Life in the Ring of Fire Part 42: Why Shouldn't Kids Play With Knives?

Tuesday I decided it was high time I started making a concerted effort to learn Tautu's local language. Almost everyone in my village speaks a very old, obscure, unwritten language that predates the arrival of Europeans to Vanuatu. Because of its disparate geography, Vanuatu has a lot of these native languages spread out across its 80-something islands and some of them are spoken by only a few people. Vanuatu, I believe, has the largest number of languages spoken per capita of any country in the world. Because of the communication difficulties this causes, almost everyone speaks Bislama as well, a pidgin of English and French that's ridiculously fun to speak, but also almost impossible to express yourself in. Peace Corps taught us Bislama during our training, and I've been pretty lucky live in a village where it's the main language of discourse (in some of the more remote villages, Bislama isn't spoken on a daily basis), thus making it easy for me to communicate and understand people. It's also been kind of a deterrent to learning the local language, as Bislama is so easy and effective. I'd been wanting to learn Tautu's local language for a while, both because it would make me a more integrated and respected member of the community and also it would be cool to show off at parties in the US that I can speak an obscure language spoken by only a few hundred people living in the north-eastern region of the small island of Malekula, and hopefully get people to buy me some beers. So, Tuesday afternoon I took a notebook and sat down with Linda and grilled her on language. It was (and still is) a little overwhelming, but by the end of the week I was beginning to get a very, very rudimentary hold on it, but a hold nonetheless. It is challenging for several reasons. First of all, there are no texts that you can refer to for definitions and pronunciations, meaning that you have to rely on asking people, a very uncertain method, as everyone has a slightly different take on how to say words and what they mean. Second, the lack of a written form means that standardization is a little lacking; you get different answers to your questions about the language depending on who you ask. Third, the sounds are quite different; they don't distinguish certain sounds that we do and do distinguish ones that we don't. For example, “no,” “na,” and “ne” all seem to be taken as the same sound, but there's a huge different between na and nga. Finally, you have to conjugate verbs, something I'd gotten used to not doing in Bislama. Anyway, I'm hoping that I'll stick with the project and be fluent by the time I finish my service, but we'll see. In the mean time, I'm going to start putting up words of the week in language on the blog for my amusement (that's right, my amusement, not yours). Unfortunately, I can't pronounce them for you in writing, but I'll be using the same transliteration system that they us for Bislama, which works as follows:

1)All consonants make their basic, English sounds. Consonants don't change sound because of spelling (ie. ci would make same sound as ki, the c doesn't become soft because it's next to the i). The only exceptions to this are “ch” and “sh” diphthongs, which aren't in Bislama, but I'm going to keep them because I like them.
2)Each vowel makes only one sound. “A” makes the short a sound, like in “apple.” “E” makes the long a sound, so “shake” would be spelled “shek” or “bake” “bek.” “I” makes the long e sound, so “meat” becomes “mit” and “greet” becomes “grit.” “O” makes the sound of its name, so “coat” would be “cot” and “boat” “bot.” “U” makes the double-o sound, so “boot” becomes “but.”
3)There are four vowel diphthongs: “ei” makes the “ay” sound, so day is spelled “dei.” “oe” makes the “oy” sound, so boy is spelled “boe.” “ae” makes the long i sound, so time is spelled “taem.” “ao” makes the “ow” sound, so now is spelled “nao.”

OK, the word of the week this week is “ares,” which means “good.” It's very versatile, however, because it can also be used to mean please, thank you, yes, cool, OK, fine, etc. Use it around town.

Wednesday I got a call from a number I didn't recognize while teaching class and was left with a mysterious, incomprehensible voice mail. Brushing it off as a wrong number, I went about my daily business. A couple hours later, they called back and I picked up. Like I've mentioned before, Bislama is a difficult language to communicate in if you don't have any context, which makes answering the phone particularly difficult, because you don't really have anything to go on to form an understanding of what the person on the other end is trying to communicate. Thus, I patiently listened to the guy on the phone ramble on about something involving water, not really having any clue what was going on. After a good ten minutes of back and forth, I was able to hammer out that he'd gotten a hold of a grant application from the EU for building rural water systems and that it somehow required the involvement of a Peace Corps volunteer so he wanted me to come to his village for the evening for some vaguely related reason. Not sure if I was up for picking up and heading to some random village for the night, I told him I'd call him back. After about ten minutes, however, I realized I didn't really have anything else to do and the idea of an adventure sounded pretty appealing, so I called back and told him I was in. He asked me to meet him at the LTC, and told me to describe myself so he'd be able to recognize me when I arrived. I told him that it really shouldn't be a problem because I'm likely to be the only white person at the LTC.

It ended up being a very uncomfortable three-ish hour truck ride to the other side of the island to a small village called Leviamb. I had to admit, they'd chosen a great location for a village. Right on a spacious river, with a long stretch of sandy beach conveniently placed on the west side of the island so that you could catch the sunsets. Unfortunately, they'd totally trashed the place. All the grass and other greenery had been removed or trodden down, so the whole place was dirt. Discarded cans, wrappers, bags, and other junk was littered everywhere. In other words, they were in serious need of a village beautification program. The guy who'd called me, Wilfred, filled me in on the situation during the drive. They were looking to get some grant money to repair their village water system which had been broken for a few years now. He seemed to be pretty on top of things, which was a surprising change, and, as far as I could tell, all he wanted from me was my signature on the grant form and for me to be signatory on the bank account they were going to set up to receive the grant money, which left me kind of wondering why they were driving me halfway across the island to see their village. He seemed to think it very important that I witness their broken water system for some reason.

We had a quick snack upon arrival and then the two of us began hiking up to their water source. Just before we cleared the village, I heard someone calling out my name. I turned around and saw someone waving excitedly, but he was too far away for me to make out his face.
“Do you know him?” asked Wilfred.
“I don't think so,” I replied as I waved back, but then he began walking towards us and I realized I did know him. If you'll remember, back in issue 36 of the blog, I ran into some guy I didn't recognize in Lakatoro who seemed to think that we were old friends and who insisted that I meet him the following Friday for something involving kava and then didn't show. Well, guess what? It was THAT GUY. I still have no idea how I knew him from before, but I definitely recognized him as the random kava dude. We exchanged pleasantries. I established that he lived in Leviamb, but frequently came into Lakatoro to sell copra. He invited me to drink kava at his nakamal that evening and I accepted. As Wilfred and I hiked on, Wilfred, showing himself to be the first Ni-Van I'd ever met to appreciate the fact that it's freaking impossible to remember everyone's names around these parts, filled me in that random kava dude's name was Sake and that he owned the main village kava bar.

We toured the village water system, which seemed to be in pretty good shape except for the fact that their water tank could use a little maintenance. They had a pipe that carried water, through the use of gravity only, from a pool at the base of a waterfall up in the bush down to a collecting tank on a hill just above the village. From there it ran down into the village and was distributed to a number of faucets at people's houses. The problem, as Wilfred explained, was that there were rocks growing in the pipes. I was puzzled by this for a while. Initially I thought he was trying to say that the pipes were clogged by dirt and sediment from the stream, but he insisted that this wasn't the case. It wasn't until we hiked up to the source that I realized what he was talking about. I noticed that stalactites were growing down the face of the waterfall that fed the pool, meaning that the water had limestone in it which was depositing on the interior of their pipes causing, as he put it, rocks to grow. I agreed to look into a way to combat the problem

That evening I joined Sake for kava at his nakamal. Unlike in Lakatoro and Tautu, where kava roots have to be imported from other parts of the island to make the drink, Leviamb grows their own kava, thus meaning it was about half as expensive and twice as good. Although there's no getting rid of the horrid kava taste, theirs wasn't as pungent and you could drink a shell without needing to spend the next five minutes removing the taste from your mouth. It was also possible to drink a lot of it without feeling sick, which was good because everyone in the village wanted to buy me a shell, so I was in for a bit of a rough night. It was fun though, as I was very much the center of attention because, as they explained, they usually only get one white man through per year. I was proud to be filling their quota. It was also a nice reminder of how much I've become at home in Vanuatu. I remembered back to my trip to Southwest bay with my uncle, Jonasi, more than half a year ago and how uncomfortable I'd felt from the very start to be away from Tautu and how difficult it was to socialize with people. Now, after being in Leviamb for all of three hours, I was totally comfortable chewing the fat with the guys at the nakamal. The next morning, as promised, I was awoken early and driven back to Tautu in time for me to teach my morning class.

Saturday I followed Duncan to the garden to help him dry copra. On the way up, I passed a group of boys, who looked to be between the ages of seven and twelve, clearing bush with machetes. I'd grown so used to seeing small kids wielding giant knives that it hardly gave me pause, but it made me think about the difference between the way kids are raised in Vanuatu and in the States. Here, pretty much from the age of five, kids are making and tending fires, preparing food to cook, working the bush with machetes, chopping firewood, holding their parent's rifles, going spear fishing, scaling trees for fruit, and pretty much doing every single dangerous task you can think of. Compare that to “OH MY GOD! Little Johnnie has a PLASTIC BAG! Get that away from him! Call the paramedics!” It makes us look kind of pathetic, doesn't it? I mean, we can send robots to mars, but we have to worry about our kids asphyxiating themselves with grocery bags. Kind of weird, don't you think?

I closed the week with another grilling experiement, this time for Duncan and my host family. It went over quite well, with both hamburgers and fajitas. It's difficult to predict what kind of American food they'll like sometimes, as evidenced by the fact that the biggest hit was the salsa I made, which they ate by itself with spoons. Not quite the point, but you take what you can get.