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.