Untitled

As many of you know, the story of my life for the past three months has been rain, mud, and mold. The relentless rain turns meandering streams into roaring rapids, foot paths and roads into rivers, and everything else to sloppy mud. When hiking to a stream to get clean, you return just as dirty as before you set off. Every small scratch on your foot quickly becomes infected. Walking anywhere, which is what you must do to get everywhere, becomes an unpleasant task. I’ve spent many days stuck in a hut with nothing to do but stare, read, and think; think about how much I hate the rain. Give me desert, give me snow, anything but rain. As I sit inside, the rain joins me. The constant wetness has molded my roof, steadily drip dropping onto my bamboo and pandus leaf floor, which is now molding too. My clothes are never dry, but smell like some kind of wet animal. Mold has over taken photos from home, book, shoes, pens, shirts, anything you can think of.
To add to these already less than desirable living conditions is my work situation. With all the rain, everything is at a stand still. Scheduled workshops have been cancelled. Kids don’t go to school because they can’t cross the flooded streams to get there, and even if they did their dirt floor classrooms will be turned to mud. The only thing I was able to make happen in the past month was hold a meeting. I needed a chief and other villagers to sign a statement concerning the ownership of the conservation area I’m working with. I sat waiting for everyone to come. After nearly four hours of lying on the bare ground I decided to go ahead with the meeting. I asked them all to sign the paper, and then I was told that nearly everyone present didn’t know how to write their names, so I did it for them. Four hours for that. Only in Tanna.
Yet during these past three months I’ve learned to deal with the life I have chosen. Take it all in stride. Dirty? Don’t worry about being falling in the slimy mud. Hungry? Imagine that laplap you’ve eaten for the past 30 straight meals is pizza, a cheeseburger, chocolate cake, whatever it may be. Lonely? Talk to your dog. Sick? Be glad it’s not malaria. Bored? Read that magazine for the fifth time. Going crazy? Laugh at yourself. Laugh at the situation that you’re in. Why in the world am I living with a handful of people in the bush on a tiny island in the Pacific Ocean? Because it’s interesting, that’s why. And it’s challenging, and it’s different.
After so long the laughter stopped though. It’s not funny anymore, or entertaining. I just wanted to go home, see my family, see my friends, be clean, eat food, and be surrounded by a culture that I actually understand. And then suddenly things changed. Yesterday something remarkable happened. The rain stopped and the Sun came out! The world looked like a different place. Trees stood proud and green, birds sang and hopped from twig to twig, and flowers shown more vibrant than before. Nature and I rejoiced in the Sun. A tremendous burden was lifted, it is a feeling I cannot describe. The gloom was gone, crisp blue sky remained. It filled me up.
At first light I was outside. I began working in my yard, pulling weeds, shifting and planting flowers, and enjoying the heat of the Sun rising on my back. After a few hours I took a break. It was Sunday, time for church. I walked to an opening of grass and coconut trees to find my horse who neighed in greeting me. I leaped on his back, and off we were. Galloping threw a small winding trail through thick bushes and tall grasses, over a hill covered in red clay, down into a trail lined with hibiscus flowers, and there we arrived at church. It is a small bamboo house. Only a few men and women are present, along with their 15 or so small children. We huddle into the hut, and church begins. Everything is spoken in their native language, not Bislama, and though I am starting to learn their language, nearly everything escapes me. I sit and watch the children. They’re sitting just as impatiently as me. I can feel the fresh wind slipping through the bamboo walls and want to get back outside where everything is bright. An hour or so later and it’s finished. I lay outside in the grass, and try to eat my laplap. It proves to me unusually inedible. Normally I can choke down most of this revolting food, but even this proves too hard. I eat half, give the other half to my brother, and off I go. My horse rides swiftly back, always in a hurry to get back to his life of munching grass. When I return home, I continue to work on my yard. One of my sisters comes to keep me company. As I work, she sits and helps me practice speaking their native language. We begin to grow hungry, and she spots and hornets nest in a near by tree. I grab my slingshot and hit it on my second try. This does nothing but make the hornets mad. I grab a few large sticks and cut them into pieces two feet long. We often use sticks like these to knock fruit out of trees, or bats, and in the case, a hornet’s nest. A few well placed throws knocks the nest to the ground, and I run for cover, wait a few minutes, and then come back with more sticks. I hit the nest, run again, and then repeat, until finally only a few very angry hornets are left on the nest with many circling around. Slowly I approach their nest. My sister reminds me how bad these hornets hurt when they sting. I say thank you and let her know I am trying my best not to purposely get stung. Slowly I pick up the nest, shake out the last remaining hornets, and smash a few of them. To the victor go the spoils. We pull out the hornet larvae, throw them on a fire, and eat them like popcorn along with a kind of fruit called niətu in native language. I have no idea what it is in English, and have never seen anything like it, but I am beginning to like it as much as rosy mangoes and juicy pineapples.
We rest outside, and the day winds down. As the sun begins to cool, I go to fetch drinking water. I carry it from a spring at a neighboring village and hall the heavy container over my shoulder back to my village. It wares me down and makes me thirsty. I climb a near by coconut tree to get a sweet drink from above. Using my remaining strength I can just barely hang on long enough to get one down. I drink it as I watch the sun dip behind the hills edging the ocean. A grey blue sky with wisp of salmon is over head and a fiery orange glow to the west. A perfect ending to my perfect day.
I head back to my house and wind down in a book, when my younger sister comes to my house to let me know they had just killed a calf which was grazing near by. From what I could gather my papa decided the calf wasn’t going to make it much longer so it would be better just to kill it and eat it now. I came to the circle of huts to find my sister hack at the already skinned calf with her machete. Legs, tail, heart, liver, and all are thrown onto a pile of leaves and blood. I eat yam and watch her crudely slashing at bones, cutting off legs, breaking the spinal column, and throwing it into the existing pile of organs and flesh. Nothing will be wasted. She cuts me off a piece of the thigh, which I in turn jab onto a sharp stick and set it over a fire of wood and stone. She soon joins me with the legs and head, throwing them onto the fire. Occasionally she reaches in with her hand, pulls out a part, scrapes the singed hair off, and throws it back on the fire. The head is staring at me, eyes slightly open, tongue halfway out. After all of the hair is burnt off the head, she cuts from underneath the mouth to remove the tongue. She detaches it, but can’t seem to pull it out as the cow has a pretty good grip on it with his teeth. Comically and morbidly she pries its mouth open just enough to get the tongue out, and flings it back on the fire. After a few minutes she cuts up the tongue, and we eat it together with the sandpaper texture of it still unmistakable. I enjoy it none the less. I call it a night though, now it really is time to end my day. I walk back to my house under a full moon. It cast shadows all about my path. Dewey grass is bathed in silver, and the reflections of wet leaves in the surrounding bush seem to glow, almost as attentive eyes. Not of something terrible, but of something mysterious. The forest is looking out for us, sustaining us. I go to bed with the sound of insects chirping and flying foxes wooshing over head.