Andrew Gray's travel tales

26th April

"Why don't you get a student to do that?" my colleagues asked when they saw me
digging a ditch to channel rainwater away from my back doorstep. (Proper
drains are one of those Western luxuries that Ranwadi manages without.)

"You should ask the students to help", they said when they saw me carrying a
sack of coral shingle up from the beach to fill in a muddy patch on the road
leading down to Vanwoki.

"Ee more-better you ask'em some student…" they began, when they saw me outside
squishing the orange beetles that nibble holes in my pumpkin plant.

Nor is maintaining the school grounds the only use to which the students are
put. In exchange for trivial rewards, I could have people sweeping my floor,
scrubbing my porch, brushing cobwebs away from my windows, emptying my bin,
and washing my dirty laundry. The students would gladly do these things - far
better to be giving home help to a teacher who might give them sweets and a
bit of pocket money in return than to risk being put to work doing harder jobs
around the school.

The other teachers take full advantage of this. The only ones who do not
employ students as regular 'house girls' to do their chores are the ones who
have wives to do the job instead.

I do my own housework. This is not just because being a privileged foreigner
having submissive black children doing my chores would strike a raw cultural
nerve, nor just because it conveniently fills spare blocks of time (Hugh
Grant's character in 'About A Boy' would empathise), nor just because it gives
me an opportunity to put on my headphones and immerse myself undistracted in
cheesy music - though all of these things are true. I first came to Ranwadi as
an eighteen year-old away from home for the first time, determined to prove
that I could look after myself, and although I proved this long ago I still
take pride in being possibly the only man on the island who scrubs his own
dirty clothes. I cannot think of any occasion when I have seen an adult
ni-Vanuatu male with his hands in soapy water.

Of course, being a good twenty-first century man, I only scrub my clothes when
they really need it. The rest of the time I merely leave them in a bucket of
detergent until they smell clean.

- - -

When there is a really big or really sweaty task to be done, the whole school
- students and teachers alike - is recruited to help. When big new water tanks
were ready to be installed up the hill above Ranwadi, the Deputy Principal
announced that every afternoon that week, after lessons, would be spent
preparing the site. The senior boys were put to work digging with spades and
pick-axes, hewing a platform the size of a small house out of the 45-degree
mountainside. For every person digging there were at least three sitting and
watching (a ratio fairly typical of Vanuatu workplaces), but you couldn't
blame them - it was hot work. On one occasion I made my way up the hill with
bottles of drinking water and was greeted with cheers from the boys.

Everybody else in the school was sent down to the beach with baskets and
buckets and old rice sacks to fetch sand and gravel with which to make
foundations for the tanks. Plodding up and down the mountainside, I passed the
principal, the bursar, the handyman and the librarian, as well as most of my
students and teaching colleagues, all carrying sand. Even the teachers'
children, some only three or four years old, toddled up the hill with their
baskets and boxes.

The students objected surprisingly little to the loss of their one regular
piece of free time. This was a community effort. With the entire school
trekking back and forth up the same narrow path, and every person nodding and
smiling at every other person as they passed during their trips up and down
the hill, the afternoons felt more like social gatherings than hard labour.
Greetings and words of encouragement could be heard in half a dozen languages:
the staccato sounds of Ambae language, the more slurred tones of Pentecost's
languages, the vigorous half-sentences of Pidgin, and occasional phrases of
real English in a tuneful Melanesian accent. People stood aside politely to
let their friends pass on the narrow path hair-pinning up the mountain. By the
end of the week the trampling of the verges had widened the path so much that
in places you could almost have driven a vehicle up it.

There was no need to tick names or take attendance - everyone could see who
was pulling their weight. Among the various things in various languages being
said by the students passing one another on the hillside, one question could
be heard above all the others:

"How many trips have you made now?"

9th April

The important of pigs in Pentecost is declining nowadays. The island's economy
is changing, and the Chinese importers who sell saucepans and DVD players want
something other than fresh pork in return. However, in one village on
Pentecost the villagers have succeeded in replacing pigs with a modern
substitute: cruise ship passengers.

Cruise ship passengers have some disadvantages compared with their porcine
predecessors. They are larger and more demanding than pigs, and they object to
being tied up - instead you have to entice them to come and stay in your
village of their own free will. It is also taboo to eat white visitors
nowadays, so instead of butchering their substitute pigs, the hungry villagers
must persuade them to part with cash which can later be exchanged for crates
of tinned pork. However, since a thousand cruise ship passengers can be
acquired on a single day - and then sent away at sunset after they have served
their purpose, to be replaced a few days later by a fresh batch - the
quantities of wealth that can be earned from them far exceed anything that was
possible in the days of pigs.

Attracting cruise ship passengers to Pentecost is very easy, for the bizarre
reason that many years before the arrival of the first Europeans a local man
fell out with his wife. The woman, in a desperate attempt to escape from her
angry husband, jumped from the branches of a tree with vines tied to her feet
to break her fall, and thus became the world's first bungee jumper. Local
women re-enacted the jump - an early display of solidarity against domestic
violence, perhaps - until their husbands put a stop to the practice, pointing
to the sound of the wind whistling in the trees as a sign that the spirits
were unhappy with the spectacle. The women were sent back to the kitchen sink
(or rather, the cooking pit, since ni-Vanuatu houses don't have kitchen
sinks), but the men took up the practice themselves, believing superstitiously
that it would guarantee them a good yam harvest. Tall towers were built from
which to jump, men became skilled in choosing vines that were of exactly the
right length to break their otherwise-suicidal fall (Darwinism may have
eliminated those who weren't good at it), and the jumps were performed
ceremonially every year between April and June, at the time of year when the
yams were ready to be dug out of the ground. In the local languages, the
ceremony was known as the Gol (or 'nangol'); visitors dubbed it 'land diving'.
The tradition is utterly unique, and has given an island that would otherwise
be an obscure speck on the world map an international claim to fame.

Visitors have been coming to Pentecost to watch the land diving for a long
time: David Attenborough brought a BBC crew to film the ceremony half a
century ago. On that occasion he was making a TV programme about people, not
animals, but you can just imagine him crouching in the bushes, whispering with
hushed excitement and pointing at the amazing behaviour of the creatures
diving behind him. Back then, a visit to the island must have been quite an
adventure.

The era of easy day-trip tourism began in 1974, when the Queen strolled off
the Royal Yacht Britannia, accompanied by a pompous colonial entourage (one
official wore a feather hat described on the radio as being made of "grass
b'long arse b'long cockerel"), to watch the most bizarre and spectacular show
that her overseas subjects had to offer. That was in February - the first and
only time that a land dive has been performed out of season - and the young
vines were springier than expected, causing the death of one unfortunate
jumper. Apparently the Queen didn't notice.

Three decades later, still glowing with pride after their royal visit, the
islanders constructed a small, permanent jetty - named the Queen Elizabeth II
Landing - on the beach in Pangi village, in roughly the spot where Her Majesty
had once stepped ashore. Now that visitors could step ashore without getting
their feet wet, cruise ships began to show an interest in coming, so that
their passengers could witness the land diving. The jetty became a portal
between the simple, happy world of Pentecost Island and a whiter, richer
universe.

On the first day of the land diving season, I was walking over Melsisi Hill
when I noticed that Pentecost had acquired a new landmark. Moored in the bay
at the far end of the island was an enormous white ship, sticking out of the
soft, natural coastline like a prosthetic appliance. I shuddered, and wondered
if the islanders realised what they were bringing down upon themselves.

The cruise ship departed at sunset that evening. From a kava bar on the
hillside at Melsisi, the other drinkers and I watched the intense, glowing
object sliding along the horizon like a flying saucer. The ship was at least
twenty miles away, but since it was pumping out a greater wattage of electric
light than the whole of Pentecost and its neighbouring islands put together,
it wasn't hard to see.

"It's like an island," my companions said.

- - -

On the next 'cruise ship day', inspired by the same sort of curiosity that
drove me to seek out the unedited video of Saddam Hussein's hanging on the
Internet, I made my way down to Pangi. Lots of villagers were walking in the
same direction.

"Me-fella ee go long Pangi blong look all tourist," they said. We're going to
watch the tourists.

"Me too," I said.

"All millionaires, uh?" they asked

I did a quick currency conversion in my head (one million vatu is around £5000
or US$9000, a fortune on Pentecost but well within the means of the average
middle-class Westerner) and agreed that most of the cruise ship passengers
probably were millionaires.

Who wouldn't be interested in seeing a crowd of a thousand millionaires all in
one place?

Passing the airfield, I came across a separate group of tourists, who had been
flown in for the day to watch the land diving. Strolling around the airfield,
they resembled a herd of very profitable cows. While they waited for another
planeload to arrive (Air Vanuatu's island hoppers can only bring a dozen or so
visitors at a time), their guide shepherded them down to the beach - one of
the dullest stretches of gravel and grey volcanic sand you'll find anywhere in
Vanuatu - where three or four children dived in for a swim.

"What a beautiful spot," their parents cooed. I realised how much I'd been
spoiled by scenery since coming to live on Pentecost.

I stopped for a chat, and explained where I was going.

"Sometimes I can go for months on Pentecost without seeing another white
person, apart from a handful of expat colleagues and the local Peace Corps
girl," I told them. "I'm interested to see what it's like when a thousand
arrive at once. I've never seen a large crowd of white people on Pentecost
before."

"You mean a crowd of large people," one tourist quipped.

When I arrived in Pangi, I saw what he meant: the passengers on the Pacific
Sun are obviously well fed. Nor was their vastness concealed; most of the
visitors were dressed in exactly the way you'd expect Western holidaymakers to
dress in a beachside spot where the temperature is 35 degrees (95F). A
Pentecost woman whose clothes failed to cover her shoulders and knees (and
everything in between) would be rebuked for indecency, and one who strolled
through the village in a bikini would cause a scandal. However, nobody
objected to the way the tourists were dressed. This way not merely because the
villagers were anxious not to offend their paying guests, but because even the
most jealous local wife could see that there was no danger of her husband
being attracted by the heaving pink flesh on display. Even as a Westerner,
culturally conditioned to find white people more attractive than dark, frizzy
Melanesians, I was struck by how inelegant the bikinied visitors were (even
the few who were young and well-proportioned) in comparison with the local
girls in their T-shirts and long skirts.

The crowd in Pangi was approximately half black and half white - the number of
Australians wandering along the road staring at the locals was roughly
balanced by the number of Melanesians sitting under the trees staring at the
tourists. Some people were making attempts to do business with the visitors: a
young man was selling carvings of fish and flying foxes, a small girl I
recognised as a Year 7 student had set up a table offering handmade baskets
for sale, women were selling fresh oranges and drinking coconuts from mats on
the ground, and the village stores that had chosen to accept dollars for the
day were doing a busy trade. A few villagers were sitting at the roadside
demonstrating local customs such as basket weaving, and inviting passers-by to
leave money in exchange for taking photos.

In the centre of the village, as string band was playing. The tourists paid
little attention - it wasn't their kind of music - but the locals were making
the most of the free concert, crowding under nearby trees and shouting out
requests.

Several cardboard boxes were laying around with signs such as "Please donate
money to support the local clinic" scrawled onto them in marker pen. They
filled up like litter bins with shiny coins and colourful plastic Australian
banknotes. A sign outside the primary school explained that the place was
poorly equipped and in need of donations; tourists were invited to walk around
the school and see for themselves. To drive home the message, a choir of
schoolchildren had been organised to stand by the road singing songs of
Christian charity and love. (The children deserve generosity: they are the
ones who are sent out to pick up litter and clean the village before each
cruise ship's arrival, sometimes missing lessons in order to do so.)

Outside Pangi's beautiful church house, an enormous breezy building made
entirely from local wood, bamboo and palm thatch, a woman was collecting funds
for the building of a more modern church. Tin roofs don't need repairing as
often as thatched ones, the woman pointed out, when I protested that I liked
the old church.

One old man with a small collecting box spent the entire day playing his
guitar by the roadside, while his grandchildren listened nearby. After passing
him for the sixth time I dropped a few vatu in his box and stopped for a chat.
"Hand b'long me ee tired," he said, smiling.

Overall, however, I was surprised at how little commercialisation was in
evidence. A couple of big stalls were selling snacks and cold drinks, but
these were being run by the cruise ship company, not by the villagers. Nobody
was selling T-shirts saying "I've been to Pentecost Island" (which
disappointed me, as I was hoping to buy one). None of the people trying to
make money by the roadside were actively attempting to stop passers-by and
persuade them to take an interest (Melanesians never do, which is one of the
things that makes them such lovely people to travel amongst). At the
delightful little Pangi Restaurant, which was selling delicious lunches for
the equivalent of a dollar (not that the Pangi Restaurant attempted to charge
me in dollars), I was the only white customer. Like most businesses on
Pentecost, the place has no sign outside - after all, everybody in the village
knows that it's a restaurant - so all the tourists passed it by.

My intention in Pangi had been to play at being a tourist for the day -
blending in with the crowd, wandering and staring and taking photographs, and
speaking only English to those I met. However, I quickly abandoned this idea.

Firstly, too many people in South Pentecost know me. Two of my colleagues from
Ranwadi had come to Pangi for the day ("We're all tourists today," chuckled
one teacher, bumping into me in the doorway of a village store), and so had
several of my students, who were off school for the Easter weekend.

Secondly, I didn't look like a cruise ship passenger. After the four-hour walk
along the dirt road from Ranwadi to Pangi, my shirt was sticky and my feet
were bruised and chafed. The actual dirt had been washed off by the nineteen
rivers and streams that I'd had to wade en route, but the highest of the
rivers had left a dark tide mark across my shorts. I was deeply tanned but in
a subtle way, the result of a few months' gentle exposure to tropical light,
not emblazoned with the brown-and-pink lines produced by a few mornings of
grilling on the beach. I wasn't wearing a badge and key card on a pink ribbon
around my neck. I was dressed in the faded colours of the overseas explorer -
colours that won't attract insects or show up dirt - and nothing that I wore
or carried was patterned with the Australian flag. I was walking briskly, even
in the heat, and seemed as if I knew where I was going. And I looked far too
excited when I heard the sound of an electricity generator and saw that it was
powering a freezer full of ice cream and cold drinks.

Above all, though, I found that I simply didn't want to act like the visitors
off the ship. I wanted to talk to people, shake their hands, tell them where
I'd come from, chat about how their nieces and nephews are getting on at
school, discuss the weather - the things that a friendly stranger would
normally do when arriving in a Melanesian village.

Under a tree outside the Pangi Guesthouse, the owner's wife Evelyn and her
tiny seven-year-old daughter Jessica were watching the tourists go by. Evelyn,
in her green Mother Hubbard dress, was looking at the slack, scantily-clad
visitors with the expression of a well-meaning auntie who disapproves of the
way the neighbours behave but is reluctant to say anything about it. Jessica,
who has a long-standing fascination with white people, was wide-eyed.

Accompanied by Jessica, I wandered along to the Queen Elizabeth Landing, where
small boats were shuttling continuously to and from the mother ship, ferrying
passengers ashore. Free cups of chilled drinking water were being dispensed
nearby. Following Jessica's lead, I helped myself; I hadn't tasted cold water
for over a month. We sat in the shade nearby, drawing pictures with our
fingers in the sand and watching the passengers file along the jetty. At one
point Jessica pointed excitedly at a white girl about her age. Sadly, they had
no common language, and the Australian girl didn't even notice the tiny brown
child beaming at her from the roadside. Poor Jessica had little hope of making
a friend.

Beside the jetty, another string band was playing, and women in grass skirts
were doing a traditional dance. The dancers wore garlands to cover their
breasts, but nevertheless, they were crossing their arms tightly. A local
woman with a megaphone was standing on the shore, greeting the arriving
visitors. It is about fifteen minutes' walk to the land-diving site, she
explained, but if you are incapable of walking then transport is available for
two dollars. Enough people were taking up this offer to keep half a dozen
pick-up trucks continuously busy, and a wooden ramp had been constructed so
that the passengers didn't have to clamber to get onto the trucks.

For ten dollars, trips were also available to Captain Cook's Rock, the Pirates
of the Caribbean-style landmark jutting out of the sea at the northern end of
the bay. This is a new attraction, the woman with the megaphone told me, when
I went over to chat to her in between batches of arriving passengers. The rock
itself has been there at least since 1774, when it was sighted by the
eponymous sea captain, but in recent years it was off limits to tourists
because the local chiefs were still arguing about who owned the rock and
therefore who had the right to collect money from visitors. This argument had
now been settled - although don't you think the admission price seems awfully
high?, the woman commented. Ten dollars is a week's wages for a labourer on
Pentecost. Were there really people who would pay that much to stare at a
rock?

The road back to Ranwadi passed Captain Cook's Rock. I hoped I wasn't going to
get charged ten dollars to walk home.

In a vast clearing at the far end of the village, tourists were congregating
to watch the land diving ceremony. On a slope at one side of the clearing, a
wooden tower had been constructed, and a sloping patch of loose earth had been
prepared to give the jumpers a softer landing - an impact that would merely
bruise them rather than breaking their necks. Most of the tourists were
clustered at the edges of the clearing, too far away to get a good view. Some
of them looked fed up. It was midday, and it was really hot. Indirectly paying
a bunch of poor people a couple of hundred dollars each to risk their lives
for the amusement of their rich guests evidently didn't give the visitors as
much of a thrill as they had hoped.

When the land diving was over, the visitors tramped back the way they had
come, like a procession of elephants leaving with a travelling circus. By
lunchtime, a long queue of passengers had formed back at the jetty. After a
couple of hours, they had seen enough of Pentecost Island, and they were ready
to leave. While they waited, some of them sunbathed on the beach, or went for
a swim in the ocean. Homo Bay soon resembled Brighton Beach. ((I wonder if the
cruise operators bothered to give their passengers a cheap laugh by telling
them the name of the stretch of coastline where they had dropped anchor.) A
crowd of a couple of hundred people lay sprawled on the shoreline, or bobbed
rotundly in the water, like walruses with skin-pigment disorders.

"Somebody should yell 'shark'," I joked to a group of local villagers.

Nobody laughed. It turned out that the waters off Pangi actually are shark
infested.

"Ee got any friend b'long you, ee come 'long place here today?" one of the
villagers asked.

No, none of my friends are on that cruise ship, I told them. Most of those
tourists are from Australia. I'm not an Australian.

The locals' expressions warmed visibly when I said this. (I was thankful that
the ni-Vanuatu have never met British package tourists.)

"You-fella ee like'm way cruise ship ee come?" I asked the villagers.

They thought about this for a moment.

"Some ee win'em plenty money, time all tourist all-ee come," sad one man. "But
me-fella, me-fella who ee sit-down 'long place here, me-fella ee no win'em
nothing." For the people driving the trucks and selling the cold drinks, the
Pacific Sun had provided a bonanza. But the people with no jobs to do, the
ones simply sitting by the roadside watching the foreigners trampling around
their village, were unlikely to see any of the money.

"Me-fella ee like'm chance b'long talk-talk with'em all man b'long overseas,"
said another villager. We enjoy the opportunity to talk to people from abroad,
and find out about life in different countries. "But all-ee no want'em
talk-talk with'em me-fella." The cruise ship passengers don't want to talk to
us.

"All-ee no savvy language b'long you-fella," I pointed out. They don't speak
your language.

Although Vanuatu has over a hundred indigenous languages, plus three official
ones, language barriers are an issue that local people seldom struggle with.
When two ni-Vanuatu who don't share a native language meet, they always have
Pidgin English to fall back on. Most of the foreigners you meet on Pentecost
are aid workers or expatriate teachers or missionaries, and they understand
Pidgin English too. To encounter a stranger and be unable to have a friendly
conversation for want of a common language is a situation the islanders are
unused to, and it makes them uneasy.

In a few places, attempts at cross-cultural interaction were being made. One
Aussie bloke tried to start a conversation about vehicles with the men sitting
beside a truck ("The engine on this model is indestructible - they once
dropped one out of an aircraft from two kilometres up and afterwards it
started first time," he said, which impressed the villagers after I translated
it into Pidgin). The local Peace Corps girl was chatting up a handsome
Canadian crewman who had come ashore for a day off. A few villagers who did
speak English were engaged in conversations with visitors about the state of
the local school, the church and the clinic (donations welcome). Several
tourists were trying to be friendly to the cute-looking village children, who
didn't understand a word of what the white people were saying but were only
too happy to grin and pose for photos.

Nearby, a group of Year 12 students from Ranwadi were enjoying a packed lunch.
They called over to me and offered me a slab of savoury banana.

"What do you think of the tourists?" I asked one girl.

"Urr," she said, and pulled the expression she normally makes when I set an
exceptionally nasty piece of homework.

A rain shower struck as the last of the visitors were making their way back to
the ship. Together with a couple of the villagers, I dived for shelter in a
shack full of petrol drums, where we chatted about the state of modern Vanuatu
for half an hour until the rain stopped. When I emerged, all the other white
people had gone. The departing Pacific Sun had turned its gigantic white
backside towards the village, and was cruising away into a rainy mist.

- - -

At the far end of the island, a very different kind of tourist business was
trying to attract visitors. In the sandy village of Nambwarangiut, a local man
named John was trying to promote the little thatched guest bungalow that he
and his family had built under the bangaware trees opposite their home.

The weekend before my trip to Pangi, I had been sent to Nambwarangiut to check
up on the two gap-year volunteers teaching in the local primary school. Like
the tourists at Pangi, I had arrived by sea. However, my transport was not the
luxurious Pacific Sun, but a passing cargo ship, which put me ashore just
before midnight in a silver, moon-washed bay.

When I stepped out of the guesthouse the next morning, stooping through the
Wendy-house-sized front porch and squinting in the daylight reflecting off the
sand, I was greeted instantly by an excited squeal.

"Tuturani!"

In the language spoken around Ranwadi, "tuturan" means 'white person'. In the
fifteen miles that I'd travelled northwards, passing three dialect areas of
Central Pentecost Language before crossing the boundary into North Pentecost
Langauge, the word had acquired an extra syllable.

Soon the place was animated with happy children, shouting greetings, picking
up dead leaves, fetching a kettle of water for my morning tea, and shooing
away the duck that was waddling nearby. (The duck didn't seem to be doing any
harm, but chasing it looked like fun.)

After having breakfast in the little porch, and going to meet the gap
volunteers and their headmaster at the school, I returned to the bungalows,
and spent the afternoon sitting outside chatting to John the owner, while the
crowd of children played nearby. On that Saturday afternoon the village was
quiet and peaceful; disturbed only by the drop-shaped fruits falling from the
bangaware tree overhead. (The fruits all missed us, but one struck a snoozing
dog on the nose. The dog opened his eyes with a start, glared at the offending
tree, decided that it wasn't worth the effort to move to a safer spot, and
went back to sleep.)

People laughed when John decided to build a guesthouse, he told me: they
thought that nobody would ever come. However, there has since been a steady
trickle of guests - people like me who come to Nambwarangiut to visit friends,
or who have business at the school. John hopes to attract tourists, too, but
publicising the place is hard - Nambwarangiut isn't even marked on the Lonely
Planet guidebook's map of Pentecost. You can pencil it in, if you wish, at the
mouth of the river south of Abwatunvutu. It's worth adding.

At present John's bungalow is a simple little place, but he dreams of
expanding it if tourists begin to come. He has yet to build a proper bathroom,
but the bungalow doesn't need one - a few minutes' walk away at the far end of
the village, a multi-tiered jungle waterfall cascades into a clear blue pool,
perfect for bathing. A neatly-laid gravel path leads to the waterfall, with
tropical flowers growing at the sides. John planted the flowers himself, he
told me proudly. He seemed excited about the possibility of tourism, not just
as a source of income (accommodation in his guesthouse is not exactly pricey),
but as a chance to meet friends from abroad and show them his beautiful
village. If I had longer to spend in Nambwarangiut, he told me, he could have
shown me the cave in the forest behind the village, taken me snorkelling out
on the reef, or dug up some kava from his garden for us to drink together.

I promised to come back sometime. (I also offered to help John publicise his
bungalows by putting details on the Internet -
www.pentecostisland.net/bangaware. John knew of the Internet, but was under
the impression that putting a page of your own on it was very difficult to do.
If you have never touched a computer and live in a village with no
electricity, I suppose it is.)

It was all a long way from the cardboard boxes of Australian dollars littering
the roadsides in Pangi. However, the land-diving spectacle at the far end of
Pentecost is something that John happens to be intimately connected with. The
man who plunged to his death in front of the Queen back in 1974 was John's
father.

"You been look nangol, time way papa b'long you ee jump?" I asked him.

No, John hadn't been watching. He had been back in his home village, attending
primary school, when he heard the news of what had happened.

"All-ee give'm any kind compensation?"

"No got."

None of John's family had been able to ask about compensation after the
accident: John's grandfather (like most Pentecost islanders of his generation)
was an uneducated man incapable of reading or writing a letter, and John and
his brothers were small children at the time. Many years later, John had
inquired into the possibility of compensation, but had been told that it was
too late.

In spite of this, John is not bitter about what happened. On the contrary, he
is immensely proud of his father. Traditional customs are important to people
on Pentecost, as is respect for authority, and John's father died in order to
demonstrate his people's customs to one of the highest chiefs in the world. In
doing so, he helped to put his island quite literally on the map. The fame of
land-diving has given many a cartographer a reason to label a dot that might
otherwise have lost been among the tens of thousands of others that speckle
the Pacific.

The man himself succeeded, in the two or three seconds it took him to hit the
ground, in making himself at least the second most famous Pentecost islander
in history. (The 'father of the nation' Walter Lini perhaps deserves the
number one spot, although as some of my friends point out, "who outside
Vanuatu has ever heard of Walter Lini?". By contrast, the story of the Queen's
visit to Pentecost, and the accompanying death, has travelled far abroad.)

The tragedy had another silver lining. The highly-memorable death of John's
father reminded the islanders that it was dangerous to perform their ceremony
at the wrong time of year. If it hadn't been for this, the temptation of
tourist dollars would surely have led them sooner or later to abandon their
traditions and put on land-dives all year round. Pentecost would have acquired
a sizeable permanent tourist industry, will all its trappings, and cruise ship
passengers would have become a regular nuisance rather than an occasional
freak show. A few local people would have made a lot of money, but the island
as a whole would have borne a horrible cost. I could have bought my "I've been
to Pentecost Island" T-shirt, along with similar Made-In-China pencils,
sunhats, beer-bottle holders, and magnets to stick on the fridge. The locals
would have looked on jealously, and devised ever less subtle ways of
extracting money from their visitors, in the hope that they too would one day
be rich enough to own a fridge and fill it with cold beer. The uniqueness of
land diving would have kept people coming long after the island itself has
ceased to be a pleasant place to visit.

Pentecost's 'development' would have been surged ahead, propelled by waves of
dollars, but even those with money would have been unable to buy the kind of
happiness that comes from being able to sit and have a friendly chat under a
bangaware tree in a beautiful village on a breezy Saturday afternoon.

5th April

Feeling alone on a black foreign hillside at midnight, while manic figures
slip in and out of the darkness around jabbering like crazy people refusing to
listen to reason, is not a comfortable experience under any circumstances. But
having your students talk to you as though you're possessed by the devil is
downright offensive.

"Forgive him, Lord, he does not know what he's saying," they were murmuring
form the shadows.

I knew exactly what I was saying. I was telling them to obey the school rules
and go to bed. For over two hours they had been keeping everybody in the
community awake, first running around the school screaming exhortations to the
Lord at the tops of their voices ("God isn't deaf!", I'd shouted at them, when
they passed my bedroom window for the third time), and then singing prayers
loudly right outside the girls' dormitories. It was a Thursday night - we had
lessons the next day - and nobody could sleep. In the staff houses, candles
and lanterns were burning long after everybody would normally have gone to
bed. Teachers were sitting awake, most of them wishing that the noise would
stop.

The school rules are quite clear about this: students must be in bed at 9.30
when the generator is switched off. Those who wish to pray after lights-out
must do so quietly in their beds, where they do not disturb anybody. The
school pastor himself had reminded the students about this only a week ago.

Nevertheless, when I saw another teacher making his way up the hill towards
me, I knew immediately that he wasn't here to help me enforce the rules and
send the students to bed. Nor - heaven forbid - was he going to tell them to
pull themselves together and stop acting like crazy people. This was the
teacher who had brought the 'crusaders' to the school at the end of last year
- travelling preachers who were invited for a weekend and stayed for a month.
The crusaders had organised a series of late-night prayer sessions, at the end
of which the students had been so tired that they were falling asleep at their
desks. This was just before the Year 12s' final exams, in which the exhausted
students got unexpectedly bad results, a coincidence that nobody has dared to
point out. That crusade had probably inspired the students' current antics.

"Why don't you go to bed?" my colleague said. Not to the students, but to me.

"Could you please tell the same thing to these students," I said.

"I think this has been coming for a while," the teacher said, in a voice that
suggested he'd witnessed the return of the Messiah. "I can explain in the
morning."

In the next day's staff meeting, the explanation was given. A few days
earlier, it seemed, one of the girls had encountered a devil on the school
grounds. (The exact nature of this 'devil' was not described.) This wasn't the
first sighting of devils around the school, and the frightened girls had asked
a couple of the teachers for advice. The teachers suggested that the students
should pour sea water around their dormitories to scare the devils away, and
pray.

I was astounded. If there really were unwanted figures bothering the girls at
night - miscreants from the local villages perhaps - wouldn't it have been
more practical to seek help from the local chiefs rather than bothering the
man upstairs? And if there was anything sinister lurking around the school,
supernatural or otherwise, shouldn't the girls all have been reminded to stay
safely indoors? Couldn't they have prayed quietly there? The Bible teaches
that God is everywhere and is always listening, so why did the students need
to shout outside people's windows in the middle of the night? And saltwater
around the dormitories? Wasn't Ranwadi School founded by missionaries to try
and eradicate superstitions like that?

Realising that there was a cultural barrier here, I let these questions pass,
and vented my anger instead of the teacher who'd intervened when I tried to
send the students to bed. The way he'd acted had been unprofessional,
irresponsible, and in some respects quite un-Christian, I told the meeting. I
went too far - there was no need for a personal attack - but I wasn't in the
mood to be tactful; I had only had five hours' sleep. So had everybody else at
the school.

"I don't think we can agree on this. We're approaching this from different
sides," the teacher said to me, after he'd calmed down enough to respond. "You
are an atheist, is that right? Do you confess?"

Not believing in God isn't a sin, I thought. Then I realised: actually, it's
quite a big sin.

"I am an atheist."

From the devoutly-Christian staff, whose prayers and sermons I'd quietly gone
along with for the past year, there was an admirable lack of reaction.
Probably they'd suspected all along that I wasn't a true believer.

Religion wasn't the issue, though. I was a teacher trying to enforce the
school rules - rules that we had all agreed on - and I'd been spoken to as if
I was the one doing wrong.

Even Harry Potter is punished when he wanders around his school at night
without permission while trying to cast out the forces of evil. Ranwadi
Churches of Christ College, however, could never bring itself to punish
students for praying. They had broken the rules, disobeyed the teachers, and
deprived the entire school of sleep - but they had done it whilst shouting the
name of Jesus, so their actions had to be condoned. It was agreed, however,
that everything has its time and its place, and that the time and place for
late-night prayers is at weekends, at the far end of the school where nobody
else can hear.

The meeting concluded, and I made peace with the teacher I'd encountered the
previous night. Most of my colleagues at Ranwadi, fortunately, are good
Christians in every sense of the term, and my confession was not held against
me. Nobody else mentioned the 'A' word. Maybe some of them privately prayed
for my soul afterwards, or maybe they decided I wasn't worth praying for, but
publicly they continued to treat me as a friend.

The school Principal - one of the most genuinely Christian people I know -
smiled and shook my hand at the end of the meeting. I was still welcome in his
school. I may have been a heathen, but everyone deserves forgiveness.
Especially the only person on the island who knows how to fix computers when
they go wrong.

On the road to Melsisi that weekend, a woman I had never met before held out a
pile of Christian magazines and insisted that I take one. I worried that word
had already got around that I was a sinner. However, it turned out that a
well-wisher had sent her the magazines and I was simply the first person the
she had met since who could read English. (She could, in any case, have seen
that I needed spiritual guidance by the fact that it was a Sunday morning and
I wasn't dressed for church.)

Down at the nakamal, I tried to laugh at the idea of "crazy students" singing
prayers and sprinkling sea water in order to scare away devils.

"Crazy," the villagers agreed. "Everyone knows that when you see a devil, all
you need to do is speak the Lord's name to make it go away."

I said nothing.

4th April

The next thing I noticed was that the breeze. Not the short-lived evening
winds that blow past Ranwadi when the mass of steamy air driven up the
mountain by the heat of the day comes rushing back down after sunset, but a
sustained breeze blowing right across the island and out onto the ocean, where
it flecked up white-topped waves.

After months of sultriness, the cool wind was invigorating, like pure oxygen.
Standing outside I felt powerful and liberated, my body no longer reluctant to
generate energy for fear of adding to the heat. It was the kind of weather
that makes you want to run and jump, and race barefoot along the beach in the
crashing surf.

Somehow it felt even more invigorating when, as I walked back to my house
after morning lessons, a passing colleague mentioned the word "cyclone".

Being located at the point where the Pacific's volcanic Ring of Fire crosses
the southern cyclone belt, Vanuatu has a reputation for natural disasters.
Impending doom of one kind or another is a regular feature of conversations
among the teachers at Ranwadi.

"Good morning, how are you today? I left those exam papers you were asking
about in your pigeon hole. Two of the students didn't complete them because
they were sick. The school truck brought some parcels from the airfield this
morning - I think there's one for you. Did you see the village women are
selling tomatoes? You should go and buy a bag before they run out. Oh, and by
the way, there's a tidal wave coming."

These swords of Damocles usually hang over us for a day or two, during which
everyone goes about their business with a quiet thrill of anticipation, before
someone picks up a radio bulletin or an e-mail giving the all-clear. In the
last few months we had survived two cyclone warnings, at least three tsunami
warnings, a volcanic eruption warning, and a national state of emergency. None
has had any serious impact on Pentecost. The most recent predicted tsunami,
which came after a massive offshore earthquake, proved to be a mere 12
centimetres (5 inches) high when it hit land (according to the news report
issued afterwards). I could have stuck my finger up through the waves.

However, the latest disaster warning seemed more serious than usual, and the
wind was gathering strength. When the school's generator was switched on that
evening, the inbox in the office computer soon filled with e-mails advising us
of the approaching danger. The Vanuatu Meteorological Office, the Peace Corps,
GAP Activity Projects, VSA (Mr Neil's organisation), and various concerned
friends had all forwarded us their cyclone warnings. Some included pictures -
a series of galaxy-shaped outlines, tracing a path that curved like a scimitar
across the island chain. You couldn't invent a track that more neatly covered
Vanuatu.

It has been quite a long time since a major cyclone scored a direct hit on
Pentecost, and I wasn't at all sure that the school was well prepared for one.
All the new buildings put up by AusAID have yet to prove themselves against
the worst that the South Pacific environment can throw at them. However,
Cyclone Becky (as the meteorologists had named) was forecast to be mild by
cyclone standards, and as stronger gusts began to huff and puff at the windows
it was hard to feel anything other than excitement about the approaching
storm.

Before bed, I went around the science labs in the dark (the generator was
still on, but none of the lights were working) and shut all the glass louvres
in the windows. One carelessly-placed measuring cylinder had already been
smashed down to the floor, and rubbish was blowing around the labs. In my
house, where several of the louvres are missing, I faced the prospect of
sitting out a cyclone with the windows open. I have no cupboards or drawers to
secure things in, so I stacked all my papers in sheltered corners and weighed
them down.

The core of the cyclone was due to pass the following morning. I hoped I would
be up early enough to witness it.

Up at the College de Melsisi, the Principal told Sara not to worry.

"We got someone with a magic leaf to cast a spell and move the cyclone away.
We're in no danger." (The Principal at Melsisi speaks little English; I'm
quoting the story as told by Sara.)

Pentecost's sorcerers have a reputation for being able to handle even the most
destructive forces of nature. When one group of villagers needed to cut a
channel through a rock face in order to lay a water pipe, they reportedly used
a magic leaf to bring down a precision-targeted lightning strike which split
the rock in two.

If chaos theory holds that a storm can be swayed by the flapping of a
butterfly's wings, why not by the rubbing of a magic leaf?

In the case of Cyclone Becky, the leaf worked. When I went outside the next
morning, the weather was not only no windier than it had been the evening
before, it was positively calm. The storm had veered to the west, and had
missed Pentecost.

Soon another batch of emails arrived in the inbox, this time telling us that
we were no longer all in grave danger. At least not for the time being.