Andrew Gray's travel tales

16th November

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

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

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

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

Sara had not been consulted about this.

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

That was when the scandal really broke loose.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even my students at Ranwadi joined in the gossip.

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

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

"But he took your girl."

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

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

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

Paulo nodded, grinning with embarrassment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She will probably never see Paulo again.

3rd November

- from the first song ever played on MTV
-----------

"Have you ever been at home during a power cut?" asks one of the
British-authored science textbooks used by the junior students at Ranwadi.
"Life's not much fun without electricity."

The majority of the students have not had the experience of being at home
during a power cut. Their homes don't have power. Even at Ranwadi, where the
buildings do have electricity wired into them, nobody uses the word "power
cut". Instead, they talk about "power on"; absence of electricity is the
normal state of affairs. Power on is from sunset until half-past nine in the
evenings, and sometimes for a couple of hours during the daytime if the
teachers need to use the photocopier or the computers and the school can
afford the fuel for the generator.

With poorly-installed circuitry, corrosive humidity, and generators that
struggle to cope with the load (twenty or so houses and an entire high
school campus are run on a wattage that probably wouldn't light even half of
Al Gore's house), electrical problems are common. In some rooms, fluorescent
lights spend the evening flickering pathetically, their power supply
insufficient to kick them into life. Students from certain classes wander
the school during evening study times because every single one of lights in
their classroom is out. The boys' dormitories were without lighting for the
whole of last term, due to an electrical fault caused by one boy's attempt
to hack into the power cables running through the wall beside his bed and
wire in an extra plug socket. ("Him ee danger little-bit," commented the
school mechanic, with typical understatement.) Sometimes computers and DVD
players flick off and on as the voltage coming out of the sockets drops
critically and teachers rush around the school trying to find and stop
whoever is overloading the power supply - the handyman using power tools
perhaps, or too many people opening and closing the freezer in the school
store.

Qualified electricians do very occasionally visit Pentecost, but at other
times the job of operating the electricity generators and repairing faults
is done by a combination of the handyman, the mechanic, the boarding master
and the Technology teacher. The handyman is experienced at painting and
patching up holes, the mechanic is skilled at disassembling engines, the
boarding master is good at odd jobs, and the Technology teacher has a
certificate in woodwork. Their knowledge of electricity is limited, but they
all know how to use a screwdriver, and through their combined efforts they
manage to keep the majority of the lights on.

In addition to its main generator, the school has two or three small
generators, one of which, on average, is in working order at any given time.
These are not enough to power the entire school, but will run parts of it at
times when somebody needs electricity for a specific purpose, such as
photocopying an important exam, and wants to economise on fuel. They are
also a useful backup when the big generator breaks down.

Twice in the two years that I've been at Ranwadi, all the generators have
broken down simultaneously, and the school has gone completely without
power, on one occasion for nearly a month. However, apart from the
frustrating lack of contact from the outside world (the only times I've ever
phoned home from Ranwadi rather than e-mailing were during power outages
when I used the mere two or three minutes of international call time
provided by local phone cards to reassure my parents that I was still
alive), I quite enjoyed the absence of electricity. Evenings were quiet and
candlelit, and instead of doing battle with temperamental computers and
being called out of lessons by colleagues who need help unjamming the
photocopier, I wrote my notes by hand and chalked them on the blackboard for
my students to copy.

Nearly everything that people on Pentecost need to do can be done without
electricity. Light can be provided by battery-powered torches, or by candles
and lanterns. (It was only after seeing the little orange flames shining
from teachers' houses late in the evenings that I realised why people talk
of "burning the midnight oil".) Heating is rarely necessary - the coldest
temperature I have ever known on Pentecost was 18C (65F) - and villagers who
do feel the cold on winter nights can wrap themselves up in a blanket or
huddle around the fire. Air-conditioning would be nice, but in its absence
those who don't want to sweat in the heat can cool themselves by reptilian
means like sitting in cool breezes or jumping in the river. The stove or the
fire can do the job of an electric kettle, a toaster or a microwave. With
most food either gathered straight from the gardens, or bought in packets
and tins with Methuselan shelf-lives, fridges and freezers are seldom
needed. Many of these can be powered with gas or kerosene anyway. Instead of
vacuum cleaners there are bush brooms; instead of hair driers there are
towels and the sun and the wind. Musical entertainment can be provided by
stereos running off chunky batteries, or by the old-fashioned means singing
and playing the guitar.

In spite of all this, an number of villagers are now using the increasing
amounts of money earned from selling kava to buy themselves small
electricity generators. However, this is not because electrical gadgets are
more convenient than their old-fashioned predecessors: most owners of new
generators continue to cook on wood fires and light their houses with
lanterns. The real reason for the slow but noticeable spread of electricity
across Pentecost in recent years is the invention of the DVD player.

Television and videos are one of the few things for which the islanders have
never found a non-electrical substitute. You can run stoves and fridges and
lights on wood and paraffin and gas, but to my knowledge nobody has ever
invented an oil-fired TV.

Until recently, few people bemoaned the inability to plug in televisions,
because there would have been little to watch. Pentecost is too far from
town to receive terrestrial TV broadcasts, and satellite TV is beyond the
means of most of the islanders. A handful of people used to have
videocassette players and tapes, but these were expensive, and didn't last
long in a jungle environment. When I was required to show a video to my Year
13 students last year using the school's ancient VCR, I had to stand beside
the screen like a weatherperson explaining to the students what the blurry
pictures and inaudible fuzz were supposed to be showing them. This year, I
refused to do the exercise unless the exam board sent me a copy of the video
on DVD.

Even in a country where import duties double the price of most electronic
goods (don't let any of the Australians who have offshore bank accounts in
Port Vila tell you that Vanuatu is tax-free), DVD players can now be bought
at Chinese stores in town for no more than the price of a couple of sacks of
good home-grown kava. Even very cheap DVD players are more robust and
portable than the old VCRs, and their discs can be copied and distributed
with far greater ease than videocassettes. People in Vanuatu have a
sophisticated notion of copyright when it comes to traditional artefacts -
those wishing to copy a particular carving were traditionally required to
pay pigs as royalties to the chief who owned the design - but the concept is
non-existent when it comes to music and videos. A few well-equipped
storekeepers buy packs of "empty DVDs" (the word "blank" has yet to enter
the local vocabulary) onto which they burn whatever movies their customers
feel like watching, which not only saves money but allows them to respond
effectively to local demand, a rare thing on an island where warehouses and
suppliers are a long ship journey away.

Approaching a village in the evenings, it is now common to be greeted by the
sound of a rumbling generator and the sight of a group of people sitting
fixated in a pool of blue light. At the increasing number of food and kava
nights that local people put on to raise money for community projects or
their children's school fees, video showings are a regular attraction. At
Ranwadi, meanwhile, a couple of the teachers have become such video junkies
that they will run small private generators even when the school's main
generator is off, just so that they can watch a DVD.

The most popular DVDs are "stories belong fight". The ordinarily gentle
ni-Vanuatu have an astonishing love of on-screen violence of all kinds,
whether it comes from black-suited gangsters raiding casinos, Oriental
martial arts masters, a giant computer-generated gorilla, rebellious Roman
legions thrown into the gladiator pit, Bruce Willis and a noble troop of
well-armed American soldiers splattering their way out of an awkward
military situation, or blue-painted Scotsmen baring their cheeks at the
English enemy before running them through with swords and spears. People who
have seen the movie before may actually fast-forward through the parts where
people are talking rather than killing, and stop the movie not when it
reaches the end but when it reaches the point where the last bad guy has
been killed.

The local taste for violent movies is partly, though not entirely, because
they are straightforward to understand. As far as I know nobody has ever
produced a movie in any of Vanuatu's languages, and even well-educated
islanders struggle to follow the English of Mafia bosses or William Wallace.
Subtitles help, but on cheap discs imported from Asia these are often
unavailable, or at least not available in languages that the locals
understand. I recently came across a group of Francophone villagers
squinting at a movie subtitled in Portuguese and muttering that French was
hard to understand. In addition, the dialogue of the average movie is so
loaded with idioms and foreign concepts that it would thoroughly confuse
even an islander who understood every individual word, just as I get
confused when villagers are describing customs to which I don't know the
cultural background.

Whilst the villagers will happily sit down with their children to watch
movies containing the most hideous violence, sex is another matter. Although
privately there is a keen demand among local men for "rubbish movies" (by
which they don't mean the kind in which Kirsten Dunst and Orlando Bloom go
on a journey of romantic self-discovery), at video nights the slightest hint
of on-screen intimacy has the villagers scrambling for the fast-forward
button. Not only are sex scenes embarrassing and distasteful to the locals,
they're also not very entertaining, since they seldom culminate in anybody
getting killed.

At video nights, it's customary to play a few music videos before the main
movie begins. People watch these avidly, and not just because they enjoy the
songs. Try spending a few minutes watching MTV sometime and think about how
many of the seemingly-mundane images that you see - a person riding a subway
train, for example, or sending a text message on a mobile phone - would be
fascinating to a person who grew up in a village in the jungle. Such
glimpses of Western life also occur in movies, of course, but the villagers
are well aware that Hollywood mixes fact with fiction, and that moviegoers
can't always tell which is which. People ask me whether Scotsmen really wear
skirts, and in the same tone of voice ask whether there really are islands
still inhabited by dinosaurs. Music videos are more interesting, one
islander told me, because they show "things that are true".

What must Britain and America look like through the lens of a pop video, I
wonder? Dangerous, colourful, decadent, fast-moving, extravagant and
hyperemotional, perhaps. Full of Englishmen who talk like Americans,
Irishmen who talk like the English, and black people who wear hats and
sunglasses indoors and make weird gestures with their hands (which are
imitated obnoxiously by Vanuatu teenagers when they get the chance to pose
in front of a camera) in order to look cool. A culture obsessed with youth,
beauty, money and sex? A lifestyle that is frightening and strange, or one
that is simply alluring?

How would it feel for the islanders to travel to these glamorous places and
find out that, just like in their own countries, the majority of the
inhabitants lead dulls lives, wear ordinary-looking clothes, and concern
themselves with the mundane routines of earning a living, bringing up
children, dealing with their friends and families, and growing old? Perhaps
something like the way it would feel for a Westerner who'd grown up on Band
Aid images of the Third World as a place whose inhabitants struggle humbly
to maintain their traditions and work themselves out of poverty to go there
and find that, just like his own country, it is full of loud and
fashion-obsessed young people who squander their education and desire money
mainly so that they can buy a bigger TV screen.

Last year, AusAID sent Ranwadi a dozen new computers to help with students'
education. Developing computer skills - which are still rare among
ni-Vanuatu - could be a real asset to students when they leave school and
seek good jobs in town. Interactive learning exercises could also help the
students get over the immense difficulty they have in trying to
conceptualise ideas when presented to them in a strange language. At first,
working with the students on the new computers was fun: they were eager to
learn, took obvious pleasure in their ability to use the new technology, and
mastered it extremely quickly. However, after it was discovered that the
computers could play music and videos, nobody wanted to use them for
anything else. Students who were allowed into the computer lab to study
would start playing music and games as soon as they sensed that a teacher
was no longer looking over their shoulders. Getting the students interested
in using computers for anything other than entertainment became so difficult
that I and the other expat teachers largely gave up bothering. It's no fun
trying to teach a student to type a letter or fill in a spreadsheet when the
student is paying little attention and enduring the lesson only in the
grudging hope that the teacher will give them permission to click on "My
Videos" when their work is finished. The lovely new Computer Room now sits
largely unused, except when the teachers want to play space invaders or
watch a video CD.

Fortunately, Pentecost is not an island of telly addicts yet. The cost of
fuelling their electricity generators means that, for the majority of the
villagers, watching videos remains an occasional treat rather than a daily
pastime. However, the spread of newer and cheaper solar panels and of
communal electricity supplies such as the school's will eventually overcome
this limitation. Now that there are potential viewers in so many villages it
is also only a matter of time before the Vanuatu government (or one of its
many foreign friends) builds a TV transmitter on Pentecost, providing
continuous entertainment even to those who have run out of DVDs to watch.
The French would probably pay for the transmitter, if they were given a
guarantee that plenty of its output would be en français. Or the government
could try asking for help from China, which has already begun generously
supplying viewers in Port Vila and Luganville with CCTV9, its poisonous
English-language news channel. Perhaps Benny Hinn could chip in a few
dollars, in return for the chance to beam his televised sermons to 15,000
virgin viewers who have fallen too hopelessly in love with their new medium
to realise that it might be capable of lying to them. And don't bemoan the
naivety of islanders who would allow themselves to be manipulated in the
interests of cheap entertainment: we all do the same every time we watch an
advert on TV.

The most often-repeated lie on television, anywhere in the world, is that is
output is not to be missed.

"I couldn't go and live in a place like Vanuatu," several of my friends back
home tell me. "I would miss television too much."

The majority would not.

Television is like caffeine. For those who are used to it, a day or a week's
deprivation is painfully frustrating. However, go without for a month, or
for a year, and you'll forget that you ever wanted it. There is no longing
to watch the next episode, no fretting that you have lost track of the
fortunes of your favourite soap-opera characters. You lost track ages ago,
the episodes passed you by, and after a while you found that it didn't
matter any more. The series you were following came to an end, and although
you know that new series have replaced them, you no longer care what they
are. Hearing friends discuss the latest programme is like hearing them
discuss someone you don't know - you might prick up your ears if something
particularly salacious comes up, but by and large you just ignore them.

Admittedly, I am not an ideal guinea pig in which to study the effect of
televisual deprivation in humans: I was never a particular fan of
television. I dislike unnecessary background noise, and back home I would
get irritated by people who automatically switched on the TV when they sat
down in a room even if there was nothing they really wanted to watch. (I, in
turn, would irritate those people by switching off TVs that nobody appeared
to be watching.) As a student in Edinburgh I went for a year without a
television set, and enjoyed it, except for the regular annoyance of people
trying to start conversations about what they'd seen on TV and an offensive
stream of letters from the TV Licensing Authority insinuating that I was
lying when I told them I didn't own a television. Yet ordinarily TV-loving
expats who I meet in Vanuatu say the same thing: it's strange how little we
miss television.

Television may not me missable, but its absence is something that I
certainly will miss as new media spreads across Pentecost. Already, the
experience of tranquil tropical evenings spoiled by rumbling generators and
videos turned up to full volume to drown them out has led me on many
occasions to wish that the DVD player had never been invented. To the
locals, however, silence is primitive: loud entertainment is the future. And
cheap DVD players would be the best thing since sliced bread if the latter
had yet made it to Pentecost. (Sliced bread, incidentally, is another
invention that I will lament when it eventually does arrive on the island
and replaces fresh, crisp, wood-smoked loaves. One enterprising local baker
has already asked me if I know where he can order a slicing machine.)

To describe TV entertainment as a drug would be clichéd and wrong. (Drugs
stimulate the mind in novel ways.) Yet there is undoubtedly something
narcotic about the glowing blue screens and the way they draw you in.

On my last evening in Pangi, as I lay in my bed in the normally-peaceful
thatched guesthouse recovering from the effects of inadvertently drinking
paraffin, the sounds of the crickets and the waves on the beach were
interrupted by the splutter and drone of a generator being started. In the
hut opposite, villagers had gathered to watch music videos on DVD. Unable to
relax amidst the lawnmower-like noise coming through the window, I did the
only thing I could. I went across to the neighbouring hut, sat down amongst
the villagers, fixed my eyes on the screen, and began to watch.