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24th July
Throughout the previous week, the school's bare dining hall has been filled
with students sitting their mid-year exams. Noel and I supervised the Physics
exams, while simultaneously doing the questions ourselves and coming up with a
mark scheme. Leaning against the wall at the end of the Dining Hall, I could
hear and feel rats running behind the wooden panels, only inches away from me. Later in the week, we sat around groaning as we marked the papers. We already
knew from working with the students in class that many of them struggled to
understand the material, but their performance under exam conditions was worse
than we could possibly have imagined. On multiple-choice papers, the average
score was only a few percent higher than the result that would have been
expected from a monkey trained to circle answers at random. Short-answer
questions yielded reams of unimaginable nonsense from some students; others
had given up after a token attempt at an answer and instead spent the time
doodling on their papers. One had drawn a marijuana leaf, with 'weeds of
wisdom' written underneath. "Weeds of wisdom - that must be all that's growing in their heads," muttered
Noel. The exam questions were at a level that British or New Zealand students of a
similar age would have been expected to cope with comfortably. Some of the
answers seemed, to us at least, to be staggeringly obvious, yet the questions
had left the students utterly flummoxed. From teachers of other subjects came the same despairing comments: we gave the
students easy questions and they could hardly answer any of them. It isn't that Ranwadi is a haven of unusually dim students; on the contrary,
this is one of Vanuatu's better schools. The difficulty is a national one.
Regional universities have recently noted that Vanuatu students as a whole
perform poorly compared with other Pacific islanders. Language is part of the
problem: there can't be many other countries in the world in which
schoolchildren are actually forbidden from speaking their national language.
Lack of resources in schools, and frequent missing of lessons by both students
and staff, also contribute to the low standards. However, the main problem
seems to be something far more fundamental: the students' terrifying inability
to apply basic logic and commonsense in their schoolwork. Put simply, the students at Ranwadi function like computers. Given a set of
specific step-by-step instructions, they will follow them diligently, but they
are utterly incapable of making intelligent connections between different
pieces of information in order to deal with problems that they haven't been
explicitly programmed to solve. If erroneous calculations lead them to a
blatantly ridiculous answers - a car was travelling at a million kilometres
per hour, a mouse weighed more than the Earth, or a ping pong ball was
travelling backwards in time - they will accept those answers without
question. In almost all of their work the students appear merely to be
following instructions robotically, without any real thought about the purpose
or meaning of what they are doing. Of course, all students make silly mistakes in exams, not everybody thinks
logically all the time (in fact, most people don't, most of the time) and few
people understand everything that they are taught at school. However, the
sheer extent of the mindlessness displayed by the students was perplexing and
frightening. I have searched desperately for explanations: perhaps the problem
is cultural, or perhaps the burden of working in a foreign language that they
don't fully understand preoccupies the students' minds. My job as a teacher is
to help them overcome these difficulties, but it's hard to know how best to
begin. - - - Arriving at the nakamal at Vanwoki on Thursday evening, I felt as if I had
walked into a hospital. One man had sliced into the end of his finger while
cutting up the kava roots; I fetched my first aid kit and helped him to clean
and bandage the wound. Another man was hobbling around with a limp foot,
having trodden on something nasty while making his way home in the dark after
a previous evening's kava-drinking. A third patient - a visitor from a
neighbouring village - was physically in fine health but mentally troubled; he
went around all evening talking nonsense to people in a mixture of languages.
Apparently he went insane after accepting money from the white ghosts that
inhabit the forbidden headland north of Bwatnapne. Two days later, the mood down at the village was happier. Normally, the
nakamal at night is a dark and quiet place: the only light comes from a
paraffin lantern and the embers of a fire, and the only sounds come from the
rhythmic pounding of kava roots, the spitting of drinkers trying to rid the
taste of the kava from their mouths, and the whispering of people and insects.
However, when I approached the nakamal on Saturday night, I was amazed to see
coloured lights flashing outside, and hear UB40's 'Kingston Town' blaring
loudly enough to be heard throughout the village. Under the eaves at the
entrance to the nakamal, a small portable TV and DVD player had been rigged
up, together with a tiny set of disco lights, powered by a rattling petrol
generator nearby. Women and children sat on mats outside watching music videos
on the glowing TV screen, while the men inside the hut jigged merrily to the
music as they ground up the evening's kava. I often marvel at the extraordinary way in which small pieces of twenty-first
century technology can fit into the otherwise-prehistoric lifestyle of
Pentecost's villagers. After the music videos were finished, the men put on Hollywood movies full of
gun-slinging Mexicans; I hate to think what impression these must give the
islanders about life overseas. The viewers barely understood a word of the
dialogue (I was the only one laughing at the jokes), but they watched avidly,
even during the few scenes in which nobody was chasing or shooting people. The
kava-drinking continued throughout the evening. Every so often, one of us
would be called inside the nakamal to swallow down his half-coconut shell of
grimy refreshment, then return to the movies. The entertainment continued late
into the night.
18th July
Even at Ranwadi, a school where it often seems that normality is abnormal,
this term is proving to be a seriously disrupted one. Many students missed the first two weeks of classes because they had yet to
return from holidays. Many missed the third week because of an epidemic of illness. Last week, messages began to appear on the notice board from teachers
explaining that they were busy preparing mid-term exams and therefore wouldn't
be coming to class. Absenteeism is contagious, and soon a number of students
were failing to turn up even to classes at which the teacher was still
present. After chasing a horde of noisy students out of their dormitories
during lesson time, Noel posted an item on the agenda of the fortnightly staff
meeting entitled "What is going on round here?". "We're too busy to teach," was the general tone of the response. Noel seemed
sceptical, but knew it would be futile to argue. This week, the students are sitting their mid-term exams. Faced with the
problem of organising classes during a week when some students would be
sitting exams during some time periods, the staff decided upon the simple
solution: all lessons were cancelled. Next week, students and teachers will be able to find plenty of excuses not to
go to lessons: marking of mid-term exams, recovering from exam revision,
training for the PISSA Games, Children's Day (a national holiday), and
Independence Week celebrations taking place in various neighbouring villages. The following week, some of the students and teachers will travel to Ambae for
the PISSA Games, leaving the rest at Ranwadi to spend the week doing
more-or-less nothing. The best competitors will remain on Ambae to train for the Provincial Games,
an adult sporting competition being held there a month later, and will not
return to Ranwadi until next term. A week or two later, the wind-down to the holidays will begin. Many of
Ranwadi's students come from far-flung corners of Pentecost or from
neighbouring islands, and the ships and trucks that take them there are
infrequent and don't run to schedules. If one happens to come past then the
students, anxious not to miss any of the holidays, are liable to jump on it
and go home, even if it is officially a week or two before the end of term. The school holidays proper begin at the end of August, and last for two weeks.
After that it will take some of the students a couple more weeks to return. All in all, I will be surprised if I am teaching full classes any time between
now and the end of September. - - - Since I wasn't required to supervise or mark exams until the middle of the
week, I realised that I had a couple of days off. "I wonder if it would be possible to walk to the northern end of the island in
a day," I mused. The journey from here to the top end of Pentecost is twenty miles (32 km) as
the crow flies, and a lot further along the winding road. There are some
formidable hills along the way. Many people doubted that the distance could be
walked in a day. So I decided to try. My target was to reach Sara Airfield, this being the only North Pentecost
landmark I knew. I set off from Ranwadi before dawn, and climbed Melsisi Hill as the rising sun
painted golden crags onto the tips of Ambrym's volcanoes. The more distant
volcano of Lopevi sat, like Tolkien's Mount Doom, under a dark grey cloud. I descended the hill towards Bwatnapne a couple of hours later. It was a
Sunday morning and the village was even sleepier than usual. The only people
not at church were a group of teenage boys, who watched as I attempted
(successfully) to cross the river without getting my feet wet. North of Bwatnapne, the road climbs again, past a series of surprisingly
well-kept villages. Although the majority of the houses are made of sticks and
palm leaves, they have an almost-suburban look to them, with tidy lawns,
well-kept front gardens, and even in one case a proper glass window (which
looked extremely out-of-place on a wall made of woven leaves). I passed
storefronts, a bank, and even a sign marked "Takeaway Restaurant". (Stores and
food-sellers are not an unusual sight in rural Vanuatu, but signs advertising
them are. In most other settlements on Pentecost, there is nothing to indicate
which building is the village store. Everyone in the community knows where it
is, so there is little point in putting up a sign.) At every settlement I passed, I was greeted by locals who were curious to know
where I had come from and where I was going. "You walkabout, no more?" was the response in every village. "Ee no got
truck?" Two or three pick-up trucks (the only vehicles that can cope with Pentecost's
roads) had indeed passed and offered me lifts. I had explained to the drivers
that I enjoyed walking. They had dismissed me as a harmless lunatic and wished
me cheerfully good day. The northern half of Pentecost is flatter than the southern half, and instead
of hugging the coast the main road turns inland and runs along the spine of
the island, following the tops of the ridges. For several miles there are
virtually no villages - just the rough, stony road sweeping and winding from
hilltop to hilltop. The roads are bordered by low, windswept tropical
shrubbery, watched over by coconut palms and tree ferns. Looking downhill
through gaps in the vegetation, you can see multi-layered ridges of forest
sliding away in parallax, towards to a dark and distant ocean. On the ridge
itself, the afternoon sun burned shadelessly. Birds of prey soared on the
currents of hot air billowing across the island. It was a long, dry, desolate, empty, lonely walk. By mid-afternoon the sun
remained strong, and I began to form a suspicion about why there are no
villages up on the ridge: there are no sources of water anywhere. I was
desperately thirsty by the time I eventually reached a village. I asked if
there was anywhere I could "full'em-up plastic" with water, and was directed
to a rainwater tank where I gratefully refilled my flasks. From here, the
landscape gradually became less deserted, and along the roadside village
gardens once again replaced untrammelled bush. In Central Pentecost language, the phrase for "white man" is "tutoran". I hear
this screamed a lot by small children when walking through villages. (It
reminds me of the way that the Chinese shout "Laowai!" at the sight of a
foreigner, although at least in Vanuatu it is done only by the children.) In the northern part of the island, a different language is spoken, as
distinct from Central Language as English is from French, although certain
words and phrases are recognisably similar. When I began to hear shouts of
"tutarani" instead of "tutoran", I knew that I had reached North Pentecost. (Linguists refer to Central Pentecost language as 'Apma', and North Pentecost
language as 'Raga'. However, these terms are virtually unused on the island:
natives of each area refer to their mother tongue simply as 'language'. "We
shouldn't speak using language in the staffroom," the Principal at Ranwadi
once told his fellow islanders. To anyone unfamiliar with Vanuatu, his
instruction would have sounded bizarre.) I walked the last few miles of the journey with a group of teenage boys from
the Lini Memorial College, who were returning to school after a weekend away
in their home village. The Lini Memorial College was built in honour of the
late Father Walter Lini, Vanuatu's first prime minister, whose grave is in the
college grounds. In addition to asking the usual questions about British life and about what
countries I had supported during the World Cup, the students told me about
life at their college. They have no piped water supply there, they told me,
and since the generator broke at the start of the year they have had no
electricity either. In previous years the college has been a top competitor at
the PISSA Games, but this year their principal has announced that they cannot
afford to send students to the Games (even though the ship journey to Ambae
from there is far shorter than from Ranwadi). All in all, the Lini Memorial
College seemed a sad yet awfully appropriate monument to the founder of modern
Vanuatu. Evening was approaching as we descended towards the northern tip of the
island. Here, the three islands that make up Vanuatu's Penama Province -
Pentecost, Ambae and Maewo - nuzzle against one another, and as the sun set
the two neighbouring landmasses loomed pink and grey. I could see the margins
of white surf fringing the coastlines of the islands. We wound our way down a long hill in increasing darkness. "Boo," said the boys
softly to each of the black figures that passed us on the road. (I guessed
that this meant 'goodnight'; the word for 'night' in Central Pentecost
language is similar.) After thirteen hours of nearly non-stop walking, I
emerged onto a flat open space: Sara Airfield, lit only by the stars. The boys
swooped happily across the field, making aeroplane motions with their arms. The Lini Memorial College is in the village of Nazareth ("Nasaret", as
pronounced by the locals), on the far side of the airfield. One of the
students showed me the way to the nearby guesthouse, a remarkably
modern-looking place. Although it lacked electricity and running water, and
was located down a dirt track amongst ramshackle wooden buildings, the house's
interior looked as if it belonged in Port Vila, or the Mediterranean, not
rural Pentecost. I was welcomed into a sitting room with comfy chairs,
smartly-decorated white walls, floor tiles that gleamed even in the half
darkness, and a large, expensive-looking hi-fi (presumably powered by large,
expensive batteries) playing familiar pop songs. I ate dinner with the owner's
two teenage sons, while a friendly animal (I hoped it was a cat, but in the
darkness I couldn't see) rubbed against my legs under the table. The one guest room doubled as the boys' bedroom. I felt bad as they were
evicted and sent off to sleep at the school dormitories, but they were
obviously used to it, and went cheerfully. The next day, I set off before dawn for the return walk. The rising sun
dribbled orange through the mist as I climbed the hill above Sara Airfield. It was a Monday morning, and wherever I passed primary schools, the children
would squeal and rush to the gate to practise their English on a real live
white man. "Hello!" the bravest one would call out. "Hello!" I would call back. This was always followed by a chorus of excited
hellos from the other children, and a smile and nod from their teacher. In one village, the men were sawing up what looked like a stack of huge fallen
trees piled on top of one another. In fact, they were the gnarled, interwoven
trunks of a single banyan tree, which had toppled over to produce a heap of
wood the size of a large house. I passed several large village stores, and went in to buy food supplies for
the journey, whilst keeping any eye out for anything interesting that wasn't
in stock at the stores around Ranwadi. All the stores on the island sell the
same basic foodstuffs (or at least aspire to sell them, although they often
run out) - everywhere there is rice, tinned meat and fish, powdered milk,
Milo, biscuits, crackers, packaged noodles, and sickly fruit cordial. However,
there are also many other Western products - tomato sauce, seasonings,
chocolate bars, alcoholic drinks, popcorn, pasta, Nutella, processed cheese,
herbal tea - which are not a normal part of Pentecost life, but will
occasionally and randomly turn up in the most unlikely little stores. To eat a
varied and interesting diet here, you need to live like a hamster, searching
widely for tasty morsels and hoarding them when they are found.
(Alternatively, like Noel and Neil and some of the Peace Corps volunteers, you
can have your food supplies shipped to you by friends in town.) My long walk
provided me with a great opportunity to forage. I reached Bwatnapne earlier than expected (the return journey being
predominantly downhill), and went to see Ian, who was having a peaceful
afternoon in his hut by the beach, waiting for local farmers to come and
arrange meetings with him. Subsistence farming is the mainstay of rural
Vanuatu's economy, yet the government knows little about what is actually
being grown in each area. As one of his community projects, Ian is helping to
gather this information. (Although 'subsistence farming' is the economists' term for what the villagers
do, most of them would refer to themselves as gardeners rather than farmers.
Their colourful fruit and vegetable plots, often located on unlikely patches
of land high up mountains and containing a copious jumble of useful plants -
some of them probably wild - are not farms in the sense of organised
mass-production. From a distance, some of the gardens are barely
distinguishable from the surrounding jungle. In this diverse growing
environment, crops thrive without the need for fertilisers or pesticides -
nobody on Pentecost has to worry about whether or not their produce is
'organic'. Such gardening is an inefficient but beautifully natural way to
feed a small population.) Continuing southwards from Bwatnapne, I plodded wearily back up into the
mountains, and reached the top of Melsisi Hill after sunset. Thousands of
large fruit bats were flying overhead in formation, silhouetted against the
twilight sky like figures from an Escher drawing. The bats must have a roost
somewhere on the other side of the hill. Descending into Melsisi was like landing in an aeroplane at night. From high
up I could see only the rooftops of houses, silhouetted by the pools of
electric light that spilled around them. As they became closer, and the angle
became lower, details of the buildings zoomed into view, until quite suddenly
I had arrived amongst them. I turned up at Sara's door with cloves of garlic, which I knew she had
searched for around Melsisi without success. I'd tracked them down the
previous evening at a little kiosk in Nazareth. "Would you believe me if I told you I'd walked forty-five miles to get these?"
I said. Down at Mango (I wasn't sure if drinking kava would soothe tired muscles or
knock them out completely, but it was an experiment that needed to be tried),
the locals whistled in astonishment when I told them where I had been. Men from Pentecost couldn't have done that walk in two days, they told me. This was probably true, but not because the islanders are physically unfit:
most are as muscular as you would expect, given that they grow their own food
in gardens perched on mountainsides and build their own houses using materials
hacked from the jungle or hauled from the beach. Locals simply live life at a
more relaxed pace. If forced to make the northward journey on foot, rather
than waiting for a ship or a truck, they would have done it more slowly,
walking at a leisurely speed and taking more time to chat to the people in the
villages they passed, share food and kava, and make the acquaintance of
distant friends-of-friends. In some ways I wished that I had done the same. I spent the night at Sara's, where I slept so well that not even the piglets
outside the window disturbed me. "Were they even squealing?" I asked the next morning. Sara nodded sadly. Before returning to Ranwadi I did some final shopping, at Melsisi's early
Tuesday morning market, to which village women come down from their gardens in
the mountains to sell fresh fruit and vegetables from woven baskets. I stocked
up on chunky cooking bananas, an avocado, and some unidentified green things
that (according to Sara) make a good stir fry. Noel and Neil were only mildly surprised that I'd managed to walk to North
Pentecost, but very surprised that I'd managed to return with an avocado. "Those are out of season," they told me. Yet the avocado was fresh. It seemed so wonderfully typical of Pentecost: even the fruiting trees pay no
attention to time.
13th July
After a week of hard work at our respective schools, Sara and I wanted to go
away for the weekend, but had made no definite arrangements. The phrase "I'll
call you" comes easily to Brits and Americans, but in an area where each
telephone is typically shared by several hundred people, it's easier said than
done. By Friday afternoon, neither of us had managed to get through despite
several attempts, and I had concluded that it would be easier simply to walk
the three miles to Melsisi and talk in person than to continue trying to
phone. I therefore threw some things in a bag, unsure of whether I was leaving
for three hours or three days, and set off. Sara was expecting me. We arranged to hike the next day to Bwatnapne, a few
miles further up the coast, and spend the weekend there with Ian, another
Peace Corps volunteer (whom we managed to contact after a mere three attempted
phone calls). That evening, while Sara caught up with some marking and her
students watched the Chronicles of Narnia (with French subtitles) on her
laptop computer, I paid a visit to the College kava bar. Several teachers were
there, relaxing after a week's work, and the bucket of kava was soon emptied.
When it was announced that the kava was "finish", I was led in the direction
of 'Mango', one of Melsisi's top night spots, to continue the night's
drinking. Mango was a tin-roofed shack under a giant mango tree. In the centre, a man
crouched on the earth floor mashing up kava roots with his bare hands in big
tin bowls, then straining the liquid through old sacks. Other men in various
states of relaxation sat on bamboo benches around the little square building,
smoking and passing round kava in plastic bottles. At a small bar at one end,
a barman sat with a plastic bucket of the brownish-grey juice, filling up
bottles and dishing out half coconut shells of the stuff for 30 vatu
(£0.15/$0.25) each. After downing his 'shell', each customer rinsed it himself
in a bowl of dirty water before returning it to the barman. Despite its grimy appearance, Mango was a friendly little establishment, and I
spent a happy hour or two there choking down the drinks while 'storying' with
some of the locals. Unlike the villagers living near Ranwadi, the people at
Melsisi dont encounter white men very often, and they were curious to find
out where I was from and how my country compares with their own. I get asked this a lot, and it's difficult to give a sensitive answer. There's
no point in pretending that Britain isn't a better country in some respects.
People on Pentecost are well aware that rich foreigners enjoy many luxuries
that are scarce here (though I sometimes wonder if the islanders realise just
how much they miss out on). And it's not just a matter of luxuries: I know
nobody in Britain who lives with chronic malaria, or whose limbs are scarred
by parasite infections and accidents with gardening knives, or who dropped out
of school at the age of eleven because their parents couldn't afford to keep
them in education. Yet I can also point out, quite truthfully, that in many ways Vanuatu is a
nicer place to live. The climate is less unpleasant, the scenery is more
beautiful, the pace of life is more relaxed, and above all the atmosphere is
much friendlier. People in Vanuatu who find themselves homeless and unemployed
aren't forced to shiver in the streets while begging money from unsympathetic
strangers; they can return to their families and their home villages and live
off the land. Living space and natural resources remain plentiful here, and
peace and contentment are a natural consequence of that. According to a recent survey entitled the 'Happy Planet Index', which sought
to measure the quality of life in each country in proportion to the natural
resources that the country consumes, Vanuatu is the officially the happiest
country on Earth. (When this statistic was announced, someone at Ranwadi
proudly wrote "Vanuatu is nambawan [number one]" on the staffroom notice
board.) When the locals ask my own opinion of Vanuatu, I always conclude by pointing
out that this is my third visit. If I hadn't liked the place, I would never
have come back. - - - There are occasions, of course, when I wish I had got a 9 to 5 job and stayed
in Edinburgh. Lying awake in Sara's spare room at 4 o'clock the next morning
was one of those occasions. A chilly wind was blowing down the mountainside,
whipping up such a cacophony of noise that no amount of sedative kava could
have got me to sleep. The outhouse door was squealing on its hinges, curtains
were flapping heavily in the draught, the branches of the trees were grinding
against one another, and objects outside were banging and clattering as if
possessed by devils. The animals living around Melsisi College couldn't sleep
either: mawing bullocks and squeaking piglets added their voices to the din.
("The piglets are a new addition," Sara told me glumly.) Unsurprisingly, we were both up early the next morning, and soon after dawn we
set off for Bwatnapne. Although Melsisi and Bwatnapne are both on the coast,
the gritty road between them climbs steeply over a mountainous headland. From
Melsisi, we walked relentlessly uphill for thirty minutes before the road
levelled out (Sara, a keen sportswoman, timed our ascent). Fortunately, the
sun had yet to break through the morning mist, and cool winds circling down
the mountain blew the sweat away. For the next hour or two, the road undulated
gently along the backbone of the island, past small villages and gardens, then
began its staggered descent into Bwatnapne. Bwatnapne has a lovely, sleepy feel to it. A river trickles out of a forested
valley and meets the ocean in a sun-filled bay, tinted with sand and coral and
bounded at either end by steep green headlands. Spread out amongst the trees
and meadows by the waterfront are rustic houses and a small school. We found Ian playing Frisbee with some of the local children. Although he
works closely with the school, Ian is not a teacher: he is employed by Peace
Corps as a 'reacher', helping the villagers to organise community projects.
His house was full of hand-woven baskets, which he helps the local women to
sell in order to raise money for paying their children's school fees. There
could be a great market for those baskets, he believes, among young Westerners
looking for an environmentally-friendly alternative to plastic shopping bags.
I agreed, and bought a couple. Ian lives on a quiet strip of land between the beach and a dried-up pandanus
swamp at the mouth of the river, in a beautiful house built entirely of local
materials. The roof is palm thatch with bamboo rafters, the walls and much of
the furniture are made of woven pandanus leaves held in place by wooden beams,
and the floor is shingled with coral. The toilet is a concrete shack in the
swamp behind the house, and his bathroom is the river. His drinking water is
collected from a nearby spring. He has a small cooker in the house, but the
gas bottle was empty, and in a simple, relaxed place like Bwatnapne there had
been no hurry to get it refilled. We cooked lunch - rice and eggs - on an open
fire, burning driftwood collected from the riverbank. A flood recently swept through the house, Ian told us, but apart from
depositing a layer of mud on the floor it did little damage. Most of his
possessions were on high shelves or dangling in bags from the rafters of the
ceiling. We spent the afternoon snorkelling on the reef, swimming in a jungle pool up
the river, and playing volleyball with the schoolchildren. That evening, we
joined the children in a Saturday night singing and dancing session. It wasn't
an energetic dance, just small groups of people shuffling merrily on the spot
to the rhythm of a string band: a typically laid-back Bwatnapne scene. We spent the night at Ian's house, with Sara and I sleeping on hard
pandanus-leaf mattresses, while Ian dangled in a hammock. Through gaps in the
woven walls I could see the stars. The next day, we hiked back to Melsisi, via the huge concrete cross that
crowns the top of Melsisi Hill. Some village children helped us find the way
to the summit: a difficult path overgrown with reeds and grasses, some of them
taller than us, which slashed to and fro in the wind. The view from the top
was spectacular, though, with the coastline of south-western Pentecost
spreading below us in thick shades of green and blue, and the white cross
piercing a cloudless heaven. Colourful shrubs and bushes were growing around
it. Sara picked the highest flower on the mountain - a lush pink hibiscus - and
stuck it in her hair. Back down at Melsisi, the French-influenced community was preparing excitedly
for the next day's World Cup final: France versus Italy. The place was filling
up with football fans from neighbouring villages, tricouleur flags were flying
from the buildings, and a celebratory feast was being prepared. A bullock had
been killed for the occasion; we saw its severed head lying on the ground by
the college. After a few shells of kava at Mango that evening, I returned to Ranwadi, where
I got up at 5 a.m. the next morning to watch the football match. Most of the
students began with support for France, but switched sides when it became
clear that Italy were in the stronger position (after French star Zidane was
sent off for head-butting an Italian player). The school dining hall erupted
with cheers when Italy eventually won the match. Down at Vanwoki that evening, there was much discussion of the game. Most of
it was in the local language, but it was obvious what the men were talking
about: the words "Italy" and "Franis" (France) came up many times. Agasten,
the school sports master, won a chicken from one of the villagers after
correctly betting on the Italian team. Back at Melsisi, the locals hastily switched from enthusiastically supporting
France to enthusiastically supporting Italy, and the celebrations went ahead
as planned. Sara, incredulous, later showed me photos of people parading
through the village with French flags that had been converted into Italian
ones! - - - At a surprise staff meeting on Monday morning, after the World Cup excitement
was over, it was announced that it was 'Prayer Week' at Ranwadi. In addition
to normal morning and evening devotions in the chapel, teachers would be
leading their students in prayer for an hour every day - five minutes in each
lesson, plus fifteen minutes after school. I left the meeting and walked down
to the science lab, to find the Year 11 Physics class already waiting for me,
expecting their prayer session to begin. (Staff meetings here often overrun
casually into lesson time.) Having been brought up an atheist (a fact that I
couldn't admit openly in a Churches of Christ school), being asked to lead
five minutes of prayer without any preparation was a serious challenge. It
isn't hard to come up with a few sentences of thanks to God, but five minutes
is a long time. Since I was addressing a Physics class, I began by looking out of the window
and commenting on how perfectly the physical laws of the world operate, with
one of the millions of leaves and branches and stones outside obeying the laws
of gravity, momentum, and so on, without the slightest deviation. We should be
thankful for the fact that the world was created in such perfect way, I told
the students: our existence depends on it. It was a reasonable piece of science, but it wasn't much of a prayer. If I'd
had the sense to deliver it in English, which the students only half
understand, I might have looked quite professional. However, since I chose to
use Bislama - the language in which prayers are normally said here - it was
embarrassingly obvious to the students that I was improvising desperately. I
closed with a sentence or two of mumbled thanks to God and an "Amen", and
hastily got on with the lesson. After the Physics class, I sat in the staffroom thumbing through an old Bible
in search of inspiration. The teacher organising Prayer Week had given out a
sheet of Bible references to guide us, but they weren't much help. The
passages quoted had a lot to say about the almightiness of God, but contained
little practical advice on how to fill an hour a day with suitable praise.
Fortunately I had a couple of hours to prepare something - or at least I
thought I did, until a Year 9 student appeared at the staffroom window. "Mr Andrew, we have Maths now?" "Maths isn't until period 7 this afternoon," I said. "No, they change timetable. Maths this period." I walked over to the school timetable - two big sheets of paper on the desk in
the middle of the staffroom, filled in with pencil and scarred by constant
corrections - and found that the student was right: somebody had changed the
timetable without telling me. I rushed down to the classroom. Half of the
students had wandered off to the dormitories; the rest were sitting peacefully
at their desks. The fact that their teacher had missed the first half of the
lesson didn't bother or surprise them - such things happen regularly at
Ranwadi. The students would be shocked, however, if I failed to deliver the
expected five minutes of prayer. For want of anything better to say, I continued my previous theme of how
perfectly and intricately the world was created. I plucked a leaf from the
bushes outside the classroom window and tried to impress upon the students
what a marvel of design it was, with its delicately layered tissues, its fine
networks of veins, its well-formed cells and the complex arrangements of
molecules inside the cells. This leaf, I pointed out, was just one of the
billions of wonderful creations that our world is endowed with. I explained
William Paley's famous argument that such beautiful design implies that the
world was created by a supreme being with a divine purpose. As a biologist who
believes passionately in evolution, I was appalled at what I found myself
saying, but the five minutes needed to be filled, and since I was preaching to
the converted I decided that there was no harm in it. I thanked God for his
creations (in English this time), then told the students to get on with their
Maths. - - - The next day, I was better prepared. My prayers could be educational, I
decided. I walked into the Maths classroom and drew a simplified
representation of Pentecost Island on the blackboard - a triangular prism 62
kilometres long, 10 kilometres wide, and 800 metres high at its peak. I helped
the students calculate the island's volume: an impressive 248 billion cubic
metres. The pile of sand the students deposited at Vanwoki last week probably had a
volume of only two or three cubic metres, I told the students. If it took the
entire school a large part of the afternoon to carry that two or three cubic
metres of sand up from the beach, imagine what supreme power it would take to
shift 248 billion cubic metres. And Pentecost is just one island, I pointed out. Think of the mightiness of a
Creator who could assemble every island on the Earth - some of them much
larger than this one - and every planet in the Universe. Of course, God didn't create Pentecost by hauling sand up from the beach, I
said. The island was created by volcanic eruptions and movements of the Earth.
But what great power could have caused those volcanoes and earth movements? I left the question unanswered. - - - "I've gone sixty-five years without praying," Noel told his own classes
bluntly, "and I don't intend to start now." The students, horrified, went away praying for Mr Noel's soul. - - - The prayer sessions became easier after I discovered that the students would
happily sing hymns if asked to. I didn't even need to tell them which hymn to
sing. One or two student would spontaneously begin humming melodies, some of
which fizzled out, but after a few seconds one would catch like fire and
spread across the room until the whole class was engaged in a rousing chorus.
For the first five minutes of each lesson, I could let the students sing their
prayers while I wrote notes the blackboard or handed out work. Several other teachers did the same, and at the start of every lesson,
peaceful singing could be heard drifting from the classrooms. - - - The Year 7 class finished their work on living things, and began a new topic:
magnetism. Unlike Western twelve-year-olds, most of them had never encountered
magnets before (few of their homes contain fridge magnets, or fridges for that
matter), and the students were fascinated by them. Using a pair of magnetic
haematite beads (a gift from Jeffrey Bowman), I demonstrated various tricks,
such as removing a paperclip from a beaker of water without getting my fingers
wet. I then handed out magnets (sadly, as with most pieces of science
equipment at Ranwadi, there weren't enough to go around and many barely
worked), and invited the class to go around the room testing what objects they
would stick to. Having established that magnets stick to certain things that are made of metal
(surprisingly, some students seemed unsure of what 'metal' was), I got out
some pieces of iron, copper, lead, tin, zinc and nickel, and asked the
students to test which kinds of metal were attracted by the magnets. As is
always the case when the Year 7s get enthusiastic, the lesson was
frighteningly noisy and chaotic, but by the end they had all grasped the fact
that magnets stick to iron (and, to a lesser extent, nickel), but not to most
other materials. - - - The Year 11 Physics students were having a less exciting time learning the
laws that govern circular motion. I tried to think of real-life examples that
would illustrate the principles I was describing - rollercoaster rides, cars
skidding on icy bends, roundabouts, spin driers, country dancing - but
realised that none of these were things that people on Pentecost have any
experience of. In the end I settled for a simple practical demonstration
involving a lump of blu-tack being whirled on the end of a piece of string,
and I helped the students to calculate the speed of the object and the forces
it was experiencing. At one point the blu-tack broke away and flew across the
classroom at great speed, missing a student's head by inches. Fortunately, the
student was staring out of the window at the time and paying no attention to
the lesson, and he never noticed a thing. - - - A gigantic black moth the size of my hand has appeared in our house, and
spends its time sitting on the walls or the fly screens watching us silently. "Devil," said the students, upon seeing the creature. - - - On a shimmery blue Wednesday afternoon, while the students at Ranwadi were
playing sports, I walked back to Melsisi to post a couple of packages (having
made the useful discovery that the little bank there doubles as a post
office). Afterwards, I spent a couple of hours on the meadows by the sea,
sitting under a giant banyan tree growing out the ruins of Melsisi's old
mission hospital (which has since been moved to a site further up the hill
where it is less vulnerable during hurricanes and tsunamis). As I sat writing a letter, I was approached to some of Sara's Year 9 students.
They chatted to me happily for a while about football, churches, England,
America, and our respective schools, before the tone of the conversation
turned suddenly melancholy. "Time you teach, you kill'im boys?" one of them asked. "Kill" in Bislama typically means to strike, not to murder, but it was
nonetheless a shocking question. I assured them that I had never beaten my students. "'Long place here, ee got some teachers, who ee kill'im boys," the student
told me quietly. I already knew that there were a few teachers at Melsisi who beat the kids.
The Catholic 'sisters' there are said to be particularly vicious. It's good that you don't beat the students, the boy told me. Sara doesn't
either. I explained that in Britain and the USA, teachers almost never punish students
with violence: the consequences would be far too severe. "From way ee got law, 'long England or 'long America," the boy said. Vanuatu has laws against hitting children too, I pointed out. "People 'long place here, ee no respect'em law," the student said sadly. - - - That afternoon, the attention of Melsisi was focused on another law-breaker: a
man who had burned down the nakamal in a neighbouring village. There are no
police stations or courthouses in rural Vanuatu - the day-to-day job of
maintaining law and order is done by village chiefs - but magistrates
occasionally tour the islands and hold courts in places where particularly
serious crimes have been committed. One had come to Melsisi to hear the
arsonist's case. The evening, down at the kava bar under the mango tree, I met the magistrate:
a smart, educated man who wore dark trousers and a clean shirt, in contrast
with the locals in their well-worn T-shirts and shorts. Looking out of place
in the dingy little hut, he walked straight over to me (the only white man in
the room, and in fact the only white man anywhere within a couple of miles),
shook my hand, offered to buy me a drink, and talked to me in authoritative,
Anglicised Bislama. I asked about the court case. The arsonist never came to trial, the magistrate told me. On the day of his
hearing, he ran off into the bush, and has yet to be tracked down. Prison cells are among the many features of Western life that are lacking on
Pentecost.
5 July
Whilst classes at Ranwadi continue in their usual fairly casual way, outside
lessons the students have been hard at work. On Saturday they were sent up the
mountainside with their bush knives to cut a trail along the route of the
school's water pipe, so that the pipe can be accessed for maintenance. The
next day, I hiked up to see what the students had done. Some villagers showed
me the way to the water source - a clear jungle stream, surprisingly high up
the mountain - and I attempted to walk back down to the school along the route
of the pipeline. Unlike in Scotland, where the mountains are nakedly exposed, on Pentecost the
sharpness of the landscape is covered beneath a blanket of greenery. It is
only when you attempt to climb the mountains, clambering beneath the blanket,
that you appreciate just how steep and intricate the terrain is. After an hour
or so of scrambling along the path of the pipeline as it arced sideways across
near-vertical slopes, scrabbling in the loose dirt and praying that the trees
and vines below would catch me if I fell, I have the utmost respect for the
students who cleared that trail. The black water pipe sweeps and bends
gracefully through the forests, indifferent to the obstacles around it. It is
surprisingly narrow, and leaks in so many places that it is amazing that any
water reaches the school. The following week, the students were once again sold as cheap labourers to
the local villagers. The school has already repaid the debt that it incurred
after the people of Vanwoki helped to pay for the new electricity generator,
but it is now fundraising for a new purpose: to raise the money necessary to
send students to the PISSA Games. This year the games will be held on Ambae
Island, and the cost of shipping the participating students there and
providing them with food and accommodation for the week adds up to
approximately half a million vatu (£2,500). Even for a Western school, that
would be a sizeable sum. At Ranwadi it represents about one-twentieth of the
entire annual budget, and the school is anxious to raise money in whatever way
it can in order to cover the cost. Monday's job was to dig a ditch leading to Vanwoki from the school's microwave
telephone dish, so that a cable can be laid there and a village telephone can
be installed. Currently, the villagers have to come to Ranwadi in order to
make or receive calls, and small groups of them can frequently be seen hanging
around by the school's payphone. With their ragged clothes, and skin
prematurely creased and scarred by a tough outdoor lifestyle, the villagers
are easily distinguished from the young, smartly-dressed students. On Tuesday, there was work to be done 'carrying beach' up to a building site
in Vanwoki, where yet more sand was required. The village's two white-bearded
chiefs sat happily on a pile of coral watching their hired helpers come and go
with buckets and baskets. They smiled upon seeing that I'd decided to join in
with the work. "You get plenty kava tonight," they said. You can always tell when the students at Ranwadi are annoyed with their
teachers: they hiss. Individually they do so quietly, but collectively they
can be quite loud. When it was announced in the dining hall that the students
would be put to work doing physical labour after classes, the hissing was
deafening. "This is a great opportunity for the students who are not in sports teams to
do their bit to help Ranwadi in the PISSA Games," the teacher on duty
announced, trying to put things positively. The students clearly didnt share his enthusiasm. - - - After a couple of shivery nights during which the temperature dropped to a
mere 18°C (64°F) - which is a lot colder than it sounds when you are sleeping
under just a thin cotton sheet - I found a moth-eaten old blanket ('rat-eaten'
might be a better description) and draped it over my bed. However, the weather
has since warmed up. The week has been calm and rainless, and on some days the
ocean was as flat as molten metal. At midday it reflected the sky so perfectly
that Pentecost Island appeared to be floating on nothing but blue air. After three weeks of drought, the grass around Ranwadi has begun to turn
yellow, and Neil has spent an increasing amount of time watering his vegetable
patch in the garden. Noel and Neil took advantage of the dry conditions to
repaint various rooms in the house. (I helped out it minor ways, but mostly
left them too it, partly because I am an inept painter and partly because the
whole job just didn't seem to me to be worth the hassle.) While our bathroom
was being repainted and out of action, the vegetable patch got extra watering. The fine weather came at the right time for my Year 7 Science class, who are
currently studying ecology. This topic provides plenty of opportunities for
fieldwork, which is an easy thing to organise at Ranwadi: the school is so
overgrown with exotic plants and infested with small animals that all I need
to do is usher the students out of the classroom door with instructions to go
and observe a particular aspect of nature. In the lesson on 'adaptation', I sent them outside to collect plants from the
lawns, and showed them the ways in which the species found there are adapted
to a lifetime of grazing and trampling. There were sensitive plants (which
have vicious thorns in addition to their unique folding leaves), small weeds
that could lie perfectly flat and inconspicuous, and the grass itself, whose
blades are much thicker and tougher than those of European grasses. In the lesson on 'food chains', I sent them outside to watch animals eating
and record what they ate. The students went about this in different ways: one
group of girls sat on a grassy bank peacefully observing a line of trees in
the hope of catching sight of animals there, another group of girls sat
outside a classroom inventing their observations (but doing it so
intelligently that I found it difficult to complain), and a group of boys
disappeared into the forest where they enthusiastically killed a lizard and
several insects and then speculated about what the creatures might have eaten
if alive. (I was alerted to what the boys were doing after noticing them hurl
stones into a tree, trying to knock some hapless critter off its perch, and I
made my instructions more specific: "observe what animals eat AND DON'T KILL
THEM". After this several of the boys lost interest.) In all three groups, "human --> mosquito" was the most common food chain
observed.
3rd July
A few years ago, a young American entrepreneur named Jeffrey Bowman was
introduced by a friend from the South Pacific to a drink named kava. Despite
its foul taste, he immediately saw the potential market his home country for a
substance which has the relaxing effect of marijuana and can be drunk socially
like alcohol but is legal at any age. He began importing kava products to sell
by mail order (www.nakamalathome.com), and in 2002, he successfully opened up
the United States' first kava bar. Realising that his American customers wouldnt tolerate the gritty texture and
nauseating side-effects of poor-quality powdered kava, Jeffrey arranged to
have supplies of fresh kava roots transported by air to the United States, and
sourced them from the island reputed to produce the world's finest kava:
Pentecost. I came into contact with Jeffrey after he visited this web site, and upon
hearing that he and two of his associates were planning a trip to Pentecost, I
suggested that they should come and see Ranwadi. "That would be a fun side trip," Jeffrey mused. "Go see a guy I found on the
Internet because of his web site." And he came. Visitors to Ranwadi have a tendency to be used as teachers, and Jeffrey and
his colleagues were no exception. They arrived early on a Thursday afternoon,
and found themselves an hour later in front of the Deputy Principal's
Agriculture class, explaining the economics of the kava industry. Next, they
were the guest speakers in the Principal's Social Science lesson. Fortunately,
they relished the chance to share their experiences with the students. "That's what we're here for, to help people out and talk to them about kava,"
they said. After a bracing swim beneath the waterfall (and a debate about how its height
compared with that of Niagara Falls), it was time for the serious business of
kava-drinking. Many local villagers were keen to meet the Americans, and after
some potent kava at Vanwoki (the quality of the local product met with
Jeffrey's approval), our party shakily moved on to Waterfall Village. A cargo
ship happened to be on its way that evening, and at Waterfall the large
nakamal beside the shore was full of people who had gathered to drink kava and
relax on palm-leaf mattresses while awaiting the ship. Standing in the centre of the nakamal in khaki jungle clothes and a
wide-brimmed hat, surrounded by natives crouching on the dirt floor in the
lamplight, Jeffrey Bowman looked the perfect picture of the white missionary.
His mission was an important one: the salvation of Vanuatu's kava industry. "I've come here to tell the truth to the people of Vanuatu," he said, in
careful English which was later translated into Bislama by one of his
associates. The truth, as Jeffrey Bowman sees it, is that the kava industry is
not thriving as much as people think. In fact, it is in danger of collapse.
Bolstered by recent increases in kava exports, the Vanuatu Commodities
Marketing Board (VCMB), which regulates Vanuatu's agricultural exports and
sets recommended prices, has increased the price of kava steeply. Too steeply.
There have been other expensive problems too: thefts of kava and money by
traders in Port Vila, irascible behaviour by the Vanuatu authorities, and the
increasing cost of shipping due to rising fuel prices. All of this means that
Jeffrey and his colleagues can no longer supply Americans with kava products
at a price they are willing to pay. "If the price of kava does not come down, I will have to close my business at
the end of the year," Jeffrey told the assembled audience. And his company is
not the only one being hurt by the high prices, he claimed. Other foreign
importers have already started to stop buying kava, because the business is
simply not viable at the prices currently being charged. Rationally, kava
sellers and the VCMB should have responded by lowering the price to a
realistic level, but many people in Vanuatu have a woefully limited
understanding of economic principles. (Having once tried to teach Economics at
Ranwadi, I can testify to this myself.) By the time they realise the problem
that exists, it may be too late. "I am the main kava importer in the United States," Jeffrey told the
villagers. And the United States is one of the biggest potential markets for
the stuff, especially now that many other countries (including the UK) have
banned or restricted kava imports because of fears over the drink's impact on
health. Recent research suggests that these fears were unfounded, but the
restrictions remain in place. ("Heck, I've drunk so much kava in the past five
years, if it was dangerous I'd be dead by now," Jeffrey assured me.) Jeffrey also gave the villagers some much-needed advice on which variety of
kava to plant. There is only one kind that foreign customers like to drink,
Jeffrey explained, yet some people in Vanuatu continue to grow undesirable
varieties - including the notorious 'two-day kava' - in the hope of selling
them for export. The fact that there is little demand for a variety of drink
that leaves consumers feeling groggy for two days afterwards shouldn't have
come as a surprise. Jeffrey has a personal interest in getting his message across, of course: his
company is losing money. Yet he also seems to care quite deeply about the
islanders' welfare. People in Vanuatu have been kind and friendly to him
("there aren't many countries in the world that are still like this," he told
me sadly), and Jeffrey, in turn, has treated them with generosity. He bought a
$10,000 boat for the villagers in South Pentecost who supply him with kava,
and he and his associates showed their gratitude for the brief hospitality
they received at Ranwadi by leaving behind a bag full of educational supplies. The villagers thanked Jeffrey for his advice. The next morning, he and his
colleagues set off for Port Vila, determined to talk to senior figures there
about the kava industry's problems. One advantage of doing business in a tiny
republic like Vanuatu is that it is often possible for relatively ordinary
people to deal directly with those who are running the country. I hope they
listen. - - - The strangest moment of my evening with the Americans came when a villager at
Vanwoki walked into the nakamal with a dead kingfisher, which he placed on the
floor for everyone to admire. Fascinated yet saddened at the sight of the iridescent little corpse, I asked
where it had come from. "One boy ee stone'm, 'long bush, close-up 'long place here," the villager told
me excitedly. It didn't look as if anyone was planning to eat the poor bird, and I decided
not to ask why it had been stoned. I suspected there wasn't a reason. - - - Exotic wildlife is not the only thing at which the locals throw stones. One
villager recently attempted to use the same method to deal with a hungry
student from Ranwadi who was stealing fruit from his trees. Fortunately, on
that occasion the stone missed. - - - Saturday morning dawned beautiful and blue. I walked up the coast to Melsisi,
with the curved silhouette of Ambae Island - famously shaped like an upturned
boat - drifting on the horizon. It was that silhouette that inspired James
Michener, who had a similar view of Ambae from his wartime base on Santo
Island, to invent the legendary paradise of Bali Ha'i. I must visit it
sometime. At Melsisi, Sara the Peace Corps girl (whose name I misspelled in an earlier
blog entry) stood at the door with brightly-painted toenails. Ordinarily I
don't notice such things, but this was the first time in a month that I'd seen
anybody with make-up. "The students wanted to use the coloured nail polish I brought with me," she
explained. "First the girls and I did it, and then the boys joined in." She
lowered her voice to a whisper. "Some of the boys even wanted their nails
painted bright pink!" Our plan that morning was to hike up the river that flows out of Melsisi
Gorge. Rumour had it that there was a dramatic waterfall higher up the gorge,
although neither Sara nor I had ever been able to confirm this, since the
available maps are vague and the landscape is screened by walls of jungle. The
steep green forest growing up the sides of the gorge is impenetrable, but we
could hike up the cascades and pools of the river itself, by a strenuous
combination of walking, swimming, scrambling, climbing and jumping. I'd tried
this last year with Rachel, a former GAP volunteer, but we had abandoned it
before encountering any waterfall. This time it was slightly easier. It hasn't
rained in a fortnight, and the river level was low. In some places, the river
flattened out into sunny pools across where wading was easy. In other places,
however, giant boulders funnelled the river into a sluicing torrent against
which we had to brace ourselves with all four limbs as we ascended. As we progressed up the river, the sides of the gorge became steeper and the
forest became deeper. Up ahead, through the trees and vines and beyond a stand
of giant bamboo, a spectacular sight emerged. The river sloshed out of a chasm of dripping grey limestone, layered and
buttressed like the walls of a cathedral. These walls of rock rose vertically
out of pool of a deep, mineral-blue water. White spray showered down the sides
of the chasm, and tumbled into the far end in a white torrent. The legend was true: there is a waterfall up Melsisi River. With its ceiling of overhanging leaves and branches, the place was like a
secret cavern. It was beautiful, and on that shady morning in the seclusion of
the gorge, it was ours. It is hard to describe just how happy it felt to be in the South Pacific at
that moment. We dived in and swam, flexing young muscles against the current. We got about
two-thirds of the way up the pool before the torrent became too powerful, and
it took all of our strength simply to remain stationary in the water. After a
brief struggle we submitted to the force of nature, and let the flow carry us
back downstream. We could go no further up the river, but we were keen to see what other sights
the mountains might hold. After scrambling back down the gorge we decided to
explore in a different direction, up one of the little footpaths that wound up
the hillside overlooking the gorge. We came across a group of villagers
resting in the sunshine. "Me-two-fella ee walkabout, no more," Sara explained cheerfully, when asked
where we were going. We were just exploring. "Ee good," they said, and waved us on our way. It was a perfect day for a hike. The sun streamed down the valley, but with
cool breezes and with our clothes still damp from the river, we scarcely felt
the heat. The steep dirt paths, which could have been impassably slippery when
wet, were dry and firm. Looking upwards from Melsisi, you can see little but matted jungle. Yet what
we found high in the mountains were gardens. There were mango and breadfruit trees, bananas and pineapples, papayas and
oranges, cassava and coconuts. There were natangora palms for making thatch,
and bamboo canes for building. There were kava plants in abundance. In one
place a stream had been diverted sideways across a hillside, to create an
enormous artificial swamp in which a water-loving variety of taro was being
grown. Further on, we found ourselves walking in groves of low trees with
yellow pods dangling from them. It took me a while to recognise what they
were. "Cocoa!" The thought of chocolate completed the sense of luxuriance. We had yet to reach the tops of the mountains, and we continued upwards.
However, beyond the gardens the paths became indistinct and hard to follow. We
passed a stone wall, deeply overgrown, and left the gardens behind. The
foliage became denser, and we found ourselves in a gnarly old forest. The sun
faded, the air chilled, and brown tree trunks began to close in. We stopped. A whistling sound came from between the trees. Sara imitated it, and it
whistled again in response. It was probably a bird. But there was something
unnerving about that whistle. "They're watching us," said Sara, in a half-joking, half-sinister tone of
voice. There are many places on Pentecost that are believed to be haunted by spirits.
Such places are 'taboo' - a word that occurs in almost every Pacific language,
and means both 'sacred' and 'forbidden'. In some cases it is believed that the
spirits will bring evil and death to whoever trespasses there. Traditionally,
the local people might have appeased the spirits by killing the transgressor
themselves, and even today, the penalties for breaking taboos are severe. "The villagers would have warned us if there was anywhere up here that was
taboo, wouldn't they?" I wondered out loud. But we knew that we had probably
wandered further than the villagers intended. "It feels like a horror movie, doesn't it?" Sara whispered, scanning the
trees. "The Blair Witch Project?" I suggested. Needless to say, we turned back hurriedly. Our fears soon disappeared as we
emerged into the sunny gardens and wound our way down the mountain. At the spot where we had spoken to the villagers earlier, two smiling children
were waiting with a huge stick of sugar cane, which they presented to us.
Small children in rural Vanuatu rarely speak anything other than the native
language, in which I'd forgotten the word for "thank you", but we did our best
to communicate our gratitude. Back at Melsisi College, after cooking lunch and then washing the dishes in
the tin-roofed shack behind Sara's house (using water fetched from a communal
tap, since the house has no running water), we played basketball with some of
the students. Sara has been busy coaching a team of girls for the forthcoming
PISSA games (an inter-school sports competition that some schools take far
more seriously than any academic league table), and I joined a team of boys to
play against them. "Hello, Mr Andrew!" said one of the boys. It was Fabrice, one of my Year 11
Physics students from Ranwadi, who had come to Melsisi for the weekend to
visit relatives. Fabrice was an excellent player, and acted as coach for our
improvised team, which included giving some tips to the person who needed them
most: me. It was embarrassingly obvious that I hadn't touched a basketball for
a long time, and I doubt that Sara, Fabrice or the students of Melsisi College
have ever seen a 6 ft 4 guy get so utterly outplayed at basketball by a group
of thirteen year-old girls three-quarters of his height. (I later commented to Noel and the Principal about how impressed I had been
with Fabrice's basketball skills and with his attempts to coach the younger
boys at Melsisi. My attempt to praise the poor guy backfired. "What was he coaching them for?" asked Noel. "They're our opposition at the
PISSA games. Who gave him permission to be out of school anyway?") In the cool of the late afternoon, we played for a long time. By the time the
basketball was over, the light was seeping from the sky, and green shadows
were rising up the mountainsides overlooking the sports fields. After the sun had set, it was time to finish off a perfect Pentecost day with
a few shells of kava. Unlike at Ranwadi (whose parent organisation, the
Churches of Christ, officially disapproves of kava-drinking), the teachers at
Melsisi College are avid drinkers, and the school even has its own kava bar.
Most of Melsisi College consists of concrete buildings with electric lights,
but kava is best enjoyed in traditional surroundings, and the kava bar was a
simple wooden hut illuminated only by a dim bluish light bulb. I introduced
myself as a fellow teacher, and over a couple drinks I chatted to my
Francophone counterparts (who, fortunately, were speaking in Bislama and not
French) about school and about football. Melsisi was filling up with local villagers who had come to watch the World
Cup quarter-finals early the following morning on the college's television.
One of the men at the bar had come from a village en route between Melsisi and
Ranwadi, and suggested that I should leave early and drop in at the nakamal in
his village for some more kava on my way home. This seemed like a good idea -
the three-mile walk back from Melsisi might have been a challenge after a full
evening's kava-drinking - so I said goodnight and departed. Nowhere between Melsisi and Ranwadi has electric lighting, but under the
moonlight the white wheel-ruts of the road were easy to follow, and I scarcely
needed my torch. Back home in Britain, a long walk at night would be cold and
menacing, but there is something wonderful about tropical nights. Insects
hummed peacefully in the dark, and beyond a bank of trees I could hear the
splashing of the ocean. Overhead, fruit bats swept the night sky, and stars
twinkled between the fingers of palm fronds. Occasionally the serenity would be interrupted by parties of football-loving
villagers en route to Melsisi, who loudly wished me goodnight as they passed. Halfway along the road, I reached the promised nakamal, and was welcomed
inside. Stepping into the yellow lamp-light, I felt like a medieval traveller
arriving at an inn after a tiring journey. After drinking kava and 'storying'
with the locals for a while, I returned to the road, and reached Ranwadi
before lights-out. After the evening's kava drinking, I was surprisingly wide awake at 2 a.m. the
next morning, when I got up to watch England's quarter-final clash against
Portugal. At Ranwadi, the boys' disappointment at seeing England lose was
nothing compared with the anguish of the girls when Brazil, too, dropped out
of the World Cup. Ronaldinho and his team-mates had attracted quite a
following. It took a while for the implications of the morning's result to
sink in. "We'll get to watch Brazil play again, though?" the girls asked. "No. They lost." "But why?" they asked, bereaved. The idea that their Brazilian heroes might be capable of losing a football
match was almost too much for them to comprehend.
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