A Serendipitous Kosraean Funeral

Kosrae, just 2,500 miles past Hawaii, is a different island from Palau.  Geographically, they are both in Micronesia.  Politically, they are different countries only due to the outcome of a plebiscite in 1978 when Palauans rejected the draft constitution.  Similar volcanic geology, similar population size (Palau has twice as many residents, but that’s only a difference of 9,000 people).

The island of Kosrae, the “Sleeping Lady.”  Notice the crowded urban coastline.

But flying from Palau to Kosrae is like traveling to another planet (though Mars is probably only two flights compared with the 4 to get here).  On Our last night in Palau we drove by dozens of restaurants to eat at a bustling hamburger stand, passed a brothel with the staff soliciting outside, had to weave our way through hordes of Chinese tourists eating ice cream, and did a little shopping at a fully stocked 3-floor department store.  Our fellow passengers to Kosrae were a guy from the peace corps and Mormon missionaries behind me.  Of the two places for tourists to stay on the island, both were fully booked – that’s nearly 30 rooms total.  (Luckily, we found a locals’ motel with one of its four rooms available.)

Got my two gallons!

Instead of a pump, each gas station has a rack of one-gallon vegetable oil jugs refilled with gas (at least here they have proper funnels, unlike in Kyrgyzstan where you have to cut the top off a plastic coke bottle to get the gas into your car).  The restaurant that allegedly would provide dinner – one of three in all of Kosrae – turned out to be a small room with a roller grill with 5 hot dogs – with the rollers on, but the heat off.

But so far (24 hours in) I love Kosrae.  A three year old girl standing in the bed of a mini pickup truck leaned over the edge and called “high five!” with her hand extended as it drove by.  Within a few minutes of arriving we were brought a bunch of local baby bananas (I have a minor obsession with the amazing variety of bananas outside the US) and, a bit later, a dozen of the local “green tangerines” that peel the way clementines used to when they first arrived in the US.  Children are out playing everywhere.  I had to move the car twice – first to get out from under the breadfruit falling from the tree outside our door, and again to avoid the coconuts being harvested from the tree next to it.  (And for my trouble, was handed a coconut with a straw in it to drink.)  We have at least 3 varieties of ants in our room, but we also have air conditioning, hot and cold running water, a shower that’s better than mine at home,

Our local store, with the all-important coffee urn.  None of these little stores have an inside — it’s just the window.

enough beds that I don’t have to endure little toes seeking warmth in the middle of the night, a large covered porch with a picnic table and comfortable chairs, rope swings, a gaggle of kids for Ethan and Aaron to play with, and a convenience store/kiosk across the driveway with hot coffee (OK, Nescafe) for $1.  We want for nothing (except, maybe, a functioning dive shop on the island).  Aaron agrees, and keeps saying that he wants to live here permanently.

After our all-night and half-the-next-day flights to get here (the Guam airport is, inexplicably, half-duplex, open either for departures or arrivals, but never both simultaneously) we took it easy this morning, with no schedule or agenda (having coffee 10 feet away helped alleviate any necessity to get moving).  Aaron quickly made friends with a 3 year old girl who was carrying a bag of bubble gum and handing pieces to everyone she encountered.  He used the wrappers to make paper airplanes for the four other kids who materialized when they saw him emerge from our room.

Origami School with Aaron and his new friends

The oldest, and the only one who knows English – Anya, age 8 – responded by folding an origami boat.  Suzie brought out the stack of moot paper notes from the two dozen phone calls she made trying to get United to send us the bag they forgot, Ethan came out, and an origami festival ensued.  The boys preferred the airplanes, but Aaron won Anya over with his paper balloon.

Anya’s little sister is very serious about her tangerines.

Anya then taught us a few words in Kosraean (the languages of each island are mutually unintelligible, so they learn English for interstate communication).  Eventually we interrupted the kids’ games to seek out lunch, do laundry, maybe find some internet (update: $10 gets you 64 megabytes) and figure out what to do with ourselves for the week here.

Anya showing Aaron her laptop from the One Laptop Per Child initiative.  I found it striking to actually see one of these in use in the real world.

We started our drive around the island and soon found out why the Kosrae Village Resort didn’t answer my emails when I was trying to find a room: deserted with everything still in place, as if everyone were either abducted by aliens or experienced a very focused rapture.   On to Pacific Tree Lodge, evangelically recommended by friends we made diving in Palau who were just there last week.  The owners are away on vacation, and the staff seems to be doing what people do when the boss isn’t looking: “I’m not sure if the Japanese guy who’s here can take divers.  I think there is a dive trip planned in August.  You should try the Nautilus resort.”  At Nautilus, “We’ll probably have a boat taking people diving one day this week.  You should check back tomorrow.”  That covers the sum total of tourist infrastructure in Kosrae.

The gang playing tetherball with an old buoy and swinging from rope swings tied to the breadfruit tree outside our room

So we drove a bit further around the north side of the island, with no plan and no lunch (though we found a stall selling some kind of coconut biscuits that kept our blood sugar stable) toward the village of Tafunsak where I’d read there may have been a bakery 16 years ago.  (This is clearly an island of things that used to be.)  As we approached the village center we saw more and more people walking along the road, then came to a huge gathering with hundreds of people in chairs on both sides of the road, food cooking, children chasing each other around, and a tent-covered area with dozens of 15 gallon pots, enormous piles of coconuts, breadfruit, and baskets made from a single coconut palm frond woven into itself.  Enough to feed the entire island for days.  I was especially fascinated by the baskets, having seen them this morning when the coconuts were being harvested from above my car; I kept trying to figure out how it was made, being from nothing but a single leaf.  Three blocks later we found a place to park next to an enormous church and walked back, thinking we’d found lunch after all.  It looked like market day, though a bit odd with so many people just sitting around, and women and girls carrying around trays of soup in Styrofoam bowls and pitchers of punch to pass out.  We walked through, looked around, and then were approached by one of the women chopping chickens near where the food was cooking.  She was friendly and welcoming, though clearly wondering what we were doing there.  Suzie asked her what this was that we were standing in the middle of.  “A funeral.”  Ummm.  Oh.  Oops.    “Please, stay.  Come sit down, and we will bring you some soup.”

We walked a bit away from the center of things, but still among the mourners, unsure of exactly how to extricate ourselves, and uncertain if we were really wanted or if she was just being polite in the face of our faux pas.  Then a man came up to us, introduced himself, and told us that this was a funeral for his mother.  She had been brought to Hawaii for treatment in a hospital.  He was the oldest of her 11 children, and also a pastor.  He insisted we stay, and led us back to the building at the center of the gathering, where he handed us off to his brother, who sat us at a table on the porch a few feet away from a table with a poster of the deceased reading “Rest in Love, Nina Louisa Jacks” and just outside the room with the open casket.  Bowls of soup appeared before us.  Then plastic take-out clamshells with fried chicken and rice.  We were given a tray of breadfruit and instructed to use it to eat the soup (which was fantastic).  A girl poured us each a cup of water; another came with super sweet punch.  Then young coconuts completely filled with juice (sans straw, which makes them hard to drink from).  Then sugar cane, cut into easily bitten strips.  Offers of more soup.  I realized that what I had thought were pots for sale were actually two dozen pots full of soup.  I saw that the cooking area had a stack of about 60 crates of chicken, probably 10 kilos each.  People were dressed with varying degrees of formality, but the women and girls who were working to serve the food and drinks were all wearing identical black dresses with silver embroidery; a clear departure from their typical brightly colored skirts.  As we ate the delicious food, in the stifling heat, sitting on the hard wooden bench, wishing for nothing in this world more than a napkin (ever try eating soup and a saucy chicken quarter with nothing but a floppy plastic fork?), the speechifying began.  Most of the eulogies were addressed to the crowd around the corner of the building, and were given casket-side, so were very hard to hear (and were in Kosraean anyway, of which we knew only the four phrases Anya had taught us this morning, and only half remembered those).  But after every half dozen speeches or so the entire assemblage would sing, in complex cords and minor key, an alien, haunting, yet somehow warm and not unfamiliar song.  And then more speeches.

Then the MC came outside to where we were sitting, grabbed the wireless mic from the 5 foot tall PA speaker in front of us that I somehow had not noticed until that moment, and called out to the other half of the crowd for additional eulogizers.  It sounded mostly like those radio stations at the bottom end of the dial, where late at night someone monotones their personal conspiracy theory out into the ether.  In the meantime, activity under the food tent picked up, with a dozen or so men sorting everything out, unpacking and repacking all the baskets.  Instead of baskets of each food, they were making goodie bags; each basket with some of each of the day’s foods.  Towers of large (paella-sized) plastic bowls appeared, and the women started ladling the soup, then covering each with aluminum foil.  The brother came to us and said, “please be patient, stay, and you will be brought your portion of the feast.”  Several others came by to deliver the same message.  Though we lack a kitchen, it seemed impolite to decline, and so each of us were presented with our own basket of coconuts, breadfruit, sugar cane, raw chicken (from Arkansas!), and rice; each enough for two meals for the four of us.  Four times people told us that we should drive our car around and they would load our baskets for us; at least we knew that our ‘motel’ owner had a family and a kitchen, and would be able to use the food.  So we followed instructions, fetched the car, and sat in the resulting traffic jam as hundreds of baskets were carried through the street to cars and houses.

Young coconuts being husked just outside our door and put into the funeral baskets woven from half of a single palm frond

By now the sun was setting, and we clearly not going to be doing any laundry, so I decided to head back to our home village of Lelu and stop by the one actual store on the island (I think of it as ‘the supermarket,’ but in reality it’s the size of a Wawa).  In Micronesia they load your bags in the car for you.  When the kid opened the trunk and saw the baskets, he seemed surprised, “Oh, you were at a funeral today.”  So we were less surprised when we got back and the hotelier made a similar comment when we gave him our goodie bags.  I had assumed those baskets were just standard Micronesian tote bags, and thought it was funny we hadn’t seen them elsewhere; now I realized that the coconuts being harvested outside our room were a funeral offering, and that I was bringing them, and their baskets, right back.  If it was another faux pas, our landlord was too nice (or too embarrassed) to say anything.