A slightly less successful but still pleasant day. The tragedy was in the morning when I discovered what I should have known, that a machete with an 18 inch blade that, if one must be honest, looks like a sword, is difficult to transport across international borders. When wandering around a place where all the men carry one thrust through their waist bands it is easy to forget that the rest of the world is less understanding.
Dinner was at our guide’s village. Traditional Sumba food includes a light soup of cassava leaves in coconut, vegetables cooked with coconut, a light fish soup, a grilled, extremely tough and flavourful grilled chicken and a fierce sambal. However, once more I thanked God I had not been born into a place where I would have had to spend my life weaving ikat. It was burned to the groun a few months ago and many villagers lost everything they owned. The houses are of bamboo with very tall thatched roofs where the ancestors live. Outside are immense megalithic tombs (Sumba is amongst the few places in the world where there is ongoing megalithic construction by hand) surrounded by taboos.
Our guide is a remarkable woman. She is a few years older than me. She was forced to convert from marapu to Christianity to attend school (‘are you marapu? Then go to the marapu school if you can find it’) and has a burning love for her people and culture whilst maintaining a clear understanding of it. She left school after completing primary school and then taught herself English and French. She practiced on visitors to the village and was surprised and pleased when they paid her for it. Then as she grew older she started acting as a tour guide and her neighbours called her a whore, feeling that the only reason foreigners would give her money is if she was sleeping with them. She responded with vitriol, shouting back ‘yes, I am sleeping with them, with the father, the mother and the four children all together!’ She also kicked out her no-good husband (one of, she says, the 45 per cent of Sumba men who are useless) saying, ‘there is a saying in Sumba that when you spit, you can’t take it back in your mouth.’
Every story and happening in Sumba appears to end with blood and sacrificed pigs.