My small and soon to be extinct group of business volunteers recently took a trip to Ambae and spent a few days and nights in Quatangwele village. Here we are!
Mac, the woman in the middle wearing blue, lives in the village and has been helping the locals with business classes and planning some bridge projects.
Now, Quatangwele is way on the Northern end of Ambae and even the locals consider it to be removed and remote. Our gaggle landed at the Ambae airstrip and were the day's entertainment for the few other people around. After a nice night in some bungalows, all ten of us and our luggage piled into a truck and headed out on a dusty and progressively more dangerous road to North Ambae. The photos below don't do justice to the fact that we were all clingling for life. I sat on a wheel well in the truck bed and clutched a bracket on the side of the truck while others were seated on the truck bed's rim. One of us had to sit on top of the truck cab and those in the back looking forward would periodically warn him of low hanging branches.
After an hour or so in the truck, we reached the end of the road and climbed up a steep hill for another hour on foot to reach the village. Exhausted and bewildered, we still managed enough energy to partake in the village's welcoming ceremonies. We were taken across a dry creek bed just outside of the village near some banyan trees while the villagers prepared. As we began to cross the creek bed into the village, several of the young men came at us, wearing charcoal face paint, green leaves, and traditional woven clothes. They yelled in their local language and made a big show of threatening us and trying to drive us away with sticks and spears. Then, one of them calmed the others saying the equivalent of "it's okay, they bear good news" and our would be attackers became our escort into the village.
We did a simple local dance once in the village proper and went through an opening ceremony where were all given a salu-salu (floral necklace / lay) and welcomed officially. Each of us was given an opened green coconut kissed by the eldest chief. By drinking this, we would be protected from poison and sickness for the duration of our stay.
The people of Quatangwele had also prepared a kava ceremony for us in which we were all lined up, sitting on our haunches, and facing the ocean. we intoned the local word for kava, "malo", as a sort of "cheers" and drank out of matching bright plastic tea cups. One of the chiefs and a few of us volunteers also took the opportunity to spit kava into the night and shout in order to drive off any malign spirits that might ruin the week's program.
There were two parts to our stay in Quatangwele. We spent half of each day attending to our internal business group stuff: sharing success stories, taking care of administrative details, and talking about what we are going to do with the rest of our time at our respective sites. The other half of each day was spent helping the village with an ongoing project of theirs. The people of Quatangwele have been building a new church using concrete, local timbers, and iron roofing. Some of us hauled cement up that damn hill while some collected sand and small stones from the nearby creek bed. We also did a lot of digging and leveling and prepared a section of the church floor. Brian, pictured in a red shirt, has some building experience, or at least more than the rest of us, and with his help we demonstrated the right way to layer stones for the floor, mix the concrete to avoid later problems, and finished a small area of the floor. We didn't have time to finish the the entire church, of course, or even the entire floor, but we were able to share some lessons and work with the villagers so that they will be able to avoid some building problems common in Vanuatu.
There were other things we did with the village that I don't have pictures of. Carla and I taught some people how to make a few new dishes with locally grown ingredients. I introduced green thai curry, which is particularly tasty in Vanuatu because you can pick cilantro and basil just before you need them and the coconut milk is also as fresh as you can get.
The biggest benefit may have been in just chatting with people. We were told several times how the village doesn't receive many visitors and had never had nearly this many Americans or white people all at once. For five days we were peppered with questions about where we were from, what America is like, and even what life is like on the islands we each came from. I'm begining to suspect that the main benefits from my own service on Epi will be stuff like this that is hard to photograph.
So, here we are on our last evening in Quangwele in front of their unfinished church house. The village is spread out among the hills and some of the 80 or so residents weren't here for the photo, but at least you can see the bearded chief on the right who kissed our protective green coconuts, the young chief in the middle just in front of me who acted as our guide for the week, and all the little kids that followed us around all week, who are inexplicably making what look like gang signs in this photo.
-- Daniel --
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