I'm on an Island

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.