Kakae

I’ve eaten REALLY well this week. Which made me realize… I haven’t written about food yet. I lose track of what I’ve shared and what I haven’t and I’ve been here long enough that I’m starting to forget that my life is not normal by American standards. Most of the reminders of this come when I talk to Mom on the phone (“Why did you boil the bananas?”)

So here you go: The Food Blog.

In Vanuatu there are two food groups: aelan kakae (island food) and waetman kakae (white man’s food), also sometimes called rabis kakae (rubbish food).

Aelan kakae consists of:

• root crops (manioc [cassava], taro, kumala [sweet potato], and yam) – every island has a different dominant root; there’s a lot of yam up here, but I’ve heard on Maewo it’s all taro.
• some greens – namely aelan kabis (island cabbage, which is spinach, “Chinese spinach,” or bok choy in the USA), several kinds of other leaves that can be cooked
• laplap (keep reading)
• all-the-time fruits – coconuts, popo (pawpaw; papaya), bananas in several different varieties
• seasonal fruits – mango, oranges, pamplemus (grapefruit), breadfruit, pineapple
• fish

The favorite cooking technique is just boiling. Things are also fried in palm oil, and sometimes root crops are cooked by literally just setting them on the fire for a while, then peeling off the burnt skin.

The largest kind of banana is a cooking banana, which you boil. If ripe, it just tastes like a hot banana. If unripe, it tastes more like a potato. You can also boil all the other kinds of bananas, which doesn’t really do anything but soften them. Then there are fried bananas, banana cake, banana pie (basically bread with sliced bananas on top), banana pancakes (which apparently only I make), peanut butter banana sandwiches… When I come back to the States I don’t plan to eat a banana for a lonnngggg time.

Anything can be “milked” by “scratching” or grating coconut meat, mixing it with the coconut water, and squeezing it over the top of the food before cooking it. This is literally coconut milk. (A lot of people are surprised that the inside of a coconut is filled with a clear juice, not a milk.) The coconut meat itself is then thrown out (unless you’re a certain bearded Banks PC legend, in which case all the Ni-Vans think you’re crazy anyway, so go ahead and toss it in the pot) though you can toast it and/or use it in baking something else.

Laplap is a dish made with any of the above root crops or bananas. The roots are “scratched” or grated on either a rough stick or a piece of tin with holes punched in it. The resulting mush is mixed with water (or coconut water) to the right consistency (mushier) then spread onto banana leaves. Your average circular laplap is 1-2 inches thick and has a diameter of probably 18 inches. Sometimes the layer of mush is topped with a layer of aelan kabis and/or coconut cream (or, rarely, beef – this is called tuluk). Then it’s all wrapped up in the banana leaves and baked in a stone oven: a layer of hot coals, then the wrapped laplap, then a pile of heated rocks on top. The laplap is done after about an hour, or when it has a slightly chewy consistency… sort of like gummy bears. Sometimes the outside is golden brown and crusty – most Ni-Vans call this burnt, and most Americans call it delicious. You cut it into squares and voilà, laplap! You can also boil laplap by wrapping about 2 cups of the mush in banana leaves and boiling the little packets.

All Peace Corps Trainees instantly declare that they hate laplap, yet somehow by the time we reach swearing in we at least sort of like it (if not LOVE it) and have a favorite. My favorite is “milked” laplap manioc. I also had a great banana laplap here in the Banks that was apparently Vanuatu-Solomons fusion cuisine. (It had slices of bananas baked into the top of it!)

Chickens roam aimlessly here, but nobody ever eats them. And they only sometimes find the eggs. So what’s the point of the chickens? Don’t ask me.

There’s beef for one of two reasons:

1. There are enough people to eat a cow (workshop),
2. There’s some kind of celebration (marriage, death, holiday) at which there are enough people to eat a cow.

But even then, you always go fishing first. If somebody manages to catch a 6 foot tuna, there’s no reason to kill the cow.

Back home we eat beef all the time: steakhouses, burritos, McDonalds anyone? Here, I can count the number of times I’ve had beef at site on one hand: my welcome in November, provincial teachers’ workshop in March, Easter, death ceremony (papa’s mama’s sister), and this week (which I’ll get to). Plus Christmas and a marriage at Kerry’s site.

White Man Kakae:

• white rice (eaten at every meal)
• macaroni (ramen noodles)
• tin mit (Oxford corned ‘beef’ – a relic of British explorers)
• tin tuna (more like cat food than tuna. Certainly not Starkiss.)
• tin fis (mackerel in tomato sauce, bones usually included)
• Breakfast Crackers (like really thick, strong saltines without salt)
• peanut butter
• salted peanuts (with MSG)
• Twisties (Fijian Cheetos)
• cookies
• and other assorted long-life foods depending on the remoteness of your island.

Living in a provincial center is great and sucks at the same time. Here’s why:

Aelan kakae is sometimes non-existant. In order to eat fresh produce, you have to go out to the garden to get said produce. A lot of gardens are actually large plantations up in the hills, and going to them is a full day process. In most of Vanuatu, agriculture is still the main economy, but it’s a problem in provincial centers because most of those people have jobs and don’t have time to go to the garden during the week. In fact, our local boarding school gets their food shipped from West Vanualava which is only accessible by boat. Hellooo, transportation costs. I am probably one of the few rural Vanuatu PCVs that can say that after 6 months, I still have not been to my host family’s garden.

Port Vila, Luganville/Santo, and Lenakel/Tanna are lucky enough to have nice markets, so at least those places have access to good stuff – but it’s still probably cheaper to buy rabis kakae. Unfortunately, we’re not cool enough to have a market here in the Banks. (I’ve never been to Lolowai or Norsup. Any input, guys?) At the beginning of the year, there was a family coming down from the hill and selling aelan kabis twice a week in front of the store, but that stopped about 6 weeks ago. Around that same time, the little market shelter fell down, giving up its month long battle of surviving with hurricane damage. I don’t know if these two events are connected.

The nice thing about living in a provincial center is that my local store has a lot more options than the outer Banks islands have. For example, I can get peanut butter, ketchup, [really bad] instant coffee, Milo, Lipton, baked beans, powdered milk, and sometimes Coke or Fanta at site. Once in a while we even have eggs at 60-70 cents each. They go fast, so I buy 10 every time I see them. They’ve also started carrying two types of canned veggies here (peas and mixed) at US$3 per can. I don’t have to ship a lot of things from Vila like a lot of other PCVs (which is good, since it’s logistically impossible to ship to the Banks). But I do still bring back some things when I travel: Nutella – I need my chocolate fix, honey, spices, pasta, dry beans, dry soup powder, popcorn,… I also bring back some cheap bulk items like 1kg jars of peanut butter to save money, since transportation up here (or lack thereof) makes for major mark-ups.

Another thing that really affects food here is the lack of electricity. When it’s consistently 90 degrees and you don’t have a fridge, leftovers can’t really exist. Food safes keep out the rats, but not the bugs and definitely not the Torba fireants which descend upon anything edible within an hour. I have successfully kept laplap for 24 hours, bread for 2 days (stretched it to 5 by cutting off the new mold every day), and banana pancakes for 36 hours. Cut yam lasts a couple days, as long as you cut off the part that was exposed to air. Boiled yam lasts 12 hours. Rice & beans lasts one day, as long as you seriously cook the heck out of it before the 2nd meal.

Uncooked aelan kabis wilts within 24 hours and starts rotting within 48, which is a problem because they sell it in huge bunches. When the “market” was running here, I bought a bundle on Monday morning, then ate island cabbage for lunch and dinner, then lunch and dinner again Tuesday, and sometimes lunch Wednesday if it was still good. I would have also given some to Nicole, and I would probably still have some to throw out on Wednesday. Needless to say, I’ve learned a lot of different ways to cook it.

But basically, any way you look at it, every PCV in Vanuatu has the right to complain about his/her food options. Those of us in the outer provincial centers are sick of ramen noodles and peanut butter. Those way out in the bush are sick of taro and cabbage. And of course in Vila there’s the money issue. We’d all love to just switch places with each other for a day. And not everyone learns to LOVE laplap.

Seriously though, I’ve fattened up this week. First, my boss came back from Santo with beef and brought me some – a really thin steak perfect for skillet frying. So that was Monday and Tuesday dinner. Then the Preschool Coordinator has been running a small workshop in the office conference room, and workshop culture in Vanuatu is great regarding food. Every day of a workshop there are two tea breaks – one in the morning and one in the afternoon – with coffee, tea, and cookies, then lunch is always provided. And there’s no Subway or Chipotle to cater here – the facilitator’s family or volunteers cook aelan kakae all morning, then bring it out for lunch. I’m not participating in the workshop, but there’s enough to feed everyone in the office anyway (they caught a giant tuna and several large red snappers), plus they use lunch as a thank you gesture for the use of the conference room. So even though I haven’t gotten a mid-day break away from the office this week, I’ve gotten great food!

April Showers Bring May… Flooding?

So much for “dry season.”

My bathroom drain is flooded. I think the pipe is plugged. But also, my neighborhood is built on a swamp and the land is not draining properly. I’m actually really lucky though – everything is still going down the toilet. My neighbors have the opposite problem – their drains are fine, but their toilets won’t “flush” so they have to use their bush toilets (hole in the ground with a concrete slab over top with a small hole over which to squat). Being in a brand new house, I do not have a bush toilet. If my toilet stops up, I’m screwed. Nobody believes me that the pipe is clogged… after all, their toilets aren’t working (plus they don’t have my hair). Until they either come up with a system for unclogging it (I can’t find anyone with a plunger) or it stops raining, I’ve just moved my bucket outside near the water tank and wear a sarong around me when I wash. Not too big of a deal, but the fact that this started the same week I got creeped has me a little paranoid.

OH YEAH, I got creeped.

I am now officially a statistic in PC Safety and Security. Ironically, some ridiculously high percentage of security incidents in Vanuatu take place in the volunteer’s first or last six months of service. The dude made it into my first six months of service by four hours. (Or maybe it’s “first six months at site” in which case he cleared it by a couple days). The conversation went something like this:

“Amanda, Amanda, Amanda, Amanda, Amanda, Amanda,…”
“Oooo!” (What?)
<something I didn’t understand>
“Yu hu?” (Who are you?)
“Mi Joe.”
“Hu??” [Liar, the only Joe I know is currently in New Zealand]
“Joe.”
“Yu mekem wanem?” (What are you doing?)
<no answer>
“Yu go!” (Go away!)
“From?” (Why?)
“From se mi no interes!” (Because I’m not interested!)

Meanwhile, Numbus is meowing up a freakin storm. Cute little guard kitten.

“Joe” interrupted my How I Met Your Mother marathon, which I felt was extremely rude. On THAT subject, I would like to note that I think it’s hilarious that in Season 1 Episode 12 Barney uses the Peace Corps as a pickup line. In my experience, it’s more of a deal breaker. But, we all know sitcoms aren’t real life.

Going back to Numbus being “cute little guard kitten,” I would like to take back the adjective “little” as he is probably the fattest kitten in Torba. Having the two kittens in the same house was fun, but Numbus eats and eats and eats, and Neko is quite slow with just about everything, so Numbus usually managed to eat Neko’s food before he could get to it. He seriously looks pregnant. So, we separated them. The first night poor Lucy was up half the night with Numbus’ meowing, while Neko was fairly confused about the food left on the tray after he was full. Numbus will be better off at Lucy’s anyway. He started hissing and spitting at the neighborhood dogs, which have tried to attacked me four times now, so who knows what they’d do to him.

Other recent events:

I ran out of unread books. Well, that’s not entirely true. I still have All the Pretty Horses and The Boxcar Children books 1-7. But (1) Cormac McCarthy apparently never learned about punctuation in grade school, and (2) no children talk like the Boxcar kids! Even in the 60s! (Mom, back me up here?) Luckily, by the time I finished the 1st Boxcar Children and somehow reached page 50 (run-on sentence #254?) in All the Pretty Horses, Kerry had sent three books over on the boat from Mota Lava.

When my house was being built, the office ordered a solar panel system. It was lost. (Surprise.) Last week it was located!! And shipped, and set up. I have lights now. It’s SUPER weird. It’ll be nice though; this time of year the sun goes down at 6 so evening activity is quite limited and I get bored so I go to bed early. Then I wake up at like 10pm and have ridiculous insomnia for the rest of the night. (And insomnia sucks once the dim little solar lantern runs out of juice and the island is out of candles. Hence the How I Met Your Mother marathons.) Now it’ll be easier to force myself to stay awake until a more appropriate bedtime.

One morning recently I woke up at 6am to the sound of the village pickup truck – an entire neighborhood family was loading into the bed with calico and washbasins, and 9-month-pregnant mom was crawling into the cab. It’s a boy! With a healthy set of lungs. The village truck driver is the grandpa. The dad works in my office, and their house has the best view of my bedroom windows so he said next time the creeper comes, play nice and make conversation while texting him so he can come over and see who it is. “It’s not like we’re sleeping much at my house anyway!” Humiliation (even just being discovered by someone other than the person they’re trying to creep) is usually the key to stopping a creeper.

The mail came!!!!! First letters since Valentine’s Day! I got 14 letters/birthday cards and 4 packages. Thank you!!! I guess you can decide whether to send things to the Sola address or the Vila address. It appears that large envelopes get opened much less often when addressed to Sola, but the mail bag apparently only comes every 2+ months, whereas the PC mailroom lady in Vila sends our mail out to the islands once a month. But THEN it’s more likely to get lost/stolen because it’s airfreighted from Vila on passenger flights. You decide.

Last week I dreamed about fresh fruit. It was some kind of event – I don’t remember what – and there were tables and tables of fresh October Michigan apples, ripe peaches, and papaya. Why those three fruits would ever be in the same place at the same time, I have no idea. But I took the dream as a sign that it might be time to get off the island.

The other sign was when I made naked spaghetti with butter, salt, and garlic powder, dumped a can of peas on it, and thought it was delicious.

But the GOOD food experiments of the month have been:

Flatbread – I got sick of breakfast crackers and the store wasn’t selling bread for a couple weeks (and if you recall, my only way of cooking is a 2 burner gas stove) so I started playing around with an Indian chapati recipe. I’ve made it now with salt (which is in the recipe), sugar, cinnamon sugar, and peanut butter. The peanut butter experiment was a bust, but I think that’s because I was using PB out of the Au Bon Marche 1kg jar, and I need to try again with higher quality PB (i.e. one in which the main ingredient is actually peanuts). Next test is Milo.

Red Snapper Burgers – The PEO has teenage sons who go diving (spearfishing) on the weekends, and sometimes when there’s extra, Annie sends over a fish. The last one she sent was a massive red snapper, so first I texted Lucy to inform her she was coming over for dinner, and then I threw it in a pot of boiling water. Unfortunately, I took it out and started taking the meat off before it cooked all the way through and I had to salvage it somehow so I finished boiling the rest of it, took the rest of the meat off, put an egg, onion, and some flour into the mush of fish meat, and fried the patties. DELICIOUS. Served on rice, topped with ketchup.

And the future experiment is with a block of cheese Brenda sent from Vila… It’s so processed you don’t have to refrigerate it until AFTER you open it. Not sure what we’re going to do with it yet. I was thinking cheese and crackers, but Lucy’s talking some kind of cheesy pasta bake… flas.

Note – My bathroom drain was repaired between writing this blog and posting it

The Story of the Kitties

As annoying as my rat problems are, the VSO house is even worse. It has concrete walls, a tin roof, and even a separate ceiling, so there should be no trouble. But a few months back, the giant tree beside the house was chopped down and the stump was partially burned. The rats that lived under the stump were now homeless. With nowhere to go, they started terrorizing the Irish VSO who lived there. Soon she had holes in the screen of her food safe and poo all over her dishes. The problem wasn’t really THAT bad, but Marian was somewhat melodramatic (I use the term “somewhat” loosely). It was the apocalypse as we knew it.

But it was about to get worse. Cyclone Yasi came through. Now if you’ve been a diligent blog reader, you know that this was the last weekend of January and stranded me in Vila for an extra 48 hours. When I finally arrived back in the Banks, I was excitedly shown the fresh hole in the windowsill where the rats had chewed through the wood to get into the kitchen. Apparently they were so freaked out by the storm and closed windows that they were willing to eat wood to get inside. “This is it,” Marian proclaimed, “The rats have declared war on the humans!!”

“Why don’t you get a cat?” I suggested.

“I HATE CATS!!!” A few weeks later her two years were up and she went back to her mother’s rat-free house in the Irish countryside before presumably finding a nice rat-free apartment in Dublin.

Her replacement was an English volunteer named Lucy, who – although less freaked out about the rat situation – was much more willing to look for a cat. Also by this time I was searching for one, as I had moved into my new house and didn’t need a cyclone to bring the rats inside; I have a thatched roof – they were already there.

We asked everyone for cats. You’d think it’d be easy to find cats in such a rural place, where people let animals roam free. Wrong. We have enough of a rat problem that cats are in incredibly high demand, plus Ni-Van culture isn’t too gentle concerning pets so they don’t exactly last long. Finally, the woman across the road from the VSO house announced that her cat was preggo. Fantastic! We both claimed one of the kittens.

When the kittens were born, there were three: one for me, one for Lucy, and one for my next door neighbors. Unfortunately, the mother wasn’t feeding them. Rose tried everything she could to feed them herself. We brought over a portion of Lucy’s horde of long-life milk she’d brought from Santo, we used little straws to try to force feed them, we tried using my bandanas, but within a month all three kittens were gone.

Back to square one. Kerry, proud owner of three cats (formerly four… moment of silence for Eugene, who was claimed by worms… okay done) came in April and on her way back to Mota Lava promised that if we didn’t find any cats by the middle of May, she might be willing to part with one.

Then, Lucy went to Santo for Easter. She came back on May 1 and said she had brought me a birthday present. I thought she was absolutely ridiculous, as she’d thrown me a party the night before my birthday (for which she baked me a cake and opened her only bottle of wine) but I followed her home out of curiosity anyway. She sat me down in her chair and apologized for not having had time to wrap the present, but told me to close my eyes and hold out my hands.

My present was fuzzy. And squirming. KITTY!!

She’d been walking down the road in Santo (yeah, we’re manbush, we call Luganville, ‘Santo,’ what of it?) and saw a cat with several kittens. She said something to the effect of, “Oh kittens! I want a cat!” She then noticed a woman who appeared to be the cats’ owner. “Take them!” (A very typically Ni-Van thing to say).

After realizing the woman was serious, she picked the two cutest ones and put them in her purse. She momentarily considered taking three, but the size of her purse limited her to two. She took them back to her motel, fed them, then went out and bought Bactroban for their fungal infections. She brought them back up the Banks in a cardboard box with holes poked in it. They made her put the box in cargo, (which I think is ridiculous; I’ve been on planes in this country with chickens and pigs, and cats are clearly more enjoyable creatures!! End rant) but they made it.

Next adventure: the naming process. By the time she got back, Lucy had already decided on a name for her kitten: Numbus (NOOM-boos), which means cat in Motlap language (of Mota Lava). So it only makes sense that mine will also be named cat, but which language? Cat in Bislama is puskat (POOS-kat), but that’s not quite name material. We started interviewing our neighbors.

The best bet would be the language of West Vanua Lava, as that language (along with Motlap) is the most widely spoken here at site. I headed for my host sisters, who said that Meow was how cats were generally called on the West side. I imagined myself wandering around my house and yard calling, “Meow! Meow!” at supper time. Sorry WVL, you’re out.

Next were Lucy’s next door neighbors. First, language Maewo: Bus, from puskat (B and P are pretty interchangeable here). Second, language Mota: Mimi. Very cute, but, lemme just check… yep, he’s a boy. Third, language ‘Parapara (of Ureparapara): Puss. Eehhhhh…

The storekeeper is from Ifira Island, which is pretty much in Vila harbor, and said that back home they usually just call the cats Pussy. Not happening.

Finally, Eba, one of our JICA volunteers, walked past. “Eba!! How do you say ‘cat’ in Japanese?” Neko! Perfect. Neko. Like the Necco Wafers.

Numbus and Neko.

My ten-year-old next door neighbor has already renamed them Bingo and Tiger, but whatever.

They’re still too little to separate, so Lucy kept them for the first weekend, then I’ve had them while she’s been on Mota Lava all week. My house now has the odd odor combination of tin tuna and cat pee, but there is no longer rat poo all over my kitchen every morning. And I have faith that eventually Neko will figure out that there’s a direct correlation between the number of times he pees on the absorbent concrete floor and the level of anger of his owner.