Andrew Gray's travel tales

16th July

The few things you weren't able to make yourself could be obtained by simple
trade. In medieval Europe, the baker could obtain new horseshoes from the
ironmonger in exchange for loaves of bread, and the gardeners could obtain
protection from the local baron and salvation from the local priest in
exchange for tithes of food. However, as economies grew more complex, this
kind of trade grew increasingly inconvenient - what if you needed a
horseshoe but the blacksmith wasn't in the mood for a loaf of bread? Some
societies solved this problem by developing written systems for keeping a
tally of who was entitled to goods and services. This is the original reason
why writing was developed. Unfortunately, these systems were (and are)
vulnerable to forgery.

A better solution was to devise a system of physical tokens - some small,
valuable item of agreed worth - signifying that the bearer had supplied
something useful to somebody in the past and was entitled to something in
return. Thus money was invented.

The type of token used varied widely. In ancient empires, the prized article
was gold. In medieval England, the standard measure of value was a pound of
sterling-quality silver, which could be cut up into silver pennies when
smaller units were required. On Pentecost Island, it was pigs (and in
particular the long, curved tusks of old boars) and intricately-dyed red
mats that were prized. Eventually, all of these forms of money were replaced
by standardised pieces of paper and base metal whose value was certified by
governments and banks - and later, in some economies, by numbers on computer
screens. However, modern currencies still bear traces of their origins: a
"pound sterling" remains the standard unit of value in England, even though
today's pound coins are neither made of sterling silver nor weigh a pound,
and Vanuatu's coins and banknotes still bear (amongst other symbols) the
emblem of a boar's tusk.

In modern cities, it is possible to go through life without doing anything
for anybody else except what you're paid for, and without receiving anything
from anybody else except what you pay for - an economically super-efficient
yet rather soulless state of affairs.

In Western countries, the change from a traditional economy to a cash
economy happened a long time ago. On Pentecost Island, the process is still
very much under way. Local villagers divide their needs into two categories:
the things they can get 'free' from the land (vegetables, meat, fish, nuts,
bamboo, wood, leaves, stones, and water) and the things that must be paid
for with money (such as tinned foods, rice, petrol, candles, soap, metal
tools, cloth, nails, cement, and corrugated iron). The second category is
expanding at the expense of the first.

Prior to the arrival of Europeans, trading amongst the islanders was all
about social climbing. A man could probably meet his basic needs entirely
from his own garden, but would have to borrow money (in the form of pigs) to
help him pay the bride-price for a new wife, or put on the lavish ceremony
that would enable him to climb to the next rung of the social ladder. When
his remaining assets (the pigs) multiplied, he would be able to pay back the
lender, who might now need them for ceremonies of his own.

The arrival of foreigners introduced a new reason for trading: to obtain
things that the islanders could not make for themselves. Originally it was
believed that the goods brought by white people had been given to them by
the gods, since in their world of sticks and stones and leaves the islanders
could not see how men could make such things as metal for themselves.
Various cargo cults sprang up with the aim of trying to persuade the gods to
shower similar generosity upon the people of Vanuatu; one or two of these
cults are still in existence. Today, the islanders can read in schoolbooks
about metallurgy and manufacturing, but most still lack the resources to
make metal or glass or plastic or DVD players for themselves. As a result,
many of their wants and needs must now be met by buying goods from abroad.

The first thing that the villagers switched to buying, instead of making for
themselves, was knives. Local stories recall that one of the earliest
encounters between European sailors and Pentecost islanders ended with the
natives stealing a sailor's knife and then running away into the bush,
pursued by gunfire. The islanders recognised that the metal blade was
greatly superior to their traditional stone tools, and for many years
afterwards, this one stolen knife was passed around by the entire community,
each person borrowing it whenever a particularly trick cutting job was
required. Eventually, more Europeans arrived and the islanders learned to
trade with them in order to obtain more of the precious tools. Thus ended
the Stone Age on Pentecost.

Metal was not just useful for blades. It can also be used to make heatproof
and waterproof containers, which revolutionised cooking. I was told by a
colleague that when a student at Ranwadi was once asked to write an essay on
how modern technology was changing the world, the technology he chose to
focus on was the saucepan. Previously, cooking had meant roasting; the
ability to boil things opened up an entirely new form of cuisine. The taro
that the islanders grow in their gardens is disgusting when boiled, but
coast-dwellers with access to ships soon discovered a new food: rice. They
began importing the starchy white grains by the sack full, and another
paid-for item was added to the islanders' shopping baskets.

Flour and cooking oil also came on the ships, and the villagers developed a
taste for greasy doughnuts - often twisted into the shape of a number 8 -
which they would fry up using their new pans. Sugar arrived, to the delight
of the island's ant population, and a few local women became skilled at
baking cakes on open fires. Some even iced their cakes, having sussed out
which varieties of tinned butter could be used to produce icing that didn't
taste too strongly of industrial grease. Good cake remains a rarity of
Pentecost, baked only on special occasions, but since the island has no
dentists this is probably a good thing.

A few villagers built proper ovens, and began to bake loaves of bread with a
delicious wood-smoked taste. (Fuel for cooking is one thing that is still
largely gathered from the jungle, although foreigners like me - who are
inexperienced at cooking anything other than marshmallows on wood fires, and
can't even get marshmallows on Pentecost - rely on gas-powered stoves.)
Local stores began selling margarine and jam for people to put on their
bread, and those frequented by American Peace Corps volunteers did a
lucrative trade in peanut butter.

Clothes were yet another import. In the days when it was acceptable to
wander around with only your crotch covered, it was easy to fashion clothing
using local materials, but it's hard to make a good Sunday dress that you
can wear to church out of dried leaves. Missionaries and well-meaning
foreigners organised shipments of second-hand clothes to be sent to Vanuatu.
In the early days, these brought diseases that wiped out entire villages.
Today they just bring incredibly bad taste.

Another thing the early missionaries helped to bring to the islands was
light. Not just the spiritual kind, but also the practical kind that allows
people to avoid walking into things after the sun goes down. Before the
arrival of Western technology, the best sources of light on the island at
night were burning coconut fronds, which flare like pine needles when put on
a smouldering fire and can be carried as flaming torches on short journeys.
However, coconut fronds burn down quickly, and slower-burning light sources
such as smouldering logs and reeds were inevitably dim. As a result, people
traditionally went to bed early on Pentecost, and were disinclined to wander
about in the dark. (On an island populated by ghosts and spirits - and once
upon a time by warring cannibals - staying indoors at night must have seemed
a sensible idea anyway.)

Candles, kerosene lanterns and electric torches represent a huge
improvement. However, for villagers who originally got all of their light
for free, they also represent a huge expense. Recent increases in the price
of kerosene have dimmed the island, as people turn down the wicks in their
lanterns or switch to cheap candles instead. Once I came across a group of
men sitting in their nakamal in pitch darkness, because none could spare
even the 20 vatu (10 pence) needed to buy a candle.

Electric torches were once used sparingly on Pentecost, because batteries
for them were expensive and short-lived. (The brands of battery sold in the
local stores are not the type advertised by energised pink bunnies that keep
on going and going and going, but the type made by generic companies with
names like Wang Hua Industries who specialise in the low-cost manufacture of
half-empty metal cylinders that happen to contain just enough electric
charge to be sold and labelled as a battery.) Fortunately, torches have
become cheaper to run in recent years, as fragile and power-hungry
incandescent bulbs have been replaced with bright, efficient LED lights. (I
played my own small part in introducing this particular change to Pentecost;
see earlier diaries.) I wonder if the laboratory boffins who came up with
the Light Emitting Diode ever imagined that their invention would be used to
help impoverished jungle villagers avoid tripping over fallen logs on
moonless South Pacific nights. In a couple of locations in Vanuatu,
pioneering schemes have also been set up to provide the villagers with
rechargeable batteries, charged using solar power.

The use of hard currency on rural islands like Pentecost remains limited -
Port Vila, the country's capital, is home to 20% of Vanuatu's population but
90% of its money. However, as one item after another is added to the
islanders shopping lists and disappears from the range of things that they
make for themselves, the circulation of money is inexorably widening.
Ironically, by far the biggest factor driving rural islanders into the cash
economy is the one thing that Westerners generally do get free (or at least
don't pay directly for): their children's education.

In the old days, when everyone on Pentecost did more-or-less the same job -
gardening, building houses, trading pigs and looking after the children -
youngsters could learn everything they needed to know from their parents and
the village elders. Now, though, Pentecost's parents have begun to ask their
children what they want to be when they grow up, and most of the answers
require some degree of schooling. The dream of many is that a school-leaving
certificate will be a ticket off the island, to a well-paid job and a better
life in town, but even those children with no desire to leave their villages
can benefit from going to school. Pentecost may have no real industries
other than its gardens (and a small amount of tourism), but it still needs
nurses, mechanics, storekeepers and churchmen - not to mention teachers who
can pass on their knowledge to the next generation of dreamy children.

High school education is not free in Vanuatu. The Ministry of Education does
find the money to employ a few schoolteachers, and overseas aid agencies do
their bit to prop up the country's school system, but there remain big gaps
in every school's budget. Books need to be bought, electricity generators
need to be fuelled, and broken equipment needs to be replaced. With a
finely-scattered population and no roads that a school bus could cope with,
high schools in rural Vanuatu are invariably boarding schools, so the cost
of food and housing must be added to the school's expenses. The only way
that these expenses can be met is by charging fees to the parents who decide
to make the necessary sacrifices and send their kids to school. At Ranwadi
these fees are typically about £100 ($200) a term - an awful lot of money
for subsistence gardeners who dig up vegetables for a living. Even jungle
villagers who would otherwise live happily without money will have to sweat
hard preparing sacks of kava and dried coconut and hauling them down to the
beach to be sold onto ships if they wish to avoid forcing the same lifestyle
upon their children. (Although if they live in the right part of the island,
they might be able to earn an entire term's school fees in a few minutes by
risking their necks bungee-jumping off towers in front of gawping tourists
in the name of traditional culture.)

If you're going to have to earn money to pay for your children's education,
you might as well earn a bit extra for yourself while you're at it, to spend
on a new knife, or some candles, or maybe a portable CD player. Since you've
been too busy with your cash crops to plant anything tasty in the garden,
some of the spare money will also need to be spent on food at the local
store. Do this kind of thing often enough, and the word 'subsistence' will
drop from your lifestyle, and you'll have become a fully-functioning member
of a modern capitalist society.

Sometimes shortages force the islanders to buy things that they would
otherwise grow for themselves. The men on Pentecost who smoke (the women
never do) prefer hand-rolled leaf tobacco to cigarettes, not only because
the latter are expensive, but because everybody knows that cigarettes give
you cancer. (The health campaigners forgot to add that the smoke from leaf
tobacco contains the same lung-destroying chemicals.) Some grow the tobacco
in their own gardens; others buy cheap sticks of it from stores who import
it from gardeners on other islands. However, the villagers on Pentecost
smoke more tobacco than they plant, and lately none has been coming on the
inter-island ships. (Rumour has it that the Vanuatu police - whose periodic
anti-marijuana campaigns give them a reason for existence on islands where
crimes are rare and are dealt with quite capably by the village chiefs -
recently destroyed a large shipment due to fears that other smokeable leaves
were being concealed amidst the tobacco.) A couple of weeks ago, the local
men awoke to the realisation that there was no leaf tobacco left in any of
the stores, and that they had smoked their gardens bare. Even old Chief
Regis, who has long kept his chiefly friends and numerous other satisfied
customers well supplied with fine tobacco, announced disconsolately that he
had run out, and that his next crop would not be ready for harvesting until
sometime around Christmas. The news sent desperate nicotine addicts
scrambling to try and find the money to buy imported cigarettes.

Other drug habits are also moving into the cash economy. The drinking of
kava on Pentecost is one of the most traditional of activities, originally
done only by chiefs at important meetings, where the drug's stupefying
effects would prevent them from getting angry with one another or taking
rash decisions. Nowadays it is drunk by men of all ages on all occasions,
but many of the other customs associated with kava-drinking remain. The
nakamal where the men gather to drink is usually the most traditional
building in the village, with a dirt floor and gnarled wooden posts holding
up a low thatched roof. Some nakamals are not even held together with nails.
The nakamal is the one place where you can still find stone tools being used
- sharpened, hand-held grinding stones of a sort that our ancestors a
million years ago would probably have recognised - although in some nakamals
nowadays the job of mashing up kava roots is done instead by a ram (a
section of plastic drainpipe in which the kava is pounded with a big stick),
or by a metal meat-grinder. The mashed kava is strained through coconut
fibre, and drunk out of a half coconut shell.

Money does not traditionally change hands in the nakamal. People dig up kava
roots in their own gardens, and bring them down to prepare and drink
themselves, or to share with friends and visitors. However, this situation
is changing. Pentecost has acquired a small but growing professional class -
schoolteachers, nurses, mechanics and priests - who enjoy kava and have
money with which they would happily pay for it, but do not get the chance to
grow it for themselves.

At Melsisi, where the school, hospital, and kava-tolerant Catholic church
employ many such people, there are now several kava bars where drinkers
without gardens of their own can go to buy an evening drink. Much of the
atmosphere of the old nakamal remains in these places - most are dimly-lit
and constructed of local materials, and the drink continues to be served in
coconut shells (although some kava bars elsewhere in Vanuatu now use
porcelain bowls instead). However, they are gradually acquiring more and
more of the trappings of Western bars. Some barkeepers now have electricity
generators and show videos to attract in the punters, and a couple even have
names painted above the door. High on the hillside, behind the communal taps
where local children wash, is the Sunset Kava Bar, whose flamboyant owner
promises "only the finest quality kava". Down by the shore, the new
Saltwater Kava Bar has a bedroom where customers who get too stoned to walk
home can sleep for the price of two drinks. Most Melsisians continue to be
regulars at a particular bar - the one run by their local community, or the
one that is within easiest staggering distance of their house. Nevertheless,
on an island where business strategy generally consists of opening your
doors and hoping that enough of your friends, relatives and neighbours will
come by to provide you with a good income - and shrugging your shoulders and
doing nothing about it if they don't - even the slightest hints of branding
and competition represent a major innovation.

Until recently, no other village nearby contained a high enough
concentration of potential customers to support a kava bar. One opened a
couple of years ago near Ranwadi to cater to the labourers who had come to
work on the new school buildings, but when the building work had finished
and the labourers went home the bar closed down. The local villagers didn't
want to pay for kava when they could get it free from their gardens, and the
majority of the teachers at Ranwadi belong to the abstemious Churches of
Christ, which frowns on kava-drinking.

The villagers' cousins in Port Vila and Luganville did want to pay for kava,
however. Vanuatu's two towns are home to growing numbers of affluent and
kava-loving islanders dislocated from their gardens, who have fuelled a
massive surge in demand for the narcotic root. Kava products have also found
small but lucrative new markets abroad. Since good varieties of kava take
four or five years to grow, supply has not kept up with demand, which has
had an inevitable effect on the price. On Pentecost, where men have always
planted a lot of kava, the islanders' long-standing drug habit provided them
with a financial windfall. As the price of kava surged, villagers
enthusiastically dug up their gardens and loaded sacks of roots onto ships
bound for Port Vila. With a typical lack of forward planning, many failed to
leave behind enough kava for themselves. (Others calculated, with a logic
familiar to drug dealers everywhere, that there was no sense in getting
hooked on their own product when there was so much money to be made selling
it to other fools.)

A few months ago, the villagers around Ranwadi slowly woke up to the fact
that there were now a lot of would-be kava drinkers about with empty gardens
and money in their pockets.

The kava bar near Ranwadi reopened, and did a steady business, and I no
longer have to walk four miles in the dark to Melsisi whenever I want to go
for an evening drink without impinging on the villagers' hospitality.
Villagers in their nakamals began holding 'kava nights', at which someone
who still had roots to spare would prepare an entire poubelle full of the
stuff, and sell it to customers. (People on Pentecost use the French word to
describe the huge containers from which kava is served on special occasions;
drinking out of a poubelle sounds so much nicer than drinking out of a
dustbin.) Some kava nights were held by individuals to earn money for their
children's school fees; others were held to raise money for other good
causes. At big kava nights, entertainment was laid on, in the form of a
video player rigged up to an electricity generator, or very occasionally a
live string band. While children watched the videos or listened to the
music, their mothers (and a few teetotal fathers) sold leaf-wrapped bundles
of food for the kava-drinkers to take home for dinner. (Kava, unlike
alcohol, is best drunk before food.) With lots of people eating together, it
was often worthwhile to butcher a pig or a bullock for the occasion, giving
people a rare chance to dine on good fresh meat. What had previously been a
subdued male-only ritual evolved into a night out for all the family.

The spread of kava nights was made possible by another new introduction:
plastic bottles. In Western countries, empty containers are a mountainous
nuisance, something to be crushed by the dozen into the recycling bin, but
in the days when people bought hardly any packaged foods they were hard to
come by. That is now changing. By filling up an old plastic bottle and
carrying it back to drink at their local nakamal, people can now attend kava
nights in faraway villages without worrying about the long drunken walk
home. The availability of cheap electric torches has been another factor
encouraging people to venture further from home on their nights out (as has
a decline in the belief in ghosts).

Thanks to the recent arrival of new trucks on Pentecost's roads, many people
don't have to walk home at all. Travelling the main coastal road you might
now be passed by two or three vehicles every hour, which sounds like a
miniscule amount of traffic but does in fact represent a huge increase over
the amount a few years ago. And now that the Ministry of Public Works has
belatedly begun a programme to repair some of the most treacherous stretches
of the road (for example, laying stones to smooth out some of the nastier
river crossings), those trucks will be able run for longer before they fall
to pieces. The concept of designated drivers has yet to catch on here, and
it's probably only a matter of time before some kava-intoxicated driver is
woken from his slumbers by the jolt of his truck colliding head-on with a
large tree. However, given the lethargic and ponderous way in which kava
drinkers do things (driving included), this will hopefully be a very slow
accident, and with any luck it won't hurt anybody except the tree.

Society on Pentecost is changing, and as at any such time, there are plenty
of people convinced that the change is for the worse. Not only are there
predictable moans coming from local old-timers, but numerous outsiders from
different corners of the world have added their voices of concern. Most of
these are people whose own societies successfully underwent the same changes
centuries ago and wouldn't dream of turning the clock back, yet still they
lament the sight of the islanders abandoning their happy traditional economy
(the one based on nice things like pigs rather than evil things like money)
and being lured down the path of capitalist folly. They observe that in
countries where people have to pay for their daily needs, those without cash
are at risk of hunger and homelessness, whilst in Vanuatu's traditional
village societies every single person is provided for.

Such people have a point, but not a very good one. Nobody begs or sleeps
rough on Pentecost because the islanders have strong families and
communities that look after those in need, and plenty of land on which to
live and grow crops. There are legitimate reasons for people to worry about
Pentecost's future: the breakdown of old communities under the influence of
Western ideals, the growing inequality between those who relax in coastal
villages doing well-paid jobs and those who scrape gardens in the mountains,
the risk of an expanding tourist industry exacerbating the previous two
problems, the pressure that will ultimately be put on the land by a swelling
population, and (in the shorter term) the prospect of the kava price
collapsing now that so many islanders are devoting their efforts to growing
the drug rather than growing food. However, money is to a large extent a
symptom of the island's problems rather than a cause.

In any case, it's not true to say that nobody in traditional Pentecost
society went hungry. Although the island is not haunted by the sort of
starvation seen in crueller Third World countries, malnourishment does exist
here, attested to by the grossly rounded bellies of protein-deficient
children fed on little but taro for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The
children who suffer worst from this, it should be noted, are the ones living
in those happy, traditional villages where people grow food in their gardens
in the happy, traditional way. By contrast, those whose parents got sucked
into the cash economy get small helpings of store-bought tinned meat with
their vegetables, and small spoonfuls of nutrient-enriched Nestlé milk
powder (spot the irony) stirred into their morning tea.

Money also buys such children medicines, schoolbooks, and a small measure of
protection against life's many hazards. Picture a traditional village in
which a cyclone has devastated the gardens and blown down the wooden houses.
Now picture a village in which the inhabitants sat securely in houses made
of imported cement eating imported rice and tinned meat while the storm
raged, and decide for yourself whether capitalism causes hunger and
homelessness.

In any case, the development of a cash economy on Vanuatu's islands is
Progress; it cannot be stopped. Unless one of the parties in Vanuatu's
government happens to be plotting a Communist revolution (which is unlikely,
since the country's well-salaried politicians rather enjoy the fruits of
capitalism), the islanders' new way of doing business will be with them for
a long time to come.