Life in the Ring of Fire Part 43: Sudden Changes

*NOTE* I'm going to have to apologize for my lack of blog entries for the past few weeks. Things have been pretty hectic and I've been getting into more adventures than usual, and so I haven't really had time to sit down and write. I'm in Sydney right now, so I don't know how much time I'll have in the near future to finish catching up, but be patient, I haven't forgotten about this project. Here's two entries to tie you over.

This week's Tautu Language word is “Er-pese” (see issue 42 for tips on pronunciation). It's probably best translated as “what's up.” It can be used as a greeting to mean “how are you?” or as a more general question meaning “what's going on?” or “what's the deal with this?”

Monday we started a fun new game at school called “Watch What My Headmaster Considers More Important Than My Class.” July is host to two of the most important holidays in Vanuatu, which occur basically back to back. The first is Children's Day on July 24th and the second is Independence on July 30th. Children's day is sort of a combination of Christmas (which is a non-event here) and a Birthday. It's kind of like instead of celebrating your kid's birthday on the day they were born, you just celebrate every kid in the country's birthday on the same day (this I guess kind of explains why no one ever knows how old they are, especially the older people. I'll ask an old man in the village how old he is and his first answer is usually something like 150. Then I'll tell them that, no, that really isn't possible, so they'll knock it down to 95. Upon further skepticism on my part, they'll finally settle on something like 76, which I'll consider to be at least ballpark accurate). School's canceled and parents get all of their kids gifts and there are parades and sporting events and various other activities. Independence, as I've explained in a previous entry, celebrates Vanuatu's independence and is supposed to be an absolute mess. As part of some of the children's day activities, the kids from my school were expected to perform various songs and participate in a number of sporting events which the headmaster felt required the use of class time to prepare for. Thus, on Monday my class was canceled in favor of singing lessons. Tuesday was spent digging and filling a sand pit for a long jump court followed by long jump practice. Wednesday was volleyball.

Wednesday night I was waiting for McKenzie to join me for kava when I got a phone call from Elin (now possible thanks to the new cell service). She frantically told me that she needed to get to Lakatoro that night with all her stuff in order to catch a plane to Vila in the morning. It was about five o'clock in the evening, and so I knew that no service trucks would be running regularly between Elin's village in the north and Lakatoro. I told her to try and find a truck in her village to charter to come down and that McKenzie and I would cover the cost until we could get Peace Corps to reimburse us (because Elin is notorious for being short of cash). Elin said she'd try asking around and call me back. About half an hour later I got another call saying that she'd chartered a truck and would be arriving in our area about eight or nine o'clock and would have the truck come and find us at the nakamal and take us all back to my house. Shortly after, McKenzie arrived and we drank a couple shells together. The kava must have been especially strong that night, because we were soon totally out of it and, while vaguely aware of the fact that Elin was supposed to be meeting us at some point in the future, we were confident that we would not have to worry about dealing with such matters for some time yet. Thus, when there suddenly appeared a figure standing over us telling us to hurry up and get in a truck, it took a bit of time for use to process that it was Elin, who'd managed to make it down earlier than expected.

We piled in the back of the truck and were surprised to see a large collection of Elin's stuff as well as about eight people from her village who'd followed her down. “What's going on?” I asked. “I'll explain when we get to your house,” Elin told me. When we arrived in Tautu, I recruited some of the boarding students to help move Elin's bags into my house and those Ni-Vans that had come down in the truck with her took turns giving her hugs and I slowly realized that everyone was crying. The truck left and McKenzie, Elin, and I walked into my house, where we finally got a full explanation of what was going on. For the past few months, Elin had been having trouble at her site. Her house had been broken into several times and a number of her belongings stolen. For some reason, both her village and Peace Corps had been surprisingly slow in responding to the situation, which was surprising because Peace Corps is usually very (sometimes overly) sensitive to volunteer safety issues. However, after many months of inaction, the Peace Corps Office had suddenly called Elin and told her to pack up her house and get to Vila immediately. “What should I tell my village?” She'd asked. “Tell them you're leaving and not coming back,” they responded. This had led to the frantic phone call I'd received earlier in the day. “Where are they sending you?” McKenzie and I asked. “I don't know,” she told us, “if I can't get another site, I might have to go back to the US.” Thus, it was apparent that that night was certainly Elin's last at her site in Lavasal, would probably be her last in Malekula, and could possibly be our last night with her in Vanuatu. I headed over to Duncan's and explained the situation and he was happy to provide me with some beers for the occasion. We stayed up most of the night talking and then were up again early in the morning to take Elin to the airport. She boarded the plane around eight in the morning, taking with her only a small portion of the belongings she'd brought down to my house the previous evening. McKenzie and I stood on the tarmac and watched the two-engine prop plane taxi its way down the landing strip. “I feel like this is the last time I'm going to see her,” McKenzie said. I nodded. “It sucks being left behind,” she continued “sucks just as much as leaving.” I nodded again. There wasn't much else to say. We both knew that, even if Peace Corps were to find a new site for Elin, it was unlikely that it would be anywhere in Malekula. On top of that, we both had a sinking feeling that Elin was probably on her way back to the States.

I headed back to Tautu and found that my class had once again been canceled in favor of milling around doing nothing. Having had enough, I decided to accept McKenzie and Laura's invitation to go up to Laura's village, Matanvat, and take a weekend to hike around the northwest of the island. I met up with McKenzie in Lakatoro and the two of us boarded a truck headed north. A few months ago, when I'd taken the hour-long truck ride put to Elin's village, I'd been crammed into the back of a rickety pickup along with about forty other people, a lot of yams, chickens, and such luggage. Needless to say, it was quite an uncomfortable ride. This time, however, the truck was carrying only four people and a few bags, so there was plenty of leg space and it was actually kind of pleasant. This was good, because the ride took about two hours. We jumped down in front of Laura's house, which McKenzie recognized from a previous trip. Laura was off doing something when we arrived, so McKenzie and I headed down to the beach to catch the sunset, now possible seeing as we were on the west side of the island. It proved to be an especially excellent sunset, with just the right amount of clouds, enough to provide some interesting lighting effects, but not too many as to block out the sun's descent. We even saw that little green flash that occurs just as the top tip of the sun vanishes beneath the watery horizon and, even though I am in Vila writing this and thus could theoretically look up the actual name for this phenomena on the internet, I'm not going to, just for added authenticity. Laura found us on the beach and brought us back up to her house. We cooked couscous for dinner, another one of those foods about whose existence I'd totally forgotten, which was really good.

The next day we were set to hike about two hours to another village further down the road, but we weren't set to depart until the afternoon, so in the morning we got a chance to walk around Laura's village and marvel at how unbelievably nice it was. The EU had just donated a huge chunk of change to the school, which had allowed them to build an enormous new school building complete with solar power which would have looked right at home in the US. The village was also very clean, not littered with various wrappers and other plastic waste like Tautu is, and still sparsely populated enough that the grass hadn't been all trod down and a lot of the trees were still standing, not cut down in favor of buildings. There were also an abundance of fruit trees, allowing one to walk around and feast on such things as grapefruits, tomatoes, lemons, and coconuts. We all mused on the fact that the more developed villages became, the more they began to look like ghettos. While the primitive villages looked quaint and pristine, with their bamboo and thatch buildings, the more modern houses are made using cinder blocks and corrugated tin which, while they appear affluent to the Ni-Vanuatu, tend to look poor and dilapidated to us westerners.

Digicel was also now providing cell service to Matanvat, so we were able to call into the Peace Corps office to check on Elin. We were all pleased to hear that she seemed determined to stay in Vanuatu and had already had once meeting with the staff, who seemed willing to work with her to find her a new site in the country. Around one o'clock in the afternoon, a Ni-Van came by Laura's house and asked if we were ready to start out hike. He was headed for a church conference and so wanted to accompany us on our journey. It was a fairly pleasant day for hiking, not too hot and with plenty of cloud cover to keep the sun off. We walked through villages and coconut plantations for a while, occasionally catching inviting glimpses of the coast through the foliage. After about an hour we arrived at a large river cutting across the road. It was honestly one of the most beautiful things I'd seen in a long time. It was deep, clear, wide, and inviting, just perfect for a day of swimming and lounging by the water. It emptied out in the ocean a little ways down stream and a sort of triangular sandbar had formed at the mouth, with the river bifurcating and running along either side. In other words, it was an absolutely perfect place. However, we needed to reach our destination before dark and so we made a note to stop in for a nice, extended stay on our way back through. McKenzie also was trying to get a little work done for her organization by collecting samples of cocoa beans from the farmers in the area to take assess if they were good enough quality to be exported. This is a more difficult task than you might think, however, because Ni-Vans are incredibly useless at providing information. You could spend hours asking locals where, say, a cocoa drying bed is located and have them all swear that they've never heard of any such thing existing, especially not in their village, but have you tried the village up the road? After much frustrating questioning you'll finally spot a cocoa bed about fifteen feet from where you're standing and ask “Well, what's that?” To which all of the previously questioned villagers will respond “Oh, that's our cocoa drying bed.” Similarly, we spent about half an hour asking around about people growing cocoa, only to have everyone tell us that no such activity goes on around these parts. Giving up, we sat down next to the river to rest and started chatting with some of the villagers and at some point in the conversation one of them casually mentioned that he grows cocoa and currently has half a ton ready to sell. Ready to beat her head against a tree, McKenzie promised to stop by on her way back to take a sample.
Another half an hour of hiking brought us to Milanavet and Tenmaru, two villages located essentially on top of each other to form a sort of twin-village area, which was our destination. Milanavet, which we came to first, sported a gorgeous black sand beach, which had the unusual property of not having any other islands visible from it (most parts of Malekula I'd been to have at least one small island visible from the coast). Looking out across the harsh uniformity of the ocean, which disappeared abruptly over the horizon, it was easy to see how one could mistake the world for being both tiny and flat. What looked liked a nakamal was located right on the beach and McKenzie and I instantly decided that we would have to return to it later that evening for kava. After a short pause, we proceeded to Tenmaru, where Laura knew a family that she thought would be willing to put us up for the couple of nights that we were there. The wonderful thing about traveling on the islands is that you never have to worry about food to accommodation, as everyone is always happy to have guests. This was proven overwhelmingly as, instantly upon our arrival, there were two families fighting over the right to host us. To prevent civil unrest, we agreed that we would sleep with one of the families, while eating the majority of our meals with the other. Even so, we ended up having to eat several meals twice, once with one family and again with the other, to keep the peace.

After we'd arranged where we were going to sleep at eat that evening, we headed back to Milanavet to patronize the beach nakamal we'd seen on the way in. We arrived and found it disappointingly closed but, not to be so easily deterred, we headed up into the village to try and seek out the proprietor. We soon ran across a young man, and I asked him where the nakamal owner lived. He told me that he would try and go find him and would be right back. A few minutes later he returned and explained that the owner had gone to another village to drink kava there but, if we wanted kava, he would be happy to go purchase some at the neighboring village and bring it back and work it for us. We gave him a 500 vatu note (about $5) and he cycled off into the night. A few minutes later, we began to consider the possibility that we'd just been had, and would be out $5 but, not ten minutes after, the guy returned with a bag of kava and began grinding it for us. Not much later, a small bucket of kava had been prepared for us. Not for the first time, we marveled at a culture so willing to go so far out of their way for total strangers. The guy who'd set aside his evening to serve us refused both cash and a portion of the kava he'd made for us.

A healthy portion of the kava drunk on Malekula comes from the Northwest of the island, where we currently were, and their kava honestly is worlds better. I really have no idea why, but the taste isn't as strong, and it fades quickly from your mouth, and it never seems to make me nauseous, not matter how much I drink. I'm not sure if this is a function of the kava being fresher or of the style in which they make it, one shell at a time, not mass-produced, like in Lakatoro, but it does make a big difference. It was a pleasant evening watching the stars and the ocean, with the full moon acting like a spot-light coming over our shoulders and lighting everything up pleasantly.

We spent Saturday milling around on the beach and walked back to Laura's village on Sunday. The walk back was equally pleasant and we had time to stop for several hours at the river we'd walked by on the way up. As an added plus, we got to practice our bush survival skills by finding our own lunch in the form of coconut and papaya. McKenzie collected her samples, which she quickly realized were not suitable for export and thus were, essentially, useless. Not to let something like cocoa beans go to waste, however, we decided to make hot chocolate when we got back to Laura's. We shelled a bunch of cocoa beans and smashed them as fine as we could with a bottle. We then mixed the powder with powdered milk, hot water, and some sugar. The result was a beverage at least halfway resembling hot chocolate, which we considered to be a success. I vowed to look into an automatic coffee grinder during my upcoming trip to Australia to aid in future hot chocolate production. It had been a fun trip, and I was happy to be expanding the number of villages I'd been to on Malekula. We went to sleep and set alarms in order to wake us up in time to catch the trucks back to Lakatoro the following day.