South Pacific Adventure: A Memoir

The Peace Corps recruiter in Minnesota, a balding ex-Peace Corps volunteer, told us we would be going to the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific, a small island chain to the east of Papua New Guinea and to the north of Australia.  He leaned back in his chair  and said, “Peace Corps will either make ya or break ya.”  Perhaps he imagined the small leaf and stick hut we would inhabit for two years.  Perhaps he had not clue where we were going.  He placed his palms on his bald head, laughing at us: recent college grads married for less than six months.

“I’ve known a few people who’ve gone crazy from the isolation, one or two who’ve been kidnapped by rebels, quite a few who’ve come down with parasitic infections incapacitating them for life.”  He stopped, checked our reaction.  “But most often,” he sighed, “I see couples return home after only a few months.”  He leaned forward, drummed his fingers on the desk as if waiting for us to flee.I’d met my new husband, Larry, in China.  There was malaria, encephalitis, and every sort of hepatitis in Shanghai.
 “We usually don’t send couples,” the recruiter shuffled papers on his desk, “cause when things don’t work out,” he turned to Larry, “we lose two volunteers instead of one.  I mean,” he coughed, “your wife might not be able to handle the jungle, and she’ll make it so bad for you, you’ll have to leave.”
Larry turned to me, winked and placed his hand on my thigh.  The recruiter didn’t know our history.  We had met in the older section of Hong Kong where laundry hung between cinder block buildings, headless chickens dangled from twine in storefront windows, and masses of black-haired people crammed the streets.  We fell in love in Shanghai and made-out on the great wall.  We had our first adventure together and were ready for more. 
I had been working with mentally disabled, behaviorally challenged teens, which Peace Corps credited as two years of teaching experience.   I wasn’t afraid of the jungle.  I thought the scariest things in the world was holding, tackling, and restraining a 200 pound tantrum. 
Besides, we’d been in a Peace Corps office before.  That time they told us they couldn’t send us to the same place unless we were married.  So, we decided to get married.  Actually is was more romantic than that, a proposal in a summer rain on the black river.  Some people marry for love, others for money.  I married for sex.  See, I couldn’t imagine life without him, in my bed.  See, he filled me with lust, his body, oh, I needed that for the rest of my life.   
Oh, I laughed at the stupid recruiter, what did he know?  He gave us a packet, which I didn’t read any more than I listened to the recruiter’s warning.  Frankly, I didn’t care much about details.  I knew the Peace Corps sent you abroad and paid you 10,000 dollars at the end.  While I’d thought I might make the world a better place, I really wanted to get away from my current job, which was one tackle away from a head injury.       
Truthfully, I’d spent my free time reading books about native american healers and aborigines.  I must admit my limited concept of Peace Corps Volunteering included some sort of noble savage fantasy.  See, I didn’t believe something about my life in the US.  I felt like there was a truth out there someone wasn’t telling me.  I figured I could find the answer in the third world, where people still retained a connection to the past.  They told the first stories to each other.  My creation story told a tale of the middle east, and evolution didn’t quite do it for me.
In the end, my husband Larry and I signed up to spend the next two years on Makira island in the Solomon Islands.   But first we had to go to training in the Western Province.

At first, the Solomon Islands felt as exotic as a scene in a drug store postcard. From the air, pristine blue waters surrounded lush green island interiors. This island chain hanging off the east coast of Papua New Guinea and curving around the northeast tip of Australia sat only 9 degrees south of the equator.

Before we could even know about our site in Makira, we first had to attend training in the Western Province. We learned to speak Pidgin English, how important it was for women to wear skirts at all times, and how to avoid offending “taboo,” which could result in paying compensation. Ughele was a Seventh Day Adventist village on the north coast of the island, Rendova. This village also happened to be the country director’s wife home. The place he met her as a Peace Corps volunteer fifteen years ago.

From the small wooden pier built over white coral, the water sparkled in the tropical haze like an aqua marine jewel. A rim of coral reef enclosed impossibly clear water. Colorful pet store fish swam wild below us. On the other side of the reef, indigo sea collapsed into white foam along an edge. Along the shore, clusters of thatched roofed houses with covered porches sat on barnacled stilts a few feet over the shallow water. Coconut palms rimmed the shore and swirled in the cool ocean breezes. Behind them, jungle devoured inland peaks like the tropical nature display at the zoo. It had the same sort of tropical birds and bugs smell that the humidifier provided, except here, giant flocks of parrots that swirled and squawked around overhead.

In Iowa, where I grew up corn waved in orderly rows. Red-winged blackbirds trilled from the marshy cattail borders around the fields. Cornfields that exhaled 100% humidity into the air and made 90 degrees suffocating, was unlike the cool humidity of these cool, salty breezes.Larry came up behind me. It was early, and our first day in the village.

“That ain’t ugly,” he said rubbing my shoulders. He lifted my shoulder length hair, thick and curly, off my shoulders to kiss the back of my neck. I turned to kiss him, but picked the yellow crusty out of his eye, first.

“Did you check to see if they have coffee?” I asked.

He had, but was informed by our host, Chief Willie, that this was a Seventh Day Adventists. “They don’t drink coffee, eat meat, or drink alcohol. How boring is that?”

Actually, it was the worst piece of news I had ever heard. Not only was I hooked on coffee, but cigarettes and booze as well. How could we live without coffee in the morning and Diet Coke for the rest of the day?

Peace Corps would be our only source for coffee, and we’d have to wait until break at 10:30 am!
Larry’s eyes matched the blue of the water. So handsome with his freckled cheeks and his short hair left long over his forehead. I kissed him on the neck right under his strong chin, inhaled his scent, and felt instant desire. His morning stubble scratched my cheek, but it couldn’t distract me from the lack of coffee.

“Great, what fun,” I pouted. I realized had never known too cold, too hot, or too hungry. In fact, before I left, the doctor told me to “cut down on the McDonalds.”

“Aw, Rach, you aren’t going to have a bad attitude about this, are you?” That struck me as something my mom had always said. His hands dropped off my shoulders as he came up beside me to watch the blue, white capped waves roll in. His favorite turquoise blue shorts fluttered in the breezes. His white belly reflected bright sunlight and contrasted against the dark hair on his chest.

“No, I just wish I could have coffee,” I said. I heard my voice, dumb and whiny. I’ve embarked on an adventure. I may feel out of control; but it will get better.

Chief Willie, an extremely dark skinned western province melanesian, walked up the peer, barefooted and shirtless. He stood next to us watching the seas before he said, “Larry, please tell your wife that it is time to eat breakfast.”

“Okay.” Larry looked at me, then at Chief Willie, and back at me as if he calculated the most culturally appropriate response. This was a Chief after all. Finally, he turned towards me without smiling. While looking down at his hands, he repeated the Chief’s words. I suddenly felt like an accessory or an old backpack he slung over his forearm.

He knew this was my favorite rant. How in US culture, there was an unspoken rule. Good women should be seen, not heard. But now I’d stepped into a culture where men wouldn’t even address me. Ignored, was my worst nightmare.

Back in the house for breakfast, Chief Willie’s wife served us food before she retreated to the kitchen. She didn’t look at me, either, as she entered and exited rooms quickly. When she stopped, she looked at my feet. From what I could see, her only purpose was to deliver and remove food.

As the weeks passed, we went to Peace Corps language and culture training, but afterwards Larry was invited to fish, hike, and swim with Chief Willie’s son. I, on the other hand, couldn’t talk to the women. When I tried to say something, they laughed, covered their mouths and looked away.

Out of the volunteers, only Larry, me and one other couple (who spent every minute together) would be teachers. The rest were single men who had community development or engineering projects to do after class.

So, I spent an embarrassing amount of time on a small bed in the leaf and stick house without windows or doors, listening to the jungle’s bugs.

Behind the house, the community service volunteers going to another island, Vanuatu, built a latrine in the center of the village. Chief Willie told Larry, while I sat at his side that night, no one in the village would use the pit toilet the volunteers dug. It went against custom to go to the bathroom where relatives could see you.

I told my fellow volunteers about this cultural issue.

“Dig the latrine somewhere more private,” I said.

They said, “That’s a stupid custom. Besides, we already dug the pit. It’s about time they got over that, don’t you think? Besides, we’re practicing for Vanuatu. They’re much more modern.”

I shuffled back to my room without answering, feeling defeated. It wasn’t part of my nature. I was usually gregarious to the point of obnoxious. I didn’t think I could decide what a whole culture of people should or shouldn’t get over. Instead I thought about The Ugly American and Things Fall Apart. Books that reminded me how my own cultural baggage included a presumption of superiority. That’s why I was here, right? To help these poor under privileged third world people?
Unfortunately, those books didn’t give me any clues about how I should act--especially when no one would talk to me. So, I returned to the room, studied the leaf, the stick construction of the roof, and then obsessed over obstinate volunteers. What assholes.

While I had originally planned to be a lawyer and then a politician, going to China changed my whole world view. Suddenly, face to face with billions of people washing and sleeping on the street, shocked me into seeing my own privilege. Rather than returning to run for the president of the student senate, I got a room in a house, finished my degree, and began working in social work. I’d worked with refugees who had cigarette burn scars covering their bodies--and that did it for me. The world was a cruel place. I had had a gentle life, so why not take that kindness a spread it around?

Each night, Chief Willie reported Peace Corps daily activities to Larry and the members of his family. He stood up, gesticulated wildly. Everybody laughed. He told us how the volunteers built a bridge over a section of river that flooded to twice its size every other week. His family laughed until they cried. They could imagine how the rushing water would obliterate the entire volunteer project, though I couldn’t. Besides, Chief Willie pointed out, this western province village didn’t own a single vehicle—not a bike, not a wheel. What would it need a bridge and a road for? To go where?
Oblivious to Chief Willie’s scorn, the toilet volunteers continued to shovel dirt outside my window and the build the bridge over the river. They argued about specs or how deep to dig the hole.
On one such day, they bickered, while I counted flies on the outside of my mosquito netting.
Then something happened. A rumbling in the distance, no, that wasn’t it, a quieting of the jungle bugs that allowed me to hear distant thunder. For that instant, I thought about the expanse of the Great Plains, miles of flatness, waving yellow grass, and the distant storm’s rumble on a sunny day. I knew something was off, even with the newness of this jungle. Then the house rocked back and forth. The wood creaked, the palm fronds whispered. I knew it was an earthquake and remained still, feeling the earth buckle and bend beneath me. Sure, I thought of California; people running outside, power lines snapping, bridges crumbling, gas lines exploding. The betel nut poles holding up the roof wobbled, flakes of frond fell on top of the mosquito net.
Outside, the toilet volunteers laughed and squealed. It wasn’t how I had imagined an earthquake from watching disaster movies. No, this was so organic, so natural and benign. There were no exploding gas lines or crumbling buildings, just a spectacular ride on an earth wave. I began to laugh, until the empty room amplified my loneliness.
Larry had been in the ocean, spear fishing. And I knew, he didn’t feel the earthquake.


“Hey,” Larry said, popping me out of a floating jungle dream. “You gonna lay there all day?”
“No, I’m just resting.” But yes, actually, I was. I wouldn’t help with the toilet; I couldn’t help with the bridge; I certainly couldn’t tag along with Larry, Chief Willie, and his two sons.
“Chief Willie invited me to go spear fishing again tonight.” He smiled. His eyes flashed, share my joy. He was out of breath with this experience. His skin was cool from lagoon water, and his kiss was cold. He put his cold hand on my inner thigh, ready for some newly-wed-nuggie.
“You just get done?” I asked, sitting up and shifting away from his hand. He’d been gone for a long time. It was getting dark. Probably time to go for dinner.
“No, I paddled the dugout canoe in the lagoon for a while after we got back. A bunch of kids swam out near that little sandy island out there.” He pointed to a spot in the water where I could see a sandy atoll with coconuts growing in the rocky interior. “I got out and swam with them. They were funny. They giggled, swam up to me, and pulled the hair on my chest.”
His chest hair curled with dried salt on his shoulders. He moved his hand up to my panties. He was in his element; he’d come to a country where he would never have to wear shoes. He could swim all day, get his toes black around the edge from tidal mud, then come home and make sweet love to his wife under a thatched roof.
“Great,” I said, my throat thickened around the small word.
“But why didn’t you come to get me. I would have liked to go out in the lagoon.”
“Come on, Rach. This is a great thing for me. Besides, I’m not sure you can ride in the boats, the woman thing, you know.”
I could barely swallow as he took his hand off my thigh. “We should go out to the island, together, sometime, it will be fun.”
I resented the fact that he had wanted to have sex, real-quick, before he had to go out on his next adventure. Then I realized how bad I felt. I had never wanted to pass up a love romp before.
“Mm.” I tried to get excited for him. I sat up, smoothed my hair. But I could only think about how I didn’t have anything to do.
“Rowlie is going to give me a real spear, this time.”
“This time?”
“We are going to go out to the reef and catch some fish under the full moon.” He opened his mouth in anticipation of my clapping. Whoop! Goodie for you, I thought.
But I said, “I thought they didn’t eat meat.”
“Maybe fish isn’t meat.”
Up until then we’d been fed mashed cassava, otherwise known as tapioca. We hadn’t been eating the little balls of it in vanilla pudding, no we ate the whole glob of it: tasted like wall plaster with four drops of coconut essence. I’d seen the women spending hours in the kitchen mashing the stuff. Then they baked it in an earth oven. It took all day to cook such disgusting tasteless food.
I didn’t know they only prepared this food for special guests and called it “pudding” so I refused to eat it. We’d only been in the Solomon Islands for four weeks and I’d already lost ten pounds.
Instead of going spear fishing right away, Larry talked me into going for a walk along the water. As we strolled along the white sand beach, I could only think about how I needed to contain my jealousy. Near the shore, a toddler, his skin black as night, sat in the gentle waves. I looked up and down the shore for his mother. Ten feet away in the shallow of the blue water a six-year-old and an eight-year-old splashed naked in the water.
“Where’s this baby’s mother?” I asked the children. I’d worked through high school as a lifeguard and swim instructor, and this worried the crap out of me.
The children shrugged. Either they didn’t know or didn’t understand. One boy pointed his chin towards a leaf and stick house built on the ground. Smoke came from the windows. The “kitchen,” was thatched roof building with a dirt floor behind the house. I could hear the women’s laughter from where we stood on shore. I ventured up to the dark house, my heart racing, wondering if my voice would waver as I tried out my new Pidgin English. I poked my head in the door. Five women worked in the smoke filled room. In the center of the structure, a small fire smoldered in a simple fire ring. Two women squatted on stools on either side. One woman nursed her baby in a cloth sling. They stopped what they were doing, saw me, and then looked down at the floor. Chief Willie’s wife had been pounding a stick in a tall narrow wooden pitcher, making more of that nasty pudding. She leaned on the stick and put her hand on her large hip. A young girl grated a coconut.
“Eh, excuse me,” I said in my newly learned Pidgin English.
Chief Willie’s wife looked up at me, briefly, raised her eyebrows, but didn’t smile. She was a heavy woman with very black skin. Her calves bulged out from the hem of her red skirt. She had extremely large breasts that hung down flat under her white shirt. I thought of Aunt Jemima on the maple syrup label, for a moment, and then scolded myself as a racist. I didn’t tell her my name or ask her what her name was, even though that was the second sentence they taught us in pidgin. The first words they taught us was, “liar.”
“Um,” I stammered, “There’s a baby down by the water. Is his mother in here?”
The women laughed. I couldn’t tell if they laughed at what I said, or how I said it. They covered their mouths and looked away. They hid their eyes and facial expressions by looking down. I couldn’t read them. While most of them turned back to work, I stood in the door and waited for an answer. I thought I had said the words wrong. I tried again.
“No worry, worry,” the Chief’s wife said waving her hand at me.
I remained in the door, worried. I’d pulled up a couple of floundering kids, once, and one big wave would knock over that toddler. Babies could drown in two inches of water. I could teach them about this. I felt a flush of hope. I could become a real Peace Corps volunteer. Instead, I just stood there.
Larry came up behind me and said, “Hey, Rach, those kids said they are watching the baby.”
“But …” I started. Larry took me by the arm and led me away from the kitchen.
“Let’s just have some fun. Enjoy yourself, Rach.”
When we were out of hearing distance, I said, “I can’t believe they won’t talk to me at all!” I let the tears gush, turned my head towards the water, feeling them slip down my cheeks, salt dripping into my mouth. Gray patches of dead coral reef poked above the water along the shore. Such a lovely, beautiful place to be lonely. I waded out noticing the temperature impossibly hot, at least 85 degrees; it felt like a bath.
I turned. “I have to wash myself in the center of the village under a standpipe fully dressed. How am I supposed to wash my crotch? Then I have to slog back to the bedroom, in my wet clothes to change with my back against the wall, since there aren’t any doors or shades for privacy. You don’t get to have a great time and make me feel shitty for having a bad time. You get to go to the swimming hole with the men. You get to swim naked in a deep, spring fed pool. How fucking fair is that?”
“The women must have something. Did you ask them?”
“Yes.” I walked further out to the water. My long pink pencil skirt dragging in the waves. I didn’t even have the right clothes for this assignment. I picked up a few skirts at the second hand store, before we left, knowing women had to wear skirts to cover their thighs. But I figured once I got here, I could break the rules and wear shorts and pants. Wrong. As a result I had three skirts, two with crunchy elastic that didn’t stay up, and this dumb, pencil skirt.
Larry was sure the women had an equivalent somewhere, but none of the other Peace Corps women knew about it. I’d thought myself a cool world-traveler-feminist-smart-person, but I couldn’t find out where the women bathed?
“Is that it? You can’t ask someone where to bathe? That’s why you’re pissed?”
“No,” I said. I watched the colorful clothing wave on the clotheslines. I wanted to have the experience Larry was having. “This whole thing is sexist. This whole culture is crazy. Men play all day and women work.” It occurred to me that the women took care of me, too, but I decided not to remind him. “I’m floating around in some sort of gender role ether.”
When we walked back towards the village, he stopped off at the swim hole. I waited on a large boulder at the trail head. He disappeared in the jungle, but I could hear splashing and men laughing. When he returned, fresh, happy and smelling of soap, I wanted to slap him.
“So, why haven’t you asked anybody, yet?” Larry asked when he returned.
“No,” I said. “Did you ask the men?” I asked in a snotty tone. I wanted to sob, “No one will talk to me.” But I kept it to myself wondering how he would act if our places were reversed. Would he be more persistent?
“Rachel, this is going to be a long two years if you can’t figure out how to live in this culture,” he said.
“Stuff it.”

Later, he tried to find out if we could go in the middle of the night, when everyone had gone to sleep, but he was told there were strict cultural taboos about men and women. As a woman, I would “soil” the water for all the men. They wouldn’t be able to go in the water, ever again. And they were damn serious about it.
Men and women went to separate toilet beaches, they couldn’t be friends, and they didn’t touch during the day. I had never known a place where men didn’t pay attention to me at all. As a white woman, I wasn’t considered a “real” woman either, so I just stood around at the edges, communing with the jungle.
At dinner that night, Chief Willie told fishing stories. He talked about his uncle who caught a big fish.
The moon had almost set when they spotted a shark’s fin circling the boat. He tried to hold the fish up over his head until he reached the dugout, but before he could toss the fish into the hull, the shark came at him, nudged his body hard with his nose.
“Now that was a warning from the shark,” Chief Willie said. He ticked his tongue and leaned on his leg. His toenails shone white on his dark skin. He sighed.
I’d figured out it was all about the story, so he took his time. This oral story was an art, and the pause after tension worked like a commercial break.
“Some Solomon Islanders,” he said to us changing the subject knowing we wouldn’t forget about the shark scene, “believe that the ancestors become sharks after they die.” He stopped to watch Larry’s reaction. He pulled a twig out of his pocket and scrubbed his large white teeth keeping his face as neutral as possible.
“The people on the island on the other side still give their dead to the sharks.” He pointed his chin towards the jungle, “because they believe their spirit moves into the body of the shark.”
In a flash, he reached down, grabbed a chicken from under the table, and chucked it out from the porch, squawking out into the darkness.
“I’ll never forget. When I was a kid I saw my great uncle underwater. His sons swam down, and secured his body to a rock. I thought he was looking up at me.”
I shuddered. I had a clear picture of hair waving under the water. Funny, I pictured a Caucasian man’s hair, because I’d never seen a Melanesians hair underwater.
This same uncle, see, he should have known better. He made a miscalculation, see, he was greedy. He’d received a fair warning from the shark. But uncle was a fast swimmer, and continued towards the boat with the fish in hand out of the water. When the shark came back for another turn, the shark bit onto the fish and tore off Uncle’s arm.
“Larry,” Chief Willie said turning impressively, “He didn’t let the shark have the fish, even when the shark asked.” He shook his head. He even stuck his bottom lip out showing a story teller’s sorrow. “That shark took Uncle’s arm and the fish as compensation.” He laughed then, tipped his head back and slapped his leg. When he looked at Larry, he chopped his arm and laughed some more.
Peace Corps told us about compensation, though we didn’t really understand it. On the large island of Malaita, if the brother’s of a girl found out a Peace Corps volunteer was sleeping with their sister, they would demand compensation. There had been volunteers in the past who ended up buying the family of his girlfriend a refrigerator. (It supposedly didn’t matter they didn’t have electricity to plug it in). But there has been more than one volunteer who had been evacuated when brothers had threatened violence if the volunteer couldn’t pay.

That night after dinner, Larry went out with the Chief’s uncle in his dugout to have another adventure of a lifetime.  I washed my hair in the standpipe and imagined the women’s magical pool of my dreams.  Afterwards, in the women’s kitchen, Chief Willie’s wife washed a sweet baby in a red bucket, chortling as she poured hot water over his head.  But when the baby saw me, he startled, sucked in a deep breath and cried.  The chief’s wife turned towards me.  Looked at me without speaking. 
Way to go scary monster girl; you made the baby cry.
I said good night and went for a walk.  At the edge of the village, a trail led into the jungle.  The damp jungle air swirled around my feet.  I shivered.  The thick bush formed a tight arch over my head where the muddy footpath scooted around large trees.   I really didn’t want to go find the women’s pool by myself.  And if what they had told us was correct, Larry wouldn’t be able to come, anyway.  I turned around on the path and went back the way I had come.  I flopped onto the bed and went to sleep.
The moon had already set behind the trees when Larry woke me.  He crawled onto the bed under the mosquito netting and sat next to me.  My eyes felt heavy from too much sleep. I felt like I had melted into the jungle, the sawing bugs and screeching birds my only friends.  I could barely make out his profile in the fading moonlight. 
“Oh my God, Rach,” he breathed.  You won’t believe how amazing that was.  We caught some lobster for you, baby.”  He rubbed my stomach, his hands cold. 
“You’re freezing,” I said. 
He shook his head, shivering.  “The Chief said that they don’t eat lobster.  SDA’s think they are dirty animals, and I guess they are.  They eat poop don’t they?”  He laughed.  He reached his cold hand up to my breast.  It made me shiver.  “But he said his wife would cook them for us.” 
That was the first piece of good news I’d heard in a long time. 
“Oh my gosh, Rach, it was so cool.”  He flopped onto his back and I listened to his voice in the darkness.  “First Rowlie had me hold the boat while he this old uncle guy took turns going down.  It was kinda scary because they would be underwater for so long.  I realized that I’ve never been in the ocean at night like that.”
Larry grew up in Cape Cod and spent his summers in the ocean.  He knew how to sail and read waves and wind.  He was not afraid of the sea creatures or the under current that sucked children under the surface the way I was.  Growing up in  Iowa, the land I knew was nothing like this.  I was accustomed to open spaces—cornfields planted in rows and a that wide, muddy Mississippi river that swirled between the bluffs. 
“I can’t believe how long they can hold their breath,” Larry continued.  “I’d think they had stayed too long when they popped out the water holding a huge fish over their head.”  He shook his head and kissed me quickly with cold lips.  “It was my job to toss it into the boat.”
As he spoke, I imagined the silhouette of Jaws circling below Larry’s kicking legs.  As he searched for signs of his submerged friends a huge mouth, with giant teeth, lurked below. 
“Weren’t you afraid of sharks?”
“Well.”
“Well, what?”
The moon set and now only a faint glow of Milky Way  lit the square of window.  I couldn’t see Larry at all.  I felt my eyes widen in the black room.
“Did you see a shark?”  I asked.
“Well, yes.  I did.  I think I did … its skin glimmered under the watery moonlight.”
I waited.  I held my breath.
“It circled around us for a while.”
“Why didn’t you get in the boat?  Were you waiting for it to nudge you?”
“Rowlie told me to stay where I was.  I didn’t have any fish.  He said we were fine.”
“But Larry, there was fish blood in the water.”  I’d seen the nature shows.  I saw Jaws.  I knew sharks could smell blood in water.  Just a tiny bit sent those sharks into frenzy.  But I asked, “Did the shark go away?”
“No.”
But the three of them decided to try another location.  With the moon full, Uncle and Rowlie intended to stay out until they couldn’t see underwater.  
 “On the last stop, I got to go down with Rowlie. I went down and held onto a rock next to Rowlie.”  He put both his hands on my thigh and squeezed hard.  “I had to hold on tight because of the tide.  It pulled us in and out.  Holding my breath at the same time was hard.”
They went down a few times together when Rowlie spotted a fish.  Larry only saw it out of the corner of his eye when Rowlie shot.
“He hit them every time.”  He put his palm on my chest and made a shooting sound.  I imagined the spear whizzing through the water and hitting its target like a James Bond underwater fight scene.
“I started to get frustrated because I couldn’t hold my breath long enough to shoot at anything close.”
“It’s okay, honey,” I said.  I patted his hand.  I knew he wanted to shoot a fish.  I changed the subject.  “So, where did you find the lobster?”
“Anyway, I’m down under the water with Rowlie, and he points at this huge fish.  It was gigantic; it sat still.  I swear it looked right at me with its giant fish eye.”  He got out from under the mosquito net and I could hear the rustle of his clothes.  Then he crawled under the sheet into bed next to me, his body still cool.
“And.”
“And I waited until it turned, aimed the spear gun and shot him.”  He sat up and pulled the sheet with him.  “I pulled him up to the surface and Uncle threw it in the boat.   Then asked them what kind of fish we caught.” 
Like most of us westerners, Larry always wanted to know the names for things.  It was the way he learned languages.  When he asked the name, he wanted the local name.  The fish with yellow and blue was probably a rainbow fish, but he’d ask.  The locals always said, “Reef fish.”  They caught fifteen different fish and a bunch of minnow.  He asked the name of each one.  Reef fish, reef fish, reef fish was the answer.       
I felt him shift and bend down to kiss me.  I reached up and put my hand on his chin.  I felt the stubble.  He was starting to warm up. 
“On the way in, Rowlie found my fish.  He held it up over his head and said, ‘Larry Fish!’  He laughed the rest of the time all the way to his house.”

The next morning the Chief’s wife found the bucket of lobster and chucked it into the lagoon before we woke.  When I asked her about it, she laughed and spoke the first words I’d ever heard from her. 
“Was that your lobster?”  She looked into my eyes.  She wore a red shirt an red skirt.  The shirt was a little too short and her dark belly showed in the middle.  Her skin seemed dark velvet next to the red of her clothing.  She put her hands on her hips and aimed her disdain straight at me.
“That’s trash fish.  I threw it out,” she said. 

On one of the last weekends in the training village, Peace Corps decided we needed to learn how live in a subsistence culture.  They called it “survival training,” which meant 25 unsupervised volunteers bickering in a jungle clearing donated for such a purpose.  I joined the garden crew, thinking since I grew up in Iowa, I must have some natural farming talent.  Peace Corps could have filmed these as episodes to sell as million dollar episodes for the “Survival” series. 
    “I think it’s a great idea,” Lee said talking about her own plan and ignoring everyone else's.  She jammed her shovel into the ground, “We’ll make rows of corn, tomatoes, beans, lettuce, and cucumber.”  Lee and her husband, the only other teachers, knew they’d been assigned to the main island of Guadalcanal to teach at a boy’s school.  “We’re going to have a cook,” she said to her husband, who never left her side, “but it will be nice to have some western vegetables.”  They laughed about how they would also have laundry service, and a three-bedroom house on campus.    “I thought I was going to rough it,” she laughed. 
    I stood staring at the cleared spot in the jungle.  Someone had already come to do the hard work, now we just had to figure out what to plant and how to make it grow.  I tried to picture rows of lush tomatoes, beans, potatoes, and flowers, because we’d be gone before they had a chance to mature. 
“Lee,” I said, “You know, I looked in the kitchen here and the women don’t cook tomatoes, potatoes, beans, or corn.  What good will these crops do them?” 
“Tomatoes have a lot of vitamin C,” she said.   Her husband nodded.  “It will be good for them.  Don’t tell me you like that mash.  They could use more variety in their diets; you know it.”
    I looked to her husband who sat on a felled tree smiling, a hoe in one hand. 
    “I don’t like what they cook ...”  I said, pausing to ponder how I might explain vitamin C in Pidgin English.  “Ah, what the heck.” We were here to help.  Introducing new crops would be a good thing.  “Okay, let’s do it.”
    Lee pointed at the mud.   “Let’s start here and move that way.  First turn over the soil and plant these seeds in a row, here and here.” 
    “Ah, Lee, why don’t we visit a local garden and try to plant the food that they already grow here?  Aren’t we supposed to learn how to grow our own food?”
    “You might need to grow food,” she said, flipping her long brown hair behind her shoulder.  I got a whiff of her sunscreen and Deet bug spray.  “Where the heck are you going, anyway?”

Finding out about sites was a big deal.  Most of the volunteers would be together in the capital city of Honiara.  While it wasn’t first world, it had hotels, refrigeration, cars, and electricity.  

Only three of us would be going to Makira.  A single guy would teach in Kira Kira, at the only secondary school on the island.  He had a “house girl” lined up who would cook and clean for him.

Our site, called the Stuyvenberg Center wasn’t so well known.  Like, it wasn’t on the map.  We were going to teach at a brand new vocational school for boys somewhere between Kira Kira and Star Harbor.  With Larry’s building experience and my various teaching and community service jobs, we made a perfect fit.  The principal, Brother George, well known for his other school, wrote a letter communicating how thrilled he was to meet us.    

Except:

“The former deputy assistant country director arranged your site,” explained the current deputy assistant country director who had arrived just to give us this news.  He’d somehow managed to maintain pressed kakis and a crisp, white shirt.  

“She was the one who developed the relationship with the site in Makira—actually the only one on staff who has ever been there.”

We sat mutely, waiting.

“But she quit.”  

“You’re going to send us someplace you’ve never been?” I asked.

He waved his hand to shoo a fly on his knee.  “She’s in China, now, I think.  We started a new program there this year, you know.  To bad for you two, with your Chinese language skills, that would have been a perfect placement.”

Huh?

“But don’t worry, we’ll put you on a boat to Kira Kira.  It will take about 24 hours, but I know they’ll be expecting you.  

I tried to think about what it meant to be dropped off “somewhere between Kirakira and Star Harbor.”  That was a distance of about 100 km.  

He showed us the map of the area, pointing out the region that didn’t have a dot on the map.  “But they know you’re coming,” he repeated.    

No one seemed to have any idea where we were going.  Makira.  That meant nothing.  No books in the Peace Corps library about this island.  No trainers from this island.  

Later, when Larry asked Chief Willie about Makira, he said, “Oh, yes, I’ve heard of people who think their ancestors live in the crocodile there.”  

I wondered if people, not unlike Chief Willie, still slid their dead into the mangrove swamp and called crocodiles instead of sharks.  I wanted to ask him about that, but Larry was in charge of the questions and couldn’t read my mind.    

**

Now I followed Lee’s bossy directions, because I had no idea how to grow a garden or  how to cook.  I got into the Peace Corps because I had experience teaching--not because I could climb mountains and eat bugs I found under dead logs.  I’d taught “life skills” to mentally disabled adolescents, which meant brushing teeth and doing laundry.   Sure, I had to administer antipsychotic medications occasionally, and hold onto kids while they had grand mal seizures, but grow food?  No. My grandma always had a garden, and I could only imagine Midwestern farms, miles of corn, harvested by tractors.  

Two days after we planted, a downpour flooded our garden area.  The bean seeds floated to the top and dried out in the sun.  I bet Chief Willie’s family had a good laugh over that.

 During the last training session in the Western Province, I’d almost grown accustomed to the gentle breezes flittering off the lagoons.   Aqua waves lapped white sand beaches.  I spent most of the Peace Corps “lectures,” with my eyes transfixed on the blue lagoon lullaby.  Except today, the Peace Corps nurse tapped my shoulder with the book, Where There Is No Doctor, by David Werner.  Larry had cookie crumbs on his chin as he sipped dark British tea.  He raised his eyebrows.  You want a cookie?  

The nurse came up against my side.  It sent a tickle up my scalp.  She said with her British accent, “It seems where you two are going there is no doctor.” and placed her hand on my shoulder. “There hasn’t been a doctor on that island for more than two years.”

  “That figures,” I said sarcastically, trying to laugh.  I opened the book and examined the amateurish drawings:  blood spurting from artery wounds, baby toes dangling from a squatting woman’s vagina.  Jagged bones poked out of skin, parasites occupied entire blood vessels, huge goiters protruded grotesquely.  “How dramatic,” I said.

  Soon, I thought, we would arrive at a similar station where palm trees waved in cool breezes, parrots flew in colorful, squawking flocks beside white sand beaches.  I would have my own space, teach English, and spend the rest of my time relaxing and getting a great tan.

Makira, a large island in the Solomon Islands archipelago, about 1000 miles off the northwest coast of Australia, sat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.  Few people with exposure to the western printing press had ever been there, since there was very little written about this small island with its unique culture.  While it was tropical, with lush jungle covering interior mountains and wide expanses of pristine beach, it wasn’t the destination tourists might choose for a fantasy vacation.  Tourists didn’t visit a place without electricity, internet, phones, toilets, running water, roads, cars, or bridges.  In fact the few visitors who recorded the Makiran culture, usually talked about cannibalism.

The Solomon Islands, first “discovered” by a Spanish gold monger named Alvaro de Mendana de Nehra. He named the island chain Islas de Salomon after King Solomon.   He called, Makira, San Cristobal in 1568 and believed he’d find Solomon’s gold buried there. According to Catholic Church records, Mendana met Aztecs in Peru who told him a continent of gold existed off the west coast of South America.  Quite clever.  A bunch of dudes show up dressed in metal, carrying metal swords, pissed off about gold and stuff; I’d send them on a quixotic ocean quest, too.

When Mendana de Nehra first arrived at the volcanic archipelago in the South Pacific, he was met by long, dug-out canoes, filled with warriors wielding bows and spears.  After some negotiations—gifts of steel swords and tools—the islanders invited Mendana inland for a feast.  According to some stories, the natives offered Mendana a child’s shoulder and arm, telling him it was “the best part.” Mendana didn’t recognize human flesh as a gift. No, he flew into a rage and killed his native hosts, burning their huts to the ground.  He left, named other islands, landed, and burned some more huts to the ground.

After setting the Solomons ablaze, he decided it would make a great Spanish settlement.  Never mind the (now homeless) islanders like to serve children’s appendages to dinner guests.  So, he headed back to Peru to fetch some colonists.  When he returned in 1595 with his wife, her brothers, and an additional 400 soldiers, sailors, spouses, and children, he burned more huts.  However, Mendana soon died from Malaria, and the settlers left.  Europeans wouldn’t return to the islands for another 200 years.

The British declared a protectorate over the southern islands in 1893-1942.  During this time, the British imposed taxes on a subsistence people.  When they could not pay their tax in money, the British forced villagers to send their sons to work camps to grow sugar cane and tea.  When the people refused, the British took drastic measures.  On the island of Malaita, they dumped creosote onto the gardens.  As a result, people either paid taxes, or moved farther and farther inland.

The people who remained on the coast paid their taxes and became christianized.    Even so, they were not unhappy to witness the British evacuation as the Japanese invaded.  Little did they know, the Japanese brought more brutality than even the British could work up.  Priests, nuns, nurses, and doctors who dared to stay behind were brutally murdered by the Japanese.  So when the US Navy arrived, they became instant heros.  Given the fact that Americans do not have a class system, the Solomon Islanders who worked as guides and hosts, were treated as friends and allies.  After independence from British rule in July of 1978, the Solomon Islands became part of the British Commonwealth, and San Cristobal was renamed Makira.

However, Makira never experienced the British or much of the war.  While they certainly met American and Japanese soldiers, they were never incorporated into the imperialistic model.   As a result, they remained isolated, visited only by priests and ministers hardy enough to rough it.

Citizens from other westernized islands like Guadalcanal and Malaita claimed the isolated Makira had been overrun by crocodiles.  Few people if any lived there, they claimed, and according to some, a mythical people, called the Kakamora, occupied the isolated mountain caves of the rugged, isolated interior.  The Kakamora, according to many of their own traditional stories, were the original inhabitants of the Solomons.  They miniature people were dark skinned, and extremely vicious.  When the current islanders arrived by boat more than 5,000 years ago, these native people put up little resistance, and reportedly retreated to the hills.

It seemed anything could live in the thick jungles of Makira.  On the map, this site was little more than a small volcanic island surrounded by the South Pacific Sea.  It had thirteen villages marked on the map.  The place where I lived, unmarked.  Makira lay to the south and east of the famous WWII battles, and a foreign land, even to the main islands’ inhabitants.  Most people lived along the coast of Makira.  The interior, mountainous regions, concealed by a constant mist and towering rain clouds.

Yet, this place remains legend of Hollywood films, a jungle world, full of head hunters.  A place where villages surrounded by spiked trenches, display shrunken heads to show their power.  Cannibalism, declared illegal in 1908 by the British Protectorate, has been rumored to continue in the interior highlands.

Previously, the Solomon Islands practiced a wide variety of cannibalism.  In the Western Province, the man who gathered the most heads became Chief.  On other islands, families ritually consumed their ancestor’s organs and brains when they died in order to keep their souls nearby.  Still others used cannibalism to defeat their enemies, believing the control of the skull translated into the control of the soul.  Yeah, this was the country where people put heads on spikes.  Heads of family members or enemies, depending on the group. 

Meanwhile, Makira seemed to practice cannibalism for food.  They only ate human flesh during special occasions like weddings, new house construction, or harvest festivals.  One rocky island called Santa Anna had a hard time growing tubers like sweet potato and cassava.  So, in trade, they used bows and arrows to hunt up and down the coast line for “meat.”  If an islander were to build a house, get married, or store enough crops for a feast day, they would order themselves up a human being.  Really.  And roast him in a motu, an earth oven that works like a pig roast.

 Epolito and elder of Makira, recalled eating human thigh at a feast when he was very young.  He also recalled fighting wars on the beaches.  Showed me his spear made from human thigh bone, he told me how men, dressed up in tapa cloth, feathers, and paint would run out onto the beach, sing, dance, and insult the other village.  Once someone threw a spear and got an injury they stopped fighting.  But was this the truth or a lie?

Ah, yes, Epolito remembered a captain, not unlike Mendana.  He said a long time ago, boat people, (that’s what they called white people in the Kahua language) came to these shores.  They hung their laundry high up on the ship’s mast.  The one who wore the most feathers was presumed to be the boss, so they invited him into the village.

Where they killed him and roasted him in a motu.  Now, these boat people were strange, had strange clothing, but the most strange thing about them was their feet.  The people then assumed they had no toes, like the water birds, and other animals that live in the water.  They decided this would be the most special part, so, they saved the two calves and feet for the guest of honor.  The funny thing was, no matter how many times they threw it back on the fire, the feet remained tough.

You know why?  Epolito asked, laughing.  “Because mifella Solomon Island mani, bye bye, hem kai kai bootie,” which meant, we eat boots.  This story, repeated countless times, served as a greeting (or a warning?) each time I arrived at a new village.  While they thought it outrageously funny, I was never sure how to take it.

Still, it remained unclear whether the people really believed in Kakamora type fellows, or they were like fairies, trolls, and elves.  I’d heard stories about a race of tiny black people a meter high (3 ft), being on the island “first” from more than one person.  There were also stories about adaro, spirits of the trees and river spirits.   They called all these “devils” in Pidgin English, but they weren’t evil--that’s just the word the priests taught them.  In addition, the souls of the Makiran dead remained among them, sometimes guarding the jungle, sometimes serving as guardian angels.  Did they exist?  I didn’t think so.  I didn’t believe in mysteries, yet.

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