After spending Christmas in Scotland, I am now on my way back to Pentecost

Island for another year.With my teaching commitments, together with a time-consuming project to

document the island's languages (see www.pentecostisland.net/languages),

it's unlikely that I'll have much time for blogging this year. However, I

may write an occasional entry.You can find tidied and illustrated versions of older blog entries and other

articles at www.andrewgray.com/pacific.Best wishes to everyone for 2008.

I wonder if Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, ruler of Dubai, ever built model cities out of Lego when he was a child.

Lego is a great medium for acting out fantasies. Given a wide enough bedroom floor and a large enough supply of bricks - and I bet Sheikh Mohammed's family could have afforded millions - you can design pretend cities with whatever utopian architecture you can dream of. Bestriding your city like a god, you can concentrate on the grandest building projects without worrying about tedious details like infrastructure or the environment. It doesn't matter if your Lego city has no agriculture and no water supply, other than inedible plastic flowers and undrinkable blue tiles, because the little people are made of plastic and will never go hungry and thirsty. It doesn't matter if your Lego city lacks adequate housing for its population, or adequate roads and railways to move them around (other than the stretch of track you built because it looked cool), because the little people will stand wherever you put them and will never complain. They are certainly not in a position to vote you out of your bedroom if you prove to be a lousy designer.

But why would the young Sheikh Mohammed have bothered with Lego, when he knew that one day he would have a real city to play with?

It would have taken an army of hyperactive children to build a Legoland on the scale of twenty-first century Dubai. (Fortunately, since Dubai is made of concrete rather than Lego, its designers have been able to do the job by exploiting imported Asian labourers instead.) A city of over a million people, which has increased its population by fifty times in as many years, the little emirate has come a long way from its beginnings two centuries ago as tiny village beside a small inlet of the Persian Gulf. Back then, the place was so insignificant that when the Al Maktoum family turned up in 1833 and declared themselves its rulers nobody bothered to try and stop them. The only resources Dubai had, apart from pearl-producing oysters and few date palms, were a modest amount of yet-to-be-discovered oil and a well-located harbour.

Oil money lubricated the city's growth, but it was the latter resource that really powered Dubai's transformation into a major city. Ever since the late nineteenth century, Dubai's rulers have encouraged foreign merchants to do business in the emirate, luring traders away from neighbouring ports with offers of lower taxes and greater commercial freedom. Today the city boasts vast industrial Free Trade Zones, an international airport that serves a regional hub and the base for one of the world's best airlines (which was why I ended up there), a thriving financial sector, and a growing status as a tourist destination. Not to mention a construction industry that has seen cranes rise like lampposts and nearly every street corner dug up by roadworks, while dusty cement factories spread for miles across the outskirts of the city. On Pentecost, I know of villagers who have struggled for years to find the money for a few bags of cement in order to build themselves a small chapel. In Dubai, concrete is poured like water. The emirate's rulers have no intention of going back to their tents in the desert after the oil runs out.

For wealthy sheikhs, and their foreign business partners, Dubai is a spectacular playground. It includes the world's grandest hotel, luxury waterfront developments, glitzy conference centres, glamorous shopping malls, a vast acreage of polished marble, and (in an impressive feat of air-conditioning) the Arabian desert's only ski centre. Its buildings stand taller and shinier than in almost any other city on earth.

But there is something distinctly uncomfortable about being one of the little people in somebody else's Lego fantasy.

"What did you do during your stopover in Dubai?" people asked me when I got home.

Well, I wandered around shopping malls admiring things I couldn't afford to buy, and wandered around the city admiring hotels I couldn't afford to stay in and developments I could never afford to invest in. I sat on the armchairs in Starbucks (not a place I'm fond of back in Britain, but a great refuge in stressful foreign cities) and flicked through guidebooks trying to find attractions that were affordable and could be reached by public transport. I can recommend the Dubai Museum, and the city's historic areas are worth a look in spite of their faked-up appearance, but there wasn't much else.

In between, spent a large proportion of the time sitting on overcrowded and infrequent buses trying to get from one part of the city to another. Sometimes I would get out at a bus stop that seemed like a short walk from where I wanted to be, only to find that it was in fact a two mile trek through grey industrial suburbs where gangs of Indian workers laboured in the desert heat and lorries thundered past. I picked my way on foot between lanes of murderous traffic, and negotiated junctions circumsected by barriers and roadworks. On one occasion I was actually forced to take a taxi in order to cross a highway.

When I built Lego towns I never thought to include road crossings either.

In none of the hundred or so cities I've visited have I spent so much time on buses, walked so many miles, breathed so much dust and carbon monoxide - and seen so little of interest - as I did in Dubai.

Above all, the emirate is a tragic waste of an opportunity. If all of its grand constructions had been clustered together in one place, and connected by a transport system as futuristic as the buildings it served, Dubai would be a wonder of the world: far and away the most impressive city on Earth. Instead, the buildings have been scattered like loose boulders over a hundred square miles of desert. The effect of this obscene sprawl has been to reduce a potential Futurama to something closer to an oversized Milton Keynes, except that Milton Keynes is pleasant and green.

Even the tallest of all Dubai's buildings is unimpressive when viewed over such sprawling distances. This is the Burj Dubai, a tapering tower which will eventually stand around half a mile high, a symbol of the emirate's prowess and the most obvious Freudian expression yet of what Sheikh Mohammed is trying to achieve with his city. The building is still under construction, and its exact projected height is a secret (Dubai is not the only up-and-coming city playing the "mine is bigger than yours" game), but it has already outstripped Toronto's CN Tower as the world's tallest structure - the first time since the days of the Pyramids that a Middle Eastern construction has held the record.

The Burj Dubai bears a resemblance to certain artists' renderings of the Tower of Babel, the Biblical construction built by humans in an arrogant attempt to climb to heaven.

The people of Babel got off lightly: God put a stop to their work by the simple measure of confounding their language. That wouldn't work in Dubai. With immigrants from over 90 countries whose lingua franca seems to be broken English of the most awkward kind, the emirate's language is already thoroughly confounded, yet still the buildings rise. Whatever God, or fate, eventually does to put a stop to Dubai will to have to be a lot nastier.

In fact, the inhabitants of this oil-fuelled little emirate may already have sealed their fate. Those who find Dubai a hideous excess can take grim comfort in one fact: few parts of it are an appreciable height above sea level. And when the water begins to lap around the base of the skyscrapers, no city will more richly deserve its fate.

Oban certainly had the feel of a Scottish village. Elderly couples strolled

along the seafront, wrapped up against the wind, while younger visitors with

heavy boots and backpacks tramped out a route between the hiking trail and

the inn. Local people stopped to have conversations with passers-by in the

street. Small boats took fishermen out to sea, or took tourists out to watch

the birds and seals on nearby islands. The narrow roads and spacious houses

of the village were strung out along a rocky shoreline, splashed with chilly

waves and smacked with kelp and bladder wrack. The rocks were interspersed

with sandy coves and promontories of scrubby trees and yellow grasses,

backed by a forested wilderness. On one side was the spill and wash of the

ocean; on the other the skyline was underlain by a distant range of

mountains. In such a setting it would have been easy to believe that I was

already back in the Highlands.In fact, I had never been so far from home.I had come to this chilly corner of the Antipodes partly to make the most of

a stopover in New Zealand on my way home for the Christmas holidays, and

partly because after a year on Pentecost I wanted to ease myself gradually

back into big Western civilisation. But there was another reason too. My original trip to Vanuatu, on a gap year in 2001, was motivated at least

partly by a desire to escape Gairloch, the bleak and sodden Highland village

that my parents now called home. After two years of cold and rain, I had

told myself, I was getting as far away from Gairloch as I possibly could.Except that I wasn't - not quite. Vanuatu is a long way from Scotland, to be

sure - over nine thousand miles - but that is only three-quarters as far

around the globe as it is possible to get.The furthest place in the world from Scotland is an empty square of the

Southern Ocean, half way between New Zealand and Antarctica. The closest

feature on a map is Campbell Island, a tiny fleck of land forming part of

the scattered and storm-tossed Sub-Antarctic Islands. A century ago the

Sub-Antarctic Islands were home to a few lonely and weather-hardened

individuals who made their living by skinning seals, and boiling penguins

down in giant vats to extract the oil. (This grisly source of biofuel has of

course been superseded nowadays by fossil fuels, a welcome development for

the penguins of the Sub-Antarctic Islands, but less welcome for their

Antarctic cousins whose habitat will soon be melted by the resulting global

warming.) Later on the islands were declared a nature reserve, and are now

uninhabited.Getting to Campbell Island would require a long and expensive boat journey,

across one of world's the most notoriously rough stretches of ocean. It

would also require a permit, which would only be granted if the New Zealand

conservation authorities were satisfied that I wasn't going to annoy the

fifteen thousand giant albatrosses that breed there. And frankly, once I

arrived on the island there would be little to do except to wander around

annoying the albatrosses. The Sub-Antarctic Islands, I conceded, were not a

realistic travel destination.The furthest inhabited island from Scotland is Stewart Island, which nestles

at the foot of New Zealand's main South Island. Like the Sub-Antarctic

Islands, Stewart Island is mainly a wilderness and a wildlife haven, but

being larger and closer to the mainland it is easier to reach and boasts a

thriving tourist industry. On the island's east coast, in the picturesquely

convoluted Halfmoon Bay, there is also a small settlement, named

(ironically) after a Scottish town. At 11,630 miles away (following the

shortest possible curve around the Earth), Oban is probably further from

Gairloch than any other village on Earth.And yet it is a remarkably similar place. It is as if somebody had sliced

the Earth in two with a mirror, so that one who tried to look at the far end

would see only the reflection of the place where he was standing.It is not merely the wild landscape that recalls the Scottish Highlands. In

the village of Oban itself, reflections of Gairloch manifest themselves like

mirages. There is the pier with its fishing boats and the nearby

fish-processing factory. There is the mini supermarket in the centre of the

village, a little concrete building whose three short aisles provide the

villagers with their daily needs. There are the prominent and well-kept

churches. There is the temporary-looking little hut selling fish and chip

takeaways. There is the old-fashioned hotel that caters to genteel elderly

tourists in the summer, and probably does a good business keeping the locals

fuelled with alcohol on long winter nights. There are the boat owners

offering wildlife cruises and fishing trips. There is the shop selling

mountaineering gear to trekkers, and another selling odd local crafts. There

is the tiny village museum, open two hours a day. There is the community

library, and an empty-looking recreational ground. And there were the trendy

little cafes and tea rooms (closed in winter) where lively young owners who

don't sound local and lively young customers who don't look local coo

together about what a beautiful spot they have found.Above all, Oban has the feel of a genuine community - a phenomenon I took

for granted back on Pentecost but is rare in modern Western countries. You

don't have to watch and listen to the locals for long to realise that most

people on the island seem to know each other. The friendly spirit extends to

visitors, too, and it is hard to go into a shop or a café without being

drawn into conversation. Stewart Island, it seemed, was Gairloch Version 2: a new and improved

edition, which retained the best features of the old one whilst correcting

many of its defects. The bugs have been fixed: in place of Scottish midges,

which are excruciating even when they don't bite and impossible to keep away

unless you mummify yourself in clothes and netting, Stewart Island had

sandflies, which are larger and easier to swat off. (The fact that I still

had a bottle of tropical-strength insect repellent in my rucksack helped.)

Instead of a lonely youth hostel on a peninsula two miles from the centre of

the village (in a region with no local buses), Oban has a bright-looking

backpacker holiday camp right in the centre of the village. And Stewart

Island is better connected to the rest of the country by public transport

than Gairloch, in spite of the fact that Gairloch is not an island.Those who come to experience the beauty of Stewart Island are provided for

by well-kept walking trails, which are so well signposted I didn't even need

the maps sold for a dollar in the smart local information centre. Off the

coast marine life thrives in large no-take zones, in contrast to Gairloch,

where trawlers trying to scrape a living out of overfished waters are still

intent on doing to the seabed what their ancestors did to the once-forested

hillsides centuries ago. None of the inlets on Stewart Island appeared to be

polluted by the effluent from salmon farms, none of its valleys seemed to

have been drowned by hydroelectric dams, and I was pretty sure that none of

its offshore islets had ever been used to test biological weapons. The cod

fillets sold by the fish and chip outlet were not only less endangered than

the north Atlantic variety but tasted better too. Even the seagulls that

descended, Hitchcock-style, when I sat down on the bench by the seaside and

unwrapped the newspaper (real newspaper) from my fish and chips, were

prettier than their Caledonian cousins.Both the inhabitants of Gairloch and Oban are in a large part the

descendants of Scots, a people justifiably proud of their traditions and

achievements. Yet whilst the natives of Gairloch are those whom waves of

emigration left behind, the people of southern New Zealand are derived from

Scots who had the spirit and ambition to leave their grey homeland and

continue their traditions and achievements in a new country. Both groups are

warm and decent people, which is why I hope nobody will be offended when I

say that I find the latter more interesting company.Yet in spite of all this, I had to admit that the main reason I lived

Stewart Island was not because it was different to Gairloch, but because it

was so much the same.I recalled a speech that a former Head Boy had made to the students at

Gairloch High School, several years ago."After leaving the Highlands, you can travel all over the world," he said.

"You can visit beautiful places and you do wonderful things. And then you

come home and realise that, actually, this is one of the most beautiful

places of them all."I remembered these words, but for a long time I dismissed them. Scots who

thought that their country was one of the nicest in the world had not

travelled far enough, I insisted. Yet several years and nearly a quarter of

a million miles of travelling later, standing on the beach in Halfmoon Bay

watching the sunset at the far end of the earth, I conceded for the first

time that he may just have been right.- - -Of course, Stewart Island was not a completely identical copy of the West

Highlands. The birdsong was different, for a start. There were sound effects

in the bushes I had never heard before, such as the flapping of the enormous

New Zealand pigeon, which takes off with as much grace and silence as a

military helicopter, and the bellbird, whose ping-pong call resembles a

novelty doorbell. The smell of the forest was different, too. On top of the

smell of earth and damp wood that pervades northern woods, there was a

sweeter scent, a honeyish blend of resin, eucalypt, and unknown flowers. I

remembered this smell from parts of Australia, but have never encountered it

in a European forest, or even a European garden. It is the perfume of the

southern hemisphere.There was something strange and exotic about the appearance of trees and

flowers too. In fact, the local forest looked like a cross between an

overgrown Scottish garden and a BBC reconstruction of the Jurassic era.

There are good reasons for both resemblances. Many Scottish gardeners plant

New Zealand shrubs, knowing that they will be at home in the local climate.

(One of the highlights of Inverewe Gardens, near Gairloch, is a 'New Zealand

Christmas tree', which responds to the inverted northern seasons by

producing its red flowers in June.) It was the profusion of plants that

would be exotic back in Scotland - and the rarity of classic Scottish

plants, though some local houses were surrounded by familiar specimens -

that gave Stewart Island the feel of a gigantic botanic garden.As for the Jurassic connection, that was the last time New Zealand's plants

and animals were in contact with those of the northern hemisphere. It was

around that era the world's continents rifted apart into two great clusters:

the continents of the northern hemisphere, and those of the south. The

northern continents have remained intermittently connected ever since (as

recently as a few thousand years ago, a cave man living at times of lowered

sea levels could have walked from Scotland to Nova Scotia without getting

wet) and developed the standard set of trees and animals which are now found

throughout the cooler parts of North America, Europe and Asia. This flora

and fauna is so homogenous that a biologist abducted by aliens and dumped,

ET-style, in the middle of a northern forest, would find it hard to tell

whether he had been left in Canada, Scandinavia or Siberia.Down under, meanwhile, a completely different set of trees and animals was

evolving. These once formed great, cool forests to rival those of the north

- a prehistoric wildwood resounding to the cries of exotic creatures - but

as the southern continents broke apart, their ancient forests dwindled.

Africa and South America drifted back into the tropics and reconnected with

their northern neighbours, losing much of their uniqueness. Australia

settled in dry sub-tropical latitudes, where much of its forest became

scrubland and desert (a process that wasn't helped by the arrival of humans

with a penchant for lighting fires), although present-day Tasmania provides

a glimpse of what the continent might once have been like. Antarctica clung

to its forests for a long time, even as the continent drifted further and

further over the South Pole, but a cold snap around 35 million years ago

finally turned the continent into an ice cube. Which left New Zealand.Had the Romans ever sailed to New Zealand, they would have found a

prehistoric lost world. A landscape tossed and riven by volcanoes (one of

which exploded so loudly that the Romans reportedly noticed the blast), and

blanketed with primeval forests ruled by strange and exotic creatures. The

dinosaurs had gone, of course, but in the absence of mammals their feathered

descendants had thrived, and some of the monstrous birds that had evolved in

New Zealand were dinosaurs in all but name. The ancient forests were home to

flightless moas, the largest of which stood three metres and laid eggs the

size of water jugs (something not lost on the first human arrivals, who

badly needed water jugs). These were hunted by the fearsome-looking Haast's

eagle, one of the largest, hookiest and clawiest birds ever to take to the

skies.The fate that befell New Zealand between the time of the Romans and the

present day was a kind of reverse Jurassic Park. Instead of being trapped on

an island with a bunch of monsters from a hundred million years in the past,

the native plants and animals of New Zealand suffered an even worse fate:

they were trapped on an island with a bunch of monsters from a hundred

million years in the evolutionary future.The first and worst of these monsters was a species named Homo sapiens. The

earliest inhabitants of New Zealand were Polynesians, the ancestors of

today's Maoris, who canoed down from tropical islands to the north-east.

Back in their homelands they had grown yams and bananas, and tended chickens

and pigs. However, the cold island on which they now found themselves was a

hard place to grow tropical vegetables, and none of their chickens or pigs

had survived the long canoe journey from Polynesia. The new arrivals got

over the loss of their crops and livestock fairly quickly after discovering

that their new home was home to meaty chickens taller than a person, which

behaved as if they had never encountered guys with spears before. The moa's

extinction became inevitable as soon as the first hungry Polynesian laid

eyes on its metre-long drumsticks.There was also plenty of food to be had from the sea, where plankton

thriving on long hours of summer sunshine and nutrients stirred up by winter

storms supported a rich marine food chain. At the top of this food chain

were millions of large sea birds, and a sort of large, flippered pig that

snoozed on rocks by the waterside just waiting to be clubbed to death. To

Pacific islanders who were used to plucking measly crabs from the reef or

trying to wrestle ocean fish into tossing canoes, it was an astonishing

bounty.When the giant chickens were gone and the flippered pigs became scarce, the

Polynesians turned to smaller prey. They hooked for fish (the first white

sailors to trade with the Maoris did a good business in metal fishhooks),

and harvested the chicks of the unappetising-sounding muttonbird from its

reeking hillside burrows. In desperate times they turned to the one edible

animal that had survived the canoe journey from Polynesia: a tenacious

critter known to the Maoris as the kiore, and to the rest of the world as

Rattus exulans. However, the Polynesian rat is an even scrawnier creature

than its European cousin and cannot have provided more than a light snack.

The rats in turn snacked on native birds and their eggs, snacking some of

them to the brink of extinction.Just when it seemed as if things couldn't get any worse for New Zealand's

native creatures, a new wave of human settlers arrived, bringing with them a

fresh bunch of monsters. One of these monsters was the Pussy Cat, whose

impact on native birds needs no explanation. This monster remains the bane

of New Zealand's park rangers today, and many a cat owner living near a

nature reserve has received a distressing phone call informing them that

Tibbles wandered too close to a nesting site and had an unfortunate accident

involving a fast-moving piece of lead.Another introduced monster was the Rabbit, a creature described by one of my

ecology lecturers as one of the most voracious predators that has ever

lived. The Rabbit's prey were plants, and the local animals must have

regarded this as a harmless sort of monster, until the day they woke up and

found their favourite shrubs and grasses nibbled bare. Realising that no

native predator could control the Rabbit, humans responded by introducing

two further monsters, the Stoat and the Ferret. Nobody at the time seems to

have questioned why a stoat would bother chasing rabbits when there were so

many slower and dumber native creatures around. Even the forests themselves succumbed to the influence of the monsters.

Trees were cleared, first by the Maoris and later at a faster rate by

European settlers, to make way for open land.In modern New Zealand, land use seems to follow a very simple principle.

Give a New Zealander a patch of good flat land, and he will put sheep on it.

Give him a patch of poor flat land, and he will water and tend it, then put

sheep on it. Give him a patch of land that cannot be made suitable for

sheep, and he will put pine trees on it instead. Give him a patch of land

too craggy or remote to be worth putting either sheep or pine trees on, and

he will declare it a national park.Stewart Island was one of the lucky areas. Being offshore, it was spared

from the worst of the monsters, and sheep farmers never took to the place.

Today, 85% of the island is a national park.Even the Maoris never settled in large numbers on Stewart Island - the local

environment didn't suit them - although they did visit the island to hunt

moas and gather muttonbirds, whose oily carcasses were stored in special

bags made from local kelp. It is remarkable that a group of people whose

ancestors were tropical islanders managed to eke out a living at all in a

chilly spot so far from the equator.The Maoris named the island Rakiura, the Land of the Shining Skies. Some

believe this is a reference to the southern auroras that occasionally ripple

the night sky. But there may also have been another reason for the name.

After spending a year in the tropics, with their scarcely-varying routine of

twelve hour days and twelve hour nights, I can appreciate how strange and

wonderful those early Polynesians must have found the long days of the

Stewart Island summer. Walking around at a time that should rightly have

been long after dusk, enjoying the soft daylight of a sub-Antarctic evening,

I remembered another thing I had missed about Scotland.

"Are you coming dancing with us?" asked one of the Peace Corps girls when I stepped off the plane at Port Vila airport. I look down at my shoes. I was wearing my enormous Doc Martens, the ones that I had worn in high school and retrieved from my parents' attic many years later when I went in search of some robust, expendable old shoes to take to Pentecost. They were hard and chunky, and the soles were the size and weight of hardback books. They hadn't been polished since high school, unless you count the time I painted them with wood preserver (it was all I had) in order to stop them growing mould after a damp week in the jungle. The only other shoes I had with me were the sandals held together with parcel tape. (The ones held together with pins had come irreparably unpinned, and the ones held together with superglue had long since come unglued. After a failed attempt to tie them together with fishing line - which simply led to them breaking in different places - I had given up, taken them to the cliff where people at Ranwadi dispose of their rubbish, and hurled them into the bush.) "I think I'll give dancing a miss," I said. It wasn't just the shoes - I didn't want to go dancing. I knew how that kind of evening would turn out. I would sit in the corner wincing at the loudness of the music and trying unsuccessfully to shout a conversation at someone while guys with better shoes (all right, better guys) took to the dance floor and left with girls in their arms. Besides, like most people on the islands I had been up since dawn, which is about 5 a.m. in the South Pacific at this time of year. I like getting up at dawn. We caught a minibus into town. The two Peace Corps girls chatted about friends I didn't know, and things I didn't want to know about friends that I did know, and what a great evening they were going to have. "You should come dancing with us," one of them repeated, turning to me. "There'll be a guy there who's come out to the islands to help people set up computers. You'd enjoy talking to him." She had known me a few minutes and already had me figured out as a nerd. The minibus dropped me at the hotel where I was staying, and took the Peace Corps away to begin their night out. Over the next day or two, I saw or experienced the following for the first time in six and a half months… hot running water, asphalt, cars, minibuses, road signs, hotels, chlorinated swimming pools, sidewalks, soap dispensers, buildings with more than two storeys, tiling, street maps, coin-operated appliances, supermarkets, urinals, vouchers, pastry, fire extinguishers, pizzas, agencies, cash machines, Asian people, street lights, paper towels, police cars, trolleys, fences high enough to keep out human beings, leaflets, espresso machines, car parks, receptionists, billboards, men in uniform, serviettes, roundabouts, ceiling fans, wireless Internet access, Ladies and Gents toilets, mobile phones, local radio, petrol stations, storm drains, air conditioning, the day's newspaper, and anonymity. A few of these things were welcome, but the majority I hadn't missed. After a day of trailing around town, I was already missing Pentecost. There was only one solution. That evening, I flagged down a bus heading in the direction of the airport. "Green Light, Fresh Water?" I said. The driver nodded. Port Vila's buses don't follow fixed routes; it's up to the passengers to discuss with the driver where they'd like the bus to go. When people from other islands began to move to Port Vila, each group of islanders bought their own plot of land, on which they did their best to recreate the village communities they had left behind. Some built small cement houses, into which they crammed huge extended families, while others lived in crudely-assembled shacks of plywood and old pieces of corrugated metal, with dogs and chickens wandering the bare ground in between. Visitors label these places slums, but what they really are is jungle villages without the jungle. People may be crowded into tiny shacks, and animals may be grubbing around outside, but the same is true back in their old villages. Whilst these little urban settlements may lack the beauty of a rural village, they also lack the isolation. Good jobs, good shops and a good hospital are only a short bus ride away, and for those who can afford it there is piped water and electricity. And since most islanders cannot dream of affording the suburban homes flogged by suntanned Australian estate agents who boast about how much prices have gone up lately as an indication that the property is a good investment - nor would they want to live in such a friendless environment - these squalid patches of communal land provide the only opportunity most ni-Vanuatu have to live affordably in their own capital. The district of Fresh Water, which occupies a damp hillside on the northern edge of town, overlooking the road to the airport, is the Central Pentecost islanders' home away from home. After doing a circuit of Port Vila's outskirts, picking people up and dropping them off, the bus driver pulled up by a road junction flanked by hedges and heaped with piles of rubbish. A revolving green light that looked as if it belonged on a toy ambulance was flashing behind one of the hedges. I got out of the bus, skirting the rubbish, and passed though a gate into a large yard. Running along one side of the yard was a long cement building containing a series of kiosks. Snacks and cigarettes were being sold at one window, bottles of wine and beer were on display behind another, and at a third a man was cooking up hot meals. At the far end of the complex, opposite to a row of benches with wooden shelters above them, a man behind another window was dispensing shells of kava. The word "sini" - kava, in the language of Central Pentecost - was buzzing back and forth. "Is this Charlot Salwai's nakamal?" I asked a guy standing beside the kava bar. "Yes," he said. This was the Green Light Nakamal that my friends on Pentecost had told me about - the place run by Charlot Salwai, Central Pentecost's MP. The man at the bar looked surprised. "How do you know Charlot Salwai?" "I work on Pentecost," I explained, in the native language. The man smiled, and offered me a shell of kava. We sat down on one of the benches and chatted. Other people came over and introduced themselves. All were from villages within a few miles of Ranwadi. I hadn't met them before, but in many cases I knew their uncles, their brothers and their cousins. Some had even heard about me from relatives on the island. More rounds of drinks were offered. I asked what the guy at the food counter was cooking. "Taro," they said simply. These were Pentecost Islanders, all right. I chuckled and remembered one reason why I was glad to be going home for Christmas. "You should get yourself some for dinner," my companions urged. "Hmm..." I said. Port Vila is known throughout the South Pacific for its fine dining, and whilst my budget didn't stretch to any of the lagoon-side restaurants featured in the tourist brochures, there was no way I was coming into town after two hundred days of island food and eating lumps of starchy taro dug out of a Pentecost swamp. Near the hotel were food stalls run by women from Paama and the Shepherd Islands - islands whose climate is not suited to taro - who fry up a pick 'n' mix selection of meat, eggs, yam, fruit, and laplap with coconut cream, which they serve on strips of giant leaf. (Nibbling with your fingers at lumps of meat and vegetables on a wooden bench in the dark by the food stall isn't quite the same as dining in a French restaurant, but it's quick and tasty and nutritious, and never costs more than a couple of dollars. And it's a huge improvement on taro.) "Maybe I'll get some taro later," I said.


Msg sent via ecosse - http://www.ecosse.net/

"It's like a modern form of grade-taking," Mr Neil observed, after the

Vanuatu government announced that this year there would be national exams

for the country's Year 8 students, in addition to the usual exams sat by

Years 10, 12 and 13.In the days before Western education arrived on Pentecost Island, a young

man who aspired to high status would have to advance through a series of

grades. At each grade, a couple of years spent raising pigs and learning

traditional customs would culminate in a ceremony at which the pigs were

killed and shared with the community, who in turn would accord the young man

greater respect. To reach the highest levels of society a man needed to have

both the right personal qualities, and wealthy friends and relatives who

could help him get together the pigs required for each grade. Many people

contented themselves with minor chiefly titles, whilst others never bothered

to set foot on the social ladder at all, preferring simple lives of low

status to the demands of grade-taking and chiefdom.Old-fashioned grade-taking continues to take place on Pentecost, and the

system still underlies the island's society. However, for the majority of

its youngsters today, the route to achieving their ambitions is not through

pigs and rituals, but through schooling. This, too, involves a series of

demanding stages through which individuals must pass in order to reach the

higher levels of society. Each stage involves the expenditure of wealth,

tests of character, and the learning of skills, culminating in a graduation

ceremony and an end-of-year party at which a pig or two is usually roasted.

And like in the grade-taking system, only a minority of those who enter the

Vanuatu education system will make it to the end.Until recently the first challenge came in Year 6, at the end of primary

school (although in the darker corners of Vanuatu there were kids who didn't

even make it that far), at which children sat the first of the sets of exams

that would decide their educational fate. The better-performing students had

the opportunity to proceed to secondary school, provided that their parents

could afford the school fees.Dropping out of school at the age of eleven is a sad fate in any country,

and the Vanuatu government is now trying to reform the system by keeping

leaving it until Year 8 before subjecting children to the trial of

examinations. The government's official hope is that the by the time they

leave Year 8, even those who are not academically gifted will at least have

acquired enough basic literacy and numeracy to enable them to enter

vocational training courses. In practise, many will go back to their

villages. It's true that Year 8 leavers will emerge from school better able

to make a contribution to their communities than Year 6 leavers, but this is

mainly because a thirteen-year-old can swing a gardening knife with more

force than an eleven-year-old. For those who progress beyond Year 8, the next trial comes at the end of

Year 10, in which students sit exams set by the Ministry of Education. These

mark the point at which the national curriculum comes to an end, and until

recently this was the end of the road for most students. A mere decade ago,

no school on Vanuatu's rural islands offered education beyond Year 10.The principal of Ranwadi, saddened by the sight of so many bright students

having their opportunities cut off at this level, was one of the first to

try and change this, by expanding his school to take students on to Years 11

and 12. Other schools followed suit. At the end of Year 12, the students sit

exams set by the South Pacific Board for Educational Assessment (SPBEA), one

of the many quirky institutions through which the micro-countries of Oceania

pool their limited resources. The region served by SPBEA spans the

International Date Line, which makes for confusing exam timetables.A handful of schools have since added yet another grade to the hierarchy

with the introduction of Year 13. For this level schools have two options:

providing a further year of teaching prescribed by SPBEA, or allowing

students to follow self-taught distance-learning courses organised by the

University of the South Pacific (another quirky regional institution).

Lacking the staff and resources to offer a fully-taught programme to its

Year 13s, Ranwadi has adopted the latter option.This expansion in education has, of course, been made possible by money.

Contrary to what optimistic islanders will tell you, Vanuatu's people are

not getting richer: the country's official GDP per head is actually going

down as the population grows faster than the economy. Yet the slow shift

from a traditional economy to a modern one is making it easier for parents

to get together the cash needed to pay a child's school fees, and the

increasing number of lucrative jobs available in town has created a class of

rich uncles who can help out with their younger relatives' education.

Overseas aid organisations have enabled schools to expand physically by

paying for new classrooms and textbooks. In addition, many foreign visitors

who fell in love with Vanuatu and were upset by the sight of their new

lover's children in rags have begun sponsoring local students.The expansion in education will bring huge benefits, both to students

themselves and to their country, which is now training enthusiastic young

citizens to perform many of the roles for which Vanuatu previously relied on

foreign expertise. However, it also has a downside. Whereas youngsters once

struggled hard in the knowledge that only the very best would be given the

chance to continue their studies at higher levels, many have now begun

committing the Western sin of taking their education for granted. Just as

the grade-taking system was undermined a century ago when islanders who had

earned money working for the white man began trying to buy their way into

the hierarchy without learning the rituals of chiefdom, the education system

is damaged today by students who know that even if their grades are mediocre

they will still find a school willing to take them and relatives willing to

continue paying their fees. Most, it is true, will succeed in leaving school

with some sort of qualification, but they will then struggle to find work

among employers who are well aware that a high school certificate is not the

mark of talent and dedication that it once was. Meanwhile, the genuinely

bright are forced to continue their studies to ever-higher levels in order

to distinguish themselves from their middle-of-the-road classmates,

sometimes postponing the start of rewarding careers in order to do so. Of

course, you can never have too much education. But you can definitely have

too much schooling.As my friends will tell you, I am in no position to criticise those who take

their schooling for granted. I drifted ambivalently through high school,

went to university more-or-less for the hell of it to study a subject I had

no serious intention of pursuing as a career, and generally took full

advantage of an overgenerous Scottish education system built on the weird

belief that keeping people in school for ever-longer periods will make them

smarter. Nevertheless, as a student I always ensured that I made enough of

an effort to get good grades (and was pragmatic enough to try and drop

subjects in which attaining a high grade looked to be more trouble than it

was worth!). As a teacher, it is immensely frustrating to see students who

would be smart enough to get good grades if they worked hard wasting the

opportunity to do so. It is even more frustrating to see students who are

not smart enough to get good grades wasting their time on a subject in which

they are hopeless instead of admitting defeat and turning their attention to

something they are good at.The problem is particularly acute with Ranwadi's hapless mob of Year 13s. At

this age, Vanuatu's smartest young people have left for urban colleges and

the bright lights of town; rural schools like Ranwadi pick up those who got

left behind. Standards among Ranwadi's Year 13s are so low that scraping a

pass in all four of your subjects is deemed a tremendous achievement. In

some semesters not a single student reaches even this minimal target. It was great reluctance that I agreed to take on Year 13 classes this year.

Not because they are hard work - students who produce little work to be

marked, seldom bother asking for help in their studies and have few

scheduled classes (to which they do not always turn up) make for easy

teaching. The students are friendly enough, and some of the subject matter

in their courses is interesting. The problem is that it's all such a

depressing waste of time. It is miserable to stand in a tutorial trying to

explain what ought to be an interesting topic to students who have no

apparent interest in the subjects they chose to study - and are only present

at all because fifteen minutes after time the lesson was scheduled to start

I got fed up with waiting and went down to the dormitories to wake them up -

when there are a hundred more useful things I could be doing with the time.

Like sitting at my desk doodling interesting patterns onto the back of my

notebook."We find that students who do these courses in Year 13 are better prepared

when they come to university," explained the professorial old man with

enormous hair who came from the University of the South Pacific to visit the

school. "They have practise at taking responsibility for their own learning.

With other students we have an enormous headache trying to adapt them to

university life.""But under this system, we get the headache," I pointed out."Personally I would be honoured if I had the opportunity to get a headache

in the interests of helping a young person improve his education," the

big-haired man responded airily.Among the younger year groups at Ranwadi, fortunately, there are plenty of

students who have not yet lost the enthusiasm to learn. Often, I would

return to my house after a dreary attempt at getting the Year 13s to take an

interest in their work, muttering to myself that education in Vanuatu was a

waste of time and that the students would be better off scraping coconuts

back in their villages, only to have my thoughts brightened by visits from

Year 10s, Year 11s and Year 12s anxious for extra help with their

schoolwork. These students were dedicated and enthusiastic, and after

repeated visits it was clear that at least some of them were learning what

they had been taught. One Year 10 boy would come to me nearly every week

with a piece of Maths homework that his teacher had ticked and crossed, keen

to find out where had gone wrong and how he could avoid making each mistake

in future. Sometimes we would spend an hour together, working through each

concept that had caused the student difficulty until he was satisfied that

he now understood it. His visits were immensely time-consuming, but I was

glad that he came.As the end of the year approached, the Year 10s and Year 12s began to

prepare in earnest for their final exams.For students at Ranwadi, exam preparation involves two equally important

things: studying and praying.As a good scientist, I completely support the idea that praying will help

the students pass their exams. The human psyche is a powerful thing, and the

belief that God is on their side will give students the confidence to

succeed, regardless of whether or not He is there to listen. However, I was

anxious to avoid the excesses of last year, when some students spent the

weekend before their exams staying up until midnight singing prayers and

going without food to show their devotion. I needn't bother telling you how

well the tired, famished students subsequently performed in their exams."The human brain is like an engine," I told my colleagues in a staff

meeting. "It needs rest, and it needs fuel. Its fuel is glucose sugar, which

it gets from the food we eat, and this is how much it needs in one day."I held up the flask of white powder which I'd measured out in the science

lab. It was an impressive amount."I know some students will want to fast, or to stay up late praying. But

please, please, encourage the students to do those things well before their

exams begin. Let's give their brains a chance to recover so they're working

fully on the day of the exams."To my surprise, the advice was followed. While my colleagues organised spiritual sing-songs and a commissioning

ceremony (to formally place the students' fate in God's hands), I

concentrated on helping my Year 12 Physics and Chemistry students with the

other important aspect of exam preparation: revision. In Physics, I prepared

sheets of exercises that systematically covered each of the topics in the

course, to help them identify which areas they needed to focus on. The

students eagerly worked through the exercises, and periodically brought them

to me for checking. Some had done well.To keep the Physics students interested during their revision, I set the

class a challenge during each lesson, which could be solved using the

techniques they had learned in the course. In each lesson, there was a

packet of chocolate biscuits as a prize for the student who came up with the

most accurate answer. For the first challenge, I gave them a metre stick and

a 100-gram weight, and asked them to tell me the mass of the stick. In the

next lesson, I gave them a ball and a stopwatch and asked them to tell me

the height of the room. In another session, I gave out metre sticks and

small mirrors, pointed at the mountaintop behind the school, told the class

how far away it was, and asked them to measure its height without leaving

the vicinity of the classroom.To students who are fed on school meals worthy of a Dickensian orphanage

(except that Dickensian orphans were lucky enough not to live on an island

where the staple crop was swamp taro), a packet of chocolate biscuits is a

big deal. They took up the challenges with great enthusiasm, and a

surprising amount of skill. I knew that they would be a lot less confident

when faced with written questions, but even if they did badly in their

exams, it was nice to know that I had helped to educate young people who

could apply science to the problems of the real world.My Chemistry students were having a harder time. Early on in their revision,

it became apparent that they had not only forgotten most of what they were

supposed to have learned in the past two years, but that even the items

listed in the syllabus as "prerequisite knowledge" - things they should have

known before they even began the course - bewildered them. I handed out

revision exercises, containing what I hoped were easy questions. The

students stared at them, baffled.Some of these were bright students, who had answered the same questions

correctly when the topics had been covered earlier in the year. How could

they have forgotten so much? Whereas Physics involves things that are easy

to visualise - bouncing balls, light reflecting from mirrors, electricity

flowing around circuits - Chemistry is full of abstract concepts and

unfamiliar things. Although the students had learned a lot of individual

facts and techniques, it seemed that they had never really put it all

together in their heads.Working through past exam papers with the Chemistry students, I did my best

to help them picture what was going on by getting out the chemicals and

giving demonstrations. Where the necessary chemicals weren't available, or

were highly dangerous, I found substitutes. If an exam question asked how to

speed up the rate of a reaction, I performed the reaction in the test tube

and invited the students to suggest ways of speeding it up, then tried them

to see if they worked. If a question asked about what colour of flame would

be produced by a particular burning substance, I allowed them to get a piece

of metal and a Bunsen burner and see for themselves what would happen. If a

question asked about the structure of molecules, I got out the coloured

balls and sticks."Chemistry is interesting," said one girl, after we had fizzed, burned,

boiled and modelled our way through one lengthy exam paper. She said it as

if this had never occurred to her before.Formal classes came to an end, and the students were given a week to do

their own revision before the exams began. I photocopied a pile of past exam

papers, and prepared for a stream of students coming to my door in need of

last-minute help. None came. To students at Ranwadi, any period in which there is no teacher

forcing them to sit in a classroom and work is, by definition, a holiday.

Their studies were finished for the year, their prayers had been said, and -

as far as they were concerned - all they had to do now was wait around for a

few days, fill in a few exam papers and go home. While they waited, they

amused themselves by wandering to and from the beach, kicking footballs

around, hanging out with the villagers, and twisting each other's hair into

elaborate styles. (You can always tell how much time the students have on

their hands by counting the number of girls with plaited hair.) Any attempt

to suggest that the students ought to be spending their time revising was

dismissed as if it was a ridiculous thing to expect of them.At the end of the week, the two Year 12 classes held their end-of-year

parties. These followed the standard format of any Vanuatu celebration: a

room was decorated with palm fronds and other vegetation, and people spent

the day preparing dishes of food which they heaped onto a big table. Guests

turned up an hour late, each carrying a plastic plate, cup and spoon, found

that the party hadn't started yet, then wandered away for another hour. When

proceedings eventually began there was a salusalu greeting in which garlands

of flowers were hung around the necks of honoured guests (of which I was

one, along with the Year 12s' other teachers), followed by lengthy and

half-whispered speeches consisting mainly of thank-yous, during which

everyone sat and stared hungrily at the food. The speeches concluded with a

quick prayer, then an awkward moment as the most honoured of the guests

proved too polite to be the first to get up and fill his plate with food.

Eventually the guests lined up and took their plate-fulls, together with

cups of diluted fruit cordial, then sat with the plates on their laps

shovelling food into their mouths with their spoons and feeling that they

really ought to be showing their gratitude for the feast by making

conversation by somebody.Anxious to put their years of malnourishment at the hands of the school

cooks behind them, the Year 12s had laid on an impressive feast. Spread on

the table were roast piglets, which the students had saved up their money to

buy, and a sizeable proportion of the school's chicken population. There

were fried fish, and delicious chunks of an enormous squid that the boys had

caught at night on the reef. ("So that's what they wanted the torch

batteries for," said Mr Neil.) There were pineapples, and watermelons that a

student's father had brought from his garden. There was a bright purple

vegetable whose colour couldn't possibly have been natural. There were

steaming pots of rice, and bowls of stew. At the end of table were cakes.

These presented guests with a dilemma: do you take a piece with the main

course and risk it getting soaked with gravy and pig juice, or do you wait

until later, by which time the cake might be all gone? (Or do you scoff the

cake as a starter, before starting on the main course?) One solution is to

balance the cake on the edge of your plate, teetering between the gravy and

a long fall.The following Saturday, the Year 8 and Year 10 students held their own

end-of-term party, at lunchtime on the beach below the school. Mr Albion the

Agriculture teacher and a group of boys with machetes had spent much of the

week preparing for the event, and had transformed the sandy strip of trees

between the road and the seashore into an impressive party venue. The area

beneath the trees had been cleared of twigs and leaves and coconut-palm

detritus, and lines of benches had been nailed together out of pieces of

wood cut from nearby saplings. Tables had been brought down to the beach,

and a generator rumbling in the bushes powered a large sound system. Fringes

of green coconut frond had been twisted around the tree trunks, a pink

frangipani flowers fastened to each spine, and coloured balloons had been

strung from the branches of all the trees. Every so often one would explode

in the midday heat, startling nearby partygoers. A few of the balloons had

fallen into the ocean, where they bobbed like toys in a swimming pool. Beach

mats made from woven palm leaves had been left on the sand for those who

wanted to lie down. Younger children were swimming, while older ones who

wanted to cool off out on the water but didn't want to get salty were taking

turns in an outrigger canoe.At the party, I was one of the guests invited to give a speech."You-fella ee lucky," I began. (Usually I insist on speaking proper English

in front of the students - it's the only way they'll learn - but as this was

a party I figured I'd give them a break.) British children go to outdoor

parties at this time of year, too, I explained, but those are nothing like

this. I tried to paint a picture of children standing around a giant bonfire

in a black field on the edge of town on a shivering November night, trying

through impossibly thick gloves to eat a wind-chilled hot dog without

getting ketchup on their scarves or losing the sausage onto the muddy

ground. (And enjoying the whole thing immensely, because unlike ni-Vanuatu

kids, British children do not normally get the chance to play around fires.)

It was all a very long way from a summer day on a South Pacific beach.A few of the students, however, had their own ideas about how best to

celebrate the end of the year. Yeast and sugar began disappearing from the

school kitchens.When the teachers discovered a bucket of homebrew hidden at the base of a

banana plant, they jokingly accused me of teaching the students too much in

Chemistry lessons. The teachers left the bucket in place, intending to come

back and replace its contents with seawater. However, when they returned,

the bucket had already gone.The week before their final exams, three Year 10 boys were seen going into a

room that was later found to smell of alcohol. Nobody saw the boys drunk,

and the evidence connecting them to the alcohol was circumstantial. That

didn't matter. All three were expelled.Getting drunk to celebrate the end of high school is a ritual for students

in Vanuatu, just as it is for students back home. Unfortunately, whilst the

teenagers' attitudes are much the same as those of their Western

counterparts, their parents' and teachers' attitudes are not. Students at

Ranwadi are particularly unfortunate in that the school is run by the

Churches of Christ, which disapproves of alcohol and kava even in the hands

of responsible adults. Originally, the church's discouragement of drinking

was probably a practical measure to ensure that the congregation was not

hung-over on Sunday morning, but groups of people have a tendency to become

fixated on the things they forbid. (Just look at the amount of newspaper

space devoted to paedophiles, or to Catholic priests caught with their

trousers down.) In the minds of many in the Church today, drinking is an

inexcusable sin, right up there with murder and adultery and coveting your

neighbour's livestock. At a recent staff meeting at Ranwadi, a colleague

circulated a piece of paper explaining how we could all strive for

"excellence" in our work. Under the subheading "spiritual excellence", he

had listed just one item: "alcohol and kava".Under the discipline policy approved by the Ranwadi College council,

drinking is a capital offence. Steal or fight or run away from school and

you might be let off with a suspension or a week's hard labour, but touch

alcohol or kava and you will be out. In past years the school Principal, a

forgiving and tolerant person who believes in the goodness of people, was

deliberately lax about enforcing this rule; he preferred to give students a

second chance. However, after a particularly rampant homebrew-making season

at the end of last year, the Churches of Christ conference (which has

authority over the school) told the Principal sternly that from now on he

must stick to the rules. Any student caught drinking was to be expelled

immediately; no forgiveness allowed.Of course, no head teacher ever utters the word "expel". Students are

"withdrawn" by their parents, then if possible "transferred" to inferior

schools. It is true that most of those forced out of Ranwadi are removed

with the grudging agreement of their parents, and will find places at other

schools. But regardless of the school's choice of verb, they leave under the

stigma of expulsion.The locals gossiping in Pidgin English are in no doubt as to what has

happened: "All-ee chuck'em-out."Later that week, I went down the kava bar to find Mr Albion sitting next to

a morose-looking Year 13 boy."It's all right, he's been thrown out of school already," said Albion,

seeing my surprise at the sight of a student in the kava bar.There was no need to ask what the boy had done."I was thrown out of school when I was your age," Albion said to the

student, trying to console him."What for?" I asked."Smoking," Albion responded, as if it was a silly question. He walked over

to the candle illuminating the bar and lit his tube of rolled-up paper and

tobacco."I found another school and did well for myself," he went on. "These things

are all part of life's challenges."The student looked unconvinced."I was nearly thrown out of school too, on the day before my exams," I

added."Just one of life's little challenges," Albion repeated, drawing a deep

breath of pungent smoke.The student sat in silence and buried his head in his hands.The following night, two more Year 13 boys joined their teachers down at the

kava bar."Why are the students such fools?" one of the villagers asked me afterwards.

"They know drinking is against the rules. They know they will get expelled

if they are caught. Why do they keep on doing it?""They do it precisely because it's against the rules," I said. "They want to

rebel." For a certain variety of teenager, the fact that they were risking

their educational lives by drinking only increased the temptation.- - -Exam week arrived, with much moving of tables and chairs. Teachers hung

around outside the chapel, which had been converted into an examination

room, waiting to ask their students how they had got on."Fine," they all responded. Some smiled more weakly than others.The teachers flicked anxiously through spare copies of the papers, hoping

that there were no questions they hadn't covered in class. Occasionally

there was muttering that a question was unfair or didn't make sense. (The

Vanuatu Ministry of Education steadfastly refuses to let native English

speakers check its exam papers.) My Physics and Chemistry students were among the last to sit their exams.

When the Physics exam was over, I took a copy of the paper and opened it at

the first page. It was a question on data networking."This is a question from a Computer Studies exam!" I protested."Yes, they misprinted that page," the invigilator told me. "Don't worry, we

handed out correction sheets."On the last day of the Year 12s' exams, other students gathered in a mob

outside the chapel to give their friends a wash. Some carried buckets of

flour and water and mashed-up leaves. Others had talcum powder. One boy held

up a rotten papaya. Most of the school - including the teachers - had

gathered to watch. Students huddled nervously inside the chapel, besieged

like medieval fugitives taking refuge in the house of God. One by one, they

plucked up the courage to step out of the door, and were greeted with

showers of beige liquid and mushy fruit.That evening, some Year 12 boys and their friends headed down to the

village."My brother is roasting a pig for them in the kitchen," Smith the barkeeper

told me at the kava bar. "We've prepared a big poubelle of kava. Why don't

you go and join them?""You shouldn't be giving kava to the students," I said."It's OK now that their exams have finished," Smith assured me. "They're not

really students any more - they're just hanging around waiting for a ship

home."I headed over to the family's kitchen. Like nearly all Vanuatu kitchens,

this was a separate hut - traditional cooking is too dirty and smoky to be

done in the main house - with a dirt floor and a roof of natanggura palm

leaves. Smoke from the cooking fire seeped through the roof, curing the

leaves. (Villagers often take strips of thatch from old kitchens to use on

other buildings, knowing that they will last an exceptionally long time

before rotting.)I was intercepted at the door of the kitchen by one of my Chemistry

students, staggering out of a clump of banana plants nearby. He took me by

the hand and spoke to me in a high-pitched voice. The boy had clearly been

drinking more than just kava."I just want to say thank you for all that you have done for us," he said.

"Thank you for teaching us Chemistry. I'm sorry if we didn't work as hard as

we could have done in your lessons, and I want to thank you for forgiving

us." I returned the compliments - this particular boy had been a good student -

and went into the kitchen, which glowed orange in the light of the fire.

Several students were sitting along a bench at one side of the hut, next to

a stereo playing music. A couple of young girls were sitting by the fire

carving up lumps of pig and taro. Smith's mother sat on a stump at the back

of the kitchen, keeping a gentle eye on the children. One of the boys shuffled along the bench to create a space, and motioned

eagerly for me to sit down beside him. He, too, shook my hand."I want to express my thanks to you for all that you have done for us as a

teacher," he said. I didn't think I'd even taught this particular student,

but I accepted the compliment. This is nice, I thought: we should let the

students drink more often. Not only were they charming when drunk, but they

were speaking good English with a confidence I had never heard before."Hey, give Mr Andrew some kaekae," called out Smith's brother, who was

chatting to someone outside."I only came to chat," I said. A generous bundle of pig and taro was

nevertheless pressed into my hands.The school Discipline Master appeared in the kitchen doorway. He glared at

the students, but didn't stop their party."Make'm sure you-fella ee sleep 'long place here tonight," he said. Don't

come back into the school until you're sober. "You hear'em?" He turned

around and went off to the kava bar.I stayed with the students for a while. Smith's mother and the girls cleared

away the remains of the food and left the boys to their party. People began

dancing. Students passed around bottles and cigarettes. I declined the

cigarettes and whatever nasty-looking mixture was in the bottles, but

accepted a couple of shells of kava from the poubelle. Being offered kava by

my students felt like being offered marijuana by a policeman, but what they

were doing here was a gesture of friendship, not of rebellion. More boys

shook my hand and thanked me for whatever I had done for them. I had never

had the chance to socialise with most of them outside the awkward confines

of a teacher-student relationship, and was struck by what good-natured

people they were. "Do you think what we're doing is wrong?" one boy asked."If you did it during school time, yes, it would be wrong," I said. "It

would spoil your studies." My eyes glanced sideways with hypocrisy. "But

you've worked hard and your exams are over now. I think you're entitled to

have a good time just this once."By teenage standards it did, indeed, seem to be a very harmless piece of

fun. Nobody was being loud or aggressive, no girls were there to get in

trouble with the boys, nobody was consuming anything illegal, and apart from

headaches the next morning I doubted anyone would be any the worse for their

night of celebration. I thanked Smith's brother and the students for their

hospitality, and made my way cheerfully back to school. I felt proud to have

helped educate such a decent group of young people.Under the searing blue and yellow light of a South Pacific morning, things

looked different. Contrary to what Smith and his brother had believed, the

students' party was not OK with the school. A list was made of all the Year

12s who had been drinking. They were ordered to pay a fine of 5000 vatu

($50) - otherwise the school would withhold their leaving certificates - and

told that they would not be admitted back to Ranwadi for Year 13.The list of those thus expelled read like a roll call of the best and

brightest of the Year 12 boys. It included the top students from my Physics

and Chemistry classes, prefects and class captains, sportsmen who had won

medals for their school, a student who had been short-listed for the annual

'citizen of the year' award, and the Head Boy. There were students who had

worked with enthusiasm in my lessons, and come to my house in the afternoons

for extra help with their work. Students who had seen me struggling to hack

down bushes with a machete in my garden and come over to give me a hand, and

students who had done gruelling weekly chores around the school with smiles

on their faces. Students who always leaned out of the window to shout a

cheerful hello when a teacher walked past their dormitories. Students who

had asked me for references so they could apply to training colleges.

Students who had not only achieved good results in their studies, but had

been valuable members of the community, and an asset to their school. All

their shining records thrown out of the window because of one harmless night

of fun.I was furious. It was reasonable, I conceded, for the school to disapprove

of the students' behaviour. While waiting for the ship home they were still

under Ranwadi's care, and the sight of students staggering around still

drunk the next morning had been an embarrassment to the school. But if the

students' party was forbidden, why hadn't the Discipline Master put a stop

to it? And who had given Smith's brother the impression that it was OK to

prepare kava for the students? If there was blame to be handed around, the

boys were not the only ones who deserved it. Most of all, though, I was

angry that the students had been told that they were not welcome back next

year.What will happen to the school, I thought, if it callously throws out good

students who make occasional mistakes whilst allowing those who wilfully

waste their time and make no effort in their studies to keep on coming back

for more? Some of those boys had achieved a lot during their time at

Ranwadi, and done a lot to help the school. Did all that count for nothing?I asked the Principal if there was any chance that the students could be

given a second chance. He shook his head and muttered about "policy". He

looked unhappy about the situation too, but his hands were tied.The Churches of Christ had fallen into the same trap as anti-drugs

campaigners all over the world: the belief that punishing people ever-more

harshly for using a substance will dissuade them from doing so. A belief so

obvious and seemingly irrefutable that people maintain it even when it

proves completely and catastrophically wrong.Tightening the screws on students who broke the rules had merely increased

the temptation to do so, and had harmed the school in the process by

depriving it of good students. The hysterical reaction had also undermined a

perfectly sensible piece of advice - that excessive drinking is bad for you.

Tell students who drink only once and do so after their last exam has

finished that their drinking will ruin their education, and your advice is

as likely to be believed as the cry that there is a wolf on the

mountainside.I would like to think that the Churches of Christ conference will look at

this year's events and draw the conclusion that their policies for

discouraging drinking do not work, and need to be re-thought. But I suspect

that elders will cling instead to their faith: that the world is a place of

rights and wrongs, that teenagers respond rationally to authority, and that

good kids are the ones who Just Say No.

One Sunday after church, Sara put on her best dress and stood in front of a

crowd of villagers to make her apology.For months, her neighbours had politely ignored the fact that Paulo, a

handsome young man from a nearby village, was spending nearly every evening

at Sara's house. In Pentecost culture, it would be scandalous for a man to

call on a lone woman in her home, but people realised that foreigners did

things differently. Paulo, they knew, was one of the few people among the

French-educated villagers around Melsisi who spoke good English. He had

spent time abroad, and could chat at length about world affairs. He was also

helpful around the house. Perhaps he was only visiting Sara to chat to her

in her native language, or to watch her DVDs, or to give a hand with tasks

such as cutting the branches of the grapefruit tree that clattered on windy

nights against the tin roof of Sara's house - tasks a girl shouldn't be

expected to do on her own.When Paulo took Sara up the mountain to visit his village - the Vanuatu

equivalent of bringing the new girlfriend home to meet the parents -

whispers began. However, the majority of Sara's neighbours continued to turn

a blind eye.However, when Paulo overslept and was seen leaving Sara's house quite a

while after dawn, rumours began to spread in earnest. Then Paulo's father, a prominent local chief, announced proudly that his son

was going to get married to the white girl.Sara had not been consulted about this."He's just my boyfriend!" she protested to the villagers. "I'm not planning

to marry him."That was when the scandal really broke loose."Lots of people round here are having secret relationships," one of Sara's

colleagues explained to her. "I've had affairs. Plenty of the other teachers

have gone to bed with women who are not their wives. If they do it in secret

and nobody can prove anything, then it will be OK. But you cannot ever admit

in public that you are having a relationship with somebody you are not

married to. When you do that, then there is trouble." The behaviour of Pentecost's inhabitants is governed by two authorities. The

first is that of God and the Bible, whose position on relationships between

unmarried men and women is fairly clear. The second is the temwat."Temwat" (or "tamwata" in neighbouring languages) is most commonly

translated as "peace". The concept encompasses not just the kind of peace in

which people aren't fighting one another, but also spiritual harmony. Temwat

also refers to the set of unwritten laws and principles by which peace is

maintained. Traditionally these included both obvious rules such as not

stealing, and local taboos such as not visiting particular places at

particular times. Enforcing these rules is the role of traditional chiefs.

If everybody follows the rules and upholds the temwat, the islanders believe

that their community will be protected from harm. However, if the temwat is

broken, the person responsible must perform a ceremony to make amends - not

just with the chiefs and with the person who was wronged, to whom pigs and

red mats must be paid in compensation, but also with the spirits. Only when

such a ceremony has been completed will the temwat be restored and harmony

return.Screwing the visiting white girl was definitely not good for the temwat.In traditional society, if a boy and girl 'made trouble' together, it would

be up to their parents to make amends."My parents don't care that I have a boyfriend," Sara told the villagers

truthfully. "They're happy for me. And Paulo's father doesn't have a problem

with me seeing his son either. It's nobody else's business."Other local elders, however, were demanding that fines be paid.The host 'father' who had been assigned to look after Sara when she first

arrived in Melsisi, embarrassed by the scandal his daughter had caused, gave

a red mat to the church."You shouldn't have done that," Sara told him.Sara's host father, in turn, demanded a pig from Paulo's family in

compensation for the defiling of his daughter."I'm not giving that man anything," said Paulo, whose clan have a

long-standing feud with Sara's host family. "He's not your father."Down in the nakamals and kava bars, the whole business was discussed at

length. At the Sunset Kava Bar, I listened to the villagers chattering in

their language and followed little of it until the flamboyant barkeeper

chose to make his contribution to the conversation loudly, in a language I

understood well:"Ee never been got one man before, along place here, who ee take'm one white

missus!""We don't blame Sara," the villagers hastily assured me. "Paulo is the one

who has done wrong."When I tried to defend Paulo, who had never seemed to me to be anything than

an honourable gentleman (although I did wonder how his father had come to be

under the false impression that Paulo and Sara had marriage plans), the

villagers shifted their blame elsewhere."The College Principal is the one who's really to blame," they agreed. "He

should have kept an eye on Sara and put a stop to this relationship before

it got this far."Although the villagers would have agreed unhesitatingly that a local boy and

girl who caused such a scandal should be fined and forced to repent, there

was concern about the idea of imposing the same punishment on a Peace Corps

volunteer. The College de Melsisi plans to expand next year and badly needs

more expatriates to come and teach English there. Some locals worried that

treating Sara harshly would dissuade overseas organisations from sending

future volunteers."You are right to be worried," I told them, in an attempt to persuade them

to drop the matter. "Sara and I appreciate that things are done differently

in your culture, but people back home are going to hear about this and find

the idea of treating someone this way just because she has a boyfriend weird

and wrong." Punishing Sara would also be wrong in the eyes of the Peace

Corps organisation, which seeks to protect its volunteers from arbitrary

fines.When legitimate discussion in the nakamals was exhausted, wilder gossip

began to take its place. One popular rumour held that Sara and Paulo were

planning to run away to America together. A medically implausible but far

more entertaining story was that Paulo had been rushed to hospital for an

emergency circumcision after developing a life-threatening swelling during a

passionate night with Sara."Gammon, gammon, gammon," I said, repeating the Pidgin word for lies."No, me-fella ee think say ee true," said my drinking companions. Even my students at Ranwadi joined in the gossip."Are you going to fight Sara's new man?" they asked me."Why would I do that? I like the guy.""But he took your girl." Most of the islanders, for whom boys and girls can never be 'just friends',

have always classified Sara as either my sister or my girlfriend. Either

way, I ought to have been furious with Paulo. Even Paulo himself seemed to

find it slightly odd when I ran into him a couple of weeks later in the

village of Hotwata, a few miles down the coast, and greeted him like a

friend."I came to Hotwata to attend a wedding," he explained. "Then my cousins here

asked me to help them dig the ground for a new kava garden. After that, I

was on my way back, when someone pointed out that there was another ceremony

happening and asked that I stay. Then, just as I was getting ready to leave,

something else came up."".and I bet it's nice for you to get out of Melsisi for while," I added.Paulo nodded, grinning with embarrassment.Up at Melsisi, Sara remained defiant. Even by the standards of Vanuatu

society, it seemed ridiculous that everyone was making such a fuss simply

because a boy and a girl were dating. It seemed that whenever Sara worked

hard to help the community - spending hours filling in application forms to

secure funding for new equipment, for example, in addition to her

time-consuming teaching job - her efforts were taken for granted. Yet now

that she had done something wrong, every eye in the village was suddenly on

her. There was a great deal of hypocrisy in the whole business: few people in

Melsisi were sufficiently without sin to throw the first stone. During her

work on Pentecost, Sara had patiently endured the company of many repulsive

men whom she knew to have beaten, raped or cheated on their wives. Although

privately she moaned about the state of Vanuatu society, and had got

involved in community education programmes aimed at improving the role of

local women, she had never openly passed judgment on her neighbours'

behaviour.I suspected that some of the villagers' gossip was also motivated by

jealousy. Paulo had merely succeeded in doing to Sara what at least a dozen

other guys had told me on various occasions they would have liked to do to

her. And then there were the double standards. I had spent nights at Sara's

house on many occasions without drawing any comment from the locals, as had

several male Peace Corps volunteers. Villagers who encounter me in Melsisi

in the evenings - even the ones who don't treat me as her brother - actually

encourage me to sleep at her house rather than braving the long and

ghost-infested road back to Ranwadi. But in my case it was different, of

course. Not because I was sleeping in the spare bed, which I don't think all

the villagers believed, but because I was a white man. The sad truth seemed

to be that in Vanuatu, like elsewhere in the world, even people who are not

ordinarily racist get uneasy at the sight of a black man hand-in-hand with a

white woman."I'm not getting fined for this," Sara asserted.Unfortunately, Sara and Paulo had fallen foul not only of the Catholic

mission and traditional customs, but also a complicated web of village

politics. The scandal brought to the surface long-standing rivalries between

Paulo's family and the various factions involved in running the mission, and

old feuds were reopened. The temwat had been broken.Sara reluctantly accepted that something needed to be done to put things

right. The penalty demanded from Sara was six red mats - traditional money

equivalent to a hundred dollars or so. By local standards, it was a big

fine. Paulo and his family were to give two prized pigs with whorled tusks -

one to Sara's host father, and the other to the local priest in compensation

for fornicating on his mission. The 'sorry ceremony' was arranged for the

following Sunday. After the ceremony was completed, all would be forgiven,

provided that Sara and Paulo did not see each other again. Sara, of course, had no red mats. Modern money would have been accepted as a

substitute, but Sara decided instead to do things the Pentecost way.When an islander lacked the pigs or mats needed to pay a fine, he would

traditionally have gone cap-in-hand to his family, his friends, and anybody

else who was well-disposed towards him. Historically, an offender who could

not raise the necessary pigs and mats to pay a fine would have been strung

up to a tree and burned alive. The fact that your neighbours' willingness to

do you a favour might one day be the only thing standing between you and a

fiery death presumably gave people a strong incentive to treat one another

nicely (as well as providing a mechanism for ridding the community of

arseholes). Nowadays, nobody gets executed for failing to pay a fine, but

they might be banished from the village. This was the fate that Sara was now

threatened with if she didn't pay.It was time for Sara to get her reward from all the people for whom she'd

done favours - filling in grant application forms, typing up letters,

lending magazines and DVDs, umpiring and scorekeeping at sports matches,

taking photos, helping order goods from abroad, and teaching English to the

children. She put on her best dress and set off around the village to ask

for red mats."I'd contribute a mat if I had one," I told her.By the time of the ceremony, Sara had persuaded her friends and neighbours

to donate the mats she needed. When she arrived in the grassy clearing

outside the tin meeting house where the villagers had gathered, proceedings

were already underway. The mats and the pigs were presented, local chiefs

inspected the items and gave speeches in a language Sara didn't understand,

and the ceremony was completed.Sara believed this would be the end of the matter. Yet the conversations she

had with the villagers afterwards bothered her. A worrying number of people

seemed to be under the impression that by presenting a pig to Sara's host

father, Paulo's father had blocked Sara.In the unromantic language of Vanuatu relationships, 'blocking' means that a

father claims a girl as a future bride for his son, blocking her from other

suitors. In other words, Sara and Paulo were now formally engaged to be

married.When I next saw Sara, she was about as happy as you would expect a girl to

be after learning that her hand in marriage has been given away, without her

knowledge, in exchange for a pig."It wasn't even a particularly good pig," she told me.Had Sara been blocked or not? Different people had told her different

things. Since she hadn't attended or understood all of the ceremony, she had

no way of finding out for herself.In frustration, she wrote an open letter to her school principal and the

local chiefs, explaining (amongst other things) that there were important

differences between Pentecost marriage customs and American ones. After

further confusion and a couple of meetings, it was eventually explained to

her that she had not, in fact, been blocked. Not that it really mattered, of

course: Sara had no intention of being forced into a marriage against her

will. Unlike the unfortunate local girls who sometimes find themselves in

similar situations, she had a means of escape."When my placement ends in a couple of months, I'm out of this place," she

said. Her tone was not sentimental. "If Paulo chooses to come and visit me

in America, he's welcome. But what happens in future is our business, nobody

else's."A few weeks later, I found myself drinking kava with one of the chiefs who

had presided over the ceremony."What really happened at Sara's sorry ceremony?" I asked him."Paulo's father tried to have her blocked," he replied. "But we refused to

allow it, on the grounds that Sara's real father wasn't around to give his

agreement."Everything was OK, then. Provided that Sara's father in America didn't

develop a sudden hankering for fresh pork, she was safe from being sold away

into marriage.Many people, including me, were hoping for a Hollywood ending to the whole

drama. I had a vision of Sara and Paulo jumping on the backs of the two

prized pigs and galloping away like cowboys, trailing long red mats behind

them. A crowd of angry villagers would shake their fists and give chase,

while an irate priest bellowed hellfire at the departing fugitives and

Paulo's old father watched the couple disappear around the headland with a

proud smile on his face. They would arrive at the airfield with the

villagers in hot pursuit, to find the plane already taxiing away along the

grass. Leaving the pigs behind to fend off the mob, they would jump on a

nearby truck, pursue the Twin Otter along the field at a hundred miles per

hour, jump on board during the split second that the plane began to leave

the ground, and fly away to live happily ever after in the land of the free.But Hollywood romances do not happen on Pentecost. Two months later, Sara's

placement at Melsisi came to an end, and she packed her things to leave.She will probably never see Paulo again.

-----------

"Pictures came and broke your heart,

Put the blame on VCR."- from the first song ever played on MTV

-----------"Have you ever been at home during a power cut?" asks one of the

British-authored science textbooks used by the junior students at Ranwadi.

"Life's not much fun without electricity."The majority of the students have not had the experience of being at home

during a power cut. Their homes don't have power. Even at Ranwadi, where the

buildings do have electricity wired into them, nobody uses the word "power

cut". Instead, they talk about "power on"; absence of electricity is the

normal state of affairs. Power on is from sunset until half-past nine in the

evenings, and sometimes for a couple of hours during the daytime if the

teachers need to use the photocopier or the computers and the school can

afford the fuel for the generator.With poorly-installed circuitry, corrosive humidity, and generators that

struggle to cope with the load (twenty or so houses and an entire high

school campus are run on a wattage that probably wouldn't light even half of

Al Gore's house), electrical problems are common. In some rooms, fluorescent

lights spend the evening flickering pathetically, their power supply

insufficient to kick them into life. Students from certain classes wander

the school during evening study times because every single one of lights in

their classroom is out. The boys' dormitories were without lighting for the

whole of last term, due to an electrical fault caused by one boy's attempt

to hack into the power cables running through the wall beside his bed and

wire in an extra plug socket. ("Him ee danger little-bit," commented the

school mechanic, with typical understatement.) Sometimes computers and DVD

players flick off and on as the voltage coming out of the sockets drops

critically and teachers rush around the school trying to find and stop

whoever is overloading the power supply - the handyman using power tools

perhaps, or too many people opening and closing the freezer in the school

store. Qualified electricians do very occasionally visit Pentecost, but at other

times the job of operating the electricity generators and repairing faults

is done by a combination of the handyman, the mechanic, the boarding master

and the Technology teacher. The handyman is experienced at painting and

patching up holes, the mechanic is skilled at disassembling engines, the

boarding master is good at odd jobs, and the Technology teacher has a

certificate in woodwork. Their knowledge of electricity is limited, but they

all know how to use a screwdriver, and through their combined efforts they

manage to keep the majority of the lights on. In addition to its main generator, the school has two or three small

generators, one of which, on average, is in working order at any given time.

These are not enough to power the entire school, but will run parts of it at

times when somebody needs electricity for a specific purpose, such as

photocopying an important exam, and wants to economise on fuel. They are

also a useful backup when the big generator breaks down.Twice in the two years that I've been at Ranwadi, all the generators have

broken down simultaneously, and the school has gone completely without

power, on one occasion for nearly a month. However, apart from the

frustrating lack of contact from the outside world (the only times I've ever

phoned home from Ranwadi rather than e-mailing were during power outages

when I used the mere two or three minutes of international call time

provided by local phone cards to reassure my parents that I was still

alive), I quite enjoyed the absence of electricity. Evenings were quiet and

candlelit, and instead of doing battle with temperamental computers and

being called out of lessons by colleagues who need help unjamming the

photocopier, I wrote my notes by hand and chalked them on the blackboard for

my students to copy.Nearly everything that people on Pentecost need to do can be done without

electricity. Light can be provided by battery-powered torches, or by candles

and lanterns. (It was only after seeing the little orange flames shining

from teachers' houses late in the evenings that I realised why people talk

of "burning the midnight oil".) Heating is rarely necessary - the coldest

temperature I have ever known on Pentecost was 18C (65F) - and villagers who

do feel the cold on winter nights can wrap themselves up in a blanket or

huddle around the fire. Air-conditioning would be nice, but in its absence

those who don't want to sweat in the heat can cool themselves by reptilian

means like sitting in cool breezes or jumping in the river. The stove or the

fire can do the job of an electric kettle, a toaster or a microwave. With

most food either gathered straight from the gardens, or bought in packets

and tins with Methuselan shelf-lives, fridges and freezers are seldom

needed. Many of these can be powered with gas or kerosene anyway. Instead of

vacuum cleaners there are bush brooms; instead of hair driers there are

towels and the sun and the wind. Musical entertainment can be provided by

stereos running off chunky batteries, or by the old-fashioned means singing

and playing the guitar. In spite of all this, an number of villagers are now using the increasing

amounts of money earned from selling kava to buy themselves small

electricity generators. However, this is not because electrical gadgets are

more convenient than their old-fashioned predecessors: most owners of new

generators continue to cook on wood fires and light their houses with

lanterns. The real reason for the slow but noticeable spread of electricity

across Pentecost in recent years is the invention of the DVD player.Television and videos are one of the few things for which the islanders have

never found a non-electrical substitute. You can run stoves and fridges and

lights on wood and paraffin and gas, but to my knowledge nobody has ever

invented an oil-fired TV.Until recently, few people bemoaned the inability to plug in televisions,

because there would have been little to watch. Pentecost is too far from

town to receive terrestrial TV broadcasts, and satellite TV is beyond the

means of most of the islanders. A handful of people used to have

videocassette players and tapes, but these were expensive, and didn't last

long in a jungle environment. When I was required to show a video to my Year

13 students last year using the school's ancient VCR, I had to stand beside

the screen like a weatherperson explaining to the students what the blurry

pictures and inaudible fuzz were supposed to be showing them. This year, I

refused to do the exercise unless the exam board sent me a copy of the video

on DVD.Even in a country where import duties double the price of most electronic

goods (don't let any of the Australians who have offshore bank accounts in

Port Vila tell you that Vanuatu is tax-free), DVD players can now be bought

at Chinese stores in town for no more than the price of a couple of sacks of

good home-grown kava. Even very cheap DVD players are more robust and

portable than the old VCRs, and their discs can be copied and distributed

with far greater ease than videocassettes. People in Vanuatu have a

sophisticated notion of copyright when it comes to traditional artefacts -

those wishing to copy a particular carving were traditionally required to

pay pigs as royalties to the chief who owned the design - but the concept is

non-existent when it comes to music and videos. A few well-equipped

storekeepers buy packs of "empty DVDs" (the word "blank" has yet to enter

the local vocabulary) onto which they burn whatever movies their customers

feel like watching, which not only saves money but allows them to respond

effectively to local demand, a rare thing on an island where warehouses and

suppliers are a long ship journey away.Approaching a village in the evenings, it is now common to be greeted by the

sound of a rumbling generator and the sight of a group of people sitting

fixated in a pool of blue light. At the increasing number of food and kava

nights that local people put on to raise money for community projects or

their children's school fees, video showings are a regular attraction. At

Ranwadi, meanwhile, a couple of the teachers have become such video junkies

that they will run small private generators even when the school's main

generator is off, just so that they can watch a DVD.The most popular DVDs are "stories belong fight". The ordinarily gentle

ni-Vanuatu have an astonishing love of on-screen violence of all kinds,

whether it comes from black-suited gangsters raiding casinos, Oriental

martial arts masters, a giant computer-generated gorilla, rebellious Roman

legions thrown into the gladiator pit, Bruce Willis and a noble troop of

well-armed American soldiers splattering their way out of an awkward

military situation, or blue-painted Scotsmen baring their cheeks at the

English enemy before running them through with swords and spears. People who

have seen the movie before may actually fast-forward through the parts where

people are talking rather than killing, and stop the movie not when it

reaches the end but when it reaches the point where the last bad guy has

been killed.The local taste for violent movies is partly, though not entirely, because

they are straightforward to understand. As far as I know nobody has ever

produced a movie in any of Vanuatu's languages, and even well-educated

islanders struggle to follow the English of Mafia bosses or William Wallace.

Subtitles help, but on cheap discs imported from Asia these are often

unavailable, or at least not available in languages that the locals

understand. I recently came across a group of Francophone villagers

squinting at a movie subtitled in Portuguese and muttering that French was

hard to understand. In addition, the dialogue of the average movie is so

loaded with idioms and foreign concepts that it would thoroughly confuse

even an islander who understood every individual word, just as I get

confused when villagers are describing customs to which I don't know the

cultural background.Whilst the villagers will happily sit down with their children to watch

movies containing the most hideous violence, sex is another matter. Although

privately there is a keen demand among local men for "rubbish movies" (by

which they don't mean the kind in which Kirsten Dunst and Orlando Bloom go

on a journey of romantic self-discovery), at video nights the slightest hint

of on-screen intimacy has the villagers scrambling for the fast-forward

button. Not only are sex scenes embarrassing and distasteful to the locals,

they're also not very entertaining, since they seldom culminate in anybody

getting killed.At video nights, it's customary to play a few music videos before the main

movie begins. People watch these avidly, and not just because they enjoy the

songs. Try spending a few minutes watching MTV sometime and think about how

many of the seemingly-mundane images that you see - a person riding a subway

train, for example, or sending a text message on a mobile phone - would be

fascinating to a person who grew up in a village in the jungle. Such

glimpses of Western life also occur in movies, of course, but the villagers

are well aware that Hollywood mixes fact with fiction, and that moviegoers

can't always tell which is which. People ask me whether Scotsmen really wear

skirts, and in the same tone of voice ask whether there really are islands

still inhabited by dinosaurs. Music videos are more interesting, one

islander told me, because they show "things that are true". What must Britain and America look like through the lens of a pop video, I

wonder? Dangerous, colourful, decadent, fast-moving, extravagant and

hyperemotional, perhaps. Full of Englishmen who talk like Americans,

Irishmen who talk like the English, and black people who wear hats and

sunglasses indoors and make weird gestures with their hands (which are

imitated obnoxiously by Vanuatu teenagers when they get the chance to pose

in front of a camera) in order to look cool. A culture obsessed with youth,

beauty, money and sex? A lifestyle that is frightening and strange, or one

that is simply alluring?How would it feel for the islanders to travel to these glamorous places and

find out that, just like in their own countries, the majority of the

inhabitants lead dulls lives, wear ordinary-looking clothes, and concern

themselves with the mundane routines of earning a living, bringing up

children, dealing with their friends and families, and growing old? Perhaps

something like the way it would feel for a Westerner who'd grown up on Band

Aid images of the Third World as a place whose inhabitants struggle humbly

to maintain their traditions and work themselves out of poverty to go there

and find that, just like his own country, it is full of loud and

fashion-obsessed young people who squander their education and desire money

mainly so that they can buy a bigger TV screen. Last year, AusAID sent Ranwadi a dozen new computers to help with students'

education. Developing computer skills - which are still rare among

ni-Vanuatu - could be a real asset to students when they leave school and

seek good jobs in town. Interactive learning exercises could also help the

students get over the immense difficulty they have in trying to

conceptualise ideas when presented to them in a strange language. At first,

working with the students on the new computers was fun: they were eager to

learn, took obvious pleasure in their ability to use the new technology, and

mastered it extremely quickly. However, after it was discovered that the

computers could play music and videos, nobody wanted to use them for

anything else. Students who were allowed into the computer lab to study

would start playing music and games as soon as they sensed that a teacher

was no longer looking over their shoulders. Getting the students interested

in using computers for anything other than entertainment became so difficult

that I and the other expat teachers largely gave up bothering. It's no fun

trying to teach a student to type a letter or fill in a spreadsheet when the

student is paying little attention and enduring the lesson only in the

grudging hope that the teacher will give them permission to click on "My

Videos" when their work is finished. The lovely new Computer Room now sits

largely unused, except when the teachers want to play space invaders or

watch a video CD.Fortunately, Pentecost is not an island of telly addicts yet. The cost of

fuelling their electricity generators means that, for the majority of the

villagers, watching videos remains an occasional treat rather than a daily

pastime. However, the spread of newer and cheaper solar panels and of

communal electricity supplies such as the school's will eventually overcome

this limitation. Now that there are potential viewers in so many villages it

is also only a matter of time before the Vanuatu government (or one of its

many foreign friends) builds a TV transmitter on Pentecost, providing

continuous entertainment even to those who have run out of DVDs to watch.

The French would probably pay for the transmitter, if they were given a

guarantee that plenty of its output would be en français. Or the government

could try asking for help from China, which has already begun generously

supplying viewers in Port Vila and Luganville with CCTV9, its poisonous

English-language news channel. Perhaps Benny Hinn could chip in a few

dollars, in return for the chance to beam his televised sermons to 15,000

virgin viewers who have fallen too hopelessly in love with their new medium

to realise that it might be capable of lying to them. And don't bemoan the

naivety of islanders who would allow themselves to be manipulated in the

interests of cheap entertainment: we all do the same every time we watch an

advert on TV.The most often-repeated lie on television, anywhere in the world, is that is

output is not to be missed."I couldn't go and live in a place like Vanuatu," several of my friends back

home tell me. "I would miss television too much."The majority would not.Television is like caffeine. For those who are used to it, a day or a week's

deprivation is painfully frustrating. However, go without for a month, or

for a year, and you'll forget that you ever wanted it. There is no longing

to watch the next episode, no fretting that you have lost track of the

fortunes of your favourite soap-opera characters. You lost track ages ago,

the episodes passed you by, and after a while you found that it didn't

matter any more. The series you were following came to an end, and although

you know that new series have replaced them, you no longer care what they

are. Hearing friends discuss the latest programme is like hearing them

discuss someone you don't know - you might prick up your ears if something

particularly salacious comes up, but by and large you just ignore them.Admittedly, I am not an ideal guinea pig in which to study the effect of

televisual deprivation in humans: I was never a particular fan of

television. I dislike unnecessary background noise, and back home I would

get irritated by people who automatically switched on the TV when they sat

down in a room even if there was nothing they really wanted to watch. (I, in

turn, would irritate those people by switching off TVs that nobody appeared

to be watching.) As a student in Edinburgh I went for a year without a

television set, and enjoyed it, except for the regular annoyance of people

trying to start conversations about what they'd seen on TV and an offensive

stream of letters from the TV Licensing Authority insinuating that I was

lying when I told them I didn't own a television. Yet ordinarily TV-loving

expats who I meet in Vanuatu say the same thing: it's strange how little we

miss television. Television may not me missable, but its absence is something that I

certainly will miss as new media spreads across Pentecost. Already, the

experience of tranquil tropical evenings spoiled by rumbling generators and

videos turned up to full volume to drown them out has led me on many

occasions to wish that the DVD player had never been invented. To the

locals, however, silence is primitive: loud entertainment is the future. And

cheap DVD players would be the best thing since sliced bread if the latter

had yet made it to Pentecost. (Sliced bread, incidentally, is another

invention that I will lament when it eventually does arrive on the island

and replaces fresh, crisp, wood-smoked loaves. One enterprising local baker

has already asked me if I know where he can order a slicing machine.)To describe TV entertainment as a drug would be clichéd and wrong. (Drugs

stimulate the mind in novel ways.) Yet there is undoubtedly something

narcotic about the glowing blue screens and the way they draw you in.On my last evening in Pangi, as I lay in my bed in the normally-peaceful

thatched guesthouse recovering from the effects of inadvertently drinking

paraffin, the sounds of the crickets and the waves on the beach were

interrupted by the splutter and drone of a generator being started. In the

hut opposite, villagers had gathered to watch music videos on DVD. Unable to

relax amidst the lawnmower-like noise coming through the window, I did the

only thing I could. I went across to the neighbouring hut, sat down amongst

the villagers, fixed my eyes on the screen, and began to watch.

One of my favourite books is William Golding's "Lord of the Flies", one of

the few stories written about schoolboys or about tropical islands that

accurately captures the spirit of either. The setting for the book is a

coral island with jagged castles of rock jutting out into the ocean at

either end. It is from one of these precipices that a boy is sent flying to

his death towards the end of the story, as the marooned youngsters' efforts

at co-operation unravel and the group descends into savagery.Like the island in Lord of the Flies, Pentecost has rocky precipices at

either end. In the north, the long nose of the island terminates in Vatubwe

Rock, a symbolic landmark from which a popular local string band takes its

name. At the opposite end, the tail of the island forks like the rear of a

centipede, with a deep bay separating two peninsulas tipped with

wave-smashed rock. On one peninsula, a bright white church marks the

location of Point Cross, the southernmost village on the island. The other

peninsula tapers down to a blunt stone that cuts defiantly into the ocean

like the prow of a ship, sundering the oncoming waves into a spectacular

foam. This Rock is known in stories and sand drawings as Vatangele.According to North Pentecost legend, the spirits of the dead must jump off

both Vatubwe Rock and Vatangele Rock on their road to the afterlife. For

many of these ghosts, the trip down to Vatangele will be their first. It's a

long way down to the southern tip of the island, along pathways that only

the ni-Vanuatu would describe as 'roads', and unless they have relatives in

that neck of the woods there are few reasons why the living would bother

going there.I did have a reason to travel down to the southern end of Pentecost: as part

of my project to catalogue the island's languages, I wanted to learn more of

South Pentecost language, especially the exotic dialect of it that is spoken

only in a few villages in the far south. In addition, I was curious to "look

the place", as the locals describe sightseeing. An excuse for a long weekend

away came up at the start of October, thanks to Constitution Day (one of the

meaningless occasions that Vanuatu's founding fathers added to the calendar

after realising that when weekends and legitimate holidays were taken away

it still left an exhausting 255 working days in the year), and I set off

southwards.A couple of hours of walking and hitching on the back of trucks took me to

Pangi and Salap, the tiny conurbation of a few dozen thatched and tin-roofed

houses that constitutes Pentecost's southern hub. On cruise ship days, Pangi

mills with people like an English village on the day of the annual fair, but

with the tourist season long past and the majority of the villagers away at

a Constitution Day football tournament in a neighbouring village, the place

was quiet and empty. One or two stragglers moafed about lazily in the sun,

while under a tree a couple of truck drivers sat and talked about money.Though the last cruise ship of the year left Pangi four months ago,

squabbles were continuing over the hundreds of thousands of vatu in landing

fees paid to the villagers by P&O Cruises in return for the right to

periodically dump a thousand scantily-clad Australians there. Well-spent

money could do a lot of good in Pangi, whose school, church and clinic are

badly in need of funds, but the local bigman who collected the money had

shown little inclination, apparently, to share it with the community. Not

only that, but he had run up huge bills with local storekeepers and truck

drivers, who mistakenly assumed that he would use the cruise ship money to

pay them off."Man here ee account all-about," one of the truck drivers complained. That

man has debts everywhere."Me tell'em 'long him, say suppose him ee no pay'em me, by-and-by me take'm

chainsaw 'long nanggol," said the other driver. I threatened to take my

chainsaw to the land-diving tower unless I got paid.The first driver nodded. "Suppose hem ee no family belong me, me make'm one

something finish," he said. I'd have done something to him already if he

wasn't a relative of mine.The truck drivers weren't the only ones who were angry. Back in May, I

remembered a local chief telling me matter-of-factly that he had burned his

nephew's house down in a dispute over who was entitled to money from the

landing fees. The whole thing is a classic tale of the corrupting influence

of money, and could be made into a brilliant film or a play if Port Vila's

Wan Smol Bag theatre company hadn't already done so. "Pacific Star", their

insightful story about a community destroyed by cruse ship tourism, is good

entertainment, but it's deeply sad to see life imitating this particular

piece of art. "We need to do more to ensure that tourism really benefits people on

Pentecost," the Principal at Ranwadi recently mused. He looked only a little

taken aback when I made a suggestion about how to achieve this, which

involved explosives and the Pangi jetty.(In fairness to the people who visit on cruise ships, I should point out

that not all have been a curse to the local community. Being the only person

on Pentecost with a web site, I get occasional e-mails from people with an

interest in the island, and among these have been a handful of former cruise

ship passengers who were deeply touched by their visit. One asked how to go

about sending supplies to the local primary school, and another is now

sponsoring a student at Ranwadi. I am only sorry that these decent people

had to experience Pentecost in the way they did.)Beyond Pangi, the southward route deteriorates from a good sandy road to a

good muddy road, then to a bad muddy road, then to a bad muddy overgrown

road, then to a network of ruts winding their way through the long grass in

a sun-dappled coconut grove. These ruts converge on the village of Ranputor,

from which the road continues to Banmatmat, home of the local Bible College.The ghosts on their way to jump off Vatangele Rock don't have to worry about

the possibility of falling off a cliff on the way down - they're dead

already - but for mortals the journey from Ranputor to Banmatmat is an

unnerving one. A couple of feet wide in the better places, the 'road' runs

along a narrow ledge with the ocean slurping against rocks a worryingly long

way below. In places, it been paved with concrete, giving it the appearance

of a walkway in a Scottish hillside garden. Scotland, however, does not

suffer from earthquakes, nor from tropical rainstorms that erode soil away

by the sack-full. Both had taken their toll on the Banmatmat road. A few

sections had iron railings (not that I'd have dared to lean my weight on

them), and in a couple of places the aerial roots of overhanging banyan

trees walled in the path, like the concrete shelters protecting Swiss roads

from avalanches. Elsewhere there was nothing but the brown and blue of

overhanging tree branches and tropical air. After a mile or so of this, I

began to wonder if the Bible scholars at Banmatmat had designed the road in

the secret hope that an accidental fall would provide them with a swift and

easy route to Heaven. In slippery conditions I would have turned back, but

the weather was dry, and I trusted in my ability to keep my feet firmly on

the road. After all, I reasoned, people walk along narrow city sidewalks

without ever worrying that they will fall off, even though they would risk

being run over by the traffic if they did. The fact that the drop here was

twenty metres rather than twenty centimetres didn't make it any more likely

that I would fall.From Banmatmat another treacherous little path led to Wanur, where the route

turned inland, cutting across the island's south-western peninsula. I was

accompanied here by a couple of women who were returning to their village on

the hilltop after going down to Wanur to use the peninsula's only telephone.

In contrast to the previous stretch of footpath, the route up from Wanur was

a sizeable road, almost wide enough for a truck, which had been levelled out

of the hillside by a considerable earth-moving operation."Road here ee good way," I commented."Me-fella ee dig'em," the women said proudly. People from our village dug

it."With'em spade, no more?"The women nodded.I whistled, impressed. Excavating a full-sized road out of the hillside

using nothing but gardening tools must have taken a lot of work."All-ee say, me-fella ee must got good road, belong carry'em sand-beach

with'em cement belong build'em church-house," one the women explained. They

told us we needed a good road to haul sand and cement so we could build a

church.In rural Vanuatu, like in medieval England, houses of wood and thatch are

fine for people, but God deserves a well-built house."You-fella ee build'em church-house yet?""No, I-think road here ee no-good yet," the woman said. The road's still not

good enough.She seemed to be resigned to the prospect of a lot more digging.After a couple of miles of jungle, villages and gardens, the road surmounted

the hilltop and descended towards Bay Martelli, the deep stretch of water

that separates Pentecost's two southern tips. In the centre of the bay, the

road descended to the shore, where huge ocean waves funnelled by the

headlands swept up a broad expanse of charcoal-coloured beach. The bay faced

neighbouring Ambrym Island, whose looming volcanoes were responsible for the

blackness. If the volcanoes rumbled, the waves that came sloshing into the

bay would be terrifying. Yet it was an undersea earthquake that eventually

demonstrated to the inhabitants of Bay Martelli village, now rebuilt on

higher ground, what a dangerous place they had chosen to make their home in.

A solidly-built church and the cement ruins of a couple of houses can still

be seen on the flat patch of coastal scrubland where the village once stood.

Nothing remains of the other houses: those were made of sticks, and the

ferocious Big Bad Wolf that swept blackly out of the ocean on that terrible

night in 1999 blew them into driftwood. Vanuatu has many natural hazards -

volcanoes, earthquakes, cyclones, sharks and tropical diseases amongst them

- but tsunamis are the one that really features in my nightmares.At the far end of the beach, I crossed a silty black river and found a small

track. This led up a grassy hillside onto the south-eastern peninsula of the

island, where nanggalat trees grew thickly amongst the coconuts. Seeing the

nanggalat growing in the open is like seeing a tiger in a zoo cage: you know

that it can't harm you unless you're stupid enough to go across and touch

it, yet you can't help a feeling of horror at what would happen to you if

you did. With stinging trees, as with tigers, it's the ones you don't see -

the ones that hide in the undergrowth - that you need to worry about.At the top of the hill, nanggalat trees gave way to small houses. This was

Point Cross, my final destination.Point Cross had a lovely and slightly unworldly feel to it. The village's

little thatched houses were built on a cluster of rounded grassy hills,

connected with winding paths and scattered with trees. I occasionally have

dreams set in a landscape like this, and have done ever since I was a young

child, but I don't know where I originally got the image from. It was like

Telly Tubby Land without the giant rabbits, or Hobbiton without the hobbit

holes. A bright and invigorating wind swept across the peninsula, blowing

life onto the hillsides. From one side of the village there were views

across the bay to Vatangele Rock, and on the other side the blue mist of the

open ocean. As usual I'd tried and failed to get a message through that I was coming,

but the villagers couldn't have been more hospitable. At the nakamal I was

formally welcomed to the village over shells of kava, and several people

offered help with my language research. People asked about where I had come

from; several had sons and daughters at Ranwadi. Rebecca the local Peace

Corps girl offered me a slice of banana pie that she had baked over a fire

in the bottom of a gigantic cooking pot. She seemed to have baked enough for

the entire village."That's a dicey road you've got, coming from Pangi," I commented."Is it?" she asked innocently. "I've never tried it. My host father owns a

boat."We chatted for a while. Rebecca had a simple life in Point Cross - teaching

in the local school, chatting and working and singing with her neighbours

and her adopted family, and baking banana pies - but she seemed

extraordinarily contended there."I'm not planning to go away at Christmas," she told me. "I'll stay here

with my host family."The following day the villagers invited me to a movie night, for which the

old wooden nakamal had been converted into a makeshift cinema. A TV screen

was perched on a wooden platform, the dirt floor was covered with mats and

coconut leaves for the children to sit on, and for the adults benches were

borrowed from the church. To power the TV a small electricity generator was

rigged up outside, its noise quite well muffled by the low thatched roof. I

sat and watched the movies, occasionally leaning over to answer questions

from the other movie-goers and help them to translate awkward pieces of

English. Men grinding kava at the back provided refreshments, and I passed

around the pack of chocolate biscuits that I'd bought from the village

store. Did they really build a wall right across the island?, the men asked, as

on-screen barbarians stormed Hadrian's Wall. Yes, I said. An island ten times as wide as this one. I've seen the remains

of the wall. It's a shame you can't stay here longer, the villagers said. We hope you get

the chance to come back sometime.I hoped so too. Point Cross - a little community on a sunny hill at the edge

of a distant island - seemed like the kind of place where you could settle

down happily and forget that there was a universe beyond. I thought of

Spectre, the ethereal little village from the movie Big Fish, a place not

quite part of the real world.Perhaps I fell off the Banmatmat road and I'm now in the afterlife, I mused,

looking out over round green hills and palm trees, my body feeling almost

lighter than usual in the warm wind. Of course, if this tropical Telly Tubby

Land really was my Heaven, they wouldn't have left out the giant rabbits.- - -The first thing that spoiled my dreamy weekend in Point Cross was a change

in the weather. When the vigorous ocean wind turned grey and became laced

with bullets of rain, the place no longer felt like Heaven. It felt more

like Scotland.The second downturn in events came when I got up before dawn, feeling

thirsty, and took a long swig out of a water bottle that had been left for

me in the rest house where I was staying. Paraffin (or kerosene, as it's

known in Vanuatu and most of the non-British world) has no taste as such,

only a smell, and it took a surprisingly long time for this to hit me. Nor

did I notice the artificial blue tint of the liquid, which is supposed to

ensure that nobody mistakes it for anything drinkable but is virtually

invisible by torchlight.I staggered out into the darkness and spat out what I could, feeling the

oily texture on my lips, but I had already swallowed a considerable amount.Point Cross in the early hours of the morning is not the place to

inadvertently poison yourself. One reality of life on Pentecost that

visitors usually put to the back of their minds that in an emergency they

would be an extremely long way from medical help. The nurses working at

Pentecost's few small clinics are good at patching up cuts and bruises, and

can dispense antibiotics and anti-malarial pills to those who look as if

they need them, but a serious medical problem would necessitate a trip to

hospital in Port Vila or Luganville. Even in town, you might not be in safe

hands: although Vanuatu's politicians regularly pledge to bring the

country's two hospitals up to "international standards", some of the stories

I've heard suggest that they have a long way to go. (A foreigner needing a

blood transfusion would be in particular trouble, since certain blood types,

including mine, are genetically absent among the ni-Vanuatu.) The nearest

truly good hospitals are in Australia, a thousand miles away. Even with

insurance company on hand to organise a medical evacuation, it would be many

hours between calling for help and being wheeled through the doors of the

emergency room. And that's assuming that you are able to call for help in

the first place. Mobile phones don't work in most of Vanuatu, and many

villages - Point Cross included - are miles from a telephone. In outlying

areas there are teleradios, but these too are few and far between. For the time being, I had only my knowledge of science to help. What would

paraffin do to my body? Would I go blind, like those who drink methylated

spirits? Probably not: there's a specific chemical reason why meths makes

you blind, and it doesn't apply to paraffin. Perhaps paraffin was an inert

substance, which would do no harm at all. That was probably too much to hope

for. The human body is based on water; introducing other solvents unbalances

its many delicate equilibria with unpleasant results. As I'd taught my

science students, water molecules sparkle with tiny electric charges that

interact with tiny charges on the surfaces of molecules like proteins and

sugars, holding the body's complex chemical framework in place.

Carbon-containing solvents, which are very different in their chemistry,

refuse to participate in this game. Instead they entice other molecules,

such as the oily layers in our cell membranes that ought to remain firmly in

place, to come out and play. I pictured paraffin molecules as the students

would model them in the science lab - crooked black chains with white knobs

sticking out of the sides, like poisonous caterpillars burrowing their way

into my body.How much paraffin would it take, though, before my cells disintegrated like

droplets of grease in a bowl of washing-up liquid? The only solvent other

than water that I'd ever attempted to drink before was alcohol. If the

volume of liquid that I'd just drunk was pure alcohol, it would make me

sick, but it wouldn't kill me. However, this was not alcohol. As organic

solvents go, alcohol is fairly water-like in its chemistry, and since it

occurs naturally in rotting fruit our bodies have a mechanism for dealing

with it. Since oil rigs were few on the prehistoric savannah, evolution

never equipped our bodies with the means to detoxify petrochemicals. At least if I died here I wouldn't have far to travel to jump off Vatangele

Rock, I thought. The trek up north to Vatubwe would be a bitch, but I'd have

all eternity to do it.Technically, I realised, the paraffin was not inside my body yet. As far as

scientists are concerned, the gut is an external space - it's only once a

substance has crossed the barrier into the bloodstream that it's said to

have been absorbed into the body. There was still time to prevent that

happening. I looked around the hut for something with which to make myself

vomit. (I discovered later that this was the wrong thing to do: vomiting

increases the risk that droplets of paraffin will find their way into your

lungs, where they can cause life-threatening inflammation. Such advice is

easy to look up in a world of books and Internet connections, but wasn't

available at Point Cross in the early hours of the morning.) All that I

could find was a sachet of instant coffee mix. This had been given to me

with my morning tea but I hadn't used it, because the taste of coffee makes

me sick. Perfect. I ripped open the sachet and poured the contents into my

mouth. The wet powder in my mouth was like caffeinated cement: unpleasant,

like a dry version of the coffee-flavoured chocolates that manufacturers put

in selection boxes to punish the person who leaves it until last to pick one

out, but not enough to make me vomit. The coffee was weak, and mixed with

milky creamer which diluted the bitterness. I chewed on the mixture for as

long as I could bear, then walked to the door and in a reflex honed by

nights down at the kava bar, spat it out into the darkness and the rain.I looked around for something else that I could swallow to make me sick.

Saltwater? There was no salt around, and the guesthouse was a long way up

the hill from the sea. How about drinking a lot of fresh water then? My

water bottle - the one that had actually contained water - was empty, and

there was no tap in the vicinity, but just outside the guesthouse was a

metal shelter containing a shower. I hopped from the front doorstep to the

door of the shower, avoiding the muddy patch between, and began trying to

catch the spray from the showerhead in the water bottle. There was a loud

clattering noise, above the noise of the rain, as a disturbed rat ran back

and forth along the top of one of the walls, inches from my head. After a

couple of seconds' dithering, the rat decided that it disliked the look of

me more than it disliked the look of the weather outside, and disappeared

out of the shelter.By the time I had filled the water bottle, my shorts were soaked with spray,

as was my torch, which continued shining obliviously. I gulped down the

water, then refilled it and gulped down more. After two or three

bottle-fulls, my stomach began to ache. I walked out into the bushes,

bracing myself against the rain, and managed to throw up. Only a small

amount of the liquid came up, but it included a disproportionate amount of

the paraffin, which had been floating on top of the water in my stomach. The

texture of the liquid in my mouth was dull and oily. I repeated the

exercise. This time it was better - more acid and less oil.It was futile trying to bring up every last drop, I realised - the greasy

paraffin would stick to the walls of my throat in a way which made that

impossible. I burped, and could still taste paraffin. I briefly wondered

whether I could bring it all up that way - burping up vapour - but after a

minute or two of forced burping I gave up. The reason paraffin is a fuel of

choice for lanterns is that it's dense and doesn't evaporate easily. I would

have to let the rest pass through, to be broken down, or excreted, or

exhaled… what would the human body do with paraffin? The enzymes that break

down alcohol would do nothing to it, nor would the chemical machinery that

processes oils in foods, which are of a different type. Perhaps it wouldn't

be absorbed at all, and all I'd have to endure would be a period of oily

diarrhoea, like people who take slimming drugs to prevent their bodies

absorbing fat. I doubted that I'd get off that lightly - paraffin molecules

are smaller and more slippery than fat molecules, and could probably worm

their way through the lining of my intestine and into my bloodstream without

much difficulty - but just the thought of it was enough to send me rushing

in the direction of the toilet. By the standards of rural Vanuatu toilets, the one at the guesthouse in

Point Cross was well constructed. It had walls of sturdy sheet metal,

against which the rain spattered noisily, and a cement toilet bowl to spare

foreigners who haven't had the chance to build up the necessary calf muscles

from the need to squat over a slit. The door was a piece of calico that

flapped wetly in the wind, but as it was still dark and there was nobody

outside, I didn't care.I lifted the toilet lid, and found the inside of the bowl lined solidly with

cockroaches. At least a hundred of them, their long antennae waving like

grass on a disgusting brown prairie. One was an albino, I noted, and a big

one too. It looked like the way a queen cockroach would look if cockroaches

had queens.For men using the toilet for minor business, the cockroaches were harmless.

In fact, you could make quite a good game of trying to wash as many as

possible down into the pit before the water jet ran out. However, I was

unhappy at the prospect of sitting down bare-cheeked on a bowl full of large

insects whose instinct is to run up dark crevices when disturbed. I shone my

torch downwards as I sat, hoping that the light shining from my backside

would keep the cockroaches away.Returning to the house, all I could do was wait for the paraffin to work its

way through my system. Unwilling to go back to bed and risk falling

unconscious in my sleep, I lit the lantern (at least now I knew they'd left

me plenty of spare fuel for it), and sat up in a chair, with the frightened

anticipation of the drug-taker who has swallowed a new substance and knows

that he can do nothing but wait for the effect to take hold. If I began to

feel seriously ill, I told myself, I would go and wake someone, although I

doubted they would be able to help. It was just possible that Rebecca would

be able to call up a doctor on her teleradio at four o'clock on Sunday

morning, or that there was someone in the village who knew an antidote to

paraffin poisoning, but I remembered hearing one of the Peace Corps

volunteers complain that her teleradio was broken, and I wasn't in the mood

for magic leaves.To distract myself, I picked up a book and began to read. A microbiological

thriller, full of people being poisoned and dying in gruesome ways. Not the

most appropriate reading material, but other than my notes on South

Pentecost language (which give me a headache at the best of times) it was

all I had.Dawn came, with the grey dripping of rainwater from the thatch and the

twinkling shadows of leaves and branches swaying through chinks in the

bamboo walls. Apart from a slight headache, which could have been accounted

for by tiredness and the strain of reading by dim light, I didn't feel too

bad.At about eight o'clock David Torsul, Member of Parliament for South

Pentecost, appeared at the door with a plate of bread and jam. Politicians in Vanuatu are invariably also businessmen. Jonas Tabi, the

former MP living at Waterfall Village, owns the local store and operates a

taxi service (which is in particular demand after heavy rain as Jonas's

truck has a higher ground clearance than many others on the island). Charlot

Salwai, his successor, is currently building a hardware store by the beach

in Melsisi, a monstrous construction that has consumed cement and corrugated

iron in quantities never before used on Pentecost and kept quite a number of

constituents employed as building labourers. David Torsul, meanwhile, had

helped his son Trevor to build the guesthouse in which I was staying.

However, since Trevor had gone out early to ferry passengers to and fro in

the family motorboat - another of the Torsuls' business investments - it was

left to David to bring me my breakfast."Good morning," he said. "You all right?""Me drink kerosene," I said, without much explanation."Oh," said David. "Sorry." He said it with the expression of a practised

politician - sincerely sympathetic to this latest concern raised by one of

his constituents, but knowing that in fact he was powerless to anything

about it. I liked David Torsul. If he had come to my door back home wearing

an orange ribbon, or possibly a red one, I would probably have voted for

him.I enquired about a boat ride back to Pangi. Even if I'd been fit and well,

in slippery wet conditions I had no intention of attempting the Banmatmat

road.Of course, said David. The journey from Point Cross to Pangi is long and is

normally expensive, he warned - I knew that already and I no longer cared -

but my boys and I are going around the point to Wanur this afternoon to give

out some tools. You can hitch a ride with us, and from Wanur it'll only be a

short and cheap ride to Pangi.I gratefully accepted the idea.In Vanuatu, Members of Parliament are each given a sizeable 'allowance' to

be spent on good works in their constituencies. Some squander the money, but

others rise to the challenge of spending it in a way that earns the greatest

possible amount of gratitude from the greatest possible number of voters.

David Torsul, for his part, choose to spend the allowance on tools for local

communities, touring villages on Pentecost to present them with spades,

saws, axes, giant saucepans, buckets and rolls of barbed wire. Today it was

the people of Wanur who were going to get their reward for voting for David.It was only after breakfast that the paraffin, which had been sitting on top

of my stomach until forced down by food, began to hit. Soon I could smell

paraffin vapour on my breath. This was worrying, and not just because I

feared for the effect on my lungs. The amount of a volatile substance on

your breath is proportional to the amount in your bloodstream - this is the

principle on which breathalysers work - which meant that a significant

amount of paraffin was now circulating in my blood. I lay down, feeling

faint, and moved my head over to the window in an attempt to get some fresh

air. This did no good, of course - the noxious vapour was coming from

within.After an hour or so the fumes and the giddiness had subsided a little, and

at midday I accompanied David down the hill to the shore. The MP was smartly

dressed now, and carried a black bag of the type that passes in Vanuatu for

a briefcase. On the beach, he stopped and rested his case against the side

of a badly-battered tin boat, which looked as if it had been pulled out of a

giant recycling bin. "Boat belong you here?" I asked.This was my old boat, David explained. When the tidal wave came it picked up

this boat and smashed it against the rocks at the far end of the bay. It's

no good now. The new boat is over there.He nodded out into the bay, where his son Trevor was wading out to a smart

fibreglass motorboat. Boys came down to the beach, hauling cardboard boxes full of goodies for the

people of Wanur, which they began loading into the new motorboat. By now the

rain had stopped and the sun had come out. Slumped groggily against the

wreck of the old boat, I rummaged in my bag for my sunscreen, watched with

curiosity by a crowd of dark-skinned men who had never seen anybody do this

before. The cardboard boxes were loaded onto the boat, and I staggered on

board, followed by a dozen of the villagers. The rest waved goodbye from the

beach.The boat ride around the point to Wanur, I knew, was going to be rough. As

the heavily-loaded little boat chugged out between the teeth of the bay, it

rolled on the ocean swell, in a way that would have been dizzying enough

even if I wasn't dizzy already. I worried that we would be picked up by one

of the giant waves and splintered against the base of Vatangele Rock, but

Trevor knew these waters well, and we rounded the rock at a safe distance.

On the far side the ocean was calmer, and by the time we approached Wanur -

a line of dark wooden houses set between dark green trees on a

asphalt-coloured beach - the water was as flat as a puddle.The boat pulled up to the beach, and the other passengers scrambled out.

We'll unload the stuff, then take you straight on to Pangi, said Trevor.I'd rather go ashore for a few minutes, I said. After half an hour of

sitting in the sun on a rolling boat after a morning of inadvertent solvent

abuse, my head felt as if something inside it was on the verge of

evaporating.I staggered ashore, desperate to lie down. The beach was damp and dirty with

volcanic ash. I cast around for a bench or a coconut leaf."Come inside," said the villagers hurriedly, seeing my expression. They

ushered me into their nakamal: a small beachside hut with a pig's jawbone

hanging ceremonially at the doorway. "Lie down 'long place here."I lay gratefully down on the bench at the back of the nakamal. One of the

villagers handed me a traditional pillow, which was more comfortable than I

would have expected given that it was carved from solid wood. "Nê mini kerosin," I explained. There was excitable chatter, as the

villagers reacted to the triple surprise of the arrival of an unexpected

white man who drank lantern fuel and was attempting to speak their language.

The tone was friendly and sympathetic.Quite a few people around here had done what you did, they reassured me.

(This didn't surprise me - nearly everyone in Vanuatu uses paraffin, and

nearly everyone stores it in unlabelled drinks bottles.) Those people were

all fine afterwards.My old grandmother used to use kerosene as a cough medicine, one man told

me. When she had a cough, she would swallow a teaspoonful to make it better.

But I guess you drank more than a teaspoonful?I nodded, and lay in silence for a while. More people gathered in the

nakamal.I hope I'm not interrupting your tool-giving ceremony, I said.Don't worry, the villagers assured me. They won't be ready to begin for a

while yet.'Island time' typically runs two or three hours behind 'white man time'. The

ceremony, scheduled to begin at one o'clock, would probably kick off

sometime around half past three.Eventually I felt well enough to return to the boat. Twenty minutes later, I

waded ashore in Pangi, where I asked after the local nurse. After talking to

a couple of villagers, I discovered that not only had she gone off

somewhere, but that she was the mother of a student I knew at Ranwadi. Aware

that if the nurse asked how her daughter was getting on at school it would

be a challenge to come up with an honest answer which neither "time" nor

"school fees" occurred in the same sentence as the word "waste", I decided

not to go looking for her. Instead I tried the Central American cure-all for

minor ailments: lukewarm Coca-Cola (since no storekeeper was running a

fridge in Pangi that day, there was no other kind). The Coca-Cola made me

feel a lot better, and seemed to wash away the traces of the oil that were

left in my stomach. By the evening I was no longer burping up paraffin

vapour.I checked into the Pangi Guesthouse, where the owner's tiny daughter Jessica

was attempting juggling tricks using the round stones that lined the floor.

If she kept practising, by the time the tourist season arrived next year,

she'd be pretty good. The men of Pangi might not have seen much of the

cruise ship money, but smiling little Jessica knew how she was going make a

few dollars next time the circus came to town.

"What on earth is that?" I wondered, as a deep roaring noise descended on

the kava bar.An earthquake? A tsunami? A volcanic eruption? (All these things come to

mind readily in Vanuatu.) A sudden gust of wind? Maybe just an unusually

large wave breaking on the reef."One jet, I think!" said Smith the barkeeper. He bounded excitedly to the

doorway and looked up. I followed.Like a vision from a science fiction movie, a silver aeroplane was flying

low overhead, leaving behind thick contrails that crystallised in the

moonlight. For anyone living within fifty miles of an international airport

- which is most people in the Western world - this would be an everyday

sight. On Pentecost, it was a once-in-a-year spectacle.Moving to Vanuatu is like one of those psychology experiments in which the

researcher removes objects from a scene to find out whether or not the

subject will notice the difference. Contrails in the sky were one familiar

thing whose absence I hadn't registered until now. Pentecost does not lie

under any of the small number of routes leading out of Port Vila

International Airport, and any trans-Pacific airliners that happen to pass

over the island are cruising at high altitude and go unnoticed against the

tropical haze of the sky. Vanuatu has no air force, and although the

Australians and New Zealanders occasionally fly military planes over the

South Pacific, visits from them are rare. (Last year, Mr Neil tried to

persuade the New Zealand Air Force that airdropping some school textbooks

onto the Ranwadi sports field would make a good training exercise. The Kiwis

were up for the idea, but Vanuatu Customs officials weren't.) Air Vanuatu's

island hoppers, chugging little propeller planes that fly unpressurised at a

mere seven thousand feet and don't always have the chance to reach even that

height on their short jumps between airfields, pass with a noise more like

the rumble of a lorry than the high suction of a jet. They leave no trails,

and don't fly after dark. At night, the moving spots of satellites are the

only reminder to the islanders that we live in an aerospace age."You look road belong him," said Smith, pointing at the trails behind the

plane. On the far side of the moon, the wind was already beginning to

disperse the white crystals, smudging the two lines like marks being erased

from a blackboard.The plane disappeared over the silhouette of the mountain, leaving the sky

empty except for the moon and a sprinkling of stars. I turned back into the

candlelit hut, and realised just how far I was from civilisation.

People in Vanuatu seldom have cause to feel unloved. Not only do they live

in friendly little communities surrounded by brothers, sisters, parents,

aunties, uncles and cousins, but they always have Jesus to turn to when they

need comfort."He is your personal friend," the Principal recently reminded the students.Dogs in Vanuatu are not so lucky. A few villagers treat their dogs with

dignity, especially if they are useful for running down pigs or for chasing

nambilak (the chicken-like rails that dart in and out of the undergrowth).

However, the majority of village dogs occupy a niche only slightly different

from that of the rats, and are treated accordingly. Most of them are loosely

attached to a particular owner, who may make half-hearted attempts to look

after them, but the creatures get little real affection. They are seldom

patted or stroked - understandably, since they are always dirty and

flea-infested - and most are not well provided for. Villagers do enjoy the

sight of a healthy, well-fed dog, but this is mainly because protein was

traditionally hard to come by on Pacific islands, and prior to the

introduction of cattle, dogs were the third meatiest animal available, after

pigs and human beings. Even if ni-Vanuatu men did love their dogs, as with

their wives they would never show it in public. The dogs do not even have

Jesus.Dogs are intelligent, and their survival in Vanuatu depends partly on

learning who is worth following around. The key is to find and associate

with people who might toss out scraps of food, and who won't kick them too

hard when they get in the way or throw anything too heavy at them when they

cause a nuisance.Occasionally, a dog strikes it lucky, and finds somebody who will actually

offer them fresh food, rather than old leftovers, and will touch them fondly

rather than kicking them away if they come too close. Such people are rare,

and a dog who finds one will often follow him for miles. These people are

aliens, visitors from a world where meat is so plentiful that dogs are

actually recipients of it rather than a source. Dogs quickly learn the

secret of how to recognise these unusual people: their skin is pale.Being followed around by dogs is one of the hazards of being a white person

on Pentecost.Some of these dogs are harmless companions, but others are a serious

nuisance. Some chase pigs and chickens, or frighten village children. One

dog that followed me on a long walk picked a fight with two other dogs and

tried to hide behind me when it realised it was outnumbered. The presence of

an uncontrolled dog also antagonises the mean-looking bullocks that graze by

the roadsides, endangering not only the dog but also the unfortunate person

it has decided to follow. Getting rid of these dogs humanely is virtually impossible. Gestures

intended to show a dog that its presence is unwanted are dumbly ignored, and

none will obey commands in any language. (When indoors, local dogs do

vaguely react to cries of "wop!" - outside - but it's hard to know if they

regard this as a command or merely as a curious noise that humans make when

they're about to throw something at you.) Shouting has little effect, and a

light smack intended not to hurt the dog will only make matters worse -

attacking but deliberately not harming is what animals do when they are

playing. Throwing stones in the dog's general direction doesn't always

dissuade it either: when the locals throw stones, they don't aim to miss. To

really convince a dog that it's not worth its while to follow you, you need

to match the level of violence used by the locals, and that level can be

quite extreme.Expatriates in Vanuatu are often shocked by the cruelty shown by the

normally friendly and peaceable islanders towards man's best friend. The

locals, meanwhile, watch the expats feeding their dogs with daily tins of

meat that would nourish one of the island's protein-deficient children for a

week, and observe nonchalantly that "white people treat their dogs

differently from the way black people do". (Similar observations were made

by a group of ni-Vanuatu sent to Britain for a TV documentary, Meet the

Natives, which filmed the villagers' reactions to the sight of Brits taking

their dogs to grooming parlours while homeless people went hungry on the

streets outside and questioned which society is really the most primitive.)Even in the world's happiest country, people occasionally get the urge to

vent unpleasant emotions, and sadly some do so with violence. In certain

Vanuatu families, there is a pecking order: the husband loses his temper and

beats the wife, the wife vents her frustration on the children, and the

children in turn take it out on the dog. The dog, which knows its place in

the hierarchy, cowers down in the most submissive posture it knows in a

desperate attempt to show its masters that there's no need for them to prove

their dominance. A fellow dog would understand the signal, but humans

usually persist in beating it anyway, even when the poor dog virtually

flattens itself into the ground in its efforts to show submission. The dog gets the worst of the violence, not just because it is at the bottom

of the hierarchy but because it has nobody to stick up for it. Whereas

excessive wife-beating can get you into trouble with the in-laws, and even

the sternest parents ultimately love their children, violence against

animals is almost entirely without consequences. Most islanders would not

even turn their heads at the sight of a man whacking his dog so hard that it

ran away yelping and limping, let alone call the RSPCA (not that Vanuatu has

such an organisation). It's perfectly OK to use force against somebody

else's dog, too, if the animal is causing a nuisance. Back home, when I

occasionally pick up stones in the presence of an untrustworthy dog, I

always check first to make sure the owner isn't watching. (I hardly ever

throw the stones; merely hinting that you're prepared to fight back is

enough to make a typical British dog keep its distance.) On Pentecost, too,

I don't let the owners see me chastising their dogs, but for the opposite

reason: the owners would laugh at what tiny stones I was trying to use and

proceed to commit some appalling act of violence in a well-meaning attempt

to show me how dogs ought to be treated.I could make many excuses for the islanders' cruelty to animals, but

probably the best is that they don't regard them as sentient beings. (As

with many things in Vanuatu, you can blame the missionaries for this if you

like, though in fact the churches probably just reinforced traditional

attitudes.) If animals have no souls, hitting them when you get frustrated

with them is no different from hitting your computer, except that animals

are self-repairing and less expensive to replace if you inadvertently do

them permanent damage.Eventually, of course, visitors to Vanuatu become desensitised to such

violence, and sometimes they have little choice but to join in. The dogs'

habit of following around the kindest person has inadvertently created a

competition among humans to see who can be most unkind, in which the loser

will be plagued by nuisance animals. And as you pick up a rock or a coconut

and take aim, it's easy to persuade yourself that the dog has only itself to

blame.- - -A while ago a large brown-and-white pooch wandering near Bwatnapne village

discovered Ian, the local Peace Corps volunteer. This pale-skinned, bearded,

blue-eyed, sandal-wearing man already had one follower - Ian's own dog,

Fonzie - and the new dog decided to join the disciples.For seven miles the dog followed Ian, over the mountain and down into

Melsisi, where he arrived at a house filled with white people - the Peace

Corps volunteers who had come to help with Sara's sex education workshop.

Three dogs had already found this place. The leader of the pack was Oreo, a

fine animal whose devotion to her white mistress was rewarded with special

meals (real dog food, which Sara imports specially from Port Vila), cosy

blankets to sleep on, and regular anointment with shampoo down at the local

river (though Oreo would gladly forgo this particular luxury). Oreo was

accompanied by Fidel, the neighbours' dog, which arrived as a sickly little

puppy and remained a sickly little puppy for many months until Sara took

pity on the malnourished creature and started supplementing his diet of

kitchen scraps with proper food. After this he grew rapidly into a

boisterous little hound.Oreo and Fidel had recently been joined by a mysterious Nice Dog that spends

his time snoozing quietly outside Sara's house. Nobody knew where Nice Dog

came from, or who he belonged to, but having identified Sara's doorstep as

the safest place in the village he made the place his home. When Sara once

offered him a bowl of dog food, poor Nice Dog stared at the strange

substance, wondering if it was supposed to be eaten and, if so, why the

white woman hadn't signalled to the dog that the food was his by throwing it

down onto the dirt.The dog from Bwatnapne would happily have joined the pack, but the white

people seemed to think that there were too many dogs here already, and tried

to shoo it away. Fortunately, at this point four more white people turned up

- the gap girls from Ranwadi - and the new dog decided to follow them home.Ranwadi at the time was home to seven expatriates - half of Pentecost's

white population. It had dustbins full of scraps (the students whose job it

is to empty them are lax about doing their duties), and no other dogs

around. To the new arrival, the place was paradise. It wasn't in any hurry

to leave."What are we supposed to do with this dog?" the gap girls asked."Get the boys to chase it out of the school?" I suggested.The girls decided instead to let it stay. The dog clearly had psychological

issues - it would hurl itself at white people and anyone else it thought

might be friendly, licking and howling for attention - but she was basically

a harmless creature. The girls named her Fig.Fig became a canine incarnation of Mary Had A Little Lamb, following the gap

girls around the school. She followed them to classes. She followed them

into the staffroom. She followed them to chapel on Sunday morning. One

Monday morning, she turned up in Assembly and threw herself into Mr Neil the

New Zealander's lap, whimpering and pawing. Mr Neil was having none of it,

so the dog turned its attention to the person sitting next to Mr Neil, who

happened to be the Principal. The sight of a large, soppy, howling dog

hurling itself at someone in the chapel would normally have been funny, but

in this case the students merely watched in horror as the Principal, looking

very undignified, tried to fend off the love-starved creature. In Vanuatu,

even dogs are supposed to respect authority.Fig attracted other dogs into the school - sinister black-and-yellow hounds

from the local village - which would have sex with her, loudly, at night

outside the girls' dormitories. During the day she wandered the school in

search of white people to befriend. The howling and jumping and licking

continued.We all tried to teach Fig to behave, but the dog was untrainable. When told

to sit, she would stare gormlessly, resist any attempt to push her bottom

down, and do her best to lick and jump on the person trying to train her. We

overcame our Western inhibitions against thumping the animal when she

wouldn't behave, but the loopy dog seemed to treat this as a sign of

friendship, licking and jumping at us more frantically than ever."Something in that dog's head is wired up wrong," Mr Neil concluded.I contemplated putting the dog on a cargo ship and sending her back to

Bwatnapne, or to a faraway village from which she was guaranteed not to find

her way back, with a note tied around her neck saying "Please look after

me". At other times I contemplated a version of my plan in which the note

said "Please eat me".I missed a wonderful opportunity to get rid of the dog when Sara and I took

a truck down to Pangi on the day of the final land-diving ceremony of the

season, which a cruise ship full of tourists had come ashore to watch. I

don't know what would have caused more of a scene - the reactions of a dog

that gets driven into an overexcited frenzy by one white person to the sight

of a thousand of them, the reactions of the well-meaning locals to the sight

of a crazy dog molesting their visitors, or the reactions of the tourists to

the sight of the smiling natives beating the shit out of a harmless animal.

Whatever the outcome, I doubt we would ever have seen Fig again. Sara vetoed

the idea.The other teachers soon got fed up with the dog, too. A drawing of Fig being

beheaded with a bush knife appeared on the staffroom notice board, together

with a warning that she was not allowed into the school buildings.The school truck ran over her ("the driver sped up when he saw the dog in

front," one of the gap girls noted), but Fig survived. One of the gap girls tried to put Fig onto a ship bound for Bwatnapne, but

the dog refused to be taken down to the beach.At the end of June the four English gap girls went home, to be replaced with

three Australians, who arrived at their placement to discover that in

addition to the job of trying to control classes of thirty or forty students

they had taken on the job of trying to control a lunatic dog. They accepted

Fig with a typical Aussie "no worries" attitude. The dog remained out of

control.Fig's owner - a man not noted for his kindness to animals - came down from

Bwatnapne during the PISSA Games, and tried to retrieve his dog. Proving

that she wasn't completely crazy, Fig ran away from him.When the Japanese ambassador came to Pentecost to attend the opening

ceremony for the new water supply, Fig deemed the visiting dignitary to be a

white person and lunged at him, pawing and whimpering. One of the gap girls

had to drag the dog off by its tail, while a horrified crowd of chiefs and

elders gave murderous looks.I offered a reward to any student who could get rid of the dog - I didn't

care how. Nobody took me up on the offer.When I showed the gap girls the route up to the waterfall high above the

school, Fig insisted on coming along. Passing through villages, we could

only shout helplessly as prized pigs and bullocks were chased all over the

mountainside with the demented dog in pursuit."It's not ours," I called out apologetically to the villagers.One well-tusked boar stood its ground when Fig approached. Part of me hoped

that the dog was going to get itself killed - if not by the pig, then by the

pig's owner. However, the gap girls were anxious for Fig's safety. By now,

she had puppies to look after.At first, the idea of one uncontrollable dog multiplying into six didn't

exactly fill me with joy. However, the puppies were nothing like their

mother. They were cute and harmless, the students loved them, and since the

little dogs had never been mistreated they didn't hurl themselves stupidly

at white people in the way that Fig did. Instead, they ambled happily about

the school, bounding up to any friendly-looking person who came by, no

matter whether they were white or black, and accompanying them for a while

before heading off to the next interesting person. It became common to see

students and teachers walking around the campus with a flop-eared puppy

trotting alongside.Motherhood also had a calming effect on Fig. She still reacted to white

people, but with quiet whimpers rather than with bounding and pawing. For a

while I was optimistic that the dog's psychological problems had been cured,

but soon I saw the real reason for Fig's lack of energy: the dog was

starving. The gap girls were feeding her on leftover rice and coconut

(supplemented with whatever rubbish she could scrounge from local dustbins),

and although this was good energy food, it couldn't nourish a family of

growing pups. Each time the puppies suckled their mother's milk, flesh was

sucked out of the big dog, until she was reduced almost to a skeleton. "You need to feed that dog better," I said. "We could try giving her some leftover bread.""She needs protein.""Pawpaw?""No real protein in that.""Cabbage?"I shook my head. "She needs meat, or fish, or something like that.""Maybe there's some spare meat in the Dining Hall?"I laughed. A typical school meal at Ranwadi includes five or ten small tins

of meat shared among three hundred growing teenagers. The soup dished up to

the students at lunch and dinnertime contains more salt than protein.Village dogs, I guessed, survive because they occasionally get to eat meat

when there are bones and scraps left over from the pigs and bullocks killed

at ceremonies. Dogs probably also benefit from the local children's pastime

of hunting scrawny, unappetising pieces of wildlife which not even the

hungriest human would eat every part of. (The white-eye, a bespectacled

yellow songbird barely larger than a robin, is a popular target.) At

Ranwadi, apart from occasional chickens and the bullock that the students

feasted on to celebrate coming second in the PISSA Games, meat comes

strictly in tins, and is far too precious to be shared with dogs.Occasionally I attend ceremonies in local villages, where I am given a

generous bundle of meat and taro to take home for dinner. The lumps of meat

are usually more than I can eat myself, and I have no fridge, so in the past

I would share them with students. Now, I took my leftover meat to the gap

girls' house instead."You can give this to the dog," I said. "But make sure she doesn't realise

where it came from." If Fig came to regard me as a source of good food she

would spend the rest of the year following at my heels. "Much as hate having

that dog around, I don't want to watch it starve slowly to death."As I returned to my house, passing groups of students huddled outside the

Dining Hall - they, too, were hungry for meat - I was suddenly ashamed.

Faced with a choice between feeding deserving Third World children, and

feeding a dog that I didn't even like (a dog I had been trying to persuade

somebody to spit-roast a few weeks earlier), I had made a choice that only

the British would be capable of. Thousands of people will buy squeaky toys and yoghurt-coated treats for

their dogs this Christmas, while "Do they know it's Christmas time?" plays

over the sound system in the shopping centre. The ones who don't know it's

Christmas time are, of course, the dogs, who would be just as happy with a

pat on the head and a chewy stick picked up in the back garden. The money

the average Brit lavishes on his or her pets each year would save a person's

life, probably several, if it were spent on food and medicines in the right

part of the world. No wonder the ni-Vanuatu find our society hard to

understand.

With the year coming to an end (at holiday-loving Ranwadi, like in

over-decorated department stores, the countdown to Christmas begins early),

it's time to put together the annual school magazine. In many ways this is a

tedious job, but the various contributions to the magazine do provide

interesting snapshots of school life from the perspectives of the different

people who live and work here.Here are some extracts...From Year 9: "This year was tough and challenging to us Year 9 students,

because there was no light in our classroom since the beginning of Term 2.

... Some teachers say that we Year 9 boys are the best night hunters of

birds, this is to do with the problem of no light."From Year 11A: "To begin with, the 11A students were considered to be the

best of all pupils at the college, due to their personal characteristics.

The pupils are very humble, kind, friendly and respectable, due to the fact

that, when teachers are explaining things on the board, the classroom is

almost always silent for them to grasp new ideas and concentrate in a deeper

sense, so as to have a clear understanding on what the topic is all about.

Moreover, the pupils are so full of kindness and friendliness, you can tell

when they make a brilliant smile at you or greet you around the school

compound. Furthermore, it is occasionally flexible for them to adopt some

ways of humbling themselves according to the College disciplines, such as to

keep our hair combed everyday, attending all meals, being part of morning

and evening devotions, and being submissive to all corresponding college

activities."From one English teacher praising another: "Her expertise in the language

and literature strands has been a multiplication for Year 11A."From Year 11B: "I think that the students' behaviour in class isn't good

enough. Most of them aren't faithful to class. This makes them go to

detention and some were later moved to two weeks' hard labour. Some never

obey the school rules. Such include combing their hair, tucking in shirts,

etc."From Year 10B: ".We would like to give our special thanks to our mothers

(teachers' wives) for helping us in so many things, giving us food or fruits

to eat when we are hungry, giving us water to drink when we are thirsty or

even helping us when we are sick. Sometimes they also encourage us to study

hard." From Year 12A: "Miss Rachel our Maths Teacher many times was annoyed and got

a red face because of our poor attendance in class and because we were noisy

during class period."From the Deputy Principal: "Special thank you to all the hard working

Ranwadi boys for digging and levelling the water tank site up the hill. The

boys dug the area every afternoon from 3.30 pm to 5.30 pm for three months.

The hard work will remain a memory of all of us who have helped ... Ranwadi

now has everlasting running water which flows from the top of the hill three

kilometres away. What a blessing from the almighty!"From Year 12B: "Beginning the year 2007, 12B consisted of thirty-one

students. Since then the number decreased gradually due to various careless

actions some students took against the school rules."From the French teacher: "Français la langue est matière qui est peut-être

difficile dans l'école." From the Head Girl: "When things go wrong with students, we prefects get all

the blame from some students, teachers, and even the boarding master, like

when students don't attend prep times, dining hall, classes, chapel, etc.

Getting girls up in the morning to do morning territories and mealing in the

dining hall is sometimes disturbing, but it's all part of our duties. When

prefects are on duty on a particular day, they say, 'GIRLS! WAKE UP AND

CLEAN AROUND YOUR DORMITORIES,' the girls would always say, 'Eh! I'm tired,

stop disturbing.' But whatever happens they have to get up and work around

the dormitories. ... Words of thanks are extended to the college Boarding

Master for the tough warnings and encouragement that he always tackled us

with, that sometimes makes us scared."From a boy in Year 12, asked to provide a quote: "Strenuous is like a

stratosphere that has learned and not excusable."From an Agriculture teacher: "Even though there are not many textbooks and

other resources available, teachers try their best to find information from

textbook A to textbook Z; time consuming. All we need at the moment is

cartons and cartons of A4 paper to do a lot of photocopying as handouts. Any

teacher thinking of coming to Ranwadi... come with all your textbooks,

handouts, etc, to enable you to find easy access to what you don't expect to

find."From the Head Boy: "According to my observation, Ranwadi is a college that

has been blessed a lot. Ranwadi is a college that bases its function on

Bible and God as the first priority. I would like to encourage teachers,

students and the whole community of Ranwadi to maintain that behaviour and

pray hard, study hard, and maintain the spirit of sports. Remember that God

comes first before yourself or any purpose of Ranwadi's activities."

From the Principal: "We have been reminded time and time again of that well

known text in the Book of Isaiah: 'They that wait upon the Lord shall renew

their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles, they shall run and

not be weary, they shall walk and not faint'."

The time of the full moon had passed, and away from the lights of the

school, the hillside was black. Night breezes were buffeting the candle in

the kava bar, periodically blowing it out and sweeping the hut into

darkness. The bucket of kava was nearly empty, and there was nobody else in

the bar, except for Smith the teenage barkeeper."You smell'em strong blood?" Smith asked me.I sniffed. There was a hint of something unusual in the air, but it was hard

to say whether or not it was the smell of clotting blood."Time smell here ee come, ee mean'em one man ee dead."You think it's the smell of a dead body?, I asked."No, I-think one man ee dead on-top, 'long bush." He gestured in the

direction of the mountains. "But ee got smell here, time him ee come-down

long saltwater, belong swim.""Spirit belong him ee come?"The boy nodded.The smell of blood from the passing ghost of a dead person, on his way down

to the sea for a last wash. I glanced uneasily through the open door of the

kava bar. It was black outside.I sniffed again. The odour had gone."Me no-more smell'em," I said, relieved."You wait. By-and-by small wind ee come, by-and-by smell ee come-back."With eerie timing, a little breeze hit the kava bar, ruffling the thatch,

and once again there was the strange smell in the air. It was too faint to

tell exactly what it was, but definitely something organic, and not quite

fresh. It could have been blood."Smell here ee come too, time way dwof all-ee born'em pickaninny.""Dwof?""Yes. You savvy?""No.""All short-short man?""Dwarf? Dwarf all-ee born'em pickaninny?"Smith nodded.So there were now two possible explanations for the scent. Either a dead man

was walking past the kava bar, or the dwarfs were reproducing. "You believe ee got dwarf 'long bush?" I asked. I'd heard stories of dwarfs

in the forest before, told by people from North Pentecost - Smith's part of

the island."'Long place here, no got. But 'long place belong me, 'long North, ee got,"

Smith told me, with complete seriousness.The dwarfs were found only in North Pentecost. I wasn't sure whether to be

disappointed or relieved."But suppose ee no got dwarf long place here, smell here ee no come from

dwarf," I said. The smell can't be from the dwarfs if they don't live in

this part of the island."True," Smith nodded. "Smell belong one dead man, I-think.""Nah," I said, dismissively. "I-think smell belong one tree, no more." There

are plants on Pentecost capable of producing fairly putrid smells. "Or smell

belong saltwater." The breeze seemed to be coming from the direction of the

sea.A shout came from the house across the clearing from the kava bar. Smith

ducked outside, leaving me alone in the shadowy hut. A minute later he

returned."Worm all-ee come now!" he told me excitedly. "Worm belong saltwater. Worm

ee make'm smell here."It was five days after the spring full moon, I realised: the night when

palolo worms all over the South Pacific rise in billions to spawn at the

surface of the ocean. It was the worms that were causing the unusual smell."You-me-two go-down 'long saltwater?," Smith asked. "You want'em look?""OK."Smith blew out the candle, and we left the bar. We rounded the side of the

house, and scuttled down the steep dirt path that led to the sea."Look-out here. Go slow-slow," Smith called out, as I skittered on loose

stones and fallen sticks.Cracking through twigs and vines, we emerged onto the stony little beach."You hear'em smell?" Smith asked. (In the languages of the ni-Vanuatu,

smells are heard.) I nodded. Down here the smell was fresher and more

saline, less menacing than it had seemed inland, where it was mixed with the

funk of decay from the forest.Smith's mother and sister were already down at the sea, standing a little

way out in the water in a rippling circle of torchlight. One was holding a

big tin bowl, and the other was straining at the water with a scrap of wire

mosquito netting, scraping her catch off the netting and into the bowl.

Smith and I waded out to join them."You look worm?" he asked.I looked down."Try'em shine'm torch."I shone my torch down into the ripples, and there they were. Hundreds of

worms, bigger than maggots but smaller than earthworms, wriggling in the

water. Half of them were a brownish orange, the other half were a bizarre

shade of greenish blue. The effect of them all moving together was like an

animated piece of abstract art."All-ee come, time you shine'm torch." The light was attracting them."You never look something here before, uh?" Smith's mother asked me."Ee no got 'long England," I explained. I peered into the tin bowl, where a

couple of hundred worms writhed in a puddle of milky grey liquid. It wasn't

a big catch, and it didn't look particularly appetising."You-fella ee kaekae?" I asked. Are you really going to eat those?"Uh-huh."The worms were soft and squishy, and the bluish ones had a poisonous look to

them.Eat them how?, I asked."Cook'em with'em cabbage.""But all-ee small," I said. When I'd heard of people eating palolo worms,

I'd imagined them being bigger."Yes, him-here small kind," one of the women explained. "Ee got 'nother

kind, who ee big more."I tried using my fingers to sift one of the worms from the water. It was

difficult, but after three or four tries I succeeded. Out of the water, the

creature hung limp and helpless from my finger. Its body was round and

segmented in narrow bands, like that of a leech or an earthworm, but with a

strange translucent tip at either end."All-ee come where?", Smith's mother asked. Where do all the worms come

from?I shrugged. "Deep sea, I-think."The small patch of water highlighted by our torches contained hundreds of

worms. In the whole of the South Pacific the number must have been

astronomical. It was hard to believe that such a mass of living organisms

could exist in complete hiding for all but one night of the year.Smith and I waded ashore, and I sat on the beach for a while waiting for my

feet to dry before putting my sandals back on. (The three pairs of sandals I

brought to Pentecost are all broken, and that night I'd opted to wear the

pair that's held together with sticky tape rather than the one held together

with safety pins or the one held together with superglue. The sticky-taped

pair is the most comfortable of the three and the least likely to come apart

without warning, but has to be kept dry.)The women had left an old rice sack on the beach, tied shut with twine.

Something was moving about slowly inside.What's in there?, I asked."Black crab, I-think," said Smith. He opened the sack and tried to pick up

one of the crabs, which lunged with its pincers. Smith jumped and the crab

fell, catching itself by one of the frayed ends dangling from the sack. With

a twig, Smith tried to coax the angry crustacean back inside.An orange light flared behind us, and Smith's older brother emerged from the

trees, carrying a flaming coconut frond. He waded out into the water and

joined his mother and sister, fishing for worms in a pool of light. The

little group shuffled back and forth, sieving the water as they went. Beyond

them, the water was black, silvered very faintly in places with the light of

the stars.Along thousands of miles of island coastlines, a similar scene was being

enacted that night. Families and friends were out in the water, taking

advantage of this bizarre delicacy that welled up once a year from the

depths of the Pacific. Yet their impact on the worm population would barely

be measurable. The people and their lights were tiny dots in an

incomprehensible volume of ocean.

"There is no such thing as society, only individuals and their families."In traditional Vanuatu, this saying was truer than in the grim Thatcherite

Britain in which it was coined. The people of Pentecost historically lived

in clans, in which everyone was related, either directly or by marriage, to

just about everyone else in the clan. Even today, islanders are defined by

their relatives - he's the brother of so-and-so, she's the sister-in-law of

so-and-so's auntie. With enough patience, you could probably draw a family

tree encompassing the entire island, or at least large areas of it. Guests

at wedding parties often introduce themselves, a little worryingly, as

relatives of both the bride and the groom. Word such as "brother" and "sister" are used loosely in Vanuatu. A brother

or sister may in fact be a cousin, or a second cousin, or a well-known

outsider who has been accepted as an honorary member of the clan. A father

and mother may be biological parents, or they may be uncles and aunts, or

other elderly kinsfolk who have taken it upon themselves to help look after

a particular child.In the old days, the downside of these strong family ties was tribalism.

Members of the same clan may be brothers and sisters, deserving of kindness

and support, but members of other clans were good for little more than being

raped or eaten. Following the arrival of the missionaries, however, the

islanders were told to put aside their tribal differences. This didn't mean

that they should stop thinking of the world in terms of family members - far

from it. Jesus's innovation was to insist that they should try and extend

their notion of the family to include the whole world. According to the new

gospel, it's fine to lavish favours on your brothers and sisters, provided

you accept that we are all brothers and sisters, with God as father over us

all."We are one big happy family," begins a popular song that ni-Vanuatu

children sing in Sunday school.Faint shadows of tribalism still persist in modern Vanuatu. The country is

full of the kind of politicians who use their power to channel benefits to

their kinsmen, and the inter-island rivalries between disaffected youths in

Port Vila and Luganville still flare occasionally into violence. However, on

the whole the islanders have taken the missionaries' message remarkably well

to heart. This doesn't mean to say that they are always pleasant to one

another - the quarrels fought by family members are among the most

passionate of all - but, on the whole, they do treat one another with the

kind of trust and generosity that comes naturally to Westerners only among

members of the family. "You-me brother everyone," says a line in the Vanuatu national anthem.Such is the need for people in Vanuatu to fit in to a family structure that

long-term visitors to the islands are generally assigned a 'host father' and

'host mother', whose families the volunteers slot into, taking on new

brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles, and so on in the process. Most of these

host fathers and mothers look after their adopted 'children' well, and take

their parental responsibilities seriously, sometimes a little too seriously."I'm giving a ceremonial red mat to the community because I'm embarrassed by

your behaviour," Sara's host father at Melsisi recently told her.I was never given a host family on Pentecost - Ranwadi is more of a college

campus than a village, and perhaps the school felt that parents would cramp

the volunteers' style. However, after spending a pleasant weekend in a

village in North Pentecost, the guesthouse owner John and his wife told me

that they wanted to adopt me like a son while I was on the island. I was

welcome to come and stay again any time I wanted, they said, and wouldn't be

expected to pay. I did go back, and was welcomed as "brother Andrew" by

John's children. However, I did insist on giving a small amount of money "to

help with my brothers' and sisters' school fees"; a genuine older brother

would have done the same.There is still no such thing as society in Vanuatu, only individuals and the

family. But that doesn't matter - not if we are all members of the family.- - -One side effect of treating everyone like family is that it leaves little

room for one other concept that underpins Western societies: friends.For foreign city-dwellers, friendship is an essential institution, allowing

individuals to forge what feels like a community out of a big, anonymous

mass of people. As anthropologists have noted, the population of the average

person's address book is roughly the same as the population of a traditional

village. A network of friends, from this perspective, is essentially a

personalised, custom-made village, made up of only the people we want to

share our lives with. (Whilst this sounds like a good thing, and sometimes

is, it has a downside: popular people find themselves torn between too many

villages, whilst there are other lonely individuals whom nobody wants in the

village.)Rural islanders don't have this luxury of picking and choosing: they are

stuck with the community that they are born into. Their social network, or

at least a large part of it, comes ready-made. Their friends are their

relatives and their neighbours, which are usually the same thing.The word 'friend' does exist in Vanuatu - it even has equivalents in the

native languages (which is a good indication that the concept predated the

arrival of Westerners) - but it is not used in the same way as in Western

countries. Among men, or among women, the word refers to a brotherly or

sisterly relationship between people who happen not to share parents.

Between a boy and girl, the word implies a sexual relationship. "We're just

friends" in Vanuatu does not have the same meaning that it does back home.Such boy-girl friendships are always illicit, and do not have an official

place in Vanuatu communities. As soon as the couple's elders find out about

the friendship, it is either stamped out (Vanuatu's schools put a lot of

effort into catching and punishing students who try to make friends), or

else leads swiftly to marriage, which converts the friend into a family

member and restores the comfortable everyone-is-family situation.Ni-Vanuatu who see tourists and expatriates together find the ease with

which white men and women associate one another deeply bizarre. Many assume

that the friendships they see between these men and women must to some

extent be sexual, an attitude reinforced by the willingness of white women

to reveal what locals regard as indecent amounts of bare skin in front of

their male companions. Other islanders conclude that since white people all

come roughly from the same place and speak roughly the same language, what

they are seeing are brother/sister relationships between members of the same

clan. At Melsisi, the villagers habitually refer to me as Sara's brother. Some

realise that we aren't actual siblings, and a perceptive islander might

notice slight differences between our dialects and customs - the kind of

difference you'd expect between two ni-Vanuatu whose home villages were

maybe five miles apart. Nevertheless, we clearly belong to the same clan.

Sara and I haven't tried too hard to set them straight on this: my regular

visits to Sara's house in the evenings would be scandalous if she weren't my

sister.The idea that an unrelated boy and girl in Vanuatu cannot have a non-sexual

relationship is self-fulfilling. None would dare try to start an 'innocent'

friendship, since they are well aware that any attempt to do so would be

misinterpreted both by their prospective friend and by the rest of the

community. At school such a pair would certainly be punished: even if they

were believed when they told their teachers there was nothing romantic going

on, the teachers would consider that it was only a matter of time. Outside

school, too, they would be punished for their friendship, either by

concerned relatives keen to prevent an unwanted pregnancy or by chiefs

anxious to avoid a scandal in the village.Apart from fear of the consequences, the main reason local boys give for not

making friends with girls (except as a prelude to sex or marriage) is that

they are "ashamed". Western-style friends, defined in a way that the

ni-Vanuatu would understand, are two companions who could potentially have

sex but choose not to because one or both is already attached, has the wrong

sexual orientation, is irredeemably unattractive to the other person, is

unwilling to put time and effort into conducting a relationship, or is too

shy to ask. To have friends of the opposite sex is therefore tantamount to

an admission that you (or the people you choose to hang around with) are

gay, ugly, lazy, cowardly, or unfaithful to an existing partner. Hence the

shame."I don't talk to girls," a villager in his twenties recently told me, in the

manner of a six-year-old. "Boys, I talk to. But girls, never."

Good housekeeping can be summed up in one basic principle: you and your pets

should be the only living organisms in your house.Back home, this is not too difficult to achieve. Once upon a time it was

said that an Englishman's home was his castle, but a modern Englishman's

house is in fact his aquarium: a glass-windowed tank, carefully sealed from

the outside world. The main reason for this design is to shut out cold air,

but it has the useful additional benefit of shutting out any creature

incapable of turning a door handle. In any case, most of Britain's wildlife

is of the kind you see in children's books sitting on toadstools in the

forest, rather than the kind that you see illustrated on cans of poison

spray. As a result, most British homes contain few living things larger than

a bacterium, and with the help of expensive cleaning products even the

bacteria can be kept to a minimum.Houses on Pentecost are different. Since none are heated or air-conditioned,

there is no need for them to be well sealed - in fact, many builders

deliberately incorporate holes in their houses to let in light and fresh

air. Even houses that are made from cement and plywood, rather than from

bits of the local forest, are lightly built and contain plenty of cracks and

crevices. Windows are almost permanently open, and although in the newer

houses these are meshed to keep out mosquitoes, the meshing easily acquires

holes. This being the tropics, there is no shortage of critters that will

find them.Here at Ranwadi I accepted long ago that my house is a place of

biodiversity. Housekeeping here is an exercise in ecology, trying to

manipulate the environment so as to control the populations of the more

obnoxious members of the ecosystem. Rats, for example. These are endemic in

Vanuatu's villages, and in its schools. Leaning against the walls of the

Dining Hall, you can feel the vibrations of the creatures running behind the

wooden boards, inches away from you. In a staff meeting I was once laughed

at for suggesting that the school ought to try and do something about them.Every so often one of these rats finds its way into my kitchen and spends a

contented couple of days foraging there. Things come to a tragic end when

the hapless rodent stops to investigate the morsel of food placed temptingly

on a metal plate surrounded by spring-loaded wire. A few rat-free weeks then

go by before another rat comes along, finds the seemingly-inviting territory

to be vacant, and never stops to wonder why.Few of the rats make it as far as my bedroom (I am very careful not to keep

anything there that might tempt them in), but one or two are adventurous.

One night I had a dream in which a rat was crawling over me. I awoke to the

sound of scuttling rodent disappearing down the side of my bed, and realised

that there had indeed been a rat crawling over me.A different rat, finding all the food in my kitchen sealed into gnaw-proof

containers, developed a taste for eating the candles that I keep around the

house to provide lighting after the school generator is switched off in the

evenings. When I got fed up with the tooth marks on my candles and hid them

away in tins at bedtime, the rat switched to eating my bathroom soap

instead. The following night I set two traps: one baited with food, the

other baited with candle wax. The rat ignored the food, but couldn't resist

the wax, and is now roaming the great chandlery in the sky.Last month, in a reshuffle of the staff accommodation at Ranwadi, I was

moved into a new house, at the bottom of the hill at the entrance to the

school. Rats don't seem to venture down to this part of the school much, but

in their place the house has other visitors: large black lizards that hide

in the cupboards and leave runny trails of droppings across the kitchen

floor. Lizards present an unusual pest problem: they don't touch (or don't

spring) my rat traps, and none of the store-bought poisons that proudly

claim to kill rats, mice, flies, ants, cockroaches, spiders and so on make

any mention of diarrhoeic reptiles. In the end I was reduced to chasing the

creatures around the kitchen, trying unsuccessfully to stab them with

various implements. I didn't want to have to kill the lizards, but nor did I

want to cook in a kitchen full of shit.The black lizards, together with the yellow geckoes that hunt moths across

the walls, form the top of the house's food chain. I am technically at the

bottom of the food chain (in an interesting reversal of the outdoor

situation), since it is my crumbs and dead skin cells that sustain the

smallest of the insects, and my blood that feeds the mosquitoes which make

it past the netted windows.At the second level of the food chain are the spiders. Pentecost's is home

to some worryingly exotic-looking spiders - such as the armoured

black-and-yellow Butsungos, which shares its name with a monster in local

stories - but these tend to stay outdoors. Most of the ones I find indoors

are essentially ordinary brown house spiders, although some of them would be

large enough to get their photos in the local newspaper if they came

crawling out of a bunch of bananas back home. Despite their evil size, they

don't appear to be dangerous to anything larger than a cockroach, and since

anything dangerous to cockroaches is very welcome in my house, I have never

attempted to sweep out the creatures. As the saying goes, my enemy's enemy

is my friend. The giant spiders, which seem to hunt by pouncing on their

prey, are at least less messy than the smaller ones, which gather in

colonies to spin webs of sticky fluff along the walls and ceiling.The house's insects, too, are an ugly but ultimately fairly harmless lot

(unless you count the abundant malaria-carrying mosquitoes, which are

technically the world's most deadly creature). Wasps and hornets are absent,

apart from one slender variety (an introduced species, according to the

locals) that doesn't appear to sting anyone. Flies are an immense irritation

when sitting outdoors, but the mosquito netting keeps most of them out of

the house. The ants are a nuisance in the kitchen, but can easily be kept

off food by standing the plates and containers in dishes of water. (This

doesn't stop the geckoes, which enjoy licking sugary things and have been

known to take flying leaps onto trays of cakes and biscuits surrounded by

water.)The local insect life is most evident at night. Moths and other species that

evolved to navigate by flying towards the moon never anticipated that human

beings would one day fill the world with artificial moons, and Ranwadi,

being the only place for miles around with electric lighting, attracts

swarms of the creatures. After the power is turned off for the evening, the

moths and flies abandon circling the fluorescent lights and turn their

attention to any other light source they can find. When working late on my

laptop, I keep a candle beside it to distract the insects that would

otherwise hurl themselves at the screen when the electricity goes off and

the laptop, switching to battery power, becomes the only source of light in

the room. One particularly stupid variety of beetle will fly straight into

the candle flame, get knocked out by the heat and spend a few minutes

recuperating before flying straight back into the flame, repeating this over

and over again until the witless insect succeeds in burning itself to death.

I hope that if enough people burn candles on Pentecost, evolution will

eventually teach this species to fly only towards the cold white moon, not

the hot yellow one.At bedtime I blow out the candles (which leaves the house smelling of

birthdays), and the place becomes completely black. This is the cue for the

cockroaches to come out of their crevices. Occasionally I attempt to deal

with these by fumigating the house with spray cans brought from Vila, which

kills a good number of them, but the population quickly recovers. Brands of

insecticide that promise to provide "lasting three-month protection" don't

live up to their claims; Pentecost houses are too porous, and too

well-ventilated. Fumigation does have the interesting side effect of driving

out the more exotic crevice-dwellers, organisms that I would never otherwise

have realised that I was sharing a house with, but in some cases I would

have preferred them to remain hidden. Past hauls of dead creepy-crawlies

found after fumigation have included millipedes as long as pencils, a

centipede as long as my finger, and a small scorpion.The centipede bothered me the most. From the otherwise-dull Arthropod

Biology course that Edinburgh University forces its zoology students to take

in their final, two images stuck in my mind: the eerily blue eyes of one of

the girls in the class, and the sight of a garden centipede under a

microscope. The latter made me shudder; a more sinister-looking creature

would be hard to imagine. The tropical centipede that I found dead in my

house at Ranwadi looked much the same, except that I didn't need a

microscope to make out clearly the rows of jagged, articulated legs or the

red, venomous pincers. The locals reassured me that the beast was harmless.

The giant venomous centipedes that terrify expatriates in Port Vila are an

urban pest, not found on Pentecost. I put the centipede in a jar, took it down to the science lab, and pickled

it in methylated spirits. Next time the biology students were learning about

the redness and toothiness and clawiness of Nature, it would make an

enlightening specimen.

"I remember when the volcano on Ambrym fired up," Old Mark told me. "I was a boy at the time. The sky on Pentecost turned black. For three days my father had to light a stick of wild cane and take it with him when he went to work in the garden."

There had been no torches or paraffin lanterns back then.

"How old do you think you are?" I asked.

"Oh, I think I've beaten a hundred," he told me brightly.

People on Pentecost are seldom sure of their age. Even my students often respond with uncertainty when asked their dates of birth, and at the time Old Mark was born there was certainly nobody around ticking off days on a calendar. Ages are often exaggerated - several islanders claim to have grandparents aged 120 or more. However, since Old Mark had just described a historical event that occurred in 1913, the mystic-looking yet bright-eyed old man sitting beside me probably was a genuine centenarian.

In Vanuatu, even more so than in Britain, old people have lived through a fascinating amount of history. A hundred-year-old on Pentecost today is only a generation removed from the Dark Ages, and only a couple of further generations removed from the Stone Age. A real life Stig of the Dump, almost, yet one who has adapted with total nonchalance to the shiny screens that are filled on Friday nights with tiny moving people and to the flying canoes that pass low over the village on their way to the nearby airfield.

"Were there missionaries around when you were born?" I asked.

"Oh yes, I remember a couple," Old Mark said. He listed the names of some of the first missionaries to have worked on Pentecost - or at least, the first who had escaped the cooking pot long enough to begin converting the islanders to Jesus's cause.

I badly wanted to ask whether people were still eating each other at the time he grew up, but I couldn't think of a tactful way of phrasing the question. Recalling the trouble that Prince Philip had once got into for asking a similar thing on a similar island, I moved on instead to the subject I had come to ask about: the language that had been spoken when Old Mark was young.

Pentecost is haunted by the ghosts of extinct languages. The linguistic diversity of the place today is impressive enough - four living languages, with ten or eleven dialects between them, confined to an island of fifteen thousand people - yet in reality these merely represent the survivors from an age of an even greater diversity. Two centuries ago the inhabitants of Pentecost lived in tiny and isolated clans, and had lived that way for long enough for each clan to have developed its own distinct way of speaking. Occasionally a clan and its language would die out, but a new one would soon arise to replace it, and a rich variety was maintained.

The arrival of white people, however, unleashed a linguistic maelstrom. Pentecost's population was gutted out, as epidemics of Western disease to which the islanders had no immunity killed off perhaps nine-tenths of the people. The survivors regrouped in new villages, and were often obliged to marry those from other clans, since so few of their own clan's people were left. The establishment of schools, churches and plantations brought together young people from many different areas, among whom the most widely-spoken language would be adopted as a lingua franca. Some of the smaller languages became the preserve of the elderly, who would sit in lonely corners conversing in them, being largely ignored by their children and grandchildren (some of whom would later regret this deeply). When the last of these old people died - or rather, when the second-last person died - the ancestral languages would cease to be heard.

The last generation that truly spoke the old languages died off as the twentieth century drew to an end. However, some of their languages survive as ghosts in the minds of the speakers' children, people who never fully learned their parents' language but have not fully forgotten it either. The Ranwadi area is home to one such ghost, Sowa language, described in an earlier blog. North-western Pentecost has two resident ghost languages, named Volvoluana and Nggasai. And from southern Pentecost I'd heard numerous linguistic ghost stories, the most well-known of which centres around the village of Hotwata, once home to a language named Doltes. Doltes is believed to have died around half a century ago, yet its ghost survives in the memory of one very old villager: Old Mark.

Sitting in Old Mark's house, a breezy wood-and-cement building that would have resembled a dockside shed if it hadn't contained beds and mats, Old Mark gave me as many words and phrases as he could remember in Doltes, which he referred to as 'the small language'. He translated these for me into 'the big language' - Ske, the language now spoken in the Hotwata area. (This made me smile: Old Mark's 'big language' is spoken by a mere five hundred people. On my way down to Hotwata from Ranwadi, I'd walked right across the area in which it was spoken in an hour and a half.) With his grandchildren's help, Old Mark translated these phrases into Pidgin English, from which I translated them into proper English. It was a weird meeting of cultures: a speaker of a language known only by a single person, working with a speaker of a language known by a billion.

"Bononfu", Old Mark said. "That means dog, in the small language. In the big language we say 'boblievuk'."

Translated literally, 'the white person's pig'.

I noted the words and phrases down as best I could with English letters, scribbling circumflexes onto the ghost language's incredibly short vowels. In my basket I had an MP3 player containing a tiny microphone, but I didn't bother to get it out.

"'Tubwi'. That means bamboo in the small language. In the big language it's 'tumbul'."

I scribbled.

"But there's two kinds of bamboo," Old Mark continued. "The really strong kind they called 'aio fat'."

"Aio fat?"

"Yes. 'Aio' on its own means 'knife'."

Of course - before metal came along, knives were made from strong bamboo. This really was a Stone Age language.

We chatted more about language, and about history. The sun outside got lower, and I remembered that I had a long walk back at Ranwadi, and that I'd arranged to meet someone at sunset. I thanked Old Mark for sharing his language with me, and prepared to leave.

As I packed my notepad away, I remembered the MP3 player in my basket. Doltes might never have been recorded before, and there might never be a chance to record it again. By the time the next person with an interest in language happens to come by, Old Mark will probably not be around. I asked if the old man would mind repeating a few of the words into the microphone. He agreed, and I made my recordings.

When Old Mark eventually passes away, those two short MP3 files, tiny snatches less than a minute in length, may be all that survives of the sounds through which an entire community once lived their lives.

The community run by the famous Chief Viraleo at Lafatmangemu is, first and

foremost, a school. Not a school like Ranwadi, with its computers and

photocopiers and piles of textbooks following curricula designed in

Australia and New Zealand, taught largely by staff born or educated abroad.

Chief Viraleo's establishment was a school of custom. It claimed to be a

place where islanders could come to be schooled not in Western ideas and

Western languages, but in Pentecost's native traditions.Students of all ages come from all over the island to attend lessons, which

are held during the first week of each lunar month (the Western calendar has

been dispensed with in Lafatmangemu). I arrived on the day before the full

moon - the middle of the month - and the place was relatively empty,

although a few scholars remained. Most were young men. Many were introduced

as assistant chiefs, who had come to Lafatmangemu to acquire knowledge about

traditional customs which they would then take back and share with their

communities.Upon my arrival I was shown the way to school office, which occupied the

upper level of an impressed two-storey building made entirely from local

wood and bamboo (except for the tin roof, and even that was lined on the

inside with a woven bamboo ceiling). I clambered up the wooden staircase and

was met at the door of the office by a bearded scholar."Ihaku be Andrew. Nan mai Ranwadi." That was as much North Pentecost

Language as I could manage; I switched into Pidgin English, and asked if

Chief Viraleo was around.The assistant showed me into the room. It was large, cosy-looking, and

richly decorated with everything from sculptures in traditional patterns to

posters of local wildlife. Many of the notices on the walls consisted of

strange, loopy symbols: Pentecost's native writing system. This was Avoiuli,

the 39-letter alphabet based on designs in ancient sand drawings that Chief

Viraleo had spent fourteen years deciphering (or, according to his critics,

inventing).The chief was sitting in front of an old fashioned ledger, filled with his

native writing. He was a younger man than I expected, with a shaved head,

narrow reading glasses and the air of an eccentric schoolteacher. He got up,

walked over to me, and tapped his forehead against mine."That's our custom greeting. We don't shake hands here."I introduced myself properly and explained why I had come. "I've heard lots

of stories about this place.""Yes, the BBC were filming here a few weeks ago," Chief Viraleo said. "One

of their people was called Andrew too."I knew - several friends and relatives had forwarded me the news article.

The BBC had come to report not on the school, but on another of Chief

Viraleo's ventures, his 'custom bank'. Instead of dealing in vatu, Vanuatu's

official currency, the bank at Lafatmangemu deals in 'livatu', a novel

currency based on the red mats and curved boar's tusks that Pentecost

islanders traditionally used as money.A lifetime's education at the school of custom costs 72 livatu. At an

official exchange rate of 18,000 vatu ($180) to the livatu, this amounts to

over a million vatu - a lot of money even by Western standards, and

substantially more than the cost of an education at Vanuatu's ordinary

schools. Some sceptics, looking at the price of pigs' tusks and mats in

their own villages, claim that the livatu is overvalued. However, since

pigs' tusks and mats are not identical and some are naturally worth more

than others, this is hard to prove."What if I wanted to stay for just a couple of days at your school, learning

about custom?" I asked. "Do you offer short courses?""Do you have any livatu?""What do you mean?" Lacking the right currency was a problem I'd only

encountered before when crossing international borders, not when crossing a

five-mile-wide island in one small corner of one small country."Do you have any pig's teeth?"Damn, I left those at home."Couldn't I pay in vatu?"Chief Viraleo gave me a look like an animal rights activist whose friend has

just asked if she'd look good in a fur coat."Sorry to corrupt your village with white man's money," I said. "It's all I

have." Surely the chief's bank could convert it for me.Chief Viraleo thought for a while, and accepted. We negotiated a price."You can pay your school fees at a ceremony this afternoon," he told me.

According to custom, it seemed, you can't just hand something over and get a

receipt. I would have to stand in the nasara while a chief walked around

three times, inspecting my cash as if it were a red mat or a pig that I was

presenting for approval, while a speech was given thanking me and welcoming

me into the school.From outside came the thudding noise of a slit drum: the school bell."Lunch time."I followed the chief and his assistant down the wooden steps of the

building, across a forest clearing and into the huge nakamal that served as

both the school's classroom and its dining hall. The building had a brown

dirt floor and no walls, just an enormous, overhanging roof, made entirely

from bamboo and palm thatch and supported on pillars made from tree trunks.

Benches of local timber ran along the sides of the nakamal, and an

old-fashioned blackboard stood at one end. A blossoming nakavika tree

carpeted the bare ground outside in deep pink fluff.A rather un-traditional bank of fluorescent lights had been attached to the

rafters of the nakamal, connected by garish pale wires to a light switch on

one of the pillars."We only run the electricity generator on special occasions," Chief Viraleo

told me.An old man entered the nakamal."Rantavuha," I said. Good day."We don't use that phrase here," Chief Viraleo said. "Here we follow the old

custom: we address people as family. If a man is your father, you greet him

with the word 'father'. If he is your uncle, you greet him as 'uncle'. Or if

he is a chief, you can address him by his chiefly title.""What if you don't know who somebody is?" This wasn't an issue in

traditional times, when strangers in the village were a rare sight and any

who did turn up were likely to be treated with suspicion rather than greeted

cordially, but Pentecost society has changed since then."You should call him 'tua'." The local word for 'brother'."OK.""We find that using the old system helps make sure we know our families,"

Chief Viraleo explained. "If you just say good day, you start to forget who

people are."Women shuffled into the nakamal and began laying out food. A group of

slightly malnourished-looking children wandered at their feet."Here we eat only local food," Chief Viraleo said. "We don't eat anything

that we buy from the store.""No biscuits, no chocolate, no tomato sauce?" I said. "I feel sorry for

you."Everybody laughed.Nobody in Lafatmangemu eats from plates or dishes. Instead, each person's

food was served on a woven, basket-like tray, lined with giant heliconia

leaves. One of the women handed me such a tray, heaped with an absurd

quantity of food. There were pieces of baked tuber in an assortment of

phallic shapes, which were bland and starchy in varying degrees, along with

chewy slabs of grated vegetable that had been mashed up with coconut milk

and baked in a fire to make laplap, Vanuatu's national dish. Some visitors

to the country take to laplap, others despise it; none would choose to eat

it for three meals a day.A side dish, consisting of a gigantic bean pod that had been boiled down

into greenish-brown mush, was handed to me in a bowl made from a giant

clamshell."Try this," said Chief Viraleo, pulling out the inside of an exotic-looking

whelk and handing it to me. It had a green tinge, and tasted as if it had

been plucked straight from the reef at low tide. I swallowed.After lunch, I was shown to the dormitory that I would be sharing with the

scholars. This was another dirt-floored nakamal, dark except for the grey

light straining through slats in the walls. There were no beds or

mattresses; instead, people slept on woven pandanus mats on the floor, with

coconut leaves underneath them for padding. I lay down and found that

midribs of the leaves dug into my back, making it hard to get comfortable.

The pillows, too, were made from strips of pandanus, hard and shiny, woven

together at the edges and stuffed with crushed-up leaves. Woven mats were

historically used as bed covers, too, but here at Lafatmangemu the scholars

had brought along ragged sheets of cloth to sleep under. Some had also

strung mosquito nets over their beds. There are custom medicines that can

relieve malaria, but people didn't seem to put too much faith in them.That afternoon, I rested and chatted to Chief Viraleo. Another chief was

introduced, a yellow-haired and elderly man, and I paid my school fees.

After circling me three times, the old man slapped me on the legs like a

prized pig as I handed over the money.At sunset, the men at Lafatmangemu gathered in yet another nakamal, higher

up the hill, to drink kava while women and children busied themselves in the

background preparing dinner. The nakamal was in the process of being

rebuilt, and half of the building consisted of bare wooden posts, with a

gnarled yet sturdy-looking ladder made of local wood leaning against them.

Bats flapped in and out of the nakamal, and the forest outside was

mystic-looking in the moonlight.Wood fires glowed under the cooking pots, and one woman held a bundle of

strips from a coconut frond which she used as a flaming torch, shaking it

every time the light dimmed so that it flared into life, scattering glowing

sparks on the ground. Small lanterns illuminated the rest of building.

Paraffin being a Muggle invention, and an expensive one, the people of

Lafatmangemu fuelled their lamps using locally-pressed coconut oil instead

(a very sensible idea that other communities in Vanuatu ought to copy). Some

of the little lights were made with half-coconut shells; others burned

inside tall glass jars."We found the jars washed up on the beach," Chief Viraleo told me. "We think

they came from Fiji." Supper was handed out in individual baskets, which each man took back to eat

the dormitory after he'd finished drinking kava. When I returned to the

dormitory, my companions had already lit a camp fire in the middle of the

floor and were sitting around it on wooden stumps, tearing apart lumps of

pig and taro from their baskets. I joined them, licking my greasy fingers -

there are no knives and forks in Lafatmangemu - and flicking gristly bits of

pig into the fire. The fire died down as we finished eating (which I was

thankful for, as it was rather close to my flammable-looking sleeping mat).

By the time I fell asleep the only light in the dormitory came from red

embers and a green luminous mushroom growing out of one of the wooden posts

in the wall.I woke at dawn the next day and went in search of a stream or a river in

which to wash. (I knew better than to ask Chief Viraleo where the bathroom

was.) I was shown the way to the village well, a deep, sandy hole in the

forest with slippery spiral steps running around the edge. Constructing a

narrow, European-style well with a winch for hoisting up water would have

been impossible in the days of true custom, I realised. At the bottom of the

well was a black, murky puddle of water, overhung by ferns. I filled up a

bucket (waterproof containers are one concession to modernisation that

you'll find even in the most traditional of Vanuatu communities) and

disappeared into a nearby shack of coconut leaves to have a shower.Breakfast consisted of more laplap and tubers, with a clamshell of boiled

cabbage on the side. I made a mental note: when visiting custom villages,

bring a supply of chocolate."We find we have more strength when we eat only traditional food," Chief

Viraleo told me.Forget strength - I wanted a sugar hit.After breakfast, the scholars went to work on various activities, and I

followed Chief Viraleo back into his office."So, what do you want to learn?" he asked.I had lots of questions for the chief, but the thing I had really come to

find out about was language. A while ago, with the help of my students at

Ranwadi, I had begun the daunting task of trying and compile a phrasebook of

all five of Pentecost's native languages (and their thirteen dialects).

Several students obligingly contributed words and phrases, but a problem

emerged: the language of Pentecost's youth today is insidiously mixed with

Pidgin English.Pentecost's native tongues are the languages of Stone Age people. In their

original form, they lacked a vast number of words that are necessary in

modern life: not just for technologies such as 'engine' and 'telephone', but

also for the intangible concepts of big civilisation, such as 'association'

and 'government'. Some speakers have attempted to solve this problem the

Icelandic way, by creatively rearranging the words they already had in their

languages: there is a local word for 'plane' that translates literally as

'flying canoe'. However, the main way in which the problem was solved was by

massive borrowing of words from the foreigners who had introduced all these

new things to the islands. As a means of acquiring terminology for new concepts, there is no harm in

this. After all, this kind of borrowing is largely how the English language

itself has expanded and enriched itself over the years. However, on

Pentecost the mixing of indigenous languages with the national one has

become such a habit that even perfectly good native words, such the terms

for 'blue' and 'thousand', are now being replaced by the Pidgin English

equivalents. Some villagers tell me that the language of children educated

in Churches of Christ schools such as Ranwadi is particularly corrupt.Some borrowed words have been so mangled in the conversion that people no

longer even realise that they are foreign words. Even native English

speakers have difficulty spotting that 'kolosisi' (toilet), for example,

comes from their own language.If Pentecost's young people want to alter their languages, that is their

choice. However, it would be immensely sad if there were no record of the

old words - something that my students can look back on in fifty years time

if they wish to reminisce about the language their grandparents' once spoke.

In the phrasebook, therefore, I wanted to try and include as many genuine

native words as possible, alongside their Pidgin replacements. And if there

was one person who was sure to know the traditional words, it was Chief

Viraleo.The chief and I spent the morning flicking through books and notes, and

writing down words. Sometimes Chief Viraleo would scribble down a word in

his own alphabet first, and ponder over it for a while before offering me a

Western transliteration. We pored over pictures of birds and trees. The ones

that the chief didn't recognise from the pictures, we showed to the other

scholars down at the nakamal at lunchtime. I sat in the centre of half a

dozen young men, all vigorously debating the identity of a particular

species."It grows deep in the bush; flying foxes take the fruit. Yellow fruit, not

red ones. Maybe they're the same kind. Straight wood, black in the centre.

People used to make arrows out of it. No, that's not the right name, wait,

it'll come to me. This tree is a."And I would hurriedly scribble down the word as the men smiled and agreed

that this was indeed the correct name of the tree.I asked a lot of questions at the school of custom, and got answers to most

of them. However, the exchange of ideas went both ways, and during the two

days I found myself trying awkwardly to string together Pidgin English

answers to some very searching questions. Chief Viraleo had one of the most

probing minds of anyone I'd met. In conversation he had a bright stare that

gave the impression he was weighing what had been said carefully, finding

the connections, and analysing how it fitted into his eccentric picture of

the world."What are you reading?" he asked, arriving in the nakamal after an afternoon

break and scrutinising my copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows."A story," I told him. "A story about a boy who fights against people who

use black magic.""Ah yes, black magic.""It's just a story," I said. Although it would be hard to find any school in

the real world that resembled Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

more closely than Chief Viraleo's school of custom."You're a science teacher, aren't you?" he asked."Uh huh.""Do scientists believe there is magic?""No," I said."But what is magic?"Magic is anything that scientists don't believe possible, I thought, but

realised that this was a circular argument. It was actually a good question:

how do you define magic?"Imagine if somebody wants to move a stone," I said, giving the first

example that came into my head. "If they move it by touching it, or blowing

on it, or poking it with something, that is normal. But if they can move it

without touching it or pushing it in any way, that is magic.""Here, stones move without being touched or pushed," Chief Viraleo informed

me."Really?""Yes. A while ago, a huge stone appeared on the reef down there. Nobody knew

where it had come from. It just appeared. That was magic.""The sea probably shifted it there.""But it was a big stone. A really big one. The sea couldn't have moved it.

Nobody could have moved it. It just appeared.""You believe in magic then?""Yes, of course." Chief Viraleo looked at me inquisitively. "But you really

don't believe?""No, I don't."Chief Viraleo thought for a moment. "What if a sick person uses a leaf to

make himself better? Is that magic?""Not necessarily," I said. "Plenty of leaves are known to act as medicines.""What if a person uses a leaf to make it rain on a hot day?""That would be magic.""What's the difference?""Scientists know how medicinal leaves work," I said. "They can study them,

and find out what's inside the leaf that helps the body to heal. But there's

no means by which rubbing a leaf can cause rain.""People here use the leaves, and when they do, it starts to rain.""Perhaps it would have rained anyway." It rains a lot on East Pentecost."But it always happens after people do their magic.""When do people do this magic?" I asked, rhetorically. "They do it after a

hot day. And that's the time when it rains. Scientists can explain that -

it's got nothing to do with leaves. On a hot day, the power of the sun

causes water to rise up into the air. Afterwards, that water falls back down

as rain. That would happen whether you rubbed the leaves or not."Chief Viraleo was chuckling and smiling. He didn't believe me, but he was

enjoying the debate."Do scientists believe in things like gods and spirits?" he asked."Some do.""So those are part of science?""No.""What are they then?""Religion."Chief Viraleo nodded. "And not all scientists believe in these things?""That's right.""But how can you explain the creation of the world, if there are no gods and

spirits?""Oh, scientists have a very good explanation for that," I said. "Before the

world existed, there were lots of stones flying around in space. Scientists

have another story explaining how those stones got there in the first

place," I added quickly, forestalling a possible objection to my theory.

"Those stones came together, one by one, to make bigger stones. They were

pulled together, in the same way that things are pulled towards the ground."

I demonstrated this by dropping Harry Potter; the heavy book hit the bench

below with satisfying force. "Bigger and bigger rocks came together, and

eventually formed a really big stone - the world we're standing on.""Yes, someone else told me there are lots of stones flying around in space,"

Chief Viraleo said, interested. "Is it true that one of them could fall down

and kill us?""It could happen," I said, "but it probably won't. Most of the stones are so

small that they burn up in the air. When you see a falling star, that's what

it is - a burning stone from space." Chief Viraleo looked a little confused. In the down-to-earth lives of the

ni-Vanuatu, one of the essential properties of a stone is that it doesn't

burn."But sometimes these stones do hit the ground?""Yes." I smiled. "Maybe that's where the mystery stone on your reef came

from. Maybe it came from space."We all laughed."What about the other stars? The ones that don't move.""They're like the sun," I said. "Like the sun, but very far away.""And the planets?""They're like the world we're on," I said, "except that there are no trees

or animals or water. Just empty stone, and sometimes clouds.""How many planets do scientists believe in?""There are eight going around the sun," I said. "Eight, including the world

we're on. Scientists used to say that there were nine, but then they held a

meeting and decided that the ninth shouldn't be called a planet. It's really

just another big stone.""In our custom, we believe that there are ten planets," Chief Viraleo said.That was interesting. "So your ancestors knew that our world isn't the only

one?""Yes.""Did they realise that our world is round?""Yes, they knew that.""How?""They saw it in an ancient sand drawing," he said, crouching down and

scratching a design in the dirt floor. The design was enclosed by a circle."This circle," Chief Viraleo said, tracing it with his finger, "is formed by

the wind, blowing around the world."That made sense. The wind blows across Pentecost largely in one direction -

as the unfortunate inhabitants of the east coast, who are on the windward

side of the island, know well. It would be natural to assume that the wind

was going around in a circuit and coming back."So your ancestors invented this drawing.""No, it was here before them."That was strange. "Are they any legends about how your ancestors first

arrived on Pentecost?" I asked."They didn't arrive," Chief Viraleo told me. "They were created here."This, too, was strange. I'd heard other stories - from local people, as well

as history books - recounting the arrival of the first ni-Vanuatu in canoes

across the ocean. One local legend puts their arrival on Pentecost at 140

generations ago, which fits fairly well with archaeologists' beliefs. "So people were created here on Pentecost, and then spread to the rest of

the world?""Yes. They built a ship, and sailed away across the ocean. And I now know

where that ship went ashore," Chief Viraleo proclaimed."Where?""Mali."Apart from being on almost exactly the opposite side of the world, I was

pretty sure that Mali is a landlocked country - quite an unlikely place for

a ship full of Pacific islanders to turn up."How do you know this?" I asked."I was in Brussels once," Chief Viraleo told me. "I went there to attend a

conference on traditional culture. I went out for dinner one evening, at a

restaurant. In restaurants in Europe, you can ask for anything you want, and

they will cook it for you," he added, for the benefit of the assistant

sitting next to him.In Pentecost food shacks, the choice of meal depends entirely on what the

chef happens to be stewing up that day."I ordered a steak, and they brought me a steak. I asked for a glass of

wine, and they brought me wine."Chief Viraleo's assistant whistled, impressed."And then I noticed that there was a sand-drawing design on the wall. It was

exactly the same as the designs on Pentecost."A lot of Pentecost's traditional sand-drawings are quite simple patterns; it

wouldn't be particularly surprising if somebody else in world had arrived by

chance at the same design. I knew it would be useless to try and suggest

this."I asked where the design had come from. The chef said it had come from

Mali. So I know that the ship from Pentecost went to Mali.""Mali is a desert country," I said. "It has a lot of sand. Maybe the people

there invented sand drawing for themselves.""But this design was exactly the same as the ones on Pentecost." Try looking up 'coincidence' in the dictionary of Vanuatu Pidgin English -

it's not there. The word doesn't exist in the islanders' vocabularies.I tried a different argument. "How do you know that the design wasn't

invented in Mali, and then taken to Pentecost later?""Because our ancestors understood the meaning of the design. They knew what

it symbolised. That proves that it started here."Five minutes earlier I'd felt as if I was in a Harry Potter story. Now it

seemed like I'd strayed into the Da Vinci Code."The Bible doesn't say anything about Man being created in Vanuatu, I said."

Citing the Bible is usually a fail-safe way to win an argument with a

ni-Vanuatu. "No, but in custom, we believe that's how it happened.""So you don't follow the Bible?" Hearing a Pentecost islander contradict the

Bible was like hearing a Scotsman praise the English - refreshing,

provocative, and unsettlingly strange. "Do you believe in God?""I was schooled as an Anglican," Chief Viraleo said. Exactly the same

evasive response that I give when people on Pentecost ask my religion."Is there a church here?""There's one in the next village." Evasive again.Chief Viraleo, I realised later, was reluctant to tell me his beliefs for

fear that I'd criticise him as a sinner. Over shells of kava that evening,

the other scholars were more open."Back in our villages, there are people who don't want anything to do with

us, because we no longer pray," one told me. "But we're not living without

religion - we do have gods.""In custom, there are two gods," another explained. "Everyone else in the

world says there is one god. It is only here on Pentecost that we believe in

two.""Plenty of cultures believe in many gods," I said. "But having exactly two

gods - that is unusual.""There must be two gods, because there is two of everything in the world,"

the scholar explained. "Look at yourself. You have two eyes. Two ears. Two

hands. Two legs. People are divided into men and women - two kinds. It's the

same with animals - two of each kind. So there must be two gods."I wanted to explain that there are species of micro-organism that have

dozens of different sexes, but my Pidgin English failed me."What if the two gods disagree about how to run the world?" I asked."They don't. They work together.""Then how can you be sure that there are two of them?""Look," one of the scholars said, "The Bible talks about God and Satan,

right?"I nodded."God and Satan - there you are. Two of them. Two gods - just like ours.""Satan isn't a god," I protested."Why do you say that?"I thought about this, and realised that Satan does in fact have all the

attributes of a god."You see," one of the scholars said. "Our beliefs aren't really that

different from the Bible."God-fearing islanders don't all see it that way. A couple of days after

returning to Ranwadi, when I told the men down at the nakamal about my trip

to Lafatmangemu, Old Zaccheus the Principal's father was visibly angry at

what he heard."You see this," he said, wavy a chubby finger at the candle illuminating the

nakamal. "This is what the missionaries brought us. Light! The light of God!

Before they came, we were down here, in darkness." He pointed at the shadow

cast by the wooden stump on which the candle stood. "People were fighting

each other. They were killing each other. They were eating each other! Then

the word of God arrived, and we rose up into light." He illustrated this

progress with hand gestures directed at the candle. "Now they want to drag

us back down into darkness again!"I stared thoughtfully at the darkness underneath the candle."I've spoken to people from villages where people have gone and joined the

school at Lafatmangemu," the old man went on. "There are no pigs' tusks or

red mats left in those villages now. The people have given them all to

Viraleo. All of them. What will happen if one of them wants to get married?

How will they pay for the ceremony? All their pigs and mats are gone! And

for what? It's. it's. all just a."I think the word that Old Zaccheus (and several other people I spoke) to

were skirting around, or perhaps didn't know, was "cult". Vanuatu, with its

deeply spiritual, tribally-minded and intellectually isolated people, has

always been a rich spawning ground for cults. The arrival in the past

century of European sailors and American soldiers laden with fabulous

foreign goods spawned cargo cults, some of whose followers actually built

roads and wharves in preparation to receive the miraculous cargo which they

believed would be delivered if they prayed hard enough for it. Elsewhere in

the country, the idea that the British royal family are of ni-Vanuatu

ancestry (an improbable belief that is surprisingly widespread throughout

Vanuatu) has reportedly given rise to a cult of people who worship Prince

Philip. Could Chief Viraleo's quirky establishment be just another cult, a

group of followers bewitched by a persuasive yet self-serving leader?But it was natural for Zaccheus to be angry at the developments at

Lafatmangemu, I thought: he is an elder of the church. And some of the more

evangelical church ministries that find eager audiences in Vanuatu have

cult-like qualities themselves.I remembered Benny Hinn, the multi-millionaire American faith healer whose

begging letters addressed to poor students continue to pile up in the inbox

at Ranwadi, even after I returned one of them with a letter of my own

explaining to Mr Hinn and his colleagues that the people they are writing to

are struggling Third World schoolchildren and pleading for the poor kids to

be removed from his mailing list. If the people of Pentecost are going to

put their money and faith in the hands of a questionable leader, it has to

be better that they throw in their lot with Chief Viraleo - who has never

threatened anybody with hellfire and who promises his followers nothing more

than a thought-provoking education (a promise that he capably fulfils) -

than with the likes of Benny Hinn."Another thing," Old Zaccheus continued, "is that the idea of using only

custom money doesn't make sense. What if I want to order something from

town? They will want cash - they won't accept red mats! And what if the

Japanese lend us money for a project? They won't want to be paid back in

pigs' teeth."This had occurred to me too. I've heard too many comments - not just from

Chief Viraleo, but also from Western journalists who have reported on his

banking scheme - implying that the 'custom economy' somehow offers the

islanders a means of relief from poverty. Their logic seems to run something

like this: in an economy based on vatu and dollars the people of Vanuatu are

poor, because they have little money, but in an economy based on pigs and

red mats they are rich, because those things are plentiful here. You don't

have to be an economist to spot the flaw in this. Vanuatu's economic problem

is an external one: there is a 3 billion vatu difference between the money

that Vanuatu spends on foreign imports and the money that it earns with

which to pay for those goods. Unless the Australians and Taiwanese develop a

sudden desire to own highly-curved tusks, custom currency cannot possibly be

used to make up the shortfall.Of course, traditional money can and does play a role in the internal

economy of islands such as Pentecost. However, apart from its cultural

cuteness it's hard to see why it's better than Western money, and it does in

fact have some disadvantages. As I pointed out to one scholar at

Lafatmangemu who tried to tell me that coins and banknotes were a pointless

invention, you can't put a pig in your wallet."Chief Viraleo isn't the only one promoting the custom economy," I told

Zaccheus in his defence. "The Vanuatu government is into it too. After all,

they've just ruled that only traditional items such as pigs and mats - not

vatu - can be used in ceremonies."This caused a murmuring around the nakamal. The villagers, it seemed, hadn't

been aware of this."There was a wedding down the coast yesterday," somebody said. "The bride

was paid for with vatu.""It's a free country," said Old Zaccheus defiantly. "If people want to use

vatu in their ceremonies, they have the right to do that. What right does

the government have to stop them?""There are already plenty of laws and customs that control how people use

money," I pointed out. "Both here and in countries like mine, there are

certain things that it's perfectly legal to give someone, but utterly

forbidden to sell for money. Political influence, for instance. Or sex."In fact, I realised, those are exactly the two things that are generally

bought and sold with custom currency - the former at grade-taking rituals

where the slaughter of pigs allows a man to rise through the chiefly ranks,

the latter at weddings. It wasn't really surprising that the government

objected to the use of cash in such ceremonies."But what if somebody who wants to get married has a lot of vatu, but no

custom currency?""Then he can use his money to buy pigs and mats from someone who does have

them." Chief Viraleo would do nicely out of the whole business. Perhaps the

guy did understand economics after all.However far-fetched his ideas may have been, Chief Viraleo was

unquestionably a thinker - and he was the kind of thinker who inspires the

people around him to think too. At the end of the day, I liked and respected

him for that. "On my trip to Europe, I went to England," the chief had told me. "I was

really surprised at what I found there. I had been taught that England was a

great country. It used to lead the world. Yet when I arrived there, I found

people begging on the road. People with no food and no money. It was the

same in the other countries I went to. Big, rich, powerful countries. It was

a real surprise to go there and find people who were hungry.""I know," I said. It's a paradox that Vanuatu, which is among the poorest of

the thirty-two countries I've visited, is also the only one in which nobody

begs on the streets."And yet the people I saw in the restaurants threw their half-eaten food

into the dustbin. The ones who were hungry on the road had to come and eat

it out of the dustbin. Why couldn't the people in the restaurants just have

given their unwanted food straight to the people who needed it?"I had never really thought about this before. Perhaps they couldn't be

bothered, I mused, although I didn't say this out loud. Sharing food is an

important way in which ni-Vanuatu show their friendship, not just with their

friends and neighbours but also with visitors and strangers, and I was

frightened of what Chief Viraleo would think of a society that allows the

person on the other side of the road to go hungry simply because the person

with food to spare cannot be bothered to go across and hand it over. My

second thought was that restaurants nowadays would probably be frightened of

being sued, if their generosity happened to inadvertently make somebody ill.

I didn't share this idea either; my ni-Vanuatu companions would have found

it too ridiculous for words.I said nothing. Chief Viraleo stared at me quizzically. I suspected I knew

what he was thinking. It isn't always our customs that are the crazy ones.

There was a very slight unease in people's expressions when I told them that

I was planning to go over to the other side.It'll be interesting for you to see, some of them said. Interesting how they

do things over there.The day before I crossed over the island was a Sunday. Attending church in

the village of Nambwarangiut on the north-west coast of Pentecost, from

which I'd planned to start my trek, an old man on the bench in front of me

turned around part way through the service and whispered to me. I hear you're planning to go across to Lafatmangemu.I nodded.I want to give a talk to you.After the priest had concluded his service, the old man stood up in front of

the church and addressed the congregation. First he gave messages of

encouragement to a group of local youths who were preparing to go and

participate in a sports tournament. Behave yourselves, he warned them. Then

he turned his attention to me.I didn't understand everything he said - nothing said to me during this trip

was in English - but his message seemed to be this: remember that what they

do over there doesn't solely reflect on Pentecost. Their ideas draw on those

of Melanesia as a whole.I don't want to criticise their methods, said another man, as the villagers

and I sat on tree stumps in the moonlight that evening. But you must

remember that some of the things they say and the things they do are things

they invented themselves. They don't represent our traditions.I realise that, I said. But I'm curious to see them anyway.The next day, my host showed me the path that led up the mountain. The

north-west coastline of Pentecost expanded below us, rich blues and greens

hazed with the steamy dew of a tropical morning. The sun, peering over the

hilltop, was shining on Nambwarangiut.I knew Pentecost's climate well enough to realise that I was probably

leaving the sunshine behind. A couple of miles into the interior of the

island a thin mist descended - or rather, we ascended into it. For an hour

or two the road meandered along ridges and hillsides, past windswept gardens

and stands of tall trees. Solitary namala - harrier hawks - hunted across

them. It began to spit rain.In a dense clump of bushes, we passed the site of a giant's grave. A man so

big, according to legend, that children could hide under his arms.At the Village of the Eight Stones - the eponymous stones were arranged in a

cross shape outside the nakamal, placed there by an old chief for some

ancient purpose - our path joined the white road. This desolate, chalky

highway, connecting north and south Pentecost, is etched like a vertebral

column onto the highest ridge of the island. Cold vapour hung on the ridge.We walked for a little way along the white road, through a village whose

thatched roofs were black and sodden. We reached a turning, and my host led

me aside along a small footpath, through a stand of trees and onto the top

of a rocky cliff.There's a good view from here, he said.Below, in a thunderous mist, stretched the coastline of East Pentecost -

known to locals as the Big Sea. This is the wild side of Pentecost, the open

ocean. The place where winds that have blown free across the ocean for a

thousand miles slam into a two thousand foot wall of island, reacting with a

fury of cloud and condensation that drenches East Pentecost in greyness. Out

towards the horizon of the Big Sea the water was faintly blue - the sun was

shining out there - but closer to shore the mist had turned it the colour of

metal. Enormous jagged reefs stretched away from the shore, barricading the

island against the anger of the ocean, which pounded on the reefs with such

violence that even from here on the mountaintop I thought I could hear the

noise.Down by the white-washed shore I could see a village; elsewhere the

mountainsides stretched away into the fog in shades of the darkest

imaginable green. When diseases cut through Pentecost's population a century

ago, most of the survivors fled west towards the lights of missionaries and

cargo ships, who landed on the island's placid western coast rather than

braving the Big Sea. There on the west coast, they built schools and

churches and stores, while on the far side the inhabitants of the few

remaining villages continued, in an isolated and lonely way, to follow the

lifestyle of their ancestors. The ghosts of their lost neighbours vanished

into the forest.The road down the mountainside twisted away into the trees below us.You can find your own way from here?Yes. I thanked my host, and set off down towards the Big Sea.On a couple of bends, I encountered toothless old villagers, who stopped in

surprise at the sight of a white person on the road.I'm going down to Lafatmangemu, I told them.Do you know the way?I think so.Do you have a map?Yes, I told them, half truthfully. I did have a map, but I'd left it at

home. You can't follow maps on Pentecost - the island's terrain is too

convoluted, the roads are too organic, the maps are too vague. Even the big

maps surveyed by the Vanuatu Lands Department are a decade old, and covered

with labels such as "approximate position".The road reached the ocean at Renbura - the village I'd seen from the

mountaintop. Prehistoric houses of wood and bamboo, built on gritty sand,

set back from the shore at what their owners hoped was a safe distance from

the ocean. The tide was out, exposing vast flats of sand and stone, a No

Man's Land in the battle between island and sea. Beyond this empty zone,

giant waves reared like white ghouls out of the grey water.I took a shortcut across the beach, wading a blue-tinted river, and rejoined

the road as it ran northwards along the sandy woodland beside the shore. The

woodland had a skeletal appearance; saltwater had burned and flushed the

undergrowth away. The bare ground was littered with droppings from the trees

- the long hairy flowers and giant seed pods of the sea navele, the round

nuts of the nambagura, and the long needles of the whistling pine -

blackened with damp, and silvered with moisture.After a mile or so, the road turned inland, and darkened sand gave way to

compacted mud. Bushes had been planted along the roadsides - spiky-leafed

namele and slender, colourful nanggaria, both powerful symbols of Vanuatu

custom. Thatched houses and the triangular roof of a huge nakamal could be

seen behind the trees.The nakamal at Lafatmangemu is enormous, I had been told. Bigger than any

you've seen before.This must be the place.Were they expecting me? There are no telephones in this part of Pentecost,

but I had tried to pass on a message to let them know was coming. I had no

idea if the message had arrived. Nervously, I approached the village, and

prepared to introduce myself.[To be continued.]

My first brush with the devil nettle was in the forested gulley that runs

down the northern boundary of the school grounds. Since this gulley is

occasionally used as a hideaway by boys and girls who sneak out for illicit

liaisons, it wouldn't surprise me if someone had planted it there on

purpose. A romp in the bushes loses its appeal when the bushes can give you

nasty stings.The pain inflicted by touching the devil nettle's leaves is no more intense

than the sting of a juicy British nettle. However, the devil nettle is the

size of a small tree, and its stings remain sore for a week.Devil nettle is a description invented by Western botanists ('fever nettle'

and 'nettle tree' are alternative names). Among islanders the species is

always referred to as the nanggalat. The reviled tree is synonymous with

things that sting: jellyfish, in the local languages, translates as

"nanggalat of the sea".Trees and plants of all kinds feature very strongly in the lives of the

people of Pentecost. They are the only resource that the island has, apart

from stones and water and a meagre amount of wildlife. Whilst the nanggalat

may be a nuisance, there are maybe a hundred other local tree species that

people value for one reason or another. The bulk of the islanders'

house-building and nearly all of their cooking is done using wood gathered

from the local forest, and trees were also a traditional source of dyes,

resins and twine. There are jungle trees with enormous flat buttresses that

were used for making plates and dishes in the days before China's

manufacturing industry flooded the world with its wares. There is the

perfume tree, the glue tree, the bead tree, the ankle rattle tree, the fish

poison tree, and the canoe tree, whose uses are self-explanatory. There are

decorative plants, such as the croton (known in Pidgin as the 'colour

leaf'), and the nanggaria (victory leaves) that are worn by dancers at

ceremonies. There is also a variety of medicinal plants, many of them known

only to witchdoctors, people who are referred to in Pidgin as 'clevers'

because of their specialist knowledge.Most obviously, there are the fruit and nut trees. In addition to familiar,

introduced species such as bananas, mangoes, papayas, avocados and oranges,

there are nakavika (Malay apples), nakatambol (dragon plums), naus (hog

plums), nandao (native lychees), navele (bush nuts), nangae (native

almonds), and namambe (Tahitian chestnuts). (In case you're wondering why

the names of all Vanuatu's native trees begin with "na", in several of the

country's languages "na" is a grammatical marker corresponding to the word

"the" in sentences like "It stung me again, the bloody tree". In Pidgin,

whose vocabulary is based on English but draws on the native languages in

describing things that don't exist back in England - of which, thankfully,

the nanggalat is one - this marker has become stuck inseparably to the

words.) There is also a variety of smaller fruits and nuts that do not merit

a name in Pidgin English but do provide tasty snacks for hungry children.

Outside my old house at Ranwadi was a 'bean tree', often surrounded at

certain times of year by schoolgirls who would hang off the little tree,

plucking the tiny seeds out of their pods and eating them. The seeds that

the students missed sprouted everywhere, and were a nuisance, but the girls

would wail when they saw me pulling the seedlings up."Mr Andrew, that's a bean!"Some plants have multiple uses. The ubiquitous coconut palm provides the

islanders with wooden posts, brooms, flaming torches, leaf mattresses,

roofing for temporary shelters, ornaments, kava-drinking cups, and half a

dozen varieties of food and drink, which range (depending on the ripeness of

the nut) from a sickly juice to an ice-cream-like gel. Dried coconut flesh

was also the island's main export, before its people discovered that

planting kava was easier and profitable than scraping coconuts by the

sack-full.One thing that most of the island's trees and plants have in common is that

they propagate themselves with ease. Vanuatu is a country of colonists: to

get the archipelago, each of its plant species had to cross a thousand miles

of ocean, either by drifting on the water or by hitching a ride in the

canoes of early settlers. Any variety that was fussy about setting down

roots in new soil would never have made it. Whilst Western agriculture is

based the sowing of seeds, most of the islanders' crops can be planted by

the simple means of sticking a cutting into the ground and waiting for it to

grow. A few, such as the banana plant, don't bother producing seeds at all.

Many of the rows of sticks that the villagers set up as fence posts also

sprout into saplings, and over time a fence evolves into a hedgerow. Even

the wooden shacks surrounding bush toilets occasionally sprout leaves.When discussing the island's flora, many locals refer not to "different

kinds of tree" but "different kinds of wood". Lighting a fire that won't go

out or building a house that won't fall down relies on knowing the

characteristics of the wood from each particular tree and knowing what it is

good for. Durable posts that will not rot in damp conditions are stuck into

the ground to support a house; equally strong but less rot-resistant timbers

can be used hold up the roof. Some trees have fine-quality wood but grow too

crookedly to be a source of building material; these were traditionally used

for making the handles of tools. Sticks of a wood that was known to burn

particularly slowly and steadily were used in days before matches to carry

fire from place to place.Even the nanggalat has its uses. Before anaesthetics came along, boys would

sometimes have their penises whipped with the leaves to deaden the pain

during circumcision. On one island, a soup of nanggalat leaves was

reportedly drunk to heighten the temper of those psyching themselves up for

a fight. The book 'A Guide to the Common Trees of Vanuatu' also reports that

cuttings of the tree are occasionally planted to make a barrier that no

intruder will touch - a living electric fence - although the book notes that

"the difficulty of handling the material means that it is not often used".The most important of all Vanuatu's trees is the palm-like cycad, or namele,

sometimes referred to as the 'peace tree'. Numerous ancient customs surround

this prehistoric plant, which only high-ranking individuals were

traditionally allowed to cultivate. Its long, spiky leaves are recognised

throughout the country as taboo signs: ni-Vanuatu will not pick fruit from a

tree against which a namele leaf has been rested, or fish in a spot where

such a leaf has been placed. Last month a government office on Malekula

Island had to be temporarily shut down after a disgruntled villager barred

its door with a namele leaf. Since tradition dictates that only the person

who set up such a taboo is entitled to take it away again, unless a very

high chief intervenes, nobody would work in the building until the Vanuatu

Supreme Court had ordered the leaf's removal.Back in the dark ages (the islanders' own description of the time before

missionaries brought them light), the namele tree had other uses. A person

who had committed a grievous offence, and could not afford the pigs needed

to pay a fine to the chief, would be tied to a namele and burned alive.That doesn't sound like an appropriate use for a peace tree, I commented to

an old man at the nakamal. How did the namele come to be a symbol of peace?When people saw a namele tree growing in a village, I was told, they would

be reminded of what would happen to them if they caused trouble. Thus the

namele promoted peace.Perhaps American cities that suffer crime problems should display electric

chairs on their street corners.In the days of tribal warfare, a pair of crossed namele leaves would be put

up to indicate that a village no longer wished to fight - a white flag of

peace. If warriors approaching an enemy village saw the crossed leaves, they

would put down their weapons. If only a single leaf was displayed, however,

they would sharpen their spears and axes and prepare the cooking pit.Today, this crossed namele sign is displayed on the Vanuatu flag, surrounded

by the whorl of a pig's tusk and some Rastafarian colours which have

symbolic meanings. Next to the flagpole in the centre of Ranwadi School

stands an aged namele tree. Its upper crown of leaves is withering, but

bright young growth is sprouting from lower down the tree - a perfect emblem

for a place where children come to be educated.Outside my own house at Ranwadi is a miniature Scottish flag, fluttering

surreally against a backdrop of coconut palms. This, too, carries a crossed

symbol: the saltire of Saint Andrew, who died on a diagonal cross after

protesting that he was unworthy to be crucified in the same way as his Lord.

The Christian cross, a place where people were once strung up in pain and

executed, is recognised today as a symbol of hope and peace. Just like the

namele. - - -Knowledge of trees is, of course, starting to disappear, as islanders get

increasing numbers of the things they need from the local store rather than

the local forest. Such a loss of knowledge is not confined to Vanuatu; I

know a lot of British people in my parents' generation, yet very few people

in my generation, who could tell the difference between a birch tree, an ash

tree, a beech tree, an elm tree, a poplar tree, and so on. I couldn't, and I

have a degree in biology. (Really this is a shift in knowledge, rather than

a loss, since at the same time that my generation was failing to learn the

names of trees it was learning the names of sportswear brands and social

networking web sites.)It doesn't matter if Brits don't know the names if the trees in their fields

and gardens, because they can look them up if they need to. If you want to

find out whether you might be prosecuted for cutting your hedge on the

grounds that it's a breeding site for endangered purple butterflies, or

whether the strange-looking leaves you found the dog eating are poisonous,

books and the Internet will tell you. In Vanuatu, by contrast, such

information is seldom written down. If children never learn what their

parents knew about the local plants, within a couple of generations that

knowledge will be lost.Yet children, in their own way, remain among the most enthusiastic of

botanists. No handyman in Vanuatu would ever try to use the glue tree, but

schoolchildren with no pocket money to buy glue occasionally stick pieces of

paper together with the adhesive gunk from its fruits. No adult at Ranwadi

would bother eating the seeds from the bean tree, but for students fed rice

and cabbage soup the beans are a valuable supplement to the diet. The giant

seed pods of flamboyant trees (known in Vanuatu as Christmas trees because

they produce red flowers in December) are of little use to adults, but make

great swords for play-fighting. And although Vanuatu has no adventure

playgrounds of the Western kind, its children do spend happy hours

clambering around in the branches of trees.Back home, too, it is children that make the most intimate use of the local

flora. When I am in Britain today I seldom regard its plants and trees as

anything other than decorations, yet as a child there were species that I

knew and used. My friends and I knew the location of just about every horse

chestnut tree in the village, and every October we collected and played with

their conkers. We knew pine trees, oak trees, and sycamore trees - those,

too, dropped interesting toys on the ground. We knew plants with sticky

burs, which could be put to various childish uses, and we knew which plants

had thorns. We could recognise stinging nettles - just as Vanuatu children

recognise the nanggalat - and we knew the dock leaves that would relieve

their stings. We knew the few wild berries that were sufficiently

easily-distinguished from poisonous species for our mothers to let us eat

them. We knew how to tell the time by blowing fluff off a dandelion, how to

tell if someone liked butter by holding a buttercup under the chin, and how

to tell if a girl loved a boy by pulling alternate petals off a daisy, in

much the same way that Pentecost islanders know how to make it rain by

rubbing a magic leaf. My grandmother taught me how to twist a particular

grass so that its head popped off in an amusing way (I still try this

occasionally, but can never seem to find exactly the right kind of grass). I

knew numerous flowers, which evoke powerful memories of England at certain

times of year: snowdrops in winter, crocuses and daffodils at Easter,

bluebells in early summer, and soft purple Michaelmas daisies in September.

Simply thinking about these plants today reminds me, as I read e-mail

bulletins about foot-and-mouth disease and flooding and terrorist plots and

other things that make me wonder whether I should ever bother going home,

that Britain too can occasionally be a beautiful island.Children in rural areas have an instinct for learning the local plants, and

probably have done ever since our ancestors were monkeys. Once upon a time,

this helped prepare them for life. In modern Britain - and to a lesser

extent modern Vanuatu - it is little more than good fun. It keeps them

amused until the time when they grow up, forget the location of the

blackberry bushes and the conker trees, and replace it in their minds with

the location of the organic fruit section in the local supermarket.

In a damp clearing surrounded by little thatched houses and overhung by

giant tropical trees, two high chiefs gathered their people together to

welcome a representative from a great foreign tribe.Over the past few months, the leaky little pipes that carry fresh water from

springs on the mountain down to Ranwadi and the surrounding villages have

been replaced with a new system of sturdy plastic hoses and tanks, thanks to

an aid project funded by the Japanese. Now the Japanese ambassador had come

to Pentecost, and the local residents had organised a ceremony to express

their gratitude.The ceremony was held at Lalbetaes, the home village of Chief Alucio and

Chief Philip, the area's highest-ranking chiefs. These two men are brothers,

but if you met them you wouldn't know it. Chief Alucio is often seen sitting

slightly apart from the other villagers, his back slightly stiffer and his

head slightly more upright. He walks around leaning on a long wooden stick,

and speaks in polite, measured tones. Everything about him portrays calmness

and clarity. Chief Philip, by contrast, is typically found sitting in the

middle of a loud, booming, guffawing cloud of tobacco smoke. He drives

around the local villages in a metal-green truck with red lightning stripes

along the side, barking at passers-by in a deep, grumbly voice.The village of Lalbetaes gives the sense of being a place of wealth and

power. Not in the manner of Ranwadi and Melsisi - which have the island's

brightest lights and its newest buildings - but in a deeper, more

traditional way. The village is slightly inland, built at the end of a muddy

road (deeply rutted by the wheels of Chief Philip's truck) in grassy

clearings in the forest. Huge banyan trees overhang the village, and navele

trees stand like Christmas trees decorated with streamers of yellow blossom.

Pigs snuffle around in the brown spaces beneath the trees. These are not the

obese pink porkers found on a British farm, but hairy, grunty little beasts

in varying shades of muddy black and brown. Some wander freely around the

village; whilst others are tied to trees, or grub around in makeshift pens. The nakamal where the people of Lalbetaes gather for meetings and ceremonies

is built in the same style as the one down at Vanwoki where I regularly

drink kava with the villagers - a sloping, thatched roof supported on chunky

wooden beams above a brown dirt floor. However, whilst the Vanwoki nakamal

is a homely little hut, Chief Alucio and Chief Philip's nakamal at Lalbetaes

has the dimensions of a gigantic hall, capable of holding hundreds of

people. The vast roof contains tens of thousands of natanggura palm leaves,

which have been individually cut, bent and pinned onto supporting poles. In

Pentecost's climate, such roofs rot within a few years, and only a chief who

could call upon the help of an awfully large number of people would be able

to maintain a building of this size.The water supply ceremony was held outdoors. A large crowd of villagers,

teachers and students gathered around the nasara - the village green - where

the Vanuatu flag was flying from a makeshift flagpole of green bamboo. Two

bullocks had been slaughtered for the occasion, and all the students who had

spent their afternoons carrying sand and gravel up the hill for the

construction of the new water supply were rewarded with a rare chance to

have a decent meal. The Japanese ambassador and his wife were seated,

together with local chiefs and government dignitaries, under a

corrugated-metal shelter at one side of the nasara. A microphone had been

rigged up, and the dignitaries gave speeches to the crowd.I arrived part-way through the afternoon, having tried to estimate what time

the speeches would be over. My estimate was out by about half an hour, but I

managed to miss the worst of the welcoming and thanking, and got to hear the

Principal's elderly father - keen to remind everybody that the Japanese

ambassador wasn't the only figure they had to thank for supplying their

villages with water - take the microphone and sing a spontaneous hymn.The final speaker was Chief Alucio, who earned my deep respect by beginning

his speech with "Me no want'em talk too-much, ee no got plenty thing me

want'em tell'em." This is a common way for speakers in Vanuatu to begin, and

usually heralds a speech of average length and above-average pointlessness,

but wise Chief Alucio actually meant his words. After a couple of sentences

of thanks his speech was over, and it was time for the traditional dancing

to begin.The group of men who shuffled and sang their way into the nasara to begin

their dance were clothed in an odd mixture of ceremonial mats and Australian

board shorts. Some had bunches of rattling nuts tied around their ankles to

provide percussion to the dance; others wore white trainers. Most had

nanggaria - ceremonial leaves - stuck into the backs of their mats or their

shorts, giving them the appearance of giant cockerels. A couple of men

tapped out a beat on wooden slit drums, while others led the dancers in an

ululating chant.Vanuatu's custom dances are not elaborate, gymnastic affairs. Imagine how

people might dance if gravity were doubled, and you will get some impression

of what a typical performance is like. Dancers shuffle in slow lines up and

down the nasara, or gather in the centre in a loose, revolving mob. In some

dances the performers are hunched over, shaking their elbows like chickens

and scuffing their feet against at the ground like frustrated cattle.After a few minutes of ritual shuffling, the man on the microphone invited

the audience to join in."You-fella who ee stop around long place here, suppose you want'em dance,

you come join'em dance."Two old ladies stepped forward a little way from the crowd, and shuffled

dead-weightedly in rhythm with the dancers. A couple of young men entered

the nasara and followed the lines of dancers, attracting laughs and cheers

from the crowd. The school sports master took up a slit drum and joined the

fray. Everyone else continued to watch."Andrew, you now, you come join'em dance," said the man on the microphone.Two hundred people looked in my direction.I turned towards the announcer and made the silent arms-wide gesture that

the ni-Vanuatu use to mean "What's going on?"."Yes, Andrew, you come dance. Me-fella want'em look say you, you dance

today." Two hundred people stared. Memories of high school ceilidhs came flooding

back. (To Scots, a ceilidh is a country dance. To an immigrant English

teenager with two oversized left feet, it's an exercise in trying to shrink

backwards into the wall when dancers are told to "take your partners please"

in the hope that no girl will be stupid enough to come over and invite you

to dance.) I shrugged and took my position in the crowd of shuffling dancers. Several

other men came out of the crowd and joined in. The announcer on the

microphone egged me on. My students laughed and cheered.Contrary to the belief of most of my family and friends, I have always

enjoyed dancing. True, I am usually the person standing in the corner of the

dance floor holding everyone else's jackets, or the person cowardishly

explaining to a girl that "I'd rather sit out this one" on the occasions

when I shrank backwards but the wall failed to absorb me. However, this is

not because I don't want to dance. It is because I have poor co-ordination,

I am shy in Western social situations, I am taller than the average girl to

an extent that makes dancing with them awkward, I have a surplus pair of

limbs (other people have this problem too, but unlike me they seem to be

able to use their arms in ways that don't make them look idiotic), and I am

usually sober enough to care what other people are thinking.None of this mattered on Pentecost. The sort of leaden shuffling that drives

my friends to despair in Western nightspots is perfectly in keeping with the

style of a Vanuatu dance. There was no awkward "take your partner" moment:

men and women were dancing in the same way that men and women do nearly

everything else in Vanuatu - in the same place at the same time yet utterly

independently of one another.Custom dancing was fun. And even if I was dancing badly, everybody knew I

had never tried this before, so nobody was expecting me to be any good. The

crowd was staring and laughing at me because I was a white man, not just

because I was a terrible dancer, and strangely that made everything OK. Some of my students, dressed for the occasion in their school uniforms,

joined in the dance. It began to drizzle, but nobody minded. Chief Philip's

truck passed back and forth, piled with tables and chairs which had been

borrowed from the school and were being returned now that the ceremony was

over. The head boy, riding in the truck with Chief Philip, hung out of the

passenger window like a happy labrador. Yellow afternoon sunlight shone

through the rain. The trees around the dancing ground glinted. The men and

women shuffled in circles. The dignitaries looked on from their dripping

shelter. The dancers chanted, stamping their feet three times and the end of

each chorus. I stamped along with them. I wondered how I had gone, in two

years, from marching through the Edinburgh Meadows in a white T-shirt on a

sunny afternoon to campaign for more aid to be sent to poor countries, to

dancing around a muddy nasara in a jungle village in the rain in gratitude

for such aid.Unlike the African countries whose cause Bob Geldof was championing on that

July weekend, Vanuatu has little difficulty finding generous well-wishers to

help it in times of need. The tiny republic is peaceful, friendly,

democratic and only moderately corrupt, and its islands are full of the type

of people you see in aid-agency adverts - hard-working farmers who are

trying bravely to haul themselves out of poverty and might well succeed if

only somebody would build them a hospital or dig them a well. The country

has never fallen into the grip of a dictator, fought a war, or been

associated with terrorism. In crude economic terms, it is demonstrably poor:

this year the United Nations added Vanuatu to its list of Least Developed

Countries, placing it in the same category as the world's worst Third World

hellholes. Vanuatu also does a good line in natural disasters - regular

earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions that remind foreign donors of

the odds that the islanders face in trying to develop their vulnerable

country.There is another, less wholesome reason why big foreign governments lavish

aid on tiny island states. Many countries have pet causes for which they

would like to win the support of as many nations as possible - whaling, for

example, or the status of Taiwan - and the friendship of a country the size

of Vanuatu is cheaply bought. If the Japanese spent a hundred dollars on

every man, woman and child in Vanuatu, Japan's own citizens would be out of

pocket by a mere fifteen cents each. For would-be international Santa Clauses trying to decide which impoverished

country to reward with the biggest presents, Vanuatu therefore represents an

excellent choice. When the United States offered money from its Millennium

Challenge Fund to help deserving poor countries build up their

infrastructure, Vanuatu was the country in the South Pacific to qualify. The

children in the Vanuatu household might squabble a bit over the gifts in

their Christmas stockings (the local officer in charge of disbursing the

Millennium Challenge money has recently been suspended over fraud

allegations), but they've had such a hard time lately that you can hardly

blame them, and you can at least trust them not to shoot the reindeer or

relight the fire while Santa is still working his way back up the chimney.

And they will be sure to leave a generous plate of mince pies.At Lalbetaes, the Japanese ambassador left the nasara holding a long, black

wooden spear that the islanders had presented him with, which served as a

convenient walking stick on the slippery road). Two or three well-wishers

followed behind to help carry the many other gifts that had been bestowed

upon the little man. One of them held an enormous bundle of

brightly-patterned woven baskets. Another cradled a giant, leaf-wrapped

ceremonial pudding in his arms. When the sun set and the dancing was over, the men decamped to the nakamal,

where kava was already being prepared, and the visiting dignitaries from

Port Vila were filling in their rural counterparts (who seldom get to read

newspapers) on the latest in Vanuatu politics. A group of men sat in a

circle while 'Sarlo' the local MP talked about the nation's current big

scandal: the attempt by various figures in Sarlo's party to defraud the

National Bank by millions of dollars. I didn't understand everything that

Sarlo said, since he was speaking the native language, but I'm guessing he

was reassuring his constituents that he wasn't involved.I chatted to a figure from the Department of Geology and Mining, whose

offices were destroyed two months ago in a suspicious fire. The offices

contained, amongst other things, the computer that received and analysed

data coming in from the various seismic monitoring stations around the

country. Such monitoring is important: Vanuatu has nine active volcanoes,

some of them prone to nasty eruptions, and suffers frequent earthquakes

which occasionally trigger tsunamis. (Two weeks ago Ranwadi was shaken awake

at 4.10 a.m. by a prolonged tremor that cracked roads and disrupted power

supplies in the town of Luganville.) The news that the country is now

without a functioning seismic monitoring network was not reassuring.After the fire, the Vanuatu government called in help from France (a

reliable foreign Santa, who asks only that children say "Merci" rather than

"Thank you" in return for their Christmas presents). A replacement computer

is on its way.

During the two years that I went to high school in the Scottish Highlands, I

felt sorry for my classmates who played sports. Not only were they obliged

to spend long hours outdoors in the region's icy dishwasher of a climate,

but living in such a sparsely-populated area made inter-school games a great

hardship. Travelling to an away game against even a 'neighbouring' school

meant many hours jammed into a minibus, driven (according to my friends'

probably-exaggerated stories) by half-crazed sports coaches who casually

mowed down sheep and deer as they careered along single-track mountain

roads.The eleven high schools in Vanuatu's Penama Province - which comprises

Pentecost and the neighbouring islands of Maewo and Ambae - are closer

together than those in the Scottish Highlands. However, for them,

inter-school sport presents an even greater challenge. Maewo's high school

is the only one on its island, and getting between the various high schools

on Pentecost and Ambae involves braving dirt roads that not even the most

roadkill-hungry Highland sports coach would try and drive a minibus on.

Flying teams from island to island would be unaffordable, and although

Penama's three islands are not far apart, getting between them on Vanuatu's

meandering cargo ships can involve journeys of a day or more - the

equivalent of Gairloch High School's celebrated hockey team having to sail

to Denmark.Nevertheless, the islands are home to some talented athletes and players,

and sport is one of the few areas in which local youths can show genuine

achievement. Pentecost will never produce an Albert Einstein or a Bill Gates

(nor would other parts of the world if potential Einsteins and Gateses had

to overcome the educational hurdles that children here face), but it's not

inconceivable that it might one day produce a global sports star. One

Ranwadi student has already been to Australia to run in a Pacific-wide

athletics tournament - a big deal on an island where most people see foreign

travel as an impossible dream - and another local athlete is currently

training in New Zealand. A few years ago, a group of headmasters keen to nurture this sort of talent

set up the Penama Inter-Secondary School Sports Association (PISSA), and

proposed that a week should be set aside from the school year during which

competitors from their various schools could come together for a big sports

tournament. The idea of spending a week watching football rather than

working in the classroom met with little resistance from the province's

teachers, and the PISSA Games were established.Sport in Vanuatu, like in most poor countries, revolves around football

(soccer). This is the universal game, one that you can play anywhere,

provided you can lay your hands on some sort of ball (for village children

having a kickabout, an unripe orange will suffice) and a couple of random

objects to serve as goalposts (coconut stumps do nicely). Basketball hoops

and tennis rackets, by contrast, do not exist in nature. It is no

coincidence that the main countries in which soccer is not a big deal - the

USA, Australia, New Zealand - are rich countries that invest heavily in

sports. Most schools in Vanuatu do have a pair of basketball hoops - although

American volunteers lament that the islanders "don't truly understand the

game" - so 'bass-kett' (as the locals say it) is also included the PISSA

Games. It is, after all, the best sport in which to strut about looking

cool. Netball, basketball's uncool relative, is also played, but only by the

girls.Unlike on other Pacific islands, rugby has never caught on here: ni-Vanuatu

are not built like Maoris or Samoans. Nor has cricket, possibly because

large fields are few and far between on mountainous islands. Any attempt to

play cricket here would turn into an exercise in retrieving well-hit balls

from the surrounding jungle. Tennis and hockey, which are among the most

expensive of ball games in terms of equipment, are not played either. This

is a shame, because with all the experience that islanders have at

precision-wielding of knives and axes in their gardens, they would probably

do very well if armed with a racket or a hockey stick. A handful of schools

do, however, have table tennis (ping pong) tables. Petanque (boules) is played enthusiastically by the French-influenced

schools in Vanuatu. This is one of the few events in which they can beat

their more sports-minded Anglophone opponents, who have barely heard of

petanque and sometimes don't even show up to the matches.Volleyball is played, and this year 'beach volleyball' was also included in

the PISSA programme, although it was not going to be played on the beach.

(Vanuatu lacks the golden expanses of sand found along the coast of

California - its shorelines tend to be steep and narrow, and most are strewn

with stones, coral, coconuts and driftwood.)The remaining sports contested at the PISSA Games are variants of the

islanders' beloved football. There is handball (whose exact rules I have

never bothered figuring out but whose basic principle is fairly

self-explanatory), and futsal (a form of indoor football that the ni-Vanuatu

play outdoors).

This year, it was the turn of the College de Melsisi to host the Games.

Melsisi is a small school, and at the start of the year their sports

facilities consisted of a rutted football field, used mainly by the local

cows, and a couple of run-down basketball courts on the small triangle of

flat land by the mouth of the river. They needed to be improved.After filling in a lot of forms, Sara the Peace Corps girl sent out letters

to her friends and relatives back in the United States, pointing out that

spare dollars were worth a lot more in a Third World village than

languishing in a US bank account and that contributions to Peace Corps

projects were fully tax-deductible. Four thousand dollars later, men in

their kava bars were nodding happily and murmuring about what an asset Sara

was to their village."She's also put a lot of her time and effort into helping people here," I

added."Yes," they agreed, and went back to talking about the money.Sacks of cement were ordered, and construction began on a third basketball

court, overseen by teams of local villagers. Basketball hoops and volleyball

nets were ordered. A beach volleyball court was dug out and filled with sand

brought by boat from Ranwadi (apparently we have the sandiest beach in the

area), and a petanque area was prepared. Running tracks were painted onto

the sports field using what looked like old engine oil.The cows huddled nervously in one corner of the field, wondering what was

going on.The principal of the College de Melsisi asked me to look up the dimensions

of a table tennis table, and ordered his school handyman to make one. The

handyman had better things to do, and plans were announced to scrap table

tennis from the programme. The schools with good table tennis players

wailed, and promised to bring tables with them to ensure that the game was

played.Some of the money was spent on lighting, and a bank of fluorescent tubes was

rigged up alongside the basketball courts. An open-walled hut was built at

one side of the field to serve as a grandstand and a headquarters for those

organising the games. An aid agency agreed to supply medals and trophies for

the winners, in return for being allowed the opportunity to come and give

health talks to the assembled students."To be a good sportsman, leave with free marijuana, alcohol, tobacco and

kava," said a well-meaning but unfortunately-worded banner. Local people geared themselves up for the arrival of a thousand or so

students, teachers and spectators. Several families constructed food stalls

- shacks of wood and corrugated iron, walled with palm leaves - under the

coconut trees between the sports field and the river, or perched on the

hillside above the field. The menu was the same at nearly every one: rice

and chicken, flavoured with a little dollop of a tasty gravy-like mixture. Electricity was wired into the stalls - making these little shacks

better-equipped than most proper Vanuatu kitchens - and some entertained

their customers with music and videos. Lights around the field flickered on

and off as the school's electricity generator struggled to cope with the

load.The cows disappeared. A few days later, as I made my way down to a pool in

the river for a wash (Melsisi's water supply had faltered under the demand

of a thousand extra people and several of the village taps were running

dry), I discovered the herd hiding amongst the coconut trees in the valley

upstream from the sports field, looking thoroughly unhappy.Melsisi's established kava bars, and the two or three huts that occasionally

serve as restaurants, also prepared themselves for a week of good business.

Some arranged live string bands to entertain their guests. One tried to

organise a barbecue steak night, but the bullock that was destined to be

barbecued disliked the idea, and after a long chase the chef gave up and put

chicken on the menu instead.Students from the schools on Ambae and Maewo islands crowded onto a

badly-overloaded cargo ship bound for Pentecost. Those from northern

Pentecost came by boat too - it would have been a long and uncomfortable

journey on the island's roads. Ranwadi's students walked the four miles (6

km) to Melsisi, with the school truck bringing their luggage. Students

staked out places to sleep on classroom floors - boys and girls in separate

classrooms, obviously - and I found a mat and sleeping bag waiting for me on

the floor of Sara's house. A visiting Peace Corps volunteer from Maewo had

already laid claim to Sara's spare bed. The one thing that could still spoil everybody's plans was the weather. On

the eve of the games, things did not look good. I caught a lift to Melsisi

on the back of a truck, and arrived in heavy rain, soaked and shivering. The

village's roads had already turned to sticky mud, and crowds of people were

tip-toeing around, trying to avoid the slimiest patches. Some called out

greetings, but through the rain and darkness I could barely make out who

they were. I escaped from the confusion, squelched my way up to Sara's

house, stripped off as many of my wet clothes as I decently could, and sat

down in a puddle of water.A delegation of school governors from the College de Melsisi had already

been sent up the mountain to complain to the sorcerer who controls the

weather."Your games don't start until tomorrow," the old man reportedly pointed out

to them. "Tomorrow there will be fine weather."The sorcerer kept his promise. The next day, the sun was shining. Crowds of

people gathered around the soggy field, perched on rocks and coconut stumps,

to watch the opening ceremony. Proceedings began, two hours behind schedule,

and competitors from nine schools paraded onto the field in their school

uniforms. (One of Penama's eleven schools, in typical Vanuatu fashion, had

failed to get a squad organised for the games this year, whilst another, in

equally typical Vanuatu fashion, had simply failed to show up.) The students

marched like lines of computerised lemmings. I had the urge to click on one

or two of them and watch them stop, count to five, put their fingers in

their ears and explode into pixels.The students from the school on Maewo wore faded blue shirts, with faded

grey skirts and shorts. Evidently these were dull, quiet, hard-working

students. Half of the girls would probably become nuns. Ranwadi's students

looked a little livelier, but still respectable - boys in white shirts and

black shorts, girls in pale blue blouses and dark blue skirts. Some of the

Ambae schools combined bright white shirts with strong blue skirts and

shorts. These high-contrast kids were clearly tearaways. Or perhaps I

shouldn't be judging schoolchildren by the colour of their uniforms.Children beat slit drums, and a group of visiting dignitaries was formally

welcomed. Leading them was none other than the Prime Minister of Vanuatu,

Ham Lini - a Pentecost islander himself, and the brother of Father Walter

Lini, who originally led the tiny nation to independence. (I hope that

nobody will consider it a great insult to Vanuatu democracy - or to American

democracy, for that matter - if I point out what a remarkable coincidence it

is that, out of the thousands of eligible people, the one most suited to

running the country just happened to be a close relative of one of his

predecessors.) Accompanying Lini was the local Member of Parliament, Charlot

Salwai - known as Sarlo to his constituents, who can't pronounce 'sh'

sounds. In one of the frequent reshuffles by which Ham Lini manages to stay

on top of his fractious government, Sarlo had recently been appointed as

Minister for Education, and back on his home island he was now being treated

with great honour. The Honourable Prime Minister and the Honourable Minister

for Education were accompanied by a crowd of lesser dignitaries, including

the school principals, the chairman of PISSA, the Provincial Education

Officer, and local chiefs.The Vanuatu flag was raised, and the crowd stood up respectfully while the

national anthem was sung. Several of the assembled VIPs gave speeches, most

of which were devoted to welcoming and thanking the other dignitaries who

had come. During this, I had time to reflect that if every speaker at an

event thanks every other speaker, and is also thanked by the master of

ceremonies, the total number of thank-yous is equal to the square of number

of speakers. Six speakers equals 36 thank-yous. Eight speakers will give 64

thank-yous. If there are ten speakers, then a hundred thank-yous must be

said. That much thanking takes a long time. And that doesn't even include

the many words of thanks given to people who weren't giving speeches, such

as the poor students assembled in lines in the sun in front of the podium. I

lost count of how many speeches there actually were: Sara, in helping to

draw up the schedule for the day, had tried bravely to keep the number down

to three or four, but Sara's colleagues kept sneaking additional speakers

into the programme.The new basketball court was formally opened, and the local priest blessed

it with what I assumed was holy water. The court, paid for by Sara's

fundraising efforts, was due to be opened by an "honoured representative

from Peace Corps", but no such person showed up, so Sara cut the ribbon

herself, standing in front of the crowd in her pink island dress and rubber

reef shoes. Sara was not, however, deemed a sufficiently Important Person to

be invited to the 'refreshments' (I passed the principal of the College de

Melsisi carrying a heavy box that made an alcoholic chinking sound) laid on

for the VIPs after the ceremony. The Prime Minister's speech came last. He began by telling his audience that

what he saw before him was "a failure". This was not an insult, it was

explained to me afterwards, but was merely an exhortation to the people to

work harder to make their country a better place. The rest of the speech was

filled with words about the importance of respect and "obedience" (I can

only imagine what the newspapers would say if Tony Blair or Gordon Brown

ever used that word), and a reminder that we all owe everything to Father

God, which won applause from the audience. Most people on Pentecost don't

get the chance to hear the Prime Minister on the radio or read his words in

the newspapers, and this was one the biggest crowds that would assemble on

the island this year. Ham Lini did not waste the opportunity to show to all

these good, traditional rural voters that he is a good, traditional guy.- - -The first proper day of the PISSA Games was devoted to athletics. Students

were divided into two age groups - Juniors (Years 7 to 10) and Seniors

(Years 11, 12 and 13). Schools with exceptionally gifted junior students

tried to run them in senior races. Some juniors (students who had probably

missed years of schooling because their families had difficulty paying the

school fees) looked as if they were about nineteen anyway.Mr Agasten, the Ranwadi sports master, had drawn up a programme of events

for the day and dusted off his starting gun, which left him partially deaf

for the rest of the week. Other people were assigned to time runners and

count laps. Some weren't sure which runners they were supposed to be

watching, and some lost count. Sara sat at a table trying to scribble down

names and times while nine sports masters stood and argued in Pidgin English

about which student had come in which position.The sports masters were an interesting collection of characters. One looked

as if he should have been behind the wheel of a truck in the American

Midwest, and one looked like the evil sea captain from Pirates of the

Caribbean. One looked like a French footballer, whilst another looked like a

French hairdresser. One resembled a gorilla. Mostly they were an amiable

bunch, however, and they showed a great willingness to work together towards

the common goal of ensuring that the day's events had finished by the time

the kava bars opened.On the second day of competition, the team games began. Sara and I drew up

an enormous timetable that attempted to fit together the 60 football

matches, 60 basketball matches, 60 volleyball matches, 60 beach volleyball

matches, 60 petanque matches, 60 table tennis matches, 60 handball matches,

60 futsal matches and 30 netball matches that were due to be played, in such

a way that no student would need to be in two places at once, and no two

teams would be trying to use the same pitch at the same time. Individualised

daily copies of the schedule were handed out, listing exactly where each

team needed to be at each time, and the sports masters were warned that if

they didn't stick to the schedule in a particular event, it would mess up

the programme of events elsewhere.Being Pacific islanders, they didn't stick to the schedule. However, the

dozens of carefully drawn-up timetables blowing around the sports field did

go some way towards turning potential chaos into mere disorganisation. At

the end of each day, the sports masters got together to reconcile the

intended schedule for the day with what had actually happened, and tried to

work out how all the games that had got missed out could be fitted in later.

New timetables were hashed out, and rehashed. After a while, I gave up

trying to type up new timetables on the computer, and simply let the sports

masters work it out amongst themselves.A public address system had been set up, and announcements were put out in

Pidgin English telling people and teams where they needed to be. In between

announcements, the loudspeakers played a random assortment of music, which

ranged from Enya to Jingle Bells. Listening to the latter on a sunny July

day on a tropical island produces the kind of disconnection between

experience and reality that can usually be achieved only with drugs.Nobody had planned out who was supposed to overseeing the various games, but

volunteers were soon found. Mr Jay, one of the local truck drivers,

discovered a talent as a handball referee. The bursar of one of the Ambae

schools, who happened to be a former volleyball star, helped Sara look after

the beach volleyball tournaments (and did an excellent job until the day he

discovered a store selling Tusker beer). One of Ranwadi's new gap girls,

after a short briefing on what petanque was, spent the rest of the week

umpiring the game.The teacher from the College de Melsisi who was asked to look after the

table tennis tournament wanted to be down on the field watching the football

instead, and lied that the school had lost all its table tennis balls. Table

tennis was quietly dropped from the programme.Only for the all-important football games had anybody made an effort to

organise a qualified referee - a huge, dark, sinister man. He looked

familiar."Who's the referee?" I asked."He was our postmaster when you were here back in 2001," I was told. "He was

the guy who used to steal our mail."On the penultimate day of the games, the referee walked away, complaining

that he wasn't being sufficiently well paid. Nobody else, as far as I could

gather, was being paid at all.The Principal of Ranwadi, a passionate sports fan, sat intently beside the

football field whenever his school was playing, absorbed in the game,

muttering to nobody in particular. "Yes. Yes, yes, yes. No. No, no. Yes, yes - no. No, no. No, no. No! No -

yes. Yes, yes, yes. YES!!"The Principal of the College de Melsisi, having worked hard to prepare for

the games, decided he'd earned himself the week off, and spent most of the

time relaxing at his house. His major contribution to the proceedings -

aside from drinking with the Prime Minister - was to go down to the school

office where poor Sara was frantically photocopying score sheets and

timetables, and tell her not to waste paper.- - -Teams in the different sports played against one another in round-robin

tournaments, and schools were ranked according to the number of points they

had won. Having volunteered to do the scorekeeping, I drew up a big

spreadsheet that would add up the results and distil them together,

according to an agreed formula, to reveal which school was the best overall.

I spent much of the week sitting in Sara's house, trying to make sense of

the various muddy and tattered score sheets that I'd been handed by the

referees and type the results into the computer.In sports such as football and netball, I was to give 3 points for a win, 2

points for a draw, and 1 point for a team that lost but did make the effort

to get a team together and play. In events like volleyball and petanque,

where a draw is impossible, it was 2 points for a win and 1 point for a

loss. Opinion differed as to whether or not it was possible for a basketball

game to end in a draw. The two Americans were adamant that it couldn't, but

nobody else could see why not."What should I do if two teams get the same number of points?" I asked the

sports masters on the first day."Rank them by goal average," came the reply.What is goal average? A quick search on the Internet revealed that it's a

slightly-flawed measure of a team's performance that was abandoned in

English and international football in the late 1960s. (Basically you divide

the number of goals scored by the number of goals conceded, instead of

subtracting the numbers.) Since goal average was one of the few things the

sports masters seemed to agree on, I didn't argue. The senior boys' football competition - the event that people cared most

about - was a close-run thing. Ranwadi and their main rivals, St Patrick's

College, emerged joint leaders with 10 points each. Ranwadi had scored five

goals and conceded two; St Patrick's had scored four goals and conceded one.

Had the teams been ranked under the system used by most modern football

leagues, Ranwadi would have been on top, equalling St Patrick's on goal

difference and beating them on goals scored. However, under the outdated

goal average system that the sports masters had recommended, it was 2.5 to

Ranwadi and 4 to St Patrick's College. Our boys came in second.That mattered. When I got the computer to add together the overall results

for the PISSA Games, St Patrick's were ahead of Ranwadi in the senior

category by a single point. If it hadn't been for the football result, it

would have been the other way around.I scanned the results desperately, looking for errors, anything that might

have led to Ranwadi winning fewer points than they deserved. I found a

couple of scores that had been incorrectly entered, but nothing that made a

difference to the final result. Had the points been added up properly, I

wondered. Computers can't miscalculate, but they can be incorrectly

programmed. The PISSA scoring system, originally devised by Ranwadi's

scientifically-minded Mr Noel, was designed on paper to be fair and

straightforward, but in real life it had acquired complexities and

ambiguities. Scanning through the spreadsheets, I spotted two or three

semi-legitimate, defensible adjustments that didn't favour our school in any

obvious way, but would have the overall effect of shifting an extra point or

two into Ranwadi's column.In general, people in Vanuatu are not mathematically-minded. My students

will happily tell me that there are three hundred metres in three

centimetres, and if a mis-pressed digit on a pocket calculator led them to

conclude that two and two made five, many of them would accept it without

question. My contract with the country's Ministry of Education states that I

am employed for a period of two years beginning in January 2007 and

finishing in December 2007. However, like most un-mathematical people, the

islanders are adept at adding up two particular things: money and sports

results. Even a subtle manipulation of the scoring of the games might well

be noticed, and if anybody suspected that I'd tipped the tables in my own

school's favour there would be hell to pay. Besides, it simply wouldn't have

been fair. As the scorekeeper I had to be impartial, and if the computer had

told me that Ranwadi was the number one school then I certainly wouldn't

have been scrambling to recalculate the figures.Reluctantly, I left the spreadsheet as it was.- - -The final day of the PISSA Games coincided with Vanuatu Independence Day.History has passed quickly in Vanuatu. Like most Third World countries, the

young republic has a child-heavy population (at twenty-four, I am older than

the average ni-Vanuatu), and the majority of today's islanders were not

alive on 30th July, 1980, when Britain and France finally brought to an end

their chaotic attempt at joint government in the former New Hebrides. This

is perhaps just as well: you might expect the ni-Vanuatu who do remember the

days of colonial rule to be bitter towards their former masters. British and

French settlers appropriated much of the territory's best land and held onto

it for a century, treating the islanders like foreigners in their own

country. They usurped traditional hierarchies, trampled on local customs,

and presided over the collapse of the native population. They imported a

petty thousand-year-old rivalry between two nations on the other side of the

world, infecting the islanders with it, so that twenty-seven years after

Vanuatu government officially ceased to be a tussle between the British and

the French, you can still see the fault lines between these two factions in

the country's politics.Yet Britain and France also gave their ill-gotten territory schools,

hospitals, roads, airports, wharves, and churches. The two powers brought at

least a semblance of law and order to the archipelago, and ended the rape

and pillage committed by an earlier generation of European visitors: traders

who sold the islanders into near-slavery on Queensland sugar plantations, or

sold them to their cannibal enemies as meat, and in the process had

unscrupulously filled the islands with guns, germs and steel (to borrow a

phrase from Jared Diamond's excellent book about why people from Europe

colonised places like Vanuatu and not the other way round). They also ended

most of the rape and pillage committed by the islanders against one another.

In place of tribal warfare, the British and French bequeathed Vanuatu a

legacy of freedom, democracy and national unity, even if the colonists did

not apply any of these principles very well at the time. Before the

Europeans left, Vanuatu may not have been an independent country, but before

they arrived, it was not a country at all. Older ni-Vanuatu today look back on their former British and French rulers

in much the way that adults look back on their former schoolteachers. At the

time they were overbearing and resented, but many years on it is possible to

respect them for the job that they did, and appreciate the ways in which

their teaching helped turn their pupils into better people. Looking back on

all the teachers who once shouted at me and punished me, the teachers I

swore at and whose lessons I disrupted, I cannot think of a single one

towards whom I have any ill feeling today. In fact, if I met them in the

street I would probably be pleased to see them. And I'd like to think that

most of them feel the same towards me.In a similar way, the people of Vanuatu today are nothing but welcoming and

courteous towards the British and French whose ancestors once oppressed

them. A couple of them have even expressed gratitude to me for "all the

things that your country taught us". Nor are the ni-Vanuatu unique in this

respect. I cannot remember encountering anti-British sentiment in any of the

dozen or so former British colonies that I have visited (with the slight

exception of Ireland, which arguably wasn't a colony). In Fiji, the people

who asked where I came from smiled sentimentally at the answer and said "ah,

mother country". In Malaysia, the businessman who leaned over to start a

conversation with me at a street café told me that the British were decent

people (not "dirty bastards" like a dozen other nationalities he listed). In

Belize, I met British soldiers who are still made welcome in their former

territory (having a bunch of friendly Brits doing military training in your

jungles helps encourage jealous neighbours to stay on their own side of the

border). In Singapore, the 19th-century figure who originally claimed the

island in the name of the British still has plazas and hotels named after

him. The Scots still resent the English, of course - "we are colonised by

wankers", said Ewan McGregor's character in Trainspotting - but they are the

exception that proves the rule: Scotland has never been a colony. (In fact,

enterprising Scots were responsible for the existence of large parts of the

British Empire, and profited handsomely from it. Several of the Europeans

who feature in Vanuatu's history were Scottish.) Based on my experience

elsewhere in the world, if the English really had colonised the Scots then

the Scots would probably respect us for it.In the interminably long speech that kicked off the Vanuatu Independence Day

celebrations in Melsisi, there was little about shaking off the yoke of

colonial oppression. Instead, there was a lot about the need to work hard

towards a better future for the young country. In his own speech a week

earlier, the Prime Minister had quoted a line from the national anthem:"You-me savvy plenty work ee stap 'long all island b'long you-me." We know

there is plenty of work still to be done on our islands.When the Independence Day speech was over and the flag had been raised, the

final sports matches were played. That evening, students gathered in the

rain for the handing out of the trophies. I had managed to get hold of a box

of feux d'artifice (people in Melsisi refer to unfamiliar foreign things by

their French names rather than their English ones), which I let off from the

hillside above the sports ground. It wasn't much of a firework display: they

were small garden fireworks, and I hadn't been able set them up in advance

in case they got wet, so there were long pauses as I slid about on the

hillside removing each firework from its waterproof bag and trying to find a

soft patch of ground to poke it into. However, most of the children watching

had never seen fireworks before, and the crowd went wild.I didn't enjoy the moment when the final result of the PISSA Games was

announced. Ranwadi's students had trained hard this year and were desperate

to come first, but in both Junior and Senior categories they had to settle

for second place. The announcer read out the final scores, beginning with

ninth place, then eighth, seventh, sixth, fifth, fourth, and third. When it

was revealed that Ranwadi was number two, I suspected that the outbreak of

cheering was not coming from our own students.I felt even worse than the students did, knowing by following a flawed

scoring system had deprived my team of a trophy that was probably rightfully

theirs.My colleagues were quick to spot the dubious football result that had cost

Ranwadi its prize."You should have ranked them by goal difference," they told me. (The sports

masters had all been very clear that they wanted goal average.) "They may

have said goal average, but they meant goal difference." (Sports masters

ought to know what they're talking about when it comes to their favourite

sport.) "Goal average is an outdated way of doing things." (If I questioned

every local practice that strikes me as outdated, I'd make myself very

unpopular.) "This would never have happened if you had used the proper

system." (It was pure chance that the system disadvantaged Ranwadi - the

scores could just as easily have been the other way round.) "We should have

been consulted about what scoring system to use." (Ranwadi's teachers were

too busy praying with the students to attend the daily meetings with the

other sports masters and coaches.) And so on.The matter was soon forgiven and forgotten, but I was left with the

unpleasant knowledge that a thing that mattered more to some my friends,

colleagues and students than anything else in the school year - winning the

PISSA Games - had been needlessly lost to them as a direct result of

something that I had done. "There's an old saying in my village," said old Ezekiel the school mechanic,

often a source of gentlemanly wisdom. "If you kill a pig, you can't eat its

head in your own nakamal."I wasn't sure that I understood.

Expatriates who come to work on Pentecost sometimes naively bring cookery

books with them. One past gap volunteer at Ranwadi left behind a book of

recipes written by her grandmother - who, according to the book's foreword,

was the wife of a Conservative MP (there is a little bit of truth in the

stereotype of the people who take gap years abroad). Back in England it is

probably a very good book, but when flicking through it on Pentecost, I

could not find a single recipe that could be made using the ingredients

available in the local stores.The Peace Corps, who often seem like the only people in the whole of Vanuatu

who try to do things properly, have a book of Western recipes specially

adapted to the minimal ingredients found on the islands. However, even these

recipes assume that the book's owner has done a certain amount of shopping

in Port Vila, or has generous friends and relatives who will send boxes of

food from the States. Good cooking can achieve a lot, but it is not

biochemically possible to turn rice, sugar and tinned tuna into a steaming

Hawaiian pizza with extra toppings.Here, therefore, is my own contribution to the literature on island cooking.

It's easy-ish, it tastes OK-ish, and after shuffling home from the kava bar

you're seldom hungry anyway...PASTA WITH RANDOM VEGETABLES AND PROCESSED CHEESEFirst step: get a packet of pasta out of its rat-proof container and inspect

it to see if it contains weevils.Weevils are probably quite nutritious, and are too small to affect the taste

and texture of the food much, but for psychological reasons you might wish

to remove them. If you empty the pasta into a bowl and leave it for a few

minutes, some of the weevils will instinctively crawl out over the rim of

the bowl and wander away somewhere (it doesn't really matter where, so long

as the rest of your food supplies are well sealed). You can strain off the

rest with water: pasta sinks, whilst agitated weevils float. If you're lucky

enough to live in a house with running water, you can do this four or five

times. Macaroni needs extra rinsing, as the weevils hide inside the tubes of

pasta. Rinsing also removes the tiny crumbs of pasta nibbled away the

weevils, which would otherwise create a sticky mess when cooked.If you thought the packet of pasta was sealed, it's worth investigating how

the weevils got in. Maybe your container wasn't as rat-proof as you thought,

and the packet has been nibbled into. If the rats have been at the pasta in

a serious way then you could be forgiven for throwing the whole lot out and

opening a packet of breakfast crackers (the hungry island-dweller's trusty

standby when there's nothing else in the cupboard) instead, but pasta is

hard to come by on Pentecost, and boiling will kill any germs the rats might

have introduced, right?Having removed the weevils (and any ants that might have got in along with

them), put a couple of handfuls of pasta in a saucepan and cover with water.

Since you'll be boiling this water, you can get it straight from the nearest

tap - no need to worry about whether or not the water supply is clean. The

Peace Corps' recipe book devotes an entire page to the cooking of perfect

pasta, but when you've got home late and you're cooking by candlelight in

the half dark because the generator has already been switched off for the

evening, or when it's evening study time and you have students interrupting

you every five minutes by banging on the door to ask for help with their

homework, you won't care how many minutes the pasta is boiled for or whether

or not the water is brought to the boil first or whether or not you've added

salt or oil. So just dump the saucepan of pasta on a lighted stove and keep

an eye on it.Now prepare the vegetables. Which vegetables you put in will depend entirely

on what the ladies who run the local market happen to have harvested from

their gardens this week. Sometimes it's capsicums (green peppers), sometimes

it's shushoots (chokos), sometimes it's snake beans. Very occasionally it's

tomatoes, but all-too-often the rats nibble those off the plants before the

villagers have a chance to harvest them. All the produce is guaranteed to be

organic (not that there's any such thing as an inorganic vegetable): the

local villagers can't afford pesticides or synthetic fertilisers, and with

their diverse little gardens growing in rich volcanic soil there's no need

for them.If there have been no vegetables at all at the market, I generally go

outside and pluck some tender young leaves off my pumpkin plant and eat

those instead. Alternatively, you can buy tinned vegetables on Pentecost,

but they cost five times what they would in Tesco or Wal-Mart, and may have

disintegrated into mush during the two or three years that they've been

sitting on a dusty storeroom shelf.Remove the seeds, stalks, skins and whatever other part of the vegetables

you feel like removing (some of the local vegetables are unfamiliar to

Westerners, and opinion differs as to which parts are supposed to be

edible). Throw the peelings out of the back door; something will come by and

eat them. Chop up what's left into small pieces and throw it into the pan

with the boiling pasta. Many stoves in Vanuatu either have only a single gas

ring or work poorly when more than one ring is lit, so it's best to do all

your cooking in a single saucepan. Besides, you don't want to use too much

gas, because if the cylinder runs out and there turns out not to be a spare

one in the school shed, you'll be boiling pots of tea on Bunsen burners down

in the science classroom until the next time that the ship comes.If you see cockroaches scuttling about while you're chopping the vegetables,

try to ignore them. If you swat at them they'll only run away and hide, and

you can't spray Mortein at them while you're cooking in case the insecticide

gets into your food. Besides, the version of Mortein sold in the local

stores is the version that merely pisses cockroaches off a bit rather than

the version that kills them dead. The good kind has to be imported from Port

Vila, and your supply will soon run out if you spray it at every cockroach

you see.While you're waiting for the pasta and vegetables to boil, get out a packet

of Kraft Cheddar - the cheese-flavoured form of edible rubber that very

occasionally turns up in the village stores. If the packet has already been

opened, brush off any ants that have got into the container, and check if

the exposed part of the cheese has gone mouldy. (Kraft Cheddar is designed

not to be perishable, but almost anything will rot when the climate is

sufficiently damp and tropical. Even elastic bands start to decompose after

a few months on Pentecost.) If there is any sign of mould, cut off the outer

couple of millimetres; the rest will be fine.Grate a handful of the Kraft Cheddar onto a plate. Your grater will probably

be rusty (see the above note about damp tropical climates), but surely extra

iron is good for you.If the pasta and vegetables seem to be done by now, strain off the water

(along with the boiled corpses of any remaining weevils). If yours is one of

the houses that doesn't have a proper sink, chuck the boiling water out of

the door, but make sure you don't hurt the cats that may be hanging around

outside hoping for food scraps.Now add in the grated cheese. Kraft Cheddar doesn't melt in the way that

real cheese does, but if you can get hold of a jar of mayonnaise, you can

stir in a spoonful of that to recreate the creamy texture. When buying

mayonnaise, try to check that it hasn't come from Australia, since

Australian brands of mayonnaise are vilely sweetened. Unfortunately, you'll

probably be stuck with whatever random brand the supplier happened to send

to the local storekeeper this month - if he has any at all.If you can get hold of a jar of Kraft Cheese Spread, a spoonful of that will

really improve the pasta, but that's something you'll probably have to bring

from Port Vila. (One local storekeeper has been telling me for months that

"next week" he'll arrange to have a crate of it shipped to Pentecost.) The

label on the cheese spread says "refrigerate after opening", but if (like

most people on Pentecost) you don't have access to a fridge, just eat it

within two or three days and it'll probably be OK.Many gas stoves in Vanuatu leak. If yours is one of them, don't forget to

turn off the valve on the propane cylinder after you've finished cooking,

otherwise the room will slowly fill with gas.If you have any herbs that aren't yet stale, sprinkle them into the pasta.

Tip the whole lot onto a plastic plate, and serve with a glass of rainwater.If you're dining with locals, don't forget to say grace. Mumble it quickly

in English (God will still understand you) and your companions won't realise

how inexperienced you are at saying your prayers.If you have any leftover pasta, you might consider feeding it to a hungry

Third World child - there are usually plenty about - but since these

children normally eat little but rice and taro, anything that's less than

95% wet starch might upset their stomachs. Perhaps it's better to feed your

leftovers to the cats and chickens outside instead. Sooner or later someone

will eat the chickens (and possibly the cats too), so this isn't really a

waste, more a form of recycling. Maybe somebody back home should invent

recycling bins that crow loudly outside people's windows at five o'clock in

the morning to remind them to recycle their rubbish.Finally, if anyone asks you what you had for dinner last night, tell them it

was noodles. Most islanders haven't heard of pasta, and as 'pasta' is the

Pidgin English rendering of the word 'pastor', talk of 'eating pasta' will

only confuse them. People in Vanuatu did eat pastors once upon a time, but

since being successfully converted to Christianity they've given up that

practice. However, those first unlucky missionaries sparked off a habit of

eating things that come on ships that persists to this day, and instant

noodles are now one of the country's major imports. Noodles are considerably

easier to cook than pastors, although since Vanuatu's last surviving

cannibal died a couple of years ago, nobody knows how the taste compares.

In a traditional village, it was possible to live without money. You could

survive on the vegetables grown in your garden and meat from the animals

that you reared or hunted or hauled out of the sea, cooked over firewood

that you gathered yourself, in a house built with materials that you cut

from of the forest or dug out of the ground.The few things you weren't able to make yourself could be obtained by simple

trade. In medieval Europe, the baker could obtain new horseshoes from the

ironmonger in exchange for loaves of bread, and the gardeners could obtain

protection from the local baron and salvation from the local priest in

exchange for tithes of food. However, as economies grew more complex, this

kind of trade grew increasingly inconvenient - what if you needed a

horseshoe but the blacksmith wasn't in the mood for a loaf of bread? Some

societies solved this problem by developing written systems for keeping a

tally of who was entitled to goods and services. This is the original reason

why writing was developed. Unfortunately, these systems were (and are)

vulnerable to forgery.A better solution was to devise a system of physical tokens - some small,

valuable item of agreed worth - signifying that the bearer had supplied

something useful to somebody in the past and was entitled to something in

return. Thus money was invented.The type of token used varied widely. In ancient empires, the prized article

was gold. In medieval England, the standard measure of value was a pound of

sterling-quality silver, which could be cut up into silver pennies when

smaller units were required. On Pentecost Island, it was pigs (and in

particular the long, curved tusks of old boars) and intricately-dyed red

mats that were prized. Eventually, all of these forms of money were replaced

by standardised pieces of paper and base metal whose value was certified by

governments and banks - and later, in some economies, by numbers on computer

screens. However, modern currencies still bear traces of their origins: a

"pound sterling" remains the standard unit of value in England, even though

today's pound coins are neither made of sterling silver nor weigh a pound,

and Vanuatu's coins and banknotes still bear (amongst other symbols) the

emblem of a boar's tusk.In modern cities, it is possible to go through life without doing anything

for anybody else except what you're paid for, and without receiving anything

from anybody else except what you pay for - an economically super-efficient

yet rather soulless state of affairs.In Western countries, the change from a traditional economy to a cash

economy happened a long time ago. On Pentecost Island, the process is still

very much under way. Local villagers divide their needs into two categories:

the things they can get 'free' from the land (vegetables, meat, fish, nuts,

bamboo, wood, leaves, stones, and water) and the things that must be paid

for with money (such as tinned foods, rice, petrol, candles, soap, metal

tools, cloth, nails, cement, and corrugated iron). The second category is

expanding at the expense of the first.Prior to the arrival of Europeans, trading amongst the islanders was all

about social climbing. A man could probably meet his basic needs entirely

from his own garden, but would have to borrow money (in the form of pigs) to

help him pay the bride-price for a new wife, or put on the lavish ceremony

that would enable him to climb to the next rung of the social ladder. When

his remaining assets (the pigs) multiplied, he would be able to pay back the

lender, who might now need them for ceremonies of his own.The arrival of foreigners introduced a new reason for trading: to obtain

things that the islanders could not make for themselves. Originally it was

believed that the goods brought by white people had been given to them by

the gods, since in their world of sticks and stones and leaves the islanders

could not see how men could make such things as metal for themselves.

Various cargo cults sprang up with the aim of trying to persuade the gods to

shower similar generosity upon the people of Vanuatu; one or two of these

cults are still in existence. Today, the islanders can read in schoolbooks

about metallurgy and manufacturing, but most still lack the resources to

make metal or glass or plastic or DVD players for themselves. As a result,

many of their wants and needs must now be met by buying goods from abroad.The first thing that the villagers switched to buying, instead of making for

themselves, was knives. Local stories recall that one of the earliest

encounters between European sailors and Pentecost islanders ended with the

natives stealing a sailor's knife and then running away into the bush,

pursued by gunfire. The islanders recognised that the metal blade was

greatly superior to their traditional stone tools, and for many years

afterwards, this one stolen knife was passed around by the entire community,

each person borrowing it whenever a particularly trick cutting job was

required. Eventually, more Europeans arrived and the islanders learned to

trade with them in order to obtain more of the precious tools. Thus ended

the Stone Age on Pentecost.Metal was not just useful for blades. It can also be used to make heatproof

and waterproof containers, which revolutionised cooking. I was told by a

colleague that when a student at Ranwadi was once asked to write an essay on

how modern technology was changing the world, the technology he chose to

focus on was the saucepan. Previously, cooking had meant roasting; the

ability to boil things opened up an entirely new form of cuisine. The taro

that the islanders grow in their gardens is disgusting when boiled, but

coast-dwellers with access to ships soon discovered a new food: rice. They

began importing the starchy white grains by the sack full, and another

paid-for item was added to the islanders' shopping baskets.Flour and cooking oil also came on the ships, and the villagers developed a

taste for greasy doughnuts - often twisted into the shape of a number 8 -

which they would fry up using their new pans. Sugar arrived, to the delight

of the island's ant population, and a few local women became skilled at

baking cakes on open fires. Some even iced their cakes, having sussed out

which varieties of tinned butter could be used to produce icing that didn't

taste too strongly of industrial grease. Good cake remains a rarity of

Pentecost, baked only on special occasions, but since the island has no

dentists this is probably a good thing.A few villagers built proper ovens, and began to bake loaves of bread with a

delicious wood-smoked taste. (Fuel for cooking is one thing that is still

largely gathered from the jungle, although foreigners like me - who are

inexperienced at cooking anything other than marshmallows on wood fires, and

can't even get marshmallows on Pentecost - rely on gas-powered stoves.)

Local stores began selling margarine and jam for people to put on their

bread, and those frequented by American Peace Corps volunteers did a

lucrative trade in peanut butter. Clothes were yet another import. In the days when it was acceptable to

wander around with only your crotch covered, it was easy to fashion clothing

using local materials, but it's hard to make a good Sunday dress that you

can wear to church out of dried leaves. Missionaries and well-meaning

foreigners organised shipments of second-hand clothes to be sent to Vanuatu.

In the early days, these brought diseases that wiped out entire villages.

Today they just bring incredibly bad taste.Another thing the early missionaries helped to bring to the islands was

light. Not just the spiritual kind, but also the practical kind that allows

people to avoid walking into things after the sun goes down. Before the

arrival of Western technology, the best sources of light on the island at

night were burning coconut fronds, which flare like pine needles when put on

a smouldering fire and can be carried as flaming torches on short journeys.

However, coconut fronds burn down quickly, and slower-burning light sources

such as smouldering logs and reeds were inevitably dim. As a result, people

traditionally went to bed early on Pentecost, and were disinclined to wander

about in the dark. (On an island populated by ghosts and spirits - and once

upon a time by warring cannibals - staying indoors at night must have seemed

a sensible idea anyway.)Candles, kerosene lanterns and electric torches represent a huge

improvement. However, for villagers who originally got all of their light

for free, they also represent a huge expense. Recent increases in the price

of kerosene have dimmed the island, as people turn down the wicks in their

lanterns or switch to cheap candles instead. Once I came across a group of

men sitting in their nakamal in pitch darkness, because none could spare

even the 20 vatu (10 pence) needed to buy a candle.Electric torches were once used sparingly on Pentecost, because batteries

for them were expensive and short-lived. (The brands of battery sold in the

local stores are not the type advertised by energised pink bunnies that keep

on going and going and going, but the type made by generic companies with

names like Wang Hua Industries who specialise in the low-cost manufacture of

half-empty metal cylinders that happen to contain just enough electric

charge to be sold and labelled as a battery.) Fortunately, torches have

become cheaper to run in recent years, as fragile and power-hungry

incandescent bulbs have been replaced with bright, efficient LED lights. (I

played my own small part in introducing this particular change to Pentecost;

see earlier diaries.) I wonder if the laboratory boffins who came up with

the Light Emitting Diode ever imagined that their invention would be used to

help impoverished jungle villagers avoid tripping over fallen logs on

moonless South Pacific nights. In a couple of locations in Vanuatu,

pioneering schemes have also been set up to provide the villagers with

rechargeable batteries, charged using solar power.The use of hard currency on rural islands like Pentecost remains limited -

Port Vila, the country's capital, is home to 20% of Vanuatu's population but

90% of its money. However, as one item after another is added to the

islanders shopping lists and disappears from the range of things that they

make for themselves, the circulation of money is inexorably widening.

Ironically, by far the biggest factor driving rural islanders into the cash

economy is the one thing that Westerners generally do get free (or at least

don't pay directly for): their children's education.In the old days, when everyone on Pentecost did more-or-less the same job -

gardening, building houses, trading pigs and looking after the children -

youngsters could learn everything they needed to know from their parents and

the village elders. Now, though, Pentecost's parents have begun to ask their

children what they want to be when they grow up, and most of the answers

require some degree of schooling. The dream of many is that a school-leaving

certificate will be a ticket off the island, to a well-paid job and a better

life in town, but even those children with no desire to leave their villages

can benefit from going to school. Pentecost may have no real industries

other than its gardens (and a small amount of tourism), but it still needs

nurses, mechanics, storekeepers and churchmen - not to mention teachers who

can pass on their knowledge to the next generation of dreamy children.High school education is not free in Vanuatu. The Ministry of Education does

find the money to employ a few schoolteachers, and overseas aid agencies do

their bit to prop up the country's school system, but there remain big gaps

in every school's budget. Books need to be bought, electricity generators

need to be fuelled, and broken equipment needs to be replaced. With a

finely-scattered population and no roads that a school bus could cope with,

high schools in rural Vanuatu are invariably boarding schools, so the cost

of food and housing must be added to the school's expenses. The only way

that these expenses can be met is by charging fees to the parents who decide

to make the necessary sacrifices and send their kids to school. At Ranwadi

these fees are typically about £100 ($200) a term - an awful lot of money

for subsistence gardeners who dig up vegetables for a living. Even jungle

villagers who would otherwise live happily without money will have to sweat

hard preparing sacks of kava and dried coconut and hauling them down to the

beach to be sold onto ships if they wish to avoid forcing the same lifestyle

upon their children. (Although if they live in the right part of the island,

they might be able to earn an entire term's school fees in a few minutes by

risking their necks bungee-jumping off towers in front of gawping tourists

in the name of traditional culture.)If you're going to have to earn money to pay for your children's education,

you might as well earn a bit extra for yourself while you're at it, to spend

on a new knife, or some candles, or maybe a portable CD player. Since you've

been too busy with your cash crops to plant anything tasty in the garden,

some of the spare money will also need to be spent on food at the local

store. Do this kind of thing often enough, and the word 'subsistence' will

drop from your lifestyle, and you'll have become a fully-functioning member

of a modern capitalist society.Sometimes shortages force the islanders to buy things that they would

otherwise grow for themselves. The men on Pentecost who smoke (the women

never do) prefer hand-rolled leaf tobacco to cigarettes, not only because

the latter are expensive, but because everybody knows that cigarettes give

you cancer. (The health campaigners forgot to add that the smoke from leaf

tobacco contains the same lung-destroying chemicals.) Some grow the tobacco

in their own gardens; others buy cheap sticks of it from stores who import

it from gardeners on other islands. However, the villagers on Pentecost

smoke more tobacco than they plant, and lately none has been coming on the

inter-island ships. (Rumour has it that the Vanuatu police - whose periodic

anti-marijuana campaigns give them a reason for existence on islands where

crimes are rare and are dealt with quite capably by the village chiefs -

recently destroyed a large shipment due to fears that other smokeable leaves

were being concealed amidst the tobacco.) A couple of weeks ago, the local

men awoke to the realisation that there was no leaf tobacco left in any of

the stores, and that they had smoked their gardens bare. Even old Chief

Regis, who has long kept his chiefly friends and numerous other satisfied

customers well supplied with fine tobacco, announced disconsolately that he

had run out, and that his next crop would not be ready for harvesting until

sometime around Christmas. The news sent desperate nicotine addicts

scrambling to try and find the money to buy imported cigarettes.Other drug habits are also moving into the cash economy. The drinking of

kava on Pentecost is one of the most traditional of activities, originally

done only by chiefs at important meetings, where the drug's stupefying

effects would prevent them from getting angry with one another or taking

rash decisions. Nowadays it is drunk by men of all ages on all occasions,

but many of the other customs associated with kava-drinking remain. The

nakamal where the men gather to drink is usually the most traditional

building in the village, with a dirt floor and gnarled wooden posts holding

up a low thatched roof. Some nakamals are not even held together with nails.

The nakamal is the one place where you can still find stone tools being used

- sharpened, hand-held grinding stones of a sort that our ancestors a

million years ago would probably have recognised - although in some nakamals

nowadays the job of mashing up kava roots is done instead by a ram (a

section of plastic drainpipe in which the kava is pounded with a big stick),

or by a metal meat-grinder. The mashed kava is strained through coconut

fibre, and drunk out of a half coconut shell.

Money does not traditionally change hands in the nakamal. People dig up kava

roots in their own gardens, and bring them down to prepare and drink

themselves, or to share with friends and visitors. However, this situation

is changing. Pentecost has acquired a small but growing professional class -

schoolteachers, nurses, mechanics and priests - who enjoy kava and have

money with which they would happily pay for it, but do not get the chance to

grow it for themselves.At Melsisi, where the school, hospital, and kava-tolerant Catholic church

employ many such people, there are now several kava bars where drinkers

without gardens of their own can go to buy an evening drink. Much of the

atmosphere of the old nakamal remains in these places - most are dimly-lit

and constructed of local materials, and the drink continues to be served in

coconut shells (although some kava bars elsewhere in Vanuatu now use

porcelain bowls instead). However, they are gradually acquiring more and

more of the trappings of Western bars. Some barkeepers now have electricity

generators and show videos to attract in the punters, and a couple even have

names painted above the door. High on the hillside, behind the communal taps

where local children wash, is the Sunset Kava Bar, whose flamboyant owner

promises "only the finest quality kava". Down by the shore, the new

Saltwater Kava Bar has a bedroom where customers who get too stoned to walk

home can sleep for the price of two drinks. Most Melsisians continue to be

regulars at a particular bar - the one run by their local community, or the

one that is within easiest staggering distance of their house. Nevertheless,

on an island where business strategy generally consists of opening your

doors and hoping that enough of your friends, relatives and neighbours will

come by to provide you with a good income - and shrugging your shoulders and

doing nothing about it if they don't - even the slightest hints of branding

and competition represent a major innovation.Until recently, no other village nearby contained a high enough

concentration of potential customers to support a kava bar. One opened a

couple of years ago near Ranwadi to cater to the labourers who had come to

work on the new school buildings, but when the building work had finished

and the labourers went home the bar closed down. The local villagers didn't

want to pay for kava when they could get it free from their gardens, and the

majority of the teachers at Ranwadi belong to the abstemious Churches of

Christ, which frowns on kava-drinking.The villagers' cousins in Port Vila and Luganville did want to pay for kava,

however. Vanuatu's two towns are home to growing numbers of affluent and

kava-loving islanders dislocated from their gardens, who have fuelled a

massive surge in demand for the narcotic root. Kava products have also found

small but lucrative new markets abroad. Since good varieties of kava take

four or five years to grow, supply has not kept up with demand, which has

had an inevitable effect on the price. On Pentecost, where men have always

planted a lot of kava, the islanders' long-standing drug habit provided them

with a financial windfall. As the price of kava surged, villagers

enthusiastically dug up their gardens and loaded sacks of roots onto ships

bound for Port Vila. With a typical lack of forward planning, many failed to

leave behind enough kava for themselves. (Others calculated, with a logic

familiar to drug dealers everywhere, that there was no sense in getting

hooked on their own product when there was so much money to be made selling

it to other fools.)A few months ago, the villagers around Ranwadi slowly woke up to the fact

that there were now a lot of would-be kava drinkers about with empty gardens

and money in their pockets.The kava bar near Ranwadi reopened, and did a steady business, and I no

longer have to walk four miles in the dark to Melsisi whenever I want to go

for an evening drink without impinging on the villagers' hospitality.

Villagers in their nakamals began holding 'kava nights', at which someone

who still had roots to spare would prepare an entire poubelle full of the

stuff, and sell it to customers. (People on Pentecost use the French word to

describe the huge containers from which kava is served on special occasions;

drinking out of a poubelle sounds so much nicer than drinking out of a

dustbin.) Some kava nights were held by individuals to earn money for their

children's school fees; others were held to raise money for other good

causes. At big kava nights, entertainment was laid on, in the form of a

video player rigged up to an electricity generator, or very occasionally a

live string band. While children watched the videos or listened to the

music, their mothers (and a few teetotal fathers) sold leaf-wrapped bundles

of food for the kava-drinkers to take home for dinner. (Kava, unlike

alcohol, is best drunk before food.) With lots of people eating together, it

was often worthwhile to butcher a pig or a bullock for the occasion, giving

people a rare chance to dine on good fresh meat. What had previously been a

subdued male-only ritual evolved into a night out for all the family.The spread of kava nights was made possible by another new introduction:

plastic bottles. In Western countries, empty containers are a mountainous

nuisance, something to be crushed by the dozen into the recycling bin, but

in the days when people bought hardly any packaged foods they were hard to

come by. That is now changing. By filling up an old plastic bottle and

carrying it back to drink at their local nakamal, people can now attend kava

nights in faraway villages without worrying about the long drunken walk

home. The availability of cheap electric torches has been another factor

encouraging people to venture further from home on their nights out (as has

a decline in the belief in ghosts).Thanks to the recent arrival of new trucks on Pentecost's roads, many people

don't have to walk home at all. Travelling the main coastal road you might

now be passed by two or three vehicles every hour, which sounds like a

miniscule amount of traffic but does in fact represent a huge increase over

the amount a few years ago. And now that the Ministry of Public Works has

belatedly begun a programme to repair some of the most treacherous stretches

of the road (for example, laying stones to smooth out some of the nastier

river crossings), those trucks will be able run for longer before they fall

to pieces. The concept of designated drivers has yet to catch on here, and

it's probably only a matter of time before some kava-intoxicated driver is

woken from his slumbers by the jolt of his truck colliding head-on with a

large tree. However, given the lethargic and ponderous way in which kava

drinkers do things (driving included), this will hopefully be a very slow

accident, and with any luck it won't hurt anybody except the tree.Society on Pentecost is changing, and as at any such time, there are plenty

of people convinced that the change is for the worse. Not only are there

predictable moans coming from local old-timers, but numerous outsiders from

different corners of the world have added their voices of concern. Most of

these are people whose own societies successfully underwent the same changes

centuries ago and wouldn't dream of turning the clock back, yet still they

lament the sight of the islanders abandoning their happy traditional economy

(the one based on nice things like pigs rather than evil things like money)

and being lured down the path of capitalist folly. They observe that in

countries where people have to pay for their daily needs, those without cash

are at risk of hunger and homelessness, whilst in Vanuatu's traditional

village societies every single person is provided for.Such people have a point, but not a very good one. Nobody begs or sleeps

rough on Pentecost because the islanders have strong families and

communities that look after those in need, and plenty of land on which to

live and grow crops. There are legitimate reasons for people to worry about

Pentecost's future: the breakdown of old communities under the influence of

Western ideals, the growing inequality between those who relax in coastal

villages doing well-paid jobs and those who scrape gardens in the mountains,

the risk of an expanding tourist industry exacerbating the previous two

problems, the pressure that will ultimately be put on the land by a swelling

population, and (in the shorter term) the prospect of the kava price

collapsing now that so many islanders are devoting their efforts to growing

the drug rather than growing food. However, money is to a large extent a

symptom of the island's problems rather than a cause.In any case, it's not true to say that nobody in traditional Pentecost

society went hungry. Although the island is not haunted by the sort of

starvation seen in crueller Third World countries, malnourishment does exist

here, attested to by the grossly rounded bellies of protein-deficient

children fed on little but taro for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The

children who suffer worst from this, it should be noted, are the ones living

in those happy, traditional villages where people grow food in their gardens

in the happy, traditional way. By contrast, those whose parents got sucked

into the cash economy get small helpings of store-bought tinned meat with

their vegetables, and small spoonfuls of nutrient-enriched Nestlé milk

powder (spot the irony) stirred into their morning tea.Money also buys such children medicines, schoolbooks, and a small measure of

protection against life's many hazards. Picture a traditional village in

which a cyclone has devastated the gardens and blown down the wooden houses.

Now picture a village in which the inhabitants sat securely in houses made

of imported cement eating imported rice and tinned meat while the storm

raged, and decide for yourself whether capitalism causes hunger and

homelessness.In any case, the development of a cash economy on Vanuatu's islands is

Progress; it cannot be stopped. Unless one of the parties in Vanuatu's

government happens to be plotting a Communist revolution (which is unlikely,

since the country's well-salaried politicians rather enjoy the fruits of

capitalism), the islanders' new way of doing business will be with them for

a long time to come.