Richard Jernigan -> RE: All is Well with the World (Sep. 22 2016 7:54:13)
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First time we went diving on Pohnpei was probably around 1994, five guys from Roi-Namur at the north end of Kwajalein atoll. Roi was becoming fairly civilized when I moved there in 1991 but the Roi Rats had a rowdy reputation, and we did our part to uphold it. Mike M. was delegated the job of picking a dive operation and making the reservations. Somehow we ended up with Phoenix Divers. They had pink boats, and were just about all Japanese except for a small minority of Pohnpeian dive guides among the Japanese ones. On our boat there were three Japanese couples, two good looking Japanese sisters in their twenties and five Roi Rats. The Japanese were suitably freaked out by our gai-jin antics, except for the two sisters, who had dived everywhere in the Pacific and swam like dolphins. After getting acquainted for a couple of days, I was bold enough to ask the sisters what they did for work. "We are office ladies," they half giggled. I knew the answer to the next question, but I wanted to see what they would say. "What do office ladies do?" "Oh we buy flowers and arrange them, make tea, that kind of thing." "But aren't pretty girls your age with university educations supposed to be married?" "Oh yes, we are supposed to be. But we are afraid that if we got married our husbands would make us stop diving!" They didn't act like they meant to stop diving any time soon. Little Mike's was the place to go on Saturday night. We went too early, the place was deserted and half dark. While we talked to the bartender a couple of people walked up behind us. One of them spoke. I'm 6'4" (193 cm) and moderately robust. I turned around to meet a guy who was inches taller, much wider and a lot thicker. He held out a hand, to scale with the rest of him, and said, "Hi. I'm Little Mike." Little Mike's father was the first Pohnpeian medical doctor, his mother Samoan. He was an example of hybrid vigor, as well as Samoan genes for size. Little Mike told us when to come back. We did, and had a blast, dancing with Pohnpeian girls. We worried that the local guys might resent us, but we all sat at a big table, and took turns buying rounds of beer. Little Mike's closed at the stroke of midnight in accordance with a Kolonia city ordnance. There was another place to go just outside the city limits, so we piled into our rented jalopy and went. There was a big crowd, including a couple dozen Filipino guys who worked at various jobs on Pohnpei, and a handful of Filipina girls who worked at hotels. Some of the Filipina girls kept walking past our table, so we asked them to dance. They ended up sitting with us, and the Filipino guys ended up giving us the stink eye. Sure enough, when the place closed up around 4 AM and we walked out into the parking lot, there were some Filipino guys waiting for us. I was worried about knives, since I wasn't packing one, and didn't see any big sticks handy to pick up. One of them walked up to me, said some bad stuff in Tagalog and took a roundhouse swing. I ducked, he went on around, fell down on the gravel, and was too drunk to get up. The big rumble ended when his buddies dragged him away to their cars. The last couple of days diving a Japanese girl showed up as part of the crew. She said she had been working in Kosrae. She was about five feet tall or a little less, weighed maybe 95 pounds, was really cute and wore a very tiny bikini. I asked her what Kosrae was like. She said, "Well for one thing there are no nude beaches!" Turned out she left home in Japan at age 18 and went to Spain to study flamenco dancing at the Amor de Dios studio in Madrid. After two or three years of that she headed out to the Pacific and went to work in the dive business. "To be flamenco dancer you have to be tall and big!" she said. Her Spanish was much better than her English, so I managed to monopolize the conversation. On the last day we went to the office to settle the bill. There were four or five Japanese guys there who acted like they had seen too many WW II movies. They had crew cuts, wore steel rimmed glasses, held their cigarettes funny, paused sententiously and exhaled streams of smoke thoughtfully before speaking. One of them asked me if any Japanese had ever dived at Kwajalein. I said I didn't think so. The Japanese flamenco dancer had wandered in just about that time. She said, "I'm changing jobs, heading to Bali, don't need to get there before next month. How do I get to Kwajalein to dive?" "The only way to dive there is with one of the two dive clubs on the American military base, one on Kwajalein island at the south end of the atoll, the other at Roi-Namur where we live at the north end. To go on the base you have to be invited by someone who lives there." She was the first Japanese to dive Kwajalein...and probably the first to put on a little flamenco show for the 175 Roi Rats. I don't know anything about the social structure at Pohnpei except what little I have read. In the Marshalls there is essentially no social mobility in a highly stratified society, and little business entrepreneurship in any American sense of the word. There were great Marshallese traditional navigators, at least up to the end of the 20th century. The Marshalls were first discovered by Europeans in the 16th century, but the inhabitants were decidedly hostile. When the white people finally showed up in considerable numbers in the 19th century the various Iroij were still almost constantly at war with one another. The big shot and his warriors went from atoll to atoll, eating up the surplus first at one place, then at the next, like the King of England did in the 12th century. When the fleet set out for the next place, all the navigators went with the Iroij in his voyaging boat--no risk of anyone striking out on their own. By contrast, at Palau, at the other end of Micronesia, there was considerable social mobility. If you worked hard, accumulated a surplus, and devoted it to the communal good, your social status went up. When the white people showed up there in the 19th century, they found an African American man who had jumped ship, used his knowledge and energy, and rose to the highest social class as a minor chief. Nowadays in Palau there is a lot of local enterprise: hotels, restaurants, dive operations, etc., much of it owned and most of it managed by local people. Very different from the Marshalls. I first went to Palau with Don H., my regular dive buddy some time in the early 1990s. We dove at Fish 'n Fins, which was started by Francis Toribiong, a local guy. Francis was in the process of retiring and selling the operation to an Israeli couple who had been running a live aboard dive boat there for a few years. Sam's Dive Tours was a much smaller operation, run by a young American. When Larisa and I went to Palau in 2007 we dove with Sam's . It was large, prosperous, and dominated the dive business on the island, though there were a number of other operations. I wondered how an American had done so well. Sam threw a big party to celebrate some anniversary of the business. I got talking to him and found out he was the stepson of Palau's highest hereditary chief, the Namwarki. The chief had married Sam's American mother, adopted Sam, and told Sam he wanted him to start a dive business, knowing Toribiong was starting to look at retirement. RNJ
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