I turned up in Waterfall Village expecting to see the Prime Minister with an enormous pig, and instead found a truck parked on the beach next to a set of giant batteries.
e
"They're for the new tower," the driver explained. A new mobile phone mast had already been built on the mountain above Melsisi, but several months on, the communities underneath it still had no network coverage. Perhaps this explained why: someone had forgotten to put the batteries in the transmitter. The tall black batteries stood like chess pieces on a bank of shingle just above the waterline. (Tides are never very high in the South Pacific.) The giant trees along the shore shaded the beach from the morning sun, but the ocean beyond shone with an energetic blue. Seeing so much electrical power next to so much saltwater was faintly alarming.
I sat down and tried to check the news on my phone. The tower above Waterfall did have its batteries in, but only on good days would it bother to transmit useable amounts of data. Like the village stores that continually run out of goods, all you could do was check it every time you passed by, hope for the best, and quietly seethe with frustration when it failed to do its job. There was nobody worth complaining to. In developing countries, when the weather is bad or someone gets ill, there are holy men and traditional healers who can try to put things right. But when basic services don't work reliably, that's just a fact of life, which nobody has the power to change.
"When do the big men get here?" the driver asked.
"I heard 8 o'clock," I said. "But I guess that plan has changed." It was past 8 o'clock now and nobody was hanging around with any particular sense of expectation. Some children were sitting under the trees playing with beach detritus, and a couple of other passers-by were idly contemplating the batteries and some other bits and pieces that a ship had evidently dropped ashore during the night. Further along the beach, a bulldozer that had been sent to resurface one of the roads up the mountain was shovelling sand and gravel.
"Any news on the fire?"
"I can't get data on my phone today. But you can still see the smoke." I pointed to a small cloud just visible over the headland. With its base obscured by the slope of the island, it didn't look much different to the other clouds on the horizon, but from further along the coast, where I'd just walked from, you could see what was causing it – an island slowly exploding from within.
Speakers of the local languages don't use complicated nouns where a simple one will suffice. The cyclone that tore across Vanuatu two years ago was referred to by nearly everyone as "the wind", the giant cascade and natural swimming hole that give Waterfall Village its name was frequently just "the water", and in the right context volcanic eruptions were simply "the fire".
Pentecost Island itself is a rather lacklustre component of the Pacific's Ring of Fire. There is a hot rockpool beyond the airport which would just about suffice to cook a lobster, but that is as much geothermal activity as the island can muster nowadays. However, Pentecost sits in between two great islands of fire. To the south is Ambrym, a picture-postcard volcano, dark with ash, crater-topped and smoking. The pools of lava bubbling in its two great vents up-light the clouds above with a red glow that can be seen on clear nights all the way from Pentecost, tens of miles away. Like the luminous mushrooms in the forest that glow ghost-green on moonless nights, the light is barely bright enough to capture on camera, but to human eyes gazing under starlight it is a magical thing to see.
Ambae, to the north, is a different sort of island. From a distance it is as smooth and featureless as a giant sand bar, a lenticular silhouette disappearing into mist. This far-off, blue-grey silhouette inspired James Michener in Tales of the South Pacific to write about the mythic paradise of Bali Ha'i. The smooth dreaminess is an illusion, however. Up close, the island is sharp, black, ash-ridden and pockmarked with craters. Its curved rim conceals a giant caldera, part-filled with sulphurous lakes. Ambae too is a volcano.
"Last night I heard strange noises," Matan had told me over breakfast a few weeks earlier. "It sounded like someone starting a war."
"Ambae," said her father, a man of few words. He had gone down to the shore on hearing the thunder, and seen a new red glow in the sky.
Volcanic fireworks are nothing new in Vanuatu, and indeed are something of a tourist draw. Tanna, a film drama set on the best known of Vanuatu's volcanic islands, recently won an Oscar with its scenes of tribesmen falling in love and clubbing each other against a background of spattering red-hot lava; no special effects needed. Every sunset, tour groups gather around Tanna's crater rim, like spectators in a giant stadium, to watch the pyrotechnics. But as the outbursts of smoke and lava got worse, it became clear that something serious was happening on Ambae. Though the eruptions that had occurred on the island in recent memory had all been minor, oral history and the geological record told of village-destroying mudslides and on one occasion of lava shooting out of the side of the island towards what is now a major population centre. Local spreaders of 'coconut news', who had until now kept conversations going at the kava bar by telling people that nuclear war might have started already between North Korea and the United States, were now telling people that government scientists were predicting that in a few days' time the entire island of Ambae would blow itself in half, or drown beneath the ocean. Like all the best coconut memes, this was far-fetched but not impossible. Two of Vanuatu's major islands, Epi and Tongoa, are the remnants of a larger island that was blown in two by an exploding volcano in the 15thcentury. Even if Ambae didn't blow itself in half, if a fissure opened up between its boiling magma chamber and one of the geochemical-tinted lakes sitting on top, the result would be a gigantic, poisonous explosion that might well blow a chunk off the island.
11,500 people live on Ambae. Ash was starting to rain onto villages and gardens, volcanologists had little idea what the volcano would do next, and the islanders were frightened. A month ago, the government had therefore announced that it planned to do something that had probably never been done in the three millennia since Ambae was first settled: empty the island of its entire population.
- - -
On Waterfall Beach, the driver's phone rang. "Are you at the field?" he asked. That usually meant the airport – simple nouns again. "What's happening? They said one now? OK."
"The big men aren't arriving until 1.00?" I surmised, after he'd got off the phone. He nodded.
I trudged up to the nakamal – the village meeting house. The villagers had only found out the previous afternoon that the government delegation was coming, but they had managed to decorate the roadway to the nakamal like a resort entrance with huge red flowers and leaves. The bulldozer came past, nearly flattening the decorations, and trundled up into the bush behind the village. As payment for the sand that the construction company were extracting from Waterfall beach, the community had asked if a new road could be bulldozed to their gardens. Industrial earth-moving equipment didn't show up on Pentecost very often and the villagers wanted it put to good use.
The village chief was standing outside the nakamal rigging up a loudspeaker. "The event is starting at one o'clock now, right?" I asked. I had nothing to do in Waterfall all morning, but going home and coming back later meant a five-mile walk in the sun, which I wasn't doing purely because of what I'd overheard from a random stranger.
"Uh huh." The chief, like Matan's father, was a good man but not a talkative one.
I turned and wandered off, watched by a crowd of unfamiliar faces. After years on Pentecost, I had become accustomed to recognising most of the faces I saw. This is not to say that I knew everyone by name, but there was a sense of familiarity and recognition, helped by the fact that nearly everyone was related to nearly everyone else – Pacific island communities have small gene pools. But the majority of the people in Waterfall village this month were new.
When the government had ordered the evacuation of Ambae, an assortment of rusty local ships and tiny planes had headed for the island and transported its people to neighbouring islands, to await further instructions. Two-thirds of the evacuees had ended up in Luganville, Vanuatu's little northern town, nearly doubling the town's population. The remainder had been distributed among the rural harbours of Ambae's two neighbouring islands, Maewo and Pentecost. There was talk of establishing proper evacuee camps at one or two centralised locations on Pentecost, and then, when it became clear that this would be impractical in the short term, there was talk of dispersing evacuee families among the island's hundreds of small villages. But the evacuees found the coastal villages in which the ships had initially dropped them surprisingly likeable. Whereas most of Pentecost is rain-soaked, muddy and precipitous, the south-west coast has grassy plains, scattered with ageing coconut palms and small thickets of beach hibiscus, with fresh running water in abundance and billowing sea breezes. It also made sense for the evacuee communities to keep together, and in places where aid could reach them easily. So the evacuees stayed more-or-less where the ships had put them. Waterfall village ended up with 115 new arrivals, and nearby Baravet got 172 – twice these villages' existing populations. The Melsisi area received a similar number, who were temporarily housed on the Melsisi mission grounds. The communities surrounding the mission set up a committee to discuss the distribution of evacuees among villages. It did what committees in Vanuatu do most effectively, which is to quietly put off forever a task that nobody wanted to admit wasn't really worth doing anyway. The evacuees remained on the mission, which was perfectly well equipped to host them.
All along the island, residents and community leaders gave the new arrivals an enthusiastic welcome. They gave up their nakamals and church houses to the new arrivals, constructed new toilets and shelters, stacked communal kitchens with firewood, and prepared meals. Some of the savvier members of the host communities realised from the start that they weren't going to have to shoulder the burden of looking after the Ambae islanders alone. Immediately, aid began arriving – government disaster-stocks of rice and tinned fish, a Red Cross boat full of tents and medical kits, and an Australian warship carrying all manner of supplies. Communities elsewhere on the island, having missed out on this bonanza, were openly bitter about it; one group of chiefs posted a letter on Facebook effectively accusing the Waterfall community of stealing evacuees who should have rightfully have been theirs. Rumours were put about that the Ambae islanders were not being well looked after. Two representatives from the Ambae islanders' association in Port Vila came to find out if their fellow islanders were OK.
Actually, life is pretty good here, they were told. The host villagers had helped the visitors put up their Red Cross tents, taken them to the gardens to fetch cabbage when they got tired of government-issue rice and tinned food, and shared kava with them in the evenings. Evacuees who had initially been disappointed at missing out on a trip to town, where thousands of evacuees were now crowded into church houses and an open-air stadium, were starting to feel like they had got the better deal. Luganville is uninviting and mercilessly hot, and there is nowhere good to escape the heat there, apart from a couple of hotel swimming pools and a brackish rockpool near the wharf that briefly became Vanuatu's most popular bathing spot after a woman claimed that the waters there had cured her of cancer, but had now faded back into obscurity. South-western Pentecost's beaches and rivers had never been claimed to have healing properties, but the water was as clear as rippled glass and the stone underneath was as white and fresh as bathroom tiles. Some of the three or four metres of fresh water that rain-making magicians and the tradewinds drop annually onto the island's upper slopes is channelled down the mountains in pipes, providing an ample supply of clean tapwater, a rarity in developing-country villages. For those escaping Ambae, which is notoriously short of fresh water even when volcanic ash isn't raining into people's water tanks, it wasn't a bad spot for an enforced camping holiday. And in town, as the islanders remind each other all the time, "everything is money". On Pentecost, if the aid agencies hadn't budgeted for enough wooden poles to prop up the tents or enough leafy greens to go with the rice, the island would provide.
However, no amount of good hospitality could mute the periodic explosions coming from the island across the water. Ni-Vanuatu smile admirably in the face of disaster, but there was no concealing the fact that the evacuees were worried about their crops and livestock, which had been abandoned to fend for themselves in the evacuation and were presumably now eating each other, and for their property. One of the small group of soldiers posted on Ambae to keep an eye on the island and round up anyone resisting evacuation had shared a picture online of a huge pig savaged to death by hungry dogs. The island's wild ghosts and devils were also assumed to be running riot. Worst of all, the evacuees had no idea when, if ever, they would be going back. They felt for their home island. An Ambae band wrote a song about the disaster, which was passed from phone to phone and was soon everywhere. "From wanem yu ronemaot mifala?" it asked the mountain whose slopes had nurtured their ancestors for over a hundred generations. Why did you drive us away?
Ambae and Pentecost are separated by about as much seawater as England and France, and their languages and cultures differ to a similar degree. Whereas Pentecost is an island of tall traditions, with chiefs wearing pig tusks and decorative leaves and the telegenic ritual of the land-diving, Ambae islanders are stereotypically more outward-looking, intellectual and bookish. (Given the nature of the only book that's widely read in Vanuatu, this also often means highly religious.) During and since Vanuatu's independence, it has been Pentecost that provided some of the most grandiose national leaders, but Ambae that provided a good number of the senior civil servants who helped to build the new nation. Like English and French, Pentecost and Ambae's languages are at times similar on paper, but their intonation differs markedly. Whereas the speech of North Pentecost, just across the strait from Ambae, is a melodious language that rises and falls like waves, adjacent East Ambae language has a clipped and business-like sound; the language actually has a grammatical rule prohibiting melodiousness.* Industrious and mobile, Ambae islanders also contributed disproportionately to the building of Vanuatu's national language: many pidgin words that have local-language roots, such as nakamal, are immediately recognisable on Ambae. Most impressively, Ambae islanders seem to have successfully avoided the reputation for violent sorcery that bedevils inhabitants of Vanuatu's other black volcanic islands. Pentecost boys used to tell me to avoid Ambae girls because "their island is dry so they don't bathe very often"; older men warned me on a more serious note that Ambae women wouldn't tolerate their husbands spending every night drinking and smoking with the other men at the nakamal, as is the custom on Pentecost. But that was pretty much the worst that anybody had to say about them. Well-organised, outgoing and more interested in reading the Bible than in bewitching people, Ambae islanders made pretty nice visitors.
- - -
Arriving back in Waterfall at 1.00, there was still no sign of the Prime Minister and his delegation. Down on the beach, the bulldozer was towing out a construction truck that had got bogged down in the gravel. A ship laden with water tanks and piping was putting more cargo ashore. The batteries were still there too. The decorative flowers lining the road had been taken away and dumped for now in a stream, lest they wilt in the heat. Evacuees and locals were sitting under trees and tarpaulins outside the nakamal.
Plastic chairs had been brought out, and the chief was sitting with a group of villagers under the beach hibiscus, looking at the time on their phones and discussing last-minute arrangements. The local MP's wife, who also ran the local guesthouse, was trying to find out who exactly were the fourteen visitors she'd been told to expect that evening. (Was she catering for government ministers? Provincial leaders? Civil servants? The same saucepan of stew and plastic jug of cordial would do for anyone, but it was nice to know.) A middle-aged man from Ambae, who had been nominated to give a speech on behalf the evacuees, was sitting with a pen and pencil listing the dignitaries whom he needed to remember to thank.
A big, thick-set man wearing a smart shirt and trousers strode up and sat down on one of the plastic chairs.
"Everyone welcome the government minister," someone said.
The others laughed.
Michael, the roguish former school cook from 2001, was the first person I ever got to know on Pentecost. Since then, he had drifted to and from the island; a couple of years ago he turned up in Port Vila, where he claimed to have been spending time "feeding short-legs for a white man". (The short-leg is a dumpy emerald-and-grey pigeon that bobs around on the forest floor. Villagers would occasionally stone them and chuck them on the fire at the nakamal for a snack, and they tasted pretty good, but I'd never heard of anyone rearing them commercially.) The short-legs and other temporary occupations couldn't keep Michael busy forever, and he returned to Pentecost to a bare garden and a rather hapless existence, until the former school principal got elected to parliament, at which point Michael reinvented himself as the MP's right-hand man in the village. Now he spent his time striding around telling people what to do, keeping an eye on everything, and running all manner of obscure errands, telling anyone who asked what he was up to that he was working for the MP now. He wore shirts nowadays, and addressed me gruffly as "my son". We were "brothers" back at Ranwadi, I pointed out to him. But it was still fun having him around again.
Since it didn't look like anything was going to start soon, I headed for the waterfall behind the village for a swim. Anticipating delays to the programme, I'd brought along my swimming shorts. The last time I'd had time to spare in Waterfall I'd managed without; there had been nobody around and if anyone had seen me, I could have told them, truthfully, that I was skinny dipping on Michael's advice. But with the village full of people and the Prime Minister on his way, this didn't seem like a good time to be caught naked in the river.
I passed a group of people hauling the decorative plants out of the stream and putting them back in place. A couple of the plants had got left behind; I carried them to the nakamal myself. They smelled faintly of pondwater but still looked fresh.
"Is that all of them?" the chief asked as I passed. Like most chiefs in Vanuatu, he was the type who wouldn't have hesitated to muck around in the stream himself if a decorative plant needed rescuing. I nodded, left the plants with the others by the roadside, and headed off for a swim.
In the gorge behind the village, two parallel plumes of white water were pouring out of the jungle and cascading down a rock face. The water struck with immense force against the rock at the bottom of the cliff, which bore the jet steadily. The river swirled wildly in a shallow pool, then poured through a gap between boulders into a second pool, expending the last of the fall's energy in a stream of bubbles. The water in this second pool was clear and fresh, chilled by the shadow of the cliffs and jungle overhead, and tinted like dilute ink. Swiflets skimmed the water, and vines draped from rocky heights. I left my things on a boulder in the sun, picked my way past the rocks at the entrance to the pool, and dived into the cool liquid.
When I got back to the nakamal, the Prime Minister and his entourage had arrived and the speeches had begun. (I'd taken my time at the waterfall: no political speech could compete with the enjoyment of sitting by a beautiful river reading an interesting book while being slowly dried by a tropical breeze.) The plastic chairs had been lined up under an awning in front of the nakamal, and a group of large, well-dressed men (politicians in Vanuatu are nearly always men) were sitting in the afternoon heat with welcome garlands around their necks and a slightly snoozy look on their faces. A small but very brightly-coloured Vanuatu flag flapped from a bamboo pole. The evacuees' representative was speaking, giving his thanks to the government and host communities for looking after his people during this time of disaster, in a characteristic high-pitched Ambae accent that reminded me of the myna birds that chatter by the roadsides in Port Vila. From Ambae islanders, caught between their languages' vowel-wrenching rules and a studied desire to speak good English, the phrase typically comes out as thenk yeu.
A couple of hundred onlookers had assembled themselves around the grassy space in front of the nakamal. As was usual at public events in Vanuatu, the audience was not seated in neat rows, but had gathered on tufts of grass, coconut stumps and other suitable perches, like a flock of big birds eager for breadcrumbs but shy of coming down from the bushes to get them. A dopey-looking dog hung around in the middle of the proceedings, oblivious to everything. A row of six vehicles – probably the most traffic I had ever seen on Pentecost at one time – was parked on the sandy road below the nakamal. The Melsisi hospital truck had been commandeered as the Prime Ministerial vehicle, a little Vanuatu flag attached to its bonnet.
Under the beach hibiscus, near the rumbling generator that was powering the microphone, a group of villagers were feeding kava into a meat grinder, ready for the evening's refreshments. The roots went into the grinder yellow and neatly chipped, and came out looking like grey, narcotic cat litter.
"What do you think they're thinking about?" one of men grinding the kava asked, gesturing to the big men in front of the nakamal.
"The MP is probably wondering who is going to drink kava on his behalf this evening." Vanuatu's kava-sharing culture was hard on teetotal politicians – to refuse a ceremonial cupful would be an insult to tradition – but asking a family member to drink on one's behalf was an acceptable get-out.
"Don't worry," one of the others smiled. "Michael is always ready and willing to perform that service for the MP."
The Ambae representative's speech finished, and it was the MP's turn. He was seated at the edge of the row of chairs, where the sun was getting under the awning, and looked hot in his dark-blue shirt and black trousers. Michael stood silently behind him, next to one of the Prime Minister's security guards, looking every bit his equal. A couple of the other guards had given up pretending to be necessary and were loitering in the shade by the trucks enjoying the sea breeze.
The MP spoke much as he had always spoken during his twenty-five years as school principal, an optimistic speech about overcoming challenges and building a better future and working together with Jesus by our sides. He also spoke of how the evacuation had brought together the three islands of Penama – Pentecost, Ambae and Maewo – as one province. Penama Province was a crude bureaucratic creation drawn up only in 1994 (under colonial-era boundaries, Pentecost and Ambae were not in the same part of the country) and its provincial government, which had now decamped from its Ambae headquarters to Luganville, seemed to do little that couldn't have been done better at local or national level. But opportunities for identity politics in Vanuatu were never to be missed, and after two decades of being lumped together in the same workshops and sports tournaments, what was at first a highly artificial identity had started to take a more genuine form. And the islands' peoples had plenty of real connections: despite the old folks' warnings about cultural differences, many happy marriages had taken place across the straits, and numerous Pentecost islanders, including the MP himself, counted their in-laws among those displaced from Ambae. In his time as school principal at Ranwadi, the MP had welcomed many hundreds of Ambae students who had proven either too good or too naughty for their local schools, and had in turn dispatched a number of students who had fallen foul of the discipline policies at Ranwadi to make a fresh start at schools on Ambae.
After the MP's speech, and a brief introduction by the director of the National Disaster Management Office, the Prime Minister stood up to take the microphone. He wore a lightweight shirt of cool blue, and his sunglasses were perched on his nose like reading glasses, giving him a serious air, even though his speech was unscripted. The evacuees gathered around the nakamal listened eagerly, because there had been meeting of the Council of Ministers the day before and rumour had it that the Prime Minister would be making a big announcement about when they would be going home. The announcement had in fact already come out in the daily newspaper, but printed copies of that seldom reached Pentecost, and almost nobody read the news online, except in Facebook news feeds where plausible articles competed for space with photoshopped images of anacondas the size of Underground trains and predictions of the end of the world. And even that depended on the ever-unreliable network. When someone started telling me that Kim Jong Un had unleashed a giant nuclear-armed anaconda against the United States, if I was near the tower that did have its batteries in and the network was having a good day, I could call up BBC News Online and prove him wrong. The rest of the time I could do nothing but tell the coconut newsmongers that I found their story implausible, which made no impression. To functionally-illiterate islanders the world was without facts, everything was just one person's word against another's. But if the Prime Minister took the trouble to come and say something, his word was probably better than most.
There was no cheering or applause when the Prime Minister announced that, after consulting with volcanologists and disaster-relief agencies, it had been deemed safe for the islanders to return home. Partly this is because one does not show enthusiasm during this type of event in Vanuatu, one listens politely. Partly this was because no return date had been set – the National Disaster Management office was still assessing the situation on the ground, transport was still being arranged, and even when disaster-ready logistics teams were on the case it was foolish to bet on what date a ship would turn up in Vanuatu. And partly it was because the evacuees were uncertain of what they would be returning home to. Although the volcano had now been deemed unlikely to blow Ambae in two, or blast anything deadly within range of the island's population centres, it was still letting off explosions and blasting out unpleasant-looking clouds that could be seen and heard from the other side of the province. Teams had already visited the evacuee camps handing out leaflets full of newly-coined Pidgin terminology, telling the evacuees what to do if ashes, acid rain or 'hot flows of sand-beach' descended on their villages. Basically stay indoors, don't panic, and do what you can afterwards to clean up the mess. And try your best to keep all the erupted shit out of your drinking water. It didn't sound like fun.
While the Prime Minister was talking, the local councillor and one of the Prime Minister's aides were spreading long red mats – ceremonial money – on the grass in front of the nakamal. The breeze blowing down from the mountain threatened to roll up the end of one of the mats; Michael came forward with a stone and triumphantly weighed it down. A giant black pig with prized tusks had already been tied to a stake in front of the nakamal, and a small heap of taro had been laid out. This presentation of gifts was the main thing the government delegation had come for: the formal ceremony at which the host communities would be thanked for hosting the evacuees. No act of significance could be allowed to pass by without such an act of 'custom' taking place. By this ceremonial settling of an account, the natamata – the interwoven threads of social fibre that bound together the islanders' communities – would be strengthened and maintained, and the evacuees would be free to return home in a state of harmony with their neighbours and the world.
The Prime Minister took up a ceremonial stick, left the microphone and the shade of the awning, and stepped forward into the centre of the clearing. He began speaking the native language, no longer a politician now but a high chief, reciting the sort of words that had to be recited every time an act of custom was being performed. The sun shone down, and drops of rain were flicking out of the blue sky, blown over the ridge from the wet side of the island by the strong wind. No chief would balk at standing in rain or wind or sun to perform custom, and neither did the Prime Minister, but the possibility of his MP's most important guest getting slightly hot and damp was intolerable to Michael, who stepped forward with an umbrella, a big multi-coloured one with its owner's name scrawled onto it in five or six different places in permanent marker. As chiefs from each of the host communities circled three times, ceremonially accepting the gifts, Michael stood in the centre of the proceedings with the Prime Minister under the umbrella, grinning heroically.
The transaction complete, the Prime Minister returned to the awning, and the provincial president took to the microphone to give a speech. I half-listened with disinterest, and watched the councillor fold up the mats. The pig, still tied to its stake, became agitated. Nobody seemed sure whether customary protocol in a volcano-evacuation situation required a pig to be killed or merely handed over, but the pig decided not to take the risk. It broke free from its stake and walked off. The provincial president continued talking. The pig passed unhindered through the group of chiefs and councillors, none of whom wanted to interrupt the speech by trying to wrestle the giant pig in front of the assembled big men, and disappeared among the soursop bushes behind the nakamal.
Pigs with curved tusks are exceptionally valuable, because they have to be hand-reared on soft foods for several years and kept penned up so that they don't break their tusks. It slowly dawned on some of the onlookers around the nakamal that letting this pig wander off into the bushes wasn't a good idea. A group of villagers, led by Michael's brother, silently followed the pig into the bushes. One of them held a machete, another wielded a length of rope. I followed too.
The men cornered the pig by a stream behind the bushes, and would have made a quick recapture, if two of the dogs hanging around hadn't suddenly realised that the pig was fair game for a chase, and begun barking at its heels. The frightened pig plunged through the stream and made off into the plantation behind the village, with five or six men now running after it. The pursuers caught up with the pig at the edge of the village, at the point where the plantation began to slope steeply up the mountain; the villagers were nimbler than the huge pig on this terrain. Two of them grabbed the pig's hind legs, while its squealing front end vainly tried to bury itself in a bush. The men flipped the fat animal over on its back, like a baby having its nappy changed, and tied a rope around its leg. However, the pig wasn't in any mood to go back to the nakamal, and was far too heavy and obstinate to drag by force. From one side of the bush, men yanked the rope, and from the other side, they poked at the pig's fat bottom with a coconut leaf, but the animal was immovable.
"Maybe it's hungry," someone said. A pig this size must be used to being well fed. The person with the machete hacked open a coconut and waved it in front of the pig. The pig looked up and grudgingly allowed itself to be hauled down the slope and back into the village. Michael's brother led the prized animal triumphantly back towards the nakamal, where the provincial president was still talking.
"We're done with the pig now," the chief hissed. "Take it away."
The pig was tied up in the shade under the beach hibiscus, and stood contentedly there eating its coconut, satisfied that it was now safe from being murdered by the Prime Minister's delegation.
"I'll sell it later and divide up the cash with the other chiefs," the chief told me later, when I asked what would become of the pig. People in Waterfall didn't perform big rituals with pigs very often any more – the local church didn't care for custom, and with easy access to roads and ships, the village's inhabitants had better things to do for a living than rearing huge porkers for the sake of community diplomacy. But people from more traditional parts of the island who had accounts to settle occasionally came looking for pigs for sale, politicians needed them from time to time, and there were plenty of special occasions everywhere that called for pork. The pig had been spared today, but its time would come.
- - -
For the evacuees from Ambae, the end came sooner than anyone had anticipated. Only two days after the Prime Minister's visit, news came that a ship was on its way to take some of them back home. There had been talk of village-by-village assessments, of prioritising the strong and fit, and of publishing a detailed logistics plan over the course of the next fortnight. But once the government had given the go-ahead, all anyone really wanted to do was get the evacuees home. Once again, a Vanuatu committee tasked with organising something appeared to have quietly accepted that it wasn't really worth doing at all. Within a week the evacuees had all gone home.
I have only unreliable news about what happened when they got back to Ambae. Some wrote on Facebook that they were hungry, left hanging around at harbours with no transport back to their home villages, or went thirsty with centimetres of ash in their water tanks. Others wrote that they were thrilled to be home. Some people praised the government and supporting agencies for their handling of the evacuation; others complained that the islanders had been mistreated by the authorities. I do not know whether these differing perspectives reflect different experiences, or just different political allegiances. Everyone agreed that the evacuation had taught those involved in disaster relief in Vanuatu a lot about how to handle such incidents. And if some future disaster ever rendered Pentecost temporarily uninhabitable, its people would surely find friends on Ambae.
Nobody yet knows what will become of the volcano. I cannot even see if it is still spitting out clouds of smoke and ash. The evacuees had enjoyed a month of unusually cool and dry weather on Pentecost, but the week they left, the weather turned sultry and a hot haze ascended over the ocean, curtaining off the other islands from view. Perhaps the volcano has gone dormant again. Or perhaps it is just now priming itself ready to blow the island apart. It is a risk that the people living on the mountain's edge accept as the price of their homes.
The day after the last of the evacuees left, Pentecost felt just as it had before the evacuation. Ordinary island life resumed like an automatic movie player: people went to their gardens, sawed up timber for their fence posts, gathered firewood for their kitchens, pinned together lines of thatch for their houses, shovelled sand and gravel into sacks for community building projects, and organised marriages and funerals. Those heavily involved in looking after the evacuees had lost a month of their working lives. Nobody complained about that: time is a free resource here, like falling coconut leaves and the water in the river. Cattle mooched and shat on the dry grass where the evacuees had packed up their tents. Sheets of corrugated metal that had been used to make temporary shelters were taken down again, and rubbish was burned or left to be scattered away by the wind. Kava drinkers, who had temporarily relocated their habit to a variety of half-disused huts and shacks while the evacuees slept in the good buildings, were restored to their old nakamals. The faces by the roadside were few and familiar again.
Looking out across the ocean at the luminous mist that disguised the horizon, you could no longer see that Ambae island was even there. Maybe it actually wasn't there any more. But if so, we would probably have heard the bang.
- - -
* Specifically, the rule in Ambae language prohibits the 'low' vowel 'a' from occurring in between the high vowels 'i' and 'u'. This combination has a nice exotic ring – think of Bali Ha'i – but anywhere it might occur on Ambae, the language automatically converts the 'a' to 'e'. Thus, for example, vanuaku, which in the prototypical local language means "my land" (and inspired the name of one of Vanuatu's first political parties) becomes vanueku on Ambae. Had James Michener's Ambae-inspired paradise been linguistically true to life, it would have been called Bali He'i, and probably wouldn't have inspired a song in the South Pacific musical. And if Vanuatu had been led to independence by an Ambae islander rather than a Pentecost islander, it might well have ended up being called Vanuetu.
