Mooning the best laid plans

Dawn has just dawned. It’s 6 a.m. and I’m sitting in my office surrounded by jungle. The birds chirp and twitter from all angles and the few flying fox that survived Cyclone Pam and its aftermath, flutter overhead on their way inland. The roosters herald the morning; they’ve been hard at it for more than an hour now. It’s still, no wind. The sea gently burbles away in the background.

It’s overcast. I’m wearing a light jumper and long pants at the moment but soon, it will get quite warm and I’ll need to change into one of my cotton shifts.

This is a typical winter’s morning. Later, the cloud will probably dissipate and the temperature will rise to about 28 degrees Celsius.

Jungle office

The weather over the past week has been just glorious, the type of weather that beckons truancy, it entices you to evade the everyday tasks and spend the day instead at a beach lying under palm trees, coconut in hand.

I resisted the urge to head to the beach several times this week.

I’d planned a big week at school teaching my three reading classes and also taking reading records on thirty three students in Class 4, a task that required an additional six hours to cover the orientation of the three texts to be read followed by individual Running Records.

I should know better by now. I often forget about The Rock Factor which exists solely to moon the best laid plans of mice and men.

Monday morning was bright and beautiful when I arrived at school. The Class 5 teacher was absent so I couldn’t do my lesson with those students but on the upside, I thought I’d have an extra hour to spend on reading records with Class 4.

First up was Class 3 and we actually got started on time which is unusual for a Monday morning. The past two Mondays hadn’t actually got underway until 9 a.m. which is an hour after the official starting time.

Thirty minutes into my first lesson of the day, the Class 2 teacher came to see me, apologising for her interruption. One of her students had had her finger crushed in the door of the classroom.

This incident had only been a matter of time in its eventuality. One of the students’ favourite pasttimes is to play the door game. This involves some kids inside the classroom holding the door shut while other students push the door from the outside, trying to force it open. As more and more students join the push party on the outside, the increasing external force soon overcomes the internal force, the door cracks open, some kids slip inside, door slams shut and so on. I could foresee the eventual and painful outcome(s) of the door game but no one else, student or teacher seemed worried about it.

As the teacher, student and I stood looking at the mangled finger the school handyman came along and advised us to remove the fingernail.

“No,” I said. “I don’t think we’ll do that.”

“Yes,” John assured me. “That’s what we do. We take off the selfinga (shell-finger).”

Five minutes later, mitrifala (me-three-fella) were in the truck heading to the clinic at Puanangisu.

The nurses at the clinic didn’t remove the selfinga either. The finger was badly injured but thankfully, not broken.

The owner of the finger must have been in pain but she hadn’t shown any discomfort apart from holding her hand gingerly. She had grinned non-stop from ear to ear from the time she realised that she was going for a ride in the truck.

After the finger was dressed and a course of antibiotics were issued we were on our way back to school so that I could deliver my next lesson to Class 4. I was determined to challenge the fickle finger of The Rock Factor and go ahead with my plans for reading records even though I’d just lost an hour on the clinic trip.

By lunchtime, I’d finished the Class 4 lesson and managed to complete six records with only twenty seven to go. At least I’d made a start.

At the start of lunch break, I drive home, chauffeuring the two Kindy kids who live at Bethel.

The Kindergarten building had blown away during Cyclone Harold in April. Between the loss of the building and the months of school closures due to the Covid threat, the Kindy kids haven’t had many days in class this year. The Kindy did reopen in the Chief’s Nakamal which is like a community hall, about a month ago but word of this hadn’t spread as far as Bethel so Navit and Annieline hadn’t been attending school.

A fortnight ago, I told Michel, Annieline’s father, that Kindy was open. I suggested that the little ones could walk down to school with the big kids in the mornings. Kindy finishes at 11:30 a.m. so I offered to bring Annieline and Navit back home with me at lunchtime from Mondays to Wednesdays. On Fridays, the littlies could walk back with the big kids as all students finish as lunchtime. One of the adults at Bethel would need to walk down to the school to escort the kids back on Thursday, only one day a week.

Since Michel and I had that chat, the kids have attended Kindy and seem to really enjoy it.

On their first day back at school, it was raining so Annieline had invited four friends to come along for the ride home with me, dropping them off along the way. She’d thoughtfully only asked kids who lived along our route. The kids were excited as they climbed into the cab. I had to ask them to sit down on the seat a couple of times as they wanted to stand up and ride chariot style, gripping the headrests in front. They were pretty good though and I think I managed to get the right kids to the right places. Sometimes it’s tricky to communicate with accuracy. The kids talk mostly in the local language of Namakura and sometimes in rapid Bislama while I’m still talking ‘Binglish’.

On their second day back at school, at a few minutes past 11:30 a.m., I was working in the library when ten excited little people, including the two Bethelites, erupted through the door. Miss Congeniality had doubled the number of her invitations! By the way, it was a bright and sunny day, no rain in sight.

I knew that Annieline and I needed to have a talk.

I was in the middle of reading records so I asked the kids to sit quietly and look at some books on the bottom shelf in a corner of the library while I finished my work. Five minutes later, I realised that this would have to be my last record for the day as squeals of laughter kept bursting from the corner. I sent the student back to their classroom, packed up and walked over to the corner. The kids had taken all the books from the shelf and had put them back, stacked in very creative and unusual orders, ways that I wouldn’t have thought of. I removed all the books and replaced them, spines facing outwards, titles positioned all in the same direction, in the usual, boring way.

There were double the number of kids in the truck that day but quadruple the excitement. Five kids were on the back seat, two on the front passenger seat and three in the tray. There were little fingers on little buttons exploring the magic of electric windows and multiple requests made to sit down were ignored until the truck stopped, then were quickly forgotten once underway. The first time I reached to move the centre gear stick to stop the truck, I was surprised to feel a little hand on top of mine, lending assistance.

Luckily we only had a distance of less than two kilometres to cover, dropping kids here and there but it was such an intense period of time that I felt like I’d driven half way round the island. There was one little chap who I guessed had to walk back towards the village when I dropped him at the track leading to one of the churches which was the last stop before Bethel. It seemed uncertain as to whether he lived nearby or not. Annieline seemed to be telling me that he was to stop here but he was reluctant to get out of the car.

“Yu go bak long skul?” Annieline asked me.

“No. Mi no go bak long skul,” I told her.

I enlisted some help with translation from a man who was passing by with a wheelbarrow.

“He can get out here,” the man assured me.

I was relieved when I’d dropped off the last tiny passenger having told each child quite firmly that from now on, I’d only be driving Annieline and Navit home. I reconfirmed this fact with Annieline at every opportunity and had a chat to her father to explain what had happened.

Tuesday was another balmy, South Pacific winter’s day.

I’d showered, dressed and set off to school with high hopes on that beautiful morning. I’d planned a full day of teaching and assessment from 8 a.m. until 3 p.m.

Fifty metres down the road, the pack of Bethel kids yelled out hellos in multiple languages as I passed them sitting in front of the restaurant. Twenty metres after that I slowed the truck and came to a stop as my brain finally got around to finish processing the image of those kids, who should have been at school, sitting around in their day clothes of T-shirts, shorts and skirts, looking very relaxed. I reversed back up the road.

“No school today?” I asked the crowd.

“We hear a man die in the village so no school,” I was informed. “Maybe you go down and see?” was a suggestion.

School is always cancelled if there is a death in the village as the funeral takes place on the day of death and travels through the school grounds from the main village to the cemetery on the other side of the school.

I set off towards the school. Not far along the road I came across the group of primary kids from the village of Epau who’d already removed their uniform, which they wear on top of their day clothes and were starting the long walk back home. They’d obviously been given the news along the road just before they’d reached school.

I loaded up the truck and drove the students four kilometres south to Epau. After that, I went home and wrote a few more stories for the reading books that I make to support reading in class and tried not to dwell too much on the fact that I still had twenty seven reading records to do as quickly as I could manage, preferably before the end of term in four weeks. Seriously, that is no joke and here follows a good example of how everyday routines are interrupted.

The fortieth Independence Day anniversary is on the 30th of July. It has just been formally announced that every business must close down for the eight consecutive days of gazetted public holidays to celebrate this event which will begin on the 23rd of July and go right through until the 31st.

Between public holidays, deaths, staff absences and other events that pop up such as fundraising and workshops, I think I really may be pushing my luck to complete reading records on Classes 3 and 4 in the next month.

Wednesday was meant to be a Fundraising day for the school. There would be no lessons on that day. Each child was asked to arrive at school from 10 a.m. and contribute two plates of food to the lunch. The funds are raised by selling each plate of food. Careful instructions were given at assembly that the food (probably meaning rice or manioc) must have some meat (probably meaning chicken or beef) on it and the meal couldn’t be ‘dry’, it should have some ‘green stew’.

Obtaining meat is tricky in many rural villages. Local shops may have a freezer but they don’t usually have a fridge. Sometimes you can buy pre-packaged frozen chicken all clumped together in a solid 2 kg mass from a village shop, rarely can you buy individual pieces of frozen chicken. It would be expensive to buy 2kg of frozen chicken just so that you have meat to add to two plates of donated food. I suppose that there is always the choice of hunting down a local chicken of the tough and scrawny jungle variety. Meals are often vegetarian, not so much through choice but due to availability of ingredients and budget.

On Tuesday afternoon, I’d made 60 biscuits to donate to Wednesday’s fundraiser.

On Wednesday morning, Tim and I set off into the spectacular morning with the container of biscuits and the first aid kit. Our first stop was at the ’Side-road’ also known as ‘Kingdom Road’ so that Tim could change the dressing on the student’s finger that had been jammed in the classroom door two days before. After that we planned to take the biscuits to the school then Tim would go to Vila, dropping me at home on the way.

While at Kingdom Road, we heard that today’s fundraiser had been cancelled and that school had been called off too. No one knew why. I handed the tub of biscuits to the mother of the student and told her that it was her lucky day. Judging by her smile, she thought so too.

After Tim re-dressed the finger injury, an older boy asked for treatment on an ugly looking knee wound caused when sliding along the ground during a game of football. The gash was half healed but quite gummy so Tim washed it out with hydrogen peroxide which caused the audience to gasp with astonishment as the liquid fizzed up and bubbled away. The kids were so impressed that they searched their own bodies looking for something which would require treatment. They were a bit downcast about not finding anything more than a few old scabs but were heartened by the thoughts of sharing all those freshly baked biscuits.

'Dr' Apu Tim heads out on a mission

By a stroke of good fortune and sheer persistence I managed to spend all of Thursday and half of Friday working with students at school and completed twenty seven records in that time. Six students were absent on both days. I will catch up with them next week or whenever they return to school.

On Thursday afternoon, I received a phone call from Joel and Elizabeth. This was unusual because we live only fifty metres apart and if we need to see tell each other some news, we just wander up or down the path.

The call was in relation to Navit who had found a fishing hook attached to some line… you can see where this story is leading.

Long story short, he was walking around holding the hook in one hand, trailing the line and stepped on the line as he walked, pulling it taut and causing the barb to deeply embed in the flesh of his finger.

Navit wouldn’t let Tim look at his finger; he started screaming as Tim approached so off to the clinic they went. It took a while to rouse a nurse out of their accommodations to come and look at the injury. The nurse said that she needed to cut the hook out but didn’t have a scalpel blade, only a handle. Luckily Tim had a few blades in his kit so the finger was numbed and cut and the hook released. Navit hollered again when he was given a tetanus needle to round things off. They do sting. He slept all the way home. I wonder how long it will be before he picks up the next fishing hook he sees lying around. I wonder who left it lying around? I wonder what the odds are of two children from the same village both injuring the same finger on the same hand and needing to go to the clinic in the same week?

On Friday night, we watched a news story online about the Covid crises in Victoria. It feels so far from us living in one of the few countries that don’t have any Covid cases. It feels like I’m watching a movie that I don’t really want to watch. I hear about the latest world-wide statistics every time Tim checks the John Hopkins site. I know that this terrible disease is happening around the globe but here, on these tiny rocks in the middle of the vast ocean, our biggest concerns are very, very small in comparison. Life goes on here in its normal way for most of us, most of the time. We are very grateful to be where we are though of course we are missing our family and we hope that they will be safe. Our son-in-law, Stef was tested for Covid19 this week but thankfully the results were negative. News like that sharpens the clarity of the emergency on a personal level but because these things aren’t happening here in Vanuatu, people are happy and relaxed and are living life as usual.

Life for us is pretty good apart from the odd injury Tim insists on inflicting on himself. This week he’s been recovering from an ankle injury which was probably caused by a day of over-enthusiastic gardening when working with Michel to put up the fence around the vegie garden.

Not only do we have a fence around the vegie garden but there are green sprouts emerging in neat rows in the garden beds; carrots, tomatoes, snow peas, spring onions, lettuce, capsicum, parsley and cucumber. The beans have been slow to pop up but we haven’t given up hope on them yet. The radishes have raced ahead and look like seedlings. We have a few chokos to plant on the outside of the fence and we are on the lookout for a passionfruit vine and a vanilla bean vine. The vines will provide protection from the wind and strong sun.

I’m very excited at the thought of being able to pick fresh vegies as I need them rather than buying them in bulk every few weeks in Vila.

The long awaited vegie garden!

In the meantime, we are lucky enough to receive bundles of bok choy, Chinese cabbage and spring onions from our neighbours every week. Terry has just brought the latest harvest up to us this morning. He presents them like a bunch of flowers and to me, they are better than flowers because I have crisp, ultra-fresh produce to include with meals for the next few days. How lucky is that?

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