My Field Staff Officer visited us for two days this week. I guess we got lots of brownie points for living the martyr's life here as a cooperant should, because she has thawed a bit. We have a smaller house than the other RDP's and only cold water, but don't complain. It's easy not to complain here; together we make more money than anyone else in town, including the Council Secretary (our neighbor), and we don't pay rent or utilities. On the other hand, if we lived in Vila, we would be the poorest expatriate family in town.
I am having a bit of trouble getting "plugged in" here at work. On Friday, I had started walking up the hill with my counterpart when he casually mentioned that a World Bank consultant was meeting with Keith Mala, the Secretary. When I expressed an interest in sitting in, he told me that he had considered it, but after all, we were going to speak with the assistant works foreman about the cost of manufacturing concrete bricks. I managed to get us turned around and into the meeting. It turned out to be an Asian Development Bank team looking into vocational training in Vanuatu. I think that comes under "Regional Development Planning". In the meeting, during which the team leader constantly looked to me for input but I had the sense to remain silent, I learned that there were three vocational institutes on this island, and I got a run-down on their strengths and weaknesses (all from the ADB team).
At least it has now been decided to move my office down to next to Keith's. There won't be too many teams like that that get into his office without me then! They aren't big on sharing information here. We had a staff meeting this week (staff consisting mostly of blue-collar workers), in which a long time was spent telling us not to unrumple stuff out of other peoples' wastebaskets to read(?) and not to read stuff on other peoples' desks. I'm not sure what prompted all this, since most of the people there never go inside an office. When I related this to my FSO and told her I had long since perfected upside-down reading, she was shocked at me. How else do you learn all the things you need to know to do your job properly?
Poor Heather (our 5-year-old daughter): Holly buys a brand of French laundry soap that includes a small plastic gift in each box. So far, we have a soap bar holder and a dish rag holder. Heather desperately longs for the yo-yo she sees on the front of the box. Last night, I made the mistake of reading out-loud off the side of the box that you can send for a list of the available gifts and, if you desire, send in the one in your box for the one you want. I'm not sure how many tens of thousands of kilometers this offer extends to, as the company offers to pay postage both ways. I told her I'd look in Vila next time. . .
I spent the other day in the field with the local Livestock Officer (an Australian Volunteer), and some local smallholders. Between them and the new Agricultural Census, I have learned an amazing thing: 72% of all cattle smallholders on Malekula (and similar numbers elsewhere in Vanuatu) have no source of water in their pastures. The cattle simply do not get any water, except for puddles when it rains, I guess. They get a six-month dry season here. A lot of livestock (cattle, pigs, goats) are just tied up to trees and left there full time. I had noticed that pigpens around here didn't have water sources in them, but had imagined that the owners carried it out in buckets or something. I told Keith that if I put cattle in a field without water in Canada, I would be put in jail, but he replied along the lines that here, cattle are a tool rather than pets. The fact seems to be that most people just don't consider that livestock needs water. Also, the land owning system is literally carved in stone here. The constitution decrees that all land belongs to its "custom" owners and prohibits the sale of land, except small amounts to government. It is therefore impossible to gain access to water and there aren't enough wells for many of the people here, let alone livestock.
The reason we were out in the field was to help one guy build a corral and chute so that John could bleed his cattle for TB and Brucellosis tests. This smallholder had 15 cattle on 5 ha and their numbers were increasing because nobody from the local village would buy them. This was because in the dry season, some of them always died from a mysterious disease. The "disease", of course, is thirst and starvation. The plan is to make a production of testing them, declare them disease-free, sell a bunch, and bring the herd numbers down to the pasture's carrying capacity. Whether the owner will be able to bring himself to decrease his herd when the time comes is open to question.
Its been raining all day, so I guess it's a good thing we put palm fronds over our garden nursery yesterday. It will give the chickens some shelter, anyway. Winter's acoming! As it has been for a couple of nights this week, it's been down to 25 degrees today. Holly put on an extra shirt and the thick socks her mother knitted her. I'm thinking of closing a few windows. We closed a couple of them the other night for the first time. Disgusting, isn't it? When it goes up to 25 in Victoria (British Columbia, Canada), we all sweat to death and turn on the fans, and if it were this humid, we'd really suffer. I guess your body must adjust itself, or something. We went to a Women's Club pot-luck dinner the other night (held outdoors), and I noticed that a few of the children had sweaters on and one man had an Adidas jogging jacket on.
I enjoyed the dinner and Holly's Jamaica Baked Bananas were a hit. All the men sat on benches on one side, of course, with women and children on mats on the other side of the food, which was laid out on benches. I tried to "storian" or chew the fat (literally a national institution) a bit with a couple of guys, and then the program began. After the obligatory prayer, after which everyone clapped as per usual (?), a couple of women got up and told funny stories, of which I missed everything. The first one seemed to be about some whitemen from Australia who didn't speak Bislama on a visit to Tanna. It had the audience rolling in the aisles. The second one was about a couple of guys who competed with each other to prepare the worst laplap (the national dish of grated root or banana with or without meat cooked in leaves on hot stones). I caught something about someone breaking a tooth, and I was later told that the story culminated in one of the guys making laplap with a live pig that got up and ran away when the other tried to eat it. I guess you had to be there. Then a group of women got up and sang a few hymns, one with motions. This is pretty standard fare at any gathering.
The program ended with a couple of relay races run by two teams of women. One of them involved one women from each team, when their number was called, running to two 5-ft. sticks, picking them up, and competing for a piece of cloth with the sticks. The winner was the one who put it into a cardboard box. As with anything that requires hand-eye coordination, most of the women were pretty good. One would swoop it up first try, just about stick it in the box, and the other would just swoop it away. They all played scrupulously fair, with no body contact or edging the stick or box around for the next bout.
It's the normal thing for people here to hold a coconut in one hand and cut it open with a mighty whack of a razor-sharp bushknife (machete). The other day, Holly was trying to crack open one that had the husk removed, and Margret and Aslika, Keith's daughter and wife, were laughing and shouting "Kilem moa strong!" ("Hit it harder!"). Needless to say, that takes a lot of faith and guts if you haven't been doing it all your life. I guess practice makes perfect, though. Yesterday when I was cutting down the palm leaves, I actually hit the same spot 5 times in a row, which is quite an accomplishment for me. I still put coconuts on the ground before splitting them, though. I have a scar on my left index finger from an encounter with a hatchet while splitting kindling in 1973.
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©S. Combs, 1987.