Global Adventures

Yu No Kick Part 20: The End

2009-12-09T21:05:00.000-05:00

Before beginning, I would like to apologize for my long absence from blog writing. This second year of my service I have fallen far from the one-blog-a-week standard that I held to for my first year. In short, I seem to have run out of things to write about. Living in Vanuatu is no longer a new and crazy experience for me, one worthy of chronicling, instead it has become the routine of everyday life. My time here has sort of fallen into a sort of lethargy. My village and host family no longer consider me a novelty and thus have ceased taking me out on adventures in the bush. Teaching class has become a simple thing, no longer needing much thought or effort to accomplish. Even such tasks as slaying giant centipedes are now performed with a kind of lazy efficiency that comes with constant practice. There are still stories to tell, for sure. Like how the constant stream of school children taking water from my house's water tank was slowly driving me insane and how I dyed the whole tank yellow with food coloring in an attempt to discourage them. Or how a misunderstood tsunami warning sparked a mass panic in my village, sending men, women, and children fleeing for the hills as fast as they could run. Time progresses and things happen but I'm afraid much of my motivation for writing about such happenings has been lost. In the last months of my service my mind has turned to other things. That being said, I enjoy closure and so I offer this final blog entry to round out the series.

It is not as hot as it was last year. The fierce November sun is sometimes hidden behind gray blankets of clouds, giving us precious hours or even days of respite from its persistent heat. My rain tank ran dry last week, the first time it has run out without me intentionally emptying it, as for almost a month storm clouds loomed and yet rain did not come, but now frequent showers provide all the water I could need. A strong wind has taken the pieces of corrugated metal that used to make up the roofs of my outhouse and shower, so now I plan my showers and prolonged trips to the toilet around the weather, lest I get rained on while sitting on the can. I also finally grew tired of the uneasy truce between myself and my household ants and invested in a can of Mortein spray. I destroyed four ant nests on the first day and now do daily patrols for ant trails. The used computers I ordered from the US finally arrived, almost a year after I collected money for orders from people in my village. A steady trickle of Ni-Vans drop by my house to pick up their orders and ask questions like “so... what does it do?” A new group of volunteers have also arrived, our replacements. Eight were assigned to Malekula and have already started their service, making my group essentially redundant. They are excited, energetic, and optimistic and roll their eyes, as I once did, when they hear McKenzie, Laura and I make cynical jokes about Peace Corps and discuss how nice it will be to be rid of Vanuatu's many annoyances.

Vanuatu has changed a lot for a country where nothing seems to ever change. The quiet, patient village of Tautu is not quite as quiet and patient as it used to be. Duncan, my host dad, is a working man now. He has taken out a loan from the bank and has used it to purchase a compressor and a machine for removing tires from their hubs. He has built an addition to his small store and now uses the extra space to run a wheel-repair business. When I go over to meet him for kava I now I find him wearing grease-stained coveralls and exhausted from a long day. He seems to be doing pretty well, and has told me that he is already close to paying off his loan, even though he still has a year and a half to go on it. Duncan has grand plans for his business. He envisions running a large store in the front of his property, near the road, and having a small guest house behind. He's already cleared the land in preparation for this. The twisted, l-shaped mango tree that used to overhang the nakamal is gone, as is the naus tree from which Duncan's nakamal light used to hang. The lonely white light announcing the presence of kava now sits atop a small, square, wooden post that juts up from the ground. The once shady yard is now a grass and dirt clearing marked by the tire treads of the many trucks that visit Duncan's shop.

I do not really know what to think of this. It sometimes seems sad to see the simple village lifestyle be invaded and transformed by western influence and technology. In many ways it seems like something is being lost, and I feel compelled to try and make Duncan understand this, to tell him that the western way of life he covets comes at the price of tranquility and that he may one day find himself working hard to procure things he once could have had for free. At the same time, I now find myself sweating away my final days on Malekula, anxiously awaiting the time when I can board a plane and return to the life that I would be maligning. In the end I found that village life did not, in fact, suit me as well as I initially thought. The slow pace, ample free time, and pervading lethargy fuel a slow boredom that eats away at you and makes you constantly restless. In the end it was not the difficultly of village life that got to me, but rather the simplicity. And who's to say that some Ni-Vanuatu don't feel the same, that they don't also become restless with their traditional lifestyles which we insist are so important to preserve. In the end I think I must confess my own ignorance. The ideals which seemed so clear when I signed up for Peace Corps have faded into a dull obscurity of confusion. In the future I will leave the giant muddle of international development to more able (or perhaps more stubborn) individuals.

In the end, leaving my village was much the same as coming to it, a calm, quiet affair with a good deal less fanfare than my ego would perhaps have liked. It was probably for the best though, I'd spent most of my service with my host parents, Duncan and Linda, and so most of my goodbyes were with them. They treated me amazingly well during my time here and I could not have asked for a better host family, and I hope to go back and see them sometime. It's hard to say whether or not I will miss Vanuatu, but I imagine I will, as one tends to miss any place where one has spent a substantial period of time.

Let me finish off this rather inconclusive conclusion by thanking all of you that have taken time out of your exciting lives in the US (and trust me, they are exciting. Most anything is compared to the slow life in Vanuatu) to read my blog. I hope it has been entertaining. I also very much appreciate those of you who went to the trouble of sending me emails, postcards, letters, and packages. You all were what kept me going. I hope to see many of you upon my return to the States, and I implore the rest of you to enjoy a bottle of beer and a plate of bacon on my behalf. Ale,

Dan

Yu No Kick Part 19: Ambae

2009-10-02T19:54:00.000-04:00

Aside from Mount Yasur, the volcano on Tanna, the volcano that gets talked about the most by Peace Corps volunteers is probably Manaro on the island of Ambae. I think a lot of Manaro's fame comes not from the volcano itself, but rather from the fact that it's associated with a tattoo that a lot of volunteers have gotten. Manaro isn't as active (at least not in the flinging-lava-up-into-the-air sense) as Yassur, and I knew right from the start that my penny-in-the-volcano dreams would not be fulfilled there, but the lure of visiting a volcano is always difficult to resist and so when I was invited to climb Manaro with a group of volunteers I, of course, accepted. Although not as active as Yasur, Manaro is generally considered to be more dangerous as the consensus seems to be that at any moment it could blow and begin raining fire down on the surrounding countryside. Some parts of the island of Ambae have even been evacuated in the past for fear of this.

Ambae is just a little bit northeast of Malekula (although the plane ride necessitates a stopover on Santo first), and so, unlike in Tanna, no pleasant changes in climate could be expected. Shockingly, Ambae's airport had even less going for it than Norsup's. The building beside the tarmac could, just barely, be called a shanty. It looked to have been hastily constructed using bamboo and coconut wood, but a few details had been overlooked, including a roof. A few coconut leaves rested on top of the frame, providing a couple, haphazard, patches of shade to waiting passengers. The office was covered by a hodge-podge of tarps and plastic sheets which looked like they would hold up in a rainstorm about as well as pieces of paper. They even seemed to be using a bathroom scale to weigh people's luggage.

Justine met me at the airport and we caught a ride into Saratamata, the provincial center of the province of which Ambae is a part. Saratamata followed the, what seems to be, standard provincial center town layout. There were a few stores selling canned and packaged food, a soccer field, and some government offices. They'd also apparently recently received some international assistance in constructing a new Provincial Education Office. Buildings built by Ni-Vanuatu on the outer islands all tend to share a number of characteristics. First, it's painfully obvious that none of the construction crew bothered to shell out a couple bucks for a level (keep in mind that buying enough cement, timber, and nails to put a small building together is going to run you at least ten grand in Vanuatu, so it seems like tacking on the extra couple dollars for the level shouldn't really be a problem). Doorways are uneven, window frames as well, walls tend to have a slight slant to them, which is most noticeable in the corners of the structure, which are never quite a clean 90 degrees. Second, it's equally obvious that no one knows anything about how to properly make concrete. The concrete bricks that houses and other buildings are built with have a consistency closer to that of a four-year-old's sand castle than the sturdy rock that they're supposed to resemble. Accidentally kicking one such brick will, likely as not, cause it to crumble and break. Thus, even newly built structures tend to look like they're in the rather advanced stages of falling apart. Finally, none of them make use of any shapes more advanced than the rectangle. Ambae's provincial education office, in contrast, had been built by an EU construction crew and made use of the rather advanced L-shape for its floor plan. Being on an outer island for a long time, you grow used to that new-yet-already-partially-dilapidated look that most of the buildings tend to have, and you sort of forget that it's actually possible to do better. Thus it's always kind of a treat to walk around a building where all of the doors are the same shape and the walls are actually perpendicular to the floor.

I was coming in on the tail end of a big youth leadership workshop that some of the volunteers were running at a big secondary school called Vereas Bay (not actually on a bay. Actually the school had originally been located on a completely different island in a village called Vereas Bay. For some reason they decided the move it to Ambae and didn't change the name). Vereas was a huge school, probably about the same size of my residential college at university. They had a nice campus with two long lines of dorms and classrooms enclosing a pleasantly maintained grassy quad. There was even a picturesque beach which seems like it would be a real distraction from any ongoing classwork. It was school break, so the majority of the students were gone, but there were still a fair number of people present as the school was hosting not only Peace Corps' youth leadership workshop, but also an unrelated cooking workshop (in my opinion, the latter is probably addressing the greater need in Vanuatu. While it's true that youth leadership is definitely lacking, the state of the cuisine here is far more deplorable), which seemed to be working out pretty well as the cooking workshop participants were able to try out their new cooking techniques on the leadership workshop participants. The group of volunteers I was to hike the volcano with were planning on catching a truck from the school at 5am the next morning to carry them to the base and so I hung out for the closing night of the workshop, which included a visit from our Peace Corps Country Director and the US Ambassador to PNG (and a number of other Pacific countries, including Vanuatu), which caused much excitement.

The next day 5am (followed by 6am and 7am) rolled by without the arrival of our truck, which meant that we would have to postpone our trip up the volcano as we would no longer have enough daylight for the drive to the base followed up the hike up and back down. It was actually later discovered that the number we had for the truck driver who was to pick us up was, in fact, incorrect and actually belonged to a random guy on Pentecost, who had good-naturedly agreed to drive us to Manaro despite the fact that he lived on a completely different island, probably didn't even have a truck, and had absolutely no idea who we were. Scrapping our original plan, we remained in Saratamata until the afternoon and made arrangements with a with another truck driver to drop us at a guest house at the base of the volcano, where we would spend the night and then climb Manaro the following morning. The guest house was pleasant, if primitive, and included kava and dinner that night, which was actually surprisingly good with lap-lap manioc (which is generally agreed to be the best kind of lap-lap), fresh prawns, and vegetables.

Manaro is a not a visitor friendly volcano like Yasur. There's no truck road leading up to the summit, making it accessible to your average out-of-shape tourist. Instead, a small, winding bush trail leads through six or so miles of jungle before depositing you at the top. It's recommended that you start the trip early as it's about a five hour walk each way so, if you leave around 6am, with ten hours of hiking and a half-hour or so at the volcano, you can just about get back before dark. We started walking around 6:30. The guest house provided us with bagged lunches, rice, taro, and canned meat wrapped up in little banana leaf lunch boxes. We also were provided with a Ni-Vanuatu guide to ensure that we did not become hopelessly lost in the bush. The trail, in general, was in very poor condition. Rocks, mud, tree branches and vegetation impeded progress with frustrating regularity. The trail cut up and down steep slopes (instead of traversing them), meaning it was often necessary to climb on your hands and knees or descend on your butt in order to keep from slipping and falling. I've actually heard that the trail becomes totally impassable during the rainy season and has to be re-cut every year when the rains let up. It also did not help that I was wearing sandals (although our guide was wearing sandals as well and didn't seem to mind). Really though, the main problem with the trail was its monotony. Aside from a plant oozing an unusual-looking gelatinous sap, there was basically nothing worth seeing for the duration of the five hour hike, just a lot of similar-looking jungle. Some Ni-Vanuatu on Ambae are trying to push Manaro as a major tourist attraction, but some very serious work is needed before this can become even remotely feasible.

Unlike Yasur, Manaro is not continually active. Not only are there no fireballs regularly flying out of it, but it occasionally it goes through spells where it doesn't do anything even remotely volcano-like at all. During these times vegetation begins to grown around the rim of the volcano. Then, when the volcano begins acting up, increasing amounts of hostile chemicals in the air and soil kill everything off. When we finally emerged from the jungle it was into a field of waist-high shrubs, the new growth since the volcano last went quiet a few years prior. Punctuating the shrubs were the twisted forms of dead trees, killed off some time before but not yet rotted. Their white, ashen trunks and branches looked like the bones of some great monster, picked dry of meat but not yet buried underneath the ground. The blighted trees surrounded a vast, misty crater, seeming to form the rib-cage of a recently slain titan. When we arrived, nothing was visible through the mists. The world seemed to end in an impenetrable fog of nothingness. We sat down to have lunch while our guide explained to us that, since it was our first visit to Manaro, we would probably not be able to see anything because the volcano is too shy. As he was saying this, the clouds overhead dispersed and the sun was able to shine through. In a matter of seconds the sun had burnt off all the fog and left us with an excellent view. Immediately below us, maybe fifty meters down, was a huge crater lake whose water was an unnatural bright greenish-blue. Supposedly, the lake is hundreds of meters deep and is unusually acidic. Some Ni-Vans claim that the water from the lake has healing properties while others hold that it's dangerous both to drink and to swim in. Either way, there was no apparent way to easily descend to the lake from where we stood to put these hypotheses to the test. In the middle of the lake, the cone of the volcano jutted above the surface, a protrusion of land that at first appeared to be an island but, as the fog lifted, became clearly visible as a sharp, circular upthrust whose center was oozing fog and smoke. The opposite bank of the crater was also briefly visible, home to more bone-white trees lining it like teeth. We had a clear view for a couple minutes and then the clouds rolled over the sun once more and the fog re-formed.

Manaro had an unquestionable mystical character to it. The fog, the dead trees, and the brief glimpse of the volcano all suggested a feeling of magic, and I could easily see how people living on the island would attribute spiritual properties to it. Really, more than the nature of the place itself, it was the lengths one had to go to get there that made it so mysterious. There was no parking lot visible from the top of Manaro, no Vanuatu Post mailbox (like there is on Yasur), and no collection of Australian tourists. It is not possible to take a quick trip to Manaro, just for the afternoon. It was a place where people were very obviously the strangers. It would be impossible to feel at home on top of Manaro because one is only ever there for a very short time, after a very long walk, and so it is by definition alien. Unfortunately, if Manaro were ever to become a major tourist attraction and a truck road were built up to its summit this feeling would probably be lost.

It had already been dark for a half-hour or so when we finally got back to the guest house where we'd started that morning. Our truck was already waiting to take us back to Saratamata, and had been for a couple hours, as we underestimated the time it would take us to get up and down the volcano. It was almost nine when we made it back to the volunteer's house in Saratamata where we were staying and we were pretty tired and not just a little bit beat up.

The next day some of our group were interested in getting the “road to Manaro” tattoo, having just hiked said road. The road to Manaro tattoo is a very simple concept, just two, black, parallel lines spaced slightly apart. According to local custom, those possessing the road to Manaro tattoo will dance on top of Manaro for eternity when they die. We made a few phone calls and a few hours later a young Ni-Vanuatu man showed up at the door carrying his tattoo supplies. The supplies consisted of a jar of ashes collected from a kerosene lantern, a napkin full of orange needles, and a few dark-colored leaves. We watched as he ground up the leaves and milked them to produce a black-colored juice. This he mixed with the ashes to form a sort of paste. He then used an orange needle to paint the paste onto the skin in the shape of the intended tattoo. He then worked over the areas he'd painted, jabbing the orange needle rapidly and frequently into the skin, forcing some of the black paste in with it. Finally, he rinsed the remaining paste off of the skin, leaving the tattoo to heal. Custom tattooing is incredibly imprecise and attempting to make any tattoo more ambitious than a few lines tends to be a mistake (I've seen some pretty horrible-looking tattoos on people in my village). Still, the road to Manaro is simple enough that it usually turns out fine, and all the tattoos that my group got looked decent enough. Myself, I thought one trip to Manaro was good enough and saw no reason to want to dance their for eternity after my death.

Yu No Kick Part 18: Ples Blong Mi Issue 3 (Lakatoro)

2009-08-21T02:59:00.001-04:00

Lakatoro is our very own slice of the western life here in on Malekula. It promises such amenities as ice, cold drinks, cheese, alcohol, ice cream, and internet (although, thanks to the arrival of Digicel, Lakatoro no longer has the monopoly on this). When I first began my service, I probably spent about as much time in Lakatoro as I did in Tautu. These days going to Lakatoro is a once or twice a week event (in some part thanks to the fact that there is no longer a Peace Corps volunteer living in Lakatoro) and is more of a chore than a treat. Lakatoro is south of Tautu and is most commonly reached by hailing a passing a truck and paying them 100 vatu to take you there. I'm one of the few who tend to forgo the truck and either walk or ride my bike. The walk (or ride) is pleasant as long as it's not too hot a day, as shade is often scarce. Tautu sprawls southwards almost as much as it does northwards (towards Norsup) and about a third of the walk is just spent clearing the village. Although most of this stretch seems uninhabited, there are actually large family compounds set back from the road all along it. So, while it looks like a bunch of unmanaged bush, chances are it's someone's garden or something. Early on in the walk you come to a mysterious sign that has intrigued me for most of my service. It's pretty large and (relatively) well made and proudly declares, in bright blue letters, “e-Shop” and advertises movies, computers, and other electronics. The arrow on the sign directs you to a follow a narrow, overgrown road off into the bush that seems rather unlikely to lead to much of anything, much less an electronics store. More baffling still is that there's an identical sign along the road between Tautu and Norsup which also points off into the bush, seemingly in a totally different direction. As it turns out, however, the signs do actually point towards the same thing, a fact I discovered one day when I decided to investigate the anomaly and set out along the tiny bush road indicated by one of the signs and emerged, some five minutes later, at the other sign. While the area that I walked through was not exactly bush, it was not exactly developed either. I passed by several bamboo and thatch houses, some complete with old ladies out front grinding yams to make lap-lap, but nothing that seemed like an establishment that might sell computers.

The end of Tautu is indicated by the Norsup Airport (like I said, nowhere near Norsup). Although having a paved runway is become increasingly common in Vanuatu, when I first arrived I considered myself very fortunate to be near an airport with a paved runway as flights would be considerably less likely to be canceled due to heavy rain. As it is, the runway is the only paved surface on the island. A small tin shack houses the airport office (with an all-in-one ticketing counter, check-in counter, arrival counter, gate counter, and baggage counter). Another small tin house is home to the airport tax collector, to whom you must give 200 vatu every time you board a flight. Attached to these two structures is a large cement outline of a building. The upper portions of the frame are in a gently sloping triangle, indicating that it may have once supported (or been intended to support) a roof. Rectangular holes in the walls at about eye level suggest the idea of windows. On the ground a cement floor is engaged in a slow, losing battle with the weeds and papaya trees which force their way through cracks in the stone. There's not much wood present in the frame, but what little there is is black and charred. The airport is the subject of a heated land dispute between a few families in the area because, as I understand, everyone really wants a piece of those 200 vatu departure tax payments (approximately 100% of Vanuatu's legal activity revolves around land disputes because of a clause in the constitution that states that all land must return to ownership of whoever owned it before the colonial government showed up. This seems like a good idea on paper until you realize that there wasn't any paper before the colonial government and so the only way historical land ownership can be established is via oral legends and hearsay. Thus, mayhem ensues), which a few years ago resulted in the airport being firebombed. Still, Norsup airport has its advantages. I can easily walk there, I can wait at the beach for my plane to come, I only need to show fifteen minutes before my flight, and no one asks me to take off my shoes before going through security.

The airport is located right on the water on the edge of a crescent bay that's home to what is, in my opinion, the nicest oceanfront in the area. A thin, pristine white sand beach encircles a bay of clear turquoise water. On especially calm days the glassy blue surface of the water surrounded by the stark white of the beach looks like a giant gemstone that somehow spontaneously formed on the coastline. Large trees grown on the fringes of the beach and provide pleasant shade on a hot day. At high tide, some of the trees even reach out over the water, allowing one to climb out over the ocean and watch the waves break below you. The opposite side of the road from the beach is covered by the ubiquitous coconut plantation, which offers little shelter from the sun and the constant dust kicked up by passing trucks clings eagerly to sweaty skin and quickly coats you in a fine sheen of dirt. Thus, it's usually more pleasant to walk along the beach when heading to Lakatoro on foot and join up with the road later. At the far end of the beach from the airport is Aop river which, according to Duncan is haunted and should be avoided, especially at night. I've never seen any evidence to support this, although Aop river does have the potential to swell considerably in heavy rain and last year knocked out the earthen bridge that connects Tautu with Lakatoro. A coconut log bridge was hastily erected in response to this to accommodate foot traffic over the river while the truck bridge was being rebuilt. At the time I predicted that, given the haphazard nature of the truck bridge that I watched public works build, the coconut bridge would outlast the new earthen one. A year and then some later, however, the coconut bridge is rotten and drooping while the earth one has yet to be washed out again.

Just outside of Lakatoro there's a Jehovah's Witness house, which is funny not only because it indicates the presence of Jehovah's Witness in Vanuatu but also because the phrase “Jehovah's Witness House” doesn't translate very well into Bislama, so they have this really big sign so that they can spell out the entire Bislama translation, which is “Haos blong Kingdom blong ol Witnes blong Jehovah.” The first thing you see when you arrive in Lakatoro is the LTC (Lakatoro Trading Center), the largest store on the island. It's kind of like a Wal-Mart in that, not only does it stock a lot of random junk, but it's also open 6am-7pm every day, even Sundays and holidays. A low wall separates the LTC's yard from the road on which Lakatoro Trading Center is spelled out in large block letters, except the first letter of each word is missing so it actually says AKATORO RADING ENTER. The LTC has a nice big building which is pleasant to walk around in, and it is the only store on the island that sells cheese, but, for the most part, I avoid shopping there because anything they sell can almost always be had a lot cheaper at one of the other stores in Lakatoro. Next to the LTC is a sort of strip mall that contains the Post Office, Bank, Air Vanuatu Office, the main office of the power company, and, in a recent addition, a customs office, which is odd because exactly zero vessels and/or aircraft arrive from overseas each day to the island of Malekula, but I suppose if an international flight crashes somewhere nearby and some survivors get washed up here and need to get their life jackets cleared by customs we'll be covered.

Across from the strip mall is Kimberley's, the one (pseudo) restaurant on the island. They've got maybe six tables inside and, if you show up in the afternoon, you can usually get a plate of rice topped with meat or fish for 300 vatu or so. If you're looking for something in particular, or if you want to come for dinner, you can make arrangements in advance with the chef, who actually does a pretty good job as long as you're specific about what you want. Next to the restaurant is a meeting area which, according to the sign, seems like it should be the offices of Vanuatu's People's Progressive Party, but is actually a nakamal. After the PPP nakamal is an auto repair shop which always seems to be doing brisk business, probably because the roads on Malekula are rarely kind to the trucks that drive upon them. Across from the auto shop is another nakamal, this one marked by a revolving yellow light on top of a wooden pole, which we like to call Cancun. Most nakamals consist of a little tin shack where the kava is served and a collection of coconut wood benches outside for people to sit on and ponder how disgusting kava is. Cancun, however, looks like something from a spring break special. Its seating consists of several, circular, thatch-roofed, open-air huts which look like they should be peopled by bikini-wearing, sunburned, inebriated college students sipping complicated-looking frozen drinks served by Mexican waiters instead of gruff, shabbily dressed Ni-Vans pounding cupfuls of mud-water and hocking loogies.

After the Cancun nakamal there's a roundabout and a road splits off from the main road to the right and heads uphill to the provincial offices The main road continues on to the second half of Lakatoro, which is separated from the first half by a good stretch of nothing. I once ran into a tourist in between the two bits of Lakatoro who stopped me and asked me which way town was. I just nodded sadly and kept walking. The beginning of the second part of Lakatoro is marked by the school on one side and a nakamal on the other. When I first got here this nakamal, Jean Louis, was by far the most popular in town. The benches were always full, they made several buckets of kava each night, staying open late into the night until all other their customers left, and sometimes there was even a line to get served. The kava crowd, however, is fickle and recently Jean Louis lost its luster. We'd show up to find it totally deserted, its single bucket of kava going unsold night after night. These days they've stopped making kava altogether there. The coconut benches are rotten and broken and the sheets of corrugated metal that used to cover some of the seating areas have all been removed.

Next to Jean Louis is the department of agriculture and fisheries, an agency who's function I'm still uncertain of. Across from this is our Stadium, a large field overlooked by a stand of bleachers on the far side. Up next is the market, a big, open concrete structure that's home to not one, but two signs. Of course, neither of them advertise the market. The first is a giant, side-of-the-highway-style billboard advertising Digicel and the second is a hand-painted pink wooden sign which says something to the effect of “Welcome to Malekula. Please Be Aware That People Here Have AIDS,” which, aside from being more or less completely untrue, has got to be pretty detrimental for the tourism trade. The market itself is painted in a sort of Christmas theme with dancing Santas, Christmas trees, and decorative bells because, I guess, someone decided it would be a good idea to paint it one year for the holidays without thinking ahead to how this would look after the holiday season was over. There's another bank of stores next to the market, the first in the bank, and my favorite, is the PIM, which I like because it's about the size of a ticket booth and yet somehow manages to have a larger selection than any other store in town. You walk in to find the entire store full of towering stacks of stuff, most of which looks like it's about to fall over and bury you along with all of the store clerks under a mountain of retail goods. Generally I walk in, take a look around, trying to spot whatever it is I want to buy and, unable to locate it, I ask, skeptically, “do you have any lawn tractors?” To which the clerk will respond, confidently, “yes, of course,” and then wander over to a tower of powdered milk tins, push it aside and, sure enough, there they'll be, a nice, neat stack of eight lawn tractors. No matter how many times this happens, I never cease to be impressed. There's another store, the MDC (yeah, I don't know what the deal is with the initials either), in the same block which is about six times bigger and has about six times less stuff.

There's another roundabout, this one marked by a large pillar which, for some reason, is painted with a bunch of World War II images, with a road continuing south to Litz Litz and another heading to a third block of store up the hill. Between the three blocks of stores, it's usually possible to find whatever it is you happen to be looking for, although this can sometimes involve a lot of walking around in the heat and dust to check all the stores. Sometimes though, you're willing to do just about anything for a bottle of wine or a cold beer.

Yu No Kick Part 17: Tanna

2009-08-09T05:17:00.000-04:00

Ni-Vanuatu from other islands have something of a mystique regarding Tanna. Although it's probably the second most visited island after Efate, Tanna maintains a reputation of being primitive and steeped in custom, two of the big reasons why it is such a popular destination for tourists. Ironically, Tanna is being exposed to large amounts of western influence and is becoming increasingly western because of its reputation for being so un-western. Among other Ni-Vans, people from Tanna (“man Tanna” in Bislama) are often looked down upon for being primitive, uncivilized (and yes, it is kind of strange to hear people living in bamboo houses accuse others of being primitive. The deciding factor seems to be whether or not you have a DVD player in your bamboo house), and practitioners of black magic and old customs. There have even been several occasions where I've heard man Tanna discussed in terms that bordered on hatred and fear. Despite the best efforts of the various branches of the Christian Church in Vanuatu, strong belief in black magic still persists (or perhaps, to some extent, the church is encouraging these beliefs. Pastors often stress the importance of attending church and praying because it is necessary to combat black magic, without realizing that this is somewhat counter-productive, as their arguments are implicitly acknowledging the existence and validity of magic), and islands that are perceived as having strong magic (namely Tanna and Ambrym) are viewed with suspicion.

Any evidence of Tanna's primitiveness was not visible from the airport, however. The airport was an impressive structure that was significantly nicer than our airport in Norsup, mostly because it had not been recently firebombed, but also because it had two stories (and as an added bonus the second story showed absolutely no signs of an impending collapse on the first), two sets of bathrooms, and even a customs and immigration counter. The latter, apparently, had just been installed in preparation for the opening of international flights between Tanna airport to New Caledonia which, due to Tanna's extreme southern location, is actually about as far away as Port Vila. In celebration of (or at least in some way related to) the opening of this new flight route, Lenekel, the largest town in the area, was hosting a joint arts festival with New Caledonia showcasing Tafea (Vanuatu's southernmost province, which includes Tanna) and New Caledonian culture, which had been generating a lot of excitement over the past few weeks.

Justine, a volunteer who was accompanying me on this expedition, and I caught a truck from the airport into town and right away I was struck by the large differences between the northern and southern islands of the country. The islands of Vanuatu are spread out laterally over a length about the same as the state of California, which means fairly large difference in climate between the northernmost islands (which are essentially on the equator) and the southernmost. Tanna was noticeably cooler than Malekula, a fact that I welcomed, and the weather seemed to actually be acknowledging the fact that it was supposed to be winter. The flora was also noticeably different, gone (or at least not as dominant ) were the reckless, heat-loving, vines, creepers, and shrubs that preside over the Malekulan bush and in their place were larger, more responsible trees that see the wisdom in growing slowly and protecting their assets with things like bark. Our truck driver dropped us off at the market in Lenekel, which, again, proudly sported its differences with the one in Lakatoro as, instead of the usual collection of bananas, coconuts, and grapefruit, it was stocked with produce more familiar to the American palate. Things like carrots, lettuce, and tomatoes were abundant and I'd heard that even things like apples, grapes, and wild raspberries are sometimes available.

As a town, Lenekel was pretty similar to Lakatoro. It sported a number of stores (more stores than Lakatoro, actually), all of which pretty much sold the same thing: rice, canned food, and packaged crackers and cookies. Unelco even provides power to the town using the same pre-paid power card system as Lakatoro. Unlike Lakatoro, however, which is laid out in a line, Lenekel was more of a square, which made it a lot more convenient to get around. Because of the festival, Lenekel was crawling with people, more people than one usually sees in Vila, much less on an outer island, which made our arrival a little intimidating. Some of the Tanna volunteers met us at the market and escorted us back to the stadium, where the festival was taking place and where one of their families was running a food stall. The arts festival showed really no signs of containing any actual art, however, and looked pretty much exactly like every other event I'd ever attended in Vanuatu, except on a bit of a larger scale. Food stalls arrayed the edges of the stadium (which was actually quite large) selling the standard Vanuatu festival food (chicken wings, fish, plates of rice and meat, fried dough, and strange-tasting cakes and other baked goods), and kava. The field was occupied by soccer players working their way through a tournament and a stage had been set up on which a band was to appear later. The entire festival seemed to be served by only two outhouses with pit toilets which, judging by the stench, had filled up long ago. The only sign of any sort of ongoing cultural-related activity was a small area where representatives from various places in Tafea had erected houses built in the traditional style of their island. For the most part the construction materials were all the same, uncut wood and coconut leaves (unlike in the north where natangora, which makes an excellent thatch, and bamboo, which is naturally grows in nice, straight, beams, are abundant, in the south coconut seems to be the staple building material), and only the shape of the houses varied. Standing next to all the Vanuatu structures was the New Caledonian contribution, a large, circular, concrete building with a thatch roof that looked like it had been erected with aid of cement mixer and a union-certified construction crew. Now, I don't know much about New Caledonian history, so I suppose it's possible but that they developed cement, along with the Romans, a few thousand years ago and have been using it as a building material ever sense (granted, at least in Vanuatu, there is an abundance of limestone from the coral reefs, which is the crucial ingredient in cement), but I kind of doubt it. Really it seem more like the New Caledonia contingent was just showing off that, since they're still under French rule, they have more money than they know what to do with. On a less cultural, but more pleasant, note, we were directed by the Tanna volunteers to a food stall that was making and selling hamburgers, which were excellent as, much to my surprise, they didn't skimp on the meat and included such extras a lettuce, tomato, onion and ketchup.

The festival proceeded pretty much as expected. The main act was a Vanuatu pop band that played a set of reggae-ish music that was heavy on the synth and included mostly covers. After they finished other, more amateur groups took the stage and the music continued into the early morning. Myself, I had my fill come about 11 o'clock and Justine and I pitched a tent in a quiet area behind the stadium and went to sleep. The next day we were planning on heading to the other side of the island to a village called Port Resolution, about 15-20 miles away, which is close to Tanna's volcano. Since it was Sunday, we were outside of the schedule of the usual service trucks, and, being volunteers, we were loath to spend the money that drivers usually charge tourists for charters. It was a nice day, however, and there was a lot of traffic because of the festival so we set out on foot, knowing that we'd probably end up in Port Resolution eventually if we were patient. The road crossing the island was in excellent condition, another testament to Tanna's booming tourist trade, and trucks passed frequently. Unlike on Malekula, where two white people walking outside of town is a rare sight and cause for much consternation, we merited little attention and very few trucks stopped to speak to us (many of the trucks were even carrying other white people and some had done up their truck beds with rain covers and cushioned seating). Tanna is shaped kind of like a hat. We had a steep climb initially, but it leveled off as we got farther from the coast and then sloped down again on the opposite coast. We gauged our progress by how insistent Ni-Vans we spoke to along the way were that what we were doing was impossible. Close to Lenekel we were told that we'd never, in a million years, be able to make it to Port Resolution on foot, towards the middle of the island we were informed that Port Resolution was really, really, really far away, and by the time the opposite coast was visible we were down to people giving us pitying looks and nodding their heads sadly. The highlight of the walk was when we rounded corner and the coastline with the volcano came into view. It was a nice, sunny day and off to the left the ocean sparkled magnificently and looked invitingly calm and peaceful. White beaches were like walls separating the green of the middle bush from the patient turquoise of the ocean. To the right the volcano jutted out rudely from the coastline, smoking ominously and covering the surroundings with a dark haze, seeming to hide something terrible and mysterious. A few minutes later an SUV rounded the same corner, pulled to a stop a few meters ahead of us and a collection of tourists got out and began photographing the vista. The driver, a Ni-Van, came to talk to us an insisted on giving us a ride. Having come this far, Justine and I were somewhat set on finishing our journey on foot, if only to say that we'd done it, and were a little hesitant. “Where is Port Resolution?” I asked. The driver pointed to the smoldering volcano blanketing the landscape in fog and said “On the other side of that.” We looked at the strangely malignant peak for a few more seconds and then got into the car.

As it turns out, it was a good thing we got a ride when we did as the nice packed coral surface of the road soon gave way to the black sand of the volcanic ash plain, and hiking through sand is notoriously difficult. For a while vegetation persisted to poke its way through the sand, before suddenly giving way to a desert of ash. The landscape in front of us was pure black and quickly turned into a minefield of sharp-looking volcanic rocks carelessly tossed onto the smooth sand. To our left, the volcano rose up like a gigantic black sand dune. I had no doubt that we had just crossed into Mordor proper and would soon begin ascending Mount Doom (although it turns out that Mount Yassur, as Tanna's volcano is called, is filled with far fewer orcs and far more Australians than Tolkien's Mount Doom). Our driver skillfully navigated through the potentially tire-puncturing rocks, following some road that I could not, for the life of me, discern. We rounded the base of the volcano and came to a road junction on the other side. One road obviously led up to the summit of the volcano, while the other made its way away from it. The driver explained that he'd be taking his carload of tourists up to the volcano, but that we should follow the other road to get to Port Resolution. As it turned out, we actually weren't even particularly to our destination, as it took another two hours of walking to reach it. We were both pretty exhausted by the time we pitched out tent and went to sleep that night.

The next day we set out to experience the strange volcanic character of the area around us. Across the bay from Port Resolution, where we'd spent the night, was a volcanic vent that had led to some interesting natural features. First, we hiked up to a large, rocky rift where volcanic gases mixed with water to send up wafts of egg-scented steam that seemed oddly refreshing (or maybe it was just that when the wind brought in breezes from across the ocean they seemed refreshing by comparison). Next we were directed to a patch of volcanic mud, a stretch of strangely spongey multi-colored earth. A little digging revealed that the upper layers of clay-like mud were warm and an inch or so away from the surface were downright hot. You could dig around to find pretty much any color of clay you wanted and its consistency made it kind of like a naturally-occurring Play-Doh. Finally, we climbed a ladder down a cliff-face to the ocean below where the tide-pools were dotted with springs of boiling water that occasionally let out sulfurous belches. That evening we caught a truck up to the top of the volcano, the event that was my motivation for coming to Tanna in the first place. The black sand road wound its way up the slope of the volcano, where the air became steadily cooler and more biting. We jumped out of the truck a couple hundred meters from the summit and continued on foot. At this point, the winds were quite strong and, even though I was wearing I jacket, I felt the coldest I'd ever felt in Vanuatu. Mount Yassur is billed as the world's most accessibly volcano. I don't know if this is true or not, but it certainly seemed plausible to me. Unlike the volcanoes I'd visited in Hawaii when I was little, which were carefully controlled with areas where it was safe to stand nicely roped off and park rangers ensuring that no one wandered off somewhere where they might be hit by a bit of flying magma, Yassur (in typical Vanuatu style) was just there. You were free to explore at will. We hiked all the way up to the rim of the volcano, where being shoved in by the strong winds seemed like a very real possibility, especially given the slippery footing offered by the volcanic sands. Unfortunately, you could not, as I'd hoped, stare down from the rim into a boiling pool of lava. The volcano was essentially a very large, circular sand dune. It slowly sloped up on the outside, finally coming to a peak at the rim, and then sloped downwards, somewhat more steeply, into the the volcano. A ways downwards a sort of flat, circular shelf was visible which separated the slope of the inner dune from a giant, dimly glowing pit in the middle. It seemed possible to safely walk down the interior slope of the volcano and stand on the shelf overlooking the pit, and we briefly considered this option when a deep grumbling sent hundreds of chunks of flaming magma flying up out of the pit. For a moment these glowing fragments hung still in the air and then descended, blanketing the shelf where we'd just been considering standing in brilliant, burning embers, and we decided that the view was just fine from the rim. The volcano's activity apparently fluctuates week-to-week (or even day-to-day) and we caught it during something of a quiet spell. I was told that it's not unheard of for the volcano to fling magma up over the rim where we were standing and onto the outside of the volcano and the assortment of volcanic rocks that dotted the outside flank were a testament to the truth of this. As it was, however, while we were there the bursts of magma never came close to the rim. We watched the volcano for about an hour and it fell into a sort of pattern. It would spend a ponderous five to ten minutes plotting its next outburst. Rumblings and tremors would announce that it was about to fire up. A sort of crashing boom accompanied each flare and chunks of burning red rained upward in one mammoth firework. Then the glowing rocks tumbled downwards, their bright forms twisting and turning in the short evening light. They peppered the shelf and sometimes the inside flank with flaming dimples which dimmed slowly as they cooled before finally going out. It was an awesome sight, but the novelty soon wore off as the wind became colder with the setting sun and soon enough we were ready to head back down to our ride.

Tired of walking, we caught a truck back to Lenekel to visit the last item on our agenda: a giant banyan tree. The banyan is a strange tree, not content to grow slowly thicker with each year, its branches attempt to create satellite trunks to support their rapid growth. Thin wooden tendrils worm their way down from the banyan's branches and, when they hit ground, begin to thicken and eventually form sturdy trunks which then sprout more branches. Older banyan trees are a mess of intertwined trunks and branches that form a sort of wooden jungle gym. The giant banyan on Tanna is supposedly the third largest in the world, a fact that I'm sure some Ni-Van just made up at some point and is now endlessly repeated. Third largest or not, however, it was a pretty impressive sight. Its network of trunks covered an area on the ground approaching half of the schoolyard at which I teach and the canopy was much larger. Intertwining woodwork formed thousands upon thousands of rungs which made the tree easily to climb up and maneuver around. Basically, it was the ultimate tree fort, the kind of thing every eight-year-old wishes they had in their backyard. Even at 23, I spent a couple hours climbing around it and could easily have spent several more.

After visiting the banyan, we headed to the airport. I liked Tanna, although my Peace Corps service has made me somewhat desensitized to natural wonders and I appreciated the plate of hot fish-and-chips that I got just off the plane in Vila almost as much as I did the volcano. Really, though, the only true disappointment was that, due to the geometry of Mount Yassur, throwing a coin into the lava pool had not been feasible, and thus my lifelong dream remains unfulfilled.

Yu No Kick Part 16: Ples Blong Mi Issue 2 (Norsup)

2009-07-22T18:24:00.000-04:00

Tautu is sandwiched between two commercial centers, Lakatoro and Norsup. They're not really towns so much and not many people live in either of them, they're mainly just locations where various stores and offices happen to be. Back when Vanuatu used to be jointly ruled by the French and British, Lakatoro was home to the British provincial offices and Norsup was home to the French ones. Today, Lakatoro has a little bit more going on in terms of commerce, but Norsup definitely has its upsides as well. There's a roundabout where the road out of Tautu joins up with the main road along the coast of the island. One turn takes you to airport and then to Lakatoro while the other takes you to Norsup. Ironically the airport is called Norsup airport even though it's not really anywhere near Norsup, which I suppose is in keeping with the time-honored tradition of airports never actually being in the cities (or villages) they're named for. The airport is probably about the midpoint between Norsup and Lakatoro, which makes Tautu a bit closer to Norsup than to Lakatoro. I'm actually not sure exactly where Tautu ends and Norsup begins (and I don't really think anyone is sure) but I usually take it to be around a house on the side of the road that would be quite a home in rural Georgia or something. Broken down cars and car parts absolutely litter the lawn. There are rusted out hulks of every kind of vehicle imaginable, buses, trucks, cars, and unidentifiable wheel beds. There's about as many broken cars on this lawn then there are functioning cars on the island, and I have absolutely no idea where all these wrecks came from, but they probably date back to British and French rule.

After passing Georgia, you round a bend to the left and the ocean, which is hidden from view for the majority of the walk from Tautu, emerges. Personally, I think Norsup has some of the best views in the area. Norsup Island, a small island just off the coast, is plainly visible and there's usually at least some canoe traffic going back and forth from the mainland. My favorite nakamals are here too, situated between the road and the ocean, providing and excellent view of the moon and stars over the water at night during kava time. There used to be only two nakamals along this stretch, but in recent months they've been springing up like Starbucks, one right next to the other. Considering that they all sell exactly the same (disgusting) thing for exactly the same price, I'm not really sure what's fueling this boom, but I suspect it has something to do with the Presbyterian Church in Tautu banning kava there on the weekends, thus forcing Tautu residents to search elsewhere. Just past nakamal row on the left is the Provincial Education Office, whose shabby-looking, dull yellow exterior masks a shabby-looking, dull yellow interior. Behind the education office is the Co-op, a large-ish store with the reasonable selection, but no refrigeration (hence no cold drinks or meat or cheese and, really, why else would I be going to the store?), and thus really only visited as a last resort. Behind the Co-op is another bank of nakamals providing emergency backup kava in case the oceanfront nakamals run low. Across from the education office is what is probably the nicest looking and newest building in the area. It was actually built by the French army when I first got to site, and thus it's larger and looks more structurally sound than most buildings on the island. It was also a source of amusement when it was being built as the construction crew was big into really short shorts and cowboy hats and thus tended to look more like an escort service. Originally the building was supposed to house a branch of the University of the South Pacific, but that didn't pan out for some reason and so this year it was re purposed as an office for the TVET program, a nebulous, Australian funded aid organization whose purpose still remains unclear to me. After the TVET office come another cement court that looks like it might once have been intended as a basketball or netball court but is currently being used as a nakamal.

The Norsup French school takes up a considerable amount of space along the road and is actually pretty impressive-looking. Unlike the British, the French have continued to fund their schools in Vanuatu even after independence as part of their (seemingly failing) mission to maintain French as an important language in the world. To their credit, however, the French schools do somehow manage to teach all of their students excellent French, a feat the English schools have yet to duplicate with English. Because of their funding, the Norsup school is able to build and maintain its facilities and has an excellent campus. Despite me having been here for almost two years, the students still seem to not have caught on to the fact that I don't speak French and so always call out to me in French as I walk or ride by on my bike.

Following the school is the hospital which, like the school, seems to be in impressively good condition. The buildings are relatively new and modern and the hospital is quite large. It's also probably the last place I'd want to be if I were sick. Norsup hospital lacks a regular doctor and the Ni-Vanuatu nursing staff are woefully under-trained. Malaria is given out as a default diagnosis for most ailments, including cuts. After McKenzie's and Elin's experiences with the hospital, I've avoided it for purposes of health care. The real reason for going to Norsup is the plantation. The PRV Plantation is (I think) the largest coconut plantation on the island and focuses on producing copra, although they also grow cocoa. The plantation worker housing is located right down the road from the hospital and is a collection of about ten to fifteen duplexes that look strangely reminiscent of cooker-cutter housing developments in the US. The walls and roof of each duplex are constructed entirely from corrugated iron, which undoubtedly makes them preposterously hot during the summer. Although I initially thought such houses to be totally unlivable, they're actually some of the fancier homes on the island. They even have legit power lines running between them. At the end of the housing comes the plantation store, a large, white, wooden building elevated off the ground a good six to eight feet for no reason that's apparent to me.

I have no interest in selling either copra or cocoa, but I frequent the plantation store probably more than any other on the island because they have by far the best butchery. As I explained in a previous entry, coconut fields are very large and relatively empty on the ground, leaving lots and lots of space for things like grass and shrubs to grow. Now, in order to make coconut harvesting easy and effective, its important to keep the grasses cut low so that workers don't have to be tramping through knee-high grass looking for fallen coconuts. Of course, there aren't very many lawn tractors on Malekula (and, even if there were, maneuvering them through the coconut trees would difficult), cutting grass with a machete is a gigantic pain, and even push mowers would take forever to cover that much ground, but there's actually a simple, 100% natural solution: cows. You see, cows eat grass, lots of grass, and they're totally automated, and never have to be paid or re-fueled. They even reproduce. The only thing is that, if you have a lot of coconut plantation to cover, you end up with a lot of cows and you've got to have something to do with the excess ones that are bound to spring up every now and again. Thus, most coconut plantation also wind up selling beef. Now, Vanuatu doesn't have a lot going for it in the food domain. Most of the local dishes are bland and boring and exist simply to sustain life. Plus, the hands-off approach to agriculture generally means that the quality of produce and livestock is inconsistent at best. But I tell you, Vanuatu has the best beef I've ever tasted. I was actually never that into beef in the US. True, I am totally obsessed with meat, but I tended to prefer pork, lamb, fish, and poultry to beef. Now I am a convert. The thing is, beef in the US is a little on the tasteless side. Our modern agricultural practices have indeed succeeded in producing cows that are more muscular and meat that is more tender, but we seem to have lost some flavor along the way. But Vanuatu beef is amazing, it's juicy and flavorful and you can eat it with absolutely no seasoning and it's delicious. And it's not just me. Every visitor we've had from the US and every volunteer that we've eaten with has mentioned that the beef here is some of the best they've ever had. The problem is that Ni-Vanuatu don't know how to respect a good cut of meat. To them, meat is meat. When Ni-Vans slaughter a cow, they chop it up with a machete into a bunch of one or two kilo chunks and sell all the meat for the same price, no matter where it came from on the cow. Thus, most of the beef Ni-Vans eat is tough and inedible unless it's stewed for many hours or cooked in a lap-lap. You never really appreciate the services a good butcher provides until you don't have one. The PRV, however, is French run and the French will be damned if they're going to see a good piece of meat go to waste. Unlike most stores on the island, the PRV store butchers their cows properly and sells their meat by the cut, from filet all the way down to stew meat. Fortunately, their prices are still all incredibly reasonable (filet for example, the most expensive cut, sells for about $4 a pound). Unfortunately, the names of all the cuts are in French, and it's taken me a while to sort out what's what, but I think I've got a pretty good handle on it now.

Upon entering the store, you're usually greeted by a plump, French-speaking, Ni-Van lady passed out behind the store's counter, her head pillowed by her arms against the wood of the counter top. Her eyes are the only thing that move as you approach. A dusty blackboard on the left lists the various cuts of beef available and their respective prices. It's up to you to initiate the transaction, as the lady behind the counter could comfortably let you stand in the store for many hours on end without speaking to you, so once you're sure of your order, you tell her, politely “half a kilo entrecote, please” And, seeming to marshal great amounts of energy in order to accomplish this, she'll lift her head off of her arms, shout your order to the wall behind her, apparently to no one, and begin rummaging around for a pen. A few moments later, strange noises will begin in the back of the store, clanging of metal, stomping of feet, occasional cursing and, sometimes, what I swear sounds like an electric saw. Once the lady finds her pen, she calculates your total on a large calculator sitting next to her on the counter, all the while muttering to herself in French, takes your money, and begins recording your purchase in a beat-up school notebook. A while later, an old, skinny, wily-looking Ni-Van man comes shuffling out of a door on the left side of the store wearing a white apron in various stages of being totally covered in blood and asks something like “two kilo faux filet, yes?” After you correct him, he shuffles back through the door and the strange noises resume. A little while longer and the man re-emerges clutching a plastic bag filled with red meat. If you're really lucky, the meat will still be warm from the slaughter, although this has only happened to me a few times over the couple of years I've been here. The total round trip from Tautu on foot is generally around an hour, but the results are so, so worth it.

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

2009-07-22T18:22:00.000-04:00

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.

Still Here...

2009-07-16T20:50:00.002-04:00

Hello all, I'd like to apologize for the long delay between posts. I owe you a lot of writing and I'll try to get it posted as soon as I possibly can. July's been a busy month (well, busy for Vanuatu) and I've spent a lot of time organizing various 4th-of-July related parties and attending to visitors. Here are a few tidbits to tie you all over until I can get a real post up:

-Jack, a volunteer down in the south of the island, did us all proud by landing a beautiful tuna and a giant mahi-mahi during a boat trip he took up the coast. Unlike tunas we've caught in the past, this one had the rich, dark, red meat that makes excellent sushi and so I got more practice rolling sushi rolls.
-The 4th gave me an excuse to bust out the sole Weber grill in the country (thanks to Jammy) once again. Still haven't figured out a really good way to make charcoal, but the burgers came out well anyway.
-My waterbed started leaking, leading to a lot of consternation on my part, but I was eventually able to fix it using a whole lot of contact adhesive. Here's hoping it will hold together for four more months until I leave.
-I'm heading to Tanna next week to go see the "world's most accessible volcano" and fulfill my lifelong dream of throwing pennies into a volcano. Will let you know how that turns out.

Yu No Kick Part 14: Coconuts

2009-06-28T23:19:00.000-04:00

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.

Yu No Kick Part 13: Class Time

2009-06-14T20:11:00.000-04:00

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.

Yu No Kick Part 12: Musical Interludes

2009-06-09T23:24:00.000-04:00

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.

Yu No Kick Part 11: Flasem Haos Nomo

2009-05-31T19:46:00.000-04:00

“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.

Yu No Kick Part 10: Land Diving

2009-05-28T19:59:00.000-04:00

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.”

Yu No Kick Part 9: Critters

2009-05-07T18:17:00.000-04:00

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.

Quick Note

2009-05-04T21:40:00.002-04:00

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?

2009-05-04T21:29:00.000-04:00

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.”

Yu No Kick Part 7: Samting Ia

2009-05-04T21:27:00.000-04:00

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...”

Yu No Kick Part 6: Ples I Hot

2009-04-19T19:23:00.000-04:00

“Ples i hot.” Bislama for “it's hot” (from the English “place is hot”), but it passes for “hello” or “goodbye” or “hey, how's it going?” And it's a great way to meet new people. Just sit down on a bench next to a bunch of guys you don't know, make a show of settling in a taking a load off and let out a “ples i hot” in a lazy voice that's half sigh and half groan. It's a start to many a fast friendship on the islands. When I was back in the States for Christmas, I invested in a $10 combination yard thermometer and hygrometer, thus allowing me to keep track of exactly how amazingly hot the place at any given moment. A hygrometer, by the way, measures humidity and is not to be confused with a hydrometer which, for some reason, is a tool that's used to measure the density of beer. It seems like it would make sense that, since humidity has to do with water and all, a tool that measures it would be called a hydrometer, but I guess beer predates meteorology by a good couple millenniums (apparently millenniums is the accepted plural of millennium now. I always thought it was millenia, but the spell checker doesn't lie), so they got to take all the good names. Anyway, every afternoon as I'm sweating and cooking lunch, I get to glance over at my thermo/hygrometer and see those large, cheerful digital numerals spell out 91.5 F and 68% (I'm all for the metric system, I really am. It makes more sense, it's easier to work with, and everyone else uses it. Thing is, at the end of the day, I still have absolutely no idea how hot 20 degrees Celsius is). Except the .5 on the 91.5 is only half the size over the other numbers (because it's a decimal, and decimals are only half as important) and is sort of tucked away under the F like an afterthought. It's a bonus, the plus tacked onto the A, that says that not only is it really hot, but it's really hot and then a bit extra.

I've always been an ice over fire kind of person. I've always felt it's easier to warm up on a cold day than cool off on a warm day. It's the second law of thermodynamics: it sucks to be hot. Unfortunately, that wonderful food that we eat to stay alive also produces waste heat when it's burned, which has to be dumped somewhere. It doesn't really seem like it should be a problem. Our bodies are running at 98.6, give or take, so that gross sticky air permeating my household around lunchtime is a whopping seven degrees cooler than me. It should be cooling me off, it really should. And I guess it does, it's just that the heat never really gets far enough away. You can feel it when you stand still, the stale air around you slowly getting hotter and hotter until it can't anymore and then it's on your skin, that horrible warm throb as your blood pumps in more and more heat that just goes nowhere, and then it starts oozing inwards, first through your arms and legs and then your chest and head as the whole system just backs up and you want to scream in frustration. Ples i hot. When I first got to Vanuatu I was obsessed with trying to prove myself to the locals who, I feared, would see me a as weak, pampered northerner with no stomach for the island heat. “Ples i hot,” people would call out to me as they passed me on the road. “No,” I'd say, feeling obligated to appear strong “no, it's not that bad. It gets hotter back in the US, actually.” And the Ni-Vans would nod and smile politely and wonder why in the hell I was trying to argue that it wasn't hot. I later realized that the ples i hot greeting was not meant to be patronizing, but was rather an invitation to mutual surrender and acceptance of forces outside of our control. More of a “hey, it's really hot out, why don't we both pass out under a tree for several hours and do absolutely nothing.”

I think the heat is responsible for the lack of success most international development projects experience in Vanuatu. You come up with a development idea, you talk it over with other development workers, you submit your idea to some development agency, get some funding, come up with a good acronym and maybe a catchy slogan, run some workshops and trainings, hand out materials, and pass the whole thing off to someone in-country, who gets sweat stains all over everything and shelves most of the work until the weather cools down a bit, which is never. We're kind of like Superman, the heat is like our kryptonite. When we can get away from it we're unstoppable. We invent things, build cities and civilizations, cross oceans, go to the moon. But when we're confronted with a hot, muggy day we become lazy, lethargic and useless. I think one of my favorite images of Vanuatu are those Sunday afternoons where I eat way too much lap-lap at Duncan's and pass out on his cement floor along with the rest of the family; looking out the door I can see all of the numerous household dogs arrayed similarly on the lawn, man and beast made alike by the afternoon sun.

I think my schoolyard is one of the hottest places on the face of the planet. The yard is open and shadeless, the perfect venue for the sun to do its relentless work, and there are stands of banana trees on all sides that choke out pretty much every breeze that even considers passing through. I can't blame the students at all for not wanting to come to class in the afternoon. There's really only one respectable thing to be doing when face with such oppressive heat, and that's absolutely anything that might help you cool off, even a little bit. Combating the heat is a subtle game and it requires creativity and cunning. Unfortunately, heat is fantastic at dulling both one's creativity and cunning, so the best ideas for combating the heat are often formed whilst away from it (I'll bet you that air conditioning was invented during the winter). Staying cool in Vanuatu is an art. In my opinion, the best option is to get yourself a job somewhere that has air conditioning. On Malekula, this leaves two options, the Air Vanuatu Office and the LTC Office (not the main store, mind you, just the office in the back). But, since the owner of the LTC is kind of a jerk, I think the most set up person on the entire island is the lady who works at the Air Vanuatu ticket counter. She gets to hang around for eight hours a day in the air conditioning, and gets paid. Oh, and occasionally she has to help a customer, but that's a small price to pay. For those of us less fortunate however, the thatch and bamboo houses are a good second choice. Despite their humble appearance and the fact that they often leak when it rains, the bamboo huts actually boast much better thermal properties than the fancier cement block and metal roof homes. Natural materials, you see, provide much better insulation than sheets of metal, which helps keep the heat of the day out. Thus, it's often a good five to ten degrees cooler inside of a bamboo house during the day than inside of my much fancier house. Location can also play an important role. Oceanfront properties are desirable not only for nice views, but also for those delightful ocean breezes which can make the difference between comfort and misery come 1pm. Although not always reliable, there's often a fairly strong wind coming off of the ocean that provides those whose houses are on the beach with a nice, natural, cross breeze. Once again, however, this is of little help to me, whose house is in a stagnant schoolyard, although many of my hours are spent down by the ocean to take advantage of the breezes anyway. Swimming and showering are also tempting possibilities, but they must be employed with care. While that water may feel good against you skin while you're in it, it can sometimes leave you with a vague, humid, sticky feeling that never quite goes away no matter how many times you dry off. The key is to only venture into the water (or the shower) in the later afternoon, as the heat is breaking, so that that last little bit of moisture can be absorbed by the cooler night air as opposed to combining with the sweat of the day.

The sad truth, however, is that on the worst days there's not a lot you can do. When the wind over the ocean cuts out and the sea is glassy calm and the sun's heat manages to work its way through even the thickest of thatch roofs, often the only thing that can give you the smallest hint of respite is the fan. A small piece of something held in the hand and slowly waved back and forth to produce the smallest of breezes across the body. Choosing a good object for fanning is key. You want something stiff enough to move air effectively (sheet of paper, for example, is far to floppy), yet light and easy to move so that you're not expending undo energy. Cardboard boxes in my house are quickly cut up and employed as fans that serve fairly well until the sweat from the hand holding them permeates the cardboard and they become too limp and must be discarded. The Ni-Vanuatu favor fans fashioned from pandanus (similar to their mats), which last long, but are just a little bit too difficult to move for my tastes. Getting the proper fanning speed is also important. If you fan too slowly, you won't feel adequately cooled, but if you fan too quickly the extra heat produced from the exertion will counter whatever cooling effect the breeze you're producing has. Fanning is best employed when the rest of the body is totally immobile, and in slow, steady strokes that can be continued for hours without tiring you out.

Getting through the days are one thing, but by far the worst is when the heat persists into the night. A hot night can make sleeping almost totally impossible, and there's little to be done about it. If you have a cement floor, you can abandon your bed in favor of the slightly cooler cement, although you're sacrificing physical comfort for thermal comfort, so it's only a matter of time before you become too sore and have to return to the bed. It's also possible to fan yourself to sleep, although this is a tricky business. You have to make your fanning motions as mechanical and monotonous as possible in order to become drowsy enough to fall asleep. Close your eyes and relax while fanning yourself slowly and allow yourself to drift off. Now, you're eventually going to have to stop fanning in order to allow sleep to fully take hold, so the key is timing, you've got quit fanning right as you feel yourself on the verge of sleep. Once the fanning stops, you've got only a minute or two to seal the deal before you start becoming too hot again and have to start over. But don't worry, it's OK if you don't nail it on the first go, practice makes perfect. Of course, sometimes the best option is just to have a few shells of kava, which will put you straight to sleep, heat or no.

Although manual fanning is about the limit of what we're able to achieve with local materials, modern technology has opened up some more possibilities for me. The electric fan, under appreciated in our over-air conditioned society, has found a new place in my heart out here on the islands. Unfortunately, technological difficulties have been something of a hindrance, so I'm now actually on my third fan. My first was a cheap, Chinese-made piece that did well for the first couple of months but began to slow down to the point where I had to push-start the blades with a pencil just to get it to move at all. When I was back in the States, I decided to upgrade and invested in an “industrial air circulator,” which worked wonderfully for about 30 minutes before the motor got fried by the electricity here (and yes, I was using a transformer to step down the voltage, but I guess 60Hz motors don't like 50Hz power). This led to a very depressing month or so where I had two fans in my house, neither of which were working. I recently went to Vila, however, and went looking for the most durable-looking, fanciest fan I could find. I finally settled on an 18 inch, 180 watt floor fan imported from England that I got for about $90. So far it's been serving me faithfully, but I'm still only cautiously optimistic that it will last me until December, when I leave, given my history with fans.

Along with the dud of a fan I also, when I was in the States, purchased a vinyl water bed mattress, which is a fancy word for a giant, watertight bag. This was at the suggestion of my engineer-filled family and the idea behind it was twofold. First, since water takes a long time to heat up (has a large heat capacity, in science-speak), a fully filled water bed would always be a few degrees cooler than whatever the temperature happened to be in the house around it. Second, since water is better at absorbing heat than air, even if the bed were to get up to 91.5 F along with the house, it would still feel cooler (sort of like how water at 70 F feels a lot colder than air at 70 F). And so, when I got back to Vanuatu, I set my vinyl bag on the floor up against my wall and set to filling it up. This was actually a lot harder than it sounds. You see, the manufacturers of the water bed were obviously expecting the person filling it up to have running water, which I don't. There was a nice little fill valve on the bed and it came with a nice little adapter to hook up to a hose and then a faucet, none of which would work with my water tank. I ended up placing the end of the hose inside of a bucket instead of attaching it to a faucet and placing the bucket on my kitchen table. I then filled the bucket with water, and used the hose as a siphon to draw water out of the bucket and into the bed. Every thirty seconds or so I ran outside with a second bucket, filled it up with water from my tank, and refilled the first bucket. The whole process ended up taking about an hour and a half, I probably made a least a hundred trips to my water tank, and used up about 2/3 of my drinking water in the process. But it was definitely worth it. Predictions were correct, and the water bed was pleasantly cool to lie on, even in the middle of the afternoon. Plus, I now have the only water bed in the country, which is kind of cool. Really, the main downside is that, given how comfortably cool it is and how difficult it can be to get out to water beds anyway, it's pretty tempting for me to spend entire weeks lying on it.

Together, the water bed and my new Gazz brand 180 watt fan make up my personal cooling solution. Lying on the bed with the fan whirring just inches away from my head goes a long way towards taking the edge off the heat. But, and this is the sad part, it's still just not *quite* enough. There are still those times when the air moving through the fan is still just a little too uncomfortably warm and the water from the water bed isn't quite sucking enough heat out of my back when I still feel the oppressiveness around me and I know that I can never really win, that my victories are small and my fight is in vain. There's just no way around it. Ples i hot.

Yu No Kick Part 5: Digicel

2009-04-19T19:19:00.000-04:00

Cell phones, those in international development like to say, are a leapfrog technology. That is, it's a technology that can be implemented more easily than earlier forms of itself and it doesn't require older forms of itself to be in place in order to function. So, cell towers are easier to build than a network of landlines and they don't require a network of landlines to be in place in order to function, thus the land line phase of telecommunications development can be totally skipped. When I first arrived in Vanuatu, communicating with anyone not within shouting distance was something of a challenge. A French company called TVL had set up a very precarious phone network. Phones connected to large radio transmitters that passed their signals over the ocean between the islands and finally fed into a large satellite dish in Port Vila which allowed a slow trickle of communication with the outside world for those few of us desiring it. Often, the transmitters were located in remote areas without access to electricity and thus relied on solar power to function, an energy source that can become decidedly scarce should it be raining a lot. Phone cord also tends not to last long in the bush, where it is baked by the sun, corroded by the rain, and chewed on by rats, and thus phone cables were often held together via arrangements that made duct-taping seem like a shockingly sturdy and long-term solution. Technicians were also usually less than thrilled to travel to areas reachable only by machete-wielding adventurers to make repairs. But there they'd be, incongruous as palm trees in Alaska, these off-white desk phones, looking like they'd come straight from Office Depot (they even had speed dial), nailed to the side of community centers or housed in little bamboo and thatch huts which you could, if you really squinted, call phone booths. Those phones were a promise, a tenuous glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe, you might be able to talk to someone outside of your village. That, if it hadn't been raining too much and if the piece of cloth holding the phone wire together continued to function properly, you might just be able to talk to your parents in the US or, if you were really lucky and happened to own a laptop, log on to Facebook and update your status.

TVL made money by charging for plastic, pre-paid phone cards with long numerical codes on the back covered by lottery-ticket style scratch off goop that you removed when you purchased them to reveal your number, which you could then punch into a phone to access airtime. It cost about $5 for the cheapest card, which earned you about ten minutes of talk time. After being prompted for the number you wished to call, a friendly voice would come on and inform of how much time you would be able to connect to said number on your current phone card. The thing was, TVL employed a complicated billing system where the phone charges were based on the time of day, the day of the week, the island that you're calling from, the island that you're calling to, and whether or not it's a good day for yams at the market; the bottom line being that sometimes you'd connect to a number and be granted fifteen minutes to talk and sometimes you'd connect to the same number and have four. You just never knew. Sometimes calling cards were used as a substitute for currency. For example, I once heard a story of a woman buying a baby using phone cards, which I thought was strange because not only did it imply that someone had negotiated the purchase of a child, but that they didn't have the common decency to at least use an actual currency when doing so.

TVL eventually branched out into cell phones as well, but there coverage was rather spotting as you could only use your cell phone in about 10% of the country. You couldn't really blame them for this though, given what a pain it is to build and maintain cell towers. The tower on Malekula, for example, required a forty-five minute hike through the bush, up a rather steep hill to reach, which really isn't that bad if you're just carry a bottle of water and maybe a few snacks, but if you're carrying, say, the cement to build a cell tower with, it starts to look like a real pain in the ass.

When I first got to Malekula, a new phone company, Digicel, was in the process of building a network of cell towers across Vanuatu with the ambitious goal of providing coverage to over 70% of the country. Unlike TVL's towers, however, which were small, simple affairs which relied on terrain (ie. hills) to provide the height needed to broadcast their signal, Digicel's structures were huge, towering monstrosities (at least for Vanuatu), and they were going up all over the country. It was an uphill battle and one that I, when I saw it began, thought was doomed to failure. For one thing, building a large tower that will remain standing for a long period of time, even in the presence of natural disasters such as earthquakes and hurricanes, requires a quality of workmanship that is mostly absent from Vanuatu. For example, the concrete cinder blocks made on my island are so incredibly shoddy and low-quailty that it's entirely possible to break one by stepping on it (which, as you can image, makes me feel really good, given that I live in a cinder block house). To get around this problem, Digicel not only imported the cement (the chemical ingredients used in making concrete) for their towers, but also the sand and water that went into the making of their concrete blocks.

The launching of the Digicel phone network was the biggest thing to hit Vanuatu since independence. Actually, no, the Digicel launching was the biggest thing to hit Vanuatu, period. And it was accompanied by an ad campaign that would have been right at home advertising the release of a new kind of Doritos chip back in the States. They imported who knows how many gallons of red and white (Digicel's logo's colors) paint and sent people up and down all the islands painting everything that they possibly could red and white. People's huts out in the middle of nowhere became Digicel advertisements. So you'll be traipsing through the bush and all of the sudden come upon a little thatch roofed store with DIGICEL written in large, white letters on the side. They wrote theme music, got celebrity endorsements (no mean feat considering that there aren't any celebrities here). The national newspaper sold them their front page for several weeks running. As in, the front page of the newspaper contained not a single bit of news but was one, giant, Digicel ad. They even put a highway-style billboard up in Lakatoro, conveniently large enough to read while you're speeding by in your car. Now all we need are some cars to speed by in. On launching day in Malekula, they rented a truck and decked it out with speakers and banners and drove up and down the island blasting Digicel music and giving out hats. I wondered if someone should try and explain to them that, in order to sell phones in Vanuatu, all they really had to do was, you know, have some phones to sell.

Needless to say, cell phones were an overnight success in Vanuatu. Even the crazy guy who sings outside of our general store got one (although his is a broken one that someone else threw away). The basic Digicel phone model is a black-and-white screen job, which I like because it's simple, functional, and easy to use, but especially because it has a little flashlight on the end of it. In my mind, this is really the only cell phone extra that's actually useful in Vanuatu (or anywhere, really. I actually saw the flashlight phone on sale in the US when I was home for Christmas. I was trying to sell my brother on it when he was shopping for his first cell phone, but with little luck. “Hey Nick, check this one out, it has a flashlight on it!” “But it doesn't even have a color screen or an enhanced keypad and it doesn't flip open or slide or do anything.” “Yeah, but check it out, it has a flashlight!”), although it can lead to complications when you're using it to walk around at night and someone calls and you have to choose between walking and talking on the phone. Of course, people in my village quickly discovered the many and varied features of the fancier phones, including the MP3 player, the camera, and the video recorder, all of which are pretty much totally useless without a computer, but no one seems to mind. I soon became pitied in Tautu as the one, poor guy still using the cheap-o, uncool phone. Even the crazy dude's broken phone is a fancier model than mine. I usually end up getting the last laugh, however, seeing people walking along at night, hunched over low so as to allow the light from the large color screens of their internet-capable camera phones to illuminate the many potholes in the road.

I think leapfrogging is an appropriate image for the arrival of Digicel to Vanuatu because, while Digicel may cover over 70% of the country, things like electricity certainly do not. Originally, Digicel sold their phones with little, red solar chargers which, as anyone who's ever used any kind of solar charger knows, are totally useless. Eventually this plan was abandoned and thriving cell phone charging businesses have sprung up all over the place. People with it enough to own generators or to have large solar setups charge $1 per charge to charge a cell phone. The stores in Lakatoro, who all run on the power grid, charge similar rates to those who want to use their outlets to charge their phones while they're in from the out villages. Given that charing a cell phone uses probably a maximum of ten joules of energy, I think this is a pretty brilliant businesses model.

Along with the lack of electricity, many Ni-Vanuatu also suffer from a lack of anyone to call. Not to be deterred, however, some adventurous Ni-Vans have taken to simply dialing random combinations of numbers and trying to strike up a conversation with however answers. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before someone gets married to a person they met while randomly punching in numbers on their phone one afternoon. For all I know this has already happened. This practice got even worse when Digicel started offering this service where you can send a free text to a friend requesting that they call you back. Whereas before randomly calling people cost money, now you can randomly text people for free and see who calls back. I get at least four such texts per day. Adding to my daily influx of phone spam are special offers that Digicel texts out to all their customers, things like “Make a 20 minute phone call today and make calls for the rest of the day for free.” Helpfully, they will sometimes send out three versions of each message, one in English, one in Bislama, and one in French. For a while, the whole concept of a special offer was a little shaky in the village and so I was having to do a lot of explaining.
Ni-Van: “What does this Digicel text mean?”
Me: “Well, if you make a phone call that lasts longer than 20 minutes, all your calls for the rest of the day are free.”
Ni-Van: “So if I talk for twenty minutes today, I don't have to buy phone cards anymore?”
Me: “No, only calls you make today will be free. Tomorrow you have to start paying again.”
Ni-Van: “So I talk for twenty minutes and then it's free until tomorrow?”
Me: “Yes.”
Ni-Van: “What if I use my brother's phone?”
Me: “No, just the calls you make on your phone.”
Ni-Van: “But what if mine runs out of battery?”
Me: “You know what, just forget about it.”

Ni-Vans are also absurdly bad at accepting the fact that they've dialed a wrong number, or maybe it's just that they don't really care if they actually end up talking to the person they're trying to call, I don't know, but the bottom line is that I get a lot of conversations like this:
Me: Hello
Caller: George?
Me: No, sorry, I'm not George.
Caller: But I'm trying to call George.
Me: Well, I'm not George, sorry.
Caller: Is George there?
Me: No, this isn't George's phone, it's my phone.
Caller: Who are you?
Me: I'm Daniel, sorry, not George.
Caller: Do you know George?
Me: No, I don't, I'm sorry, I think you have the wrong...
Caller: Where are you on?
Me: Malekula, look, I...
Caller: No, George lives on Pentecost, this should be Pentecost.
Me: Yeah, I'm not George. I”m Daniel, I'm on Malekula, look, try...
Caller: Could you get George for me?

But what's worse is when you hang up on them and they call back.

Cell phones in Vanuatu seem like some kind of alien artifact that some UFO accidentally left a bunch of behind when they were visiting earth. They're so out of sync with everything else that's going on in the country. Stores in Vila have even started selling iPhones so that you can get directions to the nearest nakamal with on your cell phone with MapQuest (Continue STRAIGHT for 200 meters on THE ONLY ROAD ON THE ISLAND, then turn LEFT). Digicel has even activated the GPRS network, allowing phones with internet capability to get online. Just last Sunday I was sitting on the beach watching Duncan and some friends grind a batch of kava. We were struggling to find a bucket in which to work the kava and a rag with which to strain out the grinds when I was asked if I knew of any good websites to check out. I turned around and was faced with a bright, color, cell phone screen displaying the Google homepage. I was flabbergasted and for a while could not think of a single web address. Finally, one popped into mind. “Try http://www.nytimes.com,” I said, and watched as the guy painstakingly typed “http://www.nytimes.com” into the Google search bar. “No,” I said “that's a URL, you don't put that in the search bar.” “What's a URL?” he asked. I sighed. Technology is a strange thing.

Yu No Kick Part 4: Centipedes

2009-04-05T19:02:00.000-04:00

Vanuatu is pretty lucky when it comes to its fauna, as most of it is friendly, or at least harmless. No large, threatening mammals. No lions, tigers or bears. The closest we've got are wild pigs and cows which, while they're nothing to be trifled with, just aren't really what one pictures when asked to think of a fearsome predator. There are no poisonous snakes (actually we do have white and black striped sea snakes whose venom is lethal, except their jaws are so small that the only place where they can bite you is on the ear lobe) and the spiders, while gigantic, are also harmless. There are no black widows or brown recluses or even wolf spiders. Basically, any animal you might even consider being afraid of doesn't live in Vanuatu. Except for the centipedes. These impossible creatures abound in the country particularly, it seems, in my house. They aren't unique to Vanuatu, really, you can find them in the desert southwest of the US, hanging out with the scorpions and other creepy-looking insectioids. In fact when I was in Big Bend National Park in west Texas over Christmas I noticed them selling centipedes encased in glass as paperweights. They were labeled as “giant centipedes” despite the fact that they were barely four inches long. Any self-respecting centipede enthusiast would scoff at such measly specimens. The centipedes in Vanuatu grow to mutant proportions far exceeding what would conveniently fit inside your average paperweight. Around these parts, centipedes upwards of eight inches aren't an unusual sight to see clambering across my walls. These are centipedes that you wouldn't be particularly surprised to see carrying off small kittens or one of those obnoxious football-sized yappy dogs.

My training group's fear of centipedes was cultivated early on in our Peace Corps experience. A few of us had read accounts of such creatures in various books about Vanuatu and the stories quickly spread. During our first week in Vila we were constantly on the lookout, expecting giant centipedes to be lurking behind every corner, ready to inflict all kinds of unimaginable horrors upon us. I didn't end up seeing my first centipede until we'd moved to our training village, in the bush a little north of Port Vila. Like any self-respecting monster, centipedes eschew the light and prefer dark, damp haunts. However, come nightfall they emerge in search of food and sometimes would venture into my family's dining area. Your average adult centipede is six to eight inches long, reddish brown, and has far more legs than is really necessary. They're about the thickness of your little finger and are made up of countless little segments, each segment sprouting a spindly pair of legs. A menacing set of what are undoubtedly pincers adorn the head and you can tell, without any questions asked, that they just HAVE to be poisonous. It takes about a second to put together the fact that these things are up to no good. Ni-Vans go after centipedes with a overly religious zeal usually reserved for witch-hunters and exorcists. Whoever spots one sounds the alarm and everyone within a fifty foot radius instantly springs into action. Even nakamals, where peace and quiet held sacrosanct, dissolve into frantic mayhem if a centipede is sighted. Flip-flops are quickly removed and converted into clubs with which to bludgeon the beasts. Dirt and gravel fly everywhere as dozens of men ruthlessly pound the ground with their shoes. And then, just as suddenly, when the foe is vanquished, the all-clear is sounded. Everyone replaces their shoes, returns to their seats, and continues their conversations as if nothing had happened.

Although physics would seem to dictate that, as the number of legs attached to a creature increases, eventually it would have far too many than is useful and any further increase in leg number would simply lead to increased clumsiness, this does not really seem to play out in the case of centipedes. They move with an impossible grace that has to be seen to be believed. They don't so much walk as they flow. None of their myriad of appendages ever really seem to move, and yet somehow they are propelled forward with terrifying speed. They ooze through the smallest nooks and crannies like syrup, making them all but impossible to keep out of your house. Of course, anything able to move with such horrible fluidity is certain to be predatory. Centipedes are the lions of the insect world. They descend upon unsuspecting cockroaches and toiling ants and slaughter them like lambs. Frightening enough as they are for us, veritable behemoths hundreds of times their size, one shudders to think how a centipede must appear to its prey: the sudden flurry of legs, the quiet whoosh of impending doom, and those giant pincers closing you.

On dry days, the centipedes stick to the outdoors, preferring the warm and moist hideouts offered by the soil. When it rains, however, they are driven from their holes and begin to creep inside. With the lights out, they claim full reign of the house, rushing across the floors and oozing up the walls to prey on the roaches, beetles, moths, and others who make up my usual collection of house guests. Once sated, they seek out warm nooks to roost: underneath pillows, in the folds of bedsheets and clothing, snuggled up against a sleeping human. I had my first close encounter during my first few weeks on Malekula. I awoke in the middle of the night with the odd sensation of something crawling on me. Still groggy, I glanced down to investigate and froze. Nestled on my sternum was a massive and distinctly alien creature. I'd seen a number of centipedes before, but never one this big. Its fangs glistened in the moonlight. My adrenaline was flowing freely, I was ready for action, but, if it came to a showdown, I was uncertain which one of us would emerge the victor. The thing was HIUGE. I mustered every ounce of strength I had and swatted the beast to the side. It went flying, hitting the wall and falling to the floor. I bolted upright, waiting for it to retaliate, but it was already in full retreat. My mind, in its panic, had vastly overestimated the size of my foe. It was tiny. Even by American standards. Little more than a baby. I smiled and relaxed and settled back into bed. But when you've shared your bed with a centipede, it puts your senses on edge. Suddenly, everything feels like a many-legged creature crawling across your body. The brush of your sheet, the night's breeze against your skin, the tickle of your mosquito net, has you bolt upright in moments, searching for your assailant. It was a long time before I was able to fall back asleep.

Over the months, I've become a seasoned veteran of centipede attacks. At a glance I can distinguish a baby centipede from its somewhat dopey and entirely harmless cousin, the millipede (millipedes rarely get to be more than an inch long and, rather than being fearsome predators, they instantly curl up into little balls whenever they're startled. Their sole purpose in life seems to be to crawl into my house and die. I have to sweep millipede corpses off my floor on a daily basis). I straighten the folds of my bed sheet and shake out my pillow before heading to sleep. And I'm a survivor of many a centipede bite. After spending almost a year in fear of being bitten, my first bite was a surprisingly painless experience: a sharp sting lasting a minute or so subsiding to a dull throb and then an itchy lump by morning. Many a centipede has regretted its decision to sink its fangs into my skin. Usually, I get stung at night when I accidentally roll on top of or brush an appendage against a centipede that's decided to share my bed with me. The sting brings me awake and is followed by a glance at the affected area of confirm the cause. Centipedes leave two little puncture holes right next to each other that make it look like I've been bitten by a midget vampire. The larger centipedes can even draw blood with their bite. With the sight of those two little welts, the hunt begins.

Centipede hunting can be a tricky business. First, you have to choose a weapon. Centipedes are well armored, so going after them empty handed is generally ineffective and will often earn you a second bits. However, they're also fast, so if you delay too long whilst arming yourself your prey will have escaped. The edge of a shoe is generally the choice I prefer (stepping on centipedes is also usually ineffective, they're too fast and slippery and, more often then not, they'll just crawl on top of your foot and deliver another bite). Next, I turn the lights on. When the room floods with light, the centipede will bolt for the nearest cover it can find. If you catch it out in the middle of the floor with no cover in sight, it can become disoriented and start running around in circles, making it an easy target. The key is to drive it out of any cover its able to find. Lift up clothes and pillows and sheets, pick up books or any other objects and force it out into the open. Then, you strike. You need to deliver a sharp blow to effectively damage a centipede. You need a hard edge. Rolled up newspapers aren't going to do you any good, neither will the flat of a book or a shoe. You need something to focus the force of your blow and crush through the centipede's armor, hence the edge of the shoe or the book will work much better than the flat. Once you've delivered one or two good blows, you're on the home stretch. Centipedes are pretty hardy, so it will probably still be alive, but you'll have effectively immobilized it by crushing some of its segments, now you just have to finish the job. Chickens are fond of eating centipedes, so you can carry it outside and feed it to one. You can also burn them. Or you can keep on hammering. Once you're sure that the centipede is damaged enough that it's not going anywhere anytime soon, you leave it and wait. The ants will finish the job for you. Once prey for these mighty beasts, the ants hover on the outskirts of the conflict waiting for you to turn the tables in their favor, then they descend upon the wounded predator. Before long, the centipede is covered in a swarm of these relentless creatures who tear it apart and carry it back to their nest for food. Of the large variety of insects and other small animals that inhabit my house, centipedes may be the most frightening, but the ants are definitely the most insidious. They may be small and weak, and one swipe of my hand my obliterate hundreds of them but, in the end, they always get the last laugh.

Yu No Kick Part 3: Black Magic

2009-03-31T20:56:00.000-04:00

Hanging a breadfruit leaf from your clothesline prevents it from raining. It wasn't entirely clear, when this was being explained to me, what, exactly, the area of effect for this particular weather control device is. Does it just not rain on your clothesline? Sort of like the reverse of the little cartoon raincloud that down pours on just one person? Or does a single breadfruit leaf take out the rainfall for the entire island because, if so, I feel like that might lead to a lot of accidental droughts. There's a leaf for just about anything around here: curing diseases, catching fish, causing diseases, catching women, making money, fertility, birth control, and bringing up the price of copra. In fact, given that there aren't really all that many kinds of plants around I think there are probably more leaf-related spells than there are actual kinds leaves, which suggests that some leaves must being doing double duty, which makes you wonder how if, for example, you're cooking up some papaya-leaf based potion, you specify you want the money-making effect as opposed to the herpes-causing effect. Although I suppose if you assume that each potion has to contain at least three kinds of leaves you open up a lot more possibilities. The local hospitals and health centers are constantly butting heads with practitioners of “kastom” (Bislama from the English word “custom,” referring to practices and traditions predating the arrival of Europeans), so for every guy you see walking around with a professional-looking hospital bandage covering a wound you see a guy strolling around with a heap of leaves fastened onto his cut with a piece of rope (this is even more amazing when you consider the fact that Vanuatu has socialized medicine, so getting bandages and antibiotic creams from the hospital is free whereas getting a stack of leaves from the witch doctor usually costs money). Belief in the magical properties of plants is so strong, in fact, that it's not unheard of for someone to make an announcement at the end of a church service asking if anyone knows of a leaf to help him nab a wife (yes, this actually has happened), which is ironic given how hard the churches work around here to combat belief in black magic and kastom.

Duncan and I go back and forth a lot about the ghost that lives at Aop river. Aop is a small river located about halfway between Lakatoro and Tautu. The road goes right over it and so one really has no choice but to cross it if you're trying to get from my house to Lakatoro or visa versa. Like any good parent, Duncan is worried sick that I'm going to get myself killed. Unlike my Dad in the States, however, who might worry about me getting involved with drugs or ending up in a nasty traffic accident or getting mugged while walking around New York City, Duncan worries that I'm going to get dismembered by spirits (is dismember the appropriate word to describe what spirits do to unsuspecting mortals? I'm not really sure, but I'm going to go with it anyway). You see, while he has no problem with me transiting between Lakatoro and Tautu during the day, I sometimes end up drinking kava in Lakatoro and then biking home after dark, and this is the source of the disagreement. It usually goes something like this:
Duncan: But you're not afraid to ride at night?
Me: No, I like it, it's not as hot.
Duncan: That road is no good at night. There's something no good there. It's not as strong as it used to be when I was little because we all pray now at church, but it's still there, ask anyone.
Me: Mmmm...
Duncan: Like, have you ever seen lights in the coconut plantation at night that look like truck lights?
Me: Yeah.
Duncan: Well, weren't you frightened?
Me: Maybe for a little bit, but then I realized that there was a truck behind me.
Duncan: You are a white man, you can't understand what I'm talking about.
And he's right, I really can't understand him when he tells me that there's a ghost haunting my road home. What's funny is that if he'd told me not to bike home at night because I might get mugged, I probably would've abandoned my late-night kava expeditions, but the idea of another person waiting to jump him on the road sounds about as ridiculous to Duncan as the idea of a ghost sounds to me. In Vanuatu they may be afraid of the dark but in US we're afraid of each other.

Unfortunately for Duncan, I will never be able to believe in ghosts any more than I'll be able to be convinced that breadfruit leaves prevent rain, but I find it increasingly difficult to argue my side of the story. I find it impossible to explain, for example, why it is that I think that antibiotic cream will help a cut heal whereas a leaf won't. Sometimes I catch myself launching into explanations about bacteria and how openings in the skin are susceptible to bacterial infections, especially in Vanuatu's humid climate, and that topical antibiotics help to prevent and fight off such infections, thus leading to better wound healing and I realize that, if one had absolutely no knowledge of bacteria or the microscopes that allow us to see them or the century or so of research into germ theory, this sounds about as plausible as mango leaves channeling the healing power of moonbeams into your skin. People listen to my explanations, of course, and sometimes remark at how right my explanations sound and a few people sometimes take my advice, but none of them really understand what I'm saying, and I realize that I've become something of a witch doctor in my own right. A practitioner of white magic, if you will. I spout scientific theory instead of mystical ramblings, but in the end it all sounds the same to those in the village. I've even had my share of triumphs and I-told-you-so moments. Most memorably, I was once approached by a few friends of mine about a rumor that had been repeated by almost everyone on the island which held that on a certain day the sun would not go down in the evening and we would proceed to have 48 consecutive hours of daylight. My first thought upon hearing this was horror that we would be having two consecutive days of unbearable heat instead of the more usual twelve to fourteen hours, but then I thought about it for a bit, trying to think of any reason why the earth would suddenly stop spinning for a couple days and, unable to come up with anything, I informed them that I was pretty sure that the sun would be going down on schedule. Everyone was duly impressed when this proved true. I felt like I was in one of those movies where some guy from the future, using his almanac, correctly predicts the coming of an eclipse and avoids some horrible fate by proving to everyone that he can blot out the sun from the sky, except mine was a lot simpler because it's WAY easier to predict that the sun will go down seeing as it happens once every 24 hours or so.

However, although it undoubtedly can sound silly, I sometimes find myself envying the Ni-Vanuatu and their black magic. It's something we've lost touch with back home, I think, that experience of standing face to face with nature and the staggeringly powerful forces that make it up. That experience of feeling so small and powerless in the face of something so massive and awesome that makes it possible to think that absolutely anything can happen. Ni-Vanuatu love their weather magic. Stories about controlling the rain are by far the most common for me to hear, and it's easy to see why. Rain is just so mystical and mysterious. It can appear in moments with such terrifying force and disappear just as quickly, sometimes not to be seen again for months. Living on a little island in the middle of the ocean, it's hard to think of anything that one has less control over. And so the breadfruit leaf on the clothesline to keep the rain from showing up. I mean, why not, right? Or the guy in Southwest Bay who can make it rain or (if it's been raining so much that rain has become the norm) stop it from raining by talking to trees (personally, if I could control the weather, I think I'd opt more for a nice, dry, breezy day, maybe in the lower 60's, as opposed to switching between hot and muggy and hot, rainy, and muggy, but I guess that just goes to show how much I know about tree-related weather control). It's easy to laugh at such things when we're sitting on a sofa inside watching the Weather Channel's 10-day forecast sum up nature in a couple of blue boxes with little cloud clip art graphics, but when you're watching the storm clouds race towards you across a rolling sea, it's hard not to see the magic. That's what I think we like to try and forget about science: it doesn't control the world, it just describes it. Newton, for example, didn't invent gravity, as some people like to say. Gravity was always there. All Newton did was come up with a clever way of describing what, exactly, gravity does. Similarly, we had weather before we had the Weather Channel, the Weather Channel just tells us the details of what the weather happens to be doing. But we don't usually think like this. We like to think of science as dictating how nature works when, in reality, the exact opposite is true. We shape scientific theories to conform to what we learn about the world, the world does not shape itself to conform with science. And so, really, we are still doing the same thing as the man hanging leaves on his clothesline. But we've gotten a lot better at it. We don't use leaves anymore. We've gotten very good at describing how the world works. In some cases, we've gotten so good at these descriptions that we can actually predict what the world will do in the future, but we still delude ourselves into thinking that we are in control of these things. We like to pretend that there is no magic in the world, but magic cannot be avoided. Magic is simple. Magic is not whispering at trees to stop the rain, nor is it water vapor in the atmosphere condensing around small dust particles and falling to earth, and it's definitely not a pixel-y smudge on a Doppler radar. When it rains, that's the magic. The rain does not care how we choose to rationalize or describe it, it has been around far longer than we have and long ago decided on its own way of doing things and it will continue to do those things for a long time yet. At its most destructive it swells our rivers, breaks our dams, floods our cities, and washes away our homes. At its gentlest it gives life to our crops, our livestock, and ourselves; it breaks the heat of the day and sends us to sleep with its whimsical patter on our roofs. Tell me that's not magic.

Yu No Kick Part 2: Local Cuisine

2009-03-22T21:39:00.001-04:00

There is one belief that I hold above all others and that is that a good meal is the best thing in the world. Perhaps there are some that would disagree with me. Perhaps there are some that would point to things like love, or friendship, or NASCAR and say “wait, isn’t THAT the best thing?” But they’re wrong. Nothing else brings a smile like a good meal. It doesn’t really even matter what it is. With the right approach, anything can be made into a mouth-watering, taste-bud-tickling delight. People like to subdivide food into neat little categories so they can organize restaurants listings in the phone book. Italian food, French food, Japanese food, Indian food, Thai food. In the end, there are only two categories that matter: good food and bad food. There are hot dog stands that turn out sublime wonders of flavor and suit-and-tie-required French restaurants whose fare makes cardboard seem appetizing. It’s all in the execution. My family and I tend to plan our vacations around where we’ll be eating. “Want to go to the art museum? Hmm. Sorry, it’s all the way across town from the seafood place we want to try. Maybe next time.” Our memories are all wrapped up in what we’ve eaten. “No, that couldn’t have been Nick’s tenth birthday because that’s the year we went to the pizza place. You know, the one with the good thick crust?” We're not picky, we'll eat anything, as long as it's good.

A lot of people claim not to know how to cook. They site being clumsy or forgetful or too afraid of screwing up, but I think this is bogus. All that's required to make a good meal is a complete and utter obsession with food. Those content with microwave pasta for dinner will never be able to cook well because they'll never see the point: why work hard to prepare something special if you're content with something mediocre? The extra time and effort will just seem wasted. On the other hand, a true foodie will think nothing of walking two hours to get a fresh fish then gutting, scaling, and de-boning it if it means a really good fish fillet for dinner. Even if said foodie has no idea how to go about scaling or gutting a fish, they're sure as hell going to find out. In cooking, as with many things, where there a will, there is a way. Thus, the will is everything.

In Vanuatu, it's easy to give up on food, even for such a devotee as myself. It's hard to muster up the will to bake a batch of cookies when the first step is sharpening a machete to go to chop down a tree for firewood. A lot of volunteers eventually give up on the whole cooking thing altogether and just subsist on boiled bananas provided by their host families. Some of us turn to kava as a replacement for food, which is sort of odd because kava is pretty much the exact opposite of food, it has absolutely no nutritional value and it tastes awful. It's kind of like drinking Diet Coke, if Diet Coke were mud-flavored. However, it's one thing for a volunteer living in Vanuatu for a couple years to suck it up and give up on good food for the duration of his service, knowing that he'll be able to return to it eventually, but it's another thing for a Ni-Van living in Vanuatu all their life to not strive for something beyond the plain, boiled root vegetable. Like with a lot of things, a lack of technology does mean some complications. We like to romanticize about simpler times before modern gadgets took the fun out of everything, but the fact of the matter is that, although a wood-burning oven may sound quaint and appealing, the lack of fine temperature control provided by gas or electric ovens means that goods prepared in an old-fashioned oven tend to be either burnt or undercooked. But, although technology has made fine food more accessible and made possible some previously unattainable culinary feats, the fact remains that good food predates Food Network. Which begs the question, what the heck happened in Vanuatu to make their cuisine so soul-crushingly boring?

The root crop is the mainstay of the Vanuatu diet. It makes sense. They're easy to grow, they're starchy and satisfying, and they have a long shelf life. You can divide root crops into four categories: manioc, yams, taro, and kumala. Manioc is what we use to make tapioca in the states. It's probably the most potato-like of the group. The meat is straight white and has that kind of flour-y, starchy texture. Yams are the broadest of the categories. There are dozen, perhaps hundreds, or different kinds of yams in Vanuatu. They range from potato-sized to full-grown-cow sized. Some have tough, wooden skins, almost like bark, some have thin, soft skins, and some have skins with long, vein-y roots growing out of them. Sometimes they're white on the inside, sometimes they're purple, and sometimes they're white with purple streaks. They can have mild, potato-y tastes or strong, wild tastes. In short, you never really know what you're getting into with a yam. Taro grow in particularly wet, swampy areas. They put out large, triangular leaves that can be as big as your chest and make decent umbrellas in a pinch. Their skins are brown and bark-y, but dotted with purple nodules. They're vaguely reddish-purple on the inside and are so incredibly starchy that cutting one covers your knife and cutting board with a flour-like paste. When you cook taro, you have to be sure to make sure every last bit of it gets soaked in plenty of water or oil or the result will taste like eating dry flour. Kumala are sweet potatoes, and are my personal favorite root crop. Sweet potatoes are kind of magical: they're easy to grow, they keep for months without preservation, they taste good, and they have more nutrients than any of the other root crops. There are two varieties of kumala in Vanuatu. One is similar to the kind you can buy in the US, brown skin with orange flesh. The second has purple skin and white flesh and is slightly sweeter. Personally, I'm a brown-and-orange fan. Unfortunately, kumala doesn't seem to get as much use as the other root crops, probably because you can't make lap-lap out of it.

The standard root crop concoction is lap-lap, and, in my opinion, manioc makes the best lap-lap. Lap-lap is essentially baked root crop mush. I can see it as perhaps a precursor to a flat bread, except they never got as far as drying their starchy mush to remove the excess water before cooking and achieve that nice, fluffy, bread texture. To make lap-lap, you peel your root crop and grate it against a rough board to make a paste. You then take the paste and wrap it in leaves. Then you put the whole thing in an underground oven made by digging a hole and filling it with hot stones. The lap-lap goes in the hole and then is covered with dirt and allowed to sit for a few hours until it congeals. Dig it up and enjoy. Serves 6-10. Manioc and taro lap-lap have the doughiest texture, kind of like raw pizza dough. Yam lap-lap is a little more mealy. Banana lap-lap is more goop-y (yes, I forgot to mention, you can make lap-lap with bananas too. Either unripe sweet bananas or plantaines. No one really like banana lap-lap though, even Ni-Vans complain that it's unappetizing).It's not that lap-lap is bad, it's just not anything. It's plain white bread, or dry mashed potatoes, or plain oatmeal, it's a vehicle for other flavors, not a complete meal in and of itself. Commonly, chunks of meat are cooked in with the root crop paste, which improves the flavor substantially as the drippings from the meat soak into the lap-lap. The more adventurous Ni-Van chefs will add salt or curry powder to the paste, which also adds a welcome addition of flavor. On Malekula, a hole is made in the middle of the lap-lap and then filled with coconut milk after the lap-lap is cooked. You can then dip your lap-lap pieces in the milk before eating. The coconut milk adds much-needed hints of sweetness and oiliness. Overall, lap-lap isn't a bad dish, it's just not something you'd expect as the crowning achievement of thousands of years of culinary practice.

There are other ways to enjoy root crops of course. Simboro is another common dish and is sort of a lap-lap variant. Instead of taking your root crop paste and wrapping it in large banana leaves to bake, you wrap it in island cabbage leaves. Island cabbage leaves are a lot smaller, but they have the advantage of being edible. Island cabbage is one of those vegetables that likes to remind you that you are, in fact, eating a leaf. Maybe it's just from experience, but things like lettuce or cabbage don't look particularly leafy to me. Like, it's obvious they didn't fall off a tree. But not island cabbage. Island cabbage looks like a leaf straight from a tree. It looks like something you might have to rake up off your yard come fall or that you might use to wipe yourself while camping. It tastes kind of like spinach or kale. Anyway, you take your paste and wrap it up in island cabbage to make little rolls that look kind of like damales (grape leaves stuffed with spiced meat and rice and soaked in lemon juice), except they don't taste nearly as good. You then boil the rolls until the paste congeals and serve. I'm not a big fan of simboro, because it's basically exactly like lap-lap, except it's often served by itself, without meat or coconut milk to enhance the flavor, and thus is spectacularly bland. Also, the island cabbage tends to get kind of slimy when you boil it, which is a little off-putting.

My favorite Vanuatu dish is probably bunya. Chop up a bunch of meat and a bunch of kumala or taro, wrap everything in banana leaves, and cook it underground, lap-lap style for a few hours. The meat gets nice and tender from the slow cooking, the banana leaves trap all the moisture inside, and the kumala soak up all the meat juices. Optionally, squeeze some coconut milk on top after it's done cooking. Simple, to the point, good.

The thing is, that that's basically about it as far as traditional dishes go: three dishes, two of which are almost the same. Just a bit of a letdown. That's not to say, of course, that lap-lap, simboro, and bunya are the only three things to eat in Vanuatu, just that these are pretty much the only prepared meals. Most other things are just eaten as is. Pineapples, mangoes, guavas, passion fruit, papayas, avocados, oranges, grapefruits, lychee, and bananas are all eaten raw and plain. I've never seen anyone incorporate fruit into their cooking. It seems like there are some good sauces and pastries that could be made. Peanuts, nangai (kind of like almonds) and other local nuts are also usually eaten raw and plain. Pumpkin and other squashes are boiled and eaten, sometimes with coconut milk. We've got tons of seafood, crabs, clams, mussels, lobsters, prawns, and fish, which are boiled or roasted and eaten plain or incorporated into lap-lap. We have spices. There are small, thai-style hot peppers no bigger than a fingernail but that pack quite a punch. We've got wild ginger and vanilla and pepper and spring onions and lemon grass, all of which go more or less unused. It just seems like there's a lot of potential going to waste in Ni-Vanuatu cuisine. Most of the raw ingredients are there, and yet there are no peanut sauces, no curries, no chutneys, and no fruit pastries. Sometimes I wonder what went wrong, but then I realize that I, who should know better being a food snob of sorts back in the US, have fallen into the same pattern. Most of my meals consist of little more than fried kumala and the occasional piece of plain fruit or meat. I think maybe its the heat.

Yu No Kick Part 1: By Popular Request

2009-03-22T21:35:00.002-04:00

Once again, sorry for the long delay between posts. Getting online has not been as easy as it was last year. However, I do have my new laptop keyboard now and that seems to have fixed my computer problem, so hopefully smoother sailing in the future.

**The following are some stories I repeated to various people while I was in the States who requested that they be added to my blog. Enjoy.**

Digging up a banana tree is hard work. Someone told me that bananas are actually more closely related to grass than to other trees. I don’t know if this is true, but it makes sense. Banana trees aren’t really made out of wood, but rather a fibrous and watery leaf-like substance that’s only barely capable of supporting it own weight. They grow quickly, shooting out huge, canopy-like leaves that make decent umbrellas if you become caught in an unexpected downpour. They don’t fruit in those nice, grocery store sized bundles, but rather in huge hands, each carrying 30-50 bananas and easily weighing over 20 kilos. The fruit hands are so heavy that they pull down the trees they’re attached to when they mature and the whole mess comes tumbling to the ground to start the next generation. Thus, banana trees tend to come in stands, since the fruit doesn’t move very far, the new trees tend to grow right on top of the old ones. Often seven or eight trees can grow in more or less the same place, their root structures becoming intertwined and indistinguishable from one another. Thus, although cutting down banana trees is relatively easy (and fun), because of their flimsy trunks, digging a banana stand out of your garden is (because of all the interlocking roots) the effective equivalent of digging out a 100 year old oak. The key is to tackle it in small pieces: use a shovel to separate a bit of truck from the rest, drive the shovel home repeatedly as hard as possible into the opening you’ve created to cut the roots apart, and work on digging out the little section you’ve just isolated. Repeat until the entire stand is gone. It’s not a pleasant job, especially in the late-summer Vanuatu heat, it takes most of the day, and it leaves one absolutely covered in mud and sweat.

I’d just finished a grueling afternoon banana-clearing to make way for my planned vegetable garden (which, by the way, never really panned out. Weeds crept in far faster than I was willing to remove them) when I saw my headmaster make the trek across the school yard from the office to my house.
“Dan!” he called out, “Can you come put the new toner in copier?”
The school had acquired a photo copier because of some ill-thought-out grant scheme in 2003 or 2004. As far as I could tell, they’d used up the original toner and never bothered to replace it.
“OK,” I said, realizing I was probably one of the few people on the island who’d had experience changing toner, and beginning to make my way towards the office.
“If you want to wash first…?” my headmaster added.
I looked down at myself and considered. I was incredibly filthy. Flecks of mud covered almost every inch of me, I wasn’t wearing a shirt, and my pants were soaked though with sweat enough to make it seem like I’d been caught out during a particularly violent downpour. However, changing a toner cartridge wouldn’t take long, I reasoned, and I’d be back to work afterwards and just get dirty again.
“It’s alright,” I said.
We made our way to the office and I realized that the headmaster’s comment about washing had not been a question, but a request. You see, I’d vastly underestimated the level of solemnity involved in a Vanuatu toner changing. I entered the office to find it full of school staff, all dressed in their Sunday finest. Given the size of the office, I had to maneuver carefully so as not to get mud all over people’s island dresses and shirts. I stood in front of the copier and a bubble of people formed around me. I reached for the copier but was told to wait as the pastor stepped forward and led us in a prayer thanking God for life and the new day and also for providing both a new toner cartridge and a Peace Corps volunteer capable of installing it. Then the headmaster stepped forward and gave a short speech covering the same basic points. Finally, he nodded toward me, indicating I had the go-ahead to replace the toner. I got to admit, I was a little nervous. Although I knew, in general, how to replace toner, I had no experience with the specific copier in front of me and I worried that I might spend too much time fiddling around with various catches and levers and ruin the moment. Perhaps, I thought, a trial run should be suggested for next time. Fortunately, the copier was well labeled (thank you Xerox) and so the procedure went off with the necessary smoothness. When I’d finished, everyone clapped politely and the pastor closed with another prayer. We all filed out of the office and I went back to my yard work wondering what in the world had just happened.

**************************

There are surprisingly few birds in Vanuatu. Well, maybe it’s not surprising. I sure as heck wouldn’t want to have to flap my way across thousands of miles of empty ocean from the mainland in order to colonize a rather small and somewhat dull string of Pacific islands. Perhaps what’s more surprising is how many land animals went through with the feat. Maybe birds just have more sense. At any rate, there are no crows crowding the rooftops, no pigeons covering the ground in search of food, no birdsong to greet you when you wake up in the morning. There are a plethora of chickens, true, but they just don’t really seem to count. They’re too awkward in the air. There’s also a species of wild pigeon that inhabits the bush that the locals call nawimba. Duncan shoots them up in his garden sometimes, and they’re pretty good grilled. But (perhaps because they’re so tasty) they’re somewhat few and far between. No, in Vanuatu, it’s the mammals that rule the skies. Flying fox (actually a kind of fruit bat) take to the air around dusk and the night is full of their sounds as they fly about screeching and eating fruit. It takes a little getting used to, but it’s actually kind of a nice way to fall asleep.

When Duncan has bullets the two of us roam the village looking for flying fox in the coconut trees to shoot and incorporate into lap-lap. I play the role of human tripod. When Duncan sees a target, he shouts “Dan!” and I run up and stand a few paces in front of him so he can balance the gun on my head as he takes aim. It’s not a bad technique, and we can bag a surprising number in a couple hours.

On one such hunting expedition, however, I discovered that the flying fox is not totally unchallenged in its dominion over the night skies. Duncan had wandered ahead of me a little more than usual one night hunting when all of the sudden he shouted “Dan!” in a tone that was a couple times more frantic than his usual, relax manner (you see, flying fox tend to sit around on one coconut tree for a while, so you’ve got plenty of time to set up your shot). I took my position as the tripod, but I could sense an increased level of excitement: something different was afoot. Duncan fired off a shot and the two of us went in search of the resulting body. I was traipsing around in the bush, finding nothing, when Duncan shouted my name again. I looked over to see him triumphantly holding up an enormous owl. Now, I’m a fan of birds of prey and this owl looked so graceful and deadly, even while dead, as Duncan held it from its wing tip, its body weight causing the wings to spread (it was a white owl, and looked kind of like the one they use to play Hedwig in the Harry Potter movies), that I felt a tinge of regret that I had been accomplice to its killing.
“Do you eat owls?” I asked. All things become justified in the pursuit of fine cuisine.
“No,” Duncan replied, “but when you see an owl, you have to shoot it.” (I should add that the Bislama word for owl is “night hawk,” which makes them sound extra awesome).
“What do you do with them?” I asked.
“Burn them,” Duncan replied.
“Why?”
“Because sometimes they’re really people doing black magic. They can turn into owls.”
That brought me up short. Not so much because he believed that it was possible for people to turn into owls, but more because he believed that this justified killing said people. In essence, that’s what had happened: an attempted homicide prevented by the fortuitous fact that people can not, actually, turn into owls. It’s like, “Hey Dad! Why’d you shoot the dog?!” “Sorry, I thought it was one of the neighbors.” “Oh, well, that’s alright then.” Killing animals for sport is one thing, but killing animals because you think they’re people was a little too much for me to wrap my head around. As tends to happen in such situations, I was at a loss for words. I just smiled and nodded.

Home for the Holidays Part 4: Tacos and Barbecue

2009-02-27T00:08:00.000-05:00

Jamitto and Charm followed me back from Utah so that we could all hang out in Austin for a few days. As is customary, as soon as we got off the plane, we immediately went for Mexican food, in this case tacos. In my opinion, the best tacos around are made with barbacoa. Barbacoa is made by taking a cow’s head, baking it slowly for many hours and then scraping off and shredding the meat. Add a bit of salt and you’re in business. Barbacoa tacos are elegant in their simplicity and they epitomize everything a taco should be: a big pile of greasy meat barely contained by a tortilla. In recent years, restaurants like Chipolte have been championing the burrito as the basic unit of Mexican food. I got to say, I cannot condone the burrito. Sure, they’re nice in a pinch, when no other Mexican food is available, but they should be eschewed whenever possible. They get thing wrong right from the start with their big, torso-sized flour tortillas. I mean what the hell? First off, tortillas are mode of corn, end of story (well, actually, they’re made of masa, ground up corn that’s been soaked in lye). Secondly, tortillas should only be about the size of your hand. I don’t want a freaking edible blanket here or some kind of sleeping bag for meat. The tortilla is supposed to be a small platform on which meat rests. The meat should be barely contained by the tortilla (if you two opposite ends of the tortilla together, your taco is definitely questionable) and the whole unit should have very precarious structural integrity. Your best tacos fall about after you’ve eaten about ¾ of them. They’re finger food, but their not dainty. Your hands should be covered in grease and salsa by the end, and there should be a serious danger of ruining your shirt. Mexican food is not for the faint of heart, you have to be willing to get down and dirty. My favorite taco joint, La Mexicana, knows how to do it right and we visited it at least three times while Charm and Jamitto where in town. Its part restaurant, part bakery, part grocery store, part Western Union office, and part jeweler. On top off all that, it’s open 24 hours. You really couldn’t ask for anything else in a commercial establishment.

Charm and Jamitto’s visit, indeed much of my time in Ausin in general, was focused around eating. I continually ran into a problem resulting from my eating habits in Vanuatu. In Vanuatu, I generally eat only one actual meal per day (sometimes less) and I really only get a good meal, like one that I’m actually excited to eat, maybe once a week. This means, that when good food presents itself, I eat as much of it as humanly possible. We’re talking like eating myself to the point of immobility. Afterwards, I pass out on the floor and sleep for several hours. Now, I found it difficult to rid myself of this habit while I was in the US, which led to a problem because basically every meal I was eating was a good meal, so I was gorging myself three times a day and spending most of the rest of the time in a food coma. I also kept forgetting that, in the US, people expect you to do things after eating, so I often found myself trying to do such things as carry on a conversation, run errands, or drive while my eyelids were tending towards shut. I kept reminding myself to not eat as much at the next meal, but it never sunk in.

At the end of the week Ben, another friend from college, joined us in Austin and the four of us made a pilgrimage to Lockhart. Lockhart is a small town about a 45 minute drive from Austin and is home to some of the best barbecue in the world. Lockhart is a city devoted entirely to barbecue and the perfection of barbecuing technique. For many decades, Lockhart had been home to a pair of barbecue restaurants, each excellent and each owned by a rival family totally obsessed with barbecue. A little while back, there was a feud inside of the families related to some obscure nuance of barbecuing technique, which led to a schism and the establishment of a third barbecue restaurant owned by a splinter group of on of the original families. The net result is that there are now three excellent barbecue joints crowded into a town that otherwise has very little to recommend it. My personal favorite of the three is Smitty’s, which is where I directed my guests.

Upon entering Smitty’s, one is immediately struck by a wall of suffocating heat. This is due to the two giant smoking fires burning continually behind the counter. Sometimes, when the line is especially long, it snakes in front of one of these fires and one is forced to wait in the sweltering heat until the line progresses sufficiently for you to move into the clear. The serving counter is a plain wooden deal adorned only with a pair of scales and pair of cash registers. Directly behind this is a huge wooden chopping block for the slicing of meat. Behind this are the two large brick smokers, brick boxes with metal grates in them to hold the meat. The smoke from the smoking fires is drawn up through the boxes and vented through metal chimneys on the roof. The brick smokers are covered with large, hinged metal plates whose handles are connected to counterweight systems on the ceiling, which prevent them from slamming shut when opened to remove meat. The brick walls behind the smokers are covered in a thick layer of black soot. In some places the soot is so thick that it forms soot stalactites clinging to the ceiling or walls. When the smokers are opened, they reveal a cornucopia of briskets, ribs, and sausages. The counters are manned by a team of very sweaty guys whose t-shirts all sport too many grease stains to count. You order your food by the pound and it is presented to you on a sheet of pink butcher paper. Plates are for the weak. Attached to the serving room is a school cafeteria style eating area with tables and chair which, thankfully, is air conditioned. They’ve used their century of barbecue experience well here, and the brisket is melt-in-your-mount tender and greasy, the ribs have just enough seasoning on them to compliment their natural porky flavor, and the sausage is loose packed, spicy, and wonderful.

After we’d eaten enough me to become immobile, we were slated to attend my brother’s 13th birthday party. Apparently, paintball has taken hold as the party activity of choice among middle school boys. Paintball is one of the primal sports which appeals to everyone’s suppressed desire to shoot each other in the face. Although the concept sounds like the kind of thing that a bunch of middle-aged guys came up with one weekend while drinking beer and decided to assemble in their garage, the level of technology involved is a little ridiculous. Paint is encased in plastic capsules of a standard diameter (the manufacture of which is probably not trivial) and propelled through a barrel using compressed carbon dioxide. It’s a decidedly expensive sport to be pursued by middle schoolers with no source of income.

We checked in and were equipped with guns and face mask and led out to the court. My brother and his friends had already been playing for a while, but were excited at the prospect of having some larger people to shoot at. Now, being hit with a plastic ball full of paint isn’t entirely painless. This divides paintballers into two distinct groups: those hesitant to get hit and those not. I’d been paintballing a few times before when I was in high school, during which I generally fell into the former category. Now, however, having gotten a bit bigger and lived in the bush for a year, getting hit with a paintball didn’t seem like that huge a deal. My guests tended to agree with this sentiment as well, so the four of us had a good time charging startled middle schoolers, a strategy that work reasonably well because it’s intimidating, and also because paintball guns aren’t particularly accurate.

After paintballing, we cleaned up and headed to a restaurant called Chuy’s, a Mexican place which, for some reason, decided to go with a 1950’s Elvis theme. They serve excellent Mexican Martinis, which are basically margaritas with olives in them. They are awesome, not so much because of the olives, but because you get about three margaritas worth in one order. After dinner, we headed to 6th Street, where Austin keeps all of its bars and clubs. It was a scene remarkably like college, except everyone was a little older, thus making everyone look more ridiculous when they’ve had too much to drink. It was nice to be with college friends again, but it was somewhat short-lived. Jamitto and Charm had only been able to make it for a week, and Ben only a couple of nights, so everyone took off Sunday afternoon. The price, I suppose, of having a real job as opposed to living on an island in the South Pacific.

My vacation home ended a little over a week later and, as vacations often do, it felt too short. Being in Austin just felt so good. It was hard to put my finger on, what, exactly, I found most appealing about it, but it just felt like home. Despite my year in the jungles, I was still a city boy at heart and I knew I’d be glad to return to the US and to Austin the following year at the end of my service.

Home for the Holidays Part 3: Skiing

2009-02-27T00:07:00.000-05:00

On New Year’s day I flew to Slat Lake City to do some skiing with Charm and Jamitto, two friends from college. I’d last been skiing some seven years prior in Switzerland. We were in Switzerland for a month because of my Dad’s work and, while my Mom thought of skiing to be basically the opposite of everything she enjoys, my Dad and I thought it somewhat criminal to leave without skiing at least once, so we drove to a resort a few hours outside of Zurich, rented some skis, and asked directions to the easy slopes (my Dad learned to ski in college, but my experience was essentially zero). We were directed to a lift that ascended a mountain so huge and foreboding that I imaged I could see the remains of some of Hannibal’s ill-fated Carthaginians lying just beneath the snow. In my first five minutes of skiing I knocked over two people and almost went off a cliff, and so it was decided that I would walk the rest of the way down. This proved to be one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life. In a second attempt, we arranged for ski lessons from a Swiss lady who spoke English like the Nazis always do in World War 2 movies. This had the advantage of making her at least as intimidating as the slope I was asked to go down, so I learned pretty quickly. Still, there’s only so much you can learn in a day and skiing became more or less associated with fear in my memory. Thus, it was with some apprehension that I accepted the invitation to attempt the sport again.

It was night when I arrived in Salt Lake City. Charm and Jamitto met me at the airport and we drove to a ski shop to rent equipment for the following day. I sat down on a char and was immediately asked a lot of questions that I didn’t understand by some very energetic staff. My friends filled in the answers for me and soon I was in procession of a pair of skis, boots, and poles. We headed back to Charm’s house where her parents had prepared a gigantic feast for us. Some of the highlights included lamb ribs, king crab legs, and some kind of spicy vegetable with chicken. Also in attendance were a couple sweet potatoes which I avoided on the grounds that I’d been eating them nonstop for the past year.

Salt Lake City is build in a valley between two mountain ranges. The ranges in the western US are newer than those in the east and thus haven’t been exposed to the weathering effects of wind and rain for as long. This makes them jagged and steep as opposed to smoothing and rolling. Salt Lake City thus appears to be surrounded by row after row of jagged teeth, like the jaws of a shark. If one drives down into the city from the mountains during the night, the glittering city lights seem in danger of being swallowed up by a giant, gaping maw.

The advantage of living inside of a massive stony mouth is that it gives easy access to mountain sports. This, it was only about a 20 minute drive the following morning to the ski resort. We managed to get there around 10 o’clock, pretty impressively early for a group of twenty-somethings who tend to sleep until noon. We donned our ski gear and I immediately felt an awkwardness that can only come from having five foot long metal poles attached to your feet. I was heartily unconvinced that this was in any way superior to the more usual foot-sized shoes that had been serving me so well for so many years.

However, several things had changed since the last time I’d attempted skiing: I was bigger, stronger, more coordinated, and I had a vastly better knowledge of physics. Therefore, as opposed to being more or less scared out of my wits the whole time, I found I learned fairly quickly. After about half and hour of being coached through some basics on a small hill served by a tow rope, Jamitto and Charm decided I was ready for the real mountains. Midway through the day, I realized I was actually enjoying myself.

Towards the end of each day, it became apparent that, although I’d mastered the various mechanical principals involved in skiing pretty well, the principals of thermodynamics were still a little beyond me. That is to say, I was getting cold. Having not used my winter gear for quite a long time, a lot of it had managed to hide itself quite cleverly in various places around my house, and so I had arrived in Salt Lake City a little skimpy on the clothing. Fortunately, Charm’s family had a large box filled with extra winter clothing which I was free to browse through. Not so fortunately, most of these clothes were obviously meant to be worn by girls. And so I ended up hitting the slopes sporting periwinkle blue gloves and a hat crowned with a giant poof ball. I was quite alright with this. Much like pizza, there are two distinct styles of winter dress: New York style and Chicago style. New York style contends that the most important principal is looking good. This style is responsible for such things as the matching hat and gloves, the form-fitting coat that compliments one’s figure, and the designer sweater. It’s practiced by people who have never had to shovel snow out of their driveway or use de-icer on the car locks, people who have never REALLY been outside during the winter (ie: residents of New York City). People in Chicago have more sense. In the Midwest, it gets COLD. And not the cute it’s-snowing-out-let’s-go-build-a-snowman kind of cold, we’re talking I-hope-I-don’t-die-of-frostbite-on-the-way-to-the-mailbox cold. Winter is a struggle for survival, and in such struggles one cannot afford to be constrained by the frivolities of fashion, you just have to pile on every piece of clothing you can get your hands on. That giant down coat that makes you look like a sumo wrestler? At least you’re a warm sumo wrestler. Plaid sweater from the attic that smells kind of funny? Throw it on. One of those giant #1 hands they sell at football games? Do what you have to do. Thus is was with a degree of satisfaction that I surveyed the stylishly dressed skiers around me. I know their secret. I know behind those fashionable good looks you’re freezing your asses off.

Unfortunately, in the evenings, I was freezing my ass off as well. It became suddenly blindly clear why the resort shut down at 4:30: after that it’s just too damn cold. The last few rides up the lifts I cursed the slowness to the ridiculous machines and swore as the wind found chinks in my armor of warmth and knifed into my skin. Every stall of the lift became unacceptably long and I wondered why it was that, while I was in Vanuatu, I’d so longed to be cold. Each day it was a miniature blessing to call it quits and head back to the car, where I’d struggle to unclip my ski boots with my frozen and useless fingers, pack up the gear and get my hands in front of the car’s heater. Of course the nice thing about being out in the cold, is that it really gets your appetite up, which was good because Charm’s family was about as obsessed with food as mine is. Every meal was delightfully massive and over the course of the weekend we demolished steaks and oysters, sushi and barbecue (brought by me from Texas), hot-pot, and dim sum. All in all, an excellent vacation.

Home for the Holidays Part 2: Christmas

2009-02-27T00:06:00.000-05:00

My parents had decided to get my brother a cell phone for Christmas. Apparently all twelve-year-olds have their own cell phones nowadays. I remember longing for a cell phone back when I was in high school before realizing that there wasn't really anyone who I wanted to talk to on the phone anyway. As the youngest responsible adult in the family, I was placed in charged of taking my brother cell phone shopping. My cell phone in Vanuatu is probably the sweetest piece of technology I've ever had the pleasure of owning because it has a little LED flashlight on the end of it. This is immensely useful in Vanuatu because one often finds oneself caught outside after dark without and flashlight and, while I've gotten pretty good at navigating through the pitch blackness, a light is good to have if it's been raining because large puddles can crop up unannounced. The flashlight phone is the cheapest model that Digicel offers and the flashlight is really the only actually useful cellphone extra that I've ever seen (the camera phones seem pretty cool until the realization strikes that no one has a computer to save their pictures on, so all their photos are relegated to the one inch by one inch phone screen. Movies suffer a similar fate), and a lot of people that I've seen purchasing the more expensive models wind up complaining that they lack a flashlight (also, the flashlight model seems to have the preferred version of snake since people are always borrowing my phone at the nakamal to play the game). The flashlight did not seem to be a major selling point in the US, however, as I found my favorite phone stuck in the back corner of the T-Mobile store with all the other neglected devices that no trendy techie would be caught dead with (I think it's time for a retro cell phone fad. I want to see them bringing back those phones from the late 80's that were basically just bricks with antennas sticking out. I know I'd buy one. Anyone else?).

According to my brother, texting is the new calling. Having an actual voice conversation with someone is considered monstrously uncool, it's much more trendy to try and express yourself using 160 character text messages painstakingly typed out on cell phone keypads. We actually use texting a lot in Vanuatu, but this is because we're charged about fifty cents a minute for voice conversations, thus basically all communications, including those regarding serious medical issues, are limited to these quasi-emails (ie: “have skin infect. need ur erythromicin”). In the US, however, I suppose it's evolved as sort of a high tech way of passing notes in class. Also, the introduction of Apple's iAmReallyObcessedWithCheckingMyEmailEverySecondOfTheDayPhone, which came out just before I left for Vanuatu, seems to have kicked off something of a cell-phone-as-a-pocket-computer trend. As we browsed through the store I noted a fair number of phones sporting full QWERTY keyboards whose buttons are conveniently sized for those of us whose fingers have been replaced with toothpicks. Some phones even had computer applications on them, like Microsoft Word or Excel, programs that we apparently loved so much at work that we want to be able to enjoy them on-the-go as well. We weren't looking to turn my brother into a mobile productivity center just yet (I actually noticed a kid while I was home who was probably in grade school, had an iPhone, and was using it to play with a virtual Zippo lighter. Yes. The screen showed a Zippo lighter that you could snap open or closed using the iPhone's motion sensors. I mean, are you supposed to use that in conjunction with a program that allows you to light and smoke virtual cigarettes and then contract virtual lung cancer? Are real Zippo lighters so prohibitively expensive now that it's more cost effective to have your iPhone simulate one?), but a texting-friendly keypad was deemed preferable. Eventually we did find a phone that was sufficiently cool to pass twelve year old standards and sufficiently inexpensive to pass parent standards, but I couldn't help but think about the horror that would be unleashed should Ni-Vans ever get their hands on internet phones. I pictured my inbox crowded with incomprehensible messages in Bislama and a veritable ocean of useless forwards. Perhaps it's best that some countries remain underdeveloped.

On Christmas Eve we drove to San Antonio. Although no one in my family really lives in San Antonio anymore, it's still considered something of a home base for us. Plus, there's this awesome Mexican restaurant there that's always open (like, always. Christmas, New Year's, Wednesdays at 3am, always) that we've been going to forever. It's approximately the size of a supermarket and it's difficult to picture how it could possibly get more tacky, but the food's pretty good and tradition is tradition. We met up with some of my extended family for lunch and then headed out to the Riverwalk. The San Antonio river runs right through the city of San Antonio (makes sense, right) and, as part of a flood control project, a network of walking paths follow the river along beneath the street level. A number of shops and restaurants have opened up along the river as well and now the whole thing is a nice sort of pedestrian commercial area.

On Christmas we had smoked duck, which was probably one of the greatest things in the world. My Dad, in what was perhaps one of the best decisions ever made, had purchased a smoker while I'd been in Vanuatu. It was a barrel style BBQ, a fat cylinder cut in half longways and hinged. Charcoal or wood can be placed directly beneath the grill in the main barrel, but there is also a smaller barrel attached to one side as a firebox, with the smoke from the fire there being drawn up through the main chamber. Thus, one can place meat in the main part of the grill, get a fire going in the firebox, and smoke meat without directly exposing it to the heat. We picked up a couple of ducks from the grocery store and smoked them for about five hours. Ducks are so amazingly greasy that big puddles of drippings were left in the bottom of our grill after cooking them. Despite this, the ducks were not in the least bit dried out and they probably made the best Christmas dinner I'd ever had.

On Friday, we piled into the car again, this time headed for Big Bend, a large national park located on that part of west Texas that sticks out to a point. It was a long drive through a lot of nothing to get there. The US is really amazingly giant. The area that all of Vanuatu covers, not just the land, ocean as well, is about the same size as California. The actual land area is about the size of Connecticut, yet Texas is so vast that you can drive through it for hours and still manage not to get anywhere. I don’t know how the crammed so much nothing into one state. Our car devoured miles of scrubby desert at an alarming rate, but always there seemed to be an endless expanse of it ahead. Once we stopped for gas at a filling station in the middle of nowhere. I mean that quite literally: just a gas station (not even an attached convenience store or McDonalds) on a patch of desert surrounded on all sides with nothing but more desert for at least 30 miles. I believe the attendant there probably had one of the loneliest jobs on the planet.

As we exited central Texas and entered west Texas, flat expanses of lonely desert gave way to hilly expanses of lonely desert. Finally, after about eight hours of riving, we arrived in the town of Terlingua, where we would be staying for the next few nights. My parents had arranged for a small condo unit which was situated on a hill amongst other small condo units. The area was a collection of short, knobby hills looking like overly large gopher mounds. Each hill had a solitary structure (presumably a condos) perched on it and they were all connected by a gravel road that ran along the valley between the small hills. It seemed like an excellent setting for some sort of Sci-Fi/horror movie involving the sudden arrival of a small number of otherworldly visitors who, wouldn’t you know it, have nothing better to do than devour the brains of unsuspecting people. The only possible problem would be that, this being Texas, everyone and their mother has a gun and the good sense to shoot anything scary and otherworldly-looking instead of blindly blundering into obviously monster-infested caves/basements/craters like lemmings over a cliff.

Not surprisingly, Terlingua is host to a ghost town. Apparently, some time ago, a valuable resource was discovered in this particular piece of desert wasteland and a number of people, who would otherwise never consider living on such undesirable real estate, were enticed to move to the area and then equally enticed to leave once the resource was depleted. This ghost town, rather than becoming infested with ghosts and demons, instead became infested with hippies (some may argue that this is basically the same thing). Combined with the opening of the nearby national park, Terlingua is now something of a tourist attraction.

The thing that struck me first about Terlingua was how dark it got a night. Although I’d only been away from Vanuatu for a few weeks, I’d already forgotten how dark it can be when you’re not in a city. Ironically, it’s equally surprising how light it can be at night when a good moon is out, but this weekend there was no moon to be seen. I think we’re all secretly afraid of the dark. How else can one explain our obsession with artificial lighting? Our towns and cities positively glitter at night. Street lights, house lights, window lights, porch lights, car lights all kick on around dusk against the impending departure of the sun. Some will shine all night so that someone wishing to go for a stroll at 4am will not be inconvenienced by having to carry a flashlight. Our world becomes bathing in that strange, yellowish not-quite-natural glow. Instinctively, night in a city FEELS dark, but very little is actually dark, rarely are you outside and unable to walk because you can’t see what’s in front of you. As such, it is possible to forget what darkness is really like and be surprised when it is encountered. In Terlingua (and Vanuatu) it gets dark. This is a darkness that’s heavy and sticky and dense. This is a darkness that takes light and swallows it. Flashlights and even car headlights seem as fragile as candles when placed within it. Fires, houses, cars provide reassuring little spheres of light to be sure, but on the edges the darkness is still visible, coiled and waiting to flood back in once the light is extinguished. Buildings are but little glowing dots against an inky black canvas, little oasis of life amongst a vast abyss of nothingness, little islands that we cling to for comfort and leave only reluctantly. It is a feeling both eerie and comforting to be in a house, restaurant, or nakamal at night at have your world shrunk down to a small area of whatever the establishment’s lights can illuminate. While your neighbors may seem so uncomfortably close in the daylight, now the seem part of a different world. I, for one, like the darkness, for all of its ominous-ness and foreboding. The power of it may seem terrifying if you are trying to oppose it, but I find darkness is much the ocean in this respect: fight it, and it will retaliate most violently, but embrace it and it will embrace you in return.

Big Bend National Park required additional driving from Terlingua in order to reach. On top of its being out of the way, the park itself is huge and takes on the order of hours to drive across. The Rio Grande is the principal attraction in the park, along with a number of canyons and interesting rock formations which it is responsible for carving. The Rio Grande also has the dubious distinction of dividing the US from Mexico. In recent years there’s been a push for tighter border control, and Big Bend has been no exception. Unfortunately for the folks at border control, the Rio Grande is not, as the name suggests, a giant, raging river worthy of dividing nations. The part I saw, at least, more resembled something that might run through a subdivision and be frequented by 8-year-olds in the summer to come splash in. IN previous years, it had been acceptable for Americans to cross the river into Mexico to go purchase tacos and maybe some trinkets, but now this is strictly prohibited. Instead, when nobody is looking (which is most of the time as this is the middle of the desert), Mexicans dash across the river and set up little stands with merchandise and donation boxes on the American side. While we got stern instructions from the rangers not to purchase anything, I guess some people still do, as the practice persists.

Desert landscapes are all very stark. The northern woods are rugged and stately, the tropical jungles and bush are wild and unmanageable, but the desert is stark. In a wood, the trees are tall and proud and they hide wide, glistening meadows, babbling brooks and swamps, all of which a hiker might come upon unexpectedly. In the bush, trees (with thin, ill-thought-out trunks that hardly seem capable of supporting themselves) grow every which way and vines and creepers choked out the sunlight. The bush is not hiked, it is slogged through with ax and machete and it hides nothing at all, just more green to be hacked at. In a desert, the scrubby greenery leaves bear the mountains and valleys and gorges and one is struck at once at how big the world is and how small we are who walk upon itt. A desert is trekked across, it spreads out like a map at your feet and you can see all at once where you started, where you are going, and how much distance separates the two. I think the desert is the most honest of landscapes. While a wood tucks its treasures away and a bush is all chest and no treasure, a desert shows everything to you all at once. To some, this makes them seem bleak and forlorn, but I enjoy the effect. I do not mind to be made small by the vastness of the world around me and, after many months hemmed in by the bush of Vanuatu, it was refreshing to be somewhere genuinely big again.

Home for the Holidays Part 1: Grocery Stores and Parking Lots

2009-02-27T00:05:00.000-05:00

We have an old, red Toyota Camery that my parents gave me to drive when I went to college. It's a 1990, and I vaguely remember my Mom going to buy it when I was four, so it's not quite older than me, but it's a close call. One of the wheel wells is all but rusted away from many years of exposure to the salty winter roads of central Illinois, augmented by the fact that I once steered it into the side of our garage as I was trying to back out into the driveway when I was sixteen and ruined the paint job; my one traffic collision to date. It has three clear glass side windows and one tinted one on the rear passenger side because while driving from New Jersey to Texas after graduation I got a flat on I-35 and, while going around to open the trunk, I realized I'd locked my keys inside the car along with my wallet and cell phone. A rock through the window quickly solved my entry problem, but apparently Toyota doesn't make clear windows for this particular model anymore. The air-conditioner still works, a miracle as it seems the AC is usually the first thing to go in old cars, but only for about thirty minutes at a time. After that, you have to give it a ten to fifteen minute break before trying to switch it back on. For long drives through the Texas desert in summer, this necessitates cranking up the AC to full blast and making the car as unbearably freezing as possible in order to have enough residual coolness to coast through the ten minutes of AClessness. The wiring for the ceiling light came loose a long time ago and one can hear it sliding around in the roof when you take a corner too quickly. And once, when I was driving to college with my friend, the engine overheated just outside of Texarkana because of a coolant leak and we refilled the coolant tank with water taken from the tap of a church retreat and then later emptied some out with a turkey baster to make room for some anti-freeze we'd purchased at Wal-Mart. I believe the turkey baster is still in the trunk. Needless to say, I love this car, and I think my parents do too, although they vehemently deny it. They were supposed to have sold it as soon as I left for Peace Corps, but there it was, still sitting in the driveway, more than a year later. According to my Dad the battery had died, so we took it into the shop to get it replaced so that we could have an extra car while I was in Austin. The trip to the shop revealed some pending problems with the transmission, but the mechanic gave it a couple months before they became critical. This was pretty perfect as I was only going to be in town for about six weeks.

Although the various skill involved with driving returned to me fairly quickly, parking remained something of an issue. I think the parking space gives an interesting insight into US life; parallel white lines that define a culture. The automobile, of course, is a widely recognized American icon, as well it should be. These modern marvels represent a culmination of over a century and a half of engineering work. Chemistry, mechanics, and electronics all come together to form a machine so intricately complicated that nowadays they can only be assembled by other machines. They operate unfailingly for decades and can be repaired by someone with only minimal technical training, and yet we've so streamlined their production that they are affordable to just about everyone and they're so easy to use that we trust them to the hands of even the most dimwitted of sixteen year olds. What is perhaps even more remarkable about these ten foot by five foot iron boxes is that, in some places, there are now so many of the machines that it has become difficult to find places to put them. Hence, the parking space. That these linear dabs of paint mean anything at all to us is in itself kind of strange. I mean, someone paints some lines on some cement and we all, without a second thought, organize our parked cars neatly between them. No one's ever like: “you know, I think I'll park ON the lines today.” Or put up a sign that says “No Parking” and we're all like “OK, no problem, I'll just drive around for another five minutes looking for another spot.” I mean, think about the level of organization that's required to achieve such a system. And how we frown upon those that do not follow the oh-so-holy parking code. I see a truck taking up two spaces outside of a Target and I'm filled with righteous indignation. Someone's back wheel is lying slightly over the line and I'm made angrier than a four-year-old whose brother is encroaching on his side of the car seat.

Parking has even become something of a competition. We take pride in our parking abilities. People brag about how close they manage to park their vehicles outside of Bed, Bath & Beyond. “Dude, you're not going to believe this. That parking lot was totally packed but I got myself a space right in front of the store. I'm talking right by the door!” Right by the door, huh? No shit. We prowl the massive concrete car-scapes outside of Best Buy or Wal-Mart in search of the holy grail: the spot that's just that much closer to the store entrance. We know it's out there somewhere and we will not rest until we've found it. And why? To shave a few tens of yards off of our foot journey? Perhaps. Perhaps we Americans are just so fat and lazy that we can no longer bear to walk the extra distance. While this explanation may appeal to those critical of our automobile-based lifestyle, I think there is more at stake here. In a world where we can no longer prove ourselves by going toe-to-toe with wild bears equipped only with wooden spears, we've found new outlets for our aggression. Backing down and accepting one of those god-forsaken back row spaces does not only increase our walking distance, it's also an admission of inadequacy. Consider: you see someone loading their purchases into the trunk. They've got a coveted third-row parking spot. Suddenly, the area fills with cars, hovering like buzzards over a fresh kill. Traffic backs up in the aisle, everyone watching for the outcome. On one side of the soon-to-be-opening space is a Lexus SUV, on the other is a Ford Expedition. The drivers stare each other down through tinted windows. They're both respectable adults. They probably have kids, perhaps even in the car with them. If they were to meet each other inside of the store whose lot they're circling, they'd no doubt be perfectly cordial and polite. But not here. Here, on this cement battleground, nothing is scared. Here, clothed in their armor of steel and rubber, two apes bare their teeth at each other. It's a contest for dominance of the oldest variety. The winner will have secured his position as leader, while the loser will be forced to go lick his wounds in the rear of the tarmac. And what about those of us that choose to frown upon such practice? I'm a back-of-the-lot kind of guy myself, and I like to think of myself as wiser for abstaining from such parking antics, but perhaps I'm kidding myself. Maybe my unwillingness to participate forever dooms me to some lesser rank of society. In our modern concrete savannah, it's hard to say.

I ended up getting plenty of parking practice, however, as with both my parents and my brother gone during the day to work and school, I was left with a lot of time to explore Austin. The first stop, and perhaps the most frequented during my vacation, was the grocery store. Texas is blessed with a large grocery store chain called H.E.B, which I've been going to with my family ever since I was a little kid and we'd fly to San Antonio for Christmas and browse the isles of said establishment for what seemed like hours, seeking various ingredients for Christmas dinner. No one really seems to know what H.E.B stands for, but a recent ad campaign associates it with the slogan “Here Everything's Better,” an assertion that I can't really argue with. H.E.B has everything a Texas family could ask for: tortillas made in-house, lots of Mexican food, a pretty good beer aisle, and it's open 24 hours. We've been over this before, I know, but I maintain that the grocery store is the single greatest achievement of the western world. It's a wonder, it really is. You approach this mecca of comestibles and the door miraculously slides open for you as you near. You're greeted by a blast of air conditioning or heat, depending on the time year, and (at least in my H.E.B) you're deposited in the produce section. I think we tend to forget this, but most fruits and vegetables have seasons. Take pineapples. In Vanuatu, we have pineapples in November and December. That's it. Want a pineapple in April? Too bad. But in the grocery store it's all there, laid out in front of you. Strawberries, apples (like ten different kinds. Ten kinds of apples!), avocados, oranges, grapes, seven different varieties of lettuce, broccoli, cucumbers, green beans, carrots, fruits and vegetables that I've never heard of. Food is shipped in from all different corners of the globe. Think about how much precision and effort goes into getting a single piece of fruit to a grocery store. The fruit has to be grown and picked, packed and shipped, unpacked and checked and placed on the shelf. Think about how many people are required in the process. Farmers, pickers, packers, truckers, and grocers all deal with the fruit directly, but a myriad of others are involved indirectly as well. Herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers have to be produced, distributed and applied to the plants. Harvesting equipment has to be built and maintained. Trucks have to be built, maintained, and fueled. Shipping routes have to be planned and overseen. A whole tangled, interconnected web of people and institutions, all relying on each other to operate properly, is required for something as simple as bringing a piece of fruit to a store. I think about this and my work in Vanuatu starts to seem just a little absurd. Our society is a staggeringly complicated mess of interlocking parts. Nothing in it exists in a vacuum, everything relies on everything else and the whole interconnected structure was built over a period of centuries. There was no moment of clarity when some guy woke up and was like “Eureka! I've invented technology! It's so simple! I don't know why I didn't think of it before!” There was no trick to it, no great leap forward, just a long trudge through a slow process of development. And now we're trying to fast forward the process for countries farther down the technological ladder, like Vanuatu. We try to hand them things. “Here, have some solar power,” we say or “here, take these medicines,” or “here, this is how bacteria work,” and we try to make such things “sustainable,” hoping that our efforts will have an impact lasting more than just a few months. It's like if aliens showed up in the US and handed us a bunch of gizmos and said “here, here's a bunch of teleportation devices, congratulations you're now a more advanced civilization.” Without any context or foundation to stand on, such infusions of technology or thinking are bound to be short lived. I'm not saying that such a fast forwarding process is necessarily impossible (I have no idea if it's possible or not, actually), but it does seem that it's usually attempted in the wrong way: donations of equipment or grants or training programs that last only a few days. Even the two years that we Peace Corps volunteers commit does next to nothing to chip away at the task. Sometimes I wonder how much thought goes into these international development projects. If this is a task we're going to pursue seriously, it seems like we should take the time to ensure that it's done well.

So……. Cont.

2009-02-27T00:04:00.000-05:00

So, my laptop is still broken, but progress has been made on the technology front. I’ve arranged to have a couple of desktop computers from my school’s computer center (which, up until this point, have been sitting in boxes) set up in my house so that I can give little computer classes to interested people in the village. This is, of course, a thinly veiled excuse to get my hands on a computer that I can use whenever I want, but it seems to have worked out well for all parties involved. McKenzie also now has internet access at her office, so what I can do is type anything I want at my computers at home and put them on a USB key and then upload them to the internet whenever I make it down to Litz Litz. Not a bad interim solution and, of course, I have a new keyboard on order from the US which should be getting here in a few weeks. So, all’s well right? Back to blogging! Well, here’s the thing: I don’t think I’m going to continue Life in the Ring of Fire. There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, and most practically, my recent technical issues have led to a great backlog of entries which seems pretty daunting and is thus leading to an infinite cycle of procrastination in which I end up writing nothing at all. Secondly, it just doesn’t seem as appealing anymore to write up week-by-week updates of my life. A few weeks into my second year volunteering and things are starting to seem awfully repetitive, the stories are the same, the jokes are the same, and the frustrations are the same. Nothing seems new enough to commit to paper. Finally, I seem to have unintentionally wrapped up Life in the Ring of Fire already. The last entry I posted before my computer stopped working actually closed things up pretty nicely (I thought), so maybe it was meant to be. I’m going to heed the writing on the wall and not force something to continue that should just finish (TV series such as Scrubs, House, and The Office might want to try this). It’s been a pleasure to write Life in the Ring of Fire and I hope all of you found it pleasant to read. Your comments, praises, and critiques have meant the world to me and I thank you for them. I can’t tell you how great it feels to know that things I’ve written are being read and talked about.

That being said, I hope you all will continue reading, because I am certainly not done writing. Rather than try to force a second season of Life in the Ring of Fire, I’m going to start fresh. I’ve written a series of articles about being back in the US for Christmas which I’m going to post in a series called Home for the Holidays. I think I only have five or six issues, so that will just be kind of a short intermission. After that, I’m going to launch a new series called “Yu No Kick” to cover my second year in Peace Corps. I’m going to go for a more open format. Instead of going through what I’ve been doing each week, I’m just going to write about whatever comes to mind. There will still be plenty of stories, I’m sure, as well as a few random thoughts about, say, centipedes, or toilets. I’ll try to keep the one-a-week thing going at the very least, but I might start throwing out two or three issues in a week if I’m feeling adventurous. We’ll see. And by the way, “Yu No Kick” is a Bislama slang term meaning something along the lines of “come on” or “chill out.” For example, if someone doesn’t want to let you buy kava on credit you might say “yu no kick,” meaning “come on man, it’s me, you know I’m good for it.” I hope you all enjoy.

So.......

2009-02-19T23:36:00.001-05:00

So, as you may have noticed, I haven't updated this blog for a while. I'm sorry to those who rely on this for entertainment (friends) and more so to those who rely on this as a steady assurance that I'm still alive (family). I am back in Vanuatu, but the keyboard on my laptop is broken, thus making writing and posting blog entries somewhat difficult. I have been keeping the blog going on paper, however, which doesn't do you all a lot of good, but rest assured that when I'm able to get regular access to a computer once again, things will be back up and running. Hang in there.

Cheers,
Dan

2009-01-24T21:37:00.000-05:00

Life in the Ring of Fire Part 64: Back in the US of A!

*Note: The title of this blog entry should be sung to the tune of “Back in the USSR” by the Beatles

Well, my flights actually did go pretty smoothly. True, I got a little hung up in Australian customs and had to surrender some of my Vanuatu wood carvings and ended up only just making my connection. And sure, one of my bags got lost on the way to LA and had to be delivered to me several days later, but I just kept thinking about how much more pleasant the whole experience was than the 48 hour hell ride on the Dante's Inferno, shivering and wet on an overcrowded refugee boat to Vila, huddling under a barely waterproof tarp in the rain. I mean, my flight to LA was air conditioned and had little TVs set into the back of every seat for Christ's sake. And the alcohol was free. Air conditioning, television, and free alcohol; that's kind of what I imagine heaven being like when I'm sitting in my shack on Malekula. I'll admit, however, that I was a little annoyed with Australian customs. I'd taken the time to get all of my wooden items chemically treated so that they could clear customs, and I'd already been allowed into New Zealand without question for my two-night layover. I'd flown from New Zealand to Sydney and was trying to catch a flight to Melbourne and then another onto LA, for a total amount of time spent in Australia probably under four hours. However, since I was making a domestic connection, I had to clear customs and thus was my first re-encounter with what western cultures like to call “laws,” and Ni-Vans like to think of as “people being jerks.” While most of my collection of Vanuatu trinkets were deemed worthy of spending four hours in Australia, they took issue with two circumcision rods. These are long sticks decorated with faces formed with tree sap and painted with colored soils. They're used when a boy undergoes a circumcision and are placed around the family's compound to denote the fact that the ceremony is going on. One of the rods was made for an average-Joe circumcision, but the other was for the son of a chief and thus was set with feathers and a pig's tusk. Although I'd picked up both for a total of about $40 from a guy on my island and could probably get an arbitrarily large number of them made for me upon request, I decided to really ham it up and make the customs officials feel really bad about confiscating them.
“These are interesting cultural artifacts,” I explained “you can only get them when there's a circumcision ceremony is going on (not true. I just have to ask my uncle), which happens, I don't know, maybe once every couple years (untrue, do you have any idea how many kids get born in my village? Lots).”
“This one here,” I continued, pointing to the simpler rod “can be used by any family, so I might be able to get another one of them, if I'm lucky. This other one, however, can only be used for the son of a chief. I was quite fortunate to be able to get it. There are very few people left from the chief family lines these days (also not true, basically everyone and their mother can claim to be a chief of something).”
My items were still confiscated, of course, but the customs staff seemed suitably guilty, distraught, and apologetic, so I considered it a moral victory.

I was in Auckland, New Zealand waiting for my flight out to the US for a couple days before my run-in with the Australian customs officials. Although it was supposed to be summer in New Zealand, the country's excessively southern location ensured that it was still somewhat chilly. This was my first experience with cool weather in a while, as November had been an exceptionally oppressive month in Vanuatu as far as heat and humidity were concerned. I hadn't packed any kind of warm clothing for my trip, as I really don't own any in Vanuatu, but I enjoyed walking around the city in the chill autumn-esque air with my shorts and t-shirt drawing inquisitive looks from other passersby. I also discovered this remarkable little device in my hotel room where you punch in the temperature you want it to be in the room and somehow it just magically becomes that temperature. I was so pleased with this device, in fact, that I changed my room from frigid ice box to sweltering sauna and back a couple of times just to prove that I could.

I set foot on US soil for the first time in over a year in LAX, where I was warmly welcomed home by a friendly US customs official. I also got paged for the first time in an airport (“Quantas airlines is paging passenger Daniel Moser. Daniel Moser, please see a Quantas airlines representative immediately”), which I was really excited about, but it turned out they just want to tell me that they'd lost my luggage. They seemed to think that this would be a huge inconvenience to me and apologized profusely and promised that it would be delivered to my house in Austin as soon as possible. I thought that this was way better than the standard method of hauling my bags through the various customs and security checkpoints myself and I wondered if I could have saved myself a lot of trouble by just requesting that they lose my bags immediately and just delivered to my house a few days after my arrival.

Upon exiting from the international terminal, I was approached by a man who gave a short spiel about some children-at-risk aid organization and requested a donation, claiming to accept any currency. Since it was all I had, I handed him a 500 vatu note, which he took and stared at blankly for a little while.
“What's this?” He finally asked.
“It's vatu,” I explained, “it's from Vanuatu.”
“Huh.” He said. I nodded in agreement.
“I don't know if our bank will accept this,” he continued.
“Probably not,” I said.
He handed the note back to me.
“Thanks,” I said, “have a Merry Christmas.”
I wondered if he would consider rewording his “accepting any currency” claim for the next person he approached.

Having made my way to the domestic side of the airport and ascertained that my flight to Austin would not be leaving for another couple hours, I settled into an airport Chili's to have a burger and a few margaritas and muse about how far I'd come in the past few days. I'd flown halfway around the world, that much was clear, but there was more than mere distance at play here. I tried to picture Duncan's nakamal: the woven bamboo sides, the flimsy-looking thatch, the uneven beams that make up the support structure– complete with twists, knots and protrusions as only fresh-cut wood can be, the giant mango tree that somehow managed to grow in an “L” shape, thus forming a nice little bench for those wanting to sit down outside. I thought about husking coconut and peeling kumala for dinner and tried to make those memories mesh with the scene in front of me: a building larger than my village whose concrete, steel, and right-angle construction doesn't even hint at the existence of nature, the steady flow of people darting in front of my table, toting all variety of wheeled clothing-containing contraptions, and the cheerful Mexican waiter who somehow managed to produce all manner of food and beverage upon request. I felt like I was in a Star Trek episode and had just stepped off the holo-deck and was now wandering the Starship Enterprise LAX, ordering food from the food synthesizer. It was like my whole life for the past few months had just been one of those annoying “Gotcha! None of that was actually real!” gimmicks that the writers like to pull every once and a while.

Further cementing the contrast between the cultures in my mind, a television in the waiting area in front of me began looping a commercial for the Radisson, highlighting the hotel's use of sleep number beds which, if my understanding is correct, is a sort of robot that allows you to adjust your bed's puffiness via remote control, just in case your mattress is too soft for comfort.

It was snowing in Austin when I landed. This is pretty unusual. I can only remember it snowing in Texas once before, one Christmas when I was staying at my cousin's house in Houston and we got a light dusting of snow covering his palm trees. It was very picturesque. I don't think I was adequately able to appreciate the strangeness this time around, however, as everything I'd seen for the past 24 hours had seemed kind of strange and I'd sort of lapsed into a just-roll-with-whatever-happens-without-asking-any-questions mode.

My Mom and brother were waiting for me at the airport. My brother was wearing a red Santa Claus hat and ran up and jumped on me as soon as I passed through the security checkpoint, just like when I used to come home for Christmas during college, except this time he was a lot bigger and almost knocked me over. My Mom had gotten some kind of contraption in her car that allows it to hook up to cellphones, thus saving everyone in the car the trouble of having to guess what someone on the phone is talking about, as the whole conversation comes booming through the car stereo. We used said device to contact my Dad to let him know I'd arrived, and for some reason this freaked me out more than the snow had. As we promised me, our first stop on the way home was at a Mexican restaurant. The same Mexican restaurant, in fact, where I'd had my going away party a couple of Septembers ago. As I ordered a plate of nachos (which had somehow assumed the status of the holy grail of food items for those of us in Vanuatu. I'm not entirely sure why, but nachos are admittedly awesome) and my brother and I jostled for room on the restaurant booth, I could feel myself beginning to slip back into my life from over a year ago. It felt right. I almost felt like I'd never left. Almost.

2009-01-23T19:48:00.002-05:00

Hey guys, I'm back! Sorry for the long delay. I've been enjoying life in the US too much to write anything. No worries, though, I'm back to the islands shortly and I owe you all about 6 more entries, so stay tuned.

Life in the Ring of Fire Part 63: The End of the Beginning

On Monday, McKenzie and I caught a plane for Vila. We left in the morning, which gave a pleasant finality to my first year of service: I was departing almost exactly a year after I'd arrived on Malekula. Plus, I didn't have to hang awkwardly around Tautu for most of the day after saying goodbye to everyone, waiting for the plane to arrive. In an act that would certainly have gotten me detained were I flying on any airline in the US, I'd purchased two clubs (one for killing pigs and one for killing people) as well as a couple of bow and arrows, all of which I was taking carry-on. In Vanuatu, of course, this barely raised an eyebrow. The relative of mine who'd done the woodwork for me had also carved a spear that he'd wanted me to buy. I explained to him, however, that, while the spear was nice, the difficulties involved with transporting it to the US were probably just a little too much. He countered by explaining that it could easily slid underneath the airplane seats for convenient traveling. I actually considered this for a while before realizing how totally ridiculous this proposition was. I also considered that probably the only thing one could fly do with a hijacked airplane in Vanuatu was fly it into the Pacific Ocean, which is actually surprisingly resilient to such terrorist attacks. I'd once had a Ni-Van ask me if there was ever likely to be any terrorist activity in Vanuatu. I explained to him that, since Vanuatu gets about ten times less media attention than a movie actor's latest haircut, this was unlikely to be a concern anytime soon. I did, however, assure him that, should Vanuatu work hard in its development efforts, they might one day be important enough to merit terrorist threats. Something to strive for, I suppose.

There's nothing like a plane ride to drive home just how small and insignificant my home in Vanuatu is. As the plane lifted off from the runway and began to gain altitude, I watched the terrain shrink below me. First, Tautu and the airport merge into one, then Norsup and the dusty road to Lakatoro are thrown in. Soon I can pick out the LTC and MDC, the PRV plantation, Urpiv island. A mere minute after takeoff, my entire world is compressed and is visible in its entirety through a tiny aircraft window no more than eighteen inches high and a foot wide. All my friends and family, my house, my haunts and hangouts, my trials, triumphs, and failures, my joys, worries, and complaints, my life for the past year have receded into obscurity. People, places, and events which seemed so large in my head are shown for what they really are: a small green blob in the middle of a vast, blue ocean. It's a humbling thought, and I try not to dwell on it.

We landed in Vila and headed to the Peace Corps office to drop off our stuff only to discover that this idea had occurred to many others before us. The office was festooned with stuff: half-packed suitcases, piles of recently purchased items, shopping bags full of clothes, food, and other random junk. I recognized the scene from our week in Vila before departing to our various islands and I remembered that the newest set of volunteers, a few of which we'd hosted on Malekula almost a month ago, were scheduled to head out in just a couple of days. We found a couple empty corners to ditch out bags and then set out for Jill's American Cafe, as it tradition, to have burritos. Knowing that there were likely to be at least a few volunteers from the new group that we hadn't met yet at the restaurant, we played “try and spot the Peace Corps volunteers.” McKenzie was convinced that the group of four sitting behind us were volunteers, but I remained skeptical due to the extravagance of their order, well beyond the budget of I volunteer, I reasoned, and their reluctance to speak Bislama to the wait staff. McKenzie ended up winning out, however, as we saw them again later at the office.

That evening our medical officer was hosting an early Christmas party for volunteers at her house in Vila. Our medical officer, Jane, has a palatial estate looking over Port Vila harbor complete with pool, guest house, and an enormous patio for hosting parties. We'd first been brought to Jane's way back in training, where we'd been given a crash course in opening coconuts by her gardener and had one last chance to see the type of deluxe accommodations that we'd be missing out on for the next two years. Jane's is also home to a number of dogs, including a great dane which is larger than your average horse. Ni-Vans are kind of funny about dogs. Most villages are literally crawling with dogs. They're like pests, locusts that attach themselves to people's houses and feed off of scraps. Since they are regularly beaten and abused by the villagers, they grow to be utterly terrified of humans, and will quickly clear out of the way if they see some approaching. Because all their dogs are so cowardly, however, the Ni-Vans are totally afraid of any dog that doesn't instantly flee in terror at the site of them. McKenzie's dog, for example, which hasn't quite made it to my knees in hight yet, regularly strikes fear into the hearts of Tautu residents whenever he comes to visit as, instead of fleeing at the approach of a human, he usually goes up and tried to sniff them. This leads to some interesting scenes as, for example, villagers jump off the road into the bushes whenever he walks by. Thus, I can't imagine what the Ni-Vans' reactions are to Jane's horse-hound. If he were living in Tautu I'm sure that most Ni-Vans there would instantly consign themselves to their houses, leaving to find food and use the facilities only after a careful inspection of the nearby area to ensure that the devil dog was nowhere in sight. Aside from the dog, however, Jane's party was enjoyable and a good opportunity to get to meet some of the new volunteers, although I ended up put my foot in my mouth several times as I discovered that assuming everyone I didn't know was a new volunteer was not really a viable strategy as I didn't really know many people from the group that had arrived six months earlier or, indeed, any group that isn't my own.

Wednesday was the last kava for our outgoing Peace Corps country director, Kevin George. Kevin had actually ceased being the country director for Peace Corps Vanuatu back in June, but he'd been hanging around Vila for a while to finish tying off all loose ends before departing. Thus, as we gathered, the past five months or so had been more or less an endless slew of farewell dinners and farewell kavas and some speculation as to when, exactly, this guy would actually be leaving. Apparently, however, things were finally winding down and Kevin actually had departure tickets for sometime in the following week, which gave this farewell kava at least some degree of finality. Plus, drinking kava with Kevin George is always a good time. We met at a nakamal a little bit outside of Vila, which had been Kevin's favorite haunt for as long as anyone could remember. In an unheard of move, Kevin had not only arrange for a bucket of kava to be set aside for us, free of charge, but was also subsidizing our beer purchases. Tusker, which usually sells for something like 300 vatu ($3) at a nakamal, was going for 100 vatu ($1) for volunteers, thus making that evening the first, and probably last, dollar beer night that I'd ever experienced in the country. At any rate, if Kevin's goal was to leave us with a glowing impression of him and make his shoes more or less impossible to fill for his replacement, he did an admirable job.

As the week drew to a close, I grew more and more anxious for my flight to New Zealand and the US on Sunday. Being in Vila makes me anxious anyway (as my Dad so eloquently put it in a recent conversation: “Yeah, Vila is really depressing”), but I'd mentally checked out of Vanuatu several weeks ago and I was now impatiently waiting for my corporeal form to follow. My parents had provided me with a long list of Vanuatu merchandise that they wanted me to bring them to be given as Christmas presents, so most of my days were spent browsing the various craft markets and stores in search of said items. Once I'd secured everything on the list, I was presented with a new difficulty: packing everything up in a manner suitable for trans-pacific travel. Towards the end of the week, I solved this problem by purchasing a cheap, large, Chinese-made suitcase, which I knew was ridiculously overpriced and probably would fall apart before my journey was over, but which I hoped would hold together long enough to at least get me to LA. I also located a long cardboard tube in which to transport my bow and arrows to make them more amenable to being checked. By Friday afternoon I was fully packed and had reached a new peak of antsy-ness. I could almost taste the enchiladas. Austin was so close I felt like I could touch it. Of course, I still had an incredibly complicated trans-oceanic flight ahead of me, requiring two nights stay in New Zealand and stops at two major cities in Australia, but things like that usually go pretty smoothly, right? I wasn't particularly concerned.

Life in the Ring of Fire Part 62: Thanksgiving

2008-12-13T21:38:00.000-05:00

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.

2008-12-12T22:19:00.000-05:00

Life in the Ring of Fire Part 61: About an Ice Box

This week's Tautu language word is “kupan.” It's the second person conjugation of “go,” thus meaning “you go.” “Kupan ape?” is a common phrase to hear on the paths of the village meaning, literally, “you go where?,” where are you going?

Monday was McKenzie's birthday. This was a little odd, as I remembered the same time the previous year, when we were still in training. McKenzie and Chris share a birthday and all of our training group happened to be in Port Vila for school visits that day. Much to the annoyance of our training staff, we talked our country director into allowing us to stay in town for the evening so we could all go to a restaurant to eat, drink, and celebrate. Much later we learned, from the two training groups entering Vanuatu after us, that we were the last group to be allowed weekly visits to Vila, and that the staff had taken steps to prevent future groups from partying as much as we had. In essence, we had so much fun we ruined it for everyone else. This is something of a source of pride. Anyway, it was just another reminder of how much time had managed to slip by while I'd been busy lounging on the beach. Strange.

While undertaking out second ship ride a few weeks ago, Laura and I had hatched a plan for a surprise party, of sorts. Granted, McKenzie, Laura, Chris, (different Chris, not the one in our training group mentioned in the paragraph above) and I were the only volunteers on the island at that particular moment, owing to the fact that Mindi had disappeared mysteriously, Ben had finished his service, Jack was in Vila doing training for the new group, and Noah was trapped by a flooding river, so the surprise party was relatively small compared to what one might expect in the US, but it was still something of a challenge to pull off because it required getting Chris and Laura to Lakatoro without McKenzie realizing they'd come. This was difficult because, being the only four white people on the island, when one of us goes somewhere, people tend to notice, and Ni-Vanuatu are perhaps the most gossipy people on the face of the planet. Whenever Laura comes into town, for example, I usually get at least six people coming around my house to tell me about it: the truck driver who brought her down, the three guys in my village that saw her pass on the road, the woman who sold her a coconut at the market, and the guy standing behind her in the bank line. Thus, when I went to fetch McKenzie from work and bring her back to Mindi's house (which we were using as a vacation home due to the fact that it had the fridge), I fully expected her to say something along the lines of: “Hey, I heard Laura and Chris are in town, have you seen them?” By some random fluke, however, she'd not been informed of their arrival by anyone, and thus was duly surprised when the two of them were waiting at the house for us, beers in hand. Overall, a far more successful event than I could've expected.

As the week went on, it slowly became apparent that we had a problem. With Mindi being gone and unlikely to be replaced for another year, it was only a matter of time before we lost control of the house that had been in Peace Corps volunteer hands since we'd arrived on Malekula. The house offered several advantages that all of us were somewhat upset about the prospect of losing. First of all, it was in Lakatoro, away from all of our respective villages, thus giving us a small measure of privacy when there to do things such as party without being scrutinized by members of our communities. It also sported running water (a rarity in Malekula) and an indoor shower and toilet. But really, the jewel in the crown was the ice box (or refrigerator, in America-speak). In a land where the temperature rarely dips below the mid-seventies, even in winter, and 100% humidity is considered dry, a device able to move heat from cold to hot (with the application of a bit of work) in such a flagrant mockery of the principles of entropy is worth its weight in gold (actually, that's a bit of an understatement, as gold isn't nearly valuable enough. Unfortunately, the phrase “worth its weight in weapons-grade uranium” hasn't caught on yet). According to Chris, whose been on Malekula six months longer than myself, and thus had had the pleasure of meeting a few of the volunteers who'd already left when I'd arrived, the fridge had been purchased by an Australian volunteer a few years back and had been left in the care of us Peace Corps volunteers when she departed. Thus, it was decided that we would remove the fridge to my house in order to keep this most treasured of appliances in the Malekula Peace Corps community. I informed Duncan of this plan, who was pleased that (in addition to the deep freezer at his house) we would now have two ice boxes in the family. On Wednesday, we hired and truck into which Duncan and I loaded the fridge and then struck out for my house. In route, the fridge, which had been loaded upright into the truck bed, was clotheslined by an overhanging tree limb. With little regard for my own safety, I flew from my seat on the opposite side of the truck bed to break the fall of the precious appliance. I caught most of it's weight on my left shoulder, leaving me with a nasty bruise for a few days, but I considered this quite a small price to pay. We unloaded the fridge at my house and I promptly filled it with my collection of home-brewed beer, pineapples, and mangoes. I then filled up as many discarded plastic cracker trays as I could find with water and placed them in the upper freezer compartment in lieu of ice trays. Then I plugged in the fridge and listened contentedly as the compressor hummed to life. It was like Christmas come early.

Unfortunately, it was not to be that easy. The following day, I was waiting in line at the bank when a woman working for the provincial government walked up to me and asked to talk to me. The two of us sat down on a bench and she launched into a long and quite mind-numbingly boring history of the house Mindi had just vacated, detailing every volunteer that had lived there for the past ten years, which country each had been from, who each one had worked with, what each of their jobs had entailed, what each one's favorite nakamal was, how much each had liked lap-lap, and which ones had been regular church-goers. She finally finished by explaining that the fridge needed to remain with the house so it could be used by any future volunteers that happened to come work for the province. I tried explaining that A) there weren't going to be any more volunteers working for the province in the near future, B) the fridge did not even belong to the province in any case, and C) they (the provincial government) were just pissed that I had taken the fridge for my house before they had had a chance to take it for one of theirs. Each point I brought up, however, was countered with a repetition of the house history story in an application of the classic Ni-Van arguing technique of being so soul-crushingly inane and repetitive that you have to agree with them just so they'll stop boring you to death. Helpless against such a strategy (and feeling kind of silly about starting a fight with the government over a fridge), I told the lady that if they wanted to send a truck to Tautu to pick up the ice box, they were welcome to do so. Of course, I knew full well that it would probably take them months, if not years, to get their act together enough to come get the fridge, so I was fairly confident that it would remain in my possession at least until May of the following year. And so it was that I spent the weekend enjoying cold beers and wrapping ice-cube filled towels around my neck to beat the crippling heat of the November afternoons. Really, I couldn't have asked for anything more.

2008-12-11T15:42:00.000-05:00

Life in the Ring of Fire Part 60: Chewing Kava

This week's Tautu language word is “no.” It means “I” or “me.”

On Monday, I received and odd text from McKenzie, it read:
“Did you know Mindi quit Peace Corps? Because I sure didn't.”
I was significantly perplexed by this that I decided to spring for the extra $2 and put through a call to get to the bottom of things. After a few minute long conversation with McKenzie I discovered that Mindi had mysteriously taken a job in Vila without telling any of us, quit Peace Corps and had left on a plane that morning. This was odd for several reasons. First and foremost, we'd all been hanging out at her house over the weekend, which would have seemed like the perfect opportunity for mentioning something like the fact that you're leaving Peace Corps. On top of that, Mindi was involved with a Master's Degree program which treats Peace Corps service as sort of a practical course in international development, thus meaning that, after writing a paper about what you did, you wind up with a degree when you finish your service, and we kind of doubted the school she was corresponding with would look too fondly on her dropping out of Peace Corps to take a job. Mostly though, it was just weird to have a volunteer on our island disappear so mysteriously. There aren't very many of us, so you'd think it'd be easy to keep track of everyone. We were informed that the key to Mindi's house had been left for us and we agreed to go up there on Wednesday to investigate.

On a more positive note, I'd last week made what was possibly one of the best moves in my entire Peace Corps service, teaching Duncan how to make pineapple-mango smoothies, and was reaping the benefits. I'd brought back a blender from Australia, but I hadn't been able to get all that much use out of it due to the fact that I don't have a freezer and smoothie friendly fruits such as pineapples and mangoes can be difficult to obtain on short notice (while it's not unusual to have some kid show up randomly at my house and give me a couple pineapples, this is by no means a reliable source. Sometimes I'll just be flooded with pineapples and sometimes I'll go weeks without seeing one. There's just no way to tell. Same thing with mangoes, sometimes they're just falling from the trees left and right and sometimes there are just none to be found. It makes you appreciate how awesome grocery stores are. In Vanuatu, food may be abundant and free, but the selection is never as good as at the local supermarket). Duncan, however, had taken an interest in the blender as soon as he saw it in my house due to the fact that it was fancy-looking, obviously from outside of Vanuatu, and needed to be plugged. I explained how one makes smoothies and he asked to borrow the blender so that he could give it a shot. Assuming that he'd probably lose interest in it rather quickly, I handed it over. To my surprise, however, that evening I arrived at his house for kava and was presented with an icy pineapple-mango smoothie. It was probably one of the best moments I'd had in a long time. Even better though, was that it actually ended up being something of a tradition. Three o'clock or so became dubbed as smoothie time and the whole family would gather around a mat while Duncan doled out his latest frozen concoction. He even got into experimenting: trying mangoes from different trees and pineapples from different patches to try and figure out which ones made the best smoothie. The best part, of course, was that he did all the work involved in smoothie production (procuring pineapples and mangoes, freezing them, blending them, cleaning the blender, the list just goes on and on) and I got to reap all the benefits as I'd been the one to front the thirty bucks for a blender. Isn't capitalism brilliant?

Wednesday, McKenzie and I headed up to Mindi's newly vacated house to clean and see if there was anything worth taking. Unfortunately, Mindi had done a pretty good job of removing anything that might have been useful, including, to our chagrin, the electric fan and the seven leftover beers from our Mexican party the previous weekend. Given the mysterious circumstances surrounding Mindi's departure, we began to speculate wildly as to why she'd left without telling us and how she'd been able to pack everything up that weekend without any of us noticing. Our imaginations ran wild with theories of her feeling from loan sharks, participating in a complicated con, and, finally, being accomplice to a murder. At this point, we began to creep ourselves out and everything in the house became a potential clue in a homicide case. Baking soda spilled on the floor became cocaine, puddles of water were regarded with suspicion, and both of us literally jumped in surprise when my cell phone went off indicating the arrival of a text. I opened it, fully expecting it to contain a cryptic messages along the lines of “check under the stairs,” but it was just Laura seeking confirmation of the news that Mindi had left. At this point, McKenzie and I decided that we were getting a little jumpy and we headed down to a nakamal for some kava in order to unwind.

Saturday, McKenzie was invited by one of her friends in Litz Litz to chew kava and asked me along for moral support. I'd read about chewed kava on Wikipedia before coming to Vanuatu. The Wikipedia article had made it seem like the standard method of preparing kava in the country and explained that the chewing was usually done by pre-pubescent boys. Kava comes out of the ground as a large root, about the size and shape of an adult octopus. In order to prepare the drink, the root has to be chopped into small pieces and ground up. Kava preparation methods differ in the chosen technique for grinding the kava. In the chewing technique, as you might imagine, the kava is ground by chewing it in one's mouth. However, chewed kava is something of a rarity, only really common on the island of Tanna in the south of the country and, contrary to the Wikipedia article, grown men and women are usually permitted to chew kava as well, a good thing because pre-pubescent boys can sometimes be hard to come by. On Malekula, the standard grinding method is running the kava chunks through a meat grinder. This is probably the fastest method, and the easiest when large amounts of kava need to be prepared (like if you're selling it at a nakamal). The downside is that kava from a grinder is supposed to be the worst tasting and the most likely to make you sick to your stomach if you drink too much of it. Other common grinding techniques include stone grinding and ramming (where the kava is placed in a tube and rammed into a pulp with wooden rods). Everyone who's had chewed kava, however, swears that it is by far the smoothest and easiest on the belly, thus I was excited to finally have a chance to try it out. I was under the impression that McKenzie's friend would be doing the actual chewing for us, but when we arrived at the appointed location, we found a collection of cut kava chunks laid out on an empty rice bag, waiting to be ground. A young Ni-Van woman took charge as our instructor. “So, you take the kava,” she explained, grabbing a chunk of kava, “and chew it until it's soft, and then spit it out into your bowl. Be careful not to swallow it or you might throw up.” To me, that didn't sound like a promising start. McKenzie and I each took hold of a piece of kava and stared at it skeptically. I sniffed mine. It smelled suspiciously like the kava drink, but I told myself that it probably didn't taste nearly as bad, since there are people in the world who prepare kava this way nightly. With that comforting thought in mind, I gamely shoved the piece of kava into my mouth. It was... awful. Drinking kava is, of course, awful, which is why one drinks it as quickly as possible to minimize the time spent actually tasting it. Chewing kava is kind of like taking a mouthful of kava and swishing it around for a while like it was Listerine. If you think this sounds bad, believe me, it's actually, much, much, worse than you're imagining. I made a face usually reserved for people suddenly faced with the loss of all their loved ones, worldly possessions, hopes, dreams, pride and dignity. I quickly masticated the kava in my mouth and spit it into a glass bowl, where I discovered that, actually, the most difficult part of the whole procedure was suppressing the gag reflex whilst disgorging one's chewed kava so as not to vomit all over the place. I surveyed the large pile of kava still waiting to be chewed and a deep sense of despondency began to settle in. I looked over at McKenzie and saw, by the look on her face, that similar emotions were going through her head. I still don't know how we did it, but eventually the pile of un-chewed kava in front of us began to diminish, and finally disappear. I was just about to begin celebrating the end of a decidedly awful experience when our Ni-Van instructor once again caught our attention and explained “Now, what you have to do is shape your chewed kava into little balls and chew it again.” I think I honestly almost cried. In the end, couldn't tell whether or not chewed kava goes down smoother than kava put through a meat grinder. By the time we finished chewing our kava for the second time, added water, squeezed out the juice, and strained it, I was so glad for the experience to be over that my bowl of kava tasted like heaven. However, I think this was entirely due to the fact that the thirty minutes leading up to the final experience of drinking had been pure hell. I decided to mark down “chewing kava” on my list of things to never, ever do again.

2008-11-20T17:05:00.000-05:00

Life in the Ring of Fire Part 59: Meet the Newbies

This week's Tautu language word is “nik.” It means “you.”

While Laura and I were in the Maskelynes, the new group of Peace Corps volunteers, who'd arrived in Vanuatu back in September and been in training, went on wokaboat (walkabout), a week-long visit to the villages where they'd be spending their next two years. We were slated to get two new volunteers in Malekula, one in Norsup and one in Wowo, a village in the north near Laura. I was somewhat concerned about the volunteer to be placed in Norsup, because Norsup is only about a fifteen minute walk from me, and I'd actually been informed the previous week that, while they'd be working in Norsup, they'd actually be living in Tautu. Having been the only white person in Tautu for almost a year, I'd become somewhat territorial and was not really sure how to respond to the information that I'd now be sharing my site with someone. Laura and I were somewhat disappointed at not having been at the airport to greet the new arrivals, so Sunday afternoon we called McKenzie from the Maskelynes to get the scoop.
“They seem pretty cool,” McKenzie informed us.
“That's not very helpful,” I said.
“Hey, what do except,” she replied “I'm sitting in the same room as them.”
“Well, go outside,” I suggested.
“Ah, Jesus, really?”
“Come on, this is important. These people are our future.”
“Fine. Hold on.”
--pause--
“Right,” McKenzie said, finally, “I think we're going to be OK.”
“Yeah?” I asked.
“Marie claims that margaritas are her favorite drink,” she continued.
“Well, that's promising,” I agreed.
“And Karen's a little older, but she seems like she's still down for partying. She's the one going to Norsup.”
“Alight,” I said.
“Also, they both claim that they can cook.”
“OK. Good. That's good.”
“Yeah. Can I go back inside now?”

We spent Sunday night in Lemap, and hoped that the river had gone down enough over the weekend to allow a truck to take us up to Lakatoro the following day. Jack's host family drives the trucks that run between Lemap and Lakatoro and Jack's host brother told us he'd be by Jack's house to pick us up at 4:30am Monday morning. This being Vanuatu, we naturally assumed that 4:30 meant more like 6 or 7, so we were pretty shocked when the truck actually showed up on schedule. Standing in the back of a pickup as it sped its way north to Lakatoro through the morning dimness, I experienced a sensation I hadn't felt for a long time: cold. I was actually, legitimately cold. Not kind of cold, or passingly cold, but, with the crisp morning air slicing its way through my t-shirt, actually cold. I wasn't entirely sure how to respond to this, so I decided to just roll with it and that it would probably go away in half an hour or so. Speculations began amongst our fellow passengers as we neared the river as to whether or not it would be passable. Word was the they'd tied to go up on Sunday but had had to turn back, which didn't bode particularly well. About an hour and a half into the ride, I saw what all the fuss was about, the river was pretty formidable. Well, OK, not really formidable, I mean we're not exactly talking about the Mississippi (and yes, I did sing the M-i-s-s-i-s-s-i-p-p-i song when I wrote that. And now you are too). The river was about fifty meters wide and maybe two feet deep. Not exactly a journey-ending obstacle for the traveler on foot, but I sure wouldn't have been comfortable driving a truck through it. The driver got out and stumped up and down the river a few times, frowning and muttering periodically. “We're good,” he announced at last. It was no longer a mystery as to why trucks rarely last longer than couple years on Malekula. We forded the river successfully (no oxen or party members lost... What's that a reference to? Anyone?), although the truck did seem on the verge of being torqued over in the middle of the river.
“They should building a bridge already,” Laura said.
“Yeah,” I concurred.
We both agreed that we would be angry about the lack of a bridge for the remainder of our service. I mean, look, we're not talking about the Golden Gate here people. All you need is your standard length of stone/metal/wood spanning a void of the variety that could have been built by, for example, the Romans over two thousand years ago. In the end, however, we did make it back to Lakatoro that morning and got to meet the two new volunteers before they headed off to their respective sites. They did, indeed, seem “pretty cool.”

On Tuesday I got giardia. Well, actually, I don't know what the incubation period for giardia is, so I might have contracted it sometime before, but on Tuesday symptoms of giardia became apparent. I was actually pretty stoked. Up until that point I hadn't contracted any kind of bizarre disease/parasite, and I was a little upset that I would be going back to the US in December and would be forced to tell friends and family that the most exotic aliment I'd wrestled with while in Vanuatu was the common cold. Giardia is an intestinal parasite transmitted through contaminated drinking water. Those of you outdoors-y types are no doubt familiar with giardia, as it is a common concern when camping, hiking, or backpacking. You know how when you eat a really big, greasy meal from some dive diner and a little while later your stomach informs you that it is not terribly pleased with you at the moment and you spend the next hour or so on the john? Having giardia is kind of like that, except it just doesn't go away. All in all, it's a pretty good disease to contract because it sounds really hardcore to say that you've had it, but having it is really more of an annoyance than anything else. Also, to treat it, you just take four pills all at once and, a few hours later, magically you're better. They really need to work on more medicines like that.

On Friday we put on a party for our newbies. They both came into Lakatoro on Friday and reported to have had enjoyable walkabout experiences, which was good because we were counting on them committing to two years here, as we're in desperate need of new volunteers to replenish our diminishing numbers. We decided to go with a Mexican night theme in celebration of the fact that one of our local stores, The Consumer, had started carrying tequila (well, it's not ACTUALLY tequila because it's not made with 100% agave, but it does have “Tequila” written on the bottle and says “Hecho en Mexico,” which is about as much authenticity as you can hope for around these parts). This, combined with ice from Mindi's freezer and the blender I purchased in Australia allowed us, for the first time, to make frozen margaritas in Vanuatu (suggested listening: “Margaritaville” by Jimmy Buffett), which was simply amazing. We also had chips and salsa which, in Vanuatu, requires a three hour long process to prepare. First, you have to make tortillas then cut and fry them to make chips. Then you have to chop tomatoes, onions, peppers, garlic, and squeeze limes for the salsa and either mash it all together or throw it in the blender. I find it hard to believe now that chips and salsa are given away, free of charge, at most Mexican restaurants. We followed this up with fajitas and tacos which, due to the fact that they were prepared after most of the margaritas had been drunk, were a little haphazardly put together. All and all though, fun times were had by all and we closed the week optimistic about our new blood.

2008-11-20T17:03:00.000-05:00

Life in the Ring of Fire Part 58: Dante's Inferno Revisited

This week's Tautu language word is “bemblen.” It means “a little bit.”

One of my favorite things about Vanuatu is the strange meld of modern technology and western culture with 3000 year old customs, technologies, and traditions. For example, a hut made of woven bamboo and natangora thatch, building materials that have been used in basically the same way for thousands of years, housing a five foot long sub woofer and a speaker setup that would be the envy of a hip-hop club in California. Or a picture of the vice President, done up in an expensive business suit, using a wooden club to beat a pig to death (better watch the pig's blood splatter on that one). Or the guy that boards the plane to Vila with a live chicken and bow and arrow as carry-on. Or the group in Southwest Bay that, in response to an archeologist's find suggesting that Ni-Vanuatu were originally from Taiwan, wrote a letter in to the newspaper politely explaining that, while some Ni-Vanuatu may have indeed come from Taiwan, they were in fact begotten by Kabat, the rock-god (rock in the geologic sense, not the musical genre, although that would actually be a lot funnier), and inviting the archaeologist to come to Southwest Bay so that he might see for himself the truth of this. Or the representatives to the national council of chiefs that showed up to the national assembly wearing only penis sheathes. Or, my personal favorite, the guy who was accused, charged, tried in court, convicted and imprisoned for making it rain during a festival.

I had my own such moment on Wednesday evening when I got a call from my host-uncle asking if I could come to Norsup to help him with a computer issue. My host uncle, Jonasi, is what passes for a computer geek in Vanuatu, meaning that he understands that computers require electricity to operate (in all seriousness, some people can not quite grasp this concept. I'm involved in a computer project that's selling refurbished computers from the US to people and organizations here in Vanuatu for a very low price, and I continually get orders from people from remote villages in the middle of the bush who I know have no electricity to speak of, and I'm always having to explain that the computer that they're purchasing will not work unless hooked up to a generator. What's even better though is the people who tell me that they understand their computer won't be able to be turned on, they just want it as a decoration). Actually, Jonasi is pretty computer savvy, especially considering Tautu has only had electricity for about five years. He can take apart and reassemble computers, for example, and understands what an operating system is and how to install one, both fairly advanced skills, even in the US. At any rate, he makes a bit of money fixing computers for people who, for some reason, happen to have them (usually the reason is to play solitaire). He's taken to calling me whenever he gets stumped, however, and I usually go help him out because Vanuatu is almost entirely a favor-based economy and I've found that generally the more people that feel like they owe me favors, the easier it is to get things done. I rode up to Norsup and ducked inside a little concrete and tin shack and felt like I'd just walked into some gear-head's basement in the US. Every available surface was covered in computer parts. There were a couple tables covered with computers in various stages of assembly, some running with their cases open and IDE cables snaking out of them to attach to hard drives and CD drives sitting on stacks of newspapers. The floor was covered with cables, circuit boards and unused drives. I was stunned. I'd never felt more at home anywhere else in Vanuatu. I was introduced to the owner for the computer shack, who'd hired Jonasi to help him resolve some computer issues. He explained to me that the building I was in was actually his internet cafe which, due to some technical difficulties, had not had internet access for many months. Fortunately, internet cafes in Vanuatu generally don't make their money by providing internet access, but rather by copying and selling bootleg DVDs, printing documents, fliers, and digital photos, and uploading new ring tones to people's cell phones. He and Jonasi were trying to install Windows on a new hard drive, but were having some difficulties. The problem ended up being fairly simple, and I fixed it quickly, but I stayed around to supervise the install because it was mentioned that kava would probably be involved. About twenty feet outside the internet cafe is a bamboo and natangora nakamal, and once they finished making their kava, the three of us had a few shells while we waited for the install to finish. A woman from Norsup came by a little after the nakamal opened and dropped off a covered tray of food to be sold along with the kava. I watched as the cloth covering the dish was removed to reveal about fifteen enormous lobsters. “How much are those?” I asked in disbelief. “Hundred vatu for one,” replied the woman. About a dollar. I bought two. Holding a lobster in each hand, and enjoying the effects of kava, I followed Jonasi and the internet cafe owner back inside his computer shack and the three of us watched the install progress. Since we were surrounded by so many computer parts, and since were probably the three most knowledgeable people on the island about computers, it was inevitable that we started talking shop. And so there I was, drinking a traditional tribal beverage derived from the root of a pepper plant out of a coconut shell, munching on fresh-caught lobster, and discussing motherboards, BIOS settings, boot orders, operating systems, LiveCDs, and how to circumvent activation codes. It was a strange night.

Thursday, Laura and I were planning on heading down to Lemap, on the southern tip of the island, and then chartering a speedboat to go to the Maskelynes, a group of islands off the southern coast of Malekula known for their excellent snorkeling. A volunteer stationed in the Maskelynes, Ben, was finishing his service and so was having a going away party. However, it had rained heavily the previous night and I was skeptical that we'd be able to get a truck down. There's a large river about an hour's drive south of Lakatoro that's shallow enough for a truck to drive through when the weather's been dry, but after any kind of significant rain, it becomes impassable (keep in mind that Vanuatu gets A LOT of rain, so the river is impassable for about six months out of the year, effectively cutting Malekula in half. Since the commercial center is in Lakatoro, anyone from the southern half of the island who wants to conduct business – sell copra, kava, cocoa, etc, is unable to do so for half the year. Although it's trendy now among international donors to provide millions of dollars in funding for things like bio fuels, they're hesitant to invest the ten grand or so it would take to build a decent bridge across the river which, although not exactly a “sustainable” project, would be a big step towards increasing the amount of revenue coming out of the island). Sure enough, after my class on Thursday Laura showed up at the school to inform me that none of the trucks from Lemap had been able to cross the river. Then a mischievous smile lit up her face as she told me that we would be taking the Moiaka the Lemap. Yes, the Moiaka, the hell-boat responsible for the worst 48 hours of my life spent in route to Vila several months before. “You've got to be freaking kidding me,” I said.

It actually wasn't nearly as bad as before. We knew what we were in for and thus could prepare accordingly. We packed plenty of snacks, so as not to be reliant on the measly plates of rice we knew the ship would be providing. I also made sure to bring my fleece, knowing it would be cold on the boat once the sun went down. Most importantly, however, we brought a couple bottles of wine to alleviate what we knew would be a soul-crushingly boring 12 hour start-and-stop journey down the coast of Malekula. Also, they'd cleaned the bathroom since we were last on the ship, which was a definite plus. I'll re-iterate: I still don't know how ships can make any money. They've got to be using more money on fuel burned by stopping and idling every thirty feet than they're taking in to transport a single watermelon to Vila. A few glasses of wine later, however, and I decided that such time and fuel budgeting problems were quite happily somebody else's, and I actually kind of enjoyed the journey. We arrived in Lemap around midnight and made our way to Jack's (a volunteer from my group based in Lemap) house. Surprisingly, he was still awake and got out mattresses for us to sleep on. After a short session of complaining about how difficult it is to teach Ni-Van kids, we all went to sleep.

The next day as we were waiting for the boat to go the Maskelynes, we wandered around Lemap. Lemap was a French controlled village which means that it's attractively laid out and not covered with garbage (not sure how the French pulled it off, but, even twenty years after leaving, all the areas that were controlled by them are still kept immaculately clean). Lemap is also known for being overcast and getting a lot of rain, which was actually awesome because it meant it was about ten degrees cooler than Lakatoro, which had become unbearably hot. I was even almost cold at night. Probably the most distinctive fact about Lemap, however, is that it's completely covered with pigs. There are pigs everywhere. Literally, everywhere. I probably tripped over pigs three or four times while walking around. Despite their lousy reputation, pigs are probably the most pleasant animal to live in close quarters with. Unlike their wild brethren, domesticated pigs are very friendly and quite harmless. They don't bark insanely like dogs, or crow at odd hours of the night like roosters, or try to peck you to death like hens, or leave giant piles of poop all over the place like cows. Plus, they eat almost anything and so are great for keeping a place nice and clean. Also, they're probably the most delicious animal. I'm seriously considering taking up pig farming after Peace Corps. Pigs are awesome. At any rate, Jack ordered us a pig to take over to the Maskelynes, which was delivered to us a few hours later, tied up in a rice sack. We met up with Julie, Chris, and Noah, volunteers form the south also heading down for the party. While motoring along in the speedboat, Jack let out a fishing line and, about five minutes later, was wrestling with a large tuna. After a bit of a struggle, he hauled it into the boat and our Ni-Van captain drove a pocket knife into its brain. It was probably about two and a half to three feet long and looked like it would make excellent sushi. We arrived in the Maskelynes in the late afternoon and lounged around until evening, when the festivities were set to begin. Although not that much to look at, the small island we were on did boast an excellent climate: a strong breeze worked its way through the village the whole time we were there and kept the temperature decidedly pleasant.

That night, the seven of us volunteers and Ben's village gathered around a trash can full of kava, which disappeared surprisingly quickly. We listened to a number of speeches given by various people in the village while eating lap-lap and then headed of sleep. The next day, I was fairly devastated to discover that the tuna we'd caught was an albacore, and thus wouldn't make good sushi. Thus, we surrendered it to Ben's host family to put in a curry. I was expecting mediocre results, because, when Ni-Vans make soup, they generally start with a bland, flavorless broth, add some small bits of overcooked meat or fish and then top it off with some slimy island cabbage served on a disproportionately large mountain of rice. However, I was surprised to find that Ben's host family were particularly good cooks and we were presented with steaming, reasonable portions of rice topped with satisfyingly large hunks of tuna covered in a nice curry sauce. It was very good. After lunch, we piled into a fiberglass canoe to check out the snorkeling. The Lonely Planet, the only guidebook that covers Vanuatu, raves about the snorkeling in the Maskelynes. I guess we should have anticipated that a lot of it was hype, as it also talks up, for example, the excellent cuisine options in Lakatoro (where there are exactly zero restaurants). It actually seemed like it might have once been a pretty spectacular sight, but the sad fact was that about half of their reef was dead and the rest was dying. I'm not a marine biologist, so I don't know what's generally responsible for killing coral. They don't exactly get a lot of large boat traffic in the Maskelynes, so pollution doesn't really seem particularly likely, although if the village was dumping their waste into the ocean from shore, I guess that might do the trick. Or maybe climate change is responsible, or some sort of coral disease (is there such a thing?), or maybe it was all the crown-of-thorns that I noticed, which I think kill coral, I don't know. Whatever the reason, the brilliant blues, greens, pinks, and yellows of the reef were too often interrupted by large patches of lifeless gray. I wondered how long it had taken for that much of the reef to die and how long it would be until the rest of the reef went with it.

We returned to shore to see our pig being butchered and dressed by Ben's host family in preparation for dinner. After the pig was cleaned and de-furred, Chris miraculously produced a bottle of Stubb's BBQ rub which he'd brought back from the States a few months before. I was particularly shocked by this because Chris isn't even from Texas. I guess it's possible, although unlikely, for people from other states of have good taste in BBQ as well. I was elected the resident meat expert and given task of seasoning the meat for roasting. I instructed Ben's host brother to make some lacerations in the pig's skin to expose the meat, and into these I rubbed the spice mixture. I wasn't entirely sure the rub would take, as I'd never had to season a whole pig (skin and all) before. When this was done, Ben's family got a fire going and cut wood to fashion a spit. They dug two y-shaped branches into the ground on either side of the fire, drove a long stick through the pig, and rested it in the nooks of the y-branches to cook. It turned out quite good (of course it did, pigs are awesome, see above), with the rub actually adding a nice touch to the meat. Chris also produced a tube of spicy mustard, which we applied liberally. In a country where meat is considered a delicacy, not a routine part of a meal, the pleasure of stuffing oneself with nothing but meat is truly unbeatable. I went to sleep happy that night.

2008-11-20T17:02:00.000-05:00

Life in the Ring of Fire Part 57: I Just Know the Chinese Are Up to No Good

This week's Tautu language word is “nesib.” It means “knife.”

This was a good week for strange nakamal experiences. It all started on Sunday. I'd gone to Duncan's early to hang out while the kava was being made. Myself, Duncan, and five other guys from the village were milling around talking. Some of the guys started complaining about sore arm and leg muscles from working in the garden and, before I knew what was happening, I was surrounded by six guys all giving each other massages. I was seated on a wooden bench, legs and arms tucked in as tight as possible, while on either side of me a guy was lying on his back being massaged by another guy. On top of that, Duncan was lying down on the next bench over getting a massage from a visiting family member from Southwest Bay. It was one of those moments when I really wished there was someone with me who could appreciate just how strange the whole scene was. Now, I'm not sure if I've covered male-female relations in Vanuatu yet, so I'll give a brief overview. I think everyone probably goes through that phase in middle school or high school when it becomes incredibly awkward to be around the opposite sex. In Vanuatu, however, it was apparently decided that, instead of getting over it after a couple years, it would be a much better idea to make said awkwardness part of the culture. Thus, you often see guys in their mid thirties who still get tongue-tied around women and thirty-something mothers of three who can't talk about guys without giggling. Remember in middle school how, when you liked a guy/girl but were too shy to go talk to them, you'd send one of your friends instead to try and find out if they like you? Yeah, well they do that here well into their twenties. Sometimes people get married based on such indirect social encounters. Even after they get married, the awkwardness persists. I've seen married couples who rarely speak to each other and yet live in the same house and have five kids. Physical contact between men and women in public is strictly forbidden. I've been living with Duncan and Linda for a year now and I have not once seen them touch each other. Not a hug, a pat on the back, nothing. If it weren't for the fact that they somehow managed to produce my younger sister, Tracey, I'd probably be willing to wager that the most intimate contact they'd had was a handshake. To make up for the fact that they're not allowed to touch their significant others/spouses, both men and women are incredibly hands-y when they're around people of the same sex. It's pretty common to see two guys walking along holding hands. Often I'll be shaking hands with someone, only to have my hand trapped for the entirety of our conversation. I've gotten kind of used to this, but I'm still pretty disconcerted if they start petting the top of my hand. Worse still are guys who talk to me at the nakamal with their hand resting on my thigh. No joke. It makes it kind of difficult to focus on what they're saying. Anyway, the point is that group massages aren't all that unusual thing to happen around here. Still though.

On Tuesday, Duncan's nakamal was host to one of the Lakatoro area's resident crazy people. There are three of four crazy people around that I see on a regular basis. I know it's probably not politically correct to refer to people as “crazy” these days in the States. We prefer phrases like “mentally disabled” and we've got all kinds of mental disorders, most of them acronyms, that we like to label people with. I think this is because in the US we're all so high strung and on the verge of going nuts that we want to be sure that other people don't make fun of us when we do. In Vanuatu the sane-insane boundary is a lot more black and white: if you can carry on a coherent conversation (and keep in mind that the standards for what constitutes a coherent conversation are a lot lower around here) for at least a minute, you're fine. So, when we say someone is crazy it doesn't mean they're bi-polar, or ADD, or learning disabled, or autistic, or agoraphobic, or anything-phobic, or OCD – people with these disorders can function normally under some circumstances, they just have some quirks. Crazy means that the person is totally and absolutely bat-shit insane: not a single thing they say or do makes the slightest bit of sense. The first crazy guy I met in Malekula is named Cesar. He hangs out at the LTC a lot and wears these great striped pajama pants with alphabet blocks on them (if anyone happens to run across any while out shopping, grab me a pair). The Digicel (Vanuatu's mobile phone company) folks sometimes set up speakers at the LTC as a promotion and on such days it's fairly common to see Cesar with the microphone stomping his feet wildly and singing “LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA!” not quite in time with the music. At first I wondered why it was that there were so many outright crazy people in Vanuatu, but then I realized that we probably have an equal percentage of them in the US, it's just that in the States we keep them locked up, whereas here they're free to wander around. I don't know the name of the guy who was hanging out at Duncan on Tuesday, but I call him ukulele guy because he's most commonly seen walking up and down the street wearing a blindly-bright yellow shirt and a giant hibiscus flower in his hair strumming a ukulele and singing incomprehensibly. He usually has such a giant smile on his face, however, that I sometimes wonder if perhaps the whole sanity thing is a bit overrated and that maybe he has the right idea. A popular pastime among the Ni-Vanuatu is messing with the crazy people (this may seem cruel but, like I said before, in the US we keep our crazies locked up in mental hospitals. Which one seems worse? Hard to say. Or, perhaps a more relevant question, can crazy people tell the difference? Also, hard to say), this usually this consists of giving them things and seeing what they do with them (ie. what would happen if we give Cesar the microphone?), which is probably how ukulele guy got his ukulele in the first place. Thus, the patrons at Duncan's undertook a project to see what would happen when they got ukulele guy to drink a lot of kava. He gamely took down three or four shells in a row, which seemed to have no discernible effect on him. They then switched to giving him cigarettes and finally beer before it was concluded that he was immune to mind-altering substances. At this point they got bored and ukulele guy wandered off.

Thursday I got a text from McKenzie instructing me to meet her for kava in Lakatoro because Yoshi had asked her to come meet his Chinese friend and she wanted some backup. Yoshi is a volunteer from Japan who works for the Fisheries Department in Lakatoro. There are four Japanese volunteers (with a program called JICA, similar to Peace Corps. No, I don't know what it stands for) near me. They all seem very nice, although it's always difficult to carry on a conversation with them. None of them speak English and, although their program does give them Bislama training, it's monstrously difficult to learn Bislama if you don't know English first. And, given that it's difficult enough to communicate with someone who speaks Bislama well, it's all but impossible to communicate with someone who speaks Bislama poorly. Thus, all of our conversations with the JICA volunteers tend to be a little strained and short lived. Thus, when were introduced to Yoshi's friend, who'd flown in from Vila for a vacation, we were pleasantly surprised to learn that she spoke both English and Bislama quite well. We had a few shells of kava and she explained that she was employed by the Chinese Ministry of Education to teach Chinese in a number of schools in Vila. She seemed pleasant enough at first but, about a third of the way through the evening, things took a turn for the bizarre. She cornered McKenzie and I and started running us over the coals with questions that sounded like they'd come, verbatim, from some kind of questionnaire. Questions like: “What are the top three reasons American join Peace Corps?” or “What percentage of Peace Corps volunteers end their service early?” or “What percentage of volunteers get married while in Peace Corps?” It honestly sounded like she was going to be reporting statistics back to some sort of Chinese intelligence agency. I don't think McKenzie and I were particularly helpful in answering her questions, not so much because our fierce loyalty to the US made us wary of cooperating with foreign intelligence agents, but more because we both get really, really annoyed whenever anyone tries to talk to us about anything serious over kava. We kept trying to move the conversation on to lighter topics such as, for example, how exciting it was that watermelon season had started, or, when this failed, cutting her out of the conversation entirely. She was remarkably persistent, however, and had absolutely no qualms about busting into the middle of a conversation to continue asking her questions. Eventually, we both claimed to have to go to work early the following day and headed home before we started getting asked questions along the lines of “How many patriot missiles does your government have deployed in the Pacific region?” or “Can you give an overview of the technologies involved in producing MIRVs?” Needless to say, a very unusual night. We wondered why Yoshi had been so insistent on us meeting his strange Chinese friend, but we finally concluded that she'd probably spent the whole day grilling him with similar questions about Japan and he wanted a break.

2008-11-03T19:58:00.000-05:00

Life in the Ring of Fire Part 56: World Food Day

This week's Tautu language word is “nanen”. It means “food.”

So, this was a pretty slow week, so I'm just going to skip to the weekend (don't you wish you could do that in life? Just skip right to the weekend? That'd be pretty awesome). Friday had been deemed World Food Day by, I don't know, I guess the UN or whoever is in charged of declaring world awareness days. This year's focus was the challenges to food security from climate change. Specifically, the increased demand for crops to be turned into fuels as well as more generally the problems related to possible drastic changes in weather patterns ruining crops. Now, I don't get a lot of chances to catch up on news of the rest of the world, but I have heard that there have been some international stirs with regards to rising food prices, so maybe such a day of awareness would make sense in the US or in Europe or whatever, I don't know. Also, I'm not sure who, exactly, was responsible for suggesting/deciding that the Vanuatu government should take steps to raise awareness of these issues within Vanuatu. Perhaps it was an entirely Ni-Van initiated program, but I doubt it. I think it's considerably more likely that some representative from the Australian or New Zealand or other western government came over and suggested the idea and the Vanuatu government, ever polite and obliging, especially to governments whose aid is their largest source of revenue, agreed. A similar thing happened four or five months ago regarding smoking. I discussed this in a previous blog, but basically the government of Vanuatu, responding to a UN Department of Health recommendation, outlawed smoking in public places. This was ridiculous firstly because, due to a generally poor understanding of concepts such as private property or trespassing, basically all places in Vanuatu are public. Secondly, it's not like there are a lot of restaurants or bars or theaters around to get filled with second-hand smoke, most places are outside. Finally, and most practically, the majority of the country is so remote as to make sending police to arrest people for murder difficult, much less sending police to fine people for smoking at the beach. We also observed World Population Day, which focused on how to reduce the birthrate to prevent overpopulation. That's all well and good for China, but Vanuatu is an UNDER-populated country. It's current population is about one fifth of what it was before the Europeans arrived with smallpox. World Food Day struck me as a similar imposition: some committee thousands of miles away deciding that they know what's best for some country they've never been too or, even worse, a lot of countries they've never been too.

Here's the thing: there is no food shortage in Vanuatu. There's not going to be one for a very, very long time. Walking around, you have to be careful not to get beaned by falling food. I mean this literally. I was hit by a falling mango the other day. I've had a couple near misses with papayas. And a few times a year people are seriously injured by having coconuts fall on them (no joke. Image having that listed as your cause of death in an obituary). Bananas, mangoes, papayas, cucumbers, pumpkins and coconuts rot on the ground. Like I said before, Vanuatu used to support five times its current population in hunter-gatherer societies with no imports. Asking Vanuatu to worry about food security is, quite simply, absurd. But absurd is OK I suppose, I've gotten used to absurd. What was downright insulting, however, was bringing bio fuels into the picture. With some urging from the EU, the Vanuatu government is starting to look into producing fuel from coconut oil. The EU has even donated something like $3 million Euro towards setting up production facilities. OK, well, let's put aside for a moment the fact that the idea of producing fuels from food crops is inherently unsustainable because we don't grow enough food to offset any substantial fraction of our energy consumption, and we REALLY don't grow enough food to do this while still feeding ourselves, and focus more on the problems with this particular project. First off, in order to extract oil from coconuts, the coconuts have to, one by one, be split open with and ax and the meat scooped out with a knife (and it takes a lot of coconuts to make even a little bit of oil). Then the meat has to be dried over a fire for several days, being turned regularly. This whole process is done by hand. As far as I know, there are no machines in existence to mechanize the procedure. In other words, there's a reason why coconut oil is expensive at the grocery store: it's a pain to make. Secondly, from my understanding, in order for the coconut oil fuel to be cheaper than gasoline, the current fuel of choice for both stationary and mobile power generation, the production facilities would have to be buying dried coconuts (copra) for less than private buyers offer for the same product. So, either the coconut oil fuel would be more expensive than gas, or they'd be relying on people being willing to sell their copra at a lower price than they can get elsewhere. But even that's all more or less OK, I suppose. The EU is free to waste its money as it sees fit. The insult is this: Vanuatu imports a tiny amount of gasoline each year. They pay exorbitant prices to have it carried, in 55 gallon drums, on ships across thousands of miles of ocean so it can be used to power three power plants (and when I say power plant, that's kind of an exaggeration, they're just collections of two or three large diesel generators running constantly), maybe some thousand cars and boats (probably less), and perhaps a few hundred private generators. They do this for the oh-so-opulent privilege of having electric lights in their bamboo huts. And now, a group of western governments is telling them that, because of global warming, a problem which they (the western governments) are ENTIRELY responsible for and, because they are the largest consumers of energy, entirely responsible for handling, Ni-Vans have to spend thousands of man hours splitting coconuts with an ax to make an alternative fuel that COSTS MORE than gasoline. Personally, I think all of Vanuatu would be completely justified in telling the EU to go stuff it. But I'm just ranting. I guess I don't really have a right to get mad on behalf of my Ni-Van friends and family. They seem content to (at least pretend) to go along with whatever Australia or New Zealand or the US or Japan tells them to do. I feel like I know something that they don't, but maybe they know something that I don't. I guess we'll see.

OK, now that I'm done raving, let's move on the various humorous particulars of the event itself. It was being hosted at the market, which made sense because that's where all the food is sold. They were giving agriculture show style award for people bring in the best yam, watermelon, manioc, etc. Since there isn't anyone on the island that actually knows anything about how to judge produce, McKenzie was made the judge on the grounds that she's white and works for an organization that has something vaguely to do with agriculture. Most people who showed up for the market, of course, had no idea that the event was taking place, but they generally agreed to have their produce judged when they were told there was a chance to win 1000 Vatu (about $10). McKenzie circulated through the competing fruits, vegetables and root crops, nodding thoughtfully and scribbling on a piece of paper. When she was finished she sat down next to me. “How did you choose the winners?” I asked.
“I just went with the bigger ones,” she replied “but not the biggest, because you know, like, how sometimes the really big watermelons don't taste as good?”
I agreed with the wisdom of this scheme. After the judging, there were speeches. It's impossible to have any sort of event in Vanuatu without speeches. Speeches in Bislama tend to consist of several impassioned rants connected together by long, unnecessary ramblings (kind of like this blog entry). They also tend to go on a lot longer they need to (again, kind of like this blog entry). Most of the speeches tended to focus on how Ni-Vans need to stop eating imported foods and return to eating locally grown crops (this is actually a pretty relevant point to cover. A lot of Ni-Vans prefer rice over their various local root crops. You actually can't really blame them. With rice, you open the bag, dump it in the pot, boil it for 10 minutes and it's done. With root crops, the first step is generally digging them out of the ground). Most of the speakers also touched briefly on the use of bio fuels in a way that suggested that they had absolutely no idea what a bio fuel was or why they were being given money to produce them. The highlight however was someone working themselves up into a very passionate rant that ended with the shouting of “China is not going to feed us any more! We don't need their food and we don't want their food! China is not going to be feeding us any more!” Enthusiastic applause followed. Now, I'm not positive, but I'm pretty sure the Chinese are unaware of both the fact that they were supposed to be feeding Vanuatu and of the amount of resentment that this was creating.

The whole event was finished off by a display and sampling of a number of baked goods made with locally produced manioc flour (manioc, or cassava as it is known in some places, can be ground up to produce a flour which many Americans might recognize as tapioca flour) instead of imported wheat flour. Apparently, the ministry of agriculture had been running a large grinder capable of making said flour and interested Ni-Vans could bring in their manioc to have it ground for them. The whole point of the show was to publicize the existence of the grinder and the service they were offering with it, as well as showcase the fact that it's possible to make many of people's favorite baked goods (breads, cookies, pastries, etc) using manioc flour instead of conventional flour. Many of the goods on display were indeed quite good, and I probably wouldn't have been able to tell that they were made with a different flour had I not known in advance. All in all, it would have been quite an effective publicity move had the bake show not been immediately followed by the announcement that, due to the fact that not enough people were coming to use it, the manioc flour grinder was going to be removed to Vila. Such is life in Vanuatu I supposed.

2008-10-23T19:31:00.000-04:00

Life in the Ring of Fire Part 55: Malampa Day Week

This week's Tautu language word is “ewis.” It means “how much.”

Monday was constitution day. Apparently having just independence day was decided to be insufficient celebration for the establishment of Vanuatu as a country, so they also take a day off in honor of their constitution being signed. Actually, it's pretty impressive, given how slow everything moves around here, that they were able to win independence at the end of July and have a constitution together by the end of September. I would've though it'd be one of those things that everyone would just let slide for a while until it became absolutely critical. Although, now that I think about it, I guess I'm assuming (perhaps rashly) that independence and the constitution signing occurred in the same year, so maybe instead of it taking two months to get a constitution together, it actually took a year and two months, or a decade and two months. That would be more in character. At any rate, Monday was a holiday, which was good because I'd contracted a cold over the weekend and thus still wasn't feeling particularly thrilled by the idea of teaching. I (knock on wood) have been pretty lucky. Our third day in Vanuatu we were given a course by our medical staff on the plethora of bizarre diseases present in the country that can kill you or, at the very least, make your life really, really miserable, to the point of making you wish that said disease would just kill you and have done with it. So far, I've contracted exactly zero of these diseases. No malaria, no dengue fever, no giardia, no African snail induced viral meningitis, no scabies, not even a boil. My health state has been more or less exactly the same as it was for the past who-knows-how-many years in the States: fine except for some seasonal allergies and maybe a couple colds. So, really, I have no right to complain. That being said, I'm going to anyway, because there's nothing like an aliment or injury, not matter how minor, to make you really wish that you were home. The medical care in the US is stellar, of course, but this isn't really what I'm talking about, since one really doesn't rely heavily on the health care system when dealing with a cold. It's more just that being sick robs you of absolutely all patience and tolerance, so things that you long ago adjusted to dealing with start getting on your nerves again. My foam sleeping pad seemed suddenly monstrously uncomfortable, my fan a pathetic attempt to lessen the sweltering heat, doing nothing an unacceptable way to amuse myself, and the food disgusting and requiring of far too much effort. In short, I wanted a nice, comfortable sofa inside an air conditioned room with satellite TV and pizza delivery. Is that too much to ask? Although, really, the most frustrating part of being sick in Vanuatu is having to talk to Ni-Vans about it. Whenever I'm sick, I generally try my very hardest to hide in my house and avoid all contact with Ni-Vans until all obvious signs of illness have abated. Otherwise, I get involved in conversation like this:
Ni-Van: “You sick?”
Me: “Yes. I have a cold.”
Ni-Van: “ 'Cause of the wind, I think.”
Me: “Umm, no, it's a virus.”
Ni-Van: “Or the dust.”
Me: “No, dust doesn't cause colds. It's caused by a virus.”
Ni-Van: “Or maybe you ate too many coconuts.”
Me: “No. It's a virus. You catch it from other people. I probably caught it from you because you never wash your hands.”
*Long pause*
Ni-Van: “I think it's because you drink too much water.”

The truly frustrating thing about these exchanges is that, while I know viruses exist, you can SEE them, after all, with a good enough microscope, there's really absolutely no evidence that I can present to people here to back up this fact. Even if they do decide to take my word for it that tiny little organisms cause disease, this would be a belief held as irrationally as believing that the wind causes colds. They'd just be blindly believing what I tell them as opposed to blindly believing what the village witch doctor tells them (no, we don't actually have a village witch doctor, I'm just trying to make a point). In the end, I just end up being an unwilling anecdote backing up whatever they've already decided to unquestioningly believe (“Of course the wind causes colds. Remember that time when it was windy and Dan, the Peace Corp, got a cold?”). It makes me feel so used.

On a more positive note, we were in the middle of the lead up to Malampa Day, which was supposed to be on Friday. Not being satisfied with having only one holiday this particular week, it had been decided that Malampa province (where I live) really needed to have its own public holiday commemorating it. Of course, then it was decided that, since Monday and Friday were holidays anyway, it'd probably be a good idea to just take the whole week off. Thus, Malampa “Day” had started the previous Friday and was slated to run throughout the week. Malampa Day Week was celebrated, as all holidays are celebrated around here, by everyone going to the football (soccer, not that sport big men with speech impediments play in the States which is so ungainly and complicated that it actually requires more referees than players) stadium in Lakatoro to play football (soccer), drink kava and beer, and eat lap-lap. Duncan had set up a kava and food stall at the stadium and had spent the whole weekend working at it. On Tuesday, finally feeling well enough to be out and about without people asking me if I'm sick, I joined him in Lakatoro. “We're going to Bushman's Bay to kill a cow.” He told me, immediately upon my arrival “you want to come?” Well, yeah.

I piled into the back of a truck with some other guys from Tautu and we set off. Bushman's Bay is a village just a little bit south of Lakatoro where, I gathered during the truck ride, there was a cattle plantation whose French owner was currently absent, thus meaning, I guess, that the cows were up for grabs. We'd come for a couple cows for the five day feast for the dead the previous Friday. Duncan had brought his .22 rifle and two bullets, which seemed to me to be cutting it a little close because I was pretty sure a one .22 round wasn't going to be adequate to take down a cow. We crawled through the barbed wire fence surrounding the plantation and struck out across the field. The more intelligent cows quickly scattered and hid in the bush but a few of the slow learners just watched us curiously.

**OK, I'm going to take a moment here and warn any particularly squeamish readers that you might want to skip over the next paragraph. Things get a little messy**

Duncan purposely walked up to one such cow and shot it in the head. As I predicted, this did not kill the cow, but it did fall over and lie on the ground, mooing unhappily and flailing its legs. However, it did not seem all that inclined to get up and run away, which was good. At this point it was noticed that no one had bothered to bring a machete with which to cut the cow's throat or, for that matter, butcher it once it was successfully killed. Between the eight or so of us assembled, the only cutting implement we had was a small knife about the size and sharpness of a steak knife. One of our team was sent off in search of someone to borrow a machete from while the rest of us tried to make do with this tool. The bravest of our group went in in an attempt to cut the cow's throat with the steak knife, while at the same time avoid the violently kicking hooves. He tried restraining the cow's front legs with one hand while cutting with the other, which is kind of like a mosquito deciding it's going to try and hold you down with its antennae while sucking your blood. The restraining strategy was quickly abandoned in favor of crouching as far away from the cow's hooves as possible while still being able to reach the throat. Surprisingly, he was actually able to make a small incision, and a stream of blood fountained from the throat onto the ground. This didn't really seem to do much to hasten the dying process however, as the only discernible difference was that the cow's frantic mooing now had a sort of rasping quality to it. A few more guys took a turn at sawing at the cow's throat with the steak knife and after a bit of work blood was pouring from the wound at an appreciable rate and the cow's kicks grew weaker and weaker. After a few minutes, it was dead. Then it was time for the gross part. Myself and three others each grabbed a leg and pulled it away from the cow, spread eagling it, stomach up, on the ground. Two others worked with the knife to make a cut all the way from the throat to the rump, thus exposing the cow's gut. Then, one of them grabbed the tough and rubbery (despite what you see in movies, cutting something's, or someone's, throat isn't all that easy. Throats are built to last) esophagus and pulled really hard. You see, conveniently enough, the entire digestive tract, the throat, stomach, and intestines (ie. all the parts of the cow that no one really wants to eat) is connected together so, in theory, you can rip the whole thing out all at once. Of course, at the moment, the rib cage was getting in the way, and it didn't seem to me that we were going to have very much luck cutting through a cow's sternum with a steak knife. Fortunately, it was about then that one of the guys showed up with a machete, which we were able to use to split the rib cage. Now, it was just a matter of muscling the cow's insides out. This ended up being quite a chore however, because the insides were 1) really heavy, 2) slippery, 3) covered in blood. It took all six of us heaving and hawing for a good twenty minutes to lift and push everything out. During the process, we ruptured the abdominal wall and got to watch the gray, slimy small intestines worm their way out into the open. That was pretty cool. Afterwards we all looked like we'd taken part in a particularly grizzly murder (perhaps certain animal rights activist would argue that we HAD taken part in a particularly grizzly murder. However, I've adopted the ethical stance of not having any qualms about inflicting harm/death on any species of animal that has attacked me. So far in Vanuatu I've been attacked by chickens, cows, goats, pigs, crabs, a variety of fish, and dogs, so I've got most of the basic meat groups covered). A truck had pulled up to us while we were working, and, after laying down a bed of coconut leaves, we hoisted the gutted cow into the bed. We also recovered the heart and liver from the discarded guts and tossed those in as well. Just as we were finishing, Duncan (who'd gone off to shoot and help butcher the second cow) walked up to me holding a cow heart, which he thrust at me. “Here,” he said “hold this and give it to your mom [Linda] when we get back.” Thus it was that I rolled into our food and kava stall in Lakatoro, covered in blood, clutching a dripping, bloody cow's heart by the aorta. I think that's probably the most badass I've ever felt in my life.

Thursday, a boxing match had been arranged in honor of Malampa Day. The match was supposed to actually be on Friday, Malampa Day, but the SDA Church complained that since they begin observing the sabbath Friday at sundown, their members would be unable to attend the event because it was taking place in the evening. McKenzie, Laura (who'd come down for the occasion), and I all agreed that if you get that worked up about the practice of your faith preventing you from seeing a boxing match, it's perhaps time to re-examine the principles underlying your faith. This is Vanuatu, however, so the provincial government politely obliged and moved the day of the match. The headlining fight was between a boxer from Southwest Bay, Malekula, Kali, who was apparently accomplished enough to have taken part in a number of matches in Australia and New Zealand, and a Fijian. To warm up the crowd, however, a number of amateurs from all over the island boxed each other first. The MC kicked off the event by asking the crowd to give a big hand to the volunteers because, and I quote, “It's difficult to get up in front of so many people.” Only in Vanuatu would you sign up for boxing (a sport which involves getting the living daylights beaten out of you by someone determined to give you a concussion) and your biggest fear be stage fright. The fight right before the headliner was between two volunteers from New Zealand, who'd decided that they wanted to be part of the event and had been allowed to do so on the basis of being white. This caused quite a lot of excitement in the crowd. Given how much Ni-Vans love to watch white people when they're just sitting around, getting to watch TWO white people fight each other was no doubt the most exciting thing most people could possibly conceive of. I have to admit, it was pretty entertaining. In the end, however, the headlining fight was somewhat disappointing as Kali knocked out the Fijian in the second round of what was supposed to be a twelve round fight. Fortunately, I'm not all that into boxing anyway, so I just had a good time hanging out with everyone. All in all, I approved of Malampa Day Week.

2008-10-23T19:30:00.000-04:00

Life in the Ring of Fire Part 54: A Dead

This week's Tautu language word is “des.” It means “ocean.”

So, I hate alarm clocks. It's a hatred that's had a long time to grow and mature. It began perhaps ten to twelve years ago when one of these insidious contraption first appeared on my bedside table and was programmed to emit obnoxious loud noises at 6:30 every morning so that I could get up for school. Ten years is a pretty sizable chunk of time for a hatred to develop, so by this point it's pretty sophisticated. It's well thought through and has a lot of facets. When I left for Vanuatu a little more than a year ago, one of the things I was looking forward to was ridding myself of the evil little gizmo that is is alarm clock for a couple years. Thus, it was with some chagrin that I discovered that, although there are indeed no alarm clocks here, they're replaced my something that I now hate even more: people bent on waking you up at ridiculously early hours of the morning. And the thing about people is that they're so much more creative, cunning, and annoying in the ways that they go about waking you up than any alarm clock could ever dream of being. I now respect this about alarm clocks. Alarm clocks are predictable. You set an alarm clock to go off at 6:30 and it will, invariably, go off at 6:30. It won't decide that some mornings it's going to go off at 6:24 and then the next morning it's going to go off at 6:32, etc. No, 6:30, every morning, on the dot. Also, it will always make the same noise every morning. It may be a beep, a bell, a buzzer, or whatever, but it's always the same. The same volume, the same tone, the same timing. It's almost... soothing. After a while you get so used to the same pattern of noise at the same time every morning that you begin to be able to tune it out (some may argue that this is actually a bad thing because the whole point of having an alarm clock is so that you can wake up at a certain time each day. This is wrong. The point of having an alarm clock is so that you can claim to have made an honest effort to wake up at a certain time, so that, no matter when you actually do wake up, you can truthfully say, to whoever is mad at you for not waking up, that you tried your best). People though, man, they can really get under your skin.

First off, there's the school bell. I think I've probably talked about this particular bane of mine before, but I think it bears repeating. There's a large, empty, laboratory compressed gas cylinder resting against a tree in the school yard about a hundred meters from my house. Every morning when school's in session, it's the job of one unfortunate kid to go beat the hell out of this cylinder with a metal rod at around 6:30, 7:00, and 7:30. I say unfortunate because close up exposure to the loud noise produced by ringing this improvised bell has got be at least as damaging to the ear drums as, say, attending ten Children of Bodom concerts, with front row seats, back to back. Just as teenagers are unfazed by loud concerts, however, these kids seem to actually enjoy making themselves go deaf and go at the bell with what can only be described as masochistic zeal. The sound produced by the gas cylinder is similar to that made by taking a mallet to an enormous gong, of the variety that always seem to be hanging all over the place in Kung-Fu movies. It's a sound that's heard, not only by the ear, but by the entire body. It hits you like a shock wave of a sort that totally unwelcome at 6:30 in the morning. But that's not really what bothers me about the bell. Yes, it's loud, it's obnoxious, it's invasive, but I can deal with all that. What's torturous is how freaking RANDOM the thing is. Of course, keeping accurate time isn't exactly all the rage around these parts, so, although the bell is supposed to be rung at 6:30, in practice it's rung anywhere between 6:15 and 6:45. My brain has decided that it'll be damned if it's going to be woken up every morning by this thing. So, what generally happens is that I've been trained to wake myself up at around 6:10, to be sure to beat the bell, and I lie in my bed, wincing in anticipation for anywhere between five and thirty-five minutes. It's like Chinese water torture: it's not that the event that your dreading is really all that bad, it's that you never know exactly when it's coming. And then there's the pattern in which the bell is rung. It's never a consistent one-two-three-four kind of beat. They'll wail on it really fast for the first five hits, pause for a few seconds, give it three slow hits, then a short pause followed by two quick hits and then a long pause and a last, sharp hit at the end for good measure. Or something random like that. And the thing is that it's different every morning, so there's no getting used to it. I think by the end of my service, I'm going to be so scarred by the sound of metal beating on metal that the accidental clanking of, say, a fork and a knife together, will make my fly into a murderous rage and strangle the person daft enough to make such a noise.

But the bell's not really the worst of it. The bell is designed to wake up everyone, indiscriminately. What's worse is when someone decides that they need to wake up you, specifically. In the US we have what I think is a wonderful custom. It's my favorite custom, actually. It's, in my opinion, the one and only custom required for a civilized society. This custom is both necessary and sufficient for a culture to be deemed sophisticated and advanced. It work's like this: when someone is sleeping, YOU DO NOT WAKE THEM UP, unless it's a matter of life and death and, even then, only if you've put in an honest effort to resolve the issue without disturbing the sleeper. In Vanuatu the custom goes more like this: if someone is sleeping, don't wake them up unless you feel like it. So what will happen is that someone will decide, at six in the morning, that it would be a really good time to ask me if I have any DVDs they can borrow. So they start knocking on my door and, of course, I don't respond, because it's six o'clock in the freaking morning, and I know it's not a matter of life and death, because there are no matters of life and death in Vanuatu. So they knock harder, and then the start calling “Daniel! Daniel!” And, of course, I still ignore them. So then they start screaming “DANIEL! DANIEL!” or, even better, screaming incoherently. If I'm still ignoring them at this point, they'll come around to my bedroom window and start banging on it and screaming. And, although I've never made it to this phase, I'm sure the next move would be putting a brick through my window and climbing in to dump a bucket of water on me. Or sometimes they'll be too lazy to come wake me up in person because, I suspect, somebody woke them up that morning way too early as well, so they'll try to wake me up via phone. They'll adopt a strategy of random calling patterns apparently adapted from the bell ringers: put in a few calls in quick succession, follow it up with a pause of random duration, and then put in some more back to back calls. By the time I cave in, there's usually about fifteen or sixteen missed calls on my phone. Of course, the kicker, the part that really gets me, is that this whole process, of waking me up at some ungodly hour, was initiated so that I could do THEM a favor. There is no justice in this world.

On a slightly less whiny note, Friday there was a dead in the village. A dead, obviously, occurs whenever someone in the village dies. This happens fairly frequently. While the medical system here is reasonable at dealing with things like infectious diseases, injuries, and other health problems commonly encountered in life, it's not really up to the task of combating the ailments brought on by old age. Thus, old people in Vanuatu tend to die young, so to speak. Ni-Vanuatu have something of a different perspective on death than we do in the US. In the States, I think, we tend to remove ourselves from the processes surrounding death. A family member dies and we put in a call to a funeral home and they basically do everything for us: prepare the body for burial/cremation/whatever, get a coffin ready, dig the grave, etc. All the family has to do is show up to the funeral to grieve and be solemn. The distance that we put between ourselves and the various chores involved when someone dies gives a funeral a certain sense of mystery and even discomfort. I tend to feel awkward at funerals, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. In Vanuatu, of course, this kind of distance from the dead is impossible. There's no one to outsource anything to, so the Ni-Vans have a sort of practiced ease when dealing with death. For example, you might hop in the back of a pickup truck and have one of the other passengers tell you, straight-faced and matter-of-factly, “careful not to step on the dead guy.”

There's a very well laid out ritual that's followed whenever a family member dies. On the day of the death, the body is left in the family's house. All the relatives come by and “wail,” which is kind of an exaggerated crying. They howl and scream and sometimes pound the body. It can be quite disconcerting to those unused to the practice. The next day (or the day after, depending on timing), there's a funeral service at the church and a burial. The grave and coffin and everything are prepared, of course, by people in the village. Starting the day the death occurred, the immediate family of the deceased is forbidden, by custom, to do any kind of work until thirty days have passed. They can't cook, clean, hunt, fish, go to the gardens, or even bathe. Since it's basically impossible to survive without doing these things in Vanuatu, the extended family, and the community in general, is obligated to take care of them. Families take turns bringing them food and doing any housework that needs to be done. There are also four feasts that are put on in honor of the dead: one five days after the death, one ten days after, one after thirty days, and one after one hundred days. The five day feast is the largest and they get progressively smaller after that. The thirty day has special significance because it means that the immediate family can one again take care of themselves and is officially done grieving. Sometimes the men in the family will mark the occasion by all shaving their beards together, something they'd been unable to do up until that point. The hundred day feast is a simple, small affair of remembrance. Now, not working for thirty days after a family member dies probably seems a little excessive for those of us from the States, but remember that time has a bit of a different meaning here in Vanuatu. Also, it's not like there's all that much work that needs to be done around these parts anyway. The time periods involved aren't really that relevant, the point is that there's a very specific ritual to be followed. Every time there's a death, exactly the same process is followed. Everyone knows exactly what's expected of them, depending on their relation to the deceased. Everyone goes through the steps, takes the appropriate actions, and then it's done. Closure is guaranteed. No one dwells on the death after the alloted time has passed, it's water under the bridge.

So anyway, Friday was the funeral and burial service for some distant relative of mine. The church was so crowded for the service that I had to sit outside, which I actually kind of preferred since I knew it had to be at least three million degrees inside. Afterwards, the coffin was carried out by a group of the village men and we followed them to a small cemetery just outside the village proper. Duncan, of course, was in charged of the actual burial (he has a tendency to put himself in charged of anything involving the use of tools, in this case a shovel). After the ceremony, everyone in the village shook hands with everyone else in the village (this took about three times as long as the actual ceremony), and I headed home. Not the most uplifting way to start your weekend, but actually far less depressing than one might think. There might be something to this more familiar relationship with death.

2008-10-14T00:57:00.000-04:00

Life in the Ring of Fire Part 53: Rain Smoke

This week's Tautu language word is “tosalsal.” It means “white man.” Needless to say, I get called this a lot.

Mango season was starting. This was very exciting. Last year, to my dismay, I left out training village on Efate to come to Malekula before Efate's mango season and after Malekula's mango season, thus meaning I've been living in a tropical paradise for more than a year now and have eaten, maybe, a grand total of three mangoes. I considered this unacceptable. There are mango trees all around Tautu, big, towering behemoths with long slender leaves and tangles of branches. There's one right next to my house, actually. They make good shade trees. Their leaves are small, but there are a lot of them and so they generally provide a nice, dense canopy. I've actually taken to setting up something of an outdoor office underneath mine. There's a half-rotten (but still functional) wooden platform built of strips of coconut logs situated between the mango tree and a nangai (a kind of nut, sort of like an almond, but more oily) tree which is shaded all day long. Someone laid a long piece of timber across a couple of supports just behind the platform, meaning that I can sit on the platform and use the timber as a sort of table for my laptop. I generally have to vacate my house between the hours of noon and four these days. Spring is rolling in with a vengeance and is making me wonder how it was that I was able to deal with impending summer last year. The school also decided a few months ago that it needed to cut down a bunch of trees around my house, meaning that there are now no trees to keep the sun off my corrugated iron roof, thus turning my house into an excellent model of a solar oven. On top of all that, my fan, which has served me faithfully for so many months, is on the fritz (sometimes requiring me to give the blades a little nudge with a pencil in order to get them going). When I was in Vila last, I looked into upgrading to a more deluxe fan model, perhaps even one made in a country besides China, but discovered that such an upgrade would have cost about $100, which seemed like a lot then, but now is seeming like a very worthy investment. So anyway, bottom line, I now have to retreat to my office during the hottest parts of the day, giving me plenty of opportunity to watch the mangoes ripen. They start off as little, green, kidney-shaped buds and eventually grow into larger, green, kidney-shaped buds. Unfortunately for me, my tree is at the school which, for some reason, is always populated by a lot of kids. I'm not sure if it's impatience or custom or some gross misunderstanding of agriculture, but Ni-Vans (especially kids) NEVER let fruit ripen properly. For example, any fruit ripe enough to fall to the ground of its own accord from a tree is immediately deem inedible. So what generally happens, be it with mangoes, papayas, grapefruits, oranges, basically any fruit, really, is that before any of the fruit is really ripe, the tree is swarmed and picked clean by kids. The kids seem to have a special penchant for under ripe mangoes. They pick them while they're still hard and sour, use a knife to cut the flesh into little slivers and eat them. They call them mango apples. This practice was really getting on my nerves, as I'd purchased a blender when I was in Australia and was looking forward to making some smoothies, but so far the only fruit I'd been able to consistently get my hands on was bananas, and plain banana smoothies really left something to be desired. Oh well, perhaps I'll have better luck during pineapple season.

In another attempt to beat the heat, I'd taken to spending part of my afternoons down in the main part of the village, which is located right on the beach. Well, beach is perhaps the wrong word to use. It implies a nice, sandy swath bordering the ocean on which one can lay out on a blanket, play beach volleyball, frolic in the shallows, etc. Tautu's beach is only a beach in the sense that it is a piece of land directly adjacent to the ocean. It is sandy, farther inland, but the actual beach is a continuous stretch of sharp, craggy rock that I can't walk on without the aid of sandals (although the village kids don't seem to have a problem running on it in bare feet). The real draw of the beach, especially these days, is that there's almost always a strong breeze coming off the ocean that, if you kind of squint, can actually border on being cold. Tautu is situated on what is essentially a large bay. Looking straight out from the shore, you can see where the island curves back around near Lakatoro and Litz Litz, as well as a few small, offshore islands. It's a nice view, even on a bad day. If you're really lucky, however, and happen to be at the right place at the right time to catch a storm front rolling in off the ocean, well, things really can't get much better. Thursday afternoon, I headed down to the beach to find that the wind was coming in unusually strong. Although the sky above Tautu was pristinely cloudless, a shadow cast by a foreboding mass of incoming clouds was creeping over the ocean. It may seem a little counter-intuitive, but it's actually not bright, sunny days that bring out the ocean's colors the best. A sun that's too bright tends to wash out subtle differences in the ocean's color, making everything a dull, universal, blue-green. Of course, with no sun at all the ocean turns into an abyss, a deep and empty void that not even the brightest of artificial lights can cast adequate light upon. It takes the shadow of an impending storm to bring out the breathtaking potential of the Pacific Ocean, when the blanket of blue-green is lifted to show three, sharp, stark bands of color, as distinct as if painted. Closest to shore, the water takes on the yellowish brown of the craggy rock structure that makes up the beach. At about twenty meters out, it suddenly changes to a brilliant turquoise brought out by the coral reef beneath it. Another ten meters past that the reef disappears and the ocean floor suddenly drops, making the water above it turn a deep, imposing blue. This is the color which defines blue. It's upfront and simple, no undertones, no hints at even the possibility of the existence of another color. Just Blue. As the wind knives across this strangely dynamic and immutable landscape it brings to life brilliant slashes of white, frothing waves as unabashedly white as the ocean that birthed them is blue. How is it that water, plain, simple, clear, colorless, is able to take on such a myriad of hues? And how is it that they can be made to change so violently? Closer to shore, you can watch these frothing creations work their way along the surface and then dissolve back into the immensity of the ocean as they break upon things unseen, but farther out the waves seem not to move at all, they're frozen stark, white gashes carelessly drawn upon a canvas of blue.

Then comes the rain. Not from above me, at least not yet, it's a little ways off still, but its presence is given away by the appearance of a thick, smoky haze that envelops the offshore islands and blots out the lush green of their vegetation, changing all color to a drab gray. For once, Bislama succeeds in being more poetic than English. The haze of an approaching rain is so perfectly dubbed “smoke blong rain” -- rain smoke. Slowly this smoke creeps its away across the ocean until even the closest offshore island, so clearly visible on a sunny day that you can pick out the shapes off village houses on its beach, becomes nothing more than a faint outline. Everyone knows what's coming. Women and children scramble to collect clothes drying on lines and men out net fishing in the shallows make a beeline for their houses. And then the rain starts. No, rain is an inadequate word to describe a thing of this magnitude. It's like suddenly standing at the base of a waterfall. A wall of water pouring from the sky. A deluge. Yes, English once again comes to the rescue with its voluminous vocabulary. Smoke blong rain was good, Bislama, but you're still behind by a lot. Finally, the rain having blotted out all but the most trivial of views of the ocean, I headed back to my house.

Fortunately, I'd finally fixed my rain gutter just a few days before. Ever since I'd dismantled my water system for cleaning after returning from Australia, I'd been unable to keep the spout connecting the gutters with the water tank from falling down. I hadn't broken or lost any important connective piece or anything. Apparently, the entire setup had been held together by some variety of mystical force, which I'd been unable to re-invoke (or maybe the dirt which I'd removed during the cleaning had been playing a crucial role in supporting the structure). In any case, I finally fixed the problem with the generous application of duct tape, which I hoped would be able to retain its adhesiveness despite the fact that, since it was part of a water system, it would probably be getting wet a lot. When I got home, I was pleased to see that the tape appeared to be holding just fine and that a nice flow of water was entering my tank.

I don't think I can describe to you how awesome that rain was. We hadn't had a good rain for almost two months. Almost all the rain tanks in the village were dry. I had taken to getting water from a well near the school. Everything was choked with dust. I'd been coated in dust for weeks. Not even the longest and most through of showers could remove the thin film of dirt from my skin. Either that or it was instantly replaced with new dust upon emerging from the shower. I think one of the coolest things about living in Vanuatu is how happy a simple thing as rain can make you. I could just feel the rain pouring vitality back into the parched landscape. It was like every person, animal, and plant on the island was breathing a collective sigh of relief. And watching my gutters divert a veritable river of water into my water tank awakened a very primal and instinctive glee. I literally jumped with joy. I was bounding up and down across my floor, doing fist pumps and screaming “Yes!” to no one in particular. I felt suddenly indestructible, because, after all, what can anyone possibly do to hamper the spirits of someone who's made happy when it rains?

Thursday and Friday it rained all day. My early Friday afternoon, water was pouring out of my tank's overflow pipe and I couldn't have been more please. The rain was even considerate enough to stop right around kava time on Friday to allow me a nice walk to Duncan's through the pleasantly damp and cool evening. Of course, I knew that soon enough the dampness on the ground would transform into oppressive humidity and the sudden influx of water would probably mean a monster hatch of mosquitoes, but I tried not to think of such things. For the time being, all was right with the world.

2008-09-28T21:12:00.000-04:00

Life in the Ring of Fire Part 52: Magician Missionaries

This week's Tautu language word is “san.” It means “one.”

So, this is issue 52. Perhaps you don't appreciate the significance of that, so I'll explain. I write an issue of this blog for every week I'm in Vanuatu and, well, there are 52 weeks in a year, so I've been here a year now. I can't believe I've made it this far. I really can't believe that I'm still writing these. I can't believe that you're still reading them. I remember, way back in training, writing issue six of this and thinking that I'd never be writing this issue. Of course, I don't feel like I've been here a year. I feel like that sentiment has been so long overused it has ceased to mean anything. A working US parent with two kids remarks, in surprise, “God, I can't believe it's almost December, where does the time go?” Well, I'll tell you where the time goes: you work forty hours or more a week. You have a house to look after. Chores to be done. Bills to be paid. Kids to be driven places. It's no mystery where the time goes. Every second is accounted for and used. Things are accomplished. The world changes. Not so in Vanuatu. Time doesn't pass, it creeps away. Minutes and hours sneak off while you're not looking. Sometimes whole days abscond with themselves and you're left wondering what in the hell happened on Tuesday. You can't think of a single thing you did that day. Nothing was changed because of events that occurred on that day. It might as well have never happened. In the US, time passes in a blur because you have no time to think. In Vanuatu, time slides by without notice because you spend whole days thinking.

Let me give you an example: I still haven't started the work I'm supposed to be doing yet. Yes, I'm halfway through my service and I've yet to start. I'm supposed to be training teachers and putting together a curriculum for the school's computer center. Except the computer center hasn't been built yet. And probably won't be for a while still. Another example: I'm still waiting for a canoe to be built for me that I ordered back in March. I'm not holding out much hope for it being completed before I leave Peace Corps. Time beats down on us in the westernized world. Constantly we fight it. Obsessively we track it. We talk about nanoseconds and picoseconds as if such things mattered. We worry about leap years and daylight savings time. For us, time is a worthy adversary, a force to be reckoned with. But not in the Pacific. Here you see time at its most impotent. Millennia pour by with little or no effect to be swallowed up by the ocean and drowned. A persistent, apathetic patience permeates everything, including the people. It's a patience born of waking up every morning to the same unflinching blue-green of the Pacific Ocean. Sometimes I wonder if the Ni-Vanuatu aren't just humoring all of us. If the western religions, the customs, the practices that they've adopted so politely at our urging are all just a way of obliging us for the time being. As if they know that one day we'll get bored with these islands, or we'll run ourselves into the ground and leave and they'll be able to go back to doing what they were doing before we showed up. All it will take is time and patience, both of which they have in abundance.

I'm getting lost in philosophic musings again, so let's try and wrap this up. The point is, that I don't feel like I've been in Vanuatu a year because not enough has happened. Not enough events have transpired to fill up a year. I've had weeks where my busiest day consisted of walking three minutes to the village store to buy sugar. I've spent entire days doing nothing. Literally nothing. Not whiling away time watching TV or reading or playing computer games or talking, but truly doing nothing, just sitting in the same spot staring staring at the same bit of ocean for hours on end. What I'm trying to say is that a year isn't a long time in Vanuatu. Things that take minutes in the US take hours here, and things that take hours in the US can take days or weeks here, so not a lot gets done in a year and, since I think we tend to judge the passage of time by the amount of things that happen, that makes a year seem like not much time at all. But regardless, let me finish by thanking everyone for following my adventures this far and for all the emails, letters, and packages that have kept me going this long. I hope I can count on your continued interest and support in my second year of service.

Sunday I decided to cut my hair. This was not an easy decision to make. I'd completely shaved my head back in training and had promised myself I'd not let clippers touch my head again until I'd completed my service. I'd always been intrigued by long hair. Growing up, my parents had always kept me carefully groomed by mandating frequent trips to the barber, but I'd always had the idea in the back of my head that, if I were to just let my hair grow, something cool would happen. Like it'd develop into one of those long, Chinese braids that people always have in martial arts movies, for example. Unfortunately, it turns out that my hair is so dense, tangled, and unmanageable that only one hairstyle is possible once it gets long: the afro. About a month ago I broke my brush trying to comb it. I mean that quite literally, I was trying to run my brush through my hair, it got tangled up, so I tried to pull harder and the handle snapped off. Really. With each morning, as I got up and tried to make some order of my mane, it was becoming clear that the situation was getting more and more hopeless. Still, I take promises seriously, especially those that I make to myself, so I was definitely experiencing some hesitation as I contemplated closing my scissors around a clump of dark brown hair. I called McKenzie.
“I think I'm going to cut my hair,” I explained.
“No.” She said.
“What do you mean, 'no'?”
“No, you can't.”
“But it's getting ridiculous!”
“OK. So quit your whining and deal with it.”
“But I have an afro! I mean, I didn't think those were words I'd ever be saying.”
“Look, at least take some time to think it over. If you still want to do it, we'll cut it for Halloween.”
“Halloween? But that's a month and a half away!”
“It's five weeks, don't exaggerate.”

So Kenzie was no help. I spent another hour in indecision before putting down some towels on the floor and laying into it. I thinned out my mess of hair with scissors and then finished the job with an electric clipper I'd borrowed from one of my uncles. After I was finished, I found myself covered in tiny, itchy little hair particles that clung stubbornly to my skin in the sweaty island heat. It would be several days before I was able to wash all of them off. On the whole, however, I felt better. Cleaner, freer.

Friday morning the provincial education officer arrived at my school in the morning to announce that a group of Australian magicians would arriving sometime mid-morning in order to entertain us. I knew of an Australian run program in which doctors-in-training were sent to countries like Vanuatu for a few months in order to practice the medical skills they'd been learning, but I was unaware that there was a similar program for magicians-in-training. Still, I guess it made sense, as a group of Ni-Van school children was probably a more forgiving audience than your average westerner. I should have known, however, that whenever large groups of white people visit Malekula, they're almost always missionaries. And these magicians were no exception. That's right, magician missionaries. Who would've thought. They put on an hour and a half performance, with each each trick they did somehow illustrating an important lesson about Jesus. Of course, none of them spoke Bislama. They got around this in two ways. Firstly, a pastor from Santo was traveling with them who spoke good English and did translations on the fly. He actually did a surprisingly good job. The thing about translating a language into a pidgin is that a lot of the subtlety is necessarily lost. And the thing about religious discourse is that it's all about the subtlety. There are actually Bislama translations of the bible, which I think are pretty funny as they take the flowery, poetic verse of the bible and reduce it to stark simplicity. Take some adjectives often used to describe God: kind, loving, all-powerful, almighty, forgiving. In Bislama, every one these descriptors would be translated as “gud” (good). Seems like maybe you're missing out on something, doest it? Anyway, in addition to having some of their acts translated by the pastor, they'd had some pre-translated and recorded on tapes, which they lip synced to. That was pretty funny.

I honestly don't know why missionaries come to Vanuatu. I don't think I've ever been to a more Christian nation in the world. I mean, I don't know a single Ni-Van who doesn't identify them self as a Christian. Not one. It's preaching to the choir. There are probably way more potential converts back in Australia, and they're much more conveniently located on the same landmass as your house. Maybe they're trying to re-live the glamorous olden days when missionaries coming to these shores were in danger of getting eaten. Maybe there's a certain amount of romanticism about preaching in a country that's described as third world. What's ridiculous is how absurdly loaded they all are. There's a group of Mormon missionaries (OK, well, maybe they actually do have some work to do, I don't know many Ni-Van Mormons) that live in the guest houses run by the LTC. Now, a few months back McKenzie and I noticed that the LTC had started stocking pudding cups. For $8 a piece. That's right, $8 for a pudding cup. And not for the four pack, I mean $8 for ONE cup of pudding. Who the hell would buy this? We'd asked each other. Well, a few weeks later Elin's dad was staying at the LTC guest house next to the Mormons and when we went over to see him McKenzie's dog knocked over their trash can. Well, guess what? It was chocked full of empty pudding cups. Mystery solved. Mindi also related a story to me of when she was stationed in Luganville, on Santo, and got to know a missionary family working with some protestant church. Their church graciously provided them with a monthly living allowance of several thousand dollars, courtesy of donations from church-goers stateside (for reference, we Peace Corps volunteers get a living allowance of about $500 a month, and that's already bit much for a country where you could easily live on $10 a week). Finding themselves completely unable to spend such a ridiculous monthly sum on the meager shopping selections inside Vanuatu (there quite literally is nothing to buy), they used it to import shipping containers of goods from the US for their personal consumption. So yeah, bottom line, if your church asks for donations to go to missionary work in Vanuatu, the money would probably be better spent helping starving kids in Africa or something.

Anyway, after the performance was over, I was left in the awkward situation of feeling obligated to talk to the Australian missionaries, but being too shy to do so. I'll be honest. I've been in Vanuatu for too long. Large groups of white people scare me, especially if they're missionaries. So I hid in the back of the crowd (well, as the only white person in the village, I'm sure I didn't blend in particularly well, but whatever) talking to a couple of my friends on the school board. After about ten minutes, I mustered up some courage and went up and starting talking to my headmaster, who was seated a mere ten feet away from the missionaries. Fortunately, I was spared having to make the final leap, as one of the missionary guys walked over and started talking to me. He claimed to be a fairly regular visitor to Vanuatu and seemed pretty savvy about the country. I refrained from asking the question that was on the tip of my tongue, “What are you guys DOING here?”, and was soon spared from having to make more forced conversation as they boarded a truck and were carted off to their next destination.

That evening the nakamal was abuzz. In a few hours, a momentous event was to occur. A rare chance to catch a delectable sea creature was going to present itself. The organism in question, whose name translates to “ocean worm,” is apparently both fickle and delicious. As it was explained to me, it appears, in massive numbers, in the shallows of the ocean only twice a year, once at the end of September and once at the end of October, and each appearance lasts only a couple of days. On top of that, it only shows up for about an hour each day, starting just as the moon begins to rise. According to custom, it is also easily startled. Screaming while in the water or the presence of women either pregnant or menstruating is said to make these strange little creatures book it back to wherever they came from, thus ruining it for everyone until next year. Curious, at the appointed hour, I headed down to the ocean to see what was up. Kids holding plastic dishes and burning coconut fronds lined the shallows, which were indeed teeming with little, black worms. Soon, all the kid's dishes were filled with these writhing creatures, which really did look remarkably like swimming earthworms, and not at all appetizing. Needless to say, I was anxious to find out what they tasted like. Fortunately, my grandma baked them into a lap-lap the following day and, I gotta say, they weren't bad, although I'm not sure if they lived up to the hype. They tasted kind of like sardines, and so added a nice, strong, salty flavor to the otherwise fairly bland lap-lap.

2008-09-23T22:03:00.000-04:00

Life in the Ring of Fire Part 51: Really, Really, Long Goodbyes

This week's Tautu language word is “kopo.” It means “only” or “just.”

Monday was the first day of school after term break which, of course, meant that nobody showed up. We pulled in a grand total of 22 kids, which was a record low since I've been here. The headmaster gave his usual speech, berating those kids who actually bothered to show up that day about how important it is to come to school, and then we let everyone go. Tim from Ambae and his three friends from the US were staying with me again, waiting for some sort of transport off the island. Tim's friends had a flight back to the States on Tuesday and were confirmed on a flight to Vila that morning, which is cutting things a little too close for Vanuatu, so they'd been trying to get on a flight standby since Sunday. Tim was trying to get to Santo via ship so he could get a flight to Ambae, which meant that he could be stuck on Malekula for weeks. The girls that had flown in from Vila were still around as well, staying with McKenzie in Litz Litz, waiting for the Fresh Cargo (the only reasonably fast ship in the country) to come in. After breakfast, the guys headed to the airport for their second attempt at standby and Tim headed to Litz Litz wharf to check for ships. Shockingly, all three of Tim's friends managed to get on the flight that morning and Tim got on a ship that night, thus cutting the number of guests on Malekula down to three.

Tuesday was a repeat of Monday as far as school was concerned, and so we decided to have a staff meeting instead of class, which was pretty much the worst thing ever as all eight of us teachers were crammed together in a little metal hut baking in the early afternoon sun. Fortunately, midway through I got a respite when a truck showed up at the school with a couple Peace Corps staff looking for me, including our new country director (the head of the whole program in Vanuatu), Eddy, who'd just arrived from Fiji a few weeks prior. He seemed quite friendly, although he looked a little out of place as, for example, he was still wearing socks and shoes instead of sandals and hadn't yet amassed the wardrobe full of bright Hawaiian shirts that our previous country directors was famous for. They did a brief inspection of my house and school and then headed off to the south of the island to look at potential sites for the new volunteers who would be arriving for training in September. Eddy also promised that, as long as not too many of the new group left during training, we'd be getting a volunteer in Norsup, just up the road from me, which was pretty exciting. The number of volunteers on Malekula had been dropping steadily over the last year, so we were definitely in need of some new blood.

That afternoon I headed up to Litz Litz to hang out with our three remaining guests, Bridgett, Alexia, and Lizzie, who were still waiting for the Fresh Cargo, which was stuck in Santo because its engine was on fire. I advised that, if they wanted to get off the island anytime this year, it might be wise to look into some airplane tickets, but they were determined to hold out for another couple days at least. They'd also made McKenzie and I crab cakes and pasta, which was pretty cool. We spent the day on the beach at Litz Litz and then headed to Lakatoro to meet Eddy to partake in the time-honored tradition of having your country director buy you kava.

Wednesday I had everyone down to the beach near me at the airport for a bit of a change of pace and we all had margaritas and discussed what a shame it was that having margaritas on the beach wasn't a more common occurrence in Vanuatu. Also, the Fresh Cargo office had apparently stopped answering their calls, further decreasing hope that it would be possible to get off the island via boat. Thursday morning, the girls caved in and decided to try for a plane. They headed out to Lakatoro to buy tickets and then to the airport. Bridgett managed to get on the flight that afternoon, bringing us down to two. That evening Duncan returned, and so I took my two remaining guests to my nakamal to meet him. Duncan was in fine form, playing with lots of obnoxious new ringing tones he'd downloaded onto this cell phone while he was in Vila, and Lizzie and Alexia both said they no longer doubted that all the stories told about him are true (Duncan is a famous character Peace Corps Vanuatu-wide).

Friday morning Lizzie set out for the Air Vanuatu office to trying and get her and Alexia confirmed on the flight that afternoon. Alexia and I stayed behind and made banana pancakes and smoothies and waited for Lizzie to come back. And waited. And waited. A couple hours after her departure, I got a call from a number I didn't recognize. It was Lizzie “Dan,” she said, a little frantic “Can't talk right now. I'm in Wala. We're confirmed on the flight. I'll be back to pick you guys up at noon!” “What the hell are you doing in Wala?” I asked. Wala is a village about an hour's drive north of me. “No time to explain!” She said “Gotta go!”

It was still a couple of hours until noon, so Alexia and I used the last of our ice to make frozen margaritas and settled into waiting for Lizzie. She showed up almost exactly at noon, as promised, with a truck, and explained her story. She'd gotten a truck to Lakatoro no problem and had gone to the airline office and secured seats for her and Alexia on the flight that afternoon. Then she caught a truck back and asked the driver to let her off at Tautu. The driver forgot, and ended up driving up to Wala to pick up someone's copra. Three hours later, she was back in Lakatoro where she started. On the upside, however, the driver felt bad enough about the whole thing to not charge us for taking us to the airport.

The plane was late in arriving, of course, but by late afternoon Lizzie and Alexia were in the air on their way to Vila and all of our guests had finally departed, leaving me with the weekend to recover and come up with some lesson plans because, if experience was any indicator, on Monday I would have a full class and would once again be expected to teach something.

2008-09-23T22:01:00.000-04:00

Life in the Ring of Fire Part 50: Recount!

This week's Tautu language word is “naem.” It means “house.”

Monday night, Tim, a volunteer from the island of Ambae, and three of his visiting friends from the US had arrived on a ship and put up at my house for the night. The ship experience they related was similar to the hell ride I'd had over to Vila almost a month before, but with the saving grace that it was slightly shorter. They arrived with both their persons and their belongings soaked through and through as they'd been seated in the bow of the boat and thus were easy targets for any waves that made it over the edge of the ship. Quickly, clothes lines were strung up across my house, hiking bags were emptied in search of dry clothing and my house soon took on the appearance of a shelter along a hiking trail. It was kind of cool.

Monday and Tuesday were national holidays. Monday was designated as such to give citizens a chance to engage in political discussions and make a decision as to which candidate they would vote for. Tuesday was voting day. It's a cool idea, I suppose, giving government holidays so that people can participate in the democratic process. It would, of course, mean a lot more if people actually worked in Vanuatu and sitting around talking about stuff wasn't occurring pretty much 24/7 anyway, but whatever. Since I wasn't a citizen of Vanuatu and school was off for term break anyway, both these holidays were lost on me. I had, however, been looking forward to the election since I'd been feeling left out of the political talk that had been prevailing at the nakamal for the past week. I was also kind of hoping that, since Duncan's cousin was running for parliament, there would be some sort of party – preferably with a lot of pigs -- in the event of his victory. I'd also heard that the night of election day tended to get pretty wild. All in all, however, the whole thing was a disappointment. Like everything in Vanuatu, the polling places were ridiculously slow and so most people spent the whole day waiting in line up in Norsup to vote. Thus, Tautu was all but empty during the day and so I headed to Lakatoro to try and use the internet and see off Tim and his friends, who were trying to make it down to a village in the south to the start of a hiking trail across the island. Of course, it hadn't really sunk in that, it being a national holiday, nothing would really be open, so I arrived to find Lakatoro the emptiest I'd ever seen it. The deserted storefronts and the constant dust kicked up due to the continuing drought all combined for a very striking old west ghost town effect. My dail-up provider was apparently also taking the day off for election day, as I couldn't connect to the internet for any of the four lines in town. I found Tim and his friends sitting underneath a pavilion having had similar luck with the trucks: no trucks were departing for the south due to the holiday. I sat with them for a few hours, hailing every passing truck on the off-chance that one might be up for the job. Towards evening, they got lucky. A rickety old truck missing most of its exterior said they were headed for a village near Tim's destination and so they all piled in and were off.

We now had a shockingly large number of Americans on the island, although none of them happened to be in the Lakatoro area at that moment. McKenzie and Laura were with four Peace Corps girls from Vila and Ambae in Matanvat, a village in the north, giving a workshop. Tim and his friends were four all together, and with myself with Mindi, and Noah, Jack, Chris, and Ben, the volunteers in the south, that made sixteen. Something of a record, I do believe. Those of us volunteers in Malekula sort of have this running joke about the island. You see, Malekula almost every island in Vanuatu has some sort of claim to fame. Efate has Vila, for those seeking the comforts of a city. Tanna, Ambae, Ambrym, and some others have active volcanoes. Santo has Luganville, another city, as well as the best SCUBA diving. The Banks and the Torres islands in the north are known for their pristine beauty. Maewo is known for its rivers and Pentecost is famous for land diving. And Malekula has, well, nothing, really. Yeah we have beaches, but everywhere has beaches. Lakatoro is a city of sorts, but it's lacking in a lot of key comforts. Our weather doesn't really help us: it's hotter, wetter, and more oppressively humid here than most islands. We have a thriving mosquito population. Really, Malekula has very little going for it. I see tourists show up to the island and the fist thing I want to ask them is what kind of mistake led them here. And yet, somehow, inexplicably, we all love it here. And we talk it up to no end with all the other volunteers in the country and now we've gotten to the point where volunteers are using up their vacation days and spending their hard-earned cash to come here, to Malekula, the black sheep island with few redeeming qualities. I mean, we were now hosting no less than eight (8) visitors, three of them having come all the way from the US. Amazing. Of course, this called for a party.

Everyone was set to converge on Lakatoro on Saturday, thus making it the logical party date, and giving me a few days to myself in Tautu before everyone showed up. I was hoping to get in some quality time hanging out with Duncan, since I'd just been gone for a little more than a month, but unfortunately politics intervened. You see, Malekula had a recount scandal. Yes, a recount scandal. Like with the Bush-Gore race in 2000. Forty-seven candidates ran for parliament from Malekula, an island with seven seats. Thus, the seven candidates with the most votes would take office. However, there was some question about who took seventh place, and thus would go to parliament, and who took eighth. The unofficial polls even called the race early and had to retract their announcement. The cool thing was that, since Vanuatu is such a small country, we weren't talking about millions of votes being disputed, we were talking, like, ten votes. The first place candidate, for example, won in a crushing landslide with 500-some votes. It was kind of like a student council election. Duncan, being, apparently an important, member of the PPP party, which was allied with the party belonging to one of the candidates being disputed, spent his days in Lakatoro overseeing the recount. On Wednesday, he told me that he would be leaving for Vila on Saturday morning to accompany the ballots to the capitol and observe the official count there.

Earlier in the week, McKenzie had asked me to arrange a charter truck to come get her and the other five girls up in Matanvat and bring them back to Lakatoro on Saturday morning in time for the party. I, as I usually do, entrusted the task to Duncan, who made a few phone calls and told me the whole thing was arranged. Friday night I was drinking a farewell kava with Duncan, when the truck that he'd chartered for me pulled up. We both went to talk to the driver to tell him what time to drive up in the morning. “I can't do it tomorrow, it's sabbath,” he explained (No, we don't have Jews in Vanuatu, as far as I know, but we do have Seventh Day Adventists, a Christian sect that keeps the Jewish sabbath. Now, I don't know what the SDA church is like in the US, but here in Vanuatu SDAs are absolutely nuts. The church bans everything: drinking, smoking, kava, Coke, pork, shellfish, and dancing. Yes, dancing. Not allowed. I mean COME ON, when did dancing ever hurt anybody? It's like banning fun. What about keeping time with your foot during a song? Is that out too? Or bobbing up and down rhythmically? How about air-banding? Whenever you hear about a volunteer being stationed in an SDA village, it's always polite to offer condolences). Both Duncan and I explained to the driver that, since Saturday isn't really an event that gets scheduled at the last minute, he should have told us he couldn't do the charter when we'd first asked him a few days ago. He told us to look for someone else, at which point Duncan told him that it was too late for that since we needed the truck to leave in the morning. He grumpily mumbled something about maybe being able to do it if we couldn't find anyone else and drove off. Duncan made a few more calls but, sure enough, all the other drivers we got a hold of had already made other commitments. I left the nakamal that night not feeling too good about the chances of getting a truck to Matanvat the following day, but Duncan told me not to worry and to come see him in the morning. I did as I was told and Duncan put a call through to the driver from last night and gave him a quite an earful. We were in business. I caught a truck to Lakatoro to meet the driver and we were off. The ride up to Matanvat was nice in the early morning and, since it was a charter, I got to sit up front in the cabin as opposed to in the truck bed and we didn't stop every five minutes to let people get in and out. The ride up took a little under two hours, and everyone was surprised upon our arrival, as the girls had also given up hope of having a truck sent for them.

That evening's party was quite a success, hopefully solidifying our reputation as an awesome island, despite everything. Sunday people started heading out but, this being Vanuatu, I knew it would be at least three or four days before everyone succeeded in making it off the island. Still, I didn't particularly mind, it was school break and it was fun to have guests.