November 19th

It is a Friday, November 19th. it's about 10:30 am. I just finished working briefly in our garden. It started raining. We are glad to see the rain as it's been dry. Though I suspect the watermelons I planted last week aren't so excited about the torrential downpour.

I drank kava last night at the nakamal in my host father's village. Try to picture it - the village is right on the sand beach, the nakamal is maybe 15 feet from the ocean's edge at a typical high tide. The ocean is very calm almost always. The nakamal and most of the houses in the village look a lot like our house, they are made of bamboo that has been split, flattened and woven together. The nakamal and most houses do not have a floor built into them, just the sand they were built on top of. The men grind the kava by hand. kava is the root of a plant, it's pretty tough, tougher than root crops for sure. The men grind the kava using cylinder-shaped pieces of coral that they gather from the reef in front of their village. So, picture lots of men, all sitting around on the ground with kava roots in one hand and a big chunk of coral in the other hand, probably not too different from a long time ago. The women cook the meal, all locally grown root crops. They build a big fire and heat up bunch of stones, then they put some stones in a shallow hole. They cover the stones with a bunch of leaves that look very much like banana leaves. They put the root crops on top of the leaves, then another layer of leaves and then more hot rocks on top. ;Again, I imagine this to be quite similar to how they cooked a long time ago. Everyone is speaking the local language, a language that about 14,000 people can understand. There may be a few kerosine lights, perhaps a flashlight. It is very dark inside the nakamal.

I imagine the whole scene to be very similar to many, many years ago. Only the sound of cell phones ringing and a cluster of young men in a corner checking text messages seems out of place, and a loud reminder that they days of before are certainly 'of before'.

the bislama for 'a long time ago' is 'bifo bifo'. The literal translation being 'before before'.