First Day in Pohnpei

Pohnpeian Word of the Day: Kaselehlie (CAS-uh-lay-lee-uh) = “Hello/Goodbye”

It’s hard to believe I’m finally here… and even harder to believe it’s only been a day or so. I can barely process all that I’ve seen, but I’ll try to record some of it here.

The flight from Honolulu was the longest and most horrible experience I believe I’ve ever had on a plane. The entire thing took some 10 or 11 hours, but it wasn’t a direct hop as I’d thought. Instead, we island-hopped for the last half of it. First Majuro and Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands, then Kosrae and finally Pohnpei in the FSM. At every stop, we took on and dropped off passengers, and the crew had to perform what they called a “security check” of the plane – which meant a lot of jostling about of some very exhausted people and their bulky bags.

Across from us on the plane, they had cleared a space for a stretcher and surrounded it with a curtain. Apparently, a man from Chuuk (another island in the FSM and second-to-last stop for our flight) was dying and wished to see his last days at home… his family sat behind him, occasionally breaking the curtain to feed him ice chips or otherwise tend to him. It was a touching scene.

We finally arrived in Pohnpei at around 2:30 in the morning, where we were picked up by our field directors Mikayla and Matt and taken to our host families (who we will live with for the next two weeks). I was assigned to the home of Tirecher Doses, who I have been instructed to simply call “mom”, along with another volunteer named Meghan. By the time we arrived, all we had the energy to do was introduce ourselves and ask where our beds were.

The small three-bedroom house was (by American standards) full of people – a few adults and a ton of children – but we were each given our own bedrooms. This is apparently stipulated in our contract with WorldTeach, but I couldn’t help but feel incredibly guilty at the sight of so many people sleeping on the tile floor while I enjoyed a comfortable bed. I found out later that most Micronesian families actually prefer to sleep on the floor together, as a family, and that our rooms would most likely be used for storage if we weren’t here. There is no air conditioning in our house, only electric fans which wax and wane in effectiveness with changes in the unreliable electricity, so sleeping on cold tile may not be such a bad deal.

I was awoken by the sun and the crowing of our neighbor’s rooster. I found Tirecher sitting on the floor in front of a griddle making pancakes – we were eventually served a heaping pile of these, along with some scrambled eggs. While I waited, I took some time to figure out who all of these people were. Apparently, “mom” is originally from the village of Kitti (pronounced like “kitschy”) on the island’s southwestern shore. She has six daughters and two sons, with the latter both living in the states. The adults I had met were some of her daughters (the others still live in Kitti) and the children, mostly female, were all theirs.

I had once read that asking a Micronesian how many people live in their house is like asking someone how many teeth they have, or how many holes are in their head. I have yet to ascertain exactly which of the sisters actually live with “mom”, and the roster appears to be rather fluid. The only consistency is the lack of men – aside from myself and an infant named A.J.

After introducing myself to the children, I decided to take a stroll and get the lay of the land. We had landed in the dead of night, and I had no clue what sort of place I would find myself in. The sight I beheld was unlike anything I have ever seen – the most surreal mix of paradise and third-world squalor.

The houses are mostly simple affairs, constructed of cinderblocks and corrugated tin roofing (which is not always used on the roof). Some houses have a nahs, basically a semicircle of benches beneath a crude roof but otherwise open to the air – these structures are where barbeques are held and sakau is drunk. The fancier houses have a second floor and stucco walls. Some of the houses I passed have collapsed completely, or burned down to their foundations.

The streets ¬- which are a mixture of paved roads, concrete slabs, and gravel - are littered with trash (sometimes collected in small piles) and roamed by wild chickens and dogs. There are mostly no sidewalks, and where they do exist they are little more than concrete slabs laid over open storm drains. Nevertheless, there are always people to be seen strolling along their edges, and little children play in groups as large as ten or twenty on some of the less-used neighborhood streets. Hibiscus and jasmine flower everywhere, and in front of our house grows a water apple tree. Basically, a water apple is like a regular apple but pear-shaped and without a core so you can eat the whole thing – and damn are they good.

Around lunch time, Mikayla came to pick us up for orientation. The three of us walked down to the main street in town (Kaselehlie Street) and it quickly became apparent why Kolonia is the place to be. It boasts innumerable supermarkets, a bank, the Telecom building (where phone cards can be purchased and you can use the internet for $4 an hour) as well as a movie theatre and video rental.

Oh, and did I mention it is hot as hell here? I mean really freakin’ hot. We must have walked two or three miles in the equatorial heat and constantly saturated humidity – I drank maybe six bottles of water without going to the bathroom once. Every time we entered an air conditioned building (which only means a wall unit cranking out 75 degree air anyway) I secretly prayed we’d stay there all day.

Orientation was interesting – we walked all the way to the Pacific Island Central School, or PICS, where some of us will be teaching, and met in one of their classrooms for about an hour or so to discuss our expectations and our reasons for being here. Then we ate lunch (half-frozen peanut butter and jelly sandwiches) in the school cafeteria. The most exciting part of this trip for me was the school’s freezer, which I was disappointed to find would not close completely with me in it.

We then walked back in to town to open our accounts with the Bank of Guam, and finally I broke off from the group to return home and take what turned out to be a five-hour nap. This heat will do that to you. Unfortunately, this meant I failed to show up to a church service which I had been invited to by a very precocious neighborhood boy named Daniel. I have to remember to apologize to him.

When I woke up, I was greated by a traditional Pohnpeian dinner spread, which included breadfruit, plantains, rice and parrotfish. Some of the parrotfish were cooked and others were simply served raw – at the expense of my already rumbling gut, I decided to go for the latter. This turned out to be a wise decision given my love of sushi – you just rip the flesh off the fish with your fingers and dip it in soy. If this is what the food here is like, I’m going to be just fine.

It’s about 5:30 in the morning here now – I can’t sleep due to the combination of jet lag and the long nap I took earlier. Plus it starts getting hot as soon as the sun comes up. I just want my family and friends to know that I got here OK and that I think I’m going to like this place, though I still miss you all.