The Anniversary

Nosy Be airport was familiar. Most immediate was the warm slap of the equatorial air. The place was littered with daggy remnants from the eighties: the wooden immigration booths, the fading advertisements, the linoleum floor and most distressingly, the plane we flew in on. The people were also clearly islanders from their complexion and the way they stood. Their cheery but unhelpful demeanour was also recognisable.

And, as my father and I sat on the conveyor belt under a desperate ceiling fan, security confirmed that they had lost our luggage. Not all of it, though; of the four bags we had checked in they had managed to deliver one to the airport, and through some deus ex machina it was mine. The others contained the clothes of both my parents and my two younger siblings as well as such nifty things as sunscreen, toiletries and the first aid kit containing the majority of our anti-malarial medication. All of these bags were back in Johannesburg, optimistically.

Both the news itself and its delivery represented precisely the kind of casual incompetence that I had grown used to, even fond of, a year earlier.

Sitting in the carpark of the airport as my mother argued with a placid official from Air Madagascar, surrounded by the unmistakeable sounds of an island around us, my brother asked me if this reminded me of Chuuk. I told him it did, a lot.

Chuuk is an isolated archipelago about 1800 kilometres North East of New Guinea and is the most populous state in the Federated States of Micronesia. I had lived on the main island of Weno for ten months in 2010 at a high school called Xavier College and teaching at a nearby middle school.

I had found myself talking about Chuuk more ever since I arrived in Africa to visit my family who now live there. Perhaps it was the feeling of leaving Australia again, and the curiosity that accompanies the observance of a foreign land. It felt stronger here, though.

In the middle of the night we drove through dense tropical jungle on poor roads past ageing plywood shacks. It was all very familiar.

***

The boat that arrived for us at Nosy Be harbour looked like it had recently dropped off a fresh batch of asylum seekers at Christmas Island. But there were only thirteen of us on the tour and the atmosphere was cruisy. I’d been on these sorts of boats before. Over the course of the week it ferried us between campsites, criss-crossing the archipelago at the Northern tip of Madagascar.

The islands themselves were spectacular. They possessed had the dense beauty of the tropics: the way the cloudless sky broadcasts every colour in its boldest hues, the way the sun, which the equator brings a few kilometres closer, sculpts the shorelines in long curves, the way the plants so fiercely contest for such fertile soil. They were at times both hypnotic and overwhelming.

On one island I found a small coconut tree near the beach. Enlisting the help of my little brother, we set out to collect some coconuts. He went about the task with the wonderful urgency that an eleven year-old approaches life with, buzzing around me suggesting, pleading, questioning and complaining at times doing all of this simultaneously. Eventually, we beat two of them down with a long stick and carried them to the shelter where we ate. After five or so minutes of hacking at one with a knife I realised that I had forgotten how to properly open the damn things. My brother, in a fit of boredom, threw the other at a tree trunk and it immediately burst open spilling most of the coconut water. I glumly returned to my own and after another solid minute of hacking heard the triumphant squelch of the shell being pierced. I brought the coconut to my lips. I had not forgotten the taste.

Another night I sat up late waiting to vomit. My stomach had been upset for an hour or so, and I was sitting on the beach letting the time pass until its grievance was addressed. The islands were dark silhouettes from my view of the beach, the stars were plentiful. The dark of a world without electricity is shocking to Western sensibilities; there was only a gas lantern in the dining shelter. I paced up and down the beach before vomiting ferociously under a tree. I buried the remnants under the sand and looked out at the night.

On the second-last day of the trip we travelled to one of the densely inhabited islands. They had a zoo and avenues of souvenir shops. My family eventually retreated to a café to drink Coke out of glass bottles and wait for our tour operator to find us. A heavily tanned-European sat shirtless writing quickly in French. He did not look unlike a writer I had read, DBC Pierre. A woman in her sixties wearing a large hat and a purple kaftan approached us in a madly tilting gait. She was an expatriate Australian; they turn up in the strangest of places. In a slightly mad monologue she described the slightly mad life she lived on a slightly mad island. She described the way the islanders would shit on the beach and let the tide take their waste away, I had seen similar. She described the staph infections that plague the population and I fingered the white scar on the back of my neck. And she described the freedom she felt living in a place like this. I stared at my feet.

It was not only what she had described that struck me. It was the peculiarities of her madness, the specific words she used and the specific gestures she accompanied them with. We had lived in similar worlds.

The next day the boat sailed into the port of Nosy Be, the water turned from translucent blue to an opaque grey-green. The port was a series of concrete embankments, ramps and staircases that was flooded with people. We farewelled our guides, they had been charming and hospitable. We were hastened into cabs waiting at the shore; a crowd of people stared curiously at us.

We drove through the town. It pulsed with energy, people poured out of colourful colonial buildings that had greyed under the strain of poverty. We drove into the hotel and I remembered the date, December 17th. I’d been back for a whole year. I’d been preparing myself for some sort of emotional response but all I found was a stillness.

***

When I returned to the hotel room I sat at the desk and started to think about a year of home.

I remembered how scared my parents looked when they realised that the emaciated figure that had just stepped into the airport terminal was their oldest son. They hadn't seen a picture of me in months.

I remembered how I needed to see Sydney the way the tourists see it and gawk at the unapologetic gorgeousness of the harbour. I was on George St and I could smell it half a kilometre away. By the time I had reached the Rocks I had broken into a light jog. I darted through the crowds at Circular Quay station and it appeared in front of me. It pulled the breath from my lungs. The Bridge,The Opera House and the impossibly blue harbour itself all stung in the December glare. I needed the physical reaction, the shock, the stun, to jolt me into being home.

I remembered how at one stage, I think it was about May, I had had the paper bag of letters scattered across my bedroom floor. They had even formed a hierarchy, the most read sat in a pile by my bed and the others staggered towards the fringes of my room, catalogued for their frequency. I had received most them in the few days before I had left, some of the students even forming little bundles of them for me denoting their particular social group. They spread like a jigsaw puzzle across my floor. This was not a conscious effort by any means.

I remembered how I sat in a café at Milsons Point trying to convince a boy who had been two years below me at school to go to Micronesia. It was winter, a cold wind cut through the back streets and I cupped my coffee to warm my hands. I told him that he had to go.

Because… Because…

Because Chuuk beckons you. Because the gravity of its madness pulls you into its orbit. Because it is a breathtakingly beautiful place that is at times profoundly fucked up and it is truly liberating as only an island can be.

The roof of Xavier will always be my view of Chuuk. During the day it belonged to the tourists who came to admire the panorama. But as the sun went down it would be returned to us. We sat at dusk and drank cheap Filipino beer quietly; we were hiding from the students.

The Pacific never looked bigger from that roof. It was the horizon on three sides, and after the islands and the waferish reef it seemed to extend into imagination, our senses failing to comprehend its immensity. We sipped our beers and sighed, we were a long way from home.

The Exorcism

I was, undoubtedly, a superstitious child. It was probably a result of paranoia and an overly active imagination. I thought clowns wee agents of pure evil. I not only believed in Santa Clause, I set up elaborate traps to catch him. I was convinced that bad things would happen to me if the total number of steps I took on a single slab of concrete did not equal an exponent of 2 (If I crossed the school oval on the way home I would sometimes mark time to reach 256). The most embarrassing of all of these was my mother’s university graduation, which I spent on the front steps of the all telling people there was a witch inside. My childhood was filled with invisible lasers, non-specific threatening forces and a need for me to act in eccentric ways to cope with the intricate and malevolent universe in my head.

However I remember the exact moment that this stopped for me. My final superstition of any note was one that had spread to me from my sister who got it from her friend. It was the belief that if someone did not hold their breath whole passing a graveyard. My sister and I dutifully carried this out for several months, even modifying it to include not touching the floor of the car. It was a rather ridiculous act to look at.

This came to a halt on a family holiday when we drove lengthwise along one of those giant country graveyards that take up a whole field. Immediately, my sister and I performed our strange ritual, and my parents looked back at their children who sat with limbs splayed and cheeks puffed. They decided to end this. They braked. The car sat in the middle of a country road as my parents patiently waited for us to give in. My sister shot me a quick look and I continued my pose until m sides hurt. But soon we spluttered and slammed our feet to the bottom of the car.

The next breath of oxygen brought with it a line of reasoning that I have continued to use to this present day. Namely, that all forms of superstition and magic are rubbish.

To this day, I do not touch wood when I tempt fate. There is no need and I feel no obligation. I do not read my astronomy charts though apparently I am a Scorpio. UFOlogists are bonkers as is anyone who predicts catastrophe based on the calendars of ancient civilizations. I do not consult psychics. I do not observe Friday the thirteenth. I do not believe in miracles. My mother’s back is in fine condition despite me regularly stepping on both lines and cracks. I do, however, allow myself to continue the exponent of two activity, however I fear no retribution if this is not achieved.

So you can imagine my reaction when Randy told me not to pack any red clothing for the junior retreat that I was supervising.
“Why?”
“We’re going to Udot, it’s famous for black magic.”
“And…”
“You can get cursed for wearing red.”
I felt the urge to ask him whether Udot was an island or a nightclub, but he had already left.

Micronesians are big on black magic. In my first week at St Cecilia’s a girl asked me if I believed in it and I replied ‘no’. This shocked the entire class and they spent the rest of the class pestering me about it. From my perspective it seemed more humourous than malicious. Most of the time it was discussed in the context of love spells like a failed joke in a Harry Potter book. Once or twice someone would attribute the state of the local nutjob to black magic. I would have liked to explain that it was, in fact, petrol sniffing that produced such a result but I tire of being culturally insensitive sometimes and just let it go.

However, it’s control over the students should not be underestimated. Approaching Udot by boat, there was an odd moment where the passengers, the vast majority of whom were sixteen-year-olds, all simultaneously sat down quietly. I wandered about for a little bit but was abruptly stopped when Mike, a second-year volunteer in charge of the retreat, asked me to sit down.
“Why?”
“Because we’re going to Udot, it’s famous for black magic.”
“And…”
“If you don’t sit down, the students will go beserk.”

Udot, for the record, was beautiful. Spectacular even. The water was transparent, the air was fresh and instead of roads they had precisely manicured grass stretching from the church to the school, a distance of about a hundred meters. The people were happy and friendly and they crowded at the shore to meet us. Tom and I made certain we pointed out people in red t-shirts if we saw them. For an island famous for black magic, it certainly was very lovely.

However, this was a school trip and any joy to be had by being there was soon siphoned off through the hectic schedule and the terrible burden of responsibility. It was exhausting, particularly monitoring students late at night. In addition there is the Chuukese penchant for, shall we say, marathon events. Four hours straight of what is known as an entertainment leaves one exasperated no matter how much goodwill or joy is behind it.

The students themselves helped to give the weekend a shambolic feel, particularly in the entertainment that they had planned for themselves. They delayed the start by two hours because of audio difficulties and ended every performance in a desperate rush to the back of the stage to avoid embarrassment. The evening ended with fire-dancing, which was performed so haphazardly that it actually set one of the audience members briefly on fire. It was all a little overwhelming.

So, later that night, Tom and I took some initiative and sat with a couple of locals our own age. Tom speaks Chuukese, I can’t, it didn’t seem to matter. One kid pulled out a ukulele and started playing; he was incredible. He just sat and played for us for about an hour, it seemed to go on forever. The night was cool; the sky went on forever as it can only do in the middle of the Pacific. It was a great moment and it was hard to turn back to the community hall were we all slept.

The next morning felt groggy. Most mornings feel like this for me, but this one in particular left me feeling disjointed and tired. I scrambled around the hall looking for privacy, a futile effort in any case. Students had begun to wander around in a similar haze; for some reason we let them drink coffee (coffee in Micronesia is consumed from preschool onwards). The staff that were up began methodically waking up the rest of the students. Most of the boys, considering that they had slept in the same room with a concrete floor, were up, but the girls who had stayed in tiny rooms to the side were only beginning to file out. Somehow, I managed to gain some privacy and got changed. Re-entering the hall, I was greeted with low, discomforting moans from one of the rooms. They seemed to echo out of the furthest to the left and stopped everybody in their stride. A few female staff leapt in to try and find out what was happening. The girl wasn’t waking up and was instead hyperventilating and moaning. A crowd of other girls sat around her, cradling her head, massaging her limbs and generally looking supportive. It didn’t seem to do much. She kept moaning and hyperventilating. The students stood around awkwardly in the hall for there was no other more adequate reaction. And then a different girl fainted.

At this point the local doctor was called. This sounds like the right decision, except that the local doctor was more of a magician than any Western concept of a medical professional. But he was, apparently, very good and well trusted by his community. And, if the students had suspected, it was the work of black magic than indeed it would be of some psychological support that he had been the first on the case. His first instruction upon seeing the two girls was to order all of the males out of the hall. The practical reasoning of this was beyond me. So, grabbing teenage boys as I went, I exited the hall as soon as possible.

What followed I can easily claim to being the strangest few hours of my life. We sat on the lawn in front of the hall and watched people filing in and out looking concerned and carrying strange objects. The sounds that came from the hall alternated between crying, moaning and chanting. Meanwhile the boys sat like stones on the manicured grass. I have never seen sixteen-year old boys sit like this. Amongst them there was barely a fidget of movement or a whisper of conversation.

The most dramatic moment came about forty-five minutes into the ritual, as a strange smelling smoke started to pour out the windows of the hall. It was accompanied by ear-splitting screaming, the most terrifying screaming I’ve ever heard. A few of the more composed boys formed a prayer circle and eevn managed a few lines of consolation. But it couldn’t stop that screaming, in my imagination, nothing could stop that screaming. It was a scream from the old ways, long before we came here with ou concrete and our crucifixes. A scream filled with the terror of the islands at night. A scream that curdled with extraordinary pain. It came from the hall, which was no longer of our world, but that of the local doctor. We were only sitting on its lawn.

The call came from Xavier to get the girls off island and into real medical care. The problem was that the ‘doctor’ disagreed. He said that a trip back to Weno would only exacerbate the problems. To the Chuukese, the spirits of the dead, like the ones that had apparently infected two of our students, live in the water. A water-borne voyage thus risked further infection. However, Mike was insistent. Medical help was needed. It’s a curious difference, that to us the problem was a medical one yet to the locals it was a mystical one.

The evacuation was a blur. We were allowed into the hall and we removed everything at a furious pace. The gear was loaded into small boats that were in turn loaded onto the larger boat moored off the reef. I remember only one thing distinctly. As we told the boys that we were to begin to pack, one gave me a look that stopped me dead. I’d previously heard him complaining to others that we were making the problem worse by leaving, that we weren’t respecting the judgment of the local doctor. When e looked at me, his eyes had a misted quality, a curious mix of fear and anguish. And a sense that this was not our world. I don’t think I will forget that look.

There have been many moments in my time here where I have genuinely entertained the thought that this is not real. Perhaps someone slipped something in my drink, that I’m really just sitting on my couch at home staring at the ceiling. Or perhaps, Fight Club style, I have invented my own reality that I have gradually slipped into to deal with stress from the HSC. I these moments, I appeal to the anonymous corner of my consciousness that knows, with certainty, that this is a lie.

And how I dug. Standing on the boat and looking back to that beautiful island, I scoured every millimeter of thought I had ever had. And I arrived, rather bluntly, at the moment by the cemetery that had abducted me from the bizarre fantasies of my childhood. I wondered if I could ever reconcile that cold breath of air, my relentless skepticism, with what I had just seen. And I decided that it was neither the malevolent universe of my childhood nor the firmament of logic that I was familiar with. It was not of my world. I had stumbled through someone else’s terrifying childhood. It was all very strange.

The Street-sign

It was five minutes, probably less, into my holiday that I saw it. I was in a car, travelling from the airport along an exceptionally smooth road. After five months of living on Weno speeds above 40km/h terrified me and we were at least doing 60; I was gripping my seat. But this was Pohnpei, the capital of the Federated States of Micronesia and the next state along from Chuuk. I was warned that things would be different.

Brother Tomi indicated right and swung the car off the street. It panned across my sight, hypnotically staring back at me. I swallowed slightly, loosened my grip on the car-seat and sighed almost inaudibly. It was at this moment, after I had taken a few seconds for my mind to appropriately respond to its beauty, that I thought, ‘Everything is going to be just fine.’ I followed it in the rear-view mirror until it passed out of sight. I turned to Tomi, who was also a Xavier High School resident on break, and swooned, ‘There are even street signs.’

It took me a while to understand my shock at the sight of street signs. I had not spent long hours pondering their absence; unlike barista coffee, uninterrupted electricity and public transport. For us children of the first world the appreciation of street-signs is a deeply subconscious affair. They provide a necessary service, but are almost invisible within the structure of the suburban environment. Seeing them again is kind of like finding a favourite childhood toy again. Life was not overly difficult without it, but upon its rediscovery one is more likely to fully understand its emotional sway. Thus I found myself agape at a simple aluminium pole with a metal oblong inscribed ‘Kasalehlie St’.

This sight alone could have made my holiday. I will admit that my focus on it could have been seen as extreme. Just about everyone I talked to on the island –Jesuits, volunteers, embassy staff, locals, nuns, embarrassingly drunk compatriots at the ‘Rusty Anchor’ bar- were treated to my philosophical musings on the topic of street-signs. By the third time it came up in conversation with the Jesuit Volunteer community on the island, one of them finally confessed that they were a little freaked out by my obsession with them.

And so I feel obliged to explain it. Street-signs represent the order and logic that seems absent from Weno. Even the steps involved in erecting a street-sign imply this. Firstly, one has to have something that can be classified as a road. His applies to very little of the ‘road’ system on Chuuk. The majority of Chuuk’s ‘roads’ would be more aptly described as a humourous line of dirt or a collection of potholes in a concentrated line. Only a few brief strips of tarmac fit the given description.

Secondly, someone has to actually name the aforementioned street. In Chuuk, the ‘roads’ are simply named after where they go to. Mostly, it’s to town. Other examples include: the ‘road’ to the Korean Research Center, the ‘road’ up to Xavier High School (which could just as easily be classified as a small mountain range) and the ‘road’ that goes past the Stop and Shop. No amount of public awareness of government intervention could ever shift the practical basis of this naming system. And I can never imagine anyone fitting ‘The ‘road’ that takes you past that strange Peace Corp building with the concrete sphere on top of it’ onto a street sign anyway.

And finally, the sign was clean and shiny and set at a perfect right angle to the pole. Nothing is ever clean and shiny on Weno. Period. The signs that are there, mostly for stores and a few government offices, look as if someone had gone on a mad spree of sign making I the early nineties and had briskly given up since then. The more recent of signs tend to be either hand painted or, as is becoming increasingly popular, stenciled. In any sense, it is a long way from the shiny metal Helvetica of Pohnpei.

In the end, Pohnpei reminded me of one of those sleepy towns on the Central Coast where the populations swell over the summer months. There were small blocks of quirky housing that felt vaguely suburban. Here was a main street, a few supermarkets and a couple of restraints. It had one of those small, two projector cinemas that played movies that had come to the rest of the word months go (Inception came out the day I left and I missed Toy Story 3 entirely). The moment where this felt strongest was when I visited the Australian Embassy to vote. It looked like every small government office I had been in my entire life. There was the dull white paint, the rectangular lobby filled with government-issued brochures and posters, the inoffensive cubicle layout. If the office wasn’t staffed mostly by Pohnpeians I could have been waiting in any tax office, any Centerlink, any Legal Aid branch (and I know those well).

That’s not to say that I didn’t find the island beautiful or unique; I loved it. But whereas the other tourists might just be awed at the spectacular cultural sites, I was in awe at the beautiful sealed roads that lead to the cultural sites. Whilst most tourists were amazed by the view from the restraints there, I was amazed that I could order a sandwich on bread that did not taste like sugared cardboard. To them, the island was a curious and magical slice of life in the Pacific. To me, it was also a curious and magical slice of life back home. Perhaps it was the restoration of subconscious symbols of the developed world, things I had taken for granted my entire life, that gave me an inexplicable sense of the familiar.

Leaving behind 24 hour power and decent internet is never easy. Add to this a strange feeling of home and the prospect of return may seem daunting. But I missed the staggering mess that is Chuuk. Three days later I walked back from St Cecilia’s after our first day planning the new school yea A plastic, vertical rectangle read ‘Welcome to Yongku Peninsula’. Hs sign had been erected during my second month on Chuuk. It is the closest thing to a real street-sign we have over here.

The ‘n’ in ‘Yongku’ was back to front.

It was nice to be back.