Yu No Kick Part 6: Ples I Hot

“Ples i hot.” Bislama for “it's hot” (from the English “place is hot”), but it passes for “hello” or “goodbye” or “hey, how's it going?” And it's a great way to meet new people. Just sit down on a bench next to a bunch of guys you don't know, make a show of settling in a taking a load off and let out a “ples i hot” in a lazy voice that's half sigh and half groan. It's a start to many a fast friendship on the islands. When I was back in the States for Christmas, I invested in a $10 combination yard thermometer and hygrometer, thus allowing me to keep track of exactly how amazingly hot the place at any given moment. A hygrometer, by the way, measures humidity and is not to be confused with a hydrometer which, for some reason, is a tool that's used to measure the density of beer. It seems like it would make sense that, since humidity has to do with water and all, a tool that measures it would be called a hydrometer, but I guess beer predates meteorology by a good couple millenniums (apparently millenniums is the accepted plural of millennium now. I always thought it was millenia, but the spell checker doesn't lie), so they got to take all the good names. Anyway, every afternoon as I'm sweating and cooking lunch, I get to glance over at my thermo/hygrometer and see those large, cheerful digital numerals spell out 91.5 F and 68% (I'm all for the metric system, I really am. It makes more sense, it's easier to work with, and everyone else uses it. Thing is, at the end of the day, I still have absolutely no idea how hot 20 degrees Celsius is). Except the .5 on the 91.5 is only half the size over the other numbers (because it's a decimal, and decimals are only half as important) and is sort of tucked away under the F like an afterthought. It's a bonus, the plus tacked onto the A, that says that not only is it really hot, but it's really hot and then a bit extra.

I've always been an ice over fire kind of person. I've always felt it's easier to warm up on a cold day than cool off on a warm day. It's the second law of thermodynamics: it sucks to be hot. Unfortunately, that wonderful food that we eat to stay alive also produces waste heat when it's burned, which has to be dumped somewhere. It doesn't really seem like it should be a problem. Our bodies are running at 98.6, give or take, so that gross sticky air permeating my household around lunchtime is a whopping seven degrees cooler than me. It should be cooling me off, it really should. And I guess it does, it's just that the heat never really gets far enough away. You can feel it when you stand still, the stale air around you slowly getting hotter and hotter until it can't anymore and then it's on your skin, that horrible warm throb as your blood pumps in more and more heat that just goes nowhere, and then it starts oozing inwards, first through your arms and legs and then your chest and head as the whole system just backs up and you want to scream in frustration. Ples i hot. When I first got to Vanuatu I was obsessed with trying to prove myself to the locals who, I feared, would see me a as weak, pampered northerner with no stomach for the island heat. “Ples i hot,” people would call out to me as they passed me on the road. “No,” I'd say, feeling obligated to appear strong “no, it's not that bad. It gets hotter back in the US, actually.” And the Ni-Vans would nod and smile politely and wonder why in the hell I was trying to argue that it wasn't hot. I later realized that the ples i hot greeting was not meant to be patronizing, but was rather an invitation to mutual surrender and acceptance of forces outside of our control. More of a “hey, it's really hot out, why don't we both pass out under a tree for several hours and do absolutely nothing.”

I think the heat is responsible for the lack of success most international development projects experience in Vanuatu. You come up with a development idea, you talk it over with other development workers, you submit your idea to some development agency, get some funding, come up with a good acronym and maybe a catchy slogan, run some workshops and trainings, hand out materials, and pass the whole thing off to someone in-country, who gets sweat stains all over everything and shelves most of the work until the weather cools down a bit, which is never. We're kind of like Superman, the heat is like our kryptonite. When we can get away from it we're unstoppable. We invent things, build cities and civilizations, cross oceans, go to the moon. But when we're confronted with a hot, muggy day we become lazy, lethargic and useless. I think one of my favorite images of Vanuatu are those Sunday afternoons where I eat way too much lap-lap at Duncan's and pass out on his cement floor along with the rest of the family; looking out the door I can see all of the numerous household dogs arrayed similarly on the lawn, man and beast made alike by the afternoon sun.

I think my schoolyard is one of the hottest places on the face of the planet. The yard is open and shadeless, the perfect venue for the sun to do its relentless work, and there are stands of banana trees on all sides that choke out pretty much every breeze that even considers passing through. I can't blame the students at all for not wanting to come to class in the afternoon. There's really only one respectable thing to be doing when face with such oppressive heat, and that's absolutely anything that might help you cool off, even a little bit. Combating the heat is a subtle game and it requires creativity and cunning. Unfortunately, heat is fantastic at dulling both one's creativity and cunning, so the best ideas for combating the heat are often formed whilst away from it (I'll bet you that air conditioning was invented during the winter). Staying cool in Vanuatu is an art. In my opinion, the best option is to get yourself a job somewhere that has air conditioning. On Malekula, this leaves two options, the Air Vanuatu Office and the LTC Office (not the main store, mind you, just the office in the back). But, since the owner of the LTC is kind of a jerk, I think the most set up person on the entire island is the lady who works at the Air Vanuatu ticket counter. She gets to hang around for eight hours a day in the air conditioning, and gets paid. Oh, and occasionally she has to help a customer, but that's a small price to pay. For those of us less fortunate however, the thatch and bamboo houses are a good second choice. Despite their humble appearance and the fact that they often leak when it rains, the bamboo huts actually boast much better thermal properties than the fancier cement block and metal roof homes. Natural materials, you see, provide much better insulation than sheets of metal, which helps keep the heat of the day out. Thus, it's often a good five to ten degrees cooler inside of a bamboo house during the day than inside of my much fancier house. Location can also play an important role. Oceanfront properties are desirable not only for nice views, but also for those delightful ocean breezes which can make the difference between comfort and misery come 1pm. Although not always reliable, there's often a fairly strong wind coming off of the ocean that provides those whose houses are on the beach with a nice, natural, cross breeze. Once again, however, this is of little help to me, whose house is in a stagnant schoolyard, although many of my hours are spent down by the ocean to take advantage of the breezes anyway. Swimming and showering are also tempting possibilities, but they must be employed with care. While that water may feel good against you skin while you're in it, it can sometimes leave you with a vague, humid, sticky feeling that never quite goes away no matter how many times you dry off. The key is to only venture into the water (or the shower) in the later afternoon, as the heat is breaking, so that that last little bit of moisture can be absorbed by the cooler night air as opposed to combining with the sweat of the day.

The sad truth, however, is that on the worst days there's not a lot you can do. When the wind over the ocean cuts out and the sea is glassy calm and the sun's heat manages to work its way through even the thickest of thatch roofs, often the only thing that can give you the smallest hint of respite is the fan. A small piece of something held in the hand and slowly waved back and forth to produce the smallest of breezes across the body. Choosing a good object for fanning is key. You want something stiff enough to move air effectively (sheet of paper, for example, is far to floppy), yet light and easy to move so that you're not expending undo energy. Cardboard boxes in my house are quickly cut up and employed as fans that serve fairly well until the sweat from the hand holding them permeates the cardboard and they become too limp and must be discarded. The Ni-Vanuatu favor fans fashioned from pandanus (similar to their mats), which last long, but are just a little bit too difficult to move for my tastes. Getting the proper fanning speed is also important. If you fan too slowly, you won't feel adequately cooled, but if you fan too quickly the extra heat produced from the exertion will counter whatever cooling effect the breeze you're producing has. Fanning is best employed when the rest of the body is totally immobile, and in slow, steady strokes that can be continued for hours without tiring you out.

Getting through the days are one thing, but by far the worst is when the heat persists into the night. A hot night can make sleeping almost totally impossible, and there's little to be done about it. If you have a cement floor, you can abandon your bed in favor of the slightly cooler cement, although you're sacrificing physical comfort for thermal comfort, so it's only a matter of time before you become too sore and have to return to the bed. It's also possible to fan yourself to sleep, although this is a tricky business. You have to make your fanning motions as mechanical and monotonous as possible in order to become drowsy enough to fall asleep. Close your eyes and relax while fanning yourself slowly and allow yourself to drift off. Now, you're eventually going to have to stop fanning in order to allow sleep to fully take hold, so the key is timing, you've got quit fanning right as you feel yourself on the verge of sleep. Once the fanning stops, you've got only a minute or two to seal the deal before you start becoming too hot again and have to start over. But don't worry, it's OK if you don't nail it on the first go, practice makes perfect. Of course, sometimes the best option is just to have a few shells of kava, which will put you straight to sleep, heat or no.

Although manual fanning is about the limit of what we're able to achieve with local materials, modern technology has opened up some more possibilities for me. The electric fan, under appreciated in our over-air conditioned society, has found a new place in my heart out here on the islands. Unfortunately, technological difficulties have been something of a hindrance, so I'm now actually on my third fan. My first was a cheap, Chinese-made piece that did well for the first couple of months but began to slow down to the point where I had to push-start the blades with a pencil just to get it to move at all. When I was back in the States, I decided to upgrade and invested in an “industrial air circulator,” which worked wonderfully for about 30 minutes before the motor got fried by the electricity here (and yes, I was using a transformer to step down the voltage, but I guess 60Hz motors don't like 50Hz power). This led to a very depressing month or so where I had two fans in my house, neither of which were working. I recently went to Vila, however, and went looking for the most durable-looking, fanciest fan I could find. I finally settled on an 18 inch, 180 watt floor fan imported from England that I got for about $90. So far it's been serving me faithfully, but I'm still only cautiously optimistic that it will last me until December, when I leave, given my history with fans.

Along with the dud of a fan I also, when I was in the States, purchased a vinyl water bed mattress, which is a fancy word for a giant, watertight bag. This was at the suggestion of my engineer-filled family and the idea behind it was twofold. First, since water takes a long time to heat up (has a large heat capacity, in science-speak), a fully filled water bed would always be a few degrees cooler than whatever the temperature happened to be in the house around it. Second, since water is better at absorbing heat than air, even if the bed were to get up to 91.5 F along with the house, it would still feel cooler (sort of like how water at 70 F feels a lot colder than air at 70 F). And so, when I got back to Vanuatu, I set my vinyl bag on the floor up against my wall and set to filling it up. This was actually a lot harder than it sounds. You see, the manufacturers of the water bed were obviously expecting the person filling it up to have running water, which I don't. There was a nice little fill valve on the bed and it came with a nice little adapter to hook up to a hose and then a faucet, none of which would work with my water tank. I ended up placing the end of the hose inside of a bucket instead of attaching it to a faucet and placing the bucket on my kitchen table. I then filled the bucket with water, and used the hose as a siphon to draw water out of the bucket and into the bed. Every thirty seconds or so I ran outside with a second bucket, filled it up with water from my tank, and refilled the first bucket. The whole process ended up taking about an hour and a half, I probably made a least a hundred trips to my water tank, and used up about 2/3 of my drinking water in the process. But it was definitely worth it. Predictions were correct, and the water bed was pleasantly cool to lie on, even in the middle of the afternoon. Plus, I now have the only water bed in the country, which is kind of cool. Really, the main downside is that, given how comfortably cool it is and how difficult it can be to get out to water beds anyway, it's pretty tempting for me to spend entire weeks lying on it.

Together, the water bed and my new Gazz brand 180 watt fan make up my personal cooling solution. Lying on the bed with the fan whirring just inches away from my head goes a long way towards taking the edge off the heat. But, and this is the sad part, it's still just not *quite* enough. There are still those times when the air moving through the fan is still just a little too uncomfortably warm and the water from the water bed isn't quite sucking enough heat out of my back when I still feel the oppressiveness around me and I know that I can never really win, that my victories are small and my fight is in vain. There's just no way around it. Ples i hot.