I found a copy of the first Harry Potter in my school library and convinved my papa to try it out. He read it in two weeks! And loved it! My family and I watched the movie together and it was fun to watch him get a kick out of all the things he had just read. My real live dad at home has an old kindle which he’s sent out here for my papa to have. This is so wonderful because of the bigger fonts, the backlight, and the built in dictionary! And a daughter with a large ebook collection that has the rest of the Harry Potters and a bunch of other similarly-leveled books inside! The kindle will be here in a few weeks and I can’t wait to see how it transforms his relationship with reading. To live up to its ambitious name, that is. I prefer a paperback any day, but the kindle has found a little corner in my heart. For me, the backlight means no headlamp, the ultimate nighttime bug attracter, even under the net. And with Dave’s collection I’ve got a thousand books to choose from! It’s easy to travel with and I find myself learning new words (and worlds) all the time thanks to the dictionary inside and ability to highlight your favorite parts.
Sometimes you just don’t feel like swimming. Okay, here’s an important note! Ni-Vanuatu (and now all of us exposed to it) call bathing “swimming.” The place where I take my bucket baths? My swimhouse. It’s just the way it is. Ni-Vanuatu pretty much swim every day ritually, usually because their hours are filled with building, bushwhacking, and being outdoors. If I don’t sleep well, my parents either chalk it up to guqwe (the karma/energy-force I’ve talked about in here before) or if that’s not the case, than it’s definitely because I didn’t swim the night before. I get a little wag of the finger, a “tsk tsk,” and a “you know better than to skip a swim” (or atleast I know better than to tell them about it.) Big swimmers, these people. But there are days that even my parents don’t feel like swimming. They scrub their feet and wash their hands and faces and call it a day. One evening as I was mockingly chastising them for this, I told them how we call it a bird bath and it’s more common than you’d think (and we all sleep fine afterwards.) After a laugh, my papa told me that they call it a nambilak, which is the name of a chicken-like bird here! A tasty one at that! Same name, same meaning, same reasoning. I really love this little overlap in cultural observation and just wanted to share our a-ha moment with our realization.
One Sunday I dug out my tie dye kit and I introduced my family to one of my favorite activities. The best part about tie dye is that it’s pretty hard to mess it up. Every design is funky and colorful and all your own! Of course, this time it was no different. One of the best parts about the day after tie dye is pulling off the rubber bands and checking out your new shirt. Everyone loved their finished products and rock their masterpieces all the time!
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| tie-dyed shamila with a stumpa of kava |
Shamila, my 20 year old neighbor/cousin/coworker, has been begging me to corn row my hair basically since I arrived on Ambae. You can imagine how upset she was when I cut it off during in-service training. After the emotional rollercoaster of Pam and the realization that my time here is not permanent (deep-ish), I agreed to let Shamila work her magic. So we spent the morning with her braiding my head and me enjoying the relaxing sensation of someone actually touching me. Haha, as funny as that sounds when I type it out, it’s true. Having my hair corn rowed is the most physically intimate experience I’ve had in Vanuatu! Other than people offering to check my head for lice (or how they singularly call it here, “louse”) which is basically the only physical interaction most people in Vanuatu partake in. Other than the strange but endearing way men and boys hold hands, twiddling with each other’s fingers and walking together and not letting go.
Anyways, a nice head massage was just what I needed. After a few hours, her work was complete and I got to check a mirror. The only photo evidence I have are some shots I’m giving to Shoshana as self-blackmail to ensure I never screw up my life in the future and because she made me promise to take them for her own sister enjoyment. Here’s a visual for you: if Dumbo and White Trash Barbie had a lovechild, I would be it. I think it’s safe to say that Corn Row Alison isn’t my best look. But here I was! At this moment in time, as I stood in confusion and amusement at the stranger in the mirror, Shamila sang out to me telling me we’d be leaving soon to head into town. Wait a second….. I didn’t know anything about going to town?!
So I got ready, laughing at my situation, left any sense of ego within the comforts of the school grounds and embarked on the walk to town, corn rowed up! The best part of this humbling afternoon is that half the people I encountered thought I looked taf tumas “ah, yu woman Ambae now!” But the other half didn’t seem to notice that my hair was twisted tightly to my scalp with the scraggly ends dangling down my neck. (but you need not worry, the scraggly stragglers were consolidated when someone advised me to tie them all up in a bun. Now we’re talkin style!) I left the corn rows in for two days, otherwise known as the maximum limit that I should ever leave corn rows in. I explained that the strain was giving me headaches (the half-truth of their removal) and my mom reassured me that this happens the first time – next time, I wouldn’t be bothered as much! I couldn’t break it to her that there’s a good chance we aren’t going to test that “next time” theory out.
One full moon, my parents and I had bonfire on the beach. We brought down a plastic bottle of kava and roasted some corn (and the fruit bat my papa shot) while my Uncle Dylan went diving. He brought up a dozen or so fish and we had ourselves a lovely fish fry under the big torch in the sky.
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fire master mama
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During 2 week school break, my siblings and cousin Edrian came home from secondary school and stayed with us. It was great! Lots of fishing and swimming and hermit crab catching. Edrian is a great diver and one night, got lucky and caught us an octopus and a lobster. I helped my papa tenderize the octopus arms (legs? tentacles?) to make them more tender. We mixed them into the green curry I made and had an unusual but delicious spicy seafood feast.
Maybe it’s because of the constantly changing weather lately, but I keep getting sick. Usually it’s just a case of “the flu” - endless sneezes and a nose on the run, nothing too serious, just obnoxious. The real tissue is that it causes problems with my toilet paper supply, a real treasure on the island, so I’ve resorted to learning a proper snot rocket. When I was little, Shoshana affectionately called me “Snot.” I wish this name gave me a leg up in the snot rocket game, but unfortunately it was just a big sister teasing her little shadow. The name Snot does, however, finally resonate with me as an appropriate nickname, which is worth something right? I’m attempting to teach myself this invaluable skill and I get jealous when I see a ni-Vanuatu showing off his or her ability with ease. It’s official, they are professional snot rocketeers. There is even a language word for the action, suru. One of these days I’ll stop missing my shirt and I’ll hit the ground instead. Or just stop being sick!
One a more serious note, I recently had to rub shoulders with two situations that were and still are unsettling for me. Domestic violence and child abuse are very real things in this country, but I’ve been fortunate enough so far to not have anything occur in my immediate community, at least nothing brought to my attention. It’s a tricky situation, too, because I am not in a position to do anything about it. I am an outsider who doesn’t quite grasp the workings of kastom and taboo around things like this and it’s incredibly hard to accept this fact. One of my neighbors told my mama and me that her partner hits her often and did so when she was pregnant. She is 20 and he has a child that is her age with a woman who apparently left him for the same fashion. She is from Santo and has no ties on Ambae, so leaving seems like an obvious choice if it were me. A-ha… “if it were me” changes everything and I am slowly learning to respect her decisions to stay while still encouraging her to go. Only my mama and I know what’s going on and I have to work with her husband, one of the school teachers, once a week. I told them I refused to ever work with him again, but then they explained to me how dangerous it would be if he knew that anyone knew.
A few weekends later, one of my students came up to the school with deep knife cuts on his hand. I helped him dress the wounds while he told me and my mama that his mom had done this to him because he was being naughty. He bent over to rinse the cut at the water tank and my mom pointed to the several scars on his back from previous cuts. Another really difficult situation. Child abuse is not publicly tolerated here and, for the record, these situations do not properly represent the majority of people here. But unfortunately things like this happen and no one really knows what to do, which saddens me. My papa called the police, but they didn’t pick up (oh boy!) and my headmaster agreed to go down to the station in Saratamata next pay day. This has been tough to deal with, but I'm definitely learning alot from these tricky situations - about my own standards and how I can be supportive and understanding that other people have their own.
but, only a lighter note, dorina!
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| knives in trees! |
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| dorina and her mandarin |
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