Diahdi

Tay here again, posting a couple more pictures whilst we're in town.

This is at Nahlap, a small island off the coast of mainland Pohnpei. Pete's holding a local speargun, getting ready to swim out past the breakers and shoot some fish.

Part of our family lives next to our house most of the time, but also goes back to their rural house in Diahdi every so often. One of the children was having her 1st birthday party back in February and Lilly invited us to come along. We drove down the ring road a ways, and then started a 2 mile trek straight into the jungle to get to the house. This view greeted us at the top of a hill, looking back where we'd come from.

Nano, Malakai, Pete, Lilly, and Sinana lead the way.

Once there, the family went out fishing and caught our lunch.

While we stay there, we only eat freshly caught fish, fresh breadfruit, the occaisonal freshly caught crab, and rice. And everything is cooked with coconut milk, which is made from the coconuts the boys climb to get.

And here are some of the kids playing games with us in the kitchen.

More Pictures!

Lehlie maing ko, it's a beautiful Friday in Pohnpei and it's Taylor here, attempting to share some more pictures with you all.
Pete and I have had some really exciting adventures in the past few weeks, including another trip out to Nahlap, becoming a science teacher (briefly), and finally getting to the top of a coconut tree!

This picture is from our Nahlap trip. We went with a couple of the other WT volunteers and another mehnwai friend. It was a really beautiful and relaxing trip, except that when it got dark, Pete and I realized we couldn't sleep! The bugs, heat, rats, mice, geckos, coral injuries, sand fleas, and lack of bedding made for a rough night. So while I was wandering the small island in the morning wrought with insomnia, I found this lovely feast! The whole entire hermit crab community, it seemed, was munching on this mature coconut, it was all very cute.



Now what we have here was Pete's first coconut-tree-summit ever! Very exciting. He finally reached the top and got his first ever coconut. Let me tell you, it's definitely much harder than the locals make it look!
While I still haven't even attempted climbing, I did get to scrape my own coconut meat and make the milk from it myself the other night, which was an hour-long experience. I tore off the coconut husk with the help of a metal pole and scraped the meat out with a sort of bench/scraper thing. After I soaked the meat to get the milk, Pete cooked a delicious spinach and potatoes curry with it.




























Here's the proud guy now! With his delicious, delicious, uhp.

















This is one of the babies who lives in the family we basically live with, taking a bath in the middle of the forest. His name's Tristan and he's just over 1 1/2 years old.
The bathtub is right next to our manual washing machine behind our house, just next to a huge drop-off into a valley with a little river/creek thing. I just thought it was in interesting sight, having a bathtub right in the middle of the greenery.
And yes, everything here is this green.










Ok, so I'm just going to post a whole bunch of pictures because it looks like they upload on this site a whole lot faster than flickr or facebook. This is just a picture of me while we were at Nahlap. We built a fire and roasted some meat some other vols had brought and played tons of different card games, dominoes, yahtzee, chess, and backgammon.








This is a kitten in a food coma, cutest coma ever. The cat's unofficial name is "sweetie," but we call her/him Professor Cereal. S/he lives in the Nahs with other family, but escapes the torture the little children inflict upon him/her daily by running up to our house. I really wish we could just keep her/him, but s/he tries to pee all over our house and there's just no way to keep the kids from getting at her/him. But the cats are all kinda figuring out I'm a huge softie for kitties, so they frequent our porch, just looking for some extra food scraps or love.








This is back at Keproi Waterfall. Rolmy decided to take a daring leap from one of the super wet slippery rocks up next to the falls. Rico and Anthony are the two climbing up after her, and John is swimming in the pool below.















A too-dark-but-too-bad picture of Pete and me at the waterfall.

Pete and I finally made it out to Nan Madol, the ancient ruins, on Saturday, so I'll try to put up some pictures of that later. Hope you all are well!