Bislama and kava

I have decided to keep track in this blog of the number of mosquito bites on my body, Bridget Jones’diary style. Thus: mosquito bites: 16 (v.i. – very itchy!)


Hello everybody!
Please find below last week’s missing posts. Sorry about the cock-up, but look at it from the bright side: it has resulted in a truly post-modern, time-warped double helping of antipodian adventures! (“Yeah…what ever”)


30 July: Sick
I have got a cold. I had planned to write a ‘weekly report’ yesterday, but instead had to spend the day – Independence Day in Vanuatu - in bed coughing and sneezing. Not a lot of fun.

In between naps I have started reading the Bislama bible (i.e. ‘Baebol’) that I bought yesterday to get into the language. A good thing to do on a Sunday.

Hopefully a more extensive report tomorrow. Sorry to keep you in suspense.


31 July: Born again
Or at least: much better, thank you. (I am not quite sure yet if reading the Bible had anything to do with my recovery).

So last week was the start of the so called VSO “In Country Training”. Together with Karen, two Philipino women and a retired British accountant I follow a full schedule with all kinds of briefings about VSO, its programmes in Vanuatu and its policies, meetings with interesting people such as the secretary of the National Council of Chiefs (a.k.a Malvatumaouri) Rosaleen Tor, a local feminist who gave us an introduction about Gender in Vanuatu. This week the ICT programme continues up until Wednesday with among other things a meeting with the Australian deputy High Commissionary to discuss the political landscape in Vanuatu and the Secretary of the Vanuatu Association of NGO’s VANGO to discuss the role of civil society in development. Good stuff. On Wednesday we will be shipped off to a small island off Efate called Pele to spend some time with a village community in order to get an understanding of life in rural Vanuatu. In Port Vila there are restaurants with cappuncino machines and ADSL internet access, in rural Vanuatu there is no electricity and no running water. In Port Vila one can get by using English only (unless you run into an obnoxious French ex-pat) in rural Vanuatu people speak their local languages (about 100 different ones throughout the country approximately) and if you are lucky: Bislama, the Vanuatu pidgin.

So just as well that all through last week, every morning we started with two hours of Bislama lessons from a professor from the University of the South Pacific who listens to the beautiful name of Helen Tamtam. Learning a pidgin might seem easy as lots of words sound – and indeed are – very familiar. Thus “I want a coconut” in Bislama would be: “Me wantem kokonas”. Easypeasy! Unfortunately when you say this sentence to one of the lovely island women in the market, they start talking back to you. Really! In really, really long sentences too. Talking really, really fast – until they see the really, really helpless and confused look on your face. And obviously being able to ask for a coconut is a far cry from uttering more work-related stuff such as: “Tomorrow I would quite like to do a training needs assessment for the secretaries of the local representative bodies using participatory facilitation methods, if that is alright with you guys?” So learning the basiscs is do-able in a week, but the real work starts when we are set loose on the poor ni-Vanuatu who will have to try and make sense of what we say. ‘Immersion’ they call this. Hm. Everyone assures me that in six months time I will be fluent. I will keep you posted…
In the meantime you might like to visit: http://www.une.edu.au/langnet/bislama.htm

My first opportunity to practise some real-life Bislama was on Wednesday evening when a Kenian VSO called Laurence invited me to join him at one of the local nakamals in order to drink kava. This was the most remarkable experience I have had in Vanuatu so far. Two words in the penultimate sentence beg for translation. First of all ‘nakamal’. Traditionally the nakamal in a village is the place where men meet at the end of the working day to discuss stuff – and drink kava. However, nowadays in Port Vila a nakamal is also refered to as a ‘kava bar’, where women are also allowed to enter and drink. The word ‘bar’ might be deceptive in this context though. Do not think of a bar or café as we know them in Europe, instead think of a very rickety backyard shed where you might put your tools and any other stuff that you’re not particularly attached to. No window panes. Gravel floor. A few wooden benches against the wall. No lights. (Remember it gets dark at six every evening over here). So far, so good. Then for the kava. Kava is the ground-up root of a plant and when mixed with water and drunk will have a mildly intoxicating effect. Most people think its tastes vile. I thought it was not too bad. Mind you: one is not supposed to sit and linger over a cup - traditionally served in coconut shells and therefore not actually called cups but ‘shells’ (100 Vatu) or ‘half-shells’ (50 Vatu) Instead this is what you do: you collect your shell (or half-shell as the case may be when you are a cautious Dutch woman who hasn’t got a clue what she’s gotten herself into), you find a quiet spot near a wall and down the shell in one. Kava etiquette then proscribes that you scrape your throat and spit, and spit, and spit, make some more disgusting noises and spit some more in order to remove the aftertaste of the kava. Then you grab one of the bottles of water that is sitting nearby (if you have had your Hep A shots, that is, otherwise BYO Evian or somesuch) and rinse and gurgle and scrape and spit some more – gravel floor, remember? You may have gathered by now that spitting is a big thing when ‘enjoying’ kava. You then sit on one of the benches against the wall and wait for the kava to take effect.(spit). And ofcourse you chat with your friends (spit) and other friendly people you might meet. In this case Jacob, the owner of the nakamal we were in (spit) and his ‘adopted brother’ Dan, a Canadian VSO who was kind enough to guide me through the kava process (spit). I must say that the intoxicating effect on me was (spit) very mild indeed – it even might just have been the aftermath of jetlag, who can tell? Apparently a full shell on an empty stomach is the best way to go about it, so we will see how I progress. Again: I will keep you posted… (I would not be surprised if it turns out that there is a causal relationship between drinking more kava and getting more fluent in Bislama.)

(I gather from the comments that you’d quite like to see some pictures. I would like to post some, trust me! I just haven’t gotten around to organising this, but hopefully will do so before I set off for Malekula sometime next week. Quite likely I will only be able to post pictures though when I am in Port Vila, which will not be that often. So please bear with me.)