Thunda Chicken Blong Jesus Christ
Speak clearly and carry a big shtick.
“Are you sure this is a road?”
“No,” Mike answered, continuing to navigate the decrepit pickup along what might have been a road.
In the periphery of incandescent green I spied movement, something between a hop and full flight.
“What was that?” I asked.
“I think it was a chicken.”
“A wild, jungle chicken?”
“I guess so.”
The jungle gave way and gardens flanked us. We entered a village where children, dogs, chickens and pigs milled about as we parked the truck.
“Hello,” Mike spoke to a man who emerged, machete in hand, from one of the dwellings. “Is the Chief here?”
With his machete the man gestured to a makeshift house along a path. We thanked him with excessive smiles. Facing a stranger who wields a two-foot knife compels one to convey good will.
Machetes in Vanuatu are like mobile phones in the rest of the world. Everyone has one, kids included. They are for sale in hardware stores, grocery stores and at gas stations, and come in a variety of sizes (My First Machete, His-and-Her Machetes, The Granddaddy of All Machetes, etc). In a place where the foliage grows supernaturally fast and dense, it’s handy to have a large knife with which to hack your way home from the office.
We made our way down the path, but the Chief emerged from his home before we reached his door, our presence having been heralded by curious children. The Chief was a squat man, no more than five foot, with a sizeable afro. He wore flip-flops, frayed denim cut-offs and an unbuttoned shirt with a bright orange floral print from which his large belly protruded.
“Hello, Mista Mike!” he exclaimed, approaching us rapidly and with open arms.
“Hello, Chief.” Mike extended his arm for a handshake, which the Chief used to pull him into a bear hug. “This is my wife Amanda,” Mike gasped as the air was pressed from his lungs.
“Hello, Amanda!” As the Chief enveloped me I noticed a tiny green spider crawling in his hair. I debated plucking it out for him or letting him know, but decided to let it go. Such creatures were a part of life.
“It is so nice to see you!” the Chief exclaimed, then giggled with the bashful tee-hee of a little girl.
“I was wondering if we might talk to some of your people about renting their canoes,” Mike explained.
“Of course!” cried the Chief, “Let us go to the tree!” The Chief never spoke without a joyous exclamation point and he periodically clapped out of sheer delight.
A band of small children joined us and swung from Mike as if he were a living jungle gym. We made our way to a large metal pipe, about three feet in length and two feet in diameter, resting against the tree. The Chief picked up a smaller piece of metal and banged on the pipe, also known as the town bell. While the ni-Van, as the locals are called, emerged and studied us, the tropical heat brought my sweat-mustache into a continuous and full bloom. I dabbed at it self-consciously and began taking pictures of the town’s canoes, trees that had been hollowed out enough to float a family from one island to the next.
The predominant language was Bislama, a pidgin with obvious French and English influences. Often decipherable, the Chief stepped in to translate when needed. After taking stock of the available watercraft, we left amid a cacophony of “tankyu tu mas,” Bislama for “thank you very much.” It’s hard not to smile when someone hits you with “tankyu tu mas.”
“No,” I’d respond emphatically, “tankyu tu mas!”
Film work brought us to this archipelago of live volcanoes in the South Pacific, not far from Fiji. At the airport, my first indication of native life was a group of tambourine-wielding women, clad in dresses of a matching floral print, cheerfully singing their greeting to arriving passengers.
“You don’t get a welcome like that every day,” I said to Mike.
A shuttle took us to our hotel, where we were again greeted by a chorus, this time a group of tambourine-wielding men, clad in shirts of a matching floral print. This would be our welcome … every day. The man at the reception counter handed us each a cocktail and Vanuatu secured a special place in my heart.
We spent three months working in various coves on the island of Efaté, the one that Cook called Sandwich, scouting for canoes, deckhands and hardware needed by the film crew. During our stint, the ni-Van trained for an annual relay race circling the island. Half of the competitors I witnessed ran barefoot. Others donned flip-flops and a select few sported sneakers. The surface underneath them changed from hard-packed dirt to pavement to loose gravel, and the runners, of both sexes and varying ages, never seemed to notice. I can’t walk to my mailbox barefoot; I am unable to fathom running around an island.
While the ni-Van toughened their soles for the relay, Mike’s mobility slowed markedly. I thought he was embracing the relaxed pace of island life, but he grew lopsided as days passed.
“Mike, why are you limping?” I asked.
“Oh, I just have a little cut on my foot,” he answered.
“Let me see it.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t want to show you.”
“Is it that bad?”
“No.”
“Then show me.”
“No.”
“Stop saying that!” I yelled. “We are married and you have to show me!”
After two weeks of insisting that marriage vows included a clause of full wound disclosure, he relented. The skin on the pad of his foot and the underside of his toes was simply missing. The raw flesh that remained, along with the fact that he had been walking on it for so long, made me shudder.
“Holy crap, I did not need to see that,” I said.
“Well I told you,” he said.
The flesh-eating infection detracted somewhat from the island’s mystique. Vanuatu flies compounded the problem; they approach cuts and scratches on human flesh with an all-you-can-eat buffet frenzy. Bandages fail to deter them; they swarm over wound coverings and try to crawl underneath. My coworkers were unfazed by this. If I glanced down at a bandaged cut on my leg, however, to find a herd of large black flies struggling to burrow their way underneath my Band-Aid and into my flesh, I would frantically swat at them and then wrap my injury in duct tape.
The extent of Mike’s injury left him with more than just flies to worry about. Medical staff treated him, but warned that if the condition worsened, he would be taken off the job and flown back to the States.
It was a typically gorgeous afternoon on Efaté when I headed toward one of our trailer-turned-offices. Three wooden steps led from the ground to the door. As my right foot came down on the first step, it trembled and a shudder swept through the entire trailer.
“Crap,” I muttered, “I’m getting fat.”
The trembling continued and grew and I knew that, despite whatever weight had recently attached to my buttocks, I did not yet have the power to make the earth shake. I looked around the job site, littered with temporary structures of little foundation. I didn’t know what to do. During the six years that Mike and I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, I had happily managed to sleep through a multitude of earthquakes.
I’d always thought that in such a situation I’d display clarity of thought and maybe a little bravery. Instead, my mind turned to mush and my spine followed. I should be with my husband, I thought, but then remembered that Mike was indefinitely confined to our hotel room, unable to walk and in hiding from the ravenous black flies.
I looked around for the nearest human, spotted one of the locals we’d hired who was moving with what seemed like a destination in mind and followed him. It turned out he was simply moving instinctively to evade the ground on which he stood, but you can’t dodge an earthquake. We looked at each other with wide eyes and fearful grins. I wondered what his name was. If the ground opened up and swallowed the two of us with a belch of finality, I felt I should know the name of my unfortunate companion.
I was too scared for speech and apparently so was he, and the earthquake ended. As my coworkers emerged to giggle and discuss the excitement of the previous ten seconds, I thanked circumstance that I hadn’t been in the port-a-potty at the time, then made my way there to determine how badly I’d wet myself.
A sign on the ladies’ room door read: Toilet blong ol woman. I peeked over at the men’s room: Toilet blong ol man. At first I took ol to mean old, as if these particular restrooms were reserved for elderly use. I pictured handrails and mechanical toilet seats to lower the user, then catapult them back to standing when finished. And then I wondered where they drew the age line. What constituted ol? Was there a particular number of years one had to have lived in order to make use of these facilities, like qualifying for a senior citizen’s discount in the States? Of course, ol turned out to mean only; Toilet blong ol (wo)man was Bislama’s elaborate distinction of men’s and women’s restrooms.
I would soon come to recognize blong as the most frequently employed word in Bislama. It can translate to belong, but also any other word signifying possession or a relationship. Instead of saying “his house,” the Bislama speaker would say “house blong John.”
I drove past the Pablik Laebri Blong Port Vila (Port Vila Public Library) and headed for the grocery store Au Bon Marche. On the other side of town was Au Bon Marche Nambatu. Figuring that Nambatu was someone’s last name or something significant to Vanuatu culture, I didn’t give it much thought. It only took two months of shopping at this store to figure out that Nambatu was, in fact Number Two.
My mission at Au Bon Marche involved purchasing Tuskers, the National beer (not to be confused with Kenya’s beloved Tusker beer), the slogan for which is Bia blong yumi (It’s our beer). I’d been charged with bringing beer to the crew. We’d reached the close of a long week and received a pass to indulge.
After consuming my share of Tuskers, I crossed the job site and felt the sudden rumble of another earthquake.
“Oh no,” I whispered. My thoughts again turned to Mike. He was finally back on his feet only to be caught in what I suspected was the Mother of All Earthquakes. He stood fifty feet away, chatting and drinking with the rest of the crew. The earthquake hadn’t yet registered with them, likely due to beer.
“Earthquake!” I yelled. They looked up, confronting me with calm but confused expressions.
Three ni-Van stood nearby, also unconcerned and drinking. They watched me run one way then the next shouting, “It’s an earthquake! What do we do?”
“No, Amanda,” one of them grabbed me by the arm. “Don’t be scared. It’s no earthquake.” The rumbling continued; I didn’t believe him. His companions were laughing at me. I didn’t understand.
“It’s only thunda chicken blong Jesus Christ,” he explained.
I followed his arm up to the piercing blue heavens, where we watched a helicopter fly low over the treetops and out into the sky above the sea.
A.K. Turner has traveled the globe to research techniques on embarrassing herself in various cultures and languages. She now lives in Idaho where she created the radio program “The Writers’ Block” for Radio Boise. She’s the co-author of Drinking with Dead Women Writers and the author of This Little Piggy Went to the Liquor Store. More of her work is available at AKTurner.com.