New Yam Festival in Lakilia

The New Yam Festival happens in villages across Vanuatu anywhere from January through April of every year. It celebrates the new yams growing and finally being ready to eat. It's celebrated with prayers, sometimes church services, and always feasting. Lavets on my island tend to involve getting together early in the morning to start cooking. As lunch gets ready, the men (and a few of the women) start day drinking kava. They take a nap for the rest of the afternoon, while everyone who's not drunk prepares dinner. Then it's a split again -- some people eat as soon as the dinner's done while other people wait and drink more kava before they eat. No matter how you do it, though, on Tongariki everyone basically stays at the nakamal until everything is done.

Here's a few photos from New Yam in Lakilia. This happened in ... late January, I think. 

This is Melissa. She's like 3 and permanently attached to her Papa's side. 

This is Rahel and Samuel. Samuel really, really, really dislikes me. I just love how you can see on his face that he is very perturbed at the idea of being so close to me. (Oh well.)

A Tongariki blackbirding story

Blackbirding was a form of slavery or forced indentured servitude that happened throughout the Pacific during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In Vanuatu, blackbirding largely consisted of men, but sometimes women, being forcibly carted off to work in sugar plantations in Australia or in Fiji. Sometimes men did volunteer to do this work, but without understanding how many years they were signing away or how little money they would get in return for that work.

So here's the Tongariki blackbirding story.

Man Tongariki gets taken to work in Queensland, Australia. They work hard and eventually, they're on their way out. They're going back to the ships to go back to Vanuatu where they'll finally see their family again.

They're walking along and they come to a river. At the river, they see two Aboriginal children, a brother and a sister, who say their parents abandoned them, they're hungry, they don't have anything to eat, and they don't have anywhere to go.

What does Man Tongariki do?

...

That's right. That's right. They tell the kids, that's okay, you come with us, we have lots of food where we live, you'll like our little island.

The kids assent.

And yeah. I heard that the boy married and only had a few children before he died young, but that the girl had tons of kids. Half of Tavia village is part Australian and there are lots of people from other villages related to them. In fact, a few months ago, there was a big discussion on the island about whether or not certain people might be eligible for Australian citizenship, as in fact their grandmother or grandfather was an Australian.

There's the story.

Boats

You know you wanna see what some boats look like ...

These are all from the Maritime Museum in Auckland.

(This boat is a three beam canoe from Anuta in the Solomon Islands. According to the plaque, Anuta is a Polynesian outlier in the southeastern Solomons. [In general, the Solomons are Melanesian, but not this area.] This particular form of canoe is very seaworthy even though it's quite small.)

(This is from Futuna in Vanuatu. Futuna is far, far, far south in Vanuatu. The people there are still Melanesian but there's a lot of Polynesian influence down there and their language is actually Polynesian, which is different. This is a traditional outrigger canoe. Previously, Ni-Vanuatu used to do inter-island sailing in canoes like this, although that hasn't been practiced for about 200 years now. Nowadays, you definitely see canoes like this all throughout Vanuatu, but they are primarily used for fishing or short travel. There are people in this country who use canoes daily to travel to their gardens, for example. I know of communities on Epi and Maewo who do this; there have got to be plenty of them. In my part of the country, the Shepherds, canoes are really only used for fishing.)

This picture is small, but I hope you can get the gist! So this boat is a Fijian drua. It's an asymmetrical double hulled canoe. It can be used for ocean traveling or warfare. This is an extremely tiny example of one. According to the plaque, "[t]he largest could be up to 30 m in length and carry as many as 200 warriors." Can you imagine? 

Another thing I found really interesting -- apparently it's thought that the ancestors of the Pacific islands peoples used double hulled canoes like this to travel from South east Asia all the way through the Pacific, navigating only by stars, clouds, birds, and the like. Whenever I hear people try to denigrate Pacific cultures by asking about what technological advances they created, historically speaking, I feel like it's obvious. The Pacific Islanders have the greatest tradition of maritime expertise in the world. They made it from Indonesia to Hawaii, New Zealand to Tahiti, Tonga to Tongoa to Tongariki to Niue to Guadalcanal, on canoes, with no maps, no compass, just their seafaring expertise. That is amazing. 

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!)

Cecelia

These are my two host sisters--Asina and Cecelia. 

Asina is about seven. Her dad lives in Vila and her mom is out of the picture. Her dad sent her to Tongariki last year for school and she hasn't seen him since. He's sent a few parcels on the ship for her, but right now she doesn't have a uniform to wear to school. Luckily an older girl outgrew a blue and white checked dress that seems to be all right. This sort of family fostering out is pretty common in Vanuatu, but it can lead to the child being a bit of a burden on the relatives. She's a really really smart kid--she has her numbers and her letters down flat, in first grade--but she talks ... and she talks ... and she talks ... and she talks. She's sweet and a total chatterbox. 

Cecelia is about fourteen or fifteen. I think she has cerebral palsy because she moves her arms and legs in that scissored way I've read about. She's nonverbal and can't walk or feed herself. In Vanuatu, mothers don't use baby food; they chew the food and then feed their babies with that. My host mama has been chewing Cecelia's meals for fourteen or fifteen years. Until very recently, they've had to carry her everywhere. In January the owners of the ship sent this stroller for her and now my host parents use it as a wheelchair for her. My host parents had a small party at their house to pray over the chair and say thanks to God and to the owners of the ship for their generosity.

Ain't that purdy? Fiji Pt. 1

That's sunset at Mana Island, Fiji, in early January 2014. Isn't that beautiful? For me, who's used to stone beaches where you stub your toe or trip every time you want to go swimming, Mana was fantastic. Super beautiful. Fiji is not at all like Vanuatu--it's a much richer, much more developed country with many more tourists and a lot more industry. (You can eat at McDonald's in Fiji! What?!) But it's still tropical island paradise.

I have this ongoing fantasy about what if I had been put at another PC post. There's PC in Fiji (all health vols) so it's easy to think what if ... But what if I hadn't been put in the South Pacific? Vanuatu is really special in its isolation. At many PC posts, it would be reasonable to expect that I'd have internet once a week, drink beer, eat ice cream, and so on. (Remember, all these posts I put up I write months in advance and set on auto-update. Tongariki i no kat intanet.) But wow, what if I'd been in Fiji ...? Just beautiful.

Laplap with my auntie/Food culture

(I'm making lap lap banana with shellfish with my auntie Leikar here. Carolannie is the one photobombing behind my head.)

When I first got to Vanuatu, I thought laplap was disgusting. That's because when I first got to Vanuatu, I was stupid. One thing about life in the States: we have too much of everything. Too much TV. Too much sugar. Too much fat. Too many delicious items to eat all the time. I think the last time I was really thin, I was a toddler--because American food is so tasty, so available. You have to have a will power of iron to be able to stay away from ice cream when you're upset and it's literally available at ten places within ten minutes' walk from your house. American food culture is based on the idea that you can eat something delicious all the time, whether it's in season or not, as much as you want. 

Ni-Van food culture isn't like that. Out on the island where I live, the people have a very seasonal diet. They feast during times of feasting, but when the party ends, it's over. We eat meat at Christmas time, at New Yam, Chief's Day, Shefa Day, Independence, funerals, weddings, new baby parties, and in celebration of important visitors. The rest of the year? No fresh meat. It's the same with fruits and vegetables. We eat certain things at certain times of the year, and when it's done, it's done. Mango season lasts from October to late December and then it's over. Nakatambol season lasts from May to July (three terrible, terrible months.) It even applies to staple crops. Certain months of the year we eat breadfruit. Other months we eat yams. There's a while when nothing's ready and we all eat a lot of rice. There's always enough food, but it's not always delicious or balanced. I would say that the mentality can be very much food-as-fuel at sometimes.

Back to laplap. When I first got here, I thought it was this gelatinous slime gunk. Laplap is basically a baked pudding of grated root crop mixed with coconut milk. It can have island cabbage, wild cane, fish, shell fish, or meat mixed into it, or it can be just eaten plain. It's not bad at all, especially if it's hot -- but if you're thinking about eating something with a lot of flavor, it's a let down. But it's what's for dinner. 

I've been thinking a lot lately about food preferences, allergies, certain kinds of restricted diets. As a volunteer in Vanuatu, I do think you could maintain a vegetarian diet or even a kosher diet without causing too much offense, but that's about it. (The kosher diet would only be acceptable because there are so many Seventh Day Adventists in Vanuatu. A lot of Ni-Vans already know people who won't eat crab or pork, and no one really eats dairy anyway). Having strong preferences in any other way, though, is really just being insulting and not trying hard enough. The way I see it is your mama or someone else's mama slaved over a fire to make you a plate of food. Whatever she cooks, that's what she knows how to cook. She might not even really enjoy the meal herself; I've heard a lot of mamas tell me that they don't really like breadfruit, for example. But if the breadfruit's ready to eat, the breadfruit's ready to eat. You have to chow down. 

Bonus points as a volunteer: nobody is going to like taro enough to get fat on it. It's impossible.