 |
| Haos Gel Numba Two |
Then a guy came walking down the path to the front door. He was wearing a name badge and carrying what looked to be a questionnaire of some sort. I assumed he was from the Census.
Vanuatu has been doing a Census. Our house was marked in July or August with a little green post-it note over the front door. When they came to put that up they asked how many people lived here and then we were told the numbers on the paper would identify our house for the Census being done in November. This is needed because outside town the streets are not named and even in town the houses are not numbered. At the time, I thought, “There is no way that little post-it note is going to stay there for four months.”
Some how we were missed, during November. I was away. Rob was doing the workaholic thing and Marie had gone to Malekula on the holiday Rob had been trying to get her to take for months.
Anyway, there was an ad in the newspaper a few days after we arrived back from Wellington saying that if you had been missed by the Census takers you should call a number. I hadn’t seen it, because I don’t read the rags anymore, but Rob saw the ad and called.
To further make the point that we had been missed he told the Government Statistician we had been missed when we ran into her at a networking function for women in senior government positions. Being Vanuatu, there aren’t many women in senior government positions so we had a great deal of time to talk to her. It was only a day or two later that this guy turned up at the door, so it must have worked.
I opened the door and sure enough he said he was with the Census and asked if I had called about not having been contacted earlier. I said, “No, that would have been my partner, Rob.” I thought, “Yeah, that would be right. Rob does the calling to set these things up and I get stuck doing them.”
He said he had called at the office the day before, but Rob was not in so he came to the house. I invited him in and we got down to the questioning. He arranged his papers then looked around the room. I asked him what the problem was. He asked if there was something around the house that gave its number. I’m not sure why he was looking inside, but I remember the little green post-it that had remained in place over the door outside for 5 months. So, I went out and pulled it off the wall. I realised then this was more than a post-it as it took a little effort to pull it off and you could hear the glue cracking as it was pulled away. I took it to him and asked if it was what he was looking for. It was and we were now down to business.
He asked my name and Rob’s name. Then he asked about education. He said, “You’re from New Zealand so that means you will have had two years of kindy.” I said, “Well, actually, no I was born in the USA and had only one.” When we got to Rob’s education, we started with kindy and taking his advice Rob had two years, but I later learned he had only one.
I found it interesting that he didn’t ask what level. He asked the number of years of each level. I assume that was due to the fact that so many people here never get through many of the levels they start.
As he started to move on from these education questions I realised that he had assumed it was only Rob and I in the house. So, I told him that our house girl lived here with her niece and asked if he want to talk to Marie too.
He did. So, I went out back to find Marie. The two of them were standing out back by the laundry. I asked Marie to come in and she asked who the man was. I said he was from the Census and had a few questions. She looked a bit sheepish about it and explained how when she was in Malekula and the Census people came everyone ran away and hid. I convinced her it was ok and so she came in and sat down with me on the couch on the questionees side of the room.
To catch up, he asked her the questions he had just asked me and then we moved on. He looked at the form. He thought. You could see the wheels turning. He looked at the form again. Then he looked up and said to me, “Ah, I’m sorry, but I have to ask you some questions about marital status.”
I realised then that he understood fully the situation otherwise he’d have had no problem asking. So, I smiled and said, “Not a problem. That's fine. You can go ahead and ask, but I don’t think the answer will be on the form.”
He looked down at the form and I expected him to start reading the list to me. Fortunately, in a very not ni-Vanuatu kind of way, he cut right to it. He looked up and said, “Defacto?”
I was quite shocked for some reason. I looked at him with what I think was a fairly surprised look on my face, laughed and said, “Yeah, that will do it.”
At first I thought my shock resulted from the fact that that particular choice was even there, given the Christian over tones of Vanuatu. On second thought, though, I remembered much of the “Christian” stuff is just a surface thing. I mean there are so many kustom or bush marriages that are formed as they were in biblical times, no where near a church or even near a government office. Unlike so many places in the Pacific, many traditional beliefs and customs in Vanuatu were not stamped out by the missionaries and now happily co-exist with ni-Vanuatu Christian beliefs even when the two systems conflict. That said gay defacto couples are still a fairly taboo subject.
Still it was strange. Was it because the Government allowed it on the form? They are often a bit stronger on maintaining the Christian pretence than the average person on the street.
No, it was some thing else. Then it hit me. What had shocked me was that this ni-Vanuatu man had categorised Rob and I. I mean he could have started with single and we could have worked our way through the options until I found one I could pick. That would have been the ni-Vanuatu way to handle it since it would not have been a direct question that might have been wrong and therefore embarrassing. He didn’t do it that way though, he completely ignored the single concept and picked one of the relationship categories and it was the right one at that. That was what shocked me.
Of course, maybe it shouldn't have been a shock given the publicity the local rags gave us when we arrived in Vila. Our relationship was no secret.
Of course, maybe it shouldn't have been a shock given the publicity the local rags gave us when we arrived in Vila. Our relationship was no secret.
Anyway, by the time I had worked through that, Marie had already been asked the same question. I noted he did not apologise about asking her. I knew she had had a man in Malekula, but I didn’t know the relationship. I was pleased to find out that it was “never married”. It had been a kustom marriage and now was over.
Then we were on to birthdays. Rob’s and mine were taken down quickly as I knew the dates and years. When we got to Marie and Anais things got interesting. Marie knew she was born in 1956, but Anais caused a bit of a problem. Marie said Anais had turned four in October. This caused a problem, since the Census guy needed the date. He started to calculate what four years from October of 1999 would have been. Marie just sat there. As far as she was concerned, she had answered the question. As he was still calculating 30 seconds later, I piped up and said, “I think that means she was born in October, 1995.” He wrote it down.
Then I was asked how many bedrooms we had. I was embarrassed to say four plus Marie’s quarters. There were a couple of more questions about the house and I learned later that there were others he didn’t ask. Diana, an artist friend of ours, told me at a dinner party a few days later that she had been asked if they had indoor plumbing. My guy had obviously rightly assumed we did and answered without asking.
Then it was my turn to look stupid to them. The next question was, “Do you have any animals?” I quickly replied, without hesitation, “Yes, one cat.” But, I had been too hasty.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Marie’s hand go up to her mouth and I looked over. The hand to mouth was to stifle her trademark loud giggle that was about to burst forth. The hand didn’t stop it though, it never does. It only succeeded in lowering the volume. Then she shot me a look with her eyes that said, “Well, you missed the point of that one, you stupid fool. He didn’t mean that kind of animal.”
The Census guy had obviously had this problem with white people before. He didn’t laugh. He just looked at me with sympathetic eyes and asked, “No bullocks? Chickens?”
I looked out at the deck, the patio furniture and pot plants on the deck, the swimming pool, the flowers in the garden, the small strip of land between the deck and the fence on the cliff’s edge… I didn’t see any cattle or chickens, nor did I see horses, sheep, pigs or any other barnyard creatures for that matter and said, “No, no animals.”
It appears cats don’t count. They must be a lower class of animal. So, I don’t think poor little Tess got counted in the 1999 Census. In hindsight, I guess I luckily had had the good sense not to volunteer her name and date of birth in answer to his first question about animals.
I was then asked a few more questions, like do you have a car. I said, “Yes.” I thought it was telling that he didn’t ask how many. I guess that in a country where most people don’t have one car the main question is about how many people have access to one, not how many there are. In any event, his not asking saved me the embarrassment of having to say we had two.
Then he said there was a section for Marie only. That section turned out to be about children. I don’t know if they were only asking women or if he just assumed two gay guys would not have any children. Anyway, he asked Marie if she had children. She told him she had one, a son, who lived in Malekula. Then he asked his name and birth date.
Again, Vanuatu’s version of the Y2K bug popped up. It was the date problem. Marie told the man her son was 24. That was all, just, “Hem i gat 24 yia.” The Census guy asked what the year was, she didn’t know. This left the poor census guy to try and figure out the year again. This time rather than try to do it in his head he started to write the equation on his hand with his pen – 1999 subtract 24 equals. He was half way through writing the equation when I suggested the year might be 1975. He wrote it down.
With that question answered, it was over. The Census guy thanked us for our help and he left to find a bus back into town.
I have to say that as someone who has done quite a bit of searching through old US Census records tracing the family's genealogy, this experience was an interesting exercise. In a way, doing the 1999 Vanuatu Census was like stepping back in time. Unlike today in the US or New Zealand where most Census forms are completed by the individuals themselves and mailed back or collected, those 1800’s Censuses were conducted in the same way as this one in Vanuatu.
For the same logistical and literacy reasons, they were conducted face to face with a family or household member or even sometimes a neighbour. As a result the information was not always accurate. Sometimes it was because the person questioned answered without full knowledge, like me about Rob’s years in kindy. Other times it may have been due to the Census taker copying the information down wrong. I noted when our Census guy wrote Anais’s name and Marie’s last name he butchered both and never asked Marie to spell them.
Those 1800 US Censuses also asked about things that were important in people’s lives at the time. For example, I remember some asked about the number of heads of cattle people owned, just like the animal question in the Vanuatu one. The US Government in the 1800’s was not interested in cats either. In fact, in some of the early ones the US Government wasn’t even interested in how many women or children there were in the country.
However, one thing I never saw asked in a US census was the question, “Do you have a canoe?”
Copyright 1999
http://www.thanjavurtemple.com/
ReplyDelete