Andrew Gray's travel tales

27th November

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"And on the mere the wailing died away."
- Morte d'Arthur
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At Ranwadi, school breaks up for the holidays in the manner of a
disintegrating piece of machinery. Components wriggle themselves loose, screws
snap out of place, parts drop off one by one, and despite half-hearted
attempts at repair it is not long before the entire system stutters to a halt.

Once the final-year students had completed their exams, there was nothing for
them to do except wait for the ship home. They had finished school now, and as
far as they were concerned there was no longer any need to follow school
rules. The school disagreed.

Lists of guilty names were written on the staffroom whiteboard. Some students
had been stealing; some had been causing trouble in the villages; some had
been drinking. A few had resumed their 'boy-girl relationships'. One
unfortunate boy had his name written on the board after "being chased down the
creek by Dingo".

"Surely the dog is the one who's done wrong?" I thought.

It turned out that the boy involved had been sniffing around the girls'
dormitories at the time Dingo was set on him.

"He's a good dog," said Agasten the sports master, Dingo's proud owner. "He
doesn't bite people. He just grabs them by their clothes."

At a Monday morning assembly the Deputy Principal announced that all those on
the whiteboard had an hour to gather their belongings and leave the school.
Some weren't ready to leave yet. They disappeared into the forest, hid there
during the day, and sneaked back into their dormitories after nightfall.

The Dining Hall became gradually emptier. The students, no longer willing to
line up at their benches for bland rice and soupy water, found other sources
of food. Local gardens were raided. One villager complained that his pig had
been stolen. The atmosphere moved a shade closer to Lord of the Flies.

One teacher, frustrated with the school's seeming inability to discipline its
students, took matters into his own hands. A student was taken to the mission
hospital at Melsisi with broken ribs; the teacher claimed that he fell. The
Principal reminded his staff that corporal punishment was against the law.

The junior students, who couldn't bear to be stuck in their classrooms
revising for their end-of-year exams while their older schoolmates were
running riot outside, began to join in the fun. For them the school year
wasn't scheduled to end for another fortnight, but many teachers had come to
the end of the year's work and stopped teaching. In the subjects where there
was work to be finished, it became more difficult than ever to get students to
come to classes. Seeing that time was running out, I told my own classes that
I would give them their end-of-year exams before the end of the week, and
urged them not to leave before then.

As younger names appeared on the whiteboard alongside those of the school
leavers, the Principal began to look increasingly morose. He pleaded with his
students to behave themselves.

"Things are really going downhill here. I look around me and I see that
everything we have worked for is being spoiled. Not by everyone, but by a few.
Those few students are ruining all that we have worked and strived and prayed
for. Ranwadi is going down."

If there is one thing that terrifies a headmaster more than losing control of
his school, it is losing his school's good reputation. When his pleas and
prayers went unanswered, the Principal made a drastic announcement.

"If your name appears on that whiteboard, you will be out of here, straight
away. And you won’t be coming next year. Even if this is not your final year,
if your name is on that board, you are finished at Ranwadi."

Expulsion - the educational equivalent of capital punishment - is a threat
that cannot normally be used lightly; such an extreme measure requires the
approval of the school board. (In practice it rarely happens: parents can
usually be persuaded to 'voluntarily withdraw' any child who is no longer
welcome at Ranwadi, allowing both the school and the student to avoid the
blemished record that would result from a formal expulsion.) Sending a student
home early and refusing to let them back in next year, however, was within the
Principal's power, and the students knew it.

The next day I was confronted in class by the surprising sight of students
sitting at their desks, working. Whilst those whose exams had finished
departed the school one by one, the rest resigned themselves to a final few
days of studying.

A change in the weather helped. Sticky heat subsided into murky rain; the
students no longer complained that they were "too hot to work", and hiding in
the jungle was no fun when everything was wet and muddy. Many returned to
class for want of anything better to do.

End-of-year tests were completed, class members were graded and ranked, and
textbooks were collected and stored away. The Principal's mood brightened.
With their work for the year legitimately finished, the junior students could
begin to leave. Teachers, too, began to pack up their things and prepare to
return to their villages for Christmas with their families.

For Mr Noel, now a pensioner, forty-two years in the teaching profession had
come to an end. He spent his last morning at Ranwadi planting young palm
trees, to give the students something to remember him by. I pictured the palms
in a few decades time, dropping coconuts on the heads of the students who laze
around under trees instead of coming to class. It will be a fitting tribute to
the man who managed to spend nearly seven years on a tropical island without
ever losing his determination to work hard or to make those around him do the
same. In the South Pacific, where sleepiness drifts like a warm wind through
the landscape, that is a remarkable achievement.

"In dry weather, I hope somebody will think of me and throw a bucket of water
on those young palm trees," Noel told the students at assembly. "They need
water to keep them healthy and strong."

"Mr Noel is like a palm tree," I added. "If the weather is dry on the day he
leaves, make sure you water him to keep him healthy and strong."

Noel chuckled. The students stared blankly.

Three days later, Noel, Neil and a crowd of departing students piled onto a
small motorboat in the rain. The sky was a sheet of grey, and vibrating
droplets hammered the surface of the ocean. All along the beach, students and
teachers huddled in small groups, waving their friends goodbye.

I waded out to the side of the boat, my umbrella keeping my head and shoulders
dry while saltwater washed around my knees. Noel was perched on the metal rim
of the boat, his nose protruding from the hood of an old-fashioned raincoat.

"You got your watering," I said.

"New Physics books need photocopying," he said, by way of a goodbye. "I left
the paper and binders on your table."

More people hauled their belongings down the beach and piled onto the boat.
The air was filled with farewells, and the slashing of water against canvas.

Some of the departing students would be back next year. Others would not.

"Will you ever come back to Pentecost?" I asked one girl.

"I don’t think so," she said.

Ni-Vanuatu are not rich enough for frivolous travel: they go places when they
need to, and for the students whose education at Ranwadi had finished it was
hard to think why they would ever need to return. For some, that rain-soaked
shoreline would be the last place they ever set foot on Pentecost Island.

With a grinding of shingle, the boat was pushed off the beach. It turned and
began to make its way out to the cargo ship waiting beyond the reef.

The students on the beach whooped and waved, and tossed palm leaves into the
water. The students on the boat waved and whooped back. The rain spattered
down. People clutched their umbrellas, gazed out to sea, and watched their
friends diminishing in the distance.

17th November

"Do you believe in magic?" Albion the Agriculture teacher asked me one
evening.

We were relaxing in between shells of kava, sitting on stools made of tree
stumps and gazing absent-mindedly at the shadows cast by the lantern onto the
thatched roof and dark wooden beams. It was a quiet night down at the nakamal,
and we could hear the scuffling of villagers and animals outside.

I shook my head. "No, I don't."

I knew that this was the wrong answer - I was making myself look like a dumb
outsider, a Muggle - but I had to be honest.

"Here on Pentecost, we have magic."

I made a non-committal noise, and waited for Albion to continue.

"There are many different kinds of magic leaf growing on Pentecost. There are
leaves that you can use to make it rain, for example."

I nodded and grunted. It's hard to convey to someone, especially when neither
of you are speaking your native language (most of this conversation took place
in Bislama), that you respect their beliefs yet find them completely absurd.

"Suppose you are working outside in your garden, and the sun is too strong,"
said Albion. "You can get a leaf, and perform a ceremony, and the sun will go
away."

"Does that really work?"

"Oh yes. When you use this leaf, you can watch the clouds coming to cover up
the sun."

"Maybe the clouds would have come anyway. It could just have been chance that
the magic worked."

"But when you use magic it happens fast. One minute there is sunshine, the
next minute the sky is completely covered with cloud."

That happens in western Scotland a lot, I thought. Until now it had never
occurred to me that it was anything other than the result of wet oceanic winds
condensing against mountains - much like on Pentecost - but I suppose magic
spells could be a contributing factor. I resolved that when I got home to
Scotland I would hunt down the sorcerers responsible and have them burned at
the stake.

"There are other kinds of leaf that can make the sun shine," he went on.

Now that would be a species worth introducing to Scotland.

"There are lots of people on Pentecost who can control the weather," said
Albion. (Those people have a lot to answer for lately, I thought.) "But in
your part of the world, you don't have anything like that? White men can't
control the weather?"

"No, we don't do anything like that," I told him. True, there have been a few
experiments in which white people have seeded rain clouds by spraying
chemicals from aeroplanes. And thanks to the (alleged) effects of greenhouse
gases in the atmosphere, the gas-guzzlers of the American South have
discovered a recent talent for bringing hurricanes down upon themselves. But
it takes a lot more than rubbing a magic leaf.

Through the doorway of the nakamal we caught glimpses of a torch beam flicking
through branches: a young man with a catapult was trying to knock fruit bats
out of the mango tree. Attacking the giant bats is a popular pastime in
Vanuatu. This is partly because they destroy the villagers' fruit and partly
because they are a tasty source of meat, but also, I suspect, because shooting
at flying targets is good fun. I once spent an evening down in the village
watching the local Member of Parliament take cracks at the fruit bats with his
air gun while his friends pointed torches into the trees. On that occasion the
bats all took fright and escaped, but the MP did succeed in bringing down a
snoozing pigeon.

"There are other kinds of leaf that allow you to fly," Albion told me. "There
is a special kind of wild kava leaf that you spread on the ground, and when
you lie on these leaves and close your eyes you will fly through the air. When
you open your eyes you might be in a completely different place." He grinned.
"Children on Pentecost have fun with that kind of magic."

Children with strong friends and strong imaginations, perhaps.

"These leaves can lift adults, too," said Albion, as if guessing what I was
thinking. "You know how small kava leaves are?" (The ones I had seen were
about the size of a man's hand - we weren't talking flying carpets here.)
"They're only small, yet they can lift a grown person into the air. That's
real magic."

I continued to nod.

"You think I'm crazy, don't you?" Albion said. "You're thinking, 'Who is this
crazy ni-Vanuatu person talking about magic?'"

"I don't think you're crazy," I reassured him. "Once upon a time, my ancestors
believed in magic, too. But white people nowadays have lost their belief.
Because of science, I suppose."

Albion shook his head sadly.

"There are some places in Vanuatu where the same thing has happened. On Efaté
Island, around Port Vila, the people have forgotten all their magic."

That didn't surprise me. I couldn't picture anybody who lived within commuting
distance of Vanuatu's gritty, urbanised capital believing in magic.

"In some other parts of the world there are sorcerers who use leaves and then
believe that they can fly," I said. "But the magic is all in their heads.
There are drugs in the plants that make them think they are flying. In reality
they are not."

"In your culture, magic women fly on brooms, don't they?"

"Only in stories," I said. I tried to give Albion the scientific explanation
of how those stories arose. "Before flying, the women would rub their brooms
with magic leaves - leaves containing drugs. They would then put the broom
between their legs, the drugs would be taken into the body through the soft
skin down there" - I explained what I meant with the help of some fairly crude
Bislama words introduced into the language by European sailors - "and that let
them believe that they could fly."

"That's not how it is on Pentecost. Here, people really do fly."

Psychedelic drugs did seem an unlikely explanation for the islanders' magic.
Although the persistent connection between sorcery and exotic leaves is
suspicious, in the majority of cases it seems that the leaves are not actually
consumed, so it is hard to see how the sorcerers could be tripping on drugs at
the time they perform their miracles. Besides, I have never heard of any plant
that grows on Pentecost having mind-altering properties (other than kava,
whose sedating effects have never made me inclined to fly). On the occasions
when I have tried asking the islanders about local hallucinogens (surely those
glow-in-the-dark mushrooms must do something funky to your brain?), they
appeared not to be familiar with the concept.

"On Pentecost we also have nakaemas," Albion went on. "People who can turn
themselves into animals."

I remembered the incident a month ago when the Year 7 girls at Ranwadi had
woken up one night to find a mysterious boy in their dormitory. The incensed
girls had tried to corner the boy, but he had somehow got away, and it was
whispered afterwards that he must have turned himself into a rat in order to
escape from the building.

"Some people can turn themselves into dogs," said Albion. Occasionally I see a
strange dog walking past at night, and I think to myself, 'That's a man!'."

I'd encountered shifty-looking dogs wandering Pentecost at night too. Up until
now I had assumed that they were ordinary dogs that came out in the middle of
the night simply so that they could raid people's dustbins without fear of
being chased and stoned.

"If you have an enemy, sometimes he will turn himself into a dog and stalk up
to your house at night, so that he can attack you."

That was uncomfortably close to the notion of a werewolf. Maybe I would take
the main road home, I thought, instead of my usual shortcut through the dark
gulley in the forest behind the school. Rationally I don't believe for a
moment that the locals are capable of turning themselves at night into
malevolent beasts, but imagination is a hideous thing.

"Sometimes friends from my village will turn themselves into fruit bats, and
fly down to Ranwadi at night to visit me," Albion went on.

Becoming a fruit bat struck me as a risky thing to do in Vanuatu. I wondered
if any of Albion's flying friends had ever been shot at by the villagers.

"They come and look down at me from the tree above my house," he continued.
"They will say to me later, 'You were doing such-and-such that night.' I ask
them, 'How did you know that?'. They will say, 'We were up in that tree,
watching you.'."

There was no way that people from Albion's village could have sneaked to
Ranwadi at night in human form - it was much too far away. Perhaps Albion had
predictable habits, and his friends had vivid dreams.

"White people don't do anything like that?" he asked.

"In our culture we have stories of nakaemas, too," I said. "But nowadays they
are just stories."

"Like Dracula?"

"Exactly."

Albion got up to take a drink of kava, swallowed a shell-full of the noxious
liquid and then wandered outside, spitting. His place was taken by John the
school handyman, a villainous-looking character with a chiselled black beard
and a liking for gold jewellery.

"Some kinds of magic are fun. But there is also black magic. If you have an
enemy, he can kill you without ever touching you."

His words hung in the yellow, smoky air.

"Suppose I wanted to harm you," he went on. There was a look in John's pointy
eyes that made me uncomfortable. "I would come up to your house in the middle
of the night and hide outside. You would wake up and want to piss. You have a
toilet inside your house, but you wouldn't use it. Instead you would go
outside, into the bushes. You wouldn't see me in the dark, but I would see
you. I could put a spell on you. The next day you would get sick. If you went
to a doctor, the doctor would say there was nothing wrong with you. But the
sickness would get worse and worse. Doctors couldn't cure you. The only cure
would be to find a person who could give you a different leaf, a leaf that
would take away the curse."

This was sinister stuff.

"On Ambrym Island there is a lot of black magic," John continued.

I had heard this before - my students had warned me not to go there.

"Once there was a man on Ambrym who shot a man on Pentecost with a bow and
arrow. He stood on Ambrym, and fired his arrow, and it killed a man standing
on Pentecost."

The two islands are several miles apart.

"He did that using black magic?" I asked.

"Uh huh."

"What had the Pentecost man done to deserve that?"

"He had put a curse on somebody from Ambrym."

That figured. Magical feuds are a common problem in parts of Vanuatu; I read
in a newspaper of one case of tit-for-tat sorcery whose perpetrators had
actually been taken to court (where the accusations were treated with complete
seriousness). On other occasions, exchanges of malicious magic have spiralled
into earthly violence. Whether or not sorcery has been directly responsible
for any deaths in Vanuatu, it has certainly been indirectly responsible for a
few, when the angry families of curse victims have sought revenge on the
alleged sorcerer.

"There is also a kind of kava that can kill people," said John.

I can believe that, I said. There's nothing supernatural about a poisonous
plant.

"But you don't die by drinking this kava. The person doing the black magic
drinks it. As he drinks he performs a curse, and the victim dies. The victim
could be far, far away. Somebody drinking here in this nakamal could kill you
even if you were at home in Scotland."

I must avoid making enemies while I'm on Pentecost.

"There are good things that you can do with magic, too," said John, perhaps
feeling that the atmosphere in the nakamal had become dark enough. "There is
also love magic. You can use magic leaves to get a woman to fall in love with
you."

There was something about the way John said 'you' that gave me the impression
he wasn't talking in the abstract. As far as people on Pentecost are
concerned, being of marriageable age and still single means that I must need
urgent help in finding a woman. (Perhaps, like some of my long-suffering
relatives, they secretly worry that I'm gay.) The school Principal,
ever-resourceful in coming up with solutions to his staffing shortages, muses
openly about how nice it would be if I went home and married a woman who's a
qualified teacher, and brought her back with me to Ranwadi. The villagers,
meanwhile, tell me suggestive stories about previous white expatriates who
have married Pentecost women.

The islanders here often talk about finding a wife in the same way that my
posh friends in Edinburgh talk about finding a new outfit. (Even the price
involved is similar.) However, when I tell them that Western courtship is not
a mere matter of identifying a suitable woman and negotiating with her father
as to how many pigs she's worth - in my country, a woman has to fall in love
with you before you can marry - they insist that the same is true on
Pentecost. Which is presumably where the magic comes in.

"There is a kind of magic involving a torch light," John told me. "You take
the bulb out of the torch and rub it in the ash from a magic leaf that has
been burned. Then you put the bulb back in the torch. It doesn’t give light
any more, but when you point it at someone, they will follow you."

This struck me as an interesting combination of ancient beliefs and modern
technology. I wondered if it would work with the little LED keyring lights
that I'd been selling. Maybe that was why the local men were so desperate to
get their hands on them.

"Originally, this kind of magic was used for stealing," John explained. "You
point the torch at another man's pig, and it follows you away to a place where
you can roast it. But nowadays men use it on women."

I laughed, visualising a hopeful young man with a torch striding out of a
village like the Pied Piper, followed by a procession of mesmerised pigs and
women. I doubted that the women involved would find it funny, though. At least
it was more original than spiking someone's drink with Rohypnol.

A spot of light in the doorway heralded Albion's reappearance in the nakamal.
He walked over to his basket, which was hanging from the rafters, and fished
out a little plastic bag of leaf tobacco, with which he began rolling a
cigarette.

"Near my village there is a magic pool," he said. "If you went down to that
pool and threw a certain leaf in the water, you could never leave Pentecost."

"What do you mean, I could never leave?"

"You would buy a ticket, and the plane would come, but you would not get on
it. You would realise that you wanted to stay."

Albion strode over to the embers of the fire, picked out a glowing stick, and
lit his cigarette.

"Every time you wanted to leave," he went on, "you would change your mind.
Maybe you would get down to the airfield, maybe you would even be at the door
of the plane, but you could never get on board. Always you would choose to
stay behind."

I resolved to stay away from that pool.

"But you still don’t believe in magic?"

"No, I don’t."

John was indignant. "Why?"

"If I saw magic with my own eyes I would believe it", I said. "But so far I
have never seen anything in the world that science cannot explain. I have
never seen any evidence for magic."

"Oh, there is evidence."

I didn't doubt that. A man casts a rain-making spell and the sky clouds over;
clearly the magic has worked. A person with many enemies dies suddenly;
obviously this is the result of a malevolent curse. And if a piece of magic
happens not to work, there are plenty of excuses. The ritual was wrongly
performed, the would-be sorcerer lacked sufficient faith in the spirits, or
somebody was performing a counter-curse. It is not in human nature to
attribute things to chance. Only scientists demand freaky things like
repeatability and statistical significance when considering the evidence for a
phenomenon, and even scientists try their best to make their statistics show
that something purposeful and non-random is going on in the world.

"There is one man from this village," said Albion, "who can get to Melsisi in
just one or two minutes. Sometimes he turns himself into a dolphin, and swims
along the coast. Or, if he chooses, he can fly."

I gave a sceptical look. It takes me an hour to walk to Melsisi, and that's if
I am in an extreme hurry. Even if I was lucky enough to catch a lift on a
passing truck, it would be a fifteen-minute ride.

"We once tested this", Albion explained. "One day we asked this man to go to
Melsisi to the bank. We gave him a signed transaction slip, and told him to
withdraw money from one of our accounts. While we were waiting, we cooked some
rice."

Albion paused.

"Ten minutes later, the man was back, with the money from the account. The
rice had not even finished cooking yet, and he was back."

He whistled.

"Rice doesn't take a long time to cook."

He emphasised this last part, perhaps aware that if it weren't for the rice in
the story, I would put it down to the Melanesians' inability to judge the
passing of time. It had never occurred to me before that anybody could use a
pot of rice as a clock.

Albion continued: "When the man got back, we said, 'Wow, that was quick!'."

"'No', the man said, 'it was slow. I had to wait in a queue at the bank.'"

Albion shook his head and made the clicking noise that ni-Vanuatu make when
they are seriously impressed.

"You couldn’t get to Melsisi and back that quickly if you didn’t have magic,"
he concluded.

"Yes, but..."

Possible explanations for the bank story came into my head, but I kept them to
myself. I didn't want to accuse anybody of lying or question their judgement.

Seeing that I remained unconvinced, John tried a different approach.

"You believe in God, don’t you?"

He thought he'd got me on that one. How could I be a Christian (in Vanuatu
it's assumed that you're a Christian) and yet refuse to accept that there were
supernatural forces in the world?

"About God…" I hesitated. Telling a ni-Vanuatu that I didn't believe in the
existence of God would be like telling a Northern Irish person that I didn't
believe in the existence of terrorists. "About God, I'm not sure."

"You're not sure," John repeated slowly. This wasn't the answer he'd been
expecting. "People like you don’t believe there are any spirits in the world?"

"Some white people believe in spirits," I said. "Lots of them claim to have
seen ghosts." My companions looked blank. "Spirits of the dead, phantasms…" I
wasn't sure of the Bislama word. "They believe that after a person dies, their
spirit sometimes stays in a place, and that occasionally you can see or hear
the spirit of that person, even after they are dead."

"Oh yes, we have spirits like that here too. We call them 'devil b'long man'.
So you believe in these?"

"Personally, I don't," I said. "But many of my friends do."

There are plenty of other examples of Western belief in the supernatural, I
realised. Visitors to Scotland still seek a monster in a chilly loch whose
ecosystem could not possibly support it, while North American enthusiasts
cling to the fantasy that an unknown ape could have wandered their forests for
centuries and never once been caught in the sights of a gun. People in Western
countries pass on chain letters for fear that they will bring down curses upon
themselves if they don't, and it is a brave person who will walk under a
ladder on Friday the thirteenth. People attend churches and synagogues to hear
about miraculous wonders beyond human understanding, and attach spiritual
significance to the most inanimate of objects. (Not even atheists wish to have
their ashes flushed down the toilet after they die.) They read in magazines
that their fortunes are determined by the position of dots in the sky, and pay
the owners of glass spheres to give unearthly revelations about their fate.
They claim that the pattern of ground-up leaves in a mug of hot drink can
reveal your fate, maintain that finding a fourth leaf on a small grassland
plant will bring good luck, and then deride Pacific islanders for believing in
magic leaves.

Maybe white people do have a sense of magic after all.

Sadly, there remain sceptical ones amongst us, myself included, whose belief
in magic has been utterly and irrevocably lost. We are forced instead to amuse
ourselves with synthetic recreations of magic: conjuring tricks computer game
sprites, cinematic effects, mind-altering mushrooms, theme park rides, or
children's books about teenage wizardry.

Sitting in a glowing hut on a starry night in the forest, these struck me as
poor substitutes for the real thing.

16th November

Things dry quickly under a tropical sun, and within a few days of the rainy
weather coming to end, Pentecost was parched. The mud on the roads was baked
into cracked brown paving, and wispy varieties of grass that had sprung up
during the rain turned into yellow hay.

On the pumpkin vine outside our house, the broad green leaves drooped like
crepe paper. I was sad to see the plant suffer. Hugh and I have spent a lot of
time looking after the pumpkin vine since moving into the house: nourishing it
with kitchen scraps (which rot down rapidly into fertiliser in the warm
conditions), squashing the orange beetles that suck its sap, pollinating the
big yellow flowers, and discouraging the lawnmower from encroaching on its
patch by the use of strategically-placed rocks. According to the Deputy
Principal, an Agriculture teacher, ours is the only pumpkin vine around the
school that bears both male and female flowers, and thus the only one that can
easily be induced to bear fruit. The plant has provided us and our neighbours
not only with pumpkins but also with juicy young shoots and leaves that make
an tasty addition to curries and stir-fries. Not wishing to preside over the
death of Ranwadi's only hermaphrodite pumpkin, I watered it daily. However, in
the grilling climate it took about ten buckets a day just to keep the poor,
temperate plant alive.

The temperature had been steadily rising for weeks, and when it reached the
high thirties (the nineties Fahrenheit) we began to really feel the heat. With
no electric fans, no air-conditioning and no chilled drinks, we were forced to
resort to the method of cooling that our ape-like ancestors invented a million
years ago when they first lost their fur: we sweated. And when that wasn't
enough, we jumped in the local river.

Sadly, in more recent times somebody less sensible than those ancient apes has
come up with rules of etiquette demanding that schoolteachers put on some sort
of shirt or T-shirt in addition to a pair of shorts when trying to look
respectable in front of a class. This made sweating an uncomfortable nuisance.
Nor was it practical to teach a class in the river, although I contemplated
trying. Lessons were sultry and stifling as a result. I took bottles of water
to class and passed them around, but it made little difference. Some of the
students decided that it was too hot to work and spent the day asleep in their
dormitories. After I began chasing boys out of their dormitories, they took to
snoozing under the trees instead. It was probably cooler there anyway.

The students who did come to class sat lethargically at their desks using
their books to waft at the sticky air. I stood at the blackboard trying to
remain dignified and enthusiastic in spite of the fact that I was drenched and
panting. When I leaned over to answer the students' questions, I did my best
not to drip sweat onto their books.

Outside, the world was an oven. The sun blazed on the tin roofs of the
classrooms, and empty petrol drums clanged as they expanded in the warmth. A
searing haze rose over the ocean, and the fronds of the palm trees were crisp
and motionless. Walking between the buildings at midday involved wading
through layers of heavy heat, across shadeless spaces drenched in radiation.
The blue sky was a bath of hot vapour, scalding the pink flesh of any European
who tried to bathe under it. I wondered if the Australian volunteers at Londua
were still 'sunbaking' from 12 to 2 every day. They would certainly be nicely
bronzed by now - assuming their skin hadn't shrivelled and fallen off already.
I pictured the girls on their black rocks, sizzling like lumps of tender meat.

They say that only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun. However,
on Pentecost even the mad dogs know better. As the only Englishman on the
island I followed their example, staying indoors during the middle of the day
and venturing outside only when the sun had descended to a more familiar level
in the sky.

- - -

With the hot weather, the local airfield dried out and reopened. Mail began to
arrive again, in its usual chancy and unpredictable way. Most of the parcels
and letters that our friends and relatives had posted over the past few weeks
were nowhere to be seen, but the first plane did bring the students another
bunch of begging letters from multi-millionaire evangelist Benny Hinn. I felt
that I could have made a moral case for quietly stealing and burning the lot,
but in the end I merely scrawled a note on the outside of each one:

"Remember Matthew 24:24-26".

Unfortunately, the plane's most important delivery - the box of final exam
papers for the Year 12 students - failed to arrive. The plane that was
supposed to bring it had come via an unusually circuitous route, flying from
Vila to Santo to Ambae, then returning to Santo to pick up more cargo before
flying back to Ambae and on to north and south Pentecost. At each stop, boxes
and bags and bundles would have been thrown hastily on and off the plane,
sometimes being unloaded and then reloaded again as the crew struggled to fit
everything in to the Twin Otters' cupboard-like storage spaces, while an Air
Vanuatu employee would have stood with a clipboard trying to sort all of the
cargo in the five minutes before the plane was due to take off again. Under
such circumstances it would have been easy for an item to be unloaded in the
wrong place. Phone calls were made to Vila and Santo and Ambae and north
Pentecost, trying to trace the whereabouts of the exam papers.

Nobody had seen them. The manifest - the scrap of paper supposedly showing
what is and isn’t on the plane - indicated that the box of exam papers had
been mistakenly unloaded at Sara, Pentecost's northern airfield, but the
person on the phone at Sara denied all knowledge of them. Perhaps the entry on
the manifest had been ticked by mistake. More enquiries were made.

Maybe the box of exam papers had been unloaded at Sara and taken somewhere by
truck. Could it have been delivered by mistake to the college at Melsisi?

"If you're going to Melsisi this weekend, could have a look for them?" the
Principal asked me. Actually I had been planning a quiet weekend at the
school, catching up with some marking. However, after other colleagues asked
me the same question I got the hint, put on my hat and a thick layer of
sunscreen, and trekked to Melsisi. It was now Sunday, the school truck driver
appeared to have taken the weekend off, Melsisi's phones weren't working, and
nobody else was going to bother with the seven mile return walk.

I explained the problem to the Principal of the Collège de Melsisi, and
together we searched through the piles of exam papers there to see if there
were any that had been delivered to the wrong school by mistake. There were,
but the papers in question belonged to another school. Ranwadi's remained
lost.

Meanwhile, Year 12 students elsewhere in Vanuatu had already sat their exams.
To prevent any possibility of cheating, the teachers at Ranwadi unplugged the
school's two public telephones, depriving the students (and the people from
several neighbouring villages who use the schools payphones) of contact with
the outside world.

In the school office, Monday morning brought more desperate phone calls. By
now, so many calls had been made that the school was running out of telecards,
and still the missing consignment was nowhere to be found. Senior teachers
vented their frustration at senior officials from Air Vanuatu, but neither
could make the box reappear. Perhaps a truck driver took it by mistake and was
then embarrassed to admit that he had it, speculated the Principal. Perhaps it
was stolen by someone from North Pentecost who was jealous of the school's
success, mused the villagers.

By the time the school had accepted that the exam papers were lost and a new
batch had been dispatched by the exam board in Fiji, the anxious Year 12s had
seen the start of their final exams delayed by over a week, and were beginning
to wonder if they would sit them at all. You can just imagine the wailing and
whinging and angry letters to The Guardian that would ensue if a group of
A-level students at an English private school were put through a similar
ordeal.

The delay meant that the Year 12s would be sitting their exams at the same
time as the Year 10s - which doesn't usually happen - and to overcome the
resulting shortage of suitable examination rooms, junior students were evicted
from their classrooms. Although alternative rooms were found for them, the
students exploited the resulting confusion and began to skip classes in
droves. Some hid in the bushes outside their classrooms when the teacher
approached, while others relaxed openly under the trees, confident that nobody
would bother sending them to lessons. Some wandered out of the school and
raided local gardens, prompting angry complaints from the villagers. On my way
to class one morning I came across a group of boys standing around a bonfire.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"Don't worry, we're only burning rubbish."

"I meant, why aren’t you in class?"

They shrugged. The students knew that even if I bothered to put their names
down for detention, nobody was likely to get around to enforcing the
punishment between now and the end of the year. In any case, the committee
responsible for enforcing school discipline has been suspended by the
Principal, following a letter of protest from a group of students who believed
that the committee was biased in favour of students from Ambae Island and
against those from Pentecost. The complaint arose from an incident in which
two Pentecost boys had been threatened with expulsion whilst an Ambae boy
accused of a similar crime had got off more lightly. The accusation of bias
was unfair: the truth was that the Pentecost boys had simply been stupid
enough to get caught red-handed whilst the Ambae boy had not. However, the
students who made the complaint were really angry, and a headmaster charged
with maintaining order among three hundred ill-disciplined, machete-wielding
teenagers on an island with no real police cannot afford to dismiss his
students' concerns too lightly.

Knowing that their teachers are no longer in a position to force them to work,
many students have apparently decided that they have done enough learning for
one year. In some subjects, the year's work has genuinely been finished, but
in others there is still a long way to go. My 9B Maths class, who were months
behind in their work when I inherited them from their previous teacher, have
worked hard and caught up dramatically, overtaking the professionally-taught
9A Maths class (which gave me quiet satisfaction), but they are still nowhere
near the end of the year's course. If they all stayed until the official end
of term (which is still more than three weeks away), they might have a chance
of finishing at least the main topics, but I know that they won't. Their
lessons have now become a salvage operation, with me frantically picking out
the most essential bits from the remaining topics and trying to teach them to
the conscientious students who have continued coming to lessons, not knowing
how long I have left before the entire class disappears.

10th November

------------------------------------------
"Kill the pig! Slit her throat! Bash her in!"
- Lord of the Flies
------------------------------------------

Sunday was Graduation Day for the Year 10, Year 12 and Year 13 students at
Ranwadi College. (Some of the Year 10s and 12s will be back next year, but
others will leave in search of work, or continue their education elsewhere.)
None of the students have actually sat their exams yet, let alone passed them,
but the school chose to have the graduation ceremony beforehand so that the
students can leave as soon as their exams are over.

"Students who hang around after their exams are over will only cause trouble."

In the run-up to Graduation Day, the students were hard at work with their
brooms and bush knives, sweeping and scrubbing the school buildings and
hacking its riotous greenery into a respectable state. Some of the vegetation
was brought indoors to decorate the chapel and the dining hall for the
occasion; the rest was burned. The warm air was filled with the rumble of the
lawn mower and the smell of bonfires.

Outside the chapel, the junior students constructed a beautiful walkway of
flowers, the kind of thing you might see at a Hollywood wedding. Wooden posts
were driven into the ground along either side of the walkway (accidentally
shattering the water pipe leading to the Principal's house), pairs of palm
leaves were bent between the posts to form archways, and each spike of every
leaf was tipped with a pink frangipani flower. (Despite their bare and stunted
look, frangipani trees somehow find the energy to produce a remarkable daily
bloom, shedding flowers the way a large dog sheds hair - but smelling far
nicer.)

A graduation lunch was prepared and Miss Katie and her Year 12 class prepared
themselves a special end-of-year dinner. The lunch was much like the students'
regular meals, except that small helpings of beef stew and pieces of fresh
lettuce were served alongside the starchy rice and taro.

On Friday morning, I saw two Year 12 boys walk past the house carrying small,
squealing pigs. Out of curiosity, I followed.

The pigs were taken to the back of the school kitchen and deposited there on a
grey mound of ash and dirt, their trotters tied using nearby vines. On this
mound of death - a sort of porcine Calvary - many pigs and other edible beasts
had been condemned to death. Before slaughtering their pigs, the boys asked
the cooks to boil a pan of water so that the carcasses could be cleaned. While
we waited for the water to boil, the boys chatted to me about life in England.

"How wide is the tunnel under the sea between England and France?", one of
them wanted to know. The two main tunnels are each about as wide as that
kitchen, I explained, pointing at the smoking tin building behind us.

"What is the Queen like?", asked another. I admittedly that I'd never her
personally (unlike some Pentecost Islanders, who still remember the occasion
in the 1970s when Her Majesty came to see what was then still part of her
Empire, and one unfortunate native died in the process of trying to entertain
the great visitor). However, from what I've heard, the Queen has done a good
job in the fifty-four years that she has now been on the throne. She isn't
quite Britain's longest-serving monarch yet, but she is probably the
longest-lasting ruler that Vanuatu will ever have, having been its joint Head
of State (together with a succession of French presidents) for 28 years prior
to the colony's independence.

"Does fruit grow in England?" the boys wanted to know. Yes, I said, but not
the same kinds of fruit that you get in Vanuatu, and not in such abundance. In
Vanuatu, it's rare to be able to look outside and not lay eyes on something
succulent and edible. From where I was sitting on the mound behind the
kitchen, I could see papaya, citrus, mangoes, bananas, breadfruit and coconuts
all growing on the trees. English countryside is not like that, I told the
boys, and apart from the occasional nut or berry Scotland is a woody
wasteland. A fine place for a bear or a squirrel, but a miserable habitat for
a tall, sweet-toothed ape such as Homo sapiens.

When the shout came from the kitchen, "Water ee boil finish!", the boys set to
work on their pigs. One was castrated before being killed, in the belief that
this would improve the flavour of the meat. The poor animal's squealing rose a
tone as the knife went in and the raw pink lumps were flung aside.

"Have you ever cut off a pig's balls before?" they asked me.

I admitted that I hadn’t.

"Didn't you learn to do this in Agriculture class?"

Agriculture is not part of the curriculum in Britain, I explained. They boys
were shocked.

"Why not?"

"Most people in Britain don't grow their food in gardens," I explained.

"They work in tertiary industries instead," expounded one boy, who'd clearly
been paying attention in Economics class.

"If schoolboys in Britain did *this*," I added, gesturing towards the
trussed-up, bleeding pig, "they would probably get arrested for cruelty."

The traditional way to dispatch a pig in Vanuatu is to batter it over the
head. Depending on the size of the pig and the accuracy of the executioner's
aim, this can either be a quick and humane or a bloody and horrible way to
die. The Year 12 boys, who had no club handy, decided to try other methods.

One pig they sat on, holding its nose and mouth closed until it suffocated.
I'll spare you the details of what they did to the other, but suffice it to
say that it involved a sharp knife and a lot of blood and wasn't particularly
pleasant, nor particularly quick. It was hard to tell at what point the pig
lost consciousness (if indeed pigs have consciousness), since its body
continued to jerk long after death, but I hope it didn't take long.

Wrongly believing that the boys knew what they were doing, and not wishing to
appear a squeamish foreigner, I stood silently and tried not to grimace during
the slaughter. Six months away from the cosseted rich world, where meat is
just another product from a factory, has desensitised me to such brutality.
Afterwards, however, I remained enough of a Brit to regret the fact that I had
said nothing. I should have intervened; I should have objected to the
castration (surely it only helps the flavour of the meat if you do it a long
time before killing the animal?) and to the method of slaughter. I should have
urged the boys to put the poor animal more speedily out of its misery.

- - -

Graduation weekend coincided with a visit to the school by a group of
'crusaders' - a travelling Christian group who had come from Port Vila to help
bring the school closer to God. For the first couple of days of their visit
crusaders visited staff houses and chanted long prayers. We're used to the
sound of praying and singing by now - our neighbours at Ranwadi make Ned
Flanders seem like Satan - but after a particularly loud evening of crusading
next door, on a day when I had gone to bed tired and early, I began to think
some very un-Christian thoughts.

Late one evening, the crusaders marched around the school in the dark shouting
out praise to the Lord. (Less enlightened people were instructed to stay
indoors.) As they marched, the light of God shone upon them, and the shadows
could be seen physically running away into the distance. (I quote an
eyewitness account given to me later by one of my fellow teachers.) Thus was
Ranwadi College delivered from evil.

Over the weekend itself, the visitors organised lively spiritual sessions for
the students in the chapel. Watching through the window it looked like good
fun, with lots of singing and jumping and clapping and twirling and touching.
(Boys and girls, of course, were segregated to opposite sides of the room.)
These sessions went on late into the night. By Monday morning, my 9B Maths
class was so exhausted that half of them were asleep in their dormitories and
half of the remainder were asleep at their desks. Not wishing to try and teach
a lesson to a half-conscious class, I made no attempt to wake them up.

- - -

With Graduation Day falling on 5th November - Bonfire Night in Britain - it
seemed the perfect time for a firework party. Real fireworks proved impossible
to find in Vanuatu, but in Vila I had bought some decorative toy fireworks and
some sparklers, and on the night of the students' graduation I planned a small
bonfire party on the beach.

"Is that OK with everyone?" I had asked at a staff meeting.

"Some of the students will be praying with the crusaders in the chapel that
evening," I was told.

"Until what time?"

"Midnight."

"Oh. How about Saturday evening then?"

"The crusaders are praying that evening too."

"Let's make it Friday then."

My colleagues shook their heads.

"OK, well, the students who want to join the crusade can go to the chapel, and
those who want to worship the devil with fire and brimstone can come down to
the beach with me."

Not all of the teachers realised that I was joking.

"Could you explain more about the meaning of this festival of yours?" the
Principal asked cautiously.

I hastily explained that Bonfire Night commemorates the attempt by terrorists
to blow up the Houses of Parliament with gunpowder on 5th November 1605, and
that there is nothing Satanic about the occasion. (Although when you come to
think about it, it is a weird excuse for a festival. I wonder if Americans in
four centuries' time will gather on the evening of September 11th to eat hot
dogs and throw burning paper aeroplanes at effigies of Osama bin Laden.)

Still, the staff didn't like the idea of giving students a choice between
praying and partying. Maybe they didn't trust enough of them to make the right
choice.

"So is there ANY time I can light a bonfire without interfering with the
Lord's work?" I asked.

The evening of Monday, 6th November, was settled upon.

- - -

On the morning of Graduation Day, students, teachers, local chiefs, and the
few parents who lived within walking distance gathered outside the chapel in
their finest (which, in Vanuatu, meant their floweriest) clothes. I wore long
trousers (my only pair) and a blue Hawaiian shirt decorated with a
hibiscus-flower pattern.

The ceremony opened with a familiar chorus:

"Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me,
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind but now I see."

It was an appropriate choice of hymn. The writer of "Amazing Grace", John
Newton, was a former slave trader who reformed his ways after discovering God.
The founder of Ranwadi was a former indentured labourer - the South Pacific
equivalent of a slave - who returned to his home island, after years on a
Queensland sugar plantation, eager to spread the good news he had discovered
about a man named Jesus Christ.

"'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear
And grace my fear relieved
How precious did that grace appear
The hour I first believed."

Listening to the hymn, I thought of my own home island. John Newton's words
were written in Olney, Buckinghamshire - a mile from where I grew up - and set
to a tune from Scotland, my adopted homeland. I pictured Newton in Olney's
cold stone church, and wondered if he ever imagined that his words would be
sung on a bright tropical morning two hundred years later, ten thousand miles
away, on an island that had yet to be discovered at the time the words were
written.

"Through many dangers, toils and snares
I have already come
'Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far
And grace will lead me home."

After a short communion ceremony (it was Sunday, after all) there were prizes
to be given and speeches to be made. The Minister of Agriculture had been
invited as the guest speaker, but failed to come because the local airfield
was waterlogged after a month of rain. His absence was a blessing insofar as
it helped to keep the proceedings short: this year's guests were kept seated
on the chapel's narrow wooden benches for a mere three and half hours.
Previous graduation ceremonies have lasted for five or six.

The Principal used his speech to reflect on the school's achievements.
Principals always do. However, Ranwadi's success is genuinely worth reflecting
on: it is about more than the usual litany of sporting prizes and academic
awards (though there have been plenty of those). It is about the development
of Pentecost Island, the struggle by villagers who dig up roots and scrape
coconuts for a living to provide their children with a real education - the
kind of education that will allow them to pursue the same dreams as their
counterparts overseas. Ranwadi has come a long way towards achieving that
goal.

Life in Vanuatu is vulnerable. A cyclone might destroy your crops. A fire
might destroy your house. Fluctuations in the world market for tropical fruit
might destroy your livelihood. Illness might destroy your health. But, as
successive headmasters have known, a good education is something that can
never be taken away from you.

Ranwadi was founded as a primary school, teaching young boys (and later girls)
how to read, write, and worship God. In the early 1970s, as the islanders'
educational standard improved, the place evolved into a high school.
Originally, secondary schools in Vanuatu provided education only from Year 7
to Year 9, but in 1985 the government added a tenth year to the national
curriculum. By the 1990s many were graduating from Year 10 with excellent
results, and seeking further education. However, at that time only a couple of
institutions in Vanuatu offered schooling beyond Year 10, and too few of
Ranwadi's graduates were able to find places there. The problem was solved by
establishing Year 11 and Year 12 classes at Ranwadi. Later, as students'
aspirations increased further, a Year 13 class was added.

Adding extra years to the students' education was a tremendous challenge. New
classrooms and dormitories had to be built and furnished, new teachers had to
be recruited, and new books and resources had to be found. The school, of
course, had no spare money for any of these things. The Principal was
undeterred. With the help of churches, youth groups, and overseas aid
agencies, the challenges were met.

"There is nothing we have ever dreamed of that has not come true," the
Principal told his audience.

An outsider might attribute Ranwadi's achievements to the hard work and vision
of the people who run the school. But most people here are in no doubt as to
the real reason for the school's success.

"There is one thing that I believe makes Ranwadi unique," said the Head Boy in
his own speech, "and that is our faith in God. This is a place where Jesus is
number one."

I wondered to what extent the school's prayers really were responsible for its
achievements.

"Obey the Lord your God and all these blessings will be yours."

I remain an atheist. However, studies have shown that those who happen to
consider themselves lucky (or, presumably, blessed by God) behave
subconsciously in a way that does increase their chance of good fortune. What
was originally a groundless belief becomes self-fulfilling. And what could be
better for your self-confidence than believing that you have the support of
the greatest power in the Universe?

"I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength."

Ranwadi's latest challenge is the most ambitious yet. Although the exam
results of its students are among the best in the country (beaten only by
those from Malapoa and Matevulu, Vanuatu's two big urban schools), it remains
immensely difficult for school leavers from islands such as Pentecost to
progress to further education. There is only one real university in the South
Pacific, plus a few specialist colleges, and places at these are limited and
expensive.

Seeing this problem, the Principal came up with a stunning solution: if
students find it difficult to get a college education elsewhere, then they
should be offered one at Ranwadi. With this in mind, he is currently liaising
with overseas universities in the hope of setting up a distance learning
programme under which students based at Ranwadi can study for college-level
diplomas. This idea is still at a very early stage, and will face many
hurdles. However, the Principal, driven by the conviction that he is helping
to fulfil God's plan for Ranwadi, believes it can succeed.

"Never, never, never, never give up trying."

Those were the Principal's final words to his departing students.

- - -

After the ceremony, the graduating students lined up along the walkway of
flowers to shake hands with each of their teachers and fellow pupils as they
filed out of the chapel, one by one. The line of students then doubled in on
itself so that the graduates could shake hands with one another. At a rough
calculation, fifty thousand handshakes were performed.

Although their graduation was meant to be a joyful ceremony, the assembled
students all looked thoroughly miserable. Some were crying.

"I don't remember being unhappy on the day I finished school," said Hugh.

These students were not merely saying goodbye to their school, though; they
were saying goodbye to their friends.

In fact, Ranwadi's graduates will probably be no worse at staying in touch
than their British or Australian counterparts - Vanuatu is a small and
sociable country. However, at Western schools it easier for students to leave
under the illusion that they will remain friends. By the time they look back
and realise how few of their former classmates they remain in contact with,
they have moved on and no longer care. For Ranwadi's graduates, there is no
such illusion. As they depart to their separate villages and separate islands,
without the benefit of e-mail or mobile phones or social networking web sites,
it is a sad and sudden farewell.

The students leaving Ranwadi also face a dim and uncertain future. In Port
Vila and Luganville, Vanuatu's overgrown little towns, too many ambitious
young people are congregating in search of too few jobs. That is the downside
of the educational improvements that schools such as Ranwadi have strived for.
Just as many British university students spend years learning the finer
subtleties of human knowledge only to find themselves in shops and call
centres doing jobs that human beings are paid to do only because it's cheaper
than building a robot, many of Vanuatu's high school leavers will find
themselves growing vegetables in jungle villages where they may never need to
read or write again. Just as British arts graduates are statistically less
well-off than those who never went to university at all, some ni-Vanuatu
families who make sacrifices in order to send their children to school end up
poorer than those who never bothered.

Back in 2001, I shocked my then-housemate Slick by suggesting that it would be
better if fewer of Vanuatu's young people went to school. Five years on, I am
more positive. In addition to the disappointments, I have heard a few stories
of success. One local man got a lowly job in airport maintenance after leaving
school, but rose to become the chief pilot for an international airline.
Another Pentecost islander, Father Walter Lini, was the national figurehead
who led his country to independence. It is my hope - no, my prediction - that
the within the current students' lifetimes, an ex-pupil of Ranwadi will become
Prime Minister of Vanuatu.

I thought of the Principal's parents, who toiled on a coconut plantation to
raise the money needed to send their son to Ranwadi. Could they have predicted
that scarcely more than a decade later, their little boy would end up running
his former school?

Many of Ranwadi's pupils will never need the knowledge they acquired at
school. However, a few of them will put it to spectacularly good use, and you
can't necessarily predict which few it will be. The success of those few lucky
students is what makes the whole effort worthwhile.

- - -

The next day at sunset, Hugh and I went down to the beach. With the students'
help we lit a bonfire (there is always plenty to burn on a tropical beach),
and decorated the surrounding rocks with crudely-made lanterns of burning
paraffin.

A rumour had spread that there was going to be a big firework display, and I
worried that the students would be disappointed when they discovered that all
I had was a few sparklers and toy fireworks.

I needn't have worried. Sparklers, the students discovered, actually make
quite good fireworks if you throw them high in the air. The sparklers were
poor-quality Chinese ones that I had bought in Port Vila (Vanuatu's remoteness
and high import duties make it uneconomical for stores to import anything but
the cheapest brands of goods), and as they flew through the air they shed
burning phosphor in a dangerous but rather beautiful way.

Crowds of students whooped and screamed with delight as they watched the
fizzling sparklers arc through the night sky. The students who couldn't get
their hands on sparklers flung burning sticks and coconut fronds in the air
instead. Some boys began to hurl flaming logs from the top of a nearby cliff,
from which - fortunately - they landed on a patch of empty waste ground.

Aware that most of the students had never seen fireworks before and knew
little of firework safety, I had been careful to explain to them that it was
dangerous to point a sparkler in someone's face. However, it had never
occurred to me to tell the students not to throw them. In the excitement of
the occasion, my warnings of "Be careful!" were ignored. All I could do was
stand and shout "Look out!" as flaming projectiles descended towards the
crowds of spectators. The screaming and cheering got louder. The scene looked
more like a Nordic fire festival or a May Day riot than like a firework party.
At least the kids were having fun, I tried to tell myself, and nobody was in
danger of serious injury. Minor skin burns are nothing to be troubled about on
Pentecost (where children play with fire from a young age), and if one of the
flaming objects headed towards someone's eyes, they would see it coming and
duck out of the way.

As far as I know, nobody burned themselves. A couple of students got cut and
bruised as they scrambled to dodge the flying sticks and sparklers and then
scrambled to pick them up and throw them in the air again afterwards, but they
didn’t seem to regret the experience.

This being Pentecost, none of the teachers who witnessed the event questioned
its safety. They merely congratulated me on providing the students with such a
good evening's entertainment. Perhaps they assumed that all firework displays
are supposed to look like this.

- - -

After nearly a month of rain, the sky cleared, and the blueness flooded back
into the landscape like a hot liquid. Even in the tropics, where there is no
real winter, the first days of summer are a beautiful time. Although life in
the classroom became hotter and more tiring the ever, after the day's lessons
were over the island was a place of supreme happiness, as students and
teachers dispersed into the shady green landscape like a flock of playful
birds.

Down by the sea, boys and girls paddled in water as clear as an aquarium, or
lay like brown mermaids on the rippled rocks. Further out, their friends were
splashing and diving on the reef. In the forest, groups of friends sat under
trees sucking the juice from sticky golden mangoes, or munching on the sweet
white sorbet scooped out germinating coconuts. At the tip of the peninsula
below the school, people stood invigorated by the Pacific breeze and the
constellations of light that sparkled off the ocean. To the south a succession
of bays and headlands stretched away in diminishing shades of green.

In the shady valley at the base of the nearby waterfall, where golden
buttresses of rock and lush curtains of jungle towered overhead like the walls
of a cathedral, schoolboys frolicked in the bubbling river. Far above, the
waterfall tumbled out of the blue sky like a fountain from heaven. Where the
white columns of water met the valley floor, they created showers and
Jacuzzis, sparkling chasms and fizzy pools. The boys tumbled and dived through
this adventure-playground landscape with as much joy and finesse as the
swiftlets that darted for insects overhead. In this Disneyland jungle, exams
and schoolwork were blissfully forgotten.

- - -

Among some of the students, this carefree spirit went too far. My Year 13
Biology class sat their final exam (which they claimed, worryingly, to have
found "easy") and promptly left school, completely ignoring the fact that in
many cases they had not yet handed in all of their practical reports. In other
subjects, too, the Year 13s had simply left without finishing their work.

Upon discovering that the students had gone, all I could do was despair at
their utter, mind-blowing stupidity. The practical sessions are a compulsory
part of the course, and students who fail to complete the required number will
automatically fail the course. The students had been told this (some would
never have bothered turning up to the practicals if I hadn't repeatedly
reminded them that the sessions were compulsory), and they knew that there was
coursework remaining to be handed in. Earlier that week I had written on their
classroom blackboard exactly which pieces of work I was still waiting for, and
from whom. Completing the necessary work would have taken half a day, at most.
In their insular laziness and their eagerness to escape from school, the
students had risked throwing away an entire semester of effort.

I don't know whether the students will be allowed to pass the course or not.
Technically they did attend the required practical sessions; they just don't
have any gradable work to show for it. Would I be justified in awarding marks
even in the absence of written reports, I wondered? Or should I enter the
results for those components as zero? Should I try to persuade the exam board
to award them the certificate, or did the stupid, stupid kids deserve to fail?
In the end I simply e-mailed the exam board in Fiji and explained what had
happened; it's up to them to decide how harshly to treat the students. I wash
my hands of them.

1st November

Last week Principal Silas had a visit from his predecessor. Mr Lyall Muller,
the Australian missionary who ran the school during the early 1980s, returned
to see his old school, accompanied by his son, a young man of about my age who
left Vanuatu as a baby and until now had never properly seen the country of
his birth.

While the school held a special church service in Mr Muller's honour, down at
the nakamal the older villagers reminisced fondly about the battles they had
once had with the ex-Principal.

In the old days, Ranwadi School was self-sufficient. Its students farmed their
own food, using land claimed several decades earlier by the missionaries who
had first founded the school. The entire area now occupied by Vanwoki village
once belonged to Ranwadi. (Parts of Vanwoki look as if they have been there
since prehistory, and it was strange to think that the village is actually as
young as I am.)

After independence in 1980 all rural land in Vanuatu legally reverted to its
indigenous owners, and the villagers demanded their gardens back. Although Mr
Muller tried his best to placate the villagers, a land dispute ensued.

One wizened chief still had a merry glint in his eye as he told me how he once
came to the school to pull up its yams and kill its chickens. He wasn't
stealing, he said - the food had been grown on land that was rightfully his.

Only with the appointment of Silas Buli, the current Principal, was the land
dispute resolved. Silas was the first local man to be given the job, and his
first duty was to sign a Lease Agreement making peace with the school's
neighbours. Under the terms of the agreement, the villagers got most of their
gardens back, but the school was allowed to keep the core of its land in
exchange for a small sum in rent.

"It was sad to lose the rest of our land," said Silas, "But since then we have
had an extremely good relationship with the villagers, and that is important.
They have been very friendly to the school."

Teachers who wanted gardens were permitted to continue planting their
vegetables and kava on the villagers' land. As Silas pointed out, kava plants
take several years to grow, and the villagers know who will get the kava if
the teachers move on to other schools before they get the chance to harvest
their crop.

The real losers from the agreement were the students, whose previous diet of
fresh, home-grown produce was replaced with sticky clods of glycaemic white
rice, supplemented with whatever miserly quantities of vegetables and tinned
foods the school can afford. Since good food is expensive in Vanuatu, and the
students' boarding fees amount to less than a dollar a day, it is hardly
surprising that the meals are pitiful. If Jamie Oliver came to Ranwadi he
might concede that British school dinners are not that bad after all.

If fed on nothing but what they are provided in the dining hall, the students
would ultimately die of malnutrition. Fortunately, they do find minor ways to
supplement their diets. They pick the fruit growing around the school,
persuade their families to send them food parcels by ship, fatten themselves
up at home during the holidays, use whatever pocket money they can get hold of
to buy themselves treats, and (in a reversal of the old situation)
occasionally steal from the villagers. A few try to do as their predecessors
did, and plant crops on patches of spare ground around their dormitories. The
Principal wants to encourage more to do this next year.

- - -

One evening an eerie sunset behind the rain clouds turned the entire landscape
an alien shade of purple. Five minutes later, the colour had changed to molten
red. The shepherds' old saying about the delight of a red sky at night clearly
doesn't apply in the tropics, however. News reached Ranwadi that a cyclone was
on the way.

The storm was relatively weak and wasn't bound directly for Pentecost, but
people worried that it would strengthen or change course. Over the next few
days e-mail bulletins and shortwave radio broadcasts were monitored avidly.
The cyclone's path was plotted on the school notice board, using the
government's official Cyclone Tracking Map, and conversations frequently
turned to co-ordinates.

"Is it still in I4?"

"No, the latest e-mail says it's in the corner of J5. They reckon it could
veer back into column I though."

In the end the cyclone swept far to the east, missing Pentecost by hundreds of
miles. The day on which it passed by was, in fact, one of the calmest we've
had in a long time. The weeks of rain, however, continued.

The gang of girls who'd been sentenced to hard labour for 'friending' with
boys (and other serious offences) trailed back and forth in the rain with
heavy baskets of sand and stones, looking soaked and sullen. Nearby, their
boyfriends were doing the same, suffering because of the ones they loved. The
sight was almost romantic.

"Is it normal to get so much rain at this time of year?" I asked one of the
other teachers.

"The villagers up the mountain prayed for it," I was told matter-of-factly.
"The water in their tanks is low."

The rain-makers may have got more than they wished for. When a marriage was
held last Friday in a village high on the ridge above Ranwadi, many people
stayed away rather than braving the awful conditions. After three weeks of
soaking weather, the steep dirt tracks leading up the mountain hadn't merely
become wet and slippery; they had liquefied. It was a miracle that Albion, the
school cook and I managed to stay upright as we squelched and staggered
uphill.

"Sof' mud, sof' mud, too much sof' mud," the cook muttered.

The two ni-Vanuatu walked barefoot, their splayed toes digging into the mud,
while I tramped through the slime in my hefty Doc Martens.

"Shoes b'long you ee nice-one," said Albion.

Actually, they're the old ones that I used to wear at school when I was
fifteen, I told him. I recently rediscovered them in my parents' attic and
realised that they'd be ideal for Pentecost, since they're plain, solid and,
above all, utterly expendable. Back home, though, they were heavy and
cumbersome, and were probably out of fashion even at the time I bought them. I
only got them in the first place because they were relatively cheap, and black
shoes were a school rule.

"'Long all school b'long England, every student ee wear'em shoes," Albion
explained to the cook. At Ranwadi, I realised, none of them did.

On the way up the mountain, Albion pointed out the local sights. First there
was the wishing stone - a rock with a natural hole through the middle of it
that people squeeze through when they desire good fortune.

"'Long year 1979, Water Lini ee pass through 'long stone here. 'Long 1980, him
ee come first Prime Minister b'long Vanuatu."

Further uphill, Albion took us to meet an acquaintance of his who specialised
in growing giant kava bushes. He showed us the enormous crater where one had
recently been dug up so that its roots could be mashed with water to make the
narcotic drink. The local men must have got very, very stoned that night.

In the villages on the mountainside, I was surprised to see a couple of smart
concrete houses amongst the thatched huts. One even had a satellite TV,
powered by a solar panel. Once upon a time, trucks could be driven up the
mountain, Albion told me, but the rutted road has now fallen into disrepair.

"Now, suppose all-ee want'em carry'em some something ee go 'long village here,
all ee must use'm horse."

That explained the horse that I occasionally encounter in the coconut
plantation behind the school on my way back from the nakamal. It is
surprisingly frightening to come unexpectedly across a horse when you're
walking alone in the dark. The beasts' eyes gleam hollow by torchlight, and it
is hard to avoid thinking of Tolkien's nazgul.

"Suppose ee no got horse…" Albion continued. He mimed the action of a person
carrying a heavy load on his back.

The rain became heavier as we arrived at the wedding, and we joined the group
of men huddling despondently under the tin shelter at the entrance to the
nakamal. The bare dancing ground in front was as wet and slippery as an ice
rink.

"Sof' mud, uh?" said the villagers, by way of a greeting.

Many of the other partygoers had come up from villages near Ranwadi, and I
recognised many of them. There were a few I knew by name, and many others whom
I recognised by sight: the short old guy who looks like Santa's chief elf, the
young man with the Britney-style hat, the bloke with the bushy beard who
reminds me of somebody, the other bloke with the bushy beard who reminds me of
somebody else, the grey-haired man who would make a very convincing Doctor
Who, the gnomish figure who looks like he walked off the cover of a Terry
Pratchett novel…

There was also a man whom I didn't recognise, but who recognised me.

"Andrew Gray or Andrew Chambers?" he asked.

It was almost five years since my former housemate Andrew Chambers and I had
trekked to the remote eastern side of Pentecost and met Norbert, a local man
who had invited us to stay with him in his village. However, Norbert not only
remembered me, but remembered every detail of our visit. Foreigners aren't a
common sight on East Pentecost - at the time, the local chief had thanked us
for coming and allowing his children meet white people. My generation may be
the last that gets the opportunity to visit such genuinely isolated spots -
soon, everyone on earth will have been exposed to the gawking white faces of
tourists and DVD movie stars - and I remain immensely grateful to Norbert for
welcoming me there. It was wonderful to encounter him again at the wedding,
despite his disappointment at the fact that I didn't remember his face and my
slight irritation at the fact that even after five years I am still being
confused with "the other Andrew".

Albion, the cook and I didn't stay long at the wedding, but instead filled up
"plastics" with kava and carried them back down the mountain. (One or two
villagers, worried by the thought of a clumsy and slightly-stoned white person
sliding down the muddy paths in the dark, kindly offered to let me stay the
night in their houses. However, I had work to do at Ranwadi early the next
morning.) Instead of negotiating the short-but-steep footpath up which we had
come, we made our way down part of the mountain following the remains of the
old "road b'long truck". This was just as slippery and overgrown as the
footpath, but at least the gradient was less severe.

We stopped at Lalwori, a village further down the mountain, to drink some of
the kava from our plastic bottles. With its long triangular roof built from
dark wooden beams, the inside of the nakamal at Lalwori resembled a Viking
hall. The building was filled with a smoky haze, and the paraffin lantern
dangling from the ceiling appeared to be floating in mid air.

From Lalwori we descended to Vanwoki, and Albion and the cook finished off
their kava in the nakamal there. The downhill journey had made me realise that
I'd already had enough, so I donated my kava bottle to the others. There were
plenty of people in the nakamal: men who had couldn't face the slippery climb
up the mountain, and men returning from the wedding who didn't want to get
truly inebriated until they were within staggering distance of their beds.
Calling a taxi when you're too drunk to walk is not an option on Pentecost.

- - -

The next day a church fundraiser - a sort of village fete - was held at
Vanvat, a couple of miles' walk from Ranwadi. The road to Vanvat is wide and
flat, but passes through a vicious river that had been swollen by yet another
night of rain. People making their way to the fundraiser crossed the river in
various places, arrived wet and unnerved to varying degrees, and had earnest
discussions about which crossing point to use on the way back.

Vanvat is a pleasant little village, nestled among the coconut trees in a
grassy valley at the foot of Pentecost's highest mountain. In a clearing
between the palm trees, groups of local men and women were competing in a
volleyball tournament, and in a makeshift concert arena surrounded by a fence
of palm leaves, local string bands were playing. Three truckloads of sand from
the beach had been dumped on the volleyball court that morning, but the mud
had absorbed it almost without trace, leaving the players wallowing in brown
slime. Meanwhile, the well-trampled concert arena resembled a pigsty. That
didn't dissuade the villagers and many Ranwadi students - who looked very much
like teenagers as they queued at the gate of the venue in their fashionable
Saturday clothes - from paying the 20 vatu (10 pence) entrance fee to go
inside and listen to the string bands strumming their twangy, repetitive
tunes.

Local wood ovens were churning out bread and 'gato', and parcels of food
(wrapped as always, in giant leaves) were being sold. From a nearby hut (a
structure so ramshackle that some people were going in and out through the
holes in the walls rather than the doorway), the sound of men spitting
indicated that kava was being sold. My kava-drinking buddies from Vanwoki -
Albion, Agasten, the school cook (whose name I really ought to know by now)
and several of the villagers - were already there, buying each other rounds
and running up hefty bar tabs. The barman sat on the floor, with a bucket of
the drink and a set of coconut shells in which to serve it. The customers sat
on bamboo benches around the edge of the hut, smoking, chatting, and quietly
contemplating what a pleasant evening it was. When it was time for a drink
each would get up and take his shell-full. He would down it in one, spit
noisily on the floor to remove the residual taste from his mouth, and then
rinse his shell in a bucket of a pale brown water and return it to the barman,
ready for the next customer.

Buying drinks in rounds is a dangerous business. The number of drinks consumed
ends up being a multiple of the number of people present, and on this occasion
it was a large number. People knew that they had to cross the river again to
get home, and were aware that this might not be entirely safe while stoned.
However, their solution to the danger was to travel in a group, which meant
waiting until the last person was ready to leave. While they waited, more
friends arrived and yet more rounds of drinks were bought. I did my best to
politely refuse the drinks, pointing out that I don't have the kava tolerance
of a native, and eventually our walking party was ready to leave. Fortunately,
somebody knew of a place where the river was relatively wide - and therefore
slow and shallow - and a rope had been strung across to assist drug-addled
waders. We crossed the dark torrent without mishap, and those who had filled
up 'plastics' with kava resumed their drinking on the other side.

- - -

Tuesday night was Halloween. The locals had never heard of the occasion (maybe
ghosts and devils aren't such fun when you actually believe in them), and
pumpkin-carving and trick-or-treating are far too uncool for the Australians,
but up at Melsisi Sara was intent upon celebrating Halloween with full
American exuberance. Her friends and relatives in the States had sent parcels
of seasonal merchandise, and Sara's little wooden house was covered with
"Happy Halloween" posters depicting smirking pumpkins and implausibly merry
ghouls. There were also bowls of vile, black 'Halloween candy'. Sara had
explained to her bemused English class that if the students turned up at her
door on the last evening of October looking scary and shouting "Trick or
treat!" she would be culturally obliged to give them the candy.

Back at Ranwadi, I searched for something that I could carve into a scary
lantern. Our pumpkins were cucumber-shaped and completely unsuitable, but the
green pawpaws growing on the tree overhanging our house made a perfect
substitute. In fact, the pawpaws made better lanterns than pumpkins back home
do: they were more solid, even after a candle had been burned inside them, and
in their size and shape they resembled a human skull.

I took my first pawpaw lantern down to the nakamal at Vanwoki, a couple of
evenings before Halloween.

"Him b'long chuck'em-out devil?" asked one of the villagers.

"Yeah, sort of." Maybe there was once a time when people carved Halloween
lanterns to keep away evil spirits rather than to celebrate them.

The villagers seemed impressed. Whether or not the glowing fruit kept devils
away, in the dim surroundings it certainly looked cool. After parading the
pawpaw around the village to show it to their children, the villagers returned
it to the nakamal and sat it at the entrance, facing out towards the dark
forest. It burned there all evening, glowering at any evil spirits that might
be tempted to come and disturb the kava drinkers.

On the afternoon of the 31st, Hugh and I walked up to Melsisi carrying baskets
full of the heavy pawpaws. We were greeted by not one Sara, but two. The
previous Peace Corps volunteer, also named Sara, had returned to Melsisi to
visit her old friends and to finalise the research for a thesis she's now
writing on the history of Catholic nuns in Vanuatu. (I had to admire her for
coming up with such a creative excuse for returning to the country.) I had met
the original Sara before, in 2001, although the only definite thing I
remembered about her was that she spoke Bislama with a cranky Midwestern
accent. She still does.

At sunset, while Sara 1 went off to drink kava, Hugh and I helped Sara 2 to
light the pawpaw lanterns. We put several on the rocks outside Sara's house,
and impaled another on a stick at the front door in Lord of the Flies style.
The electricity generator at the Collège de Melsisi had yet to come on, and in
the darkness the glowing lanterns looked extremely festive. A crowd of
students soon gathered, curious to know what the strange luminous objects on
the rocks were and what the crazy white people were up to now.

A few of the students remembered what Sara had told them, and during the
evening small groups of shy-looking boys came knocking at the door. Some had
chalked their faces, or put on unusual-looking combinations of clothes in an
attempt to dress up in costume.

"What do you say?" Sara prompted, as though addressing a three-year-old who
had forgotten to say please.

"Trick or treat," they mumbled quietly. Bowls of the black candy were passed
around.

Later that evening, as the students were making their way back to the
dormitories after evening studies, we hid in the shadows wearing scary masks.

"Do you get the feeling we're too old for this?" I asked.

"You two are," said Hugh. "I'm still only eighteen."

Sara, whose recent twenty-fifth birthday was an occasion for lamenting about
how old she is becoming, moaned.

"Sssh… they're coming."

Shouting "Happy Halloween!", we jumped out at the students, who were more
bemused than scared. I then lit some sparklers (a novelty on Pentecost) and
gave them to the students, who used them to light their way back to the
dormitories.

Hugh and I set off home, carrying two of the flickering pawpaw lanterns. Mine
was dribbling gobs of wax from the corner of its mouth.

Men standing and spitting in the doorways of kava bars wished us good night as
we passed. They were used to seeing white people with strange lights (after
all, I was the man with the small torches) and didn't comment on our glowing
pawpaws.

At Melsisi River we blew out the candles (the light from them was dazzling our
eyes) and walked the rest of the way back to Ranwadi by moonlight. Giant bats
swooped overhead, and in the undergrowth ghoul-green mushrooms were glowing
faintly. Only the lack of a chill in the air prevented it from feeling
completely like Halloween.