A Cool Day in the Tropics

Today it rained - praise God! Possibly just 1/8th of an inch - but something. And it was cool and reminded me of a rainy day in Kiribati.

When we went to live at 3-degrees N-Lat; 0 degrees longitude, we took a lot of shorts and short-sleeves. We packed flip-flops (went through about 4 pairs of those) and sunglasses. But I'm glad we each brought a pair of jeans and a long-sleeve shirt, too, because even though the sun every day was much the same (as in "magnifying glass") whenever the sun gave us a break and it rained, our tropical hotspot actually felt chilly. The ocean would get foggy, pigs would lie in puddles in the middle of the road, and school would be canceled (pretty much everything stopped).

That usually meant reading a book in our hammock.

One time the weather was bad for maybe two weeks straight but seemed to be calming down. So we got on the boat with the Catholic Youth that was traveling to the capital. I had worked with Marian's counterpart, Merea, to write and direct a play about teenage suicide. Suicide was definitely a good description of getting on this boat. Dude, did you ever see Perfect Storm? It is no fun looking out and seeing a wall of water so high you cannot spot sky. Even the captain of the ship turned around - and we all know Kiribati seamen are fearless and a little insane. While the captain waited for a chance to head out again for Tarawa, we took our chance to return to shore. (Thanks, Biroun!) With us were two girls who had been so seasick they had to be peeled off the deck of the ship.

Occasionally when it rained we found ourselves walking into town to buy food. Besides, you couldn't stay in your hut all day without going a little nuts, and one got used to the puddles after a while (even if the pigs did pee in a good many of them). Kiribati families would be sitting on their bouias (BOO-yuhs) playing cards (such as Uno, Crazy Eights, and Sorry - yes, a card version of the board game - or Canasta). A very few would play chess. I was a card snob and refused to play because THEY NEVER SHUFFLED THEIR CARDS! It was like playing the same game over and over again. The I-Kiribati don't mind repitition much; I do.

Our first week on Marakei we got the bright idea to go looking for te manai -- crabs. We insisted on going in the afternoon, even though NO ONE went looking for crabs except at night. But we were told Marakei was known for crabs, and, by God, we were going to get us some. Some local women joined us in turning rocks over.

Then it started to rain. Now, that was back when I wore glasses. Here I was slipping in my wet flip-flops and trying not to fall on these very sharp coral rocks. Half-blind, I was not much worse a crab-catcher than I would have been had I been able to see. Our guides found us several small crabs and did what so many Kiribati do -- ripped off their limbs while they were alive. We were halfway home when Marian remembered we didn't have any kerosene for our stove - so we stopped at the largest store on the island (a one-room shack a little bigger than a walk-in closet) and got a bottle of kerosene, threw it in the "rice bag" with the dismembered crabs. We had brought some lentils from the capital and remembered we had some red pepper flakes to spice up the normally bland side. We were golden!

Too bad some kerosene had spilled on the crabs, the lentils were too dry and WAY too spicy, and we ended up burning the breadfruit we had borrowed from our neighbor. THAT was one true rainy day meal.

What had me thinking of Kiribati during our rainy day today was none of the above. It was our wet pup, Kope (Co-pay), who was getting a flea bath. His shaking reminded me of the day we adopted him, when he was truly a pup being played with by a group of boys in the surf. He was scrawny and mangy. And he had just won the lottery, because soon he was eating canned corned beef - a delicacy in those parts.

During rainy days in Kiribati, Kope would take long naps on our floor. Some things don't change. And I've got my long-sleeve shirt on, in August.