Sleep?

My body has quickly made the adjustment to my different sleep schedule and my homeostatic levels have normalized into a regular pattern. In America, I could never fall asleep before midnight unless I was gravely ill. If I got into bed before midnight then I would just stay up and twiddle my thumbs until sleepiness finally came upon me. My normal sleep schedule was from sometime after midnight until 9 or 10ish in the morning. If I were somehow awoken before 9am then my entire day would be become worthless. I would be a sluggish blob of laziness and drag my feet through the daylight hours of the afternoon. I am fully aware that this was a very unique pattern that I developed based on my ridiculous college antics and job situation in the last 5 or 6 years. Nonetheless, these habits of late nights and late mornings were deeply engrained in my system.

When I arrived in Micronesia, I was greeted with the harsh reality of living by the sunlight. It gets dark around 6pm and the sunrises around 5am here in Chuuk every single day of the year, because we are nearly on the equator and there aren’t really seasons. When the sun goes down, it becomes very dark immediately. It is a curious phenomenon about life on the equator, the quickness that darkness descends when the sun drops below the horizon.  When dark comes, there aren’t street lights to cast a pale yellow glow throughout the village, and there is no electricity to brighten our houses and power the flicker of our televisions. My family usually lights a couple of kerosene lanterns and often run our gas-powered generator. We are fairly wealthy so we have the luxury of generator power, but most families just rely on flashlights and kerosene. However the generator only lasts for a few hours and gives us just enough electricity to power a few lights and sometimes charge the family’s 5 inch portable DVD player.

Basically the point that I am driving at is that due to the lack of lights, everybody goes to sleep when it gets dark. These days I usually go into my room between 8 and 9 to read and always fall asleep before 10. This makes sense because I am usually up at 6am. I know it is ridiculous to many of you that I am complaining about this. The majority of the people in America work 9-5 type jobs and adhere to a similar sleep schedule, but it is a horrific shock for me to adjust to this illogical system of waking up so early. I have adjusted and wake up rather easily in the morning, but it still defies what I think should be the standard of sleep in the world.

            Although none of you may pity me for my newly normalized schedule of rising early in the morn, I can assure you that my sleeping situation in Chuuk is far different from what most of you have ever experienced. I do have room of my own, which is rare for Micronesia where most people sleep communally in one large room. However, I do sleep on the ground. Well not entirely on the ground, I do have a straw mat that is approximately 7mm thick. Its kind of like sleeping on thatched cardboard. This was quite frustrating at first because I am side sleeper. Side sleeping is not conducive to sleeping on hard floor. My sore hips and shoulders can attest to that. Slowly I have adjusted to sleeping on my back, which I think is better for my lower back pain. I am trying to convince myself that sleeping on the floor is actually a blessing in disguise.

            I have a sheet, but I never use it. Even at night it is 187 degrees with 300% humidity, so covers are not necessary. However, this presents a problem. Sleeping without covers in just a pair of boxers leaves my body very exposed. The tropical regions of the world are infamous for supporting swarming hordes of tiny bloodsucking insects called mosquitoes. (“Nikun” in Chuukese, which I kind of think is a better name for them). Anyone who has ever been on a camping trip with me knows that I have especially sweet skin that is a delicacy to members of the mosquito family. They seem to flock towards me like the “salmon of Capistrano”. Luckily, because I have endured so many thousands of bites, now the sensation of itchiness is only fleeting for each bite. The bites only last for less than a day and usually only itch for about an hour. This is good because I receive about 10 or 20 bites everyday. My ankles and arms are constantly covered in little red bumps that I am trying to pass off as a fashion statement.

I have developed three good methods of dealing with these pests. The most obvious way is the use of deet infused bug spray to deter the bugs from latching onto my flesh and sucking the juices from my veins. At night I also employ the use of mosquito coils, which burn to produce a noxious smoke that is unpalatable to the insects. Those are methods of prevention; my solution to the completed attacks is hydrocortisone cream. I have enough tubes of anti-itch hydrocortisone cream to supply a small African village for a year. The quick application of this creamy white panacea and the avoidance of direct fingernail scratching ensure that the mosquito bites are impermanent and short-lived. Oh, I am also quite fortunate that Micronesia is one of the only tropical areas of the world that is entirely free of malaria. Which is very good for me because I would most assuredly have been infected due to the plethora of bites that I receive on a daily basis.

The rock hard ground, swarming mosquitoes, and stifling heat are only a few issues that plague my sleep. I wont even get into describing the spiders, rats, cockroaches and ants that make their home in my abode; because those don’t seem to bother me as much as you might expect. I also have a brother and brother-in-law that snore like boars. My brother has a gargoyle-sounding snore that resembles a vacuum cleaner with a Barbie doll head stuck in it. My brother-in-law’s snore is more animalistic and can be likened to an elephant playing a broken harmonic submerged in chunky mayonnaise. Together they make a cacophonous symphony that echoes through the walls of our small house. Sometimes they align their snoring cycles so that one’s inhale is simultaneous with the others exhale; this generates one continuous blaring snore. I also live with a 2-year-old baby who cries whenever the time strikes her right. (My sister is pregnant, so I also have another baby coming into my family sometime in January to add to the crying party.) The dogs outside erupt into ferocious barking at the drop of a leaf and can often be heard fighting and snarling in the distance. However, the one sound has been entirely novel to me here in Chuuk in the rooster crow. It is a foolish myth that roosters crow when the sun comes up. That is not true. They crow whenever they damn well feel like it. Sometimes at 4am, sometimes at 3 am, and every so often to they time it right at about 5:30 am when the sun actually comes into view over the ocean. The roosters crow in chains. I usually hear a “cock-a-doodle-dooooooo” off in the distance, and every rooster along the path repeats the crow until it reaches my house and then continues down the road. All it takes is one stupid rooster to ring his alarm at 4am and then the crowing will continue for hours in a continuous cycle until the sun is fully in view above the trees.

When I sat down to write this blog, I had no intention of describing my sleeping situation in such intricate detail. Rather I simply wanted to relay a short story from the other night.  I had fallen asleep around 9pm as usual and was sound asleep dreaming of pizza, football and bacon. Then at about 1 am I was awoken by pounding on my door, “John, John, wake up, wake up”. I sprung out of bed in surprise, thinking that we were being robbed by a monkey or a deadly typhoon was approaching. I quickly opened my door and was greeted by the smiling face of my brother. He simply said, “Eopus” and held up a bag of fish. I was brought into the kitchen and rubbed the sleep out of my eyes to surprisingly see half a dozen men in my kitchen eating voraciously. Grease was popping out the pan, dirty hands were scooping handfuls of rice, and bloody fish guts were lying in a bowl on the ground. Eopus is the Chuukese midnight meal. After a successful nighttime fishing expedition, the men bring back their fresh catch and feast upon their bounty in the wee hours of the morning. I was promptly given a 10 inch fish and a clump of rice. I tore the fish to pieces with my hands and devoured all the edible parts of the oceanic creature. I have become quite adept at extracting all the pieces of meat from a full fish and sucking each morsel of goodness from the bones and skin. I grubbed this fish heartily, wipe my hands off and crawled back into bed. This was my first “eopos”, but surely not my last.