Life in the Ring of Fire Part 57: I Just Know the Chinese Are Up to No Good

This week's Tautu language word is “nesib.” It means “knife.”

This was a good week for strange nakamal experiences. It all started on Sunday. I'd gone to Duncan's early to hang out while the kava was being made. Myself, Duncan, and five other guys from the village were milling around talking. Some of the guys started complaining about sore arm and leg muscles from working in the garden and, before I knew what was happening, I was surrounded by six guys all giving each other massages. I was seated on a wooden bench, legs and arms tucked in as tight as possible, while on either side of me a guy was lying on his back being massaged by another guy. On top of that, Duncan was lying down on the next bench over getting a massage from a visiting family member from Southwest Bay. It was one of those moments when I really wished there was someone with me who could appreciate just how strange the whole scene was. Now, I'm not sure if I've covered male-female relations in Vanuatu yet, so I'll give a brief overview. I think everyone probably goes through that phase in middle school or high school when it becomes incredibly awkward to be around the opposite sex. In Vanuatu, however, it was apparently decided that, instead of getting over it after a couple years, it would be a much better idea to make said awkwardness part of the culture. Thus, you often see guys in their mid thirties who still get tongue-tied around women and thirty-something mothers of three who can't talk about guys without giggling. Remember in middle school how, when you liked a guy/girl but were too shy to go talk to them, you'd send one of your friends instead to try and find out if they like you? Yeah, well they do that here well into their twenties. Sometimes people get married based on such indirect social encounters. Even after they get married, the awkwardness persists. I've seen married couples who rarely speak to each other and yet live in the same house and have five kids. Physical contact between men and women in public is strictly forbidden. I've been living with Duncan and Linda for a year now and I have not once seen them touch each other. Not a hug, a pat on the back, nothing. If it weren't for the fact that they somehow managed to produce my younger sister, Tracey, I'd probably be willing to wager that the most intimate contact they'd had was a handshake. To make up for the fact that they're not allowed to touch their significant others/spouses, both men and women are incredibly hands-y when they're around people of the same sex. It's pretty common to see two guys walking along holding hands. Often I'll be shaking hands with someone, only to have my hand trapped for the entirety of our conversation. I've gotten kind of used to this, but I'm still pretty disconcerted if they start petting the top of my hand. Worse still are guys who talk to me at the nakamal with their hand resting on my thigh. No joke. It makes it kind of difficult to focus on what they're saying. Anyway, the point is that group massages aren't all that unusual thing to happen around here. Still though.

On Tuesday, Duncan's nakamal was host to one of the Lakatoro area's resident crazy people. There are three of four crazy people around that I see on a regular basis. I know it's probably not politically correct to refer to people as “crazy” these days in the States. We prefer phrases like “mentally disabled” and we've got all kinds of mental disorders, most of them acronyms, that we like to label people with. I think this is because in the US we're all so high strung and on the verge of going nuts that we want to be sure that other people don't make fun of us when we do. In Vanuatu the sane-insane boundary is a lot more black and white: if you can carry on a coherent conversation (and keep in mind that the standards for what constitutes a coherent conversation are a lot lower around here) for at least a minute, you're fine. So, when we say someone is crazy it doesn't mean they're bi-polar, or ADD, or learning disabled, or autistic, or agoraphobic, or anything-phobic, or OCD – people with these disorders can function normally under some circumstances, they just have some quirks. Crazy means that the person is totally and absolutely bat-shit insane: not a single thing they say or do makes the slightest bit of sense. The first crazy guy I met in Malekula is named Cesar. He hangs out at the LTC a lot and wears these great striped pajama pants with alphabet blocks on them (if anyone happens to run across any while out shopping, grab me a pair). The Digicel (Vanuatu's mobile phone company) folks sometimes set up speakers at the LTC as a promotion and on such days it's fairly common to see Cesar with the microphone stomping his feet wildly and singing “LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA!” not quite in time with the music. At first I wondered why it was that there were so many outright crazy people in Vanuatu, but then I realized that we probably have an equal percentage of them in the US, it's just that in the States we keep them locked up, whereas here they're free to wander around. I don't know the name of the guy who was hanging out at Duncan on Tuesday, but I call him ukulele guy because he's most commonly seen walking up and down the street wearing a blindly-bright yellow shirt and a giant hibiscus flower in his hair strumming a ukulele and singing incomprehensibly. He usually has such a giant smile on his face, however, that I sometimes wonder if perhaps the whole sanity thing is a bit overrated and that maybe he has the right idea. A popular pastime among the Ni-Vanuatu is messing with the crazy people (this may seem cruel but, like I said before, in the US we keep our crazies locked up in mental hospitals. Which one seems worse? Hard to say. Or, perhaps a more relevant question, can crazy people tell the difference? Also, hard to say), this usually this consists of giving them things and seeing what they do with them (ie. what would happen if we give Cesar the microphone?), which is probably how ukulele guy got his ukulele in the first place. Thus, the patrons at Duncan's undertook a project to see what would happen when they got ukulele guy to drink a lot of kava. He gamely took down three or four shells in a row, which seemed to have no discernible effect on him. They then switched to giving him cigarettes and finally beer before it was concluded that he was immune to mind-altering substances. At this point they got bored and ukulele guy wandered off.

Thursday I got a text from McKenzie instructing me to meet her for kava in Lakatoro because Yoshi had asked her to come meet his Chinese friend and she wanted some backup. Yoshi is a volunteer from Japan who works for the Fisheries Department in Lakatoro. There are four Japanese volunteers (with a program called JICA, similar to Peace Corps. No, I don't know what it stands for) near me. They all seem very nice, although it's always difficult to carry on a conversation with them. None of them speak English and, although their program does give them Bislama training, it's monstrously difficult to learn Bislama if you don't know English first. And, given that it's difficult enough to communicate with someone who speaks Bislama well, it's all but impossible to communicate with someone who speaks Bislama poorly. Thus, all of our conversations with the JICA volunteers tend to be a little strained and short lived. Thus, when were introduced to Yoshi's friend, who'd flown in from Vila for a vacation, we were pleasantly surprised to learn that she spoke both English and Bislama quite well. We had a few shells of kava and she explained that she was employed by the Chinese Ministry of Education to teach Chinese in a number of schools in Vila. She seemed pleasant enough at first but, about a third of the way through the evening, things took a turn for the bizarre. She cornered McKenzie and I and started running us over the coals with questions that sounded like they'd come, verbatim, from some kind of questionnaire. Questions like: “What are the top three reasons American join Peace Corps?” or “What percentage of Peace Corps volunteers end their service early?” or “What percentage of volunteers get married while in Peace Corps?” It honestly sounded like she was going to be reporting statistics back to some sort of Chinese intelligence agency. I don't think McKenzie and I were particularly helpful in answering her questions, not so much because our fierce loyalty to the US made us wary of cooperating with foreign intelligence agents, but more because we both get really, really annoyed whenever anyone tries to talk to us about anything serious over kava. We kept trying to move the conversation on to lighter topics such as, for example, how exciting it was that watermelon season had started, or, when this failed, cutting her out of the conversation entirely. She was remarkably persistent, however, and had absolutely no qualms about busting into the middle of a conversation to continue asking her questions. Eventually, we both claimed to have to go to work early the following day and headed home before we started getting asked questions along the lines of “How many patriot missiles does your government have deployed in the Pacific region?” or “Can you give an overview of the technologies involved in producing MIRVs?” Needless to say, a very unusual night. We wondered why Yoshi had been so insistent on us meeting his strange Chinese friend, but we finally concluded that she'd probably spent the whole day grilling him with similar questions about Japan and he wanted a break.