Yu No Kick Part 15: Ples Blong Mi Issue 1 (Tautu)

The village where I live, Tautu, is actually made up of two villages. There's both Big Tautu and Small Tautu and, as these things tend to work, I'm pretty sure Small Tautu is actually bigger than big Tautu. Of course, it's hard to know for sure because the city has been a little slow putting up one of those big, friendly, welcome signs on the side of the road that say “Welcome to Tautu, Population: **,” but I'm pretty sure Small Tautu at least covers more area than Big Tautu. According to what I've heard, these two actually used to be separate villages, with Big Tautu being called Tautu and Small Tautu being called Alau, which grew together over time to form what you could call a twin village area (but probably wouldn't). Since the two villages couldn't have ever really been any more than a kilometer or so apart, the growing together probably didn't take much effort, but there you go. Big Tautu is built directly on the beach, a good move both because of the nice view and the cooling breezes that come off of the ocean during hot season. The houses along the beach are older and thus are almost all custom: woven bamboo walls with thatch roofs. Some houses mix the old with the new, they sport concrete floors in lieu of sand and coral covered with pandanus mats. A few windows made of glass louvers set into their bamboo walls. These glass slat windows are the standard in Vanuatu for some reason unclear to me, as I've never seen one that's not in some way broken. A typical window consists of parallel metal frames mounted against the wood of the window frame (perpendicular to the ground). Each frame sports 5-8 slots for glass pieces. The glass pieces are slender rectangles, maybe two feet long and half a foot wide, that sit in said slots and span the width of the window. Each slot is hinged, allowing you to adjust the angle of the glass pieces using a lever protruding from the frame. When the window is open the glass slats make what looks like a set of transparent shelves and when the window is closed it approximates a standard single pane of glass. Not a bad idea in theory, but the slats are easily unseated from their perches by strong winds or earthquakes and are broken and often never replaced. The humid, salty sea air also makes quick work of the hinges, rusting them into uselessness and freezing the louvers in position. Myself, I prefer the older method, windows covered by hinged wooden boards that can be opened and closed, essentially miniature doors. Glass is more expensive, however, and thus more desirable, and my preference is rarely implemented anymore.

In the main village, the houses are crowded closely together. A housing unit usually consists of at least four separate structures, one house for sleeping and general purpose use, one house for the kitchen and dining area, one smaller shack (often constructed of whatever junk happens to be lying around; rusted, jagged corrugated iron sheets, coconut leaves, pieces of tarps, black plastic garbage backs, or old burlap sacks) for the toilet, and another shack for the shower. White and brown electrical cables worm their way out of the thatch roofs and run between the various buildings, precarious power lines to give life to electric lights, televisions, and DVD players. The lines originate at little gray boxes on poles that allow the power company, Unelco, charge for power consumption. Users must buy little plastic cards at various stores through out the village and insert them into the Unelco boxes in order for them to work (a system similar to prepaid phone cards). One card entitles one to 30kWhrs of power. Sometimes the power lines are allowed to drape lazily between the two structures they connect, requiring anyone passing beneath them to duck to avoid being clotheslined. The more safety conscious prop their lines up with bamboo pole which, for some reason, are always wedged into the ground at an angle as opposed to being vertical. Since I'm taller than most people in the village, I generally still have to duck for these elevated lines, just not as much (actually this is a common problem for me, not just with power lines, but also with doorways and ceilings). Extra power cord is often run between a series of bamboo poles to make clotheslines, which are always placed on the ocean side of the house to take advantage of the nearly constant wind. Such a crowded collection of ramshackle structures, where it to appear in or around a large city in the West, would probably be called a slum, but the picturesqueness of the nearby ocean (literally less than a stone's throw away) and the swaying coconut tree in the distance make it difficult to apply that term here. Also, the crowded character of the village is not due to the space restrictions imposed by a city or town, there's plenty of undeveloped land stretching in both directions from the village, people just prefer to live close to each other.

The village is built a respectful 50 or so meters away from the ocean, leaving a sort of open sandbar between the rows of houses and the craggy black rock that makes up the ocean bottom. As you work your way along this bar you can see the entire village, row after row of brown bamboo walls, occasionally punctuated by what can only be described as the occasional empty lot: a broken cement foundation in various stages of being overrun with weeds and young papaya trees which worm their way through the cracks in the rock, finally terminating in a low tree line that marks the end of the village. The house nearest the tree line belongs to a cement worker and so the patch of sand in front of his house is always covered with homemade cinder blocks and cement toilet seats drying before being sold. Across the sandbar from these stone concoctions is a long wooden bench where the chief and other important men in the village like to hang out. The bench is a makeshift job consisting of a long wooden plank supported in various places along its length by a number of old pieces of machinery. Most look like they were once part of a car, but I'm not really sure. A small path leads into the bush that borders the village, which seems deceptively thick near the village but actually thins out quickly into a pleasant wooded beach area. Occasional short trees with broad branches give excellent shade to what is mostly a bare sandy beach. In lieu of rocks, large washed up pieces of coral dot the ground. Old brain corals have a distinctively rounded shapes, like pieces of a large, spherical shell, that are rough on one side and comparatively smooth on the other. Other corals are bizarre branching structures that look like little stone trees. Remains of giant clam shells are also a common sight, including some that have fused into the rock of a dead coral formation and look like petrified fossils. A little ways down the forested beach gives way to bush once again, but a narrow path offers easy passage through. After a a couple hundred meters, the path spits you out onto the ocean. At high tide you emerge from the bush directly into the water, but at low tide you are greeted with dry, craggy, black rock instead. The sharp and uneven nature of this surface makes it uncomfortable to walk on, even with sandals or shoes protecting you from the worst of it (some Ni-Vans, however, fish along the shallows so often that they have grown used to walking on this sharp surface even when barefooted). The rocks are often slippery as well and the sharp protrusions seem to be taunting you, just daring you to take a fall. At low tide, this area is ripe with tide pools and you can see all matter of bizarre aquatic life living in them. If you walk or wade further you will quickly come to a sharp point from which you can see the shining iron roofs of the French school in Norsup. As the point terminates in the ocean, a couple pillars of black rock jut out of the water, reaching up about eight feet or so. The rough surface of the pillars makes them easy to climb and the tops are covered with vegetation which offers some padding should you wish to sit on top of one and stare off at the sea.

Moving inland from the main village brings you to the community center, an open sand and dirt square shaded by a huge natafoa tree growing in the middle of it. The natafoa is a strange looking tree, as it seems to prefer growing at right angles. The trunk, as you would expect, grows vertically upward, but its all of its main branches extend almost perfectly horizontally outward, with the smaller branches growing out from the main branches then reaching up vertically again. On the right as you walk up from the ocean is one of the village stores, a large window from which you can view the various items on sale and direct the storekeeper (who is usually found sleeping on a bench just in front of the window) as to what you'd like. On the left is a large custom house where I used to live until an unusually leaky roof led me to take up residence at the school. Directly in front is the community dining hall, a large wooden structure with iron roofing, which is currently undergoing renovations and is home to the village's public phone. The phone has been broken since I got here, but nobody really seems to mind (including myself) as Digicel's cell service is both cheaper and more reliable. Behind the dining hall is the soccer field (or anything field I suppose. There are no goals or anything to distinguish it as a soccer field, but that's all I've ever seen played there). The road which connects Tautu to the wider world dead-ends in the soccer field and is often accidentally followed by tourists looking for Lakatoro. Occasionally a particularly obtuse tourist wanders into the village and the villagers have to come fetch me so that I can clearly explain to them in English that they've gone the wrong way.

After the soccer field comes the Presbyterian Church, the largest building in the village. It's painted white with a the iron roof seems to have done an exceptionally good job remaining shiny through the years, which makes the place (compared to the other builds at least, which are usually unpainted) seem very bright and cheery. The community water tank is fed by rain gutters off of the church roof and is a large cement cylinder sitting next to the building. Behind the church lies the school and the ambiguous ending of Big Tautu and beginning of Small Tautu. Houses in Small Tautu are newer, more modern, and spaced farther apart than houses in Big Tautu. Here cement and corrugated iron dominate as the preferred building materials (which to me seems strange given the abundance of high-quality timber available in bush on the island. The problem, I suppose, is the lack of a local saw mill to process the raw trees into timber to be used for building. Cement, on the other hand, can be made by hand relatively easily), some houses could even pass as reasonable houses in the US. The pastor's house, for example, which is located along the path connecting the church with the school, is large and has a big, inviting front porch.

The school's the first thing you see when rounding the bend in the road up from the soccer field. The school consists mainly of a large, open yard dotted by school buildings (including my house) along the edges. About a third of the school yard is taken up by what was at one point almost a basketball court. A while back a Peace Corps volunteer won a grant to build a court but money or interest ran out sometime mid-project and now random, crumbling cement pads adorn the entrance to the school. We also have a mostly rusted iron pole that looks like it might have one time have thought about holding up a backboard. Following the road up from the school away from the ocean takes you into the part of the village I know best, as I walk through it many times daily. The road is white, made from pressed coral, and is fairly wide, at least as far as Vanuatu is concerned, in that it can ALMOST accommodate two cars next to each other. Greenery surrounds the road on either side occasionally punctuated by a clearing denoting a house. The store I frequent is just a hundred or so meters up the road and is set back from it by one of the nicest lawns I've seen in Vanuatu. The store owner liberally enlists the many children in his family to achieve this and one can usually see them laboring away in the heat with a bush knife keeping the grass and weeds at bay. Across from the store is a nakamal known as “Christmas tree,” which I frequent whenever Duncan fails to make kava for whatever reason. The name comes from the fact that the nakamal light is hung from a large Christmas tree in front. Of course, Christmas trees in Vanuatu aren't the same as Christmas trees in the US or elsewhere. Pine trees aren't known for their ability to thrive in the tropics. In Vanuatu “Christmas tree” refers to a large tree that produces long bean pods in the summer, which coincides with Christmas in these parts of the world.

Past the Christmas tree nakamal you finally come to a large, stone roundabout which sits at the intersection of two roads. Going straight through the roundabout will take you to the airport and, eventually, Lakatoro, while the road to the right leads, most immediately, to Duncan's house and then onto the rest of Small Tautu and Norsup. Duncan's, however, is pretty much the end of what I would consider to be my home base or, in Bislama, “ples blong mi” (from the English “place belonging to me”). Home sweet home.