52: Wind in my Beard

Last Friday marked the day when for the first time in my life, my facial hair is long enough and the wind strong enough for me to feel it the wind ruffle my beard! Here’s the backstory: On Friday morning, my boss spontaneously “yanked” me (in a good way) out of the office and invited me to join a community meeting on Dehpek/Takaiau, an island just off the coast of U Municipality. We arrived at super low tide and walked across the reef to the nahs where we would spend the next 6h drinking sakau and discussing their management plan.

 I’ve never had sakau this early in the day – it must have been about 11am, and they started cleaning (foreground) and pounding (background). When our Director Eugene saw the amount of sakau to be prepared, he accurately remarked: “We’re going home drunk.”

 I had the best pineapple I have EVER tasted in my life, and also really good cinnamon tea. It’s made from local cinnamon, which has medicinal properties (good for your vertebrate when cold, helps against cancer when it’s still hot).

 The meeting was about their management plan, which includes a marine protected area, but also the whole island. The chief is the one in the orange Tshirt, and for the first time I observed a woman actively participating in the discussions (the chief’s wife). In this exercise, the elders recorded the historic and sacred sites on a map, because passing this knowledge down orally (the traditional way) hasn’t been going smoothly lately, for various reasons.

 Oh, and I want to take a moment to appreciate Tshirt choices on Pohnpei. Most of them are free Tshirts from NGOs or awareness/outreach events, but you’ll find the occasional outlier, like one of our CSP interns working the pink “Daddy Good” here.

 I didn’t see much of the actual island, except for the nahs and this cool stairway.

 Here’s the Dehpek nahs with Kesdy (left) and Selino (right). Kesdy in his classic neon-yellow outfit that I think he’s been wearing for every community meeting.

When I got home after this long day, I went out again with Kodaro and Pahpa – you guessed it, to drink more sakau (he was invited to a different sakau bar by a friend). It rained BUCKETS that night (like every night the past week), but we were sitting beneath a gigantic tarp, so all good. What you see here is where the rain drained from the tarp – a waterfall so strong it was creating a pot hole in the pebbles of the parking lot, so they put a cardboard box there to “break the fall.” Yes, it lasted about 10min.

Also, that night I did kapwohpwo, which is drinking alcohol on top of sakau O.O