Football!!!! And a discussion about names.

This picture is from the end of February. I was playing football with all the village kids (by football, read: I was playing goalie). So in photos here, kids always throw peace signs ... I'm not just being a dork; I'm being culturally normal. From the left, on top: Morris and me. Second row: Morris, Eddie, Mark, and Wicki. Bottom row: Jayline, Michel, Carolannie, Aaron, Moses, and John-Mark. 

One thing you'll probably notice about these names: they're basically either biblical or very straight forward and English sounding. Not everyone has a name like Marie, Jack, Charlie, or Esther, but those sorts of names are really common. A lot of my students have names that sound like they're a hundred years old: Dick, Elsie, Reynald, et cetera. But there are still a lot of kids with kastom names too, names like Leisongi, Kalo, Lepakoa, Leimande, Kaloran, and so on.

Another feature about Ni-Vanuatu naming is that children take their father's first name as their last name. So my little brother Morris (the one in the blue with the rad hair) is called Morris Jerry or Morris Paul, because my host papa is Paul Jerry. It's very, very common in Vanuatu for young women to have children before they're married, because marriage is so expensive and permanent here. In the case that the parents are unmarried but the dad recognizes the kid as his own, the baby takes the dad's first name as his/her last name. But if the baby's dad doesn't think it's his, the mom doesn't want to say who the dad is, or if it's a pikinini blong rod (child of the road--saying that the mom doesn't know the dad), then the kid will usually take the grandfather's name. There are a few families on Tongariki that have decided to use one name as an English-style last name and keep that as their official name, but that's not very common yet.