Embedded Files
Loren Peterson was 76 in 2013. He was the director of my Peace Corps group in Pohnpei from 1968 to 1971 and has remained in Micronesia all during the time I was gone. Most of his time was spent in Pohnpei. Here’s a photo Loren back in the day. He was drinking beer with Dave Garner, who was the deputy director. There must have been some kind of celebration because Loren was wearing a mwaramwar, a Pohnpeian wreath made from fresh, sweet-smelling plants.
Loren's marriage with Sylvia ended while he had the Peace Corps job, and he later married Enerika, a Micronesian woman from the island of Ngatik, who worked at the Bank of Hawaii branch around the corner from the old Peace Corps office.Enerika already had four children at that time, and they added three more to make seven.
When Loren--who had never had kids before--married Enerika, the twins were something like 8/8, and her other two children were 4 and 2. Enerika’s family members seem to be running half of the businesses in Kolonia. They named their hotel the Seven Stars Inn, after their seven children. Here is a family reunion photo taken probably in the late 80s or early 90s.
Here is Loren and a couple of his grandkids when I was staying at their hotel.
To the left of Loren is his adopted son Mike (Marcello) who has a twin sister Marta (Marcella). Mike was lieutenant governor of Pohnpei in 2013, and I had the good fortune to meet him briefly in his office. He explained to me that the high language variant of Pohnpeian, which is called meing, is still required usage in political speeches out in the municipalities, and so all the politicians have to learn to speak it.
Enerika and Loren bought the former Penny Hotel back in 2011 after it went on the auction block. The previous owner had defaulted on his loan from the Bank of Guam (or Bank of Saipan, not sure which); and the place had gone to the dogs. They had never developed the large basement space, but now it is in great shape: partitions for the restaurant, a bar, and a conference room.
Loren was a treasure mine of stories about things that had happened since we left, but the first one I asked him about was a tip I had gotten from Philip Ritter in Palo Alto, that Loren had been in a bad accident.
In July, 2011, Loren was pulling into his home driveway as his daughter was about to drive off. While he stopped to wait for her, he leaned over to the passenger side window of the Japanese van (with steering wheel on the right). A large tree suddenly came uprooted and fell on both cars. The daughter was unhurt because the tree bisected her car between her and the back seat. Loren, on the other hand, was pinned inside his van, where he was lying across the well between the seats.
Eventually a neighbor brought his chain saw to start removing branches while friends and family used machetes and rebar to break into the van, tearing of the driver’s side door and pulling Loren out. “No jaws of life here,” Loren explained.
Loren was X-rayed at the local hospital and diagnosed with two or three fractured vertabrae, maybe L2 and L3. It took four days to book passage to Honolulu. Eneriko and a close friend went along. To Loren’s relief, surgery was not recommended. Instead, he wore a brace (a “flack jacket”) that he learned to lace on. The vertebrae fused as the doctors hoped and he was in recovery three weeks later back on Pohnpei.
Then his right eye started giving him trouble, and his doctor in Pohnpei (who was trained in the the States) sent him back to Hawaii. Three surgeries later, his detached retina could not be repaired, so back home he flew.
“But what happened next was the worst,” Loren continued: a debilitating case of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It went undiagnosed for a while, but friends and family grew concerned about his personality change. “I was mean to them, I knew it, and I didn’t care,” Loren told me.
Finally he agreed to return to Hawaii a third time. Straub Hospital (where Jack Gillmar hand his hip and knee replacements done) had no psychotherapy ward and would not admit Loren. “I just wanted some drugs to put me out of it.”
He reluctantly agreed to see a psychiatrist at another hospital, a 30ish woman from an Eastern European country. She got Loren's history from Eneriko and saw the classic symptoms immediately (having worked with many soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan). She started him on two medications and within two days Loren was sounding sane again, so she let the couple return to Pohnpei, knowing that his doctor there would wean him off the stronger medication in a couple of weeks. But she gave him the following earnest advice:
“You must now take responsibility for continuing the recovery,” she said. And Loren counted off on his fingers the four “prescriptions” she gave him as Jack and Janet and I listened.
- Get off the stronger medication as soon as possible.
- Exercise daily. Loren started swimming at Net Point, getting a ride from one of his sons, who doubled as a lifeguard. He also walked a lot.
- Take advantage of his support system; Loren has lots of family and friends.
- If available, rely on your religious underpinning. Loren had converted to Roman Catholicism when he married Eneriko in 1970.
Thus, Loren was able to follow all four steps and had fully recovered by the time I saw him in 2013. As he talked, he seemed almost beatific; it was a truly sacred story.
In 1972 Loren left the Peace Corps and taught two years at Poonape Agriculture and Trade School (PATS), vocational teacher training. Then we worked for the Trust Territory Education Department for foru more years. Loren move to Saipan and worked two years in the Trust Territory Education Department there. When he returned to Pohnpei, he was appointed Acting Chancellor of College of Micronesia for five years. After that he sold life insurance for a business based in Guam. In this position he always made personal visits, never phone calls. His replacement in the insurance job was a Pingelapese. Each time he left a post, a Micronesian replacement took over. They bought the hotel in May of 2011.
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