Life in the Ring of Fire Part 52: Magician Missionaries

This week's Tautu language word is “san.” It means “one.”

So, this is issue 52. Perhaps you don't appreciate the significance of that, so I'll explain. I write an issue of this blog for every week I'm in Vanuatu and, well, there are 52 weeks in a year, so I've been here a year now. I can't believe I've made it this far. I really can't believe that I'm still writing these. I can't believe that you're still reading them. I remember, way back in training, writing issue six of this and thinking that I'd never be writing this issue. Of course, I don't feel like I've been here a year. I feel like that sentiment has been so long overused it has ceased to mean anything. A working US parent with two kids remarks, in surprise, “God, I can't believe it's almost December, where does the time go?” Well, I'll tell you where the time goes: you work forty hours or more a week. You have a house to look after. Chores to be done. Bills to be paid. Kids to be driven places. It's no mystery where the time goes. Every second is accounted for and used. Things are accomplished. The world changes. Not so in Vanuatu. Time doesn't pass, it creeps away. Minutes and hours sneak off while you're not looking. Sometimes whole days abscond with themselves and you're left wondering what in the hell happened on Tuesday. You can't think of a single thing you did that day. Nothing was changed because of events that occurred on that day. It might as well have never happened. In the US, time passes in a blur because you have no time to think. In Vanuatu, time slides by without notice because you spend whole days thinking.

Let me give you an example: I still haven't started the work I'm supposed to be doing yet. Yes, I'm halfway through my service and I've yet to start. I'm supposed to be training teachers and putting together a curriculum for the school's computer center. Except the computer center hasn't been built yet. And probably won't be for a while still. Another example: I'm still waiting for a canoe to be built for me that I ordered back in March. I'm not holding out much hope for it being completed before I leave Peace Corps. Time beats down on us in the westernized world. Constantly we fight it. Obsessively we track it. We talk about nanoseconds and picoseconds as if such things mattered. We worry about leap years and daylight savings time. For us, time is a worthy adversary, a force to be reckoned with. But not in the Pacific. Here you see time at its most impotent. Millennia pour by with little or no effect to be swallowed up by the ocean and drowned. A persistent, apathetic patience permeates everything, including the people. It's a patience born of waking up every morning to the same unflinching blue-green of the Pacific Ocean. Sometimes I wonder if the Ni-Vanuatu aren't just humoring all of us. If the western religions, the customs, the practices that they've adopted so politely at our urging are all just a way of obliging us for the time being. As if they know that one day we'll get bored with these islands, or we'll run ourselves into the ground and leave and they'll be able to go back to doing what they were doing before we showed up. All it will take is time and patience, both of which they have in abundance.

I'm getting lost in philosophic musings again, so let's try and wrap this up. The point is, that I don't feel like I've been in Vanuatu a year because not enough has happened. Not enough events have transpired to fill up a year. I've had weeks where my busiest day consisted of walking three minutes to the village store to buy sugar. I've spent entire days doing nothing. Literally nothing. Not whiling away time watching TV or reading or playing computer games or talking, but truly doing nothing, just sitting in the same spot staring staring at the same bit of ocean for hours on end. What I'm trying to say is that a year isn't a long time in Vanuatu. Things that take minutes in the US take hours here, and things that take hours in the US can take days or weeks here, so not a lot gets done in a year and, since I think we tend to judge the passage of time by the amount of things that happen, that makes a year seem like not much time at all. But regardless, let me finish by thanking everyone for following my adventures this far and for all the emails, letters, and packages that have kept me going this long. I hope I can count on your continued interest and support in my second year of service.

Sunday I decided to cut my hair. This was not an easy decision to make. I'd completely shaved my head back in training and had promised myself I'd not let clippers touch my head again until I'd completed my service. I'd always been intrigued by long hair. Growing up, my parents had always kept me carefully groomed by mandating frequent trips to the barber, but I'd always had the idea in the back of my head that, if I were to just let my hair grow, something cool would happen. Like it'd develop into one of those long, Chinese braids that people always have in martial arts movies, for example. Unfortunately, it turns out that my hair is so dense, tangled, and unmanageable that only one hairstyle is possible once it gets long: the afro. About a month ago I broke my brush trying to comb it. I mean that quite literally, I was trying to run my brush through my hair, it got tangled up, so I tried to pull harder and the handle snapped off. Really. With each morning, as I got up and tried to make some order of my mane, it was becoming clear that the situation was getting more and more hopeless. Still, I take promises seriously, especially those that I make to myself, so I was definitely experiencing some hesitation as I contemplated closing my scissors around a clump of dark brown hair. I called McKenzie.
“I think I'm going to cut my hair,” I explained.
“No.” She said.
“What do you mean, 'no'?”
“No, you can't.”
“But it's getting ridiculous!”
“OK. So quit your whining and deal with it.”
“But I have an afro! I mean, I didn't think those were words I'd ever be saying.”
“Look, at least take some time to think it over. If you still want to do it, we'll cut it for Halloween.”
“Halloween? But that's a month and a half away!”
“It's five weeks, don't exaggerate.”

So Kenzie was no help. I spent another hour in indecision before putting down some towels on the floor and laying into it. I thinned out my mess of hair with scissors and then finished the job with an electric clipper I'd borrowed from one of my uncles. After I was finished, I found myself covered in tiny, itchy little hair particles that clung stubbornly to my skin in the sweaty island heat. It would be several days before I was able to wash all of them off. On the whole, however, I felt better. Cleaner, freer.

Friday morning the provincial education officer arrived at my school in the morning to announce that a group of Australian magicians would arriving sometime mid-morning in order to entertain us. I knew of an Australian run program in which doctors-in-training were sent to countries like Vanuatu for a few months in order to practice the medical skills they'd been learning, but I was unaware that there was a similar program for magicians-in-training. Still, I guess it made sense, as a group of Ni-Van school children was probably a more forgiving audience than your average westerner. I should have known, however, that whenever large groups of white people visit Malekula, they're almost always missionaries. And these magicians were no exception. That's right, magician missionaries. Who would've thought. They put on an hour and a half performance, with each each trick they did somehow illustrating an important lesson about Jesus. Of course, none of them spoke Bislama. They got around this in two ways. Firstly, a pastor from Santo was traveling with them who spoke good English and did translations on the fly. He actually did a surprisingly good job. The thing about translating a language into a pidgin is that a lot of the subtlety is necessarily lost. And the thing about religious discourse is that it's all about the subtlety. There are actually Bislama translations of the bible, which I think are pretty funny as they take the flowery, poetic verse of the bible and reduce it to stark simplicity. Take some adjectives often used to describe God: kind, loving, all-powerful, almighty, forgiving. In Bislama, every one these descriptors would be translated as “gud” (good). Seems like maybe you're missing out on something, doest it? Anyway, in addition to having some of their acts translated by the pastor, they'd had some pre-translated and recorded on tapes, which they lip synced to. That was pretty funny.

I honestly don't know why missionaries come to Vanuatu. I don't think I've ever been to a more Christian nation in the world. I mean, I don't know a single Ni-Van who doesn't identify them self as a Christian. Not one. It's preaching to the choir. There are probably way more potential converts back in Australia, and they're much more conveniently located on the same landmass as your house. Maybe they're trying to re-live the glamorous olden days when missionaries coming to these shores were in danger of getting eaten. Maybe there's a certain amount of romanticism about preaching in a country that's described as third world. What's ridiculous is how absurdly loaded they all are. There's a group of Mormon missionaries (OK, well, maybe they actually do have some work to do, I don't know many Ni-Van Mormons) that live in the guest houses run by the LTC. Now, a few months back McKenzie and I noticed that the LTC had started stocking pudding cups. For $8 a piece. That's right, $8 for a pudding cup. And not for the four pack, I mean $8 for ONE cup of pudding. Who the hell would buy this? We'd asked each other. Well, a few weeks later Elin's dad was staying at the LTC guest house next to the Mormons and when we went over to see him McKenzie's dog knocked over their trash can. Well, guess what? It was chocked full of empty pudding cups. Mystery solved. Mindi also related a story to me of when she was stationed in Luganville, on Santo, and got to know a missionary family working with some protestant church. Their church graciously provided them with a monthly living allowance of several thousand dollars, courtesy of donations from church-goers stateside (for reference, we Peace Corps volunteers get a living allowance of about $500 a month, and that's already bit much for a country where you could easily live on $10 a week). Finding themselves completely unable to spend such a ridiculous monthly sum on the meager shopping selections inside Vanuatu (there quite literally is nothing to buy), they used it to import shipping containers of goods from the US for their personal consumption. So yeah, bottom line, if your church asks for donations to go to missionary work in Vanuatu, the money would probably be better spent helping starving kids in Africa or something.

Anyway, after the performance was over, I was left in the awkward situation of feeling obligated to talk to the Australian missionaries, but being too shy to do so. I'll be honest. I've been in Vanuatu for too long. Large groups of white people scare me, especially if they're missionaries. So I hid in the back of the crowd (well, as the only white person in the village, I'm sure I didn't blend in particularly well, but whatever) talking to a couple of my friends on the school board. After about ten minutes, I mustered up some courage and went up and starting talking to my headmaster, who was seated a mere ten feet away from the missionaries. Fortunately, I was spared having to make the final leap, as one of the missionary guys walked over and started talking to me. He claimed to be a fairly regular visitor to Vanuatu and seemed pretty savvy about the country. I refrained from asking the question that was on the tip of my tongue, “What are you guys DOING here?”, and was soon spared from having to make more forced conversation as they boarded a truck and were carted off to their next destination.

That evening the nakamal was abuzz. In a few hours, a momentous event was to occur. A rare chance to catch a delectable sea creature was going to present itself. The organism in question, whose name translates to “ocean worm,” is apparently both fickle and delicious. As it was explained to me, it appears, in massive numbers, in the shallows of the ocean only twice a year, once at the end of September and once at the end of October, and each appearance lasts only a couple of days. On top of that, it only shows up for about an hour each day, starting just as the moon begins to rise. According to custom, it is also easily startled. Screaming while in the water or the presence of women either pregnant or menstruating is said to make these strange little creatures book it back to wherever they came from, thus ruining it for everyone until next year. Curious, at the appointed hour, I headed down to the ocean to see what was up. Kids holding plastic dishes and burning coconut fronds lined the shallows, which were indeed teeming with little, black worms. Soon, all the kid's dishes were filled with these writhing creatures, which really did look remarkably like swimming earthworms, and not at all appetizing. Needless to say, I was anxious to find out what they tasted like. Fortunately, my grandma baked them into a lap-lap the following day and, I gotta say, they weren't bad, although I'm not sure if they lived up to the hype. They tasted kind of like sardines, and so added a nice, strong, salty flavor to the otherwise fairly bland lap-lap.

Life in the Ring of Fire Part 51: Really, Really, Long Goodbyes

This week's Tautu language word is “kopo.” It means “only” or “just.”

Monday was the first day of school after term break which, of course, meant that nobody showed up. We pulled in a grand total of 22 kids, which was a record low since I've been here. The headmaster gave his usual speech, berating those kids who actually bothered to show up that day about how important it is to come to school, and then we let everyone go. Tim from Ambae and his three friends from the US were staying with me again, waiting for some sort of transport off the island. Tim's friends had a flight back to the States on Tuesday and were confirmed on a flight to Vila that morning, which is cutting things a little too close for Vanuatu, so they'd been trying to get on a flight standby since Sunday. Tim was trying to get to Santo via ship so he could get a flight to Ambae, which meant that he could be stuck on Malekula for weeks. The girls that had flown in from Vila were still around as well, staying with McKenzie in Litz Litz, waiting for the Fresh Cargo (the only reasonably fast ship in the country) to come in. After breakfast, the guys headed to the airport for their second attempt at standby and Tim headed to Litz Litz wharf to check for ships. Shockingly, all three of Tim's friends managed to get on the flight that morning and Tim got on a ship that night, thus cutting the number of guests on Malekula down to three.

Tuesday was a repeat of Monday as far as school was concerned, and so we decided to have a staff meeting instead of class, which was pretty much the worst thing ever as all eight of us teachers were crammed together in a little metal hut baking in the early afternoon sun. Fortunately, midway through I got a respite when a truck showed up at the school with a couple Peace Corps staff looking for me, including our new country director (the head of the whole program in Vanuatu), Eddy, who'd just arrived from Fiji a few weeks prior. He seemed quite friendly, although he looked a little out of place as, for example, he was still wearing socks and shoes instead of sandals and hadn't yet amassed the wardrobe full of bright Hawaiian shirts that our previous country directors was famous for. They did a brief inspection of my house and school and then headed off to the south of the island to look at potential sites for the new volunteers who would be arriving for training in September. Eddy also promised that, as long as not too many of the new group left during training, we'd be getting a volunteer in Norsup, just up the road from me, which was pretty exciting. The number of volunteers on Malekula had been dropping steadily over the last year, so we were definitely in need of some new blood.

That afternoon I headed up to Litz Litz to hang out with our three remaining guests, Bridgett, Alexia, and Lizzie, who were still waiting for the Fresh Cargo, which was stuck in Santo because its engine was on fire. I advised that, if they wanted to get off the island anytime this year, it might be wise to look into some airplane tickets, but they were determined to hold out for another couple days at least. They'd also made McKenzie and I crab cakes and pasta, which was pretty cool. We spent the day on the beach at Litz Litz and then headed to Lakatoro to meet Eddy to partake in the time-honored tradition of having your country director buy you kava.

Wednesday I had everyone down to the beach near me at the airport for a bit of a change of pace and we all had margaritas and discussed what a shame it was that having margaritas on the beach wasn't a more common occurrence in Vanuatu. Also, the Fresh Cargo office had apparently stopped answering their calls, further decreasing hope that it would be possible to get off the island via boat. Thursday morning, the girls caved in and decided to try for a plane. They headed out to Lakatoro to buy tickets and then to the airport. Bridgett managed to get on the flight that afternoon, bringing us down to two. That evening Duncan returned, and so I took my two remaining guests to my nakamal to meet him. Duncan was in fine form, playing with lots of obnoxious new ringing tones he'd downloaded onto this cell phone while he was in Vila, and Lizzie and Alexia both said they no longer doubted that all the stories told about him are true (Duncan is a famous character Peace Corps Vanuatu-wide).

Friday morning Lizzie set out for the Air Vanuatu office to trying and get her and Alexia confirmed on the flight that afternoon. Alexia and I stayed behind and made banana pancakes and smoothies and waited for Lizzie to come back. And waited. And waited. A couple hours after her departure, I got a call from a number I didn't recognize. It was Lizzie “Dan,” she said, a little frantic “Can't talk right now. I'm in Wala. We're confirmed on the flight. I'll be back to pick you guys up at noon!” “What the hell are you doing in Wala?” I asked. Wala is a village about an hour's drive north of me. “No time to explain!” She said “Gotta go!”

It was still a couple of hours until noon, so Alexia and I used the last of our ice to make frozen margaritas and settled into waiting for Lizzie. She showed up almost exactly at noon, as promised, with a truck, and explained her story. She'd gotten a truck to Lakatoro no problem and had gone to the airline office and secured seats for her and Alexia on the flight that afternoon. Then she caught a truck back and asked the driver to let her off at Tautu. The driver forgot, and ended up driving up to Wala to pick up someone's copra. Three hours later, she was back in Lakatoro where she started. On the upside, however, the driver felt bad enough about the whole thing to not charge us for taking us to the airport.

The plane was late in arriving, of course, but by late afternoon Lizzie and Alexia were in the air on their way to Vila and all of our guests had finally departed, leaving me with the weekend to recover and come up with some lesson plans because, if experience was any indicator, on Monday I would have a full class and would once again be expected to teach something.

Life in the Ring of Fire Part 50: Recount!

This week's Tautu language word is “naem.” It means “house.”

Monday night, Tim, a volunteer from the island of Ambae, and three of his visiting friends from the US had arrived on a ship and put up at my house for the night. The ship experience they related was similar to the hell ride I'd had over to Vila almost a month before, but with the saving grace that it was slightly shorter. They arrived with both their persons and their belongings soaked through and through as they'd been seated in the bow of the boat and thus were easy targets for any waves that made it over the edge of the ship. Quickly, clothes lines were strung up across my house, hiking bags were emptied in search of dry clothing and my house soon took on the appearance of a shelter along a hiking trail. It was kind of cool.

Monday and Tuesday were national holidays. Monday was designated as such to give citizens a chance to engage in political discussions and make a decision as to which candidate they would vote for. Tuesday was voting day. It's a cool idea, I suppose, giving government holidays so that people can participate in the democratic process. It would, of course, mean a lot more if people actually worked in Vanuatu and sitting around talking about stuff wasn't occurring pretty much 24/7 anyway, but whatever. Since I wasn't a citizen of Vanuatu and school was off for term break anyway, both these holidays were lost on me. I had, however, been looking forward to the election since I'd been feeling left out of the political talk that had been prevailing at the nakamal for the past week. I was also kind of hoping that, since Duncan's cousin was running for parliament, there would be some sort of party – preferably with a lot of pigs -- in the event of his victory. I'd also heard that the night of election day tended to get pretty wild. All in all, however, the whole thing was a disappointment. Like everything in Vanuatu, the polling places were ridiculously slow and so most people spent the whole day waiting in line up in Norsup to vote. Thus, Tautu was all but empty during the day and so I headed to Lakatoro to try and use the internet and see off Tim and his friends, who were trying to make it down to a village in the south to the start of a hiking trail across the island. Of course, it hadn't really sunk in that, it being a national holiday, nothing would really be open, so I arrived to find Lakatoro the emptiest I'd ever seen it. The deserted storefronts and the constant dust kicked up due to the continuing drought all combined for a very striking old west ghost town effect. My dail-up provider was apparently also taking the day off for election day, as I couldn't connect to the internet for any of the four lines in town. I found Tim and his friends sitting underneath a pavilion having had similar luck with the trucks: no trucks were departing for the south due to the holiday. I sat with them for a few hours, hailing every passing truck on the off-chance that one might be up for the job. Towards evening, they got lucky. A rickety old truck missing most of its exterior said they were headed for a village near Tim's destination and so they all piled in and were off.

We now had a shockingly large number of Americans on the island, although none of them happened to be in the Lakatoro area at that moment. McKenzie and Laura were with four Peace Corps girls from Vila and Ambae in Matanvat, a village in the north, giving a workshop. Tim and his friends were four all together, and with myself with Mindi, and Noah, Jack, Chris, and Ben, the volunteers in the south, that made sixteen. Something of a record, I do believe. Those of us volunteers in Malekula sort of have this running joke about the island. You see, Malekula almost every island in Vanuatu has some sort of claim to fame. Efate has Vila, for those seeking the comforts of a city. Tanna, Ambae, Ambrym, and some others have active volcanoes. Santo has Luganville, another city, as well as the best SCUBA diving. The Banks and the Torres islands in the north are known for their pristine beauty. Maewo is known for its rivers and Pentecost is famous for land diving. And Malekula has, well, nothing, really. Yeah we have beaches, but everywhere has beaches. Lakatoro is a city of sorts, but it's lacking in a lot of key comforts. Our weather doesn't really help us: it's hotter, wetter, and more oppressively humid here than most islands. We have a thriving mosquito population. Really, Malekula has very little going for it. I see tourists show up to the island and the fist thing I want to ask them is what kind of mistake led them here. And yet, somehow, inexplicably, we all love it here. And we talk it up to no end with all the other volunteers in the country and now we've gotten to the point where volunteers are using up their vacation days and spending their hard-earned cash to come here, to Malekula, the black sheep island with few redeeming qualities. I mean, we were now hosting no less than eight (8) visitors, three of them having come all the way from the US. Amazing. Of course, this called for a party.

Everyone was set to converge on Lakatoro on Saturday, thus making it the logical party date, and giving me a few days to myself in Tautu before everyone showed up. I was hoping to get in some quality time hanging out with Duncan, since I'd just been gone for a little more than a month, but unfortunately politics intervened. You see, Malekula had a recount scandal. Yes, a recount scandal. Like with the Bush-Gore race in 2000. Forty-seven candidates ran for parliament from Malekula, an island with seven seats. Thus, the seven candidates with the most votes would take office. However, there was some question about who took seventh place, and thus would go to parliament, and who took eighth. The unofficial polls even called the race early and had to retract their announcement. The cool thing was that, since Vanuatu is such a small country, we weren't talking about millions of votes being disputed, we were talking, like, ten votes. The first place candidate, for example, won in a crushing landslide with 500-some votes. It was kind of like a student council election. Duncan, being, apparently an important, member of the PPP party, which was allied with the party belonging to one of the candidates being disputed, spent his days in Lakatoro overseeing the recount. On Wednesday, he told me that he would be leaving for Vila on Saturday morning to accompany the ballots to the capitol and observe the official count there.

Earlier in the week, McKenzie had asked me to arrange a charter truck to come get her and the other five girls up in Matanvat and bring them back to Lakatoro on Saturday morning in time for the party. I, as I usually do, entrusted the task to Duncan, who made a few phone calls and told me the whole thing was arranged. Friday night I was drinking a farewell kava with Duncan, when the truck that he'd chartered for me pulled up. We both went to talk to the driver to tell him what time to drive up in the morning. “I can't do it tomorrow, it's sabbath,” he explained (No, we don't have Jews in Vanuatu, as far as I know, but we do have Seventh Day Adventists, a Christian sect that keeps the Jewish sabbath. Now, I don't know what the SDA church is like in the US, but here in Vanuatu SDAs are absolutely nuts. The church bans everything: drinking, smoking, kava, Coke, pork, shellfish, and dancing. Yes, dancing. Not allowed. I mean COME ON, when did dancing ever hurt anybody? It's like banning fun. What about keeping time with your foot during a song? Is that out too? Or bobbing up and down rhythmically? How about air-banding? Whenever you hear about a volunteer being stationed in an SDA village, it's always polite to offer condolences). Both Duncan and I explained to the driver that, since Saturday isn't really an event that gets scheduled at the last minute, he should have told us he couldn't do the charter when we'd first asked him a few days ago. He told us to look for someone else, at which point Duncan told him that it was too late for that since we needed the truck to leave in the morning. He grumpily mumbled something about maybe being able to do it if we couldn't find anyone else and drove off. Duncan made a few more calls but, sure enough, all the other drivers we got a hold of had already made other commitments. I left the nakamal that night not feeling too good about the chances of getting a truck to Matanvat the following day, but Duncan told me not to worry and to come see him in the morning. I did as I was told and Duncan put a call through to the driver from last night and gave him a quite an earful. We were in business. I caught a truck to Lakatoro to meet the driver and we were off. The ride up to Matanvat was nice in the early morning and, since it was a charter, I got to sit up front in the cabin as opposed to in the truck bed and we didn't stop every five minutes to let people get in and out. The ride up took a little under two hours, and everyone was surprised upon our arrival, as the girls had also given up hope of having a truck sent for them.

That evening's party was quite a success, hopefully solidifying our reputation as an awesome island, despite everything. Sunday people started heading out but, this being Vanuatu, I knew it would be at least three or four days before everyone succeeded in making it off the island. Still, I didn't particularly mind, it was school break and it was fun to have guests.

Life in the Ring of Fire Part 49: Can We Please Stop Talking About Politics?

This week's Tautu language word is “lelen.” It means “tomorrow.”

On Monday I cleaned my water tank. It had been getting progressively grosser since I'd left for Vila in an attempt to see Elin off almost a month ago, and I suspected this was because a lot of rotting leaves and lemons had gathered in the bottom. My water supply works like this; rain falls on my corrugated iron roof and flows into rain gutters. Instead of funneling the rainwater onto the ground, however, the gutters empty into a large plastic tank with a tap on the bottom which I use to draw water from. Ideally, to keep a water tank clean and free of mosquito larvae (which aren't so much a problem because they contaminate the water, but rather because they eventually turn into mosquitoes which then hang out by your house, waiting for you to set foot outside so they can swarm you), it should be completely closed except for a hole that allows the water to flow in and an overflow pipe, both of which should be covered with screens. I'd inherited an old tank whose screens had long ago gone missing, thus meaning that is was both teeming with mosquito larvae and regularly collected whatever refuse was washed into it off the roof. When I'd first arrived, it was passably clean water, but over the past month it had turned a light brown color and started to smelled a little funny. I'd been reluctant to clean it because it's a 1000 liter tank (which is 1 cubic meter, a fact that I hope all my year eight students have mastered), and to clean it I needed to empty it and emptying 1000 liters of water onto the ground had always seemed like a terrible waste. There was nothing for it though, so I used a piece of one of my gutters to channel the water away from my front yard, so as to flood my neighbor's yards instead of my own, turned on the tap, and let it run. While I waited for it to empty, I took down all the gutters and scrubbed them out. Each one had accumulated about half an inch of mud in the bottom. Then I climbed up on my roof and knocked off all the remaining lemons and leaves (which, because my lemon tree was now dead, would hopefully not be reappearing). By that time the tank had emptied to the point where I could tip it over. Sure enough, a large collection of leaves and black, rotten lemons fell onto the ground. I crawled inside with a scrub brush and removed all the dirt and leaves which had caked onto the sides and then left the thing in the sun for a couple hours to kill all the remaining mosquito larvae as well as the slugs – whose existence in my water supply I had been blissfully ignorant of up until that point. I gave the tank a final rinse and then repositioned it to catch the runoff from the gutters. I taped window screens over the intake and overflow holes and then I was finished. The only thing I need now was rain. This turned out to be trickier than initially anticipated. For basically the entire time I'd been in Vanuatu up until then, we'd gotten a nice, strong rain at least once a week. Figures that the week I decide to empty my tank ended up being the beginning of a veritable drought.

This was driven home to me when I road my bike into Lakatoro and was subjected to a miniature dust bowl. The roads were so dry that passing trucks kicked up dust clouds the size of storm fronts. Even just walking from my house to Duncan's would result in me being completely covered in a thin coating of dust. The school's main water tank was already empty when I got back, as was the large village tank that feeds off the church roof, the main source of water for those living in Tautu proper. There was still water in the school's secondary tank, a big cement thing operated by a pump mechanism. The pump handle was entrusted to me, as the only teacher living at the school over the term break, so that the water could only be used by those associated with the school. The tank that Duncan and his extended family used was also dry, meaning that they had to catch a truck to the airport every day to get water. Of course, this makes the situation seem a lot more dire than it actually was. Central Malekula is blessed with a large, fresh, close water table. Dig a hole about six feet deep and you'll strike water. Tautu is dotted with wells which you can lower buckets into with bamboo poles to obtain water. The thing is, the villagers don't like the taste of the groundwater (it's got a lot of minerals in it), thus causing them to go to great lengths (such as driving to the airport as opposed to using the well in your backyard) to procure rainwater for drinking. Also, of course, using a well is a huge pain compared to using a tank. However, the bottom line was that I wasn't particularly worried about running out of water.

Coinciding with the drought was the election. Election day in Vanuatu is September 2, about a week away, and the campaigning was getting intense. The political system in Vanuatu works like this: there's one house of parliament. Every island (well, not quite, some of the really small islands get grouped together) gets a certain number of seats in parliament. When a new parliament is voted in, they elect the president, prime minister, and all other ministers from within their ranks. In other words, the people don't get to vote for the president or prime minister directly. What's a little odd, at least to me, is how the voting works. There aren't any constituencies. In the US, every House Representative is elected by voters in a very specific geographic location, so everyone knows exactly who elected each representative. Vanuatu doesn't do this, things aren't divided any more finely than by island. For example, Malekula has seven seats. There are 47 candidates contesting them. Everyone on the island gets to vote for one of them. At the end, they count up all the votes and the top seven candidates win. So it's possible, for example, to have all seven Malekula MPs come from the same village. I thought that was a little strange.

In Vila, I'd run across many a truck with a man standing in the back with a megaphone giving stump speeches. Every notice board in Tautu, as well as most trees, were covered with campaign posters. What's hilarious about politics in Vanuatu is how unpolished everything is. I know the campaigning is heating up in the US as well, so think, when was the last time you saw a photo of a candidate where they looked unkempt, ruffled, or tired? When is their hair ever a mess or their clothing rumpled? Never. It's always pictures of Obama gracefully emerging from an airplane or McCain confidently shaking hands with some general. You never see pictures of them when they look like hell. Not so in Vanuatu. Every poster boasted a picture, a mug shot really, of some scowling, dirty black man or some frumpy black woman who doesn't pluck her chin hairs. They all looked like they'd just got done mowing the lawn. Not a single poster photo was attractive or flattering. And my god, the speeches. Every day during the week one party or another would take over the microphone at the LTC and the market and harangue the masses. And, it really pains me to stereotype like this, but Ni-Vans are AWFUL at public speaking. I have yet to see one who's good at it. They mumble a lot. They often talk to softly to be heard. They stare at the ground the whole time and fiddle with the change in their pockets. They ramble. They get sidetracked talking about one of their relatives' new truck. They loose their train of thought. They pause a lot unnecessarily. And, worst of all, they go on for HOURS. I couldn't take it.

The jewel in the crown, however, was an article that we found in the Independent, one of the local papers. It was written by a guy in Vila endorsing his son-in-law, who was running for office. It had the feel of, like, Snoop Dogg talking about how sweet one of his rapper friends is. I'm going to give a few quotes here, because I don't think I can do this justice just by summing up.

“JN [the candidate] will always be there when things/events happen in our communities. I have seen and witnessed him dropping off young slaughtered cattle at my place not one, but a few times.”

Slaughtered cattle delivery skills are definitely something I look for in my candidates, I don't know about you.

“Every time when I went to drink kava at his nakamal he would call out to me 'Hey, before you go, go and take a shell or two or a bottle of tusker [beer].' He passes my test 100%”

Giving out free beers is a plus, definitely, but does he know how to show off his bling?

“JN sometimes plays big time with his money when he feels like it. Like, he would call a taxi and drive around drinking beer and then stop at a takeaway shop and have some food and then leave when he is satisfied. When he is dropped off, he would open his wallet, pause, and pay with a red note (five in front and three zeros).”

The guy wraps up the article with (I swear this is true) a list of people he thinks are cool, with himself included, of course (not going to lie, I was a little disappointed not to be listed), and signs the article as the candidate's political analyst and strategist. Actually, a lot of campaigning in Vanuatu does seems to involve driving around buying people kava. I went to Duncan's nakamal Monday night and the place was packed, but no one seemed to be drinking kava, just sitting around. Eventually, I realized that they were hanging out waiting for a candidate to come and buy them all kava.

The neat thing about politics in Vanuatu is how involved everyone gets in it. Almost everyone in the country that is able to votes. The nakamals were brimming with political discussions. Unfortunately, most of these went basically over my head. Like I've explained before, Bislama relies heavily on a common frame of reference and, since I was not already versed in current Vanuatu politics, much of what was said made no sense to me. By the end of the week, after being consistently left out of nakamal political discussions for several days in a row, I was ready for the election to be over. Unfortunately, this wouldn't happen until the following week.

Life in the Ring of Fire Part 48: Back to the Bush

This week's Tautu language word is “mewi.” It means “tomorrow.”

On Monday my family caught their flight out to LA. The cool thing about flying from the Pacific to the US is that you get to travel back in time: their flight was scheduled to land a couple hours before it was scheduled to depart. Take that Einstein. Weren't counting on the old time zone trick, were you? We all woke up early Monday morning and I said goodbye to the family again. Unlike when I first left for Peace Corps, I was due to see them again in just over three months, so it didn't seem quite as sad. I was staying in Sydney for a couple extra days in order to purchase a few key items to take back to Vanuatu, including a blender and as many bottles of wine as I could sneak through Vanuatu customs without being charged import duty. My flight was scheduled for Wednesday afternoon, giving me a scant two days to procure all the items on my list. It would be tight, but I though I could make it. I packed up my things and checked out of the hotel my family and I had been sharing and checked into the YMCA hotel a few blocks away, ditched my luggage and got to work. During the week or so I'd been in Sydney with my parents, I'd been scoping out stores likely to have the things I was looking for, so I had some idea of where I was going. It was 10am when I started my shopping expedition, and my goal was to get through half of my list by dinner time. I knew it would be hectic, but I was confident I could do it. By 1pm I was finished. And not just with half the list either, I'd successfully procured every single item I was looking for. You see, I'd forgotten that it's actually possible to do things quickly in countries other than Vanuatu. Were I in Vila, sure, it probably would have taken me four hours to buy a blender, but in Sydney it only took about ten minutes. Man, these westerners sure know how to run a tight ship. At a loss for what to do next, I sought out an internet cafe to putter around online for a while. Get this: there was this place that had an internet cafe, a grocery store, an electronics store, and a home wares store all IN THE SAME BUILDING. How awesome is that? I emailed some Malekula volunteers to take requests for anything they might want from Australia. Want coffee? No problem, I think the coffee section is just up the stairs (or rather, the escalator. I'll reiterate, those things are weird). Blank CDs? OK, sure, they're right here. A four-in-one food processor/clothes press/oven/cheese grater? Don't see any on display, but let me get an employee to check the back... yep, sure enough, here they are, only $19.99. I was pretty impressed.

The nice thing about finishing all my shopping early was that it left plenty of time to go see movies at the theater. All in all, I saw five movies while in Australia: Dark Knight, Get Smart, Taken, Wanted, and Pineapple Express. Most of them I'd never heard of before, but I didn't really care. They could have been showing only Steven Segal movies and I would've been perfectly happy. I also hit up the used video stores. Man, why are DVDs so expensive? That is totally not cool. I could get behind something like, say, five dollars each. But at fifteen bucks per, for used copies even, it's like they're asking you to download them illegally online. Briefly I thought about asking the folks at Blockbuster if they do long-term, overseas rentals for people living in impoverished, third-world countries who only make it in to drop off returns once a year or so. I faced the same issues with music CDs. In the end, I resisted the temptation to spend my life savings on music and movies but, believe me, it was a close thing.

I had a beer with lunch and a bottle of wine with dinner every day. That was pretty glorious. In terms of restaurants, I mostly did repeats, revisiting places I'd already been with my family. I went to the fish market twice to feast on buckets of fish and chips. I went to this Chinese BBQ place and had roasted duck. I went to a fast-food place and got a fried chicken sandwich (juicy, inhumanely raised goodness. Like I said before, don't knock it until you've tried the alternative). These days, I take new pleasure in eating chicken. I think of it as one less vicious, obnoxious, pooping, squawking, garden-ruining, sleep-disturbing animal roaming the planet (I hate chickens. At least, I hate live ones. Does it show?).

On Wednesday I took a bus to the airport and checked in for my flight back to Vila. After a while spent browsing the duty free selections, I settled in at my gate to wait for the plane. After a bit, a group of black men sat down in the seats behind me. Even though I'd only been away from Vanuatu for ten days or so, my mind had already fallen back into an American perception of black people. In Vanuatu, the majority of people are black and so it's white people who stand out. After enough time on the island, I tend to even forget that I'm white. Since everyone I see around me is black, I kind of subconsciously assume that I am too. In other words, I group myself with the Ni-Vans as opposed to with other white people. I'll sometimes even extend this assumption to other volunteers. On numerous occasions, I've been wandering around Lakatoro and thought: “Hey is that McKenzie? No... wait, that's a black girl.” After being in Australia, however, I'd re-established my perceptions of black people as being a group to which I do not belong; I was grouping myself with white people again. Anyway, when they sat down behind me, I didn't think much of it, I just went on reading my book. Every once in a while, however, I'd catch snippets of their conversation and... are they speaking Bislama?! It was like a switch flipped. Suddenly I was a Ni-Van again. The group of them sitting behind me were my brothers (because everyone in Vanuatu is family) and all the Australians sitting in the terminal were the strange white tourists. I got up, greeted them in Bislama, and took a seat with them.

It was almost midnight when the flight arrived in Vila, which was good because all the customs people were too tired to make an issue out of the fact that I was carrying in a bit more than my allotted three bottles of duty-free wine. I caught a cab to my hotel and hit the sack. Vila is a strange place, and the more times I go the more I feel I don't really like it. It's like the escalator or the spork: it's trying to be two things at once and failing at both. It's small like a village, but it lacks the close-knit friendliness and the laid-back attitude that makes village life enjoyable. It's modern like a city, but it lacks the good restaurants, the variety of stores, and the availability of, well, just about everything, that makes city life enjoyable.

Thursday morning I headed down to the local dive shop. I'd arranged to stay in Vila until Sunday to do a SCUBA certification course. I'd been SCUBA diving almost ten years prior at a resort in the Bahamas and had really liked it and been intending to get certified ever since. However, since both Illinois and Austin are land-locked locations, and the New Jersey waterfront is gross, I hadn't had an opportunity. I paid for the course and was immediately outfitted with SCUBA gear and whisked off to a hotel pool for my first course. We chewed through the practical skills pretty quickly. A year in Vanuatu had made me as comfortable in the water as it's possible to get, so things like getting water out of diving masks and swimming for 100 meters weren't really all that much of a hurdle. That afternoon I went out on the boat for my first dive in the ocean. Diving is cool because it's probably the closest it's possible to get to flying (well, you can fly in airplanes, of course, but being encased in several inches of aluminum kind of removes you from the experience). It's an odd feeling to be able to have unhampered movement in all three dimensions, what with the bouncy of the water canceling out that pesky force of gravity that so determinedly keeps us down on land.

After the boat brought us back in, I headed to the Peace Corps office and met up with Chris, a volunteer from my training group originally stationed on Tanna but in the process of moving to a village just off the coast of Efate. Like me, he'd just come back from a re-westernization in New Zealand. The two of us went for kava at a nakamal a little bit out of town, but strategically chosen because it is a favorite haunt of Kevin George, our now retired country director. I held my first shell in hand and wondered just why in the hell I had subjected myself to this disgusting ritual on such a regular basis in Malekula. We sat down and swapped stories of our travels for a little while before, as expected, Kevin George showed up, along with Solo, one of the Peace Corps Ni-Van staff members responsible for our training. I'd been hoping to run into Kevin while in Vila, and was happy for the chance to talk with him for a while before his departure from Vanuatu sometime in the coming couple months. Unfortunately, I learned that our new country director would be arriving just after the departure of my flight to Malekula, so I wouldn't get the opportunity to greet him at the airport.

I did two more dives Friday morning and some short lectures in the afternoon and finished up the course on Saturday with one more dive and a written final exam. On the whole, the process was a lot easier than I was expecting. I guess there's not really all that much to SCUBA diving after all. My last night in Vila I drank kava (Again! Why? I don't know) with Chris and Bridgett, another volunteer from my training group, who revealed that she would be coming to Malekula in about a week to help out with a workshop Laura and McKenzie were planning. It looked like our little island was about to get crowded.

I arrived back in Malekula Sunday morning and received the usual welcome from my friends, the airport staff. I caught a truck and unloaded my substantial collection of food, drink, and amenities acquired in Australia and Vila at my house and then headed over to see Duncan. I found him, in typical Sunday fashion, lying on the cement floor of his house. He looked up upon hearing my footsteps.
“Dan!” He shouted “I knew it! I knew you were coming today. I dreamed about you last night and I thought, Dan's coming home today!”

I'd lost my cell phone in Vila just before departing for Australia. I bought a new one as soon as I got back, but I'd lost all the phone numbers stored in my old phone, including Duncan's, so I couldn't call home to tell him when I would be arriving. I'd even managed to get his number from my US family, but still hadn't been able to get a hold of him. I took him back to my house to show him all the goodies I'd gotten in Australia, and he was suitably impressed. He immediately borrowed all the movies I'd brought and returned my diving torch and battery charger, both of which he always borrows without telling me whenever I leave. I agreed to drink kava with him that night and we both went to take naps. As always, Malekula was hot, muggy, and suffocatingly miserable, but I was happy to be back.

Life in the Ring of Fire Part 47: Australia

This week's Tautu language word is “ejke.” It's simplest translation is just “no.” It can also be used, however, to mean “there isn't” or “there isn't any.” For example you can say “mle ejke” to mean “There isn't any kava” or “we're out of kava.”

OK, so, Australia, cool place. And I mean that literally, it was quite cold, especially at night. The house we were staying at in the Blue Mountains didn't have any central heating, only a fireplace. The fireplace, of course, was in the living room, so that tended to stay reasonably warm, but the rest of the house was generally frigid at night. There were electric blankets on all the beds, so sleeping wasn't a problem but, say, getting up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night had to be a speedy exercise involving the minimum amount of time out of bed possible. No settling in on the pot with a newspaper in this place. When we'd arrived the previous night I'd piled wood on the fire in preparation for having it burn through the night, but I'd forgotten to close the air intake (the air intake limits the amount of oxygen allowed to the fire. If it's almost closed, there's a minimum of oxygen, meaning a cooler, longer-burning fire. If it's open, it makes a hot, quick-burning fire), so the fire had burned itself out by morning. Fortunately, I live in Vanuatu, so getting a new fire going wasn't as big a problem as it would have been a few months ago. It still required a good bit of time tramping around in the freezing collecting kindling though. As a mentioned last issue, though, it was kind of nice for the default temperature to be cold instead of hot, as there are a number of strategies one can undertake to combat the cold (get a fire going, put on a coat, crawl under a blanket, etc), whereas for the heat you just have to take it. It also cuts down significantly on the lethargy.

Well, fair warning, but I'm going to be waxing in and out of philosophic musings during this entry to talk about the thoughts I was having about briefly returning to a western lifestyle after a year away from it. Before I start though, I want to get something straight: I'm not trying to badmouth my native culture and lifestyle. I'm not about to abandon western civilization in favor of the quasi-wilderness of Vanuatu. I loved Australia, I was happy to be there. I also love the US. In fact, the US is still my favorite country that I've been to. I also love Vanuatu. Vanuatu has very little in common with places like the US and Australia. I think this is cool. I admire my adopted Vanuatu culture and lifestyle and I am fully in favor of preserving it against too much western influence, not because I think Vanuatu's culture is necessarily better, but simply because it's different. Similarly, I wouldn't want the US or Europe or Australia to adopt the Vanuatu way of life. It makes me happy to know that two (and maybe more) so drastically different, yet still functional, lifestyles can exist together. That way, when you get tired of one you can go experience a different one for a while and then, when you get tired of the new one, you can go back. OK, first things first: plumbing. I remember recently having had a discussion with McKenzie and Laura about indoor plumbing, specifically hot showers and indoor toilets. All three of us have adjusted to using cold bucket showers and outhouses, and it wasn't at all difficult to do, both of these things work pretty well in Vanuatu and we were wondering why we'd found the idea of them so terrible in the States. What we'd forgotten, however, was that in Vanuatu it's not FREAKING FREEZING. I gotta say, I was not about to fill up a bucket with cold water and go outside to wash myself in the Blue Mountains of Australia. Nor would I have been particularly amenable to the idea of going outside in the cold to use the bathroom. So yeah, indoor plumbing and hot showers, check. Good thinking. Another thing that struck me, and I don't know if this is something that's happened in the States too since I've been gone or if it's just Australia, but it was weird how trendy being global warming conscious has become. Actually, environmental consciousness in general seemed to be heightened, but the change in thinking about global warming was particularly drastic. All the businesses along the little main street of the small town we were staying in (previously, I would have used the word “village” to describe the town we were in, but these days village has an entirely new meaning for me) had these signs up advertising how they were a carbon-neutral business (meaning, I believe, that they had opted into some plan with their power company to pay extra in order to support alternative energy). This seemed odd to me for two reasons. Firstly, it was weird to see something that I'd really only heard talked about in academia plastered all over the place. Secondly, it had become strange for me to see the environment talked about as something that's fragile and would break if handled improperly. In Vanuatu nature seems big, powerful, and intimidating, not something you worry about accidentally breaking. It'd be like if someone described a tank as fragile. Of course, I didn't see anyone living in a hut in Australia, so I guess it's easy to see where the difference in perspective comes from.

Anyway, first order of business after getting the fire going Monday morning was exploring the town and perhaps finding some breakfast. One of my goals for being in Australia was consuming as much bacon as humanly possible. Why bacon? You may ask. Well, because it's amazingly delicious, that's why. We chose a restaurant for breakfast and wandered in to discover that heat had somehow gone out of fashion in Australia. Just like the house, the restaurant wasn't heated either. Neither was the grocery store, or the butcher shop, or the bakery, or the pharmacy. But I'm getting ahead of myself. I had fried eggs on sourdough bread (you know what's almost as awesome as bacon? Sourdough bread. I'd forgotten about it. It's amazing. If you're in a position to do so, I suggest you go eat some immediately) with a side of bacon. Fortunately, we seemed to have stumbled into a town that knew its bacon. Instead of the pathetic dry, thin, skinny slices I was expecting, I was presented with three glorious strips of dripping, beefy bacon, each piece almost too long for my plate. The trend of delicious bacon continued when we went to the butcher's after breakfast and I feasted my eyes on the heavenly selection of meats, none of which appeared to have animal hair still attached to them. Like I said, the bacon was especially extraordinary, nice thick, meaty slices with just the right fat to pork ratio. The lamb looked awesome too. Lamb was another one of those things I'd forgotten about. Apparently Australia is a big lamb producer because the lamb was one of the least expensive meats available. We purchased a lot of lamb, bacon, and chicken. I'd been craving a nice juicy piece of chicken for several months previously. And yes, I know, why should I miss chicken? As I've said on numerous occasions, Vanuatu is absolutely crawling with chickens, surely eating chicken is a common occurrence. OK, well, allow me to clarify: I'd been craving a nice piece of factory raised, hormone pumped, specially bred, not-viable-in-the-wild chicken. Yes, I know, it's a cruel practice. I know chickens are cooped up practically on top of each other and not allowed to move. I know they're fed hormones to make them grow larger breasts. I know they're so impractically huge they can't even mate naturally. But, let me ask you this: have you ever eaten a wild chicken? They're awful. Each bone has approximately three molecules of meat on it, and it has the consistency of tanned leather. It's like eating a belt. A bony belt. You have to boil it for at least an hour to make it even begin to approach edible. Personally, I'll take the mass produced stuff any day. As an added bonus at the butcher's, some Australian meat grower's group had come up with promotional posters that were all over the butcher shop with slogans like: “Red Meat. If it had any more nutrients, you'd need a prescription.” or “Red Meat, satisfy your 2 million year old craving.”

After the butcher we went to the bakery to get more sourdough bread as well as some pastries and croissants. After that it was the deli for ham, pastrami, and cheese. The pastrami was particularly good. There's this cut of pastrami at the grocery store in Vila that I salivate over every time I go in, but I've never been able to justify buying it. And, my God, I just want to pause for a second to fill you guys in on how painful it is for me to be writing this, after the fact, while sitting in my house in Tautu. Want to know what I had for lunch today? Sweet potatoes. I'll probably have more sweet potatoes for dinner or, if I'm lucky, Duncan will have cooked up some rice with canned tuna and cabbage. So, to all of my readers residing in reasonably developed countries, I want you to do me favor. Think of your favorite meal. Got it? OK, now go eat it. Maybe there's a restaurant nearby that makes it well, that's cool, go hit that up. Maybe you have to go to the grocery store and buy the ingredients and make it yourself. That's cool too. How unbelievably sweet is it that you can just go out and procure basically any food item on the planet whenever you want to? Like, you could eat a totally different meal made with totally different ingredients every day for, like, a month and every one would be delicious. In fact, for those particularly dedicated readers of mine, do this: take a weekend and just go to town with your meals. Make every breakfast, lunch, and dinner something good. No skipped meals. No Ramen noodles. No grabbing a piece of bread on your way out to tie you over. No leftovers. Make every meal something you really love. That's six awesome meals in a row. Oh, and no repeats either. Then write me an email and tell me about it. Sweet. I'll stop my food sermon. But, you know what, that's the thing I miss the very most here in Vanuatu: food. Not running water, not hot showers, not the internet, not air conditioning, not cars, not dishwashers or TV. Food. Weird, huh? But there you go. Onwards.

Now, the Blue Mountains are, of course, mountains. So there were some good views and hikes to be had in the area surrounding our house. Unfortunately, it was unseasonably cold, and we didn't really have adequate clothing to go to some of the really sweet places. We tried to go to a place called echo point, which had a great view of a gorgeous canyon between the mountains, but it also had crosswinds coming in at approximately 30 million miles per hour, so we could only go out to enjoy the view for about a minute at a time before scurrying back inside the gift shop. Also, my dad had come down with a cold on the plane from Vanuatu, so he wasn't really up for hiking all that much. My mom, brother, and I did go on one hike down to a waterfall, which was pretty cool but, overall, our outdoors activities were somewhat limited. Still, that was fine with me. I enjoyed the mountainous backdrop, the blustery small town we were in, and the winding roads built onto the sides of cliffs. More than anything, it was a change of scenery. My favorite activity in the Blue Mountains turned out being sitting in front of the fire with a glass of wine (OK, I'll expand the things I miss most while in Vanuatu to include drinks), a pastrami, bacon, ham, and cheese sandwich on toasted sourdough, and watching a movie. Try it sometime.

On Wednesday we headed back into Sydney to get some city time in. On the way, however, we stopped at a sort of zoo to observe the Australian macro-fauna. We saw kangaroos, wombats, koalas, Tasmanian devils, dingos, and emus. I think the most surprising were the wombats. I don't really know what I was picturing a wombat would look like, but it didn't. It was sort of a like a giant fur-ball with little stumpy legs. I can't do it justice in writing, look up a picture on Google images if you're interested.

If you haven't been to Sydney, you should check it out. It is gorgeous. It's a harbor city and has three or four harbors strung out along its length. They're all very nice. The wharves and waterways are surprisingly clean, given the size of the city and the amount of traffic it gets. Despite the fact that its so built up, it still has some lovely views of the ocean. They did a good job of planning their constructions such that they add to the natural beauty of the place as opposed to taking away from it. What sucks about Sydney is driving in it. My dad and I had a fun adventure trying to return the rental car where we were thwarted by many a one-way street and No Right Turn sign (they drive on the left in Australia). The first night we were there we went to a Mexican restaurant which my mom had read about on the internet. It was very good and, at least temporarily, satisfied my deep and long-running craving for Mexican food. I got nachos (man, I would honestly kill for a plate of nachos right now), chicken mole (sort of a spicy chocolate peanut sauce) and (yes!) an excellent margarita. We saw the famous opera house which, I'm sorry to say, looks a lot bigger and more impressive in the photos. A lot whiter too. It always looks like it's just been bleached or something in the pictures, but really it's kind of a light tan color. The grounds were very nice though. At the Royal Botanical Gardens we say flying fox, which was kind of funny for me to see them kept and cared for so, because they're like an infestation in Vanuatu – sort of like having cockroaches at the zoo, but it was good for my parents because they hadn't gotten a chance to see one up close during the day while in Tautu. A big highlight for me was the Sydney Fish Market, which is basically just a big warehouse with a bunch of fish vendors in it. You can buy cooked fish, fish to cook, and sushi. We feasted on a giant platter of various kinds of fried seafood. It was glorious. And yeah, I'm not really going to go into all the various attractions there are in Sydney. This isn't really supposed to be a travel guide. I'm going to talk about what I liked about Sydney, which are things I think your typical tourist aren't all that interested in.

My favorite thing about Sydney was the bigness of it. It was wonderful to be lost in a city: unnoticed and unimportant. No one said “hi” to me as I walked by. It was awesome. I loved the people, the bustle of the place. Everyone seemed so purposeful. I liked being able to walk around all day and not run into a single person I knew. I liked being able to see something, a store, a restaurant, a statue, and then not be able to find it again. The city changed. You could walk down the same street six times and each time it would be different. The people and the cars on it were different, of course, but it wasn't just that. There was so much on a street you couldn't take it all in on one pass, or even on six passes. Every time you walked by you noticed something different, a funny sign, an item in a shop window, a crack in the sidewalk. You might think that, after a year in the bush, I'd find things like traffic or large buildings intimidating, but this wasn't really the case. I guess it makes sense. After 21 years of living in cities, one year out in the middle of nowhere isn't going to make cities stop feeling like home. The movie theaters were another favorite of mine. I saw a total of five movies at the theater while I was in Sydney. I loved the huge screens, the overpowered speakers, the previews, the high-backed, padded chairs.

Here's what struck me as strange about Sydney. First, the advertisements. There are advertisements everywhere. Billboards, buildings, cars, buses, mailboxes, bus stops, people (and I don't mean people wearing clothes that have brand names written on them, they have those in Vanuatu, I mean people holding signs or handing out fliers), there are even advertisements on other advertisements. Now, what was striking about all the ads was how colorful and vibrant everything was. There was SO MUCH eye candy. It was like walking around a carnival. Or Vegas. I'd kind of tended to think of cities as kind of bland and drab and natural scenes as bright and colorful, but I guess sometimes the opposite is true (sure, there are some natural scenes that really excel at looking spectacular. The Grand Canyon, for example, but there's a lot of nature that's just sort of a mix of dull green and brown). Compared to Sydney, the Vanuatu scenery seems kind of plain. Second, no one likes walking. This observation is probably a little overdone, but it's so true. I had people giving me instructions on how to take a bus to places less than a fifteen minute walk away. I guess it's not really fair, I have to walk 45 minutes to buy flour, so walking is necessary for me. Maybe if I regularly had another choice I wouldn't walk that much either. I don't know. Thirdly, people are so apologetic about making you wait. Like, an item takes a couple extra scans to register at the grocery store, “Sorry sir.” Or there's two people in front of you to buy movie tickets, “We apologize for the wait.” Dude, I usually have to wait an hour to buy a stamp, it's cool. Finally, there were the escalators. What is the deal with escalators? Moving stairs? Really? Stationary stairs actually work quite well, and you can make them more than two people lengths wide. And elevators, sure, if you've got more than three or four flours in your building then yeah, do it up. But escalators? I don't get it. It kind of wants to be stairs and it kind of wants to be an elevator, but instead it's this weird in-between thing that serves neither purpose well. If you're only going up a couple floors, stairs make more sense, and if you're going up a lot of floors, elevators make more sense. It's kind of like the spork: it tries to be two things at once and ends up being a poor version of each.

Right, well, I know this entry has been a little scattered, so sorry about that. I also realize I went off on, like, a page and a half tangent about how awesome food is, sorry about that too. Next week's will take me back to Vanuatu, so no worries (Oh, one last thing. Australians have no right to claim the phrase “no worries” as their slogan. They worry WAY too much. That phrase is much more at home in Vanuatu).

Life in the Ring of Fire Part 46: Full House

This week's Tautu language word is “rolbong.” It means “morning.” Like with natanbong, you can combine it with ares to say “ares rolbong,” which means “good morning.”

Monday started my last week of teaching, which I was indescribably happy about. I was going to be in Australia for the next two weeks, which were the last two weeks of the term, and so I'd gotten my headmaster to cover my class for me. Seeing how much things tend to peter out by the end of the term anyway, I doubted I would be missing much. In addition, my parents and little brother were to be spending the week with me in Tautu, which was pretty cool. Their first order of business was to declare the water in the water tank outside my house, in other words, my drinking water, unsuitable for all purposes except flushing the toilet, which made me feel really good about my sanitary habits. In their defense (or perhaps in mine), the water quality in my tank had degraded significantly since I'd left for Vila almost two weeks before, I think because there'd been a heavy rain that had washed a lot of dead leaves and rotting lemons into it. I promised to clean out my tank as soon as I returned from Australia and, in the interim, we all used the water from the school's tank. Also, a cool thing about having visitors from the States is that they're really impressed at how much work I go through to accomplish everyday tasks, even though it's really just part of the routine. For example:

“OK, well, I'm just gonna whip up some bread dough, knead it and let it rise, then chop some firewood and get a fire going so we can have fresh bread for breakfast.”
“No, Daniel, it's fine, you don't need to go through all that trouble.”
“Umm, it's not really any trouble. I mean, the alternative is sitting around for an hour.”

The funny thing is that it really isn't any trouble. It's like having guests that are really impressed at how much work you put into microwaving soup for them. Another cool thing was that my parents aren't volunteers and have actual jobs, and thus actual paychecks, so costs that'd I'd come to think of as being preposterously expensive were shrugged off by them (“Two dollars to go snorkeling here! It's not like I'm buying a freaking car!” “Uhh, Daniel, that's just fine, actually”). And, of course, I finally had people to take pictures of me. You see, since I actually live in Tautu, if I were to walk around with a camera all the time taking pictures of things, people would think it was a little weird, but visitors are expected to do such things. Thus, I was at last able to get photos of me doing things like walking around with a machete. Also, my brother was tasked with filming a documentary about Vanuatu since he was missing a few days of school to come visit, so he was carrying around a camcorder the whole time, which caused a lot of excitement in the village.

At any rate, on Monday I showed them around the Greater Lakatoro Area (GLA), being Norsup, Tautu, Lakatoro, and Litz-Litz. During the process I stopped in at the post office to pick up all the mail that had been piling up in my box since I'd left for Vila, and received a package from a couple friends from college loaded with a variety of snacks which, combined with all the stuff my family had brought for me, skyrocketed the amount of American stuff in my house to record levels. On Tuesday we chartered a motor boat to go out to Urpiv, a small island off the coast of Malekula. I'd heard about Urpiv from a couple of the older volunteers who'd told me that there was supposed to be some good snorkeling there. My mom had also read in a tour book (yeah, Malekula does show up in the Lonely Planet guide to Vanuatu. Of course, about half of the information it gives is inaccurate) about a supposed marine sanctuary, which I suspected was the same place, although I was guessing it wasn't so much a “sanctuary” as a “place that the chief tries to keep people from fishing in.” We made it over to the island without a problem (I was shocked). I asked some of the villagers where we should snorkel to see some good coral and fish, and they pointed us up the island, saying that diving was not allowed in the other direction. I thought that probably meant that that was where the protected area was, which was where we wanted to go, but everyone was fairly adamant that we head off in the opposite direction. We worked our way up along the coast; it was OK, but fairly mediocre by Vanuatu standards. Eventually, we crossed over to the windward side of the island and lost it's protection from the wind and where forced out of the water by rough seas. We walked back to where we started and started asking around again. Finally it came out that we could snorkel in the protected area, but we would have to pay a fee. This we did and set out again. The second time was much nicer, with a lot more coral and fish and a lot fewer waves, more what I'd come to expect from Vanuatu. After snorkeling, Duncan and Linda gave my family lap-lap making lessons, so that they could enjoy the delicacy when they got back to the US, provided that they were willing to dig a big pit in their back yard and build a giant fire in it. I had a feeling it might be a little difficult to get the home owner's association's approval for that.

Thursday was my family's going away feast (their second feast in less than a week). Once again, Duncan had been busy fussing around for the previous couple days to get everything ready. I one point, I went to see him to check on things and he was very concerned about something that I just couldn't weasel out of him. It can be very difficult to get Ni-Vans to get to the point, especially when something is wrong. After about half an hour of back and forth, it came out that he'd invited too many people to the party and was concerned about having enough food. “I think we should get a second pig,” he told me. “That's awesome,” I replied. Two pigs in one feast, things were getting pretty epic. When we showed up Thursday evening, all of my US family were whisked off by by Vanuatu family and dressed up in matching island clothes: a Hawaiian print dress for my mom and matching Hawaiian print shirts for my dad and brother. My family was also presented with a gift: a carved wooden canoe to symbolize safe passage home and welcome should they ever wish to return to Vanuatu. Then my host grandpa got up and gave a speech in Bislama and asked me to translate it into English. The problem with translating Bislama into English is that an entire paragraph of Bislama can be summed up by one English word, so what would happen is that by grandpa would say a couple lines and then pause and look at me, waiting for me to translate, and I'd be like, “Uhh, you haven't, actually, said anything yet.” In the end, it all turned out nicely, and I think my two families got along pretty well, and I think my US family really liked their carving, although, as I was told later, they had a little trouble getting it through airport security in the US, as it was tagged as a “sharp object.” I thought this was a pretty perfect juxtaposition of the two cultures.
Vanuatu: “This craving represents our appreciation of your visit and is a symbol of you being welcome to return any time.”
US: “Sir, are you aware that boat could be used to stab someone?”

Friday afternoon we caught a plane back to Vila and spent another day there before Sunday, the big day, my first return to western civilization in almost a year, our flight to Sydney. I was excited. Although I do like Vanuatu quite a bit, I was ready for a vacation. I was getting a little claustrophobic. The thing about Vanuatu is that, not only is it small, but it's also disconnected. The usual web made up of phone, TV, internet, radio, newspapers, etc, that tie us to the rest of the world in the US just aren't in place to the same extent in Vanuatu, so when you look out from your beach and see nothing but the endless dull blue of the Pacific Ocean, it's easy to forgot that the rest of the world exists. Sometimes when things just aren't going my way in Vanuatu, it's good to know that there are other places on the planet.

So, for the first time ever, I went through Port Vila's international terminal on the departing end. Surprisingly, Air Vanuatu is actually a pretty nice airline to fly for international flights. You always get lots of food, and it's usually pretty good, and wine and drinks are included in your ticket and, I got to say, you can really taste the difference between really cheap cooking wine sold in two liter jugs and only pretty cheap airplane wine poured out of bottles. Sydney airport is massive. Huge. I'd sort of forgotten what it was like to be able to walk long distances inside. We walked what was probably the equivalent of my house to Duncan's house just to get from the gate to the customs counters. We got our bags, spent a little bit of time working things out at the car rental counter and then we were outside. It was pretty cold. My parents had brought me some winter clothes, so I wasn't totally unprepared, but still, I hadn't felt cold for a while. It was really nice actually. While heat makes you lethargic and lazy, cold makes you active and alert. I liked the feeling. We found our car and hit the road. We were headed for a few nights at a cottage in the Blue Mountains, about an hour's drive outside of Sydney. The rental car lady had given us easy directions and so soon, with very little trouble, we were cruising down the highway leaving town. We stopped once at a gas station convenience store to use the bathroom and I browsed the grocery section. To my surprise, western food items such as chips and crackers and the like weren't significantly cheaper than they were back in Vila. I was a little disappointed. It was almost ten at night when we reached the town we were staying in. We'd gained a lot of altitude and, I assumed, colder, because I could see snow on the ground outside the car window. Yes, snow, unbelievable. It was also almost ten at night and it was very dark. We found the street our cottage was supposed to be on, but it was too dark to see the numbers, so we couldn't locate the address. Me and my brother were sent out to investigate. It was frigid outside. Not the pleasant cold from back in Sydney, this was a painful cold. I was jumping up and down and running in place as we looked for addresses. Finally, we found it, and let ourselves inside. The house was almost as cold as the outside. There was not central heat, but the proprietor had left a fire going in the fireplace which I spent the next half hour huddled next to. The bedrooms were even more frigid, as they were far away from the fireplace, but the beds all had electric blankets, which were pretty key, just as long as you didn't need to get up to go to the bathroom. It was late and I was tired and thus wasn't in the mood to access my re-introduction to westerness and glorify in such pleasures as running water. I would have to wait until Monday for that.