The other day me and Zack had a bigfala walkabout to a place called Waluriki. It was probably the most strenuous hike I’ve ever made and took about 3 ½ hours one way. What you need to know is that Ambae is extremely mountainous and just goes up and down so harshly it doesn’t care about your sole. (Get it? Ha) Anyway we finally get there but my socks were creating the worst blisters on my heels and I was starting to feel extremely sick. For some reason I was terribly sick during this walk which made it about 10x harder than it was and it was already on the extremely difficult scale. That night I went home and looked up the symptoms of malaria, I seemed to have every single one. I took my tests and they were negative but whatever I had closely resembled it and made me feel pretty crappy.
As I walk through West Ambae (which I do every day) I meet more and more people who teach me more and more language. Hardly anyone uses Bislama on the islands, they just use their local language and each island has their own. Because Ambae’s West, North and East are just so inaccessible and difficult to traverse, they each have their own dialect. Since I live in the West, I’m learning language blo West Ambae, here’s a sample sentence that I learned:
Ningko tanaloymaeto fanemae cancan mwa-mwave guaratu.
Roughly translated to: You, blackman, come eat hot flying fox (bat)
You say blackman? That’s racist, right? Wrong. Everywhere I go, people singout “tamtan” which literally means “white man”. There is no negative connotations to saying either tamtan or tanaloymaeto, it’s just what you are and there’s nothing wrong with that.
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