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.