Filth colonises an empty house rapidly in the tropics. My house's previous occupants had not been gone that long, but from the volume of spider webs, hornet nests and dusty grime, it might have been abandoned ever since I was last teaching at Ranwadi College eight years ago. Or since that week in September 2001 when the world changed and everyone remembers where they were: in my case, on my way for the first time to the strip of land on the very edge of the world map that was first sighted by Europeans on the day of the Holy Spirit.
Pentecost Island, forty miles long, half a mile high and about a thousand miles across the ocean from Australia's Great Barrier Reef, is muddy, malarious, isolated, choked with vegetation, circumsected by ravines and has rainfall levels that make the greyest parts of Britain look arid. It is also one of the friendliest, most fascinating and most spectacularly beautiful places on Earth.
Now I was back.
Ranwadi College, my once and future home, was founded in 1902 when an islander who had been taken away to work on the sugar plantations of Queensland returned home with a burning desire to teach people about a man named Jesus. In the old days, islanders had passed on knowledge through storytelling and sand drawing, and used the island's abundant flora as a way of passing on messages. A blood-coloured leaf across a path indicated punishment for anyone who used the path; waking up to find a nettle tree planted on your doorstep was a sign that you had annoyed somebody. Spirits and deities were communicated with in similar ways. However, Jesus's religion came with a long instruction manual, so with Him came literacy and the teaching of English, and Ranwadi grew into something resembling a modern school.
Like all secondary schools in rural Vanuatu, Ranwadi is a boarding school - the local population is finely scattered and no school bus could cope with the roads. And like all Vanuatu schools, it is an odd mixture of the primitive and the modern. It runs to a timetable, but the time is announced with the beating of a traditional wooden slit drum. Students are each required to come armed with a machete, with which they are put to work twice a week defending the school against the ever-invading jungle. The school has a well-equipped science laboratory, teaches that Jesus is the only possible route to knowledge and understanding, and occasionally uses magic to punish its students (unlike at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, there is no policy against this). Unlike most settlements on the island, it has electricity, at least for the few hours in the evening when the generator is running, and piped water, at least when no clods of leaves or stream-dwelling eels have blocked the pipes.
Back in the 2000s, Western volunteers comprised about a third of Ranwadi's staff. We were here mainly for the adventure, but the organisations who sent us claimed that we were helping to train and build up local expertise, and surprisingly, it seems that we did. Local teachers, many of them newly graduated, now staff the school, and one of my former students is now doing my old job. Sexual assaults and natural disasters drove off the last few Western volunteers. Pentecost was spared the worst of Cyclone Pam, the mega-storm that tore up parts of Vanuatu two years ago, but "Visitor Trapped On Storm-Ravaged Island" is too good a headline for news outlets to pass up.
Ranwadi was partially rebuilt with Australian aid money in the mid-2000s, and the main school buildings, on a breezy mountainside overlooking the ocean, are among the best constructed on the island. However, since newly-graduated ni-Vanuatu teachers, unlike Westerners of a similar age, tend to come with young families, the school had been left perpetually short of staff housing. The school badly needed a teacher this term, the Principal had told me, but the only available house was the old school driver's house. The house isn't the same standard as some of the others, I was warned.
Ancillary staff at Ranwadi are beneath the teaching staff, literally, being housed at the bottom of a hill next to the ocean. A slippery path leads up the hill, among tree roots, cassava plants and outcrops of uplifted reef, to the main school buildings. Unlike the main school campus, the place has the air of a village, although the houses are constructed mostly of modern materials and the school's electricity and water supplies just about reach them. Outside my new house, a broken stump of pipe that once bore a tap gently squirted water with the exact motion of a man taking a never-ending piss. A more profusely-leaking pipe outside the neighbour's house served as the main water supply. The neighbours had taken advantage of the wet patch created by the continuous water leak by planting swamp taro. Mosquitoes had also taken full advantage. Broken coral hauled from the shore kept people's feet out of the mud. Another clump of swamp taro marked the outflow from the tin shack where everyone showered. The door of the shack looked like it could fall off its hinges any time, leaving a naked bather in full view of
the students on the school sports field. People spoke of the school handyman in the same way that they spoke of the devils that haunt the roads at night - everyone took it as a fact that he existed, and some even claimed to have seen him recently, but I saw little evidence.
Up on the hill among the good buildings, the school principal's house was beautifully decorated, with white and pink streamers dangling from every part of the ceiling. "Christmas decorations," he explained, as he invited me in for lunch. It was 31st May.
The principal I'd worked with a decade ago had now left the teaching profession and spent his retirement fund getting himself elected as a Member of Parliament. He could now be found travelling around the capital in a shiny black government car, contemplating the government's response to
climate change and trying to persuade the Chinese to build roads to villages whose people had voted for him. His were big shoes to fill, but after a string of 'acting principals', the school council had settled on one of the senior teachers whom I'd worked alongside in the mid-2000s as a permanent replacement. Like some of the other faces I recognised from a decade ago, the new principal had done time at other schools but kept coming back to Ranwadi, "back in the same little boxes where we keep living our lives".
Like his predecessor, the new principal knew a thing or two about looking after white people, including the fact that we didn't get on well with cooking on open fires. A gas cylinder and stove duly appeared in my house the next day. For connecting the two there was only a piece of garden hose, twice the diameter of a gas pipe. With bits of tape jammed into the ends, gas appeared to be coming out in the right place, but a couple of minutes into my cooking, jets of flame began shooting out of the back of the stove and up the wall behind. As a gap year volunteer sixteen years ago I wouldn't have known simple things like how to hurriedly turn the gas bottle off at the valve.
While I was out that evening, some students sent by the Principal came by and cleaned the worst of the filth out of the house. I was glad that I hadn't locked the house properly. Since there was no glass in some of the windows, it had seemed pointless. I hoped that my new neighbours were intrusive enough to be relied upon for security. The students who cleaned the kitchen hadn't taken any of the food, but for some reason they had left the lids off my rat-proof containers. Luckily the local rats didn't yet seem to have noticed that the house was re-occupied.
A large hornet now buzzed around continuously under the dining table looking for a place to rebuild its smashed nest.
The next morning, my neighbour the Boarding Master knocked on my door - or rather, shouted outside to get my attention, as is the more common local habit - and proposed a house swap. "If you live alone in this house it will be hard to keep fowl off the verandah," he explained. The fowl on the verandah seemed to be the least of the house's problems (they certainly bothered me less than the hornet under the dining table) and he could just as easily have said "I currently have a family of six jammed into a two bedroom house, and the house you've been put in is far too big for you." I readily agreed to the swap. I wondered why nobody had asked the Principal's permission to move into the bigger house earlier, when it was still empty. But jealousies are aroused easily in small island communities, and the best way to prevent them is for everyone to keep following the same routines they have always followed, even after that ceases to make sense. The driver's house was the driver's house, even though the driver had decamped to the neighbouring village. Only when the principal had been forced by
circumstances to allow it to someone other than the driver - and there was an outsider who could legitimately be claimed to need rescuing from offensive chickens - could houses be reshuffled without upsetting the school's delicate status quo.
An hour later, we had both moved house. I didn't even need to make myself a fresh cup of tea; I just carried a half-full teapot across to my new house.
Shortly before sunset I took my shampoo along to the next village, where a waterfall thunders into a natural swimming pool. Men on the beach greeted me in four languages. Where the road rounded the headland, the ocean lapped and sucked at the reef. Behind and beyond rose the island, draped in mottled green and dappled along its ridges with wisps of cloud.
I was back.
