Flying Cows and Coconut Palms

06:00: There is a cyclone coming. It’s not officially a cyclone until it’s christened, probably later today. It’s busily sucking up warm, moist ocean air to the north of us. Its little sister sits further east.

I’m glad I recently made curtains for the windows in the main room. I’ll be able to block the view of flying cows and coconut palms.

If (when) a cyclone comes our way it will be the first for our new house which has been engineered for earthquake and cyclone with metal strapping anchoring beams and trusses, timber bracing underneath and un-shuttered windows under the ceiling to counteract the force of the cyclone’s pull against our roof. I imagine that it will probably be windy inside the house when we’re in the middle of a big blow! We’ve been assured by the builder and an independent engineer that we don’t need cyclone shutters as our windows were built within box frames featuring crim-safe mesh and shatter-proof glass but I look at all those walls of windows with slightly squinty and distrustful eyes. Guess we’re going to have to suck it and see. Luckily we’d discovered and dealt with one major problem with these windows. About four months ago, Tim hosed a window from the outside. Water gushed in and all over the floor. When the louvres were in the locked position, there was quite a large gap left between the panes of glass. This would be a big problem in times of horizontal rain. He ordered 400 metres of flat sided silicone tubing from China. After wrangling with Customs and paying taxes he came home, unwrapped the giant rolls of tubing and began the task of cutting 700 pieces of tube to fit to the edges of each louvre in the house and the shed, where our power system lives. The window panels had also been made in China. You’d expect each louvre to be the same width, wouldn’t you? Of course they weren’t. Luckily Tim hadn’t cut too many tubes by the time he realised.

The house; each window consists of 60 glass louvres set in a frame with external steel mesh

Inside the main room: note open meshed windows near the ceiling to equalise pressure

Obviously, we don’t want wind and destruction but we do want rain. Water tanks in the villages are empty and community water supplies – piped trickles from springs in the hills, have dried up. Takara, Emua and Siviri in north Efate have had to truck water from Port Vila, 30 000 litres each trip, I’m not sure who paid for the transport but the buck would have to stop somewhere. Here at Bethel, people have miles of bore water for washing but Mary is out of rain water again and arrived two days ago with plastic bottles, a kettle and a 20L biscuit bucket. Our tanks are fairly full so it’s not a problem to give her rainwater. We filled her bottles and kettle but told her to send a man up with the wheelbarrow and the other plastic water drum as there was no way she could carry that bucket full of water. This is the fourth time we’ve asked for someone to come and carry the water drums using a wheelbarrow. The bucket still sits at the bottom of our stairs, full and waiting for collection. The good news is that it’s wet on the inside AND the outside! It has rained overnight! Over an inch (30mL) fell, mostly in one massive downpour that woke us as it gusted through the open windows. Tim got up to deal with it so I went back to sleep thinking happy thoughts about Mary’s tank.

If (when) a cyclone comes, we should be right for supplies. Two bottles of brandy and a bottle of rum should see me through. I figure that I won’t have to climb a palm to get drinking coconuts; should be plenty lying on the ground, possibly on the verandah.

Seriously, we have stocked up on everything from loo paper to chainsaw fuel. Our freezer is full of meat and we bought multiple cans of vegetables to supplement meals in case we can’t restock for a while. We have enough flour to fill a bakery with bread thanks to Tim and the breadmaker. We don’t have a vegie garden yet but we do have an abundant supply of green pawpaws which can be grated and used to make a coleslaw type salad by adding onion, carrot, garlic and lemon juice. We’ve found two gnarly lemon trees in the jungle bordering the house site. The lemons are surprisingly juicy and not too tart. In the past, I’ve bought citrus fruit at the market that turned my mouth inside out after one experimental lick! One bag of orangey globes was advertised as oranges. Couldn’t get the taste out of my mouth for a week! Avocado season has just begun; I’m keeping an eye on local trees. The local sweet pink or yellow grapefruit called pamplemus are ripening. It is naos season too. The Great Hog Plum is known locally as naos. The size and shape of a kiwi fruit but green, smooth and really hard, you bite or peel the thick skin to find hard, crisp flesh inside, like a green apple but much more dense. Be careful when crunching them, the inside area contains small seeds, perfect for breaking a tooth. Small chunks of naos are good in salad but I am careful to avoid those seeds. There seems to be no local tomatoes, lettuce or cucumbers at the moment, probably because it’s been so dry and ni-Vanuatu don’t irrigate crops, that’s not how it’s done here. The rich volcanic soil is porous so it doesn’t hold water and the concept of composting is unknown so the soil has turned to rich brown dust. We like to eat salad particularly when the weather is hot and humid. I have mung beans, chickpeas and lentils that can be sprouted when I run out of the lettuce and cucumber bought in Vila. Cans of beetroot, beans, peas, corn and mushrooms could be useful and it occurred to me the other day that we could eat cans of whole, peeled tomatoes in lieu of fresh ones so twelve cans are now sitting on our shelves. I don’t know why I didn’t think of that when we were living in a guesthouse in north Efate with a tiny fridge for three months. The custard apples are ripening behind the house and I can usually cadge some bananas from someone. I don’t think we’ll starve.

These preparations are useful for other reasons. We are very concerned about the outbreak of the Coronavirus especially with Vanuatu recently welcoming cruise ships that have been denied entry to other countries. If there is an outbreak, we will stay well away from Port Vila.

It’s 9am and Tim just checked the weather sites. They are a bit hit and miss, so we cross check with international radar patterns. There’s still a big low north of Vanuatu, just hanging around in the same place and a smaller one pops in and out far to the north of Fiji. Squirts of rain, maybe twenty drops at a time, scud quickly overhead. It is cooler today thankfully, it’s been oppressive.

If we do happen to get a cyclone, we’ll be notified of its progress by phone every three hours. When I first began travelling to Vanuatu there was very little mobile phone service and a very limited number of land lines, perhaps one in your village or another village eight kilometres down the track. One positive outcome of the fairly recent installation of mobile phone networks that cover most islands in Vanuatu is that people can be warned about impending cyclones or tsunamis. Perhaps this outweighs the negative side, of needing money to purchase, use and recharge mobile phones and an even greater negative - young people unknowingly adopting the poses of their international peers, hunched over devices, forever scrolling. Facebook is the social media used here. Phone companies offer deals to access Facebook cheaply which means families can stay in touch; there’s usually at least one person around who has a phone and Facebook.

Speaking of phones, the first weather warning just came through as follows:

(Info 1) 08/02/20 07:50AM. TL top right corner B,4. Mov slowly. Heavy rain, flash flooding, rough seas expected over TORBA/PENAMA/SANMA/MALAPMA & SHEFA.

There is a map of Vanuatu overlaid with grid lines and marked with letters and numbers on the weather site and also commonly seen on the walls of schools and places in the community so that you can track the cyclone using the given coordinates. The capitalised names represent five of the six provinces of Vanuatu. TORBA covers the Torres and Banks island groups at the northernmost part of the 83 inhabited islands that make up the Republic of Vanuatu. SANMA covers Espiritu Santo and Malo in the lower north west. PENAMA represents Pentecost, Ambae and Maewo in the lower north east. MALAMPA covers Malekula, Ambrym and Paama in the centre and SHEFA refers to The Shepherd Islands and Efate in the lower middle. There is no warning yet for TAFEA on the islands of Tanna, Aneityum, Erromango and Aniwa to the south.

Now we are officially on alert.

That means school won’t be open next week. Not that it was planning to open.

School officially started in Vanuatu last Monday the third of February after breaking up in November last year. I know this was the official starting date because I received multiple text messages from the Ministry of Education naming this date. Everyone did. So it was a little bit surprising to arrive at school on Monday morning to discover that no classes would be held that week, due to renovations… well, that was the reason given. The place did look like a building site, some rooms had been painted, rooves removed, cyclone strapping screwed on and new, lockable shutters installed over the window holes. It was a little more surprising to discover that we were still short a few teachers and that two out of the three teachers who had announced their retirement at the end of last year to great celebration were told that they could not retire and needed to come back to teach for at least one more year. It seems there is not enough money to pay teachers their retirement package. Imagine how happy they were to hear that news!

I hadn’t planned on starting work with classes until they’d had a week to settle in so I went home, made another 300 guided readers, laminated 200 pages of letters and alphabet posters and visited two of my local schools at Takara and Epau to hand out readers and laminated resources in English and Bislama to teachers along with written suggestions. I’ll follow this up with classroom demonstrations and further instruction throughout the year. The other two schools took the first day of term as an enrolment day but they started lessons the very next day and were hard at work when I arrived.

I’d planned to spend next week at Ekipe working in the school library. We’ve got a lot of work to do in there! Yesterday I rang Delin, who was the librarian in 2019 to see if she’d be at school next week. Delin reapplied for the 2020 position several weeks ago but hadn’t heard if she’d been successful. She then told me that school was closed next week anyway because they’d run out of water!

I’ve heard that the four new classrooms that have taken more than a year to build will be officially handed over to the school at the end of next week. That will be a day of celebration followed by days of moving in. And then we have Walter Lini day, a public holiday, the Friday after that. Then it will be time for the election which seems to be another holiday.

At this rate, I should manage to start lessons by mid-March.

Heaven forbid that anyone should pass away in the meantime. When that happens, the school closes because the funeral procession passes straight through the playground on the way to the cemetery. There’s not a lot of warning given for funerals. If someone dies, they are buried the next day for obvious reasons in this tropical climate. There are no autopsies or trips to the morgue. The family sits around you through the night, grieving and taking pictures which are often posted on Facebook for the benefit of family and friends on other islands. Tim has learned to quickly flick through those. The next day, it’s into the ‘bokis (box)’ or perhaps rolled in a mat, then into the ground. Hundreds of people visit the bereaved over the following days, bringing and preparing food, sharing the loss and holding major ceremonies on the fifth, tenth and hundredth anniversary day.

It’s rather lovely.

Most of it - not the Facebook part.

I’ve told The Family that I don’t want photos taken when it’s my time but I won’t be around to argue the point so I can only hope that they get a nice shot.

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