Wichita Talk to Kansas RPCVs

Thanks for the invitation to come down to Wichita. The last time I lived here was the only time, and that was in 1971, just after I got back from the Peace Corps. I took music classes at WSU, and that is where I met Elaine, my wife to be. Little did I know that I had signed up for a lifetime of carrying her harp. Elaine is a massage therapist and Certified Rolfer in Lawrence. Saturday is a busy day for clients, so she decided not to make the drive today.

In the winter of 1968 my thought was, I either get into the Peace Corps, or I flee to Canada, or I get drafted. Graduate school was not a remote possibility. The Peace Corps application had spaces for three countries for me to choose, along with a list of which countries was accepting volunteers.

Three spaces. Well, you all probably still remember the application form yourselves.

In the first one I wrote India. I had a college friend who had gone to India and wrote me several arresting letters from there. In the second one I wrote Chile, because I knew that a lot of political change was going on there, and it wouldn’t hurt to learn Spanish. For the third space I really had no idea, but I wrote in Micronesia just because it sounded kind of mysterious and cool. That was where I ended up going. It turned out that a lot of other kids had the same experience, because, even though the place was far away, it was logistically easy to send Americans there and keep them healthy and safe.

I was in the Peace Corps in Micronesia for three years, starting in the summer 1968 to the summer of 1971. I went back last year in the spring because another Peace Corps couple, who live in Hawaii, wanted me to go with them and offered to pay my airfare. Believe it or not, I said no thanks … at first. I thought I had finally gotten the island of Pohnpei out of my mind, and I was pretty sure the shock would be overwhelming—45 years of change. I even sent emails to other friends who had been in my Peace Corps group, explaining why I was not going. Most of them replied immediately and told me I was crazy, so I changed my mind and went.

What could I tell you about Pohnpei or that you couldn’t learn for yourselves by surfing the Internet?

Well, it doesn’t have any beaches. Instead, it is surrounded by mangrove swamps, which look like this.

The roots of the mangrove trees jut up from the ground at low tide, and they love to pose for photographs. We have mangrove swamps all around the Florida peninsula. I found this diagram that shows how the roots work. Mangrove yields the hardest lumber in the world. If you are planning to drive any nails into it, don’t wait more than 2 or 3 days.

What else? Pohnpei has the most beautiful children in the world. They were that beautiful when I was there as a grade school English teacher in 1968 and it was still true when I returned as a tourist in 2013. These are all photos I either took myself or copied from other volunteers’ collections.

Finally, here is a statistic that I just made up, but it might be true. Pohnpei has more waterfalls per square mile than anyplace else in the world. They aren’t huge, but you find them everywhere if you go hiking in the interior. The photo below shows Louie Miller, who went hiking with me one weekend in the hills about Uh municipality. Louie was a Micro 8 agriculture volunteer.

All of the land mass in the FSM (Federated States of Micronesia) could fit inside Sedgwick County, no problem. [Sedgwick County is where Wichita is located. The other two Kansas Volunteers in my Micro 7 group were Lorry Smith and Len ("Lenny" to Lorry) Schamber. Lorry eventually married a Ngatikese man named Lorenzo Shoniber and, more eventually, moved to Wichita with him--but that is a whole nuther story. Len, from Damar, Kansas, has visited me several times. He and Lorry and I had a great reunion in Salina last summer. But I digress.]

This map shows the boundaries of the current nation.

As for Pohnpei, the island where Lorry, Len, and I worked, this will give you an idea of its size and shape. Here is Lawrence, Kansas, with the KU campus shown in the center. Now I’ll show you the outline of Pohnpei on top of that.

Now I will do the more logical introduction, and show you where the island is.Here’s the Pacific Ocean, with Hawaii and Australia. The Micronesian islands cover a large area here, as you see, but it’s almost all water.

The only town in Pohnpei is Kolonia, which is on the north coast. You might be able to see the causeway that connects it to the airport, which was built on an islet called Deketik. Lorry worked on the southern side, in Kiti, Len worked in Madolenihmw (around the large harbor on the east side) and I worked down the coast from Kolonia, in Uh municipality. As a matter of fact, despite the small size of the island, Lorry and Len and I did not see much of each other during that time and have gotten much better acquainted since returning to Kansas, where the distances that separate us are vastly greater. Go figure.

We had volunteers all around the island and several on the atolls to the east and south. In fact, the Peace Corps had the highest concentration of volunteers, when compared to the population of the host country, of anyplace else in the world. We were an invasion force.

Then and Now

At this point, I’ll make some comparisons between the time when first went to Pohnpei and when I made the return trip last year.

Let’s start with how we got there. Our staging location was a former nudist colony outside of Escondido, California. We were part of a larger group that included Volunteers destined for other districts in Micronesia—Palau and possibly Yap. We boarded a chartered Trans International Airlines 707 in LA, flew to Honolulu, refueled, and continued on to Guam. It was there that we realized we had arrived in a different world. The humidity at Agaña Airport whapped you like a damp warm shower curtain.

After spending the night in Guam (Hotel Micronesia?) we flew in a DC-6 to Chuuk, which was then called Truk.

I had no camera at this time, so I am beholden to some friends, whom I have now forgotten, for sharing these slides with me, especially Loren Book, with whom I only regained contact after starting this website. In the photo below, that is me squatting with my mouth open.

Transportation

In those days, if you were in a hurry, you flew in and out of Pohnpei in a seaplane, a Grumman SA-16.

The Trust Territory owned a few of these, probably not more than three or four. They were sarcastically referred to as “a bunch of spare parts flying in close formation.” Here's a passenger's eye view from the seaplane.

At Chuuk we had a few hours to look around. Some of us hoofed up a hill where we were told we could see a Japanese cannon left over from the war.

Len Schamber, Joe Behm, John Brewer (with Beth Rye behind him), Ruth Book, and two more that I can't identify

Finally we boarded a small steamer called the Captain James Cook and sailed eastward overnight towards Pohnpei, which was then called Ponape.

Today, if you want to go to Pohnpei, you board a United Airlines 737 at 5:30 in the morning in Honolulu.

Approaching the island by ship was a tantalizing experience. This was before electrification, so there were no signs of life. Daylight was just breaking when we first saw its silhouette off the bow—just a thin dark strip on the horizon. And it slowly, slowly got wider and taller.

They call it the island hopper because it lands in Majuro, then flies up to Kwajalein, which is still super secret, then down to Kosrae, which used to be Kusaie, then finally to Pohnpei, in the middle of the afternoon of the next day.

Now let me show you where I lived and worked. You see these little islets here on the map:

Day 1 in Wene

This is the first day we were on Pohnpei. On the most remote part of the island, a place called Wene, where there was a Catholic mission church and school. All of the kids in this photo made it for the long haul. Some stayed even longer and worked for other agencies on the island. From left to right are (I think): Ewalt Josef (smoking language informant, more about him below) some kid, Christy Lachman, our psychologist, whose name I don't remember, Sue and Don Bourassa, Dave Hetue, Beth Rye, Marcia Freer, guy with glasses, John Dennerlein. If you can improve on my list, I will update the caption.

At the time, this was a brand new cinder block school, and it was just a couple of minutes on foot from my house. It had the only water fountain in the entire municipality. I watched the cookhouse being built—one of the few times I have wept without understanding why. I had better try to explain this. The cookhouse floor was a cement slab and the walls were corrugated iron, but the roof was thatch, called os or ohs en Pohnpei, I believe. After the mangrove pole framework is installed to hold the overlapping sheaves of thatch, the roofers formed two teams to race to the central beam at the top. This was all hand work, as each sheaf was lashed to the frame with hand twisted coconut husk twine. To give you an idea, here's a photo of my neighbor, who was re-thatching his canoe house.

Below are some of the frisky females in the Micro 7 group. They appear to be singing at some kind of party of ceremony.

Charleen Hauser Jane Hurd

Lorry Smith Beth Rye Ruth Book Mary Crist

Karen Haukom

Charleen taught ESL at the Catholic mission school in Awak, just an hour up the road from me, and Mary Crist often visited her, from Kolonia, I think. I have lost touch with both of them. Karen worked at Ronkiti, and Ruth taught at MTEC (Micronesian Teacher Education Center) in Kolonia.

By the time I left Pohnpei in summer 1971, they had completed a jet airstrip that was paved with crushed coral, such that Air Micronesia's 727s could land there.

He has about 8 layers done and is working systematically to the top, but the cookhouse roofers had about 4 guys on each side, and they kept yelling for the next sheaf to be thrown up. They were having a great time working on this roof and enjoyed the suspense of the competition. I had never seen a community experience the joy of labor like this in my life. I felt tears coming down my cheeks. Wish we could have experiences like that here. You can see a photo of the finished cookhouse in the Micronesia Reporter article.

The school received free USDA surplus rice, and flour, and canned food for the school lunches. I would bring my own can of mackerel or tuna or corned beef and combine it with the free rice. I was always famished, and it always tasted great. I still eat mackerel on a regular basis, but I have to be careful with microwaves, because it explodes in them.

When I visited the school last year, I got my first major shock. It had been just a single long building with rooms for five grades plus a teacher resource room at the north end. I made a circle here on the door to the teacher’s room.

The first time I saw one of these planes in Micronesia was when I was headed for a reunion vacation with my parents in Maui. I took the seaplane to Truk, which was the closest place you could get on the jet. It was summer 1969 and I had not seen any modern technology other than a typewriter and an outboard motor for a year. When the 727 first came into view above Moen (now Weno) Island, it was just a brilliant shiny speck. It might as well have been a flying saucer, so alien it was to the world to which I had grown accustomed. As it drew closer I was overwhelmed with something akin to joy that my species had figured out how to create this craft, not so far descended from the brilliantly designed outriggers (made from local materials) on which ancient navigators had crossed the Pacific to settle these islands.

Here they are again in a photograph I took from the tallest mountain in Uh (where the Japanese installed their humongous cannon).

This way you can compare it to what I saw when I went back. Ready?

The green circle shows where my school (Saladak School) was and still is. You can just barely make out the dock, which reached out far enough for boats to approach at low tide. Before the road around Pohnpei was built, the tide chart was a big deal. There were two high tides and two low tides every day (don't expect me to explain this; they don't have any tides at all in the Baltic Sea, which strikes me as very odd). Anywhere, if you were planning to go somewhere in a boat (the other option was walking), you had to go when the water was high enough that your boat didn't hit the coral reef or sit in the mud in a shallow lagoon. This was a very strange concept for a kid from Kansas.

Most of the coast is enclosed by mangrove swamps. They are actually what makes the island grow. As soil is eroded by the rainfall, the swamp traps the soil in its roots so it doesn’t get swept out into the lagoon. And Pohnpei gets a lot of rain—up to 300 inches a year in the interior. Which is why we had so many waterfalls.There are about 50 streams and rivers on the island, which is pretty good when it is only 7 miles across.

More photos of Saladak School Today

Do you see the circle now? They must have removed the three vents above the door and windows when they added the second story. This and the neighboring photos were extracted from a video I took on a Sunday, which was our first full day on the island. Jack had rented a car and we were taking the road around the island. This road did not exist back in 1968. Well, it was a path which had deteriorated from what was once a Japanese road, but the only sign of road progress when I was there was the bridges built by the PTB (Ponape Transportation Board), which consisted largely of Peace Corps engineers. These concrete bridges were a big improvement over the one- or two-long bridges that they replaced.

Anyway, Saladak Elementary is now a campus of five buildings, two of which are 2-story classroom structures. They have about 18 teachers. I did not ask but I assume it has taken over the students from the two smaller schools where I also taught (Nan Uh and Takaieu). It was electrifying to realize how much had changed here. For a taste of how it was in the old days, you're invited to read the article I wrote for the Micronesian Reporter back in 1970.

Now let’s go back to Kolonia for a while.

This area on the upper or left side of the river is where all the colonial regimes were headquartered. There are other sites for urban settlements. The Germans and Japanese had plantations and at least one sugar refinery down around Madolenihmw harbor. But today, all of the government and business activity happens in Kolonia.

I used to walk into town from Saladak after school on Friday. It took me about 2.5 hours, and I was ready for a nice cold beer at Martin's (mar TEENS) by the time I got there. I would walk back out on Sunday afternoon, or get a boat ride if I could find one. Here's an aerial photo of this town, with the airstrip in the center.

In this view you can see Kolonia just below the center and the two peninsulas (Sokehs and Net) that stick out into the lagoon on either side. You can see pieces of the barrier reef to the north. I have never gone scuba diving anywhere, but I know Pohnpei was a fabulous place to do it.

There are a couple of other plugs on the island that stand alone and are invariably called pwisie en malek (chicken poop). There is one in Sokehs, one in Kiti, and probably at least one in Madolenihmw, but I'm not sure. They have a great mural in the post office of the actual chicken that deposited this poop. Don't miss it.

This rock, and others like it around the island, is a lava plug, a thick cylinder that is harder than the material that eroded away from it. Loren Peterson told me that a daredevil guy jumped off this cliff with a hang glider. It took quite a while to find him and pull him out of the trees where he crash landed. He was flown to Honolulu for surgery and apparently l lived to tell the tale. Fred Kluge also had a bad fall when he was hiking in Pohnpei, possibly in Awak, and he too had to be flown to Honolulu to be repaired. It was really the only bad thing he could say about Pohnpei in his otherwise unhappy evaluation of recent Micronesian history (The Edge of Paradise).

Now for some more changes. As I said earlier, the new school buildings were a shock, but so were the pigs.

At least he was still in good health. I recognized a few of my former students also in the congregation. It must have been as much of a shock to them as it was to me. Pendu had died a few years earlier, as had the principal, Welter John. Hilario Primo was not in good health, and I believe Siro Donre had died.

The Peace Corps office in Kolonia used to be just for the administration of volunteers on Pohnpei, but now it covers volunteers in the entire Federated States of Micronesia and Palau.

There weren’t any! I can’t tell you what a difference this must make. I mean, I know the pigs are still there, just not where you can see them—because you have to roast pigs at a feast. Probably they were getting hit by cars after the road was completed. The pig-parasite cycle worked like this (squeamish persons, avert your eyes):

Pigs used to poop on the path that everybody walked on. Flies ate some of the poop, which was contaminated with parasite larvae (roundworm, tapeworm, whatever-worm), and then the flies landed on your lunch plate and dropped some of the gift on your rice or corned beef. You ate that and got a colony of parasites thriving in your intestines. When they get bad enough, you go to the Peace Corps doctors and get giant pills to kill them. Do NOT look these up on Google Images. You will regret it, I can tell you.

I still had roundworm (ascaris in my gut in 1974, when Elaine and I were living in Sioux City, Iowa, going to vocational-technical school The public health specialists there had never seen such creatures under their microscopes before. This was three years after I had returned from Pohnpei, so you can see that the infestation does not make you horribly sick. If it had been amoebic dyssentery, I would have ... well, that is too much information. We had a pill in our medical kits called paregoric, that is probably not even legal in the U.S. It had opium in it, and it lessened the pain you felt from intestinal upset. We guarded those pills with our lives.

This was, for me, a fabulous way to learn a language. Listen and repeat, listen and repeat. I had never come close to anything like this in high school or college. It was probably adapted by the Peace Corps from the Army and State Department language programs, but I don't know this history for sure. Ken Rehg could tell us because he is the man who designed the Pohnpeian language curriculum from the get to back in 1966. Since then there have been 4,275 Volunteers in Micronesia, but there are currently just 38. There must have been a few hundred when I was out there. Our original office was a gloried wooden shack. The new one is concrete, air-conditioned, and you have to pass through security to get in.

Jeffie (Jennifer) Gillespie, shown below seated on the barrel of a (never fired) Japanese cannon, was a Micro 8 who taught ESL in Kiti. She was quite adept at learning Pohnpeian and probably had closer ties with the women where she lived than I managed to achieve with the men in my village.

This is what downtown is like at rush hour, which is probably when school lets out.

I know it doesn’t look super busy, but compared to what we knew, it’s a different planet. That is a traffic cop standing in the street.

The main thing that helped me change my mind about going to Pohnpei was the fact that we would be staying in the hotel that is run by our former Peace Corps director, Loren Peterson. Loren has been in Micronesia all during the time I was gone, and most of his time was spent in Pohnpei. He was able to tell us so many stories about things that had happened since we left—really a treasure mine. I have a separate page on Loren, so I won't tell you any more of his story here.

The town is still recognizable from its main street, but there are a lot more fancy buildings and much more development south of town, with the College of Micronesia and legislative buildings of the Federated States of Micronesia.

Kolonia, 2013

Here ends the reading, as they say in church. I did a fair amount of editing of this script, which was originally written for an audience of returned Peace Corps Volunteers in Wichita, Kansas. I hope I filled in enough extra material for the general reader. I am still finding typos, as I am sure you are.