Training in Pohnpei

I have been in Pohnpei for about 10 days now, but have been too busy to spend any time writing. My days have been full of Peace Corps training and my nights have been consumed by drinking sakau and acclimating to Micronesian life. It has been much more hectic than I expected. I envisioned lying on the beach and staring at the ocean all day while I pondered the meaning of life and shit like that. Instead, I have been constantly bombarded by overwhelming cultural experiences and long days of classroom type learning.
The Peace Corps training has been tedious, but tremendously helpful. Basically they are teaching us how to be good teachers. We are being schooled in the various methodologies of English as a Second Language (ESL) teaching. We are practicing developing lesson plans with specific formats and understanding our roles at teachers in Micronesia. I have a little bit of teaching experience, but this knowledge is absolutely necessary to give me the tools to be a successful teacher. We are not learning the local language, but do spend a significant amount of time learning about the culture of Micronesian people. It doesn’t make sense to learn a language yet, because most of the volunteers will be shipped out to other islands of Micronesia and every island speaks different languages. So as of now, we are ignoring the language aspects and concentrating on the other skills we will need to successfully integrate into the society. We spend much of our afternoons listening to lectures on safety and health. I feel like they are deliberately scaring the crap out of us and overestimating the safety risks that we are faced with. However, it is highly likely that we will get seriously sick and have to deal with foreign threats that could endanger our health and safety sometime during our service.
Beyond learning how to maintain our well-being, we are being taught the intricacies of the Micronesian culture and how we can successfully bridge the gap between our societies. Micronesia is a vastly different place from America and we cannot behave in many of the ways that we are accustomed to in the states. Micronesians are extremely collectivist and conservative, which sharply contrasts with the individualistic and liberal attitudes of the volunteers. We must step carefully over here and be cognizant of all the differences that the lifestyle presents. For example, women have sharply defined roles over here and must be careful not to overstep their boundaries. They must always wear long skirts and cover their shoulders. Any promiscuous dress, playful conversations, licentious looks, or extended interactions with men will be perceived as sexual advances and lead to unwanted attention. We are also instructed in the importance of meals, the strong relationships of family members, emphasis on hygiene and appearance, and the general behaviors of Micronesian people. Our goal is to assimilate into the culture, so it is imperative that we respect the cultural norms and do our best to adhere to practices of Micronesian people. We are also being taught how to assess the needs of a community and work to develop practical plans of improvement. Our main goal beyond teaching is to help the community by whatever means necessary. It is hard to plan anything yet, because we need to be in our specific villages before we can start generating ideas about how to create sustainable projects that will benefit the community.
Well now that I’ve told you about the training aspects of my experience, let me get into the really interesting stuff. Living in a 3rd world village on a tropical island! I have been ridiculously overwhelmed by my experiences over the last week. The people and lifestyle are so starkly different from southern California that it amazes me how people can exist on such varying levels. Nonetheless, my living situation is actually much nicer than I expected. I have a concrete room to myself, fully equipped with a fan and a light. We have electricity (although there are constant blackouts), so I am skeptical to plug in my electronic devices for fear of them blowing up. There is no running water, but we have a huge water basin that has a couple faucets coming out of the sides. I take bucket showers twice a day and have been maintaining surprisingly good hygiene. People in Pohnpei are greatly concerned with cleanliness and require that you shower twice a day and always smell nicely. It is ironic that I am showering more with a bucket in a 3rd world country than I did in my dual headed deluxe shower back in Irvine. However, it is rather necessary because I sweat about 8 pounds of water weight a day and am constantly resisting bugs, dirt, rain and humidity. The property of my family is quite substantial. The main area stretches about 100 yards along the road and contains 3 or 4 buildings. I live in the main structure will the majority of the family; but we also have a couple huts, a market, and a few covered seating areas. We have 4 enormous mango trees, a half a dozen coconut palms, and endless amounts of trees and bushes that are scattered throughout the property. There is an outdoor kitchen with two fireplaces for cooking. The kitchen is constantly in use, but most of the time women are the only ones allowed to prepare food.
Food is extremely important in Micronesian culture. It is the centerpiece of family life and is an essential part of daily life. There are specific customs that must be observed and I am expected to respect the methods of dining. I am usually always served first, because I am a guest and a man. I sometimes eat with my host father, but if he is not around then I eat by myself. I eat in the kitchen while the rest of the family is idly sitting around and watching me. The women watch me carefully as I taste each of the foods that they have prepared. I am very open-minded when it comes to food and I will try just about anything, even if I don’t know what it is. And I definitely don’t know what I’m eating here some of the time. Every meal is accompanied by a heaping plate of sticky white rice. I usually am served a fried fish with sides of cooked bananas, boiled breadfruit, a chunk of taro and other various tropical sides. I have also had plenty of spam, little sand crabs, spaghettio type things and ramen noodles. I am expected to finish my meal each time, which can sometimes be quite a challenge. Eating three plates of food with a family of onlookers can be intimidating. Overall, I have enjoyed the food but am getting sick of eating shredded mackerel for breakfast. O, I forgot to mention that utensils are not used. I grub with my fingers almost exclusively. However, sometimes I will get a spoon for soup. I have become quite dexterous at tearing each and every little piece of edible flesh and skin from a fish (fully equipped with his head and tail). The food has been pretty damn good, but I would kill for a In N Out double double right now.
Let me break down the family dynamics a little. I am not entirely sure because so many people are constantly filtering in and out of the household, but I am guessing that approximately 20 people live in my house. My house father, Papa John Waltu (his title is Soulik), and his wife take care of quite a large clan. Two of his daughters and one of his sons live with us along with their families. The son has a wife that does most of the cooking and chores around the house and takes care of gaggle of kids. They have 4 kids of their own, one of the daughters has 3 kids and a husband, and the other daughter has 3 kids who were born in America. Their names are Cleopatra, Rihanna, Alana, Randall, Rinard, Lenard, OJ, BJ, Ray Ray, and Nora. Then there are a flurry of cousins that kind of live with us. I am not sure there exact relation, but they are always around and seem to be part of the household. My Pahpa and Nohno (host mother) live in their little hut together, but the rest of us live in the main house. Most of the kids sleep together in one big room huddle in a circle of sheets and blankets. There are empty rooms in the house, but the family prefers to sleep in a big group. It is part of the collectivist nature to prefer to sleep in tight quarters. There is absolutely no privacy and I am slightly ostracized for having my own separate bedroom. It is not uncommon to have group showers with several naked children running gleefully around the property flaunting their business to the world. The closeness of the family is remarkable and it truly proves the group mentality that the community embraces. However, it is not just my family that is tight knit. The entire island is related. Every person in my village has some sort of relationship to one another and knows every person in the surrounding villages by face and name. I have always joked about how Armenians claim that everybody is cousins, but it’s actually true over here. My father’s cousin lives across the street, and my mother’s uncle lives next door, everybody on our road is related as cousins on some level. So basically, the village is one big family. People will walk through and eat meals casually, borrow shirts off the clothesline, and interact comfortably in all situations. Every time that I have been in the car we have picked somebody up on the road and given them a ride towards their destination. Like I said, everybody knows everybody, so everybody helps everybody. It is really a collectivist society. The chickens, cats and dogs run freely throughout the neighborhood and nobody really takes ownership over them. I asked my father how he knows which chickens are his; he replied, “When I am hungry, the closest chicken is mine”. Dogs are not really treated as pets. Each family has 3 or 4 that hang around their property, but they are just used for protection and meat. Dog is a common meal over here, but I haven’t been lucky enough to dine on Lassie yet. However, I am sure that my first dog grubbing experience is on the near horizon. This does dismay me a little because we have two 3 week old puppies at our house that are a constant source of entertainment. I also have a lovable Dude at home in Irvine, and really appreciate the cuteness and friendship of canines. But not everybody feels the same. Pigs are the only animals that people truly care about. They are caged and taken care of religiously. Pigs are a sign of wealth and are an essential part of the diet. Much time and effort is put towards maintaining the vitality of your pigs.
I have also gotten the chance to become involved in a few island activities in my time over here. I climbed a coconut tree and knocked down a couple that I husked and drank. It was one of my goals to climb up a palm tree over here, and I have already accomplished it. Scaling up a palm tree seems pretty impossible and highly dangerous, but after watching my younger host brother scamper up the tree, I felt that I had to do it. It just took a tight grip and a lot of balls to get myself up to the top. I have also cracked a coconut with a machete and scraped out the insides with the blade. This may seem kind of bad-ass, but it is common practice for most everyone over here. It is not uncommon to see a naked infant running across the road wielding a machete. It seems that pacifiers are replaced with machetes when the babies reach toddler age. Machetes are used by everyone for everything. Luckily, I have not seen any errant blows or severed digits yet.
Outside of the household, I have participated in a few of the daily activities for subsistence living. Harvesting taro is one of them. My host brothers took me out on Saturday to try my hand at harvesting this staple crop of Micronesians. Harvesting taro is a dirty, muddy, sweaty, grueling job. The edible part of taro is root of a huge green leafed plant that grows in muddy swamps throughout the island. The leaves of the plant can be 4 feet in diameter and the stalks can stretch over 10 feet in the air. To harvest the taro, you jump into the mud with a machete and hack your way through the thick foliage. Tromping through these huge green stalks to carve a path through the plants was utterly exhilarating! The plants slice like butter and I felt like a jungle explorer fighting my way through the forest. As you trudge through knee-deep mud, it is important to keep your eye out for taro plants that are green all the way to the bottom of the stalk. The ones with reddish tints on the bottom are not ready yet, so we searched through the swamp for a proper clump of plants. After finding a suitable green-based grouping of stalks, we really went to work. With a series of machete chops and shovel stabs, we began to pull the taro roots out of the watery muck. You dig around the base and then pull with two hands to try to rip the roots out of the ground. The result is a bulbous white base of bland tuber food. We worked through a patch until we had harvested a sufficient amount of thick roots and then lugged them out onto the road. We piled the roots on the side of the road, covered them in a giant taro leaf and then began our walk back home. At this point, I was covered up to my waist in muddy itchy water and splattered all over my arms and face with sweat and dirt. We walked about a mile in the blistering sun until we came upon a little stream. To my great delight we dove into the pool and cleansed ourselves of the dried mud and stinking sweat. It was a satisfying ending to a hard days work.
As we emerged from the stream and starting our trek back towards our house, a car pulled up besides us and asked if we wanted a ride. Of course it was a cousin of the family named Ketis, so we happily accepted. The driver spoke pretty good English and inquired to whether I would like to go out to ocean and catch some fish. Woohooo!! I had been on a tropical island in the middle of the ocean, but hadn’t touched the ocean yet. I was delighted to be invited to head out to the reef to try my new snorkeling equipment. Within an hour, we had our gear and loaded up into an open 15 foot motor boat down near the mangroves. Pohnpei is a tropical island, but it has no beaches. No white sandy stretches cascade down the coastline, rather it is surrounded by miles of mangrove forests. Mangroves are scraggly trees that protrude their roots down in the salt water in scattered bunches. The entire coast of Pohnpei is encircled by about a mile of mangroves before the ocean is reachable. So he hopped in the boat and sped off through the trees. The ride through the mangroves was insane! We zipped this little craft through crevices and dodged roots, I had to duck every 10 seconds to avoid being clocked by errant branches and hanging vines. It felt like I was in a boat racing video game traversing my way through a tropical tunnel of death. Then suddenly…. whoosh, we were out in the ocean. We sped out into a pristine lagoon and left the lush green island in our wake. I turned around to see leafy emerald mountains silhouetted by a cloudy blue sky. Out towards the open ocean, I noticed waves crashing on the reef a couple miles in front of us. Pohnpei is surrounded by a coral reef that circumscribes the outline of the island. Inside the peak of the reef is calm blue water that stretches for miles in all directions. Small islands are scattered throughout the lagoon, some have fishermen houses or local hotels propped upon their sandy shores. We swerved our way out in the lagoon and came to a stop about 500 yards from the waves crashing on the reef. We didn’t have spears this day, so we were planning on using a net to fish. However, they have a most peculiar way of net fishing. We dove into the to water and swam around for a bit to get our bearings and make sure we were in the correct spot. Then we attached one end of a large net to a chunk of coral and stretched it across into a deeper area where the reef fell off. Then I stayed in the water near the net to mark the spot and my fishing partners drove the boat a couple hundreds yards towards the reef. Ketis started smacking the water with a big stick and slowly creeping back towards the location of the net. The splashing of the water scares the fish and they race off in the other direction. He corrals them towards the net with his constant water smacks and they unknowingly run right into their doom. The boat pulled up next to me and we dove down to check our luck. To my surprise, 8 or 10 fish were stuck in the grasp of the net. We dove down, plucked the fish out of the net with our bare hands and threw them into the boat. I was amazed how helpless the fish seemed once they were ensnared in the net. I was easily able to clench them in my hand and toss them out of the water into the boat. We repeated this process once more and then called it a day. We caught about a dozen fish and spent a fantastic couple hours swimming around the reef. On our way in, we checked my friends crab traps near the mangrove forests. He set the traps up with a newly caught fish caged inside the larger cage to attract the smell of the crabs. Hopefully, the crabs will smell the dying fish and crawl into the cage and end up as dinner for us next week. One of fishermen asked if I liked sashimi, and of course I said hell yeah! I didn’t know that he meant immediately. He scaled one of our fishes, sliced it lengthwise and handed me a full fish that had been dead for less than an hour. I am not one to refuse generosity, so I chomped on the side of the fish and had a slimy little snack. I felt like Gollum from Lord of the Rings….”I likes ‘em raw and wriggling”. I was disappointed that we didn’t get to use spears yet, but overall I was ecstatic that I finally got out on the ocean and caught some tropical fish.
I returned home and had a tasty meal of fully cooked fish. We handed some of the fish out to the neighbors, but saved the fattest one for me to eat that night. I felt rather proud to eat a fish caught with my own hands in the lagoon of Pohnpei. After dinner, I went across the street and participated in a nightly ritual for the people of Pohnpei. Drinking sakau. Sakau is the Pohnpeian word for the popular Polynesian drink called Kava kava. Sakau is a mudlike drink made from the roots of a pepper bush and squeezed with a hibiscus leaf into a large bucket. First the sakau roots are pounded on a large flat rock with smaller handheld rocks, then the mush is mixed with water and squeezed with hands on another large flat rock, the concentrated slop is then wrapped in hibiscus leaves and filtered out into buckets. The result is a brown bitter drink that is the glue of social society on the island. Sakau is made by most households, but is especially produced at various markets throughout town. My family has a market, our neighbors have a market, and there are probably 3 or 4 more on our street. Markets do sell some small products like cigarettes, soap, beer, water and snacks; but they mainly serve as social gathering spots for drinking sakau. The men of the area, and a few women gather at these markets every night and spend the evening slowly getting “drunk” on sakau. The effects of sakau are most analogous to having a strong body high. You become extremely relaxed and fade into a sleepy state of leisure and pleasure. The taste is horrible and many people use chasers to follow each sip of sakau. But apparently it’s worth it. An average person will drink 5-10 cups a night and then crawl off to bed. The point of sakau is not only to chill out and slip into a drug infused euphoria, the main focal point of drinking sakau is social. It is the time when people hang out. It is time where people make friends. It is the time when gossip happens. It is the time when stories are told. It is the time when bonds of family and friends are cemented. The drinking of sakau was traditionally reserved for high chiefs at ritualistic occasions. Offerings of sakau would be brought to the elders and they would ceremoniously imbibe these gifts. Over time, sakau spread to the masses and became a popular drink of the commen man. Now everybody drinks sakau. It has a similar function as alcohol in America, but is much more socially accepted and does not have as many deleterious effects. Nobody fights on sakau, nobody commits crimes on sakau, nobody blacks out on sakau, nobody ruins their lives on sakau (maybe). The transfer and sale of sakau is a funny practice though. The standard price is 60 cents per cup and all the men seem to drink at each others markets. The money and sakau seem to be in a circular process that benefits everybody equally. One night you will go across the street and drink at your buddies and pay him for the sakau ,but the next night he will be at your market repaying the favor. My host father even pays for the sakau at his own market. The sakau is always plentiful and always flowing. And to say the least, I have gained a modest reputation as a strong sakau drinker. I have never shied away from a good time, so I jumped right into the sakau scene. Everytime I go out, the old men buy me sakau and love to sit around and shoot the shit with me as we sip our bitter cups of poop water. I am asked every night to drink sakau, and have refused only a couple times. It does sometimes result in a slight hangover, but not comparable to alcohol hangovers. It has much milder effects and does not seem to alter the mind nearly as much. It is almost purely a bodily sensation, which is easily manageable. So I plan on continuing regular sakau drinking to increase my integration into society and acceptance as a community member. Everyone, including the current and former Peace Corps volunteers, say that it is a necessary step to truly understand the culture of Pohnpeians.
Well, I have had a relatively insane first week on Pohnpei and I am sure that my experiences will only get wilder. I am becoming accustomed to the culture and learning the language bit by bit. Although I most likely will only be here for another month, I am excited to learn about the island lifestyle and continue to have the time of my life. Kasalehlia.