Andrew Gray's travel tales

17th January

2008-01-17T10:24:00.001Z

After spending Christmas in Scotland, I am now on my way back to Pentecost
Island for another year.

With my teaching commitments, together with a time-consuming project to
document the island's languages (see www.pentecostisland.net/languages),
it's unlikely that I'll have much time for blogging this year. However, I
may write an occasional entry.

You can find tidied and illustrated versions of older blog entries and other
articles at www.andrewgray.com/pacific.

Best wishes to everyone for 2008.

14th December

2007-12-17T12:24:00.001Z

I wonder if Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, ruler of Dubai, ever built model cities out of Lego when he was a child.

Lego is a great medium for acting out fantasies. Given a wide enough bedroom floor and a large enough supply of bricks - and I bet Sheikh Mohammed's family could have afforded millions - you can design pretend cities with whatever utopian architecture you can dream of. Bestriding your city like a god, you can concentrate on the grandest building projects without worrying about tedious details like infrastructure or the environment. It doesn't matter if your Lego city has no agriculture and no water supply, other than inedible plastic flowers and undrinkable blue tiles, because the little people are made of plastic and will never go hungry and thirsty. It doesn't matter if your Lego city lacks adequate housing for its population, or adequate roads and railways to move them around (other than the stretch of track you built because it looked cool), because the little people will stand wherever you put them and will never complain. They are certainly not in a position to vote you out of your bedroom if you prove to be a lousy designer.

But why would the young Sheikh Mohammed have bothered with Lego, when he knew that one day he would have a real city to play with?

It would have taken an army of hyperactive children to build a Legoland on the scale of twenty-first century Dubai. (Fortunately, since Dubai is made of concrete rather than Lego, its designers have been able to do the job by exploiting imported Asian labourers instead.) A city of over a million people, which has increased its population by fifty times in as many years, the little emirate has come a long way from its beginnings two centuries ago as tiny village beside a small inlet of the Persian Gulf. Back then, the place was so insignificant that when the Al Maktoum family turned up in 1833 and declared themselves its rulers nobody bothered to try and stop them. The only resources Dubai had, apart from pearl-producing oysters and few date palms, were a modest amount of yet-to-be-discovered oil and a well-located harbour.

Oil money lubricated the city's growth, but it was the latter resource that really powered Dubai's transformation into a major city. Ever since the late nineteenth century, Dubai's rulers have encouraged foreign merchants to do business in the emirate, luring traders away from neighbouring ports with offers of lower taxes and greater commercial freedom. Today the city boasts vast industrial Free Trade Zones, an international airport that serves a regional hub and the base for one of the world's best airlines (which was why I ended up there), a thriving financial sector, and a growing status as a tourist destination. Not to mention a construction industry that has seen cranes rise like lampposts and nearly every street corner dug up by roadworks, while dusty cement factories spread for miles across the outskirts of the city. On Pentecost, I know of villagers who have struggled for years to find the money for a few bags of cement in order to build themselves a small chapel. In Dubai, concrete is poured like water. The emirate's rulers have no intention of going back to their tents in the desert after the oil runs out.

For wealthy sheikhs, and their foreign business partners, Dubai is a spectacular playground. It includes the world's grandest hotel, luxury waterfront developments, glitzy conference centres, glamorous shopping malls, a vast acreage of polished marble, and (in an impressive feat of air-conditioning) the Arabian desert's only ski centre. Its buildings stand taller and shinier than in almost any other city on earth.

But there is something distinctly uncomfortable about being one of the little people in somebody else's Lego fantasy.

"What did you do during your stopover in Dubai?" people asked me when I got home.

Well, I wandered around shopping malls admiring things I couldn't afford to buy, and wandered around the city admiring hotels I couldn't afford to stay in and developments I could never afford to invest in. I sat on the armchairs in Starbucks (not a place I'm fond of back in Britain, but a great refuge in stressful foreign cities) and flicked through guidebooks trying to find attractions that were affordable and could be reached by public transport. I can recommend the Dubai Museum, and the city's historic areas are worth a look in spite of their faked-up appearance, but there wasn't much else.

In between, spent a large proportion of the time sitting on overcrowded and infrequent buses trying to get from one part of the city to another. Sometimes I would get out at a bus stop that seemed like a short walk from where I wanted to be, only to find that it was in fact a two mile trek through grey industrial suburbs where gangs of Indian workers laboured in the desert heat and lorries thundered past. I picked my way on foot between lanes of murderous traffic, and negotiated junctions circumsected by barriers and roadworks. On one occasion I was actually forced to take a taxi in order to cross a highway.

When I built Lego towns I never thought to include road crossings either.

In none of the hundred or so cities I've visited have I spent so much time on buses, walked so many miles, breathed so much dust and carbon monoxide - and seen so little of interest - as I did in Dubai.

Above all, the emirate is a tragic waste of an opportunity. If all of its grand constructions had been clustered together in one place, and connected by a transport system as futuristic as the buildings it served, Dubai would be a wonder of the world: far and away the most impressive city on Earth. Instead, the buildings have been scattered like loose boulders over a hundred square miles of desert. The effect of this obscene sprawl has been to reduce a potential Futurama to something closer to an oversized Milton Keynes, except that Milton Keynes is pleasant and green.

Even the tallest of all Dubai's buildings is unimpressive when viewed over such sprawling distances. This is the Burj Dubai, a tapering tower which will eventually stand around half a mile high, a symbol of the emirate's prowess and the most obvious Freudian expression yet of what Sheikh Mohammed is trying to achieve with his city. The building is still under construction, and its exact projected height is a secret (Dubai is not the only up-and-coming city playing the "mine is bigger than yours" game), but it has already outstripped Toronto's CN Tower as the world's tallest structure - the first time since the days of the Pyramids that a Middle Eastern construction has held the record.

The Burj Dubai bears a resemblance to certain artists' renderings of the Tower of Babel, the Biblical construction built by humans in an arrogant attempt to climb to heaven.

The people of Babel got off lightly: God put a stop to their work by the simple measure of confounding their language. That wouldn't work in Dubai. With immigrants from over 90 countries whose lingua franca seems to be broken English of the most awkward kind, the emirate's language is already thoroughly confounded, yet still the buildings rise. Whatever God, or fate, eventually does to put a stop to Dubai will to have to be a lot nastier.

In fact, the inhabitants of this oil-fuelled little emirate may already have sealed their fate. Those who find Dubai a hideous excess can take grim comfort in one fact: few parts of it are an appreciable height above sea level. And when the water begins to lap around the base of the skyscrapers, no city will more richly deserve its fate.

5th December

2007-12-14T18:14:00.000Z

Oban certainly had the feel of a Scottish village. Elderly couples strolled
along the seafront, wrapped up against the wind, while younger visitors with
heavy boots and backpacks tramped out a route between the hiking trail and
the inn. Local people stopped to have conversations with passers-by in the
street. Small boats took fishermen out to sea, or took tourists out to watch
the birds and seals on nearby islands. The narrow roads and spacious houses
of the village were strung out along a rocky shoreline, splashed with chilly
waves and smacked with kelp and bladder wrack. The rocks were interspersed
with sandy coves and promontories of scrubby trees and yellow grasses,
backed by a forested wilderness. On one side was the spill and wash of the
ocean; on the other the skyline was underlain by a distant range of
mountains. In such a setting it would have been easy to believe that I was
already back in the Highlands.

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

2007-12-07T07:31:00.000Z

"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.

Msg sent via ecosse - http://www.ecosse.net/

23rd November

2007-12-02T19:24:00.001Z

"It's like a modern form of grade-taking," Mr Neil observed, after the
Vanuatu government announced that this year there would be national exams
for the country's Year 8 students, in addition to the usual exams sat by
Years 10, 12 and 13.

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.

16th November

2007-11-18T23:04:00.000Z

One Sunday after church, Sara put on her best dress and stood in front of a
crowd of villagers to make her apology.

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

2007-11-12T00:32:00.000Z

-----------
"Pictures came and broke your heart,
Put the blame on VCR."

- 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.