Service not Slavework

Today (Wednesday June 21st) as part of the 3^rd and 4^th grade “agriculture” lesson, the teacher asked the students to all bring stems/branches of food plants to school. After lunch they gathered in front of my house and proceeded to create a garden. To call it a lesson isn’t really fair… These kids already know everything there is to know about gardening on Tanna. They went straight to business. I figured they might as well make it how they wanted, since they know more about this stuff than I do. I took pictures. They cleared the grass with their “big knives” (machetes) and dug up bigger weeds and unwanted plants with the school’s spade. The kids without knives disposed of the “dirty” (the English word that gets overused thanks to the Bislama language). Then they took their cassava branches, island cabbage stalks, and pineapple tops, and put them properly into the ground like the very good gardeners that they are, all with a fair amount of ordering each other around. They put some logs around the whole thing to hopefully keep the pigs out of it. (We’ll see how that goes tomorrow morning…pigs can do so much damage to gardens around here). The whole process took about an hour. They did great work and were so proud of themselves.

My little garden, or rather the work these kids did creating the garden, had nothing at all to do with learning how to garden. It was more about the collective service the kids were doing together…for me-ha! The fact is, these kids have the concept of service engrained in them. It’s so strong in their culture, where family and community absolutely comes first and foremost. You take care of each other here. You share. If you have 2 oranges in your basket, you give one away. And If you only have 1 orange, you give half of it away. If you’re a kid, you contribute to the meal. Maybe you go to the garden and get some island cabbage. Or maybe you gather the firewood. Or grate the coconut, or cook the rice, or do the whole thing all by yourself. You help your family. And if you don’t, well, you’re probably gonna get a whipping… But these kids learn fast how to take care of themselves and each other. Sometimes it may look like slave labor when every Friday the students participate in “working parties” in which they weed the school grounds, collect firewood and coconuts for the teachers, sweep the classrooms and clean the windows. But the students are helping to serve the school community. That’s the point of working parties, that the kids help the school. They do a great job of it too. They don’t complain. If anything, they hide, or forget their knives at home as a way of avoiding certain kinds of work. But they will get singled out later. What matters is the community, and the service they provide for and with each other. I think back home kids and everyone else could really benefit from a culture more rich in service. In the meantime, every day I hope to have a nice reminder of the easy community service potential of an 8-year-old right outside my door, in the form of a beautiful little vegetable garden.