|
25th October
Every weekday morning, women from the local villages come to Ranwadi and set
up a little market at which they trade fresh produce, home baking and gossip.
Some of the items on sale are similar every day: slabs of laplap (the pasty
vegetable pudding), bundles of leafy local cabbage (which is tasty when fresh
but decomposes faster than almost anything else I know), and 'gato' (greasy
doughnuts that are often shaped into figures-of-eight). Other items vary, depending on what happens to be growing in the villagers'
gardens. Some days there will be bunches of bananas. Some days there will be
tomatoes and green peppers stuffed into grubby plastic bags. Some days there
will be purple and yellow kumala (sweet potatoes) neatly arranged into little
heaps. Some days there will be bush nuts threaded together on sticks like
kebabs. Some days there will be eggs (although you have to get to the market
pretty early to get your hands on these). Some days there will be baskets of
pink and white nakavika (rose apples, which taste like bathroom soap but in a
strangely pleasant way). Some days - inevitably the days on which you have run
out of fresh food - there will be virtually nothing at all. Occasionally something really unusual and exotic appears. Last week, one of
the village women turned up with a small parrot (a rainbow lorikeet, or
'nasiviru' in the local pidgin), which she hoped to persuade one of the
teachers to buy as a pet. The bird was tame and had its wings clipped so that
it couldn't fly; instead it perched tenaciously on the woman's finger. Ten minutes after returning from the market that day, I heard my housemate
Hugh walk into the house. "I bought the parrot," he called out. "You what?" Thus Rocky the Rainbow Lorikeet became part of the household. We constructed
an elaborate perch for him on the spare bed in Hugh's room, by tying together
twigs and bits of broken chairs. With his red chest, blue head, yellowish neck
band and green wings - all streaked like a circuit board with shiny
iridescence - the colourful bird looked out of place in the drab room. Since
he couldn't fly, there was no need to cage him, and although he occasionally
jumped down and wandered out of Hugh's room to investigate what was going on
in the rest of the house, he generally kept to his perch on the spare bed. Rocky proved to a friendly and inquisitive bird, although he has a strange
compulsion to manipulate things in his beak. While sitting on people's
shoulders he twirls their hair or tries to detach their jewellery. Sometimes
he clambers down their shirts and attempts to undo each of their buttons in
turn, systematically. While Hugh sits in his hammock playing the guitar, the
parrot perches at one end of the hammock and does his best to unpick the knot
holding it up. The bird is too incompetent at these tasks to cause any damage,
but they seem to keep him well amused. I wonder if the constant gnawing and fiddling is a sign of intelligence or
just insanity. - - - October brought gloom to Pentecost. The weather has been foul, with chilly
rain slashing nosily against the tin roofs, and blustery winds tearing around
the mountainside. One particularly ferocious night brought down a hundred or
so mangos from the big tree near our house (adding to the carpet of splattered
fruits already knocked down by the flying foxes). Most of the mangos were
smashed or unripe. A foraging troop of Year 7 girls came down from their
dormitory at dawn and carried off most of the good ones. They needed the food:
the supplies down in the school kitchens are running pitifully low (the
villagers who normally sell vegetables to the school have probably been kept
out of their gardens by the weather), and the meals provided to the students
have gone from bad to worse. On the day when Mr Noel and I were the ones supervising in the dining hall,
the food was as dismal as the sky outside. 'Tea' at breakfast was nothing but
heavily-sugared water. Lunch consisted of bland piles of sticky rice wetted
with a 'soup' consisting of boiling, salty water with a few cabbage leaves and
the occasional noodle floating in it. (Five packets of instant noodles - each
designed to serve one person - had been stirred into a big pot and served to
three hundred. This was all that the school could afford.) "This soup is only good for pigs," complained one groups of students. I
doubted that pigs would find it appetising. Supper was much the same, except for the addition of a miserly quantity of
tinned fish, plus a couple of extra packets of noodles thrown in by a
sympathetic Mr Noel. The sight of the kids at their bare wooden benches straining cabbage leaves
from their miserable-looking soup was like a scene out of Oliver Twist. It is
hardly surprising that the students get themselves into trouble by stealing
from the village gardens. - - - Other things contributed to the atmosphere of gloom. In villages to the north
of Ranwadi there were a number of deaths, and attending funerals became a
regular weekend activity for the teachers and students native to that area.
Another teacher received a phone call from relatives overseas and broke down
wailing. Her brother was dead. News also came that the first ever native
missionary to travel abroad from Vanuatu had died in Papua New Guinea. The
country mourned. Deaths are a regular feature of life in communities where families are large,
life expectancies are relatively short, and most people know one another.
Quite often I go down to Vanwoki and find the place almost deserted because
the villagers are away attending a funeral (or attending one of the ceremonies
traditionally held ten days later to remember the departed). However, such a
string of deaths in quick succession cast a particular shadow over Pentecost. - - - On a chilly, grey Friday afternoon, Albion the Agriculture teacher,
Pierre-Marie the French teacher, the school cook and I trekked up the muddy
slopes above the school to a small village where a wedding ceremony was taking
place. Up on the mountain, the weather was even fouler than down at Ranwadi.
At the wedding, men were huddling under the eaves of the nakamal or crowding
around fires beneath the trees, as wind and rain sheeted across the hillside.
Some of the villagers were braving it in their usual shorts and T-shirts, but
others had piled on thick layers of clothing with worn-looking overcoats on
top. It was bizarre to see Pacific islanders dressed for winter. I tried to take shelter at the front of the nakamal. Unfortunately this was
where the kava was being served, and when the villagers saw me loitering there
they wrongly assumed that I wanted drinks. My protests were dismissed as mere
politeness as the eager hosts repeatedly pressed coconut shells of the
narcotic brown liquid into my hands. Not wishing to get completely stoned
prior to the long, slippery journey back down the mountain, I eventually moved
outside into the rain and joined the group of boys standing around one of the
fires. Sparks and flames spat around my ankles, but I was so damp that it
scarcely mattered. I reached into my basket (partygoers on Pentecost always
carry baskets, so that they can fill them with slabs of food) and pulled out
my jacket. For the first time in months, I put it on. When the rain got even heavier, I retreated to the nakamal, where half a dozen
people - perhaps realising that they had a dark and treacherous journey home -
approached me and asked if they could buy small torches. There is such demand
for my little keyring lights on Pentecost that I now carry a packet of them
almost anywhere I go. News of the tall white man with the amazingly tiny
torches has spread far and wide. Whenever I go for walks, I am approached by
enthusiastic strangers, eager to know if my name is Andrew and, if so, whether
I am still selling small torches. Villagers living high on the mountain have
got into the habit of sending their long-suffering children down to Ranwadi to
buy the torches, and I frequently answer the door to find a silent,
nervous-looking six-year-old there, holding out a handful of grubby coins. Not since the days of the missionaries has anybody brought so much light to
Pentecost. Meanwhile, I've accumulated a sizeable pot of money with which to
buy much-needed equipment for the school. - - - With the end of the year approaching, the Year 10 and Year 12 students focused
themselves on the impending exams. The Year 10s asked the school to switch the
generator on at 4.30 a.m., so that they could fit in an hour's study before
dawn. (The students were forced to get up so early because in between their
classes, chores and church services they get very little spare time. The
school insists that students will only cause trouble if they have time on
their hands.) When some visitors from the health department came to the school to sell cheap
mosquito nets, the Principal could be seen standing at the window of his
office urging final-year students to buy them. "You don't want to get malaria during your exams." Meanwhile, the other students - fed up at the end of a long year - became
troublesome and restless. The Principal tried to set them straight with
impassioned, Blair-like speeches about the importance of education. Education,
education, education. The only reason we are here is for education. Nothing
else. Education should be our only priority. That and Jesus. Trouble continued, however. The school Boarding Master, fed up with
misbehaviour in the boys' bush kitchen (the shack near the dormitories that
the boys had built in order to provide them with a place to gather and cook
food), ordered the bush kitchen to be destroyed. The sight of their bush
kitchen being carried away in pieces nearly triggered a riot among the boys,
and caused consternation to the Principal and Deputy, who had not been
consulted prior to its removal. "At least when the boys were misbehaving in the bush kitchen, we knew where
they were," the Deputy pointed out. "Without the bush kitchen, they will go
and spend their time in caves in the bush, and we will never find them." The Principal nodded sadly. "There are many caves around the school." In an attempt to ease the tension, the Principal addressed the boys in chapel.
The bush kitchen was taken down because people were causing trouble in there,
he explained. They were smoking, skipping classes, and missing meals. "Those things are not compatible with your education." He promised the boys that if their behaviour improved, he would give them
permission to rebuild the bush kitchen. The disobedient boys rebuilt it anyway. In typical Ranwadi fashion, the staff
spent half an hour debating how to respond, and then did nothing. A week later, however, a boy was caught smoking in the bush kitchen, and on
the teachers' orders the bush kitchen was once again destroyed. "Smoking is not compatible with education." Like fugitive terrorists, the smokers and skivers retreated to their caves. - - - Meanwhile, it had come to the teachers' attention that girls at the school
were receiving phone calls from boys claiming to be their brothers. In
reality, they had no such brothers. Other girls at the school had been caught chatting alone with boys who were
not their brothers or their cousins. Having a friend of the opposite sex is grounds for serious punishment at
Ranwadi, and the ni-Vanuatu teachers were furious. "That kind of thing is not compatible with education." Students were shouted at in assemblies, and all the girls were banned from
making phone calls unless in the presence of a teacher. Twenty or so students
guilty of "boy-girl relationships" were named and shamed on the school notice
board, and sentenced to "hard labour and counselling". The expatriate teachers, culturally separated from their colleagues by a
century or more, shook their heads and quietly wondered what all the fuss was
about. "Our culture is not like yours," one of the teachers told me, down at the
nakamal. "When boys and girls get together in Vanuatu, things happen too
quickly. They do not wait, like in your culture." (The man had never been to
Scotland.) "If we let them have boyfriends or girlfriends, then at weekends
they will sneak away together to the villages. They will use leaves. And when
they try to use leaves, soon there will be babies." "But how are people supposed to meet their future husbands and wives?" I
asked. "Sometimes a girl gets pregnant," he said, "And then they have to marry." I laughed. "So if everybody followed the rules, nobody would ever get together?" I
pondered the Darwinian implications of a society in which only the disobedient
procreated. "Not necessarily," the teacher told me. "In some parts of Vanuatu there are
arranged marriages." No wonder the kids want to get in there first. "And when boys and girls go away to university, it is OK for them to get
together then," he added. Few students from Vanuatu will get the opportunity to go to university,
however. "I don't know why these boys and girls need friends," another teacher mused.
"They should not be lonely. I am never lonely. I have God as a friend. He is
always with me." There are things you can do with a boyfriend or girlfriend that you can't do
with God, I pointed out. "But I don't understand why they're lonely." "Who said they're lonely?" "Why else would they need these... these friends?" "They're teenagers." "Here in Vanuatu we don't have teenagers," I was told. "People start as
children, then they become adults." Ranwadi's students looked like teenagers to me.
18th October
At the start of term I gratefully handed over the Year 7 Science class - an
entertaining but exhausting bunch - to one of the gap volunteers. I used the
free time to help Mr Agasten, the overworked Sports Master and Senior Maths
teacher, with his two Year 11 Maths classes. Having come to Ranwadi as a science teacher, I have now become primarily a
teacher of Maths. (My only remaining science classes are Year 11A Physics, in
which a large part of my time is spent correcting the students' mathematical
errors, and Year 13 Biology, which the students largely teach themselves.) With Maths, as with Physics, teaching has given me the opportunity to
rediscover a subject that I once enjoyed but abandoned at school in favour of
more colourful subjects. Although Maths teaching involves moments of extreme
tedium (notably when I have to collect in the students' books and go through
all thirty of them mechanically ticking and crossing the answers while
privately wishing that the students had done more time-wasting and less work),
playing with numbers is fun, and the hard certainties of mathematics make a
nice change from the squishy world of biology. Maths is also by far the
easiest subject to teach to students who barely speak English. Sadly, like most subjects, Maths becomes steadily less appealing as you
progress through the curriculum. Last week, I introduced the 9B Maths class to
trigonometry for the first time. I felt as if I was taking away their
innocence. Trigonometry marks a sad step away from the number games of primary
school and towards a more arcane, abstract kind of mathematics - the kind of
mathematics that drove me at the age of seventeen to abandon the subject I had
once loved. Of course, for future scientists and engineers, trigonometry is an important
topic - my Year 11 Physics students would get better results if they hadn't
forgotten the trigonometry they had learned in Year 9 - and there have even
been rare occasions on which I've used it in the real world since leaving
school. The topic isn't completely dull: sine waves are fun, and so are
tangent waves (although the latter have an annoying habit of shooting off into
infinity). Architecture, rocket science, and the creation of mesmerising
screensaver patterns are among the important fields in which the humble
techniques of triangle-measuring have been put to use. However, reminding
students for the hundredth time that the sine of theta equals the opposite
divided by the hypotenuse, the cosine equals the adjacent divided by the
hypotenuse and the tangent equals the opposite divided by the adjacent makes
you lose the will to live. Or at least the will to be a Maths teacher. - - - Meanwhile in Year 13 Biology, the struggle to find resources for the
compulsory practical sessions continues. This week, the course required the
students to investigate what happens when drops of blood are placed in
different solutions. I put out the word that I wanted blood. Upon hearing that some nearby villagers were slaughtering a pig, I gave them a
plastic bottle (with a crude homemade anticoagulant sloshing around in the
bottom) and asked them to fill it up. The bottle was returned full of
ghastly-smelling crimson liquid, with translucent, congealed bits of pig
floating in it. Unfortunately, the blood was not particularly fresh, and the experiments
didn't work as well as I had hoped. To try and salvage the lesson, I attempted
to start a class discussion about what should have happened. "What happens to red blood cells when they are put in pure water?" I asked. Silence. "Is pure water hypotonic or hypertonic to the cell?" More silence. After a few seconds there were one or two inaudible whispers, of
what sounded like the wrong answer. "Could you speak more loudly, please?" Silence. The practical went on like this for a few minutes. Eventually I gave up. "I can't go on like this," I told the students. "You are Year 13s now. Your
course is intended to be self-taught. I'm only here for guidance, and I can't
guide you if you won't talk to me. Figure the practical out for yourselves." I walked out of the lab. Five minutes later, I saw the students standing outside the school nurse's
hut, asking for needles. Obviously they cared more about their work than I
thought. The nurse was refusing. (Schools are not in the habit of handing out
hypodermic needles to their kids, even in Vanuatu.) I went in and explained to the nurse that fresh blood was needed for a biology
lesson. The poor woman looked horrified, but she gave me a couple of needles,
hygienically sealed in their blister packs. Back in the lab, one of the students took a needle and began determinedly
stabbing her finger. She then realised that the solution into which she was
meant to be dripping the blood wasn't ready yet, and nor was the stopwatch
with which she was supposed to be timing the reaction. "Read the instructions before you start pricking yourself," I advised. Realising that a reasonable quantity of blood would be needed, I stuck the
second needle into my own arm, and tried unsuccessfully to draw blood. One or
two of the watching students were looking queasy; it was obvious to them that
I'd never done this before. Poking the slanted, sharpened point through my
skin was easy, but piercing a vein proved trickier than I expected. (I would
make a terrible junkie.) Having inserted the needle into what I thought was a
blood vessel, I tried to pull back the plunger on the syringe. Nothing came
out. I took the needle back to the nurse, and asked her to take my blood. She
pricked my finger cautiously, but only a few red drops came out. She seemed
reluctant to stick a needle in my arm and draw a larger amount of blood
without some sort of medical reason. I contemplated reassuring her that she
wasn't the first person to take blood out of me in the interests of science.
However, the story of how I once spent a fortnight up a mountain in Bolivia
taking Viagra while being pricked and probed in the name of medical research
is best saved for drunken parties. The students and I returned to the lab, where a couple of their classmates
were trying again with the pig's blood. They found that the experiment worked
after all. Ten minutes later, I was still dabbing my arm with a tissue, while
the students sat and watched wisps of red blood cells disintegrating in their
test tubes. - - - Sitting in the school office one evening, Mr Noel and I were concerned to see
students putting their pocket money into envelopes and leaving them in the
Outbox to be taken down to the airfield and posted. The envelopes were
addressed to the Australian branch of an organisation called Benny Hinn
Ministries. "I am sorry I cannot send more, because this is all I have," wrote one girl in
an enclosed letter. "When I get more money, I promise I will send it to you." A little research revealed that Benny Hinn is an American televangelist who
claims to receive messages from God. He passes these messages on to his
followers, warning them that the end of the world is nigh and that only those
who send him their money will receive salvation. His TV programme, in which
sick patients are brought to him and proclaimed to be healed in front of an
enraptured audience, airs in nearly every country in the world, including
Vanuatu. Most of Ranwadi's students grew up in villages that (thankfully) lack
television, but some of them spend their holidays with aunts and uncles in
town, where they have watched Benny Hinn's performances. Benny Hinn has attracted a remarkable following throughout the world, despite
the fact that many of his prophecies have failed to come true, most of those
he 'healed' actually remained sick (or were never sick in the first place),
and some of his pronouncements are at odds with the Biblical word of God.
Nobody knows precisely how the millions of dollars that Benny Hinn receives
from followers are spent, but we do know that his Californian home costs $8.5
million, and that when holidaying in the Caribbean he stays in luxury hotel
suites costing $3000 per night. The students, unaware of all this and innocently unfamiliar with television
and the ease with which it can portray falsehoods, wrote enthusiastic letters
to the healer whom they saw performing miracles on TV. Benny Hinn (or rather,
the employees who sit in his office complex) wrote back with a predictable
request. The poor, well-meaning children, desperate to please God, obliged. They
gathered their few precious coins - money that their parents or sponsors had
given them to buy schoolbooks or nutritious food - and posted them off to
Benny Hinn Ministries. There are words for rich foreigners who lure Third World schoolchildren into
giving up all the money they have in the world. Many of those words begin with
'c'. I would genuinely like to believe that Benny Hinn's employees were unaware of
the fact that the people from whom they were begging money were impoverished
children. Children who eat little but rice and water at some meals because
their school can afford no better given the limited money that their families
have to spend on the kids' education. Children who frequently fall ill with
bouts of malaria because they cannot spare the money for mosquito nets in
their ramshackle dormitories. However, I'm sorry to say that I've helped the students at Ranwadi write
letters in the past, and I know how they write them. Always friendly and
polite, they rarely fail to begin by introducing themselves. "Hello! I am fifteen years old, I come from Pentecost Island, and my name is
" Even if Benny Hinn's is a genuine good cause, the students are wasting their
money. They are stuffing small-denomination coins, in a currency that is
unusable and virtually unchangeable abroad, into airmail envelopes that do not
have nearly enough stamps to cover the weight. Even if correctly stamped,
envelopes rattling with money get easily lost by Vanuatu's postal service. I stood up in assembly on Monday morning, and explained to the students why
they are wasting their money. "Do not let anybody else tell you what God wants you to do," I concluded,
after pointing out a couple of facts about currencies, postal services, and
Benny Hinn. "If you want to know what God wants from you, read the Bible. Do not read
crazy letters or listen to crazy foreign preachers. Thank you." A few of the students - Benny Hinn's followers - hissed and booed as I left
the stage. The rest cheered and applauded wildly. It is a long time since
anyone caused such a sensation at 7 a.m. on a Monday morning. For somebody who privately lacks belief in God, I don't think I make a bad
preacher. The students, however, were unconvinced. "We still believe in Benny Hinn," they told me. "He heals people." "He goes around on television telling people that they are healed," I said.
"But how do you know that they are really healed? And how do you know that
they were really sick in the first place?" At this point the students' English usually failed them, but you could see the
thought going through their heads: "It must be true, I saw it on TV". I pointed out that several of Benny Hinn's pronouncements were at odds with
those of Jesus and the other prophets in the Bible. I hoped that this, at
least, would have an impact. Ranwadi's students are a devout bunch of
teenagers, and are extremely well aware of the eternal damnation that awaits
them if they stray from the teachings of their Lord and Saviour. Frustratingly, however, it seemed that the students approach spiritual matters
with the same incredible lack of logic that they sometimes exhibit in their
Science and Maths lessons. "We must follow the Bible and the teachings of Jesus Christ above all others
if we wish to be rewarded with eternal life. Jesus disapproved of
money-making, and made it clear that you cannot buy your way into heaven. The
Bible also warns us about false prophets. Benny Hinn is intent upon making
money, and many of his prophecies have proven false. He looks impressive on
TV. Let's give him our money
" I despair.
30th September
After I offered my help to GAP Activity Projects in Vanuatu, they had a job
for me: to visit the two Australian gap girls who had been posted to Paama
Island, and report on their placement. Happily, there are no direct flights between Pentecost and Paama. In order to
get there, I had to spend a night in Port Vila, Vanuatus capital, which gave
me my only opportunity in six months for a cold milkshake, a proper hot
shower, or a visit to a real supermarket. My colleagues on Pentecost were only mildly interested in the fact that I was
going to Paama, but when I mentioned that I was flying via Vila, their ears
pricked up. The school bursar wondered if I could pick up a pile of stamps and
phone cards for the school. The Principal wanted me to deliver money to his
son at Malapoa College (a good excuse to have a look around what is officially
the best school in the country - and marvel at the places dilapidation). Hugh
gave me his bank card and PIN and asked me to bring him back as much cash as I
felt comfortable carrying. Several people gave me letters to post. Noel and
Neil wanted me to buy rat traps (Neil had picked up four on his last trip to
Vila, but decided that another ten would be needed to bring the schools
rodent population under control). Nat wanted oats. Kate wanted liquorice
bullets (whatever those were) - or, failing that, dark chocolate. The gap
girls on Paama wanted me to go looking for a parcel of school supplies that
had been sent from Australia but only made it as far as Vila. My biology class
needed seeds. I flew into Port Vila and found the town sitting in a hot haze. Taxis and
minibuses bopped around the streets to the beat of funky music, while the
sound system in the cool, shiny lobby of the Wild Pig Hotel serenaded visitors
with the usual wonderful mix of classic soft rock tunes. When I arrived it was
playing All Out Of Love, by Air Supply. (Sadly, the sign outside the hotel
had recently been changed to Coconut Palms Resort, a name so unmemorable I
had to write it down. In protest at the name change Ill continue to refer to
the place as the Wild Pig Hotel.) A cruise ship had docked in Port Vila that day, and the town centre was full
of bronzed, waxy-looking Australians, sweating into their fashionable clothes
and wearing hats and sunglasses at the angle at which they looked coolest
rather than the angle at which they best kept off the sun. Hey mate, does this thing spit out Aussie dollars? asked the man standing
beside me in the queue for the cash machine. Does it look like were in Australia? I felt like replying, but then looked
around - tanned white faces, sunglasses on foreheads, milkshake cartons in
hands, silly souvenirs in the shop windows. It did look like we were in
Australia. Nah, sorry mate, I told him. He walked off. I spent the afternoon racing around town - with a look of such haste and
purposefulness that nobody could possibly mistake me for an Australian - and
accomplished (or at least attempted) all of the errands Id been given. I also
visited the airline office and the immigration office, extending my stay in
Vanuatu from November to December. (Teaching at Ranwadi will probably have
ground to a halt by mid-November, but Im in no hurry to leave.) My final stop was the Au Bon Marché supermarket in the plush suburb of
Nambatu. The Au Bon Marché is an expatriate lifeline: the only place in the
whole of Vanuatu where Westerners can go and shop in the way they are
accustomed to back home, pushing trolleys up shiny aisles where every
conceivable kind of household item is stacked in convenient abundance. I walked systematically up and down each aisle in turn, scanning the tens of
thousands of products, nearly all of them unobtainable on Pentecost. (As a
safeguard against buying more than I could carry, I wasnt pushing a trolley.) Which would be the most useful things with which to fill the limited space in
my luggage? Tinned mushrooms? Too big and heavy. Dried mushrooms? Much better. I wondered
if the mushrooms would spoil if I punctured the packets and let out the air so
they would pack down smaller. Honey? Not unless I could find it in a plastic
tub - I didnt want to lug a heavy, breakable jar around. Parmesan cheese?
Great, if I could find the kind that doesnt need refrigerating. (I went and
found it.) Whisky? No point - you dont need alcohol to enjoy yourself on a
Pacific island. Baileys cream liqueur? No, really, you dont need alcohol.
Real fruit juice? Much too heavy - the sickly synthetic fruit cordial sold on
Pentecost would have to suffice. A tea pot? That would probably break. A tea
strainer? Much less fragile. Dried raspberries? Mmm
dried raspberries. Too
expensive, sadly. Instant oatmeal? Theres a storekeeper on Pentecost who
could supply us with that, but not in such a range of flavours. Jelly? I
wondered if that would set without a fridge. Probably, if I used less water
than the packet recommended. Ditto the instant puddings. A box of chocolates?
Those would melt in the heat. (I bought them anyway.) Sticky rat traps? I
didnt fancy wrenching off sticky rats. Cockroach poison? No, the house had
been doused with enough insecticide already. Vanilla essence? That had better
not leak in my bag. Liquid rooting hormone? Could be useful in science
classes, or for the garden. Id need to make sure that didnt leak either.
Miniature fireworks? Surely Air Vanuatu wouldnt let me carry those on the
plane. (They did let me.) Balloons? The Year 7s love those. Danish pastries? I
bet the girls on Paama would appreciate them. Giant paraffin torches for the
garden? If only I had the space in my luggage
I made two or three trips back to the Wild Pig, my arms straining with plastic
bags, and spent an hour or two compressing all of my shopping into my giant
rucksack. Two or three plastic bags full of excess packaging were discarded in
the process. At the end of the day, the cruise passengers drifted back to their ship, like
goggle-eyed aliens preparing to return to their home planet. Souvenir sellers
packed up their stalls, tour operators stacked away their billboards, and Port
Vila became once again a chilled-out Melanesian town. I stood on the
waterfront and watched the cruise ship sail away into the sunset. The huge,
blazing boat - its size and brightness dwarfing the dimly-lit, low-rise
buildings of Vila harbour - really did resemble a departing UFO. Locals and
expatriates, glad that the alien invasion was over, returned to their normal
lives.
- - - Descending into Paama airfield the next day, the blue skies of the South
Pacific gave way to rain showers, which spattered onto the windscreen of the
little plane. Even by Vanuatu standards, Paama is a small and dark island. Its
scenery is blackly volcanic, and its people have a reputation for sorcery.
Beyond the gloomy, wet hillsides of Paama loomed the neighbouring island of
Lopevi, a monstrous mile-high volcanic cone. Earlier this year a local chief
failed to perform a ritual designed to appease Lopevi, and since then the
mountain had been fuming, rumbling the earth and belching clouds of ash that
blow onto Paama. Dark green vegetation thrives in the nutritious ash, but machinery does not;
the only vehicle on Paama broke down years ago. Since then the main road had
fallen into disuse, and been reclaimed by the forest. No boats were around, so
the only way to get from the airfield into the village was to walk along the
beach. One of the gap girls met me at the airfield, and showed me the way. For
a mile or two we trudged through volcanic sand the colour of asphalt, and
clambered across piles of black boulders. Staggering dangerously under the
weight of my rucksack, I began to regret all of the things I had bought in
Port Vila. Eventually, after clambering around a particularly rocky headland, the steep
coastline opened out into a grassy cove, and we arrived at Liro. This was
Paamas main village - built around a Presbyterian church established a
century ago by Maurice and Jean Frater, two Scottish missionaries. (Their
grandson, Alexander Frater, wrote about Paama in his entertaining book of
tropical travels, Tales from the Torrid Zone.) I introduced myself to the villagers I met - who were friendly and curious to
know why I had come to their little island - and a small boy was sent off to
find Kenneth, the village chief. (In a society without mobile phones and text
messaging, small boys are frequently used as a substitute.) For once Id succeeded in telephoning ahead before arriving in a village, so
Kenneth was expecting me. He showed me the way to his guesthouse, a lovely
thatched building with walls woven from faded bamboo. (Nearly everything in
Liro looked old and faded.) He gratefully took the daily newspaper that Id
brought from Vila, and invited me to join him that evening for kava drinking. The gap volunteers and I cooled off that afternoon by going for a swim, but
didn't venture far out to sea. Paama's waters are notoriously shark-infested
(the island is home to sorcerers who transform themselves into sharks to
devour their enemies), and the sooty sand provides the beasts with excellent
camouflage. Although it was early afternoon on a tropical beach, the sheer
darkness of the scenery was overpowering. The looming craters of neighbouring
Ambrym, a giant imposed themselves the horizon. Men fishing from distant
canoes were like silhouettes in a painting. Looking down through the water, my
arms and legs looked like those of an exhumed corpse - green-tinged and pale
against the coal-black seabed. On the shoreline behind us, the little wooden
cottages and concrete schoolhouses of the village were faded and grey. While the volunteers showed me around Liro, I chatted to them about their
placement. It turned out that things were not well. White girls were a new
phenomenon on Paama, and the volunteers had found themselves menaced at night
by 'creepers', sinister men who would lurk under their windows, peer through
the cracks in the walls, and try to force entry through shuttered windows that
couldn't be properly secured. There were other issues too. The school bursar was absent, and the villages
little bank was closed (the person with the keys had gone away), leaving the
girls short of money with which to buy food. Their responsibilities at the
school had never been made clear, and their timetables altered from week to
week as colleagues changed their minds about which classes the gap volunteers
should be teaching. Their school lacked even the most basic resources - there
is money to buy equipment, I was told, but the teachers spend it on
themselves. Meanwhile, the school headmistress - who should have sorted all these problems
out - had gone away leaving nobody in particular in charge. Even when she is
around, by all accounts, she appears to care about nothing at the school
except her salary. The reason that the useless woman has yet to be sacked
became clear when I saw posters on the walls depicting a prominent Vanuatu
politician. He and the headmistress shared a surname. Over peppery-tasting shells of kava at the Five Horseshoes, a lamp-lit
thatched hut that looked the perfect picture of a fairy-tale tavern (its name
had been bestowed on it by a previous British visitor), we discussed all these
problems with Kenneth the chief. He offered to call a meeting of the villagers
and put a stop to the creeping. Dont worry, he told the girls: if any man
rapes you, you will get many mat and pigs in compensation. This last comment
didn't have the reassuring effect that the chief had hoped, but his meeting
with the villagers seemed to have an impact; the creeping stopped. - - - There is something hauntingly old-fashioned about Liro. The place has a sense
of Sleepy Hollow or The Village about it. It felt like the ghost of a
Scottish community from a century or two ago, perhaps the kind of community
that the Fraters left behind. The atmosphere was created partly by the damp clouds that billowed
continuously over the mountain. Rain dripped from the thatched eaves of the
guesthouse in which I was staying, and sluiced off the tin roof of the
outhouse into a nearby tank. There was no electricity in Liro that week; the
generator had run out of fuel. At night I went to bed by candlelight, then lay
in the dark listening to the scuttling of rats in the thatch and the silence
of the ghosts outside. (A local story tells how the worlds creatures were
originally created on Paama, and later expelled from the island - all except
for the rats, which got left behind.) At dawn, I got up and boiled tea and porridge on a gas stove, using water
fetched in a tin jug from the tank. The girls joined me: at their own house
the bottle of cooking gas had run out, and nobody at the school was willing to
replace it. From nearby, we could hear children chanting hymns in Paamese. It sounded
distantly like Gaelic. Recently, the language was under threat from Bislama,
but the islanders have since begun to actively teach Paamese to their
children, and a project is underway to translate the Bible into the language.
A ceremony will be held next month to mark the completion of the first book to
be translated, the Gospel of Mark. Matthew, Luke and John will follow. Since flights only land on Paama twice a week, I had three days to spend on
the island. Fortunately, Liro is a friendly and hospitable place, in spite of
its ghostliness, and by the end of my visit I felt like part of the community.
I got to know the shopkeepers, the church minister, the chief and his wife,
and the local aid workers. I chatted in English to the children at the school,
and in Bislama to their teachers. I met a former student of mine - a girl who
was in my Year 11 Economics class back in 2001, who is now working as a
science teacher on Paama. I learned more Paamese during my three days on the
island than I have ever known of Gaelic, and I reflected afterwards that I
ought to have made more effort during the two years I spent in the Scottish
Highlands. While on Paama, I was invited to the Father's Day church service (held at the
end of September here) at which men dressed in their Sunday best were showered
with confetti and talcum powder by appreciative women and children. (Despite
protesting light-heartedly that I wasn't anybody's father, I was given the
same treatment.) After the service, there was cake, and a big celebratory
lunch for the entire village. I talked to the church minister, a middle-aged
man who had been born on Lopevi in the days before the volcanos
increasingly-vicious eruptions rendered the island uninhabitable. On my last day, as I made my way back to the airfield and Liro disappeared
behind the headland, the clouds dispersed and blue morning light flooded the
beach. The ghosts faded, and Paama became a mere tropical island -
sun-sparkled waves washing against a coconut-fringed shoreline. - - - It took no less than seven short flights - ranging from five to twenty minutes
in length - to get from Paama back to Pentecost. The plane first touched down
at the eastern end of Ambrym Island, then landed again at the western tip of
the island, skirting the monstrous volcanoes in between and providing cloudy
glimpses of scenery in which the dinosaurs would have looked quite at home.
The next stop was Norsup on Malekula Island, which I visited five years ago,
when a fire had recently reduced the terminal building to a burned-out shell.
Nobody has rebuilt it yet: it was still a burned out shell. The next airport, by contrast, had recently been renovated, and now boasted a
vast, hangar-like terminal building and a wide, tarmacked runway. This was
Pekoa International Airport (the government is currently in the process of
trying to persuade international flights to actually land there), the gateway
to Espiritu Santo, Vanuatus largest island, and Luganville, its major
northern town. Santo - as both the island and the town are generally known - is sprawling,
sleepy, and thoroughly dilapidated. Having a few hours to spare in between
planes, I caught a bus into town (actually, it was a taxi that agreed to take
me for the price of a bus fare, since the giant airport was virtually deserted
and the driver knew that his chances of picking up another customer were
slim). In the last five years, Santo hadnt changed as much as Id hoped. Whilst Liro (civilised by Scottish missionaries) feels like the ghost of rural
Scotland in the 1900s, Santo (established as an American base during the
Second World War) feels like the ghost of small-town America in the 1940s. The
town has been slowly decaying ever since the Americans abandoned it at the end
of the war, and since my last visit an additional five years worth of cracks
and corrosion had been added. A few colourful buildings had received a lick of
paint - mostly government offices, and hotels and tour operators catering for
the visitors who come to dive on wartime wrecks - but the rest were as white
and faded as ever. Nowadays, Santo fulfils the same role in Vanuatu that Glasgow does in
Scotland. Both are second towns, unable to compete with the capital for wealth
and status, and ugly and neglected in consequence. However, both remain major
population centres (in Vanuatu, twenty thousand inhabitants is more than
enough to qualify as a major population centre) and continue to attract young
people because they contain useful amenities that are absent in more rural
areas. Santo, like Glasgow, is a place people come to when they want to go
shopping or get drunk. I visited the shops, stocked up on yet more food to take back to Pentecost
(replacing some of the supplies Id shared with the girls on Paama), and
wandered along Main Street in search of something interesting to do. Failing
to find anything, I walked all the way back to the airport. There were only three people on the 8-seater plane that took me back to
Pentecost: myself, the pilot, and a boy returning to school after the
holidays. I realised that if anything happened to the pilot, I would be the
one who would have to try and land the plane safely. I didnt fancy my
chances. On its way back to Pentecost, the plane touched down at West and East Ambae.
At West Ambae, a big hand stuck itself through the door of the plane and shook
mine. It was Graham Bule, the Principal at Londua, who was at the airfield
seeing off his daughter, who was returning to Ranwadi after the holidays.
(Term had officially begun two and a half weeks ago, but the students were
still drifting back.) It had rained heavily on Pentecost the previous day. The river running
alongside Lonorore Airfield was too high for a truck to drive through, so we
had to wade across the river (hauling our luggage, and half a dozen other
boxes marked Ranwadi that had arrived on the plane). A truck was waiting on
the other side (not the school truck, which had broken down, but one belonging
to a man from Waterfall Village, which had been hired to take us back to
Ranwadi). Attempting to cross a second raging river, the truck stuck a big stone in the
middle of the river and stuck fast. It took the help of about a dozen
passers-by, standing waist-deep in the rushing water and shoving stones or
pushing on the obstinate vehicle, to extricate the truck from the river. - - - I returned to Ranwadi to find the school in the grip of a health scare. A rumour had gone around that somebody at Ranwadi had AIDS. Bullying children,
with no evidence on which to base their suspicions, had already pointed the
finger at one unfortunate classmate, who had run away from school. Parents of
other students were phoning up and demanding that their children be sent home.
It wasnt safe for them, they said - not if theres AIDS at Ranwadi. Among the teachers, fingers were also being pointed. Who did this story come
from? Is it true? Did somebody tell the students that theres AIDS at Ranwadi? It emerged that the story had been started by a teacher, acting on information
allegedly given to him by a friend working at a clinic. He had stood up at
breakfast time and announced to the students that somebody among them had
AIDS, but refused to say who. Paranoia had ensued. The next morning, the Principal and I gave speeches of our own at breakfast
time, and tried to calm things down. As a biology teacher I talked to the
students about the virus, explained that being HIV positive is not technically
the same thing as having AIDS, and pointed out that unless the students are
sleeping around or using dirty needles they should have little to fear from
the disease, even if somebody at Ranwadi is infected. The Principal sternly
reminded the students that it is un-Christian to make such accusations about
people, regardless of the circumstances. The panic died down, but the fear remained. Students and villagers told wild
stories: in Port Vila, 70% of all students had AIDS, and people were going
around stealing syringes of infected blood from clinics and stabbing strangers
with them in the dark. I told them I didnt believe a word of it. According to
the last reliable information Id heard, there had only ever been three
confirmed cases of HIV in the whole of Vanuatu. When I had been in Vila a week
ago, the newspapers contained no mention whatsoever of AIDS. Ah, but the
situation has changed, people told me. I thought this unlikely, but since
there was no way I could actually disprove it (Pentecost is beyond the reach
of newspapers or local radio, and the telephone lines were down so I couldnt
search the Internet), my opinion was dismissed. Dont try too hard to squash the rumours, some of my colleagues advised me.
AIDS may not yet be a big problem in Vanuatu, but it soon will be unless
people learn to take precautions. Its good that people are afraid. They may have a point, but it worries me that AIDS education in Vanuatu will
suffer the same problem as the boy who cried wolf, or the teachers who tell
children that smoking spliffs will destroy their health. People will be
frightened at first, but when people realise that the worst of the stories are
untrue, they will become blasé, and overlook the fact that there is a genuine
risk.
22nd September
Down at Vanwoki, a major event was taking place: the villagers were 'cooking
mats'. Producing the long, red-patterned mats that are exchanged during
ceremonies is a long and intensive process (which is presumably why the mats
are valued so highly). I went down to the village during the school lunch
break to watch. I found the villagers gathered in small groups under the big mango trees in
the centre of the village. A large number of people were there: not just the
Vanwokians, but men and women from villages further up the mountain who had
come down to take part in the mat-making. Fires were burning, and smoky
sunbeams shimmered through the trees. In typical Vanuatu fashion, it was the
women who seemed to be doing most of the work; the men sat in sleepy groups
and watched. The village chiefs stood around supervising the proceedings and
hobnobbing with neighbouring chiefs who had come along for the event. Plain, brown mats had already been woven from strips of pandanus palm leaves,
and were lying in heaps waiting to be dyed. Some of the villagers were
cutting banana stems into the patterns with which the mats would be imprinted.
Others were wrapping the mats tightly around the patterned stems before
'cooking' them in a long metal trough full of boiling red liquid, a dye made
from water and ground-up roots. One or two people were tending the fires
underneath the trough that kept the dye boiling. Two young women were
extracting the newly-coloured mats from the trough and spreading them out to
dry. Later, the mats would be taken down to the river to rinse off the excess
dye, and the manufacturing would be complete. These ceremonial mats are used as a form of currency, so what the villagers
were doing was essentially printing money. I wondered if excessive mat-making
ever caused inflation. "'Long 'time before way all papa b'long you-fella ee got metal tank, all-ee
cook'em mat all-same wanem?" I asked one of the villagers. How did your
ancestors manage before metal troughs came along? "All-ee cook'em inside 'long skin b'long tree," he told me. "Him ee no burn?" Wouldn't a trough made of bark burn when fires were lit
underneath? "Fire ee no touch'em him." They kept the fires at a safe distance from the
trough, and relied on the heat radiating from them to boil the liquid inside. Cooking mats the old-fashioned way was slow and laborious, however. Containers
made of bark were too small to take an entire mat; the dyeing had to be done
in sections. The new metal tank, by contrast, was not only long enough for an
entire mat but could take six at a time. Even the most traditional of
practices, it seemed, were open to industrialisation. - - - The fires were still smouldering under the metal trough that evening, as Hugh
and I walked through the dark village to the nakamal, where the men had
gathered to drink kava and discuss the day's mat-making. The fires were not
the only source of light, however. In the undergrowth by the path I noticed a
bizarre green glow, and bent down to investigate. The ghoulish light was
coming from a small mushroom growing out of a piece of rotting wood. I picked up the piece of wood and took it to the nakamal, staring at the
amazing luminous mushroom with much the same expression of wonderment that the
locals adopt when they see my tiny LED torches for the first time. The villagers nodded impassively. Yes, we get glowing mushrooms sometimes. You
can find much bigger ones deep in the bush. "Him ee make'm light from wanem?" I asked. Why does it glow? (I wasn't
expecting a scientific explanation, but hoped for a good story.) The villagers
had no answer. It was just an accepted part of their natural world: birds
sang, flowers bloomed, insects buzzed, and mushrooms occasionally glowed green
in the dark. It seemed strange that people who often attach supernatural stories to the
most mundane of things could find something as magical as a luminous mushroom
so unremarkable.
| 