When I think about Malekula, the first thing that pops into my head is invariably coconuts. As one descends in a plane into our airport, the only thing really to see are row upon row of slender coconut trees dotting a field of low-cut greenery. Malekula is the copra-producing capital of Vanuatu, which is about as dubious a distinction as being, say, the septic tank producing capital of somewhere. Copra is a vile-smelling agricultural product made by drying coconut meat over a fire. It's supposedly used to make things like soap, but I find it hard to imagine anything pleasant possibly resulting from it. Apparently copra used to be a hot commodity back in the day, as the British and French ran enormous plantations all over the South Pacific in order to make the stuff. These days, making copra completely by hand, as is done in Vanuatu, is kind of like mining coal with a pickax: it's a giant pain, the end product isn't really even all that valuable, and everyone else in the world uses machines that do the work about a thousand times faster. In order to ensure that no one in the country accidentally tries to make or grow something that might actually be exportable, the Vanuatu government jacks up the price of copra with subsidies to something astronomically above the actual price. And so, instead of growing things like kava or sandalwood, which actually fetch a high price on the world market, the vast majority of people on Malekula still grow coconut trees and spend their days tending their copra fires. I don't really know what the government does with all the copra it ends up buying at ridiculously high prices, but I suspect it gets chucked in the ocean.
The largest coconut plantation on Malekula is called the PRV (which is probably an acronym for something, but nobody seems to know what), and it encompasses Tautu, Norsup, and Lakatoro (basically, the entire area surrounding where I live). It is their coconut trees that you see from the plane as you come in to land, the runway cut from amongst the towering palms. It is their trees that line the road from the airport to the town of Lakatoro and it is their trees that dominate the landscape as you gaze out from the beach in Norsup. Coconut groves are striking because of how empty they always seem. Coconuts are a very no-nonsense kind of tree. They don't bother with such frivolities as branches and limbs, their trunks shoot single-mindedly upward, thrusting their palmy canopies right into the face of the sun, like a cheerleader raising a pom-pom. Their forms seem to somehow defy gravity. Most trees grow cautiously, their trunks thick at the base and anchored to the ground with a myriad to thick roots, but coconuts will have none of this. Their trunks are as slender at the base as they are at the top and when you see them lined up and swaying in the wind they seem decidedly alien and impossible. The thin, branch-less trunks leave a lot of space on the ground, however, so you can walk through a dense grove of coconut trees and feel like you're in a mostly empty field. Those serious about growing a lot of coconuts worry about rats climbing up the trees and eating the green coconuts. To prevent this, they wrap a sheet of metal around a small section of the trunk. Although the rat's sharp claws give it traction to climb up the bark of the tree, when it gets to the metal it can no longer get a hold. When these metal bands catch the sun as you drive by a plantation the unreal feeling is complete: row upon row of improbably slender trees rocking back and forth and glinting in the sunlight.
Unlike turning coconuts into copra, the actual growing of coconuts is the easiest thing in the world. Coconuts fall from the trees well-equipped to face the hazards of the world. These well-armored seeds can actually be hazardous to the unsuspecting passerby. Falling coconuts have been known to cause serious injury if they happen to fall on someone from a particularly tall tree, as it's sort of the equivalent of having a rock dropped on you from the top of a three-story building. I've even heard stories of people being killed by falling coconuts, which has got to be one of the more embarrassing epitaphs to have on one's gravestone. The fall of a coconut is proceeded by a loud snap as the fiber anchoring it to the tree breaks. Live in Vanuatu long enough and hearing such a noise has you instantly covering your head with your arms (the beginner's move is to look up upon hearing the noise to see where the coconut is going to fall, but pros know that by the time you're able to locate the coconut, it's most likely already hit you). It's not just people who are at risk from falling coconuts; drivers unfortunate enough (or careless enough) to not check the skies for overhanging coconuts before parking their cars may return to find their windshields broken or hoods caved in.
The coconut tree's rock-like reproductive capsules consist of two layers, the first being a tough, fibrous husk. If you're trying to get into a coconut to eat it, this is the most difficult layer to remove (if you buy a coconut at the grocery store in the US, this work has already been done for you). The husk protects spherical nut whose hard shell seems daunting at first, but is actually surprisingly bitter. Rapping it with a knife is the preferred method for opening, but actually repeatedly striking it against any hard surface will do the trick. What the coconut is hiding behind all this protection is an inner shell of rich, fatty meat and a good deal of water, start-up resources for a new tree. Given the complexity and size of the coconut, and thus the energy required of the tree to make it, one would think that a given tree would only produce a few nuts a year. Coconut trees are always ripe with fruit, however, which, I suppose, just goes to show just how much solar energy is available in the South Pacific. Coconut are kind of egg-shaped and on the small end of the egg there's a sort of eye. When triggered by some kind of magical coconut sense, the eye will sprout a small palm that begins to reach skyward. Roots begin to punch through the husk and dig into the ground. Soon the coconut is anchored firmly in the ground and is growing strong.
On a plantation, the base of the coconut trees must be cleared regularly to guard against the mile-a-minute vine. The mile-a-minute vine was introduced to Vanuatu during World War II by the Americans in order to provide cover so as not to be seen from the air. The vine grows ridiculously quickly (hence the name), and likes to climb up coconut trees and smother them. It winds its way up the tree, it's large, heart-shaped leaves completely obscuring the view of the trunk as it climbs. When it reaches the palm at the top it spreads out, weaving its way around the coconut's leaves and effectively tying them up against the trunk, making them useless for collecting sunlight. Eventually, the vine ensnares all of the coconut's leaves and the tree begins to die and rot. When the trunk weakens and finally collapses, it will take all of the mile-a-minute vine out with it, but the vine does not seem to be a particularly forward-thinking kind of plant.
Despite the aggressiveness of this invader, the coconut is still pulling strong, which is a good thing because coconut trees have a myriad of uses in Vanuatu. Basically every bit of the coconut tree can be put to some use if needed. The meat of the nut, obviously, can be eaten and (if you really, really want to) made into copra. The meat can also be grated and squeezed to extract the milk, and the milk can be boiled until it is reduced to a cream and coconut oil skimmed off the top (the dried meat can actually be cold-pressed to extract the oil directly, but this technology is not native and was brought over by the Europeans). The water contained in the nut is a sure source of hydration if you're in the bush and can't find a stream to drink from. Coconut shells and husks are used for firewood, and the fibrous material that fastens the husk to the shell makes excellent tinder. The trunk itself can be used as a building material if ever anything needs to be hastily put together (coconut woods is soft, easy to work with, and readily available, but rots quickly and thus is not often used for permanent structures). Coconut logs cut into cylinders are often used as columns and coconut wood slats made from cutting the wood longways make surprisingly comfortable benches. The wooden, squid-like fruiting body that connects the coconuts to the tree can be used as a broom to clean your house or burned as kindling. Coconut fronds are used a fencing material; they can be slid between two supporting branches (with the branches running parallel to the ground) and will keep chickens and dogs out. Each individual long leaves of the coconut front has a stiff spine that can be removed and used as a skewer for cooking or a lot of spines can be bundled together to form a more effective broom than can be achieved with the fruiting body. Finally, where a frond connects to the trunk, a sort of fibrous mesh grows which can be used as a strainer to sieve kava or coconut milk. I once tried explaining to Duncan that, in the US, some people are deathly allergic to coconut and ingesting just a little bit of coconut leads to a life-threatening reaction. He just laughed at me and told me that that wasn't possible. In Vanuatu, you see, coconuts are an essential part of life.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Yu No Kick Part 13: Class Time
I usually teach in the mornings. Despite my general disdain for mornings, this is actually a good thing. Even in the thick of the hot season, the hours before 9AM are generally tolerable. It becomes difficult to teach a class when you can't even see what you're writing on the board because there's too much sweat dripping into your eyes. Heat also makes pretty much everyone want to be somewhere besides a tin-roofed classroom. Hence, morning classes are the way to go. Mondays and Tuesdays I get the prime 7:30-9:30 slots for my math class and so I get to check out and go sit in front of my fan as heat of the day starts to set in. Wednesdays and Thursdays I get the 10:00-11:30 slot, which is not as ideal, but still better than an afternoon class. Fridays is a half day and so I only teach from 7:30-8:30. I have one afternoon class on Tuesdays 1:30-2:30, which is invariably my most unpleasant and the one I'm most likely to curtail in favor of some small assignment for my kids to work on outside. At first glance, a school in Vanuatu may seem to be only a few steps away from total chaos. Upon closer inspection, however, it's revealed to actually be total chaos. Accurate timekeeping is important in maritime navigation as it allows you to determine your longitude by measuring the difference between the local time where you are and a reference time. Similarly, accurate timekeeping is important for maintaining an orderly school environment as it lays a groundwork upon which one can build things like schedules and lesson plans. Unfortunately, Vanuatu lacks a method of accurate timekeeping. It's not so much that accurate timepieces are unavailable (actually now, thanks to Digicel, almost everyone has a cellphone with a built-in clock), but rather that the numbers read off of a timepiece are not connected to reality in any meaningful way. So, while a person may be able to glance at their cell phone and determine that it is, in fact, 7:30, the connection isn't always made that school starts at 7:30 and thus they should be at school as opposed to still hanging out at home. Actually, the problem isn't so much of with the students as it is with the teachers, which isn't to say that the kids are always timely and punctual, but rather that since none of the teachers are timely and punctual, the student's punctuality is irrelevant. It's very much a top-down problem. Since not every kid can be counted upon to have a watch at home, the beginning of school is announced with three bells (which are the bane of my existence), one at 6:30, one at 7:00 and one at 7:30. This seems reasonable, except that the bell must be rung manually and thus ends up being rung whenever the headmaster thinks of it instead of being on a fixed schedule. Some days the bells are only a couple minutes off, some days they're half an hour off or don't happen at all. Mondays are especially patchy and we often don't get the last bell until 8 or 8:30.
How good the teachers are about showing up on time seems to be proportional to how far away we are from a weekend. Wednesdays almost everyone shows up at a reasonable time, Mondays almost no one does. Students tend to mirror this behavior, and it's hard to blame them. If their teachers don't show up, they just get to goof off outside anyway. On Mondays and Fridays we don't even get to start right away as there's an assembly. Everyone gathers in the sixth grade classroom (the largest classroom) and all of the teachers who've showed up sit down in front of them. We start by greeting each other. One by one the teachers stand up and say “Good morning everyone” and all of the kids chant back “goodmorningmister(or Miss) – (whatever the teacher's name is)” in a monotone that makes the robot on automated voice mail messages seems surprisingly lifelike. Then they all sing a few church songs and the teacher on duty, which changes every week (but is never me because I declined to be put on the duty roster), gets up and recites a bible passage and tries to relate it to a valuable life lesson. Now, it seems to me that there are a lot of very famous bible passages with a lot of very famous life lessons attached to them from which to choose, but most people seem to just pick a passage at random because they're always a really obscure verse from some really obscure book that no one ever talks about and generally seem to be, like, description or background information as opposed to an actual teaching. They then have to come up with some really convoluted explanation to draw a valuable lesson from a passage that goes something like “Then Jesus walked from one town to another.” Full points for creativity, I suppose. Finally, we come to headmaster's announcements, which is always the longest part of the assembly as the headmaster likes to expound at length about the importance of wearing uniforms and being on time to school. When we finally actually start school it's usually something like 8:15 or 8:30 (my class starts at 7:30 on Mondays, remember?) because the assembly for some reason isn't written into the school schedule. So, bottom line, when I walk into my class somewhere between 45 minutes and an hour after it was supposed to have started to give my lesson, I feel like I'm working at a fairly huge disadvantage. Assigning punishments to kids who walk in tardy (and yes, some kids still do manage to be late to class despite the fact that they've had an extra hour to get to school) seems just a little bit ridiculous and besides, if I punished everyone who was late, I'd pretty much be punishing everyone. It's also kind of difficult to call a class to order when half the school is still running around outside screaming because their teachers haven't showed yet.
On non-assembly days starting class is a little easier, but you never really get to walk into a classroom with all of your students calmly waiting inside for the lesson to start (don't confuse calm with quiet. I don't expect kids to wait quietly. Everyone likes to talk. I'd settle for there not being any brawls going on when I walk in the door). Grade Eight, which I teach, does not have one teacher, but several, each teaching different subjects. So at several points during the day, we have to change teachers. Except, since there's no one keeping an accurate schedule, there's no telling when this will happen. Sometimes the stars will align and one teacher will be leaving just as the next one is showing up, but more often one teacher will leave and it will be a good half hour before the next one comes. Or sometimes one teacher will come to find that the previous one hasn't finished yet and so head back home. Understandably, the kids don't wait in their classrooms for the teacher, the spread out to various corners of the school yard and do whatever it is kids do to amuse themselves. When it looks to them like a teacher's about to be entering a classroom, they start meandering back over. This takes a while. The school yard's not that big, but hurrying isn't really a concept here, so there will often be a long delay between receiving the visual information that a teacher is in the classroom and activating the motor skills needed to walk back inside. Simply walking into a classroom and starting a lesson tends to generate confusion, so I try to give the kids as much time as possible. I slowly walk from my house across the schoolyard to the office to get chalk, thus signaling to everyone that class is about to begin. I then go back to my house and putter around for a few minutes inside, pretending to get my things together. Then I walk into the classroom and put my stuff down on the teacher's desk, do a survey of the classroom, sigh and, pretending to have forgotten something, walk back to my house and return with a piece or paper or a pencil or a similarly school-related, yet unnecessary object. Then I pick up the eraser (actually just a piece of cloth) and start slowly erasing the board, which actually does take a while as cloth isn't the ideal board wiping material and our blackboard is especially sticky or something and thus is a real pain to wipe down. Even if the board is already pretty well erased when I enter, I pretend that the previous eraser did an unsatisfactory job and go about touching it up. By this point usually about 90% of the students who came to school that day have made it inside (on a given day I'll have 1-4 kids out of 32 absent, which is actually pretty good for Vanuatu). Finally, I write a warm-up exercise on the board, usually consisting of about five questions, to give the students who've made it to class already something to do and students who haven't a few more minutes to get inside.
Most of the lower grade's classes seem to be largely chant-based. When I finally get my kids quieted down a bit and working I can hear the other classes in progress around the school. “bananasareafruitfoundmostlyintropicalclimatestheyrequirelotsofrainandlotsofsunlighttogrow,” that's probably an agriculture class. “australiaisthesmallestcontinentintheworldandishometoonlyonecountry,” social studies. “threetimesthreeisninethreetimesfouristwelve,” math. “blahblahblahblahblahblahblahblah,” that's French. By the time they hit Grades 7 and 8, however, they've advanced from chanting to copying. When I come into class right after another teacher has left, I generally find the kids hard at work precisely copying a blackboard full of text into their notebooks. They've grown somewhat comfortable with my science class, as it to requires at least some amount of copying from the board, but they're still flummoxed by my math course, during which I write relatively little on the board. Instead, I expect them to solve math problems, an expectation that some students have obviously never had a teacher expect of them. A healthy portion of my kids still try and translate math problems into copying problems. They try and spend most of the time I allot for solving a problem transcribing the problem into their workbooks. They use a ruler and red pen to draw nice, red boarders around each of the pages, then switch to a blue pen to write any words (if I'm giving word problems) and the problem numbers. Numbers and math symbols in the problem are written in red and then the solution is written in pencil, and all problems have to be copied before work can begin on the first one. Generally they'll copy one question and then leave just one ruled line blank to work the problem and write the answer in. This works fine if the question is something like 4x8, but doesn't really pan out as well for things like decimal division. Also, there's about 1 red pen, ruler, and blue pen to every six students so this procedure is significantly lengthened by the fact that they have to spend a lot of time shouting at/hitting their friend to get them to pass the pen/ruler and recovering the pen/ruler from outside when it is accidentally chucked out a window during the passing process. I always spend a lot of time emphasizing the fact that I'm not handing out any points for neatness and that 1) they should choose one writing implement and stick to it, 2) rulers should really only be used when measuring the length of something and 3) they should finish working out one problem before copying the next one into their notebooks. Actually, that last point is one of my very few class rules. Unlike other teachers, I don't care if they speak Bislama or wear their uniforms everyday (a problem because you can't exactly go to the uniform store around here) or curse or sweep the classroom at the end of the day. All I really want is for them to attempt to do some math as opposed to copy stuff from the board. Some kids do take my advice. They write only in pencil, forgo the ruler, go through the problems one at a time, and finish my exercises in record time. Others I think have yet to finish an in-class exercise.
Unfortunately, a lot of students spend all their time copying things incredibly neatly into their books not because they think that their teachers require it of them, which was my original theory, but rather because copying is really the only part of the class they're comfortable doing. This also leads to a lot of cheating. Interestingly though, a lot of teachers put work on the board and then leave the classroom as the kids work on it, even during exams. This means that most kids are horrible at cheating because they've never had to be subtle about it. There's never been anyone watching them. Thus, I tend to be angered by their cheating, not because of any ethical or moral stance on my part, but rather because I feel insulted that they think I'm dumb enough not to notice that they've got their head on their friend's shoulder and are copying his answers, or that they have their notes open next to them on their desk.
As an education volunteer, I'm supposed to be working to improve the quality of education in Vanuatu. Often I feel like this is kind of like trying to repair a car that's spent eight years sitting on the bottom of a lake: it doesn't seem like repair is really the appropriate solution, rather replacement sounds like the way to go. Sure, some problems are small and seem solvable, like shortages of school supplies, old or poorly maintained buildings and facilities, or insufficient curriculum materials. But many problems are far more entrenched and systemic, like the language of instruction being a language that many students and even some teachers do not fully understand, or the fact that teachers are employed by the ministry of education, not by the schools, meaning that headmasters do not have the authority to fire their teachers or even dock their pay for not attending. And some problems even stem into the cultural realm, like a drastically different conception of the meaning of time or the importance of education. As just one recent college graduate (in a field having basically nothing to do with education, no less), here for just a couple years, the idea that I'm going to somehow fix this system seems a little ridiculous. I usually de-scope this goal and instead see if I can offer a slightly better math course to a few kids than they would otherwise receive, although whether or not this would even be all that beneficial to them in the long run is anyone's guess. Bottom line, I guess, is that the best way to procure a top-notch western education in Vanuatu is to go to Australia. Fortunately, top-notch western educations aren't usually a prerequisite for enjoying a nice beach.
How good the teachers are about showing up on time seems to be proportional to how far away we are from a weekend. Wednesdays almost everyone shows up at a reasonable time, Mondays almost no one does. Students tend to mirror this behavior, and it's hard to blame them. If their teachers don't show up, they just get to goof off outside anyway. On Mondays and Fridays we don't even get to start right away as there's an assembly. Everyone gathers in the sixth grade classroom (the largest classroom) and all of the teachers who've showed up sit down in front of them. We start by greeting each other. One by one the teachers stand up and say “Good morning everyone” and all of the kids chant back “goodmorningmister(or Miss) – (whatever the teacher's name is)” in a monotone that makes the robot on automated voice mail messages seems surprisingly lifelike. Then they all sing a few church songs and the teacher on duty, which changes every week (but is never me because I declined to be put on the duty roster), gets up and recites a bible passage and tries to relate it to a valuable life lesson. Now, it seems to me that there are a lot of very famous bible passages with a lot of very famous life lessons attached to them from which to choose, but most people seem to just pick a passage at random because they're always a really obscure verse from some really obscure book that no one ever talks about and generally seem to be, like, description or background information as opposed to an actual teaching. They then have to come up with some really convoluted explanation to draw a valuable lesson from a passage that goes something like “Then Jesus walked from one town to another.” Full points for creativity, I suppose. Finally, we come to headmaster's announcements, which is always the longest part of the assembly as the headmaster likes to expound at length about the importance of wearing uniforms and being on time to school. When we finally actually start school it's usually something like 8:15 or 8:30 (my class starts at 7:30 on Mondays, remember?) because the assembly for some reason isn't written into the school schedule. So, bottom line, when I walk into my class somewhere between 45 minutes and an hour after it was supposed to have started to give my lesson, I feel like I'm working at a fairly huge disadvantage. Assigning punishments to kids who walk in tardy (and yes, some kids still do manage to be late to class despite the fact that they've had an extra hour to get to school) seems just a little bit ridiculous and besides, if I punished everyone who was late, I'd pretty much be punishing everyone. It's also kind of difficult to call a class to order when half the school is still running around outside screaming because their teachers haven't showed yet.
On non-assembly days starting class is a little easier, but you never really get to walk into a classroom with all of your students calmly waiting inside for the lesson to start (don't confuse calm with quiet. I don't expect kids to wait quietly. Everyone likes to talk. I'd settle for there not being any brawls going on when I walk in the door). Grade Eight, which I teach, does not have one teacher, but several, each teaching different subjects. So at several points during the day, we have to change teachers. Except, since there's no one keeping an accurate schedule, there's no telling when this will happen. Sometimes the stars will align and one teacher will be leaving just as the next one is showing up, but more often one teacher will leave and it will be a good half hour before the next one comes. Or sometimes one teacher will come to find that the previous one hasn't finished yet and so head back home. Understandably, the kids don't wait in their classrooms for the teacher, the spread out to various corners of the school yard and do whatever it is kids do to amuse themselves. When it looks to them like a teacher's about to be entering a classroom, they start meandering back over. This takes a while. The school yard's not that big, but hurrying isn't really a concept here, so there will often be a long delay between receiving the visual information that a teacher is in the classroom and activating the motor skills needed to walk back inside. Simply walking into a classroom and starting a lesson tends to generate confusion, so I try to give the kids as much time as possible. I slowly walk from my house across the schoolyard to the office to get chalk, thus signaling to everyone that class is about to begin. I then go back to my house and putter around for a few minutes inside, pretending to get my things together. Then I walk into the classroom and put my stuff down on the teacher's desk, do a survey of the classroom, sigh and, pretending to have forgotten something, walk back to my house and return with a piece or paper or a pencil or a similarly school-related, yet unnecessary object. Then I pick up the eraser (actually just a piece of cloth) and start slowly erasing the board, which actually does take a while as cloth isn't the ideal board wiping material and our blackboard is especially sticky or something and thus is a real pain to wipe down. Even if the board is already pretty well erased when I enter, I pretend that the previous eraser did an unsatisfactory job and go about touching it up. By this point usually about 90% of the students who came to school that day have made it inside (on a given day I'll have 1-4 kids out of 32 absent, which is actually pretty good for Vanuatu). Finally, I write a warm-up exercise on the board, usually consisting of about five questions, to give the students who've made it to class already something to do and students who haven't a few more minutes to get inside.
Most of the lower grade's classes seem to be largely chant-based. When I finally get my kids quieted down a bit and working I can hear the other classes in progress around the school. “bananasareafruitfoundmostlyintropicalclimatestheyrequirelotsofrainandlotsofsunlighttogrow,” that's probably an agriculture class. “australiaisthesmallestcontinentintheworldandishometoonlyonecountry,” social studies. “threetimesthreeisninethreetimesfouristwelve,” math. “blahblahblahblahblahblahblahblah,” that's French. By the time they hit Grades 7 and 8, however, they've advanced from chanting to copying. When I come into class right after another teacher has left, I generally find the kids hard at work precisely copying a blackboard full of text into their notebooks. They've grown somewhat comfortable with my science class, as it to requires at least some amount of copying from the board, but they're still flummoxed by my math course, during which I write relatively little on the board. Instead, I expect them to solve math problems, an expectation that some students have obviously never had a teacher expect of them. A healthy portion of my kids still try and translate math problems into copying problems. They try and spend most of the time I allot for solving a problem transcribing the problem into their workbooks. They use a ruler and red pen to draw nice, red boarders around each of the pages, then switch to a blue pen to write any words (if I'm giving word problems) and the problem numbers. Numbers and math symbols in the problem are written in red and then the solution is written in pencil, and all problems have to be copied before work can begin on the first one. Generally they'll copy one question and then leave just one ruled line blank to work the problem and write the answer in. This works fine if the question is something like 4x8, but doesn't really pan out as well for things like decimal division. Also, there's about 1 red pen, ruler, and blue pen to every six students so this procedure is significantly lengthened by the fact that they have to spend a lot of time shouting at/hitting their friend to get them to pass the pen/ruler and recovering the pen/ruler from outside when it is accidentally chucked out a window during the passing process. I always spend a lot of time emphasizing the fact that I'm not handing out any points for neatness and that 1) they should choose one writing implement and stick to it, 2) rulers should really only be used when measuring the length of something and 3) they should finish working out one problem before copying the next one into their notebooks. Actually, that last point is one of my very few class rules. Unlike other teachers, I don't care if they speak Bislama or wear their uniforms everyday (a problem because you can't exactly go to the uniform store around here) or curse or sweep the classroom at the end of the day. All I really want is for them to attempt to do some math as opposed to copy stuff from the board. Some kids do take my advice. They write only in pencil, forgo the ruler, go through the problems one at a time, and finish my exercises in record time. Others I think have yet to finish an in-class exercise.
Unfortunately, a lot of students spend all their time copying things incredibly neatly into their books not because they think that their teachers require it of them, which was my original theory, but rather because copying is really the only part of the class they're comfortable doing. This also leads to a lot of cheating. Interestingly though, a lot of teachers put work on the board and then leave the classroom as the kids work on it, even during exams. This means that most kids are horrible at cheating because they've never had to be subtle about it. There's never been anyone watching them. Thus, I tend to be angered by their cheating, not because of any ethical or moral stance on my part, but rather because I feel insulted that they think I'm dumb enough not to notice that they've got their head on their friend's shoulder and are copying his answers, or that they have their notes open next to them on their desk.
As an education volunteer, I'm supposed to be working to improve the quality of education in Vanuatu. Often I feel like this is kind of like trying to repair a car that's spent eight years sitting on the bottom of a lake: it doesn't seem like repair is really the appropriate solution, rather replacement sounds like the way to go. Sure, some problems are small and seem solvable, like shortages of school supplies, old or poorly maintained buildings and facilities, or insufficient curriculum materials. But many problems are far more entrenched and systemic, like the language of instruction being a language that many students and even some teachers do not fully understand, or the fact that teachers are employed by the ministry of education, not by the schools, meaning that headmasters do not have the authority to fire their teachers or even dock their pay for not attending. And some problems even stem into the cultural realm, like a drastically different conception of the meaning of time or the importance of education. As just one recent college graduate (in a field having basically nothing to do with education, no less), here for just a couple years, the idea that I'm going to somehow fix this system seems a little ridiculous. I usually de-scope this goal and instead see if I can offer a slightly better math course to a few kids than they would otherwise receive, although whether or not this would even be all that beneficial to them in the long run is anyone's guess. Bottom line, I guess, is that the best way to procure a top-notch western education in Vanuatu is to go to Australia. Fortunately, top-notch western educations aren't usually a prerequisite for enjoying a nice beach.
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Yu No Kick Part 12: Musical Interludes
When I came to Vanuatu, I tried to come prepared. I knew from time spent backpacking and doing other wilderness activities the importance of music for maintaining one's sanity. It's not so much that listening to music is a pleasant way to pass the time (which it is), but rather that, in the absence of an external source of music, my mind has this tendency to provide it's own soundtrack for my life. This can be pleasant if, say, you've got a good selection of Beatles constantly rolling around in the back of your head, but it can be maddening if you're stuck with the Meow Mix song. Thus, it's important to have music of your own to counter with in order to flush out the old internal soundtrack every once in a while. When I left the US, I carefully put together a music collection on my laptop consisting of a few thousand songs that I thought might come in handy. I tried to be as broad as possible, throwing in as many different genres and artists as I could because it's hard to predict what kind of situations are going to arise, and so it's best to be prepared. And we really do have a staggering amount of music to choose from in the States, and all of it so different. It's kind of mind boggling. In Vanuatu things are a lot simpler. Going along with it's lackluster cuisine, Vanuatu also decided that it would be best if they skipped the whole music phase of their cultural development. As far as I know, there are only a couple instruments that are native to Vanuatu. The first is the tam-tam, a wooden still drum, so basically a log that's been hollowed out and is beaten with a stick to produce sound only slightly more pleasing to the ear than banging two sticks together (and there are a couple custom dances I've seen that incorporate the banging-sticks-together instrument). Well, that might be a little harsh. Tam-tams do make a nice, dense, natural, wood-like sound, which is kind of cool, but just not particularly interesting. I mean, I can't envision a lot of online lists of people's top ten all time favorite tam-tam solos. Actually, for the most part, tam-tams are used as like bells to get people's attention for meetings and such, a much more pleasant alternative to banging on an empty metal acetylene canister.
The second all-Vanuatu instrument is the heart of what's called a string band, which is the closest thing Vanuatu has to its own style of music. I'm not even sure what the instrument is called, or if it even has a name, but it's a large wooden box with a hinged stick protruding from one of the top corner. A cord connects the end of the stick with the center of the box. The musician uses the stick to adjust the tension in the cord and plucks it to make music. In a string band, the box player is accompanied by a couple guitars, maybe some keyboard synth, a few guys with rattles, and a singer belting it in Bislama. Traditionally, all the band members are supposed to dress up in matching, overly colorful Hawaiian shirts. The thing about string band is that there's only so many different notes you can make with a string tied to a box, so all the songs tend to sound the same. I mean, like, really the same, not like how old people say rock music all sounds the same. Literally, the tune of every string band song is almost identical. The only real difference is in the lyrics. When I first got to Vanuatu, I spent a day with my training group in a pool at a resort in Vila. The entire day we kept hearing the same song repeated over and over again, and most of us just assumed the resort had a single CD on infinite repeat. It was only later that we discovered that it was actually a live band playing, and that they were actually playing different songs, it's just that all their songs sounded alike. There are also string band music videos, most of which were very obviously made by some guy who'd only just downloaded Final Cut Pro off the internet a few days prior and usually feature the lead singer superimposed a slide show of various pictures from around Vanuatu.
Another common musical genre in Vanuatu is church songs, which one tends to get exposed to at least three or four times a day, independent of whether or not you happen to be at church. My school, and, I think, most schools, are big on the church songs and most classes get kicked off with a chorus, as they're called. Some of these choruses are in English and this, combined with the fact that a lot of the people singing them are horrendous singers and have only a very limited command of the English language, means that they mostly sound like total gibberish with the word “Jesus” occasionally mixed in. Other choruses are in Bislama or, even better, a mix of English and Bislama, which renders them slightly more comprehensible because the people singing at least understand what the words to the song mean. A personal favorite of mine, and probably every Peace Corps volunteer in Vanuatu, is a chorus called “Jesus is the Winner-man,” winner-man being an English-Bislama-ism meaning someone who always wins at everything, or is just generally awesome. The thing is that no one ever gets the pronunciation quite right, so it always, always ends up sounding like wiener-man. So it's really amusing to be sitting in church listening to the entire congregation sing “Jesus is the wiener-man, the wiener-man, the wiener-man. Jesus is the wiener-man, the wiener man all the time.”
Aside from the locally produced music, it's always funny what kinds of foreign music manage to catch on over here. Of course, Reggae is really huge, as it is almost everywhere except the US, from my understanding, which probably accounts for the enormous number of people one sees every day wearing shirts with giant pictures of Bob Marley on them and why every village has at least seven people in it named Bob Marley. There's also a slow trickle of pop music that makes it here from the Solomon Islands and the Philippines, because, I guess, they're the closest musically inclined countries. Solomon and Philippine music is usually very heavy on the synth and often have beats and tunes ripped off from popular American groups and overlayed with different music. So, I'll often hear a beat I recognize and get all excited because it's a song a like from the States only to be sorely let down a few seconds later with I realize that the lyrics are in the Philippine Spanish-English pidgin and thus were probably not written by Snoop Dogg. I'm not really sure why, but songs from abroad tend to arrive one at a time. So one week everyone will be rocking the latest new song over, and over, and over again without interruption and then the next week they'll have moved on to the next one. Thus, when someone asks you “have you heard that one good song?” or “do you have the music video for the song?” it's not that hard to figure out what they're talking about, as there's usually only one or two songs to choose from. Duncan finds it difficult to get his head around that fact that, where I come from, you could listen to music for months on end without repeating a single song, which leads to some confusion as he once came over and asked me “can you make me a CD of that song?”
To which I responded “Umm, which song?”
“You know, the one you were playing when I came over the other day that I liked.”
“Uhh, you're going to have to give me more to go on than that.”
“No, you know, the good one.”
“I have no idea what you're talking about.”
“Oh, well just play all your songs and I'll stop you when we get to the right one.”
“Umm, Duncan, I have thousands of songs.”
“Just start playing through them.”
I actually did, a few hours later, figure out what song he was talking about. It was Sweet Home Alabama. I made him a CD and threw on some other, similar, music I thought he might like and now our nakamal is the only one on the island that occasionally busts out the Skynyrd and Creedence. Shania Twain is also a big name around Vanuatu, which leads to a lot of humorous situations involving large groups of burly, well-muscled men saying things like “Kas, Shania Twain i tuf tumas!” (literally, “Shania Twain is really tough.” In Vanuatu “tough” is slang that's probably best translated as “bad-ass”).
Somewhere along the line Ni-Vans in Vila and other more westernized areas decided to crank things up a bit and try and make some home grown pop music. Much like that from the Solomon Islands and Philippines, Vanuatu pop is also heavy on the synth and borrows extensively from western artists. For example one rising star in Vanuatu is a singer who exclusively sings Selena covers, and makes it painfully obvious that she has absolutely zero grasp of the Spanish language, which all Selena songs are written in. Perhaps it's best that they stick to covers, however, because just a few months ago a real Vanuatu original was born, a pop song that tells the story (which is supposed to be based on a true story) of a Vanuatu mother whose newborn baby died due to negligence and who tried to secretly bury the corpse in her yard so her husband wouldn't find out (and yes, I agree, that it seems like the husband would probably, at some point, notice the lack of a living baby in the household, even without necessarily having to find the body, but I guess that's why I'm not a musician). The song is sung from the perspective of the husband and is supposed to be a tribute to the baby. It starts off (translated from Bislama) something like this: “I'm singing this song to say I'm sorry that we ruined you, that the cold killed you and then the dogs dug up your body,” and goes downhill from there. And I know what you're thinking and, yes, there is a music video, featuring footage of an actual dead baby. Also, although I've never had the pleasure myself, people tell me that the song is way better live. Far be it from me to critique the work of an aspiring artist, but I think I'll stick to my laptop.
The second all-Vanuatu instrument is the heart of what's called a string band, which is the closest thing Vanuatu has to its own style of music. I'm not even sure what the instrument is called, or if it even has a name, but it's a large wooden box with a hinged stick protruding from one of the top corner. A cord connects the end of the stick with the center of the box. The musician uses the stick to adjust the tension in the cord and plucks it to make music. In a string band, the box player is accompanied by a couple guitars, maybe some keyboard synth, a few guys with rattles, and a singer belting it in Bislama. Traditionally, all the band members are supposed to dress up in matching, overly colorful Hawaiian shirts. The thing about string band is that there's only so many different notes you can make with a string tied to a box, so all the songs tend to sound the same. I mean, like, really the same, not like how old people say rock music all sounds the same. Literally, the tune of every string band song is almost identical. The only real difference is in the lyrics. When I first got to Vanuatu, I spent a day with my training group in a pool at a resort in Vila. The entire day we kept hearing the same song repeated over and over again, and most of us just assumed the resort had a single CD on infinite repeat. It was only later that we discovered that it was actually a live band playing, and that they were actually playing different songs, it's just that all their songs sounded alike. There are also string band music videos, most of which were very obviously made by some guy who'd only just downloaded Final Cut Pro off the internet a few days prior and usually feature the lead singer superimposed a slide show of various pictures from around Vanuatu.
Another common musical genre in Vanuatu is church songs, which one tends to get exposed to at least three or four times a day, independent of whether or not you happen to be at church. My school, and, I think, most schools, are big on the church songs and most classes get kicked off with a chorus, as they're called. Some of these choruses are in English and this, combined with the fact that a lot of the people singing them are horrendous singers and have only a very limited command of the English language, means that they mostly sound like total gibberish with the word “Jesus” occasionally mixed in. Other choruses are in Bislama or, even better, a mix of English and Bislama, which renders them slightly more comprehensible because the people singing at least understand what the words to the song mean. A personal favorite of mine, and probably every Peace Corps volunteer in Vanuatu, is a chorus called “Jesus is the Winner-man,” winner-man being an English-Bislama-ism meaning someone who always wins at everything, or is just generally awesome. The thing is that no one ever gets the pronunciation quite right, so it always, always ends up sounding like wiener-man. So it's really amusing to be sitting in church listening to the entire congregation sing “Jesus is the wiener-man, the wiener-man, the wiener-man. Jesus is the wiener-man, the wiener man all the time.”
Aside from the locally produced music, it's always funny what kinds of foreign music manage to catch on over here. Of course, Reggae is really huge, as it is almost everywhere except the US, from my understanding, which probably accounts for the enormous number of people one sees every day wearing shirts with giant pictures of Bob Marley on them and why every village has at least seven people in it named Bob Marley. There's also a slow trickle of pop music that makes it here from the Solomon Islands and the Philippines, because, I guess, they're the closest musically inclined countries. Solomon and Philippine music is usually very heavy on the synth and often have beats and tunes ripped off from popular American groups and overlayed with different music. So, I'll often hear a beat I recognize and get all excited because it's a song a like from the States only to be sorely let down a few seconds later with I realize that the lyrics are in the Philippine Spanish-English pidgin and thus were probably not written by Snoop Dogg. I'm not really sure why, but songs from abroad tend to arrive one at a time. So one week everyone will be rocking the latest new song over, and over, and over again without interruption and then the next week they'll have moved on to the next one. Thus, when someone asks you “have you heard that one good song?” or “do you have the music video for the song?” it's not that hard to figure out what they're talking about, as there's usually only one or two songs to choose from. Duncan finds it difficult to get his head around that fact that, where I come from, you could listen to music for months on end without repeating a single song, which leads to some confusion as he once came over and asked me “can you make me a CD of that song?”
To which I responded “Umm, which song?”
“You know, the one you were playing when I came over the other day that I liked.”
“Uhh, you're going to have to give me more to go on than that.”
“No, you know, the good one.”
“I have no idea what you're talking about.”
“Oh, well just play all your songs and I'll stop you when we get to the right one.”
“Umm, Duncan, I have thousands of songs.”
“Just start playing through them.”
I actually did, a few hours later, figure out what song he was talking about. It was Sweet Home Alabama. I made him a CD and threw on some other, similar, music I thought he might like and now our nakamal is the only one on the island that occasionally busts out the Skynyrd and Creedence. Shania Twain is also a big name around Vanuatu, which leads to a lot of humorous situations involving large groups of burly, well-muscled men saying things like “Kas, Shania Twain i tuf tumas!” (literally, “Shania Twain is really tough.” In Vanuatu “tough” is slang that's probably best translated as “bad-ass”).
Somewhere along the line Ni-Vans in Vila and other more westernized areas decided to crank things up a bit and try and make some home grown pop music. Much like that from the Solomon Islands and Philippines, Vanuatu pop is also heavy on the synth and borrows extensively from western artists. For example one rising star in Vanuatu is a singer who exclusively sings Selena covers, and makes it painfully obvious that she has absolutely zero grasp of the Spanish language, which all Selena songs are written in. Perhaps it's best that they stick to covers, however, because just a few months ago a real Vanuatu original was born, a pop song that tells the story (which is supposed to be based on a true story) of a Vanuatu mother whose newborn baby died due to negligence and who tried to secretly bury the corpse in her yard so her husband wouldn't find out (and yes, I agree, that it seems like the husband would probably, at some point, notice the lack of a living baby in the household, even without necessarily having to find the body, but I guess that's why I'm not a musician). The song is sung from the perspective of the husband and is supposed to be a tribute to the baby. It starts off (translated from Bislama) something like this: “I'm singing this song to say I'm sorry that we ruined you, that the cold killed you and then the dogs dug up your body,” and goes downhill from there. And I know what you're thinking and, yes, there is a music video, featuring footage of an actual dead baby. Also, although I've never had the pleasure myself, people tell me that the song is way better live. Far be it from me to critique the work of an aspiring artist, but I think I'll stick to my laptop.
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