PEANUT BUTTER-GATE

How do you insult an entire village of people? Simple, just tell them their food sucks in a public speech!

In what was the first of three public speeches I had to give during my training, we were asked to prepare a short and simple speech that taught the audience something about America, and present it in Bislama. The idea was to present our language skills and get us used to giving oral bislama speeches, the subject matter was really not that important. As such, I choose peanut butter and jelly sandwiches as my topic. Seemed like a good idea - the ni-vans make a pb+j with super thick bread and just the thinnest application of peanut butter and jelly. Basically you get no flavor and tons of carbs. As a vegetarian i need more protein. I would show them how I would make the sandwich in America. I would show them how, if you slice the bread thinner and add copious amounts of goodness then the sandwich would actually have flavor and would, in fact, be good. I told them, in my best bislama, that in America we like things big - bigfala house, bigfala trucks, bigfala airplanes, and bigfala flavor. I actually made two sandwiches on stage. I sliced the bread and spead on the stuff. One sandwich I made like theirs, one like mine. I built in quite a bit of humor and the speech sure seemed well recieved at the time, but as you can plainly see, I had made a serious faux pas. Even though I was only trying to demonstrate how I prefer my sandwiches, I did it at the expense of how they prefer theirs. Now, the controversy I caused by all this was somehow completely lost on me. Several of the Momma's were mildly upset by this and expressed as much to other trainee's and my own momma - who had helped me translate the speech and only seemed upset that I didn't tell her sooner how i like my sandwiches. But all the hubbub managed to escape me for over a month until that time when we were ask if two of us would volunteer to give speeches at our swearing-in ceremony. I volunteered for the english speech (the other was to be given in bislama) and more than a couple people in our group surprised me with their distress that I might somehow repeat the trauma of the peanut butter speech. arrrgh. After giving it some reflection I was embarrassed that I would have been so naive to let something like that happen - especially when we've all be on pins and needles hyper-aware of cultural sensitivity. How could i have been so stupid? It doesn't matter that if you read the speech, or watched the speech, you would have completely understood that i was in no way intending to insult thier cooking. It' s a whole different culture and they are affectd by things in different ways that we can't always predict. And in my own defense my very own Momma helped me translate the speech and didn't indicate any problems - but of course she never would since that would be out of character for a Ni-Van. Really it wasn't a big deal, but I felt really bad that some Momma's were personally hurt and I didn't have a chance to apologise at the right moment.

Luckily I more than won-over the village with my dancing antics at our beach party the evening of our site assignment announcements. They're a very prudish bunch (thank the missionaries) and only a couple momma's had the courage to get up and dance. Me and some other volunteers, however, had been away from nightclubs for too long and sort of broke it all down - let it all out. carried on like dancing fools. In fact, I was laying it on pretty thick just 'cause they were having so much fun watching me be a fool. So much so that for every day that followed I was able to garner squeals and giggles with just the slightest little hip wiggle when any momma happened to be looking at me. I gained something of a reputation - only to be enhanced and solidified by my crowd pleasing Swearing-In speech. details coming soon.