The People You Meet in the Middle of Nowhere

Pohnpeian Word of the Day: aramas = “people”

I seem to have let another week go by without posting anything – I wish I could tell you I’ve just been lazy, but the truth is that there hasn’t really been much to say. My life these days mostly consists of teaching and grading, teaching and grading, teaching and grading… it’s good to be busy, since it keeps me from being homesick, but it doesn’t leave much time for anything else.

Also, Pohnpei is a very small place and I’ve already seen a lot of the tourist-y sights (Sokehs, Kepirohi, Salapwuk, Nahlap, Nan Madol etc…). There’s still a couple major waterfalls I’ve missed, and the Pohnpaip petroglyphs near Madolenihmw, but I guess I have to save those for a rainy day – well, a less rainy day anyway. :)

My classes are chugging along well enough – I put in a couple of late nights this week and managed to catch up on all my grading, so maybe if I just stay on top of it I can start relaxing in the evenings. We just finished talking about negative numbers in Prealgebra, and we started solving linear equations in Elementary Algebra. The lower-level class is actually testing much better than the higher-level one, and they honestly seem to be putting a little more effort into it as a whole.

Of course, they roll their eyes at me a lot when we talk about basic things. The way they see it, they already know how to do this stuff – what I keep trying to impress on them is the importance of knowing why, but it's a hard sell. For example, on the last MS96 test, I had a fill-in-the-blank section for important vocabulary like “solution” and “identity”. Everybody did very poorly on this part, mixing up terms left and right (even putting adjectives or verbs in blanks where a noun was clearly required, and so on) – even if they did fine on the calculation part of the exam.

They try their best to push me forward during class, but I can’t assume this means they understand. I did half a dozen problems on distributing with them, but a good quarter of them still didn't realize that you have to multiply the factor by both terms. At least I can start giving them more immediate feedback, now that I’m on top of my grading – that’s really the point of the daily problem (besides making sure they show up on time).

On Nialim (Friday), I cancelled one of my MS96 classes. I’m teaching two sections, and since one of them started on the third day of the semester it has always been a bit behind. By canceling the other one, I finally have them lined up, which makes lesson planning a lot easier for me. Now I give the same lecture twice every day, and I only change the daily problem a little bit.

On Rahnkaulop (Saturday), I treated myself to dinner at Joy for the first time in weeks – I’ve been watching my funds a lot more closely, eating hot dogs at lunch and so on. While I was there, I was approached by an older (middle-aged?) menwai named Jim Fenton who noticed I was reading War and Peace (288 pages down, xxx to go). We struck up a conversation, and I found out that he is on a ten-island tour of the Pacific. His last stop was Kosrae, and he actually met a couple of the WorldTeach volunteers there. Within ten minutes of meeting, he proposed that we go on a hike or something the next day.

At first, I was a little weirded out – after all, I barely knew this guy, and I couldn’t tell if he was trying to scam me or hit on me or something. Plus, he’s got quite an eccentric personality (30% insane, as he puts it) … during the dinner, he asked me everything from how to hitchhike around the island to whether I had any advice on robbing banks. However, it turned out that he had just landed on Pohnpei a few hours earlier, he was only staying a few days, and he figured I knew the lay of the land well enough. I decided to take him up on the hike, and I suggested Sokehs ridge since it has a view of practically the whole island.

That night, Matt and Lucas were up visiting from Madolenihmw – they don’t come up as much as Beth and Nic, who seem to be here every three or four days, but then again Kitti is a lot closer. Erin cooked some sort of vegetable noodles, and Meghan and Michaela brought over sashimi. I wish they had told me they were going to have a meal, or I wouldn’t have gone to Joy and paid $6.50 for the same thing, but I guess I should have asked. At any rate, it was a nice visit.

The next day, I walked down to the Palm Terrace grocery store to meet Jim at the appointed time. When I saw that hey had brought only a half-empty water bottle, I suggested he buy another one – I had brought four of my own. Physical exercise plus saturated humidity plus tropical heat equals rapid dehydration.

We headed off to Sokehs for a pleasant little hike. I had suggested we start at ten, figuring it would be cooler in the morning, but then again “ten” isn’t really the morning. The sun comes up at 6:30 or so, and the temperature hits daytime levels within an hour, so it was already hot when we left. Also, it was noon by the time we got to the top, and there wasn’t much cloud cover, so I got a moderate sunburn. Normally, I don’t bother with sunscreen on hikes because the trees offer a lot of shade, but not on the Sokehs hike.

This time around it was a lot easier, partly because I had done it before and partly because Jim is apparently in worse shape than I am and had to take a lot of breaks. Along the way, I learned more about this odd man. He works as a substitute ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher in Los Angeles, which I’m guessing must be a good business, because the FSM is the 147th country he has visited. At first I didn’t believe him when he told me that number (he also said he was a former police interrogator and championship water polo player) but I started to believe it when he described various places.

There are, by the way, 192 countries in the UN. I would have thought that if you wrote them all out and scratched out all the ones too unsafe for westerners to travel in, you would have a lot fewer than 147 left, but I guess Jim is proof that the world is a much safer place than the TV news would have us believe. He says there are only about ten countries that he would never go to – Iraq, for example.

At some point on the hike, I talked about my little sushi experiment a month or so ago, and he asked me to show him how it’s done. I said we could have dinner Tuesday (Niare) night, if he promised to buy me lunch at Sei in exchange. With that, we parted company and I returned to my grading.

Come Niare, I trudged down to the fish market only to find it difficult to obtain tuna. There was one table with a lot of smaller yellowfins and skipjacks, but that guy was only selling the whole fish – I definitely didn’t need (and couldn’t afford) thirty pounds. I decided to try using the smaller reef fish that they sell in plastic ice-filled coolers – these sell for about $.75 each, and I’ve eaten them raw before. I bought two blue parrotfish, and four other fish that I think were wrasse, but I’m not sure. This turned out to be a bit of a mistake.

I bought the fish at lunchtime, and tossed them in the freezer for a few hours to kill off the surface bacteria. When I got home after work, I put them out to thaw and started on the rice. It wasn’t as sticky as I would have liked – the bag has been sitting out and the grains have gotten a bit stale – but at least I flavored it right this time. Jim said he wanted to make the rolls himself, so I left all the fish and vegetable-cutting up to him.

Of course, neither one of us had ever cut up a little fish like that. Following Sandy’s suggestion, I scraped off the scales with a fork, and then did my best to cut a filet off the ribs. This turned out to be a very thin filet, and skinning it would have been impossible, so I just left the skin on ¬– I’ve eaten it like that before, but sushi demands that the fish not be so chewy. The first fish I tried this with, I ended up with two pieces of meat each about the size of a quarter, but I kept at it and did a bit better with the next one.

I had invited Takuya over for dinner, and he arrived while we were cutting the fish. We asked if he had any clue how to do it, and he said he didn’t, but it soon became apparent that he definitely knew more than we did. While Jim and I had hacked away at the fish randomly, hoping to get some meat where we could see it, Takuya had a definite plan of attack, and managed to produce some much larger filets than either of us had. Eventually, Takuya cut up three fish like this, which was enough for a couple of rolls.




I had never had too much trouble actually rolling the sushi, but when I tried to teach it to Jim I realized how hard it really must be. He kept squeezing too hard in one place or too soft in another, getting the mat caught in the middle of the roll, or failing to get the nori to stick on the another end. At any rate, the rolls still came out okay, if a bit lop-sided. We made some with cucumber and carrot, and others with mango.

By the time we had figured all this out, we had man-handled the fish quite a lot, and they had been sitting out for too long and were beginning to smell, so everybody was a bit apprehensive about trying the rolls. They were definitely too chewy for my liking, and I had to be pretty liberal with the soy sauce to get them down. Overall, it wasn’t that impressive as a dinner, but it was a good learning experience for all.

Jim left around ten o’clock, and Takuya and I chatted for another hour or so, mostly about our respective native tongues. I had to miss my Japanese class that day to buy fish and catch up with the grading, so I was jonesing for a nihongo fix. These conversations are always a lot of fun – at one point, I was trying to explain what a “trial” was, and I drew pictures of a man in handcuffs and a courtroom with a judge and jury. Takuya talked about how the police in Japan don’t make suspects put up their hands when they arrest them, because guns are illegal there.

The most fun part of the chat was getting to use the hiragana symbols, which I managed to memorize last week - I've hardly mastered them, but I can in theory read or write any Japanese word this way. Hiragana is one of the two syllabaries of written Japanese, with each symbol representing a single spoken syllable. There are 46 basic symbols, and these can be modified with dakuten( ﾞ) and handakuten( ﾟ), or combined to yield the remaining 55 syllables. For example, the symbol ひ is pronounced “hi” while ぴ is “pi”, び is “bi” and ひゃ is “hya”. Takuya’s name in Hiragana is:

す  の  は  ら    た  く  や
Su-no-ha-ra   Ta-ku-ya

We took turns teaching each other words and discussing the history and grammars of our languages. Mom asked me in a recent letter if Japanese is anything like Chinese ... at first, that seemed like a silly question, but I've been finding out just how closely they are related. Basically, Chinese is to Japanese what Latin and Greek are to English. The Chinese gave the Japanese their writing system, much as the Romans gave us ours. Also, some Japanese words are composites of (Japanese translations of) Chinese words that have no inherent meaning in Japanese, just like we derive words like "anthropomorphic" from Greek words ("anthropos" and "morphos") that don't mean anything by themselves in English. 

In other words, a Japanese person can no more speak Chinese than an English speaker can automatically speak Latin. The languages are connected but have divergently evolved, partly through the way that one language adapts the other to fill its needs and partly through historical accident. For example, the Greek word isosceles and the Latin word equilateral have essentially the same meaning (equal sides) but have been adopted into English with two different meanings. Also, the English word "decimation" derives from the Latin word decem meaning "ten", but its meaning of "slaughter" comes from the historical Roman practice of killing every tenth man in a disobedient legion. I explained both of these examples to Takuya, and he shared similar ones (to the best of his ability, considering the main language we spoke was still English).

Today (rahnwet), I met Jim as promised for lunch at Sei restaurant, across the street from my apartment. They have a lunch buffet for only $6.50, which includes salad, pancit, chicken, fish and sashimi. Jim was not too impressed with the food, but I loved it, and the place has really nice hardwood decor. While we ate, he talked some more about his travels and his involvement with "hospitality clubs" like Servas and CouchSurfing.com which connect travelers with people willing to offer them a place to stay for free, in the interests of furthering person-to-person contacts between people from different cultures. He said that he had personally hosted over a hundred people at his place in LA through these clubs.

When lunch was over, we exchanged e-mails, posed for this photo and said good-bye. Although I wasn't sure what to make of him at first, Jim turned out to be yet another interesting and inspiring menwai that I've met here on the island, and I'm glad I had the chance to get to know him. Who knows, maybe I'll extend my stopover in LA on the way home and crash at his place for a while - the only other time I was there I hated it, but maybe he can show me the good side of the city. The side that doesn't look like an overcrowded strip mall with a fascistic police force. I think they call it San Diego.

Tomorrow (aio) is September 11th, which is a holiday (Liberation Day) here – it marks the anniversary of the day in 1945 that the Japanese occupation ended. We (the US) were not in fact the liberators, at least not directly ... although we shelled and bombed the island during the war, it was not until the fighting ended elsewhere that the Japanese were forced to leave. COM was supposed to take us on a faculty retreat to Ant atoll (which is normally a $75 boat ride), but they just postponed the trip not ten minutes ago. Pohnpei style, man. Hopefully they'll take us out before too long - the reef out there is alive, unlike the one at Nahlap, and it would be a new thing to see. Oh well ... stay tuned.

One other piece of good news - hot showers are back (sort of)! We discovered that if you turn the heater on for only about 15-20 minutes, its enough for a piping hot shower of about the same length. As long as you turn it off before you take that shower, you only use about a buck's worth of power. So, we set up a "hot shower jar" - if either one of us wants to take one, we put a dollar in the jar. When we go to refill the CashPower, we'll take that money in and split the rest of the bill evenly. Thank heavens - I never really feel clean after a cold shower, since all I can manage to do is stick my head under the water for a few minutes.