danaleeling

This year coronation was separated from Founding Day. The committee made the decision to hold coronation at 4:00 P.M. on March 30th, the eve of the Rahn en Tiahk cultural holiday here on Pohnpei. None of the numbers below should be quoted as being factually correct, these are what I thought I heard the announcer say. Blue team, Pohnpei national, came in third runner up with $300.00 contributed to the endowment fund. The start of the ceremony was slightly delayed awaiting the arrival of Mimi-Lane Weital, the blue princess. Alex Alexander is the prince. White team, Chuuk, were the second runner up with $646.57. If I understood the announcer correctly, $586.53 of that was obtained here on island, home island fund raising apparently raised the remainder. Jessica Reyes and Artray Irons are the princess and prince. Red team, Yap, were the first runner up with $1100 dollars. Jeanie Gabriel and Dominic Gadad were the princess and prince.   Green team, Kosrae, capture...

After spending the day in the sun down at a funeral down in Kitti for a friend, family member, former student, and a teacher at the local high school. the floral morphology class was certainly a change of pace. Of course the flowers bloom in the sun, and my students are somewhat adverse to standing in the equatorial sun. I was already sunburned and had spent the day reminded that the sun is a part of life on Pohnpei. Funerals are also a reminder of the social order here on Pohnpei, so I leaned slightly on my weak command of local language (the class is predominantly composed of Pohnpeian speakers) to order the students out into the sunshine to look at flowers.   Hymenocallis littoralis or the beach spider lily covered with ants This term I did not want to start in the classroom. I did not pull out the flower model nor did I explain floral formulas. The class is SC/SS 115 and while I covered the four whorls orally in the field, I also swung over to the SS side of the dual appe...

Ohigan, a clean up. In late February 2003 Kazuhide Aruga of Japan visited the College of Micronesia-FSM. He came to visit the Haruki cemetery and pay his respects to the graves of his elder brother and younger sister, Natsue. Although the remains of the adults were exhumed after World War II and returned for reburial in Japan, there were apparently infants buried in unmarked graves. Thus the site remains a cemetery due to the presence of human remains. Kazuhide Aruga was born on 11 November 1936 in Palikir, Pohnpei. The elder brother died after a couple weeks of life. This happened before Kazuhide Aruga was born and the elder brother was either unnamed when he died or his name was not known to the younger Kazuhide Aruga. His younger sister was named Natsue. Although Kazuhide Aruga could not remember the exact location of the graves, he seemed to remember the general area as indeed being the location of the original cemetery. At ten years old Kazuhide Aruga had left for Japan...