Andrew Gray's travel tales

14th December

5th December

In fact, I had never been so far from home.

I had come to this chilly corner of the Antipodes partly to make the most of
a stopover in New Zealand on my way home for the Christmas holidays, and
partly because after a year on Pentecost I wanted to ease myself gradually
back into big Western civilisation. But there was another reason too.

My original trip to Vanuatu, on a gap year in 2001, was motivated at least
partly by a desire to escape Gairloch, the bleak and sodden Highland village
that my parents now called home. After two years of cold and rain, I had
told myself, I was getting as far away from Gairloch as I possibly could.

Except that I wasn't - not quite. Vanuatu is a long way from Scotland, to be
sure - over nine thousand miles - but that is only three-quarters as far
around the globe as it is possible to get.

The furthest place in the world from Scotland is an empty square of the
Southern Ocean, half way between New Zealand and Antarctica. The closest
feature on a map is Campbell Island, a tiny fleck of land forming part of
the scattered and storm-tossed Sub-Antarctic Islands. A century ago the
Sub-Antarctic Islands were home to a few lonely and weather-hardened
individuals who made their living by skinning seals, and boiling penguins
down in giant vats to extract the oil. (This grisly source of biofuel has of
course been superseded nowadays by fossil fuels, a welcome development for
the penguins of the Sub-Antarctic Islands, but less welcome for their
Antarctic cousins whose habitat will soon be melted by the resulting global
warming.) Later on the islands were declared a nature reserve, and are now
uninhabited.

Getting to Campbell Island would require a long and expensive boat journey,
across one of world's the most notoriously rough stretches of ocean. It
would also require a permit, which would only be granted if the New Zealand
conservation authorities were satisfied that I wasn't going to annoy the
fifteen thousand giant albatrosses that breed there. And frankly, once I
arrived on the island there would be little to do except to wander around
annoying the albatrosses. The Sub-Antarctic Islands, I conceded, were not a
realistic travel destination.

The furthest inhabited island from Scotland is Stewart Island, which nestles
at the foot of New Zealand's main South Island. Like the Sub-Antarctic
Islands, Stewart Island is mainly a wilderness and a wildlife haven, but
being larger and closer to the mainland it is easier to reach and boasts a
thriving tourist industry. On the island's east coast, in the picturesquely
convoluted Halfmoon Bay, there is also a small settlement, named
(ironically) after a Scottish town. At 11,630 miles away (following the
shortest possible curve around the Earth), Oban is probably further from
Gairloch than any other village on Earth.

And yet it is a remarkably similar place. It is as if somebody had sliced
the Earth in two with a mirror, so that one who tried to look at the far end
would see only the reflection of the place where he was standing.

It is not merely the wild landscape that recalls the Scottish Highlands. In
the village of Oban itself, reflections of Gairloch manifest themselves like
mirages. There is the pier with its fishing boats and the nearby
fish-processing factory. There is the mini supermarket in the centre of the
village, a little concrete building whose three short aisles provide the
villagers with their daily needs. There are the prominent and well-kept
churches. There is the temporary-looking little hut selling fish and chip
takeaways. There is the old-fashioned hotel that caters to genteel elderly
tourists in the summer, and probably does a good business keeping the locals
fuelled with alcohol on long winter nights. There are the boat owners
offering wildlife cruises and fishing trips. There is the shop selling
mountaineering gear to trekkers, and another selling odd local crafts. There
is the tiny village museum, open two hours a day. There is the community
library, and an empty-looking recreational ground. And there were the trendy
little cafes and tea rooms (closed in winter) where lively young owners who
don't sound local and lively young customers who don't look local coo
together about what a beautiful spot they have found.

Above all, Oban has the feel of a genuine community - a phenomenon I took
for granted back on Pentecost but is rare in modern Western countries. You
don't have to watch and listen to the locals for long to realise that most
people on the island seem to know each other. The friendly spirit extends to
visitors, too, and it is hard to go into a shop or a café without being
drawn into conversation.

Stewart Island, it seemed, was Gairloch Version 2: a new and improved
edition, which retained the best features of the old one whilst correcting
many of its defects. The bugs have been fixed: in place of Scottish midges,
which are excruciating even when they don't bite and impossible to keep away
unless you mummify yourself in clothes and netting, Stewart Island had
sandflies, which are larger and easier to swat off. (The fact that I still
had a bottle of tropical-strength insect repellent in my rucksack helped.)
Instead of a lonely youth hostel on a peninsula two miles from the centre of
the village (in a region with no local buses), Oban has a bright-looking
backpacker holiday camp right in the centre of the village. And Stewart
Island is better connected to the rest of the country by public transport
than Gairloch, in spite of the fact that Gairloch is not an island.

Those who come to experience the beauty of Stewart Island are provided for
by well-kept walking trails, which are so well signposted I didn't even need
the maps sold for a dollar in the smart local information centre. Off the
coast marine life thrives in large no-take zones, in contrast to Gairloch,
where trawlers trying to scrape a living out of overfished waters are still
intent on doing to the seabed what their ancestors did to the once-forested
hillsides centuries ago. None of the inlets on Stewart Island appeared to be
polluted by the effluent from salmon farms, none of its valleys seemed to
have been drowned by hydroelectric dams, and I was pretty sure that none of
its offshore islets had ever been used to test biological weapons. The cod
fillets sold by the fish and chip outlet were not only less endangered than
the north Atlantic variety but tasted better too. Even the seagulls that
descended, Hitchcock-style, when I sat down on the bench by the seaside and
unwrapped the newspaper (real newspaper) from my fish and chips, were
prettier than their Caledonian cousins.

Both the inhabitants of Gairloch and Oban are in a large part the
descendants of Scots, a people justifiably proud of their traditions and
achievements. Yet whilst the natives of Gairloch are those whom waves of
emigration left behind, the people of southern New Zealand are derived from
Scots who had the spirit and ambition to leave their grey homeland and
continue their traditions and achievements in a new country. Both groups are
warm and decent people, which is why I hope nobody will be offended when I
say that I find the latter more interesting company.

Yet in spite of all this, I had to admit that the main reason I lived
Stewart Island was not because it was different to Gairloch, but because it
was so much the same.

I recalled a speech that a former Head Boy had made to the students at
Gairloch High School, several years ago.

"After leaving the Highlands, you can travel all over the world," he said.
"You can visit beautiful places and you do wonderful things. And then you
come home and realise that, actually, this is one of the most beautiful
places of them all."

I remembered these words, but for a long time I dismissed them. Scots who
thought that their country was one of the nicest in the world had not
travelled far enough, I insisted. Yet several years and nearly a quarter of
a million miles of travelling later, standing on the beach in Halfmoon Bay
watching the sunset at the far end of the earth, I conceded for the first
time that he may just have been right.

- - -

Of course, Stewart Island was not a completely identical copy of the West
Highlands. The birdsong was different, for a start. There were sound effects
in the bushes I had never heard before, such as the flapping of the enormous
New Zealand pigeon, which takes off with as much grace and silence as a
military helicopter, and the bellbird, whose ping-pong call resembles a
novelty doorbell. The smell of the forest was different, too. On top of the
smell of earth and damp wood that pervades northern woods, there was a
sweeter scent, a honeyish blend of resin, eucalypt, and unknown flowers. I
remembered this smell from parts of Australia, but have never encountered it
in a European forest, or even a European garden. It is the perfume of the
southern hemisphere.

There was something strange and exotic about the appearance of trees and
flowers too. In fact, the local forest looked like a cross between an
overgrown Scottish garden and a BBC reconstruction of the Jurassic era.
There are good reasons for both resemblances. Many Scottish gardeners plant
New Zealand shrubs, knowing that they will be at home in the local climate.
(One of the highlights of Inverewe Gardens, near Gairloch, is a 'New Zealand
Christmas tree', which responds to the inverted northern seasons by
producing its red flowers in June.) It was the profusion of plants that
would be exotic back in Scotland - and the rarity of classic Scottish
plants, though some local houses were surrounded by familiar specimens -
that gave Stewart Island the feel of a gigantic botanic garden.

As for the Jurassic connection, that was the last time New Zealand's plants
and animals were in contact with those of the northern hemisphere. It was
around that era the world's continents rifted apart into two great clusters:
the continents of the northern hemisphere, and those of the south. The
northern continents have remained intermittently connected ever since (as
recently as a few thousand years ago, a cave man living at times of lowered
sea levels could have walked from Scotland to Nova Scotia without getting
wet) and developed the standard set of trees and animals which are now found
throughout the cooler parts of North America, Europe and Asia. This flora
and fauna is so homogenous that a biologist abducted by aliens and dumped,
ET-style, in the middle of a northern forest, would find it hard to tell
whether he had been left in Canada, Scandinavia or Siberia.

Down under, meanwhile, a completely different set of trees and animals was
evolving. These once formed great, cool forests to rival those of the north
- a prehistoric wildwood resounding to the cries of exotic creatures - but
as the southern continents broke apart, their ancient forests dwindled.
Africa and South America drifted back into the tropics and reconnected with
their northern neighbours, losing much of their uniqueness. Australia
settled in dry sub-tropical latitudes, where much of its forest became
scrubland and desert (a process that wasn't helped by the arrival of humans
with a penchant for lighting fires), although present-day Tasmania provides
a glimpse of what the continent might once have been like. Antarctica clung
to its forests for a long time, even as the continent drifted further and
further over the South Pole, but a cold snap around 35 million years ago
finally turned the continent into an ice cube. Which left New Zealand.

Had the Romans ever sailed to New Zealand, they would have found a
prehistoric lost world. A landscape tossed and riven by volcanoes (one of
which exploded so loudly that the Romans reportedly noticed the blast), and
blanketed with primeval forests ruled by strange and exotic creatures. The
dinosaurs had gone, of course, but in the absence of mammals their feathered
descendants had thrived, and some of the monstrous birds that had evolved in
New Zealand were dinosaurs in all but name. The ancient forests were home to
flightless moas, the largest of which stood three metres and laid eggs the
size of water jugs (something not lost on the first human arrivals, who
badly needed water jugs). These were hunted by the fearsome-looking Haast's
eagle, one of the largest, hookiest and clawiest birds ever to take to the
skies.

The fate that befell New Zealand between the time of the Romans and the
present day was a kind of reverse Jurassic Park. Instead of being trapped on
an island with a bunch of monsters from a hundred million years in the past,
the native plants and animals of New Zealand suffered an even worse fate:
they were trapped on an island with a bunch of monsters from a hundred
million years in the evolutionary future.

The first and worst of these monsters was a species named Homo sapiens. The
earliest inhabitants of New Zealand were Polynesians, the ancestors of
today's Maoris, who canoed down from tropical islands to the north-east.
Back in their homelands they had grown yams and bananas, and tended chickens
and pigs. However, the cold island on which they now found themselves was a
hard place to grow tropical vegetables, and none of their chickens or pigs
had survived the long canoe journey from Polynesia. The new arrivals got
over the loss of their crops and livestock fairly quickly after discovering
that their new home was home to meaty chickens taller than a person, which
behaved as if they had never encountered guys with spears before. The moa's
extinction became inevitable as soon as the first hungry Polynesian laid
eyes on its metre-long drumsticks.

There was also plenty of food to be had from the sea, where plankton
thriving on long hours of summer sunshine and nutrients stirred up by winter
storms supported a rich marine food chain. At the top of this food chain
were millions of large sea birds, and a sort of large, flippered pig that
snoozed on rocks by the waterside just waiting to be clubbed to death. To
Pacific islanders who were used to plucking measly crabs from the reef or
trying to wrestle ocean fish into tossing canoes, it was an astonishing
bounty.

When the giant chickens were gone and the flippered pigs became scarce, the
Polynesians turned to smaller prey. They hooked for fish (the first white
sailors to trade with the Maoris did a good business in metal fishhooks),
and harvested the chicks of the unappetising-sounding muttonbird from its
reeking hillside burrows. In desperate times they turned to the one edible
animal that had survived the canoe journey from Polynesia: a tenacious
critter known to the Maoris as the kiore, and to the rest of the world as
Rattus exulans. However, the Polynesian rat is an even scrawnier creature
than its European cousin and cannot have provided more than a light snack.
The rats in turn snacked on native birds and their eggs, snacking some of
them to the brink of extinction.

Just when it seemed as if things couldn't get any worse for New Zealand's
native creatures, a new wave of human settlers arrived, bringing with them a
fresh bunch of monsters. One of these monsters was the Pussy Cat, whose
impact on native birds needs no explanation. This monster remains the bane
of New Zealand's park rangers today, and many a cat owner living near a
nature reserve has received a distressing phone call informing them that
Tibbles wandered too close to a nesting site and had an unfortunate accident
involving a fast-moving piece of lead.

Another introduced monster was the Rabbit, a creature described by one of my
ecology lecturers as one of the most voracious predators that has ever
lived. The Rabbit's prey were plants, and the local animals must have
regarded this as a harmless sort of monster, until the day they woke up and
found their favourite shrubs and grasses nibbled bare. Realising that no
native predator could control the Rabbit, humans responded by introducing
two further monsters, the Stoat and the Ferret. Nobody at the time seems to
have questioned why a stoat would bother chasing rabbits when there were so
many slower and dumber native creatures around.

Even the forests themselves succumbed to the influence of the monsters.
Trees were cleared, first by the Maoris and later at a faster rate by
European settlers, to make way for open land.

In modern New Zealand, land use seems to follow a very simple principle.
Give a New Zealander a patch of good flat land, and he will put sheep on it.
Give him a patch of poor flat land, and he will water and tend it, then put
sheep on it. Give him a patch of land that cannot be made suitable for
sheep, and he will put pine trees on it instead. Give him a patch of land
too craggy or remote to be worth putting either sheep or pine trees on, and
he will declare it a national park.

Stewart Island was one of the lucky areas. Being offshore, it was spared
from the worst of the monsters, and sheep farmers never took to the place.
Today, 85% of the island is a national park.

Even the Maoris never settled in large numbers on Stewart Island - the local
environment didn't suit them - although they did visit the island to hunt
moas and gather muttonbirds, whose oily carcasses were stored in special
bags made from local kelp. It is remarkable that a group of people whose
ancestors were tropical islanders managed to eke out a living at all in a
chilly spot so far from the equator.

The Maoris named the island Rakiura, the Land of the Shining Skies. Some
believe this is a reference to the southern auroras that occasionally ripple
the night sky. But there may also have been another reason for the name.
After spending a year in the tropics, with their scarcely-varying routine of
twelve hour days and twelve hour nights, I can appreciate how strange and
wonderful those early Polynesians must have found the long days of the
Stewart Island summer. Walking around at a time that should rightly have
been long after dusk, enjoying the soft daylight of a sub-Antarctic evening,
I remembered another thing I had missed about Scotland.

2nd December

"Are you coming dancing with us?" asked one of the Peace Corps girls when I stepped off the plane at Port Vila airport.

I look down at my shoes. I was wearing my enormous Doc Martens, the ones that I had worn in high school and retrieved from my parents' attic many years later when I went in search of some robust, expendable old shoes to take to Pentecost. They were hard and chunky, and the soles were the size and weight of hardback books. They hadn't been polished since high school, unless you count the time I painted them with wood preserver (it was all I had) in order to stop them growing mould after a damp week in the jungle.

The only other shoes I had with me were the sandals held together with parcel tape. (The ones held together with pins had come irreparably unpinned, and the ones held together with superglue had long since come unglued. After a failed attempt to tie them together with fishing line - which simply led to them breaking in different places - I had given up, taken them to the cliff where people at Ranwadi dispose of their rubbish, and hurled them into the bush.)

"I think I'll give dancing a miss," I said. It wasn't just the shoes - I didn't want to go dancing. I knew how that kind of evening would turn out. I would sit in the corner wincing at the loudness of the music and trying unsuccessfully to shout a conversation at someone while guys with better shoes (all right, better guys) took to the dance floor and left with girls in their arms.

Besides, like most people on the islands I had been up since dawn, which is about 5 a.m. in the South Pacific at this time of year. I like getting up at dawn.

We caught a minibus into town. The two Peace Corps girls chatted about friends I didn't know, and things I didn't want to know about friends that I did know, and what a great evening they were going to have.

"You should come dancing with us," one of them repeated, turning to me. "There'll be a guy there who's come out to the islands to help people set up computers. You'd enjoy talking to him." She had known me a few minutes and already had me figured out as a nerd.

The minibus dropped me at the hotel where I was staying, and took the Peace Corps away to begin their night out.

Over the next day or two, I saw or experienced the following for the first time in six and a half months… hot running water, asphalt, cars, minibuses, road signs, hotels, chlorinated swimming pools, sidewalks, soap dispensers, buildings with more than two storeys, tiling, street maps, coin-operated appliances, supermarkets, urinals, vouchers, pastry, fire extinguishers, pizzas, agencies, cash machines, Asian people, street lights, paper towels, police cars, trolleys, fences high enough to keep out human beings, leaflets, espresso machines, car parks, receptionists, billboards, men in uniform, serviettes, roundabouts, ceiling fans, wireless Internet access, Ladies and Gents toilets, mobile phones, local radio, petrol stations, storm drains, air conditioning, the day's newspaper, and anonymity. A few of these things were welcome, but the majority I hadn't missed.

After a day of trailing around town, I was already missing Pentecost. There was only one solution. That evening, I flagged down a bus heading in the direction of the airport.

"Green Light, Fresh Water?" I said. The driver nodded. Port Vila's buses don't follow fixed routes; it's up to the passengers to discuss with the driver where they'd like the bus to go.

When people from other islands began to move to Port Vila, each group of islanders bought their own plot of land, on which they did their best to recreate the village communities they had left behind. Some built small cement houses, into which they crammed huge extended families, while others lived in crudely-assembled shacks of plywood and old pieces of corrugated metal, with dogs and chickens wandering the bare ground in between. Visitors label these places slums, but what they really are is jungle villages without the jungle. People may be crowded into tiny shacks, and animals may be grubbing around outside, but the same is true back in their old villages. Whilst these little urban settlements may lack the beauty of a rural village, they also lack the isolation. Good jobs, good shops and a good hospital are only a short bus ride away, and for those who can afford it there is piped water and electricity. And since most islanders cannot dream of affording the suburban homes flogged by suntanned Australian estate agents who boast about how much prices have gone up lately as an indication that the property is a good investment - nor would they want to live in such a friendless environment - these squalid patches of communal land provide the only opportunity most ni-Vanuatu have to live affordably in their own capital.

The district of Fresh Water, which occupies a damp hillside on the northern edge of town, overlooking the road to the airport, is the Central Pentecost islanders' home away from home.

After doing a circuit of Port Vila's outskirts, picking people up and dropping them off, the bus driver pulled up by a road junction flanked by hedges and heaped with piles of rubbish. A revolving green light that looked as if it belonged on a toy ambulance was flashing behind one of the hedges. I got out of the bus, skirting the rubbish, and passed though a gate into a large yard. Running along one side of the yard was a long cement building containing a series of kiosks. Snacks and cigarettes were being sold at one window, bottles of wine and beer were on display behind another, and at a third a man was cooking up hot meals. At the far end of the complex, opposite to a row of benches with wooden shelters above them, a man behind another window was dispensing shells of kava. The word "sini" - kava, in the language of Central Pentecost - was buzzing back and forth.

"Is this Charlot Salwai's nakamal?" I asked a guy standing beside the kava bar.

"Yes," he said. This was the Green Light Nakamal that my friends on Pentecost had told me about - the place run by Charlot Salwai, Central Pentecost's MP. The man at the bar looked surprised. "How do you know Charlot Salwai?"

"I work on Pentecost," I explained, in the native language. The man smiled, and offered me a shell of kava. We sat down on one of the benches and chatted. Other people came over and introduced themselves. All were from villages within a few miles of Ranwadi. I hadn't met them before, but in many cases I knew their uncles, their brothers and their cousins. Some had even heard about me from relatives on the island.

More rounds of drinks were offered. I asked what the guy at the food counter was cooking.

"Taro," they said simply. These were Pentecost Islanders, all right. I chuckled and remembered one reason why I was glad to be going home for Christmas.

"You should get yourself some for dinner," my companions urged.

"Hmm..." I said. Port Vila is known throughout the South Pacific for its fine dining, and whilst my budget didn't stretch to any of the lagoon-side restaurants featured in the tourist brochures, there was no way I was coming into town after two hundred days of island food and eating lumps of starchy taro dug out of a Pentecost swamp. Near the hotel were food stalls run by women from Paama and the Shepherd Islands - islands whose climate is not suited to taro - who fry up a pick 'n' mix selection of meat, eggs, yam, fruit, and laplap with coconut cream, which they serve on strips of giant leaf. (Nibbling with your fingers at lumps of meat and vegetables on a wooden bench in the dark by the food stall isn't quite the same as dining in a French restaurant, but it's quick and tasty and nutritious, and never costs more than a couple of dollars. And it's a huge improvement on taro.)

"Maybe I'll get some taro later," I said.

23rd November

In the days before Western education arrived on Pentecost Island, a young
man who aspired to high status would have to advance through a series of
grades. At each grade, a couple of years spent raising pigs and learning
traditional customs would culminate in a ceremony at which the pigs were
killed and shared with the community, who in turn would accord the young man
greater respect. To reach the highest levels of society a man needed to have
both the right personal qualities, and wealthy friends and relatives who
could help him get together the pigs required for each grade. Many people
contented themselves with minor chiefly titles, whilst others never bothered
to set foot on the social ladder at all, preferring simple lives of low
status to the demands of grade-taking and chiefdom.

Old-fashioned grade-taking continues to take place on Pentecost, and the
system still underlies the island's society. However, for the majority of
its youngsters today, the route to achieving their ambitions is not through
pigs and rituals, but through schooling. This, too, involves a series of
demanding stages through which individuals must pass in order to reach the
higher levels of society. Each stage involves the expenditure of wealth,
tests of character, and the learning of skills, culminating in a graduation
ceremony and an end-of-year party at which a pig or two is usually roasted.
And like in the grade-taking system, only a minority of those who enter the
Vanuatu education system will make it to the end.

Until recently the first challenge came in Year 6, at the end of primary
school (although in the darker corners of Vanuatu there were kids who didn't
even make it that far), at which children sat the first of the sets of exams
that would decide their educational fate. The better-performing students had
the opportunity to proceed to secondary school, provided that their parents
could afford the school fees.

Dropping out of school at the age of eleven is a sad fate in any country,
and the Vanuatu government is now trying to reform the system by keeping
leaving it until Year 8 before subjecting children to the trial of
examinations. The government's official hope is that the by the time they
leave Year 8, even those who are not academically gifted will at least have
acquired enough basic literacy and numeracy to enable them to enter
vocational training courses. In practise, many will go back to their
villages. It's true that Year 8 leavers will emerge from school better able
to make a contribution to their communities than Year 6 leavers, but this is
mainly because a thirteen-year-old can swing a gardening knife with more
force than an eleven-year-old.

For those who progress beyond Year 8, the next trial comes at the end of
Year 10, in which students sit exams set by the Ministry of Education. These
mark the point at which the national curriculum comes to an end, and until
recently this was the end of the road for most students. A mere decade ago,
no school on Vanuatu's rural islands offered education beyond Year 10.

The principal of Ranwadi, saddened by the sight of so many bright students
having their opportunities cut off at this level, was one of the first to
try and change this, by expanding his school to take students on to Years 11
and 12. Other schools followed suit. At the end of Year 12, the students sit
exams set by the South Pacific Board for Educational Assessment (SPBEA), one
of the many quirky institutions through which the micro-countries of Oceania
pool their limited resources. The region served by SPBEA spans the
International Date Line, which makes for confusing exam timetables.

A handful of schools have since added yet another grade to the hierarchy
with the introduction of Year 13. For this level schools have two options:
providing a further year of teaching prescribed by SPBEA, or allowing
students to follow self-taught distance-learning courses organised by the
University of the South Pacific (another quirky regional institution).
Lacking the staff and resources to offer a fully-taught programme to its
Year 13s, Ranwadi has adopted the latter option.

This expansion in education has, of course, been made possible by money.
Contrary to what optimistic islanders will tell you, Vanuatu's people are
not getting richer: the country's official GDP per head is actually going
down as the population grows faster than the economy. Yet the slow shift
from a traditional economy to a modern one is making it easier for parents
to get together the cash needed to pay a child's school fees, and the
increasing number of lucrative jobs available in town has created a class of
rich uncles who can help out with their younger relatives' education.
Overseas aid organisations have enabled schools to expand physically by
paying for new classrooms and textbooks. In addition, many foreign visitors
who fell in love with Vanuatu and were upset by the sight of their new
lover's children in rags have begun sponsoring local students.

The expansion in education will bring huge benefits, both to students
themselves and to their country, which is now training enthusiastic young
citizens to perform many of the roles for which Vanuatu previously relied on
foreign expertise. However, it also has a downside. Whereas youngsters once
struggled hard in the knowledge that only the very best would be given the
chance to continue their studies at higher levels, many have now begun
committing the Western sin of taking their education for granted. Just as
the grade-taking system was undermined a century ago when islanders who had
earned money working for the white man began trying to buy their way into
the hierarchy without learning the rituals of chiefdom, the education system
is damaged today by students who know that even if their grades are mediocre
they will still find a school willing to take them and relatives willing to
continue paying their fees. Most, it is true, will succeed in leaving school
with some sort of qualification, but they will then struggle to find work
among employers who are well aware that a high school certificate is not the
mark of talent and dedication that it once was. Meanwhile, the genuinely
bright are forced to continue their studies to ever-higher levels in order
to distinguish themselves from their middle-of-the-road classmates,
sometimes postponing the start of rewarding careers in order to do so. Of
course, you can never have too much education. But you can definitely have
too much schooling.

As my friends will tell you, I am in no position to criticise those who take
their schooling for granted. I drifted ambivalently through high school,
went to university more-or-less for the hell of it to study a subject I had
no serious intention of pursuing as a career, and generally took full
advantage of an overgenerous Scottish education system built on the weird
belief that keeping people in school for ever-longer periods will make them
smarter. Nevertheless, as a student I always ensured that I made enough of
an effort to get good grades (and was pragmatic enough to try and drop
subjects in which attaining a high grade looked to be more trouble than it
was worth!). As a teacher, it is immensely frustrating to see students who
would be smart enough to get good grades if they worked hard wasting the
opportunity to do so. It is even more frustrating to see students who are
not smart enough to get good grades wasting their time on a subject in which
they are hopeless instead of admitting defeat and turning their attention to
something they are good at.

The problem is particularly acute with Ranwadi's hapless mob of Year 13s. At
this age, Vanuatu's smartest young people have left for urban colleges and
the bright lights of town; rural schools like Ranwadi pick up those who got
left behind. Standards among Ranwadi's Year 13s are so low that scraping a
pass in all four of your subjects is deemed a tremendous achievement. In
some semesters not a single student reaches even this minimal target.

It was great reluctance that I agreed to take on Year 13 classes this year.
Not because they are hard work - students who produce little work to be
marked, seldom bother asking for help in their studies and have few
scheduled classes (to which they do not always turn up) make for easy
teaching. The students are friendly enough, and some of the subject matter
in their courses is interesting. The problem is that it's all such a
depressing waste of time. It is miserable to stand in a tutorial trying to
explain what ought to be an interesting topic to students who have no
apparent interest in the subjects they chose to study - and are only present
at all because fifteen minutes after time the lesson was scheduled to start
I got fed up with waiting and went down to the dormitories to wake them up -
when there are a hundred more useful things I could be doing with the time.
Like sitting at my desk doodling interesting patterns onto the back of my
notebook.

"We find that students who do these courses in Year 13 are better prepared
when they come to university," explained the professorial old man with
enormous hair who came from the University of the South Pacific to visit the
school. "They have practise at taking responsibility for their own learning.
With other students we have an enormous headache trying to adapt them to
university life."

"But under this system, we get the headache," I pointed out.

"Personally I would be honoured if I had the opportunity to get a headache
in the interests of helping a young person improve his education," the
big-haired man responded airily.

Among the younger year groups at Ranwadi, fortunately, there are plenty of
students who have not yet lost the enthusiasm to learn. Often, I would
return to my house after a dreary attempt at getting the Year 13s to take an
interest in their work, muttering to myself that education in Vanuatu was a
waste of time and that the students would be better off scraping coconuts
back in their villages, only to have my thoughts brightened by visits from
Year 10s, Year 11s and Year 12s anxious for extra help with their
schoolwork. These students were dedicated and enthusiastic, and after
repeated visits it was clear that at least some of them were learning what
they had been taught. One Year 10 boy would come to me nearly every week
with a piece of Maths homework that his teacher had ticked and crossed, keen
to find out where had gone wrong and how he could avoid making each mistake
in future. Sometimes we would spend an hour together, working through each
concept that had caused the student difficulty until he was satisfied that
he now understood it. His visits were immensely time-consuming, but I was
glad that he came.

As the end of the year approached, the Year 10s and Year 12s began to
prepare in earnest for their final exams.

For students at Ranwadi, exam preparation involves two equally important
things: studying and praying.

As a good scientist, I completely support the idea that praying will help
the students pass their exams. The human psyche is a powerful thing, and the
belief that God is on their side will give students the confidence to
succeed, regardless of whether or not He is there to listen. However, I was
anxious to avoid the excesses of last year, when some students spent the
weekend before their exams staying up until midnight singing prayers and
going without food to show their devotion. I needn't bother telling you how
well the tired, famished students subsequently performed in their exams.

"The human brain is like an engine," I told my colleagues in a staff
meeting. "It needs rest, and it needs fuel. Its fuel is glucose sugar, which
it gets from the food we eat, and this is how much it needs in one day."

I held up the flask of white powder which I'd measured out in the science
lab. It was an impressive amount.

"I know some students will want to fast, or to stay up late praying. But
please, please, encourage the students to do those things well before their
exams begin. Let's give their brains a chance to recover so they're working
fully on the day of the exams."

To my surprise, the advice was followed.

While my colleagues organised spiritual sing-songs and a commissioning
ceremony (to formally place the students' fate in God's hands), I
concentrated on helping my Year 12 Physics and Chemistry students with the
other important aspect of exam preparation: revision. In Physics, I prepared
sheets of exercises that systematically covered each of the topics in the
course, to help them identify which areas they needed to focus on. The
students eagerly worked through the exercises, and periodically brought them
to me for checking. Some had done well.

To keep the Physics students interested during their revision, I set the
class a challenge during each lesson, which could be solved using the
techniques they had learned in the course. In each lesson, there was a
packet of chocolate biscuits as a prize for the student who came up with the
most accurate answer. For the first challenge, I gave them a metre stick and
a 100-gram weight, and asked them to tell me the mass of the stick. In the
next lesson, I gave them a ball and a stopwatch and asked them to tell me
the height of the room. In another session, I gave out metre sticks and
small mirrors, pointed at the mountaintop behind the school, told the class
how far away it was, and asked them to measure its height without leaving
the vicinity of the classroom.

To students who are fed on school meals worthy of a Dickensian orphanage
(except that Dickensian orphans were lucky enough not to live on an island
where the staple crop was swamp taro), a packet of chocolate biscuits is a
big deal. They took up the challenges with great enthusiasm, and a
surprising amount of skill. I knew that they would be a lot less confident
when faced with written questions, but even if they did badly in their
exams, it was nice to know that I had helped to educate young people who
could apply science to the problems of the real world.

My Chemistry students were having a harder time. Early on in their revision,
it became apparent that they had not only forgotten most of what they were
supposed to have learned in the past two years, but that even the items
listed in the syllabus as "prerequisite knowledge" - things they should have
known before they even began the course - bewildered them. I handed out
revision exercises, containing what I hoped were easy questions. The
students stared at them, baffled.

Some of these were bright students, who had answered the same questions
correctly when the topics had been covered earlier in the year. How could
they have forgotten so much? Whereas Physics involves things that are easy
to visualise - bouncing balls, light reflecting from mirrors, electricity
flowing around circuits - Chemistry is full of abstract concepts and
unfamiliar things. Although the students had learned a lot of individual
facts and techniques, it seemed that they had never really put it all
together in their heads.

Working through past exam papers with the Chemistry students, I did my best
to help them picture what was going on by getting out the chemicals and
giving demonstrations. Where the necessary chemicals weren't available, or
were highly dangerous, I found substitutes. If an exam question asked how to
speed up the rate of a reaction, I performed the reaction in the test tube
and invited the students to suggest ways of speeding it up, then tried them
to see if they worked. If a question asked about what colour of flame would
be produced by a particular burning substance, I allowed them to get a piece
of metal and a Bunsen burner and see for themselves what would happen. If a
question asked about the structure of molecules, I got out the coloured
balls and sticks.

"Chemistry is interesting," said one girl, after we had fizzed, burned,
boiled and modelled our way through one lengthy exam paper. She said it as
if this had never occurred to her before.

Formal classes came to an end, and the students were given a week to do
their own revision before the exams began. I photocopied a pile of past exam
papers, and prepared for a stream of students coming to my door in need of
last-minute help.

None came. To students at Ranwadi, any period in which there is no teacher
forcing them to sit in a classroom and work is, by definition, a holiday.
Their studies were finished for the year, their prayers had been said, and -
as far as they were concerned - all they had to do now was wait around for a
few days, fill in a few exam papers and go home. While they waited, they
amused themselves by wandering to and from the beach, kicking footballs
around, hanging out with the villagers, and twisting each other's hair into
elaborate styles. (You can always tell how much time the students have on
their hands by counting the number of girls with plaited hair.) Any attempt
to suggest that the students ought to be spending their time revising was
dismissed as if it was a ridiculous thing to expect of them.

At the end of the week, the two Year 12 classes held their end-of-year
parties. These followed the standard format of any Vanuatu celebration: a
room was decorated with palm fronds and other vegetation, and people spent
the day preparing dishes of food which they heaped onto a big table. Guests
turned up an hour late, each carrying a plastic plate, cup and spoon, found
that the party hadn't started yet, then wandered away for another hour. When
proceedings eventually began there was a salusalu greeting in which garlands
of flowers were hung around the necks of honoured guests (of which I was
one, along with the Year 12s' other teachers), followed by lengthy and
half-whispered speeches consisting mainly of thank-yous, during which
everyone sat and stared hungrily at the food. The speeches concluded with a
quick prayer, then an awkward moment as the most honoured of the guests
proved too polite to be the first to get up and fill his plate with food.
Eventually the guests lined up and took their plate-fulls, together with
cups of diluted fruit cordial, then sat with the plates on their laps
shovelling food into their mouths with their spoons and feeling that they
really ought to be showing their gratitude for the feast by making
conversation by somebody.

Anxious to put their years of malnourishment at the hands of the school
cooks behind them, the Year 12s had laid on an impressive feast. Spread on
the table were roast piglets, which the students had saved up their money to
buy, and a sizeable proportion of the school's chicken population. There
were fried fish, and delicious chunks of an enormous squid that the boys had
caught at night on the reef. ("So that's what they wanted the torch
batteries for," said Mr Neil.) There were pineapples, and watermelons that a
student's father had brought from his garden. There was a bright purple
vegetable whose colour couldn't possibly have been natural. There were
steaming pots of rice, and bowls of stew. At the end of table were cakes.
These presented guests with a dilemma: do you take a piece with the main
course and risk it getting soaked with gravy and pig juice, or do you wait
until later, by which time the cake might be all gone? (Or do you scoff the
cake as a starter, before starting on the main course?) One solution is to
balance the cake on the edge of your plate, teetering between the gravy and
a long fall.

The following Saturday, the Year 8 and Year 10 students held their own
end-of-term party, at lunchtime on the beach below the school. Mr Albion the
Agriculture teacher and a group of boys with machetes had spent much of the
week preparing for the event, and had transformed the sandy strip of trees
between the road and the seashore into an impressive party venue. The area
beneath the trees had been cleared of twigs and leaves and coconut-palm
detritus, and lines of benches had been nailed together out of pieces of
wood cut from nearby saplings. Tables had been brought down to the beach,
and a generator rumbling in the bushes powered a large sound system. Fringes
of green coconut frond had been twisted around the tree trunks, a pink
frangipani flowers fastened to each spine, and coloured balloons had been
strung from the branches of all the trees. Every so often one would explode
in the midday heat, startling nearby partygoers. A few of the balloons had
fallen into the ocean, where they bobbed like toys in a swimming pool. Beach
mats made from woven palm leaves had been left on the sand for those who
wanted to lie down. Younger children were swimming, while older ones who
wanted to cool off out on the water but didn't want to get salty were taking
turns in an outrigger canoe.

At the party, I was one of the guests invited to give a speech.

"You-fella ee lucky," I began. (Usually I insist on speaking proper English
in front of the students - it's the only way they'll learn - but as this was
a party I figured I'd give them a break.) British children go to outdoor
parties at this time of year, too, I explained, but those are nothing like
this. I tried to paint a picture of children standing around a giant bonfire
in a black field on the edge of town on a shivering November night, trying
through impossibly thick gloves to eat a wind-chilled hot dog without
getting ketchup on their scarves or losing the sausage onto the muddy
ground. (And enjoying the whole thing immensely, because unlike ni-Vanuatu
kids, British children do not normally get the chance to play around fires.)
It was all a very long way from a summer day on a South Pacific beach.

A few of the students, however, had their own ideas about how best to
celebrate the end of the year. Yeast and sugar began disappearing from the
school kitchens.

When the teachers discovered a bucket of homebrew hidden at the base of a
banana plant, they jokingly accused me of teaching the students too much in
Chemistry lessons. The teachers left the bucket in place, intending to come
back and replace its contents with seawater. However, when they returned,
the bucket had already gone.

The week before their final exams, three Year 10 boys were seen going into a
room that was later found to smell of alcohol. Nobody saw the boys drunk,
and the evidence connecting them to the alcohol was circumstantial. That
didn't matter. All three were expelled.

Getting drunk to celebrate the end of high school is a ritual for students
in Vanuatu, just as it is for students back home. Unfortunately, whilst the
teenagers' attitudes are much the same as those of their Western
counterparts, their parents' and teachers' attitudes are not. Students at
Ranwadi are particularly unfortunate in that the school is run by the
Churches of Christ, which disapproves of alcohol and kava even in the hands
of responsible adults. Originally, the church's discouragement of drinking
was probably a practical measure to ensure that the congregation was not
hung-over on Sunday morning, but groups of people have a tendency to become
fixated on the things they forbid. (Just look at the amount of newspaper
space devoted to paedophiles, or to Catholic priests caught with their
trousers down.) In the minds of many in the Church today, drinking is an
inexcusable sin, right up there with murder and adultery and coveting your
neighbour's livestock. At a recent staff meeting at Ranwadi, a colleague
circulated a piece of paper explaining how we could all strive for
"excellence" in our work. Under the subheading "spiritual excellence", he
had listed just one item: "alcohol and kava".

Under the discipline policy approved by the Ranwadi College council,
drinking is a capital offence. Steal or fight or run away from school and
you might be let off with a suspension or a week's hard labour, but touch
alcohol or kava and you will be out. In past years the school Principal, a
forgiving and tolerant person who believes in the goodness of people, was
deliberately lax about enforcing this rule; he preferred to give students a
second chance. However, after a particularly rampant homebrew-making season
at the end of last year, the Churches of Christ conference (which has
authority over the school) told the Principal sternly that from now on he
must stick to the rules. Any student caught drinking was to be expelled
immediately; no forgiveness allowed.

Of course, no head teacher ever utters the word "expel". Students are
"withdrawn" by their parents, then if possible "transferred" to inferior
schools. It is true that most of those forced out of Ranwadi are removed
with the grudging agreement of their parents, and will find places at other
schools. But regardless of the school's choice of verb, they leave under the
stigma of expulsion.

The locals gossiping in Pidgin English are in no doubt as to what has
happened: "All-ee chuck'em-out."

Later that week, I went down the kava bar to find Mr Albion sitting next to
a morose-looking Year 13 boy.

"It's all right, he's been thrown out of school already," said Albion,
seeing my surprise at the sight of a student in the kava bar.

There was no need to ask what the boy had done.

"I was thrown out of school when I was your age," Albion said to the
student, trying to console him.

"What for?" I asked.

"Smoking," Albion responded, as if it was a silly question. He walked over
to the candle illuminating the bar and lit his tube of rolled-up paper and
tobacco.

"I found another school and did well for myself," he went on. "These things
are all part of life's challenges."

The student looked unconvinced.

"I was nearly thrown out of school too, on the day before my exams," I
added.

"Just one of life's little challenges," Albion repeated, drawing a deep
breath of pungent smoke.

The student sat in silence and buried his head in his hands.

The following night, two more Year 13 boys joined their teachers down at the
kava bar.

"Why are the students such fools?" one of the villagers asked me afterwards.
"They know drinking is against the rules. They know they will get expelled
if they are caught. Why do they keep on doing it?"

"They do it precisely because it's against the rules," I said. "They want to
rebel." For a certain variety of teenager, the fact that they were risking
their educational lives by drinking only increased the temptation.

- - -

Exam week arrived, with much moving of tables and chairs. Teachers hung
around outside the chapel, which had been converted into an examination
room, waiting to ask their students how they had got on.

"Fine," they all responded. Some smiled more weakly than others.

The teachers flicked anxiously through spare copies of the papers, hoping
that there were no questions they hadn't covered in class. Occasionally
there was muttering that a question was unfair or didn't make sense. (The
Vanuatu Ministry of Education steadfastly refuses to let native English
speakers check its exam papers.)

My Physics and Chemistry students were among the last to sit their exams.
When the Physics exam was over, I took a copy of the paper and opened it at
the first page. It was a question on data networking.

"This is a question from a Computer Studies exam!" I protested.

"Yes, they misprinted that page," the invigilator told me. "Don't worry, we
handed out correction sheets."

On the last day of the Year 12s' exams, other students gathered in a mob
outside the chapel to give their friends a wash. Some carried buckets of
flour and water and mashed-up leaves. Others had talcum powder. One boy held
up a rotten papaya. Most of the school - including the teachers - had
gathered to watch. Students huddled nervously inside the chapel, besieged
like medieval fugitives taking refuge in the house of God. One by one, they
plucked up the courage to step out of the door, and were greeted with
showers of beige liquid and mushy fruit.

That evening, some Year 12 boys and their friends headed down to the
village.

"My brother is roasting a pig for them in the kitchen," Smith the barkeeper
told me at the kava bar. "We've prepared a big poubelle of kava. Why don't
you go and join them?"

"You shouldn't be giving kava to the students," I said.

"It's OK now that their exams have finished," Smith assured me. "They're not
really students any more - they're just hanging around waiting for a ship
home."

I headed over to the family's kitchen. Like nearly all Vanuatu kitchens,
this was a separate hut - traditional cooking is too dirty and smoky to be
done in the main house - with a dirt floor and a roof of natanggura palm
leaves. Smoke from the cooking fire seeped through the roof, curing the
leaves. (Villagers often take strips of thatch from old kitchens to use on
other buildings, knowing that they will last an exceptionally long time
before rotting.)

I was intercepted at the door of the kitchen by one of my Chemistry
students, staggering out of a clump of banana plants nearby. He took me by
the hand and spoke to me in a high-pitched voice. The boy had clearly been
drinking more than just kava.

"I just want to say thank you for all that you have done for us," he said.
"Thank you for teaching us Chemistry. I'm sorry if we didn't work as hard as
we could have done in your lessons, and I want to thank you for forgiving
us."

I returned the compliments - this particular boy had been a good student -
and went into the kitchen, which glowed orange in the light of the fire.
Several students were sitting along a bench at one side of the hut, next to
a stereo playing music. A couple of young girls were sitting by the fire
carving up lumps of pig and taro. Smith's mother sat on a stump at the back
of the kitchen, keeping a gentle eye on the children.

One of the boys shuffled along the bench to create a space, and motioned
eagerly for me to sit down beside him. He, too, shook my hand.

"I want to express my thanks to you for all that you have done for us as a
teacher," he said. I didn't think I'd even taught this particular student,
but I accepted the compliment. This is nice, I thought: we should let the
students drink more often. Not only were they charming when drunk, but they
were speaking good English with a confidence I had never heard before.

"Hey, give Mr Andrew some kaekae," called out Smith's brother, who was
chatting to someone outside.

"I only came to chat," I said. A generous bundle of pig and taro was
nevertheless pressed into my hands.

The school Discipline Master appeared in the kitchen doorway. He glared at
the students, but didn't stop their party.

"Make'm sure you-fella ee sleep 'long place here tonight," he said. Don't
come back into the school until you're sober. "You hear'em?" He turned
around and went off to the kava bar.

I stayed with the students for a while. Smith's mother and the girls cleared
away the remains of the food and left the boys to their party. People began
dancing. Students passed around bottles and cigarettes. I declined the
cigarettes and whatever nasty-looking mixture was in the bottles, but
accepted a couple of shells of kava from the poubelle. Being offered kava by
my students felt like being offered marijuana by a policeman, but what they
were doing here was a gesture of friendship, not of rebellion. More boys
shook my hand and thanked me for whatever I had done for them. I had never
had the chance to socialise with most of them outside the awkward confines
of a teacher-student relationship, and was struck by what good-natured
people they were.

"Do you think what we're doing is wrong?" one boy asked.

"If you did it during school time, yes, it would be wrong," I said. "It
would spoil your studies." My eyes glanced sideways with hypocrisy. "But
you've worked hard and your exams are over now. I think you're entitled to
have a good time just this once."

By teenage standards it did, indeed, seem to be a very harmless piece of
fun. Nobody was being loud or aggressive, no girls were there to get in
trouble with the boys, nobody was consuming anything illegal, and apart from
headaches the next morning I doubted anyone would be any the worse for their
night of celebration. I thanked Smith's brother and the students for their
hospitality, and made my way cheerfully back to school. I felt proud to have
helped educate such a decent group of young people.

Under the searing blue and yellow light of a South Pacific morning, things
looked different. Contrary to what Smith and his brother had believed, the
students' party was not OK with the school. A list was made of all the Year
12s who had been drinking. They were ordered to pay a fine of 5000 vatu
($50) - otherwise the school would withhold their leaving certificates - and
told that they would not be admitted back to Ranwadi for Year 13.

The list of those thus expelled read like a roll call of the best and
brightest of the Year 12 boys. It included the top students from my Physics
and Chemistry classes, prefects and class captains, sportsmen who had won
medals for their school, a student who had been short-listed for the annual
'citizen of the year' award, and the Head Boy. There were students who had
worked with enthusiasm in my lessons, and come to my house in the afternoons
for extra help with their work. Students who had seen me struggling to hack
down bushes with a machete in my garden and come over to give me a hand, and
students who had done gruelling weekly chores around the school with smiles
on their faces. Students who always leaned out of the window to shout a
cheerful hello when a teacher walked past their dormitories. Students who
had asked me for references so they could apply to training colleges.
Students who had not only achieved good results in their studies, but had
been valuable members of the community, and an asset to their school. All
their shining records thrown out of the window because of one harmless night
of fun.

I was furious. It was reasonable, I conceded, for the school to disapprove
of the students' behaviour. While waiting for the ship home they were still
under Ranwadi's care, and the sight of students staggering around still
drunk the next morning had been an embarrassment to the school. But if the
students' party was forbidden, why hadn't the Discipline Master put a stop
to it? And who had given Smith's brother the impression that it was OK to
prepare kava for the students? If there was blame to be handed around, the
boys were not the only ones who deserved it. Most of all, though, I was
angry that the students had been told that they were not welcome back next
year.

What will happen to the school, I thought, if it callously throws out good
students who make occasional mistakes whilst allowing those who wilfully
waste their time and make no effort in their studies to keep on coming back
for more? Some of those boys had achieved a lot during their time at
Ranwadi, and done a lot to help the school. Did all that count for nothing?

I asked the Principal if there was any chance that the students could be
given a second chance. He shook his head and muttered about "policy". He
looked unhappy about the situation too, but his hands were tied.

The Churches of Christ had fallen into the same trap as anti-drugs
campaigners all over the world: the belief that punishing people ever-more
harshly for using a substance will dissuade them from doing so. A belief so
obvious and seemingly irrefutable that people maintain it even when it
proves completely and catastrophically wrong.

Tightening the screws on students who broke the rules had merely increased
the temptation to do so, and had harmed the school in the process by
depriving it of good students. The hysterical reaction had also undermined a
perfectly sensible piece of advice - that excessive drinking is bad for you.
Tell students who drink only once and do so after their last exam has
finished that their drinking will ruin their education, and your advice is
as likely to be believed as the cry that there is a wolf on the
mountainside.

I would like to think that the Churches of Christ conference will look at
this year's events and draw the conclusion that their policies for
discouraging drinking do not work, and need to be re-thought. But I suspect
that elders will cling instead to their faith: that the world is a place of
rights and wrongs, that teenagers respond rationally to authority, and that
good kids are the ones who Just Say No.