Naked in Dangerous Places - Cash Peters [21]
“I'm using the stick, Tom! But nothing's happening.”
To make matters worse, the cheap sunblock I slapped on my forehead earlier in the day is starting to mingle with my sweat. Together they form salty rivulets that dribble into my eyes, stinging and blinding me. And Tom is no help. He just stands there, berating me with his eyes, the way he might if I were, for instance, one of his wives.
“Dig down with the stick,” he urges again.
“TOM—I AM DIGGING DOWN WITH THE BLOODY STICK! Look at me, I'm digging down.” Even as I'm proving my point by dragging it hard across the ground, the damn thing snaps. Sonofabitch!
“What happened?”
“What d'you think happened? I broke my stick!”
“Wait—I find you another.”
“No, no, it's okay, I'm good,” I leap in. “You know what?” And I let out a long sigh. “Maybe I'm more suited to doing women's work.”
“No,” he says very firmly. “Men dig kava only. Not women.”
Thirty seconds later, with sweat cascading off my chin, I quit again. “Come on, Tom, can't we skip kava for today? Let's go without. Let's have bananas instead.”
Well, that does it! You'd think I'd just made a casual offer to castrate him with his own machete, because instantly the most peculiar silence envelops us.
Go without kava? These people never go without their kava. It's the mainstay of their life; their savior, their mistress, their reward each night for making it through another miserable twenty-four hours in this humid, monstrous pit of hell.
Through a halo of circling flies, I see him glowering. Until, in the end, perhaps realizing that, left to the likes of me, nothing will ever get done—which is a pretty fair assessment—he crouches down by the hole and pitches in, shoveling dry earth aggressively with his bare hands, until …
Success!
“Hey look, we've done it!”
… we uncover a set of bagpipes.
Yay!
Three gentle tugs, and out pops a bulbous vegetable with a dozen frayed woolly tendrils dangling from the bottom like dreadlocks. All of a sudden, the mood in the garden lightens. The addict has his fix; he's happy again. And, after repairing the damage we've done, kicking the loose soil back into the hole and patting it down, we set off on the long steep trek home, with Tom dangling the dirty, disgusting object at his side proudly, like a severed head.
“So how about a telephone?” I begin again. “Wouldn't you want a telephone?”
“No.”
“A car?”
“No.”
“How about electricity?” I try to explain electricity, and how it's all the rage where I live. “Come on, you've got to want that. Refrigeration, air conditioning, lights. Who doesn't want lights?”
But he's resolute. “No.”
“A microwave oven, a toaster …?”
“No, no.”
“Do you even know what they are, Tom?”
No. But even if he did, something tells me he wouldn't want them.
“We like the life,” he repeats. “We like our culture. Our kastom.”
Kastom refers to customs (forgive me if I translate these difficult words for you): the many diverse traditions the tribe adopted centuries ago and which it insists on sticking to even today, despite overwhelming evidence that there may possibly be a better way.
Tanna was first settled in about 400 B.C., during Ancient Historical Times, by Melanesians from neighboring islands. These early pagan tribes were a superstitious bunch. They believed that mankind was evolved from volcanic rocks—which was a bit of a hard sell, I'm guessing, even then. The world, they claimed, was created by a rock spirit called Wuhngin who lived inside a mountain. Wuhngin decreed that it was the woman's job to do the household chores, from cooking to gardening, while the men, he insisted, should focus all their efforts on sitting and not much else. Well, suffice it to say, the menfolk worshiped Wuhngin.
Skipping forward now a couple of thousand years to Historical Times …
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, wave after wave of missionaries set sail from Europe, especially Portugal and Spain, to indoctrinate the people of the South Pacific with Christianity. The place became a virtual revolving door for every Tom, Dick, and Pedro with a Bible and