a Comment