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.

Thoughts...

No pictures in this post – my camera has passed on. Curse you, humidity! We’ll see how long my other electronics can hold out in this climate.

I’ve been enjoying using stories from my childhood in the classroom. Last quarter we read part of a Ramona book. If you never read those books, Ramona is a little girl who gets into lots of trouble, with humorous results. Despite her brattiness, Ramona is supposed to be a likeable character, but not so in Micronesia, I’ve learned. In their responses to the book, almost everyone said they hated Ramona for being so “naughty” (one of the vocab words for the chapter). Considering how some of them have behaved this school year, I was a little blown away by the moral outrage (and hypocrisy, in some cases). But I’ve learned my lesson – no more Ramona.

A few weeks ago I tried out a different book, Keep the Lights Burning, Abbie, which my sister and I enjoyed. It’s about a girl who takes care of her lighthouse during a storm while her father is away. This one was a hit. They loved Abbie for helping her family – “I want to be like Abbie,” one of the girls wrote.

This is all just one example of the importance of family here in Micronesia. Again and again, students mention how they are motivated to succeed in school so they can find a good job and help their family. (Did you know that citizens of FSM can serve in the United States military? Just one more detail of the complicated Compact Agreement. Lots of the boys want to join the military, always adding “to help my family” when they state the goal.)

Childrearing is very different here, partially just because of the role of the extended family. There was an awesome article in Newsweek last year (my awesome mom sends me magazines a few months late to keep me up to date on the world, but now I learn that Newsweek has switched to digital-only! Curse you, Newsweek!). Anyway, the article… It was about childrearing practices in hunter-gatherer societies. There were so many similarities with family life here. Kids are given a lot more freedom and less supervision. They use machetes, play with the fire, swim and play unsupervised – everything that would completely freak out an American parent. I’ve been watching my 3 year-old host sister learn how to swim – she goes down to the river while the older kids swim, jumps in and flaps around to stay above water. Now she knows how to swim! It seems inconceivable to the American mentality that children could just teach themselves to swim (what would happen to the swimming lesson industry?!), but obviously that how the species did it originally.

School!

I realized that I’ve been writing a lot about Pohnpeian culture and not too much about my job here. There’s a very good reason for this – cultural differences are far more interesting to read about than my attempts to make a class of middle schoolers be quiet. However, to mark my six-month anniversary (February 15^th) at my permanent site, this post is going to be all about school!

The biggest challenge has been implementing co-teaching and co-planning. Peace Corps used to send volunteers into the schools to be solo teachers, but that has no sustainable effect on the school once the volunteer leaves. (Sustainability is the big word in Peace Corps right now – every project must be sustainable.) Getting co-teachers to cooperate on this is easier said than done, however. It’s still a balancing act with lots of persistence necessary on my part (why does it come as a surprise every Tuesday that we have our weekly co-planning meeting!?), but co-planning and co-teaching are now happening, amazingly enough. Only took the first six months of service to get to this point, lol!

Sixth grade is going really well! We’ve broken the students into three groups based on their reading level three days a week. I’ve been fighting for this since October, so it’s a huge relief to finally win that battle with co-teachers. It’s been really successful – the “higher” students are being challenged for the first time all year, basically. And the lowest students are finally moving at a pace that actually benefits them.

Eighth grade is also going well. We’re trying to get them to use creativity and critical thinking in their assignments. I’m so impressed with their progress! My co-teachers and I gave a presentation on developing critical thinking skills at the Pohnpei Teacher Forum this month, which was pretty exciting.

And I really don’t want to talk about 7^th grade. No, they’re not really that terrible, just not my most enjoyable class… The textbook for 7^th grade is terrible. I’m trying to find other readings to use that are closer to their reading level.

I’ve also gotten some secondary projects started up. My school got a grant from the Pohnpeian government to have a school garden, so I’ve been helping with that. The eighth graders are in charge of planting and caring for it. It’s sort of losing energy as the novelty wears off and as the year progresses. I’m also so busy with other projects that I can’t really dedicate much time to it, so it’s going to have a minimal role for the rest of the school year. But hopefully we’ll be able to get the energy back for the coming school year.

Also, since The Magic Tree House books are wildly popular with the students (I’ve actually seen students fighting over who gets to check one out!), I started a Magic Tree House reading club. (HUGE thank you to everyone who sent books!!!!) For each book they read, they have to answer three questions in their “passport.” Then they get a “stamp” based on the country setting of that specific book. This is also an attempt to improve students’ knowledge of basic geography. As is, they can’t even name the continents, I guess because it all feels rather insignificant when you’re on a tiny island… (I didn’t think a country existed that both cared less about soccer than the United States and was worse at geography than the United States, but Micronesia succeeds on both counts.)

A Very Pohnpeian Christmas

It was a wonderfully long Christmas season – starting with school Christmas celebrations on the 19^th and culminating in a huge New Year’s Eve/belated Christmas bash. (Hey, it’s literally 12 Days of Christmas!)



Oly Girl wishes you a belated Merry Christmas! (in front of the
"Christmas tree" that the kids decorated!

Since there’s no separation of church and state here, the annual Christmas party is a BIG DEAL. The entire month of December, students were decorating their classrooms (they may not have snow here, but these kids can make some mean paper snowflakes!). For the Christmas party, all the kids brought a food platter and a gift for their Secret Santa gift exchange (I was the designated Santa, handing out the gifts!). Lots of food, lots of dancing, lots of singing (bilingual Christmas songs!) – it was a good time. 

The 8th grade girls loved making paper snowflakes
in my room during recess!

We had three days in a row of church – December 23, 24, and 25 – which was sort of pushing my limit for sitting in a hot room while people preach in a foreign language.

Matching muumuus with my nohno for the Christmas Eve church service



"Sexy muumuus," as my host sister called them (because they're
slightly more form-fitting) for Christmas Day

But at least I got to learn lots of Christmas songs in Pohnpeian! Peren Me Laud (Joy to the World), O Kodo Me Pwoson (Oh Come, All Ye Faithful), Pwong Kalomw (Silent Night). Plus the kids taught me a Christmas song about animals and animal sounds. It’s always interesting to see how different languages interpret animal sounds. Here, a pig says “ngoap” and a frog says “kluk.”

Anyway…. Christmas was a nice calm day. After church in the morning we just hung out, danced, and ate candy. It was very low-key. And, for the first time ever, I went swimming on Christmas! Life in the tropics, what can I say?



with little Kalni on Christmas morning

The BIG party came on New Year’s Eve, which is without a doubt the biggest holiday of the year here on Pohnpei. We had a big feast with extended family (and extended-extended family…) that we spent the whole day preparing for – so much food! Then we hung out, played bingo, and chatted until midnight finally came around. Unlike in the states, the actual moment of midnight isn’t a big deal here – no countdown (and definitely no kissing in public!). Instead, once we were generally confident that it was 2013 (two watches confirmed it), all the kids ran around from house to house, banging makeshift drums and shouting “Parakap maingko! Kaski karahka!” (Happy New Year! Throw the candy!). It’s basically like Halloween without the costumes. 

Also, it was Bobo Len's first birthday on the 31st!

Then around 1 in the morning began the craziest dance party I’ve ever seen. All the men got completely wasted – I’ve never seen so much drunkenness (and keep in mind that I survived four years of college). They would pass out for awhile, then get up and dance again. I avoided that scene and danced with the kids – we had a fun, sober time! I called it a night around 4, but apparently the party was still going strong at 6 in the morning!

So, Happy 2013 to all! Hope it’s a wonderful year!

Pohnpeian Bingo, Extreme Weeding, and the Dreaded VRF

I should probably start this post with an apology to my mother for being AWOL recently. I’ll try to sum up the highlights of the last two months here (plus Christmas and New Year in a separate post).

December was a wonderful month – I really needed the break from school to restore my sanity, ha ha. I played lots of Bingo with my family. Pohnpeian Bingo, by the way, is the greatest thing ever. There are like 10 different ways you can get a bingo (diamonds, “six-packs,” corners, etc.), so you’re looking for all these different patterns on six different boards. It’s like a giant puzzle. And when you play “doubles,” you have to get two of these patterns on a board to win. The first 30 times I played, I wouldn’t even realize when I got a bingo because it’s so complicated! But now that I’ve played maybe 200-300 games, I’m getting pretty good at spotting bingos!

One of my favorite days over break was when someone brought back a package of balloons from Kolonia. We played “don’t let the balloon touch the ground” for hours that evening. I got some awesome photos of the kids – they don’t quite capture the insane excitement in the room, but still…

The other highlight of break was getting to go up to the mountains of Pohnpei. It was a 1-2 hour trek up the jungle-y slope to the clearing where my family plants sakau (I can’t do sakau justice here – I’ll be writing a separate post later!). Sometimes they stay up on the mountain overnight or for several days, but this was just a daytrip for my first go. We had an amazing view of the sea – so glad I brought my camera!



Our little mountain chalet

After a quick rest to recover from the hike up, eat some food, and take pictures, the work began! We were “mut”-ing (pronounced “mutch”) which I think best translates to English as “extreme weeding.” Everyone took a machete, and we just hacked at everything coming out of the ground that wasn’t sakau. Keep in mind, this was done on a mountain slope, so we were rather precariously climbing up the rocky slope as we worked. It was kind of awesome.

After we came down and walked back through the village covered in dirt and sweat, everyone passing by asked if we had been working in the jungle. No one could believe that I had gone up there! I made my host sister promise to take me along next time they go to the jungle on a weekend!

Also, it’s time for our first dreaded VRF (Volunteer Report Form). This is how volunteers report to Peace Corps Headquarters absolutely everything we’ve done in the previous six months (it takes about 5-6 hours to fill out the whole thing). It’s rather daunting, but also a really great opportunity to look back on the progress that’s been made so far and to recognize the greatest needs for the coming period. However, Peace Corps also manages to make you feel like a total failure. Despite being constantly told that we’re expected to save the world (just have an impact on our small communities), the VRF asks questions like “Did this activity help combat Human Trafficking?” “Did this activity contribute to food security?” “Did this activity support renewable energy efforts?” Wow, Peace Corps, sorry that my teacher workshops didn’t end human trafficking! Way to make my work feel insignificant!

Time for a FEAST!! (or two or three)

It’s yam season in Pohnpei, which means FEAST season! Pretty much every village has a feast, so I went with my family to three of them this month.

The first feast was in our village, and it was a rather small, humble affair compared with the feasts in the larger villages that we went to. I met the chief of our village (I’m hoping my inability to speak the “high language” didn’t offend him… I just through in whatever formal words I know in Pohnpeian, ha ha). We all ate yams and a few pigs.

In the larger villages, though, the feasts were a really big deal. The best feast was a few weeks ago now. There were hundreds of people crowded into the “nahs” (feast house). First, there was a huge procession of men carrying in sakau, yams, and pigs. Everything was carried on huge logs, including the live pigs hanging upside down. Just when I thought we had wiped out the entire pig population on the island, even more would appear! Some of the pigs were so big that it took 10 men or so to carry them. The yams were ridiculously huge too. As they carried in the ridiculously heavy loads, all the guys were dancing and yelping. At the same time, the pigs were shrieking and squealing like crazy – I guess when you’re upside down tied to a log, you know you’re in trouble. It was insane.

A pig facing certain death

Elaborate construction



Pig head! (very Lord of the Flies...)



The yams are kind of giant...

Meanwhile, the women were dancing in the nahs. Lots of shaking and undulating. They were all just having a great time. I swear, Pohnpeians are immune to self-consciousness or something. During the dance “breaks,” we ate a ridiculous amount of food (I was given two trays for my portion) and listened to some speeches from the chiefs. After the pigs had been slaughtered and cooked, the men danced in with the pig carcasses on their backs.



Dancing!



Pig carcasses

The whole thing lasted for about eight hours or so – a rather exhausting amount of time to spend sitting on the concrete floor of the nahs with no room to stretch out. It was a constant battle as my various limbs took turns falling asleep.

And, in case you're wondering what I'm learning in the Peace Corps... I now know the lyrics to just about every Backstreet Boys song every recorded. My family is kind of obsessed. We listen to them everyday! I can also recite my 2 and 3 times tables in Pohnpeian (in a super sing-songy chant that my first grade nieces learned at school).

Update

Halloween isn’t celebrated here, but I was determined to make Halloween day an awesome cross-cultural learning experience for my students and host family. I was so pumped… and then came my second major Peace Corps sickness! So instead of making paper jack-o-lanterns, I ended up bedridden for most of Halloween week. I had already given my host nieces and nephews an overview of “trick-or-treating,” and they were aware that I had bought candy in Kolonia for the occasion. So on Halloween evening, I woke up from a rather delirious sleep to a knocking on my door and lots of giggles. I somehow managed to drag myself to the door, and was greeted with like a dozen extended family members screaming “Trick or treat!!” They got in trouble for waking me up, but I was so happy that I told them they had to do it again so I’d have time to get the candy ready (not sure how I managed to do all this in my physical state – Halloween mania took over!). As I opened the door the second time, I snapped this photo of them in action:

I gave them the candy, then collapsed back into bed. A few days later, when I was feeling up to it, we made masks out of construction paper. These were supposed to be cute, but they ended up kind of making the kids look like a gang of executioners or something… Oh well, all with the Halloween theme, right?

When I got back to school the following week, we had our belated Halloween-themed day. We read and wrote scary stories in 7^th and 8^th grade (the 8^th graders wrote some very scary stories, by the way) and in 6^th grade we did a reader’s theater version of “The Little Old Lady Who Wasn’t Afraid of Anything,” complete with all the sound effects and motions. It was fun!

And of course, there was the big election. I was lucky enough to receive text message updates in real time from family and friends, so I wasn’t totally out of the loop (despite being in the middle of nowhere, literally). It didn’t quite feel like an election, though, without Wolf Blitzer surrounded by ridiculous computer graphics, lol. It was WONDERFUL to be outside of the states during all the campaigns (I never saw ONE political ad – yay!!!), but it was – surprisingly – kind of a bummer to miss out on the excitement of watching the election results.

Along with these American holidays/events, it’s been a month full of Pohnpeian holidays – Independence Day, Constitution Day, Veteran’s Day, etc. This means that we haven’t had a full 5-day week of school in the past four weeks. It’s crazy. Perhaps the most ironic school holiday is “Education Day.” I wonder who had the idea for that one… “Guys, I think we should have a holiday to celebrate education… and cancel school!” Instead, all the teachers went to a party and had a talent show/dance contest. Yay, education!

At home I’m slowly forcing my way into helping out with chores. After being told I was a “princess” and therefore didn’t need to work, I gave them a long speech (well, actually rather short considering my limited Pohnpeian language abilities) about how I want to help! So along with the chores I already knew how to do (washing dishes, raking), I’ve finally mastered doing laundry by hand (hit it with a paddle!), grating coconuts (koikoi mangas – this one I actually learned how to do during training, but I finally managed to convince my family to let me do it a few weeks ago), and planting banana trees!

But there’s still plenty of down time, as evidenced by the infinite number of times I play Uno daily. One day we got bored of playing real games, so I taught the kids how to make card houses (so if I accomplish nothing else during these two years, I have already imparted knowledge to Pohnpeian children!). After we succeeded at building a house with the whole deck, things got creative as they found other ways to build card houses. I was pretty darn impressed.

If you want a better idea of island life, check out the book “The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific” by J. Maarten Troost (don’t be misled by the title – there are no cannibals and very little sex in this book). It’s basically a humorous collection of Troost’s experiences in the Republic of Tarawa. Different country and culture, of course, but there are tons of similarities with my experience. Plus, it’s just a hilarious read.

Or, if you’re a fan of the “What They Should Call Me” tumblr, check out this link that one of the Kosrae volunteers stumbled upon:

http://whatshouldpcvscallme.tumblr.com/

In closing, a photo of Oly Girl, because everyone loves puppies!