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.