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.