Andrew Gray's travel tales

12th August

Over the past few months, the leaky little pipes that carry fresh water from
springs on the mountain down to Ranwadi and the surrounding villages have
been replaced with a new system of sturdy plastic hoses and tanks, thanks to
an aid project funded by the Japanese. Now the Japanese ambassador had come
to Pentecost, and the local residents had organised a ceremony to express
their gratitude.

The ceremony was held at Lalbetaes, the home village of Chief Alucio and
Chief Philip, the area's highest-ranking chiefs. These two men are brothers,
but if you met them you wouldn't know it. Chief Alucio is often seen sitting
slightly apart from the other villagers, his back slightly stiffer and his
head slightly more upright. He walks around leaning on a long wooden stick,
and speaks in polite, measured tones. Everything about him portrays calmness
and clarity. Chief Philip, by contrast, is typically found sitting in the
middle of a loud, booming, guffawing cloud of tobacco smoke. He drives
around the local villages in a metal-green truck with red lightning stripes
along the side, barking at passers-by in a deep, grumbly voice.

The village of Lalbetaes gives the sense of being a place of wealth and
power. Not in the manner of Ranwadi and Melsisi - which have the island's
brightest lights and its newest buildings - but in a deeper, more
traditional way. The village is slightly inland, built at the end of a muddy
road (deeply rutted by the wheels of Chief Philip's truck) in grassy
clearings in the forest. Huge banyan trees overhang the village, and navele
trees stand like Christmas trees decorated with streamers of yellow blossom.
Pigs snuffle around in the brown spaces beneath the trees. These are not the
obese pink porkers found on a British farm, but hairy, grunty little beasts
in varying shades of muddy black and brown. Some wander freely around the
village; whilst others are tied to trees, or grub around in makeshift pens.

The nakamal where the people of Lalbetaes gather for meetings and ceremonies
is built in the same style as the one down at Vanwoki where I regularly
drink kava with the villagers - a sloping, thatched roof supported on chunky
wooden beams above a brown dirt floor. However, whilst the Vanwoki nakamal
is a homely little hut, Chief Alucio and Chief Philip's nakamal at Lalbetaes
has the dimensions of a gigantic hall, capable of holding hundreds of
people. The vast roof contains tens of thousands of natanggura palm leaves,
which have been individually cut, bent and pinned onto supporting poles. In
Pentecost's climate, such roofs rot within a few years, and only a chief who
could call upon the help of an awfully large number of people would be able
to maintain a building of this size.

The water supply ceremony was held outdoors. A large crowd of villagers,
teachers and students gathered around the nasara - the village green - where
the Vanuatu flag was flying from a makeshift flagpole of green bamboo. Two
bullocks had been slaughtered for the occasion, and all the students who had
spent their afternoons carrying sand and gravel up the hill for the
construction of the new water supply were rewarded with a rare chance to
have a decent meal. The Japanese ambassador and his wife were seated,
together with local chiefs and government dignitaries, under a
corrugated-metal shelter at one side of the nasara. A microphone had been
rigged up, and the dignitaries gave speeches to the crowd.

I arrived part-way through the afternoon, having tried to estimate what time
the speeches would be over. My estimate was out by about half an hour, but I
managed to miss the worst of the welcoming and thanking, and got to hear the
Principal's elderly father - keen to remind everybody that the Japanese
ambassador wasn't the only figure they had to thank for supplying their
villages with water - take the microphone and sing a spontaneous hymn.

The final speaker was Chief Alucio, who earned my deep respect by beginning
his speech with "Me no want'em talk too-much, ee no got plenty thing me
want'em tell'em." This is a common way for speakers in Vanuatu to begin, and
usually heralds a speech of average length and above-average pointlessness,
but wise Chief Alucio actually meant his words. After a couple of sentences
of thanks his speech was over, and it was time for the traditional dancing
to begin.

The group of men who shuffled and sang their way into the nasara to begin
their dance were clothed in an odd mixture of ceremonial mats and Australian
board shorts. Some had bunches of rattling nuts tied around their ankles to
provide percussion to the dance; others wore white trainers. Most had
nanggaria - ceremonial leaves - stuck into the backs of their mats or their
shorts, giving them the appearance of giant cockerels. A couple of men
tapped out a beat on wooden slit drums, while others led the dancers in an
ululating chant.

Vanuatu's custom dances are not elaborate, gymnastic affairs. Imagine how
people might dance if gravity were doubled, and you will get some impression
of what a typical performance is like. Dancers shuffle in slow lines up and
down the nasara, or gather in the centre in a loose, revolving mob. In some
dances the performers are hunched over, shaking their elbows like chickens
and scuffing their feet against at the ground like frustrated cattle.

After a few minutes of ritual shuffling, the man on the microphone invited
the audience to join in.

"You-fella who ee stop around long place here, suppose you want'em dance,
you come join'em dance."

Two old ladies stepped forward a little way from the crowd, and shuffled
dead-weightedly in rhythm with the dancers. A couple of young men entered
the nasara and followed the lines of dancers, attracting laughs and cheers
from the crowd. The school sports master took up a slit drum and joined the
fray. Everyone else continued to watch.

"Andrew, you now, you come join'em dance," said the man on the microphone.

Two hundred people looked in my direction.

I turned towards the announcer and made the silent arms-wide gesture that
the ni-Vanuatu use to mean "What's going on?".

"Yes, Andrew, you come dance. Me-fella want'em look say you, you dance
today."

Two hundred people stared. Memories of high school ceilidhs came flooding
back. (To Scots, a ceilidh is a country dance. To an immigrant English
teenager with two oversized left feet, it's an exercise in trying to shrink
backwards into the wall when dancers are told to "take your partners please"
in the hope that no girl will be stupid enough to come over and invite you
to dance.)

I shrugged and took my position in the crowd of shuffling dancers. Several
other men came out of the crowd and joined in. The announcer on the
microphone egged me on. My students laughed and cheered.

Contrary to the belief of most of my family and friends, I have always
enjoyed dancing. True, I am usually the person standing in the corner of the
dance floor holding everyone else's jackets, or the person cowardishly
explaining to a girl that "I'd rather sit out this one" on the occasions
when I shrank backwards but the wall failed to absorb me. However, this is
not because I don't want to dance. It is because I have poor co-ordination,
I am shy in Western social situations, I am taller than the average girl to
an extent that makes dancing with them awkward, I have a surplus pair of
limbs (other people have this problem too, but unlike me they seem to be
able to use their arms in ways that don't make them look idiotic), and I am
usually sober enough to care what other people are thinking.

None of this mattered on Pentecost. The sort of leaden shuffling that drives
my friends to despair in Western nightspots is perfectly in keeping with the
style of a Vanuatu dance. There was no awkward "take your partner" moment:
men and women were dancing in the same way that men and women do nearly
everything else in Vanuatu - in the same place at the same time yet utterly
independently of one another.

Custom dancing was fun. And even if I was dancing badly, everybody knew I
had never tried this before, so nobody was expecting me to be any good. The
crowd was staring and laughing at me because I was a white man, not just
because I was a terrible dancer, and strangely that made everything OK.

Some of my students, dressed for the occasion in their school uniforms,
joined in the dance. It began to drizzle, but nobody minded. Chief Philip's
truck passed back and forth, piled with tables and chairs which had been
borrowed from the school and were being returned now that the ceremony was
over. The head boy, riding in the truck with Chief Philip, hung out of the
passenger window like a happy labrador. Yellow afternoon sunlight shone
through the rain. The trees around the dancing ground glinted. The men and
women shuffled in circles. The dignitaries looked on from their dripping
shelter. The dancers chanted, stamping their feet three times and the end of
each chorus. I stamped along with them. I wondered how I had gone, in two
years, from marching through the Edinburgh Meadows in a white T-shirt on a
sunny afternoon to campaign for more aid to be sent to poor countries, to
dancing around a muddy nasara in a jungle village in the rain in gratitude
for such aid.

Unlike the African countries whose cause Bob Geldof was championing on that
July weekend, Vanuatu has little difficulty finding generous well-wishers to
help it in times of need. The tiny republic is peaceful, friendly,
democratic and only moderately corrupt, and its islands are full of the type
of people you see in aid-agency adverts - hard-working farmers who are
trying bravely to haul themselves out of poverty and might well succeed if
only somebody would build them a hospital or dig them a well. The country
has never fallen into the grip of a dictator, fought a war, or been
associated with terrorism. In crude economic terms, it is demonstrably poor:
this year the United Nations added Vanuatu to its list of Least Developed
Countries, placing it in the same category as the world's worst Third World
hellholes. Vanuatu also does a good line in natural disasters - regular
earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions that remind foreign donors of
the odds that the islanders face in trying to develop their vulnerable
country.

There is another, less wholesome reason why big foreign governments lavish
aid on tiny island states. Many countries have pet causes for which they
would like to win the support of as many nations as possible - whaling, for
example, or the status of Taiwan - and the friendship of a country the size
of Vanuatu is cheaply bought. If the Japanese spent a hundred dollars on
every man, woman and child in Vanuatu, Japan's own citizens would be out of
pocket by a mere fifteen cents each.

For would-be international Santa Clauses trying to decide which impoverished
country to reward with the biggest presents, Vanuatu therefore represents an
excellent choice. When the United States offered money from its Millennium
Challenge Fund to help deserving poor countries build up their
infrastructure, Vanuatu was the country in the South Pacific to qualify. The
children in the Vanuatu household might squabble a bit over the gifts in
their Christmas stockings (the local officer in charge of disbursing the
Millennium Challenge money has recently been suspended over fraud
allegations), but they've had such a hard time lately that you can hardly
blame them, and you can at least trust them not to shoot the reindeer or
relight the fire while Santa is still working his way back up the chimney.
And they will be sure to leave a generous plate of mince pies.

At Lalbetaes, the Japanese ambassador left the nasara holding a long, black
wooden spear that the islanders had presented him with, which served as a
convenient walking stick on the slippery road). Two or three well-wishers
followed behind to help carry the many other gifts that had been bestowed
upon the little man. One of them held an enormous bundle of
brightly-patterned woven baskets. Another cradled a giant, leaf-wrapped
ceremonial pudding in his arms.

When the sun set and the dancing was over, the men decamped to the nakamal,
where kava was already being prepared, and the visiting dignitaries from
Port Vila were filling in their rural counterparts (who seldom get to read
newspapers) on the latest in Vanuatu politics. A group of men sat in a
circle while 'Sarlo' the local MP talked about the nation's current big
scandal: the attempt by various figures in Sarlo's party to defraud the
National Bank by millions of dollars. I didn't understand everything that
Sarlo said, since he was speaking the native language, but I'm guessing he
was reassuring his constituents that he wasn't involved.

I chatted to a figure from the Department of Geology and Mining, whose
offices were destroyed two months ago in a suspicious fire. The offices
contained, amongst other things, the computer that received and analysed
data coming in from the various seismic monitoring stations around the
country. Such monitoring is important: Vanuatu has nine active volcanoes,
some of them prone to nasty eruptions, and suffers frequent earthquakes
which occasionally trigger tsunamis. (Two weeks ago Ranwadi was shaken awake
at 4.10 a.m. by a prolonged tremor that cracked roads and disrupted power
supplies in the town of Luganville.) The news that the country is now
without a functioning seismic monitoring network was not reassuring.

After the fire, the Vanuatu government called in help from France (a
reliable foreign Santa, who asks only that children say "Merci" rather than
"Thank you" in return for their Christmas presents). A replacement computer
is on its way.