Roast Pork & How The Pig Got its Testicles

Jo Kafer
Jan 16, 2020
5 min read

Updated: Oct 2, 2020

Staff and students from Menindee in outback Australia spent time at Ekipe Centre School before heading back to Bethel Garden Restaurant and Bungalows to spend the afternoon preparing for the farewell feast to be held that night.

Volleyball is one of the favourite sports of ni-Vanuatu but soccer, known as football, is their main obsession.

Back at Bethel, the visitors had a craving for roast pork and were keen to see how a pig would be cooked in the ground.

Joel explained that pigs are of great value in Vanuatu. They are usually only killed and eaten for important kastom celebrations. Pigs are used as gifts or for bartering. At a wedding, a groom's family will give gifts of pigs, mats and yams to the bride's family in exchange for her.

After some discussion, a pig was purchased for the feast and the boys volunteered to help prepare it. Everyone at Bethel village would enjoy it tonight.

Meanwhile, manioc had been harvested from the gardens and peeled ready to be baked or used for laplap. Manioc is a large tuber which has a taste and consistency that is very similar to roast potato when it is baked. It appears almost buttery inside when the baked tuber is broken open; a delightful treat when you are in a village, a long, long way from butter.

The boys with manioc tubers, manioc plants in the background

Baked manioc pieces

Manioc can also be boiled until tender. If you grate it, it forms a pulpy mass, like glutinous custard. This can be used to make laplap when it is poured onto a layer of large green leaves (unsurprisingly named 'laplap leaves'), wrapped into a sealed parcel and baked in a ground oven lined with hot rocks for several hours. The result is a solid wedge of carbs, it's hard to describe, it's like super thick porridge that has set overnight. Mary adds oodles of freshly squeezed coconut cream into her batter then uses more cream to 'ice' the cooked laplap.

Other feast preparations included harvesting green drinking coconuts and scratching (grating) the hard white flesh inside older, brown coconuts. The grated coconut is put inside a nest made from dry coconut husk then squeezing it until the coconut cream trickles out. Salads were made, fruit was sliced, island cabbage was steamed, the restaurant was strewn with flowers and the pig had been in the oven for hours.

To dismantle the ground oven, first remove the lava hot rocks using 'tongs' made from a piece of bamboo folded in half. Everybody helps, kids too, and no one seems concerned about burning their feet - note footwear below... or lack of.

Vegetarians might want to close their eyes for the next couple of pictures.

The pig was revealed in all its glory! The crowd grew very excited as the crackling snapped and roast meat smell tantalised the tastebuds with promises of good things to come.

It was time to feast. The pork tasted as good as it looked, succulent and crispy in all the right places.

After the feast, there were dances performed by local kids. Everyone sat on the steps at the front of the restaurant in the cool night air to enjoy the show.

Then we heard stories from each culture. Daniel described life in the outback.

Joel retold the well-known kastom story about how the rat got its tail. Rats feature in many stories and I smile everytime I hear Joel say, 'Once, there was a rat.'

So...

Once there was a rat.

Back then, long ago, rats had no tails.

The rat was climbing a tree overhanging a fast running river when he lost his balance and fell in the water.

The rat was caught in the raging torrent and swept out to sea. He thought he was going to drown and was flailing around desperately, trying to save himself when up from beneath the waves popped the round head of an octopus. The rat begged the octopus to save him.

'Climb onto my back,' said the octopus, 'And I will take you to shore.'

As the octopus swam with the rat clinging to his back, he heard the rat laughing.

'What are you laughing about' he asked the rat.

'Oh I'm just so happy to be saved!' claimed the rat.

The rat became quiet for a while but before long he was laughing harder than before.

'What are you laughing about now?' the octopus asked the rat.

'Oh, I'm just so happy that we are nearly back on land, I can see it over there!'

The closer they got to the shore, the louder the rat laughed until the tears ran down his little rodent cheeks.

'What is so funny? Tell me!', demanded the octopus.

The rat chortled, 'I was laughing at your bald head you stupid octopus,' as he leapt from the octopus and scampered through the shallows towards land.

The octopus was furious! He picked up a casuarina quill; a leaf from one of the casuarina trees growing on the coast, which was floating on the water. He threw that spiky leaf hard and true and it struck the rear end of that cheeky rat lodging itself forever. And that is how the rat got his tail.

Disclaimer: This is my retelling of this story and no doubt I've got parts of it wrong or left parts out. If you want to hear the real thing, you'll just have to come and hear Joel tell it, in the jungle with millions of stars blanketing the sky and local people singing a lilting refrain throughout the telling of this story. It's magical.

Joel continued on with a short kastom story that I'd never heard before.

This story was called 'How the pig got it's testicles'.

Once, there was a pig. The pig was in the process of being made by the Creator of animals. The pig would not cooperate as the Creator made and added parts to the pig's body, no doubt rolling bits up out of pork flavoured putty. Legs, tail, head, nose, eyes, mouth and ears, all were attached as the pig squirmed and fussed in the Creator's grasp as pigs always do. The pig was almost complete but because it was going to be a male pig, it needed one more thing. Two things actually. The Creator rolled two balls of pink putty and reached down to attach them underneath the pig, to hang below his body as is the case with all mammals.

'Oh no you don't!' squealed the pig, breaking away from the Creator and running for the door like greased piggy lightning.

The pig's front trotters disappeared out the door. Quick as a flash, the Creator threw those two balls from one hand where they smacked into the rear end of the pig, just under his tail. And that is how the pig got his testicles and also, how they ended up positioned sticking out from his rear end, rather than hanging down like all the other animals.

Unfortunately I don't have a photo of a pig from the rear on hand.