“Dan,” my headmaster said to me one day, “I want to write a grant.” I'd be hard pressed to think of a word that strikes more fear into the heart of a Peace Corps volunteer than “grant.” Over the past several decades, Vanuatu has been the recipient of so much doner money that Ni-Vans have come to all but expect white people to hand them funding for whatever they happen to want to do. As a Peace Corps volunteer this makes your life somewhat annoying, as the idea with Peace Corps is that we're supposed to be providing human resources, not financial. This subtle shift in thinking behind international aid is generally lost on most Ni-Vans, the result being that you end up getting asked from grant money a lot. Actually, the truth is that, if I really wanted to, I could probably very easily net something like thirty to fifty grand in grant money for my village. Australia, New Zealand, and the EU give very large sums of grant money to Vanuatu annually, usually earmarked for health or education projects. The thing is that these organizations, in what seems to me like spectacularly bad planning, don't really have a lot of staff working in Vanuatu, so they have no idea how to spend their money (from what I've seen of international development efforts in Vanuatu, this seems to be a common trend. People are eager to donate money, and sometimes even their time, but no one really gets all that excited about doing the research and grunt work necessary to figure how their resources can be effectively used to help people), thus a lot of money ends up running through Peace Corps volunteers, who are conveniently located in actual rural villages, actually speak the language, and actually have something of an idea of what's going on in said villages. The thing is, at least in my experience, that the more you get to know a village in Vanuatu and the people who live in it, the more reluctant you are to put large sums of money at their disposal. And so it was with some trepidation that I asked my headmaster “what do you want a grant for?” “I want to repaint the school,” he replied. I thought about explaining that, since most of our buildings are more than a decade old, have leaky roofs and, in some cases, concrete floors that have caved in, painting should really not be the first thing on his list of school maintenance activities, but I decided that this explanation was probably fruitless and instead gave my standard response to requests for grants, “fill out a grant application form and I'll be happy to check it over and edit it for you” (I have yet to have someone take me up on this offer).
So here's a question: given the choice, would you rather have a house with a plain exterior and a nice, comfortable interior or a nice exterior and an interior resembling a garage? I think I'd go for the former, and I feel like most people reading this would agree with me, but people around here have different priorities. In Vanuatu, it's all about the paint job. So when it comes to ideas to improve the school, the first thing my headmaster thinks of is making it look snazzier. Never mind the leaky roofs, the chronically later or absent students and teachers, or the fact that I'm the only one at the school who knows what a negative number is. But more paint, that's really what we need. Duncan employs a similar strategy in outfitting his home. Duncan's house has been under construction since I got here (which is common in Vanuatu, once the walls and the roof are up the house is livable and further work on it becomes less pressing). Currently, there's no ceiling, you can look up directly at the metal sheeting the roof is made of (the lack of a ceiling makes a house enormously hotter on a sunny day), nor are there light switches or electrical outlets. The light in the main room hangs by its electrical cord; to turn it on, you jam the bare wire leads of said cord into the plug holes on a power strip that also hangs from the ceiling, a procedure that I'm just waiting to result in someone's death. Over the time that I've been here, instead of fixing these rather basic and simple problems with the house, Duncan has instead spent a lot of money plastering the entire outside (plaster goes over the cinder blocks to hide them and give the house a smoother appearance from the outside as well as make it ready to take a paint job), and installing two polished mahogany doors (Vanuatu's bush is rich with high-quality hardwoods). So it looks like a nice, real house from the outside, but the inside looks like a construction site.
Being appropriately flased out is important in Vanuatu (“flas,” from the English “flash” or “flashy” is Bislama for fancy and expensive-looking) in all aspects of life. Ni-Vanuatu have a strange relationship with money. Unlike in the US, where money is required for basically everything, even such necessities as food and shelter, in Vanuatu money isn't really needed on a day-to-day basis. Food can be found for free growing pretty much all over the place and reasonable houses can be built using only materials that grow naturally. Money is only really needed to buy good imported from abroad, luxuries, in other words. While we think of money as being needed for survival, the Ni-Vanuatu think of money more as a means of procuring ridiculous stuff. So, if you were to somehow get your hands on, say, a couple hundred dollars, you could use it to invest in a gas stove, thus saving many hours and a lot of work on cooking each day over a wood fire, or you could flas your house out a bit and get a giant stereo system. A stove may be more useful, but people will only notice that if they happen to walk into your kitchen. A stereo, on the other hand, can be heard by people living in the next village over. Thus, you see a lot of people still hunched over a fire cooking dinner along with a lot of people thumping bass at six in the morning. Flasem haos nomo (“flasem,” the verb form of flas, meaning to make flashy, “haos,” which is pronounced like and means “house,” and “nomo” from the English “no more,” meaning just or only. So, just blinging out my house).
Anything can, and is, flased out whenever possible, including houses, trucks, canoes, and people. Flame decals for trucks are a popular item, even for trucks so old and rusted that most of their bodies have been replaced with wood, and I have a feeling that rims, spinners, and spoilers would do a brisk business. Recently, a guy from Tautu invested in some rope lights and flashers for the front of his truck and has been the talk of the town for several weeks. Anything electronic is considered to be particularly flas, even if the function of the electronic device in question is unknown or non-existent. I ran a program selling used computers from the States to people on the island, nominally to encourage computer literacy, that pulled in a lot of orders. To my surprise, I found myself getting orders not only from people in the Lakatoro area, which has continuous power, but also from the outer villages on the island. “Do you have electricity?” I'd ask these people before they ordered a computer. “No,” they'd answer. “Generator?” “No” “Solar?” “No.” “Do you realize that you won't be able to turn your computer on?” “That's alright. Flasem haos nomo.” There was also a story about a guy last year who stole a solar system battery, weighing something like 30 or 40 kilos, and hauled it a few kilometers back to his house to be used as a decoration.
Personal flas, however, is probably my favorite variety, things that people do to flas up their own appearance. The mobile phone, of course, is a must, the more expensive the model the better. Mobiles are generally carried in hand or worn around the neck with a lanyard, thus making them more visible. The especially fancy individual will have more than one mobile, just to stay ahead of the curve. Mobiles were even popular in areas like the northwest of the island, where I say a number of people strolling around the village with their cell phones out, despite the fact that Digicel would not be offering service to their village for at least six months. Ear buds are also a popular accessory, and I've seen many a person sporting the earphones which are, in fact, not connected to anything, the jack that's supposed to be plugged into a MP3 player or Discman is simply stuffed into a pocket. My favorite, however, which, unfortunately, I haven't had the pleasure of witnessing myself, only heard stories about, is a guy who sports a (non-working) mini boom box worn on a chain as a necklace.
Accessorizing is all well and good, but it would mean little without the underlying fancy clothes. In Vanuatu, where frequent use and primitive clothes-washing techniques are quick to give all clothes a dull, drab look, anything bright-colored (including those neon green vests meant to be worn by airport ground crews and construction works so that people don't run them over with large pieces of machinery) is bound to draw the air and is worn with pride. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your perspective), brightly colored shirts often tend to be the ones with something offensive, or at least inappropriate, written on them. And so you see people in church wearing bright green, yellow, and red t-shirts with the slogan “God Made Cannabis” on them which, admittedly, does at least have something to do with religion, making it better for churchgoing than the shirt with a giant picture of a hand giving you the middle finger. Or there's the guy that walks around with the bright pink shirt that says “Guys Make Good Pets,” or the teenager in the shirt with the picture of a bald guy and the saying “It's not a bald spot, it's a solar panel for a sex machine.” Or the Ni-Vanuatu Peace Corps staff member who once showed up in Malekula with a shirt claiming “I Only Date Crack Whores.” In the end, though, I think I have to agree with the man at the nakamal the other day in the shirt stating “I have absolutely no idea what's going on.” Words to live by in Vanuatu.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Yu No Kick Part 10: Land Diving
I'd been getting rather claustrophobic during my second year of Peace Corps service. I felt like I'd exhausted most of the exciting things (and probably also most of the unexciting things as well) to do in my village and increasingly was finding myself spending way too much time watching movies on my laptop. Also, take my advice and never, ever agree to live at a school. Especially a grade school. Dealing with a large group of children is difficult enough when it's in a classroom for a few hours a day, but when large groups of children are running and shouting about four feet outside your living room window pretty much 24-7, it's all you can do every day to keep from snapping. I'm sure living at a high school would be no picnic either, but I feel like older kids tend to get into quieter kinds of mischief than young kids. I mean, they may sneak off during recess to smoke cigarettes or whatever, but at least they do it without making a lot of noise. Really, it's the screaming that gets me. It's incessant. And it's actually not even screaming, it's too high pitched to be screaming. They're more like squeals. It's like they're perfectly planned to enter the ear at just the right octave to make you cringe and wish that you could listen to someone drag their nails across a chalkboard instead. It makes one long for the soothing sounds of police sirens and passing trains and car alarms and the relative quiet of the city (people imagine villages as being quiet. This is wrong. Villages have about a thousand times – I'm serious. I've measured. The precise number is 1003.74 ± 0.02 -- more noise than cities. The animals alone make quite a racket. There's roosters and bats and pigs and dogs and rats and bugs and then you add to that all the kids screaming, all the people screaming at the kids, and then the people screaming at each other. These days, when I spend time in a town such as Port Vila or a city like Austin I marvel at how quiet everything is), hell I'll even take roosters at 3am and the guy next door who puts on loud music at insane hours of the morning. Just... no squealing. Please.
At any rate, when school let out for an end-of-term break in early May, I was ready to be away from my little island. I'd used up all of my Peace Corps leave (the time that I'm allowed to be out of Vanuatu) with my trip back to Austin during Christmas and my week in Australia, so I couldn't get too far away but still, better than nothing. When I first read about Vanuatu on Wikipedia after discovering I was to be sent here, I devised two main goals for my Peace Corps service: throwing a penny into the volcano on Tanna (I mean, if fountains are supposed to bring good luck, volcanoes should be the mother load, right?), and watching the land diving on Pentecost. And so, when I got word of a group of volunteers heading to Pentecost during the school break, I decided to jump on board. Land diving is one of the more popular Vanuatu customs for tourists to witness and it's often photographed and put in tourism pamphlets and promotional videos. It's basically like bungee jumping, except elastics hadn't been invented back when it first started, so people had to improvise. Instead of synthetic bungee cords that are deemed low-risk enough to be featured at most amusement parks even in the super safety conscious US, the land divers on Pentecost use tough, wooden vines with something of a poor safety record. Although generally fairly strong, the vines don't really have a lot of elasticity to effectively adsorb the energy of a fall. In fact, land diving is traditionally only practiced in the months of May and June because during thus time of year the vines are slightly more elastic and thus marginally safer. The reason for the timing of this custom was apparently forgotten and rudely re-discovered some years ago when a village decided to put on a jump out of season to honor the visit of the queen of England and a diver was killed when the overly brittle vine broke securing him broke. A second safety issue arises from the towers which they jump off of, tall structures made from tree branches lashed together with bush rope (a plant whose bark is ductile enough to allow it to be used as a makeshift rope). Unfortunately the towers suffer from a lack of effective building code, as well as a lack of nails, and during a jump last year the tower collapsed and killed one of the people climbing it. Needless to say, I received a warning from my parents back in the US that I should not try and jump myself (which some tourists do sometimes), but I was a little surprised when I was waiting at the airport for my flight and I got a call from Duncan. “Dan,” he said in a frantic voice which suggested that he'd nearly forgotten something important, “I forgot to tell you before you left. Sometimes white people like to jump in the land diving, but you don't do it!”
The nice thing about living in a small country with a lot of other Peace Corps volunteers is that there's always someone you can look up wherever you go, meaning that you rarely have to pay for accommodation and you can get into most tourist attractions for free, or at least at a discount. Sure enough, one of our Pentecost volunteers, Erika (who sounds a lot like Ellen Degeneres, which I think is pretty hilarious), let us all crash in her house and arranged for us to see a jump that was being put on in her village for the benefit of a cruise ship. Cruise ships are apparently becoming a growing phenomena in the Pacific, judging from the large increase in frequency of their visits to Vanuatu in the year and a half I've been here. There's even a cruise ship stop at a village on Malekula, just a little bit north of Tautu, although god knows what there is to see there. Most Ni-Vans I've talked to get a real kick out of watching all the white people (usually Australians) disembark from their ship and putter around their island for a few hours, so I was actually looking forward to seeing the cruise ship almost as much as I was looking forward to seeing the land diving.
The ship showed up on Sunday morning and all of us volunteers headed down to the beach to check it out. I'm sure most people reading this have seen one (or maybe been on one) but cruise ships are MASSIVE. Like, it was probably the biggest man made object I'd ever seen in Vanuatu, and it looked very out of place, parked just offshore of this village carrying with it more wealth, technology, and power (power in the scientific sense, being work per unit time) than is even fathomable on the island it visits. During my time in Vanuatu, I'd grown somewhat annoyed by the tendency of Ni-Vans to jack up the price of goods and services for white people, but looking at that ship I understood their thinking perfectly: anyone capable of producing THAT can easily spare a few hundred vatu extra. The small landing boats the ship put out to ferry Australians the half kilometer to shore were larger than the majority of the copra ships that carry cargo as well as Ni-Vans between Malekula, Santo, and Vila. It kind of felt like we were being visited by a UFO, that a species of vastly superior beings were coming down from their mother ship in order to observe and document the eccentricities of a primitive society.
The change the village undertook for the benefit of the cruise ship was very strange. Land diving is one of the many Vanuatu customs that live on today solely because the Ni-Vans have realized that they can get tourists to pay to see them. It's a bizarre dynamic, hanging onto old practices and traditions for financial or historical reasons rather than because they're actually still applicable ways to living. There's a lot of pressure on Ni-Vans to maintain their authentic lifestyles rather than adopt western practices, but I feel like that calls a lot of the authenticity into doubt. I mean, what's more authentic, old traditions being acted out by people who don't really use them in their daily lives anymore or an adopted lifestyle that the majority of people actually do practice all the time? In a lot of ways I feel like my quasi-westernized village, although it has lost most of its custom, is a much more accurate portrayal of what Vanuatu is actually like. It's not quite as exotic or exciting as the tour guides indicate. People go to church instead of dressing up in costumes and dancing to make the yams grow, people wear pants and shirts or dresses, not penis sheathes and grass skirts, and people like to eat rice and noodles, not each other. So, while these cruise ship passengers were witnessing more Vanuatu custom in a few hours than I had in my entire service, I felt like they were leaving with a totally false picture of what living in a village in Vanuatu is like. I think it's kind of like learning about American culture by visiting Disneyland. Yeah, it's more glamorous and entertaining than, say, Cleveland, but it's all staged. And that's kind of what this village felt like when the cruise ship rolled in, Disneyland. People dressed up in traditional dress to get their pictures taken with the tourists, they put on dances and shows, put up signs directing people to various attractions (including one which labeled their dock as “Queen Elizabert II's Landing,” after an English monarch very few people have heard of) and sold souvenirs (such as the very traditional Pentecost beer cozys). There were even overpriced concessions. Grapefruits, which are usually handed out for free, were going for a hundred vatu a piece. On the plus side, however, the cruise ship staff had set up beverage stalls around the village selling cold drinks (so the passengers wouldn't have to go a whole afternoon without a frosty brew), which you could get if you could find an Australian willing to charge you one to their account in exchange for some vatu. The best part, however, was that, when they departed later that day, the staff left us with two giant bags of ice.
The land diving itself was very strange, and definitely not quite fit for prime time. Let's just say that once you've seen one guy jump from a wooden tower with vines tied to his feet, you've pretty much seen them all. However, the land diving ceremony consisted of something like fifteen jumps and lasted almost three hours. Towards the end, it was basically just us Peace Corps volunteers with the patience to still be watching. The jumping was accompanied by a troupe of men doing a stomp dance next to the tower, which they doggedly kept up for the entirety of the ceremony, although they did look a little worn out near the end. The tower was adorned with about fifteen wooden platforms (one for each jump), each one slightly higher than the last. A pair of vine ropes were fastened to the end of each platform. People started jumping from the lowest platform, maybe ten to fifteen feet off the ground and worked their way up, finally climaxing with the platform at the very top of the tower, maybe a hundred feet up. A guy would climb onto a platform and stand still while a team of kids tied a vine to each foot. When they were finished, he'd step to the edge of the platform and do a sort of ceremonial dance, which seemed to me to be a thinly veiled excuse to buy time to psyche himself up before taking the plunge. Finally, he'd cover his head with his hands and dive headfirst to the ground. The platforms were rigged such that they would partially break as the diver neared the ground and the vines became taught, thus absorbing some of the force of the fall. The ground below the tower was kept kicked up and soft to offer some padding and was inclined to allow the diver to roll, all of which were planned to reduce the force of the impact. Even still, some of the divers took quite a beating and looked none too happy as they were pulled out of the dirt to their feet. As the jumpers moved to the higher platforms, the lengths of their pre-jump dances became longer and the last jumper (from the highest point) actually stopped the whole ceremony so that an extra branch could be fastened to the side of his platform for him to hold onto while he was mentally preparing himself. We'd all been sitting in the sun for a long while by the time the whole thing was over and we were all glad to be able to adjourn to the beach and sit in the shade. I struck up a conversation with a Ni-Van who sat down near me and asked him what the significance of the land diving ceremony used to be. “There was never a reason for it,” he replied “it was just for fun.”
At any rate, when school let out for an end-of-term break in early May, I was ready to be away from my little island. I'd used up all of my Peace Corps leave (the time that I'm allowed to be out of Vanuatu) with my trip back to Austin during Christmas and my week in Australia, so I couldn't get too far away but still, better than nothing. When I first read about Vanuatu on Wikipedia after discovering I was to be sent here, I devised two main goals for my Peace Corps service: throwing a penny into the volcano on Tanna (I mean, if fountains are supposed to bring good luck, volcanoes should be the mother load, right?), and watching the land diving on Pentecost. And so, when I got word of a group of volunteers heading to Pentecost during the school break, I decided to jump on board. Land diving is one of the more popular Vanuatu customs for tourists to witness and it's often photographed and put in tourism pamphlets and promotional videos. It's basically like bungee jumping, except elastics hadn't been invented back when it first started, so people had to improvise. Instead of synthetic bungee cords that are deemed low-risk enough to be featured at most amusement parks even in the super safety conscious US, the land divers on Pentecost use tough, wooden vines with something of a poor safety record. Although generally fairly strong, the vines don't really have a lot of elasticity to effectively adsorb the energy of a fall. In fact, land diving is traditionally only practiced in the months of May and June because during thus time of year the vines are slightly more elastic and thus marginally safer. The reason for the timing of this custom was apparently forgotten and rudely re-discovered some years ago when a village decided to put on a jump out of season to honor the visit of the queen of England and a diver was killed when the overly brittle vine broke securing him broke. A second safety issue arises from the towers which they jump off of, tall structures made from tree branches lashed together with bush rope (a plant whose bark is ductile enough to allow it to be used as a makeshift rope). Unfortunately the towers suffer from a lack of effective building code, as well as a lack of nails, and during a jump last year the tower collapsed and killed one of the people climbing it. Needless to say, I received a warning from my parents back in the US that I should not try and jump myself (which some tourists do sometimes), but I was a little surprised when I was waiting at the airport for my flight and I got a call from Duncan. “Dan,” he said in a frantic voice which suggested that he'd nearly forgotten something important, “I forgot to tell you before you left. Sometimes white people like to jump in the land diving, but you don't do it!”
The nice thing about living in a small country with a lot of other Peace Corps volunteers is that there's always someone you can look up wherever you go, meaning that you rarely have to pay for accommodation and you can get into most tourist attractions for free, or at least at a discount. Sure enough, one of our Pentecost volunteers, Erika (who sounds a lot like Ellen Degeneres, which I think is pretty hilarious), let us all crash in her house and arranged for us to see a jump that was being put on in her village for the benefit of a cruise ship. Cruise ships are apparently becoming a growing phenomena in the Pacific, judging from the large increase in frequency of their visits to Vanuatu in the year and a half I've been here. There's even a cruise ship stop at a village on Malekula, just a little bit north of Tautu, although god knows what there is to see there. Most Ni-Vans I've talked to get a real kick out of watching all the white people (usually Australians) disembark from their ship and putter around their island for a few hours, so I was actually looking forward to seeing the cruise ship almost as much as I was looking forward to seeing the land diving.
The ship showed up on Sunday morning and all of us volunteers headed down to the beach to check it out. I'm sure most people reading this have seen one (or maybe been on one) but cruise ships are MASSIVE. Like, it was probably the biggest man made object I'd ever seen in Vanuatu, and it looked very out of place, parked just offshore of this village carrying with it more wealth, technology, and power (power in the scientific sense, being work per unit time) than is even fathomable on the island it visits. During my time in Vanuatu, I'd grown somewhat annoyed by the tendency of Ni-Vans to jack up the price of goods and services for white people, but looking at that ship I understood their thinking perfectly: anyone capable of producing THAT can easily spare a few hundred vatu extra. The small landing boats the ship put out to ferry Australians the half kilometer to shore were larger than the majority of the copra ships that carry cargo as well as Ni-Vans between Malekula, Santo, and Vila. It kind of felt like we were being visited by a UFO, that a species of vastly superior beings were coming down from their mother ship in order to observe and document the eccentricities of a primitive society.
The change the village undertook for the benefit of the cruise ship was very strange. Land diving is one of the many Vanuatu customs that live on today solely because the Ni-Vans have realized that they can get tourists to pay to see them. It's a bizarre dynamic, hanging onto old practices and traditions for financial or historical reasons rather than because they're actually still applicable ways to living. There's a lot of pressure on Ni-Vans to maintain their authentic lifestyles rather than adopt western practices, but I feel like that calls a lot of the authenticity into doubt. I mean, what's more authentic, old traditions being acted out by people who don't really use them in their daily lives anymore or an adopted lifestyle that the majority of people actually do practice all the time? In a lot of ways I feel like my quasi-westernized village, although it has lost most of its custom, is a much more accurate portrayal of what Vanuatu is actually like. It's not quite as exotic or exciting as the tour guides indicate. People go to church instead of dressing up in costumes and dancing to make the yams grow, people wear pants and shirts or dresses, not penis sheathes and grass skirts, and people like to eat rice and noodles, not each other. So, while these cruise ship passengers were witnessing more Vanuatu custom in a few hours than I had in my entire service, I felt like they were leaving with a totally false picture of what living in a village in Vanuatu is like. I think it's kind of like learning about American culture by visiting Disneyland. Yeah, it's more glamorous and entertaining than, say, Cleveland, but it's all staged. And that's kind of what this village felt like when the cruise ship rolled in, Disneyland. People dressed up in traditional dress to get their pictures taken with the tourists, they put on dances and shows, put up signs directing people to various attractions (including one which labeled their dock as “Queen Elizabert II's Landing,” after an English monarch very few people have heard of) and sold souvenirs (such as the very traditional Pentecost beer cozys). There were even overpriced concessions. Grapefruits, which are usually handed out for free, were going for a hundred vatu a piece. On the plus side, however, the cruise ship staff had set up beverage stalls around the village selling cold drinks (so the passengers wouldn't have to go a whole afternoon without a frosty brew), which you could get if you could find an Australian willing to charge you one to their account in exchange for some vatu. The best part, however, was that, when they departed later that day, the staff left us with two giant bags of ice.
The land diving itself was very strange, and definitely not quite fit for prime time. Let's just say that once you've seen one guy jump from a wooden tower with vines tied to his feet, you've pretty much seen them all. However, the land diving ceremony consisted of something like fifteen jumps and lasted almost three hours. Towards the end, it was basically just us Peace Corps volunteers with the patience to still be watching. The jumping was accompanied by a troupe of men doing a stomp dance next to the tower, which they doggedly kept up for the entirety of the ceremony, although they did look a little worn out near the end. The tower was adorned with about fifteen wooden platforms (one for each jump), each one slightly higher than the last. A pair of vine ropes were fastened to the end of each platform. People started jumping from the lowest platform, maybe ten to fifteen feet off the ground and worked their way up, finally climaxing with the platform at the very top of the tower, maybe a hundred feet up. A guy would climb onto a platform and stand still while a team of kids tied a vine to each foot. When they were finished, he'd step to the edge of the platform and do a sort of ceremonial dance, which seemed to me to be a thinly veiled excuse to buy time to psyche himself up before taking the plunge. Finally, he'd cover his head with his hands and dive headfirst to the ground. The platforms were rigged such that they would partially break as the diver neared the ground and the vines became taught, thus absorbing some of the force of the fall. The ground below the tower was kept kicked up and soft to offer some padding and was inclined to allow the diver to roll, all of which were planned to reduce the force of the impact. Even still, some of the divers took quite a beating and looked none too happy as they were pulled out of the dirt to their feet. As the jumpers moved to the higher platforms, the lengths of their pre-jump dances became longer and the last jumper (from the highest point) actually stopped the whole ceremony so that an extra branch could be fastened to the side of his platform for him to hold onto while he was mentally preparing himself. We'd all been sitting in the sun for a long while by the time the whole thing was over and we were all glad to be able to adjourn to the beach and sit in the shade. I struck up a conversation with a Ni-Van who sat down near me and asked him what the significance of the land diving ceremony used to be. “There was never a reason for it,” he replied “it was just for fun.”
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Yu No Kick Part 9: Critters
I remember a time, not too long ago, when finding ants in a house was cause for great consternation. Little white ant gazebos housing ant poison were purchased from the super market and laid around the house in heavily ant-trafficked areas in an attempt at enticing ants to carry toxic substances back to their nest and do themselves in. When this failed, we had to take all the food out of our pantry and cupboards, stack it on the kitchen table, cover everything with a sheet and asked a man in a haz-mat suit and breathing apparatus to come spray chemicals all over our house and make it uninhabitable for the better part of a day. Flies inside the household were stalked and hunted with green plastic fly swatters and killed. Cockroaches, spiders, and other larger critters were trapped under and glass or tupperware and re-released into the wilds of the back yard on the grounds that nobody wanted to clean up the cockroach guts that would result were they to be squished. I remember days when cakes, cookies, and even defrosting meat was left unattended on kitchen counters over night, a daring and brazen taunt to insects everywhere to just try and come inside the house.
Truth is, these days I have no idea how we manage to keep our homes so immaculately free of insects and other critters. Even houses in the suburbs and in more rural areas, whose surrounding greenery no doubt abounds with such beasts, they manage to keep nature strictly outside the home. In Vanuatu, we open our houses to any creature tenacious enough to make it inside. Rather than being a mono culture consisting solely of homo sapiens, and perhaps a dog, a Vanuatu household is teeming with biodiversity. Arthropods (arthropods are a class of animals that includes insects, spiders, centipedes, millipedes, scorpions and some others. Although we commonly group all of these animals together, this is not technically accurate. However, often I find it convenient to refer to all arthropods together as opposed to just insects and, so as not to sully an otherwise light-hearted and sophomoric blog with fancy science words, I shall use the term “bug” as a replacement for arthropod) are by far the most common type of animal on the land, and they are well represented inside of my house. I've heard it said that bugs will take over the world once humans are dead and gone, a saying that is wrong only in that it implies that bugs do not already own the world. I think everyone instinctually feels the truth of this, which accounts for most people's fear of bugs. Just as we become anxious and uneasy in the presence of our bosses or other authority figures, we are made uncomfortable when we must share a room with bugs, who we know to be the true masters of the earth. Sometimes our fear causes us to lash out as we try to assert our dominance and, while we may be able to easily destroy a single bug, or even a hundred bugs, our feeble attempts at violence are generally ignored by the larger body of the bug population who knows that we are completely incapable of inflicting any sort of real or lasting harm on it. Although people tend to fear large and exotic bugs such as cockroaches, tarantulas, or centipedes, in my opinion the real danger comes not from the big and unusual (the fact that they're big makes them easy to see and avoid and the fact that they're exotic means that they're unlikely to be encountered on a daily basis), but from the small and commonplace, the mosquito. We're all familiar with these little flying vampires, they're something that brings us together as a species. No matter what continent you live on, what culture you belong to, or whether you're rich or poor, everyone can get behind hating mosquitoes. In Vanuatu, and in other tropical areas, mosquitoes are hated not only for being annoying but also for their ability to transmit malaria and dengue fever. To be honest, however, it's difficult to say which is worse: malaria, that obnoxious buzzing noise mosquitoes make when they're flying around your ears while you're trying to sleep, or those persistently itchy little bites. Fortunately, you don't have to worry about choosing, because you can get all three at once. My experience with American mosquitoes than that with Vanuatu mosquitoes. In the States, the mosquitoes were relatively large and somewhat dumb, slow moving, and easier to swat. Their bites left large, red welts that itched for days. In Vanuatu the mosquitoes are smaller and more wily, killing a mosquito is decidedly harder. However, their bites are smaller, less itchy, and fade faster. In the beginning of my service, the large water tank that collects rainwater from my roof was uncovered, providing a perfect breeding ground of mosquitoes. Consequently, there would always be a cloud of them hovering around my door waiting for a chance at entrance to my house so that they could annoy me. I finally got around to cleaning out the water tank, killing all the mosquito larvae inside of it, and putting a cover on it, which has done a good job of thinning out the mosquito crop in the vicinity of my house. Nowadays, the mosquitoes show up only two or three at a time, making them easier to hunt down and kill.
Slightly less annoying than the mosquito is the ant. For my entire tenure in Vanuatu, my house has been infested with doggedly determined little brown ants. These wily little scavengers are almost inspiring to watch. Able to reach almost anywhere in the house and defeat even the most clever ant-prevention technologies to find food, it's easy to see why these little guys are thriving whereas lazy, slow, picky animals, like the panda, are not. For some reason, the one place where these ants won't venture is on top of my stove, which means that my stove is often home to large, precarious stacks of tupperware containers and plates of food which I want to be spared from the wrath of the ants. Leave something on the floor or on the table, however, and it will be covered in teeming brown bodies in a matter of minutes. Often I just have to resign myself to the fact that I'm going to be eating food covered in ants, especially if they manage to worm their way into, say, my stash of Snickers bars. More annoying than the fact that they get into my food, is their occasional tendency to crawl over me while I'm sleeping. It's not unusual to wake up to an odd, tickling feeling that slowly creeps along my body. They're small enough that you can *almost* ignore them, but the sensation of them walking over you is just a little too strange to be ignore an they can make falling asleep difficult. Recently, a new variety of ant has been trying to muscle it's way into my house. These large, black ants may not be as numerous as the brown ones (their ant trails tend to look more like small city roads, with only one ant passing by every few seconds, as opposed to the bulging ant superhighways which the brown ants tend to form), but they must be packing some serious heat as they seem to have forced the brown ants out of my common room completely. Although the brown ant hold on my kitchen is still very strong, the black ant territory seems to be slowly expanding and they look like something of a force to be reckoned with. We'll have to see how the turf wars play out in the months to come, but it may be that the days of the brown ant are numbered.
Somewhat more pleasant to host than bugs are the numerous geckos that inhabit my house. There are two kinds. Small black geckos with bright, blue stripes like to hide in my curtains when I roll them up at night. When I left them down during the day, the geckos come tumbling out and thunk unto the floor, where the stand, dazed and confused for several seconds before quickly scurrying off to wherever geckos scurry to. More interesting are the ghostly-white geckos that dot my walls at night. These geckos are larger, chubbier, and more active than the black and blue geckos and they like to come out at night to catch insects. The sticky pads on their feet allow them to climb walls and stick to the ceiling and they make a light drumming sound as they scamper across my ceiling in search of food. Some geckos will park themselves next to a swarm on gnats and you'll see their little heads dart to and fro quickly as they gobble them up. Others go in search of larger prey. After it gets dark, the electric lights in my house attract a large number of moths. My bulbs are bare (ie not part of light fixtures), which allows the moths to get nice and close into them. A swarm of moths will be constantly orbiting my light bulb whenever it's on at night. Every few seconds, a moth will decide to try and go in and will make a quick and determined swoop into the light until it comes up hard and fast against the glass of the bulb with a satisfying dinging sound. They never really seem to learn, however, and after letting a few of their friends make a try for it and end with similar fates, they give it another go. Taking advantage of this confusion, the geckos will creep across the ceiling until they near the swarm of moths around the light bulb. As they approach the moths, their motions become slower and more deliberate so as not to startle their prey. Then, when the time is right, they'll seize upon a moth's momentary confusion after running headlong into a piece of glass and strike, grabbing a startled moth in their mouths. The work's not done yet, however, as often the moth is a half or three quarters the size of the gecko, so subduing it is no easy feat. What ensues is like a miniature Godzilla versus Mothra as moth and gecko duke it out. Sometimes the battle becomes so fierce that the gecko looses its grip on the ceiling and splats on the floor, where the fighting continues unabated. Finally, either a successful gecko will forcefully stuff the moth entirely in it's mouth and begin munching contentedly, or a successful moth will battle its way to freedom and fly off, leaving the gecko to start the whole process over again. With a few shells of kava in me, I've spent many an hour watching the geckos war with the moths.
The largest inhabitants of my house, aside from myself, are the mice and rats. The rats live in my attic and, at night, you can hear the sounds of them running around echoing through my ceiling. I'm not sure what they do up there at night, but they certainly can make quite the ruckus. Sometimes you'll hear them pounding across the attic at full speed, followed by loud crashes that seem to indicate some sort of tussle and then silence. Moments later they're booking it across the attic again and another tussle ensues. It's almost like they're playing tackle football or something. Sometimes these games can go on for upwards of an hour and I fall asleep to the soothing clatter of rats doing whatever rats do. I bought a box of ramen noodles when I first came to Vanuatu that I haven't been using nearly as much as I thought I would, and these packages of dry noodles have become a favorite of the rodents. The box which contains them has several holes gnawed into the side and by now most of the noodle packets are chewed through and a portion of the noodles missing. I don't really mind this all that much, actually, as it seems to distract them from the rest of the food in my house, some of which I'm much more attached to than ramen.
Some volunteers are more opposed to critters sharing their house than other. I get people giving me advice on how to get rid of my rats or my geckos or my ants, and I thank them politely and proceed to do nothing. Truth is, I've grown somewhat attached to my house guests. Fighting the ants for control of my food keeps me on my toes and watching an ant trail form can provide a solid half hour of entertainment. The geckos and moths provide my evening cinema and the scampering of the rats serves as a soothing cacophony to accompany me to sleep. Oddly, while I'm not the biggest fan of pets, I have absolutely no problem with pests. They don't need to be fed or walked or taken care of in any way. They're easy to ignore when I want to and they go about their business without any need for interference from me. In many ways, I admire their tenacity and self-reliance. While pets often die despite our best efforts to save them, these pests live on despite our best efforts to exterminate them.
Truth is, these days I have no idea how we manage to keep our homes so immaculately free of insects and other critters. Even houses in the suburbs and in more rural areas, whose surrounding greenery no doubt abounds with such beasts, they manage to keep nature strictly outside the home. In Vanuatu, we open our houses to any creature tenacious enough to make it inside. Rather than being a mono culture consisting solely of homo sapiens, and perhaps a dog, a Vanuatu household is teeming with biodiversity. Arthropods (arthropods are a class of animals that includes insects, spiders, centipedes, millipedes, scorpions and some others. Although we commonly group all of these animals together, this is not technically accurate. However, often I find it convenient to refer to all arthropods together as opposed to just insects and, so as not to sully an otherwise light-hearted and sophomoric blog with fancy science words, I shall use the term “bug” as a replacement for arthropod) are by far the most common type of animal on the land, and they are well represented inside of my house. I've heard it said that bugs will take over the world once humans are dead and gone, a saying that is wrong only in that it implies that bugs do not already own the world. I think everyone instinctually feels the truth of this, which accounts for most people's fear of bugs. Just as we become anxious and uneasy in the presence of our bosses or other authority figures, we are made uncomfortable when we must share a room with bugs, who we know to be the true masters of the earth. Sometimes our fear causes us to lash out as we try to assert our dominance and, while we may be able to easily destroy a single bug, or even a hundred bugs, our feeble attempts at violence are generally ignored by the larger body of the bug population who knows that we are completely incapable of inflicting any sort of real or lasting harm on it. Although people tend to fear large and exotic bugs such as cockroaches, tarantulas, or centipedes, in my opinion the real danger comes not from the big and unusual (the fact that they're big makes them easy to see and avoid and the fact that they're exotic means that they're unlikely to be encountered on a daily basis), but from the small and commonplace, the mosquito. We're all familiar with these little flying vampires, they're something that brings us together as a species. No matter what continent you live on, what culture you belong to, or whether you're rich or poor, everyone can get behind hating mosquitoes. In Vanuatu, and in other tropical areas, mosquitoes are hated not only for being annoying but also for their ability to transmit malaria and dengue fever. To be honest, however, it's difficult to say which is worse: malaria, that obnoxious buzzing noise mosquitoes make when they're flying around your ears while you're trying to sleep, or those persistently itchy little bites. Fortunately, you don't have to worry about choosing, because you can get all three at once. My experience with American mosquitoes than that with Vanuatu mosquitoes. In the States, the mosquitoes were relatively large and somewhat dumb, slow moving, and easier to swat. Their bites left large, red welts that itched for days. In Vanuatu the mosquitoes are smaller and more wily, killing a mosquito is decidedly harder. However, their bites are smaller, less itchy, and fade faster. In the beginning of my service, the large water tank that collects rainwater from my roof was uncovered, providing a perfect breeding ground of mosquitoes. Consequently, there would always be a cloud of them hovering around my door waiting for a chance at entrance to my house so that they could annoy me. I finally got around to cleaning out the water tank, killing all the mosquito larvae inside of it, and putting a cover on it, which has done a good job of thinning out the mosquito crop in the vicinity of my house. Nowadays, the mosquitoes show up only two or three at a time, making them easier to hunt down and kill.
Slightly less annoying than the mosquito is the ant. For my entire tenure in Vanuatu, my house has been infested with doggedly determined little brown ants. These wily little scavengers are almost inspiring to watch. Able to reach almost anywhere in the house and defeat even the most clever ant-prevention technologies to find food, it's easy to see why these little guys are thriving whereas lazy, slow, picky animals, like the panda, are not. For some reason, the one place where these ants won't venture is on top of my stove, which means that my stove is often home to large, precarious stacks of tupperware containers and plates of food which I want to be spared from the wrath of the ants. Leave something on the floor or on the table, however, and it will be covered in teeming brown bodies in a matter of minutes. Often I just have to resign myself to the fact that I'm going to be eating food covered in ants, especially if they manage to worm their way into, say, my stash of Snickers bars. More annoying than the fact that they get into my food, is their occasional tendency to crawl over me while I'm sleeping. It's not unusual to wake up to an odd, tickling feeling that slowly creeps along my body. They're small enough that you can *almost* ignore them, but the sensation of them walking over you is just a little too strange to be ignore an they can make falling asleep difficult. Recently, a new variety of ant has been trying to muscle it's way into my house. These large, black ants may not be as numerous as the brown ones (their ant trails tend to look more like small city roads, with only one ant passing by every few seconds, as opposed to the bulging ant superhighways which the brown ants tend to form), but they must be packing some serious heat as they seem to have forced the brown ants out of my common room completely. Although the brown ant hold on my kitchen is still very strong, the black ant territory seems to be slowly expanding and they look like something of a force to be reckoned with. We'll have to see how the turf wars play out in the months to come, but it may be that the days of the brown ant are numbered.
Somewhat more pleasant to host than bugs are the numerous geckos that inhabit my house. There are two kinds. Small black geckos with bright, blue stripes like to hide in my curtains when I roll them up at night. When I left them down during the day, the geckos come tumbling out and thunk unto the floor, where the stand, dazed and confused for several seconds before quickly scurrying off to wherever geckos scurry to. More interesting are the ghostly-white geckos that dot my walls at night. These geckos are larger, chubbier, and more active than the black and blue geckos and they like to come out at night to catch insects. The sticky pads on their feet allow them to climb walls and stick to the ceiling and they make a light drumming sound as they scamper across my ceiling in search of food. Some geckos will park themselves next to a swarm on gnats and you'll see their little heads dart to and fro quickly as they gobble them up. Others go in search of larger prey. After it gets dark, the electric lights in my house attract a large number of moths. My bulbs are bare (ie not part of light fixtures), which allows the moths to get nice and close into them. A swarm of moths will be constantly orbiting my light bulb whenever it's on at night. Every few seconds, a moth will decide to try and go in and will make a quick and determined swoop into the light until it comes up hard and fast against the glass of the bulb with a satisfying dinging sound. They never really seem to learn, however, and after letting a few of their friends make a try for it and end with similar fates, they give it another go. Taking advantage of this confusion, the geckos will creep across the ceiling until they near the swarm of moths around the light bulb. As they approach the moths, their motions become slower and more deliberate so as not to startle their prey. Then, when the time is right, they'll seize upon a moth's momentary confusion after running headlong into a piece of glass and strike, grabbing a startled moth in their mouths. The work's not done yet, however, as often the moth is a half or three quarters the size of the gecko, so subduing it is no easy feat. What ensues is like a miniature Godzilla versus Mothra as moth and gecko duke it out. Sometimes the battle becomes so fierce that the gecko looses its grip on the ceiling and splats on the floor, where the fighting continues unabated. Finally, either a successful gecko will forcefully stuff the moth entirely in it's mouth and begin munching contentedly, or a successful moth will battle its way to freedom and fly off, leaving the gecko to start the whole process over again. With a few shells of kava in me, I've spent many an hour watching the geckos war with the moths.
The largest inhabitants of my house, aside from myself, are the mice and rats. The rats live in my attic and, at night, you can hear the sounds of them running around echoing through my ceiling. I'm not sure what they do up there at night, but they certainly can make quite the ruckus. Sometimes you'll hear them pounding across the attic at full speed, followed by loud crashes that seem to indicate some sort of tussle and then silence. Moments later they're booking it across the attic again and another tussle ensues. It's almost like they're playing tackle football or something. Sometimes these games can go on for upwards of an hour and I fall asleep to the soothing clatter of rats doing whatever rats do. I bought a box of ramen noodles when I first came to Vanuatu that I haven't been using nearly as much as I thought I would, and these packages of dry noodles have become a favorite of the rodents. The box which contains them has several holes gnawed into the side and by now most of the noodle packets are chewed through and a portion of the noodles missing. I don't really mind this all that much, actually, as it seems to distract them from the rest of the food in my house, some of which I'm much more attached to than ramen.
Some volunteers are more opposed to critters sharing their house than other. I get people giving me advice on how to get rid of my rats or my geckos or my ants, and I thank them politely and proceed to do nothing. Truth is, I've grown somewhat attached to my house guests. Fighting the ants for control of my food keeps me on my toes and watching an ant trail form can provide a solid half hour of entertainment. The geckos and moths provide my evening cinema and the scampering of the rats serves as a soothing cacophony to accompany me to sleep. Oddly, while I'm not the biggest fan of pets, I have absolutely no problem with pests. They don't need to be fed or walked or taken care of in any way. They're easy to ignore when I want to and they go about their business without any need for interference from me. In many ways, I admire their tenacity and self-reliance. While pets often die despite our best efforts to save them, these pests live on despite our best efforts to exterminate them.
Monday, May 4, 2009
Quick Note
So, I was looking over my blog while I'm in Luganville and have access to faster internet and noticed that there seems to have been an issue of Life in the Ring of Fire that I wrote but never posted. For posterity, I've uploaded it and changed the post date of it to make it look like it was uploaded back on December 13 of 2008. If you're interested in reading it, it's Life in the Ring of Fire Part 62: Thanksgiving
Yu No Kick Part 8: Be... Yu Save Chuck Norris?
I think people in the US tend to associate being a Peace Corps volunteer with going to Africa and building bridges and schools and whatnot for starving children. Truth be told, however, most of the Peace Corps volunteers I've met aren't people that I'd trust to build a picnic table, much less a bridge (no offense guys). The current fad in international development is something called sustainable development, which means we shy away from projects that require us to actually DO anything (like build things) and focus more on “building capacity,” which usually means trying to teach people how to do things. The idea is that while one-time development projects like a bridge will eventually fall apart, a successful sustainable project will live on forever. It's a nice idea and, of course, it often doesn't pan out in practice as frequently the lasting lessons a volunteer leaves with his village aren't exactly the ones he was trying to teach. In Tautu, for example, a major lesson that my villagers took away from previous volunteers is how to make bootleg liquor with sugar water and bread yeast, which is an accomplishment I don't think makes it onto the Powerpoint slides at the Peace Corps congressional budgetary hearings. Still, most people tend to think of Peace Corps as being all about the do-gooding. However, saving the world by teaching math to underprivileged kids (actually, if I'm really going to come clean on this one, I think most of the major contributions I've made as a volunteer involve unjamming the photocopier at the school), which is the part of the job one usually talks up at the bar, is only a component of what Peace Corps is about. Being a US government funded institution, part of what Peace Corps tries to do is build understanding and goodwill towards Americans and the US in obscure and sometimes pissed-off corners of the world (Latin America, for example). So, part of what the government is paying me to do is to buy people drinks and talk about how awesome America is. This is a part of my job that I take very seriously. Especially the drinks part.
In Vanuatu we catch a pretty huge break on this one, as pretty much everyone here already thinks the US is the really damn cool. Unlike, say, people in Chile, who seem to like nothing better than to remind us of how the CIA totally screwed up their country, most Ni-Vans have only ever had positive dealings with Americans. Older Ni-Vans remember American soldiers defending the country from Japanese occupation (of course, no one has the heart to break it to them that, really, no one was all that keen on occupying Vanuatu in the first place) and a majority of Ni-Vans can remember at least one occasion where a Peace Corps volunteer bought them a shell of kava. To top it all off, most of the obnoxious tourists come from Australia or New Zealand, so they draw most of the heat on that front. So really, all us Peace Corps Vanuatu volunteers need to do in order to build goodwill towards the US is not be total assholes. Actually, I often find myself having to downplay the awesomeness of America to keep stories from spiraling out of control. I've had the following conversation a number of times.
Ni-Van: So... America is really awesome, huh?
Me: Umm, yeah, I mean, we try.
Ni-Van: Best country in the world.
Me: Well, I guess, well, actually, it depends on how you...
Ni-Van: There isn't another country that's better than you guys at anything.
Me: Umm... I don't know about that, for example, I think the Germans have better beer and...
Ni-Van: Man! The US!
Me: ....yeah, we are pretty sweet.
Of course, much of what Ni-Vans know about the US comes either from movies or what Peace Corps volunteers have told them. The problem with this is that both movies and volunteers are prone to making things up for the sake of entertainment. Thus, a lot of Ni-Vans tend to picture the US as a sort of mystic wonderland full of all sorts of fantastical people and creatures. A place where cowboys battle dinosaur-riding Indians and Rambo is always close at hand in case something needs to be blown up. Basically, anything cool that Vanuatu doesn't have is pictured as existing in the States. As a volunteer, I must choose between trying to dispel misconceptions (ie. Explaining that Rambo isn't a real person) and compounding misconceptions for my own amusement (ie. Explaining that Rambo is my next door neighbor). Of course, it's usually far easier to just roll with whatever ridiculous fact some person in your village believes about the US than to try and set things straight. Like, I'm not sure who came to Malekula before me to spread this rumor, but people are dead set on the fact that we still have dinosaurs in the US, to the point where they will argue very forcefully with me about it, as if I'm lying to cover something up and at some point I'll break down and be like “OK, you got me. I was trying to keep this on the DL but, yeah, we've got dinosaurs. Actually, I used to fly a pterodactyl to school every day before it ran away and got sucked into the intake of a 747.” McKenzie actually once had a really heated argument with someone in her village about the existence of dinosaurs who at one point noticed a map she had hanging on her house of the US with stylized cartoons of each state's major attractions and, wouldn't you know, Dinosaur State Park was marked with a few cartoon dinosaurs. This led to an attempted explanation of the fact that there actually are dinosaur FOSSILS, just not any living dinosaurs, which I'm sure the villager just took as further evidence that something fishy is afoot. One of my favorites was a day when I was waiting at the airport and a guy walked up to me and told me that he'd just heard that Harry Potter had died and asked whether or not it was true. My first reaction was to chastise him for giving away the ending of the last book, which I hadn't read yet, but then I realized that the chances of him having read it were unbelievably slim. My next reaction was a decent into confusion and an eventual explanation that, seeing as Harry Potter isn't really real, he can't really die, which was probably taken to mean that not only is there a teenage boy able to fly around on broomsticks in the US, but he's also immortal.
Early on I make the mistake/brilliant move of explaining to everyone that, seeing as I live in Texas, I'm from the same State in the US as Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris is idolized in Vanuatu almost as much as Rambo is, which is impressive considering that Chuck Norris is actually a real person. Thus, Duncan likes to introduce me to people as his son from the US who comes from the “same place straight” as Chuck Norris. At first I tried to explain to everyone that, seeing as Texas is a really big place, just because the two of us were from there didn't mean that I'd ever been in the same room as him, or even the same city. Now, however, I've grown tired of wasting my breath trying to explain that I'm not nearly as awesome as they think I am and instead just try my best to look quietly imposing as if at any moment I might break into some spontaneous ass-kicking taught to me by my good buddy Chuck Norris. And there are always those moments of temptation. Those nights when someone settles into a seat next to me and the nakamal and, without even so much as a “hello” breaks out and says “Dan, yu save.... Chuck Norris?” (Dan, do you know Chuck Norris?), when I know that I should be a good volunteer and patiently explain the fact that the US is not like Vanuatu and that not everyone knows each other and that actually the only times I've ever seen Chuck Norris were on TV, just like them, but there they are, the words forming in my head, just waiting for the green light from my conscience to be vocalized: “Yeah! Chuck Norris! Of course! He's actually my cousin. We used to go dinosaur hunting together all the time when we were little.”
In Vanuatu we catch a pretty huge break on this one, as pretty much everyone here already thinks the US is the really damn cool. Unlike, say, people in Chile, who seem to like nothing better than to remind us of how the CIA totally screwed up their country, most Ni-Vans have only ever had positive dealings with Americans. Older Ni-Vans remember American soldiers defending the country from Japanese occupation (of course, no one has the heart to break it to them that, really, no one was all that keen on occupying Vanuatu in the first place) and a majority of Ni-Vans can remember at least one occasion where a Peace Corps volunteer bought them a shell of kava. To top it all off, most of the obnoxious tourists come from Australia or New Zealand, so they draw most of the heat on that front. So really, all us Peace Corps Vanuatu volunteers need to do in order to build goodwill towards the US is not be total assholes. Actually, I often find myself having to downplay the awesomeness of America to keep stories from spiraling out of control. I've had the following conversation a number of times.
Ni-Van: So... America is really awesome, huh?
Me: Umm, yeah, I mean, we try.
Ni-Van: Best country in the world.
Me: Well, I guess, well, actually, it depends on how you...
Ni-Van: There isn't another country that's better than you guys at anything.
Me: Umm... I don't know about that, for example, I think the Germans have better beer and...
Ni-Van: Man! The US!
Me: ....yeah, we are pretty sweet.
Of course, much of what Ni-Vans know about the US comes either from movies or what Peace Corps volunteers have told them. The problem with this is that both movies and volunteers are prone to making things up for the sake of entertainment. Thus, a lot of Ni-Vans tend to picture the US as a sort of mystic wonderland full of all sorts of fantastical people and creatures. A place where cowboys battle dinosaur-riding Indians and Rambo is always close at hand in case something needs to be blown up. Basically, anything cool that Vanuatu doesn't have is pictured as existing in the States. As a volunteer, I must choose between trying to dispel misconceptions (ie. Explaining that Rambo isn't a real person) and compounding misconceptions for my own amusement (ie. Explaining that Rambo is my next door neighbor). Of course, it's usually far easier to just roll with whatever ridiculous fact some person in your village believes about the US than to try and set things straight. Like, I'm not sure who came to Malekula before me to spread this rumor, but people are dead set on the fact that we still have dinosaurs in the US, to the point where they will argue very forcefully with me about it, as if I'm lying to cover something up and at some point I'll break down and be like “OK, you got me. I was trying to keep this on the DL but, yeah, we've got dinosaurs. Actually, I used to fly a pterodactyl to school every day before it ran away and got sucked into the intake of a 747.” McKenzie actually once had a really heated argument with someone in her village about the existence of dinosaurs who at one point noticed a map she had hanging on her house of the US with stylized cartoons of each state's major attractions and, wouldn't you know, Dinosaur State Park was marked with a few cartoon dinosaurs. This led to an attempted explanation of the fact that there actually are dinosaur FOSSILS, just not any living dinosaurs, which I'm sure the villager just took as further evidence that something fishy is afoot. One of my favorites was a day when I was waiting at the airport and a guy walked up to me and told me that he'd just heard that Harry Potter had died and asked whether or not it was true. My first reaction was to chastise him for giving away the ending of the last book, which I hadn't read yet, but then I realized that the chances of him having read it were unbelievably slim. My next reaction was a decent into confusion and an eventual explanation that, seeing as Harry Potter isn't really real, he can't really die, which was probably taken to mean that not only is there a teenage boy able to fly around on broomsticks in the US, but he's also immortal.
Early on I make the mistake/brilliant move of explaining to everyone that, seeing as I live in Texas, I'm from the same State in the US as Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris is idolized in Vanuatu almost as much as Rambo is, which is impressive considering that Chuck Norris is actually a real person. Thus, Duncan likes to introduce me to people as his son from the US who comes from the “same place straight” as Chuck Norris. At first I tried to explain to everyone that, seeing as Texas is a really big place, just because the two of us were from there didn't mean that I'd ever been in the same room as him, or even the same city. Now, however, I've grown tired of wasting my breath trying to explain that I'm not nearly as awesome as they think I am and instead just try my best to look quietly imposing as if at any moment I might break into some spontaneous ass-kicking taught to me by my good buddy Chuck Norris. And there are always those moments of temptation. Those nights when someone settles into a seat next to me and the nakamal and, without even so much as a “hello” breaks out and says “Dan, yu save.... Chuck Norris?” (Dan, do you know Chuck Norris?), when I know that I should be a good volunteer and patiently explain the fact that the US is not like Vanuatu and that not everyone knows each other and that actually the only times I've ever seen Chuck Norris were on TV, just like them, but there they are, the words forming in my head, just waiting for the green light from my conscience to be vocalized: “Yeah! Chuck Norris! Of course! He's actually my cousin. We used to go dinosaur hunting together all the time when we were little.”
Yu No Kick Part 7: Samting Ia
Vanuatu is a country with far too many languages than is good for it. There are three national languages: English, French, and Bislama, which means that whenever someone posts a public notice, they usually end up posting three copies of it, one in each language. For a lot of Ni-Vans, their command of English and French is a little shaky, so it's not uncommon for a notice to end up saying completely different things in each language. As if this weren't confusing enough, each island is also home to several indigenous languages that predate the arrival of Europeans to the country. There are over two hundred of these local languages and many of them are drastically different from each other. In some places the local language is still used as a main form of communication. It's retrofitted with western vocabulary and concepts and made to function in the modern world like a tired old suitcase held together with crude stitches and duct tape that's still being forced into service. In practice, the borrowed English words will often far outnumber the traditional vocabulary in a given sentence: “blah blah Peace Corps blah Nokia phone charger blah blah Toyota Landcruiser blah blah Rambo.” More often, however, these custom languages are shelved in favor of the more modern European ones and soon begin to yellow and rot until only a few stray words remain, relics from a not-so-distant past. Some see this as sad, and perhaps it is, but the fact is that these traditional languages are often only valuable in the same way that antique cars are valuable, they're cool to show off to your friends and remember times gone by, but if you're actually trying to get somewhere you need something newer. These are languages that developed in small island villages and are well suited to village life, but they're not particularly useful for conducting international business, for example. It's not just that almost no one outside of Vanuatu knows these tribal languages, which is a pretty big problem in and of itself, but rather that they lack the ability to express concepts and ideas important in the modern world (Tautu's local language, for example, lacks the ability to talk about time). Linguists and Bible translators love Vanuatu. They like to move into a village for five or ten years, learn the local language, and then spend many hours painstakingly writing out a local language-English dictionary or wondering how to translate the book of Psalms into a language that has no word for God. The problem that they face, of course, is that they're Bible translators and linguists. They can learn all the vocabulary they want, but they will never really understand a Vanuatu language because Ni-Vanuatu do not translate bibles or write dictionaries, their languages are not outfitted for such tasks.
Bislama is Vanuatu's black sheep of a language that tries to bridge the gap between the village and the wider world. Bislama is named after a sort of sea slug that the French were apparently really into back in the 1700's and 1800's. The fact that Bislama is named after a sea slug makes about as much sense as anything else in Bislama. Bislama originated in the plantations of Australia and PNG which used to kidnap Ni-Vanuatu and force them to work. The people doing the kidnapping, of course, were rarely considerate enough to take all of their stolen workers from the same village, or even the same island, so the chances were that, if you were a plantation worker, you had no language in common with the other workers. In order to communicate, they cobbled together words and phrases from the languages of their overseers, French and English. Of course, these humble, exploited originators of Bislama had no idea that their tentative pidgin would one day have the distinction of being one of the most ridiculous languages on the planet. While the vast majority of Bislama's vocabulary originates in English, English speakers tend to find it totally incomprehensible when they first hear it. I remember my first experience with the language, at LAX when we were checking in for our flight to Vanuatu. We had all been given the address of the Peace Corps office in Port Vila to be written on our luggage tags. The address included the phrase “Nambatu District.” Nambatu sounded like a pretty exciting and exotic island word to me. Of course, I soon learned nambatu is actually pronounced numba-too, as in “number two.” Number Two District, not nearly as original.
Nowadays I find it hard to believe that an English speaker can't understand Bislama, it just seems like it's staring them right in the face. I mean, hemi klosap tumas lo English, mi tingse ol man bae i kasem olsem nomo, right? Peace Corps volunteers, being native English speakers, tend to catch onto Bislama pretty quickly (like, in a matter of weeks), but I can't help feeling sorry for the Japanese volunteers who, since they usually don't already know English, spend their two years in Vanuatu struggling with Bislama only to be rewarded with moderate fluency in a language that's more to less completely useless anywhere else. We, on the other hand, get to brag about being completely fluent in a new foreign language on our resumes, safe in the knowledge that no potential employer could possibly know that Bislama really doesn't count as a foreign language.
Learning Bislama is about learning how to let go. In fact, that's a good first Bislama word, “lego” (as in “lego my eggo”). Just let go, don't worry about it. Grammar, pronunciation, spelling, structure, just let it all go. We speakers of Romance and Germanic languages love our rules and so we look for them in Bislama, write them down and memorize them, and end up with convoluted and confusing lists of linguistic ordinances. Far easier is to start with the realization that there are no rules, just the occasional guideline. Bislama is all about being good enough. If you can cobble together some words and maybe a few wild gesticulations and get someone to understand that you want a shell of kava, then you're already fluent. None of the spellings are standardized either, and it not uncommon to see a piece of written Bislama where the same word is spelled three different ways in the same sentence (Bislama Scrabble is absurdly easy). Just as important as learning all the rules not to follow is learning all the things you can't say. Question: how would you translate the following sentence into Bislama? “With the money I earned from my job I could have bought a new stereo, but instead I deposited it in my bank account.” Answer : You would never, ever, say this in Vanuatu. In our language classes during training we'd constantly bombard our language instructors with such questions, determined to master the ins and outs of Bislama's present conditional, and we'd receive vague confused answers, which we tried to make sense of. It took a while for us to put together the fact that there often just isn't an answer. Mastering Bislama is more about learning a culture than learning a new vocabulary. Although we don't often think about it, English is much more to us than just a method of communicating with each other. Our language guides the way we look at the world and governs the things we choose to talk about and think about. So, to speak Bislama well you have to stop thinking like an educated American and start thinking like an island villager. Thoughts about truth, meaning, and Halo 3 need to be replaced with thoughts about where various other people in the village are walking to and what kind of yams are in season.
Bislama is a language that values talking over communicating. In English, it is considered proper to speak precisely and concisely until you reach your point, and then stop talking. In Bislama it is custom to speak vaguely and verbosely about something unrelated to your point until it gets to be around kava time and you and whoever you're talking to have a few shells. Thus, while English sports a myriad of vocabulary words that allow one to make nice, succinct arguments, Bislama boasts a tiny vocabulary of words with uncertain meanings to ensure vagueness and overly long conversations. One of the few nouns, for example, is “samting,” from the English word “something,” meaning thing. A variation is “samting ia” from the English “something here,” this thing, or thing-y, if you will. As in “yu bin karem samting ia?”, did you bring that thing-y? Or “yu save samting ia we yumi bin tokabaot?”, you know that thing that you and I were talking before? It's entirely possible to have a long conversation with someone in Bislama and come out of it having absolutely no idea what the other person was talking about. You see, in the village, it just doesn't matter if you get a point across. It's not like there's any sort of vital information that needs to be passed along, people are just trying to pass the time by talking at each other about nothing. Also, when vagueness and misunderstanding fail to generate enough conversation, exaggeration and outright lying are also acceptable. And don't worry about contradicting yourself, that's all part of the fun.
The problem, of course, comes on the other end of the bridge, when people attempt to use Bislama to actually communicate with each other and get things done. Businessmen and government officials in Vila often try to expand the usefulness of Bislama by creating more Bislama words by sticking an “em” onto the end of English words. When used properly, this technique produces a sort of strangely accented English that's slightly more understandable than straight-up Bislama. Often, however, it falls into the wrong hands and English office jargon is mixed with Bislama's incomprehensibility to produce nonsense the likes to which the world has never seen (ie: bae yumi amalgamate-em ol processes blong yumi blong facilitate-em ol business mo utilize-em ol niufala synergy). In the end, however, there's a reason why all Ni-Vanuatu students are required to learn either English or French (strangely, the French schools are far better at teaching French to the Ni-Vans than the English schools are at teaching English, despite the fact that Bislama so closely mirrors English). English and French offer more than just a means of communicating on the international level, they provide a framework for understanding and explaining all sorts of concepts and ideas that are impossible to convey in Bislama or any of the traditional languages for that matter. Unfortunately, many students don't become sufficiently fluent in English to benefit from this. Often, they only learn the English equivalents of the concepts and vocabulary they already know from Bislama, and never use the other 98% of the language, which is kind of like purchasing a supercomputer and using it to surf the web; you're missing out on a whole lot of potential. And so I find myself explaining optical refraction and sound propagation in Bislama in my science class, which is quite simply absurd; when it's put into Bislama, I barely understand it myself. Without a some level of English proficiency, there are some topics that will always remain beyond my student's grasp, Bislama simply does not provide the tools needed to convey them. While it works fine for chatting with people around the village, it is not a language powerful enough for more advanced learning. It's like trying to build a skyscraper with a hammer, while the hammer may have worked well for putting a chair together, in order to tackle a skyscraper you're going to need something a little more high-tech.
And so slowly you resign yourself to the fact that there are certain things that you'll never be able to explain to the people in your village, certain things that they lack the language to understand. Slowly you grow comfortable chatting for hours about someone's new truck or who drank kava where the previous night. But every now and then that sense of stubbornness seizes you and you grow determined that, just this once, you're going to really just take the time to really explain the difference between 50 hertz and 60 hertz current, and everyone's just going to GET IT this time. And you find yourself crouched over on the ground drawing sine curves in the dirt with a stick and saying “you see this thing-y, it goes up on top and then comes back down fifty times in one second and this other thing-y, it's kind of like the first thing-y but different, and it goes...”
Bislama is Vanuatu's black sheep of a language that tries to bridge the gap between the village and the wider world. Bislama is named after a sort of sea slug that the French were apparently really into back in the 1700's and 1800's. The fact that Bislama is named after a sea slug makes about as much sense as anything else in Bislama. Bislama originated in the plantations of Australia and PNG which used to kidnap Ni-Vanuatu and force them to work. The people doing the kidnapping, of course, were rarely considerate enough to take all of their stolen workers from the same village, or even the same island, so the chances were that, if you were a plantation worker, you had no language in common with the other workers. In order to communicate, they cobbled together words and phrases from the languages of their overseers, French and English. Of course, these humble, exploited originators of Bislama had no idea that their tentative pidgin would one day have the distinction of being one of the most ridiculous languages on the planet. While the vast majority of Bislama's vocabulary originates in English, English speakers tend to find it totally incomprehensible when they first hear it. I remember my first experience with the language, at LAX when we were checking in for our flight to Vanuatu. We had all been given the address of the Peace Corps office in Port Vila to be written on our luggage tags. The address included the phrase “Nambatu District.” Nambatu sounded like a pretty exciting and exotic island word to me. Of course, I soon learned nambatu is actually pronounced numba-too, as in “number two.” Number Two District, not nearly as original.
Nowadays I find it hard to believe that an English speaker can't understand Bislama, it just seems like it's staring them right in the face. I mean, hemi klosap tumas lo English, mi tingse ol man bae i kasem olsem nomo, right? Peace Corps volunteers, being native English speakers, tend to catch onto Bislama pretty quickly (like, in a matter of weeks), but I can't help feeling sorry for the Japanese volunteers who, since they usually don't already know English, spend their two years in Vanuatu struggling with Bislama only to be rewarded with moderate fluency in a language that's more to less completely useless anywhere else. We, on the other hand, get to brag about being completely fluent in a new foreign language on our resumes, safe in the knowledge that no potential employer could possibly know that Bislama really doesn't count as a foreign language.
Learning Bislama is about learning how to let go. In fact, that's a good first Bislama word, “lego” (as in “lego my eggo”). Just let go, don't worry about it. Grammar, pronunciation, spelling, structure, just let it all go. We speakers of Romance and Germanic languages love our rules and so we look for them in Bislama, write them down and memorize them, and end up with convoluted and confusing lists of linguistic ordinances. Far easier is to start with the realization that there are no rules, just the occasional guideline. Bislama is all about being good enough. If you can cobble together some words and maybe a few wild gesticulations and get someone to understand that you want a shell of kava, then you're already fluent. None of the spellings are standardized either, and it not uncommon to see a piece of written Bislama where the same word is spelled three different ways in the same sentence (Bislama Scrabble is absurdly easy). Just as important as learning all the rules not to follow is learning all the things you can't say. Question: how would you translate the following sentence into Bislama? “With the money I earned from my job I could have bought a new stereo, but instead I deposited it in my bank account.” Answer : You would never, ever, say this in Vanuatu. In our language classes during training we'd constantly bombard our language instructors with such questions, determined to master the ins and outs of Bislama's present conditional, and we'd receive vague confused answers, which we tried to make sense of. It took a while for us to put together the fact that there often just isn't an answer. Mastering Bislama is more about learning a culture than learning a new vocabulary. Although we don't often think about it, English is much more to us than just a method of communicating with each other. Our language guides the way we look at the world and governs the things we choose to talk about and think about. So, to speak Bislama well you have to stop thinking like an educated American and start thinking like an island villager. Thoughts about truth, meaning, and Halo 3 need to be replaced with thoughts about where various other people in the village are walking to and what kind of yams are in season.
Bislama is a language that values talking over communicating. In English, it is considered proper to speak precisely and concisely until you reach your point, and then stop talking. In Bislama it is custom to speak vaguely and verbosely about something unrelated to your point until it gets to be around kava time and you and whoever you're talking to have a few shells. Thus, while English sports a myriad of vocabulary words that allow one to make nice, succinct arguments, Bislama boasts a tiny vocabulary of words with uncertain meanings to ensure vagueness and overly long conversations. One of the few nouns, for example, is “samting,” from the English word “something,” meaning thing. A variation is “samting ia” from the English “something here,” this thing, or thing-y, if you will. As in “yu bin karem samting ia?”, did you bring that thing-y? Or “yu save samting ia we yumi bin tokabaot?”, you know that thing that you and I were talking before? It's entirely possible to have a long conversation with someone in Bislama and come out of it having absolutely no idea what the other person was talking about. You see, in the village, it just doesn't matter if you get a point across. It's not like there's any sort of vital information that needs to be passed along, people are just trying to pass the time by talking at each other about nothing. Also, when vagueness and misunderstanding fail to generate enough conversation, exaggeration and outright lying are also acceptable. And don't worry about contradicting yourself, that's all part of the fun.
The problem, of course, comes on the other end of the bridge, when people attempt to use Bislama to actually communicate with each other and get things done. Businessmen and government officials in Vila often try to expand the usefulness of Bislama by creating more Bislama words by sticking an “em” onto the end of English words. When used properly, this technique produces a sort of strangely accented English that's slightly more understandable than straight-up Bislama. Often, however, it falls into the wrong hands and English office jargon is mixed with Bislama's incomprehensibility to produce nonsense the likes to which the world has never seen (ie: bae yumi amalgamate-em ol processes blong yumi blong facilitate-em ol business mo utilize-em ol niufala synergy). In the end, however, there's a reason why all Ni-Vanuatu students are required to learn either English or French (strangely, the French schools are far better at teaching French to the Ni-Vans than the English schools are at teaching English, despite the fact that Bislama so closely mirrors English). English and French offer more than just a means of communicating on the international level, they provide a framework for understanding and explaining all sorts of concepts and ideas that are impossible to convey in Bislama or any of the traditional languages for that matter. Unfortunately, many students don't become sufficiently fluent in English to benefit from this. Often, they only learn the English equivalents of the concepts and vocabulary they already know from Bislama, and never use the other 98% of the language, which is kind of like purchasing a supercomputer and using it to surf the web; you're missing out on a whole lot of potential. And so I find myself explaining optical refraction and sound propagation in Bislama in my science class, which is quite simply absurd; when it's put into Bislama, I barely understand it myself. Without a some level of English proficiency, there are some topics that will always remain beyond my student's grasp, Bislama simply does not provide the tools needed to convey them. While it works fine for chatting with people around the village, it is not a language powerful enough for more advanced learning. It's like trying to build a skyscraper with a hammer, while the hammer may have worked well for putting a chair together, in order to tackle a skyscraper you're going to need something a little more high-tech.
And so slowly you resign yourself to the fact that there are certain things that you'll never be able to explain to the people in your village, certain things that they lack the language to understand. Slowly you grow comfortable chatting for hours about someone's new truck or who drank kava where the previous night. But every now and then that sense of stubbornness seizes you and you grow determined that, just this once, you're going to really just take the time to really explain the difference between 50 hertz and 60 hertz current, and everyone's just going to GET IT this time. And you find yourself crouched over on the ground drawing sine curves in the dirt with a stick and saying “you see this thing-y, it goes up on top and then comes back down fifty times in one second and this other thing-y, it's kind of like the first thing-y but different, and it goes...”
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