Life in the Ring of Fire Part 62: Thanksgiving

The Tautu language feature will be taking a brief hiatus while I am in the US. Yes, I know I'm still writing about stuff in Vanuatu, but I'm a little behind, meaning I'm actually in the States while I'm writing this, and I find it a little hard to think about Tautu language while sitting in a climate controlled house on a comfortable chair in front of a wide screen computer monitor with a cold beverage. Apologies.

Monday kicked off my last week in Malekula before my two month-long vacation (and, in my opinion, much deserved vacation). Although school would not be officially closing until the end of the week, students had long ago stopped attending classes and teachers had recently given up the charade of pretending to teach to no one, so I really hadn't had anything to do for a while and I was getting pretty bored. It was also getting absurdly hot, as summer was kicking into full gear, and so most of my days were spent down at the beach sleeping. Needless to say, I was very much looking forward to escaping to Texas, were it would be winter and thus much colder. As an added perk there would also be TV, Mexican food, movie theaters, beer, margaritas, and takeout. I'd kind of checked out mentally from Vanuatu and was really hoping to just coast through the week, but Vanuatu, as it often does, had other plans.

On Tuesday I went to Lakatoro to lend McKenzie my laptop, as the one she usually uses to check her email had been misbehaving, and afterward the two of us headed to the post office and the bank to hang out (I mean, where else would you hang out on a dusty Tuesday afternoon?), when a white truck with three Ni-Vans pulled up in front of us. One of it's occupants I recognized as a employee of the provincial government.
“Hey!” Yelled one of them, “You need to bring the fridge back to the house on top!”
Jesus, I thought, you've got to be kidding me.
“I told you you could come pick it up,” I explained “it's sitting at my house. I've been waiting for you all weekend.”
“No!” Shouted the guy, “you took it, you come put it back.”
I sensed a long, pointless back-and-forth coming on. Earlier in the year I probably would've taken the polite route and just done what was asked without arguing. Earlier in the year I was concerned with making a good impression on everyone I met and being a model volunteer. But now, to be quite honest, I was fed up. I was tired of the inefficiency and the general uselessness of everyone around me, I was tired of the passive-aggressiveness, the long arguments about nothing, the say-one-thing-but-do-another attitude. I was tired of the excuses and the ridiculous, pointless lies and the inability of everyone to say what they mean. In short, I was ready for a vacation and in absolutely no mood to be accommodating.
“No,” I said “You already told me you'd come pick it up. So come pick it up.”
“Come put it back on top by tomorrow, or we're going to the police,” replied my shouting match partner.
With a great effort, I choked back a laugh. The police? Did they mean my uncle and the two other guys I drink kava with on Fridays? Those police? They want to get them to arrest me? Really?
“The police?” I asked, still not really believing that he'd just said that word.
“Yes, so bring the fridge back by tomorrow!”
“Look,” I said, “if you want me to take the fridge back on top, you're going to have to wait. Maybe I can do it Friday, maybe later.”
The two of us glared at each other for a few seconds and then they drove off. As is typical of arguments in Vanuatu, absolutely nothing had been resolved. I considered my options. The reasonable thing to do, of course, would have been to deliver the fridge, as requested, sometime later in the week because, really, it wasn't that big a deal. Or I could go petty and make the guy-who'd-just-yelled-at-me's life really uncomfortable. I decided to go petty. I headed back to Tautu and went to see Duncan. I explained what had happened to him and, of course, he was totally incensed and said he'd go up to the Provincial offices the next day to yell at people. Childish? Yes. Totally unnecessary? Yes. But I was annoyed. The police threat had really gotten me riled up. The fact that I knew it was complete nonsense made it somehow more irksome. We all have our breaking points I suppose.

The thing about Duncan is that it's totally impossible to argue with him. It's like arguing with a pre-schooler: all of your arguments, no matter how well-reasoned or eloquent they may be, are just met with indifference and loud noises. The next morning two of us found Jimmy's (the man who I'd had it out with the previous day) office and sat down in front of his desk. Jimmy immediately began moving around and clicking his computer's mouse and typing on his keyboard to avoid making eye contract with either of us, despite the fact that his computer was not turned on. Duncan and him went back and forth for a while, I mostly just sat there. In the end, we ended up back where we started: the Province agreed to send a truck for the fridge. But I was pretty sure that none of them would be bothering me at the bank again. In Vanuatu, disputes are resolved entirely by who you know.

Wednesday, things started looking up. I was on the home stretch, I'd be leaving for Vila and then Austin at the end of the week, but first we had a Thanksgiving party to host. Simon, a New Zealand volunteer and a friend of Laura's, was scheduled to fly in sometime during the afternoon for the occasion and Laura had come down from Matanvat to meet him. I met the two of them on the beach near the airport and we surveyed what goodies Simon had brought from Vila. He'd done a fairly good job, bringing several bottles of South Pacific Comfort and a selection of fruit juices to use as mixers. He also brought a couple boxes of coconut milk, knowing that we were in possession of a blender and thus could make pinya-coladas. All of us Malekula volunteers thought that this was very funny. We'd all come to think of coconuts and all coconut-derived products as being free for the taking. I mean, all you have to do is walk outside, find a coconut, remove its husk with a sharpened wooden stake, split it in half with a machete, scrape out the meat with a jagged metal ring, mix the shavings with a bit of water, ring them out and, bingo, coconut milk. How hard is that? Who'd be crazy enough to actually spend money on purchasing coconut milk in a box? People who live in Vila, apparently. Actually, we all ended up admitting that it did make the process of drink production significantly less time consuming.

McKenzie joined us later that evening bringing with her ten plastic, 50ml packets of tequila which her family had sent her earlier that week. She explained that the plastic pouches were designed to be slipped into one's pocket, bra, or pants for sneaking alcohol into concerts. I was pleased that the long-overlooked needs of under-boozed concert-goers were finally being addressed. Fortunately, they were equally useful for slipping past customs officials and thus we were able to make frozen margaritas for the second time in a month, which has got to be some sort of record for Peace Corps Vanuatu.

Thursday Chris came up to join us for Thanksgiving, a day that was devoted entirely to cooking and eating (it goes without saying, my kind of day). We'd decided to go with the theme of a midwest thanksgiving, a idea inspired by the fact that Elin had left behind three packets of instant mashed potatoes that we hadn't gotten around to eating yet. Laura had also purchased some cranberry sauce the last time she'd been in Vila (unfortunately the cranberry sauce came in a jar, not a can, thus meaning that we would not be able to enjoy our cranberries in gelatinous, can-shaped form), which fit in reasonably well. We rounded out the meal with green beans (going against the theme a little bit, we were only able to get our hands on fresh green beans. Chris and I had discussed how one might make fresh green beans taste like canned green beans, but eventually had decided against doing such things as grossly overcooking them and marinating them in salt water overnight), tuna helper from a box, and mashed sweet potatoes with marshmallows melted on top. We were, of course, missing the crucial ingredient: a butterball turkey. On a suggestion from Laura, we decided to make a meatloaf instead. I was a little shocked to discover that the principal ingredient of meatloaf was, in fact, ketchup, but it actually turned out pretty well. We had a bit of a crisis early in the afternoon when it was discovered that the market that day had no pumpkins for sale, seriously threatening our evening's pumpkin pie. Fortunately, McKenzie come through for us by persistently pestering the Ni-Vans at the market until someone agreed to sell her a pumpkin. One pumpkin produces a surprisingly large amount of mashed pumpkin goop, however, so we ended up making a pumpkin soup in addition to the pie to use up the excess. The whole meal was topped off with some not-so-midwestern pinya-coladas made from boxed coconut milk. So, not quite a Thanksgiving at home, but pretty good nonetheless.

Friday was the official closing for my school. There were speeches, of course, and various awards given out to kids for excelling in such important categories as penmanship and being quiet in class (the competition for this award must have been pretty intense, the kids in my class rarely raise their voices above the stealthy-nighttime-bank-heist level). I was somewhat pleased, however, that I was asked to fill the role of the useless guy who stands next to the person announcing the awards and shakes hands with everyone as they come up to collect their prize. We also celebrated the fourteenth consecutive month of our new school building's opening being delayed.

Sunday was my last day in Malekula and, since Duncan and Linda were pretty sure there was at least a fifty percent chance that I wouldn't be coming back from my vacation in the US (volunteers kind of have a history of going back to their home counties for a holiday and not returning), they decided to throw me a going away party, just in case. Duncan had procured two pigs for the occasion, one for the going away, and one to keep in reserve on the off-chance that I'd come back and they'd need to throw a welcome back party. Duncan's pig roasting skills had improved significantly since I'd explained to him how slow-cooking meat could make it significantly more tender. The previous night, they'd fired (literally, it's just a stone box that you heat up by building a fire in and then use to bake) up my uncle's big bread oven and put the pig in. By lunchtime, it had been cooking for a solid sixteen hours or so and was fall-off-the-bone tender. We stuffed ourselves with meat and the usual assortment of carbohydrates: rice, sweet potatoes and yams, and then passed out underneath a tree to nap through the heat of the afternoon. That evening, I had my last kava with my relatives and said my goodbyes. I reflected that it would be almost two months before I'd be watching the stars at Duncan's nakamal, an activity which had easily consumed the majority of my time during the last year. Still, I was glad for the upcoming break and, unlike my Ni-Van friends and family, I was absolutely certain I'd be back.