Settling In

It's rather poetic when your “shopping” becomes “cargo”. Visions of the “cargo cult” of the Pacific Islands spring to mind. After two days of wandering the supermarkets in town with food prices that would make your eyes water ($10 for a box of Corn Flakes!!!), we finally set off for the island.

Usually the family has their own speed boat, but it has sprung a leak, so we made our journey on the local banana boat. After wending our way on a potholed road through the jungle for about an hour, we came to the “port” consisting of a bunch of people sitting on the roots of huge trees on the waters edge and three or four banana boats (a little bigger than a dingy and made of fibre glass) ties to the roots. My suitcase and some other small cargo was loaded onto a shipping palette at the center of the boat. The family, three other passengers and the two boatsmen scrambled on and I got pride of place at the front of the boat, sitting on the pallet. The volcanic island loomed in front of us and after a butt bruising hour on rough seas, we scrambled ashore on the black sand beach.

There is one, semi-paved road running around the outside of the island. We drove to the plantation through countless tiny villages made up of grass huts and the occasional market. It makes sense to build houses out of grass since the rainfall is around 2,500mm a year. Everything rots, so you might as well make your house out of something you can rebuild and repair without great expense.

The plantations that surround the island are made up of massively tall coconut trees with cocoa cultivated underneath. As we drove along the coast with the kids and the cargo in the back of the pick-up truck, everyone we passed waved and smiled. A bunch of kids playing soccer. Women with naked babies on their backs. Men carrying bamboo and bales on their heads. People outside huts cooking over open fires. Coconut trees and jungle everywhere.

We finally got to the plantation just as it was starting to get dark and I finally saw my new home. The teachers house/school house is brand new. I'm the first person to live in it. It's a three bedroom bungalow with a huge veranda overlooking the coastal cliffs. It has been built to catch the breezes with louvered and screened windows. The trees on the cliff in front of my house are full of bananas and papayas (but I'm not sure how to get them without falling down the cliff). The view is spectacular.

The kids gave me a tour of the garden the next day. I returned with an armful of fruit from the trees. There is a patch of pineapple, a patch of watermelon, starfruit, passionfruit, a lime tree, not to mention the ubiquitous coconuts, bananas, papayas and sweet potatoes. There is a set of stairs that leads down to a beautiful, shaded, black sand beach with translucent water and coral just off shore.

We also went to see the copra processing plant and the storerooms where the copra is dried. The family runs a supplies store nearby where you can get staples like flour, sugar, rice, tinned tuna and coca cola. Because there is so much theft, the store is behind a barricade. You have to walk up to the counter and ask for what you want. You can't wander the shop and take things off the shelf. I was introduced to everyone there so they would know I belonged to the plantation and wasn't just some lost white woman.

The local brand of tinned tuna is called “Diana”. I think it's hilarious. It feels like I've fallen victim to a very sophisticated new type of cannibal with their own processing plant. Strangely the locals don't go out and catch their own tuna (which is abundant in these waters). They all eat tinned tuna.