July 15, 2009

Some Vanuatu Culture
The outrigger canoes of Vanuatu are not like the sophisticated sailing machines that slice through the waters of Micronesia. In Efate island, they are made from the soft wood trunks of a rapid growing tree, hollowed out with saws and axes and maybe an adz, with the ends of the log shaped to points. The edges of the hollowed side of the canoe are extended upward with small planks, as wide as a hand, nailed or stitched to the edge to give the canoe a little more freeboard above the water’s surface. The tree is rarely very straight, so the canoe hull has small curves and lumps, which increase the drag as it moves through the water. The canoes aren’t rigged with sail, and at paddling speed the drag is nearly negligible, so the lumps don’t matter much. Two rows of sticks, one near each end of the boat, are lashed across the top of the canoe. They extend a couple of feet off one side, and about 6 feet the other way. The outer half of the short side is planked fore and aft with more sticks, nearly the length of the canoe, to form a platform. Enough room is left open next to the canoe body to allow the paddle to be worked. The long side of the cross sticks has some platform area too, but at the outer end they are lashed to a series of short, roughly vertical sticks which project up at angles from a small log outrigger. The angled sticks hold the platform a foot above the water. The outrigger log is buoyant, but moderately heavy, providing stability both up and down, so the canoe is near impossible to capsize. These outrigger canoes make a good work platform, a moderate load carrier, but are work to paddle, and require both finesse and strength to move and steer. If they weren’t so low in profile, they’d be impossible in strong winds, but there’s not much for the air to blow against. There’s also not much distance from the water to the rail, so when the wind kicks up much of a chop, there is a need to bail between paddle strokes. The children have a paddle in their hands about 6 months after they learn to walk. Any villager more than 8 years old makes it look a lot easier than it is.
Often while they paddle, they sing, loudly, some in good tune, others abysmally. Sometimes the singing is to let us, and others, know they’re coming. It’s courtesy, not to surprise someone by appearing unannounced in a silent canoe. Sometimes they sing just to pass the time. It takes a while to cross the bay, and they don’t have to think about the paddling any more than one normally thinks about walking. So they sing hymns, and sometimes mangled, bislama versions of pop songs or country/western favorites. The words don’t often rhyme or flow well. Bislama was derived as a practical necessity, and is not a flowing, rhyming language. Translations of lyrics are simply wedged into the available musical bar. It makes for interesting listening, even if you don’t understand 95% of the words. And knowing there’s a paddler about, we will stick a head out of a hatch and wave, to let them know we’re aware of them, and they’re welcome if they wanted to stop here. It’s courtesy.
In recent years a few of the wealthier families, some schools, a few businesses, have purchased big fiberglass or aluminum skiffs, with 20 or 30 horsepower outboard motors. That allows for more flexibility in moving people and materials to and from gardens and social events. It buys more time for work or play, at the cost of the investment in the boat, and the fuel to run it. I notice that, unlike everyplace else we’ve visited in the Pacific, the ni-Vanuatu hardly ever run the motors fast. They’ve made the connection between sporting around at speed and fuel consumption, and they opt for frugality over the ego rush. A different choice than that of most other Pacific islanders, or of American motorists and boaters. The boat is a valued tool, not a status symbol, not a toy.
Vanuatu villagers seem to have a work ethic closer to that of our Western culture than that of most other Pacific islanders. They seem to plan a little further ahead, and they work two gardens. One is their own food supply, a subsistence farm. The other is exclusively for growing cash crops. They have adopted a seasonal pattern for when each crop is planted. Techniques change very slowly.
Peter explained that the stakes we saw in his tomato garden were unusual, and were part of an experiment. A Japanese advisor had convinced him to try pruning the terminal buds from his plants, to make them fill out but remain short, supported by the stakes. It’s a technique I learned about as a teenager, forty plus years ago. Peter wasn’t so sure it would work, but being a progressive farmer, he decided to try it out. I asked why, in this stable, fairly uniform climate, nobody ever plants tomatoes except in late April. It appeared to take him by surprise. He’d never thought about it. They just don’t.
There are however rules that I understand. They cultivate by “slash and burn”. They clear a plot of jungle with a bush knife, then burn it off to kill grass and weeds, and to fertilize the ground with the ash layer. The plot will be used for tomatoes, cabbage or lettuce for a year, then switched to beans, yams or kumara for a year. Then it is abandoned for a few years, to revert to jungle. Bananas, papayas, breadfruit, mango and coconut trees grow between cultivated plots, breaking up the monoculture, separating clusters. That greatly reduces the likelihood of a pest epidemic affecting everyone’s crop. They don’t use fertilizers or pesticides, and they don’t wear out the topsoil. They rotate crops, and allow fallow time. It’s worked for them for hundreds of years. In terms of the deforestation issue, they rarely take down large trees, but rotate through the near coastal land where the jungle canopy is low and broken. The impact is a tiny fraction of what results from clearing for livestock pasture or plantation monoculture.
Of course, modern medicine, and a changing culture that has reduced violence means there are more people for the land to support. Until now, when a village became unwieldy because of size or social friction, one of the chiefs would simply move a sizeable fraction of the people to a fresh section of jungle. Chiefs attain their leader status by merit and consensus, and they have the power to bring about a move like that without having to resort to coercion. But they’re getting a little short on new sites now, and land disputes are beginning to work through the courts of the young nation. The losers have little choice but to try their luck looking for work in a town or city. They lose the land, the community, the way of life. The rules that sustained them for a thousand years here are no longer sufficient. Other cultures changed the game. Resources are not infinite, regardless of what some economists would have us believe. The people work a bit harder than before, clear a little bigger garden, because when they sell the crop, they want to buy a generator, some lights for the house, and a DVD player. It’s understandable, but it can’t go on forever.
As in the rest of Pacific Oceania, the protestant missionaries of the last two centuries have had their effect in Vanuatu. And what the ni-Vanuatu accepted from the Western religions loosely follows the pattern of the rest of the region, but with significant limitations.
A considerable portion of time is spent in church services, and church projects. But, unlike in Tonga, Fiji, and to a lesser extent Micronesia, the ni-Vanuatu don’t spend a great proportion of their money on buildings. In other island nations homes are a conglomeration of woven mat walls with thatched roofs, pole buildings with corrugated sheet metal walls and roofs, or combination buildings. But churches are substantial frame or concrete block structures with steeples and ornate windows and doors. In Vanuatu, the church building is pretty similar to the houses, and for big services, they simply put up a temporary shade tent, with benches and mats for seating.
All over the Pacific, modest, Western influenced dress codes are part of the church. Men come to church in shirt and necktie, usually with a jacket, and depending on the country, with either a formal sulu ( a wrap-around skirt) or suit trousers. Women wear long, loose fitting dresses, called “Mother Hubbards” made from bright patterned cottons, covering shoulders and upper arms, down to the ankles. After the Sabbath, the men revert to shorts and t-shirts, or in some places just the shorts. The women stay in the voluminous dresses, even if they go in the water to swim or work. And yet, for all the public modesty culturally enforced on the women, the evidence indicates that childbirth is as common outside of marriage as in, and functional monogamy is rare indeed. And in Vanuatu there is another departure from the daily modesty. They still have holidays when the celebrations include traditional dancing. The male costume for this includes a variety of head-dresses, body paint, and a namba. A namba is a penis sheath, woven from grass and leaves, secured around the hips with a string which maintains it in an upright orientation. That is the total extent of clothing for men at traditional dances. Women don’t do the head-dress, or the body painting, but go topless, and wear a knee length grass skirt. They all spend the day singing and dancing, naked, then the next day the women are back in their bright colored sacks. I don’t know how much of the traditional dancing is for the benefit of the increasing tourist traffic, and how much is for the villagers own sense of cultural identity. We may get to attend one of those events this month, and maybe we’ll get a better insight to that.
Marriage is another thing that seems to have evolved with the changing times. In the distant past, the genetic diversity of a village was sustained by bringing home the women of other villages defeated in inter-tribal warfare. Now, to avoid incestuous couplings, marriages are arranged among far flung communities, on a trial basis. One of our frequent visitors from Essen village is Kenneth, the chief’s son. On his first visit, he had two little girls, his daughters, with him. He wanted to have me show him how to work on his generator, and we set up a day and time. The morning of the appointment, I got a message from his brother that he couldn’t come that day. His new wife had just arrived on the ship from Epi Island. It seems that the mother of his daughters had never married him, and had decided to go home to her village. She took the youngest daughter, and left the 4 year old with Kenneth and his sister. A friend promptly arranged for a new wife for Kenneth. Everyone seemed pleased with the prospect. Three weeks later, things had changed. I asked Kenneth how the new wife was getting on with the new life, and he explained that his father, Chief Edward had decided to “send it back”. When a marriage is arranged, the new husband’s family pays a bride price to the family of his new wife. It seems that the new wife’s family thought 2 weeks was enough trial time, and was demanding payment now. Edward insisted that nobody could tell if a relationship would work long term with such a short trial, and wanted to hold off payment for a while. No compromise had been reached, so Edward, as chief and head of the family, decreed that they should “send it back”. In Bislama, there is no need to define a person differently from any other object, so the ex-bride is “it”. Kenneth seemed a little saddened, but philosophically resigned. After all, 5 years had been required for his first woman to decide it wasn’t a viable pairing, so what can you tell in 2 weeks. Right now, Karen and I have Sequester on a mooring in Port Vila harbor for a few days re-provisioning and catching up on internet. We’ve found a couple of cafes with free wi-fi internet now, so for the price of a couple of (fairly expensive) fruit smoothies we can work on correspondence, do a little research, and hopefully, we can get the blog caught up. On our last attempt to update it, last month, we got entangled in having forgotten the password, exacerbated by internet access so slow that it kept timing us out and dropping the site. This time there’s no cruise ship in town, so the traffic on the server will be lighter, and I think we can reset the password. Wish us luck. Ted