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.