Once again, sorry for the long delay between posts. Getting online has not been as easy as it was last year. However, I do have my new laptop keyboard now and that seems to have fixed my computer problem, so hopefully smoother sailing in the future.
**The following are some stories I repeated to various people while I was in the States who requested that they be added to my blog. Enjoy.**
Digging up a banana tree is hard work. Someone told me that bananas are actually more closely related to grass than to other trees. I don’t know if this is true, but it makes sense. Banana trees aren’t really made out of wood, but rather a fibrous and watery leaf-like substance that’s only barely capable of supporting it own weight. They grow quickly, shooting out huge, canopy-like leaves that make decent umbrellas if you become caught in an unexpected downpour. They don’t fruit in those nice, grocery store sized bundles, but rather in huge hands, each carrying 30-50 bananas and easily weighing over 20 kilos. The fruit hands are so heavy that they pull down the trees they’re attached to when they mature and the whole mess comes tumbling to the ground to start the next generation. Thus, banana trees tend to come in stands, since the fruit doesn’t move very far, the new trees tend to grow right on top of the old ones. Often seven or eight trees can grow in more or less the same place, their root structures becoming intertwined and indistinguishable from one another. Thus, although cutting down banana trees is relatively easy (and fun), because of their flimsy trunks, digging a banana stand out of your garden is (because of all the interlocking roots) the effective equivalent of digging out a 100 year old oak. The key is to tackle it in small pieces: use a shovel to separate a bit of truck from the rest, drive the shovel home repeatedly as hard as possible into the opening you’ve created to cut the roots apart, and work on digging out the little section you’ve just isolated. Repeat until the entire stand is gone. It’s not a pleasant job, especially in the late-summer Vanuatu heat, it takes most of the day, and it leaves one absolutely covered in mud and sweat.
I’d just finished a grueling afternoon banana-clearing to make way for my planned vegetable garden (which, by the way, never really panned out. Weeds crept in far faster than I was willing to remove them) when I saw my headmaster make the trek across the school yard from the office to my house.
“Dan!” he called out, “Can you come put the new toner in copier?”
The school had acquired a photo copier because of some ill-thought-out grant scheme in 2003 or 2004. As far as I could tell, they’d used up the original toner and never bothered to replace it.
“OK,” I said, realizing I was probably one of the few people on the island who’d had experience changing toner, and beginning to make my way towards the office.
“If you want to wash first…?” my headmaster added.
I looked down at myself and considered. I was incredibly filthy. Flecks of mud covered almost every inch of me, I wasn’t wearing a shirt, and my pants were soaked though with sweat enough to make it seem like I’d been caught out during a particularly violent downpour. However, changing a toner cartridge wouldn’t take long, I reasoned, and I’d be back to work afterwards and just get dirty again.
“It’s alright,” I said.
We made our way to the office and I realized that the headmaster’s comment about washing had not been a question, but a request. You see, I’d vastly underestimated the level of solemnity involved in a Vanuatu toner changing. I entered the office to find it full of school staff, all dressed in their Sunday finest. Given the size of the office, I had to maneuver carefully so as not to get mud all over people’s island dresses and shirts. I stood in front of the copier and a bubble of people formed around me. I reached for the copier but was told to wait as the pastor stepped forward and led us in a prayer thanking God for life and the new day and also for providing both a new toner cartridge and a Peace Corps volunteer capable of installing it. Then the headmaster stepped forward and gave a short speech covering the same basic points. Finally, he nodded toward me, indicating I had the go-ahead to replace the toner. I got to admit, I was a little nervous. Although I knew, in general, how to replace toner, I had no experience with the specific copier in front of me and I worried that I might spend too much time fiddling around with various catches and levers and ruin the moment. Perhaps, I thought, a trial run should be suggested for next time. Fortunately, the copier was well labeled (thank you Xerox) and so the procedure went off with the necessary smoothness. When I’d finished, everyone clapped politely and the pastor closed with another prayer. We all filed out of the office and I went back to my yard work wondering what in the world had just happened.
**************************
There are surprisingly few birds in Vanuatu. Well, maybe it’s not surprising. I sure as heck wouldn’t want to have to flap my way across thousands of miles of empty ocean from the mainland in order to colonize a rather small and somewhat dull string of Pacific islands. Perhaps what’s more surprising is how many land animals went through with the feat. Maybe birds just have more sense. At any rate, there are no crows crowding the rooftops, no pigeons covering the ground in search of food, no birdsong to greet you when you wake up in the morning. There are a plethora of chickens, true, but they just don’t really seem to count. They’re too awkward in the air. There’s also a species of wild pigeon that inhabits the bush that the locals call nawimba. Duncan shoots them up in his garden sometimes, and they’re pretty good grilled. But (perhaps because they’re so tasty) they’re somewhat few and far between. No, in Vanuatu, it’s the mammals that rule the skies. Flying fox (actually a kind of fruit bat) take to the air around dusk and the night is full of their sounds as they fly about screeching and eating fruit. It takes a little getting used to, but it’s actually kind of a nice way to fall asleep.
When Duncan has bullets the two of us roam the village looking for flying fox in the coconut trees to shoot and incorporate into lap-lap. I play the role of human tripod. When Duncan sees a target, he shouts “Dan!” and I run up and stand a few paces in front of him so he can balance the gun on my head as he takes aim. It’s not a bad technique, and we can bag a surprising number in a couple hours.
On one such hunting expedition, however, I discovered that the flying fox is not totally unchallenged in its dominion over the night skies. Duncan had wandered ahead of me a little more than usual one night hunting when all of the sudden he shouted “Dan!” in a tone that was a couple times more frantic than his usual, relax manner (you see, flying fox tend to sit around on one coconut tree for a while, so you’ve got plenty of time to set up your shot). I took my position as the tripod, but I could sense an increased level of excitement: something different was afoot. Duncan fired off a shot and the two of us went in search of the resulting body. I was traipsing around in the bush, finding nothing, when Duncan shouted my name again. I looked over to see him triumphantly holding up an enormous owl. Now, I’m a fan of birds of prey and this owl looked so graceful and deadly, even while dead, as Duncan held it from its wing tip, its body weight causing the wings to spread (it was a white owl, and looked kind of like the one they use to play Hedwig in the Harry Potter movies), that I felt a tinge of regret that I had been accomplice to its killing.
“Do you eat owls?” I asked. All things become justified in the pursuit of fine cuisine.
“No,” Duncan replied, “but when you see an owl, you have to shoot it.” (I should add that the Bislama word for owl is “night hawk,” which makes them sound extra awesome).
“What do you do with them?” I asked.
“Burn them,” Duncan replied.
“Why?”
“Because sometimes they’re really people doing black magic. They can turn into owls.”
That brought me up short. Not so much because he believed that it was possible for people to turn into owls, but more because he believed that this justified killing said people. In essence, that’s what had happened: an attempted homicide prevented by the fortuitous fact that people can not, actually, turn into owls. It’s like, “Hey Dad! Why’d you shoot the dog?!” “Sorry, I thought it was one of the neighbors.” “Oh, well, that’s alright then.” Killing animals for sport is one thing, but killing animals because you think they’re people was a little too much for me to wrap my head around. As tends to happen in such situations, I was at a loss for words. I just smiled and nodded.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment