This is my namesake, Ester Sandra. She's about 3 months old in this picture. Although she had a bit of a rough start, she is doing fine now. Ester is her kastom name and Sandra is her English name. My host brother, Samson, and his wife, Shelley are the proud parents. Sandra is their firstborn.
Mt. Yasur is at Level 5 which means it is very cranky. I was visiting a bungalow operation up by the volcano and in between the explosions happening every 5 minutes, I could hear the thud, thud, thud of huge rocks landing on the ash plain nearby. We’ve also had a number of sizeable earthquakes, most of them in the ocean. I woke up one night wondering who was rocking my bed. When I sat up and turned on my torch I realized the house and everything in it was swaying. I learned later there was a 6.3 earthquake a little NW of Tanna. At times like these, I remember Vanuatu to prone to more natural disasters than any other place in the world. Remember the cyclones from the last blog??
Rats have become a minimal problem in the last few months and I rarely see evidence of them in the kitchen or house. With the new roof on my kitchen, I finally was able to hand calico under it to block some of the “dirty” from falling down, and put new calico on the table tops with a clear plastic coating – makes cleaning easy and I can almost believe it’s a safe environment to cook and eat out of.
The kitchen has also proved to be useful in another way. I’ve never had kastom kava, kava that is chewed rather than pulverized in a meat grinder, and when Matt D. was visiting, some men agreed to come to the kitchen to prepare it. Some of then scrubbed it, some chewed it, some did the final preparation. None of it did much to improve the taste, but it was a tad bit more smooth.
A young 12-year old boy drowned last month. We were all woken around 2:00 am because people were out searching for him and me and some mamas sat around to storian for awhile. His cousin had seen him after they had all returned from the solwota (salt water) and called out to him, but he just looked at him and didn’t say anything. He was carrying a puffer fish, the kind with needles sticking out all over. They found him in the morning and buried him on the 3rd day. The mamas were wailing, crying and flailing the ground around the boy. The mourning went on for 5 more days and then everyone worked together to make a big feast and eat together. I helped scratch manioc and Tanna soup. A klebber (a kind of magician) was called in to find out why this had happened. Some of the stories circulating were: the boy’s father hadn’t killed a pig for Day Blong Yam for the last three years; the boy’s father had tried sorcery to hurt another man and hadn’t done it right so it had come back to harm him; someone had killed the boy on land and hid him in the water. The klebber found some bad stones in 6 houses and removed them so he could destroy them later. His sister could actually smell them and so she went into the houses first to find them, but the klebber was the only one who could touch them and so he followed her into the house to remove them.
April 1st is Day Blo Yam which means it is the first day that yam can be harvested from the garden and the reef is opened for all kinds of fishing, not just kastom ways (nets, spear guns). When Larry, the PCV I replaced came to visit, my host brother arrived with a lobster and gave it to me for dinner. He then took Larry to the nakamal for kava. I think I got the better deal. There are two main family groups at Port. Those that are the keepers of the yam and others. The others harvest and prepare the yam and give it to the keepers in a big lafete on April 1. The others can then eat yam starting 5 days later. Not having had yam for close to a year, I was really looking forward to boiled hunks of yam with coconut cream and salt. It was as good as I remember and sitting here writing this I am happy to know I’ve got two 3 foot long yams waiting for me in my kitchen when I get back.
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