Yu No Kick Part 11: Flasem Haos Nomo

“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.