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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Life in the Ring of Fire Part 49: Can We Please Stop Talking About Politics?

This week's Tautu language word is “lelen.” It means “tomorrow.”

On Monday I cleaned my water tank. It had been getting progressively grosser since I'd left for Vila in an attempt to see Elin off almost a month ago, and I suspected this was because a lot of rotting leaves and lemons had gathered in the bottom. My water supply works like this; rain falls on my corrugated iron roof and flows into rain gutters. Instead of funneling the rainwater onto the ground, however, the gutters empty into a large plastic tank with a tap on the bottom which I use to draw water from. Ideally, to keep a water tank clean and free of mosquito larvae (which aren't so much a problem because they contaminate the water, but rather because they eventually turn into mosquitoes which then hang out by your house, waiting for you to set foot outside so they can swarm you), it should be completely closed except for a hole that allows the water to flow in and an overflow pipe, both of which should be covered with screens. I'd inherited an old tank whose screens had long ago gone missing, thus meaning that is was both teeming with mosquito larvae and regularly collected whatever refuse was washed into it off the roof. When I'd first arrived, it was passably clean water, but over the past month it had turned a light brown color and started to smelled a little funny. I'd been reluctant to clean it because it's a 1000 liter tank (which is 1 cubic meter, a fact that I hope all my year eight students have mastered), and to clean it I needed to empty it and emptying 1000 liters of water onto the ground had always seemed like a terrible waste. There was nothing for it though, so I used a piece of one of my gutters to channel the water away from my front yard, so as to flood my neighbor's yards instead of my own, turned on the tap, and let it run. While I waited for it to empty, I took down all the gutters and scrubbed them out. Each one had accumulated about half an inch of mud in the bottom. Then I climbed up on my roof and knocked off all the remaining lemons and leaves (which, because my lemon tree was now dead, would hopefully not be reappearing). By that time the tank had emptied to the point where I could tip it over. Sure enough, a large collection of leaves and black, rotten lemons fell onto the ground. I crawled inside with a scrub brush and removed all the dirt and leaves which had caked onto the sides and then left the thing in the sun for a couple hours to kill all the remaining mosquito larvae as well as the slugs – whose existence in my water supply I had been blissfully ignorant of up until that point. I gave the tank a final rinse and then repositioned it to catch the runoff from the gutters. I taped window screens over the intake and overflow holes and then I was finished. The only thing I need now was rain. This turned out to be trickier than initially anticipated. For basically the entire time I'd been in Vanuatu up until then, we'd gotten a nice, strong rain at least once a week. Figures that the week I decide to empty my tank ended up being the beginning of a veritable drought.

This was driven home to me when I road my bike into Lakatoro and was subjected to a miniature dust bowl. The roads were so dry that passing trucks kicked up dust clouds the size of storm fronts. Even just walking from my house to Duncan's would result in me being completely covered in a thin coating of dust. The school's main water tank was already empty when I got back, as was the large village tank that feeds off the church roof, the main source of water for those living in Tautu proper. There was still water in the school's secondary tank, a big cement thing operated by a pump mechanism. The pump handle was entrusted to me, as the only teacher living at the school over the term break, so that the water could only be used by those associated with the school. The tank that Duncan and his extended family used was also dry, meaning that they had to catch a truck to the airport every day to get water. Of course, this makes the situation seem a lot more dire than it actually was. Central Malekula is blessed with a large, fresh, close water table. Dig a hole about six feet deep and you'll strike water. Tautu is dotted with wells which you can lower buckets into with bamboo poles to obtain water. The thing is, the villagers don't like the taste of the groundwater (it's got a lot of minerals in it), thus causing them to go to great lengths (such as driving to the airport as opposed to using the well in your backyard) to procure rainwater for drinking. Also, of course, using a well is a huge pain compared to using a tank. However, the bottom line was that I wasn't particularly worried about running out of water.

Coinciding with the drought was the election. Election day in Vanuatu is September 2, about a week away, and the campaigning was getting intense. The political system in Vanuatu works like this: there's one house of parliament. Every island (well, not quite, some of the really small islands get grouped together) gets a certain number of seats in parliament. When a new parliament is voted in, they elect the president, prime minister, and all other ministers from within their ranks. In other words, the people don't get to vote for the president or prime minister directly. What's a little odd, at least to me, is how the voting works. There aren't any constituencies. In the US, every House Representative is elected by voters in a very specific geographic location, so everyone knows exactly who elected each representative. Vanuatu doesn't do this, things aren't divided any more finely than by island. For example, Malekula has seven seats. There are 47 candidates contesting them. Everyone on the island gets to vote for one of them. At the end, they count up all the votes and the top seven candidates win. So it's possible, for example, to have all seven Malekula MPs come from the same village. I thought that was a little strange.

In Vila, I'd run across many a truck with a man standing in the back with a megaphone giving stump speeches. Every notice board in Tautu, as well as most trees, were covered with campaign posters. What's hilarious about politics in Vanuatu is how unpolished everything is. I know the campaigning is heating up in the US as well, so think, when was the last time you saw a photo of a candidate where they looked unkempt, ruffled, or tired? When is their hair ever a mess or their clothing rumpled? Never. It's always pictures of Obama gracefully emerging from an airplane or McCain confidently shaking hands with some general. You never see pictures of them when they look like hell. Not so in Vanuatu. Every poster boasted a picture, a mug shot really, of some scowling, dirty black man or some frumpy black woman who doesn't pluck her chin hairs. They all looked like they'd just got done mowing the lawn. Not a single poster photo was attractive or flattering. And my god, the speeches. Every day during the week one party or another would take over the microphone at the LTC and the market and harangue the masses. And, it really pains me to stereotype like this, but Ni-Vans are AWFUL at public speaking. I have yet to see one who's good at it. They mumble a lot. They often talk to softly to be heard. They stare at the ground the whole time and fiddle with the change in their pockets. They ramble. They get sidetracked talking about one of their relatives' new truck. They loose their train of thought. They pause a lot unnecessarily. And, worst of all, they go on for HOURS. I couldn't take it.

The jewel in the crown, however, was an article that we found in the Independent, one of the local papers. It was written by a guy in Vila endorsing his son-in-law, who was running for office. It had the feel of, like, Snoop Dogg talking about how sweet one of his rapper friends is. I'm going to give a few quotes here, because I don't think I can do this justice just by summing up.

“JN [the candidate] will always be there when things/events happen in our communities. I have seen and witnessed him dropping off young slaughtered cattle at my place not one, but a few times.”

Slaughtered cattle delivery skills are definitely something I look for in my candidates, I don't know about you.

“Every time when I went to drink kava at his nakamal he would call out to me 'Hey, before you go, go and take a shell or two or a bottle of tusker [beer].' He passes my test 100%”

Giving out free beers is a plus, definitely, but does he know how to show off his bling?

“JN sometimes plays big time with his money when he feels like it. Like, he would call a taxi and drive around drinking beer and then stop at a takeaway shop and have some food and then leave when he is satisfied. When he is dropped off, he would open his wallet, pause, and pay with a red note (five in front and three zeros).”

The guy wraps up the article with (I swear this is true) a list of people he thinks are cool, with himself included, of course (not going to lie, I was a little disappointed not to be listed), and signs the article as the candidate's political analyst and strategist. Actually, a lot of campaigning in Vanuatu does seems to involve driving around buying people kava. I went to Duncan's nakamal Monday night and the place was packed, but no one seemed to be drinking kava, just sitting around. Eventually, I realized that they were hanging out waiting for a candidate to come and buy them all kava.

The neat thing about politics in Vanuatu is how involved everyone gets in it. Almost everyone in the country that is able to votes. The nakamals were brimming with political discussions. Unfortunately, most of these went basically over my head. Like I've explained before, Bislama relies heavily on a common frame of reference and, since I was not already versed in current Vanuatu politics, much of what was said made no sense to me. By the end of the week, after being consistently left out of nakamal political discussions for several days in a row, I was ready for the election to be over. Unfortunately, this wouldn't happen until the following week.

Life in the Ring of Fire Part 48: Back to the Bush

This week's Tautu language word is “mewi.” It means “tomorrow.”

On Monday my family caught their flight out to LA. The cool thing about flying from the Pacific to the US is that you get to travel back in time: their flight was scheduled to land a couple hours before it was scheduled to depart. Take that Einstein. Weren't counting on the old time zone trick, were you? We all woke up early Monday morning and I said goodbye to the family again. Unlike when I first left for Peace Corps, I was due to see them again in just over three months, so it didn't seem quite as sad. I was staying in Sydney for a couple extra days in order to purchase a few key items to take back to Vanuatu, including a blender and as many bottles of wine as I could sneak through Vanuatu customs without being charged import duty. My flight was scheduled for Wednesday afternoon, giving me a scant two days to procure all the items on my list. It would be tight, but I though I could make it. I packed up my things and checked out of the hotel my family and I had been sharing and checked into the YMCA hotel a few blocks away, ditched my luggage and got to work. During the week or so I'd been in Sydney with my parents, I'd been scoping out stores likely to have the things I was looking for, so I had some idea of where I was going. It was 10am when I started my shopping expedition, and my goal was to get through half of my list by dinner time. I knew it would be hectic, but I was confident I could do it. By 1pm I was finished. And not just with half the list either, I'd successfully procured every single item I was looking for. You see, I'd forgotten that it's actually possible to do things quickly in countries other than Vanuatu. Were I in Vila, sure, it probably would have taken me four hours to buy a blender, but in Sydney it only took about ten minutes. Man, these westerners sure know how to run a tight ship. At a loss for what to do next, I sought out an internet cafe to putter around online for a while. Get this: there was this place that had an internet cafe, a grocery store, an electronics store, and a home wares store all IN THE SAME BUILDING. How awesome is that? I emailed some Malekula volunteers to take requests for anything they might want from Australia. Want coffee? No problem, I think the coffee section is just up the stairs (or rather, the escalator. I'll reiterate, those things are weird). Blank CDs? OK, sure, they're right here. A four-in-one food processor/clothes press/oven/cheese grater? Don't see any on display, but let me get an employee to check the back... yep, sure enough, here they are, only $19.99. I was pretty impressed.

The nice thing about finishing all my shopping early was that it left plenty of time to go see movies at the theater. All in all, I saw five movies while in Australia: Dark Knight, Get Smart, Taken, Wanted, and Pineapple Express. Most of them I'd never heard of before, but I didn't really care. They could have been showing only Steven Segal movies and I would've been perfectly happy. I also hit up the used video stores. Man, why are DVDs so expensive? That is totally not cool. I could get behind something like, say, five dollars each. But at fifteen bucks per, for used copies even, it's like they're asking you to download them illegally online. Briefly I thought about asking the folks at Blockbuster if they do long-term, overseas rentals for people living in impoverished, third-world countries who only make it in to drop off returns once a year or so. I faced the same issues with music CDs. In the end, I resisted the temptation to spend my life savings on music and movies but, believe me, it was a close thing.

I had a beer with lunch and a bottle of wine with dinner every day. That was pretty glorious. In terms of restaurants, I mostly did repeats, revisiting places I'd already been with my family. I went to the fish market twice to feast on buckets of fish and chips. I went to this Chinese BBQ place and had roasted duck. I went to a fast-food place and got a fried chicken sandwich (juicy, inhumanely raised goodness. Like I said before, don't knock it until you've tried the alternative). These days, I take new pleasure in eating chicken. I think of it as one less vicious, obnoxious, pooping, squawking, garden-ruining, sleep-disturbing animal roaming the planet (I hate chickens. At least, I hate live ones. Does it show?).

On Wednesday I took a bus to the airport and checked in for my flight back to Vila. After a while spent browsing the duty free selections, I settled in at my gate to wait for the plane. After a bit, a group of black men sat down in the seats behind me. Even though I'd only been away from Vanuatu for ten days or so, my mind had already fallen back into an American perception of black people. In Vanuatu, the majority of people are black and so it's white people who stand out. After enough time on the island, I tend to even forget that I'm white. Since everyone I see around me is black, I kind of subconsciously assume that I am too. In other words, I group myself with the Ni-Vans as opposed to with other white people. I'll sometimes even extend this assumption to other volunteers. On numerous occasions, I've been wandering around Lakatoro and thought: “Hey is that McKenzie? No... wait, that's a black girl.” After being in Australia, however, I'd re-established my perceptions of black people as being a group to which I do not belong; I was grouping myself with white people again. Anyway, when they sat down behind me, I didn't think much of it, I just went on reading my book. Every once in a while, however, I'd catch snippets of their conversation and... are they speaking Bislama?! It was like a switch flipped. Suddenly I was a Ni-Van again. The group of them sitting behind me were my brothers (because everyone in Vanuatu is family) and all the Australians sitting in the terminal were the strange white tourists. I got up, greeted them in Bislama, and took a seat with them.

It was almost midnight when the flight arrived in Vila, which was good because all the customs people were too tired to make an issue out of the fact that I was carrying in a bit more than my allotted three bottles of duty-free wine. I caught a cab to my hotel and hit the sack. Vila is a strange place, and the more times I go the more I feel I don't really like it. It's like the escalator or the spork: it's trying to be two things at once and failing at both. It's small like a village, but it lacks the close-knit friendliness and the laid-back attitude that makes village life enjoyable. It's modern like a city, but it lacks the good restaurants, the variety of stores, and the availability of, well, just about everything, that makes city life enjoyable.

Thursday morning I headed down to the local dive shop. I'd arranged to stay in Vila until Sunday to do a SCUBA certification course. I'd been SCUBA diving almost ten years prior at a resort in the Bahamas and had really liked it and been intending to get certified ever since. However, since both Illinois and Austin are land-locked locations, and the New Jersey waterfront is gross, I hadn't had an opportunity. I paid for the course and was immediately outfitted with SCUBA gear and whisked off to a hotel pool for my first course. We chewed through the practical skills pretty quickly. A year in Vanuatu had made me as comfortable in the water as it's possible to get, so things like getting water out of diving masks and swimming for 100 meters weren't really all that much of a hurdle. That afternoon I went out on the boat for my first dive in the ocean. Diving is cool because it's probably the closest it's possible to get to flying (well, you can fly in airplanes, of course, but being encased in several inches of aluminum kind of removes you from the experience). It's an odd feeling to be able to have unhampered movement in all three dimensions, what with the bouncy of the water canceling out that pesky force of gravity that so determinedly keeps us down on land.

After the boat brought us back in, I headed to the Peace Corps office and met up with Chris, a volunteer from my training group originally stationed on Tanna but in the process of moving to a village just off the coast of Efate. Like me, he'd just come back from a re-westernization in New Zealand. The two of us went for kava at a nakamal a little bit out of town, but strategically chosen because it is a favorite haunt of Kevin George, our now retired country director. I held my first shell in hand and wondered just why in the hell I had subjected myself to this disgusting ritual on such a regular basis in Malekula. We sat down and swapped stories of our travels for a little while before, as expected, Kevin George showed up, along with Solo, one of the Peace Corps Ni-Van staff members responsible for our training. I'd been hoping to run into Kevin while in Vila, and was happy for the chance to talk with him for a while before his departure from Vanuatu sometime in the coming couple months. Unfortunately, I learned that our new country director would be arriving just after the departure of my flight to Malekula, so I wouldn't get the opportunity to greet him at the airport.

I did two more dives Friday morning and some short lectures in the afternoon and finished up the course on Saturday with one more dive and a written final exam. On the whole, the process was a lot easier than I was expecting. I guess there's not really all that much to SCUBA diving after all. My last night in Vila I drank kava (Again! Why? I don't know) with Chris and Bridgett, another volunteer from my training group, who revealed that she would be coming to Malekula in about a week to help out with a workshop Laura and McKenzie were planning. It looked like our little island was about to get crowded.

I arrived back in Malekula Sunday morning and received the usual welcome from my friends, the airport staff. I caught a truck and unloaded my substantial collection of food, drink, and amenities acquired in Australia and Vila at my house and then headed over to see Duncan. I found him, in typical Sunday fashion, lying on the cement floor of his house. He looked up upon hearing my footsteps.
“Dan!” He shouted “I knew it! I knew you were coming today. I dreamed about you last night and I thought, Dan's coming home today!”

I'd lost my cell phone in Vila just before departing for Australia. I bought a new one as soon as I got back, but I'd lost all the phone numbers stored in my old phone, including Duncan's, so I couldn't call home to tell him when I would be arriving. I'd even managed to get his number from my US family, but still hadn't been able to get a hold of him. I took him back to my house to show him all the goodies I'd gotten in Australia, and he was suitably impressed. He immediately borrowed all the movies I'd brought and returned my diving torch and battery charger, both of which he always borrows without telling me whenever I leave. I agreed to drink kava with him that night and we both went to take naps. As always, Malekula was hot, muggy, and suffocatingly miserable, but I was happy to be back.