Andrew Gray's travel tales

15th February

"They roasted him on the fire in the middle of the nakamal, with pieces of
taro."

I thought of the ceremonies I'd been to on Pentecost. The whole village
gathering hungrily around the fire, heaving away the hot cooking stones with
callipers made from a split tree trunk, unwrapping the boulder-like lumps of
taro from the charred leaves in which they had been baked, carving stringy
grey meat from long yellow bones… nowadays the meat was beef, but it didn't
take too much imagination to turn the scene into a cannibal feast.

"Afterwards, they gave one of his arms to a respected local chief. But the arm
wasn't properly done. The strings in it were still tough. When the chief bit
into the arm, his teeth caught one of the strings, and the hand turned and
punched him in the face. The poor old chief thought that the arm had come
alive again!"

This was fascinating stuff. I wondered why it had never occurred to me to ask
the villagers about cannibal stories before.

"Our fathers ate white men too," the old man continued. "When the first
missionary came ashore at Banmatmat, south of here, they captured him and tied
him to a tree. The men danced around him and chanted. The missionary had his
arms crossed, and he was holding his Bible against his chest, and praying."

This was such a perfect cartoon image that I would have questioned whether it
was genuine, were it not for the fact that the old man telling the story had
probably never watched a cartoon in his life.

"The chief came with a club, the kind they used for killing pigs. He cracked
the missionary on the head with the club, and killed him."

"And then they ate him?"

The old man nodded, with a hint of embarrassment.

Today, Banmatmat is the site of the local Bible College. Whatever you think of
the missionaries, you have to admire their perseverance.

"Things only changed after people from Pentecost went away to cut sugar cane
in Queensland," the old man explained. "Some of them came back and brought the
Gospel with them."

I already knew this part of the story. One of those returned labourers was Mr
Willie Tabimamkan, whose concrete grave and memorial now sits at the corner of
the local playing fields (where it provides a useful stand for spectators who
wish to get a better view during sports matches). Mr Tabimamkan, arriving back
on Pentecost in 1902, founded a school where he taught people that Jesus had
told them to love their fellow men rather than clubbing and roasting them.
That school evolved into the place where I now work.

"Tabimamkan was one of them," the old man said. "There was another who landed
further north, at Bwatnapne. He built a church there, made out of wood and
bamboo, just like this nakamal. Every Sunday he prayed there, but nobody came.
Nobody else wanted to hear about Jesus. So he prayed there on his own. Every
Sunday."

"In the end he had an idea. He arranged a pig-killing ceremony, and people
came to give offerings to the local chief. Some people brought many pigs. The
guests lined up, one by one, and presented their pigs to the chief.

"The man who built the church went last. He had brought no pigs at all.
Instead, he handed the chief a Bible.

"'What I am giving you is worth more than any number of pigs,' he told the
chief. 'This is the word of God.'"

"How did the chief react?"

"That I don't know," the old man said. "But we're all Christians now."

- - -

Valentine's Day passed without a heart-shaped card, pink teddy bear, red rose,
fluffy bunny rabbit, or sickly shop window display in sight. At times like
this I'm glad to be on a distant island. In fact, this may have been my second
best Valentines Day ever. The best being the one I spent in the middle of the
desert.

At Melsisi, I tried with difficulty to explain the concept of Valentine's Day
to my drinking buddies down at Mango, the kava shack under the mango tree.
They claimed never to have heard of the occasion, even after I did my best to
pronounce "Saint Valentine" with a French accent. They grasped the fact that
February 14th is a significant date in the Western calendar, but getting
across the idea of what people are supposed to do on that day was tricky. In
Pentecost society, to announce that you fancied someone would, depending on
the circumstances, be interpreted either as a grievous offence or as a
marriage proposal.

I think some of my companions were left under the impression that Brits on
Valentine's Day must do what the ni-Vanuatu do on any special occasion: take
the day off, roast a pig and hold a football tournament.

On my way home from the kava bar, I stopped at Sara's for a candlelit dinner.
Not a romantic occasion, of course, but a consequence of the fact that the
electricity generator at the College de Melsisi had been switched off early
that evening. It's hard to imagine anything less romantic than two people
crouching on a concrete floor, sweating in the humidity, while one of them
picks at cold leftovers on a plastic plate and the other frets about lesson
planning and pulls bloodsucking parasites off a smelly, snoozing dog.

9th February

"The Ministry wants us to take an extra twenty-five new Year 11s," he
announced, halfway through the first week. Timetables were hastily redrawn,
and extra classes were created.

Naughty students who had been told that they weren't welcome back at Ranwadi
were traded with other schools. I laughed at the thought of headteachers all
trying to pass on undesirable students to one another, like low-value playing
cards.

"Those students might prosper in a new environment," the Principal claimed.

The junior classes settled into their work without much fuss, but sorting out
the senior classes (the Year 11s and Year 12s) was trickier. These students,
who are studying towards their Pacific Senior Secondary Certificates (the
local equivalent of A-levels), take varying combinations of subjects, and many
of them were newly arrived at Ranwadi after transferring from other schools.

Mr Neil and I did our best to get them organised. We split the new Year 11s
arbitrarily into two classes, A and B - an act of casual randomness that will
determine the poor kids' social lives for the next two years - and asked them
to choose which subjects to study. Mr Neil then went around each class to
check if the students who had actually turned up to a particular subject bore
any resemblance to those on his list. Sometimes they didn't. Names were
ticked, crossed out and amended.

Meanwhile, the Principal made increasingly desperate phone calls and faxes to
the Ministry of Education, telling them that the school needed more teachers
to help cope with all of the new students. There was little that the Ministry
could do. In many of the most important subjects, such as Maths and Science,
there is a critical shortage of teachers throughout Vanuatu.

Finding enough teachers is always a struggle at Ranwadi (this is one reason
why the Principal is so willing to accept overseas volunteers and asks few
questions about their qualifications), but this year the staffing situation is
particularly bad. Some of last year's teachers have left and haven't been
replaced, and one or two new teachers who were supposed to be posted to
Ranwadi have been sent elsewhere instead. One teacher has been suspended by
the Ministry after allegedly pushing a student down the stairs. The school's
Geography teacher and one of its English teachers are still making their way
back after the holidays; in the meantime their classes sit unoccupied. Both
the Agriculture teachers were taken ill after eating a poisonous fish, and one
has yet to return to work.

Admittedly, one reason for the staff shortages is that most of the teachers
here spend fewer hours per week in the classroom than their Western
counterparts. I have one of the fullest timetables, and nearly half of my
periods are free. This is partly because of tropical languor (it's hard to
work when it's 35C and you have no air-conditioning), but also because
teachers are required to do a lot of other duties around the school. Ranwadi
is not merely a boarding school, it is a community whose members are liable to
be called upon to do all kinds of odd jobs at odd hours of the day or night in
order to keep the place running. A lot of tasks for which a city school could
rely on hired companies or the local council - taking away and incinerating
the rubbish, for example, or plugging leaks in the water supply when the taps
stop running (as happened last week) - have to be dealt with by the school's
ever-resourceful staff. (The more menial chores are given to the students, of
course, but it's still up to the staff to make sure that they get done.)
Teachers here do not go home at the end of the day, and some of them barely
leave the premises during the entire three-month school term.

- - -

A fortnight into the term, new students were continuing to arrive, and in
spite of Mr Neil's efforts there were still no class registers, nor even a
definite idea of how many students were in the school. It occurred to me that
we could clang the fire bell - a big, red-painted metal cylinder outside the
staffroom - to force the students to line up and be counted. However, since
there has been no fire drill within recent memory (the teachers contemplated
having one last year but decided it would be too much of a nuisance), and
people are used to the handyman making loud noises around the school, the
alarm would probably have been ignored.

Even in cases where students had given us their names, there were questions.
Some of the new names were strangely spelled (Lavander, Trevar, Niel), and
when typing them into the computer Neil and I were unsure whether or not to
'correct' them. Were these legitimate local spellings, we wondered, or were
they simply examples of people (of whom there are plenty in Vanuatu) who
cannot consistently spell their own names?

Matters were complicated by the fact that the islanders traditionally put
their family name before their Christian name, in contrast to the Western
style. The students had been instructed to put their family name last when
submitting their names to the school, but some hadn't listened, leaving us
uncertain which were the students' first names and which were their surnames.

In some parts of Vanuatu, surnames are a recent introduction. Down in the
villages, official notices on the doors of nakamals remind people that for the
purposes of government records they are required to have a surname. If your
family does not have a name yet, the notices tell the villagers, you should
choose one now.

Here on Central Pentecost, surnames of a sort did exist before bureaucracy
imposed them. All boys are traditionally given the surname of either Bule or
Tabi (or some variant of these), whilst girls are either Mabon or Matan. The
daughter of a Bule is a Mabon, and the daughter of a Tabi is a Matan. Among
men, the names alternate between generations, so that the son of a Bule is a
Tabi, and the son of a Tabi is a Bule. A Bule is only permitted to marry a
Mabon, whilst a Tabi can only marry a Matan. Through the ages, a great deal of
heartache has been suffered by islanders who happened to fall in love with
someone of the wrong surname. (Gay marriages are also out of the question,
presumably.)

The ostensible purpose of this naming system is to prevent men from marrying
their sisters. In practice, this is unnecessary, since brothers and sisters
never want to marry and their parents have no interest in forcing them. The
true reason for such genealogical systems, according to some anthropologists,
is to prevent marriages between parallel cousins. ('Parallel cousins' are the
children of two brothers or the children of two sisters, as opposed to the
children of a brother and a sister, who are 'cross cousins'.) When parallel
cousins marry, wealth and power are kept within the family, and parents who
allowed such marriages would forgo the opportunity to forge useful alliances
with other families.

Visiting white men are placed into either the Bule or the Tabi clan, usually
being given the name of the first local person who feels brotherly towards
them. Sometimes their names, like those of the islanders, are adorned with
suffixes. My own 'custom name' is Tabisini, which roughly translates as Mr
Kava. The villagers insist that this is a respectable name and not a comment
on my drinking habits. Hugh, my former housemate at Ranwadi, was known to the
villagers as Buledam - Mr Yam.

"I think this means you can marry my sister," I told him, when his new name
was announced.

6th February

I added, jokingly, "except perhaps East Anglia".

With no major cities, no legendary sports teams, and no political bodies
larger than the ones that decide what colour the park benches will be painted,
the rural counties of eastern England are not a bountiful source of news. When
I meet fellow emigrants from the region, we often chuckle fondly at the memory
of Anglia News and BBC Look East, whose bulletins are padded extensively with
the sort of amazing story in which a brave cat narrowly saves its kittens from
an unfortunate end by cleverly jumping up and pressing the stop button on the
tumble drier.

Even in such a sleepy region as East Anglia, Upper Holton - the Suffolk hamlet
where my mother grew up and where my uncle and cousins still run the family
farm - is not the sort of place you would expect to feature in the local news.
Still less would you expect anything of national significance to happen there.
And if you had told me a week ago that an event in Upper Holton would make the
news in the South Pacific, I would have laughed.

"I hear on Radio New Zealand that bird flu has reached England," Mr Neil the
New Zealander told me as we sat down in the chapel for the Monday morning
assembly.

I grunted with half-interest. Not needing to care too much about events like
this is one of the luxuries of living on a dot in the ocean.

"Apparently an outbreak has happened at a turkey farm in Lowestoft," he went
on.

"My uncle lives next door to a turkey farm a few miles from Lowestoft," I
said. "I hope it doesn't spread there."

Later than day I hooked up my laptop to the frayed telephone wire in the
school office and I checked my e-mail.

"Don't know if news of this has reached you yet…" began my mum's message. She
had sent me an e-mail like that once before - on September 11th, 2001.

The outbreak of bird flu wasn't in Lowestoft itself, it turned out, but in a
village a few miles away. On the turkey farm next door to my uncle's farm, to
be precise.

Rings of protection zones had been set up around Upper Holton, the health
officials had cordoned off the village, and government vets had begun a mass
slaughter of turkeys, whose carcasses were being treated like radioactive
waste. My uncle, the worried local resident, had been interviewed on Anglia
News (which, having little else to report, had presumably devoted a week's
worth of bulletins to the story).

At least the village where my mother grew up now has a claim to fame.

Down at the nakamal, I told my drinking buddies that in my uncle's village
there was "big trouble from one new kind sick b'long fowl". Most were
uninterested - they had never heard of bird flu. The image of government
officials turning up at someone's farm and massacring all of his poultry did,
however, cause a frisson of horror.

Vanuatu is usually one of the last places in the world to suffer the arrival
of new diseases. A century ago, its population was decimated (in the modern
sense, not the Latin sense) when the coming of Europeans unleashed a Pandora's
Box of germs that the islanders' immune systems had never encountered before -
diseases that had done their worst elsewhere in the world centuries earlier.
AIDS has only been here since 2002, and if you had mentioned it to the
islanders during the 1980s when Western fear of the virus was at is height,
they might well have shown the same indifference that they have now towards
bird flu.

In Vanuatu, poultry wanders freely around the villages, and infests the
school. You can't look out of the window at Ranwadi without seeing a chicken.
Occasionally they wander into the Dining Hall, judging by the white mess which
nobody bothers to clean up. In addition to their 'fowl', the islanders on
Pentecost will enthusiastically eat any wild bird that they can knock off its
perch with a catapult or an air gun. Pigeons are a popular target.
Protein-hungry children armed with sticks and stones are particularly
enterprising in supplementing their diets, and for some of them no songbird is
too small to be worth roasting. I sincerely hope that bird flu is a long time
in coming.

1st February

Port Vila, Vanuatu's capital, passed in a blur of ceiling fans, cold drinks
and Australian tourists. Two days later I boarded a Twin Otter, under the
control of an adventurous young pilot whose manoeuvres were probably well
within the plane's limits but were more than most airlines would subject their
passengers to, and returned to Pentecost.

What a beautiful island, I thought, perching on the back of the school truck
as a flowery breeze matted my hair. And this time I'll be here for a whole
year. What a scary prospect. I'm here for the whole year.

"Well, I'm back."

January is typically the rainiest month of the year on Pentecost, and having
endured a month of heavy rain during last year's 'dry season', I was
apprehensive about what the real wet season would be like. Answer: it was dry.
The rivers sparkled low in their gulleys, the dead leaves were crispy, and the
mud paths leading to the villages were cracked and firm. On Pentecost, it
seemed, even the seasons ran on 'island time'. Or perhaps the men with magic
leaves who control the weather had decided to do things differently this year.

At Ranwadi School, my house looked as if it had been abandoned for years. Not
only were there cobwebs, but insects had eaten a worrying hole in the bathroom
wall, and judging by the state of my posters the critters had also developed a
taste for Blu-tack. Something far larger than an insect had scuttled around,
knocking things off the shelves. The ants, fortunately, had moved out, and so
had most of the cockroaches. Insecticidal spray drove out the last few.

Outside, the garden was in a sorry state. The fertility of Pentecost's crops
is matched only by that of its "rubbish grass" - the pidgin term for weeds.
Some of the rubbish grass that had sprouted from the garden path was a metre
in height, and my poor pumpkin patch could have featured on a poster entitled
"Wild grasslands of the South Pacific". The rubbish grass would have taken
over my vegetable patch too, if the ginger plants hadn't got there first. I
vowed to pull them up and bake a big batch of gingerbread at the earliest
opportunity.

It was probably our fault, I realised afterwards, that the weeds had done so
well: Hugh and I had been sloshing nutrients extensively onto the garden at
the end of last year during the time that our septic tank was out of action. I
mentally added to my list of Things To Beware Of When In The Tropics. Be
careful where you piss; you never know what you might be fertilising.

I had expected our old house to be given to the new gap volunteers, with me
once again placed with Neil the New Zealander in 'International House' -
Ranwadi's home for white bachelors with nowhere else to go. However, since the
Principal was unsure whether the perennially-blocked bathroom drains at the
volunteers' house could cope with the demand inflicted on them by four girls,
the new volunteers had been installed in apartments beside the girls'
dormitories instead, and I had the old house to myself - at least until
somebody had a chance to work on the plumbing. This being Vanuatu, that
probably wasn't going to get done anytime soon.

- - -

After sunset, I followed the familiar path through the forest to the nakamal
(the men's meeting hut) in the local village. Nobody had brought along any
kava roots that evening, so instead of drinking we sat outside chatting and
gazing at the moon. After discussing the day's gardening, and questioning me
about what people ate during the British winter when the ground was too icy to
dig up vegetables, the conversation turned to my favourite topic: the
supernatural.

A while ago, I was told, there had been a robbery at a nearby village store.
The thief had stolen a magic leaf from Ambrym Island, used it to make himself
invisible, walked unseen past the shopkeeper, grabbed a bundle of cash, then
turned into a fruit bat and flown out of the window.

I tutted and shook my head, which I judged to be the appropriate response.

"Ee got full-up devil 'long place here," one of the villagers told me. This
place is full of evil spirits.

I glanced at the bushes surrounding the nakamal.

"Man ee no savvy look'em devil," the man told me.

"How now you savvy devil here, suppose you no look'em?" I asked. How do you
know they exist if you can't see them?

"Suppose one man ee come sick, you savvy, devil ee make'm him ee sick." Evil
spirits cause illness.

This was a bit medieval for my liking. I simply nodded.

"Ee got devil 'long England?" the man asked.

Britain has lots of ghost stories, I said. But to most people they are just
stories. I gave one example:

"Close-up 'long village b'long mama b'long me, ee got one story…" I began.
Telling Melanesian islanders about spiritual goings-on in East Anglia was like
telling New Yorkers about tall buildings in Milton Keynes, but I carried on.

"Story here ee talk-about one devil b'long dog. One time, dog here ee come
inside 'long one church house. Him ee big-one all-same one bullock, hem ee
black, more fire ee come-out 'long eye b'long him. Everyone who dog here ee
touch'em, all-ee burn. All man ee come dead."

The villagers listened with interest. They were used to stories like this, but
not coming from white people.

England is full of myths like the Black Dog of Bungay. In a modern country of
suburbs and brick houses and yellow street lighting and television monsters
(some of them inspired by the old folk legends), it is hard to take the
stories seriously. However, sitting under the thatched eaves of a shadowy,
unlit wooden hut on the fringes of the forest, I could see why people once
found such legends creepy.

In the darkness nearby, a big, black horse was breathing noisily. Where had
that horse come from? I wondered. I was fairly sure it didn't belong to any of
the men outside the nakamal.

I finished my tale like a true ghost story:

"Some ee tell'em say story b'long dog here ee no true. But 'long door b'long
church, all-ee look'em place where finger blong dog ee scratch'em wood. 'Long
place here, wood ee been burn."

Some dismissed the dog as a myth. But looking at the door of the church, they
found claw marks burned into the wood.