Andrew Gray's travel tales

18th June

In private, needless to say, the situation is somewhat more nuanced. Teenage
boys and teenage girls are attracted to one another in even the most
straitened of traditional societies, and secret 'friending' between boys and
girls does happen in Vanuatu schools. Since such friendships are not
supposed to occur, and are definitely not supposed to be talked about, the
students are never taught about how to conduct them responsibly.

Occasionally, of course, a mishap will occur, which leads to a lot of
tut-tutting and causes one unfortunate ni-Vanuatu girl to begin her career
of child-rearing and domestic drudgery at the age of fifteen rather than the
age of twenty. (Abortion is so completely out-of-the-question that I don't
even know what its legal status is in Vanuatu.) Such accidents are
embarrassing, but there are always plenty of aunties on hand who can help
the young mother look after her baby, and plenty of uncles who can hunt down
the hapless father and force him down the aisle. For parents who worry about
the risk of teenage pregnancies, the traditional solution is not to promote
safe sex, but to redouble their efforts to keep young boys and girls well
apart.

The arrival of HIV in Vanuatu five years ago brought a change in attitudes.
Now, illicit liaisons were no longer merely a matter of loose morals and
poor family planning - they could be life-threatening. Doctors, aid workers
and the Vanuatu Ministry of Health began to put out earnest messages about
the importance of safe sex. In bashful island society, their messages did
not penetrate far. The only form of sex education given at most Vanuatu
schools is to remind the students that it's a sin.

At Ranwadi, where staff and students live together on a small campus and
there is nearly always somebody watching you, the school is fairly efficient
at finding and stamping out inappropriate friendships before they reach a
serious stage. The path between the school and its sports field, laid with
coral stones last year by boys who'd been sentenced to spend their
afternoons doing hard labour after being caught alone with female friends,
is a monument to frustrated teenage love. (The path is starting to become
slippery as the coral wears thin, and I privately hope that a few more
students will be caught making friends with one another soon so that we can
get it resurfaced.) Penitent young Romeos also supplied many of the stones
for the rockery outside my house.

Outsiders occasionally worry that the boys at the school will react to this
suppression of their instincts in the way that male prisoners sometimes do,
but as far as the locals are concerned, this isn't an issue: homosexuality
doesn't officially exist on Pentecost. (Then again, neither do teenage
romances.)

In the French-influenced, Catholic environment of the College de Melsisi,
the gap between preaching and practice is wider than at Ranwadi, and with
the school buildings scattered through a large village full of dark nooks
and crannies there is more room for mischief. After listening to some
worrying gossip about what her students get up to after the electricity
generator is shut down for the night and the lights go off, Sara the Peace
Corps volunteer decided to do something about it. A bowl of little foil
packets appeared in Sara's house. Boys who came round to the house for help
with their homework could slip one into their pocket if they wanted, no
questions asked.

I admired Sara's bravery. "You're giving out condoms to the kids on a
Catholic mission?"

"The students are already friending one another. They might as well be doing
it safely."

Sara's next step was to organise a health education workshop for the
students at the College. Local aid agencies gladly contributed a pile of
resources, including booklets explaining in Pidgin English how to use a
condom ("Step one: Find'em one partner who ee want'em make'm sex with'em
you"), and several Peace Corps volunteers from other parts of Vanuatu came
to help.

The local doctors and the Ministry of Health approved wholeheartedly of
Sara's efforts. Her Catholic colleagues, she suspected, might be less
supportive. The workshop was scheduled for a Saturday - when none of the
other teachers would be around.

I visited Melsisi late on the day of the workshop, and found the
participants gathered around the flat lawn in front of the College. Lessons
had finished, and the students were busy demonstrating their new knowledge
to their friends. Small groups of boys and girls had organised short skits,
each designed to communicate a message about being healthy and responsible,
and were performing them in front of the others. It all seemed to be going
well. The first to perform were the youngest students, the Year 7s, whose
skits dealt with uncontroversial, straightforward topics such as drinking
and smoking (don't do it, kids). After a break for dinner, the innocent
young Year 7s were sent home, and the hard-core stuff could begin.

During the break, I chatted to some of the students attending the workshop.
Compared with pupils in sex education lessons in Britain - who think they've
heard it all before, and often treat the lessons as little more than a
slightly-awkward form of light entertainment - the teenagers at Melsisi were
serious and solemn.

It's good that they are teaching these things to us, some boys said.

They said it a little nervously. I didn't know whether they were nervous of
romance, of sex, of embarrassment in front of their friends, of AIDS, of
sitting in classrooms listening to foreigners break local taboos and
wondering just how far they'd go, or of the prospect of their English
teacher being kicked out of the village by an irate Catholic priest. (The
latter, to Sara's relief, never happened.)

When I returned to Melsisi a few days later, two of the other Peace Corps
volunteers were still there. One was sitting at Sara's laptop, reading out
questions in Pidgin English that had been submitted anonymously by students
at the workshop.

"Hole b'long sex ee big one or small one?"

Sara and the other volunteer were dictating answers.

"You guys are really taking this health programme seriously," I observed.

Sara nodded. "Let me show you the sex education room."

She led me into her spare bedroom, where the walls were covered with
posters, many of them hand-written in Pidgin English. Some had diagrams,
illustrating what happens when boys and girls turn into men and women, while
others explained topics such as "sick moon" (menstruation) and
contraception.

It's OK to say no if your boyfriend wants sex, said one poster. But here are
some things you can do in the meantime. The suggestions ranged from "write'm
letter" and "hold'em hand" to "hold'em titty" and "fight'em kok" (either
alone or with your partner, the poster advised).

"Don't Catholics consider that a sin?" I asked.

"That's why some of the women here are so unhappy," Sara said. "As far as
the men are concerned, masturbation is a sin, but forcing yourself violently
on your wife when she doesn't want it is not."

The following Friday night, while Sara was down at the shore collecting a
parcel off a cargo ship, two boys in her class approached her and asked for
condoms.

Nervously, as though she were a drug dealer, Sara allowed the boys to follow
her back to her house. It was late, and she hoped her neighbours weren't
watching. She explained to the boys that she would only give what they
wanted if they intended to use them responsibly. They were not to play with
them, and were not to try and use them on any girl who wasn't entirely ready
and willing.

"So who are your girlfriends?" she asked.

The boys looked awkward.

"Er, me-two-fella ee hope, say, me-two-fella ee try'em with'em you."

"What?"

"Me-two-fella ee want'em make'm sex with'em you." The boys were serious.
"You savvy show'em how you make'm sex. Help'em education b'long
me-two-fella."

Sara was still in shock when she told me the story the next day.

"What you are asking is completely inappropriate and disrespectful," she had
told the boys, as she kicked them out into the night. "There are lines,
lines that you don't cross, and you have crossed those lines."

"But you already crossed their lines," I pointed out. "You crossed their
lines by talking to them about sex, which is normally taboo here. How were
they supposed to know where the new lines were drawn?"

"But still, I'm their teacher. Their teacher! It's totally disrespectful."

Although horrified by what the boys had said, Sara never reported the
incident to her colleagues. ("Nobody in Melsisi surfs the Internet, and they
certainly wouldn't read a page in English", she reassured me, when I
mentioned this blog.) One of the boys had a record of misbehaviour and would
have been expelled if the Principal had discovered what he had tried to do
with his English teacher, which Sara didn't want. She was also reluctant to
draw attention to her sex education programme.

By this time preparations were well under way for the PISSA Games - a big
inter-school sports tournament, which Melsisi will be hosting this year -
and the College was busy coaching students and building new sports
facilities. Sara went back to her usual job of teaching students to shoot
basketballs at hoops and conjugate English verbs, and at the College de
Melsisi sex was quietly forgotten.