Kaselehlie Maingko,
My super special nice friends and family wish list is for a reusable coffee cup and reusable water bottle, so that I can stop using Styrofoam and plastic everyday.
We’ve been here almost two weeks and so much has happened already. Things have been very busy with our language and teacher trainings. Pohnpeian language is next to impossible! You’d think that by the middle of two weeks of language class you’d be able to at least count to ten but you’d be dead wrong. Before you just start counting willy nilly, you’d better ask yourself if you are going to be counting people, animals, long things, plants, days, etc… There are about 55 different counting systems depending on what needs to be counted. Today we learned the seven different places for suffixes! That’s right! You can have seven different suffixes. “What would that look like,” you might be asking? Well say that you wanted to say come with me and let’s go over there. No need for separate words, just say lusungkiniedhlahngirailehr. I’m not kidding.
Trieste and I are moving into our apartment on Monday which is very exciting. The apartment is really cool, very spacious with a nice balcony. It’s close to everything in Kolonia and my only complaint is that we won’t have land to garden on, but I’m working on coopting the other Kolonia kids’ yard to grow veggies. To be a good Pohnpeian I need three things; pigs, yams, and sakau.
Sakau is the root of a pepper bush that you pound with a stone and mix with water. Then you strain it through the bark of a hibiscus tree and drink copiously. Sakau is weird. It makes you feel very peaceful and relaxed. No important meeting or celebration is complete without drinking sakau, it’s one of the most important customs of the island. But like I said it’s weird. It looks like chocolate milk, tastes like mud, makes your lips and mouth numb, and is the consistency of thick phlegm.
More later. The view from The Village is too beautiful.
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