Instalment 14; The Coconut Rebellion:

 

I was picked up at 6am. I had dinner with the New Zealand high commissioner, who was visiting Santo, the night before and felt particularly tired. On the way to Fanafo we had to stop and pick up the literacy trainers from their various villages. You can always tell a lot from the reaction of children. Children are honest with their emotions. I became aware that I was a rare species when the babies screamed at my passing and the children cried and stared. We were moving very slowly in an old green truck with ‘World Vision’ painted on the side. The road had been cut into the mountain, it was similar looking to an old river bed,  the trees had grown together and entwined their branches above us. On the way we past a very black skinned lady with out clothes on. Around her waist was a skirt made from fresh bright green leaves. Not the long flax sort, but a shorter round leaf. Her breasts drooped to her stomach. I wondered if they make new skirts daily, and what they wore while making the skirt for the day. She was with a boy of about 12. He wore nothing at all but had a long stick over his shoulder and on each end hung a big bunch of bright yellow bananas. At the time it was teeming heavily with thick tropical rain. It occurred to me that if I saw the two in movie; I would complain that it was unrealistic and clichéd. When we arrived in Fanafo it first appeared everyone had clothes on, at this I couldn’t help feeling slightly disappointed. Fanafo was like a small paradise in the forest. Each small community lives in circles of about fifteen huts.  The community I was staying in had converted to Christianity, and so wore muddy shorts and floral dresses. We walked down a little path through the jungle. The children couldn’t take their eyes off me. One little girl walked along beside, continually tripping over, gazing at me with such intensity that even as she fell she would still be looking until the moment she hit the ground. She too looked fascinating to me, she was about eight, and she wore only a pair of white muddy shorts, lined with holes around the rims. She had a wild long blond afro which grew up and out and pointed at the ends. She had that exotic child beauty, as you might see on the cover of an arty magazine, her magnificent look would probably bring her fame and fortune if born into a different part of our inequitable world.

 

Two minutes through the jungle we came across another community dressed completely in traditional custom attire. I first noticed an old blind man sitting alone on a log nearby, he spoke to us but I couldn’t understand him. I said hello back. He had a small frame, with little fat on it, his dark skin wrinkled over it in folds. He had a long white beard which had grown down to his stomach and pointed at the end. He seemed happy enough just sitting there on his log and I wondered how long he had been sitting there, and how many hours he would stay. Groups of boys played volleyball with a coconut over a vine net. Each boy was wearing a long thin rectangle of fabric at the front attached to a vine around his waist. There were no women there. Where do all the woman go? I never see them. Probably looking after the pigs. I could hear a noise that sounded like music coming from one of the grass huts. Do they have a radio I asked? “A generator, a dvd and a tv” The world vision lady replied, “these people are nomads, they wear custom dress still but make money from kava plantations, they have nothing to spend it on, so they bought a generator and a dvd player.” The mind boggles. Tribes people in a remote place, grass huts, no electricity, no transport, no clothes and a working dvd player.  We then went past a green concrete building. “This is the health centre. Built by world vision, we also put a water tap into this village,” the lady said. In the health centre was the village phone and the chief. “The chief is the nurse”, the lady added. On hearing this I opened my mouth to ask why the chief was the nurse and whether he knew much about medicine, then decided just to accept it… as the way things were. I poked my head in the room and made a mental note not to get sick and need medical attention while in Fanafo.

 

When I stand up in front of people to start the training, I can never shake the feeling that I’m a fraud. I always feel like I’m pretending to know about something that I do actually know a lot about.  I have a secret fear that if they ask too many questions they will find out that I am really still just the little girl that was never really very good at anything, trying to be seen in the shadow caused from the considerably brighter light of her older brother. It doesn’t occur to the village people that you might be nervous, I get the feeling white people are considered to be free from human weakness and I sometimes get an overwhelming urge to explain that this is very far from being true.

We gave everybody a pair of scissors, and a piece of cardboard box to make some letter cards and there was much excitement when the news came out that the trainers could keep the scissors, for some, they were probably the only pairs of scissors they would ever own. Everybody asked me if I could send them some more cardboard boxes. The workshop actually went quite well, and I was yet again impressed by the pious sacrifice these people made to share their limited literacy skills with their communities, for no salary or reward.

 

Fanafo holds the body of Jimmy Stevens, not buried but his skeleton partly covered in tin so that his soul may easily escape. Jimmy Stevens is very famous in Vanuatu. He started the ‘coconut rebellion’ a movement which contributed greatly to Vanuatu eventually winning its freedom from the colonial powers which controlled it. Born from royalty in Tonga, he was raised in Vanuatu. In 1980 he moved to Fanafo and bought with him men from fifteen islands in Vanuatu, he started his own world there, with structure, guards and order, the new Vanuatu. He proclaimed the island of Santo as independent, and called it ‘Vermarana’. With bows and arrows they occupied Luganville town, and took complete control of the island. He even printed his own currency, with the help of French settlers. As Jimmy’s men stormed the municipal building, young British authorities tried to defend them selves with tear gas, the strong sea breeze blew the tear gas immediately back into their offices. The young guards ran coughing right into the hands of Jimmy’s men. The basis of Steven’s movement was that white people were buying too much land and clearing it for coconut plantations, the local people were losing their rights to live there and use the land for their traditional life styles. Stevens petitioned the UN for early independence and although a date was arranged he continued to rule his ‘independent republic of Vermarana’. When Vanuatu became independent in 1980 the new government, wanting Santo back as part of the new Vanuatu, arrested Stevens and Vermarana was no more. While living in Fanafo he had fifteen wives who all lived in the same hut with him. They did tell me it was an especially big hut. On my first night I talked to one of his wives over the welcome ceremony kava, she was on my training course. She was his traveling wife.

 

In Vanuatu each of the man’s wives would have a different purpose. There was usually one for looking after the pigs, one for the children, one for gardening etc. I quickly decided that if I had been married to Jimmy Stevens I would also have chosen to be his traveling wife, rather than the one for looking after the pigs. I asked his traveling wife how she met him. She is very old now and spoke very slowly. Her eyes glassed over and she spent long moments staring into the distance, as though she was getting lost in the memories of her life as a young woman in love with a powerful man. She was 14 when her father came to work for Jimmy Stevens and bought her to live in Fanafo. As his traveling wife Jimmy bought her with him to Africa, Europe, Australia, and England. She stopped talking and I got the feeling that the memories were almost too much for her to bear. We were sitting outside under a sky brightly alight with a thousand stars. It went quiet and I sat there in silence for a while, listening to the sound of insects in the distance. It was very peaceful in that place, and people seemed content and happy, like perhaps they knew a secret that we don’t know in the west. I wondered if it was us that needed help and not them. Sitting there pondering my thoughts, I had another one of those moments that I used to search for and not find. A feeling of utter contentment, combined with the feeling that I was experiencing something very unique. I sat on my sleeping mat alone and awake for many hours that night. It was another time when I had so much to talk about and nobody to tell. When I finally lay down I noticed many cockroaches on the ground. I was exhausted, too exhausted to sleep or even move my body. The first few that crawled on me I tried to flick off, but there were so many and I knew I couldn’t win. There was one nestling against the skin on my stomach as I drifted off to sleep.