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.

30th October

2007-10-31T23:41:00.000Z

One of my favourite books is William Golding's "Lord of the Flies", one of
the few stories written about schoolboys or about tropical islands that
accurately captures the spirit of either. The setting for the book is a
coral island with jagged castles of rock jutting out into the ocean at
either end. It is from one of these precipices that a boy is sent flying to
his death towards the end of the story, as the marooned youngsters' efforts
at co-operation unravel and the group descends into savagery.

Like the island in Lord of the Flies, Pentecost has rocky precipices at
either end. In the north, the long nose of the island terminates in Vatubwe
Rock, a symbolic landmark from which a popular local string band takes its
name. At the opposite end, the tail of the island forks like the rear of a
centipede, with a deep bay separating two peninsulas tipped with
wave-smashed rock. On one peninsula, a bright white church marks the
location of Point Cross, the southernmost village on the island. The other
peninsula tapers down to a blunt stone that cuts defiantly into the ocean
like the prow of a ship, sundering the oncoming waves into a spectacular
foam. This Rock is known in stories and sand drawings as Vatangele.

According to North Pentecost legend, the spirits of the dead must jump off
both Vatubwe Rock and Vatangele Rock on their road to the afterlife. For
many of these ghosts, the trip down to Vatangele will be their first. It's a
long way down to the southern tip of the island, along pathways that only
the ni-Vanuatu would describe as 'roads', and unless they have relatives in
that neck of the woods there are few reasons why the living would bother
going there.

I did have a reason to travel down to the southern end of Pentecost: as part
of my project to catalogue the island's languages, I wanted to learn more of
South Pentecost language, especially the exotic dialect of it that is spoken
only in a few villages in the far south. In addition, I was curious to "look
the place", as the locals describe sightseeing. An excuse for a long weekend
away came up at the start of October, thanks to Constitution Day (one of the
meaningless occasions that Vanuatu's founding fathers added to the calendar
after realising that when weekends and legitimate holidays were taken away
it still left an exhausting 255 working days in the year), and I set off
southwards.

A couple of hours of walking and hitching on the back of trucks took me to
Pangi and Salap, the tiny conurbation of a few dozen thatched and tin-roofed
houses that constitutes Pentecost's southern hub. On cruise ship days, Pangi
mills with people like an English village on the day of the annual fair, but
with the tourist season long past and the majority of the villagers away at
a Constitution Day football tournament in a neighbouring village, the place
was quiet and empty. One or two stragglers moafed about lazily in the sun,
while under a tree a couple of truck drivers sat and talked about money.

Though the last cruise ship of the year left Pangi four months ago,
squabbles were continuing over the hundreds of thousands of vatu in landing
fees paid to the villagers by P&O Cruises in return for the right to
periodically dump a thousand scantily-clad Australians there. Well-spent
money could do a lot of good in Pangi, whose school, church and clinic are
badly in need of funds, but the local bigman who collected the money had
shown little inclination, apparently, to share it with the community. Not
only that, but he had run up huge bills with local storekeepers and truck
drivers, who mistakenly assumed that he would use the cruise ship money to
pay them off.

"Man here ee account all-about," one of the truck drivers complained. That
man has debts everywhere.

"Me tell'em 'long him, say suppose him ee no pay'em me, by-and-by me take'm
chainsaw 'long nanggol," said the other driver. I threatened to take my
chainsaw to the land-diving tower unless I got paid.

The first driver nodded. "Suppose hem ee no family belong me, me make'm one
something finish," he said. I'd have done something to him already if he
wasn't a relative of mine.

The truck drivers weren't the only ones who were angry. Back in May, I
remembered a local chief telling me matter-of-factly that he had burned his
nephew's house down in a dispute over who was entitled to money from the
landing fees. The whole thing is a classic tale of the corrupting influence
of money, and could be made into a brilliant film or a play if Port Vila's
Wan Smol Bag theatre company hadn't already done so. "Pacific Star", their
insightful story about a community destroyed by cruse ship tourism, is good
entertainment, but it's deeply sad to see life imitating this particular
piece of art.

"We need to do more to ensure that tourism really benefits people on
Pentecost," the Principal at Ranwadi recently mused. He looked only a little
taken aback when I made a suggestion about how to achieve this, which
involved explosives and the Pangi jetty.

(In fairness to the people who visit on cruise ships, I should point out
that not all have been a curse to the local community. Being the only person
on Pentecost with a web site, I get occasional e-mails from people with an
interest in the island, and among these have been a handful of former cruise
ship passengers who were deeply touched by their visit. One asked how to go
about sending supplies to the local primary school, and another is now
sponsoring a student at Ranwadi. I am only sorry that these decent people
had to experience Pentecost in the way they did.)

Beyond Pangi, the southward route deteriorates from a good sandy road to a
good muddy road, then to a bad muddy road, then to a bad muddy overgrown
road, then to a network of ruts winding their way through the long grass in
a sun-dappled coconut grove. These ruts converge on the village of Ranputor,
from which the road continues to Banmatmat, home of the local Bible College.

The ghosts on their way to jump off Vatangele Rock don't have to worry about
the possibility of falling off a cliff on the way down - they're dead
already - but for mortals the journey from Ranputor to Banmatmat is an
unnerving one. A couple of feet wide in the better places, the 'road' runs
along a narrow ledge with the ocean slurping against rocks a worryingly long
way below. In places, it been paved with concrete, giving it the appearance
of a walkway in a Scottish hillside garden. Scotland, however, does not
suffer from earthquakes, nor from tropical rainstorms that erode soil away
by the sack-full. Both had taken their toll on the Banmatmat road. A few
sections had iron railings (not that I'd have dared to lean my weight on
them), and in a couple of places the aerial roots of overhanging banyan
trees walled in the path, like the concrete shelters protecting Swiss roads
from avalanches. Elsewhere there was nothing but the brown and blue of
overhanging tree branches and tropical air. After a mile or so of this, I
began to wonder if the Bible scholars at Banmatmat had designed the road in
the secret hope that an accidental fall would provide them with a swift and
easy route to Heaven. In slippery conditions I would have turned back, but
the weather was dry, and I trusted in my ability to keep my feet firmly on
the road. After all, I reasoned, people walk along narrow city sidewalks
without ever worrying that they will fall off, even though they would risk
being run over by the traffic if they did. The fact that the drop here was
twenty metres rather than twenty centimetres didn't make it any more likely
that I would fall.

From Banmatmat another treacherous little path led to Wanur, where the route
turned inland, cutting across the island's south-western peninsula. I was
accompanied here by a couple of women who were returning to their village on
the hilltop after going down to Wanur to use the peninsula's only telephone.
In contrast to the previous stretch of footpath, the route up from Wanur was
a sizeable road, almost wide enough for a truck, which had been levelled out
of the hillside by a considerable earth-moving operation.

"Road here ee good way," I commented.

"Me-fella ee dig'em," the women said proudly. People from our village dug
it.

"With'em spade, no more?"

The women nodded.

I whistled, impressed. Excavating a full-sized road out of the hillside
using nothing but gardening tools must have taken a lot of work.

"All-ee say, me-fella ee must got good road, belong carry'em sand-beach
with'em cement belong build'em church-house," one the women explained. They
told us we needed a good road to haul sand and cement so we could build a
church.

In rural Vanuatu, like in medieval England, houses of wood and thatch are
fine for people, but God deserves a well-built house.

"You-fella ee build'em church-house yet?"

"No, I-think road here ee no-good yet," the woman said. The road's still not
good enough.

She seemed to be resigned to the prospect of a lot more digging.

After a couple of miles of jungle, villages and gardens, the road surmounted
the hilltop and descended towards Bay Martelli, the deep stretch of water
that separates Pentecost's two southern tips. In the centre of the bay, the
road descended to the shore, where huge ocean waves funnelled by the
headlands swept up a broad expanse of charcoal-coloured beach. The bay faced
neighbouring Ambrym Island, whose looming volcanoes were responsible for the
blackness. If the volcanoes rumbled, the waves that came sloshing into the
bay would be terrifying. Yet it was an undersea earthquake that eventually
demonstrated to the inhabitants of Bay Martelli village, now rebuilt on
higher ground, what a dangerous place they had chosen to make their home in.
A solidly-built church and the cement ruins of a couple of houses can still
be seen on the flat patch of coastal scrubland where the village once stood.
Nothing remains of the other houses: those were made of sticks, and the
ferocious Big Bad Wolf that swept blackly out of the ocean on that terrible
night in 1999 blew them into driftwood. Vanuatu has many natural hazards -
volcanoes, earthquakes, cyclones, sharks and tropical diseases amongst them
- but tsunamis are the one that really features in my nightmares.

At the far end of the beach, I crossed a silty black river and found a small
track. This led up a grassy hillside onto the south-eastern peninsula of the
island, where nanggalat trees grew thickly amongst the coconuts. Seeing the
nanggalat growing in the open is like seeing a tiger in a zoo cage: you know
that it can't harm you unless you're stupid enough to go across and touch
it, yet you can't help a feeling of horror at what would happen to you if
you did. With stinging trees, as with tigers, it's the ones you don't see -
the ones that hide in the undergrowth - that you need to worry about.

At the top of the hill, nanggalat trees gave way to small houses. This was
Point Cross, my final destination.

Point Cross had a lovely and slightly unworldly feel to it. The village's
little thatched houses were built on a cluster of rounded grassy hills,
connected with winding paths and scattered with trees. I occasionally have
dreams set in a landscape like this, and have done ever since I was a young
child, but I don't know where I originally got the image from. It was like
Telly Tubby Land without the giant rabbits, or Hobbiton without the hobbit
holes. A bright and invigorating wind swept across the peninsula, blowing
life onto the hillsides. From one side of the village there were views
across the bay to Vatangele Rock, and on the other side the blue mist of the
open ocean.

As usual I'd tried and failed to get a message through that I was coming,
but the villagers couldn't have been more hospitable. At the nakamal I was
formally welcomed to the village over shells of kava, and several people
offered help with my language research. People asked about where I had come
from; several had sons and daughters at Ranwadi. Rebecca the local Peace
Corps girl offered me a slice of banana pie that she had baked over a fire
in the bottom of a gigantic cooking pot. She seemed to have baked enough for
the entire village.

"That's a dicey road you've got, coming from Pangi," I commented.

"Is it?" she asked innocently. "I've never tried it. My host father owns a
boat."

We chatted for a while. Rebecca had a simple life in Point Cross - teaching
in the local school, chatting and working and singing with her neighbours
and her adopted family, and baking banana pies - but she seemed
extraordinarily contended there.

"I'm not planning to go away at Christmas," she told me. "I'll stay here
with my host family."

The following day the villagers invited me to a movie night, for which the
old wooden nakamal had been converted into a makeshift cinema. A TV screen
was perched on a wooden platform, the dirt floor was covered with mats and
coconut leaves for the children to sit on, and for the adults benches were
borrowed from the church. To power the TV a small electricity generator was
rigged up outside, its noise quite well muffled by the low thatched roof. I
sat and watched the movies, occasionally leaning over to answer questions
from the other movie-goers and help them to translate awkward pieces of
English. Men grinding kava at the back provided refreshments, and I passed
around the pack of chocolate biscuits that I'd bought from the village
store.

Did they really build a wall right across the island?, the men asked, as
on-screen barbarians stormed Hadrian's Wall.

Yes, I said. An island ten times as wide as this one. I've seen the remains
of the wall.

It's a shame you can't stay here longer, the villagers said. We hope you get
the chance to come back sometime.

I hoped so too. Point Cross - a little community on a sunny hill at the edge
of a distant island - seemed like the kind of place where you could settle
down happily and forget that there was a universe beyond. I thought of
Spectre, the ethereal little village from the movie Big Fish, a place not
quite part of the real world.

Perhaps I fell off the Banmatmat road and I'm now in the afterlife, I mused,
looking out over round green hills and palm trees, my body feeling almost
lighter than usual in the warm wind. Of course, if this tropical Telly Tubby
Land really was my Heaven, they wouldn't have left out the giant rabbits.

- - -

The first thing that spoiled my dreamy weekend in Point Cross was a change
in the weather. When the vigorous ocean wind turned grey and became laced
with bullets of rain, the place no longer felt like Heaven. It felt more
like Scotland.

The second downturn in events came when I got up before dawn, feeling
thirsty, and took a long swig out of a water bottle that had been left for
me in the rest house where I was staying. Paraffin (or kerosene, as it's
known in Vanuatu and most of the non-British world) has no taste as such,
only a smell, and it took a surprisingly long time for this to hit me. Nor
did I notice the artificial blue tint of the liquid, which is supposed to
ensure that nobody mistakes it for anything drinkable but is virtually
invisible by torchlight.

I staggered out into the darkness and spat out what I could, feeling the
oily texture on my lips, but I had already swallowed a considerable amount.

Point Cross in the early hours of the morning is not the place to
inadvertently poison yourself. One reality of life on Pentecost that
visitors usually put to the back of their minds that in an emergency they
would be an extremely long way from medical help. The nurses working at
Pentecost's few small clinics are good at patching up cuts and bruises, and
can dispense antibiotics and anti-malarial pills to those who look as if
they need them, but a serious medical problem would necessitate a trip to
hospital in Port Vila or Luganville. Even in town, you might not be in safe
hands: although Vanuatu's politicians regularly pledge to bring the
country's two hospitals up to "international standards", some of the stories
I've heard suggest that they have a long way to go. (A foreigner needing a
blood transfusion would be in particular trouble, since certain blood types,
including mine, are genetically absent among the ni-Vanuatu.) The nearest
truly good hospitals are in Australia, a thousand miles away. Even with
insurance company on hand to organise a medical evacuation, it would be many
hours between calling for help and being wheeled through the doors of the
emergency room. And that's assuming that you are able to call for help in
the first place. Mobile phones don't work in most of Vanuatu, and many
villages - Point Cross included - are miles from a telephone. In outlying
areas there are teleradios, but these too are few and far between.

For the time being, I had only my knowledge of science to help. What would
paraffin do to my body? Would I go blind, like those who drink methylated
spirits? Probably not: there's a specific chemical reason why meths makes
you blind, and it doesn't apply to paraffin. Perhaps paraffin was an inert
substance, which would do no harm at all. That was probably too much to hope
for. The human body is based on water; introducing other solvents unbalances
its many delicate equilibria with unpleasant results. As I'd taught my
science students, water molecules sparkle with tiny electric charges that
interact with tiny charges on the surfaces of molecules like proteins and
sugars, holding the body's complex chemical framework in place.
Carbon-containing solvents, which are very different in their chemistry,
refuse to participate in this game. Instead they entice other molecules,
such as the oily layers in our cell membranes that ought to remain firmly in
place, to come out and play. I pictured paraffin molecules as the students
would model them in the science lab - crooked black chains with white knobs
sticking out of the sides, like poisonous caterpillars burrowing their way
into my body.

How much paraffin would it take, though, before my cells disintegrated like
droplets of grease in a bowl of washing-up liquid? The only solvent other
than water that I'd ever attempted to drink before was alcohol. If the
volume of liquid that I'd just drunk was pure alcohol, it would make me
sick, but it wouldn't kill me. However, this was not alcohol. As organic
solvents go, alcohol is fairly water-like in its chemistry, and since it
occurs naturally in rotting fruit our bodies have a mechanism for dealing
with it. Since oil rigs were few on the prehistoric savannah, evolution
never equipped our bodies with the means to detoxify petrochemicals.

At least if I died here I wouldn't have far to travel to jump off Vatangele
Rock, I thought. The trek up north to Vatubwe would be a bitch, but I'd have
all eternity to do it.

Technically, I realised, the paraffin was not inside my body yet. As far as
scientists are concerned, the gut is an external space - it's only once a
substance has crossed the barrier into the bloodstream that it's said to
have been absorbed into the body. There was still time to prevent that
happening. I looked around the hut for something with which to make myself
vomit. (I discovered later that this was the wrong thing to do: vomiting
increases the risk that droplets of paraffin will find their way into your
lungs, where they can cause life-threatening inflammation. Such advice is
easy to look up in a world of books and Internet connections, but wasn't
available at Point Cross in the early hours of the morning.) All that I
could find was a sachet of instant coffee mix. This had been given to me
with my morning tea but I hadn't used it, because the taste of coffee makes
me sick. Perfect. I ripped open the sachet and poured the contents into my
mouth. The wet powder in my mouth was like caffeinated cement: unpleasant,
like a dry version of the coffee-flavoured chocolates that manufacturers put
in selection boxes to punish the person who leaves it until last to pick one
out, but not enough to make me vomit. The coffee was weak, and mixed with
milky creamer which diluted the bitterness. I chewed on the mixture for as
long as I could bear, then walked to the door and in a reflex honed by
nights down at the kava bar, spat it out into the darkness and the rain.

I looked around for something else that I could swallow to make me sick.
Saltwater? There was no salt around, and the guesthouse was a long way up
the hill from the sea. How about drinking a lot of fresh water then? My
water bottle - the one that had actually contained water - was empty, and
there was no tap in the vicinity, but just outside the guesthouse was a
metal shelter containing a shower. I hopped from the front doorstep to the
door of the shower, avoiding the muddy patch between, and began trying to
catch the spray from the showerhead in the water bottle. There was a loud
clattering noise, above the noise of the rain, as a disturbed rat ran back
and forth along the top of one of the walls, inches from my head. After a
couple of seconds' dithering, the rat decided that it disliked the look of
me more than it disliked the look of the weather outside, and disappeared
out of the shelter.

By the time I had filled the water bottle, my shorts were soaked with spray,
as was my torch, which continued shining obliviously. I gulped down the
water, then refilled it and gulped down more. After two or three
bottle-fulls, my stomach began to ache. I walked out into the bushes,
bracing myself against the rain, and managed to throw up. Only a small
amount of the liquid came up, but it included a disproportionate amount of
the paraffin, which had been floating on top of the water in my stomach. The
texture of the liquid in my mouth was dull and oily. I repeated the
exercise. This time it was better - more acid and less oil.

It was futile trying to bring up every last drop, I realised - the greasy
paraffin would stick to the walls of my throat in a way which made that
impossible. I burped, and could still taste paraffin. I briefly wondered
whether I could bring it all up that way - burping up vapour - but after a
minute or two of forced burping I gave up. The reason paraffin is a fuel of
choice for lanterns is that it's dense and doesn't evaporate easily. I would
have to let the rest pass through, to be broken down, or excreted, or
exhaled… what would the human body do with paraffin? The enzymes that break
down alcohol would do nothing to it, nor would the chemical machinery that
processes oils in foods, which are of a different type. Perhaps it wouldn't
be absorbed at all, and all I'd have to endure would be a period of oily
diarrhoea, like people who take slimming drugs to prevent their bodies
absorbing fat. I doubted that I'd get off that lightly - paraffin molecules
are smaller and more slippery than fat molecules, and could probably worm
their way through the lining of my intestine and into my bloodstream without
much difficulty - but just the thought of it was enough to send me rushing
in the direction of the toilet.

By the standards of rural Vanuatu toilets, the one at the guesthouse in
Point Cross was well constructed. It had walls of sturdy sheet metal,
against which the rain spattered noisily, and a cement toilet bowl to spare
foreigners who haven't had the chance to build up the necessary calf muscles
from the need to squat over a slit. The door was a piece of calico that
flapped wetly in the wind, but as it was still dark and there was nobody
outside, I didn't care.

I lifted the toilet lid, and found the inside of the bowl lined solidly with
cockroaches. At least a hundred of them, their long antennae waving like
grass on a disgusting brown prairie. One was an albino, I noted, and a big
one too. It looked like the way a queen cockroach would look if cockroaches
had queens.

For men using the toilet for minor business, the cockroaches were harmless.
In fact, you could make quite a good game of trying to wash as many as
possible down into the pit before the water jet ran out. However, I was
unhappy at the prospect of sitting down bare-cheeked on a bowl full of large
insects whose instinct is to run up dark crevices when disturbed. I shone my
torch downwards as I sat, hoping that the light shining from my backside
would keep the cockroaches away.

Returning to the house, all I could do was wait for the paraffin to work its
way through my system. Unwilling to go back to bed and risk falling
unconscious in my sleep, I lit the lantern (at least now I knew they'd left
me plenty of spare fuel for it), and sat up in a chair, with the frightened
anticipation of the drug-taker who has swallowed a new substance and knows
that he can do nothing but wait for the effect to take hold. If I began to
feel seriously ill, I told myself, I would go and wake someone, although I
doubted they would be able to help. It was just possible that Rebecca would
be able to call up a doctor on her teleradio at four o'clock on Sunday
morning, or that there was someone in the village who knew an antidote to
paraffin poisoning, but I remembered hearing one of the Peace Corps
volunteers complain that her teleradio was broken, and I wasn't in the mood
for magic leaves.

To distract myself, I picked up a book and began to read. A microbiological
thriller, full of people being poisoned and dying in gruesome ways. Not the
most appropriate reading material, but other than my notes on South
Pentecost language (which give me a headache at the best of times) it was
all I had.

Dawn came, with the grey dripping of rainwater from the thatch and the
twinkling shadows of leaves and branches swaying through chinks in the
bamboo walls. Apart from a slight headache, which could have been accounted
for by tiredness and the strain of reading by dim light, I didn't feel too
bad.

At about eight o'clock David Torsul, Member of Parliament for South
Pentecost, appeared at the door with a plate of bread and jam.

Politicians in Vanuatu are invariably also businessmen. Jonas Tabi, the
former MP living at Waterfall Village, owns the local store and operates a
taxi service (which is in particular demand after heavy rain as Jonas's
truck has a higher ground clearance than many others on the island). Charlot
Salwai, his successor, is currently building a hardware store by the beach
in Melsisi, a monstrous construction that has consumed cement and corrugated
iron in quantities never before used on Pentecost and kept quite a number of
constituents employed as building labourers. David Torsul, meanwhile, had
helped his son Trevor to build the guesthouse in which I was staying.
However, since Trevor had gone out early to ferry passengers to and fro in
the family motorboat - another of the Torsuls' business investments - it was
left to David to bring me my breakfast.

"Good morning," he said. "You all right?"

"Me drink kerosene," I said, without much explanation.

"Oh," said David. "Sorry." He said it with the expression of a practised
politician - sincerely sympathetic to this latest concern raised by one of
his constituents, but knowing that in fact he was powerless to anything
about it. I liked David Torsul. If he had come to my door back home wearing
an orange ribbon, or possibly a red one, I would probably have voted for
him.

I enquired about a boat ride back to Pangi. Even if I'd been fit and well,
in slippery wet conditions I had no intention of attempting the Banmatmat
road.

Of course, said David. The journey from Point Cross to Pangi is long and is
normally expensive, he warned - I knew that already and I no longer cared -
but my boys and I are going around the point to Wanur this afternoon to give
out some tools. You can hitch a ride with us, and from Wanur it'll only be a
short and cheap ride to Pangi.

I gratefully accepted the idea.

In Vanuatu, Members of Parliament are each given a sizeable 'allowance' to
be spent on good works in their constituencies. Some squander the money, but
others rise to the challenge of spending it in a way that earns the greatest
possible amount of gratitude from the greatest possible number of voters.
David Torsul, for his part, choose to spend the allowance on tools for local
communities, touring villages on Pentecost to present them with spades,
saws, axes, giant saucepans, buckets and rolls of barbed wire. Today it was
the people of Wanur who were going to get their reward for voting for David.

It was only after breakfast that the paraffin, which had been sitting on top
of my stomach until forced down by food, began to hit. Soon I could smell
paraffin vapour on my breath. This was worrying, and not just because I
feared for the effect on my lungs. The amount of a volatile substance on
your breath is proportional to the amount in your bloodstream - this is the
principle on which breathalysers work - which meant that a significant
amount of paraffin was now circulating in my blood. I lay down, feeling
faint, and moved my head over to the window in an attempt to get some fresh
air. This did no good, of course - the noxious vapour was coming from
within.

After an hour or so the fumes and the giddiness had subsided a little, and
at midday I accompanied David down the hill to the shore. The MP was smartly
dressed now, and carried a black bag of the type that passes in Vanuatu for
a briefcase. On the beach, he stopped and rested his case against the side
of a badly-battered tin boat, which looked as if it had been pulled out of a
giant recycling bin.

"Boat belong you here?" I asked.

This was my old boat, David explained. When the tidal wave came it picked up
this boat and smashed it against the rocks at the far end of the bay. It's
no good now. The new boat is over there.

He nodded out into the bay, where his son Trevor was wading out to a smart
fibreglass motorboat.

Boys came down to the beach, hauling cardboard boxes full of goodies for the
people of Wanur, which they began loading into the new motorboat. By now the
rain had stopped and the sun had come out. Slumped groggily against the
wreck of the old boat, I rummaged in my bag for my sunscreen, watched with
curiosity by a crowd of dark-skinned men who had never seen anybody do this
before. The cardboard boxes were loaded onto the boat, and I staggered on
board, followed by a dozen of the villagers. The rest waved goodbye from the
beach.

The boat ride around the point to Wanur, I knew, was going to be rough. As
the heavily-loaded little boat chugged out between the teeth of the bay, it
rolled on the ocean swell, in a way that would have been dizzying enough
even if I wasn't dizzy already. I worried that we would be picked up by one
of the giant waves and splintered against the base of Vatangele Rock, but
Trevor knew these waters well, and we rounded the rock at a safe distance.
On the far side the ocean was calmer, and by the time we approached Wanur -
a line of dark wooden houses set between dark green trees on a
asphalt-coloured beach - the water was as flat as a puddle.

The boat pulled up to the beach, and the other passengers scrambled out.
We'll unload the stuff, then take you straight on to Pangi, said Trevor.

I'd rather go ashore for a few minutes, I said. After half an hour of
sitting in the sun on a rolling boat after a morning of inadvertent solvent
abuse, my head felt as if something inside it was on the verge of
evaporating.

I staggered ashore, desperate to lie down. The beach was damp and dirty with
volcanic ash. I cast around for a bench or a coconut leaf.

"Come inside," said the villagers hurriedly, seeing my expression. They
ushered me into their nakamal: a small beachside hut with a pig's jawbone
hanging ceremonially at the doorway. "Lie down 'long place here."

I lay gratefully down on the bench at the back of the nakamal. One of the
villagers handed me a traditional pillow, which was more comfortable than I
would have expected given that it was carved from solid wood.

"Nê mini kerosin," I explained. There was excitable chatter, as the
villagers reacted to the triple surprise of the arrival of an unexpected
white man who drank lantern fuel and was attempting to speak their language.
The tone was friendly and sympathetic.

Quite a few people around here had done what you did, they reassured me.
(This didn't surprise me - nearly everyone in Vanuatu uses paraffin, and
nearly everyone stores it in unlabelled drinks bottles.) Those people were
all fine afterwards.

My old grandmother used to use kerosene as a cough medicine, one man told
me. When she had a cough, she would swallow a teaspoonful to make it better.
But I guess you drank more than a teaspoonful?

I nodded, and lay in silence for a while. More people gathered in the
nakamal.

I hope I'm not interrupting your tool-giving ceremony, I said.

Don't worry, the villagers assured me. They won't be ready to begin for a
while yet.

'Island time' typically runs two or three hours behind 'white man time'. The
ceremony, scheduled to begin at one o'clock, would probably kick off
sometime around half past three.

Eventually I felt well enough to return to the boat. Twenty minutes later, I
waded ashore in Pangi, where I asked after the local nurse. After talking to
a couple of villagers, I discovered that not only had she gone off
somewhere, but that she was the mother of a student I knew at Ranwadi. Aware
that if the nurse asked how her daughter was getting on at school it would
be a challenge to come up with an honest answer which neither "time" nor
"school fees" occurred in the same sentence as the word "waste", I decided
not to go looking for her. Instead I tried the Central American cure-all for
minor ailments: lukewarm Coca-Cola (since no storekeeper was running a
fridge in Pangi that day, there was no other kind). The Coca-Cola made me
feel a lot better, and seemed to wash away the traces of the oil that were
left in my stomach. By the evening I was no longer burping up paraffin
vapour.

I checked into the Pangi Guesthouse, where the owner's tiny daughter Jessica
was attempting juggling tricks using the round stones that lined the floor.
If she kept practising, by the time the tourist season arrived next year,
she'd be pretty good. The men of Pangi might not have seen much of the
cruise ship money, but smiling little Jessica knew how she was going make a
few dollars next time the circus came to town.

24th October

2007-10-26T00:36:00.000+01:00

"What on earth is that?" I wondered, as a deep roaring noise descended on
the kava bar.

An earthquake? A tsunami? A volcanic eruption? (All these things come to
mind readily in Vanuatu.) A sudden gust of wind? Maybe just an unusually
large wave breaking on the reef.

"One jet, I think!" said Smith the barkeeper. He bounded excitedly to the
doorway and looked up. I followed.

Like a vision from a science fiction movie, a silver aeroplane was flying
low overhead, leaving behind thick contrails that crystallised in the
moonlight. For anyone living within fifty miles of an international airport
- which is most people in the Western world - this would be an everyday
sight. On Pentecost, it was a once-in-a-year spectacle.

Moving to Vanuatu is like one of those psychology experiments in which the
researcher removes objects from a scene to find out whether or not the
subject will notice the difference. Contrails in the sky were one familiar
thing whose absence I hadn't registered until now. Pentecost does not lie
under any of the small number of routes leading out of Port Vila
International Airport, and any trans-Pacific airliners that happen to pass
over the island are cruising at high altitude and go unnoticed against the
tropical haze of the sky. Vanuatu has no air force, and although the
Australians and New Zealanders occasionally fly military planes over the
South Pacific, visits from them are rare. (Last year, Mr Neil tried to
persuade the New Zealand Air Force that airdropping some school textbooks
onto the Ranwadi sports field would make a good training exercise. The Kiwis
were up for the idea, but Vanuatu Customs officials weren't.) Air Vanuatu's
island hoppers, chugging little propeller planes that fly unpressurised at a
mere seven thousand feet and don't always have the chance to reach even that
height on their short jumps between airfields, pass with a noise more like
the rumble of a lorry than the high suction of a jet. They leave no trails,
and don't fly after dark. At night, the moving spots of satellites are the
only reminder to the islanders that we live in an aerospace age.

"You look road belong him," said Smith, pointing at the trails behind the
plane. On the far side of the moon, the wind was already beginning to
disperse the white crystals, smudging the two lines like marks being erased
from a blackboard.

The plane disappeared over the silhouette of the mountain, leaving the sky
empty except for the moon and a sprinkling of stars. I turned back into the
candlelit hut, and realised just how far I was from civilisation.

18th October

2007-10-19T03:59:00.000+01:00

People in Vanuatu seldom have cause to feel unloved. Not only do they live
in friendly little communities surrounded by brothers, sisters, parents,
aunties, uncles and cousins, but they always have Jesus to turn to when they
need comfort.

"He is your personal friend," the Principal recently reminded the students.

Dogs in Vanuatu are not so lucky. A few villagers treat their dogs with
dignity, especially if they are useful for running down pigs or for chasing
nambilak (the chicken-like rails that dart in and out of the undergrowth).
However, the majority of village dogs occupy a niche only slightly different
from that of the rats, and are treated accordingly. Most of them are loosely
attached to a particular owner, who may make half-hearted attempts to look
after them, but the creatures get little real affection. They are seldom
patted or stroked - understandably, since they are always dirty and
flea-infested - and most are not well provided for. Villagers do enjoy the
sight of a healthy, well-fed dog, but this is mainly because protein was
traditionally hard to come by on Pacific islands, and prior to the
introduction of cattle, dogs were the third meatiest animal available, after
pigs and human beings. Even if ni-Vanuatu men did love their dogs, as with
their wives they would never show it in public. The dogs do not even have
Jesus.

Dogs are intelligent, and their survival in Vanuatu depends partly on
learning who is worth following around. The key is to find and associate
with people who might toss out scraps of food, and who won't kick them too
hard when they get in the way or throw anything too heavy at them when they
cause a nuisance.

Occasionally, a dog strikes it lucky, and finds somebody who will actually
offer them fresh food, rather than old leftovers, and will touch them fondly
rather than kicking them away if they come too close. Such people are rare,
and a dog who finds one will often follow him for miles. These people are
aliens, visitors from a world where meat is so plentiful that dogs are
actually recipients of it rather than a source. Dogs quickly learn the
secret of how to recognise these unusual people: their skin is pale.

Being followed around by dogs is one of the hazards of being a white person
on Pentecost.

Some of these dogs are harmless companions, but others are a serious
nuisance. Some chase pigs and chickens, or frighten village children. One
dog that followed me on a long walk picked a fight with two other dogs and
tried to hide behind me when it realised it was outnumbered. The presence of
an uncontrolled dog also antagonises the mean-looking bullocks that graze by
the roadsides, endangering not only the dog but also the unfortunate person
it has decided to follow.

Getting rid of these dogs humanely is virtually impossible. Gestures
intended to show a dog that its presence is unwanted are dumbly ignored, and
none will obey commands in any language. (When indoors, local dogs do
vaguely react to cries of "wop!" - outside - but it's hard to know if they
regard this as a command or merely as a curious noise that humans make when
they're about to throw something at you.) Shouting has little effect, and a
light smack intended not to hurt the dog will only make matters worse -
attacking but deliberately not harming is what animals do when they are
playing. Throwing stones in the dog's general direction doesn't always
dissuade it either: when the locals throw stones, they don't aim to miss. To
really convince a dog that it's not worth its while to follow you, you need
to match the level of violence used by the locals, and that level can be
quite extreme.

Expatriates in Vanuatu are often shocked by the cruelty shown by the
normally friendly and peaceable islanders towards man's best friend. The
locals, meanwhile, watch the expats feeding their dogs with daily tins of
meat that would nourish one of the island's protein-deficient children for a
week, and observe nonchalantly that "white people treat their dogs
differently from the way black people do". (Similar observations were made
by a group of ni-Vanuatu sent to Britain for a TV documentary, Meet the
Natives, which filmed the villagers' reactions to the sight of Brits taking
their dogs to grooming parlours while homeless people went hungry on the
streets outside and questioned which society is really the most primitive.)

Even in the world's happiest country, people occasionally get the urge to
vent unpleasant emotions, and sadly some do so with violence. In certain
Vanuatu families, there is a pecking order: the husband loses his temper and
beats the wife, the wife vents her frustration on the children, and the
children in turn take it out on the dog. The dog, which knows its place in
the hierarchy, cowers down in the most submissive posture it knows in a
desperate attempt to show its masters that there's no need for them to prove
their dominance. A fellow dog would understand the signal, but humans
usually persist in beating it anyway, even when the poor dog virtually
flattens itself into the ground in its efforts to show submission.

The dog gets the worst of the violence, not just because it is at the bottom
of the hierarchy but because it has nobody to stick up for it. Whereas
excessive wife-beating can get you into trouble with the in-laws, and even
the sternest parents ultimately love their children, violence against
animals is almost entirely without consequences. Most islanders would not
even turn their heads at the sight of a man whacking his dog so hard that it
ran away yelping and limping, let alone call the RSPCA (not that Vanuatu has
such an organisation). It's perfectly OK to use force against somebody
else's dog, too, if the animal is causing a nuisance. Back home, when I
occasionally pick up stones in the presence of an untrustworthy dog, I
always check first to make sure the owner isn't watching. (I hardly ever
throw the stones; merely hinting that you're prepared to fight back is
enough to make a typical British dog keep its distance.) On Pentecost, too,
I don't let the owners see me chastising their dogs, but for the opposite
reason: the owners would laugh at what tiny stones I was trying to use and
proceed to commit some appalling act of violence in a well-meaning attempt
to show me how dogs ought to be treated.

I could make many excuses for the islanders' cruelty to animals, but
probably the best is that they don't regard them as sentient beings. (As
with many things in Vanuatu, you can blame the missionaries for this if you
like, though in fact the churches probably just reinforced traditional
attitudes.) If animals have no souls, hitting them when you get frustrated
with them is no different from hitting your computer, except that animals
are self-repairing and less expensive to replace if you inadvertently do
them permanent damage.

Eventually, of course, visitors to Vanuatu become desensitised to such
violence, and sometimes they have little choice but to join in. The dogs'
habit of following around the kindest person has inadvertently created a
competition among humans to see who can be most unkind, in which the loser
will be plagued by nuisance animals. And as you pick up a rock or a coconut
and take aim, it's easy to persuade yourself that the dog has only itself to
blame.

- - -

A while ago a large brown-and-white pooch wandering near Bwatnapne village
discovered Ian, the local Peace Corps volunteer. This pale-skinned, bearded,
blue-eyed, sandal-wearing man already had one follower - Ian's own dog,
Fonzie - and the new dog decided to join the disciples.

For seven miles the dog followed Ian, over the mountain and down into
Melsisi, where he arrived at a house filled with white people - the Peace
Corps volunteers who had come to help with Sara's sex education workshop.
Three dogs had already found this place. The leader of the pack was Oreo, a
fine animal whose devotion to her white mistress was rewarded with special
meals (real dog food, which Sara imports specially from Port Vila), cosy
blankets to sleep on, and regular anointment with shampoo down at the local
river (though Oreo would gladly forgo this particular luxury). Oreo was
accompanied by Fidel, the neighbours' dog, which arrived as a sickly little
puppy and remained a sickly little puppy for many months until Sara took
pity on the malnourished creature and started supplementing his diet of
kitchen scraps with proper food. After this he grew rapidly into a
boisterous little hound.

Oreo and Fidel had recently been joined by a mysterious Nice Dog that spends
his time snoozing quietly outside Sara's house. Nobody knew where Nice Dog
came from, or who he belonged to, but having identified Sara's doorstep as
the safest place in the village he made the place his home. When Sara once
offered him a bowl of dog food, poor Nice Dog stared at the strange
substance, wondering if it was supposed to be eaten and, if so, why the
white woman hadn't signalled to the dog that the food was his by throwing it
down onto the dirt.

The dog from Bwatnapne would happily have joined the pack, but the white
people seemed to think that there were too many dogs here already, and tried
to shoo it away. Fortunately, at this point four more white people turned up
- the gap girls from Ranwadi - and the new dog decided to follow them home.

Ranwadi at the time was home to seven expatriates - half of Pentecost's
white population. It had dustbins full of scraps (the students whose job it
is to empty them are lax about doing their duties), and no other dogs
around. To the new arrival, the place was paradise. It wasn't in any hurry
to leave.

"What are we supposed to do with this dog?" the gap girls asked.

"Get the boys to chase it out of the school?" I suggested.

The girls decided instead to let it stay. The dog clearly had psychological
issues - it would hurl itself at white people and anyone else it thought
might be friendly, licking and howling for attention - but she was basically
a harmless creature. The girls named her Fig.

Fig became a canine incarnation of Mary Had A Little Lamb, following the gap
girls around the school. She followed them to classes. She followed them
into the staffroom. She followed them to chapel on Sunday morning. One
Monday morning, she turned up in Assembly and threw herself into Mr Neil the
New Zealander's lap, whimpering and pawing. Mr Neil was having none of it,
so the dog turned its attention to the person sitting next to Mr Neil, who
happened to be the Principal. The sight of a large, soppy, howling dog
hurling itself at someone in the chapel would normally have been funny, but
in this case the students merely watched in horror as the Principal, looking
very undignified, tried to fend off the love-starved creature. In Vanuatu,
even dogs are supposed to respect authority.

Fig attracted other dogs into the school - sinister black-and-yellow hounds
from the local village - which would have sex with her, loudly, at night
outside the girls' dormitories. During the day she wandered the school in
search of white people to befriend. The howling and jumping and licking
continued.

We all tried to teach Fig to behave, but the dog was untrainable. When told
to sit, she would stare gormlessly, resist any attempt to push her bottom
down, and do her best to lick and jump on the person trying to train her. We
overcame our Western inhibitions against thumping the animal when she
wouldn't behave, but the loopy dog seemed to treat this as a sign of
friendship, licking and jumping at us more frantically than ever.

"Something in that dog's head is wired up wrong," Mr Neil concluded.

I contemplated putting the dog on a cargo ship and sending her back to
Bwatnapne, or to a faraway village from which she was guaranteed not to find
her way back, with a note tied around her neck saying "Please look after
me". At other times I contemplated a version of my plan in which the note
said "Please eat me".

I missed a wonderful opportunity to get rid of the dog when Sara and I took
a truck down to Pangi on the day of the final land-diving ceremony of the
season, which a cruise ship full of tourists had come ashore to watch. I
don't know what would have caused more of a scene - the reactions of a dog
that gets driven into an overexcited frenzy by one white person to the sight
of a thousand of them, the reactions of the well-meaning locals to the sight
of a crazy dog molesting their visitors, or the reactions of the tourists to
the sight of the smiling natives beating the shit out of a harmless animal.
Whatever the outcome, I doubt we would ever have seen Fig again. Sara vetoed
the idea.

The other teachers soon got fed up with the dog, too. A drawing of Fig being
beheaded with a bush knife appeared on the staffroom notice board, together
with a warning that she was not allowed into the school buildings.

The school truck ran over her ("the driver sped up when he saw the dog in
front," one of the gap girls noted), but Fig survived.

One of the gap girls tried to put Fig onto a ship bound for Bwatnapne, but
the dog refused to be taken down to the beach.

At the end of June the four English gap girls went home, to be replaced with
three Australians, who arrived at their placement to discover that in
addition to the job of trying to control classes of thirty or forty students
they had taken on the job of trying to control a lunatic dog. They accepted
Fig with a typical Aussie "no worries" attitude. The dog remained out of
control.

Fig's owner - a man not noted for his kindness to animals - came down from
Bwatnapne during the PISSA Games, and tried to retrieve his dog. Proving
that she wasn't completely crazy, Fig ran away from him.

When the Japanese ambassador came to Pentecost to attend the opening
ceremony for the new water supply, Fig deemed the visiting dignitary to be a
white person and lunged at him, pawing and whimpering. One of the gap girls
had to drag the dog off by its tail, while a horrified crowd of chiefs and
elders gave murderous looks.

I offered a reward to any student who could get rid of the dog - I didn't
care how. Nobody took me up on the offer.

When I showed the gap girls the route up to the waterfall high above the
school, Fig insisted on coming along. Passing through villages, we could
only shout helplessly as prized pigs and bullocks were chased all over the
mountainside with the demented dog in pursuit.

"It's not ours," I called out apologetically to the villagers.

One well-tusked boar stood its ground when Fig approached. Part of me hoped
that the dog was going to get itself killed - if not by the pig, then by the
pig's owner. However, the gap girls were anxious for Fig's safety. By now,
she had puppies to look after.

At first, the idea of one uncontrollable dog multiplying into six didn't
exactly fill me with joy. However, the puppies were nothing like their
mother. They were cute and harmless, the students loved them, and since the
little dogs had never been mistreated they didn't hurl themselves stupidly
at white people in the way that Fig did. Instead, they ambled happily about
the school, bounding up to any friendly-looking person who came by, no
matter whether they were white or black, and accompanying them for a while
before heading off to the next interesting person. It became common to see
students and teachers walking around the campus with a flop-eared puppy
trotting alongside.

Motherhood also had a calming effect on Fig. She still reacted to white
people, but with quiet whimpers rather than with bounding and pawing. For a
while I was optimistic that the dog's psychological problems had been cured,
but soon I saw the real reason for Fig's lack of energy: the dog was
starving. The gap girls were feeding her on leftover rice and coconut
(supplemented with whatever rubbish she could scrounge from local dustbins),
and although this was good energy food, it couldn't nourish a family of
growing pups. Each time the puppies suckled their mother's milk, flesh was
sucked out of the big dog, until she was reduced almost to a skeleton.

"You need to feed that dog better," I said.

"We could try giving her some leftover bread."

"She needs protein."

"Pawpaw?"

"No real protein in that."

"Cabbage?"

I shook my head. "She needs meat, or fish, or something like that."

"Maybe there's some spare meat in the Dining Hall?"

I laughed. A typical school meal at Ranwadi includes five or ten small tins
of meat shared among three hundred growing teenagers. The soup dished up to
the students at lunch and dinnertime contains more salt than protein.

Village dogs, I guessed, survive because they occasionally get to eat meat
when there are bones and scraps left over from the pigs and bullocks killed
at ceremonies. Dogs probably also benefit from the local children's pastime
of hunting scrawny, unappetising pieces of wildlife which not even the
hungriest human would eat every part of. (The white-eye, a bespectacled
yellow songbird barely larger than a robin, is a popular target.) At
Ranwadi, apart from occasional chickens and the bullock that the students
feasted on to celebrate coming second in the PISSA Games, meat comes
strictly in tins, and is far too precious to be shared with dogs.

Occasionally I attend ceremonies in local villages, where I am given a
generous bundle of meat and taro to take home for dinner. The lumps of meat
are usually more than I can eat myself, and I have no fridge, so in the past
I would share them with students. Now, I took my leftover meat to the gap
girls' house instead.

"You can give this to the dog," I said. "But make sure she doesn't realise
where it came from." If Fig came to regard me as a source of good food she
would spend the rest of the year following at my heels. "Much as hate having
that dog around, I don't want to watch it starve slowly to death."

As I returned to my house, passing groups of students huddled outside the
Dining Hall - they, too, were hungry for meat - I was suddenly ashamed.
Faced with a choice between feeding deserving Third World children, and
feeding a dog that I didn't even like (a dog I had been trying to persuade
somebody to spit-roast a few weeks earlier), I had made a choice that only
the British would be capable of.

Thousands of people will buy squeaky toys and yoghurt-coated treats for
their dogs this Christmas, while "Do they know it's Christmas time?" plays
over the sound system in the shopping centre. The ones who don't know it's
Christmas time are, of course, the dogs, who would be just as happy with a
pat on the head and a chewy stick picked up in the back garden. The money
the average Brit lavishes on his or her pets each year would save a person's
life, probably several, if it were spent on food and medicines in the right
part of the world. No wonder the ni-Vanuatu find our society hard to
understand.

10th October

2007-10-11T02:05:00.001+01:00

With the year coming to an end (at holiday-loving Ranwadi, like in
over-decorated department stores, the countdown to Christmas begins early),
it's time to put together the annual school magazine. In many ways this is a
tedious job, but the various contributions to the magazine do provide
interesting snapshots of school life from the perspectives of the different
people who live and work here.

Here are some extracts...

From Year 9: "This year was tough and challenging to us Year 9 students,
because there was no light in our classroom since the beginning of Term 2.
... Some teachers say that we Year 9 boys are the best night hunters of
birds, this is to do with the problem of no light."

From Year 11A: "To begin with, the 11A students were considered to be the
best of all pupils at the college, due to their personal characteristics.
The pupils are very humble, kind, friendly and respectable, due to the fact
that, when teachers are explaining things on the board, the classroom is
almost always silent for them to grasp new ideas and concentrate in a deeper
sense, so as to have a clear understanding on what the topic is all about.
Moreover, the pupils are so full of kindness and friendliness, you can tell
when they make a brilliant smile at you or greet you around the school
compound. Furthermore, it is occasionally flexible for them to adopt some
ways of humbling themselves according to the College disciplines, such as to
keep our hair combed everyday, attending all meals, being part of morning
and evening devotions, and being submissive to all corresponding college
activities."

From one English teacher praising another: "Her expertise in the language
and literature strands has been a multiplication for Year 11A."

From Year 11B: "I think that the students' behaviour in class isn't good
enough. Most of them aren't faithful to class. This makes them go to
detention and some were later moved to two weeks' hard labour. Some never
obey the school rules. Such include combing their hair, tucking in shirts,
etc."

From Year 10B: ".We would like to give our special thanks to our mothers
(teachers' wives) for helping us in so many things, giving us food or fruits
to eat when we are hungry, giving us water to drink when we are thirsty or
even helping us when we are sick. Sometimes they also encourage us to study
hard."

From Year 12A: "Miss Rachel our Maths Teacher many times was annoyed and got
a red face because of our poor attendance in class and because we were noisy
during class period."

From the Deputy Principal: "Special thank you to all the hard working
Ranwadi boys for digging and levelling the water tank site up the hill. The
boys dug the area every afternoon from 3.30 pm to 5.30 pm for three months.
The hard work will remain a memory of all of us who have helped ... Ranwadi
now has everlasting running water which flows from the top of the hill three
kilometres away. What a blessing from the almighty!"

From Year 12B: "Beginning the year 2007, 12B consisted of thirty-one
students. Since then the number decreased gradually due to various careless
actions some students took against the school rules."

From the French teacher: "Français la langue est matière qui est peut-être
difficile dans l'école."

From the Head Girl: "When things go wrong with students, we prefects get all
the blame from some students, teachers, and even the boarding master, like
when students don't attend prep times, dining hall, classes, chapel, etc.
Getting girls up in the morning to do morning territories and mealing in the
dining hall is sometimes disturbing, but it's all part of our duties. When
prefects are on duty on a particular day, they say, 'GIRLS! WAKE UP AND
CLEAN AROUND YOUR DORMITORIES,' the girls would always say, 'Eh! I'm tired,
stop disturbing.' But whatever happens they have to get up and work around
the dormitories. ... Words of thanks are extended to the college Boarding
Master for the tough warnings and encouragement that he always tackled us
with, that sometimes makes us scared."

From a boy in Year 12, asked to provide a quote: "Strenuous is like a
stratosphere that has learned and not excusable."

From an Agriculture teacher: "Even though there are not many textbooks and
other resources available, teachers try their best to find information from
textbook A to textbook Z; time consuming. All we need at the moment is
cartons and cartons of A4 paper to do a lot of photocopying as handouts. Any
teacher thinking of coming to Ranwadi... come with all your textbooks,
handouts, etc, to enable you to find easy access to what you don't expect to
find."

From the Head Boy: "According to my observation, Ranwadi is a college that
has been blessed a lot. Ranwadi is a college that bases its function on
Bible and God as the first priority. I would like to encourage teachers,
students and the whole community of Ranwadi to maintain that behaviour and
pray hard, study hard, and maintain the spirit of sports. Remember that God
comes first before yourself or any purpose of Ranwadi's activities."

From the Principal: "We have been reminded time and time again of that well
known text in the Book of Isaiah: 'They that wait upon the Lord shall renew
their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles, they shall run and
not be weary, they shall walk and not faint'."

2nd October

2007-10-03T01:06:00.000+01:00

The time of the full moon had passed, and away from the lights of the
school, the hillside was black. Night breezes were buffeting the candle in
the kava bar, periodically blowing it out and sweeping the hut into
darkness. The bucket of kava was nearly empty, and there was nobody else in
the bar, except for Smith the teenage barkeeper.

"You smell'em strong blood?" Smith asked me.

I sniffed. There was a hint of something unusual in the air, but it was hard
to say whether or not it was the smell of clotting blood.

"Time smell here ee come, ee mean'em one man ee dead."

You think it's the smell of a dead body?, I asked.

"No, I-think one man ee dead on-top, 'long bush." He gestured in the
direction of the mountains. "But ee got smell here, time him ee come-down
long saltwater, belong swim."

"Spirit belong him ee come?"

The boy nodded.

The smell of blood from the passing ghost of a dead person, on his way down
to the sea for a last wash. I glanced uneasily through the open door of the
kava bar. It was black outside.

I sniffed again. The odour had gone.

"Me no-more smell'em," I said, relieved.

"You wait. By-and-by small wind ee come, by-and-by smell ee come-back."

With eerie timing, a little breeze hit the kava bar, ruffling the thatch,
and once again there was the strange smell in the air. It was too faint to
tell exactly what it was, but definitely something organic, and not quite
fresh. It could have been blood.

"Smell here ee come too, time way dwof all-ee born'em pickaninny."

"Dwof?"

"Yes. You savvy?"

"No."

"All short-short man?"

"Dwarf? Dwarf all-ee born'em pickaninny?"

Smith nodded.

So there were now two possible explanations for the scent. Either a dead man
was walking past the kava bar, or the dwarfs were reproducing.

"You believe ee got dwarf 'long bush?" I asked. I'd heard stories of dwarfs
in the forest before, told by people from North Pentecost - Smith's part of
the island.

"'Long place here, no got. But 'long place belong me, 'long North, ee got,"
Smith told me, with complete seriousness.

The dwarfs were found only in North Pentecost. I wasn't sure whether to be
disappointed or relieved.

"But suppose ee no got dwarf long place here, smell here ee no come from
dwarf," I said. The smell can't be from the dwarfs if they don't live in
this part of the island.

"True," Smith nodded. "Smell belong one dead man, I-think."

"Nah," I said, dismissively. "I-think smell belong one tree, no more." There
are plants on Pentecost capable of producing fairly putrid smells. "Or smell
belong saltwater." The breeze seemed to be coming from the direction of the
sea.

A shout came from the house across the clearing from the kava bar. Smith
ducked outside, leaving me alone in the shadowy hut. A minute later he
returned.

"Worm all-ee come now!" he told me excitedly. "Worm belong saltwater. Worm
ee make'm smell here."

It was five days after the spring full moon, I realised: the night when
palolo worms all over the South Pacific rise in billions to spawn at the
surface of the ocean. It was the worms that were causing the unusual smell.

"You-me-two go-down 'long saltwater?," Smith asked. "You want'em look?"

"OK."

Smith blew out the candle, and we left the bar. We rounded the side of the
house, and scuttled down the steep dirt path that led to the sea.

"Look-out here. Go slow-slow," Smith called out, as I skittered on loose
stones and fallen sticks.

Cracking through twigs and vines, we emerged onto the stony little beach.

"You hear'em smell?" Smith asked. (In the languages of the ni-Vanuatu,
smells are heard.) I nodded. Down here the smell was fresher and more
saline, less menacing than it had seemed inland, where it was mixed with the
funk of decay from the forest.

Smith's mother and sister were already down at the sea, standing a little
way out in the water in a rippling circle of torchlight. One was holding a
big tin bowl, and the other was straining at the water with a scrap of wire
mosquito netting, scraping her catch off the netting and into the bowl.
Smith and I waded out to join them.

"You look worm?" he asked.

I looked down.

"Try'em shine'm torch."

I shone my torch down into the ripples, and there they were. Hundreds of
worms, bigger than maggots but smaller than earthworms, wriggling in the
water. Half of them were a brownish orange, the other half were a bizarre
shade of greenish blue. The effect of them all moving together was like an
animated piece of abstract art.

"All-ee come, time you shine'm torch." The light was attracting them.

"You never look something here before, uh?" Smith's mother asked me.

"Ee no got 'long England," I explained. I peered into the tin bowl, where a
couple of hundred worms writhed in a puddle of milky grey liquid. It wasn't
a big catch, and it didn't look particularly appetising.

"You-fella ee kaekae?" I asked. Are you really going to eat those?

"Uh-huh."

The worms were soft and squishy, and the bluish ones had a poisonous look to
them.

Eat them how?, I asked.

"Cook'em with'em cabbage."

"But all-ee small," I said. When I'd heard of people eating palolo worms,
I'd imagined them being bigger.

"Yes, him-here small kind," one of the women explained. "Ee got 'nother
kind, who ee big more."

I tried using my fingers to sift one of the worms from the water. It was
difficult, but after three or four tries I succeeded. Out of the water, the
creature hung limp and helpless from my finger. Its body was round and
segmented in narrow bands, like that of a leech or an earthworm, but with a
strange translucent tip at either end.

"All-ee come where?", Smith's mother asked. Where do all the worms come
from?

I shrugged. "Deep sea, I-think."

The small patch of water highlighted by our torches contained hundreds of
worms. In the whole of the South Pacific the number must have been
astronomical. It was hard to believe that such a mass of living organisms
could exist in complete hiding for all but one night of the year.

Smith and I waded ashore, and I sat on the beach for a while waiting for my
feet to dry before putting my sandals back on. (The three pairs of sandals I
brought to Pentecost are all broken, and that night I'd opted to wear the
pair that's held together with sticky tape rather than the one held together
with safety pins or the one held together with superglue. The sticky-taped
pair is the most comfortable of the three and the least likely to come apart
without warning, but has to be kept dry.)

The women had left an old rice sack on the beach, tied shut with twine.
Something was moving about slowly inside.

What's in there?, I asked.

"Black crab, I-think," said Smith. He opened the sack and tried to pick up
one of the crabs, which lunged with its pincers. Smith jumped and the crab
fell, catching itself by one of the frayed ends dangling from the sack. With
a twig, Smith tried to coax the angry crustacean back inside.

An orange light flared behind us, and Smith's older brother emerged from the
trees, carrying a flaming coconut frond. He waded out into the water and
joined his mother and sister, fishing for worms in a pool of light. The
little group shuffled back and forth, sieving the water as they went. Beyond
them, the water was black, silvered very faintly in places with the light of
the stars.

Along thousands of miles of island coastlines, a similar scene was being
enacted that night. Families and friends were out in the water, taking
advantage of this bizarre delicacy that welled up once a year from the
depths of the Pacific. Yet their impact on the worm population would barely
be measurable. The people and their lights were tiny dots in an
incomprehensible volume of ocean.

20th September

2007-09-21T00:06:00.000+01:00

"There is no such thing as society, only individuals and their families."

In traditional Vanuatu, this saying was truer than in the grim Thatcherite
Britain in which it was coined. The people of Pentecost historically lived
in clans, in which everyone was related, either directly or by marriage, to
just about everyone else in the clan. Even today, islanders are defined by
their relatives - he's the brother of so-and-so, she's the sister-in-law of
so-and-so's auntie. With enough patience, you could probably draw a family
tree encompassing the entire island, or at least large areas of it. Guests
at wedding parties often introduce themselves, a little worryingly, as
relatives of both the bride and the groom.

Word such as "brother" and "sister" are used loosely in Vanuatu. A brother
or sister may in fact be a cousin, or a second cousin, or a well-known
outsider who has been accepted as an honorary member of the clan. A father
and mother may be biological parents, or they may be uncles and aunts, or
other elderly kinsfolk who have taken it upon themselves to help look after
a particular child.

In the old days, the downside of these strong family ties was tribalism.
Members of the same clan may be brothers and sisters, deserving of kindness
and support, but members of other clans were good for little more than being
raped or eaten. Following the arrival of the missionaries, however, the
islanders were told to put aside their tribal differences. This didn't mean
that they should stop thinking of the world in terms of family members - far
from it. Jesus's innovation was to insist that they should try and extend
their notion of the family to include the whole world. According to the new
gospel, it's fine to lavish favours on your brothers and sisters, provided
you accept that we are all brothers and sisters, with God as father over us
all.

"We are one big happy family," begins a popular song that ni-Vanuatu
children sing in Sunday school.

Faint shadows of tribalism still persist in modern Vanuatu. The country is
full of the kind of politicians who use their power to channel benefits to
their kinsmen, and the inter-island rivalries between disaffected youths in
Port Vila and Luganville still flare occasionally into violence. However, on
the whole the islanders have taken the missionaries' message remarkably well
to heart. This doesn't mean to say that they are always pleasant to one
another - the quarrels fought by family members are among the most
passionate of all - but, on the whole, they do treat one another with the
kind of trust and generosity that comes naturally to Westerners only among
members of the family.

"You-me brother everyone," says a line in the Vanuatu national anthem.

Such is the need for people in Vanuatu to fit in to a family structure that
long-term visitors to the islands are generally assigned a 'host father' and
'host mother', whose families the volunteers slot into, taking on new
brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles, and so on in the process. Most of these
host fathers and mothers look after their adopted 'children' well, and take
their parental responsibilities seriously, sometimes a little too seriously.

"I'm giving a ceremonial red mat to the community because I'm embarrassed by
your behaviour," Sara's host father at Melsisi recently told her.

I was never given a host family on Pentecost - Ranwadi is more of a college
campus than a village, and perhaps the school felt that parents would cramp
the volunteers' style. However, after spending a pleasant weekend in a
village in North Pentecost, the guesthouse owner John and his wife told me
that they wanted to adopt me like a son while I was on the island. I was
welcome to come and stay again any time I wanted, they said, and wouldn't be
expected to pay. I did go back, and was welcomed as "brother Andrew" by
John's children. However, I did insist on giving a small amount of money "to
help with my brothers' and sisters' school fees"; a genuine older brother
would have done the same.

There is still no such thing as society in Vanuatu, only individuals and the
family. But that doesn't matter - not if we are all members of the family.

- - -

One side effect of treating everyone like family is that it leaves little
room for one other concept that underpins Western societies: friends.

For foreign city-dwellers, friendship is an essential institution, allowing
individuals to forge what feels like a community out of a big, anonymous
mass of people. As anthropologists have noted, the population of the average
person's address book is roughly the same as the population of a traditional
village. A network of friends, from this perspective, is essentially a
personalised, custom-made village, made up of only the people we want to
share our lives with. (Whilst this sounds like a good thing, and sometimes
is, it has a downside: popular people find themselves torn between too many
villages, whilst there are other lonely individuals whom nobody wants in the
village.)

Rural islanders don't have this luxury of picking and choosing: they are
stuck with the community that they are born into. Their social network, or
at least a large part of it, comes ready-made. Their friends are their
relatives and their neighbours, which are usually the same thing.

The word 'friend' does exist in Vanuatu - it even has equivalents in the
native languages (which is a good indication that the concept predated the
arrival of Westerners) - but it is not used in the same way as in Western
countries. Among men, or among women, the word refers to a brotherly or
sisterly relationship between people who happen not to share parents.
Between a boy and girl, the word implies a sexual relationship. "We're just
friends" in Vanuatu does not have the same meaning that it does back home.

Such boy-girl friendships are always illicit, and do not have an official
place in Vanuatu communities. As soon as the couple's elders find out about
the friendship, it is either stamped out (Vanuatu's schools put a lot of
effort into catching and punishing students who try to make friends), or
else leads swiftly to marriage, which converts the friend into a family
member and restores the comfortable everyone-is-family situation.

Ni-Vanuatu who see tourists and expatriates together find the ease with
which white men and women associate one another deeply bizarre. Many assume
that the friendships they see between these men and women must to some
extent be sexual, an attitude reinforced by the willingness of white women
to reveal what locals regard as indecent amounts of bare skin in front of
their male companions. Other islanders conclude that since white people all
come roughly from the same place and speak roughly the same language, what
they are seeing are brother/sister relationships between members of the same
clan.

At Melsisi, the villagers habitually refer to me as Sara's brother. Some
realise that we aren't actual siblings, and a perceptive islander might
notice slight differences between our dialects and customs - the kind of
difference you'd expect between two ni-Vanuatu whose home villages were
maybe five miles apart. Nevertheless, we clearly belong to the same clan.
Sara and I haven't tried too hard to set them straight on this: my regular
visits to Sara's house in the evenings would be scandalous if she weren't my
sister.

The idea that an unrelated boy and girl in Vanuatu cannot have a non-sexual
relationship is self-fulfilling. None would dare try to start an 'innocent'
friendship, since they are well aware that any attempt to do so would be
misinterpreted both by their prospective friend and by the rest of the
community. At school such a pair would certainly be punished: even if they
were believed when they told their teachers there was nothing romantic going
on, the teachers would consider that it was only a matter of time. Outside
school, too, they would be punished for their friendship, either by
concerned relatives keen to prevent an unwanted pregnancy or by chiefs
anxious to avoid a scandal in the village.

Apart from fear of the consequences, the main reason local boys give for not
making friends with girls (except as a prelude to sex or marriage) is that
they are "ashamed". Western-style friends, defined in a way that the
ni-Vanuatu would understand, are two companions who could potentially have
sex but choose not to because one or both is already attached, has the wrong
sexual orientation, is irredeemably unattractive to the other person, is
unwilling to put time and effort into conducting a relationship, or is too
shy to ask. To have friends of the opposite sex is therefore tantamount to
an admission that you (or the people you choose to hang around with) are
gay, ugly, lazy, cowardly, or unfaithful to an existing partner. Hence the
shame.

"I don't talk to girls," a villager in his twenties recently told me, in the
manner of a six-year-old. "Boys, I talk to. But girls, never."

12th September

2007-09-17T01:24:00.001+01:00

Good housekeeping can be summed up in one basic principle: you and your pets
should be the only living organisms in your house.

Back home, this is not too difficult to achieve. Once upon a time it was
said that an Englishman's home was his castle, but a modern Englishman's
house is in fact his aquarium: a glass-windowed tank, carefully sealed from
the outside world. The main reason for this design is to shut out cold air,
but it has the useful additional benefit of shutting out any creature
incapable of turning a door handle. In any case, most of Britain's wildlife
is of the kind you see in children's books sitting on toadstools in the
forest, rather than the kind that you see illustrated on cans of poison
spray. As a result, most British homes contain few living things larger than
a bacterium, and with the help of expensive cleaning products even the
bacteria can be kept to a minimum.

Houses on Pentecost are different. Since none are heated or air-conditioned,
there is no need for them to be well sealed - in fact, many builders
deliberately incorporate holes in their houses to let in light and fresh
air. Even houses that are made from cement and plywood, rather than from
bits of the local forest, are lightly built and contain plenty of cracks and
crevices. Windows are almost permanently open, and although in the newer
houses these are meshed to keep out mosquitoes, the meshing easily acquires
holes. This being the tropics, there is no shortage of critters that will
find them.

Here at Ranwadi I accepted long ago that my house is a place of
biodiversity. Housekeeping here is an exercise in ecology, trying to
manipulate the environment so as to control the populations of the more
obnoxious members of the ecosystem. Rats, for example. These are endemic in
Vanuatu's villages, and in its schools. Leaning against the walls of the
Dining Hall, you can feel the vibrations of the creatures running behind the
wooden boards, inches away from you. In a staff meeting I was once laughed
at for suggesting that the school ought to try and do something about them.

Every so often one of these rats finds its way into my kitchen and spends a
contented couple of days foraging there. Things come to a tragic end when
the hapless rodent stops to investigate the morsel of food placed temptingly
on a metal plate surrounded by spring-loaded wire. A few rat-free weeks then
go by before another rat comes along, finds the seemingly-inviting territory
to be vacant, and never stops to wonder why.

Few of the rats make it as far as my bedroom (I am very careful not to keep
anything there that might tempt them in), but one or two are adventurous.
One night I had a dream in which a rat was crawling over me. I awoke to the
sound of scuttling rodent disappearing down the side of my bed, and realised
that there had indeed been a rat crawling over me.

A different rat, finding all the food in my kitchen sealed into gnaw-proof
containers, developed a taste for eating the candles that I keep around the
house to provide lighting after the school generator is switched off in the
evenings. When I got fed up with the tooth marks on my candles and hid them
away in tins at bedtime, the rat switched to eating my bathroom soap
instead. The following night I set two traps: one baited with food, the
other baited with candle wax. The rat ignored the food, but couldn't resist
the wax, and is now roaming the great chandlery in the sky.

Last month, in a reshuffle of the staff accommodation at Ranwadi, I was
moved into a new house, at the bottom of the hill at the entrance to the
school. Rats don't seem to venture down to this part of the school much, but
in their place the house has other visitors: large black lizards that hide
in the cupboards and leave runny trails of droppings across the kitchen
floor. Lizards present an unusual pest problem: they don't touch (or don't
spring) my rat traps, and none of the store-bought poisons that proudly
claim to kill rats, mice, flies, ants, cockroaches, spiders and so on make
any mention of diarrhoeic reptiles. In the end I was reduced to chasing the
creatures around the kitchen, trying unsuccessfully to stab them with
various implements. I didn't want to have to kill the lizards, but nor did I
want to cook in a kitchen full of shit.

The black lizards, together with the yellow geckoes that hunt moths across
the walls, form the top of the house's food chain. I am technically at the
bottom of the food chain (in an interesting reversal of the outdoor
situation), since it is my crumbs and dead skin cells that sustain the
smallest of the insects, and my blood that feeds the mosquitoes which make
it past the netted windows.

At the second level of the food chain are the spiders. Pentecost's is home
to some worryingly exotic-looking spiders - such as the armoured
black-and-yellow Butsungos, which shares its name with a monster in local
stories - but these tend to stay outdoors. Most of the ones I find indoors
are essentially ordinary brown house spiders, although some of them would be
large enough to get their photos in the local newspaper if they came
crawling out of a bunch of bananas back home. Despite their evil size, they
don't appear to be dangerous to anything larger than a cockroach, and since
anything dangerous to cockroaches is very welcome in my house, I have never
attempted to sweep out the creatures. As the saying goes, my enemy's enemy
is my friend. The giant spiders, which seem to hunt by pouncing on their
prey, are at least less messy than the smaller ones, which gather in
colonies to spin webs of sticky fluff along the walls and ceiling.

The house's insects, too, are an ugly but ultimately fairly harmless lot
(unless you count the abundant malaria-carrying mosquitoes, which are
technically the world's most deadly creature). Wasps and hornets are absent,
apart from one slender variety (an introduced species, according to the
locals) that doesn't appear to sting anyone. Flies are an immense irritation
when sitting outdoors, but the mosquito netting keeps most of them out of
the house. The ants are a nuisance in the kitchen, but can easily be kept
off food by standing the plates and containers in dishes of water. (This
doesn't stop the geckoes, which enjoy licking sugary things and have been
known to take flying leaps onto trays of cakes and biscuits surrounded by
water.)

The local insect life is most evident at night. Moths and other species that
evolved to navigate by flying towards the moon never anticipated that human
beings would one day fill the world with artificial moons, and Ranwadi,
being the only place for miles around with electric lighting, attracts
swarms of the creatures. After the power is turned off for the evening, the
moths and flies abandon circling the fluorescent lights and turn their
attention to any other light source they can find. When working late on my
laptop, I keep a candle beside it to distract the insects that would
otherwise hurl themselves at the screen when the electricity goes off and
the laptop, switching to battery power, becomes the only source of light in
the room. One particularly stupid variety of beetle will fly straight into
the candle flame, get knocked out by the heat and spend a few minutes
recuperating before flying straight back into the flame, repeating this over
and over again until the witless insect succeeds in burning itself to death.
I hope that if enough people burn candles on Pentecost, evolution will
eventually teach this species to fly only towards the cold white moon, not
the hot yellow one.

At bedtime I blow out the candles (which leaves the house smelling of
birthdays), and the place becomes completely black. This is the cue for the
cockroaches to come out of their crevices. Occasionally I attempt to deal
with these by fumigating the house with spray cans brought from Vila, which
kills a good number of them, but the population quickly recovers. Brands of
insecticide that promise to provide "lasting three-month protection" don't
live up to their claims; Pentecost houses are too porous, and too
well-ventilated. Fumigation does have the interesting side effect of driving
out the more exotic crevice-dwellers, organisms that I would never otherwise
have realised that I was sharing a house with, but in some cases I would
have preferred them to remain hidden. Past hauls of dead creepy-crawlies
found after fumigation have included millipedes as long as pencils, a
centipede as long as my finger, and a small scorpion.

The centipede bothered me the most. From the otherwise-dull Arthropod
Biology course that Edinburgh University forces its zoology students to take
in their final, two images stuck in my mind: the eerily blue eyes of one of
the girls in the class, and the sight of a garden centipede under a
microscope. The latter made me shudder; a more sinister-looking creature
would be hard to imagine. The tropical centipede that I found dead in my
house at Ranwadi looked much the same, except that I didn't need a
microscope to make out clearly the rows of jagged, articulated legs or the
red, venomous pincers. The locals reassured me that the beast was harmless.
The giant venomous centipedes that terrify expatriates in Port Vila are an
urban pest, not found on Pentecost.

I put the centipede in a jar, took it down to the science lab, and pickled
it in methylated spirits. Next time the biology students were learning about
the redness and toothiness and clawiness of Nature, it would make an
enlightening specimen.

8th September

2007-09-10T00:14:00.000+01:00

"I remember when the volcano on Ambrym fired up," Old Mark told me. "I was a boy at the time. The sky on Pentecost turned black. For three days my father had to light a stick of wild cane and take it with him when he went to work in the garden."

There had been no torches or paraffin lanterns back then.

"How old do you think you are?" I asked.

"Oh, I think I've beaten a hundred," he told me brightly.

People on Pentecost are seldom sure of their age. Even my students often respond with uncertainty when asked their dates of birth, and at the time Old Mark was born there was certainly nobody around ticking off days on a calendar. Ages are often exaggerated - several islanders claim to have grandparents aged 120 or more. However, since Old Mark had just described a historical event that occurred in 1913, the mystic-looking yet bright-eyed old man sitting beside me probably was a genuine centenarian.

In Vanuatu, even more so than in Britain, old people have lived through a fascinating amount of history. A hundred-year-old on Pentecost today is only a generation removed from the Dark Ages, and only a couple of further generations removed from the Stone Age. A real life Stig of the Dump, almost, yet one who has adapted with total nonchalance to the shiny screens that are filled on Friday nights with tiny moving people and to the flying canoes that pass low over the village on their way to the nearby airfield.

"Were there missionaries around when you were born?" I asked.

"Oh yes, I remember a couple," Old Mark said. He listed the names of some of the first missionaries to have worked on Pentecost - or at least, the first who had escaped the cooking pot long enough to begin converting the islanders to Jesus's cause.

I badly wanted to ask whether people were still eating each other at the time he grew up, but I couldn't think of a tactful way of phrasing the question. Recalling the trouble that Prince Philip had once got into for asking a similar thing on a similar island, I moved on instead to the subject I had come to ask about: the language that had been spoken when Old Mark was young.

Pentecost is haunted by the ghosts of extinct languages. The linguistic diversity of the place today is impressive enough - four living languages, with ten or eleven dialects between them, confined to an island of fifteen thousand people - yet in reality these merely represent the survivors from an age of an even greater diversity. Two centuries ago the inhabitants of Pentecost lived in tiny and isolated clans, and had lived that way for long enough for each clan to have developed its own distinct way of speaking. Occasionally a clan and its language would die out, but a new one would soon arise to replace it, and a rich variety was maintained.

The arrival of white people, however, unleashed a linguistic maelstrom. Pentecost's population was gutted out, as epidemics of Western disease to which the islanders had no immunity killed off perhaps nine-tenths of the people. The survivors regrouped in new villages, and were often obliged to marry those from other clans, since so few of their own clan's people were left. The establishment of schools, churches and plantations brought together young people from many different areas, among whom the most widely-spoken language would be adopted as a lingua franca. Some of the smaller languages became the preserve of the elderly, who would sit in lonely corners conversing in them, being largely ignored by their children and grandchildren (some of whom would later regret this deeply). When the last of these old people died - or rather, when the second-last person died - the ancestral languages would cease to be heard.

The last generation that truly spoke the old languages died off as the twentieth century drew to an end. However, some of their languages survive as ghosts in the minds of the speakers' children, people who never fully learned their parents' language but have not fully forgotten it either. The Ranwadi area is home to one such ghost, Sowa language, described in an earlier blog. North-western Pentecost has two resident ghost languages, named Volvoluana and Nggasai. And from southern Pentecost I'd heard numerous linguistic ghost stories, the most well-known of which centres around the village of Hotwata, once home to a language named Doltes. Doltes is believed to have died around half a century ago, yet its ghost survives in the memory of one very old villager: Old Mark.

Sitting in Old Mark's house, a breezy wood-and-cement building that would have resembled a dockside shed if it hadn't contained beds and mats, Old Mark gave me as many words and phrases as he could remember in Doltes, which he referred to as 'the small language'. He translated these for me into 'the big language' - Ske, the language now spoken in the Hotwata area. (This made me smile: Old Mark's 'big language' is spoken by a mere five hundred people. On my way down to Hotwata from Ranwadi, I'd walked right across the area in which it was spoken in an hour and a half.) With his grandchildren's help, Old Mark translated these phrases into Pidgin English, from which I translated them into proper English. It was a weird meeting of cultures: a speaker of a language known only by a single person, working with a speaker of a language known by a billion.

"Bononfu", Old Mark said. "That means dog, in the small language. In the big language we say 'boblievuk'."

Translated literally, 'the white person's pig'.

I noted the words and phrases down as best I could with English letters, scribbling circumflexes onto the ghost language's incredibly short vowels. In my basket I had an MP3 player containing a tiny microphone, but I didn't bother to get it out.

"'Tubwi'. That means bamboo in the small language. In the big language it's 'tumbul'."

I scribbled.

"But there's two kinds of bamboo," Old Mark continued. "The really strong kind they called 'aio fat'."

"Aio fat?"

"Yes. 'Aio' on its own means 'knife'."

Of course - before metal came along, knives were made from strong bamboo. This really was a Stone Age language.

We chatted more about language, and about history. The sun outside got lower, and I remembered that I had a long walk back at Ranwadi, and that I'd arranged to meet someone at sunset. I thanked Old Mark for sharing his language with me, and prepared to leave.

As I packed my notepad away, I remembered the MP3 player in my basket. Doltes might never have been recorded before, and there might never be a chance to record it again. By the time the next person with an interest in language happens to come by, Old Mark will probably not be around. I asked if the old man would mind repeating a few of the words into the microphone. He agreed, and I made my recordings.

When Old Mark eventually passes away, those two short MP3 files, tiny snatches less than a minute in length, may be all that survives of the sounds through which an entire community once lived their lives.

31st August

2007-09-07T01:31:00.000+01:00

The community run by the famous Chief Viraleo at Lafatmangemu is, first and
foremost, a school. Not a school like Ranwadi, with its computers and
photocopiers and piles of textbooks following curricula designed in
Australia and New Zealand, taught largely by staff born or educated abroad.
Chief Viraleo's establishment was a school of custom. It claimed to be a
place where islanders could come to be schooled not in Western ideas and
Western languages, but in Pentecost's native traditions.

Students of all ages come from all over the island to attend lessons, which
are held during the first week of each lunar month (the Western calendar has
been dispensed with in Lafatmangemu). I arrived on the day before the full
moon - the middle of the month - and the place was relatively empty,
although a few scholars remained. Most were young men. Many were introduced
as assistant chiefs, who had come to Lafatmangemu to acquire knowledge about
traditional customs which they would then take back and share with their
communities.

Upon my arrival I was shown the way to school office, which occupied the
upper level of an impressed two-storey building made entirely from local
wood and bamboo (except for the tin roof, and even that was lined on the
inside with a woven bamboo ceiling). I clambered up the wooden staircase and
was met at the door of the office by a bearded scholar.

"Ihaku be Andrew. Nan mai Ranwadi." That was as much North Pentecost
Language as I could manage; I switched into Pidgin English, and asked if
Chief Viraleo was around.

The assistant showed me into the room. It was large, cosy-looking, and
richly decorated with everything from sculptures in traditional patterns to
posters of local wildlife. Many of the notices on the walls consisted of
strange, loopy symbols: Pentecost's native writing system. This was Avoiuli,
the 39-letter alphabet based on designs in ancient sand drawings that Chief
Viraleo had spent fourteen years deciphering (or, according to his critics,
inventing).

The chief was sitting in front of an old fashioned ledger, filled with his
native writing. He was a younger man than I expected, with a shaved head,
narrow reading glasses and the air of an eccentric schoolteacher. He got up,
walked over to me, and tapped his forehead against mine.

"That's our custom greeting. We don't shake hands here."

I introduced myself properly and explained why I had come. "I've heard lots
of stories about this place."

"Yes, the BBC were filming here a few weeks ago," Chief Viraleo said. "One
of their people was called Andrew too."

I knew - several friends and relatives had forwarded me the news article.
The BBC had come to report not on the school, but on another of Chief
Viraleo's ventures, his 'custom bank'. Instead of dealing in vatu, Vanuatu's
official currency, the bank at Lafatmangemu deals in 'livatu', a novel
currency based on the red mats and curved boar's tusks that Pentecost
islanders traditionally used as money.

A lifetime's education at the school of custom costs 72 livatu. At an
official exchange rate of 18,000 vatu ($180) to the livatu, this amounts to
over a million vatu - a lot of money even by Western standards, and
substantially more than the cost of an education at Vanuatu's ordinary
schools. Some sceptics, looking at the price of pigs' tusks and mats in
their own villages, claim that the livatu is overvalued. However, since
pigs' tusks and mats are not identical and some are naturally worth more
than others, this is hard to prove.

"What if I wanted to stay for just a couple of days at your school, learning
about custom?" I asked. "Do you offer short courses?"

"Do you have any livatu?"

"What do you mean?" Lacking the right currency was a problem I'd only
encountered before when crossing international borders, not when crossing a
five-mile-wide island in one small corner of one small country.

"Do you have any pig's teeth?"

Damn, I left those at home.

"Couldn't I pay in vatu?"

Chief Viraleo gave me a look like an animal rights activist whose friend has
just asked if she'd look good in a fur coat.

"Sorry to corrupt your village with white man's money," I said. "It's all I
have." Surely the chief's bank could convert it for me.

Chief Viraleo thought for a while, and accepted. We negotiated a price.

"You can pay your school fees at a ceremony this afternoon," he told me.
According to custom, it seemed, you can't just hand something over and get a
receipt. I would have to stand in the nasara while a chief walked around
three times, inspecting my cash as if it were a red mat or a pig that I was
presenting for approval, while a speech was given thanking me and welcoming
me into the school.

From outside came the thudding noise of a slit drum: the school bell.

"Lunch time."

I followed the chief and his assistant down the wooden steps of the
building, across a forest clearing and into the huge nakamal that served as
both the school's classroom and its dining hall. The building had a brown
dirt floor and no walls, just an enormous, overhanging roof, made entirely
from bamboo and palm thatch and supported on pillars made from tree trunks.
Benches of local timber ran along the sides of the nakamal, and an
old-fashioned blackboard stood at one end. A blossoming nakavika tree
carpeted the bare ground outside in deep pink fluff.

A rather un-traditional bank of fluorescent lights had been attached to the
rafters of the nakamal, connected by garish pale wires to a light switch on
one of the pillars.

"We only run the electricity generator on special occasions," Chief Viraleo
told me.

An old man entered the nakamal.

"Rantavuha," I said. Good day.

"We don't use that phrase here," Chief Viraleo said. "Here we follow the old
custom: we address people as family. If a man is your father, you greet him
with the word 'father'. If he is your uncle, you greet him as 'uncle'. Or if
he is a chief, you can address him by his chiefly title."

"What if you don't know who somebody is?" This wasn't an issue in
traditional times, when strangers in the village were a rare sight and any
who did turn up were likely to be treated with suspicion rather than greeted
cordially, but Pentecost society has changed since then.

"You should call him 'tua'." The local word for 'brother'.

"OK."

"We find that using the old system helps make sure we know our families,"
Chief Viraleo explained. "If you just say good day, you start to forget who
people are."

Women shuffled into the nakamal and began laying out food. A group of
slightly malnourished-looking children wandered at their feet.

"Here we eat only local food," Chief Viraleo said. "We don't eat anything
that we buy from the store."

"No biscuits, no chocolate, no tomato sauce?" I said. "I feel sorry for
you."

Everybody laughed.

Nobody in Lafatmangemu eats from plates or dishes. Instead, each person's
food was served on a woven, basket-like tray, lined with giant heliconia
leaves. One of the women handed me such a tray, heaped with an absurd
quantity of food. There were pieces of baked tuber in an assortment of
phallic shapes, which were bland and starchy in varying degrees, along with
chewy slabs of grated vegetable that had been mashed up with coconut milk
and baked in a fire to make laplap, Vanuatu's national dish. Some visitors
to the country take to laplap, others despise it; none would choose to eat
it for three meals a day.

A side dish, consisting of a gigantic bean pod that had been boiled down
into greenish-brown mush, was handed to me in a bowl made from a giant
clamshell.

"Try this," said Chief Viraleo, pulling out the inside of an exotic-looking
whelk and handing it to me. It had a green tinge, and tasted as if it had
been plucked straight from the reef at low tide. I swallowed.

After lunch, I was shown to the dormitory that I would be sharing with the
scholars. This was another dirt-floored nakamal, dark except for the grey
light straining through slats in the walls. There were no beds or
mattresses; instead, people slept on woven pandanus mats on the floor, with
coconut leaves underneath them for padding. I lay down and found that
midribs of the leaves dug into my back, making it hard to get comfortable.
The pillows, too, were made from strips of pandanus, hard and shiny, woven
together at the edges and stuffed with crushed-up leaves. Woven mats were
historically used as bed covers, too, but here at Lafatmangemu the scholars
had brought along ragged sheets of cloth to sleep under. Some had also
strung mosquito nets over their beds. There are custom medicines that can
relieve malaria, but people didn't seem to put too much faith in them.

That afternoon, I rested and chatted to Chief Viraleo. Another chief was
introduced, a yellow-haired and elderly man, and I paid my school fees.
After circling me three times, the old man slapped me on the legs like a
prized pig as I handed over the money.

At sunset, the men at Lafatmangemu gathered in yet another nakamal, higher
up the hill, to drink kava while women and children busied themselves in the
background preparing dinner. The nakamal was in the process of being
rebuilt, and half of the building consisted of bare wooden posts, with a
gnarled yet sturdy-looking ladder made of local wood leaning against them.
Bats flapped in and out of the nakamal, and the forest outside was
mystic-looking in the moonlight.

Wood fires glowed under the cooking pots, and one woman held a bundle of
strips from a coconut frond which she used as a flaming torch, shaking it
every time the light dimmed so that it flared into life, scattering glowing
sparks on the ground. Small lanterns illuminated the rest of building.
Paraffin being a Muggle invention, and an expensive one, the people of
Lafatmangemu fuelled their lamps using locally-pressed coconut oil instead
(a very sensible idea that other communities in Vanuatu ought to copy). Some
of the little lights were made with half-coconut shells; others burned
inside tall glass jars.

"We found the jars washed up on the beach," Chief Viraleo told me. "We think
they came from Fiji."

Supper was handed out in individual baskets, which each man took back to eat
the dormitory after he'd finished drinking kava. When I returned to the
dormitory, my companions had already lit a camp fire in the middle of the
floor and were sitting around it on wooden stumps, tearing apart lumps of
pig and taro from their baskets. I joined them, licking my greasy fingers -
there are no knives and forks in Lafatmangemu - and flicking gristly bits of
pig into the fire. The fire died down as we finished eating (which I was
thankful for, as it was rather close to my flammable-looking sleeping mat).
By the time I fell asleep the only light in the dormitory came from red
embers and a green luminous mushroom growing out of one of the wooden posts
in the wall.

I woke at dawn the next day and went in search of a stream or a river in
which to wash. (I knew better than to ask Chief Viraleo where the bathroom
was.) I was shown the way to the village well, a deep, sandy hole in the
forest with slippery spiral steps running around the edge. Constructing a
narrow, European-style well with a winch for hoisting up water would have
been impossible in the days of true custom, I realised. At the bottom of the
well was a black, murky puddle of water, overhung by ferns. I filled up a
bucket (waterproof containers are one concession to modernisation that
you'll find even in the most traditional of Vanuatu communities) and
disappeared into a nearby shack of coconut leaves to have a shower.

Breakfast consisted of more laplap and tubers, with a clamshell of boiled
cabbage on the side. I made a mental note: when visiting custom villages,
bring a supply of chocolate.

"We find we have more strength when we eat only traditional food," Chief
Viraleo told me.

Forget strength - I wanted a sugar hit.

After breakfast, the scholars went to work on various activities, and I
followed Chief Viraleo back into his office.

"So, what do you want to learn?" he asked.

I had lots of questions for the chief, but the thing I had really come to
find out about was language. A while ago, with the help of my students at
Ranwadi, I had begun the daunting task of trying and compile a phrasebook of
all five of Pentecost's native languages (and their thirteen dialects).
Several students obligingly contributed words and phrases, but a problem
emerged: the language of Pentecost's youth today is insidiously mixed with
Pidgin English.

Pentecost's native tongues are the languages of Stone Age people. In their
original form, they lacked a vast number of words that are necessary in
modern life: not just for technologies such as 'engine' and 'telephone', but
also for the intangible concepts of big civilisation, such as 'association'
and 'government'. Some speakers have attempted to solve this problem the
Icelandic way, by creatively rearranging the words they already had in their
languages: there is a local word for 'plane' that translates literally as
'flying canoe'. However, the main way in which the problem was solved was by
massive borrowing of words from the foreigners who had introduced all these
new things to the islands.

As a means of acquiring terminology for new concepts, there is no harm in
this. After all, this kind of borrowing is largely how the English language
itself has expanded and enriched itself over the years. However, on
Pentecost the mixing of indigenous languages with the national one has
become such a habit that even perfectly good native words, such the terms
for 'blue' and 'thousand', are now being replaced by the Pidgin English
equivalents. Some villagers tell me that the language of children educated
in Churches of Christ schools such as Ranwadi is particularly corrupt.

Some borrowed words have been so mangled in the conversion that people no
longer even realise that they are foreign words. Even native English
speakers have difficulty spotting that 'kolosisi' (toilet), for example,
comes from their own language.

If Pentecost's young people want to alter their languages, that is their
choice. However, it would be immensely sad if there were no record of the
old words - something that my students can look back on in fifty years time
if they wish to reminisce about the language their grandparents' once spoke.
In the phrasebook, therefore, I wanted to try and include as many genuine
native words as possible, alongside their Pidgin replacements. And if there
was one person who was sure to know the traditional words, it was Chief
Viraleo.

The chief and I spent the morning flicking through books and notes, and
writing down words. Sometimes Chief Viraleo would scribble down a word in
his own alphabet first, and ponder over it for a while before offering me a
Western transliteration. We pored over pictures of birds and trees. The ones
that the chief didn't recognise from the pictures, we showed to the other
scholars down at the nakamal at lunchtime. I sat in the centre of half a
dozen young men, all vigorously debating the identity of a particular
species.

"It grows deep in the bush; flying foxes take the fruit. Yellow fruit, not
red ones. Maybe they're the same kind. Straight wood, black in the centre.
People used to make arrows out of it. No, that's not the right name, wait,
it'll come to me. This tree is a."

And I would hurriedly scribble down the word as the men smiled and agreed
that this was indeed the correct name of the tree.

I asked a lot of questions at the school of custom, and got answers to most
of them. However, the exchange of ideas went both ways, and during the two
days I found myself trying awkwardly to string together Pidgin English
answers to some very searching questions. Chief Viraleo had one of the most
probing minds of anyone I'd met. In conversation he had a bright stare that
gave the impression he was weighing what had been said carefully, finding
the connections, and analysing how it fitted into his eccentric picture of
the world.

"What are you reading?" he asked, arriving in the nakamal after an afternoon
break and scrutinising my copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

"A story," I told him. "A story about a boy who fights against people who
use black magic."

"Ah yes, black magic."

"It's just a story," I said. Although it would be hard to find any school in
the real world that resembled Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry
more closely than Chief Viraleo's school of custom.

"You're a science teacher, aren't you?" he asked.

"Uh huh."

"Do scientists believe there is magic?"

"No," I said.

"But what is magic?"

Magic is anything that scientists don't believe possible, I thought, but
realised that this was a circular argument. It was actually a good question:
how do you define magic?

"Imagine if somebody wants to move a stone," I said, giving the first
example that came into my head. "If they move it by touching it, or blowing
on it, or poking it with something, that is normal. But if they can move it
without touching it or pushing it in any way, that is magic."

"Here, stones move without being touched or pushed," Chief Viraleo informed
me.

"Really?"

"Yes. A while ago, a huge stone appeared on the reef down there. Nobody knew
where it had come from. It just appeared. That was magic."

"The sea probably shifted it there."

"But it was a big stone. A really big one. The sea couldn't have moved it.
Nobody could have moved it. It just appeared."

"You believe in magic then?"

"Yes, of course." Chief Viraleo looked at me inquisitively. "But you really
don't believe?"

"No, I don't."

Chief Viraleo thought for a moment. "What if a sick person uses a leaf to
make himself better? Is that magic?"

"Not necessarily," I said. "Plenty of leaves are known to act as medicines."

"What if a person uses a leaf to make it rain on a hot day?"

"That would be magic."

"What's the difference?"

"Scientists know how medicinal leaves work," I said. "They can study them,
and find out what's inside the leaf that helps the body to heal. But there's
no means by which rubbing a leaf can cause rain."

"People here use the leaves, and when they do, it starts to rain."

"Perhaps it would have rained anyway." It rains a lot on East Pentecost.

"But it always happens after people do their magic."

"When do people do this magic?" I asked, rhetorically. "They do it after a
hot day. And that's the time when it rains. Scientists can explain that -
it's got nothing to do with leaves. On a hot day, the power of the sun
causes water to rise up into the air. Afterwards, that water falls back down
as rain. That would happen whether you rubbed the leaves or not."

Chief Viraleo was chuckling and smiling. He didn't believe me, but he was
enjoying the debate.

"Do scientists believe in things like gods and spirits?" he asked.

"Some do."

"So those are part of science?"

"No."

"What are they then?"

"Religion."

Chief Viraleo nodded. "And not all scientists believe in these things?"

"That's right."

"But how can you explain the creation of the world, if there are no gods and
spirits?"

"Oh, scientists have a very good explanation for that," I said. "Before the
world existed, there were lots of stones flying around in space. Scientists
have another story explaining how those stones got there in the first
place," I added quickly, forestalling a possible objection to my theory.
"Those stones came together, one by one, to make bigger stones. They were
pulled together, in the same way that things are pulled towards the ground."
I demonstrated this by dropping Harry Potter; the heavy book hit the bench
below with satisfying force. "Bigger and bigger rocks came together, and
eventually formed a really big stone - the world we're standing on."

"Yes, someone else told me there are lots of stones flying around in space,"
Chief Viraleo said, interested. "Is it true that one of them could fall down
and kill us?"

"It could happen," I said, "but it probably won't. Most of the stones are so
small that they burn up in the air. When you see a falling star, that's what
it is - a burning stone from space."

Chief Viraleo looked a little confused. In the down-to-earth lives of the
ni-Vanuatu, one of the essential properties of a stone is that it doesn't
burn.

"But sometimes these stones do hit the ground?"

"Yes." I smiled. "Maybe that's where the mystery stone on your reef came
from. Maybe it came from space."

We all laughed.

"What about the other stars? The ones that don't move."

"They're like the sun," I said. "Like the sun, but very far away."

"And the planets?"

"They're like the world we're on," I said, "except that there are no trees
or animals or water. Just empty stone, and sometimes clouds."

"How many planets do scientists believe in?"

"There are eight going around the sun," I said. "Eight, including the world
we're on. Scientists used to say that there were nine, but then they held a
meeting and decided that the ninth shouldn't be called a planet. It's really
just another big stone."

"In our custom, we believe that there are ten planets," Chief Viraleo said.

That was interesting. "So your ancestors knew that our world isn't the only
one?"

"Yes."

"Did they realise that our world is round?"

"Yes, they knew that."

"How?"

"They saw it in an ancient sand drawing," he said, crouching down and
scratching a design in the dirt floor. The design was enclosed by a circle.

"This circle," Chief Viraleo said, tracing it with his finger, "is formed by
the wind, blowing around the world."

That made sense. The wind blows across Pentecost largely in one direction -
as the unfortunate inhabitants of the east coast, who are on the windward
side of the island, know well. It would be natural to assume that the wind
was going around in a circuit and coming back.

"So your ancestors invented this drawing."

"No, it was here before them."

That was strange. "Are they any legends about how your ancestors first
arrived on Pentecost?" I asked.

"They didn't arrive," Chief Viraleo told me. "They were created here."

This, too, was strange. I'd heard other stories - from local people, as well
as history books - recounting the arrival of the first ni-Vanuatu in canoes
across the ocean. One local legend puts their arrival on Pentecost at 140
generations ago, which fits fairly well with archaeologists' beliefs.

"So people were created here on Pentecost, and then spread to the rest of
the world?"

"Yes. They built a ship, and sailed away across the ocean. And I now know
where that ship went ashore," Chief Viraleo proclaimed.

"Where?"

"Mali."

Apart from being on almost exactly the opposite side of the world, I was
pretty sure that Mali is a landlocked country - quite an unlikely place for
a ship full of Pacific islanders to turn up.

"How do you know this?" I asked.

"I was in Brussels once," Chief Viraleo told me. "I went there to attend a
conference on traditional culture. I went out for dinner one evening, at a
restaurant. In restaurants in Europe, you can ask for anything you want, and
they will cook it for you," he added, for the benefit of the assistant
sitting next to him.

In Pentecost food shacks, the choice of meal depends entirely on what the
chef happens to be stewing up that day.

"I ordered a steak, and they brought me a steak. I asked for a glass of
wine, and they brought me wine."

Chief Viraleo's assistant whistled, impressed.

"And then I noticed that there was a sand-drawing design on the wall. It was
exactly the same as the designs on Pentecost."

A lot of Pentecost's traditional sand-drawings are quite simple patterns; it
wouldn't be particularly surprising if somebody else in world had arrived by
chance at the same design. I knew it would be useless to try and suggest
this.

"I asked where the design had come from. The chef said it had come from
Mali. So I know that the ship from Pentecost went to Mali."

"Mali is a desert country," I said. "It has a lot of sand. Maybe the people
there invented sand drawing for themselves."

"But this design was exactly the same as the ones on Pentecost."

Try looking up 'coincidence' in the dictionary of Vanuatu Pidgin English -
it's not there. The word doesn't exist in the islanders' vocabularies.

I tried a different argument. "How do you know that the design wasn't
invented in Mali, and then taken to Pentecost later?"

"Because our ancestors understood the meaning of the design. They knew what
it symbolised. That proves that it started here."

Five minutes earlier I'd felt as if I was in a Harry Potter story. Now it
seemed like I'd strayed into the Da Vinci Code.

"The Bible doesn't say anything about Man being created in Vanuatu, I said."
Citing the Bible is usually a fail-safe way to win an argument with a
ni-Vanuatu.

"No, but in custom, we believe that's how it happened."

"So you don't follow the Bible?" Hearing a Pentecost islander contradict the
Bible was like hearing a Scotsman praise the English - refreshing,
provocative, and unsettlingly strange. "Do you believe in God?"

"I was schooled as an Anglican," Chief Viraleo said. Exactly the same
evasive response that I give when people on Pentecost ask my religion.

"Is there a church here?"

"There's one in the next village." Evasive again.

Chief Viraleo, I realised later, was reluctant to tell me his beliefs for
fear that I'd criticise him as a sinner. Over shells of kava that evening,
the other scholars were more open.

"Back in our villages, there are people who don't want anything to do with
us, because we no longer pray," one told me. "But we're not living without
religion - we do have gods."

"In custom, there are two gods," another explained. "Everyone else in the
world says there is one god. It is only here on Pentecost that we believe in
two."

"Plenty of cultures believe in many gods," I said. "But having exactly two
gods - that is unusual."

"There must be two gods, because there is two of everything in the world,"
the scholar explained. "Look at yourself. You have two eyes. Two ears. Two
hands. Two legs. People are divided into men and women - two kinds. It's the
same with animals - two of each kind. So there must be two gods."

I wanted to explain that there are species of micro-organism that have
dozens of different sexes, but my Pidgin English failed me.

"What if the two gods disagree about how to run the world?" I asked.

"They don't. They work together."

"Then how can you be sure that there are two of them?"

"Look," one of the scholars said, "The Bible talks about God and Satan,
right?"

I nodded.

"God and Satan - there you are. Two of them. Two gods - just like ours."

"Satan isn't a god," I protested.

"Why do you say that?"

I thought about this, and realised that Satan does in fact have all the
attributes of a god.

"You see," one of the scholars said. "Our beliefs aren't really that
different from the Bible."

God-fearing islanders don't all see it that way. A couple of days after
returning to Ranwadi, when I told the men down at the nakamal about my trip
to Lafatmangemu, Old Zaccheus the Principal's father was visibly angry at
what he heard.

"You see this," he said, wavy a chubby finger at the candle illuminating the
nakamal. "This is what the missionaries brought us. Light! The light of God!
Before they came, we were down here, in darkness." He pointed at the shadow
cast by the wooden stump on which the candle stood. "People were fighting
each other. They were killing each other. They were eating each other! Then
the word of God arrived, and we rose up into light." He illustrated this
progress with hand gestures directed at the candle. "Now they want to drag
us back down into darkness again!"

I stared thoughtfully at the darkness underneath the candle.

"I've spoken to people from villages where people have gone and joined the
school at Lafatmangemu," the old man went on. "There are no pigs' tusks or
red mats left in those villages now. The people have given them all to
Viraleo. All of them. What will happen if one of them wants to get married?
How will they pay for the ceremony? All their pigs and mats are gone! And
for what? It's. it's. all just a."

I think the word that Old Zaccheus (and several other people I spoke) to
were skirting around, or perhaps didn't know, was "cult". Vanuatu, with its
deeply spiritual, tribally-minded and intellectually isolated people, has
always been a rich spawning ground for cults. The arrival in the past
century of European sailors and American soldiers laden with fabulous
foreign goods spawned cargo cults, some of whose followers actually built
roads and wharves in preparation to receive the miraculous cargo which they
believed would be delivered if they prayed hard enough for it. Elsewhere in
the country, the idea that the British royal family are of ni-Vanuatu
ancestry (an improbable belief that is surprisingly widespread throughout
Vanuatu) has reportedly given rise to a cult of people who worship Prince
Philip. Could Chief Viraleo's quirky establishment be just another cult, a
group of followers bewitched by a persuasive yet self-serving leader?

But it was natural for Zaccheus to be angry at the developments at
Lafatmangemu, I thought: he is an elder of the church. And some of the more
evangelical church ministries that find eager audiences in Vanuatu have
cult-like qualities themselves.

I remembered Benny Hinn, the multi-millionaire American faith healer whose
begging letters addressed to poor students continue to pile up in the inbox
at Ranwadi, even after I returned one of them with a letter of my own
explaining to Mr Hinn and his colleagues that the people they are writing to
are struggling Third World schoolchildren and pleading for the poor kids to
be removed from his mailing list. If the people of Pentecost are going to
put their money and faith in the hands of a questionable leader, it has to
be better that they throw in their lot with Chief Viraleo - who has never
threatened anybody with hellfire and who promises his followers nothing more
than a thought-provoking education (a promise that he capably fulfils) -
than with the likes of Benny Hinn.

"Another thing," Old Zaccheus continued, "is that the idea of using only
custom money doesn't make sense. What if I want to order something from
town? They will want cash - they won't accept red mats! And what if the
Japanese lend us money for a project? They won't want to be paid back in
pigs' teeth."

This had occurred to me too. I've heard too many comments - not just from
Chief Viraleo, but also from Western journalists who have reported on his
banking scheme - implying that the 'custom economy' somehow offers the
islanders a means of relief from poverty. Their logic seems to run something
like this: in an economy based on vatu and dollars the people of Vanuatu are
poor, because they have little money, but in an economy based on pigs and
red mats they are rich, because those things are plentiful here. You don't
have to be an economist to spot the flaw in this. Vanuatu's economic problem
is an external one: there is a 3 billion vatu difference between the money
that Vanuatu spends on foreign imports and the money that it earns with
which to pay for those goods. Unless the Australians and Taiwanese develop a
sudden desire to own highly-curved tusks, custom currency cannot possibly be
used to make up the shortfall.

Of course, traditional money can and does play a role in the internal
economy of islands such as Pentecost. However, apart from its cultural
cuteness it's hard to see why it's better than Western money, and it does in
fact have some disadvantages. As I pointed out to one scholar at
Lafatmangemu who tried to tell me that coins and banknotes were a pointless
invention, you can't put a pig in your wallet.

"Chief Viraleo isn't the only one promoting the custom economy," I told
Zaccheus in his defence. "The Vanuatu government is into it too. After all,
they've just ruled that only traditional items such as pigs and mats - not
vatu - can be used in ceremonies."

This caused a murmuring around the nakamal. The villagers, it seemed, hadn't
been aware of this.

"There was a wedding down the coast yesterday," somebody said. "The bride
was paid for with vatu."

"It's a free country," said Old Zaccheus defiantly. "If people want to use
vatu in their ceremonies, they have the right to do that. What right does
the government have to stop them?"

"There are already plenty of laws and customs that control how people use
money," I pointed out. "Both here and in countries like mine, there are
certain things that it's perfectly legal to give someone, but utterly
forbidden to sell for money. Political influence, for instance. Or sex."

In fact, I realised, those are exactly the two things that are generally
bought and sold with custom currency - the former at grade-taking rituals
where the slaughter of pigs allows a man to rise through the chiefly ranks,
the latter at weddings. It wasn't really surprising that the government
objected to the use of cash in such ceremonies.

"But what if somebody who wants to get married has a lot of vatu, but no
custom currency?"

"Then he can use his money to buy pigs and mats from someone who does have
them." Chief Viraleo would do nicely out of the whole business. Perhaps the
guy did understand economics after all.

However far-fetched his ideas may have been, Chief Viraleo was
unquestionably a thinker - and he was the kind of thinker who inspires the
people around him to think too. At the end of the day, I liked and respected
him for that.

"On my trip to Europe, I went to England," the chief had told me. "I was
really surprised at what I found there. I had been taught that England was a
great country. It used to lead the world. Yet when I arrived there, I found
people begging on the road. People with no food and no money. It was the
same in the other countries I went to. Big, rich, powerful countries. It was
a real surprise to go there and find people who were hungry."

"I know," I said. It's a paradox that Vanuatu, which is among the poorest of
the thirty-two countries I've visited, is also the only one in which nobody
begs on the streets.

"And yet the people I saw in the restaurants threw their half-eaten food
into the dustbin. The ones who were hungry on the road had to come and eat
it out of the dustbin. Why couldn't the people in the restaurants just have
given their unwanted food straight to the people who needed it?"

I had never really thought about this before. Perhaps they couldn't be
bothered, I mused, although I didn't say this out loud. Sharing food is an
important way in which ni-Vanuatu show their friendship, not just with their
friends and neighbours but also with visitors and strangers, and I was
frightened of what Chief Viraleo would think of a society that allows the
person on the other side of the road to go hungry simply because the person
with food to spare cannot be bothered to go across and hand it over. My
second thought was that restaurants nowadays would probably be frightened of
being sued, if their generosity happened to inadvertently make somebody ill.
I didn't share this idea either; my ni-Vanuatu companions would have found
it too ridiculous for words.

I said nothing. Chief Viraleo stared at me quizzically. I suspected I knew
what he was thinking. It isn't always our customs that are the crazy ones.

27th August

2007-08-31T02:48:00.000+01:00

There was a very slight unease in people's expressions when I told them that
I was planning to go over to the other side.

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

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

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

I nodded.

I want to give a talk to you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can find your own way from here?

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

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

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

Do you know the way?

I think so.

Do you have a map?

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

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

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

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

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

This must be the place.

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

[To be continued.]

22nd August

2007-08-23T02:33:00.001+01:00

My first brush with the devil nettle was in the forested gulley that runs
down the northern boundary of the school grounds. Since this gulley is
occasionally used as a hideaway by boys and girls who sneak out for illicit
liaisons, it wouldn't surprise me if someone had planted it there on
purpose. A romp in the bushes loses its appeal when the bushes can give you
nasty stings.

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

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

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

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

"Mr Andrew, that's a bean!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- - -

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

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

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

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

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

12th August

2007-08-21T01:01:00.000+01:00

In a damp clearing surrounded by little thatched houses and overhung by
giant tropical trees, two high chiefs gathered their people together to
welcome a representative from a great foreign tribe.

Over the past few months, the leaky little pipes that carry fresh water from
springs on the mountain down to Ranwadi and the surrounding villages have
been replaced with a new system of sturdy plastic hoses and tanks, thanks to
an aid project funded by the Japanese. Now the Japanese ambassador had come
to Pentecost, and the local residents had organised a ceremony to express
their gratitude.

The ceremony was held at Lalbetaes, the home village of Chief Alucio and
Chief Philip, the area's highest-ranking chiefs. These two men are brothers,
but if you met them you wouldn't know it. Chief Alucio is often seen sitting
slightly apart from the other villagers, his back slightly stiffer and his
head slightly more upright. He walks around leaning on a long wooden stick,
and speaks in polite, measured tones. Everything about him portrays calmness
and clarity. Chief Philip, by contrast, is typically found sitting in the
middle of a loud, booming, guffawing cloud of tobacco smoke. He drives
around the local villages in a metal-green truck with red lightning stripes
along the side, barking at passers-by in a deep, grumbly voice.

The village of Lalbetaes gives the sense of being a place of wealth and
power. Not in the manner of Ranwadi and Melsisi - which have the island's
brightest lights and its newest buildings - but in a deeper, more
traditional way. The village is slightly inland, built at the end of a muddy
road (deeply rutted by the wheels of Chief Philip's truck) in grassy
clearings in the forest. Huge banyan trees overhang the village, and navele
trees stand like Christmas trees decorated with streamers of yellow blossom.
Pigs snuffle around in the brown spaces beneath the trees. These are not the
obese pink porkers found on a British farm, but hairy, grunty little beasts
in varying shades of muddy black and brown. Some wander freely around the
village; whilst others are tied to trees, or grub around in makeshift pens.

The nakamal where the people of Lalbetaes gather for meetings and ceremonies
is built in the same style as the one down at Vanwoki where I regularly
drink kava with the villagers - a sloping, thatched roof supported on chunky
wooden beams above a brown dirt floor. However, whilst the Vanwoki nakamal
is a homely little hut, Chief Alucio and Chief Philip's nakamal at Lalbetaes
has the dimensions of a gigantic hall, capable of holding hundreds of
people. The vast roof contains tens of thousands of natanggura palm leaves,
which have been individually cut, bent and pinned onto supporting poles. In
Pentecost's climate, such roofs rot within a few years, and only a chief who
could call upon the help of an awfully large number of people would be able
to maintain a building of this size.

The water supply ceremony was held outdoors. A large crowd of villagers,
teachers and students gathered around the nasara - the village green - where
the Vanuatu flag was flying from a makeshift flagpole of green bamboo. Two
bullocks had been slaughtered for the occasion, and all the students who had
spent their afternoons carrying sand and gravel up the hill for the
construction of the new water supply were rewarded with a rare chance to
have a decent meal. The Japanese ambassador and his wife were seated,
together with local chiefs and government dignitaries, under a
corrugated-metal shelter at one side of the nasara. A microphone had been
rigged up, and the dignitaries gave speeches to the crowd.

I arrived part-way through the afternoon, having tried to estimate what time
the speeches would be over. My estimate was out by about half an hour, but I
managed to miss the worst of the welcoming and thanking, and got to hear the
Principal's elderly father - keen to remind everybody that the Japanese
ambassador wasn't the only figure they had to thank for supplying their
villages with water - take the microphone and sing a spontaneous hymn.

The final speaker was Chief Alucio, who earned my deep respect by beginning
his speech with "Me no want'em talk too-much, ee no got plenty thing me
want'em tell'em." This is a common way for speakers in Vanuatu to begin, and
usually heralds a speech of average length and above-average pointlessness,
but wise Chief Alucio actually meant his words. After a couple of sentences
of thanks his speech was over, and it was time for the traditional dancing
to begin.

The group of men who shuffled and sang their way into the nasara to begin
their dance were clothed in an odd mixture of ceremonial mats and Australian
board shorts. Some had bunches of rattling nuts tied around their ankles to
provide percussion to the dance; others wore white trainers. Most had
nanggaria - ceremonial leaves - stuck into the backs of their mats or their
shorts, giving them the appearance of giant cockerels. A couple of men
tapped out a beat on wooden slit drums, while others led the dancers in an
ululating chant.

Vanuatu's custom dances are not elaborate, gymnastic affairs. Imagine how
people might dance if gravity were doubled, and you will get some impression
of what a typical performance is like. Dancers shuffle in slow lines up and
down the nasara, or gather in the centre in a loose, revolving mob. In some
dances the performers are hunched over, shaking their elbows like chickens
and scuffing their feet against at the ground like frustrated cattle.

After a few minutes of ritual shuffling, the man on the microphone invited
the audience to join in.

"You-fella who ee stop around long place here, suppose you want'em dance,
you come join'em dance."

Two old ladies stepped forward a little way from the crowd, and shuffled
dead-weightedly in rhythm with the dancers. A couple of young men entered
the nasara and followed the lines of dancers, attracting laughs and cheers
from the crowd. The school sports master took up a slit drum and joined the
fray. Everyone else continued to watch.

"Andrew, you now, you come join'em dance," said the man on the microphone.

Two hundred people looked in my direction.

I turned towards the announcer and made the silent arms-wide gesture that
the ni-Vanuatu use to mean "What's going on?".

"Yes, Andrew, you come dance. Me-fella want'em look say you, you dance
today."

Two hundred people stared. Memories of high school ceilidhs came flooding
back. (To Scots, a ceilidh is a country dance. To an immigrant English
teenager with two oversized left feet, it's an exercise in trying to shrink
backwards into the wall when dancers are told to "take your partners please"
in the hope that no girl will be stupid enough to come over and invite you
to dance.)

I shrugged and took my position in the crowd of shuffling dancers. Several
other men came out of the crowd and joined in. The announcer on the
microphone egged me on. My students laughed and cheered.

Contrary to the belief of most of my family and friends, I have always
enjoyed dancing. True, I am usually the person standing in the corner of the
dance floor holding everyone else's jackets, or the person cowardishly
explaining to a girl that "I'd rather sit out this one" on the occasions
when I shrank backwards but the wall failed to absorb me. However, this is
not because I don't want to dance. It is because I have poor co-ordination,
I am shy in Western social situations, I am taller than the average girl to
an extent that makes dancing with them awkward, I have a surplus pair of
limbs (other people have this problem too, but unlike me they seem to be
able to use their arms in ways that don't make them look idiotic), and I am
usually sober enough to care what other people are thinking.

None of this mattered on Pentecost. The sort of leaden shuffling that drives
my friends to despair in Western nightspots is perfectly in keeping with the
style of a Vanuatu dance. There was no awkward "take your partner" moment:
men and women were dancing in the same way that men and women do nearly
everything else in Vanuatu - in the same place at the same time yet utterly
independently of one another.

Custom dancing was fun. And even if I was dancing badly, everybody knew I
had never tried this before, so nobody was expecting me to be any good. The
crowd was staring and laughing at me because I was a white man, not just
because I was a terrible dancer, and strangely that made everything OK.

Some of my students, dressed for the occasion in their school uniforms,
joined in the dance. It began to drizzle, but nobody minded. Chief Philip's
truck passed back and forth, piled with tables and chairs which had been
borrowed from the school and were being returned now that the ceremony was
over. The head boy, riding in the truck with Chief Philip, hung out of the
passenger window like a happy labrador. Yellow afternoon sunlight shone
through the rain. The trees around the dancing ground glinted. The men and
women shuffled in circles. The dignitaries looked on from their dripping
shelter. The dancers chanted, stamping their feet three times and the end of
each chorus. I stamped along with them. I wondered how I had gone, in two
years, from marching through the Edinburgh Meadows in a white T-shirt on a
sunny afternoon to campaign for more aid to be sent to poor countries, to
dancing around a muddy nasara in a jungle village in the rain in gratitude
for such aid.

Unlike the African countries whose cause Bob Geldof was championing on that
July weekend, Vanuatu has little difficulty finding generous well-wishers to
help it in times of need. The tiny republic is peaceful, friendly,
democratic and only moderately corrupt, and its islands are full of the type
of people you see in aid-agency adverts - hard-working farmers who are
trying bravely to haul themselves out of poverty and might well succeed if
only somebody would build them a hospital or dig them a well. The country
has never fallen into the grip of a dictator, fought a war, or been
associated with terrorism. In crude economic terms, it is demonstrably poor:
this year the United Nations added Vanuatu to its list of Least Developed
Countries, placing it in the same category as the world's worst Third World
hellholes. Vanuatu also does a good line in natural disasters - regular
earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions that remind foreign donors of
the odds that the islanders face in trying to develop their vulnerable
country.

There is another, less wholesome reason why big foreign governments lavish
aid on tiny island states. Many countries have pet causes for which they
would like to win the support of as many nations as possible - whaling, for
example, or the status of Taiwan - and the friendship of a country the size
of Vanuatu is cheaply bought. If the Japanese spent a hundred dollars on
every man, woman and child in Vanuatu, Japan's own citizens would be out of
pocket by a mere fifteen cents each.

For would-be international Santa Clauses trying to decide which impoverished
country to reward with the biggest presents, Vanuatu therefore represents an
excellent choice. When the United States offered money from its Millennium
Challenge Fund to help deserving poor countries build up their
infrastructure, Vanuatu was the country in the South Pacific to qualify. The
children in the Vanuatu household might squabble a bit over the gifts in
their Christmas stockings (the local officer in charge of disbursing the
Millennium Challenge money has recently been suspended over fraud
allegations), but they've had such a hard time lately that you can hardly
blame them, and you can at least trust them not to shoot the reindeer or
relight the fire while Santa is still working his way back up the chimney.
And they will be sure to leave a generous plate of mince pies.

At Lalbetaes, the Japanese ambassador left the nasara holding a long, black
wooden spear that the islanders had presented him with, which served as a
convenient walking stick on the slippery road). Two or three well-wishers
followed behind to help carry the many other gifts that had been bestowed
upon the little man. One of them held an enormous bundle of
brightly-patterned woven baskets. Another cradled a giant, leaf-wrapped
ceremonial pudding in his arms.

When the sun set and the dancing was over, the men decamped to the nakamal,
where kava was already being prepared, and the visiting dignitaries from
Port Vila were filling in their rural counterparts (who seldom get to read
newspapers) on the latest in Vanuatu politics. A group of men sat in a
circle while 'Sarlo' the local MP talked about the nation's current big
scandal: the attempt by various figures in Sarlo's party to defraud the
National Bank by millions of dollars. I didn't understand everything that
Sarlo said, since he was speaking the native language, but I'm guessing he
was reassuring his constituents that he wasn't involved.

I chatted to a figure from the Department of Geology and Mining, whose
offices were destroyed two months ago in a suspicious fire. The offices
contained, amongst other things, the computer that received and analysed
data coming in from the various seismic monitoring stations around the
country. Such monitoring is important: Vanuatu has nine active volcanoes,
some of them prone to nasty eruptions, and suffers frequent earthquakes
which occasionally trigger tsunamis. (Two weeks ago Ranwadi was shaken awake
at 4.10 a.m. by a prolonged tremor that cracked roads and disrupted power
supplies in the town of Luganville.) The news that the country is now
without a functioning seismic monitoring network was not reassuring.

After the fire, the Vanuatu government called in help from France (a
reliable foreign Santa, who asks only that children say "Merci" rather than
"Thank you" in return for their Christmas presents). A replacement computer
is on its way.

31st July

2007-08-06T01:21:00.001+01:00

During the two years that I went to high school in the Scottish Highlands, I
felt sorry for my classmates who played sports. Not only were they obliged
to spend long hours outdoors in the region's icy dishwasher of a climate,
but living in such a sparsely-populated area made inter-school games a great
hardship. Travelling to an away game against even a 'neighbouring' school
meant many hours jammed into a minibus, driven (according to my friends'
probably-exaggerated stories) by half-crazed sports coaches who casually
mowed down sheep and deer as they careered along single-track mountain
roads.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- - -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Who's the referee?" I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

- - -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reluctantly, I left the spreadsheet as it was.

- - -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wasn't sure that I understood.

23rd July

2007-07-31T03:30:00.000+01:00

Expatriates who come to work on Pentecost sometimes naively bring cookery
books with them. One past gap volunteer at Ranwadi left behind a book of
recipes written by her grandmother - who, according to the book's foreword,
was the wife of a Conservative MP (there is a little bit of truth in the
stereotype of the people who take gap years abroad). Back in England it is
probably a very good book, but when flicking through it on Pentecost, I
could not find a single recipe that could be made using the ingredients
available in the local stores.

The Peace Corps, who often seem like the only people in the whole of Vanuatu
who try to do things properly, have a book of Western recipes specially
adapted to the minimal ingredients found on the islands. However, even these
recipes assume that the book's owner has done a certain amount of shopping
in Port Vila, or has generous friends and relatives who will send boxes of
food from the States. Good cooking can achieve a lot, but it is not
biochemically possible to turn rice, sugar and tinned tuna into a steaming
Hawaiian pizza with extra toppings.

Here, therefore, is my own contribution to the literature on island cooking.
It's easy-ish, it tastes OK-ish, and after shuffling home from the kava bar
you're seldom hungry anyway...

PASTA WITH RANDOM VEGETABLES AND PROCESSED CHEESE

First step: get a packet of pasta out of its rat-proof container and inspect
it to see if it contains weevils.

Weevils are probably quite nutritious, and are too small to affect the taste
and texture of the food much, but for psychological reasons you might wish
to remove them. If you empty the pasta into a bowl and leave it for a few
minutes, some of the weevils will instinctively crawl out over the rim of
the bowl and wander away somewhere (it doesn't really matter where, so long
as the rest of your food supplies are well sealed). You can strain off the
rest with water: pasta sinks, whilst agitated weevils float. If you're lucky
enough to live in a house with running water, you can do this four or five
times. Macaroni needs extra rinsing, as the weevils hide inside the tubes of
pasta. Rinsing also removes the tiny crumbs of pasta nibbled away the
weevils, which would otherwise create a sticky mess when cooked.

If you thought the packet of pasta was sealed, it's worth investigating how
the weevils got in. Maybe your container wasn't as rat-proof as you thought,
and the packet has been nibbled into. If the rats have been at the pasta in
a serious way then you could be forgiven for throwing the whole lot out and
opening a packet of breakfast crackers (the hungry island-dweller's trusty
standby when there's nothing else in the cupboard) instead, but pasta is
hard to come by on Pentecost, and boiling will kill any germs the rats might
have introduced, right?

Having removed the weevils (and any ants that might have got in along with
them), put a couple of handfuls of pasta in a saucepan and cover with water.
Since you'll be boiling this water, you can get it straight from the nearest
tap - no need to worry about whether or not the water supply is clean. The
Peace Corps' recipe book devotes an entire page to the cooking of perfect
pasta, but when you've got home late and you're cooking by candlelight in
the half dark because the generator has already been switched off for the
evening, or when it's evening study time and you have students interrupting
you every five minutes by banging on the door to ask for help with their
homework, you won't care how many minutes the pasta is boiled for or whether
or not the water is brought to the boil first or whether or not you've added
salt or oil. So just dump the saucepan of pasta on a lighted stove and keep
an eye on it.

Now prepare the vegetables. Which vegetables you put in will depend entirely
on what the ladies who run the local market happen to have harvested from
their gardens this week. Sometimes it's capsicums (green peppers), sometimes
it's shushoots (chokos), sometimes it's snake beans. Very occasionally it's
tomatoes, but all-too-often the rats nibble those off the plants before the
villagers have a chance to harvest them. All the produce is guaranteed to be
organic (not that there's any such thing as an inorganic vegetable): the
local villagers can't afford pesticides or synthetic fertilisers, and with
their diverse little gardens growing in rich volcanic soil there's no need
for them.

If there have been no vegetables at all at the market, I generally go
outside and pluck some tender young leaves off my pumpkin plant and eat
those instead. Alternatively, you can buy tinned vegetables on Pentecost,
but they cost five times what they would in Tesco or Wal-Mart, and may have
disintegrated into mush during the two or three years that they've been
sitting on a dusty storeroom shelf.

Remove the seeds, stalks, skins and whatever other part of the vegetables
you feel like removing (some of the local vegetables are unfamiliar to
Westerners, and opinion differs as to which parts are supposed to be
edible). Throw the peelings out of the back door; something will come by and
eat them. Chop up what's left into small pieces and throw it into the pan
with the boiling pasta. Many stoves in Vanuatu either have only a single gas
ring or work poorly when more than one ring is lit, so it's best to do all
your cooking in a single saucepan. Besides, you don't want to use too much
gas, because if the cylinder runs out and there turns out not to be a spare
one in the school shed, you'll be boiling pots of tea on Bunsen burners down
in the science classroom until the next time that the ship comes.

If you see cockroaches scuttling about while you're chopping the vegetables,
try to ignore them. If you swat at them they'll only run away and hide, and
you can't spray Mortein at them while you're cooking in case the insecticide
gets into your food. Besides, the version of Mortein sold in the local
stores is the version that merely pisses cockroaches off a bit rather than
the version that kills them dead. The good kind has to be imported from Port
Vila, and your supply will soon run out if you spray it at every cockroach
you see.

While you're waiting for the pasta and vegetables to boil, get out a packet
of Kraft Cheddar - the cheese-flavoured form of edible rubber that very
occasionally turns up in the village stores. If the packet has already been
opened, brush off any ants that have got into the container, and check if
the exposed part of the cheese has gone mouldy. (Kraft Cheddar is designed
not to be perishable, but almost anything will rot when the climate is
sufficiently damp and tropical. Even elastic bands start to decompose after
a few months on Pentecost.) If there is any sign of mould, cut off the outer
couple of millimetres; the rest will be fine.

Grate a handful of the Kraft Cheddar onto a plate. Your grater will probably
be rusty (see the above note about damp tropical climates), but surely extra
iron is good for you.

If the pasta and vegetables seem to be done by now, strain off the water
(along with the boiled corpses of any remaining weevils). If yours is one of
the houses that doesn't have a proper sink, chuck the boiling water out of
the door, but make sure you don't hurt the cats that may be hanging around
outside hoping for food scraps.

Now add in the grated cheese. Kraft Cheddar doesn't melt in the way that
real cheese does, but if you can get hold of a jar of mayonnaise, you can
stir in a spoonful of that to recreate the creamy texture. When buying
mayonnaise, try to check that it hasn't come from Australia, since
Australian brands of mayonnaise are vilely sweetened. Unfortunately, you'll
probably be stuck with whatever random brand the supplier happened to send
to the local storekeeper this month - if he has any at all.

If you can get hold of a jar of Kraft Cheese Spread, a spoonful of that will
really improve the pasta, but that's something you'll probably have to bring
from Port Vila. (One local storekeeper has been telling me for months that
"next week" he'll arrange to have a crate of it shipped to Pentecost.) The
label on the cheese spread says "refrigerate after opening", but if (like
most people on Pentecost) you don't have access to a fridge, just eat it
within two or three days and it'll probably be OK.

Many gas stoves in Vanuatu leak. If yours is one of them, don't forget to
turn off the valve on the propane cylinder after you've finished cooking,
otherwise the room will slowly fill with gas.

If you have any herbs that aren't yet stale, sprinkle them into the pasta.
Tip the whole lot onto a plastic plate, and serve with a glass of rainwater.

If you're dining with locals, don't forget to say grace. Mumble it quickly
in English (God will still understand you) and your companions won't realise
how inexperienced you are at saying your prayers.

If you have any leftover pasta, you might consider feeding it to a hungry
Third World child - there are usually plenty about - but since these
children normally eat little but rice and taro, anything that's less than
95% wet starch might upset their stomachs. Perhaps it's better to feed your
leftovers to the cats and chickens outside instead. Sooner or later someone
will eat the chickens (and possibly the cats too), so this isn't really a
waste, more a form of recycling. Maybe somebody back home should invent
recycling bins that crow loudly outside people's windows at five o'clock in
the morning to remind them to recycle their rubbish.

Finally, if anyone asks you what you had for dinner last night, tell them it
was noodles. Most islanders haven't heard of pasta, and as 'pasta' is the
Pidgin English rendering of the word 'pastor', talk of 'eating pasta' will
only confuse them. People in Vanuatu did eat pastors once upon a time, but
since being successfully converted to Christianity they've given up that
practice. However, those first unlucky missionaries sparked off a habit of
eating things that come on ships that persists to this day, and instant
noodles are now one of the country's major imports. Noodles are considerably
easier to cook than pastors, although since Vanuatu's last surviving
cannibal died a couple of years ago, nobody knows how the taste compares.

16th July

2007-07-17T00:01:00.000+01:00

In a traditional village, it was possible to live without money. You could
survive on the vegetables grown in your garden and meat from the animals
that you reared or hunted or hauled out of the sea, cooked over firewood
that you gathered yourself, in a house built with materials that you cut
from of the forest or dug out of the ground.

The few things you weren't able to make yourself could be obtained by simple
trade. In medieval Europe, the baker could obtain new horseshoes from the
ironmonger in exchange for loaves of bread, and the gardeners could obtain
protection from the local baron and salvation from the local priest in
exchange for tithes of food. However, as economies grew more complex, this
kind of trade grew increasingly inconvenient - what if you needed a
horseshoe but the blacksmith wasn't in the mood for a loaf of bread? Some
societies solved this problem by developing written systems for keeping a
tally of who was entitled to goods and services. This is the original reason
why writing was developed. Unfortunately, these systems were (and are)
vulnerable to forgery.

A better solution was to devise a system of physical tokens - some small,
valuable item of agreed worth - signifying that the bearer had supplied
something useful to somebody in the past and was entitled to something in
return. Thus money was invented.

The type of token used varied widely. In ancient empires, the prized article
was gold. In medieval England, the standard measure of value was a pound of
sterling-quality silver, which could be cut up into silver pennies when
smaller units were required. On Pentecost Island, it was pigs (and in
particular the long, curved tusks of old boars) and intricately-dyed red
mats that were prized. Eventually, all of these forms of money were replaced
by standardised pieces of paper and base metal whose value was certified by
governments and banks - and later, in some economies, by numbers on computer
screens. However, modern currencies still bear traces of their origins: a
"pound sterling" remains the standard unit of value in England, even though
today's pound coins are neither made of sterling silver nor weigh a pound,
and Vanuatu's coins and banknotes still bear (amongst other symbols) the
emblem of a boar's tusk.

In modern cities, it is possible to go through life without doing anything
for anybody else except what you're paid for, and without receiving anything
from anybody else except what you pay for - an economically super-efficient
yet rather soulless state of affairs.

In Western countries, the change from a traditional economy to a cash
economy happened a long time ago. On Pentecost Island, the process is still
very much under way. Local villagers divide their needs into two categories:
the things they can get 'free' from the land (vegetables, meat, fish, nuts,
bamboo, wood, leaves, stones, and water) and the things that must be paid
for with money (such as tinned foods, rice, petrol, candles, soap, metal
tools, cloth, nails, cement, and corrugated iron). The second category is
expanding at the expense of the first.

Prior to the arrival of Europeans, trading amongst the islanders was all
about social climbing. A man could probably meet his basic needs entirely
from his own garden, but would have to borrow money (in the form of pigs) to
help him pay the bride-price for a new wife, or put on the lavish ceremony
that would enable him to climb to the next rung of the social ladder. When
his remaining assets (the pigs) multiplied, he would be able to pay back the
lender, who might now need them for ceremonies of his own.

The arrival of foreigners introduced a new reason for trading: to obtain
things that the islanders could not make for themselves. Originally it was
believed that the goods brought by white people had been given to them by
the gods, since in their world of sticks and stones and leaves the islanders
could not see how men could make such things as metal for themselves.
Various cargo cults sprang up with the aim of trying to persuade the gods to
shower similar generosity upon the people of Vanuatu; one or two of these
cults are still in existence. Today, the islanders can read in schoolbooks
about metallurgy and manufacturing, but most still lack the resources to
make metal or glass or plastic or DVD players for themselves. As a result,
many of their wants and needs must now be met by buying goods from abroad.

The first thing that the villagers switched to buying, instead of making for
themselves, was knives. Local stories recall that one of the earliest
encounters between European sailors and Pentecost islanders ended with the
natives stealing a sailor's knife and then running away into the bush,
pursued by gunfire. The islanders recognised that the metal blade was
greatly superior to their traditional stone tools, and for many years
afterwards, this one stolen knife was passed around by the entire community,
each person borrowing it whenever a particularly trick cutting job was
required. Eventually, more Europeans arrived and the islanders learned to
trade with them in order to obtain more of the precious tools. Thus ended
the Stone Age on Pentecost.

Metal was not just useful for blades. It can also be used to make heatproof
and waterproof containers, which revolutionised cooking. I was told by a
colleague that when a student at Ranwadi was once asked to write an essay on
how modern technology was changing the world, the technology he chose to
focus on was the saucepan. Previously, cooking had meant roasting; the
ability to boil things opened up an entirely new form of cuisine. The taro
that the islanders grow in their gardens is disgusting when boiled, but
coast-dwellers with access to ships soon discovered a new food: rice. They
began importing the starchy white grains by the sack full, and another
paid-for item was added to the islanders' shopping baskets.

Flour and cooking oil also came on the ships, and the villagers developed a
taste for greasy doughnuts - often twisted into the shape of a number 8 -
which they would fry up using their new pans. Sugar arrived, to the delight
of the island's ant population, and a few local women became skilled at
baking cakes on open fires. Some even iced their cakes, having sussed out
which varieties of tinned butter could be used to produce icing that didn't
taste too strongly of industrial grease. Good cake remains a rarity of
Pentecost, baked only on special occasions, but since the island has no
dentists this is probably a good thing.

A few villagers built proper ovens, and began to bake loaves of bread with a
delicious wood-smoked taste. (Fuel for cooking is one thing that is still
largely gathered from the jungle, although foreigners like me - who are
inexperienced at cooking anything other than marshmallows on wood fires, and
can't even get marshmallows on Pentecost - rely on gas-powered stoves.)
Local stores began selling margarine and jam for people to put on their
bread, and those frequented by American Peace Corps volunteers did a
lucrative trade in peanut butter.

Clothes were yet another import. In the days when it was acceptable to
wander around with only your crotch covered, it was easy to fashion clothing
using local materials, but it's hard to make a good Sunday dress that you
can wear to church out of dried leaves. Missionaries and well-meaning
foreigners organised shipments of second-hand clothes to be sent to Vanuatu.
In the early days, these brought diseases that wiped out entire villages.
Today they just bring incredibly bad taste.

Another thing the early missionaries helped to bring to the islands was
light. Not just the spiritual kind, but also the practical kind that allows
people to avoid walking into things after the sun goes down. Before the
arrival of Western technology, the best sources of light on the island at
night were burning coconut fronds, which flare like pine needles when put on
a smouldering fire and can be carried as flaming torches on short journeys.
However, coconut fronds burn down quickly, and slower-burning light sources
such as smouldering logs and reeds were inevitably dim. As a result, people
traditionally went to bed early on Pentecost, and were disinclined to wander
about in the dark. (On an island populated by ghosts and spirits - and once
upon a time by warring cannibals - staying indoors at night must have seemed
a sensible idea anyway.)

Candles, kerosene lanterns and electric torches represent a huge
improvement. However, for villagers who originally got all of their light
for free, they also represent a huge expense. Recent increases in the price
of kerosene have dimmed the island, as people turn down the wicks in their
lanterns or switch to cheap candles instead. Once I came across a group of
men sitting in their nakamal in pitch darkness, because none could spare
even the 20 vatu (10 pence) needed to buy a candle.

Electric torches were once used sparingly on Pentecost, because batteries
for them were expensive and short-lived. (The brands of battery sold in the
local stores are not the type advertised by energised pink bunnies that keep
on going and going and going, but the type made by generic companies with
names like Wang Hua Industries who specialise in the low-cost manufacture of
half-empty metal cylinders that happen to contain just enough electric
charge to be sold and labelled as a battery.) Fortunately, torches have
become cheaper to run in recent years, as fragile and power-hungry
incandescent bulbs have been replaced with bright, efficient LED lights. (I
played my own small part in introducing this particular change to Pentecost;
see earlier diaries.) I wonder if the laboratory boffins who came up with
the Light Emitting Diode ever imagined that their invention would be used to
help impoverished jungle villagers avoid tripping over fallen logs on
moonless South Pacific nights. In a couple of locations in Vanuatu,
pioneering schemes have also been set up to provide the villagers with
rechargeable batteries, charged using solar power.

The use of hard currency on rural islands like Pentecost remains limited -
Port Vila, the country's capital, is home to 20% of Vanuatu's population but
90% of its money. However, as one item after another is added to the
islanders shopping lists and disappears from the range of things that they
make for themselves, the circulation of money is inexorably widening.
Ironically, by far the biggest factor driving rural islanders into the cash
economy is the one thing that Westerners generally do get free (or at least
don't pay directly for): their children's education.

In the old days, when everyone on Pentecost did more-or-less the same job -
gardening, building houses, trading pigs and looking after the children -
youngsters could learn everything they needed to know from their parents and
the village elders. Now, though, Pentecost's parents have begun to ask their
children what they want to be when they grow up, and most of the answers
require some degree of schooling. The dream of many is that a school-leaving
certificate will be a ticket off the island, to a well-paid job and a better
life in town, but even those children with no desire to leave their villages
can benefit from going to school. Pentecost may have no real industries
other than its gardens (and a small amount of tourism), but it still needs
nurses, mechanics, storekeepers and churchmen - not to mention teachers who
can pass on their knowledge to the next generation of dreamy children.

High school education is not free in Vanuatu. The Ministry of Education does
find the money to employ a few schoolteachers, and overseas aid agencies do
their bit to prop up the country's school system, but there remain big gaps
in every school's budget. Books need to be bought, electricity generators
need to be fuelled, and broken equipment needs to be replaced. With a
finely-scattered population and no roads that a school bus could cope with,
high schools in rural Vanuatu are invariably boarding schools, so the cost
of food and housing must be added to the school's expenses. The only way
that these expenses can be met is by charging fees to the parents who decide
to make the necessary sacrifices and send their kids to school. At Ranwadi
these fees are typically about £100 ($200) a term - an awful lot of money
for subsistence gardeners who dig up vegetables for a living. Even jungle
villagers who would otherwise live happily without money will have to sweat
hard preparing sacks of kava and dried coconut and hauling them down to the
beach to be sold onto ships if they wish to avoid forcing the same lifestyle
upon their children. (Although if they live in the right part of the island,
they might be able to earn an entire term's school fees in a few minutes by
risking their necks bungee-jumping off towers in front of gawping tourists
in the name of traditional culture.)

If you're going to have to earn money to pay for your children's education,
you might as well earn a bit extra for yourself while you're at it, to spend
on a new knife, or some candles, or maybe a portable CD player. Since you've
been too busy with your cash crops to plant anything tasty in the garden,
some of the spare money will also need to be spent on food at the local
store. Do this kind of thing often enough, and the word 'subsistence' will
drop from your lifestyle, and you'll have become a fully-functioning member
of a modern capitalist society.

Sometimes shortages force the islanders to buy things that they would
otherwise grow for themselves. The men on Pentecost who smoke (the women
never do) prefer hand-rolled leaf tobacco to cigarettes, not only because
the latter are expensive, but because everybody knows that cigarettes give
you cancer. (The health campaigners forgot to add that the smoke from leaf
tobacco contains the same lung-destroying chemicals.) Some grow the tobacco
in their own gardens; others buy cheap sticks of it from stores who import
it from gardeners on other islands. However, the villagers on Pentecost
smoke more tobacco than they plant, and lately none has been coming on the
inter-island ships. (Rumour has it that the Vanuatu police - whose periodic
anti-marijuana campaigns give them a reason for existence on islands where
crimes are rare and are dealt with quite capably by the village chiefs -
recently destroyed a large shipment due to fears that other smokeable leaves
were being concealed amidst the tobacco.) A couple of weeks ago, the local
men awoke to the realisation that there was no leaf tobacco left in any of
the stores, and that they had smoked their gardens bare. Even old Chief
Regis, who has long kept his chiefly friends and numerous other satisfied
customers well supplied with fine tobacco, announced disconsolately that he
had run out, and that his next crop would not be ready for harvesting until
sometime around Christmas. The news sent desperate nicotine addicts
scrambling to try and find the money to buy imported cigarettes.

Other drug habits are also moving into the cash economy. The drinking of
kava on Pentecost is one of the most traditional of activities, originally
done only by chiefs at important meetings, where the drug's stupefying
effects would prevent them from getting angry with one another or taking
rash decisions. Nowadays it is drunk by men of all ages on all occasions,
but many of the other customs associated with kava-drinking remain. The
nakamal where the men gather to drink is usually the most traditional
building in the village, with a dirt floor and gnarled wooden posts holding
up a low thatched roof. Some nakamals are not even held together with nails.
The nakamal is the one place where you can still find stone tools being used
- sharpened, hand-held grinding stones of a sort that our ancestors a
million years ago would probably have recognised - although in some nakamals
nowadays the job of mashing up kava roots is done instead by a ram (a
section of plastic drainpipe in which the kava is pounded with a big stick),
or by a metal meat-grinder. The mashed kava is strained through coconut
fibre, and drunk out of a half coconut shell.

Money does not traditionally change hands in the nakamal. People dig up kava
roots in their own gardens, and bring them down to prepare and drink
themselves, or to share with friends and visitors. However, this situation
is changing. Pentecost has acquired a small but growing professional class -
schoolteachers, nurses, mechanics and priests - who enjoy kava and have
money with which they would happily pay for it, but do not get the chance to
grow it for themselves.

At Melsisi, where the school, hospital, and kava-tolerant Catholic church
employ many such people, there are now several kava bars where drinkers
without gardens of their own can go to buy an evening drink. Much of the
atmosphere of the old nakamal remains in these places - most are dimly-lit
and constructed of local materials, and the drink continues to be served in
coconut shells (although some kava bars elsewhere in Vanuatu now use
porcelain bowls instead). However, they are gradually acquiring more and
more of the trappings of Western bars. Some barkeepers now have electricity
generators and show videos to attract in the punters, and a couple even have
names painted above the door. High on the hillside, behind the communal taps
where local children wash, is the Sunset Kava Bar, whose flamboyant owner
promises "only the finest quality kava". Down by the shore, the new
Saltwater Kava Bar has a bedroom where customers who get too stoned to walk
home can sleep for the price of two drinks. Most Melsisians continue to be
regulars at a particular bar - the one run by their local community, or the
one that is within easiest staggering distance of their house. Nevertheless,
on an island where business strategy generally consists of opening your
doors and hoping that enough of your friends, relatives and neighbours will
come by to provide you with a good income - and shrugging your shoulders and
doing nothing about it if they don't - even the slightest hints of branding
and competition represent a major innovation.

Until recently, no other village nearby contained a high enough
concentration of potential customers to support a kava bar. One opened a
couple of years ago near Ranwadi to cater to the labourers who had come to
work on the new school buildings, but when the building work had finished
and the labourers went home the bar closed down. The local villagers didn't
want to pay for kava when they could get it free from their gardens, and the
majority of the teachers at Ranwadi belong to the abstemious Churches of
Christ, which frowns on kava-drinking.

The villagers' cousins in Port Vila and Luganville did want to pay for kava,
however. Vanuatu's two towns are home to growing numbers of affluent and
kava-loving islanders dislocated from their gardens, who have fuelled a
massive surge in demand for the narcotic root. Kava products have also found
small but lucrative new markets abroad. Since good varieties of kava take
four or five years to grow, supply has not kept up with demand, which has
had an inevitable effect on the price. On Pentecost, where men have always
planted a lot of kava, the islanders' long-standing drug habit provided them
with a financial windfall. As the price of kava surged, villagers
enthusiastically dug up their gardens and loaded sacks of roots onto ships
bound for Port Vila. With a typical lack of forward planning, many failed to
leave behind enough kava for themselves. (Others calculated, with a logic
familiar to drug dealers everywhere, that there was no sense in getting
hooked on their own product when there was so much money to be made selling
it to other fools.)

A few months ago, the villagers around Ranwadi slowly woke up to the fact
that there were now a lot of would-be kava drinkers about with empty gardens
and money in their pockets.

The kava bar near Ranwadi reopened, and did a steady business, and I no
longer have to walk four miles in the dark to Melsisi whenever I want to go
for an evening drink without impinging on the villagers' hospitality.
Villagers in their nakamals began holding 'kava nights', at which someone
who still had roots to spare would prepare an entire poubelle full of the
stuff, and sell it to customers. (People on Pentecost use the French word to
describe the huge containers from which kava is served on special occasions;
drinking out of a poubelle sounds so much nicer than drinking out of a
dustbin.) Some kava nights were held by individuals to earn money for their
children's school fees; others were held to raise money for other good
causes. At big kava nights, entertainment was laid on, in the form of a
video player rigged up to an electricity generator, or very occasionally a
live string band. While children watched the videos or listened to the
music, their mothers (and a few teetotal fathers) sold leaf-wrapped bundles
of food for the kava-drinkers to take home for dinner. (Kava, unlike
alcohol, is best drunk before food.) With lots of people eating together, it
was often worthwhile to butcher a pig or a bullock for the occasion, giving
people a rare chance to dine on good fresh meat. What had previously been a
subdued male-only ritual evolved into a night out for all the family.

The spread of kava nights was made possible by another new introduction:
plastic bottles. In Western countries, empty containers are a mountainous
nuisance, something to be crushed by the dozen into the recycling bin, but
in the days when people bought hardly any packaged foods they were hard to
come by. That is now changing. By filling up an old plastic bottle and
carrying it back to drink at their local nakamal, people can now attend kava
nights in faraway villages without worrying about the long drunken walk
home. The availability of cheap electric torches has been another factor
encouraging people to venture further from home on their nights out (as has
a decline in the belief in ghosts).

Thanks to the recent arrival of new trucks on Pentecost's roads, many people
don't have to walk home at all. Travelling the main coastal road you might
now be passed by two or three vehicles every hour, which sounds like a
miniscule amount of traffic but does in fact represent a huge increase over
the amount a few years ago. And now that the Ministry of Public Works has
belatedly begun a programme to repair some of the most treacherous stretches
of the road (for example, laying stones to smooth out some of the nastier
river crossings), those trucks will be able run for longer before they fall
to pieces. The concept of designated drivers has yet to catch on here, and
it's probably only a matter of time before some kava-intoxicated driver is
woken from his slumbers by the jolt of his truck colliding head-on with a
large tree. However, given the lethargic and ponderous way in which kava
drinkers do things (driving included), this will hopefully be a very slow
accident, and with any luck it won't hurt anybody except the tree.

Society on Pentecost is changing, and as at any such time, there are plenty
of people convinced that the change is for the worse. Not only are there
predictable moans coming from local old-timers, but numerous outsiders from
different corners of the world have added their voices of concern. Most of
these are people whose own societies successfully underwent the same changes
centuries ago and wouldn't dream of turning the clock back, yet still they
lament the sight of the islanders abandoning their happy traditional economy
(the one based on nice things like pigs rather than evil things like money)
and being lured down the path of capitalist folly. They observe that in
countries where people have to pay for their daily needs, those without cash
are at risk of hunger and homelessness, whilst in Vanuatu's traditional
village societies every single person is provided for.

Such people have a point, but not a very good one. Nobody begs or sleeps
rough on Pentecost because the islanders have strong families and
communities that look after those in need, and plenty of land on which to
live and grow crops. There are legitimate reasons for people to worry about
Pentecost's future: the breakdown of old communities under the influence of
Western ideals, the growing inequality between those who relax in coastal
villages doing well-paid jobs and those who scrape gardens in the mountains,
the risk of an expanding tourist industry exacerbating the previous two
problems, the pressure that will ultimately be put on the land by a swelling
population, and (in the shorter term) the prospect of the kava price
collapsing now that so many islanders are devoting their efforts to growing
the drug rather than growing food. However, money is to a large extent a
symptom of the island's problems rather than a cause.

In any case, it's not true to say that nobody in traditional Pentecost
society went hungry. Although the island is not haunted by the sort of
starvation seen in crueller Third World countries, malnourishment does exist
here, attested to by the grossly rounded bellies of protein-deficient
children fed on little but taro for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The
children who suffer worst from this, it should be noted, are the ones living
in those happy, traditional villages where people grow food in their gardens
in the happy, traditional way. By contrast, those whose parents got sucked
into the cash economy get small helpings of store-bought tinned meat with
their vegetables, and small spoonfuls of nutrient-enriched Nestlé milk
powder (spot the irony) stirred into their morning tea.

Money also buys such children medicines, schoolbooks, and a small measure of
protection against life's many hazards. Picture a traditional village in
which a cyclone has devastated the gardens and blown down the wooden houses.
Now picture a village in which the inhabitants sat securely in houses made
of imported cement eating imported rice and tinned meat while the storm
raged, and decide for yourself whether capitalism causes hunger and
homelessness.

In any case, the development of a cash economy on Vanuatu's islands is
Progress; it cannot be stopped. Unless one of the parties in Vanuatu's
government happens to be plotting a Communist revolution (which is unlikely,
since the country's well-salaried politicians rather enjoy the fruits of
capitalism), the islanders' new way of doing business will be with them for
a long time to come.

6th July

2007-07-06T00:07:00.001+01:00

It was a cold winter night on Pentecost. With the thermometer dropping to
20C (68F), most of the islanders were huddled indoors, and the only other
person down at the kava bar was the fifteen-year-old barkeeper.

"You no hear'em cold?" he asked me. (To people in Vanuatu, sensations such
as cold and sadness and joy and nausea are not 'felt', they are 'heard'.)

The temperature is five degrees hotter than the average British summer day,
I said. The barkeeper shivered.

We sat in silence for a while. A draft of air was blowing under the eaves of
the thatched roof. It did actually feel cold.

"Ee got gorilla, 'long England," the boy asked, out of nowhere.

"No."

"Hippopotamus?"

"No got."

"Elephant?"

"'Nah. All animal here, all-ee stop 'long zoo, no-more."

Is Zoo a part of England?, the barkeeper asked.

"No." I tried, in Pidgin English, to explain the concept. "Fence ee round'em
animal." The boy seemed to understand.

"Oh, me want'em look elephant!" he said. "But me never look live one. Me
look inside 'long book, no-more."

In Vanuatu there are no zoos. No elephant, hippopotamus or gorilla has ever
set foot in the country.

"Ee got crocodile 'long England?"

"No. Ee cold too-much."

"You-fella ee look crocodile inside 'long zoo, no-more."

I have seen crocodiles in the wild, I told him. (Well, I've seen alligators
and caimans, but I wasn't going to bother explaining the difference.) Just
not in England.

"You-fella who ee got chance b'long go long different country, you-fella ee
lucky," the barkeeper said. "I-think by-and-by me never go long 'nother
country."

Some ni-Vanuatu do get to travel abroad, I pointed out. Even if they can't
afford the plane ticket by themselves, they are often sponsored to go
overseas for work or training. (One bonus of living in an isolated little
island country is that there are plenty of opportunities for this type of
travel.) I've even met a few who've been to England.

"But me, me out 'long school 'long Class Six," the fifteen-year-old said.
"Head b'long me ee no-good!" He laughed.

Don't put yourself down, I said.

"Some kind work 'long school, me savvy make'm good," he explained. "But
reading with'em writing, me no savvy good."

It sounded to me like a case of dyslexia. Back home, the boy would have been
given extra tuition and special allowances would have been made for him in
exams. Here in Vanuatu, he was left to flunk out of school at the age of
eleven (probably to the relief of his parents, who were no longer faced with
the challenge of raising money for the boy's school fees).

"But ee all-right," the boy went on. "By-and-by me school back-again. By me
school from mechanic." I'm going to train as a mechanic.

A good career choice, I agreed. There's plenty of money to be made as a
mechanic on Pentecost. With trucks running on some of the world's most
destructive roads (the fact that they can run for even a day without
breaking down fills me with admiration for Toyota's engineers), plus an
increasing assortment of crappy little electricity generators that the
villagers power up on special occasions (most of the time they can't afford
the petrol) and don't always maintain properly, anyone on the island with a
reputation as a good mechanic will never be short of work. At Ranwadi, the
school mechanic spends not only all day but also most evenings banging and
welding in his tin garage. When I suggest that the guy works too hard, his
friends rub their fingers and thumb together and point out that he's being
well rewarded for his efforts.

There was another silence.

"Man 'long DVD, man who ee work with'em crocodile, him ee dead, uh?"

"Steve Irwin?" Yes, he died last year.

"Him ee come 'long Vanuatu one time. Him ee come b'long catch'em crocodile."

Vanuatu's crocodile population currently stands at three: a band of lonely
individuals who migrated down from the Solomon Islands and settled in the
outlying island of Vanua Lava in the north of the country. A few years ago,
one of these crocodiles ventured further south, and turned up on an island
near Pentecost. This caused much concern, both to the crocodile's new
neighbours, whose hordes of highly-edible children spend much of their time
playing in rivers and the sea, and also to the people of Vanua Lava, who had
grown attached to their crocodile and for some reason wanted it back. Steve
Irwin was called in.

The barkeeper proceeded to give me a long and lively description of the
Crocodile Hunter's encounter with the errant reptile, which ended with it
being loaded onto an Air Vanuatu plane and flown back to Vanua Lava. (Live
pigs may be banned on the inter-island planes nowadays, but apparently live
crocodiles are welcome.)

After watching Steve Irwin wrestle down the crocodile, the boy told me, the
awestruck villagers had asked him if there was any animal he couldn't
overcome.

"'Ee got one', him ee say. All-ee call'em what.white great shark?"

"Great white shark."

"Ah yes."

Another long and complicated story in Pidgin English followed. It involved
Steve, a great white shark, and an inadequate metal cage.

But it was a much smaller fish that eventually killed the great man, I said.
"One stingray."

The boy nodded. "But 'long place here, stingray all-ee no kill'em man.
All-ee help'em man."

I looked up, interested. Help them how?

"Booboo b'long me ee tell'em story here," the boy said. (I love the Pidgin
word for grandparent.) "Time when one man ee drown, stingray ee save'm him."
Just like a barbed version of Flipper the friendly dolphin. "Stingray ee
come underneath 'long leg b'long man. Man ee stand-up long stingray.
Stingray ee carry'em man ee go shore."

I had a nice image of Steve Irwin being carried up into Heaven, surfing on
the back of a giant stingray.

3rd July

2007-07-04T22:20:00.000+01:00

For the inhabitants of Terry Pratchett's imaginary circular Discworld, the
concepts of North, South, East and West did not apply. Instead, directions
were described as 'rimwards' or 'hubwards', and 'turnwise' or
'counter-turnwise'.

The people of Pentecost Island did not traditionally think in terms of
North, South, East and West either. Their world is shaped like a Toblerone
bar: a jagged triangular prism about forty miles long, six miles wide, and
half a mile high. Here the four directions are 'up', 'down', 'up the coast',
and 'down the coast'. In the local mindset 'up the coast' is southwards and
'down the coast' northwards; I suffered a lot of confusion until somebody
eventually explained this to me. If Pentecost islanders rather than
Europeans had invented cartography, they would probably have portrayed the
Earth with Antarctica on top and Britain languishing down under.

Whilst the characters in Terry Pratchett's fantasies go about their lives on
the surface spinning disc, for the inhabitants of Pentecost life takes
places on a slope. What is striking to visitors about the island's geography
is not the fact that it is mountainous - a feature that it shares with
thousands of other wild and beautiful places in the world - but the fact
that the islanders build villages and roads with total disregard for the
steepness of their landscape. Look at any two neighbouring villages on a map
and you can bet that there will be a well-used footpath running directly
between them, no matter how sheer and dangerous the intervening terrain is.
A friend at Waterfall Village once took me gardening; the poor guy's garden
turned out to be halfway up the mountain, at the end of a muddy trail that
led up a rock face and through swamps and streams. (I never truly
appreciated what it means to "lead someone up the garden path" until I came
to Pentecost.) The high ridges above Ranwadi and Melsisi, which look from a
distance like a precipitous wilderness, are in fact the site of several
small villages. Bunlap, one highly traditional community in the south-east
of the island, is built on ledges hacked out of a diagonal slope. I visited
it in wet weather (one consequence of Pentecost's mountainousness is that it
provokes damp ocean winds into dumping extraordinary amounts rain onto the
island's eastern side) and found myself scrambling on all fours up muddy
slopes just to get from house to house.

After a few months of living on Pentecost, a weird thing happened to me: my
dreams became sloped. Previously, the landscapes in my dreams had either
been nondescript flatland or rolling hills (the scenery of south-eastern
England, where I grew up) or flattish land with mountains in the distance
(the scenery of much of Scotland). On Pentecost, my mental imagery became
three-dimensional in a way that it had never been before; now I frequently
have dreams that involve going up and down steep hills. Often the scenery
remains otherwise British, even if I am dreaming about people and situations
I have known only in Vanuatu - I have never seen a palm tree or a coral reef
in a dream - but the gradient of the island I am living on has insinuated
itself deeply into my mind.

Westerners living in mountainous countries usually settle in flat,
accessible spots - broad river valleys and coastal plains. On Pentecost, by
contrast, the rivers have no chance to carve broad valleys on their short
tumble from hilltop to ocean, and although there are a few strips of flat
land along the coast, these were historically uninhabited. In traditional
Pentecost villages, the only flat piece of land is the ceremonial ground, a
brown clearing of compacted earth outside the nakamal that is used for
dances and gatherings. Some of these are artificially levelled out of steep
mountainsides, which must have been quite a job in the days when digging
tools were made from sticks and stones. The ceremonial ground is known in
the local languages as 'saa' or 'sara'; in Pidgin, which adds 'na' to the
start of every indigenous word, it is a 'nasara'. When Europeans arrived on
Pentecost and created flat places of their own, the locals referred to these
using the same words that they used for their old ceremonial grounds.
Nowadays, villagers use the word 'saa' to mean the school football field,
and the airfield at the northern end of Pentecost is known as Sara Airport.

To foreign visitors, some aspects of the island's geography defy reason.
When the College de Melsisi recently organised a fundraising afternoon, each
student was told to go to his or her home village and bring back one piece
of taro to be sold at the event. The kids dutifully trooped off into the
mountains, and one of them invited Sara to go along. She came back after a
seven-hour return hike into the centre of the island with tales of slipping
and sliding down 45-degree slopes ("everybody fell down") and teetering
along precipices above hundred foot drops ("we could have died") - all for
the sake of one vegetable.

"Yet the people who live in that village do that trek all the time," she
said. "Why?! I mean, you'd think they would be better off just taking the
entire village and moving it down to the coast?"

In recent years an increasing number of islanders have indeed moved to the
coast, where they have easier access to the goods that arrive on cargo
ships. However, there are reasons why many continue to live in the
mountains. The climate is cooler up on the slopes, and some crops grow
better there. Vanuatu lies in an earthquake zone, and settlements by the sea
are vulnerable to tsunamis. There isn't room for Pentecost's entire
population on the coast (at least, not unless they learn to live like the
Japanese, inhabiting high-rise blocks and feeding themselves by plundering
the ocean). Above all, the people here have deep ancestral ties to their
home villages. Few Westerners would fret that they were leaving their
homeland if they moved to a new house three miles away, but on a Pacific
island three miles is a long way.

In societies such as Pentecost's, each clan traditionally had its own patch
of land, and the more treacherous and remote the patch, the easier it was to
fend off unfriendly neighbours. Nobody in Vanuatu nowadays worries about
being kidnapped and eaten by the guys from the next village, but they do
still worry about the land on which they make their homes and gardens being
appropriated by greedy outsiders.

During the colonial era, European planters and missionaries laid claim to
the areas of land that they deemed useful or habitable. On islands like
Pentecost these areas didn't add up to very much, but among people who
depend on the land for their survival, the slightest suggestion of it being
taken away from them inspires a powerful horror and resentment. Even today's
normally-peaceful islanders deem it quite acceptable to take their bush
knifes to somebody who tries to infringe upon their rights to their land.

At independence, the Vanuatu government therefore reinstated the prehistoric
system of land ownership, drawing up a constitution which states that all
rural land belongs forever to its customary owners: the villagers who have
always lived and gardened there. Outsiders such as property developers and
plantation owners are allowed to lease such land, but cannot buy it outright
- they will always have to respect the local chiefs as their landlords.

- - -

Recently, foreigners have been experimenting with a potential new means of
depriving Pacific islanders of their land: polluting the planet so as to
raise its sea levels. Within the next few centuries a couple of countries in
the region will probably be reduced to nothing more than scribbles on a
nautical chart warning sailors of "submerged reefs". Vanuatu, fortunately,
will not be one of them.

Friends back home occasionally ask if the South Pacific island I'm working
on is going to disappear because of global warming. I laugh at the idea. In
reality, Vanuatu is probably less vulnerable to the effects of climate
change than any other coastal country. Its land rises just as high as
Britain's, and given that Britain's highlands are fairly uninhabitable
whilst Pentecost's support lush gardens and thriving populations, I know
which island I would rather be on in the even of a Great Flood. Even the
sort of apocalyptic rise in sea level that would occur if every ice sheet on
Earth melted and ran into the oceans would deprive islands like Pentecost of
only a few percent of their land area, and displace only a minority of their
people.

True, a large rise in sea level would wreck Port Vila and Luganville,
decapitating Vanuatu's infrastructure and wiping out most of its official
economy. A bunch of Australians would lose their holiday homes, a few
offshore banks and dubious Internet companies would lose their headquarters,
and a lot of urban ni-Vanuatu would have to abandon their sunglasses and
stereos and return to their home villages. Rural islands would have to
function without central government, police, or communications with the
outside world. However, since they get by with a minimum of these things
anyway, life there might not change very much. Chiefs, elders and Jesus
would continue to do their job of maintaining peace and order, much as they
do now, and it could conceivably be a long time before the islands descended
back into savagery.

While the rest of civilisation collapsed in chaos, old men on Pentecost
would sit quietly in their shady huts in the forest, surrounded by flowers
and birdsong. Smoking their home-grown tobacco and drinking their kava, they
would murmur to their grandchildren that they had always known that building
villages in the mountains was the right thing to do.

18th June

2007-06-20T23:30:00.000+01:00

Imagine dividing new pupils at a school into two groups, which they are to
remain in until the day they graduate. Pupils and their parents have no say
in which group they are put into, and changing groups is impossible. Both
groups take the same lessons, but they are required to wear different
uniforms and sit on different sides of the room. In their spare time, they
must play different sports, use different facilities, and socialise in
different parts of the school. Friendships between the two groups are
forbidden: if a member of one group is caught touching or holding a private
conversation with a member of the other group, both will be sentenced to two
weeks of hauling rocks as a punishment. If their friendship proves lasting
or intimate, the two pupils risk expulsion. Yet, in public at least, this
state of apartheid is accepted quite happily by the school's pupils. Indeed,
any attempt to make the two groups mix would be met with resistance and
horror.

In private, needless to say, the situation is somewhat more nuanced. Teenage
boys and teenage girls are attracted to one another in even the most
straitened of traditional societies, and secret 'friending' between boys and
girls does happen in Vanuatu schools. Since such friendships are not
supposed to occur, and are definitely not supposed to be talked about, the
students are never taught about how to conduct them responsibly.

Occasionally, of course, a mishap will occur, which leads to a lot of
tut-tutting and causes one unfortunate ni-Vanuatu girl to begin her career
of child-rearing and domestic drudgery at the age of fifteen rather than the
age of twenty. (Abortion is so completely out-of-the-question that I don't
even know what its legal status is in Vanuatu.) Such accidents are
embarrassing, but there are always plenty of aunties on hand who can help
the young mother look after her baby, and plenty of uncles who can hunt down
the hapless father and force him down the aisle. For parents who worry about
the risk of teenage pregnancies, the traditional solution is not to promote
safe sex, but to redouble their efforts to keep young boys and girls well
apart.

The arrival of HIV in Vanuatu five years ago brought a change in attitudes.
Now, illicit liaisons were no longer merely a matter of loose morals and
poor family planning - they could be life-threatening. Doctors, aid workers
and the Vanuatu Ministry of Health began to put out earnest messages about
the importance of safe sex. In bashful island society, their messages did
not penetrate far. The only form of sex education given at most Vanuatu
schools is to remind the students that it's a sin.

At Ranwadi, where staff and students live together on a small campus and
there is nearly always somebody watching you, the school is fairly efficient
at finding and stamping out inappropriate friendships before they reach a
serious stage. The path between the school and its sports field, laid with
coral stones last year by boys who'd been sentenced to spend their
afternoons doing hard labour after being caught alone with female friends,
is a monument to frustrated teenage love. (The path is starting to become
slippery as the coral wears thin, and I privately hope that a few more
students will be caught making friends with one another soon so that we can
get it resurfaced.) Penitent young Romeos also supplied many of the stones
for the rockery outside my house.

Outsiders occasionally worry that the boys at the school will react to this
suppression of their instincts in the way that male prisoners sometimes do,
but as far as the locals are concerned, this isn't an issue: homosexuality
doesn't officially exist on Pentecost. (Then again, neither do teenage
romances.)

In the French-influenced, Catholic environment of the College de Melsisi,
the gap between preaching and practice is wider than at Ranwadi, and with
the school buildings scattered through a large village full of dark nooks
and crannies there is more room for mischief. After listening to some
worrying gossip about what her students get up to after the electricity
generator is shut down for the night and the lights go off, Sara the Peace
Corps volunteer decided to do something about it. A bowl of little foil
packets appeared in Sara's house. Boys who came round to the house for help
with their homework could slip one into their pocket if they wanted, no
questions asked.

I admired Sara's bravery. "You're giving out condoms to the kids on a
Catholic mission?"

"The students are already friending one another. They might as well be doing
it safely."

Sara's next step was to organise a health education workshop for the
students at the College. Local aid agencies gladly contributed a pile of
resources, including booklets explaining in Pidgin English how to use a
condom ("Step one: Find'em one partner who ee want'em make'm sex with'em
you"), and several Peace Corps volunteers from other parts of Vanuatu came
to help.

The local doctors and the Ministry of Health approved wholeheartedly of
Sara's efforts. Her Catholic colleagues, she suspected, might be less
supportive. The workshop was scheduled for a Saturday - when none of the
other teachers would be around.

I visited Melsisi late on the day of the workshop, and found the
participants gathered around the flat lawn in front of the College. Lessons
had finished, and the students were busy demonstrating their new knowledge
to their friends. Small groups of boys and girls had organised short skits,
each designed to communicate a message about being healthy and responsible,
and were performing them in front of the others. It all seemed to be going
well. The first to perform were the youngest students, the Year 7s, whose
skits dealt with uncontroversial, straightforward topics such as drinking
and smoking (don't do it, kids). After a break for dinner, the innocent
young Year 7s were sent home, and the hard-core stuff could begin.

During the break, I chatted to some of the students attending the workshop.
Compared with pupils in sex education lessons in Britain - who think they've
heard it all before, and often treat the lessons as little more than a
slightly-awkward form of light entertainment - the teenagers at Melsisi were
serious and solemn.

It's good that they are teaching these things to us, some boys said.

They said it a little nervously. I didn't know whether they were nervous of
romance, of sex, of embarrassment in front of their friends, of AIDS, of
sitting in classrooms listening to foreigners break local taboos and
wondering just how far they'd go, or of the prospect of their English
teacher being kicked out of the village by an irate Catholic priest. (The
latter, to Sara's relief, never happened.)

When I returned to Melsisi a few days later, two of the other Peace Corps
volunteers were still there. One was sitting at Sara's laptop, reading out
questions in Pidgin English that had been submitted anonymously by students
at the workshop.

"Hole b'long sex ee big one or small one?"

Sara and the other volunteer were dictating answers.

"You guys are really taking this health programme seriously," I observed.

Sara nodded. "Let me show you the sex education room."

She led me into her spare bedroom, where the walls were covered with
posters, many of them hand-written in Pidgin English. Some had diagrams,
illustrating what happens when boys and girls turn into men and women, while
others explained topics such as "sick moon" (menstruation) and
contraception.

It's OK to say no if your boyfriend wants sex, said one poster. But here are
some things you can do in the meantime. The suggestions ranged from "write'm
letter" and "hold'em hand" to "hold'em titty" and "fight'em kok" (either
alone or with your partner, the poster advised).

"Don't Catholics consider that a sin?" I asked.

"That's why some of the women here are so unhappy," Sara said. "As far as
the men are concerned, masturbation is a sin, but forcing yourself violently
on your wife when she doesn't want it is not."

The following Friday night, while Sara was down at the shore collecting a
parcel off a cargo ship, two boys in her class approached her and asked for
condoms.

Nervously, as though she were a drug dealer, Sara allowed the boys to follow
her back to her house. It was late, and she hoped her neighbours weren't
watching. She explained to the boys that she would only give what they
wanted if they intended to use them responsibly. They were not to play with
them, and were not to try and use them on any girl who wasn't entirely ready
and willing.

"So who are your girlfriends?" she asked.

The boys looked awkward.

"Er, me-two-fella ee hope, say, me-two-fella ee try'em with'em you."

"What?"

"Me-two-fella ee want'em make'm sex with'em you." The boys were serious.
"You savvy show'em how you make'm sex. Help'em education b'long
me-two-fella."

Sara was still in shock when she told me the story the next day.

"What you are asking is completely inappropriate and disrespectful," she had
told the boys, as she kicked them out into the night. "There are lines,
lines that you don't cross, and you have crossed those lines."

"But you already crossed their lines," I pointed out. "You crossed their
lines by talking to them about sex, which is normally taboo here. How were
they supposed to know where the new lines were drawn?"

"But still, I'm their teacher. Their teacher! It's totally disrespectful."

Although horrified by what the boys had said, Sara never reported the
incident to her colleagues. ("Nobody in Melsisi surfs the Internet, and they
certainly wouldn't read a page in English", she reassured me, when I
mentioned this blog.) One of the boys had a record of misbehaviour and would
have been expelled if the Principal had discovered what he had tried to do
with his English teacher, which Sara didn't want. She was also reluctant to
draw attention to her sex education programme.

By this time preparations were well under way for the PISSA Games - a big
inter-school sports tournament, which Melsisi will be hosting this year -
and the College was busy coaching students and building new sports
facilities. Sara went back to her usual job of teaching students to shoot
basketballs at hoops and conjugate English verbs, and at the College de
Melsisi sex was quietly forgotten.

8th June

2007-06-14T01:29:00.000+01:00

After classes one afternoon, all the students at Ranwadi lined up in their
classrooms to brandish knives at their teachers.

Fed up with students failing to do their chores because they lacked a knife
or a broom, or lurking in the bushes outside the Dining Hall waiting for
friends to pass food out of the windows because they lacked a plate and
spoon, the Deputy Principal had ordered an Equipment Inspection. Teachers
were to check that everyone in their classes had all of the seven items that
students at Ranwadi are required to possess.

1. A bush knife

Students laid their rusty, eighteen-inch blades on the desk in front of me.
Most looked as if they had been well used: trimming hedges around the
school, hacking a path through the jungle for the new water pipeline,
ploughing soil in the Agriculture gardens, carving on the bedposts in the
dormitories. (The posts holding up some of the bunk beds are so deeply
notched that I wouldn't want to be the person sleeping on top - or, for that
matter, underneath.) I've even seen students use the giant knives to sharpen
their pencils.

Everyone got their bush knives? I ticked the list. Show me your knife so I
can see. Tick. Where's yours? Go and get it. Tick, tick, tick. OK, thank
you. You can put them away now.

2. A small knife

Students came forward with an assortment of implements, ranging from pen
knives to full-size chopping knives. Not exactly small, but I know the
students are quite capable of buttering bread with them, so they'll do.
Tick, tick, blank. Where's your small knife? Sheepish look. Cross. You need
a small knife. Make sure you get one.

3. A broom

Students waved their brooms in the air. Bundles of long twigs plucked from
coconut trees, tied loosely together at one end. Tick.

4. A plate

Students showed me their plates. Tick, tick, tick. Much as I suspected,
nearly all the students do have plates. They only loiter outside the Dining
Hall because they know they're supposed to eat indoors and they want to
rebel against the rules.

5. A cup

Boys extricated cups awkwardly from the baggy pockets at the sides of their
shorts. The girls had already laid them neatly on top of their plates, ready
to inspect. A varied assortment, ranging from tall drinking tumblers to tin
mugs. Tick, tick, tick.

6. A spoon

Cutlery was brandished. Tick, tick, tick. Does a fork count as a spoon? The
students assured me that it did.

7. A Bible

Tick, tick, tick. All present and correct. These kids were good Christians.
They may have been willing to go hungry or get punished for turning up to
school without the other items, but they weren't prepared to risk going to
Hell.

"What if we don't have the other pieces of equipment?" the students asked.

"You need to get them before next week," I said, passing on what the Deputy
Principal had said. "There will be another inspection then."

Get them how? The students had no money to buy new equipment.

The Principal, always quick to spot an opportunity for the simultaneous
stoning of multiple birds, came up with the answer. "Students with missing
pieces of equipment can work for them," he wrote on the notice board.
"Carrying sand for the building of the Principal's new house."

30th May

2007-06-11T01:09:00.000+01:00

After the sudden death of Michel Vusi, Bishop of Vanuatu, the country's
Catholics plummeted into mourning. All-night prayer sessions were held at
missions around the country, and a national holiday was declared. Flights
were booked out as priests and well-wishers tried to get to Port Vila for
the funeral ceremony. (When an island is served by minibus-sized planes that
land only three or four times a week, it doesn't take a lot to fill them
up.) The village men in their nakamals (meeting houses) talked in respectful
tones about the many good works that the bishop had done during his
tragically-shortened life, and in the absence of reliable news, speculation
raged about what had caused the death. While some opted for the mundane idea
that the middle-aged bishop had suffered a heart attack, the more
superstitious argued that the unfortunate man must have come into contact
with the blood of a menstruating woman.

Unlike most things in Vanuatu, mourning follows a strict calendar. A
commemorative feast, accompanied by plenty of kava, must be held on the
tenth day after the death, and after the loss of a particularly beloved
figure the intervening nine days will also be devoted to soulful bouts of
pig-roasting and kava-drinking. A further ritual is held exactly one hundred
days after the death. Other round numbers, such as five days and twenty
days, may also be the occasion for ceremonies.

Ranwadi College is run by the Churches of Christ, who have nothing to do
with any figure as worldly and corruptible as a bishop, and here the impact
of the tragedy was minimal. Nobody tried to teach classes during the
national holiday, but this was simply because it was the first week of term
and half of the students had yet to make their way back to school. The day
of mourning didn't stop the Deputy Principal from ordering the students who
had returned on time to spend the morning hauling rocks for the new water
tanks.

"It's not surprising that your students come back late after the holidays,"
observed my parents, who were spending the week with me at Ranwadi before
flying home.

At the College de Melsisi, part of the local Catholic mission, it was a
different story. There, respect and tradition demanded that the school
remain closed for the entire ten days following the bishop's death.

At Ranwadi, the loss of a week or two of school would prompt nothing more
than a few mutterings followed by a long shrug. It happens regularly.
Education at Ranwadi bounces from one obstacle to another like an inflatable
raft, taking on water and capsizing at regular intervals yet always somehow
managing to stay afloat with most of its passengers still clinging on. The
College de Melsisi, by contrast, is normally an imperturbable steamship of a
school, seldom deviating from its rigid schedule. The disruption caused by
the bishop's death was agonising, and Melsisi's principal talked (to his
colleagues' horror) of taking away a week of the next school holidays to
compensate. Yet nobody would countenance the possibility of sending the
College's students and teachers back to work until the Ten Days were over.

On Day Eight, after saying goodbye to my parents at the airfield, I went to
visit Sara the Peace Corps girl at Melsisi.

On a normal afternoon, Sara's house buzzes like a honey pot with people
coming and going: students with their English books, colleagues with keys
and pieces of paper, and well-meaning villagers bringing enormous bundles of
cabbage and unappetising slabs of roasted vegetable. (Disposing of these
unwanted gifts discreetly, so as not to cause offence, is one of the major
challenges in Sara's life. They don't burn well, the dog refuses to eat
them, and the rubbish bin outside the house is in full view of passers-by.)
During spare minutes in between visitors, Sara is usually busy 'grading
papers', planning lessons, listening to music, or trying out the latest
packet of ready-made cookie dough or Betty Crocker instant muffin mix posted
by her friends back in the States.

This particular afternoon was different. Walking up to the house, past empty
lawns and deserted classrooms, the only sign of animation came from Sara's
dog, which had picked up a fresh batch of fleas during the holidays and was
rolling on the grass in itchy spirals. Inside the house it was gloomy and
quiet. With college life suspended, nobody had switched on the electricity
generator, and the batteries in Sara's laptop and her iPod had run out a
week ago.

Sara was sitting hunched on the floor, flipping idly through a magazine.

"I've never been here with no work to do before," she said. "It's amazing
how much of the day you can spend sleeping."

The kava bar under the mango tree was closed that evening, but in the
corrugated-metal nakamal next door, groups of men were hunched solemnly
around large wooden boards, working away at kava roots with stone grinders
and straining the pulp through scraps of coconut fibre to make a strong,
traditional brew. Other men were slouched on benches along the sides of the
room: smoking, snoozing, or sitting in quiet contemplation. Now and again
one of the men doing the grinding would mutter "mam sini" ("your kava") and
nod towards one of the onlookers, who would walk over, gulp down his coconut
shell full of liquid, and spit noisily to clear the taste from his mouth
before returning to his seat.

Food was being roasted in a house nearby, and leaf-wrapped packages of pig
and taro were being passed around. (People in Vanuatu use the same word for
a pig regardless of whether it's roaming in the forest or cooking in pieces
on the fire, much like the Anglo-Saxons did before the French introduced
"porc" into our language.)

I was welcomed in to the nakamal, and sat down in the corner next to Crazy
English-Speaking Old Guy, a figure whose unique command of the English
language has livened up many a visit to Melsisi.

"I am not, er, imbibing of the, er, prepared beverages at, er, the present
time," he told me. "I have, er, partaken of a great, er, quantity during
this, er, period of, er, commemoration and on this particular night I am,
er, remaining in this place solely for purposes of, er, socialisation."

After saying this, he curled up on his bench and went to sleep.

"Man here, head b'long him ee no-good little-bit," the man sitting on the
other side of me whispered, gesturing at Crazy English-Speaking Old Guy.

I nodded. We sat for a while in silence.

"Andrew, mam sini."

I got up and swallowed my shell-full. It was strong kava, and I could feel
my thoughts mellowing even before I had sat down again. Some unidentifiable
part of my brain - some part that I would probably use if caught in a big
foreign city in the rush hour, or if using a wooden spear to fend off an
angry predator on a prehistoric savannah, but really wasn't necessary on a
tropical island - was being shut down for the night.

After ten days of drinking this stuff, every bishop in the world could pass
away and you would no longer care.

- - -

On Day Ten, a large crowd gathered in Melsisi for the grand finale of the
mourning. The village was filled with women in their island dresses, men in
their tattered shorts and T-shirts, children dressed in little or nothing,
and a trouser-wearing VIP who turned out to be a visiting churchman from New
Caledonia. Long, red-patterned mats - Pentecost's traditional currency -
were changing hands, to thank the people who had donated food and kava for
the ceremonies. Several men were working their way amongst the crowd making
sure that everyone's basket was generously filled with pig and taro. In both
the kava bar and the nakamal, brown roots were being pulverised by the
sack-full, and mud-coloured liquid was being decanted into buckets, bottles
and coconut shells.

I sat down in the kava bar and bought a drink, then popped over to chat to
somebody in the nakamal, where I was greeted with "mam sini" and handed
another narcotic shell-full. A couple more shells followed. Hoping to slow
the rate at which the drinks were coming - I had to walk back to Ranwadi
that night - I wandered back to the kava bar. Five minutes later, however,
there was another shout of "mam sini", and I was called back over to the
nakamal. I gulped down my shell with a polite nod of thanks, spat on the
ground to flush away the taste, and staggered back to the kava bar, where
the barman, not to be outdone, promptly handed me a free drink.

On that tenth day, the people of Melsisi were doubly keen to drown their
sorrows. Not only was the bishop dead, but that morning they had received
news of the death of the daughter of a local chief - a one-year-old child.
This latest tragedy was the chief's fault, people whispered: he had invited
misfortune by building his house on a taboo patch of land. When the baby
fell ill, she was brought down to the mission hospital at Melsisi, but the
doctor there was unable to cure her. She was taken back up to her village in
the mountains, to die.

I wondered whether a baby who lives to one year of age ever really
experiences the world into which she was born. What was going through her
infant mind as she was carried up the mountainside on her last journey? Blue
sky, brown earth, green trees, caring arms and faces, the feel of misty air
against her face, the sound of birds and water, the smell of wood smoke and
rainy soil. A succession of vaguely-connected images, their meaning and
significance never really understood, interspersed by periods of empty
sleep. In other words, a dream. A dream that she would never wake from.
Imagine if your entire lifetime was nothing more than a dream.

In a typical Western country, only one child out of every two hundred dies
in infancy. In Vanuatu, where children grow up in malaria-ridden villages a
long way from medical care and a trip to the doctor is all-too-often a last
resort after the magic leaves have failed, the figure is one in eighteen.

Welcome to paradise.

"Will there be another Ten Days?" I asked one of the men at the kava bar.

He shook his head. "Ee finish now."

The islanders had had enough of grieving. It was time to get on with their
lives.

14th May

2007-06-08T00:09:00.000+01:00

Our next destination was Espiritu Santo, the largest island in Vanuatu's
chain. The size of the island led its first European visitor, the
17th-century explorer Quiros, to believe that he had discovered a great
antipodean continent, which he named "Australia del Espiritu Santo", the
southern land of the Holy Spirit. The first part of the name was eventually
transferred to the true southern continent, while the second part was kept
by its original owner.

Espiritu Santo's geography mirrors Britain's, with the north and west
dominated by wild and beautiful mountains (the tallest of which exceed
Snowdon or Ben Nevis by a thousand feet or so) while the south and east are
flat and agricultural. The island's population is centred around the town of
Luganville, built beside a reefy channel along on the southern coast.

Tourists fly from Port Vila to Luganville aboard the ATR, a comfortable,
pressurised airliner quite unlike anything else in Air Vanuatu's domestic
fleet. Having grown accustomed to inter-island journeys in tiny propeller
planes jammed with passengers, baskets, bags and occasional animals (Air
Vanuatu have recently passed a rule requiring pigs to be killed and cleaned
before being loaded onto the planes, but live chickens are still welcome),
my trip from Port Vila to Luganville was like a dream. In my dream I was on
an internal flight in Vanuatu - it must have been Vanuatu, because they'd
slapped a "Security Checked" sticker on my hand luggage without making me
take out any of the sharp objects - yet the plane had numbered seats,
in-flight magazines, and a flight attendant handing out orange juice and
snacks.

As in Port Vila, our priority was to get out of town. Luganville grew up out
of the hollowed-out remains of an American wartime base and is, quite
literally, a dump. The infrastructure left behind at the end of the war has
been upgraded a bit in the past sixty years, but you'd hardly notice. The
corrugated-metal Quonset huts that one held soldiers and their supplies
still dot the suburbs, and two of the stretches of road leading out of town
are undisguisedly the remains of old airstrips.

Luganville is noticeably nearer to the equator than Port Vila, and on
breezeless days the atmosphere is stupefying. Watching dusty vehicles rattle
up and down Main Street while youths sit boredly in the shade by the shop
fronts, you get the impression that nothing interesting has happened here
since 1945, apart from the occasional riot. By the standards of the
developing world Luganville is not a bad town - it isn't smelly or dirty or
highly dangerous or even particularly ugly. It is simply utterly devoid of
glamour. Whilst Port Vila's resorts lavish their hospitality on romantic
couples with hibiscus flowers behind their ears, government ministers with
champagne glasses in their hands and short-sleeved businessmen with tax-free
dollars in their bank accounts, Luganville's shabby hotels and cafes get
their business from beer-soaked scuba divers (the local wartime wreckage
extends far beneath the ocean) and Peace Corps volunteers from isolated
villages who come into town desperate for a pizza and an ice-cream.

Car hire is not big business on Espiritu Santo - the roads deteriorate
pretty rapidly as you drive out of town - but we managed to rent an old four
wheel drive in which to explore the island. The air-conditioning was broken,
the suspension was useless, and a few miles along the road one of the
windows dropped open. We returned to Luganville, where a flustered employee
at the car hire company reluctantly agreed to take back the old rattler and
allow us to use her boss's car, an enormous, shiny chrome-blue SUV of the
kind that occupies pride of place in expensive showrooms. Cruising along
inside, you could just feel yourself contributing to global warming (or
maybe it was just the fact that we hadn't turned up the air conditioning
quite high enough to cope with Santo's climate). Taking such a vehicle out
on Vanuatu's destructive rural roads seemed like borrowing your neighbour's
best suit and wearing it to go out digging in the garden. We let my Dad do
the driving.

First we travelled up the east coast, stopping for a picnic lunch at
Champagne Beach, a gorgeous palm-lined, crystalline bay filled to the brim
with sand and sunlight. The thatched Champagne Beach Bar, built for visitors
who come on occasional cruise ships, was empty and deserted; we sat under
the shade in front of the bar pouring ourselves orange juice out of the
picnic bag in plastic cups.

After a snooze under the trees, we continued along the coast to Port Olry, a
surprisingly substantial settlement of three thousand people, built on a
grassy coastal strip looking out across pale blue water and wave-splashed
islets. (Port Olry is reputedly Vanuatu's second largest village; Mele, on
the outskirts of Port Vila, is the largest.) There we spent the night in a
rustic wooden guest bungalow decorated with seashells and obscure carvings,
by the seashore in the centre of the village.

A pet fruit bat dangled in a cage under the eaves of the house next door.
When I touched the cage, the bat leaned over and licked my finger.

In Port Olry, like in Siviri, our visit coincided with a wedding: on the day
of our arrival a local boy had married a girl from a distant part of the
island. (There are plenty of eligible girls in the neighbouring village, I
was told, but the people of Port Olry traditionally regard the people of
that village as enemies. Nowadays members of the two communities can just
about bring themselves to sit down at a table together, but intermarriage is
out of the question.) Some of the young bridegroom's friends continued to
party all through the night, sending highly-amplified pop music resonating
through the village. Exotic kava, combined with a loud midnight playing of
the Eighties rock anthem "The Final Countdown", combined to give me a
strange dream whose storyline I hope to adapt someday into a bestselling
novel.
At breakfast next morning, we ate baguettes and giant pamplemousse outside
the guest bungalow, watching turtles amble back and forth in the
swimming-pool-coloured water. A group of attenuated-looking partygoers were
shambling about under the trees nearby, still clutching their CD player and
refusing to accept that it was now The Morning After. Every so often one
would collapse on the sand and lie there for a few minutes before regaining
consciousness and getting up to continue the party. It was a scene familiar
in urban Britain, yet strange on a South Pacific beach.
Youths are the same everywhere, my parents concluded.

With big co-operative stores, a glitzy little wooden restaurant (the
glitziness came largely from the Christmas decorations, which didn't look as
out-of-place as you would expect on a tropical island in May), and a fleet
of minibuses that departed at dawn every day to carry workers into
Luganville, Port Olry had a positively suburban feel. Our next stop, the
village of Tassiriki, was a very different place.

"It's like stepping back into Saxon times," my Mum observed, looking out
across the grassy clearing where cows and chickens wandered freely among the
thatched wooden huts.

Tassiriki is on the mountainous western side of Espiritu Santo, at the end
of a dirt road so bad that my Dad spent his night there lying awake,
worrying about the prospect of having to drive back along it in the hire
company boss's shiny new car. The people of Tassiriki have traditionally
earned a living by growing food in their hillside gardens and selling the
surplus at market, but with the population growing rapidly the elders of the
village's Presbyterian Church realised that something extra would be needed
to support the village's economy. Tourism, they decided, was the answer.

On a patch of ground donated by the church, fenced to keep away the
wandering cows, a small cement guesthouse had been constructed. On the wall
was a poster listing in Pidgin English the stages to be completed in the
village's tourism project, and who was responsible for each one. First build
the guesthouse, the poster instructed, then organise people who can cook for
the guests and act as tour guides, and plant a garden with food that the
visitors might like (in other words, something other than taro). Drawn up on
jumbo-sized flipchart paper in thick coloured markers, the poster was the
unmistakeable attempt of yet another Peace Corps volunteer trying valiantly
to encourage American efficiency and entrepreneurship in a place where such
things would never, ever catch on. The deadlines on the chart had all
passed, and every box appeared to have been ticked, yet several of the
things to do had clearly not been done. "Build'em one tourist bathroom," for
example. A patch of ground for the new bathroom had been cleared all right,
and the sacks of cement were there - piled up in two of the guesthouse's
four rooms - but the actual construction of the bathroom had yet to begin.
In the meantime, guests were shown the way to the local pit toilet (on the
far side of a prickly swamp), and the creek at the bottom of the nearby
gulley where the villagers go when they need a wash.

The poor woman who had been given the role of looking after the tourists
cared for them well, but was struggling to build up the confidence for her
new role. When our shiny blue hire car had pulled up in the village, it had
been a great relief for her to discover that one of its occupants could
speak Pidgin English.

"Sometimes, when tourists who only speak English come, I cry," she told us
(in Pidgin). "I go and hide in my house, and I cry. I say, 'No, I don't want
to go out and speak English to the tourists. I have too much shame!'"

(The Pidgin word "shame" covers not just shame in its Western sense, but
also the deep shyness that sometimes afflicts the ni-Vanuatu in public,
particularly in the presence of foreigners and members of the opposite sex.
When a boy at Ranwadi who turn up late to class is reluctant to come into
the room because of his "shame", what he means is not that he is ashamed by
his lack of punctuality, but rather that he does not want the sensation of
the entire class watching as he walks in.)

The young men of Tassiriki, by contrast, were only too eager to talk to
visitors and to show us round. One took us down to a cove on the shore where
a tree jutted out from a cliff over the sea, as high as a multi-storey
building.

"Don't you dare encourage the tourists to jump off that tree," his mother
called out as the young man led us down to the base of the cliff. "If you
want to risk your neck with that silly jumping trick of yours, go ahead, but
I don't want the tourists getting hurt!"

She was speaking in the local vernacular - one of the fourteen unique
languages spoken on Espiritu Santo - in which I know nothing except the
obligatory "good day" ("ran bani") and "good night" ("won bani"), but I
discovered afterwards what had been said.

The young man did as he was told, showing us the best spot from which to
watch as he clambered alone up the cliff, strutted along the tree like a
displaying bird, and dived into the water. Unharmed, he swam ashore and
proudly watched his performance on the screen of my Dad's digital camera.

On the black-sand beach, other villagers had strung a net out into the
water. A group of small boys waded towards the net, splashing and slapping
the water to drive the fish towards it. Some of the fish managed to jump the
net, but others were less lucky. The net was pulled around into a circle,
and hauled ashore, with a couple of little silver bodies entangled in the
meshing. It wasn't a spectacular haul, but for the boys it would make a nice
change from taro.

In a hut by the shore, an electricity generator was powering an icebox
containing more of the fish, along with the previous night's leftover kava.
(Pidgin words have a habit of working their way into the vocabularies of
expats who spend time in Vanuatu, like invasive weeds slowly displacing the
native species. Freezers are now iceboxes, just as cattle are now bullocks,
cloth is now calico, chickens are now fowls - though their cooked limbs are
still 'chicken wings' - and containers are now plastics.) Two of the village
boys and I filled up a plastic with the chilled kava and drank it back at
the guesthouse, where my Mum was trying to take action photos of geckoes
hunting insects around the fluorescent light. Chilled kava is much nicer
than the fresh drink, I discovered - the coldness dulls the awful taste.

With tourism still a new idea in Tassiriki, the villagers were anxious for
advice on how to make white visitors welcome.

Don't butter their bread on both sides, I advised, after an exceptionally
messy and greasy breakfast. "Some white misses all-ee worry from body ee
come fat-fat too-much". And get some mosquito nets for the rooms. "Some
white people all-ee worry b'long catch'em fever".

The villagers took our advice on the butter, but reassured us that
mosquitoes are not a problem in Tassiriki. Once upon a time they were, but
when the first Presbyterian missionary came from Scotland he brought a curse
down upon the mosquitoes and cast them out of the village.

Get some mosquito nets anyway, I recommended.

9th May

2007-06-04T01:29:00.001+01:00

Standing on the old-fashioned observation terrace of Port Vila International
Airport watching the passengers disembark from the plane, I didn't recognise
my parents until they stepped to one side and waved. My family live in the
Scottish Highlands, and I'm unused to seeing them in summer clothes.

My Mum had decided to come for a holiday in Vanuatu, to see for herself the
islands for which her son had abandoned his home country. Having spent part
of her own youth teaching in Belize, a tiny tropical country with many
similarities to Vanuatu, back in the 1960s (long before most people had
heard of gap years), I had little doubt she'd enjoy the place.

My Dad spent his youth (and pretty much all of his life since the age of
about five) immersed in electronics. He travels only when there is a good
reason, usually accompanied by computer magazines and an assortment of
hi-tech gadgetry. (The gadgets get smaller and more efficient each year, but
their battery chargers don't.) He dislikes heat, reacts badly to mosquito
bites, and (like me) has legs far longer than airline seating was designed
for. Bravely, he agreed to come along too.

Rain threatened to close the local airfield in the run-up to my parents'
arrival, so I left Pentecost on the roof of a cargo ship under the stars,
sleeping on top of a pile of iron bars. (This was more comfortable than it
sounds - the iron bars filled in the grooves on the corrugated metal roof -
although it left horrible rust marks on my clothing.) I arrived in Port Vila
with three or four days to spare, by the end of which I had so thoroughly
exhausted the list of interesting and affordable things to do in town that
on the day of my parents' arrival I walked the four or five miles to the
airport in the rain to relieve the boredom.

When my parents decided to fly out from Britain to visit me in Vanuatu
during the school holidays, and asked whereabouts in the country we should
go, I had one overriding suggestion: get out of town. Port Vila is a
pleasant enough place for a short holiday, but gets boring quite quickly if
you're not wealthy enough to enjoy the cocktails and cuisine or
easily-amused enough to spend the day lounging beside the pool. My parents
fall into neither category. Besides, they were coming largely out of
curiosity to see what had motivated their son to abandon his home country
for a dot on the other side of the planet. A fortnight in an air-conditioned
hotel would give them a very inaccurate impression of what my life (and the
life of most other people) in the South Pacific is like.

The majority of the visitors who come to Vanuatu never leave town. Their
experience of the country is confined to the few-mile-square enclaves of
paved roads, mains electricity, piped water and supermarkets that surround
Port Vila, the capital, and Luganville, the country's other main town. The
few tourists who visit the rest of the country typically do so on day trips
choreographed by tour operators who do their best to ensure that their
guests don't have to eat the local food, drink the local water, shit in the
local toilets, sleep in the local bungalows, or try to talk to anybody
except the English-speaking tour guide. The number of foreign visitors who
spend time in rural Vanuatu is less than the meagre number who read about
the place on my web site. These travellers talk smugly of 'the real Vanuatu'
as we settle down in our candlelit bungalows with flasks of lukewarm
drinking water fetched from the village tap, watch the day-trippers being
flown back to town in time for a hot shower and a sunset cocktail by the
poolside, and lament that the ordinary tourists don't know what they're
missing out on.

I was determined that my parents were not going to miss out. As a first step
we hired a car (actually a minibus - the extra ground clearance was useful
on the uneven dirt roads) and drove around to the rural side of Efaté, Port
Vila's island. (There are plans to pave the round-island road later this
year, to make rural Efaté more accessible to day trippers from the town.
Enjoy the tranquillity while it lasts.) Stopping en route, we saw beaches
tinted blue-green by the rounded shards of a million Coca-Cola bottles
discarded by the Americans in the Second World War, and beaches of volcanic
pumice where the stones were lighter than the water and floated in the surf.
On the north-eastern side of Efaté, we saw hillsides so smothered with the
alien mile-a-minute vine (another thing that the Americans introduced during
the war and neglected to clean up afterwards) that from a distance the
landscape appeared to be wrapped in green tinfoil. We saw forests overhung
by giant banyan trees, shorelines lined by wind-tasselled pandanus palms,
and pigs wallowing in puddles on the road. We were taken to see pygmy bats,
crawling on our hands and knees across the floor of caves chocolate-coated
with the creatures' manure. We watched villagers weaving a basket from a
single coconut leaf, and using a hammer to crack a nut. In exchange for a
small fee, one man showed us his collection of wartime artefacts; another
showed us his collection of banded iguanas. My parents watched and took
photos as two men hoisted me into the air on a pile of small leaves that
were not tied or glued together in any way, holding together under my weight
seemingly by magic. (A Pentecost islander who once described this trick to
me claimed that it actually was magic. To Muggles it's all a matter of
friction.)

Coming from Scotland, a nation in which fried potato chips are officially
the number one source of Vitamin C, the thing that most appealed to my
parents about Vanuatu was the delicious abundance of tropical fruit. Looking
around the market in Port Vila, the names of most of the fruits were
familiar, but the produce on display bore little resemblance to the
groceries in a British superstore (and not just because of the live chickens
and dead fruit bats being sold amongst the piles of fruit and vegetables).
Bananas, a simple product back home, come in half a dozen varieties here.
(When Peace Corps volunteers on Pentecost were demonstrating the use of
contraception to local teenagers, using bananas as props, an amusing debate
ensued about which kind of banana was the most appropriate.) Lemons in
Vanuatu are green, limes are yellow, and oranges can be either green or
yellow but are seldom orange. The succulent, sweet pamplemousse that weigh
down the local trees are so different from the acid yellow mush served with
continental breakfasts back home that it had never occurred to me that the
two were related until my Dad (who paid more attention in French classes
than I did at school) pointed out that "pamplemousse" is merely "grapefruit"
by a foreign name.

Not all the fruits were so appealing. May is the season for nakatambol,
bunches of golf ball-sized yellow fruits that grow on giant trees in the
jungle and have absolutely no flavour whatsoever.

"What do people do with these things?" my Dad asked.

"Eat them," I replied.

"They must be bored."

Vanuatu's vegetables, too, were an exotic bunch. My parents' opinion of taro
was the same as that of most foreigners confronted with Melanesia's
swamp-grown staple food: it may be good for supplying cheap calories to
hungry Third World farmers, but you need to fry the mushy purple root pretty
heavily before it makes an enjoyable meal. (Some anthropologists actually
blame a diet of taro for Melanesians' historical failure to develop advanced
civilisations.) Fortunately the local yams, a more potato-like vegetable,
met with my parents' approval, and in the restaurants that served chips made
from kumala (sweet potato) my Mum ordered extra helpings.

At the suggestion of a hotel receptionist in Port Vila, our first night out
of town was spent in Siviri, a quiet Presbyterian village on the north coast
of the island. My parents smiled bravely when they saw the inside of the
guesthouse. The corrugated-metal hut was utterly bare, except for the old
pandanus mats covering the coral floor. The bathroom was a concrete shed
beside a neighbouring house, with a cold shower that barely worked and a
yellow-stained toilet that could be flushed only by the old-fashioned method
of chucking down a bucket of water.

"We're planning to build a new guesthouse," the villagers told us, gesturing
to an empty patch of ground beside the nearby church.

As usual, the message that we were coming had not been passed on, but we
were nonetheless welcome. Within an hour mattresses had been laid on floor
of the guesthouse, mosquito nets had been rigged up (supported by sticks
freshly cut from the surrounding trees), a lantern had been hung from the
ceiling, and the place was looking positively comfortable. The villagers
cooked dinner and brewed cups of tea while chatting to us about their
families, and asking about our lives back in 'England'. (Ni-Vanuatu, like
many careless Englishpeople, don't usually distinguish between 'England' and
'Britain', and trying to explain in Pidgin English that actually my parents
live in Scotland, which is part of the same country as England yet is also a
separate country from England, is usually more trouble than it's worth.)

There was a lively atmosphere in Siviri that week. A local man was preparing
to get married, and piles of vegetables were accumulating in preparation for
the wedding feast. A prayer evening was being held in the local church,
which we were welcome to attend. We were introduced to the chief, the
minister, and numerous passing sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, aunts and
uncles.

At the end of the evening I asked how to wish our hosts goodnight in the
local language.

Trying to exchange pleasantries in their native languages with the people I
meet has become a hobby of mine recently, mainly because in a country with
over a hundred languages it's such an interesting challenge. It's a mission
even to remember who speaks what where: the map of Vanuatu is a convoluted
jigsaw-puzzle of different linguistic areas. Sometimes the boundaries are
logical - the people on one side of the island speak this language, and the
people on the other side speak that language - but in many cases historical
movements of people from place to place have contorted a language area so
that it resembles a gerrymandered electoral district. In a few places, the
villages that share common tongues are scattered as though their languages
were dropped on them from the sky like bombs.

Pentecost Island is chopped like a sausage into four relatively neat
language slices, some of which are subdivided into further slices
representing dialects. The boundaries between these slices have slid up and
down over past centuries, as neighbouring languages expanded and contracted
their share of the Pentecost pie. The central slice - Abma, the language now
spoken around Ranwadi - has spread in recent times to cover half of the
island, squeezing one southern neighbour down to a few square miles and
overrunning another completely. However, Pentecost's language map has
remained fairly straightforward. Depending where on how far north or south I
am on the island, I might wish the passers-by in the evening "bung mwamak",
"bontavuha", "bong avwis", or "ranlopas entu". Unless, of course, I
recognise the person as a visitor or a student from neighbouring Ambae
Island, in which case it's "bon karea", or as a history enthusiast who still
remembers a few words of Sowa language (the almost-forgotten fifth slice),
in which case I can really show off and say "bung awe".

In Port Vila, which is populated by immigrants from all over Vanuatu and
must have one of the highest language densities of any town on Earth (a
hundred languages among 40,000 people), the speaking-their-native-language
game is trickier, but sometimes it can be done. The ladies at the food stall
where I often buy dinner come from Tongariki Island; I can greet them in the
evenings with "em bong". At the nearby kava bar run by Paama islanders it's
"morray vongien" - or "morray vizokon" if I run into the same people the
next morning - and at the bar run by North Pentecost islanders it's back to
"bontavuha" or its shortened form, "bongi". The Australian tourists in Port
Vila speak more-or-less my own language (although to indicate that I'm
addressing them formally as a polite stranger I must remember to include the
word "mate"), and I can attempt half a dozen or so phrases in the languages
of half a dozen or so European nations. (However, in practice I don't
normally wish "good evening" to white strangers on the streets of Port Vila,
because if they haven't been in Vanuatu for long they might consider it
weird.) To French expatriates, as a matter of principle, I speak English.

The locals' reactions to my efforts range from appreciation ("Thank you for
taking the time to learn our language," one man said to me recently) to
utter surprise. An old woman in South Pentecost once reacted with such shock
to a phrase in her native language that I stopped using the phrase until I'd
had the chance to double-check that it was a greeting and not an obscene
swear word that somebody had taught me for a joke. The phrase turned out to
be perfectly innocuous; people in Vanuatu simply don't expect outsiders to
speak their indigenous languages.

In traditional Vanuatu society, individuals would have learned the languages
of neighbouring tribes as a way of acquiring influence and demonstrating
skill. Nowadays the ni-Vanuatu do this by learning English and French
instead, although knowledge of multiple vernaculars is still common among
people who live in linguistic border zones, and people whose relatives come
from different parts of the country. Those who know a second indigenous
language generally pick it up at a young age, and therefore speak it like
natives. The ni-Vanuatu are not used to hearing their languages
mispronounced, so my stuttering Anglicisations amuse them a lot. (Their
amusement turns to horror when I point out that the way I sound when
speaking their languages is much like the way people in Vanuatu sound to me
when they are speaking English.)

The most entertaining moments occur when somebody in town, taking me for a
tourist, happens to mention to me that he comes from Pentecost Island.
Casually inquiring what part of Pentecost, I can ascertain whether or not
his language is likely to be the same as the one that the villagers around
Ranwadi have been trying to teach me.

My native language is known by over a billion people, and there is no corner
of the world where I would be surprised to be spoken to in English. However,
if your language is used only by a tiny community of a few thousand people
living on a isolated island, meeting a foreigner from the other side of the
world and finding him suddenly start to speak in it is like receiving a
message from aliens thousands of light years away and finding them talking
in Cockney rhyming slang. Watching the expressions on people's faces, it
seems appropriate that Pentecost Island is named after the day on which the
apostles started speaking in tongues.

Back in Siviri, it turned out that I knew a phrase or two of the local lingo
already: the language spoken on North Efate is the same as that spoken on
neighbouring Nguna, an island where I spent a week six years ago. (This
language, which is also spoken in the northern half of Tongoa Island - I
occasionally use it with Tongoans at bars in Port Vila - goes by the name of
Nakanamanga.) The Nguna phrase for "good night" originally stuck in my mind
because it sounded a lot like the French, although the similarity is
coincidental; here "bon" means "night" rather than "good":

"Bon wia."

26th April

2007-04-30T00:31:00.001+01:00

One of the few resources that is never in short supply at Vanuatu's schools is
labour. Whenever there are bushes to be trimmed, grass to be cut, rubbish to
be burned, firewood to be collected, holes to be dug, holes to be filled in,
classrooms to be swept, or things to be carried from place to place, there are
always students nearby who can be ordered to help.

"Why don't you get a student to do that?" my colleagues asked when they saw me
digging a ditch to channel rainwater away from my back doorstep. (Proper
drains are one of those Western luxuries that Ranwadi manages without.)

"You should ask the students to help", they said when they saw me carrying a
sack of coral shingle up from the beach to fill in a muddy patch on the road
leading down to Vanwoki.

"Ee more-better you ask'em some student…" they began, when they saw me outside
squishing the orange beetles that nibble holes in my pumpkin plant.

Nor is maintaining the school grounds the only use to which the students are
put. In exchange for trivial rewards, I could have people sweeping my floor,
scrubbing my porch, brushing cobwebs away from my windows, emptying my bin,
and washing my dirty laundry. The students would gladly do these things - far
better to be giving home help to a teacher who might give them sweets and a
bit of pocket money in return than to risk being put to work doing harder jobs
around the school.

The other teachers take full advantage of this. The only ones who do not
employ students as regular 'house girls' to do their chores are the ones who
have wives to do the job instead.

I do my own housework. This is not just because being a privileged foreigner
having submissive black children doing my chores would strike a raw cultural
nerve, nor just because it conveniently fills spare blocks of time (Hugh
Grant's character in 'About A Boy' would empathise), nor just because it gives
me an opportunity to put on my headphones and immerse myself undistracted in
cheesy music - though all of these things are true. I first came to Ranwadi as
an eighteen year-old away from home for the first time, determined to prove
that I could look after myself, and although I proved this long ago I still
take pride in being possibly the only man on the island who scrubs his own
dirty clothes. I cannot think of any occasion when I have seen an adult
ni-Vanuatu male with his hands in soapy water.

Of course, being a good twenty-first century man, I only scrub my clothes when
they really need it. The rest of the time I merely leave them in a bucket of
detergent until they smell clean.

- - -

When there is a really big or really sweaty task to be done, the whole school
- students and teachers alike - is recruited to help. When big new water tanks
were ready to be installed up the hill above Ranwadi, the Deputy Principal
announced that every afternoon that week, after lessons, would be spent
preparing the site. The senior boys were put to work digging with spades and
pick-axes, hewing a platform the size of a small house out of the 45-degree
mountainside. For every person digging there were at least three sitting and
watching (a ratio fairly typical of Vanuatu workplaces), but you couldn't
blame them - it was hot work. On one occasion I made my way up the hill with
bottles of drinking water and was greeted with cheers from the boys.

Everybody else in the school was sent down to the beach with baskets and
buckets and old rice sacks to fetch sand and gravel with which to make
foundations for the tanks. Plodding up and down the mountainside, I passed the
principal, the bursar, the handyman and the librarian, as well as most of my
students and teaching colleagues, all carrying sand. Even the teachers'
children, some only three or four years old, toddled up the hill with their
baskets and boxes.

The students objected surprisingly little to the loss of their one regular
piece of free time. This was a community effort. With the entire school
trekking back and forth up the same narrow path, and every person nodding and
smiling at every other person as they passed during their trips up and down
the hill, the afternoons felt more like social gatherings than hard labour.
Greetings and words of encouragement could be heard in half a dozen languages:
the staccato sounds of Ambae language, the more slurred tones of Pentecost's
languages, the vigorous half-sentences of Pidgin, and occasional phrases of
real English in a tuneful Melanesian accent. People stood aside politely to
let their friends pass on the narrow path hair-pinning up the mountain. By the
end of the week the trampling of the verges had widened the path so much that
in places you could almost have driven a vehicle up it.

There was no need to tick names or take attendance - everyone could see who
was pulling their weight. Among the various things in various languages being
said by the students passing one another on the hillside, one question could
be heard above all the others:

"How many trips have you made now?"