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25 August
For the first time in over a month, a relatively uninterrupted week of
teaching went by at Ranwadi. There were a few minor disruptions - the
Principal went to visit a school in the Banks Islands in the north of Vanuatu
and was trapped there by an out-of-season hurricane, and a group of students
from the south Pentecost went away to pay tribute to a local man who had just
died as a result of injuries sustained during 'land diving' (the local
tradition that inspired bungee jumping). However, for most people at Ranwadi
it was a solid, wholesome week of education, and I had the unusual experience
of walking into classrooms and finding students behind nearly every desk. The next week was a different story. Classes were cancelled on Monday;
instead, the students and teachers spent the day preparing a big feast, partly
to celebrate Children's Day (which should have been celebrated a month ago,
but was postponed by the school in a rare effort to minimise disruption), and
partly to honour the sporting students who had recently returned from the
PISSA Games (in which Ranwadi came a close second). The dining hall was decorated for the occasion using the prettiest and
cheapest materials available - leaves and flowers from the bushes outside -
and by the evening the room looked more like a jungle than the jungle itself
did. The celebration was carried out in the usual Vanuatu way: long speeches
were made, a string band played, God was dutifully praised, and the weary
partygoers finally dug into the food. The students and teachers preparing the
feast had worked hard: a bullock had been slaughtered and hacked into ten
thousand pieces to make delicious stews, several chickens had gone into the
cooking pot, mountains of rice and taro had been boiled, a literal truckload
of lettuces had arrived from some distant garden, and a giant Children's Day
cake had been baked. All had been spread out on a green tablecloth of palm
leaves, decorated with candles burning in green candle-holders made from
pieces of papaya. (Since I loathe papaya - a fruit whose one merit is that it
tastes more-or-less the same when mouldy as when fresh - I was delighted to
see that someone had found a use for the stuff that didn't involve eating it.) The gap volunteers and I, who know little about how to cook island-style (and
aren't very good cooks even in our home countries) had been assigned the
infallibly-simple task of preparing juice to accompany the food. Six litres of
the sickly fruit cordial were taken from the school shop and diluted in clean
plastic dustbins, before being served from the tin kettles that the students
normally use at breakfast. Ranwadi College is very good at making use of the
limited equipment available. It was now the final week of term, and after the party was over, the students
were stuck in a holiday mood from which nothing could rescue them. At a staff
meeting, at which we were told that classes would continue as normal until
Wednesday, I laughed and promised to give everyone in the room a free keyring
torch if all my students actually turned up to their Wednesday afternoon
lesson. My colleagues never got their torches. On Tuesday afternoon, a ship came past,
and some of the students packed to leave. The rest wandered merrily around the
school with no intention of going to their classes. (They couldn't entirely be
blamed for this, since several of their teachers had no intention of going to
classes either.) "What's going on?" I asked. "Are we on holiday now?" The Principal shrugged, and accepted the inevitable. Term-time was over. - - - Among the villagers the craze for "small-small torches" continues unabated.
Young men want them to show off to their friends, doting parents buy them for
their children, and elderly chiefs have been bulk-buying them to trade with
other villages. Since I'm the only person around here with the means or
know-how to shop on eBay (except for Sara at Melsisi, who has so far been too
busy flogging wind-up torches to branch out into the keyring torch business),
all these people have come knocking at my door. Being put in a situation in which I had utter control over the supply of a
scarce product, I was forced to play at being an economist (economics being
the science of how to distribute limited resources). I thought for a while
about how to handle the situation, and then posted a big notice in front of
the school announcing my decisions: "1. Price b'long one torch ee go on-top 'long 250 vatu. By-and-by me use'm
profit b'long pay'em new equipment b'long school." With demand vastly exceeding supply, I would do the economically-sensible
thing and raise the price. At the new price many customers still considered
the torches cheap, but even if the price hike didn't throttle the demand, it
would at least enable me to raise much-needed funds for the school. "2. One man ee savvy pay'em one or two torch no-more. Suppose all friend
b'long you ee want'em, all-ee must ask'em me one-one." It is a sad illustration of human greed that when people are told that an item
is in short supply and liable to run out, they respond not by ordering less
but by ordering more. Many had been requesting the torches in fives and tens.
To ensure that as few people as possible missed out, I resolved not to sell
more than two to any individual. If their friends and cousins all wanted
torches, they would have to come and see me individually. Both of these announcements were accepted by the locals with surprisingly few
complaints. Supply shortages are a continuous feature of life on Pentecost,
and people understood my position. They also seemed to appreciate the fact
that I was trying to be fair and to help the school rather than profiteering
from the situation. However, my third rule caused a lot of consternation in obvious quarters: "3. Me no sell'em torch 'long any student. You-fella ee got electric light
'long place here." Not only do the students have electric lights at Ranwadi, they also have far
better things to spend their limited pocket money on: nutritious food, new
schoolbooks, mosquito nets for their dormitories. Besides, I couldn't get
enough small torches for everyone at the school, and if I sold torches to some
students but not to others, the cries of unfairness would be unstoppable. Of course, trying to explain to teenagers that they ought to spend their money
on nutritious food or mosquito nets so that they don't get ill, rather than on
the latest fashionable accessory, was a futile task. Students came to me with
various inventive reasons why I should break my rule and sell them torches.
None were convincing, although out of sheer amusement I almost gave a torch to
the Year 9 girl who told me that she needed one because there were devils in
the girls' bathrooms. Unfortunately, the higher price and limited supply of the torches have only
increased people's desire to own one. I've seen photos of local chiefs wearing
curved boars' tusks (a highly-valued item in traditional Vanuatu society)
around their necks on pieces of string as symbols of their status; a few
villagers have now started wearing my torches in a similar style. - - - It isn't just my torches that I'm becoming known for on Pentecost. A colleague
returning from a trip to the north of the island told me that stories are now
going round there about a crazy, tall white guy who walked from Ranwadi to
Sara Airfield in a day. - - - With nothing that needed to be done at Ranwadi, I wandered up to Melsisi to
visit the bank, and ended up staying for a night and a day there. The bank
couldn't change my traveller's cheques at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, because
that involved phoning an office in Vila that was already closed. (There are no
computers at the Melsisi bank.) Come back at 8.30 the next morning, suggested
the bank teller. That was no problem; I had the rest of the week to spare. At the Collège de Melsisi, Sara was still busy teaching classes and showing
around her retired father, who had come to Vanuatu for a month's holiday. I
met the two of them on the sports field, where Sara was handing out World Cup
posters that her dad had brought (from Port Vila, not from the
soccer-oblivious USA) to delighted students. Later that evening, while Sara busied herself with grading her students for
their end-of-term reports, I took her father out for a drink. The man was
apprehensive about the idea of a visit to the kava bar, but agreed to have
half a shell of the narcotic drink. He downed his shell manfully, and stayed
for another. And another. "Wow, I can really feel my tongue and my lips going numb," he said. The locals may not have understood every word, but they picked up the key
ones, and laughed. More drinkers arrived and shook his hand, and more shells
of kava were offered. (Sara's father tried to pay for the drinks, but his
money was refused.) "I like this place," Sara's father told. "It looks like this is the spot to
hang out in the evenings." "Yeah, it's the local version of a pub," I said (adding, just in case, "Do you
have pubs in America?"). Sara's father began chatting to the other drinkers in that loud, flamboyant
way of which only Americans are capable - making no allowances, of course, for
the fact that the listeners might not be fluent in his language, yet somehow
being (mostly) understood. "Looking at Sara and Andrew, I think it's great," he said. "These two young
people dreamed about something the two of them wanted to do, and now they're
doing it together." Conscious that his words were open to misinterpretation, I offered a hasty
Bislama translation. Two or three of Sara's teaching colleagues arrived, and began conversations
with her father in fluent English. (I'd never realised that any of the
regulars at the kava bar could speak English - the locals schools are
Francophone - although it occurred to me that I had never actually *tried*
speaking English to them.) The other drinkers, as if in defiance at the use of the language, tried to
start a conversation with me in French. "Je parle seule un peu français!" I protested. I didn't 'comprend' a single word of the reply. "Me no hear'em savvy," I told them: I don't understand. We resumed talking
Bislama. "Him ee got how-much year?" one villager asked, pointing at Sara's dad. I
passed on the question. "I'm sixty-one," he responded. Whistles of surprise went around. It transpired
that he was the oldest person in the bar. Sara's dad looked surprised at being
regarded as such an old man, until I quietly pointed out to him what Vanuatu's
average life expectancy is: sixty-one. More shells of kava were poured, and Sara's dad accepted them
enthusiastically. By now he was becoming noticeably stoned. "These rocks on the floor are amazing," he told the barman, staring at the
floor (which was covered with ordinarily-looking shingle from the beach). Most visitors to Pentecost can only manage two or three shells of kava on
their first night out. I've developed a reasonable tolerance to the stuff, but
nonetheless I usually stop at five or six. Sara's dad kept on going. After a seventh shell, he eventually suggested that we should leave, not
because he'd had enough kava but merely because he was hungry. We staggered
back up the hill to Sara's house. She reacted in the same slightly-amused,
slightly-horrified way you'd expect from somebody seeing their
normally-respectable sixty-one year-old father high on marijuana-like drugs. We ate dinner cross-legged on the floor (Sara has no dining table) and Sara's
father went to bed, while I crashed on a mat. The next day, all three of us
were up at dawn feeling none the worse for wear. We went to the market to buy
vegetables, and I spent much of the morning trying to network the five
temperamental computers in the college office (some of which were configured
in French). The Collège de Melsisi is luxuriously equipped compared with
Ranwadi, where the staff have the use of just two ageing computers. I don't
know if I succeeded or not, because somebody switched off the electricity
generator just as we were testing the network. It was early afternoon by the time I walked back to Ranwadi. A few straggling
students were still wandering the college, but most had already left. The
holidays had definitely begun.
14 August
Last Friday morning, my Year 13 Biology students finally reassembled in the
science laboratory. Predictably, my advice that they needed to take work away
and do it while at the PISSA Games had been ignored. As a result that the
students now have five weeks' worth of work to cover in just a fortnight,
prior to a compulsory mid-semester test on a date set by the exam board. When
I pointed this out to the students, they reacted with their usual awkward,
half-comprehending silence. During the course of the week, I had managed to gather together the materials
for the week's practical session, an investigation of enzymes. However, I had
then received an e-mail from the exam board informing me that the practical
work on enzymes was not part of the course this year, even though it is
included in this year's edition of the Laboratory Manual from which we have
been working. I would have known that if I had been following the weekly Work
Plan for the semester, the course co-ordinator reminded me. I hadn't been following the Work Plan, firstly because my students had now
missed three weeks of the semester, which would have thrown any attempt to
follow the plan into disarray, and secondly because for the first couple of
weeks of the semester Ranwadi's copy of the Work Plan had been drifting
unclaimed on a ship somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. (The exam board in Fiji
had dispatched a set of Year 13 resources to the school at the start of the
semester, but nobody from Ranwadi had been down at the beach to collect the
package when it arrived on the weekly cargo ship, so the ship had taken it
away again.) When the box containing the documents finally reached Ranwadi, it
sat in the school office for a fortnight before the teacher to whom it was
addressed got around to opening it. I contemplated writing an irritated e-mail back to the course co-ordinator
explaining the difficulties of running a senior-level biology course on an
island like Pentecost, but realised it would achieve nothing apart from
highlighting the school's incompetence. Instead, I wearily turned the page in
my Laboratory Manual and prepared for the next practical session. This session was on the topic of leaves and photosynthesis, and fortunately
the materials were relatively easy to obtain. The grounds of Ranwadi College
are draped with exotic leaves in every size, shape and colour that a science
teacher could wish for. Among the cobwebby glass bottles in the laboratory I
found the solvents necessary for extracting chlorophyll from the leaves,
although none of the empty bottles or tubes into which we decanted the
powerful-smelling liquids had lids that fitted. "Just try not to breathe," I told the students. Fortunately, unshuttable and
half-broken windows ensured that the lab - like every other room in Ranwadi -
was well-ventilated. For peeling layers off the leaf surfaces so that they could be examined under
a microscope, I already had a bottle of nail polish. This is the kind of
product that doesn't turn up often on Pentecost, so when I'd spied a bottle in
the village store at Ranmawot, I'd bought it, knowing that it would be useful
sooner or later in the science lab. The girls in the class were quick to spot
that the pale blue colour of the nail polish matched their school uniforms,
and were thrilled when I gave them permission to paint their nails while
waiting for the polish on the leaves to dry. Vanuatu's teenagers don't get to
play with make-up very often. The theory work involved in this section of the course, which the students now
have to cram in preparation for their mid-semester test, was less thrilling.
The chemical reactions of photosynthesis, which the students were expected to
learn, constitute one of the gnarliest and most difficult topics in all of
biology. (I run over it in my head on occasions when I desperately need to
distract my mind: the thought of ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate being converted
into 3-phosphoglyeric acid which is in turn converted into
glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate, and so on and so on, has kept me from crying at
funerals and from thinking about what's lurking in the bushes when walking
alone at night.) The Year 13 course, working from a university-level textbook,
covers the material in terrifying depth. Even with the help of diagrams,
passages like this make you lose the will to study biology
"Both photosystems absorb light energy, and excited electrons pass from the
reaction-centre chlorophylls (P680 and P700) to the primary electron
acceptors. In turn, each primary acceptor is oxidised as it donates
high-energy electrons to the first electron carrier of an electron transport
chain." [From "Biology: Concepts and Connections", 4th Edition, by Campbell, Reece,
Mitchell & Taylor.] Now, to appreciate the difficulties faced by the students at Ranwadi - for
whom English is very much a foreign language - try understanding the next
couple of sentences, which I've half-translated into Bislama
"Ee got more redox reaction way ee shift-shift'em all electron ee come long
one molecule b'long carry'em electron ee go 'long 'nother-one. 'Long every
place 'long cascade, one electron ee lose'm small power, more some power
b'long him ee go ee stop small time 'long all ATP molecule or 'long all NADH
molecule." I spent an afternoon preparing a handout for the students in which I attempted
to summarise the most important aspects of the process in a form that I hoped
they would understand. My notes will probably only confuse them further. Photosynthesis is just one of the topics that the students have to get to
grips within the next two weeks. They must also understand plants' physiology,
growth, nutrient requirements, life cycles, reproductive processes and
hormones. In addition, they must remember what I tried to teach them a
fortnight ago about biochemistry, enzymes, cells, thermodynamics and
respiration. Of course, in all of these topics, it is assumed that the Year 13s will be
building on previous knowledge. Unfortunately, the information that students
cram into their heads in preparation for an exam escapes rapidly afterwards if
it is not continuously wedged in with further learning and practice. After
asking a few questions in class it was evident that the Year 13s, returning to
school after a succession of long holidays, had forgotten much of what they
previously learned about biology (if, indeed, they had ever learned it).
Recovering that knowledge will be a difficult task. - - - For the local couple whose pre-wedding parties I had been invited to the
previous week, Friday was the big day. After a service in Melsisi's splendid
Catholic church, the wedding guests made their way to the groom's village,
Ranmawot, where the lucky man had prepared a house for himself and his new
wife, and an enormous celebration had been organised to welcome the newlyweds.
The village was filling up with well-wishers: groups of people from north and
south were shuffling along the coast in the direction of Ranmawot, while
others were winding their way down from the mountains. Pick-up trucks made
their way back and forth along the sandy road, laden with partygoers, pigs and
ceremonial mats. I set off for Ranmawot after school, and along the road I caught up with the
villagers from Vanwoki who had invited me along. We arrived early and
'spelled' for a few minutes on a beach below the village, where large boulders
created natural seating and overhanging tree provided shade (and amusement for
the young boys, who attempted to knock the seed pods off the tree with
well-aimed stones). When the celebration was ready, we made our way up to the nakamal, where there
was much cheerful greeting and hand-shaking. Kava had been prepared in vast
quantities, and coconut shells of the narcotic liquid were being served out of
large dustbins. Later in the afternoon, when the bins had been drained, some
locals were sent to dig up more kava roots, and fresh gallons of the stuff
were prepared. (At a Western wedding party, I reflected, the hosts don't have
the option of going to pick, squeeze and ferment more grapes if the wine runs
low.) Pentecost is a small island, and nearly everybody at the large gathering found
a large number of friends and acquaintances there. I was the only foreigner in
their midst, but by now my name and face are fairly well known on Pentecost
(at least a dozen people came up to me to ask if I had any tiny torches left),
and I was accepted and welcomed as just another friend-of-a-friend. The majority of the party-goers spoke amongst themselves in Central Pentecost
Language (the same language spoken at Vanwoki and Melsisi), although a few
visitors from villages beyond Ranmawot spoke different vernaculars. (The area
around Ranmawot is a linguistic hotchpotch even by Vanuatu standards: no less
than four distinct native languages are spoken within an area of a few square
miles.) Conversations among people with different native languages, including
me, took place in Bislama. Ranmawot has an Anglophone primary school, and a reasonable number of the
villagers there must know at least the basics of English, but only one person
attempted to speak to me in the language: a bearded old gentleman who sat down
beside me in the nakamal and began asking the usual questions about where I
was from and what I was doing in Vanuatu. He paused for a second before each
phrase, translating it slowly in his head. To my shock, I found myself doing
the same. My thoughts were coming out in Bislama, and it took a conscious
effort to speak in my mother tongue! Pondering the psychological implications
of this, I pulled myself together, and after a few sentences my brain was once
again outputting in its normal language. When all of the guests had arrived, it was time for the marriage to be paid
for. Fourteen pigs - ranging from enormous, blubbery porkers to pointy little
piglets - had been lined up on the grass outside the nakamal, each one tied to
a stake by a rope looped around its front trotter. The pigs shuffled lazily in
their positions, some grunting and butting their neighbours jerkily, while
others grubbed up the grass. (If they had been creatures in a TV documentary
about extinct wildlife, I would have said that they were badly animated.) The
pigs were a gift from the groom to the bride's family. A local chief made a
short speech, the names of the lucky relatives who were to receive the animals
were read out, and each recipient walked over to collect and admire his new
pig. "Fourteen pigs - is that what a woman is worth here?" I wondered. However, the
giving of gifts went both ways. Next to the pigs was a row of ceremonial red
mats, which were given by the bride's family and distributed to relatives of
the groom. With this exchange of valuables - pigs in return for red mats - the
two families had cemented their new relationship. As darkness fell, there came a cacophony of deep, rumbling bangs: the sound of
rocks being flung against rock. It sounded unnerving like the noise made by a
volcanic eruption (such things come to mind easily in Vanuatu), and I looked
up fearfully. Fortunately, the banging noises merely heralded the start of
dinner. Forget white tablecloths and multi-tiered wedding cakes: the dinner here was
straight out of The Flintstones. Boulder-like lumps of taro, and
dinosaur-sized drumsticks from the five bullocks that had been slaughtered for
the occasion, had been slowly baked in pits over smouldering embers covered by
hot stones. Every village was assigned to its own pit. The banging noise came
from the cooking stones being flung aside as guests from each village gathered
hungrily around their pit to extract the food. No plates or cutlery were
necessary: all the guests had brought small baskets which they filled with
lumps of beef and taro, wrapped in banana-like laplap leaves. Having collected
their dinner, they found comfortable places to sit - under a tree, or on the
grassy bank behind the nakamal - and ate using their fingers. My own basket
was filled generously with food from the Vanwokians' pit, although like most
of the men, I saved it until after the kava-drinking had finished. (The effect
of kava, unlike that of alcohol, is worse if the drug is mixed with food.) After dinner a string band began to play, and many of the guests prepared to
'dance daylight' - party until dawn. Other said their goodbyes and began to
leave. It was a very pleasant, easy-going party. Nobody was rowdily drunk (except for
two isolated youths who had got hold of a bottle of Vanuatu rum and staggered
around being politely ignored by the rest of the guests), nobody was flashing
cameras (not wishing to be a gawking tourist, I'd left my own at the school),
and nobody was the least bit dressed up. As the evening wore on, a carpet of dried palm fronds was spread across the
dirt floor of the nakamal and soft woven mats were laid on top, so that tired
partygoers and those feeling the effects of the kava could lie down (and, if
they wished, sleep for the night). The mats were made in the traditional
Pentecost style, long and thin with hairy, tasselled edges. I finally
discovered the reason for this curious design: it allows a resting person to
fold the mat over himself like a sleeping bag, the tassels down the sides
meshing with one another to keep out the draught. I was tempted to spend the night there, but doubted I would get much sleep, so
I waited until moonrise and walked back to Ranwadi. Giant fruit bats were
sweeping back and forth across the silvered road. It was long after lights-out
when I returned to the school, but quite a few people were still awake,
standing outside chatting in the moonlight or sitting indoors with candles and
paraffin lanterns. I found the gappers seated around the dining table by lamplight, spooning
homemade bread-and-butter pudding out of a baking tray and speculating about
why it tasted funny. It transpired that they had forgotten to add the butter. The next morning, as I was hauling a shell of coral shingle up from the beach
to repair the garden path, a pick-up truck came past. Perched on the sides of
the truck was a large group of young men - the bride's cousins, still
energised after their night of partying, returning to their home village. They
whooped and called out to me as the truck swerved passed along the winding
road. Reclining at their feet were four or five large, hairy pigs. What fate held in store for the pigs, I didn't know. Perhaps they would be
traded with another family to help another man win his bride, perhaps they
would help an aspiring young chief climb the social ladder, or perhaps they
would be killed and feasted upon during some forthcoming celebration. Like
supporting characters in a soap opera, the pigs would have a role to play in
the next great drama of Pentecost life, whatever it might be.
10 August
There were several more small earthquakes during the night, and at 3 a.m. on
Tuesday morning the government issued a tsunami warning. Of Vanuatu's many
natural hazards, tsunamis are one of the rarest yet possibly the most
frightening; seven years ago one destroyed a village on Pentecost. At Ranwadi, which didn't receive the warning until midday, many of the
students (who were still waiting for lessons to resume) spent the morning on
the beach. When the warning finally came and the students were ordered to stay
away from the sea, some of them sat in groups on the grassy banks outside the
school - safely uphill - watching the grey ocean excitedly in the hope of
spotting a giant wave. By this time, however, the danger had probably passed. I realised with mild horror that all of the people travelling back to
Pentecost from the PISSA Games - Ranwadi's Principal, several of its teachers,
and a hundred and twenty of its students, as well as many students and
teachers from other schools (including Sara) - were on the deck of a small,
overloaded cargo ship somewhere out the ocean at the time of the tsunami
warning. I was reassured that a ship in the middle of the ocean has little to
fear from a tsunami - it is only when they reach land that the waves build to
devastating proportions. However, Vanuatu's cargo ships cling closely to
perilous coastlines along much of their routes. No deadly waves appeared, and the ship unloaded its passengers safely on
Waterfall beach that evening. It took the tired, seasick students and teachers
a day or two to recover from their trip, and it wasn't until Thursday morning
that Ranwadi returned to 'normality'. By this time nearly a fortnight of
lessons had been missed.
8 August
Prior to the new gap volunteers' arrival, I left Noel and Neil and moved into
the new house that I would be sharing with Hugh. Our new place is part of a
cluster of staff houses at the rear of the school grounds, simple
semi-detached buildings with brightly-painted wooded walls built on concrete
bases and sheltered from the drumming rain by corrugated metal roofs. The
houses are separated by grassy lawns, and surrounded by small shrubberies and
vegetable patches. Two slender little trees laden with unripe papaya stand
outside our front door, and a vine growing beside the house bears mysterious
vegetables that the locals refer to as pumpkins but look like cucumbers. (The
Deputy Principal, who teaches Agriculture, showed me how to pollinate the
vine's giant yellow flowers, to ensure that the pumpkins develop.)
Overshadowing the house next door is a gigantic mango tree, whose branches are
currently burning with yellow blossom. It is said that an Englishman's home is his castle. If you could stand a
typical English house - stocky brick buildings of two or three storeys - next
to one of Ranwadi's breezy wooden bungalows, you would see how true that is.
Unlike in English (or Scottish) communities where people conceal themselves
indoors, insulated against the cold and against suspicious neighbours, in
Vanuatu domestic lives are very much on display. Children play freely amongst
the houses, women sit on their doorsteps rinsing their laundry whilst chatting
to the neighbours, people wander to and fro carrying food or water or
furniture or rubbish from place to place, and passers-by shout messages
through the open windows without needing or bothering to knock at the doors.
Privacy and silence are rare, but here these seem like unnecessary Western
obsessions: it is nice to be surrounded by the pleasant babble of daily human
existence. Although the houses have proper kitchens with gas stoves and running water,
our neighbours do much of their cooking the traditional way, over small fires
in outdoor 'bush kitchens' (tin shacks behind the houses). The ancient smell
of wood smoke drifts amongst the houses, occasionally combined with more
noxious modern fumes from plastic rubbish being burned. Chickens wander the lawns, dodging the rocks thrown at them by irate
householders who try in vain to keep the noisy, destructive birds away from
their gardens. At night, while the chickens roost in silence, the job of
noise-making falls to the cats. The family of little tabby kittens that
Jeffrey bought when I lived next door to him in 2001 have grown up and had
kittens of their own, and the school now has quite a population. Hopefully
they eat the rats, although in a fight between one of the timid little cats
and a large, desperate rodent, I wouldn't necessarily bet on the cat. The cracks in the walls of our house seem to be too small to let in the rats,
but they do let in cockroaches in enormous numbers. In the past I have never
been particularly bothered by cockroaches, but after a few nights of sitting
at the table after lights-out feeling the big, creepy insects running across
my toes, and waking the next morning to find natty little holes nibbled in my
precious food supplies, I'd had enough. I found three cans of fumigating
spray, gave one to our next door neighbour, and detonated the other two in the
middle of the house. Science fiction writers sometimes predict a future in which the human race
will choke itself to death in a poisonous cloud, leaving the cockroaches to
take over. The scene that I saw when I returned to the house a few hours after
releasing the spray was precisely the opposite. The place resembled an
abandoned battlefield. Big brown insects, dead or dying, lay strewn across
every floor, tabletop and windowsill in the building. It was hard to believe
that one little house could support such a population of vermin. I borrowed a
broom and swept all the cockroaches out of the door, but the insecticide had
obviously lingered, because every few hours a new harvest of brown corpses
would appear, sprouting like seedlings from the concrete floor. For the next few days, sweeping out the dead cockroaches became a daily chore.
To help with the task I asked for a new broom, which the students manufactured
by tying together a bundle of thin twigs cut from the bush. I used my hands to
pluck the insects out from behind the glass louvres of the windows; some
weren't as dead as they looked, and would revive and run up my arm when I
picked them up. Few escaped, however. The cockroaches, groggy from the
after-effects of the poison spray, were easily knocked to the ground and
dispatched by the heels of my sandals, to live eternally in that great nuclear
wasteland in the sky. - - - After several weeks of dry weather, rain returned to Pentecost. The first few
showers had little effect on the parched island, but as the rainfall became
more incessant, the landscape began to resume its wet-season colours. The
grass turned from pale yellow to green, the dappled jungle turned dark and
sodden, and the road surfaces became a palette of muddy browns. The rest of
the scenery turned grey. For the new gap volunteers and the few students and teachers lingering at
Ranwadi, it was miserable weather. Fortunately, whilst the school languished
in gloomy somnolence, elsewhere on the island lively ceremonies were taking
place. A man from Ranmawot, a big village a couple of miles down the coast
from Ranwadi, was preparing to marry a woman from Vansemakul, a village a
couple of miles in the other direction. The marriage was still a week away,
but in both villages pre-wedding parties were taking place, which involved the
usual combination of feasting, singing, socialising, and (for the men) copious
consumption of kava. The new gap volunteers and I were invited along to the parties by some of the
drinkers at Vanwoki, who were cousins of the young people getting married.
(Pentecost is an island of large families and small populations, and some of
the party-goers were related - not too closely, I hoped - to both the bride
and the groom.) Following dubious Bislama directions given to me by the
villagers, we found our way to Vansemakul - which, to my slight surprise, was
in exactly the location that the Vanwokians had described it - and were
pointed in the direction of the nakamal. Like all nakamals on Pentecost, it
was a simply-constructed hut with a bare dirt floor and a thatched ceiling
that sloped all the way down to the ground, but this one was an enormous
building, with room inside for the entire village. At one end of the nakamal,
women were laying out bowls of rice, stew and laplap. At the other end, rows
of men were seated on wooden stools with grinding stones in their hands,
preparing kava on an industrial scale. On the grass outside, groups of pigs,
dogs, chickens and people were milling about sociably, each species largely
ignoring the others. It was unlike any party I had been to before, but I did what I would have done
at any other party: introducing myself and my companions to the many strangers
while looking about nervously for someone familiar. Some of the Vanwokians
were there, and motioned to us to sit beside them on a rickety wooden bench
under the eaves of the nakamal. They introduced me to the local MP, a big,
bearded man clasping a shiny little digital camera that he had brought from
Port Vila. When lunch was ready, everybody got up helped themselves from the buffet.
There weren't enough plates to go around, but some guests used giant leaves as
a substitute. After lunch there was business to be done. Guests lined up to present wedding
gifts to the bride-to-be: an assortment of useful household items, much like
the wedding presents requested by Western couples, although (in accordance
with the level of Vanuatu's economy) much less expensive. Many people gave a
plate or a bowl; others left mats or baskets that they had made themselves. I
had brought along a decorated wooden tray, which I'd found on sale in an
obscure village store in Melsisi. Groups of people arrived with piles of traditional mats, woven from thin brown
leaf strips and dyed with red patterns. Such mats are a form of currency on
Pentecost, and change hands during any ceremony at which debts are being paid.
When you consider the effort that must go into making them - some of the
intricately-woven mats were as large as bed sheets - it is hardly surprising
that they are regarded as items of value. On this occasion, the red mats were
being given to the aunties and uncles of the bride to be. "Why the aunts and uncles?", I wondered. The aunts and uncles will need to help out the newlyweds, one of the old men
from Vanwoki explained. They might be called upon to teach the new couple the
ways of married life, provide shoulders to cry on when they fight with one
another, and help to look after the children. The aunts and uncles were being
paid with red mats to reward them for all these services. It made sense. Whilst the proud aunties folded away their mats, the men began to do what men
do at parties all over the world: get drunk. The gap volunteers sensibly made
their excuses and left. For the next hour or so, the floor of the nakamal was abuzz with activity, as
the names of guests were shouted out, each one followed by the now-familiar
phrase "mamsini". Roughly translated, "your kava is ready". My own name was
shouted with alarming frequency, and after the seventh or eighth shell-full my
head was spinning. "Temis!", I shouted back. ("Enough!") The men laughed, and the kava kept on coming. The nakamal gradually quietened, as men drifted away or became progressively
more stoned. Having eventually convinced my drinking buddies that I'd had
enough, I spent the rest of the afternoon sitting under the eaves of the
nakamal (daylight is oppressive after too much kava), talking dazedly to a
group of local children in a fragmentary mixture of English, French, Bislama
and the local language. The children had probably never heard a foreigner
attempting to pronounce their native language before, and they laughed as I
recited the numbers from one to ten ("bwaleh, karu, katsil, kavet, kalim,
lapaleh, laviru, labtsil, lapet, sangwul"). The children then taught me the numbers beyond ten, which proved to be long
and awkward ("sangwepnanbwaleh, sangwepnankaru, sangwepnankatsil
"). The
numbers beyond twenty were even worse ("ngawulkaruvetnanbwaleh,
ngawulkaruvetnankaru
"). I had already noticed that the villagers often use
English words when giving large numbers; now I understand why. I began to wonder what language my students think in when doing sums in their
heads. If it's the cumbersome native one, it could explain a few things. - - - The celebration was repeated the next day at Ranmawot, where it was the turn
of the groom's aunts and uncles to receive their red mats. A bullock had been
slaughtered to provide food for the assembled guests (at one point I banged my
head on one of the animal's disembodied feet, which were dangling from the
ceiling of the nakamal), and once again there was kava by the bucketful. Here, the nakamal was smaller, and instead of crouching indoors many of the
guests relaxed on palm leaves under trees outside. Rather than being
relentlessly being plied with kava, the men were left to get up and help
themselves to shell-fulls when they wanted one, which suited me fine, since I
was still recovering from the previous day's drinking. Unfortunately, the
others misinterpreted my reluctance to drink as politeness, and hastened to
reassure me that I could get up and take as much kava as I wanted. I realised
that I would cause offence if I didn't swig down a few shells of the muddy
liquid. Fortunately, there was plenty of food to wash away the taste of the
drink. Bits of bullock and hot roasted taro were extricated from the fire, and
a portion was wrapped up in leaves for each guest. As the afternoon faded, I thanked the partygoers for their hospitality and
wandered back to Ranwadi. It felt like the end of a great weekend of
celebrations, and I had to keep reminding myself that it wasn't a weekend.
There is no need here for parties to be confined to Saturdays: few of the
islanders have jobs that need to be done on particular days of the week.
Planting vegetables, picking fruit, and repairing houses could wait until
another day. - - - On Monday evening, as I sat fiddling with Ranwadi's temperamental staffroom
computer, the floor began to judder, causing the computer to wobble on its
desk. I turned to the teacher behind me to ask him to stop shaking the floor,
but realised as I did so that the floor was solid concrete, and that
everything else in the world was juddering too. "Earthquake," said the teacher nonchalantly. In Vanuatu, which sits precariously on the edge of the great Pacific tectonic
plate, wobbles of the ground are fairly common. This was a minor one, and had
no effect other than to cause people to look up with mild excitement, the sort
that Brits experience on the rare occasions when they see snow falling
outside. I mentally ticked off "Earthquake" on my list of Interesting Things I'd Like
To Experience Sometime In My Life, and returned to fixing the computer.
3 August
On Tuesday afternoon, a scene from my own past was re-enacted when a group of
pale teenagers extricated themselves stiffly from a tiny plane and took in the
sight and smell of Pentecost Island for the first time. There were few people around to welcome them. The Principal is away at the
PISSA Games, and the Deputy Principal had gone home to his village (leaving me
wondering who, if anyone, was now running the school). Even the school truck
driver was planning a trip away, down to South Pentecost, but I was assured
that he would return via the airfield and collect the new GAP volunteers. Landing in a strange place for the first time is always vaguely frightening,
but in an exciting way, like a fairground ride or a romantic date. (Maybe it's
because the former make me sick and the latter never come my way that I
travel, to compensate.) Landing in a very remote strange place expecting to be
greeted by someone yet finding yourself alone is also frightening, but in a
much less exhilarating way. I therefore put on my sunhat and sandals and set
off for the airfield. It was a hot afternoon, and most of the inquisitive villagers who would
normally have interrupted my long walk ("You go where? 'Long airport? Ooh,
long way too-much!") were away taking a siesta, so I arrived in plenty of time
to meet the three gappers. Hugh, the South Australian volunteer I am now living with, made a slightly
dubious first impression by stepping off the plane with long hair and a
guitar, but seems a straightforward and amicable guy. (Don't get me wrong, I
have friends with long hair and guitars, but they aren't friends I would share
a house with for several months.) The two girls were both from Melbourne. Dani
looked as if she could have auditioned for 'Neighbours'; whilst Nat looked
like the kind of girl you would expect to see behind the desk at a library. The school truck duly arrived and took us to Ranwadi. Students waved and
shouted 'hello' to the newcomers as we passed the sports fields on our way up
to the school. The three spent much of the next day being shown around by Miss Kate and I,
and asking anxious questions about life at the school and what they would be
expected to do. At the end of it all they looked as if they had been driven to
dementia by an overload of information. Fortunately the week's holiday gives
the three teenagers a chance to settle in for a while before classes begin,
and adjust to the fact that they are now no longer students but teachers - at
a difficult, disorganised and deeply foreign school.
31 July
An ecology lecturer once told me that disruptions that happen continuously
are, by definition, not disruptions. By a similar token, there have been so
many weeks at Ranwadi this term when large numbers of students were absent
from large numbers of classes that that I probably shouldn't refer to last
week as a disrupted one. The main problem was that it was the week in which Vanuatu's schools are
supposed to have their mid-term holiday. However, the Principal, mindful of
the amount of teaching time that has already been missed this term, decreed
that Ranwadi would have its holiday a week later - at the time when many of
the students will be away anyway at the PISSA Games. At first the staff and
students reluctantly went along with this, but the strain of being forced to
work during an official holiday was palpable. Meanwhile, the school's sports players and athletes prepared vigorously for
the forthcoming Games. This involved not just physical training - with
students jogging backwards and forwards along the coastal road or doing
exercises on the beach down at Waterfall Village every afternoon - but also
daily prayer sessions asking the Lord to look favourably upon Ranwadi's
competitors. (One or two irreligious white teachers dismissed this as a waste
of time, but I can see the psychological benefit to it, regardless of whether
or not there was a God listening.) The Physics students, dejected after their poor results in the mid-term exams,
skived classes in even greater numbers than usual (thereby starting a vicious
cycle that will ensure even poorer results in future!). One even drowned his
sorrows with rum bought from the Vanwoki village store, an offence that the
teachers tut-tutted about for half an hour in a staff meeting before agreeing
to suspend the student for two weeks. Reluctant to cover new material with
only a third of the Physics class present, I decided instead to spend the time
on revision and practical work. In one lesson I brought along the most rickety
of the wooden benches from the dining hall, helped the students to calculate
how close to the end of the bench they could sit before it would tip, then
invited them to test their predictions. By mid-week, cracks in the timetable were beginning to appear. My Wednesday
afternoon Science lesson was cancelled due to sport. On Thursday morning, a
third of the desks in the classrooms were empty. "It's a holiday," said the
students, and nothing could persuade them otherwise. There is a strange sort
of democracy in operation at Ranwadi sometimes. Only fourteen of the thirty-four Year 7s turned up to Science that afternoon.
Since the class has made good progress this term, and I didn't want the absent
students to fall behind, I declared the lesson a free period. In the early hours of Friday morning, many of the students who live locally
sneaked out of school and went home to their villages. By mid-morning on Friday the Principal had given in. The week's remaining
lessons were formally cancelled. - - - The one group of students who worked moderately hard last week were the Year
13s - Ranwadi's oldest students. Their school year is organised into two
semesters rather than three terms, and they have just returned (a week later
than they were supposed to) from their mid-year break. I agreed to take the
Year 13 Biology class, and thus found myself - for the first time at Ranwadi -
teaching the subject in which I am actually qualified. The Year 13 courses are intended to be largely self-taught, but the material
is tough (the Biology students' recommended reading comes from a mighty
university-level textbook) and I spent a long tutorial attempting to explain
some of topics to the students in simple English, illustrating my points with
lots of dubious analogies and examples. Fortunately this is what I spent the
whole of last year doing, while working as a biology tutor in Edinburgh, so
I've had plenty of practice. The biggest difficulty for me is organising the
weekly practical sessions that are a compulsory part of the course. The exam
board supplies a book of instructions for each session, but nearly all of them
demand materials that are utterly unobtainable on Pentecost. Teachers are
permitted to substitute the suggested experiments with similar ones, but with
the limited resources available at Ranwadi, organising any practical work at
all is a challenge. In their first practical session, the students had to use microscopes to
observe cells from different types of tissue: waterweed leaves, potato tubers,
toad blood and skeletal muscle. I searched the local rivers and pools for
waterweed without success, but found some green slime on the beach that served
as a substitute. There are no potatoes here, and I found no tubers of any kind
at the daily markets, but I put out the word among the villagers that I was
looking for a root vegetable, and on the day before the practical session two
of the local women obligingly came to me with armfuls of yam and taro.
Predictably, they brought far more than I needed for the experiment, but I
bought as much as I could and saved the surplus for cooking. There are no toads on Pentecost, but a dead rat (an educational resource of
which Ranwadi has an endlessly self-perpetuating supply) provided both blood
and muscle tissue. Despite never having done dissections before, the students
carved up the rodent to extract some tissue samples very skilfully; they have
probably had experience of helping to butcher animals in their villages. The
school had no scalpels for the job, so I donated the one from my first aid kit
(I can't envisage a situation in which I would use the thing on a human, even
in a medical emergency). Unfortunately, the microscopes were so weak and dirty
that on most of the samples the students saw little but a faint lumpiness
suggesting the presence of cells. I found some photos illustrating what the
students should have seen, and told them to base their drawings upon those. - - - There are a few things that I always carry in my pockets here: a notepad and
paper (for jotting things down around the school or making a note of new words
in the local language), a handful of elastic bands (which have a thousand
uses), a pack of breath-freshening mints (for taking away the taste of kava),
and a miniature LED keyring torch (in case the batteries in my main torch fail
as I'm making my way through the forest to the nakamal). This last item
fascinated the villagers, who had never seen such a tiny yet powerful little
light before. They asked how much it was worth, and when I told them that they
could be bought back home for only a dollar or two, they asked if I could get
them some. I ordered a couple of dozen on eBay from one of those unbelievably low-cost
Asian suppliers who will ship for the same price to anywhere in the world,
including Vanuatu. (Shopping online from Ranwadi is a slow and painful
experience: eBay's web designers obviously hadn't considered the possibility
that some of their most desperate customers might still be using 1990s-quality
Internet connections.) The people of Vanwoki were delighted a couple of weeks
later when the new torches arrived, as were the people at Melsisi, to whom I'd
also promised a few. When I got out a handful at the bar under the mango tree,
there was an astonishing frenzy amongst the normally-somnolent kava drinkers,
with people grabbing torches and thrusting money at me in return. Within about
thirty seconds I had sold the lot. Although people are aware that the little lights won't last forever, they
nonetheless regard them as good value: batteries for regular torches sold on
Pentecost are expensive and short-lived, and the villagers aren't exactly in a
position to use rechargeables. On an island where most villages don't have
electricity, the demand for torches is pretty high, and the tiny new lights
also have a certain coolness factor. I appear to have started a craze. - - - With little teaching to do, I've kept myself amused in a variety of satisfying
little ways. I made some files for organising my paperwork out of old
cardboard boxes and parcel tape. I killed cockroaches, and chased noisy
roosters away from under my window. I tested all of the magnets in the science
lab, tippexing 'N' and 'S' onto the correct poles (some of which were
previously mislabelled) and throwing away the ones that no longer worked. I
helped Noel, who will be the official scorekeeper at the PISSA Games, to
prepare score sheets, and helped Agasten the sports master to type up lists of
the students participating in each sports team. I sat down with Neil, who has
been given the task of assembling this year's school magazine, and discussed
how the magazine might be put together. I advised various Year 12 students on
how to complete various pieces of homework. (When students in my own classes
come knocking repeatedly at my door because they don't understand their work,
I get disheartened and worry that I didn't teach them properly in class, but
since I don't teach the Year 12s I was vaguely flattered that they had
identified me as someone they could turn to for help.) I showed one girl how
to add footnotes to her History essay, and gave a half-hour crash-course in
statistics to one poor boy who had missed seven weeks of school because his
parents had difficulty finding the money to pay his school fees. I have also spent many peaceful evenings at Vanwoki, drinking kava and
relaxing after a day's work. The quiet, friendly, lamp-lit wooden hut is a
great place to sit and mediate on life, and I can spend hours simply sitting
there contentedly (even before the sedative effects of the kava kick in),
whilst the villagers rest in peaceful silence or converse in their native
language. None of the regulars at the nakamal speak English (except for the
schoolteachers), and their Bislama is often spoken in a rapid whisper that I
struggle to understand, but from time to time they make conversation with me,
asking about life on my own home island and patiently attempting to teach me
their own language (which I'm slowly but steadily learning) and their customs. The kava itself is foul - even the locals wince as they choke down the liquid
and spit afterwards to get rid of the taste - but after a few groggy nights my
body seems to have developed a tolerance for the stuff. I no longer feel the
need to avoid the nakamal on occasions when I need to get up early the next
morning. Any negative effects that the drug may have are probably
counterbalanced by its benefits: it relieves stress, and helps to ensure a
good night's sleep in spite of the many loud noises (from animals, wind, rain
and early-rising students) that reverberate through uninsulated wooden walls
and permanently-open windows. At the very least, an evening of kava is less
unhealthy than an evening of alcoholic drinks (which I haven't touched since
arriving on Pentecost). The other day, some of the villagers spent a long time explaining to me the
local customs regarding chiefs. In this part of Vanuatu there are six grades
of chiefdom, and a man ascends through the grades by holding feasts at which
pigs are killed and ceremonial mats and other goods are given away. In return
for each display of generosity, the aspiring chief moves up in status. Some
observers have derided a system in which "power is given to those who can
throw the biggest parties", but to me it seems like a sensible form of
trading: the chief gives some of his excess wealth to the community, and in
return the community accords the chief greater respect. The highest grade of
all, a 'mariak', represents a chief who has more pigs and other goods than he
knows what to do with and is therefore willing - in theory at least - to give
them away to anybody who needs them. I have never met a mariak, but there was a visiting 'tanmonok' - the
second-highest level of chief - down at the kava hut last week. He didn't look
any different from the rest of the villagers, dressed in tattered shorts and a
T-shirt, but he came along in a shiny green land cruiser (private vehicles are
rare on Pentecost). Wealth clearly isn't entirely a matter of pigs these days.
The villagers and I spent the evening trying to fix the tanmonok's broken
torch, during which I discovered - unsurprisingly - that the words for
"torch", "spring", "contact", and "battery" in Central Pentecost Language are
the same as the English words. (For "light bulb" the villagers used the French
word, "ampoule".) We couldn't get the torch working, but after fetching a
voltmeter from the school I did succeed in figuring out which part was faulty.
In the meantime, I was happy to sell the tanmonok one of my LED keyring
lights. Maybe I should have asked for a pig in return. - - - One afternoon I went shopping for eggs at Melsisi: the six-mile return walk
was well worthwhile for the sake of obtaining a source of protein other than
the cat-food-like tinned meat and fish sold in the school store. (Teachers
have repeatedly asked the school store to order batches of eggs on the weekly
cargo ship from town, but responding to customer demand is an unfamiliar idea
to local shopkeepers.) I arrived in Melsisi to find that I was the most sought-after person in the
village. Everyone I met asked me the same frantic question: "You got small
torch?". Their faces fell when I told them that I had run out. The tanmonok had bought
my last one. I promised that I would order more, but I doubt that I will be able to bring
enough to cope with the demand: Melsisi's entire population of several hundred
people seems desperate for the little lights. Even when the villagers were
talking amongst themselves in their own language, I heard the word "torch"
come up frequently. The Vanwokians are also crying out for more, the teachers
at Ranwadi have begun asking about them, and it's only a matter of time before
my students get in on the act too. Faced with such an imbalance of supply and demand, the obvious thing to do
would be to jack up the price. However, economics doesn't work like that in
Vanuatu: here everything has its value, and in any case profiteering from the
torches was never my intention. I was simply responding to a friendly request
from some villagers who aren't in a position to order things on eBay for
themselves. Most people here have never even heard of online shopping. (By an
appropriate coincidence, the word "eBay" means "where?" in the local
language.) I just hope that there is someone else on the island with enough business
sense and foreign contacts to begin supplying the torches, otherwise I'm
afraid that soon everyone on Pentecost - about fifteen thousand people at the
last count - will be coming to me and demanding them. - - - On Saturday morning, a squad of a hundred and twenty students comprising
Ranwadi College's hundred and twenty best runners, jumpers, throwers,
footballers, netballers, basketball players, and so on, assembled on the beach
at Waterfall Village. Accompanied by the Principal and four of the other
teachers, they boarded a (badly overloaded) cargo ship, bound for the PISSA
Games on Ambae Island. The rest of the students were given a week's holiday, but were under strict
instructions not to leave the island (the school is well aware that if
students go home to other islands it may be months before they return). The
students and teachers with relatives on Pentecost disappeared, whilst the
small number remaining at school settled down to amuse themselves quietly for
the week. I had contemplated catching a boat into town, but decided it wasn't worth
spending thousands of vatu and enduring two nights on the deck of a cargo ship
just for the sake of getting a hot shower and visiting a supermarket. I am
happy to relax on Pentecost, and besides, somebody needs to be here to show
around the new gap volunteers who are arriving this week. With the school virtually empty, Vanuatu's Independence Day - 30 July - passed
by virtually unheralded. I had planned to walk up to Bwatnapne, where a big
celebration was underway (the school pastor, who passed Bwatnapne on a ship on
his way back from a church conference, reported that 219 sacks of kava were
unloaded there in preparation for the festivities). However, I was taken
mildly ill over the weekend, and after spending the night awake and shivering
I decided that the four hour walk over the mountains probably not a good idea.
I therefore passed the day in a very typical Vanuatu way, relaxing quietly at
home. The Republic of Vanuatu is now twenty-six years old. The little country is
only three years older than I am.
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