Naked in Dangerous Places - Cash Peters [22]
“Listen up, indigenous people, for I give you the Book of Matthew, Chapter 1,” the missionaries would stand on the beach and say in pidgin English, only to find to their astonishment—“¡Ay, Dios mió!”—that they were met, not by the naive, grinning, warmhearted Polynesians they'd seen in all the brochures, but rather by a bunch of violent men and women who resented complete strangers waltzing in and trashing their culture.
“¡Ay, mierda!! Nos están tirando cocos!” [“Shit! They're throwing coconuts at us!”] the Spaniards cried as a rain of missiles showered down upon their heads. “¡Huye! ¡Huye! ¡Ay! Todos al bote. ¡Ay, ay!” [“Flee! Ouch! Everyone back to the boat. Ouch!”]
And quite honestly, if teams of very determined missionaries over many centuries couldn't change these people and their customs, no way is a U.S. TV crew going to.
“We like the life,” Tom says again.
As if to answer my further unspoken questions, he adds: no, the tribe doesn't seek progress; no, the tribe doesn't feel it's missing out by not having modern amenities; and no, the tribe doesn't regret being out of step with the world beyond these shores. And that's their final word on the matter. At least until this policy comes up for review, in, say, another ten million years or so.
Back in the village again, it's lunchtime. In the spirit of the show, that means I have to eat what the tribe eats, which is something called laplap, Tanna's national dish. It's a lasagna/pudding cooked in a fire pit and fashioned from layers of cabbage, bananas, coconut milk, and a little more soil than I'm used to, all bound up in a parcel of coconut leaves. A big parcel it is, too. About the size of a tractor seat. It takes six women and a child to maintain the fire and pile on the rocks that weigh it down, then to take the rocks off again and lift the laplap free of the smoldering ashes onto a tree stump, where it's hacked into individual slabs using bush knives and transferred to a plate. And when I say plate, I mean leaf.
“It's good,” Tom says, chomping on his laplap. “You try.”
Staring at the thick wad of steaming green slime in my hand, I'm seriously inclined to give it a miss. But Mark and Eric are looking on and there's a camera trained on me. So, taking a deep breath, I close my eyes and sink my teeth deep into it.
Hm. He's right, actually, it's not bad. Bit dry, bit gritty, but okay. For all the world like chewing a tractor seat, in fact.
The crew, for its part, is spared the complex soily goodness that is laplap. For them, the hotel restaurant has packed two heavy-duty plastic coolers with sandwiches, fresh fruits, potato chips, and chocolate bars. These, plus bottled waters and sodas, are unloaded off the back of the van in a clearing, allowing everyone to take a well-deserved break. Except for Director Mark, who's not feeling well, his already gaunt face suddenly geisha pale. Cursed with a rogue digestive tract, he always seems to be sick with something. Right now he maintains he's not really sick at all; he just needs to take a dump somewhere, and then he'll be fine.
“Go over there,” Camera Mark tells him. “Crap in the woods. Nobody will see.”
It is, after all, what everyone else does around here.
The patient is horrified. “Dude, are you serious? Look at this place. It's unsanitary. Nah—I'll wait 'til we get back to the hotel.”
And, clutching his stomach, he turns his back on the food and retreats to the van, where he sits half in, half out for the next twenty minutes, staring forlornly at the ground.
A big feature of each episode in the series is that I must find a generous stranger to give me a bed for the night. The challenge is to get them to offer it. Once they agree to that on principle, my job is done; I'm not