I’ve also helped one mama start a tobacco selling business. Okay, not the healthiest lifestyle modeling one could do as a volunteer, but you could say I’m modeling how to start up a business from the bottom up. Basically, I buy local tobacco at the market and give it to Kasu. She sells it piece by piece, gives me money to cover the cost of the tobacco and keeps the profit. For every $10 of tobacco, she makes about $5. Next, I worked with her to save it until she had enough to pay for the tobacco herself. And lastly, I took her to the market and showed her how to buy good tobacco. So now all her profit goes to paying school fees for her 5 children. It has been so successful in fact, that 2 other people in the village, using their own money to start, are also re-selling tobacco. Now, Kasu is moving onto selling cigarettes and phone cards the same way.
Using this as a model, I’m also in the process of helping my host brother, Samson, start a kava business. And, next year, after “taem blong spel” (time for resting), I’ve found another mama who wants to start a business making clothes and I’ll help her to buy the clothing material. If the “monkey business” thinking prevails, their might be a lot of people with small businesses here before I leave. (Monkey business: monkey see, monkey do. The language is ni-Vanuatu, not white man, should you be wondering – so don’t go and get all sensitive.)
I’ve also drunk a lot of kastom kava in my kitchen in the last few months. Enough that I decided to spell or rather my body said, “no, you ARE NOT putting that in me” and I had to listen. Too, some oldfalas asked me to accept their direction which was not to drink in my kitchen anymore. Okay, I could see that for kastom kava, because after all, it is kastom, but no kava? Well, when I got back from Australia, I asked my brother what the status of the problem was and he told me, “hemi go lus long bush” (it got lost in the bush). No problem now.
Speaking of going loose in the garden, you might have gathered, I have a garden now. Or did. When I got back, everything I had planted was pretty well finished. It is incredible how quickly things grow here. I planted 5 different kinds of cabbage, lettuce, carrots, beets, tomatoes, beans, peppers, onions and melons. The first time Jacobeth and I went to the garden I had no idea where we were. She and Marta (her auntie and kind of like mother-in-law) decided to hide it so that no one would steal what I grew. That also meant we had to break bush just to get there. I can find it on my own now about 3 different ways, but there is not way I could describe how to get there. It is about 1-1/2 miles from the house, uphill. When we need to carry back food, we weave coconut leaf baskets and use a kind of rope vine to sling the basket on our backs. We usually fill them with manioc, taro, corn, kumala and pumpkin as well as all the other green vegetables. They are heavy!
There have been a lot of kastom ceremonies and between May and September is when most of them occur. Some related to binding a man and women together, getting married, circumcision, first sick moon, first shave and first hair cuts. There were also a few memorials to people who had died and their graves were covered with cement and head stones erected. We had about 2 a week for 4 months. It seemed like the mamas did nothing but weave baskets and mats, and cook. When a mama receives a basket or mat or food, she keeps a record of who she got it from. When that mamas has a kastom ceremony of some kind, the first mama will make enough baskets or mats to return what she received. Some mamas make them even when they don’t need to because they know they’ll need them in the future, so it is a kind of banking ahead.
Using this as a model, I’m also in the process of helping my host brother, Samson, start a kava business. And, next year, after “taem blong spel” (time for resting), I’ve found another mama who wants to start a business making clothes and I’ll help her to buy the clothing material. If the “monkey business” thinking prevails, their might be a lot of people with small businesses here before I leave. (Monkey business: monkey see, monkey do. The language is ni-Vanuatu, not white man, should you be wondering – so don’t go and get all sensitive.)
I’ve also drunk a lot of kastom kava in my kitchen in the last few months. Enough that I decided to spell or rather my body said, “no, you ARE NOT putting that in me” and I had to listen. Too, some oldfalas asked me to accept their direction which was not to drink in my kitchen anymore. Okay, I could see that for kastom kava, because after all, it is kastom, but no kava? Well, when I got back from Australia, I asked my brother what the status of the problem was and he told me, “hemi go lus long bush” (it got lost in the bush). No problem now.
Speaking of going loose in the garden, you might have gathered, I have a garden now. Or did. When I got back, everything I had planted was pretty well finished. It is incredible how quickly things grow here. I planted 5 different kinds of cabbage, lettuce, carrots, beets, tomatoes, beans, peppers, onions and melons. The first time Jacobeth and I went to the garden I had no idea where we were. She and Marta (her auntie and kind of like mother-in-law) decided to hide it so that no one would steal what I grew. That also meant we had to break bush just to get there. I can find it on my own now about 3 different ways, but there is not way I could describe how to get there. It is about 1-1/2 miles from the house, uphill. When we need to carry back food, we weave coconut leaf baskets and use a kind of rope vine to sling the basket on our backs. We usually fill them with manioc, taro, corn, kumala and pumpkin as well as all the other green vegetables. They are heavy!
There have been a lot of kastom ceremonies and between May and September is when most of them occur. Some related to binding a man and women together, getting married, circumcision, first sick moon, first shave and first hair cuts. There were also a few memorials to people who had died and their graves were covered with cement and head stones erected. We had about 2 a week for 4 months. It seemed like the mamas did nothing but weave baskets and mats, and cook. When a mama receives a basket or mat or food, she keeps a record of who she got it from. When that mamas has a kastom ceremony of some kind, the first mama will make enough baskets or mats to return what she received. Some mamas make them even when they don’t need to because they know they’ll need them in the future, so it is a kind of banking ahead.
1 comment:
I think that phone cards are great! They work so well and are very easy to use.
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