3:12 PM Comment3 Comments

Laughter. People here are serious about laughter. There's lots of it a lot of the time. For how culturally traditional people are here, they are unreserved with the fun. People are also unreserved with their bodies, which is, to be fair, what one might expect of a culture in which women go topless and men wear loin cloths. But it is interesting to observe families' physical affection towards their kids. Massage here is a tafeeli faliuwashe, or a local remedy for the majority of minor aches or illnesses. My favorite example of this to date occurred between my 24 yr. old host brother and his buddy Catowin. Now, let me set the stage a little. My host brother looks like a professional tight end and I'm sure he's come out the winner of any skirmish he's been in. Catowin, on the other hand, I first met when he was showing off his scar from when a shark attacked him at the age of ten. It's gnarly looking and he supplemented it with a tattooed cartoon shark with its mouth around the scar. Not to mention that he's built of muscle. (How do I know this? Let's just say it's one of the advantages of young men wearing only a thu.). So these are the characters and here is the rest of the story. A couple of weekends ago the fam and I were hanging out under the beranta (the outdoor living 'room'). My brother and Cat were sitting next to each other as everyone was chatting. The next time I looked over, there was Mr. Shark-Bite himself giving the Woleaian Shannon Sharp a coconut oil massage on his arm with total nonchalance and absolutely no awkwardness. All this to say that I am really appreciating the small parts of the culture upon which I'm slowly, and hopefully not too clumsily, stumbling upon.

Here's a random update on my thoughts/observations about gender roles and respect in Yap. In Woleaian culture, women cannot be higher than men. As a result, for example, they are not supposed to climb trees. Another manifestation of this is that when a woman's brother or uncle passes her on the road, she must cross the road and squat down. My current understanding of this is that these behaviors are how respect is shown here. In the States, we often spout ideologies (myself highly included) about respect - about equality for all and showing every person the same level of respect. But how often do we really "show" our respect for one another? I'm honestly hard pressed to think of specific examples that bring my respect for people to the surface. Here, however, I can see the respect that women show for their family. The tricky thing is whether I will also be able to detect ways in which other people in the culture are shown respect or disrespect.

Adventures in mwongoo...Mwongoo is the most common word I say and hear here. Why? Well, we've been told that mwongoo is love. So what is it? Food, of course. Interestingly, there is no common greeting in Woleaian, no 'hi' or 'good day.' Instead, people say 'buutogo mwongoo' (come eat) whenever someone approaches. Needless to say, food is central to life in this culture. My most recent adventures up to date include 'al dente' (read: barely cooked) ramen with ant floaties galore (more protein, right?); delicious fiiyefiiye, a sweet rice, pumpkin, coconut pudding drink; a bite of sea turtle (it's a frequent meal in Woleai :-( ); and a declined offer of gelaagu...dog. I tried to do my best to respectfully decline and explain that, to me, dogs are part of the family and it just wouldn't seem right to eat part of the family!

Dogs in Micronesia are aplenty, and we're not talking pedigreed pooches here. We're talking about nearly or totally wild canines that are scrawny and mangy and battle-worn. When walking about, one must be weary of dogs and either carry a stick or rock for self-defense. On the whole, I've found that dogs are better treated here in Yap than in Pohnpei due to two factors. One being the availability of free vet clinics to have dogs spayed or neutered, and the other being that dogs are seen more as pets than pests. My family has a dog named Spike plus a few others who have island names I can never remember, plus a new puppy. Notwithstanding, dog is an occasional guest on the dinner table as well as a constant guest under the table. (Side note to my cat loving friends: there are cats as well, but they are just ignored, which is probably safer for them to be outside the realm of mwongoo potential.).

This weekend was the first annual Yap Canoe Festival. I got to hang out at it on Friday and I volunteered on Sat. It was fun to get to help out and my favorite part was getting to hang out with the local kids that were volunteering. The kids here are wonderful - they'll start teasing you the second they meet you. I spent most of the time working with a kid named Jake. He's sixteen but could be some lost relative of Hagrid. He is big, big-hearted, and a barrel of laughs. This weekend was also fun b/c it helped me realize how many wonderful people I've met and friends I've made. For instance, there was a wrestling demonstration Saturday night and I knew probably half the boys. My twin brothers wrestled against each other and one was recognized as a hopeful for a great scholarship opportunity to Singapore. There was such a spirit of fun and instead of competitiveness and jeering from the crowd, there was camaraderie and cheers and laughter from the crowd. Like I said before, laughter is one of my favorite parts of this culture.

In other news, I've started reading A Walk in The Woods by Bill Bryson. I've also discovered that Yapese ants' favorite food is the Just Tomatoes brand of freeze-dried veggies. It's intense how they always seem to go for it and none of the other tasty treats around it (thankfully). Well, I best be off to start my second to last week of training.

I hope you are all well and thanks for thoughts! Whee!

emily

1:21 PM Comment2 Comments

Just a quick update. Everything is going really well...language training has calmed down a bit and training in general is a little more relaxed. I'm enjoying my host family and community here, but I'm also really looking forward to getting out to Woleai so I can really settle in and get my feet set for the next two years. Everyone I tell I'm going to Woleai replies with one of two things - either "take a mosquito net" or "lucky! It's so beautiful!" I'm stoked.

I want to extend a heartfelt thank you to my family and friends who have sent letters and care packages. At the PO today I had four packages and I could definitely feel the love! It's really great to hear from friends and I love opening packages in front of the other PCVs, who have all declared that they're taking notes from me on what to ask from their friends. They keep saying I must have really great friends, and I tell them YES. I ABSOLUTELY DO! So thank you thank you thank you!

Oh, and just as a quick side note on the wardrobe...I have not yet 'gone local' to the full extent. I have been given two beautiful lavalavas, but it's not tops-off until the swear-in ceremony. It's been fun to hear the little stories about all the fun and laughter my new lifestyle is causing :-) I'm happy you think of me when you laugh. There are many, many moments here where I smile or laugh just thinking about you and the memories we have.

I have another post in the works, so be on the lookout for Mr. Shark-Bite and what a man-eat-dog world it is here. Stay tuned...

12:05 PM Comment2 Comments

[posted by MOM]

= Not always getting what I expect. Case in point: ordering the veggie burger for the first time at Oasis (one of a very few restaurants here). The veggie burger, it turns out, is a pile of suateed veggies on a sweet burger bun. It was good and I enjoyed it, but I also learned that a menu in a foreign country contains all sorts of mysteries!

= Where everybody knows your name. Yap is a small, insular place and a group of seven new Peace Corps are nobody's stranger. Many times walking in town I'll have people say hi to me by name and I've never met them. Case in point: the other day I was eating lunch with Gita and Porter, the other two volunteers going to Woleai, when a young woman approached us. The first thing she said was, "you're going to Woleai" and all we could say is, "yes we are, what's your name?"

= Raw gums. I mentioned before that betel nut chewing is ubiquitous here and constant. Which means people will be speaking to me in another language while chewing betel nut and spitting red in the middle of a sentence, which may be a contibuting factor to why Woleaian is so hard to learn. I've tried it a few times myself and the gums on the left side of my mouth are raw from the lime, which ppl sprinkle in the middle of it to purposefully make their mouths raw. Why? Because it let's the 'buzz' properties of the betel nut get into the body and cause a mini little high.

= Death by volleyball. I have six host brothers and we play volleyball together a lot. Now, you might think that as their host sister they'd give me a break. Or you might be like me and underestimate their abilities. But boy oh boy. When I step onto the court (read: patch a dirt with a clothesline as a net and bounded by rusty metal pipes) they have it out for me and get a huge kick out of spiking the ball in my face, esp. Riley and Rodney, the 16 yr. old identical twins. In the states I can hold my own on the court, but here I cower in fear. Sad, but true.

= Kissing lizards. We have countless house lizards that eat bugs and make kissing noises at you. When we first arrived in Micronesia, we were told about nightcrawling, where young men crawl outside thier sweethearts' rooms at night as a form of dating ritual. We were warned that it might happen to us and several of the girls here mistook the kissing lizards to be nightcrawlers.

= Christmas carols. I've heard several since coming to Yap. What can I say? They're catchy.

= Picture imperrfect moments, like the sun setting after a run and Gita double-fisting a can of spaghetti in one hand a cup of chocolate water in the other.

Here is a run down of what communication is going to look like once I'm on Woleai:

-Mail about once a month

-Phone and email about once every three or four months

Here's a little more detail. There are two ways to get to the atoll - by plane and by ship. The plane goes out very rarely, only when the are enough passengers or when there is an emergency. The ship is supposed to come about once a month. Any time either of these makes a trip to Woleai, any letters/packages for me will be brought out to me and I'll be able to send mail back. Also, I'll have a number of resource trips or training sessions throught the next two years that will bring me back to the main island.

As far as communcation available on Falalus, there is an SSB radio and I'll have a satellite phone for emergency purposes. I'll have weekly checkins with my program assistant on Yap with the sat phone, but all other communication is going to have to be written.

Im going to end this quickly to send off while I'm still connected to wifi. Be well, thanks for following along, and keep in touch!

whee !

emily

3:59 PM Comment1 Comments

Week one of six of PST 2 on Yap - check. This week, marking my first experience of Yap, had a rough start to say the least. It began quite well at first after a day of travel and a cool, breezy night at a hotel. The next day, however, I got a bad case of the burps. Many of you who know me know that usually means bad news, and let me tell you, these burps meant BAD news. Unfortunately it coincided with meeting my new host family. What a first impression. I show up and immediately curl up in a ball for a few hours until my system starts to revolt, at which point I proceed to expel any and everything in my system to the point that my family insisted that I go to the Yap Memorial Hospital. Fun. And if that weren't enough, Tropical Storm 19W decided to extend an extra hand of welcome. Magotin - welcome to Yap.

As unpleasant as this experience was, I'm happy to report that many a good thing came of this episode. For one thing, I am 100% certain that I have the most wonderful host mother in all of Uap - Ramona was such a comfort and support during many first experiences, incl. horking from a car, getting full-blown food poisoning, and visiting a hospital in a foreign country. Another good thing is that, even when I felt like my body was trying to explode, I didn't have even an inkling that this isn't where I want to be.

So let me tell you a little bit more about where I am and what I'm doing. I have training every weekday, shich consists of at least four hours of language training with Tino, or Augustino. Porter, Gita and I are in this together, but it's still rough at times. Our afternoons are spent with the other Yap volunteers for technical trainings or meetings with the CoE and whatnot. My family drops me off and picks me u0p every day, so pretty much everything I do is planned by and in the hands of other people.

Like I said, I have six weeks in the state of Yap, the western most state in the FSM. Yap on the whole seems to be a very traditional and relatively quiet island. There remains a strong sense of family, a social caste system (where outer islanders, like me, are at the bottom), and gender roles that prevail in determining most aspects of daily life. Now, I know this is a very loaded generalization and one that initially gave me reservations before coming here. I have the next two years and five weeks to explore this further. So far, I have come to see (and been told) that a sense of respect guides the culture and, however different it may seem from how I would establish a way of life based on the principle of equality, each person is seen as valuable. I also want to qualify that I haven't been here long and have not had the chance to really observe in depth how these aspects of culture play out (plus they're not obvious). All this to basically say, I have not yet reconciled myself to or understood the social structure at work here (and It's likely to be different once I'm in Woleai) but it is different and much less of an issue that I would've anticipate. Like I said, I'm leaving room for future investigation and reflection.

I am living with a Woleain Family in order to begin the slow learning process that will hopefully equip me with the linguistic, cultural, and technical knowledge I'll need when I get to my post (read: island). I say slow for a couple of reasons. The main one is that woleain is HARD! For example, here is how to say thank you: go sa gashigashige, pronounced along the lines of ho sa hasihehasihe. Yes is ngoa. It's a language with mostly unvoiced vowels and vowels up the wazoo. Plus, being the language of only a tiny Pacific atoll, there aren't many resources to turn to. Wish me luck. My family is very helpful, but that hasn't stopped them from laughing at me many, many times.

I live with about fourteen people. There's my host mom and dad, theri six sons (including one set of identical twins), two other couples, and two other women (cousins, I think). Our house (imwashe) is comprised of two open platforms, one of which is the cookhouse (mwaluumwu), and two buildings. There's an indoor toilet and both an indoor and outdoor shower. We have power and fans, and overall it's a nice setup.

My friend Gita, one of the other PCVs going to Woleai, Lives two houses down from me so we've been learning and getting laughed a lot together. Yesterday we went for a run and were laughed at outright by the neighborhood kids. Exercise isn't a normal concept here (& I can't blame them with the heat), but we did get most of the kids around to play a game of volleyball at sunset. It was one of those beautiful moments in life where there's so much goodness and beauty around you that you can taste it. Life is delicious.

Another such moment happened Thursday night when Elizabeth, the PC Program and Training Asst., treated all the PCVs on Yap - past, present, & future...M47s-M76s to beer and pizza at a restaurant on a ship. It turns out a favorite pastime at Mnuw is to jump from the top deck into the bay, which is roughly a three-story distance. The Woleai Trio - Gita, Porter, and I, took the plunge together, and me in a lavalava no less (sorry mom). It was another beautiful moment.

Oh, yeah, what's a lavalava? It's the traditional skirt worn by the outer island women of Yap. It's a handwoven piece of fabric that is wrapped around and folded on the waist held in place with a "belt" (I use a shoelace). It comprises the whole of the warrobe for women, as it's a topless culture. I'm already very used to the women in my community letting it all hang out so to say, but I have yet to join them. My family is going to wean me off of shirts slowly with the cunning use of smaller and smaller leis :-) The men here similarly have a one piece wardrobe that consists of a thu, more or less a loincloth created by any number of ways of folding. I love seeing people conduct their daily business so comfortably and causually. For instance, several of the DoE representatives with whom we met today were wearing thus. My favorite was a macho young man strutting around like nobody's business at a birthday party wearing a thu and a tank top that said "I love my attitude" as he handed out melting ice cream cones.

Diet here is mostly imported - my brunch after mass today was Chef Boyardee cold out of a can. There are lots of root crops like taro and tapioca (very much like a potato). Breadfruit is in season and I've had it a kajillion different ways. It's a big skikey fruit that has an almost feathery flesh. Canned meat is ubiquitous, as is turday tail (which I'm convinced entails no meat, only fat). I've been fortunate in that I haven't had to have much of either, but it'll be a long five weeks. I have ramen for breakfast, lunch in town, and then any variety of fried food with peraasi (rice). I haven't seen a vegetable in days. The other staple of the Yapese diet is betel nut, a little green nut that people sprinkle with lime and wrap with a pepper leaf. They chew it constantly and spit red all over the place (you don't actually eat it). It gives you a little buzz, but it also makes your mouth raw. I tried it this weekend and I'm no a huge fan.

Speaking of diet, now might be a good time to implore health food care packages. I've received some amazing care packages from the fam (incl. this iTouch I'm now typing on) that have lots of freezedried fruits and veggies from Just Tomatoes...they're super light and ship well. Other great items I'd kiss you for include:

( bran flakes [fiber is SPARSE!]

( nuts - especially walnuts and cashews, mixes are great, too

( quinoa

( dried beans, esp. garbanzo and black beans

( just add water mixes, like hummus or beans

( seeds for veggies and herbs...I'll ask you to do the research for me on what will grow well here

( spices

( dried fruits, i.e. mango and cranberries

( bars of any variety, like Kashi, Clif / Luna, or those green superfood ones

( popcorn and nutritional yeast :-)

( canned spinach (weird, I know...just call me Popeye)

*quick note about packages / mail: we have a US zipcode and all domestic shipping rates apply. Check out flat rate boxes and make sure to ship by air. It seems to take between 1 & 2 weeks for me to get things here on Yap proper...it'll take longer once I'm in Woleai - I'll hopefully get mail at least once a month. I'll definitely be excited for any mail.

Thank you everyone for following along. I've been busier than I expected here and so I've fallen behind on all the letter writing I wanted to be doing. If you sit down and write me a quick note, I promise I'll get back to you with some inside sotry or little trinket. I'll be learning how to weave soon, so maybe you'll get something handmade! Here's my address:

Emily Hurianek, Peace Corps Trainee

PO BOX 190

Colonia, Yap FM 96943

Be well, be happy and keep in touch! My love to you all and a great big Woleain WHEE,

emily

4:46 PM Comment0 Comments

Thanks to everyone for posting and reading! I typed up a nice long new post on my new iTouch, but I'm having trouble getting it online. Cross your fingers for me and be on the lookout. In the meantime...

The good news is aplently, including:

  • I AM SAFE! I know there were a lot of natural disasters in my neck of the ocean, but I steared clear for the most part (my host family moved me to a church one night just as a precaution)
  • I AM HEALTHY! I guess it must have just been food poisoning. It passed :-)
  • I AM CONNECTED! Well, somewhat. I will be here in Colonia, the capital, for the next five weeks and there is access to internet. My fam sent me some great packages - thank you! - including an iTouch, and I'm hoping to use it to receive/send email and make some calls via Skype. Be on the lookout for an international number

Like always, I'd love to hear from you, esp. as communication now is going to be much easier than in the future. I'm very isolated here, so I'm hungry for news from the people and places I love :-)

Kristin - congrats on the move! Be prepared to entertain my qusetions about possibly tackling the AT when I get back

Jamie D - glad you're healthy. I did see 500 days of Summer...I loved the dance scene and the Hans Solo reference. Otherwise, I'd say I just liked it.

Jamie O - miss you too, can't wait to be penpals!

Cate - "When elephants fight, it's the grass that suffers"...read this today and thought fondly of you. Keep a list of all the movies we'll have to watch together in two years :-)

Mary - I hope you figured it out. I know mail can be a little tricky. Kick butt at poker for me!

Everyone else, thanks again and be well - I'll hopefully be in touch again soon!

emily