Andrew Gray's travel tales

27th August

It'll be interesting for you to see, some of them said. Interesting how they
do things over there.

The day before I crossed over the island was a Sunday. Attending church in
the village of Nambwarangiut on the north-west coast of Pentecost, from
which I'd planned to start my trek, an old man on the bench in front of me
turned around part way through the service and whispered to me.

I hear you're planning to go across to Lafatmangemu.

I nodded.

I want to give a talk to you.

After the priest had concluded his service, the old man stood up in front of
the church and addressed the congregation. First he gave messages of
encouragement to a group of local youths who were preparing to go and
participate in a sports tournament. Behave yourselves, he warned them. Then
he turned his attention to me.

I didn't understand everything he said - nothing said to me during this trip
was in English - but his message seemed to be this: remember that what they
do over there doesn't solely reflect on Pentecost. Their ideas draw on those
of Melanesia as a whole.

I don't want to criticise their methods, said another man, as the villagers
and I sat on tree stumps in the moonlight that evening. But you must
remember that some of the things they say and the things they do are things
they invented themselves. They don't represent our traditions.

I realise that, I said. But I'm curious to see them anyway.

The next day, my host showed me the path that led up the mountain. The
north-west coastline of Pentecost expanded below us, rich blues and greens
hazed with the steamy dew of a tropical morning. The sun, peering over the
hilltop, was shining on Nambwarangiut.

I knew Pentecost's climate well enough to realise that I was probably
leaving the sunshine behind. A couple of miles into the interior of the
island a thin mist descended - or rather, we ascended into it. For an hour
or two the road meandered along ridges and hillsides, past windswept gardens
and stands of tall trees. Solitary namala - harrier hawks - hunted across
them. It began to spit rain.

In a dense clump of bushes, we passed the site of a giant's grave. A man so
big, according to legend, that children could hide under his arms.

At the Village of the Eight Stones - the eponymous stones were arranged in a
cross shape outside the nakamal, placed there by an old chief for some
ancient purpose - our path joined the white road. This desolate, chalky
highway, connecting north and south Pentecost, is etched like a vertebral
column onto the highest ridge of the island. Cold vapour hung on the ridge.

We walked for a little way along the white road, through a village whose
thatched roofs were black and sodden. We reached a turning, and my host led
me aside along a small footpath, through a stand of trees and onto the top
of a rocky cliff.

There's a good view from here, he said.

Below, in a thunderous mist, stretched the coastline of East Pentecost -
known to locals as the Big Sea. This is the wild side of Pentecost, the open
ocean. The place where winds that have blown free across the ocean for a
thousand miles slam into a two thousand foot wall of island, reacting with a
fury of cloud and condensation that drenches East Pentecost in greyness. Out
towards the horizon of the Big Sea the water was faintly blue - the sun was
shining out there - but closer to shore the mist had turned it the colour of
metal. Enormous jagged reefs stretched away from the shore, barricading the
island against the anger of the ocean, which pounded on the reefs with such
violence that even from here on the mountaintop I thought I could hear the
noise.

Down by the white-washed shore I could see a village; elsewhere the
mountainsides stretched away into the fog in shades of the darkest
imaginable green. When diseases cut through Pentecost's population a century
ago, most of the survivors fled west towards the lights of missionaries and
cargo ships, who landed on the island's placid western coast rather than
braving the Big Sea. There on the west coast, they built schools and
churches and stores, while on the far side the inhabitants of the few
remaining villages continued, in an isolated and lonely way, to follow the
lifestyle of their ancestors. The ghosts of their lost neighbours vanished
into the forest.

The road down the mountainside twisted away into the trees below us.

You can find your own way from here?

Yes. I thanked my host, and set off down towards the Big Sea.

On a couple of bends, I encountered toothless old villagers, who stopped in
surprise at the sight of a white person on the road.

I'm going down to Lafatmangemu, I told them.

Do you know the way?

I think so.

Do you have a map?

Yes, I told them, half truthfully. I did have a map, but I'd left it at
home. You can't follow maps on Pentecost - the island's terrain is too
convoluted, the roads are too organic, the maps are too vague. Even the big
maps surveyed by the Vanuatu Lands Department are a decade old, and covered
with labels such as "approximate position".

The road reached the ocean at Renbura - the village I'd seen from the
mountaintop. Prehistoric houses of wood and bamboo, built on gritty sand,
set back from the shore at what their owners hoped was a safe distance from
the ocean. The tide was out, exposing vast flats of sand and stone, a No
Man's Land in the battle between island and sea. Beyond this empty zone,
giant waves reared like white ghouls out of the grey water.

I took a shortcut across the beach, wading a blue-tinted river, and rejoined
the road as it ran northwards along the sandy woodland beside the shore. The
woodland had a skeletal appearance; saltwater had burned and flushed the
undergrowth away. The bare ground was littered with droppings from the trees
- the long hairy flowers and giant seed pods of the sea navele, the round
nuts of the nambagura, and the long needles of the whistling pine -
blackened with damp, and silvered with moisture.

After a mile or so, the road turned inland, and darkened sand gave way to
compacted mud. Bushes had been planted along the roadsides - spiky-leafed
namele and slender, colourful nanggaria, both powerful symbols of Vanuatu
custom. Thatched houses and the triangular roof of a huge nakamal could be
seen behind the trees.

The nakamal at Lafatmangemu is enormous, I had been told. Bigger than any
you've seen before.

This must be the place.

Were they expecting me? There are no telephones in this part of Pentecost,
but I had tried to pass on a message to let them know was coming. I had no
idea if the message had arrived. Nervously, I approached the village, and
prepared to introduce myself.

[To be continued.]

22nd August

The pain inflicted by touching the devil nettle's leaves is no more intense
than the sting of a juicy British nettle. However, the devil nettle is the
size of a small tree, and its stings remain sore for a week.

Devil nettle is a description invented by Western botanists ('fever nettle'
and 'nettle tree' are alternative names). Among islanders the species is
always referred to as the nanggalat. The reviled tree is synonymous with
things that sting: jellyfish, in the local languages, translates as
"nanggalat of the sea".

Trees and plants of all kinds feature very strongly in the lives of the
people of Pentecost. They are the only resource that the island has, apart
from stones and water and a meagre amount of wildlife. Whilst the nanggalat
may be a nuisance, there are maybe a hundred other local tree species that
people value for one reason or another. The bulk of the islanders'
house-building and nearly all of their cooking is done using wood gathered
from the local forest, and trees were also a traditional source of dyes,
resins and twine. There are jungle trees with enormous flat buttresses that
were used for making plates and dishes in the days before China's
manufacturing industry flooded the world with its wares. There is the
perfume tree, the glue tree, the bead tree, the ankle rattle tree, the fish
poison tree, and the canoe tree, whose uses are self-explanatory. There are
decorative plants, such as the croton (known in Pidgin as the 'colour
leaf'), and the nanggaria (victory leaves) that are worn by dancers at
ceremonies. There is also a variety of medicinal plants, many of them known
only to witchdoctors, people who are referred to in Pidgin as 'clevers'
because of their specialist knowledge.

Most obviously, there are the fruit and nut trees. In addition to familiar,
introduced species such as bananas, mangoes, papayas, avocados and oranges,
there are nakavika (Malay apples), nakatambol (dragon plums), naus (hog
plums), nandao (native lychees), navele (bush nuts), nangae (native
almonds), and namambe (Tahitian chestnuts). (In case you're wondering why
the names of all Vanuatu's native trees begin with "na", in several of the
country's languages "na" is a grammatical marker corresponding to the word
"the" in sentences like "It stung me again, the bloody tree". In Pidgin,
whose vocabulary is based on English but draws on the native languages in
describing things that don't exist back in England - of which, thankfully,
the nanggalat is one - this marker has become stuck inseparably to the
words.) There is also a variety of smaller fruits and nuts that do not merit
a name in Pidgin English but do provide tasty snacks for hungry children.
Outside my old house at Ranwadi was a 'bean tree', often surrounded at
certain times of year by schoolgirls who would hang off the little tree,
plucking the tiny seeds out of their pods and eating them. The seeds that
the students missed sprouted everywhere, and were a nuisance, but the girls
would wail when they saw me pulling the seedlings up.

"Mr Andrew, that's a bean!"

Some plants have multiple uses. The ubiquitous coconut palm provides the
islanders with wooden posts, brooms, flaming torches, leaf mattresses,
roofing for temporary shelters, ornaments, kava-drinking cups, and half a
dozen varieties of food and drink, which range (depending on the ripeness of
the nut) from a sickly juice to an ice-cream-like gel. Dried coconut flesh
was also the island's main export, before its people discovered that
planting kava was easier and profitable than scraping coconuts by the
sack-full.

One thing that most of the island's trees and plants have in common is that
they propagate themselves with ease. Vanuatu is a country of colonists: to
get the archipelago, each of its plant species had to cross a thousand miles
of ocean, either by drifting on the water or by hitching a ride in the
canoes of early settlers. Any variety that was fussy about setting down
roots in new soil would never have made it. Whilst Western agriculture is
based the sowing of seeds, most of the islanders' crops can be planted by
the simple means of sticking a cutting into the ground and waiting for it to
grow. A few, such as the banana plant, don't bother producing seeds at all.
Many of the rows of sticks that the villagers set up as fence posts also
sprout into saplings, and over time a fence evolves into a hedgerow. Even
the wooden shacks surrounding bush toilets occasionally sprout leaves.

When discussing the island's flora, many locals refer not to "different
kinds of tree" but "different kinds of wood". Lighting a fire that won't go
out or building a house that won't fall down relies on knowing the
characteristics of the wood from each particular tree and knowing what it is
good for. Durable posts that will not rot in damp conditions are stuck into
the ground to support a house; equally strong but less rot-resistant timbers
can be used hold up the roof. Some trees have fine-quality wood but grow too
crookedly to be a source of building material; these were traditionally used
for making the handles of tools. Sticks of a wood that was known to burn
particularly slowly and steadily were used in days before matches to carry
fire from place to place.

Even the nanggalat has its uses. Before anaesthetics came along, boys would
sometimes have their penises whipped with the leaves to deaden the pain
during circumcision. On one island, a soup of nanggalat leaves was
reportedly drunk to heighten the temper of those psyching themselves up for
a fight. The book 'A Guide to the Common Trees of Vanuatu' also reports that
cuttings of the tree are occasionally planted to make a barrier that no
intruder will touch - a living electric fence - although the book notes that
"the difficulty of handling the material means that it is not often used".

The most important of all Vanuatu's trees is the palm-like cycad, or namele,
sometimes referred to as the 'peace tree'. Numerous ancient customs surround
this prehistoric plant, which only high-ranking individuals were
traditionally allowed to cultivate. Its long, spiky leaves are recognised
throughout the country as taboo signs: ni-Vanuatu will not pick fruit from a
tree against which a namele leaf has been rested, or fish in a spot where
such a leaf has been placed. Last month a government office on Malekula
Island had to be temporarily shut down after a disgruntled villager barred
its door with a namele leaf. Since tradition dictates that only the person
who set up such a taboo is entitled to take it away again, unless a very
high chief intervenes, nobody would work in the building until the Vanuatu
Supreme Court had ordered the leaf's removal.

Back in the dark ages (the islanders' own description of the time before
missionaries brought them light), the namele tree had other uses. A person
who had committed a grievous offence, and could not afford the pigs needed
to pay a fine to the chief, would be tied to a namele and burned alive.

That doesn't sound like an appropriate use for a peace tree, I commented to
an old man at the nakamal. How did the namele come to be a symbol of peace?

When people saw a namele tree growing in a village, I was told, they would
be reminded of what would happen to them if they caused trouble. Thus the
namele promoted peace.

Perhaps American cities that suffer crime problems should display electric
chairs on their street corners.

In the days of tribal warfare, a pair of crossed namele leaves would be put
up to indicate that a village no longer wished to fight - a white flag of
peace. If warriors approaching an enemy village saw the crossed leaves, they
would put down their weapons. If only a single leaf was displayed, however,
they would sharpen their spears and axes and prepare the cooking pit.

Today, this crossed namele sign is displayed on the Vanuatu flag, surrounded
by the whorl of a pig's tusk and some Rastafarian colours which have
symbolic meanings. Next to the flagpole in the centre of Ranwadi School
stands an aged namele tree. Its upper crown of leaves is withering, but
bright young growth is sprouting from lower down the tree - a perfect emblem
for a place where children come to be educated.

Outside my own house at Ranwadi is a miniature Scottish flag, fluttering
surreally against a backdrop of coconut palms. This, too, carries a crossed
symbol: the saltire of Saint Andrew, who died on a diagonal cross after
protesting that he was unworthy to be crucified in the same way as his Lord.
The Christian cross, a place where people were once strung up in pain and
executed, is recognised today as a symbol of hope and peace. Just like the
namele.

- - -

Knowledge of trees is, of course, starting to disappear, as islanders get
increasing numbers of the things they need from the local store rather than
the local forest. Such a loss of knowledge is not confined to Vanuatu; I
know a lot of British people in my parents' generation, yet very few people
in my generation, who could tell the difference between a birch tree, an ash
tree, a beech tree, an elm tree, a poplar tree, and so on. I couldn't, and I
have a degree in biology. (Really this is a shift in knowledge, rather than
a loss, since at the same time that my generation was failing to learn the
names of trees it was learning the names of sportswear brands and social
networking web sites.)

It doesn't matter if Brits don't know the names if the trees in their fields
and gardens, because they can look them up if they need to. If you want to
find out whether you might be prosecuted for cutting your hedge on the
grounds that it's a breeding site for endangered purple butterflies, or
whether the strange-looking leaves you found the dog eating are poisonous,
books and the Internet will tell you. In Vanuatu, by contrast, such
information is seldom written down. If children never learn what their
parents knew about the local plants, within a couple of generations that
knowledge will be lost.

Yet children, in their own way, remain among the most enthusiastic of
botanists. No handyman in Vanuatu would ever try to use the glue tree, but
schoolchildren with no pocket money to buy glue occasionally stick pieces of
paper together with the adhesive gunk from its fruits. No adult at Ranwadi
would bother eating the seeds from the bean tree, but for students fed rice
and cabbage soup the beans are a valuable supplement to the diet. The giant
seed pods of flamboyant trees (known in Vanuatu as Christmas trees because
they produce red flowers in December) are of little use to adults, but make
great swords for play-fighting. And although Vanuatu has no adventure
playgrounds of the Western kind, its children do spend happy hours
clambering around in the branches of trees.

Back home, too, it is children that make the most intimate use of the local
flora. When I am in Britain today I seldom regard its plants and trees as
anything other than decorations, yet as a child there were species that I
knew and used. My friends and I knew the location of just about every horse
chestnut tree in the village, and every October we collected and played with
their conkers. We knew pine trees, oak trees, and sycamore trees - those,
too, dropped interesting toys on the ground. We knew plants with sticky
burs, which could be put to various childish uses, and we knew which plants
had thorns. We could recognise stinging nettles - just as Vanuatu children
recognise the nanggalat - and we knew the dock leaves that would relieve
their stings. We knew the few wild berries that were sufficiently
easily-distinguished from poisonous species for our mothers to let us eat
them. We knew how to tell the time by blowing fluff off a dandelion, how to
tell if someone liked butter by holding a buttercup under the chin, and how
to tell if a girl loved a boy by pulling alternate petals off a daisy, in
much the same way that Pentecost islanders know how to make it rain by
rubbing a magic leaf. My grandmother taught me how to twist a particular
grass so that its head popped off in an amusing way (I still try this
occasionally, but can never seem to find exactly the right kind of grass). I
knew numerous flowers, which evoke powerful memories of England at certain
times of year: snowdrops in winter, crocuses and daffodils at Easter,
bluebells in early summer, and soft purple Michaelmas daisies in September.
Simply thinking about these plants today reminds me, as I read e-mail
bulletins about foot-and-mouth disease and flooding and terrorist plots and
other things that make me wonder whether I should ever bother going home,
that Britain too can occasionally be a beautiful island.

Children in rural areas have an instinct for learning the local plants, and
probably have done ever since our ancestors were monkeys. Once upon a time,
this helped prepare them for life. In modern Britain - and to a lesser
extent modern Vanuatu - it is little more than good fun. It keeps them
amused until the time when they grow up, forget the location of the
blackberry bushes and the conker trees, and replace it in their minds with
the location of the organic fruit section in the local supermarket.

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.

31st July

The eleven high schools in Vanuatu's Penama Province - which comprises
Pentecost and the neighbouring islands of Maewo and Ambae - are closer
together than those in the Scottish Highlands. However, for them,
inter-school sport presents an even greater challenge. Maewo's high school
is the only one on its island, and getting between the various high schools
on Pentecost and Ambae involves braving dirt roads that not even the most
roadkill-hungry Highland sports coach would try and drive a minibus on.
Flying teams from island to island would be unaffordable, and although
Penama's three islands are not far apart, getting between them on Vanuatu's
meandering cargo ships can involve journeys of a day or more - the
equivalent of Gairloch High School's celebrated hockey team having to sail
to Denmark.

Nevertheless, the islands are home to some talented athletes and players,
and sport is one of the few areas in which local youths can show genuine
achievement. Pentecost will never produce an Albert Einstein or a Bill Gates
(nor would other parts of the world if potential Einsteins and Gateses had
to overcome the educational hurdles that children here face), but it's not
inconceivable that it might one day produce a global sports star. One
Ranwadi student has already been to Australia to run in a Pacific-wide
athletics tournament - a big deal on an island where most people see foreign
travel as an impossible dream - and another local athlete is currently
training in New Zealand.

A few years ago, a group of headmasters keen to nurture this sort of talent
set up the Penama Inter-Secondary School Sports Association (PISSA), and
proposed that a week should be set aside from the school year during which
competitors from their various schools could come together for a big sports
tournament. The idea of spending a week watching football rather than
working in the classroom met with little resistance from the province's
teachers, and the PISSA Games were established.

Sport in Vanuatu, like in most poor countries, revolves around football
(soccer). This is the universal game, one that you can play anywhere,
provided you can lay your hands on some sort of ball (for village children
having a kickabout, an unripe orange will suffice) and a couple of random
objects to serve as goalposts (coconut stumps do nicely). Basketball hoops
and tennis rackets, by contrast, do not exist in nature. It is no
coincidence that the main countries in which soccer is not a big deal - the
USA, Australia, New Zealand - are rich countries that invest heavily in
sports.

Most schools in Vanuatu do have a pair of basketball hoops - although
American volunteers lament that the islanders "don't truly understand the
game" - so 'bass-kett' (as the locals say it) is also included the PISSA
Games. It is, after all, the best sport in which to strut about looking
cool. Netball, basketball's uncool relative, is also played, but only by the
girls.

Unlike on other Pacific islands, rugby has never caught on here: ni-Vanuatu
are not built like Maoris or Samoans. Nor has cricket, possibly because
large fields are few and far between on mountainous islands. Any attempt to
play cricket here would turn into an exercise in retrieving well-hit balls
from the surrounding jungle. Tennis and hockey, which are among the most
expensive of ball games in terms of equipment, are not played either. This
is a shame, because with all the experience that islanders have at
precision-wielding of knives and axes in their gardens, they would probably
do very well if armed with a racket or a hockey stick. A handful of schools
do, however, have table tennis (ping pong) tables.

Petanque (boules) is played enthusiastically by the French-influenced
schools in Vanuatu. This is one of the few events in which they can beat
their more sports-minded Anglophone opponents, who have barely heard of
petanque and sometimes don't even show up to the matches.

Volleyball is played, and this year 'beach volleyball' was also included in
the PISSA programme, although it was not going to be played on the beach.
(Vanuatu lacks the golden expanses of sand found along the coast of
California - its shorelines tend to be steep and narrow, and most are strewn
with stones, coral, coconuts and driftwood.)

The remaining sports contested at the PISSA Games are variants of the
islanders' beloved football. There is handball (whose exact rules I have
never bothered figuring out but whose basic principle is fairly
self-explanatory), and futsal (a form of indoor football that the ni-Vanuatu
play outdoors).

This year, it was the turn of the College de Melsisi to host the Games.
Melsisi is a small school, and at the start of the year their sports
facilities consisted of a rutted football field, used mainly by the local
cows, and a couple of run-down basketball courts on the small triangle of
flat land by the mouth of the river. They needed to be improved.

After filling in a lot of forms, Sara the Peace Corps girl sent out letters
to her friends and relatives back in the United States, pointing out that
spare dollars were worth a lot more in a Third World village than
languishing in a US bank account and that contributions to Peace Corps
projects were fully tax-deductible. Four thousand dollars later, men in
their kava bars were nodding happily and murmuring about what an asset Sara
was to their village.

"She's also put a lot of her time and effort into helping people here," I
added.

"Yes," they agreed, and went back to talking about the money.

Sacks of cement were ordered, and construction began on a third basketball
court, overseen by teams of local villagers. Basketball hoops and volleyball
nets were ordered. A beach volleyball court was dug out and filled with sand
brought by boat from Ranwadi (apparently we have the sandiest beach in the
area), and a petanque area was prepared. Running tracks were painted onto
the sports field using what looked like old engine oil.

The cows huddled nervously in one corner of the field, wondering what was
going on.

The principal of the College de Melsisi asked me to look up the dimensions
of a table tennis table, and ordered his school handyman to make one. The
handyman had better things to do, and plans were announced to scrap table
tennis from the programme. The schools with good table tennis players
wailed, and promised to bring tables with them to ensure that the game was
played.

Some of the money was spent on lighting, and a bank of fluorescent tubes was
rigged up alongside the basketball courts. An open-walled hut was built at
one side of the field to serve as a grandstand and a headquarters for those
organising the games. An aid agency agreed to supply medals and trophies for
the winners, in return for being allowed the opportunity to come and give
health talks to the assembled students.

"To be a good sportsman, leave with free marijuana, alcohol, tobacco and
kava," said a well-meaning but unfortunately-worded banner.

Local people geared themselves up for the arrival of a thousand or so
students, teachers and spectators. Several families constructed food stalls
- shacks of wood and corrugated iron, walled with palm leaves - under the
coconut trees between the sports field and the river, or perched on the
hillside above the field. The menu was the same at nearly every one: rice
and chicken, flavoured with a little dollop of a tasty gravy-like mixture.

Electricity was wired into the stalls - making these little shacks
better-equipped than most proper Vanuatu kitchens - and some entertained
their customers with music and videos. Lights around the field flickered on
and off as the school's electricity generator struggled to cope with the
load.

The cows disappeared. A few days later, as I made my way down to a pool in
the river for a wash (Melsisi's water supply had faltered under the demand
of a thousand extra people and several of the village taps were running
dry), I discovered the herd hiding amongst the coconut trees in the valley
upstream from the sports field, looking thoroughly unhappy.

Melsisi's established kava bars, and the two or three huts that occasionally
serve as restaurants, also prepared themselves for a week of good business.
Some arranged live string bands to entertain their guests. One tried to
organise a barbecue steak night, but the bullock that was destined to be
barbecued disliked the idea, and after a long chase the chef gave up and put
chicken on the menu instead.

Students from the schools on Ambae and Maewo islands crowded onto a
badly-overloaded cargo ship bound for Pentecost. Those from northern
Pentecost came by boat too - it would have been a long and uncomfortable
journey on the island's roads. Ranwadi's students walked the four miles (6
km) to Melsisi, with the school truck bringing their luggage. Students
staked out places to sleep on classroom floors - boys and girls in separate
classrooms, obviously - and I found a mat and sleeping bag waiting for me on
the floor of Sara's house. A visiting Peace Corps volunteer from Maewo had
already laid claim to Sara's spare bed.

The one thing that could still spoil everybody's plans was the weather. On
the eve of the games, things did not look good. I caught a lift to Melsisi
on the back of a truck, and arrived in heavy rain, soaked and shivering. The
village's roads had already turned to sticky mud, and crowds of people were
tip-toeing around, trying to avoid the slimiest patches. Some called out
greetings, but through the rain and darkness I could barely make out who
they were. I escaped from the confusion, squelched my way up to Sara's
house, stripped off as many of my wet clothes as I decently could, and sat
down in a puddle of water.

A delegation of school governors from the College de Melsisi had already
been sent up the mountain to complain to the sorcerer who controls the
weather.

"Your games don't start until tomorrow," the old man reportedly pointed out
to them. "Tomorrow there will be fine weather."

The sorcerer kept his promise. The next day, the sun was shining. Crowds of
people gathered around the soggy field, perched on rocks and coconut stumps,
to watch the opening ceremony. Proceedings began, two hours behind schedule,
and competitors from nine schools paraded onto the field in their school
uniforms. (One of Penama's eleven schools, in typical Vanuatu fashion, had
failed to get a squad organised for the games this year, whilst another, in
equally typical Vanuatu fashion, had simply failed to show up.) The students
marched like lines of computerised lemmings. I had the urge to click on one
or two of them and watch them stop, count to five, put their fingers in
their ears and explode into pixels.

The students from the school on Maewo wore faded blue shirts, with faded
grey skirts and shorts. Evidently these were dull, quiet, hard-working
students. Half of the girls would probably become nuns. Ranwadi's students
looked a little livelier, but still respectable - boys in white shirts and
black shorts, girls in pale blue blouses and dark blue skirts. Some of the
Ambae schools combined bright white shirts with strong blue skirts and
shorts. These high-contrast kids were clearly tearaways. Or perhaps I
shouldn't be judging schoolchildren by the colour of their uniforms.

Children beat slit drums, and a group of visiting dignitaries was formally
welcomed. Leading them was none other than the Prime Minister of Vanuatu,
Ham Lini - a Pentecost islander himself, and the brother of Father Walter
Lini, who originally led the tiny nation to independence. (I hope that
nobody will consider it a great insult to Vanuatu democracy - or to American
democracy, for that matter - if I point out what a remarkable coincidence it
is that, out of the thousands of eligible people, the one most suited to
running the country just happened to be a close relative of one of his
predecessors.) Accompanying Lini was the local Member of Parliament, Charlot
Salwai - known as Sarlo to his constituents, who can't pronounce 'sh'
sounds. In one of the frequent reshuffles by which Ham Lini manages to stay
on top of his fractious government, Sarlo had recently been appointed as
Minister for Education, and back on his home island he was now being treated
with great honour. The Honourable Prime Minister and the Honourable Minister
for Education were accompanied by a crowd of lesser dignitaries, including
the school principals, the chairman of PISSA, the Provincial Education
Officer, and local chiefs.

The Vanuatu flag was raised, and the crowd stood up respectfully while the
national anthem was sung. Several of the assembled VIPs gave speeches, most
of which were devoted to welcoming and thanking the other dignitaries who
had come. During this, I had time to reflect that if every speaker at an
event thanks every other speaker, and is also thanked by the master of
ceremonies, the total number of thank-yous is equal to the square of number
of speakers. Six speakers equals 36 thank-yous. Eight speakers will give 64
thank-yous. If there are ten speakers, then a hundred thank-yous must be
said. That much thanking takes a long time. And that doesn't even include
the many words of thanks given to people who weren't giving speeches, such
as the poor students assembled in lines in the sun in front of the podium. I
lost count of how many speeches there actually were: Sara, in helping to
draw up the schedule for the day, had tried bravely to keep the number down
to three or four, but Sara's colleagues kept sneaking additional speakers
into the programme.

The new basketball court was formally opened, and the local priest blessed
it with what I assumed was holy water. The court, paid for by Sara's
fundraising efforts, was due to be opened by an "honoured representative
from Peace Corps", but no such person showed up, so Sara cut the ribbon
herself, standing in front of the crowd in her pink island dress and rubber
reef shoes. Sara was not, however, deemed a sufficiently Important Person to
be invited to the 'refreshments' (I passed the principal of the College de
Melsisi carrying a heavy box that made an alcoholic chinking sound) laid on
for the VIPs after the ceremony.

The Prime Minister's speech came last. He began by telling his audience that
what he saw before him was "a failure". This was not an insult, it was
explained to me afterwards, but was merely an exhortation to the people to
work harder to make their country a better place. The rest of the speech was
filled with words about the importance of respect and "obedience" (I can
only imagine what the newspapers would say if Tony Blair or Gordon Brown
ever used that word), and a reminder that we all owe everything to Father
God, which won applause from the audience. Most people on Pentecost don't
get the chance to hear the Prime Minister on the radio or read his words in
the newspapers, and this was one the biggest crowds that would assemble on
the island this year. Ham Lini did not waste the opportunity to show to all
these good, traditional rural voters that he is a good, traditional guy.

- - -

The first proper day of the PISSA Games was devoted to athletics. Students
were divided into two age groups - Juniors (Years 7 to 10) and Seniors
(Years 11, 12 and 13). Schools with exceptionally gifted junior students
tried to run them in senior races. Some juniors (students who had probably
missed years of schooling because their families had difficulty paying the
school fees) looked as if they were about nineteen anyway.

Mr Agasten, the Ranwadi sports master, had drawn up a programme of events
for the day and dusted off his starting gun, which left him partially deaf
for the rest of the week. Other people were assigned to time runners and
count laps. Some weren't sure which runners they were supposed to be
watching, and some lost count. Sara sat at a table trying to scribble down
names and times while nine sports masters stood and argued in Pidgin English
about which student had come in which position.

The sports masters were an interesting collection of characters. One looked
as if he should have been behind the wheel of a truck in the American
Midwest, and one looked like the evil sea captain from Pirates of the
Caribbean. One looked like a French footballer, whilst another looked like a
French hairdresser. One resembled a gorilla. Mostly they were an amiable
bunch, however, and they showed a great willingness to work together towards
the common goal of ensuring that the day's events had finished by the time
the kava bars opened.

On the second day of competition, the team games began. Sara and I drew up
an enormous timetable that attempted to fit together the 60 football
matches, 60 basketball matches, 60 volleyball matches, 60 beach volleyball
matches, 60 petanque matches, 60 table tennis matches, 60 handball matches,
60 futsal matches and 30 netball matches that were due to be played, in such
a way that no student would need to be in two places at once, and no two
teams would be trying to use the same pitch at the same time. Individualised
daily copies of the schedule were handed out, listing exactly where each
team needed to be at each time, and the sports masters were warned that if
they didn't stick to the schedule in a particular event, it would mess up
the programme of events elsewhere.

Being Pacific islanders, they didn't stick to the schedule. However, the
dozens of carefully drawn-up timetables blowing around the sports field did
go some way towards turning potential chaos into mere disorganisation. At
the end of each day, the sports masters got together to reconcile the
intended schedule for the day with what had actually happened, and tried to
work out how all the games that had got missed out could be fitted in later.
New timetables were hashed out, and rehashed. After a while, I gave up
trying to type up new timetables on the computer, and simply let the sports
masters work it out amongst themselves.

A public address system had been set up, and announcements were put out in
Pidgin English telling people and teams where they needed to be. In between
announcements, the loudspeakers played a random assortment of music, which
ranged from Enya to Jingle Bells. Listening to the latter on a sunny July
day on a tropical island produces the kind of disconnection between
experience and reality that can usually be achieved only with drugs.

Nobody had planned out who was supposed to overseeing the various games, but
volunteers were soon found. Mr Jay, one of the local truck drivers,
discovered a talent as a handball referee. The bursar of one of the Ambae
schools, who happened to be a former volleyball star, helped Sara look after
the beach volleyball tournaments (and did an excellent job until the day he
discovered a store selling Tusker beer). One of Ranwadi's new gap girls,
after a short briefing on what petanque was, spent the rest of the week
umpiring the game.

The teacher from the College de Melsisi who was asked to look after the
table tennis tournament wanted to be down on the field watching the football
instead, and lied that the school had lost all its table tennis balls. Table
tennis was quietly dropped from the programme.

Only for the all-important football games had anybody made an effort to
organise a qualified referee - a huge, dark, sinister man. He looked
familiar.

"Who's the referee?" I asked.

"He was our postmaster when you were here back in 2001," I was told. "He was
the guy who used to steal our mail."

On the penultimate day of the games, the referee walked away, complaining
that he wasn't being sufficiently well paid. Nobody else, as far as I could
gather, was being paid at all.

The Principal of Ranwadi, a passionate sports fan, sat intently beside the
football field whenever his school was playing, absorbed in the game,
muttering to nobody in particular.

"Yes. Yes, yes, yes. No. No, no. Yes, yes - no. No, no. No, no. No! No -
yes. Yes, yes, yes. YES!!"

The Principal of the College de Melsisi, having worked hard to prepare for
the games, decided he'd earned himself the week off, and spent most of the
time relaxing at his house. His major contribution to the proceedings -
aside from drinking with the Prime Minister - was to go down to the school
office where poor Sara was frantically photocopying score sheets and
timetables, and tell her not to waste paper.

- - -

Teams in the different sports played against one another in round-robin
tournaments, and schools were ranked according to the number of points they
had won. Having volunteered to do the scorekeeping, I drew up a big
spreadsheet that would add up the results and distil them together,
according to an agreed formula, to reveal which school was the best overall.
I spent much of the week sitting in Sara's house, trying to make sense of
the various muddy and tattered score sheets that I'd been handed by the
referees and type the results into the computer.

In sports such as football and netball, I was to give 3 points for a win, 2
points for a draw, and 1 point for a team that lost but did make the effort
to get a team together and play. In events like volleyball and petanque,
where a draw is impossible, it was 2 points for a win and 1 point for a
loss. Opinion differed as to whether or not it was possible for a basketball
game to end in a draw. The two Americans were adamant that it couldn't, but
nobody else could see why not.

"What should I do if two teams get the same number of points?" I asked the
sports masters on the first day.

"Rank them by goal average," came the reply.

What is goal average? A quick search on the Internet revealed that it's a
slightly-flawed measure of a team's performance that was abandoned in
English and international football in the late 1960s. (Basically you divide
the number of goals scored by the number of goals conceded, instead of
subtracting the numbers.) Since goal average was one of the few things the
sports masters seemed to agree on, I didn't argue.

The senior boys' football competition - the event that people cared most
about - was a close-run thing. Ranwadi and their main rivals, St Patrick's
College, emerged joint leaders with 10 points each. Ranwadi had scored five
goals and conceded two; St Patrick's had scored four goals and conceded one.
Had the teams been ranked under the system used by most modern football
leagues, Ranwadi would have been on top, equalling St Patrick's on goal
difference and beating them on goals scored. However, under the outdated
goal average system that the sports masters had recommended, it was 2.5 to
Ranwadi and 4 to St Patrick's College. Our boys came in second.

That mattered. When I got the computer to add together the overall results
for the PISSA Games, St Patrick's were ahead of Ranwadi in the senior
category by a single point. If it hadn't been for the football result, it
would have been the other way around.

I scanned the results desperately, looking for errors, anything that might
have led to Ranwadi winning fewer points than they deserved. I found a
couple of scores that had been incorrectly entered, but nothing that made a
difference to the final result. Had the points been added up properly, I
wondered. Computers can't miscalculate, but they can be incorrectly
programmed. The PISSA scoring system, originally devised by Ranwadi's
scientifically-minded Mr Noel, was designed on paper to be fair and
straightforward, but in real life it had acquired complexities and
ambiguities. Scanning through the spreadsheets, I spotted two or three
semi-legitimate, defensible adjustments that didn't favour our school in any
obvious way, but would have the overall effect of shifting an extra point or
two into Ranwadi's column.

In general, people in Vanuatu are not mathematically-minded. My students
will happily tell me that there are three hundred metres in three
centimetres, and if a mis-pressed digit on a pocket calculator led them to
conclude that two and two made five, many of them would accept it without
question. My contract with the country's Ministry of Education states that I
am employed for a period of two years beginning in January 2007 and
finishing in December 2007. However, like most un-mathematical people, the
islanders are adept at adding up two particular things: money and sports
results. Even a subtle manipulation of the scoring of the games might well
be noticed, and if anybody suspected that I'd tipped the tables in my own
school's favour there would be hell to pay. Besides, it simply wouldn't have
been fair. As the scorekeeper I had to be impartial, and if the computer had
told me that Ranwadi was the number one school then I certainly wouldn't
have been scrambling to recalculate the figures.

Reluctantly, I left the spreadsheet as it was.

- - -

The final day of the PISSA Games coincided with Vanuatu Independence Day.

History has passed quickly in Vanuatu. Like most Third World countries, the
young republic has a child-heavy population (at twenty-four, I am older than
the average ni-Vanuatu), and the majority of today's islanders were not
alive on 30th July, 1980, when Britain and France finally brought to an end
their chaotic attempt at joint government in the former New Hebrides. This
is perhaps just as well: you might expect the ni-Vanuatu who do remember the
days of colonial rule to be bitter towards their former masters. British and
French settlers appropriated much of the territory's best land and held onto
it for a century, treating the islanders like foreigners in their own
country. They usurped traditional hierarchies, trampled on local customs,
and presided over the collapse of the native population. They imported a
petty thousand-year-old rivalry between two nations on the other side of the
world, infecting the islanders with it, so that twenty-seven years after
Vanuatu government officially ceased to be a tussle between the British and
the French, you can still see the fault lines between these two factions in
the country's politics.

Yet Britain and France also gave their ill-gotten territory schools,
hospitals, roads, airports, wharves, and churches. The two powers brought at
least a semblance of law and order to the archipelago, and ended the rape
and pillage committed by an earlier generation of European visitors: traders
who sold the islanders into near-slavery on Queensland sugar plantations, or
sold them to their cannibal enemies as meat, and in the process had
unscrupulously filled the islands with guns, germs and steel (to borrow a
phrase from Jared Diamond's excellent book about why people from Europe
colonised places like Vanuatu and not the other way round). They also ended
most of the rape and pillage committed by the islanders against one another.
In place of tribal warfare, the British and French bequeathed Vanuatu a
legacy of freedom, democracy and national unity, even if the colonists did
not apply any of these principles very well at the time. Before the
Europeans left, Vanuatu may not have been an independent country, but before
they arrived, it was not a country at all.

Older ni-Vanuatu today look back on their former British and French rulers
in much the way that adults look back on their former schoolteachers. At the
time they were overbearing and resented, but many years on it is possible to
respect them for the job that they did, and appreciate the ways in which
their teaching helped turn their pupils into better people. Looking back on
all the teachers who once shouted at me and punished me, the teachers I
swore at and whose lessons I disrupted, I cannot think of a single one
towards whom I have any ill feeling today. In fact, if I met them in the
street I would probably be pleased to see them. And I'd like to think that
most of them feel the same towards me.

In a similar way, the people of Vanuatu today are nothing but welcoming and
courteous towards the British and French whose ancestors once oppressed
them. A couple of them have even expressed gratitude to me for "all the
things that your country taught us". Nor are the ni-Vanuatu unique in this
respect. I cannot remember encountering anti-British sentiment in any of the
dozen or so former British colonies that I have visited (with the slight
exception of Ireland, which arguably wasn't a colony). In Fiji, the people
who asked where I came from smiled sentimentally at the answer and said "ah,
mother country". In Malaysia, the businessman who leaned over to start a
conversation with me at a street café told me that the British were decent
people (not "dirty bastards" like a dozen other nationalities he listed). In
Belize, I met British soldiers who are still made welcome in their former
territory (having a bunch of friendly Brits doing military training in your
jungles helps encourage jealous neighbours to stay on their own side of the
border). In Singapore, the 19th-century figure who originally claimed the
island in the name of the British still has plazas and hotels named after
him.

The Scots still resent the English, of course - "we are colonised by
wankers", said Ewan McGregor's character in Trainspotting - but they are the
exception that proves the rule: Scotland has never been a colony. (In fact,
enterprising Scots were responsible for the existence of large parts of the
British Empire, and profited handsomely from it. Several of the Europeans
who feature in Vanuatu's history were Scottish.) Based on my experience
elsewhere in the world, if the English really had colonised the Scots then
the Scots would probably respect us for it.

In the interminably long speech that kicked off the Vanuatu Independence Day
celebrations in Melsisi, there was little about shaking off the yoke of
colonial oppression. Instead, there was a lot about the need to work hard
towards a better future for the young country. In his own speech a week
earlier, the Prime Minister had quoted a line from the national anthem:

"You-me savvy plenty work ee stap 'long all island b'long you-me." We know
there is plenty of work still to be done on our islands.

When the Independence Day speech was over and the flag had been raised, the
final sports matches were played. That evening, students gathered in the
rain for the handing out of the trophies. I had managed to get hold of a box
of feux d'artifice (people in Melsisi refer to unfamiliar foreign things by
their French names rather than their English ones), which I let off from the
hillside above the sports ground. It wasn't much of a firework display: they
were small garden fireworks, and I hadn't been able set them up in advance
in case they got wet, so there were long pauses as I slid about on the
hillside removing each firework from its waterproof bag and trying to find a
soft patch of ground to poke it into. However, most of the children watching
had never seen fireworks before, and the crowd went wild.

I didn't enjoy the moment when the final result of the PISSA Games was
announced. Ranwadi's students had trained hard this year and were desperate
to come first, but in both Junior and Senior categories they had to settle
for second place. The announcer read out the final scores, beginning with
ninth place, then eighth, seventh, sixth, fifth, fourth, and third. When it
was revealed that Ranwadi was number two, I suspected that the outbreak of
cheering was not coming from our own students.

I felt even worse than the students did, knowing by following a flawed
scoring system had deprived my team of a trophy that was probably rightfully
theirs.

My colleagues were quick to spot the dubious football result that had cost
Ranwadi its prize.

"You should have ranked them by goal difference," they told me. (The sports
masters had all been very clear that they wanted goal average.) "They may
have said goal average, but they meant goal difference." (Sports masters
ought to know what they're talking about when it comes to their favourite
sport.) "Goal average is an outdated way of doing things." (If I questioned
every local practice that strikes me as outdated, I'd make myself very
unpopular.) "This would never have happened if you had used the proper
system." (It was pure chance that the system disadvantaged Ranwadi - the
scores could just as easily have been the other way round.) "We should have
been consulted about what scoring system to use." (Ranwadi's teachers were
too busy praying with the students to attend the daily meetings with the
other sports masters and coaches.) And so on.

The matter was soon forgiven and forgotten, but I was left with the
unpleasant knowledge that a thing that mattered more to some my friends,
colleagues and students than anything else in the school year - winning the
PISSA Games - had been needlessly lost to them as a direct result of
something that I had done.

"There's an old saying in my village," said old Ezekiel the school mechanic,
often a source of gentlemanly wisdom. "If you kill a pig, you can't eat its
head in your own nakamal."

I wasn't sure that I understood.