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.