2013 Trip - Pohnpei to Kansas

Wednesday

I had breakfast with Janet and Loren. I went out to buy donuts and asked for two donuts, but I got two bags of ten donuts each. I returned one and kept one. They were so hot that I could eat only 2 or 3 and saved the rest for the hotel lobby.

Back at the hotel I visited with Largo Edwin, who had been on the Peace Corps staff back in the 70s and I gave him a flexagon to Largo Edwin. I gave my four remaining ones to Loren and Enerika. I got a mwaramwar from Enerika.

Loren drove us out and waited until we were checked in. He gave us a newspaper and newsletter. Robert Andreas came to the airport to say good-bye. This is a tradition I remembered from my last departure. My father, Takasi Soukon, from Wone, where we trained three years earlier the southern end of the island, came all the way to Kolonia to see me off at the airport. It almost took my breath away. He said nothing but his love was radiant. I wept quietly on the plane as we took off, knowing that I would never see him again.

Flight back to Hawaii

As we flew eastward Wednesday afternoon, it flipped back to Tuesday, and we get into Honolulu at 2:50 a.m. on Wednesday, May 8. I had the rest of that day to recover from the trip and so did not get out of bed until noon. I had all of Thursday to walk around Honolulu.

On Thursday Jack took me on several expeditions that I won't describe here. I will thank him, though, for find the Jehovah Witness headquarters, where I obtained English translations of the Pohnpeian devotional texts I had been given in Kolonia. The Jehovah Witnesses and the Mormons and the 7th Day Adventists were all installed in Pohnpei, and it must have been bewildering to the locals to discover how many new ways they could get heaven either right or wrong.

We drove to the Pacific Club to join Ken Rehg for breakfast, and that is where the idea of my helping with the new edition of the dictionary took root.

Flights back to Kansas

As previously mentioned, I stayed again with Philip and Lynn Ritter on my return trip. They had lots of questions about the trip, and I just unloaded as much as I could think of, since I had not organized all of my notes the way I was able to this year.

I had too much stuff to haul onto the plane back to Kansas CIty, so I schlepped a box of books to either UPS or Fedex the next morning. I know was in Palo Alto for two nights, but I can't remember doing much other than lying around or walking out to Philip's coy pond to watch Philip and his grandchildren feed the fish. They have a couple of very charming cats, and one of them took pity on me and let me hold him.

When I got back to Lawrence, I had new piles of books and papers to sort through. This took a while. I met with the Program planning group of my UU Fellowship and agreed to give a talk on my trip in December, which turned into January. I wrote only a brief description of the trip in my Thanksgiving newsletter, which was to the displeasure of most of my Micro 7 colleagues who read the letter. But the fact was I really did not know where to begin.

The 2013 trip was inextricably bound to the 1968-71 tenure, to the extent that I could not write about the later trip without referring to the former. But if I did that, how would I know where to stop? And how much did anyone truly want to read?

It helped me to do the short PowerPoint presentation for the UUs in early January, and it helped even more when Lorry Shoniber and her friends in Wichita arranged for me to give a longer version of this talk at their RPCV meeting in June.

And, finally, thanks to my cousin Jack Krebs, it helped that I discovered a free way to organize all of my Pohnpei materials on a Google Site. I had helped edit company websites in the past, but I had never started my own until this year. It still takes a lot of time, but I believe that this has been time well spent, in the sense that I won't have to retell these stories in different formats until hell freezes over. Best wishes to all of my readers, known and to be made known. ~ John Brewer

Ken was busy as always, but he looked well and he generously answered my questions about his educational background. I have continued to stay in touch with him through email as we plow through the various phases of the dictionary revision.

Jack decided it was time to enter his chamber of solitude to extract the 30 or 40 cartons of Micronesia papers, booklets, and books that he had brought back, or had shipped, when he returned from the Peace Corps. I eagerly pawed through each box searching for treasures and found many, including a complete Pohnpeian language course, which Jack allowed me to photocopy and take home. It was the version used at Udot (Chuuk) in 1967 and then revised for the training of my group in 1968. I worked my way all through the book during my flight back to California. Why? Because it made me feel smart and happy that I could still read and understand the lessons. I really can't think of any other reasons.