The past week has been exceedingly slow as everyone is starting to take breaks from their busy work schedules (not busy at all, even the busiest people probably only put in about 15 legitimate hours of work a week on Maewo) and begun "spelling" since its almost christmas time. Going from only working on a house or something about one or two days a week to not working at all cause its christmas time, kava drinking and card playing has taken over for everyone. While i have no objections to drinking kava most nights with other people in my village, i tend to get bored of playing cards for days upon end. The only card game anyone ever plays is a game they call 7-lock which is played with a regular 52 card deck and is a bit like uno but there is minor betting involved. The game can be really fun for the first hour or two you learn it and start playing it, but here it is taken to excess, they play from the time they wake up until 1 or 2 o clock in the morning and then get up to do it again the next day at 6am.
Now you may be wondering what all of this has to do with the title of the post? I was bored as hell so i decided to make a bunch of kava drinking shells to pass my time, which led me to a trip up to one of the coconut plantations. I went with my mom and we collected 25 coconuts that are longer than normal coconuts that we would be cut and cleaning into nice drinking shells. After collecting them we passed through a lone housing area that i'd only been to a few times and for the first time since coming to vanuatu i met on of my bubus (grandmas). She is not the bearded lady of the story, but the reason i'd yet to meet her despite living about a 10 minute walk from her house for a whole year was that she rarely left her house because she can't walk due to the number of boils on her legs. So i shake hands with her and then she turns to my mom and asks in local language, "ian na fafnai?" in local language ian is he/she its not gender specific so roughly translate: he/she a woman? After hearing my bubu ask my mom this i was slightly confused because i thought she was talking about me but i was positive that i had to have misunderstood and that my bubu was just talking about someone else or something else that i was following. Finally the two of them stop talking and my mom and i are walking back down to my house so i ask my mom to confirm what i thought i'd heard. My mom starts laughing immediately and says that i had heard right my bubu was asking if i was a woman. This had to be the most surprised i've been in a long, long time. Here i am with a huge rice bag filled with 25 coconuts, my shorts are covered in mud, and i have a beard that hasnt seen a razor or scissors in 6 months. Still convinced that i couldnt possibly have been mistaken for a woman i asked my mom if her eyesight was poor. My mom said no her eyesight was fine the reason she thought i was a woman was because i had my hair in a pony tail. I asked my mom how she could see that i had a pony tail and not notice the fact that my beard is like 4 inches long and my mom shrugged and said, "sam woman penecost igat mustash olsem yu." Never in my life did i think that i would be mistaken for being a woman, much less while sporting a beard longer than the average man's head hair, but apparently on pentecost island there are woman that justify this gender confusion. Glad i live on Maewo!
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