Easter, Pohnpei Style

Easter in Pohnpei isn’t just one day – it’s a whole week of pretty intense celebrating. Everyday we went to church at 7 AM and again at 7 PM. Slightly more church than I’d prefer, but to make up for it we had a huge feast after each church service! A few days we had even more church in the afternoon when we would visit different houses and have a church service at each. My host sister was in charge of the music for Easter week, so I learned lots of Easter hymns (and useful vocabulary like “cross,” “repent,” and “crucify”).

For each feast, a different family would prepare all the food, which is a lot of work, to say the least. On our assigned day, we spent the whole day barbequing chicken and hot dogs (inexplicably, every church feast in Pohnpei includes frozen chicken from Australia and American bun-less hotdogs in the midst of local food… I can’t figure it out…) Everyone helped prepare different local foods – I spent the afternoon peeling yams.



All our food, ready to be transported to church

On Good Friday, only the women go to afternoon church. They covered the windows with black fabric and everyone wore all black (or the closest we had to all black – lots of people only had black muumuus with pink flowers on them or something… including me). There were candles on the main altar (but no candlesticks, so we put them in used soda cans). Each woman read a different bible verse about Jesus on the cross. They assigned them randomly, so as luck would have it, I ended up with one of the longest passages to read.

I was sooooo nervous and I practiced my verse over and over all day long. I wasn’t familiar with a lot of the words because they were honorific rather than the common language. The first part of my reading went really well – I don’t think I made any mistakes. Then came the tricky part in the middle and I mispronounced one of the long honorific words that I had been repeating to myself over and over. That threw me off, so by the time I got to the part where Jesus says “Father, into your hands I send my spirit” (or something like that, I’m really only familiar with the verse from the musical, Jesus Christ, Superstar), I completely batched it. I stumbled over the words and mispronounced like half of them, and my voice was shaking the whole time. It probably sounded like a lot of nonsense to all the Pohnpeians. Either that or I inadvertently made Jesus’ last words, “Father, into your frog I vomit my ear” or something. But I nailed the last verse, thank goodness.

In addition to the Pohnpeian festivities, I incorporated some American Easter traditions. Most importantly, we had an Easter egg hunt! I went on a wild goose chase in Kolonia trying to find food coloring so we could dye Easter eggs. I finally found some sketchy power from the Philippines labeled “blue hue” etc. I was skeptical, but it worked (although who knows what toxins we were all exposed to, he he).

In addition to the three dozen dyed eggs, I bought over 300 pieces of candy to hide. I severely underestimated the seeking-ability of 20 plus enthusiastic children (remember, Pohnpeian families are big), so the hunt only lasted about five minutes before all the candies were found, but it was a really fun five minutes! When I was little, we would usually find extra eggs in the garden a few days after Easter that hadn’t been found during the hunt, but here we haven’t found any forgotten candies. The kids were that good.

So Easter was fun, culturally insightful, and busy, but I’m so glad the week is over. It was an exhausting week. I think I’ll need the whole year to recover my strength for Easter next year!

On an unrelated note… by some inexplicable force of evil, the song, “Friday,” has made its way to Pohnpei.