A look back from Luganville

Three weeks is long enough to make a start on knowing a country. We’ve made a start on knowing Vanuatu. I can’t say that we know what we’re doing here yet – and yes, that can be read in two ways, and both are correct. But we’ve been moving slowly and in a direction of our own choosing, which suits us just fine. We’ve come north to Luganville, on the beautifully named island of Espirito Santo, via a route less traveled, the west coast of Malakula.

We shared the wide sweep of South West Bay with only one other boat, a large NZ-registered catamaran called Koncerto.  Anna and Clyff are old Vanuatu hands, hard-core cruisers. Though the weather was moody, as west coast weather so often is, we grew fond of seeing Koncerto, anchored at the other end of the bay opposite the village of Lembinwen, framed by a rainbow each morning, and at our end of the bay, opposite the village of Wintua, we watched fine misty rain fogs sweep down from the dark rainforest-clad mountains day after day..

We spent a week anchored in this remote corner of Malakula, where the Namba tribes are famously fierce, and only one or two generations away from cannibalism. In South West Bay we stayed still long enough to find our footing, to adjust our thinking and our attitude towards Vanuatu. And we stayed still long enough to meet some very interesting people. People who are not afraid of solitude, for South West Bay is truly remote. There are no roads in (or out), and supply boats call in only sporadically. The airstrip, often reputedly under water, is being upgraded, and has been out of service for eight months.

The path between Wintua and Lembinwen comes around the red cliffs off which we were anchored, and where it meets the beach it ducks underneath the most beautiful old shade trees. Then it passes in front of Lamango. Lamango was once a French-owned coconut plantation. But those days are gone, and the place was derelict when a Kiwi butcher from Whakatane, Kevin Muncanster, and his wife Brenda, took a 75 year lease on it about five years ago. They hired local men to clear the overgrowth, and brought in stock from New Zealand – pigs, cattle, sheep, goats, horses, and chickens too, for the lucrative egg trade. We came in from the boat to buy eggs and meat from them, and ended up sharing their table and hearing their story.

Like all the best stories, it hinges on a friendship -  in their case with a young man called Simon who was working in the Meridien hotel in Vila where Brenda and Kevin used to frequently holiday. The Muncasters took a shine to Simon, and sponsored his first visit to NZ. Simon stayed nine months, and became part of their family. When it was time for him to come home, he insisted that they come and meet his family in South West Bay. They ended up building themselves a holiday house on the lagoon which backs onto Lembinwen (Simon’s village) and holidayed there with their two young sons for several years. Then came the opportunity at Lamango, and now 20 years after they first met him,  Simon runs the finances of the South West Bay farm and lives in the house on the lagoon with his wife and children. There’s a new village grown up around that first house of Kevin and Brenda’s. When a cyclone ripped through Lembinwen several years ago, leaving several of Simon’s relatives homeless, Simon asked Kevin to help build more houses by the lagoon for his uncles. It turned out there were quite a few of those.

Brenda and Kevin come and go from South West Bay half a dozen times a year. Simon’s brother James lives and works on the farm too with his wife, but Kevin’s right hand man is Albie who lives with his family in the old plantation homestead. He manages the farm, and slaughters the beasts. Albie displays his NZ certification in the Lamango butchery, where I was delighted to learn I could have my meat vacuum packed. 

As for what Kev and Brenda get out of this, well, they say that money can’t buy the kind of fun they have at Lamango. They built up a chain of 52 butcher shops around New Zealand, but sold it and have kept only their first shop in Whakatane, which their younger son manages, and a farm, which his parents help with when they are away. They’ve put a big house on the beachfront, built to Western standards. They are not embarrassed by their wealth. They like the people in South West Bay, they say. They want to help them, but they’re not missionary types.  What they’re doing at Lamango is offering work, and decent wages, and even more importantly than that, demonstrating an alternative to the subsistence economy which traps ni-Vans in poverty.

 

As I said, we’ve met some interesting people. At each anchorage though, you start again, because at each anchorage there is a village, maybe several. Vanuatu may have just celebrated 30 years of nationhood, but it’s a nation of 83 islands, and many villages. Every village has its own protocol and often its own language. In Malakula, there are 30 different languages, I’ve read.  In South West Bay, Wintua and Lembinwen each have their own language. The people in Wintua people are from a different tribe. It’s quite usual apparently for people from Lembinwen and Wintua not to visit the other village for years at a time.

Jolly (Simon’s father) explained to us that in the 1940s the missionaries told the tribes to come down from the hills and live on the coast. His parents’ tribe came to Lembinwen, where he was born. “Were your parents cannibals?” we asked, boldly. Yes, said Jolly, his parents were heathens. He described for us various traditional (or kastom, as they say) rituals to do with marriage and pigs which were, and are still, intimately linked. I though they sounded pretty limiting, from a woman’s point of view, but Jolly, who is nearly as old as Alex, is of the opinion that life was better up in the bush. Here he is below in the rainforest behind the lagoon,
with the water supply for Lembinwen behind him.

 

Jolly took Alex and me, and Anna and Clyff into the lagoon, and from there, quite a long way into the forest behind it, which is lush and moist, with vines twisting up every tree, and strange fruit hanging in unexpected places. Pawpaws wind down tree trunks like strands of Christmas baubles. We ate raw cocoa seeds, and they tasted tangy, juicy. Under the trees were big piles of cooked and halved cocoa shells, the nuts harvested already. I am definitely not an into the wild kind of girl. I found myself thinking how little I would like to be left alone in this tropical wilderness, though it is bursting with life and nutrition. I was glad to get back to the dinghy on the lagoon shore.

It rained all day at Wintua on July 30, Independence Day, a filthy day with no sunlight getting through the thick low cloud cover. Humidity on the boat measured around 85%.  The big wet was unfortunate enough, given that this was the biggest party that Vanuatu expected to throw this year, but an even darker pall was thrown over festivities because the previous day a man had dropped dead on the beach. He, like us, had been watching soccer at Wintua. It was a big day. The teams were kitted out in brand new uniforms. The field had been freshly marked. 

This was on Wednesday, the first day of a three day soccer tournament which was to climax on Friday, Independence Day. This was big, like the Easter Show. There must have been about 500 people or more watching the boys playing soccer. In a corner, there was a girls volley ball tournament going on, and scatter about in specially constructed thatch huts were women selling food,  like  local “icecream” (coconut milk mixed with shaved pawpaw and the soft slimy flesh of green coconut), and rice. And of course, there were games for the kids. 

But the man dying put paid to all the fun. We got the details on Wednesday evening, when we were invited for dinner at Lamango (“we haven’t had a white girl for dinner for a long time,” Kevin joked with the boys making up kava outside the butchery. Only on Malakula…). We sat at a long table outside, with the wind rushing through the coconut palms, keeping the mozzies at bay, and drifts of dark men coming in and out like the tide, drawn by the kava bowl. They made little sound, even among themselves. Young men in groups in our culture are rowdy, shouting over each other, puffing themselves up. These men seemed to hang in the air, like birds. When Kevin gave them the ok, they came, one by one, to take a shell, or a plastic bowl, and dip it into the kava bowl.

Apparently, they told Kevin, the deceased wasn’t very well liked. In fact, the young men who were asked to take him back up to the village on a stretcher first tossed his body into the water, and let it roll onto the beach. Eventually the body was carted up the slippery mud cliff, and the next day, as we expected, the soccer and associated activities were cancelled.

We didn’t go into Wintua on Thursday or on Friday because by then we’d had our lagoon adventure and our dinghy was out of action (suffice to say, we went fishing in the lagoon, and landed a fish-hook in Clyff’s finger and in the floor of the blow-up dinghy. And yes, he caught a fish, a big one, but nobody much cared about the fish by the time he’d pushed the hook through his finger). Back to the narrative. The next time we went to Wintua was on Sunday to collect Sara. Sara Anderegg  (above) is  a 23-year-old Peace Corps volunteer from Savannah, Georgia and she’s been living in Wintua since November.

I’d met Sara on Tuesday when I’d visited the school in Wintua with Anna and Brenda to deliver a box of children’s books. Sara is the school librarian. She is the only white person in the village. Her life there is mind-boggling. I still can’t come to grips with it. She has her own little house in amongst the school buildings (there are about 100 children in the primary school, and 100 in the secondary school – most of them are boarders). Like every other house in Wintua, it has no electricity, and no running water. Her toilet is an outhouse up the hill. She is trying to make a vege garden, but it keeps getting washed away. People give her food, but aside from fruit, her diet is mostly starch and the few items – rice, tinned fish – she can buy at the village “shop”. She’s put on 15 kg since she arrived in Wintua in November. For several months she ate mostly with her “host” family. Her “mother” took me into their eating house and showed me where she cooks – on the ground, over stones, using a wood fire.

Sara has a hammock outside her house where she likes to read, but it’s rare for the children to leave her alone. Privacy is not a village thing. She has her bolthole, the library. She came to Wintua on a two-year teaching contract, but she has made the revival of the library, essentially a disused storage shed, her project.  What she’s achieved is miraculous given the lack of resources. She pushes open the shutters with poles, and behold, a light, bright, well-organised room, with books catalogued on shelves, sets of encyclopedias, posters, tantalizing invitations to read and to learn.

The bottom line though is that Sara is a single white girl living among people who have very strict traditional customs. She doesn’t speak the local language, though she has learned Bislama, or pidgin English, which is Vanuatu’s official language. She has little in common with most of the women, who are either married or at school, and she doesn’t talk to any of the men, ever. She can’t afford to cross that line. There are no police in the village. The chiefs enforce law.  If she were a white man, her situation would be very different. She has seen that from the few times another Peace Corps volunteer, a young man from New York based in a neighbouring village, has visited her.  He spends a lot of time in Vila, she says, but when he’s been to Wintua, he’s treated respectfully by both men and women. Women in Vanuatu have no status, white or brown. Girls are educated to be married and stay in their villages where their work never ends. Very few girls ever leave to take a job in Vila. Hers is a very odd position – and she’s seems completely committed to it.

On Sunday, when we’d fixed the dinghy and the skies had cleared, we brought Sara out to Kukka and fed her up on olives and fresh wholemeal bread, feta cheese, salami, bean sprouts and beer. Then we motored over to Koncerto, the palatial catamaran, and whiled away a couple of hours drinking tea and eating scones with Anna and Clyff.

I doubt that we’ll visit South West Bay again before Sara leaves, but I know I won’t forget her. It’s her solitude that staggers me. As we sat out at anchor on Independence Day, listening late into the night to the whoops and calls of men who had spent several days drinking kava, I worried about her. When I asked her on Sunday if she’d felt safe then, she didn’t answer me directly. She said that she had gone to the library to get away from the noise, and that this was one of the few times she’d seen alcohol in the village.  Men had gathered in the middle of the soccer field late at night, she said. She didn’t elaborate. I couldn’t imagine my daughter in her shoes. Now I’ve seen what the Peace Corps asks of its volunteers, I know that if I were an employer and I saw Peace Corps on a resume, I would ask no further questions.