Sunday in Rohi, Pohnpei

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  Rohi, Kitti, Micronesia
Monday, October 30, 2006

From my personal journal........


Sunday in Rohi 10.30.06

Tomorrow is Halloween. The venerable American tradition, memories of past adventures and misadventures, stomach aches, toilet papering trees, etc. That thought just crossed my mind as I wrote the date, but it has little resonance in this place. Tomorrow will just be a regular day, a day like any other. The children won't flinch at the fact that they could be consuming vast quantities of sweets instead of fish and rice. What they don't know, wont hurt them, especially in this case.
A normal, routine Sunday in Rohi. Awoke to mayhem this morning in the homestead, island time catching up to Church (sarawee) time, choking down some fried bananas and bathing in the river with the masses of children who never seem to tire of splashing one another (but they know not so splash the scary big white man-he doesn't like that game).
Off to church with Sasko, my 15 year old host neice as the unlicensed pilot, Nono and Nahnep in the back, me in shotgun, sweat already forming as I think forward to the heat of the church house, all the talking, singing, standing, sitting, handshaking, and prostrations that I would understand little of, even in my own country. But, its an event, and seeing that events here are few and far between, its always looked forward to, sweat aside. Everyone dressed up to the nines, shined up for the show. Unfortunately, Justino, the last of the endless procession of brothers to borrow Nono's car, failed to remember the gas part, and we roll into the parking lot on fumes, in neutral. Sasko seems to have that part down cold. Arrival, even on fumes, is still exceptional, as most will walk many miles in the searing troopical heat and rain to show off their flower dresses and compare sakau hangovers.
We hustle in with the masses after a few formal greetings (kasalelia mein-ko) to the elders seated out front, and I take a seat on the end of an old wooden pew, amongst giggles and stares-some of my students, getting a big kick out of me wearing pants and a collared shirt (the oven-like classrooms requiring nothing more than flip flops, shorts, and a tank top), and the states of many of the people of the other villages who don't see the big white man so often, and thus still havent adjusted to seeing someone of my height and hue of skintone around their parts. Maybe in a year, the stares will finally abade. Maybe not.
But, alas, today, I'm not the only menwhi (white man) in the village, as today we have a special visitor, an elderly Jesuit priest who come around to the villages sopradically for masses, who also happens to speak fluent Pohnpein, and thus makes me look even worse than normal, with my sputtering, sentence-fragmented, cave-man Pohnpein skills. So I sit, enjoy the spectacle, and try not to sweat, too much. Work is frowned upon greatly on Sundays in these islands, so I will eat some fish, some yam, some banana, sit back with a good book (now onto One Hundred Years of Solitude, which is breathtaking), and enjoy the lush green environs of my habitat. Until, of course, the call for the sakau and the pounding of the sakau rocks comes rolling in the early evening, as it always does. Just another day in Pohnpei.

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