Building the Court
The basketball court was the only thing anyone would talk about on Kuttu. Where is it going? When do we start? How many bags of cement was that again? It seemed like the perfect project; if I gave it a push it would roll to the end on its own. Not so much.
Instead of a 5,000-word post with all of the cultural background and the necessary character development in order to understand the true dynamics of trying to complete a Peace Corps project with a mere two months left until the end of my service, I’ll explain it in a few key points.
First there was a funeral. Funerals are Chuukese culture at its best. If someone dies in Hawaii and hasn’t set foot on Kuttu in 30 years, they will still get a full week of mourning. For the first two days, everything stops. People hang around, men drink coffee, and the women cry around the body. For the next week, people are busy fishing or cooking for the family, finally capped by a big meal called arek, which takes a full day of preparation and a meal capped off with a few hours of speeches. Funerals are the last great example of a culture based around community and family ties. In the Western world, we did away with these traditions so we could quickly get back to work and life. So everything got pushed back a week. In my first year I would have been frustrated and depressed. Luckily, I was a seasoned volunteer, and took advantage of the lull to try to do things the right way. On Kuttu, this meant a community meeting. I got to put my language skills to use to run a meeting in Mortlockese-a two-hour affair of speeches and voting on everything that puts famed New England town halls to shame. We would start the work the Tuesday after the funeral.
One of the family members decided he didn’t agree with the project. Although the plan had been known for almost a year, we checked with the family twice (with the eldest brother who originally offered the land, and with the next brother after the death of the eldest), and held a community meeting, he didn’t speak up until we had already started knocking down trees on his family’s land. But it was his right to disagree, so we had to scrap everything and start again.
It took three weeks to find another place for the court. Which is actually really fast. When news runs by biweekly boats, things don’t happen quickly in the Mortlocks. There was talk of people offering a few pieces of land for the court, but nothing ever came through. So we had to use a spot I had turned down before because I thought it would be too much work. It had about twice as many trees, and three big slabs of concrete left over from old buildings that once stood there. But it was more level and we had permission from the family, so it became our new site.
People have more important things to do than build a basketball court. Living a subsistence lifestyle generally means your family has some sort of work to do every day. People need to fish or go to the taro patch. Houses and property are in a constant state of improvement or repair in the Mortlocks, and someone is always extending their cooking house or re-roofing a local house. When the original construction got put on hold, the youth started fundraising for the annual Easter celebration, doing odd jobs or cooking local food for a few bucks here and there. And there was talk of another boat coming out to buy sea cucumbers, so people were collecting them. All of these things are more important than a basketball court.
But in the Pacific islands not everyone works all day every day. With modern fishing equipment and canned food, people will generally have a morning or afternoon off most days, if not every other day. But people are lazy. Young people are especially lazy. No matter how much I tried to tell the young men that part of the agreement in the grant was that they would work for free, they didn’t want to work for free. Much as my parents complained that they had to pay me to do chores that they did for free, the older generation in Chuuk complains that the young kids won’t do anything unless someone is giving them cigarettes (or food, which we will get back to). Every day I would find young men my age wandering aimlessly or lying on hammocks, instead of building the basketball court they promised they would help me with.
But when people showed up to work they were unstoppable. Twenty young men pulling stumps the size of Volkswagen Beetles (okay, Smart Cars) out of holes or empty boats full of gravel are not a force to be reckoned with. Even on the days when we had a low turnout some people would stop by to chop some wood or take a few swings with the sledgehammer.
Oh, yes, the sledgehammer. I don’t know anyone in the United States who owns a sledgehammer. Somehow, several people on Kuttu do. When I saw the slabs of concrete, with the six-inch wide and foot deep foundations around the edges, I didn’t think we could break it. But they told me it was no problem. Even when the rotten wood handle of the sledgehammer broke after about five swings they weren’t worried. When the 3/8″ steel pipe replacement handle broke no one was worried. Then they figured out how to attach the 1/2″ stainless steel pipe to the sledgehammer (which involved a metal saw fashioned from rebar and a broken regular hammer) we were in business. Young men may be lazy in every culture, but give them a chance to show how much concrete they can break with a heavy piece of metal and they’ll work. Even the old men wanted a few cracks at the concrete while wearing their flip flops. I doubted, and again, I was wrong.
As much as I gave my friends a hard time for being lazy the land got cleared pretty quickly. In only a month we were able to empty out a plot of land big enough to build a high school basketball court. By manpower only. With volunteers. If I weren’t trying to get it all finished in the last six weeks before I left, this could have taken months.
Once they decided there would be food every day we mixed concrete, there was no question that we would finish. When you eat lunch at a community work event, it’s not the sandwich and chips Americans would hand out. You and a buddy sit down to a dish the size of a cake pan filled with taro, rice, fish, bananas, and rice, most of it slathered in coconut milk. They usually wait until work is finished to eat because no one wants to move after they eat. Like funerals, preparing food for an event shows the best of Mortlockese culture. Things are planned quickly and efficiently, and when the day comes heaps of food show up right on time. While women weren’t doing the physical construction of the court, cooking food for the days we poured concrete was an invaluable contribution. When people know there will be food, they show up to work.
The only problem came when we actually started mixing the cement. The men were plowing away, pouring out bags of cement, then sand, gravel and water, mixing it and pouring it by the wheelbarrow into the mold we had laid out. But when we reached the end we used 50 bags the first day. For a quarter of the court. Meaning the last section would come up about 20 feet short. There was much discussion and clearly I had a pained look on my face because everyone told me it would be alright. So we took an extra day to make everything all even and adjusted our schedule so that it would still be finished before I left. We split the remaining part in half, meaning 65 bags each for our grand total of 180 bags. We used 70 bags the next time. Again I was reassured that we had again made a mistake in measuring and leveling and we could get those bags back in the last section.
Halfway through the last section it was clear we weren’t going to make it. So they adjusted the sand to cement ration (assuring me that it would not affect the structural integrity of the court) and hoped for the best. We scraped every last drop of freshly mixed concrete off the cement and poured it in buckets as everyone predicted whether it would be enough. Everyone had a prediction, from having leftovers to being three bags short. I was surprised by number of optimists, since our math hadn’t been right the whole time. As the last bucket got poured out and spread we ended up just inches short. But it was alright, since we had built and extra foot around the whole court to prevent people from twisting ankles when they stepped out of bounds.
This is the moment where the skies opened up, sending us to cover, and I stood with one of my friends in silence staring at the most beautiful slab of concrete I’ve ever seen in my life.
So I lied about a few key points. But there’s a lot more to the story, like the coconut tree everyone was afraid to climb, or the day I cussed out my friends, and the dogs who tried to bite all of the workers. The teamwork involved in mixing and pouring 70 bags of cement by hand in four hours is a spectacle unseen in the U.S. today.
But, with less than a week left on Kuttu, it was still only a concrete slab.
Two Takes on What’s Going on in Micronesia
Here are two articles on wrongheaded U.S. policy in the FSM and how this policy is directly affecting Guam and Hawaii.
Despite China’s recent investments and development projects, it has a long way to go to oust the United States as the FSM’s bff. But the current compact expires 12 years from now, and if the Dept. of Interior continues to make decisions from Hawaii without a real understanding of the place and its culture things might start looking very different in the next decade.
180 Bags of Cement
I buy the cement before I knew whether it was going to make it on the boat, only because I am afraid that it would run out and there would be no cement in Chuuk while the boat is waiting for me on the dock. This leads to me telling the store that I needed it delivered one day, then changing it three or four times.
The day the boat is confirmed, I go to the store and told them I will be back the next morning to have the cement delivered. Thursday morning I arrive at the store and tell them to prepare my things. I wait for 20 minutes and they tell me that the truck is broken down. It won’t be ready until 11. No problem, I’ll do my other shopping first. We manage to get 50 bags of cement (out of 180) on the boat on Thursday. Fifty more are left in the rain, but covered, because the boat can’t open it’s storage in the rain.
The boat is supposed to leave at 2 on Friday. I get to the store at 8:30 to tell them to deliver the cement at 9:30. The woman tells me it’s already 9:30. I check my watch; it’s 8:30. She checks a clock. I’m right.
I walk to the dock and wait. At 9:30 no one’s there. It’s cool, Chuukese time. After 10 there’s no cement and no sign of the men who will load it. It’s running close to our 2 p.m. departure and 130 bags are left to load. Luckily people from Kuttu are loading things, and I tell the flatbed driver to pick up some young men to load the cement. I walk to the store and they’ve done nothing. Apparently the truck is having problems again. So she goes and talks to them and they say they’ll get it ready.
I walk to the loading area and it’s clear the truck’s not ready yet. First we need engine oil. It takes a few minutes to retrieve, and the mechanic returns with a five-gallon tank. He spills a pint before he finds the hole, and empties what looks like a gallon of oil into the engine. Meanwhile, the driver from the day before talks about his problems with the truck the day before. I realize that he never turned it off during his deliveries, because he was afraid it wouldn’t restart. Every time he parked it, he also looked for something to block the wheels to make sure it wouldn’t roll away. All the padding is torn away inside the cab, and the entire steering column is visible under the wheel. The windshield is spiderwebbed, and a couple promotional stickers for mosquito coils cover the middle, where the cracks are especially bad.
This morning, they’re trying to charge the battery. The mechanic fiddles around with it for a big, then climbs underneath. He starts poking around, and the engine starts to sputter. He pokes his tool around a couple more times underneath, touching different spots. He hits the magic place, and the engine turns over and starts. We’re in business.
We get to the dock and the young men aren’t there yet. Luckily another truck is unloading. Just as it’s our turn, the flatbed pulls up and everyone jumps out. We unload 40 more bags and it’s back to the store. There’s a short comedy number where my driver has problems with the forklift. He knocks over two stacks of cement. The last stack gets on, and we literally throw the 10 extra bags off.
I still have to grab the invoice, and I tell the driver. “It’s OK, I forgot water.” I go to get the invoice, thinking he’s thirsty. I come back to see him filling the radiator directly from a hose. There’s no cap, so when it’s full and he walks away, boiling water starts bubbling out.
We load the last bag of cement at 12. Two hours left. I run back to the office and rush through the last minute things I always have to do. I write checks for money I owe, send some mail, leave notes for things others need to do.
I knew all along that the boat wouldn’t be leaving on Friday, but I had to be ready in case it did. So when I got to the dock all ready to leave and my principal was going the other direction, I wasn’t surprised. At least I would have a free night to relax.
That night my digestive system did some interesting tricks, and it became clear I had some intestinal parasites. I called the Peace Corps doctor the next day, and she told me I couldn’t take the boat.
It’s All Done
The basketball court is complete. Somehow in less than two months the project was completed. This is a bit of a miracle in and of itself, in a place littered with half-finished houses. Projects get started, but without pushing to finish them, they linger in limbo for years. Here’s the happy ending to start with:
Just as we laid the last of the concrete the skies opened up. Everyone made a mad dash for the nearest meeting house, an old one with a rusty tin roof full of holes. The only dry spot was half-hunched under a concrete beam to avoid the drips, facing the newly finished concrete slab. Dadius, a friend, stood next to me, watching the rain fall on the concrete in silence for a few minutes. “A far lingach” – “It’s so pretty.”
The whole story is too long and complicated to tell it all in one post. I’ll put up the highlights in installments.
I’ve left Chuuk now, but I’ll keeping posting about my experience until I’m out of things to say, so keep checking back.
Pictures
For those of you who might not have Facebook (I’m not sure who that might be) or aren’t friends of me, here are some pictures of Kuttu for your viewing pleasure.
Purple Rice
I’ll never understand Pacific Islanders’ relationship to rice. Many will themselves admit that their addiction to rice makes no sense. Rice requires large areas of lands to cultivate. There’s no reason it should be the staple of a region called Micronesia.
Though I’ve never heard anyone say it, a meal is not complete without rice. The first time I met my host family they prepared a feast with fish and different kinds of taro and banana. My host dad apologized because there was no rice.
At my old house, the family could go through a 50-pound bag of rice in less than a week. In a house of seven where rice is the major part of every meal, it’s still a staggering number. Go to your kitchen, cook a couple cups of rice, and pile it an inch deep on a dinner plate. Try to finish it. Do it again for breakfast tomorrow, and take it in a tupperware container to work for lunch. If you want meat, open a can of tuna.
It’s not uncommon to have only rice for a meal. If we run out of fish, sometimes there’s only rice to eat. I’ve spent many a morning trying to down a plate of rice just so my stomach won’t grumble while I’m teaching. Not altogether crazy, considering burnt bread is considered a proper breakfast in our country.
All this can be explained logically. Rice is cheap and quick. It fills up your stomach. It lasts and is easy to transport. Perfect for island life.
The problem is that people love rice. They crave it. This week I bought stuffing and mashed potatoes (both instant) for my family. They still ate rice on the side. On my birthday we had three kinds of taro and two kinds of breadfruit (all special dishes that require a lot of preparation), and some of my friends skipped them all to pile their plates with rice.
They can be pretty creative with rice. Sometimes they’ll add food coloring and we’ll have purple or orange rice. If we’ve been eating plain rice for a few days, they’ll put a bit of coconut milk and salt on it. If there’s a bit of flour they’ll mix them together and fry it. For a special treat they cook ramen with canned meat and pour it over rice. But mostly it’s large portions of plain white rice.
From time to time boats will be late and we’ll run out of rice on Kuttu (I no longer have this problem because I live in a store). To the volunteers, this is a cause for celebration. It means taro and breadfruit for every meal. But the locals go hungry. The kids complain. People slouch and slow down and talk about how much they miss rice.
It’s even become a part of the language. It’s polite to invite someone to eat if they come to your house. People will often take it a step further and invite you to eat rice-”sa mongo rais”-even if they have none.
It’s commonly thought that the Japanese started it all. Surely they brought it with them when they invaded these islands before the war. Taro patches were torn up to plant rice. But most of this probably went to the soldiers, not the locals. They were stuck eating coconut to fill their stomachs.
It was actually the United States that caused it all. During the Trust Territory days, large amounts of aid came to the islands. Some brilliant American realized that rice is cheap and easy to transport, and the Micronesian diet changed for ever.
I’ll never understand that there is no American counterpart to rice. We can go days without bread (though we don’t always). Vegetables can changed because of the season. We want meat for lunch and dinner, but so do people here. There is no single staple food in the States.
Now it’s started to grow on me. I don’t look forward to it, but even when I have taro cooked in coconut milk or pounded breadfruit, I’ll find myself putting rice on my plate, and sometimes eating it first. I still can’t eat rice like my friends on Kuttu, but I’m catching up. That plate of rice I told you about earlier? I often call that lunch.
A Near Miss
I’m on the wrong end of Lekenioch, eight miles of ocean from home, watching my ride home take off without me. Not a single person from Kuttu is left. Not a free motorboat is in sight. They forgot me.
Kuttu is literally split by religion. A line can be drawn east-west through the middle of the island, and everyone south of the line is Protestant. To the north live the Catholics. I live in the south, and attend all of the Protestant events-Easter, Christmas, church anniversary, youth celebrations. When I heard there was a big party on Lekenioch to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Catholicism in Chuuk, I saw it as a good chance to spend some quality time with the Catholics.
I spent weeks learning the songs with the youth. I waited anxiously with them when the news about the boat inevitably changed and we almost didn’t go. I rode the ship for six hours (actually a pretty short boat ride) to get to Lekenioch.
(Quick geography lesson. Lekenioch and Kuttu are on separate atolls. About a mile of open ocean separates the two atolls. Lekenioch on the Eastern end of one atoll, and Kuttu on the Western edge of another, making them the islands farthest apart in this part of the Mortlocks.)
We got there late, and I took the opportunity to spend some time with fellow volunteers and spent the night at the Lekenioch PCV’s house. I told my friends from Kuttu I’d be down the next day.
After church the next morning, I humped it down to where the Kuttu delegation was staying. Lekenioch is shaped like a horseshoe, but a three-mile horseshoe. After 18 months on a half-mile piece of rock, walking from one end to the other is tiring. I get to the two-story house where my friends are staying and find the men spent the night stacked head to toe, shoulder to shoulder in a single room. They suggest I stay in the spacious PCV accommodations. I feign hesitation and agree.
The Jubilee is lots of fun. Every island has prepared several songs. Ettal has a cool reggae number. Satawan’s is bouncy and poppy. Nameluk sings a capella. Lekenioch has five minutes of choreographed hand movements before they start singing. They’ve all spent several hours a night for weeks practicing.
To show their appreciation, people throw candy, cigarettes, betel nut, T-shirts, and sunglasses, or spray perfume and cologne while we sing. I can’t concentrate on singing while there are projectiles flying about me. My fellow Kuttuese don’t flinch. We finish and I trade my cigarettes for betel nut.
Then there’s the speeches. The event stretches late into the night because each song is proceeded by a long sermon from each group. Plus the governor, the mayor of Lekenioch, the speaker of the House of Representatives, and any other dignitaries have to give long lists of thank yous and commentaries that often stretch past 20 minutes each.
Around 1 a.m. I’m spent, even though there are songs left to sing. I’ve spent at least 8 hours today sitting cross-legged, and my back is killing me. I go back to the house and get sit for a bit on the porch. There’s a crack and a flash of light back at the field. Someone brought fireworks to the Mortlocks. A couple more sail into the air and crack, but not above the coconut trees.
On Sunday we’re supposed to leave. The meeting is mercifully short because all the kids have to be at school on Monday. Or maybe not. They make the final announcements about the boats, and I can’t hear them. My friends tell me we’re not leaving until Monday.
I go back to enjoy a cup of coffee when two of my students show up. “Dan, we’re leaving at 2.” I check my walk, it’s 1:30. It’s at least a 20 minute walk (like I said, far). I don’t rush. It’s Chuukese time. I pack, use the bathroom, and say my goodbyes. As I’m walking I see the boats are already loading. We pick up the pace.
I arrive at the Kuttu house at 2:30. Empty. I ask where they all went. Gone. People point to the lagoon. I rush over.
The Nomo Sepei (of earlier blog fame) is already starting to turn. All of my friends are already on it, and they’ve forgotten about me.
I frantically search for a motorboat to take me out to the Nomo Sepei. None in sight. The rest are loading people on another ship. I rush over to some people loading one up. Sorry, going to Ettal (yet another atoll, not near Kuttu).
The Nomo Sepei is now headed straight for the pass and toward the open ocean.
A motorboat pulls up. I say quick goodbyes and jump on. We head out at full bore, through the other boats ferrying passengers. The Nomo Sepei stays on course. Fellow PCV Alex waves from his boat.
We pull up next to the Nomo Sepei and a cheer erupts. Maybe they didn’t forget about me. But the captain won’t slow down. Nor do they put the ladder down. So we cut through the wake and pull alongside. I toss my bag in and jump from my moving motorboat to the cruising (OK five knots isn’t cruising, but creeping isn’t as dramatic) fishing boat. Applause all around.
It took a few months to convince people that I did not have a girlfriend on Lekenioch.
Kapasen Kilisou
Kilisou chappur.
Thanks to your generosity, my grant has been funded. Faster than I planned too, which will keep me on track to COS in November.
Thanks to everyone who donated or spread the word for helping out. It made what could have been stressful experience much easier for me.
The youth of Kuttu are excited to get to work on the project. I’ve spent months trying to keep expectations low, and now that it’s happening everyone’s excited to get to work.
The physical work hasn’t started yet, though, so there’s still a long way to go. I have transportation issues to deal with, plus whatever other kinks Chuuk has to thrown in my way.
So keeping thinking good thoughts, praying, sending good vibes, or doing whatever in hopes that it all works out.
I’ll post pictures and such when it’s all done.
Fishin’
They say to keep your body out of the water to prevent hypothermia. But I only shiver when I stand up, so I’m squatting down with only my head above the surface while I wait for my friends to wrap up the fishing net.
I look past them, where the brown rocks of the reef end and the ocean drops off steeply into deep blue that probably extends all the way to Antarctica. To the east and west the reef stretches as far as I can see, which isn’t very far in the steady rain. I can barely make out the silhouette of a small island that sits between us and Kuttu.
I think about what my friends might be doing on a Saturday in April, because I sometimes I can’t believe that I’m here. That and I don’t want to think about how cold I am. I realize a coffeeshop or a city park seem foreign to me. It’s been more than four months since I’ve seen a car. I’d really like a cup of hot chocolate or a hot shower right now–going on four months on that one too. When I’m sitting by the fire cooking rice later tonight I’ll remember the tingly, burning sensation in your toes when you jolt them back to life in the shower after being in the cold. Reality returns and I see three men collecting a net in a great expanse of nothing eight thousand miles from my home.
Erat carries the net back and we climb in the motorboat. “Omwi werei umule?” he asks.
“Ewer, ina epwe engol are engol me liman.”
“Ia werei nucha. Ái luku Samwei a ierló.”
I laugh.
I’ve spent the morning chasing a fish into a net on the reef, swimming or running around in my snorkel ans
Sambas. Just twenty minutes earlier I was trying to swim with two dead fish in my hands when Erat pointed out the spines that were about to cut up my hands. Doggie paddling in sneakers is not fun.
Erat poles the boat another hundred feet down the reef and we climb out to set the net again. He’s about to put it down when he stops. “Ucha.” Just in front of us in the waist deep water is a circle of blue shapes. I set my half of the net carefully, keeping an eye on the shapes and trying not to splash too much and scare them away. I put on my mask and duck under the water to check out the school of blue-green parrotfish slowly swirling.
I pick up some rocks and them off the side to scare them toward the center of the net. But when I check underwater again all I see is a black-tip shark cruising in a cloud of dust where the fish were. Gone. Stokichy and Samwei come running in and only one or two of the fish end up in the net.
We go a few more rounds with the net before we climb on the boat for lunch. There’s a container of rice, and some clams that Samwei found while Erat and I were setting the net. Erat cleans one of the umule we caught and hands it to me to eat off the boat. The other three laugh when, shivering, I put on my raincoat. They were just taking a break. I thought we were done.
There’s still another trip with the net and then some linefishing. They laugh at me again because after I pull in a few fish they can tell I’ve forgotten how cold I am (“Met Dan, a morokoló om féú?”). We’re still not done because they want to drop the net on the ocean side of the reef by the wreck of the Golden Pacific. When I rest by the side of the boat for too long Stokichy tells me to get because out here the sharks are bigger than the four-footer I just saw on the reef.
It’s four in the evening when we get back to land, and by the time I’ve shower (which made me shiver again) and had a cup of the coffee the sun is down.
Barbequed umule with two kinds of taro for dinner and I read for a bit before laying down on my pandanus mat at nine, listening to the wind and rain still coming down outside.
