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.