My favorite Ni-Van (so far)

So the last Sunday everyone went down to church, I opted not to go, citing that I needed to take care of some serious “whiteman” work down at the school since school would be starting the next day. Everyone of course understood because white-people make all kinds of serious work that black people don’t understand. (Exactly how the people here always talk about it, I kid you not) I went down to the school and proceeded to type up a few blog entires, listen to music and eventually getting around to writing me classroom management workshop. After about 3 hours of sitting infront of the computer typing I was both hungry and incredibly bored, so I figured I’d try to integrate a little and just invite myself over to lunch with some of my family in the village. After wandering through Talise I realized no one was going to be around everyone was up at church, so I turned to head back up the hill to my house when I head the twang of an acoustic guitar. Curious about who would be down by themselves at the beach playing an accoustic guitar while everyone else was up at church I went down and found one of my dads (not straight dad, my dad’s male cousins are also my dads) sitting in a plactic backyard chair strumming his acoustic guitar. He was playing Hotel California perfectly. I grabbed a seat next to him on the rocks of the beach and we began talking. Turns out that his straight father was the first man to become a pastor on Maewo, and he himself “mi no wan man blo pray” as he put it. So we spent the afternoon hanging out on the beach and ate bannanas his wife had cooked before going to church. As the after noon wore on he decided I had to see the eels he fed in the river by his house so he grabbed his .22 rifle and we went hunting for Nawimba, an oversized pigeon look-a-like. After about an hour of wandering around the bush we had shot 2 of them and went back to his house to clean the birds and feed their organs to the eels. We fed the eels, fried up the birds, which we didn’t eat because we were waiting to drink kava and continued chatting. He doesn’t like stringband, unlike every other male in Vanuatu, he likes good old classic rock and roll. When he was a youngfala, (20’s something) he had got into a fight with a drunk man and was thrown in jail in Santo. He was in jail for 3 months, but as he had know-how in carpentry, every morning he got up and an officer drove him around, making him do repairs to all of the police officer’s houses. At the end of the 3 months Francis didn’t want to go home, and the head of the police, sad to see him go bought him a nice bottle of whiskey as a good-bye present. That night he finished the bottle and bought a pack of cigarettes for everyone in the jail, returned that night, passed out cigarettes, stayed the night and then the next morning followed a boat back to Makila. He is full of great stories and he’s always ready to laugh about the style of living of people in Vanuatu. At the end of the kava drinking I was headed home feeling good and just as I was leaving, Francis let me know that all of his kids were off in school so he was a youngfala again and we should hang out every Sunday. I fully intend to ditch church and hang out with Francis every Sunday until he gets bored of me haha.