Life in the Ring of Fire Part 55: Malampa Day Week
This week's Tautu language word is “ewis.” It means “how much.”
Monday was constitution day. Apparently having just independence day was decided to be insufficient celebration for the establishment of Vanuatu as a country, so they also take a day off in honor of their constitution being signed. Actually, it's pretty impressive, given how slow everything moves around here, that they were able to win independence at the end of July and have a constitution together by the end of September. I would've though it'd be one of those things that everyone would just let slide for a while until it became absolutely critical. Although, now that I think about it, I guess I'm assuming (perhaps rashly) that independence and the constitution signing occurred in the same year, so maybe instead of it taking two months to get a constitution together, it actually took a year and two months, or a decade and two months. That would be more in character. At any rate, Monday was a holiday, which was good because I'd contracted a cold over the weekend and thus still wasn't feeling particularly thrilled by the idea of teaching. I (knock on wood) have been pretty lucky. Our third day in Vanuatu we were given a course by our medical staff on the plethora of bizarre diseases present in the country that can kill you or, at the very least, make your life really, really miserable, to the point of making you wish that said disease would just kill you and have done with it. So far, I've contracted exactly zero of these diseases. No malaria, no dengue fever, no giardia, no African snail induced viral meningitis, no scabies, not even a boil. My health state has been more or less exactly the same as it was for the past who-knows-how-many years in the States: fine except for some seasonal allergies and maybe a couple colds. So, really, I have no right to complain. That being said, I'm going to anyway, because there's nothing like an aliment or injury, not matter how minor, to make you really wish that you were home. The medical care in the US is stellar, of course, but this isn't really what I'm talking about, since one really doesn't rely heavily on the health care system when dealing with a cold. It's more just that being sick robs you of absolutely all patience and tolerance, so things that you long ago adjusted to dealing with start getting on your nerves again. My foam sleeping pad seemed suddenly monstrously uncomfortable, my fan a pathetic attempt to lessen the sweltering heat, doing nothing an unacceptable way to amuse myself, and the food disgusting and requiring of far too much effort. In short, I wanted a nice, comfortable sofa inside an air conditioned room with satellite TV and pizza delivery. Is that too much to ask? Although, really, the most frustrating part of being sick in Vanuatu is having to talk to Ni-Vans about it. Whenever I'm sick, I generally try my very hardest to hide in my house and avoid all contact with Ni-Vans until all obvious signs of illness have abated. Otherwise, I get involved in conversation like this:
Ni-Van: “You sick?”
Me: “Yes. I have a cold.”
Ni-Van: “ 'Cause of the wind, I think.”
Me: “Umm, no, it's a virus.”
Ni-Van: “Or the dust.”
Me: “No, dust doesn't cause colds. It's caused by a virus.”
Ni-Van: “Or maybe you ate too many coconuts.”
Me: “No. It's a virus. You catch it from other people. I probably caught it from you because you never wash your hands.”
*Long pause*
Ni-Van: “I think it's because you drink too much water.”
The truly frustrating thing about these exchanges is that, while I know viruses exist, you can SEE them, after all, with a good enough microscope, there's really absolutely no evidence that I can present to people here to back up this fact. Even if they do decide to take my word for it that tiny little organisms cause disease, this would be a belief held as irrationally as believing that the wind causes colds. They'd just be blindly believing what I tell them as opposed to blindly believing what the village witch doctor tells them (no, we don't actually have a village witch doctor, I'm just trying to make a point). In the end, I just end up being an unwilling anecdote backing up whatever they've already decided to unquestioningly believe (“Of course the wind causes colds. Remember that time when it was windy and Dan, the Peace Corp, got a cold?”). It makes me feel so used.
On a more positive note, we were in the middle of the lead up to Malampa Day, which was supposed to be on Friday. Not being satisfied with having only one holiday this particular week, it had been decided that Malampa province (where I live) really needed to have its own public holiday commemorating it. Of course, then it was decided that, since Monday and Friday were holidays anyway, it'd probably be a good idea to just take the whole week off. Thus, Malampa “Day” had started the previous Friday and was slated to run throughout the week. Malampa Day Week was celebrated, as all holidays are celebrated around here, by everyone going to the football (soccer, not that sport big men with speech impediments play in the States which is so ungainly and complicated that it actually requires more referees than players) stadium in Lakatoro to play football (soccer), drink kava and beer, and eat lap-lap. Duncan had set up a kava and food stall at the stadium and had spent the whole weekend working at it. On Tuesday, finally feeling well enough to be out and about without people asking me if I'm sick, I joined him in Lakatoro. “We're going to Bushman's Bay to kill a cow.” He told me, immediately upon my arrival “you want to come?” Well, yeah.
I piled into the back of a truck with some other guys from Tautu and we set off. Bushman's Bay is a village just a little bit south of Lakatoro where, I gathered during the truck ride, there was a cattle plantation whose French owner was currently absent, thus meaning, I guess, that the cows were up for grabs. We'd come for a couple cows for the five day feast for the dead the previous Friday. Duncan had brought his .22 rifle and two bullets, which seemed to me to be cutting it a little close because I was pretty sure a one .22 round wasn't going to be adequate to take down a cow. We crawled through the barbed wire fence surrounding the plantation and struck out across the field. The more intelligent cows quickly scattered and hid in the bush but a few of the slow learners just watched us curiously.
**OK, I'm going to take a moment here and warn any particularly squeamish readers that you might want to skip over the next paragraph. Things get a little messy**
Duncan purposely walked up to one such cow and shot it in the head. As I predicted, this did not kill the cow, but it did fall over and lie on the ground, mooing unhappily and flailing its legs. However, it did not seem all that inclined to get up and run away, which was good. At this point it was noticed that no one had bothered to bring a machete with which to cut the cow's throat or, for that matter, butcher it once it was successfully killed. Between the eight or so of us assembled, the only cutting implement we had was a small knife about the size and sharpness of a steak knife. One of our team was sent off in search of someone to borrow a machete from while the rest of us tried to make do with this tool. The bravest of our group went in in an attempt to cut the cow's throat with the steak knife, while at the same time avoid the violently kicking hooves. He tried restraining the cow's front legs with one hand while cutting with the other, which is kind of like a mosquito deciding it's going to try and hold you down with its antennae while sucking your blood. The restraining strategy was quickly abandoned in favor of crouching as far away from the cow's hooves as possible while still being able to reach the throat. Surprisingly, he was actually able to make a small incision, and a stream of blood fountained from the throat onto the ground. This didn't really seem to do much to hasten the dying process however, as the only discernible difference was that the cow's frantic mooing now had a sort of rasping quality to it. A few more guys took a turn at sawing at the cow's throat with the steak knife and after a bit of work blood was pouring from the wound at an appreciable rate and the cow's kicks grew weaker and weaker. After a few minutes, it was dead. Then it was time for the gross part. Myself and three others each grabbed a leg and pulled it away from the cow, spread eagling it, stomach up, on the ground. Two others worked with the knife to make a cut all the way from the throat to the rump, thus exposing the cow's gut. Then, one of them grabbed the tough and rubbery (despite what you see in movies, cutting something's, or someone's, throat isn't all that easy. Throats are built to last) esophagus and pulled really hard. You see, conveniently enough, the entire digestive tract, the throat, stomach, and intestines (ie. all the parts of the cow that no one really wants to eat) is connected together so, in theory, you can rip the whole thing out all at once. Of course, at the moment, the rib cage was getting in the way, and it didn't seem to me that we were going to have very much luck cutting through a cow's sternum with a steak knife. Fortunately, it was about then that one of the guys showed up with a machete, which we were able to use to split the rib cage. Now, it was just a matter of muscling the cow's insides out. This ended up being quite a chore however, because the insides were 1) really heavy, 2) slippery, 3) covered in blood. It took all six of us heaving and hawing for a good twenty minutes to lift and push everything out. During the process, we ruptured the abdominal wall and got to watch the gray, slimy small intestines worm their way out into the open. That was pretty cool. Afterwards we all looked like we'd taken part in a particularly grizzly murder (perhaps certain animal rights activist would argue that we HAD taken part in a particularly grizzly murder. However, I've adopted the ethical stance of not having any qualms about inflicting harm/death on any species of animal that has attacked me. So far in Vanuatu I've been attacked by chickens, cows, goats, pigs, crabs, a variety of fish, and dogs, so I've got most of the basic meat groups covered). A truck had pulled up to us while we were working, and, after laying down a bed of coconut leaves, we hoisted the gutted cow into the bed. We also recovered the heart and liver from the discarded guts and tossed those in as well. Just as we were finishing, Duncan (who'd gone off to shoot and help butcher the second cow) walked up to me holding a cow heart, which he thrust at me. “Here,” he said “hold this and give it to your mom [Linda] when we get back.” Thus it was that I rolled into our food and kava stall in Lakatoro, covered in blood, clutching a dripping, bloody cow's heart by the aorta. I think that's probably the most badass I've ever felt in my life.
Thursday, a boxing match had been arranged in honor of Malampa Day. The match was supposed to actually be on Friday, Malampa Day, but the SDA Church complained that since they begin observing the sabbath Friday at sundown, their members would be unable to attend the event because it was taking place in the evening. McKenzie, Laura (who'd come down for the occasion), and I all agreed that if you get that worked up about the practice of your faith preventing you from seeing a boxing match, it's perhaps time to re-examine the principles underlying your faith. This is Vanuatu, however, so the provincial government politely obliged and moved the day of the match. The headlining fight was between a boxer from Southwest Bay, Malekula, Kali, who was apparently accomplished enough to have taken part in a number of matches in Australia and New Zealand, and a Fijian. To warm up the crowd, however, a number of amateurs from all over the island boxed each other first. The MC kicked off the event by asking the crowd to give a big hand to the volunteers because, and I quote, “It's difficult to get up in front of so many people.” Only in Vanuatu would you sign up for boxing (a sport which involves getting the living daylights beaten out of you by someone determined to give you a concussion) and your biggest fear be stage fright. The fight right before the headliner was between two volunteers from New Zealand, who'd decided that they wanted to be part of the event and had been allowed to do so on the basis of being white. This caused quite a lot of excitement in the crowd. Given how much Ni-Vans love to watch white people when they're just sitting around, getting to watch TWO white people fight each other was no doubt the most exciting thing most people could possibly conceive of. I have to admit, it was pretty entertaining. In the end, however, the headlining fight was somewhat disappointing as Kali knocked out the Fijian in the second round of what was supposed to be a twelve round fight. Fortunately, I'm not all that into boxing anyway, so I just had a good time hanging out with everyone. All in all, I approved of Malampa Day Week.
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Life in the Ring of Fire Part 54: A Dead
This week's Tautu language word is “des.” It means “ocean.”
So, I hate alarm clocks. It's a hatred that's had a long time to grow and mature. It began perhaps ten to twelve years ago when one of these insidious contraption first appeared on my bedside table and was programmed to emit obnoxious loud noises at 6:30 every morning so that I could get up for school. Ten years is a pretty sizable chunk of time for a hatred to develop, so by this point it's pretty sophisticated. It's well thought through and has a lot of facets. When I left for Vanuatu a little more than a year ago, one of the things I was looking forward to was ridding myself of the evil little gizmo that is is alarm clock for a couple years. Thus, it was with some chagrin that I discovered that, although there are indeed no alarm clocks here, they're replaced my something that I now hate even more: people bent on waking you up at ridiculously early hours of the morning. And the thing about people is that they're so much more creative, cunning, and annoying in the ways that they go about waking you up than any alarm clock could ever dream of being. I now respect this about alarm clocks. Alarm clocks are predictable. You set an alarm clock to go off at 6:30 and it will, invariably, go off at 6:30. It won't decide that some mornings it's going to go off at 6:24 and then the next morning it's going to go off at 6:32, etc. No, 6:30, every morning, on the dot. Also, it will always make the same noise every morning. It may be a beep, a bell, a buzzer, or whatever, but it's always the same. The same volume, the same tone, the same timing. It's almost... soothing. After a while you get so used to the same pattern of noise at the same time every morning that you begin to be able to tune it out (some may argue that this is actually a bad thing because the whole point of having an alarm clock is so that you can wake up at a certain time each day. This is wrong. The point of having an alarm clock is so that you can claim to have made an honest effort to wake up at a certain time, so that, no matter when you actually do wake up, you can truthfully say, to whoever is mad at you for not waking up, that you tried your best). People though, man, they can really get under your skin.
First off, there's the school bell. I think I've probably talked about this particular bane of mine before, but I think it bears repeating. There's a large, empty, laboratory compressed gas cylinder resting against a tree in the school yard about a hundred meters from my house. Every morning when school's in session, it's the job of one unfortunate kid to go beat the hell out of this cylinder with a metal rod at around 6:30, 7:00, and 7:30. I say unfortunate because close up exposure to the loud noise produced by ringing this improvised bell has got be at least as damaging to the ear drums as, say, attending ten Children of Bodom concerts, with front row seats, back to back. Just as teenagers are unfazed by loud concerts, however, these kids seem to actually enjoy making themselves go deaf and go at the bell with what can only be described as masochistic zeal. The sound produced by the gas cylinder is similar to that made by taking a mallet to an enormous gong, of the variety that always seem to be hanging all over the place in Kung-Fu movies. It's a sound that's heard, not only by the ear, but by the entire body. It hits you like a shock wave of a sort that totally unwelcome at 6:30 in the morning. But that's not really what bothers me about the bell. Yes, it's loud, it's obnoxious, it's invasive, but I can deal with all that. What's torturous is how freaking RANDOM the thing is. Of course, keeping accurate time isn't exactly all the rage around these parts, so, although the bell is supposed to be rung at 6:30, in practice it's rung anywhere between 6:15 and 6:45. My brain has decided that it'll be damned if it's going to be woken up every morning by this thing. So, what generally happens is that I've been trained to wake myself up at around 6:10, to be sure to beat the bell, and I lie in my bed, wincing in anticipation for anywhere between five and thirty-five minutes. It's like Chinese water torture: it's not that the event that your dreading is really all that bad, it's that you never know exactly when it's coming. And then there's the pattern in which the bell is rung. It's never a consistent one-two-three-four kind of beat. They'll wail on it really fast for the first five hits, pause for a few seconds, give it three slow hits, then a short pause followed by two quick hits and then a long pause and a last, sharp hit at the end for good measure. Or something random like that. And the thing is that it's different every morning, so there's no getting used to it. I think by the end of my service, I'm going to be so scarred by the sound of metal beating on metal that the accidental clanking of, say, a fork and a knife together, will make my fly into a murderous rage and strangle the person daft enough to make such a noise.
But the bell's not really the worst of it. The bell is designed to wake up everyone, indiscriminately. What's worse is when someone decides that they need to wake up you, specifically. In the US we have what I think is a wonderful custom. It's my favorite custom, actually. It's, in my opinion, the one and only custom required for a civilized society. This custom is both necessary and sufficient for a culture to be deemed sophisticated and advanced. It work's like this: when someone is sleeping, YOU DO NOT WAKE THEM UP, unless it's a matter of life and death and, even then, only if you've put in an honest effort to resolve the issue without disturbing the sleeper. In Vanuatu the custom goes more like this: if someone is sleeping, don't wake them up unless you feel like it. So what will happen is that someone will decide, at six in the morning, that it would be a really good time to ask me if I have any DVDs they can borrow. So they start knocking on my door and, of course, I don't respond, because it's six o'clock in the freaking morning, and I know it's not a matter of life and death, because there are no matters of life and death in Vanuatu. So they knock harder, and then the start calling “Daniel! Daniel!” And, of course, I still ignore them. So then they start screaming “DANIEL! DANIEL!” or, even better, screaming incoherently. If I'm still ignoring them at this point, they'll come around to my bedroom window and start banging on it and screaming. And, although I've never made it to this phase, I'm sure the next move would be putting a brick through my window and climbing in to dump a bucket of water on me. Or sometimes they'll be too lazy to come wake me up in person because, I suspect, somebody woke them up that morning way too early as well, so they'll try to wake me up via phone. They'll adopt a strategy of random calling patterns apparently adapted from the bell ringers: put in a few calls in quick succession, follow it up with a pause of random duration, and then put in some more back to back calls. By the time I cave in, there's usually about fifteen or sixteen missed calls on my phone. Of course, the kicker, the part that really gets me, is that this whole process, of waking me up at some ungodly hour, was initiated so that I could do THEM a favor. There is no justice in this world.
On a slightly less whiny note, Friday there was a dead in the village. A dead, obviously, occurs whenever someone in the village dies. This happens fairly frequently. While the medical system here is reasonable at dealing with things like infectious diseases, injuries, and other health problems commonly encountered in life, it's not really up to the task of combating the ailments brought on by old age. Thus, old people in Vanuatu tend to die young, so to speak. Ni-Vanuatu have something of a different perspective on death than we do in the US. In the States, I think, we tend to remove ourselves from the processes surrounding death. A family member dies and we put in a call to a funeral home and they basically do everything for us: prepare the body for burial/cremation/whatever, get a coffin ready, dig the grave, etc. All the family has to do is show up to the funeral to grieve and be solemn. The distance that we put between ourselves and the various chores involved when someone dies gives a funeral a certain sense of mystery and even discomfort. I tend to feel awkward at funerals, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. In Vanuatu, of course, this kind of distance from the dead is impossible. There's no one to outsource anything to, so the Ni-Vans have a sort of practiced ease when dealing with death. For example, you might hop in the back of a pickup truck and have one of the other passengers tell you, straight-faced and matter-of-factly, “careful not to step on the dead guy.”
There's a very well laid out ritual that's followed whenever a family member dies. On the day of the death, the body is left in the family's house. All the relatives come by and “wail,” which is kind of an exaggerated crying. They howl and scream and sometimes pound the body. It can be quite disconcerting to those unused to the practice. The next day (or the day after, depending on timing), there's a funeral service at the church and a burial. The grave and coffin and everything are prepared, of course, by people in the village. Starting the day the death occurred, the immediate family of the deceased is forbidden, by custom, to do any kind of work until thirty days have passed. They can't cook, clean, hunt, fish, go to the gardens, or even bathe. Since it's basically impossible to survive without doing these things in Vanuatu, the extended family, and the community in general, is obligated to take care of them. Families take turns bringing them food and doing any housework that needs to be done. There are also four feasts that are put on in honor of the dead: one five days after the death, one ten days after, one after thirty days, and one after one hundred days. The five day feast is the largest and they get progressively smaller after that. The thirty day has special significance because it means that the immediate family can one again take care of themselves and is officially done grieving. Sometimes the men in the family will mark the occasion by all shaving their beards together, something they'd been unable to do up until that point. The hundred day feast is a simple, small affair of remembrance. Now, not working for thirty days after a family member dies probably seems a little excessive for those of us from the States, but remember that time has a bit of a different meaning here in Vanuatu. Also, it's not like there's all that much work that needs to be done around these parts anyway. The time periods involved aren't really that relevant, the point is that there's a very specific ritual to be followed. Every time there's a death, exactly the same process is followed. Everyone knows exactly what's expected of them, depending on their relation to the deceased. Everyone goes through the steps, takes the appropriate actions, and then it's done. Closure is guaranteed. No one dwells on the death after the alloted time has passed, it's water under the bridge.
So anyway, Friday was the funeral and burial service for some distant relative of mine. The church was so crowded for the service that I had to sit outside, which I actually kind of preferred since I knew it had to be at least three million degrees inside. Afterwards, the coffin was carried out by a group of the village men and we followed them to a small cemetery just outside the village proper. Duncan, of course, was in charged of the actual burial (he has a tendency to put himself in charged of anything involving the use of tools, in this case a shovel). After the ceremony, everyone in the village shook hands with everyone else in the village (this took about three times as long as the actual ceremony), and I headed home. Not the most uplifting way to start your weekend, but actually far less depressing than one might think. There might be something to this more familiar relationship with death.
This week's Tautu language word is “des.” It means “ocean.”
So, I hate alarm clocks. It's a hatred that's had a long time to grow and mature. It began perhaps ten to twelve years ago when one of these insidious contraption first appeared on my bedside table and was programmed to emit obnoxious loud noises at 6:30 every morning so that I could get up for school. Ten years is a pretty sizable chunk of time for a hatred to develop, so by this point it's pretty sophisticated. It's well thought through and has a lot of facets. When I left for Vanuatu a little more than a year ago, one of the things I was looking forward to was ridding myself of the evil little gizmo that is is alarm clock for a couple years. Thus, it was with some chagrin that I discovered that, although there are indeed no alarm clocks here, they're replaced my something that I now hate even more: people bent on waking you up at ridiculously early hours of the morning. And the thing about people is that they're so much more creative, cunning, and annoying in the ways that they go about waking you up than any alarm clock could ever dream of being. I now respect this about alarm clocks. Alarm clocks are predictable. You set an alarm clock to go off at 6:30 and it will, invariably, go off at 6:30. It won't decide that some mornings it's going to go off at 6:24 and then the next morning it's going to go off at 6:32, etc. No, 6:30, every morning, on the dot. Also, it will always make the same noise every morning. It may be a beep, a bell, a buzzer, or whatever, but it's always the same. The same volume, the same tone, the same timing. It's almost... soothing. After a while you get so used to the same pattern of noise at the same time every morning that you begin to be able to tune it out (some may argue that this is actually a bad thing because the whole point of having an alarm clock is so that you can wake up at a certain time each day. This is wrong. The point of having an alarm clock is so that you can claim to have made an honest effort to wake up at a certain time, so that, no matter when you actually do wake up, you can truthfully say, to whoever is mad at you for not waking up, that you tried your best). People though, man, they can really get under your skin.
First off, there's the school bell. I think I've probably talked about this particular bane of mine before, but I think it bears repeating. There's a large, empty, laboratory compressed gas cylinder resting against a tree in the school yard about a hundred meters from my house. Every morning when school's in session, it's the job of one unfortunate kid to go beat the hell out of this cylinder with a metal rod at around 6:30, 7:00, and 7:30. I say unfortunate because close up exposure to the loud noise produced by ringing this improvised bell has got be at least as damaging to the ear drums as, say, attending ten Children of Bodom concerts, with front row seats, back to back. Just as teenagers are unfazed by loud concerts, however, these kids seem to actually enjoy making themselves go deaf and go at the bell with what can only be described as masochistic zeal. The sound produced by the gas cylinder is similar to that made by taking a mallet to an enormous gong, of the variety that always seem to be hanging all over the place in Kung-Fu movies. It's a sound that's heard, not only by the ear, but by the entire body. It hits you like a shock wave of a sort that totally unwelcome at 6:30 in the morning. But that's not really what bothers me about the bell. Yes, it's loud, it's obnoxious, it's invasive, but I can deal with all that. What's torturous is how freaking RANDOM the thing is. Of course, keeping accurate time isn't exactly all the rage around these parts, so, although the bell is supposed to be rung at 6:30, in practice it's rung anywhere between 6:15 and 6:45. My brain has decided that it'll be damned if it's going to be woken up every morning by this thing. So, what generally happens is that I've been trained to wake myself up at around 6:10, to be sure to beat the bell, and I lie in my bed, wincing in anticipation for anywhere between five and thirty-five minutes. It's like Chinese water torture: it's not that the event that your dreading is really all that bad, it's that you never know exactly when it's coming. And then there's the pattern in which the bell is rung. It's never a consistent one-two-three-four kind of beat. They'll wail on it really fast for the first five hits, pause for a few seconds, give it three slow hits, then a short pause followed by two quick hits and then a long pause and a last, sharp hit at the end for good measure. Or something random like that. And the thing is that it's different every morning, so there's no getting used to it. I think by the end of my service, I'm going to be so scarred by the sound of metal beating on metal that the accidental clanking of, say, a fork and a knife together, will make my fly into a murderous rage and strangle the person daft enough to make such a noise.
But the bell's not really the worst of it. The bell is designed to wake up everyone, indiscriminately. What's worse is when someone decides that they need to wake up you, specifically. In the US we have what I think is a wonderful custom. It's my favorite custom, actually. It's, in my opinion, the one and only custom required for a civilized society. This custom is both necessary and sufficient for a culture to be deemed sophisticated and advanced. It work's like this: when someone is sleeping, YOU DO NOT WAKE THEM UP, unless it's a matter of life and death and, even then, only if you've put in an honest effort to resolve the issue without disturbing the sleeper. In Vanuatu the custom goes more like this: if someone is sleeping, don't wake them up unless you feel like it. So what will happen is that someone will decide, at six in the morning, that it would be a really good time to ask me if I have any DVDs they can borrow. So they start knocking on my door and, of course, I don't respond, because it's six o'clock in the freaking morning, and I know it's not a matter of life and death, because there are no matters of life and death in Vanuatu. So they knock harder, and then the start calling “Daniel! Daniel!” And, of course, I still ignore them. So then they start screaming “DANIEL! DANIEL!” or, even better, screaming incoherently. If I'm still ignoring them at this point, they'll come around to my bedroom window and start banging on it and screaming. And, although I've never made it to this phase, I'm sure the next move would be putting a brick through my window and climbing in to dump a bucket of water on me. Or sometimes they'll be too lazy to come wake me up in person because, I suspect, somebody woke them up that morning way too early as well, so they'll try to wake me up via phone. They'll adopt a strategy of random calling patterns apparently adapted from the bell ringers: put in a few calls in quick succession, follow it up with a pause of random duration, and then put in some more back to back calls. By the time I cave in, there's usually about fifteen or sixteen missed calls on my phone. Of course, the kicker, the part that really gets me, is that this whole process, of waking me up at some ungodly hour, was initiated so that I could do THEM a favor. There is no justice in this world.
On a slightly less whiny note, Friday there was a dead in the village. A dead, obviously, occurs whenever someone in the village dies. This happens fairly frequently. While the medical system here is reasonable at dealing with things like infectious diseases, injuries, and other health problems commonly encountered in life, it's not really up to the task of combating the ailments brought on by old age. Thus, old people in Vanuatu tend to die young, so to speak. Ni-Vanuatu have something of a different perspective on death than we do in the US. In the States, I think, we tend to remove ourselves from the processes surrounding death. A family member dies and we put in a call to a funeral home and they basically do everything for us: prepare the body for burial/cremation/whatever, get a coffin ready, dig the grave, etc. All the family has to do is show up to the funeral to grieve and be solemn. The distance that we put between ourselves and the various chores involved when someone dies gives a funeral a certain sense of mystery and even discomfort. I tend to feel awkward at funerals, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. In Vanuatu, of course, this kind of distance from the dead is impossible. There's no one to outsource anything to, so the Ni-Vans have a sort of practiced ease when dealing with death. For example, you might hop in the back of a pickup truck and have one of the other passengers tell you, straight-faced and matter-of-factly, “careful not to step on the dead guy.”
There's a very well laid out ritual that's followed whenever a family member dies. On the day of the death, the body is left in the family's house. All the relatives come by and “wail,” which is kind of an exaggerated crying. They howl and scream and sometimes pound the body. It can be quite disconcerting to those unused to the practice. The next day (or the day after, depending on timing), there's a funeral service at the church and a burial. The grave and coffin and everything are prepared, of course, by people in the village. Starting the day the death occurred, the immediate family of the deceased is forbidden, by custom, to do any kind of work until thirty days have passed. They can't cook, clean, hunt, fish, go to the gardens, or even bathe. Since it's basically impossible to survive without doing these things in Vanuatu, the extended family, and the community in general, is obligated to take care of them. Families take turns bringing them food and doing any housework that needs to be done. There are also four feasts that are put on in honor of the dead: one five days after the death, one ten days after, one after thirty days, and one after one hundred days. The five day feast is the largest and they get progressively smaller after that. The thirty day has special significance because it means that the immediate family can one again take care of themselves and is officially done grieving. Sometimes the men in the family will mark the occasion by all shaving their beards together, something they'd been unable to do up until that point. The hundred day feast is a simple, small affair of remembrance. Now, not working for thirty days after a family member dies probably seems a little excessive for those of us from the States, but remember that time has a bit of a different meaning here in Vanuatu. Also, it's not like there's all that much work that needs to be done around these parts anyway. The time periods involved aren't really that relevant, the point is that there's a very specific ritual to be followed. Every time there's a death, exactly the same process is followed. Everyone knows exactly what's expected of them, depending on their relation to the deceased. Everyone goes through the steps, takes the appropriate actions, and then it's done. Closure is guaranteed. No one dwells on the death after the alloted time has passed, it's water under the bridge.
So anyway, Friday was the funeral and burial service for some distant relative of mine. The church was so crowded for the service that I had to sit outside, which I actually kind of preferred since I knew it had to be at least three million degrees inside. Afterwards, the coffin was carried out by a group of the village men and we followed them to a small cemetery just outside the village proper. Duncan, of course, was in charged of the actual burial (he has a tendency to put himself in charged of anything involving the use of tools, in this case a shovel). After the ceremony, everyone in the village shook hands with everyone else in the village (this took about three times as long as the actual ceremony), and I headed home. Not the most uplifting way to start your weekend, but actually far less depressing than one might think. There might be something to this more familiar relationship with death.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Life in the Ring of Fire Part 53: Rain Smoke
This week's Tautu language word is “tosalsal.” It means “white man.” Needless to say, I get called this a lot.
Mango season was starting. This was very exciting. Last year, to my dismay, I left out training village on Efate to come to Malekula before Efate's mango season and after Malekula's mango season, thus meaning I've been living in a tropical paradise for more than a year now and have eaten, maybe, a grand total of three mangoes. I considered this unacceptable. There are mango trees all around Tautu, big, towering behemoths with long slender leaves and tangles of branches. There's one right next to my house, actually. They make good shade trees. Their leaves are small, but there are a lot of them and so they generally provide a nice, dense canopy. I've actually taken to setting up something of an outdoor office underneath mine. There's a half-rotten (but still functional) wooden platform built of strips of coconut logs situated between the mango tree and a nangai (a kind of nut, sort of like an almond, but more oily) tree which is shaded all day long. Someone laid a long piece of timber across a couple of supports just behind the platform, meaning that I can sit on the platform and use the timber as a sort of table for my laptop. I generally have to vacate my house between the hours of noon and four these days. Spring is rolling in with a vengeance and is making me wonder how it was that I was able to deal with impending summer last year. The school also decided a few months ago that it needed to cut down a bunch of trees around my house, meaning that there are now no trees to keep the sun off my corrugated iron roof, thus turning my house into an excellent model of a solar oven. On top of all that, my fan, which has served me faithfully for so many months, is on the fritz (sometimes requiring me to give the blades a little nudge with a pencil in order to get them going). When I was in Vila last, I looked into upgrading to a more deluxe fan model, perhaps even one made in a country besides China, but discovered that such an upgrade would have cost about $100, which seemed like a lot then, but now is seeming like a very worthy investment. So anyway, bottom line, I now have to retreat to my office during the hottest parts of the day, giving me plenty of opportunity to watch the mangoes ripen. They start off as little, green, kidney-shaped buds and eventually grow into larger, green, kidney-shaped buds. Unfortunately for me, my tree is at the school which, for some reason, is always populated by a lot of kids. I'm not sure if it's impatience or custom or some gross misunderstanding of agriculture, but Ni-Vans (especially kids) NEVER let fruit ripen properly. For example, any fruit ripe enough to fall to the ground of its own accord from a tree is immediately deem inedible. So what generally happens, be it with mangoes, papayas, grapefruits, oranges, basically any fruit, really, is that before any of the fruit is really ripe, the tree is swarmed and picked clean by kids. The kids seem to have a special penchant for under ripe mangoes. They pick them while they're still hard and sour, use a knife to cut the flesh into little slivers and eat them. They call them mango apples. This practice was really getting on my nerves, as I'd purchased a blender when I was in Australia and was looking forward to making some smoothies, but so far the only fruit I'd been able to consistently get my hands on was bananas, and plain banana smoothies really left something to be desired. Oh well, perhaps I'll have better luck during pineapple season.
In another attempt to beat the heat, I'd taken to spending part of my afternoons down in the main part of the village, which is located right on the beach. Well, beach is perhaps the wrong word to use. It implies a nice, sandy swath bordering the ocean on which one can lay out on a blanket, play beach volleyball, frolic in the shallows, etc. Tautu's beach is only a beach in the sense that it is a piece of land directly adjacent to the ocean. It is sandy, farther inland, but the actual beach is a continuous stretch of sharp, craggy rock that I can't walk on without the aid of sandals (although the village kids don't seem to have a problem running on it in bare feet). The real draw of the beach, especially these days, is that there's almost always a strong breeze coming off the ocean that, if you kind of squint, can actually border on being cold. Tautu is situated on what is essentially a large bay. Looking straight out from the shore, you can see where the island curves back around near Lakatoro and Litz Litz, as well as a few small, offshore islands. It's a nice view, even on a bad day. If you're really lucky, however, and happen to be at the right place at the right time to catch a storm front rolling in off the ocean, well, things really can't get much better. Thursday afternoon, I headed down to the beach to find that the wind was coming in unusually strong. Although the sky above Tautu was pristinely cloudless, a shadow cast by a foreboding mass of incoming clouds was creeping over the ocean. It may seem a little counter-intuitive, but it's actually not bright, sunny days that bring out the ocean's colors the best. A sun that's too bright tends to wash out subtle differences in the ocean's color, making everything a dull, universal, blue-green. Of course, with no sun at all the ocean turns into an abyss, a deep and empty void that not even the brightest of artificial lights can cast adequate light upon. It takes the shadow of an impending storm to bring out the breathtaking potential of the Pacific Ocean, when the blanket of blue-green is lifted to show three, sharp, stark bands of color, as distinct as if painted. Closest to shore, the water takes on the yellowish brown of the craggy rock structure that makes up the beach. At about twenty meters out, it suddenly changes to a brilliant turquoise brought out by the coral reef beneath it. Another ten meters past that the reef disappears and the ocean floor suddenly drops, making the water above it turn a deep, imposing blue. This is the color which defines blue. It's upfront and simple, no undertones, no hints at even the possibility of the existence of another color. Just Blue. As the wind knives across this strangely dynamic and immutable landscape it brings to life brilliant slashes of white, frothing waves as unabashedly white as the ocean that birthed them is blue. How is it that water, plain, simple, clear, colorless, is able to take on such a myriad of hues? And how is it that they can be made to change so violently? Closer to shore, you can watch these frothing creations work their way along the surface and then dissolve back into the immensity of the ocean as they break upon things unseen, but farther out the waves seem not to move at all, they're frozen stark, white gashes carelessly drawn upon a canvas of blue.
Then comes the rain. Not from above me, at least not yet, it's a little ways off still, but its presence is given away by the appearance of a thick, smoky haze that envelops the offshore islands and blots out the lush green of their vegetation, changing all color to a drab gray. For once, Bislama succeeds in being more poetic than English. The haze of an approaching rain is so perfectly dubbed “smoke blong rain” -- rain smoke. Slowly this smoke creeps its away across the ocean until even the closest offshore island, so clearly visible on a sunny day that you can pick out the shapes off village houses on its beach, becomes nothing more than a faint outline. Everyone knows what's coming. Women and children scramble to collect clothes drying on lines and men out net fishing in the shallows make a beeline for their houses. And then the rain starts. No, rain is an inadequate word to describe a thing of this magnitude. It's like suddenly standing at the base of a waterfall. A wall of water pouring from the sky. A deluge. Yes, English once again comes to the rescue with its voluminous vocabulary. Smoke blong rain was good, Bislama, but you're still behind by a lot. Finally, the rain having blotted out all but the most trivial of views of the ocean, I headed back to my house.
Fortunately, I'd finally fixed my rain gutter just a few days before. Ever since I'd dismantled my water system for cleaning after returning from Australia, I'd been unable to keep the spout connecting the gutters with the water tank from falling down. I hadn't broken or lost any important connective piece or anything. Apparently, the entire setup had been held together by some variety of mystical force, which I'd been unable to re-invoke (or maybe the dirt which I'd removed during the cleaning had been playing a crucial role in supporting the structure). In any case, I finally fixed the problem with the generous application of duct tape, which I hoped would be able to retain its adhesiveness despite the fact that, since it was part of a water system, it would probably be getting wet a lot. When I got home, I was pleased to see that the tape appeared to be holding just fine and that a nice flow of water was entering my tank.
I don't think I can describe to you how awesome that rain was. We hadn't had a good rain for almost two months. Almost all the rain tanks in the village were dry. I had taken to getting water from a well near the school. Everything was choked with dust. I'd been coated in dust for weeks. Not even the longest and most through of showers could remove the thin film of dirt from my skin. Either that or it was instantly replaced with new dust upon emerging from the shower. I think one of the coolest things about living in Vanuatu is how happy a simple thing as rain can make you. I could just feel the rain pouring vitality back into the parched landscape. It was like every person, animal, and plant on the island was breathing a collective sigh of relief. And watching my gutters divert a veritable river of water into my water tank awakened a very primal and instinctive glee. I literally jumped with joy. I was bounding up and down across my floor, doing fist pumps and screaming “Yes!” to no one in particular. I felt suddenly indestructible, because, after all, what can anyone possibly do to hamper the spirits of someone who's made happy when it rains?
Thursday and Friday it rained all day. My early Friday afternoon, water was pouring out of my tank's overflow pipe and I couldn't have been more please. The rain was even considerate enough to stop right around kava time on Friday to allow me a nice walk to Duncan's through the pleasantly damp and cool evening. Of course, I knew that soon enough the dampness on the ground would transform into oppressive humidity and the sudden influx of water would probably mean a monster hatch of mosquitoes, but I tried not to think of such things. For the time being, all was right with the world.
This week's Tautu language word is “tosalsal.” It means “white man.” Needless to say, I get called this a lot.
Mango season was starting. This was very exciting. Last year, to my dismay, I left out training village on Efate to come to Malekula before Efate's mango season and after Malekula's mango season, thus meaning I've been living in a tropical paradise for more than a year now and have eaten, maybe, a grand total of three mangoes. I considered this unacceptable. There are mango trees all around Tautu, big, towering behemoths with long slender leaves and tangles of branches. There's one right next to my house, actually. They make good shade trees. Their leaves are small, but there are a lot of them and so they generally provide a nice, dense canopy. I've actually taken to setting up something of an outdoor office underneath mine. There's a half-rotten (but still functional) wooden platform built of strips of coconut logs situated between the mango tree and a nangai (a kind of nut, sort of like an almond, but more oily) tree which is shaded all day long. Someone laid a long piece of timber across a couple of supports just behind the platform, meaning that I can sit on the platform and use the timber as a sort of table for my laptop. I generally have to vacate my house between the hours of noon and four these days. Spring is rolling in with a vengeance and is making me wonder how it was that I was able to deal with impending summer last year. The school also decided a few months ago that it needed to cut down a bunch of trees around my house, meaning that there are now no trees to keep the sun off my corrugated iron roof, thus turning my house into an excellent model of a solar oven. On top of all that, my fan, which has served me faithfully for so many months, is on the fritz (sometimes requiring me to give the blades a little nudge with a pencil in order to get them going). When I was in Vila last, I looked into upgrading to a more deluxe fan model, perhaps even one made in a country besides China, but discovered that such an upgrade would have cost about $100, which seemed like a lot then, but now is seeming like a very worthy investment. So anyway, bottom line, I now have to retreat to my office during the hottest parts of the day, giving me plenty of opportunity to watch the mangoes ripen. They start off as little, green, kidney-shaped buds and eventually grow into larger, green, kidney-shaped buds. Unfortunately for me, my tree is at the school which, for some reason, is always populated by a lot of kids. I'm not sure if it's impatience or custom or some gross misunderstanding of agriculture, but Ni-Vans (especially kids) NEVER let fruit ripen properly. For example, any fruit ripe enough to fall to the ground of its own accord from a tree is immediately deem inedible. So what generally happens, be it with mangoes, papayas, grapefruits, oranges, basically any fruit, really, is that before any of the fruit is really ripe, the tree is swarmed and picked clean by kids. The kids seem to have a special penchant for under ripe mangoes. They pick them while they're still hard and sour, use a knife to cut the flesh into little slivers and eat them. They call them mango apples. This practice was really getting on my nerves, as I'd purchased a blender when I was in Australia and was looking forward to making some smoothies, but so far the only fruit I'd been able to consistently get my hands on was bananas, and plain banana smoothies really left something to be desired. Oh well, perhaps I'll have better luck during pineapple season.
In another attempt to beat the heat, I'd taken to spending part of my afternoons down in the main part of the village, which is located right on the beach. Well, beach is perhaps the wrong word to use. It implies a nice, sandy swath bordering the ocean on which one can lay out on a blanket, play beach volleyball, frolic in the shallows, etc. Tautu's beach is only a beach in the sense that it is a piece of land directly adjacent to the ocean. It is sandy, farther inland, but the actual beach is a continuous stretch of sharp, craggy rock that I can't walk on without the aid of sandals (although the village kids don't seem to have a problem running on it in bare feet). The real draw of the beach, especially these days, is that there's almost always a strong breeze coming off the ocean that, if you kind of squint, can actually border on being cold. Tautu is situated on what is essentially a large bay. Looking straight out from the shore, you can see where the island curves back around near Lakatoro and Litz Litz, as well as a few small, offshore islands. It's a nice view, even on a bad day. If you're really lucky, however, and happen to be at the right place at the right time to catch a storm front rolling in off the ocean, well, things really can't get much better. Thursday afternoon, I headed down to the beach to find that the wind was coming in unusually strong. Although the sky above Tautu was pristinely cloudless, a shadow cast by a foreboding mass of incoming clouds was creeping over the ocean. It may seem a little counter-intuitive, but it's actually not bright, sunny days that bring out the ocean's colors the best. A sun that's too bright tends to wash out subtle differences in the ocean's color, making everything a dull, universal, blue-green. Of course, with no sun at all the ocean turns into an abyss, a deep and empty void that not even the brightest of artificial lights can cast adequate light upon. It takes the shadow of an impending storm to bring out the breathtaking potential of the Pacific Ocean, when the blanket of blue-green is lifted to show three, sharp, stark bands of color, as distinct as if painted. Closest to shore, the water takes on the yellowish brown of the craggy rock structure that makes up the beach. At about twenty meters out, it suddenly changes to a brilliant turquoise brought out by the coral reef beneath it. Another ten meters past that the reef disappears and the ocean floor suddenly drops, making the water above it turn a deep, imposing blue. This is the color which defines blue. It's upfront and simple, no undertones, no hints at even the possibility of the existence of another color. Just Blue. As the wind knives across this strangely dynamic and immutable landscape it brings to life brilliant slashes of white, frothing waves as unabashedly white as the ocean that birthed them is blue. How is it that water, plain, simple, clear, colorless, is able to take on such a myriad of hues? And how is it that they can be made to change so violently? Closer to shore, you can watch these frothing creations work their way along the surface and then dissolve back into the immensity of the ocean as they break upon things unseen, but farther out the waves seem not to move at all, they're frozen stark, white gashes carelessly drawn upon a canvas of blue.
Then comes the rain. Not from above me, at least not yet, it's a little ways off still, but its presence is given away by the appearance of a thick, smoky haze that envelops the offshore islands and blots out the lush green of their vegetation, changing all color to a drab gray. For once, Bislama succeeds in being more poetic than English. The haze of an approaching rain is so perfectly dubbed “smoke blong rain” -- rain smoke. Slowly this smoke creeps its away across the ocean until even the closest offshore island, so clearly visible on a sunny day that you can pick out the shapes off village houses on its beach, becomes nothing more than a faint outline. Everyone knows what's coming. Women and children scramble to collect clothes drying on lines and men out net fishing in the shallows make a beeline for their houses. And then the rain starts. No, rain is an inadequate word to describe a thing of this magnitude. It's like suddenly standing at the base of a waterfall. A wall of water pouring from the sky. A deluge. Yes, English once again comes to the rescue with its voluminous vocabulary. Smoke blong rain was good, Bislama, but you're still behind by a lot. Finally, the rain having blotted out all but the most trivial of views of the ocean, I headed back to my house.
Fortunately, I'd finally fixed my rain gutter just a few days before. Ever since I'd dismantled my water system for cleaning after returning from Australia, I'd been unable to keep the spout connecting the gutters with the water tank from falling down. I hadn't broken or lost any important connective piece or anything. Apparently, the entire setup had been held together by some variety of mystical force, which I'd been unable to re-invoke (or maybe the dirt which I'd removed during the cleaning had been playing a crucial role in supporting the structure). In any case, I finally fixed the problem with the generous application of duct tape, which I hoped would be able to retain its adhesiveness despite the fact that, since it was part of a water system, it would probably be getting wet a lot. When I got home, I was pleased to see that the tape appeared to be holding just fine and that a nice flow of water was entering my tank.
I don't think I can describe to you how awesome that rain was. We hadn't had a good rain for almost two months. Almost all the rain tanks in the village were dry. I had taken to getting water from a well near the school. Everything was choked with dust. I'd been coated in dust for weeks. Not even the longest and most through of showers could remove the thin film of dirt from my skin. Either that or it was instantly replaced with new dust upon emerging from the shower. I think one of the coolest things about living in Vanuatu is how happy a simple thing as rain can make you. I could just feel the rain pouring vitality back into the parched landscape. It was like every person, animal, and plant on the island was breathing a collective sigh of relief. And watching my gutters divert a veritable river of water into my water tank awakened a very primal and instinctive glee. I literally jumped with joy. I was bounding up and down across my floor, doing fist pumps and screaming “Yes!” to no one in particular. I felt suddenly indestructible, because, after all, what can anyone possibly do to hamper the spirits of someone who's made happy when it rains?
Thursday and Friday it rained all day. My early Friday afternoon, water was pouring out of my tank's overflow pipe and I couldn't have been more please. The rain was even considerate enough to stop right around kava time on Friday to allow me a nice walk to Duncan's through the pleasantly damp and cool evening. Of course, I knew that soon enough the dampness on the ground would transform into oppressive humidity and the sudden influx of water would probably mean a monster hatch of mosquitoes, but I tried not to think of such things. For the time being, all was right with the world.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
