How to Make Tongs

In Vanuatu, you use tongs a lot in traditional cooking. Two popular dishes here for a crowd are laplap (the grated vegetable pudding) and buniya (meat and root veg). Both are wrapped in banana leaves and cooked indirectly by hot stones. 

First you make a big fire, then you put the stones on (with tongs). While you wait for the stones to get red hot, you can roast bananas, yam, or namambe (like chestnut) as a snack. You take them off (with tongs). When the stones are hot, you move them (usually with a big stick shaped like a giant croquet mallet). You place the pudding/buniya on the fire, and use the tongs to put the stones back on the banana leaf packets. Then you put lots of dead leaves and old dirty cloth on top off the fire. Wait for a few hours (maybe only one for laplap yam, up to five if you're cooking a huge amount of food and you're in no hurry). Then remove the leaves and cloth by hand, take the stones out with the tongs, cut up, eat.

I've done or seen this procedure about three hundred times by now. But one thing I'd never thought of ... How do you make the tongs???

You put strips of bamboo on a fire.

And then you bend them with your bare hands. (Hi, Mami Suzanne!)