Life in the Ring of Fire Part 62: Thanksgiving

The Tautu language feature will be taking a brief hiatus while I am in the US. Yes, I know I'm still writing about stuff in Vanuatu, but I'm a little behind, meaning I'm actually in the States while I'm writing this, and I find it a little hard to think about Tautu language while sitting in a climate controlled house on a comfortable chair in front of a wide screen computer monitor with a cold beverage. Apologies.

Monday kicked off my last week in Malekula before my two month-long vacation (and, in my opinion, much deserved vacation). Although school would not be officially closing until the end of the week, students had long ago stopped attending classes and teachers had recently given up the charade of pretending to teach to no one, so I really hadn't had anything to do for a while and I was getting pretty bored. It was also getting absurdly hot, as summer was kicking into full gear, and so most of my days were spent down at the beach sleeping. Needless to say, I was very much looking forward to escaping to Texas, were it would be winter and thus much colder. As an added perk there would also be TV, Mexican food, movie theaters, beer, margaritas, and takeout. I'd kind of checked out mentally from Vanuatu and was really hoping to just coast through the week, but Vanuatu, as it often does, had other plans.

On Tuesday I went to Lakatoro to lend McKenzie my laptop, as the one she usually uses to check her email had been misbehaving, and afterward the two of us headed to the post office and the bank to hang out (I mean, where else would you hang out on a dusty Tuesday afternoon?), when a white truck with three Ni-Vans pulled up in front of us. One of it's occupants I recognized as a employee of the provincial government.
“Hey!” Yelled one of them, “You need to bring the fridge back to the house on top!”
Jesus, I thought, you've got to be kidding me.
“I told you you could come pick it up,” I explained “it's sitting at my house. I've been waiting for you all weekend.”
“No!” Shouted the guy, “you took it, you come put it back.”
I sensed a long, pointless back-and-forth coming on. Earlier in the year I probably would've taken the polite route and just done what was asked without arguing. Earlier in the year I was concerned with making a good impression on everyone I met and being a model volunteer. But now, to be quite honest, I was fed up. I was tired of the inefficiency and the general uselessness of everyone around me, I was tired of the passive-aggressiveness, the long arguments about nothing, the say-one-thing-but-do-another attitude. I was tired of the excuses and the ridiculous, pointless lies and the inability of everyone to say what they mean. In short, I was ready for a vacation and in absolutely no mood to be accommodating.
“No,” I said “You already told me you'd come pick it up. So come pick it up.”
“Come put it back on top by tomorrow, or we're going to the police,” replied my shouting match partner.
With a great effort, I choked back a laugh. The police? Did they mean my uncle and the two other guys I drink kava with on Fridays? Those police? They want to get them to arrest me? Really?
“The police?” I asked, still not really believing that he'd just said that word.
“Yes, so bring the fridge back by tomorrow!”
“Look,” I said, “if you want me to take the fridge back on top, you're going to have to wait. Maybe I can do it Friday, maybe later.”
The two of us glared at each other for a few seconds and then they drove off. As is typical of arguments in Vanuatu, absolutely nothing had been resolved. I considered my options. The reasonable thing to do, of course, would have been to deliver the fridge, as requested, sometime later in the week because, really, it wasn't that big a deal. Or I could go petty and make the guy-who'd-just-yelled-at-me's life really uncomfortable. I decided to go petty. I headed back to Tautu and went to see Duncan. I explained what had happened to him and, of course, he was totally incensed and said he'd go up to the Provincial offices the next day to yell at people. Childish? Yes. Totally unnecessary? Yes. But I was annoyed. The police threat had really gotten me riled up. The fact that I knew it was complete nonsense made it somehow more irksome. We all have our breaking points I suppose.

The thing about Duncan is that it's totally impossible to argue with him. It's like arguing with a pre-schooler: all of your arguments, no matter how well-reasoned or eloquent they may be, are just met with indifference and loud noises. The next morning two of us found Jimmy's (the man who I'd had it out with the previous day) office and sat down in front of his desk. Jimmy immediately began moving around and clicking his computer's mouse and typing on his keyboard to avoid making eye contract with either of us, despite the fact that his computer was not turned on. Duncan and him went back and forth for a while, I mostly just sat there. In the end, we ended up back where we started: the Province agreed to send a truck for the fridge. But I was pretty sure that none of them would be bothering me at the bank again. In Vanuatu, disputes are resolved entirely by who you know.

Wednesday, things started looking up. I was on the home stretch, I'd be leaving for Vila and then Austin at the end of the week, but first we had a Thanksgiving party to host. Simon, a New Zealand volunteer and a friend of Laura's, was scheduled to fly in sometime during the afternoon for the occasion and Laura had come down from Matanvat to meet him. I met the two of them on the beach near the airport and we surveyed what goodies Simon had brought from Vila. He'd done a fairly good job, bringing several bottles of South Pacific Comfort and a selection of fruit juices to use as mixers. He also brought a couple boxes of coconut milk, knowing that we were in possession of a blender and thus could make pinya-coladas. All of us Malekula volunteers thought that this was very funny. We'd all come to think of coconuts and all coconut-derived products as being free for the taking. I mean, all you have to do is walk outside, find a coconut, remove its husk with a sharpened wooden stake, split it in half with a machete, scrape out the meat with a jagged metal ring, mix the shavings with a bit of water, ring them out and, bingo, coconut milk. How hard is that? Who'd be crazy enough to actually spend money on purchasing coconut milk in a box? People who live in Vila, apparently. Actually, we all ended up admitting that it did make the process of drink production significantly less time consuming.

McKenzie joined us later that evening bringing with her ten plastic, 50ml packets of tequila which her family had sent her earlier that week. She explained that the plastic pouches were designed to be slipped into one's pocket, bra, or pants for sneaking alcohol into concerts. I was pleased that the long-overlooked needs of under-boozed concert-goers were finally being addressed. Fortunately, they were equally useful for slipping past customs officials and thus we were able to make frozen margaritas for the second time in a month, which has got to be some sort of record for Peace Corps Vanuatu.

Thursday Chris came up to join us for Thanksgiving, a day that was devoted entirely to cooking and eating (it goes without saying, my kind of day). We'd decided to go with the theme of a midwest thanksgiving, a idea inspired by the fact that Elin had left behind three packets of instant mashed potatoes that we hadn't gotten around to eating yet. Laura had also purchased some cranberry sauce the last time she'd been in Vila (unfortunately the cranberry sauce came in a jar, not a can, thus meaning that we would not be able to enjoy our cranberries in gelatinous, can-shaped form), which fit in reasonably well. We rounded out the meal with green beans (going against the theme a little bit, we were only able to get our hands on fresh green beans. Chris and I had discussed how one might make fresh green beans taste like canned green beans, but eventually had decided against doing such things as grossly overcooking them and marinating them in salt water overnight), tuna helper from a box, and mashed sweet potatoes with marshmallows melted on top. We were, of course, missing the crucial ingredient: a butterball turkey. On a suggestion from Laura, we decided to make a meatloaf instead. I was a little shocked to discover that the principal ingredient of meatloaf was, in fact, ketchup, but it actually turned out pretty well. We had a bit of a crisis early in the afternoon when it was discovered that the market that day had no pumpkins for sale, seriously threatening our evening's pumpkin pie. Fortunately, McKenzie come through for us by persistently pestering the Ni-Vans at the market until someone agreed to sell her a pumpkin. One pumpkin produces a surprisingly large amount of mashed pumpkin goop, however, so we ended up making a pumpkin soup in addition to the pie to use up the excess. The whole meal was topped off with some not-so-midwestern pinya-coladas made from boxed coconut milk. So, not quite a Thanksgiving at home, but pretty good nonetheless.

Friday was the official closing for my school. There were speeches, of course, and various awards given out to kids for excelling in such important categories as penmanship and being quiet in class (the competition for this award must have been pretty intense, the kids in my class rarely raise their voices above the stealthy-nighttime-bank-heist level). I was somewhat pleased, however, that I was asked to fill the role of the useless guy who stands next to the person announcing the awards and shakes hands with everyone as they come up to collect their prize. We also celebrated the fourteenth consecutive month of our new school building's opening being delayed.

Sunday was my last day in Malekula and, since Duncan and Linda were pretty sure there was at least a fifty percent chance that I wouldn't be coming back from my vacation in the US (volunteers kind of have a history of going back to their home counties for a holiday and not returning), they decided to throw me a going away party, just in case. Duncan had procured two pigs for the occasion, one for the going away, and one to keep in reserve on the off-chance that I'd come back and they'd need to throw a welcome back party. Duncan's pig roasting skills had improved significantly since I'd explained to him how slow-cooking meat could make it significantly more tender. The previous night, they'd fired (literally, it's just a stone box that you heat up by building a fire in and then use to bake) up my uncle's big bread oven and put the pig in. By lunchtime, it had been cooking for a solid sixteen hours or so and was fall-off-the-bone tender. We stuffed ourselves with meat and the usual assortment of carbohydrates: rice, sweet potatoes and yams, and then passed out underneath a tree to nap through the heat of the afternoon. That evening, I had my last kava with my relatives and said my goodbyes. I reflected that it would be almost two months before I'd be watching the stars at Duncan's nakamal, an activity which had easily consumed the majority of my time during the last year. Still, I was glad for the upcoming break and, unlike my Ni-Van friends and family, I was absolutely certain I'd be back.

Life in the Ring of Fire Part 61: About an Ice Box

This week's Tautu language word is “kupan.” It's the second person conjugation of “go,” thus meaning “you go.” “Kupan ape?” is a common phrase to hear on the paths of the village meaning, literally, “you go where?,” where are you going?

Monday was McKenzie's birthday. This was a little odd, as I remembered the same time the previous year, when we were still in training. McKenzie and Chris share a birthday and all of our training group happened to be in Port Vila for school visits that day. Much to the annoyance of our training staff, we talked our country director into allowing us to stay in town for the evening so we could all go to a restaurant to eat, drink, and celebrate. Much later we learned, from the two training groups entering Vanuatu after us, that we were the last group to be allowed weekly visits to Vila, and that the staff had taken steps to prevent future groups from partying as much as we had. In essence, we had so much fun we ruined it for everyone else. This is something of a source of pride. Anyway, it was just another reminder of how much time had managed to slip by while I'd been busy lounging on the beach. Strange.

While undertaking out second ship ride a few weeks ago, Laura and I had hatched a plan for a surprise party, of sorts. Granted, McKenzie, Laura, Chris, (different Chris, not the one in our training group mentioned in the paragraph above) and I were the only volunteers on the island at that particular moment, owing to the fact that Mindi had disappeared mysteriously, Ben had finished his service, Jack was in Vila doing training for the new group, and Noah was trapped by a flooding river, so the surprise party was relatively small compared to what one might expect in the US, but it was still something of a challenge to pull off because it required getting Chris and Laura to Lakatoro without McKenzie realizing they'd come. This was difficult because, being the only four white people on the island, when one of us goes somewhere, people tend to notice, and Ni-Vanuatu are perhaps the most gossipy people on the face of the planet. Whenever Laura comes into town, for example, I usually get at least six people coming around my house to tell me about it: the truck driver who brought her down, the three guys in my village that saw her pass on the road, the woman who sold her a coconut at the market, and the guy standing behind her in the bank line. Thus, when I went to fetch McKenzie from work and bring her back to Mindi's house (which we were using as a vacation home due to the fact that it had the fridge), I fully expected her to say something along the lines of: “Hey, I heard Laura and Chris are in town, have you seen them?” By some random fluke, however, she'd not been informed of their arrival by anyone, and thus was duly surprised when the two of them were waiting at the house for us, beers in hand. Overall, a far more successful event than I could've expected.

As the week went on, it slowly became apparent that we had a problem. With Mindi being gone and unlikely to be replaced for another year, it was only a matter of time before we lost control of the house that had been in Peace Corps volunteer hands since we'd arrived on Malekula. The house offered several advantages that all of us were somewhat upset about the prospect of losing. First of all, it was in Lakatoro, away from all of our respective villages, thus giving us a small measure of privacy when there to do things such as party without being scrutinized by members of our communities. It also sported running water (a rarity in Malekula) and an indoor shower and toilet. But really, the jewel in the crown was the ice box (or refrigerator, in America-speak). In a land where the temperature rarely dips below the mid-seventies, even in winter, and 100% humidity is considered dry, a device able to move heat from cold to hot (with the application of a bit of work) in such a flagrant mockery of the principles of entropy is worth its weight in gold (actually, that's a bit of an understatement, as gold isn't nearly valuable enough. Unfortunately, the phrase “worth its weight in weapons-grade uranium” hasn't caught on yet). According to Chris, whose been on Malekula six months longer than myself, and thus had had the pleasure of meeting a few of the volunteers who'd already left when I'd arrived, the fridge had been purchased by an Australian volunteer a few years back and had been left in the care of us Peace Corps volunteers when she departed. Thus, it was decided that we would remove the fridge to my house in order to keep this most treasured of appliances in the Malekula Peace Corps community. I informed Duncan of this plan, who was pleased that (in addition to the deep freezer at his house) we would now have two ice boxes in the family. On Wednesday, we hired and truck into which Duncan and I loaded the fridge and then struck out for my house. In route, the fridge, which had been loaded upright into the truck bed, was clotheslined by an overhanging tree limb. With little regard for my own safety, I flew from my seat on the opposite side of the truck bed to break the fall of the precious appliance. I caught most of it's weight on my left shoulder, leaving me with a nasty bruise for a few days, but I considered this quite a small price to pay. We unloaded the fridge at my house and I promptly filled it with my collection of home-brewed beer, pineapples, and mangoes. I then filled up as many discarded plastic cracker trays as I could find with water and placed them in the upper freezer compartment in lieu of ice trays. Then I plugged in the fridge and listened contentedly as the compressor hummed to life. It was like Christmas come early.

Unfortunately, it was not to be that easy. The following day, I was waiting in line at the bank when a woman working for the provincial government walked up to me and asked to talk to me. The two of us sat down on a bench and she launched into a long and quite mind-numbingly boring history of the house Mindi had just vacated, detailing every volunteer that had lived there for the past ten years, which country each had been from, who each one had worked with, what each of their jobs had entailed, what each one's favorite nakamal was, how much each had liked lap-lap, and which ones had been regular church-goers. She finally finished by explaining that the fridge needed to remain with the house so it could be used by any future volunteers that happened to come work for the province. I tried explaining that A) there weren't going to be any more volunteers working for the province in the near future, B) the fridge did not even belong to the province in any case, and C) they (the provincial government) were just pissed that I had taken the fridge for my house before they had had a chance to take it for one of theirs. Each point I brought up, however, was countered with a repetition of the house history story in an application of the classic Ni-Van arguing technique of being so soul-crushingly inane and repetitive that you have to agree with them just so they'll stop boring you to death. Helpless against such a strategy (and feeling kind of silly about starting a fight with the government over a fridge), I told the lady that if they wanted to send a truck to Tautu to pick up the ice box, they were welcome to do so. Of course, I knew full well that it would probably take them months, if not years, to get their act together enough to come get the fridge, so I was fairly confident that it would remain in my possession at least until May of the following year. And so it was that I spent the weekend enjoying cold beers and wrapping ice-cube filled towels around my neck to beat the crippling heat of the November afternoons. Really, I couldn't have asked for anything more.

Life in the Ring of Fire Part 60: Chewing Kava

This week's Tautu language word is “no.” It means “I” or “me.”

On Monday, I received and odd text from McKenzie, it read:
“Did you know Mindi quit Peace Corps? Because I sure didn't.”
I was significantly perplexed by this that I decided to spring for the extra $2 and put through a call to get to the bottom of things. After a few minute long conversation with McKenzie I discovered that Mindi had mysteriously taken a job in Vila without telling any of us, quit Peace Corps and had left on a plane that morning. This was odd for several reasons. First and foremost, we'd all been hanging out at her house over the weekend, which would have seemed like the perfect opportunity for mentioning something like the fact that you're leaving Peace Corps. On top of that, Mindi was involved with a Master's Degree program which treats Peace Corps service as sort of a practical course in international development, thus meaning that, after writing a paper about what you did, you wind up with a degree when you finish your service, and we kind of doubted the school she was corresponding with would look too fondly on her dropping out of Peace Corps to take a job. Mostly though, it was just weird to have a volunteer on our island disappear so mysteriously. There aren't very many of us, so you'd think it'd be easy to keep track of everyone. We were informed that the key to Mindi's house had been left for us and we agreed to go up there on Wednesday to investigate.

On a more positive note, I'd last week made what was possibly one of the best moves in my entire Peace Corps service, teaching Duncan how to make pineapple-mango smoothies, and was reaping the benefits. I'd brought back a blender from Australia, but I hadn't been able to get all that much use out of it due to the fact that I don't have a freezer and smoothie friendly fruits such as pineapples and mangoes can be difficult to obtain on short notice (while it's not unusual to have some kid show up randomly at my house and give me a couple pineapples, this is by no means a reliable source. Sometimes I'll just be flooded with pineapples and sometimes I'll go weeks without seeing one. There's just no way to tell. Same thing with mangoes, sometimes they're just falling from the trees left and right and sometimes there are just none to be found. It makes you appreciate how awesome grocery stores are. In Vanuatu, food may be abundant and free, but the selection is never as good as at the local supermarket). Duncan, however, had taken an interest in the blender as soon as he saw it in my house due to the fact that it was fancy-looking, obviously from outside of Vanuatu, and needed to be plugged. I explained how one makes smoothies and he asked to borrow the blender so that he could give it a shot. Assuming that he'd probably lose interest in it rather quickly, I handed it over. To my surprise, however, that evening I arrived at his house for kava and was presented with an icy pineapple-mango smoothie. It was probably one of the best moments I'd had in a long time. Even better though, was that it actually ended up being something of a tradition. Three o'clock or so became dubbed as smoothie time and the whole family would gather around a mat while Duncan doled out his latest frozen concoction. He even got into experimenting: trying mangoes from different trees and pineapples from different patches to try and figure out which ones made the best smoothie. The best part, of course, was that he did all the work involved in smoothie production (procuring pineapples and mangoes, freezing them, blending them, cleaning the blender, the list just goes on and on) and I got to reap all the benefits as I'd been the one to front the thirty bucks for a blender. Isn't capitalism brilliant?

Wednesday, McKenzie and I headed up to Mindi's newly vacated house to clean and see if there was anything worth taking. Unfortunately, Mindi had done a pretty good job of removing anything that might have been useful, including, to our chagrin, the electric fan and the seven leftover beers from our Mexican party the previous weekend. Given the mysterious circumstances surrounding Mindi's departure, we began to speculate wildly as to why she'd left without telling us and how she'd been able to pack everything up that weekend without any of us noticing. Our imaginations ran wild with theories of her feeling from loan sharks, participating in a complicated con, and, finally, being accomplice to a murder. At this point, we began to creep ourselves out and everything in the house became a potential clue in a homicide case. Baking soda spilled on the floor became cocaine, puddles of water were regarded with suspicion, and both of us literally jumped in surprise when my cell phone went off indicating the arrival of a text. I opened it, fully expecting it to contain a cryptic messages along the lines of “check under the stairs,” but it was just Laura seeking confirmation of the news that Mindi had left. At this point, McKenzie and I decided that we were getting a little jumpy and we headed down to a nakamal for some kava in order to unwind.

Saturday, McKenzie was invited by one of her friends in Litz Litz to chew kava and asked me along for moral support. I'd read about chewed kava on Wikipedia before coming to Vanuatu. The Wikipedia article had made it seem like the standard method of preparing kava in the country and explained that the chewing was usually done by pre-pubescent boys. Kava comes out of the ground as a large root, about the size and shape of an adult octopus. In order to prepare the drink, the root has to be chopped into small pieces and ground up. Kava preparation methods differ in the chosen technique for grinding the kava. In the chewing technique, as you might imagine, the kava is ground by chewing it in one's mouth. However, chewed kava is something of a rarity, only really common on the island of Tanna in the south of the country and, contrary to the Wikipedia article, grown men and women are usually permitted to chew kava as well, a good thing because pre-pubescent boys can sometimes be hard to come by. On Malekula, the standard grinding method is running the kava chunks through a meat grinder. This is probably the fastest method, and the easiest when large amounts of kava need to be prepared (like if you're selling it at a nakamal). The downside is that kava from a grinder is supposed to be the worst tasting and the most likely to make you sick to your stomach if you drink too much of it. Other common grinding techniques include stone grinding and ramming (where the kava is placed in a tube and rammed into a pulp with wooden rods). Everyone who's had chewed kava, however, swears that it is by far the smoothest and easiest on the belly, thus I was excited to finally have a chance to try it out. I was under the impression that McKenzie's friend would be doing the actual chewing for us, but when we arrived at the appointed location, we found a collection of cut kava chunks laid out on an empty rice bag, waiting to be ground. A young Ni-Van woman took charge as our instructor. “So, you take the kava,” she explained, grabbing a chunk of kava, “and chew it until it's soft, and then spit it out into your bowl. Be careful not to swallow it or you might throw up.” To me, that didn't sound like a promising start. McKenzie and I each took hold of a piece of kava and stared at it skeptically. I sniffed mine. It smelled suspiciously like the kava drink, but I told myself that it probably didn't taste nearly as bad, since there are people in the world who prepare kava this way nightly. With that comforting thought in mind, I gamely shoved the piece of kava into my mouth. It was... awful. Drinking kava is, of course, awful, which is why one drinks it as quickly as possible to minimize the time spent actually tasting it. Chewing kava is kind of like taking a mouthful of kava and swishing it around for a while like it was Listerine. If you think this sounds bad, believe me, it's actually, much, much, worse than you're imagining. I made a face usually reserved for people suddenly faced with the loss of all their loved ones, worldly possessions, hopes, dreams, pride and dignity. I quickly masticated the kava in my mouth and spit it into a glass bowl, where I discovered that, actually, the most difficult part of the whole procedure was suppressing the gag reflex whilst disgorging one's chewed kava so as not to vomit all over the place. I surveyed the large pile of kava still waiting to be chewed and a deep sense of despondency began to settle in. I looked over at McKenzie and saw, by the look on her face, that similar emotions were going through her head. I still don't know how we did it, but eventually the pile of un-chewed kava in front of us began to diminish, and finally disappear. I was just about to begin celebrating the end of a decidedly awful experience when our Ni-Van instructor once again caught our attention and explained “Now, what you have to do is shape your chewed kava into little balls and chew it again.” I think I honestly almost cried. In the end, couldn't tell whether or not chewed kava goes down smoother than kava put through a meat grinder. By the time we finished chewing our kava for the second time, added water, squeezed out the juice, and strained it, I was so glad for the experience to be over that my bowl of kava tasted like heaven. However, I think this was entirely due to the fact that the thirty minutes leading up to the final experience of drinking had been pure hell. I decided to mark down “chewing kava” on my list of things to never, ever do again.