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.