Amazing Stories 1

PS (first!): I'm loading this from Tanna on a dial-up connection so it is VERY slow. Next time I'm in Vila, I'll add some pictures - especially of my buchi (namesake) - Sandy

Just back from Australia and find myself with plenty of time in Vila for a change which means I get to write a LOT about everything that has happened in the last – oh my – 5 months! First, Australia was FANTASTIC. I met up with a long time friend of mine, Martha at the airport at 11:00am in late October with a bottle of wine and 2 glasses. Well, actually 2 coffee mugs. After a delicious lunch we indulged in massages and some great Greek food, thanks to a young man I met in the airport in Sydney who not only recommended it but worked there. New friend and he might visit Vanuatu next year! We stayed in Melbourne for a few days and then headed to Alice Springs and Uluru (Ayers Rock) for a 4 day outback safari. We were a little surprised to find ourselves watching the sunset at Uluru with glasses of champagne in our hands! Seems we got upgraded to the “deluxe” tour because not enough people had signed up for the 4 day basic tour. That meant wine with every meal, no cooking or cleaning and permanent tents with real beds, sheets and pillows. We DID NOT complain. However, I wanted to sleep in a swag, under the stars and did that every night. If the Peace Corps could provide mattresses like those inside the swags I think they’d make a lot of volunteers happy. We did a lot of hiking and it was hot, like 38 C or 100 F. We saw wallabies, wild camels and witchety grubs. One guy even ate one – a big white worm that is supposed to taste like raw egg – no thank you! At one creek, me and a couple of other people swam across to the other side and took a walk down the canyon. The water was incredibly cold, the canyon beautiful. As we entered, a chorus of sound stretched out in front of us – some kind of bird or animal early warning system.

We saw a lot of wildlife, learned a lot about the history of Australia both socially and geologically, and drank a lot of wine. Oh, and ate a lot of good food! Wine was a major theme or our stay in the Adelaide area. Thanks to Martha, we got a private tour of the Molly Dooker winery and I must say that I learned to love Shiraz as a result. Since most of their distribution is in the US you might be able to find it and try it too. We went to Kangaroo Island, the Great Ocean Road, and lots more. I could spend the entire blog just on our trip. Great company, great scenery, great food and of course, great wine!

I also got to see a dermatologist and had a basal cell carinoma removed which was good even if I do have “the mark of Zorro” on my forehead. It is healing nicely and I had the last of the stitches removed after I returned to site. The only advice from the PC medical officer was to keep it clean. I tried exploring my writing style on this topic since I found it somewhat ironic that the one thing I can’t do at site is keep anything clean.

Ok, now for a little bad news, just to get it out of the way. Tusker my dog (and Larry’s) got hit by a truck at the beginning of July and died. We buried him with some bananas (his favorite) and his toys and planted petunas and marked the edge of his grave with upturned Tusker beer bottles. Seems appropriate, huh?

We also lost my namesake just 3 weeks ago. Ester Sandra struggled with a respiratory problem for a long time and after all of the kastom medicine failed, she went to the hospital. Apparently “hart blong hem i kat fulap toti” (her heart was filled with dirty) and after she recovered from her cold/pneumonia, they gave her medicine to take for her heart. She and her mom were also given medicine for “sik blong faol” (illness coming from chickens). She fought really hard. I only wish she had learned to smile more.

The oldest chief in the village died last week too. He was the titular leader of the nakamal and I’m unsure what his passing will mean in terms of village politics. I’ll probably not find out anytime soon and I may be gone before anything happens anyway.

Two other chiefs tried to kill each other recently, but were unsuccessful. It appears Jimmy was upset about a pig and used something akin to a 4x4 piece of wood to knock Phil upside the head. Now, if it were anyone but man-Tanna, the blow would not only have knocked him down but also killed him. Phil is over 80, but is recovering from the cracked skull and concussion. His two sons weren’t real happy and so they beat Jimmy up or rather down to the ground and kicked the living sh*t out of him. Several broken ribs later he too is recovering. He had friends though and they weren’t happy either and so men from 7 (yes not 1, but 7) villages went to Phil’s place and tore down all of their houses and destroyed a lot of their things. The word went out to all of the women who were in the gardens to go back to the village because the gardens are close to Phil’s place and the men were going to be looking for Phil’s family in the gardens if they didn’t find them in the village, and if they would “kil” (hit, beat up) anyone they found. Me and a friend of mine, Jacobeth, we on our way to the gardens and decided to go anyway, but we hurried. This basically means we only stayed in the garden for 2 hours not 4. One of the leaders of the nakamal by the 7 villages sent word to the men in our village to stay out of the fight because the fight would only come inside the village if they brought it there by interfering. After, some men from the South were planning on going to the village and make the same damage to the houses belonging to Jimmy’s family. However, they haven’t gotten around to it yet. So everything was a little interesting for a couple of days, but ultimately safe.

Seems to be the taem (time) for raos (fights). Lots of village meetings about things like women leaving their men, women fighting with women over men, jealousy over sharing cigarettes or other things, disrespect for elders, stealing, etc. Yaoma kils the tamtam early early and everyone starts to gather under the meeting tree. The talk goes on and on and on, anyone with something to say waiting politely until the previous speaker is finished, pausing briefly, and then standing up and speaking. The talk goes on and on and on until the issues is decided, the fines levied and payments made. One side usually pays something like a pig and some kava and the other side does too. I haven’t seen a one sided fine come out of these meetings yet. Maybe that’s what the sori ceremonies are about because they are definitely one-sided.

I almost found myself in one of these meetings too. Seems I was slow in paying to charge my mobile like everyone else here, but he didn’t like it. Seems too that it is ok for me to answer his phone and take messages when he is gone, but not to use it to make calls which I pay for. And finally, I learned it is not ok to ask the same questions about some other donor activities that other members of the village ask. After some yelling - by him, shoving and pushing – by him, and a LOT of calm words by me, we came to an understanding and he apologized. If he hadn’t, I would have had to go to Yaoma and ask him to kil the tamtam. Not because of the supposed rightness of my position – there is not kastom about the matters we differed on, but because he physically and orally assaulted me – which is village business because I’m their Peace Corps person. Finished now – at least in theory. Sometimes I’m a bit confused as to what standard I’m expected to live at sometimes – like man-Tanna or not?

All that aggression was good for something though. The Nipikinamu Futbol Team won the All-Tanna Futbol Championship this year! YAY!!! They almost won last year but the title-holding team refused to play the final round. This year they beat their asses!! And won 200,000 vatu or roughly $200. Next year, the tournament will be close to my village and so I’ll be able to watch the preliminaries as well as the final. The village is planning a celebration around Christmas and I’ll be presenting a framed team picture to them. They used the money to start a small business selling mazut (gasoline) to taxi trucks.

Amazing Stories 2

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.

Amazing Stories 3

This year, 5 boys were circumcised and the ceremony involved 3 families. The boys went to the nakamal at the end of the first school term and were circumcised with a small bamboo knife. Bamboo is incredibly sharp. Ouch! Need I say more? After healing, and in time for the start of the second school term, the boys went back to school. When the families were ready for the ceremony, everyone brought a lot of water tar, yam, mats, baskets, calico (fabric) to the nakamal and made 3 very large piles. Pigs, nannys (goats) and bullock (cows) were carried or led inside the area too. The women dressed up in grass skirts, face paint and chicken feathers. Everyone goes to the nakamal. Then most of the men came from the solwata (salt water) with the boys and they walked around the edge of the nakamal before sitting down. One or two men then used a very large club to hit the pigs over the head and kill them. Sometimes it took 3 or 4 bashes before they were sure it was dead. They did the same for the nannys and then slit the throats of the bullock. The dogs ran around lapping up blood from the ground. Everyone from the families and surrounding villages then walked around to the young boys and their families and shook hands and gave a small gift to the boys, like soap or crackers. Finally, the men hauled the animals off to different houses, mats, baskets and calico were given to grandmothers of the boys and distributed around to other women, and the women started cooking. The rest of the day was spent cooking and talking, then eating and resting. Around 9:00pm the music starts in the nakamal and the women put on kastom dress again. Everyone goes to the nakamal and dances kastom dance all night long, until a little after sunrise the next day.

One mama made me a grass skirt – Kaha Ellen, another painted my face – Nani, and I joined the women both in the morning and for about 3 hours of dancing at night. I then quietly slipped off and went to sleep. I woke around 8:00 and could just hear them finishing as I made tea.

I also went to a first sick moon ceremony. Here, a young girl passage into womenhood is first celebrated by cutting her lower back in a series of inverted Vs with a piece of bamboo or glass. Any young girl who was away at school for her first sick moon and missed having a full ceremony can also be cut at this time. If she is not cut, the bad blood cannot come out and she will have problems with pain and bearing children as she gets older. All of the witnesses are cut too, but on their upper arms, ether in an small line of inverted Vs or in a star shape. I now have a star shaped scar on my arm. After, all of the women from her family go down to the beach. A mixture of grated coconut, some kind of leaf and coconut “hair” is mixed together. Everyone uses it like soap to wash first their cuts and then their entire body. All at once, everyone runs into the water and rinses it off. No amount of bacitracin is as soothing to an open wound at that mixture. It was warm from the sun and felt absolutely divine! When we came ashore, everyone put on dry clothes, the girl was dressed in kastom dress and her face painted. Her aunties were also in kastom dress. Everyone was given some kind of plant stalk and we started walking back to the village. We were joined by 2 of the girl’s uncles. Their job, and ours, was to protect the feathers in her hair from being snatched by any young man because if they were able to take it, then she would have to become his wife. Well, that was what happened in the past, but now that part isn’t followed. As we started to run, we were surrounded by young men with bigger, thicker and harder plant stalks, whipping us to get to the girl. Speaking from experience, when you get wacked with one, it hurts. There are some rules though. They can’t hit you on the head, face or front of your chest. I got so mad from being hit, I used my stalk to hit back. Unfortunately, the only men in site were the girl’s two uncles. When we got back to the village, everyone was laughing from the run and because the two uncles thought it was hilarious I hit them. So, to laughter and lots of talking, more food was prepared and cooked. Later we all ate.

Just a few more notes about life in the village and then I’ll talk a little about work. We’ve had quite a few large yachting groups come through, one with over a 100 people. At times I’ve felt like a tour guide. Lillian and Napua (Nelson) had a new baby girl and named her Lily Eleanor, the second name being my mother’s. Some men came and stole Enid one night and an uncle found her the next day and brought her home. Dawa likes to chew kava for me and Samson, and after taking a group to the volcano at night, stops by to eat whatever I happen to have cooked. Nathan and Noa, 2 volunteers from the other side of the island stopped by one day. They were trying to talk around Tanna in 4-1/2 days. Nathan had a backpack with all of the essentials. Noa arrived at Nate’s place with a taro and his dog. I made a dehydrated chocolate cheesecake I’d been saving for Nate, they slept and in the morning I found Nate had left sometime in the middle of the night to finish his walk. Noa hung around for a day, made friends, drank kava and caught a truck back to his sight the day after. I heard a story about papaya (po po). Some are very sweet and some are just ok. If you feed the skin or parts of a sweet one to the pigs, it will spoil the tree and the rest of the fruit will just be ok.

Amazing Stories 4

Now onto work. This could be another lengthy chapter, but I’ll try to keep it short. Right before gong to Vila in May I had a talk with the village about projects falling down and down reluctance to continue providing funds in areas where this had happened. When I came back, 3 mamas met me at my house and took me to the Mamas Market to show me it was open and operating. It has been running well since then. Their goal with the market revenue is to build a permanent house just for women. So, after things went well for 5 months, I asked them if they really wanted a women’s center. They said yes and told me the kind of building they wanted, what they would use it for and how they would manage it. I wrote a grant application and it looks like it will be approved in early December. The Cultural Center has a strong committee now, but not a lot of community support, so the building and its offerings continue to languish. The equipment for the rechargeable battery project was repaired and it is being used to charge mobile phones. In 10 weeks, they have raised 25,000 vatu (around $250). We also determined the limitations for recharging AA and D batteries – it wasn’t sized incorrectly and doesn’t have a large enough solar panel – and they plan on using the revenue to buy upgrade the system in about 6 more months. We’re still waiting on the supplier to bring the windmill, but a committee was organized and it is beginning to define a constitution and bylaws. And finally, I did a used battery cleanup project, making a contest for the children to see who could find the most batteries. They got one piece of candy for every 5 batteries. In one week, I had over 1,500 batteries laying around the house and ran out of lollies (candy) 3 times! I also approached the builder of a new bungalow about encasing the batteries in the cement floors and walls of the new bungalows he was constructing to protect the environment. So, the boy with the most batteries won an expanding egg that after being placed in water grows into a lizard. His family was a little concerned it would grow a real lizard, gecko, because people here are afraid of them, but I told them it was just rubber. Later they came back and asked me how big it would grow. I thought it was going to be about a foot long, but when it finished, it was over 3 feet big! Now, everyone wants one or something like it. Great fun!

And lastly, after my refreshing break in Australia, I’m having a lot of fun most days. My relationships with people are growing stronger. I still get very angry inside about how women are viewed and treated here and yet I’m developing a big sister friendship with some of the young men that is teaching me more about what they really think and how kastom strongly limits their freedom to act as they want in some matters, and teaching them (I hope) women can be part of their team and not just objects. Big hope, somewhat naive perhaps, but hey, that’s me sometimes. Things now are less about people taking my advice or doing what I say and more about how they find their own way with new knowledge and me learning how something new and different and really good can come out of the synergy of different ways/views/ideas/beliefs. And, losing the arrogance of believing that my way or the American/Western way is the best way for all people. Now I know what they mean when they say a volunteer gets more out of the experience than they put into it. None of us want that, but it is what happens.