Choir songs and swine, balloons and bubblegum

The road leading up to the new church in Tafunsak is strung along with balloons and a long line of cars, pick-up tracks packed with people in the back. It is a pile up of traffic that I will likely never see again on the island. I take in the scene from the back of my host family's truck, snapping a couple of photos, ducking to avoid palm branches.

After we park and hop out of the truck, we are each handed a tupperware container stuffed with food. Each one has at least two hard boiled eggs, chicken legs, bacon, ham, pork chops, muffins, cake, rice, breadfruit. Towels tied with ribbon into wreaths are placed atop our heads, and necklaces of gumballs manufactured in the Philippines are strung around our necks. It's supposed to feel festive; I mostly feel ridiculous.

Along with roads lined with flags and families, there's hundreds of pig carcasses along the side of the road. You could hear the squeals of the slaughters the night before. Some Kosraeans had stayed up all night preparing the pigs, thousands and thousands of dollars worth of meat. It's expected that hundreds of pigs will be killed for the holiday, a show of generosity and a tradition for big events that has made the slaughtering of the pigs a social expectation. The same expectation to give permeates the church service. A poster has been set up outside of the doors listing each church on the island and how many tens of thousands of dollars have been raised at each to put towards the construction of the new church that we are now piling into. The people around me go up to the front time and time again to give money in between choir songs delivered by Kosraeans coming from Honolulu, Seattle, Phonopei and all around Kosrae. It's hard knowing that people are going into debt for this, that people buy food on credit here on a regular basis, because they don't have enough to feed their families and yet here they are handing out forty or fifty dollars. Apparently shops shut down, because they let their customers pay with credit, allow friends and family (because everyone here falls into the friends and family category basically) to owe money that they don't have in exchange for a can of corned beef or a bottle of soy sauce.

Still, I hope to pick up some of this generosity, absorb the attitude that you give what you have, no questions asked. Owning is sharing, borrowing is giving. I went to my host family's house to have lunch out of that tupperware, that pre=packaged feast that we had picked up in the morning, and they loaded me up with bananas, sent me home with coconuts and soda. I kept shaking my head, saying I didn't need it, but they insisted. You take what you're given, you give what you get, you give what you don't even really have; that's just how it works.