LYNN'S ACCOUNT OF LIVING ON KOSRAE IN MICRONESIA, 1969-1975, p.5
Kosraean families did not have a kitchen in the house. Instead, they had a cookhouse out in back—with a thatched roof and open sides. My favorite activity in these cookhouses was watching the Kosraeans prepare earth ovens, usually done by the men. Rocks were heated to a red hot temperature, then split breadfruit or other food was put directly on the rocks. These were covered by various layers of leaves, some wet. The roasted breadfruit which came out of there was delicious—one of my favorite foods in the world still although we no longer have it.
Preparing the Um
But I digress. We did not have a cookhouse—it was just our little grass hut on the beach. And I didn’t have a separate kitchen in the house, as our house just had one big room and a bedroom. One end of the big room was my kitchen. I had water piped in from the rain barrels used for our shower, and I had a sink with a drain hole—but the water just dripped down under the house—fairly primitive as far as plumbing goes. My stove was a kerosene one, somewhat like a camp stove. I cooked everything on that—we mostly had rice and canned food. Unfortunately, we did not nearly as much fresh food as I would have liked. Our diet was occasionally supplemented by food given to us by Kosraean families: big bunches of bananas, pineapples, papayas, breadfruit soup (made on Saturdays so as not to have cook on Sunday), feast food when someone died for example. That’s when people went all out killing pigs, of which we got a big chunk that had been roasted.
Tapita in the kitchen end of our house
For an oven we first used a ship biscuit tin set on top of a stove burners, although eventually we obtained a kind of oven--a contraption that had been abandoned by a former American resident. It worked by putting the kerosene stove under the oven. During those two years, I made bread almost every week. I could buy bread locally, but it was always too sweet for me. We had ready access to ordinary white flour, which I mostly used, but we were sometimes able to get hold of fancier flour, like cracked wheat or rye, especially if we went off-island. One of my most vivid memories was using a nylon stocking to sift the worms out of the flour—then we deemed it fit to use!
In our village, there were two Peace Corps couples, as well as a couple that were contract teachers. At the high school, we spent all day in a pretty much English-speaking environment. And at home, we could speak English to each other. As part of a couple, we also could confide in each other.
But I thought life was much more difficult for the single women Peace Corps volunteers, of which there were three then two, each in different villages. For one, there weren’t any other Americans in those villages, and the schools in which they taught were run by Kosraeans. I know that the women were subject to some degree of harassment—peeping Toms, unwanted innuendoes, and even attempted break-ins for the purpose of "seduction." The traditional Micronesian custom or "night crawling"--or sneaking into a house to try to have sex with a woman--may have been tolerated or even encouraged by some Kosraean women. However it was not appreciated by Americans, who considered it attempted rape. But I was proud of the two women in our group, because they did stick it out for two years. It helped to have visitors (one women had a boyfriend of sorts come from the States for a visit). There was also a group of Sea Bees stationed for a time on Kosrae—these two women eventually formed attachments to guys in the unit. And the Americans on the island, both Peace Corps and contract teachers, did form something of a social group and had gatherings and such. So no one was really totally isolated from other Americans all of the time.
However we were all fairly isolated from the rest of the world. For one, the nearest big island (Pohnpei) where planes came was two or three days away by ship, a trip which we hardly ever made. I did go out on medical once—turned out to be just a scare (lump in my ovary that went away). Other than that, we only left the island once—in the summer between the two years. We spent that summer on Pohnpei, working in the local junior college. We rented a house in Kolonia, the capital, enjoyed a more cosmopolitan life that summer (more Americans, more stores, etc.). We also spent that summer traveling on vacation. We did not go home to the States, but we spent time on some of the other islands: Guam (which was very Americanized), Chuuk (former capital of the Japanese Imperial Navy during World War II), Saipan (where the Trust Territory headquarters was located), and Yap. Yap was the most exotic—bare-breasted, grass-skirted women walking the streets, men with beetle-juice stained teeth, round stone "money" sometimes as large as a person.
Men’s House on Yap Preparing Beetle Nut
On the way home we decided to spend some of our "Peace Corps readjustment allowance" to travel the rest of the way around the world, via Guam, Japan, the trans-Siberian railway, and Europe. Unfortunately shortly before we left Kosrae, the Peace Corps mailroom on Pohnpei burned down along with our passports and newly issued Soviet visas. We spent an anxious few weeks on Pohnpei and Guam while we waited to see if the Russians would reissue our visas or not. Fortunately they did and we were able to make our trip. We arrived back in California at the end of the summer of 1971 after more than two years away from home and with Marisa already on the way--although at that time the latter fact was still unknown to us.