This Week in Review

Pohnpeian Word of the Day: uluhl = "pillow"

Micronesian time is finally starting to creep its way into my consciousness… the days are blurring together, one into the next, and I seem to have forgotten to update everyone back home on recent events. Here’s my attempt to rectify that.

First, a quick note on the Pohnpeian names for days. There are several different counting systems in the language, though the standard one begins ehu, riau, siluh, pahieu, limau… a slight modification of these yields the system used for counting days: ehd, are, esil, epeng, alem and so on. The weekdays are then named by appending the prefix ni- to these, to yield:

Niehd(Monday)
Niare(Tuesday)
Niesil(Wednesday)
Niepeng(Thursday)
Nialem(Friday)

The days of the weekend are named by combining the word rahn(day) with the words kaulop(to prepare) and sarahwi(church/sacred). Thus, Saturday is Rahnkaulop(literally, “day of preparation”) and Sunday is Rahnsarahwi(literally, “day for church”). Obviously, all of these names were invented after the island was Christianized – before that, I doubt anyone tried to keep track of what day or even what month it was. That should give you an idea of what its like to live in the seasonless tropics.

So, on Niehd, we met with Nora Esigrah, an American ex-pat attorney who has lived and worked in the FSM for more than a decade – she has a Kosraean husband. Her talk was a good opportunity for the Kosrae volunteers to get a better sense of the island they will soon call home (and have yet to see), but what I most enjoyed was her discussion of the Micronesian legal system, which is similar to ours in most respects.

Later that day, we walked down to the Micronesian Seminar, an organization dedicated to research on everything pertaining to the region (including not only the FSM, but also Palau and the Marshalls). They have a library with almost 20,000 volumes on everything from Palauan tuna fishing to Yapese politics, and have produced 48 in-house documentaries which you can order from their website.

The purpose of our visit was to meet with “Mr. Micronesia”, father Francis Hezel. He is a Jesuit priest who has lived in the region since the 1960’s and is widely regarded as its foremost expert (hence the nickname). Having been well-informed about this reputation, I was a bit surprised when a man with a vague New York accent wearing a T-shirt and shorts walked up to greet us – then again, everything here is just a little more casual.

He did, however, live up to expectations and proceeded to spend about an hour filling us in on various aspects of Micronesian culture and history, from the unusually high suicide rate (two to five times that of the US) to the practice of adoption within a single family. One of the big issues confronting the country today is the break-down of the traditional extended family into the nuclear units more familiar to Americans, and the resulting effects on conflict resolution and so on. Father Hezel also gave us great reassurances that we are in fact needed in our roles as educators, and he emphasized that we should do our best to insure the best and most competent people are given opportunities to excel.

Niare was most notable for the fact that orientation let out early and we had the chance to try out one of the local restaurants for lunch. A few of us decided to try out the Joy restaurant, which I can attest serves delicious sashimi – no nasty cheeseburge this time. I still can’t get over how cheap the fish is here… the same meal in American would cost maybe two or three times as much.

After eating, the Pohnpei volunteers walked to the college, where a van was waiting to take us to the airport. The last two members of our group (the married couple I discussed earlier) were arriving, and we went to greet them. Planes only land once a day or so here, and a lot of people show up to stand by the chain-link fence and watch their loved ones deplane onto the tarmac. In the post-9/11 world, where you have to say your last good-bye or get your first hug next to the security checkpoint, it was refreshing to see the way things used to be.

We spent most of the rest of the day showing Andy and Erin around town, and doing our best to bring them up to speed on the Pohnpeian they’ve missed these last few weeks. I’m afraid we may have overloaded them with information, but they seem to be adapting well. At least they have plenty of teaching experience, so missing the rest of orientation shouldn’t affect them.

That night, a few of the volunteers met up at the Rusty Anchor, which has to be by far the most beautiful bar I have ever seen in my entire drinking life. It’s located in the basement of a hotel which has sat abandoned for some 20 years – the only thing marking the outside is a small neon Budweiser sign, but once you head down the stairs and follow the ropes you wind up in a large room with an open-air balcony overlooking the jungle and the lagoon beyond that. I can tell I will spend quite some time there.

When I arrived, only Scott was there already, and he was drinking with a couple of surly ex-pats. One of them was an Aussie with the darkest tan I’ve ever seen, whose wife apparently owns the place. He gave us a good ribbing about being “do-gooders”, but then to make up for it he bought us both shots of tequila, as he did with every volunteer who showed up that night. The only good beer in the whole place (in fact, the whole island from what I’ve seen) was Heineken, which I hate, but I managed to knock back five anyway. It was just the kind of stress relief we all needed.

Niesil was pretty boring… the only notable event was my trip to the video store, where I procured a membership and rented some movies. You can get DVDs for three days for $2.50 each (or two for $4), and apparently they’re not all copied. There are no copyright laws here, so proprietors basically buy one movie and copy it several times, but you can still get the original if you’re the only one renting that title. They have a decent selection for being in the middle of nowhere, and the little slice of home was nice.

Today, Niepeng, was our last day of orientation with the Kosrae volunteers – they will get on a plane tomorrow. Later tonight, we plan to take a taxi to a resort called the Village to celebrate with beer and quesadillas. I hope it will be as much fun as the Rusty was, though some of the good-byes will be hard to say. We’ve gotten quite close these last two weeks.

Last night I had a strange dream that I had gone back to visit JU, my alma mater, and everything was different. Like, crazy different... they had a shopping mall and twice as many parking lots, all the buildings were made of glass, stuff like that. I think my greatest fear is that when I get home, everything will be so different I won't be able to recognize it. Of course, I guess I'll be different too.