Island Style Christmas

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houston, we have blogs. =) i'm home for the weekend and enjoying it. i received a jump drive of entries from sher earlier this week, and figured i better get uploaded. if you know our house, i'm lounging on one of our awesome front room couches right now and loving it. its things like this i miss about home. that and snacks. ok, ok, here's sher's bloggy blog. - b

30 December 2009

While Kansas was blanketed in snow for Christmas, we had our precipitation in the form of rain on Maewo. It’s hot and rainy season on Maewo. Which isn’t saying much, I feel like it is hot and rainy all the time. So, by my standards, it’s hot-er and rainy-er season on Maewo.

The lady in the Melbourne airport said while checking our passports before our departing flight, “Ah, home for Christmas, eh?” The comment took us off guard at first, but I think it is true. We were lucky to be back on the island in time for Christmas. Since we hadn’t yet paid for our flight bookings from Vila to Maewo before we left for Australia and the Christmas rush began, Air Vanuatu sold our seats to the customer with cash in hand. Initially, we were told it would be January before we could get back to site. Funny how the place I was so itching to take a break from was the only place that I now wanted to get back to.

Peace Corps must have some good connections in this country. In the typical Vanuatu fashion, once word of our situation got passed around to the right people, we were told to go to one of the staff members and see what he could do about it. He got on the phone and started talking code “…foxtrot mango tango…” and a few days later, we were booked all the way to Maewo.

We boarded a small, 18 seater Twin Otter plane and found it full of extended family members going home for Christmas. Turns out, they had chartered the flight when the rest were full. Guess it pays to travel in numbers in that situation. We were definitely the odd ones out, but I lived vicariously through the energy that abounds when family members are kept in a small space for an extended amount of time. There’s just something about having the teenage cousin who is too cool for everything, the hokey uncle with lame jokes, a wailing baby, and all the rest of the mix that makes me feel nostalgic for holidays with the family I grew up with.

The plane landed on the freshly mowed airstrip on Maewo and we tossed our luggage into the back of a truck and clambered down the road to our house.

There is absolutely no one at the school right now. With a months’ worth of rain and vacancy, the bush was overtaking our yard. Vines, thorns, stickers, and thistles were winning out over our preferred species of short grass. We were bummed to come back to only one of our two cats; Kody is either on an extended vacation in the bush or only a memory now. Other than that, everything else seemed intact.

We had barely settled things back into their places before some friends came by. One needed Justin to help put credit into his phone, the other seemed adamant that we really needed to clean up our yard right away. This woman, whose hearing and vision I often question, picked up our bush knife and started whacking up everything in sight. I followed her with my empty rice bag, picking up the carnage and hauling it around the house to our compost pile. There was no stopping her cleaning frenzy and I was scared to get close enough for her to hear me and tell her it was okay to stop here for now. When it was all over, despite the sweat and mosquito bites, I have to admit it was worth it. I was particularly grateful for the old woman’s zeal for yard work. I attributed it to the Christmas season, the time when everyone cleans the road and the area around their houses. In my mind, this was the equivalent to someone coming over to help me decorate or wrap presents.

It turns out she had an ulterior motive. The next day, the same woman came back to our house. This is a very out of the way place for her to be, seeing as there is not a soul around but us and I barely know her. She had come to ask me to bake a cake for the church Christmas party the next day. Of course I agreed, though I wasn’t sure how my two dinky saucepans were going to produce enough cake for about a hundred people to eat with less than a day’s time to prepare. I asked if she had any ripe bananas, papaya, or pumpkin, thinking that would save her some money in funding this cake project. Since she owns a store, she decided to just use some goods out of there. She sent her granddaughter to help, with cake mixes, eggs, milk powder and butter in hand.

The pre-packaged cake mixes asked for an electric mixer and stove. Ignoring this, the granddaughter (my new partner in cake-butchering crime) and I set out to whip up the cakes by hand. We scraped together enough dry coconut leaves and flowers to start the fire to “preheat” our oven. Following instructions, we mixed each cake for four minutes. The batter smelled like plastic, and showed no reaction whatsoever to our mixing, just turned a rich smooth brown color. I wasn’t worried, we’d just make lots of frosting to make up for the lack of flavor.

The first two cakes went on the fire to bake and we started making frosting. No recipe, I was just going for something sweet to slather over these plastic cakes. Butter (really just yellow, butter flavored margarine), sugar, milk powder, and a bit of vanilla. My new sister got the task of whipping that for the next hour, trying to compensate for the grainy sugar and get some volume in that frosting. I went to take a peek at the first round of cakes. Not much had changed since we put them on the fire, they just looked drier. No rising.

Every one of the four cake mixes turned out to be about an eight inches wide and one inch tall. I was thankful we didn’t have to taste test. Now what to do to make these wheels work for a hundred people to eat. Our grainy yellow frosting went on top of each one and we stacked them up. Frosting around the edges and I signed off from the project. I wrapped a piece of cardboard in the Hays Daily News and sent the cake out of my sight with my new sister. We were both disappointed in our work but with such short notice and limited supplies, what can you do?

That night was Christmas Eve. Justin and I opened two packages that had come in the mail while we were gone. Some fun new spices went into our pasta and we had a dessert of Halloween Oreos. We enjoyed a quiet night away from the hard partying that tends to accompany Christmas and New Year festivities. Ni-Vanuatu don’t hold their alcohol very well and I prefer not to be around them when they’re drinking.

Christmas day is largely a holiday spent at church. On our way to the service, we stopped off at my host family’s house to play Santa Clause. For my parents, we brought back T-Shirts from Australia and for the kids swim rings, bubbles, and we divvied up some of the Halloween candy that came in the mail for them. When the last bell rang (a propane bottle that gets clanged with a stone) we were off to church. My first time to get back in an island dress after a month’s break and we were right back into the routine of two hour, stuffy church services. Merry Christmas. After the service I snuck home to change out of my sweaty dress before lunch. I also gave a shout out to the Larson family celebrating their Christmas Eve, but couldn’t get them to zap any of the abundant snow my way.

Back at the church, we had a lunch of beef, rice, and laplap. I also spent a better part of the afternoon unwrapping the tootsie rolls that we had shared with the kids and convincing them to throw the trash in my island basket, not on the ground. When everything else you eat has a biodegradable wrapper (bananas, mangos, taro, you name it), that’s a hard concept to swallow.

Christmas is also a time for people to splurge on benzene, the fuel needed to run generators so you can listen to music and watch movies. The movie selection is hit and miss. With limited access to pop culture, there are low expectations. People will watch anything, whether they understand it or not. Filipino soap operas, African music videos, a Mike Tyson documentary. It doesn’t matter what language or content, as long as it makes noise and moves on the screen. I tend to lose interest very quickly.

We were in bed early so we could make another call home for Christmas. This time, waking up at 3:30 am to reach the Brock’s before Christmas lunch only to find out the snow had changed everyone’s plans. How could I argue with Grandma when she asked me to call back at the same time the next day? What’s one more 3:30 am phone call?

The day after Christmas is Family Day. This day feels the most like Christmas to me. People spend the day with their family, usually make a big meal of laplap and kill a pig or bullock. Justin and I made a small cake with pumpkin that my host mom gave us to add to the meal. Then, most of the day was spent relaxing from the heat, waiting for the laplap to bake, and chatting with the family.

We rang in the new year of 2010 in a similar fashion. Big meals with lots of meat, generators powering music and videos, lots of merry making. We spent a few days down with Justin’s host family for this holiday. His parents killed a large bull to provide meat for the village the next few days. We spent New Year’s Day cooking and, late that afternoon, carried all our dishes to a small clearing by the ocean for a meal. As I sat on a mat watching everyone filter in to the picnic area, I noticed that almost all the women and girls were wearing dangly earrings. This is a new accessory, usually they’ll pierce their ears with the “bone” from a coconut leaf and leave it there. A store close by must have got a shipment of tacky, dangly earrings just in time for Christmas.

That evening was similar to Christmas festivities, watching music videos, eating, and talking. The kids and women in the village also did a “Secret Friend” activity. A few days prior, they all drew a name from the group and got that person a present to give on New Year’s Day. Presents were often bars of soap, plastic dishes, or clothing.

After eating as much meat as possible to hold us over for the next few months or so without, Justin and I were ready to take a spell from holidays. We’ve retired to our now solitary abode at the school and are taking full advantage of some down time before the school year starts again.

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Photos

Christmas Present
Aldayer testing out his new swim ring.

The Party Scene
Balloons are a must for Vanuatu Christmas decor.

We like to Party
Justin's host siblings and cousins.

Mamas with the Food
There is no such thing as buffet style here, you've got to trust your mama to get the perfect combination of food.

Fire up the generator!
Such a captivating little box. And I mean little. Check out the size of that thing compared to how many people are watching it.

The emcee
One of Justin's uncles, keeping the New Year's program moving. He's got the remote in one hand and a cup of kava in the other.

Secret Friend
Justin's mama (in the Australia tee) presenting her gift to her secret friend.

Comments

[John]

Great write up.
Arguably, one of the South Pacifics' most beautifull travel destinations is Vanuatu, it is a stunning country both culturally, and geographically, so diverse with a myriad of thingsto do, but in the end it is the memories of the local people that we all remember when travelling. You can see thousands of photos of the numerous islands I have taken over the many years living here at: http://picasaweb.google.com/vanuatutravel. I came with my wife in 2001 and never left..... Tropical regards from Port Vila, Vanuatu, John