Instalment 29; Mustard Shorts Man and some rather gigantic rats

My yoga teacher, and his yoga class have moved out by the airport. When walking to yoga now, it is obligatory to walk through the area known for its gigantic rodents. Imagine the biggest rat you thought possible to be in existence, fatten it up a little, until it is almost the size of a small dog, with a snake sized tail, and you will have rat from this part of town. I didn’t really believe in them, until one frightful day, when I was walking home from the kindy in this area, and one walked out across the road in front of me. I was walking down a steep hill, along a tiny one-lane dirt road; the grass on each side of the road had grown up over my head. When I saw the gigantic rodent I turned around and ran back up the hill, then stopped and panicked a little, feeling trapped in the grass. I decided it was probably home to a whole pack of gigantic rodents and their rodent uncles. I then turned around again, paused, and ran full speed ahead down the hill with my eyes closed, and half way along the main road back into town. When I go to yoga, I only have to walk along the main road, not up the hill, but I can often hear much rustling in the grass and trees beside me. Yesterday, when I was quite along way from anywhere, walking to yoga, I heard quite a bit of rustling in the grass. I froze still, trying to figure out whether to run forward or back, when out of the overgrowth popped ‘Mustard Shorts Man.’ Mustard Shorts Man often pops up when you least expect him, in all different parts of town, I’m never really sure where he’s going, or where he’s been. Mustard Shorts Man is balding on the top of his shiny head, but has a puffy white afro ring, which grows out and the sides and back. His mustard shorts, which he never takes off, may have started their life as suit pants in the 1970’s. I’m not sure if they were once full length suit pants, that have been cut and sewed into tiny shorts, or if they belong to a summer fashion era, long ago, where suit pants were worn as very short shorts. They are made of that old professor-tweed woolen sort of fabric, and lately I have been noticing that they have an ever-increasing size hole, right in the middle of the bottom. Every day Mustard Shorts Man visits the USP office. This is the office for students studying by distance learning at the University of the South Pacific. I also visit this office frequently, because I am holding study groups there, and posting assignments for teachers. Mustard Shorts Man is not enrolled in any papers, nor has he ever been, but he spends hours there with his old dog-eared notepad, scrawling plans and writing vast quantities of notes. When asked what he is doing, he will reply that he is a professor, and has much important research to do, and requests politely that he is not disturbed again. I do not disturb him, but I smile nicely and sometimes give a little wave.

Instalment 28; Shiny new plastic bags

Like ice melts in hot fat, Santo too is changing rapidly. For a start a new phone company has moved in, the newest and biggest thing that has happened to the island in a long time. This phone company, not only works within a two-minute radius of the town centre, but reaches every corner, of every island in Vanuatu. The days of waiting three weeks for someone to pass a paper message to a remote village, will soon be over. Every chief, every tribe, everybody’s teenage daughter will be able to have a cell phone. Wives will be able to ring their husbands, who are fishing in their coconut tree canoes out on the reef, from the privacy of their own grass huts in the jungle. Each phone comes with a free solar powered charger. On the morning of the first day of coverage, ten billboards, giant enormous billboards, were erected around the town. Santos’ first advertising, Santos’ only advertising, intrudes upon the undisturbed jungle and muddy roads like cancerous tumors appearing on the liver of a non-smoking vegan.

 

Advertising is different, when it stands alone. In the west, we get so much of it thrust upon us, that we become desensitized to it; we screen it out with our super-dooper anti-advertising brain shields. But when you see it for the first time, glossy full colour pictures, of beautiful thin local girls on beaches, with cool topless Ni-Vanuatu boys, you stand and marvel, and think ‘I too could be that cool, if only I had one of those phones he’s talking on’. Oh, all right, perhaps we do that in the west too. The point is, now the people here have somebody to try to look like. The new phone company has a new shop. On the main road, in amongst the crumbled dusty shops, which are dark inside and piled full of random assorted junk, standing amongst them, is a brand new, glossy phone shop. It has Santos’ only flat screen television in the background, and glistening pictures of happy people, as big as the wall, talking on cell phones. One of the girls on the wall is Lynn (remember her?), who moved to Vila for a job in a beauty shop, and next thing we knew she reappeared in Santo as a giant billboard girl. The shop has glossy plastic shelves and gives out shiny new plastic bags. It has a similar effect on the local people as an alien spaceship would have on us if it planted itself down in the middle of a busy western city. Crowds of people stand outside, gazing in night and day, transfixed by the magical thinness of the screen and mysterious dustlessness of the windows. The people peer in the windows and line up along the street, until at last it is their turn to go in and have a look. There is a looming feeling in the air, for most volunteers, that this is the beginning of the end. The world…it seems… is creeping in.

 

Yesterday we had a meeting with all the rural teachers on the island. Usually to organize this is quite complex. We must decide to have the meeting three weeks before we have it, and then write hand-written notes to each of the ten remote areas on the island. We give the note, with the name and village on the outside, to anyone we can find going in that direction. It is then a matter of waiting and hoping that the note will eventually be handed to the person. That person then must pass the message to all the remote preschools in the area, often it will be a two day walk through the jungle in one direction, then another. When the meeting comes, about a third usually turn up, another third come at the wrong time on the wrong day. You will understand, that we don’t try to hold such meetings very often, but some contact and support for these remote teachers is deemed important. Anyway. This last meeting, everyone was there, all ten areas were represented. When I was chatting with a teacher from the south of the island, she got out her new mobile phone to show me. She said that usually it’s a long walk for her to contact the teachers in her area, but this time she just rang them all. She said at first she couldn’t believe it was really their voice, so far away, but sounding so clear. On the back of the phone was all her phone numbers, taped on with clear tape. I showed her how to put them in the phone, and everybody crowded around, amazed the phone had such a function. But how does the phone remember all those numbers? We then tried to ring my phone. We found my name, and pressed call. When my phone rang, shrieks of laughter came from all around us. Everybody was delighted that the phone knew how to ring me, with out being told the number again. If the rural teachers don’t have a new phone, then you can be sure that they are saving up for one.

Instalment 27; Fatfat Tumas

At Thursday study group we learnt about obesity. Obesity in Bislama is ‘fatfat tumas’ (fat fat too much). Most people in Vanuatu are obese, most women anyway. Obesity is becoming one of the biggest health risks, next to malaria. This is mainly because the consistently available food here is taro, sweet potato and island yam. I would estimate 80 percent of the diet is made up of these stodgy carbs. Meat is much rarer, quite expensive and usually kept for special occasions. There are scrawny chickens and valuable plump pigs, but you don’t want to go eating your own wealth away do you? There are loads of fruits and vegetables, but the availability of these things largely depend on good weather. Different vegetables come and go in the markets, and there are times when little is available, especially if there has been cyclones and storms destroying trees. So people eat stodge, and a lot of stodge at that. Children get very unbalanced diets, as they eat the stodge combined with imported cheap junk food (chemical snacks) and raspberry cordial. It was quite difficult explaining what obesity was. This was because everybody is obese, so Agnus and Alice thought that size of people was quite normal, rather than a heath risk. What would be the point of everyone being scrawny and thin? It would be terribly unattractive for a start. No, it is much better for women to be very large and fat and beautiful. For the first time in my life I suddenly wished I was a bit plumper. Much to the teachers dismay I have actually lost 6kg since arriving. To much walking, not enough delishous fried and fatty western food.