Andrew Gray's travel tales

16th November

For months, her neighbours had politely ignored the fact that Paulo, a
handsome young man from a nearby village, was spending nearly every evening
at Sara's house. In Pentecost culture, it would be scandalous for a man to
call on a lone woman in her home, but people realised that foreigners did
things differently. Paulo, they knew, was one of the few people among the
French-educated villagers around Melsisi who spoke good English. He had
spent time abroad, and could chat at length about world affairs. He was also
helpful around the house. Perhaps he was only visiting Sara to chat to her
in her native language, or to watch her DVDs, or to give a hand with tasks
such as cutting the branches of the grapefruit tree that clattered on windy
nights against the tin roof of Sara's house - tasks a girl shouldn't be
expected to do on her own.

When Paulo took Sara up the mountain to visit his village - the Vanuatu
equivalent of bringing the new girlfriend home to meet the parents -
whispers began. However, the majority of Sara's neighbours continued to turn
a blind eye.

However, when Paulo overslept and was seen leaving Sara's house quite a
while after dawn, rumours began to spread in earnest.

Then Paulo's father, a prominent local chief, announced proudly that his son
was going to get married to the white girl.

Sara had not been consulted about this.

"He's just my boyfriend!" she protested to the villagers. "I'm not planning
to marry him."

That was when the scandal really broke loose.

"Lots of people round here are having secret relationships," one of Sara's
colleagues explained to her. "I've had affairs. Plenty of the other teachers
have gone to bed with women who are not their wives. If they do it in secret
and nobody can prove anything, then it will be OK. But you cannot ever admit
in public that you are having a relationship with somebody you are not
married to. When you do that, then there is trouble."

The behaviour of Pentecost's inhabitants is governed by two authorities. The
first is that of God and the Bible, whose position on relationships between
unmarried men and women is fairly clear. The second is the temwat.

"Temwat" (or "tamwata" in neighbouring languages) is most commonly
translated as "peace". The concept encompasses not just the kind of peace in
which people aren't fighting one another, but also spiritual harmony. Temwat
also refers to the set of unwritten laws and principles by which peace is
maintained. Traditionally these included both obvious rules such as not
stealing, and local taboos such as not visiting particular places at
particular times. Enforcing these rules is the role of traditional chiefs.
If everybody follows the rules and upholds the temwat, the islanders believe
that their community will be protected from harm. However, if the temwat is
broken, the person responsible must perform a ceremony to make amends - not
just with the chiefs and with the person who was wronged, to whom pigs and
red mats must be paid in compensation, but also with the spirits. Only when
such a ceremony has been completed will the temwat be restored and harmony
return.

Screwing the visiting white girl was definitely not good for the temwat.

In traditional society, if a boy and girl 'made trouble' together, it would
be up to their parents to make amends.

"My parents don't care that I have a boyfriend," Sara told the villagers
truthfully. "They're happy for me. And Paulo's father doesn't have a problem
with me seeing his son either. It's nobody else's business."

Other local elders, however, were demanding that fines be paid.

The host 'father' who had been assigned to look after Sara when she first
arrived in Melsisi, embarrassed by the scandal his daughter had caused, gave
a red mat to the church.

"You shouldn't have done that," Sara told him.

Sara's host father, in turn, demanded a pig from Paulo's family in
compensation for the defiling of his daughter.

"I'm not giving that man anything," said Paulo, whose clan have a
long-standing feud with Sara's host family. "He's not your father."

Down in the nakamals and kava bars, the whole business was discussed at
length. At the Sunset Kava Bar, I listened to the villagers chattering in
their language and followed little of it until the flamboyant barkeeper
chose to make his contribution to the conversation loudly, in a language I
understood well:

"Ee never been got one man before, along place here, who ee take'm one white
missus!"

"We don't blame Sara," the villagers hastily assured me. "Paulo is the one
who has done wrong."

When I tried to defend Paulo, who had never seemed to me to be anything than
an honourable gentleman (although I did wonder how his father had come to be
under the false impression that Paulo and Sara had marriage plans), the
villagers shifted their blame elsewhere.

"The College Principal is the one who's really to blame," they agreed. "He
should have kept an eye on Sara and put a stop to this relationship before
it got this far."

Although the villagers would have agreed unhesitatingly that a local boy and
girl who caused such a scandal should be fined and forced to repent, there
was concern about the idea of imposing the same punishment on a Peace Corps
volunteer. The College de Melsisi plans to expand next year and badly needs
more expatriates to come and teach English there. Some locals worried that
treating Sara harshly would dissuade overseas organisations from sending
future volunteers.

"You are right to be worried," I told them, in an attempt to persuade them
to drop the matter. "Sara and I appreciate that things are done differently
in your culture, but people back home are going to hear about this and find
the idea of treating someone this way just because she has a boyfriend weird
and wrong." Punishing Sara would also be wrong in the eyes of the Peace
Corps organisation, which seeks to protect its volunteers from arbitrary
fines.

When legitimate discussion in the nakamals was exhausted, wilder gossip
began to take its place. One popular rumour held that Sara and Paulo were
planning to run away to America together. A medically implausible but far
more entertaining story was that Paulo had been rushed to hospital for an
emergency circumcision after developing a life-threatening swelling during a
passionate night with Sara.

"Gammon, gammon, gammon," I said, repeating the Pidgin word for lies.

"No, me-fella ee think say ee true," said my drinking companions.

Even my students at Ranwadi joined in the gossip.

"Are you going to fight Sara's new man?" they asked me.

"Why would I do that? I like the guy."

"But he took your girl."

Most of the islanders, for whom boys and girls can never be 'just friends',
have always classified Sara as either my sister or my girlfriend. Either
way, I ought to have been furious with Paulo. Even Paulo himself seemed to
find it slightly odd when I ran into him a couple of weeks later in the
village of Hotwata, a few miles down the coast, and greeted him like a
friend.

"I came to Hotwata to attend a wedding," he explained. "Then my cousins here
asked me to help them dig the ground for a new kava garden. After that, I
was on my way back, when someone pointed out that there was another ceremony
happening and asked that I stay. Then, just as I was getting ready to leave,
something else came up."

".and I bet it's nice for you to get out of Melsisi for while," I added.

Paulo nodded, grinning with embarrassment.

Up at Melsisi, Sara remained defiant. Even by the standards of Vanuatu
society, it seemed ridiculous that everyone was making such a fuss simply
because a boy and a girl were dating. It seemed that whenever Sara worked
hard to help the community - spending hours filling in application forms to
secure funding for new equipment, for example, in addition to her
time-consuming teaching job - her efforts were taken for granted. Yet now
that she had done something wrong, every eye in the village was suddenly on
her.

There was a great deal of hypocrisy in the whole business: few people in
Melsisi were sufficiently without sin to throw the first stone. During her
work on Pentecost, Sara had patiently endured the company of many repulsive
men whom she knew to have beaten, raped or cheated on their wives. Although
privately she moaned about the state of Vanuatu society, and had got
involved in community education programmes aimed at improving the role of
local women, she had never openly passed judgment on her neighbours'
behaviour.

I suspected that some of the villagers' gossip was also motivated by
jealousy. Paulo had merely succeeded in doing to Sara what at least a dozen
other guys had told me on various occasions they would have liked to do to
her. And then there were the double standards. I had spent nights at Sara's
house on many occasions without drawing any comment from the locals, as had
several male Peace Corps volunteers. Villagers who encounter me in Melsisi
in the evenings - even the ones who don't treat me as her brother - actually
encourage me to sleep at her house rather than braving the long and
ghost-infested road back to Ranwadi. But in my case it was different, of
course. Not because I was sleeping in the spare bed, which I don't think all
the villagers believed, but because I was a white man. The sad truth seemed
to be that in Vanuatu, like elsewhere in the world, even people who are not
ordinarily racist get uneasy at the sight of a black man hand-in-hand with a
white woman.

"I'm not getting fined for this," Sara asserted.

Unfortunately, Sara and Paulo had fallen foul not only of the Catholic
mission and traditional customs, but also a complicated web of village
politics. The scandal brought to the surface long-standing rivalries between
Paulo's family and the various factions involved in running the mission, and
old feuds were reopened. The temwat had been broken.

Sara reluctantly accepted that something needed to be done to put things
right.

The penalty demanded from Sara was six red mats - traditional money
equivalent to a hundred dollars or so. By local standards, it was a big
fine. Paulo and his family were to give two prized pigs with whorled tusks -
one to Sara's host father, and the other to the local priest in compensation
for fornicating on his mission. The 'sorry ceremony' was arranged for the
following Sunday. After the ceremony was completed, all would be forgiven,
provided that Sara and Paulo did not see each other again.

Sara, of course, had no red mats. Modern money would have been accepted as a
substitute, but Sara decided instead to do things the Pentecost way.

When an islander lacked the pigs or mats needed to pay a fine, he would
traditionally have gone cap-in-hand to his family, his friends, and anybody
else who was well-disposed towards him. Historically, an offender who could
not raise the necessary pigs and mats to pay a fine would have been strung
up to a tree and burned alive. The fact that your neighbours' willingness to
do you a favour might one day be the only thing standing between you and a
fiery death presumably gave people a strong incentive to treat one another
nicely (as well as providing a mechanism for ridding the community of
arseholes). Nowadays, nobody gets executed for failing to pay a fine, but
they might be banished from the village. This was the fate that Sara was now
threatened with if she didn't pay.

It was time for Sara to get her reward from all the people for whom she'd
done favours - filling in grant application forms, typing up letters,
lending magazines and DVDs, umpiring and scorekeeping at sports matches,
taking photos, helping order goods from abroad, and teaching English to the
children. She put on her best dress and set off around the village to ask
for red mats.

"I'd contribute a mat if I had one," I told her.

By the time of the ceremony, Sara had persuaded her friends and neighbours
to donate the mats she needed. When she arrived in the grassy clearing
outside the tin meeting house where the villagers had gathered, proceedings
were already underway. The mats and the pigs were presented, local chiefs
inspected the items and gave speeches in a language Sara didn't understand,
and the ceremony was completed.

Sara believed this would be the end of the matter. Yet the conversations she
had with the villagers afterwards bothered her. A worrying number of people
seemed to be under the impression that by presenting a pig to Sara's host
father, Paulo's father had blocked Sara.

In the unromantic language of Vanuatu relationships, 'blocking' means that a
father claims a girl as a future bride for his son, blocking her from other
suitors. In other words, Sara and Paulo were now formally engaged to be
married.

When I next saw Sara, she was about as happy as you would expect a girl to
be after learning that her hand in marriage has been given away, without her
knowledge, in exchange for a pig.

"It wasn't even a particularly good pig," she told me.

Had Sara been blocked or not? Different people had told her different
things. Since she hadn't attended or understood all of the ceremony, she had
no way of finding out for herself.

In frustration, she wrote an open letter to her school principal and the
local chiefs, explaining (amongst other things) that there were important
differences between Pentecost marriage customs and American ones. After
further confusion and a couple of meetings, it was eventually explained to
her that she had not, in fact, been blocked. Not that it really mattered, of
course: Sara had no intention of being forced into a marriage against her
will. Unlike the unfortunate local girls who sometimes find themselves in
similar situations, she had a means of escape.

"When my placement ends in a couple of months, I'm out of this place," she
said. Her tone was not sentimental. "If Paulo chooses to come and visit me
in America, he's welcome. But what happens in future is our business, nobody
else's."

A few weeks later, I found myself drinking kava with one of the chiefs who
had presided over the ceremony.

"What really happened at Sara's sorry ceremony?" I asked him.

"Paulo's father tried to have her blocked," he replied. "But we refused to
allow it, on the grounds that Sara's real father wasn't around to give his
agreement."

Everything was OK, then. Provided that Sara's father in America didn't
develop a sudden hankering for fresh pork, she was safe from being sold away
into marriage.

Many people, including me, were hoping for a Hollywood ending to the whole
drama. I had a vision of Sara and Paulo jumping on the backs of the two
prized pigs and galloping away like cowboys, trailing long red mats behind
them. A crowd of angry villagers would shake their fists and give chase,
while an irate priest bellowed hellfire at the departing fugitives and
Paulo's old father watched the couple disappear around the headland with a
proud smile on his face. They would arrive at the airfield with the
villagers in hot pursuit, to find the plane already taxiing away along the
grass. Leaving the pigs behind to fend off the mob, they would jump on a
nearby truck, pursue the Twin Otter along the field at a hundred miles per
hour, jump on board during the split second that the plane began to leave
the ground, and fly away to live happily ever after in the land of the free.

But Hollywood romances do not happen on Pentecost. Two months later, Sara's
placement at Melsisi came to an end, and she packed her things to leave.

She will probably never see Paulo again.