Note: This blog entry is about liquid precipitation, not the star of “Ninja Assassin”.
It’s really wet here. Kolonia town, where I live and work, gets just under 200 inches of rain annually, but the mountain peaks at the interior of the island receive an estimated 400. However, since many people have never heard of our islands, Pohnpei often and unjustly does not make the top ten lists of “wettest places on earth.” Having lived for a year and a half in one of those places, I think about rain a lot.
Each morning, I spend a few moments deciding whether it will rain during my walk to school. I consider hooded jackets, umbrellas, sometimes ponchos. If it’s already pouring when I am ready to leave the house, I might wear a skirt that is different than the one I plan to wear for the day, knowing that when I get to school, the lower half of my body will be drenched, and I will need to look at least somewhat presentable for my students.
At school, I live in constant fear of the rain. Each time I’m about to leave a classroom, I peer at the sky and wonder if it will burst open and blow liters of rain through the open windows while I’m gone; I usually close them when I leave to be safe. Each time I walk from my classroom to the main building to use the bathroom, I walk as fast as I can in case it starts pouring while I’m there, thus preventing me from walking back to the classroom in time for my next class. Sometimes, in the middle of a lesson, a crazy storm will wreak havoc in my classroom. The windows will slam suddenly shut, any loose papers on the students’ desk will waltz around the room together, and the door will slam. The rain will be so loud that no matter how well I project my voice, my students – bodies leaned forward, head turned slightly to position one ear in my direction, faces scrunched up in that familiar way that means, “I have no idea what you are saying” – cannot make out a single word of my lesson. I laugh helplessly and sink into my chair, and they sit back and grin, silently (and sometimes quite loudly) thanking God for this gift that has caused their teacher to be quiet for a few glorious minutes.
The walk home from school isn’t so much of a concern – if I end up soaking wet, which is often, I will just change once I walk in the door, and hang my clothes up to dry. Late at night, I sometimes postpone my bedtime in hopes of a heavy rain – there’s nothing like drifting to sleep, cool and dry in my bed, as the rain falls, angry on the tin roof. (Thanks for getting stuck in my head every time, Edwin McCain.)
In my seventeen months of intensive meteorological ponderings, I’ve been able to discern the direction from which the storms blow in, and even how strong a storm will be. I used to marvel at the ability of our groundskeeper, Immanuel, to show up at school in the morning and say, “it will rain all day today”, and go home, but now I, too, can determine these days – the difference being that I am not exempt from my job in the event of poor weather.
Despite my revelations, I am usually overly confident in my abilities to dodge raindrops, and, discovering that I am not a duck, often find myself immobilized by the rain. I will have been on my way to the post office, or from the container store where I bought a mid-day, off-brand cherry cola. The rain will be light at first, refreshing even, but then -things change. I can hear the heavier rain coming, ominous, before I feel it on my skin. I'm never quite certain where the sound is coming from – behind me or before me, depending on how the storm is blowing in, or sometimes directly above me, as one standing beneath an overturned bucket would hear the water splashing against itself as it descends… the sound of impending liquid doom. The only certainty in my mind is that I need to find cover. NOW.
There will be an awning, a large tree, or, in the worst of cases, a very small tree that is not keeping me dry at all. Whether successful or in vain, I will cower under these objects and curse the rain, curse the heavens that sent it, curse my stupidity and lack of umbrella, curse my skin for not being made of duck feathers. It is during these times that I think about rain the most. More specifically, I think about the differences between the Pohnpeian reaction to rain, and my own.
When I was trying to pack for my two years here, I was told by someone who had lived on the islands that, considering the amount of annual rainfall, utilizing an umbrella would make me the "island idiot." I decided to risk my dignity and pack a small yet fashionable, collapsible, purple umbrella. Upon arrival on the island, I discovered that there were enough white folk (who, really, do so many things other than umbrella usage that make us island idiots), as well as a number of Filipinos and others, who use umbrellas that it would be relatively safe to do the same.
My handy umbrella gets a lot of use, but as I mentioned, sometimes an umbrella just isn’t enough, especially when the winds are strong. But why, I wondered in those first days on Pohnpei, did I seem to be the only one that arrived at my destination soaked? How do Pohnpeians navigate the rains when they’re not even using umbrellas? How are they staying dry? It didn’t take me long to discover their strategy – and what a simple strategy it is: find a dry spot and don’t move. It’s essentially what I had been doing under my awnings and trees, but I failed to mention that my American impatience and anxiety usually had me conceding to the skies within minutes – at the first sign it was letting up, or sometimes even before then. I had places to be! Things to do! Classes to teach! Documents to author! And so, my attitude had to be, “whatever – I’ll just get wet.” I would go lunging into the falling water, my mind cursing my legs’ decision.
When I find myself stuck in the rain here, car-less and with long distances to walk for the first time in my life, those words run through my head every time: “whatever – I’ll just get wet.” I discovered that Pohnpeians have the same attitude, but with the opposite result: “whatever – I’ll just stay here and miss whatever I was on my way to do.” Rain presents a great opportunity to pause, sometimes for an hour or more, under that awning or tree. There are many options for occupying oneself during this long pause. I’ve watched people hum or sing to themselves and sway back and forth, chew betelnut, laugh at the white people dodging the puddles, or strike up a conversation with other waiters – sometimes a full conversation, sometimes just: “Uhdahn kotou rahnwet!” (“It’s really raining today!”) Another option is to run through the rain like a child, laughing so hard that crying is inevitable. Waiting under my awning just yesterday, two grown Pohnpeian men ran past me in a laughing fit, running and splashing in the puddles. One following the other, the man in the lead ducked behind a car while the other man wasn't looking, circled the car, and ended up running behind the other man, switching their order. This sent them into absolute hysterics. I don’t know where they were going, if anywhere, but I wanted to join them. The one thing Pohnpeians don’t do during the rain is look worried, angry, or upset in any way – which white people have decided is an absolute requirement for getting stuck in the rain.
There’s a reason for the sour looks; the Western perspective of rain is universally negative. We are acclimatized to adages that reinforce this outlook. Children sing in desperation, “Rain, rain, go away! Come again some other day!” Dolly Parton imparts her wisdom upon us that “if you want the rainbow, you have to put up with the rain,” and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow reminds us that “into each life, some rain must fall.” The gist of these sayings is that rain, though unavoidable and unpleasant, will soon be gone from us, and in the meantime, we can take comfort in the fellowship of the whole world in that we all experience some rain. In this way, rain is sort of like one’s mother-in-law.
Even the language I’ve used here to describe rain is largely negative – “poor weather,” “impending liquid doom.” Rain ruins things, as Barbara Streisand’s number from “Funny Girl” regarding her parade can attest. Just for fun, I typed “rain ruins” into a Google search, and came up with 165,000 results, mostly news reports of the various world events that have apparently been devastated by something so simple as drops of water. Rain ruins T20 opening ceremony, rain ruins racing at Coffs club, rain ruins Portuguese test session, rain ruins West Indies’ chance, and rain ruins Wednesday’s activities. An especially somber news report is simply entitled, “Rain Ruins Day.” In the United States and elsewhere, the phrase that must be uttered before any major event is: “let’s just pray it doesn’t rain.” Even when the rain is not busy ruining things, Igor from Young Frankenstein soundly expresses our Western style of optimism: “It could be worse. It could be raining.” And, without fail, the rain begins to fall.
But between being upset and anxious during those hard rains, I’ve been passively observing for the past seventeen months. My conclusion: I haven’t seen a single Micronesian upset about the rain. I guess they’ve had a lot more rain to get used to than many others around the world, but I find their attitude calming and inspiring. “Whatever.” My attitude was "whatever," too, but I didn't mean it. I'm usually pretty upset about the general outcome - which is to say, me, soaking wet - of the battles between me and the rain. (The current score: Samantha, 2; Rain, 393.) I’m not saying rain doesn’t ruin things. Aside from important events, heavy rains can ruin roads, infrastructure, plants, clothes, and womens’ hairstyles. It keeps us from appointments, helps us get into terrible accidents, and makes dogs smell horrible. But instead of getting upset about rain and, symbolically, the many other misfortunes that come our way in life, what if we adopted a different attitude?
Langston Hughes had a different attitude about rain. “Let the rain kiss you. Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops. Let the rain sing you a lullaby.”
No impending liquid doom there.
There’s a loose translation of “whatever” into Pohnpeian – “sohte lipilipil.” It literally means “not choosy/selective,” but is used more casually to mean, “it doesn’t matter” when faced with a choice or unpleasant life situation. It’s the Pohnpeian attitude to most of the “rain” – literal and figurative – that visits us all. It is what it is - no point in getting upset. Just wait it out - this, too, shall pass. Whatever.
