Vanuatu Culture

On Thursday the 29th September the IGCA team at the ABC had a special visitor who came to the club weekly meeting to give to our members of the IGCA team a small view of a culture he once , for 8 of his life, was a part of.
This visitor was Mr. Horrocks who is biology teacher and a current member of the ABC Staff. The culture he talked about was that of a set of islands called Vanuatu. His presentation on the culture was very audience involving as he applied some principles of the Vanuatu culture itself in the presentation and related well to the members of IGCA team. He describe a whole variety of the cultures characteristics such as the country’s location, people’s common religion and beliefs, the language spoken and the celebrations and traditions practiced there. He also added in a few fun and interesting details on how life as a student was in Vanuatu which totally attracted the audience’s attention. He also taught a small dance called “The Levy Levy Dance” which is particular of Vanuatu.

Next on this post you can read in detail what was the Vanuatu Culture presentation about:


The location of the country itself.

From the presentation you could understand that Vanuatu was a set of 120 islands of which only 21 are inhabited. It’s original name was New Hebrides when it was a colony of England.

Common religion and believes

Mr. Horrocks explained that people are very superstitious in Vanuatu and before England came to colonize the inhabitants were all cannibals and they ate all visitors.
We also learned that in this culture for boys to be considered as men they had to do a risky task. These tasks were: a bungee jump of a cliff (Vanuatu is the place were bungee jumping was invented), attract a shark at sea using a dead chicken and then stabbing and killing it and another task was to use the boy as a bait to catch a giant octopus before the octopus can bite the boy with its beak.

Language

The language spoken in Vanuatu is Bislamic. This language is a mixture of English and French.

Life as a student

Student life in Vanuatu largely differs from other cultures as students have to return to clean the classrooms after the school day has ended. Students were to do other physical activities as well such as tending to the school’s crops and animals. Also every Friday students have to take to school a big knife and collectively all students have to cut the grass of the school grounds.
Mr. Horrocks also explained that when story telling, mostly during break times, everyone would gather up in a circle and take of their shoes to listen to the story. The story teller would stand up and everyone else would be sitting down.

Traditions

In the culture of Vanuatu celebrations involved feasts in which delicious food was offered all along in a big circle. People would grab from from anywhere along the circle and eat as much as the want and were they want to eat it. But after the dining was complete they would dance almost completely naked just with a strap of cloth hanging from a string for both men and women. These were the traditional dances there in Vanuatu.
For people in Vanuatu the sea is very important, when the tide is low all the people in the island go through the reef and pick animals such as crabs, fish , octopuses, sea-snails and sea-worms. Sea-worms are cooked into a certain type of food wrapped up in banana leaves which is considered a local delicacy.The reef for inhabitants is a major source of food but it also presents a large danger for people walking through it as there are lethal animals such as the stone-fish, cone-shell, a certain type of jelly fish and the banded coral snake.

A video and images of the activity can be seen below in this post: