And there's still more: Letter Home by Jess

The following is taken from my workmate Jess' recent email home: a very amusing tale of life here and another take on the Bicycle, Bissiou, Boil episode.

My eye's are still watering from laughing so much!!!! enjoy.


Halo olgeta,

This edition is earlier than I was planning, but the past fortnight has been quite strange and I felt like a rant.
I’ll begin by introducing a new character to my South Pacific ensemble drama: Sarah. She’s a new volunteer at WTEC, a coastal planner from New Zealand with everything we hold dear at Team Wantok: sarcastic sense of humour, good iPod selection, interest in weekends that don’t involve playing Spin The Bottle with drunken Baby Docs and a healthy disrespect for Peace Corps volunteers (we are trying to come up with a T-shirt slogan to convey to everyone that we are NOT Peace Corps - the best we’ve come up with so far is a Team America deco that says “American? F*?! No”, but that relies too heavily on people having seen the movie. All suggestions will be considered and the winner gets a free T-shirt). It does mean that my entire life is wrapped up with WTEC – I live, work and socialise almost exclusively with these girls, so I hope to hell that we don’t fall out!

Week One
As the work crises continue at WTEC, I’ve been helping Daniel, the Compliance Officer with Sanma Council and the owner of the loudest collection of shirts I have ever seen (including my Year 10 Soc Ed teacher), to draft legislation to create a dugong sanctuary at Turtle Bay. As the first step, we are carrying out preliminary consultation sessions in affected communities. The first of these sessions could have been used as a case study on how not to carry out consultation. Daniel had led me to believe that I was only there in case anyone had any specific questions about the implications of the sanctuary. Instead, he started with a general rave about how WTEC is being run by three young white girls at the moment, then threw it over to me. It was windy, the meeting was being held in the middle of a coconut plantation and ni-Vans have a thing about sitting in front of anyone else, so they tend to spread out in a deep U shape. So, totally unprepared, I had to yell a speech about the benefits of marine conservation in incredibly shonky Bislama into the wind at a widely dispersed group of men who just wanted to get to kava. It was excruciating. To make matters worse, I very disrespectfully got the giggles during the closing prayer when they thanked God profusely for having sent them the very pale lawyer.

The second session was equally entertaining. There was hardly anyone at the nakamal to begin with, so they actually blew into a bubu shell to beckon the community. This took a few goes as neither of the Chiefs could get a good noise out of the shell, so they had to wait until a younger guy with a good set of lungs turned up. I was much better prepared this time, but got thrown when Daniel changed his opening to rave about the fact that I am a volunteer, which means that I don’t get paid and that my parents had probably just given me a lot of pocket money and said “Go to Vanuatu and see who you can help!” [this is funnier if you know my parents]."


Despite that off-putting introduction, the information session went fairly well and then one of the chiefs hitched a ride back into town with us. Because we were outside radio reception, we spent the first part of the journey discussing Australia – how long the summer days are in Hobart, whether I think a dingo took Azaria, the incredibly large pineapple on the Sunshine Coast and the fact that they sell food on the Overlander (“Food? On a train???” I decided not to tell them about the piano bar for fear that their brains would explode). Then we hit a huge pothole and the radio sprang back to life, right in the middle of “Country Hour” on Radio Vanuatu. So, the four of us – the chief, Ezra the gossipy driver, Daniel in his pink and green Hawaiian shirt and the pale girl with the philanthropist parents belted out a raucous rendition of “Take me Home, Country Road” as we drove back to Luganville.

[As an aside, driving around with the Council boys discredits any notion that it is the women in the community who are the gossipers! Throughout every journey, they were making comments like “Did you see that? Rex had that temptress from Pentecost in his car! She’s trouble that one…” or “Hey, back up, bush knives are on special at LCM”].

On a less amusing note, that week also brought home the extent of sexual inequality in Vanuatu.
It started when an outspoken public figure announced that women who wear trousers invite sexual abuse by drawing immediate attention to their buttocks. His solution? To form a security company to apprehend girls who have the audacity to wear pants and deliver them to their chiefs for punishment. Honestly. National Council of Women came out strongly against this insane plan, but the fact that it was given any traction at all speaks volumes.

Week Two

The next strange week started when we were stood up by the Dutch parasitologist (there is an international scientific team in Santo for two months and Sarah has been schmoozing with them) and ended up having dinner with three drunken French sailors from the expedition vessel. These were Vincent – a young, handsome New Caledonian; Franc – a 30-ish guy very obviously from the south of France; and the poor third wheel, a middle-aged French man with a very French Clouseau moustache and the very un-French name of Bob. Only Vincent spoke any English, and only Sarah speaks any French – and even then it is limited to locating the toilet and ordering baguettes - so it was a quite funny evening of baby-talk and hand gestures that got more animated with each bottle of wine. Vincent was clearly keen on Sarah (who was vaguely interested) and Franc was training his “too long at sea” glances at Jen (who was horrified at the prospect). Because she has a mischievous streak, Sarah ended up inviting them back to her place for a drink, so Jen and I went along to make sure nothing untoward happened. It went pretty much as you might expect – Vincent flirted with Sarah, Jen tried to avoid Franc’s advances, I tried desperately to find some music that we could all agree on and Bob just sat in the corner watching his two younger colleagues try their luck. Hilarious. When it came time to leave, Vincent tried the bisou approach, which we are convinced is simply an ancient French conspiracy to help present men with an opportunity to go the pash. Sarah didn’t play along, but did invite him over for dinner a few days later. After they left, we had a good laugh about how little we’d understood in the past four hours, the fact that the three of them actually wore deck shoes and all the excuses Sarah could use if she decided to back out of the date. The very Pacific one she ended up having to use didn’t even occur to us at the time…

The day before the big date, her cheek started to fill with puss. After a bit of fervent hoping that it would just go away, we used our daily internet allowance to google cures for tropical boils and sent her home to try hot towels and onion poultices. The next morning she was incredibly swollen and sore and asked me to take her to the hospital. We managed to navigate the shambolic admission procedures and were advised that she could have the boil drained that morning. We were only charged 200 vatu (about $3) and the nurses made it sound quite simple, so I cheerily waved Sarah off as she wandered into surgery after being told to take her thongs off at the door. I was quite shocked when they wheeled her into the recovery room 20 minutes later in a surgical gown, talking general-anaesthetic-fuelled gibberish and sporting an enormous bandage on her face! Four hours later she was discharged, still wobbly, swollen and bandaged, and told to come back the next day to see how things were progressing. So, the date had to be postponed. Two days and four dressing changes later, she was looking much more symmetrical and, with the aid of skin-coloured bandaids and a poorly lit restaurant (luckily, the only kind there are in Luganville), she got to have dinner with the New Caledonian sailor and his deck shoes.

Jen’s parents have been staying with us in the midst of all this madness. They even got to experience some of it for themselves. The maximum-security prison in Luganville is a standing joke. It has an open prison yard, a fence with only two loose strings of barbed wire and seems to operate on an honesty system. The men wander around the yard throughout the day, usually with friends and family leaning over the fence. I’ve been told (how credibly, I’m not sure) that a few years ago the authorities accepted the fact that people were going to “escape”, so they adopted a policy that prisoners could make town visits as long as they went in pairs (aka packing an accomplice) and came back in time for meals. Because the gaol provides a guarantee of decent meals and a comfortable bed, most of them did. Anyway, Jen’s parents caught a taxi back from town yesterday and the driver told them that he had to “deliver a gift to a friend” before dropping them off. He pulled up outside the prison and one of the prisoners furtively jumped the fence, ran to the car, grabbed a bottle of kava from the driver, jumped back over the fence and did a jaunty little “I’m not doing anything wrong” walk around the yard with the precious cargo shoved up his jumper. That truly is where they lock up the rapists in this town!