The Cook Islands and Fiji: A Thirty Years’ Retrospective of Living in Manihiki

By Barry Pomeroy

Thirty years have passed since I went to the Cook Islands and Fiji, and although the original record of my voyage has long been lost, when I sifted through my memories of that most seminal time in my life, the entire trip was still there waiting for me. My first time overseas, teaching, and living with a family, I found that what I’d been taught about people from other countries was vague and largely untrue. Instead, the tapestry of the Islanders’ way of life was much more complex, subtle, and even when I left I discovered aspects of their culture that surprised me.
I lived in the Cook Islands for four months, landing in Rarotonga where I found a placement in the northern Cooks, and then teaching high school on Manihiki. I travelled to the north by ship, by way of Aitutaki, Palmerston and Suwarrow, and visited the neighbouring island of Rakahanga while I lived in the northern Cooks. Traditional Maori culture still peeked out from under its colonial blanketing, and everywhere I went I was made to feel welcome. When my placement was done I flew to Fiji where I met other travellers, learned something of Fijian history and culture, and dreamed of floating a bamboo raft down the Sigatoka River.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barry Pomeroy
• Release date: Dec 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9781987922769

Barry Pomeroy

Barry Pomeroy is a Canadian novelist, short story writer, academic, essayist, travel writer, and editor. He is primarily interested in science fiction, speculative science fiction, dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction, although he has also written travelogues, poetry, book-length academic treatments, and more literary novels. His other interests range from astrophysics to materials science, from child-rearing to construction, from cognitive therapy to paleoanthropology.

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When tropical Cyclone Martin devastated the tiny atoll of Manihiki in the early hours of November 1st, 1997, few in North America knew what was happening on the other side of the planet. Even as four survivors were fighting for their lives by trying to sail to another island with a sleeping bag as a sail with their home island behind them devastated, the North American media concentrated on concerns closer to home.

The cyclone hit the country only a few years after I had lived there in 1991, and because in those pre-internet days international news did not travel like it does now, I didn’t know what had happened for nearly twenty years. Only when the internet was fully functional, and I was thinking back on that most seminal time of my life, did I think to search for the people that I had known. Foremost on the list was Ana Katoa, the principal in the school in Tauhunu, Manihiki, where I taught for a few months on a volunteer cross-cultural placement through Canadian Crossroads International.

The news articles I found were already old by that time, and that’s when I realized that the island I had so blithely imagined to have continued in the same vein as when I’d last seen it, had profoundly changed. The belated news that Cyclone Martin had devastated Manihiki and swept so many people to their deaths stirred up memories of my time on the island that I thought were long buried.

After I found the news article about the cyclone, I was late into the night scouring the internet looking for other old news pages so I could learn what had happened to the children I had taught—although now they would be adults—and the people I cared about most. I was twenty-five at the time and likely impressionable, but the people of Manihiki had stayed with me all those years. I often wondered how my students were doing and where they were now. I learned that not a building was left standing except for the old coral and lime church and that nineteen people had lost their lives. I found the story about Ana and her husband Willie Katoa’s harrowing escape when they were washed out to sea. They had endured largely due to her, her husband, and a neighbour’s survival tactics. They were swept into and then across the nine-kilometre lagoon and into the ocean. During that time they lost their hold on their own children, and that was a terrible loss to read about. I spent hours trying to find out if the children I knew and loved were still alive, but it wasn’t an easy search.

The wreckage from the disaster had finally reached Canadian shores, and too late I realized what those people had meant to me. As we get older and people pass in and out of our lives it is natural that we should forget some of them, but there are also others who have a deep hold on us. I wonder about close friends who disappeared in other ways, but I also can’t help but remember that tiny isolated atoll and the people on it who so long ago opened their homes to a strange foreigner who claimed to be a teacher, and taught me much about their culture and way of living.

Even now, a few years after I initially heard about the disaster, I looked again. I wondered how the people I knew over twenty years earlier endured not just the cyclone and the aftermath and cleanup, but the changes that and other events brought to their society. I guessed that my teacher friend, Api Dan, had likely died, since she was in her sixties then, but I looked for mention of her niece, my student Peretira, whose brash sense of humour was a delight if a disruption in the classroom.

Although at the time I had planned to keep a journal by writing letters to my girlfriend, I should have known that such a record in her unsteady hands would not last much longer than my trip. By the time I approached her about photocopying what I’d sent, the careful missives I wrote every day and posted once a week were gone. She informed me that they’d gotten wet in her house and that she’d pitched the lot. There was no record left, and I only had my unsteady memories of that time to guide me. Disheartened, I finally dismissed the notion of attempting to recover the story of my life on a tiny coral atoll in the middle of the South Pacific.

Only this year I realized, while talking to some of my friends about my travels in those times, that I remembered much more than I thought. With that in mind, I turned once again to the attempt to record what I remembered before it all disappeared from the world like the Manihiki that now only exists in the memories of those who have lived at sea level in the South Pacific. Luckily, my retelling the stories over the years had kept some of the information alive in my memory. I even recalled some dialogue, since I have the habit of quoting when telling such stories to friends.

I’ve written a few travel journals before, and some of them detail trips months long, such as How to get to Bangkok, my journal of my travels to Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Myanmar in 2004-2005, and the record of my next trip to Thailand: Going Back to Bangkok, from 2011. I also wrote a record of my road trips by RV in South America: South America by RV: Chile, Peru, and Argentina from 2017, and Uruguay, Brazil, and Argentina, from 2018. I kept a log book (Life on the Water) of my trips with the wooden sailboat that I’d built in 2005 and 2007, and a five hundred kilometre trip by canoe down the Saint John River in New Brunswick, Canada in 2004. I spent a few summers building and then living in a cabin, and recorded that venture in The Wish to Live Deliberately: Building a Cabin and its Consequences.

On each of those occasions I had kept a fairly careful diary so that I would not lose track of those minor details which slip out of recollection once the traveller returns. As well, I was careful to record my reactions to the world around me. The best time to make note of the story’s emotional content is while the impressions are fresh and before they become incorporated into the traveller’s notion of the world or glossed over with a new version.

Although my memories of living in the Cook Islands nearly thirty years ago are still clear, my experiences there have become part of my understanding of the world, and because of that, my memories are suspect. Such recollections by their nature are necessarily incomplete and modified by our notion of ourselves—although they are also, paradoxically, more accurate—as the more recent perspective helps to put them into a useful context.

Therefore, this attempt to record my voyage to an island which has slipped behind me now is as much an experiment in retrospective narration as it is an attempt to capture the trip I took to the Cook Islands and Fiji in the late spring of 1991.

The Idea of Travel

International travel was never part of my experience when I was young. Some of my peers in school had visited Europe but such trips were dependent on their parents’ wealth. In my case—a former foster child from rural New Brunswick—even the idea of international travel seemed impossible. That’s why I was twenty-five before it occurred to me that I could go to another country as well. By that time, I had moved to western Canada in order to finish my first degree, a long-term relationship had ended, and I was back in eastern Canada casting about for what I would study next.

I knew I wasn’t prepared to join the working world—given that I only had a general undergraduate degree in Arts and my options would be few—so I enrolled in a second BA program majoring in psychology and counselling, at least until University of New Brunswick decided that they didn’t offer a second BA after all. That year of study wasn’t entirely a waste, however, since I was to use those skills in subsequent years, and I became closer to my friend Lou. We spent that winter chatting about her volunteering in Botswana the previous year. She told me about her experiences, and introduced me to the African Student Union, which had a few hundred members at the university.

Once I joined that union, and went to their meetings and met many Africans and Caribbeans, I began to think about the possibility of traveling with the same organization Lou had used. Another friend, Natalie, had gone to Kenya, and they both praised the experience and claimed it to be—as trite as it sounds—life-changing. They met amazing people and reformed much of their outlook about their place in the world. I liked this aspect of it, and because I had little money at the time, I was even more attracted by the fact that someone else was paying for my plane ticket and providing a stipend for living expenses.

Although Canadian Crossroads International (CCI) was meant to be a cross-cultural organization and they used their Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) money to bring people from other countries as well, such organizations are sometimes collapsed with those which use their position of privilege to proselytize or engage in aid tourism.

Frequently aid is an excuse to get into the country and proselytize, for many of these organizations are religious in orientation. Although I don’t know the percentage, I would guess they are more made up of Christians of various stripes than other faiths. The Christian mandate attempts to ensure that their true god becomes everyone else’s true god, at nearly any price. After the Boxing Day Tsunami such religious aid packages—where food was dangled over the heads of recalcitrant heathens by over-zealous Christian groups—was made illegal in Sri Lanka. The first law of its kind, it was a legislative acknowledgement of what most people already suspected: that starving people to make them worship your god might be religious but is hardly Jesus-like.

More than a few of the non-proselytizing organizations, and there are many, would prefer to send privileged people from the west to enjoy the other country than to put their money to better use in the community. Thus, we have Habitat for Humanity teaching unskilled teenagers from the west how to build houses in a poor country where most people are capable of building their own home but cannot afford the supplies. The teenagers have a great trip, they get to bond with other teenagers from their own country, and in the process learn some useful skills. They have also, in their minds, earned bragging rights back home. The houses get built, although the price of shipping our overfed youth would have built far more houses and could have been used to employ skilled craftspeople locally.

The organization I went overseas with had more in common with World University Service of Canada (WUSC) than the religious groups. CCI began as a group under the auspices of the church, but it threw off the spread-the-word yoke and instead began to focus on cross-cultural understanding. With that in mind, they chose largely middle-class university students, although some older people became involved, and shipped them to a set of countries where their skills—if they had any—could be of use. The main purpose was not condescension-flavoured helping, however, for they were more interested in what a young person from Canada might learn about the other culture and their own place in the global environment by observing the situation of others. Their rationale for sending the overfed on expensive jaunts was slightly more tenable, although perhaps the outcome was the same. At least with CCI we stayed with a host family, learned some of the local language and culture, and mixed with the community rather than kept to compounds and only socialized with those who had come with us.

Lou still knew people who were involved in CCI, and it was a simple matter to apply and then begin the lengthy procedure which would allow me to volunteer overseas. The first hurdle to going overseas with CCI was a highly questionable selection process, however. The particular vicissitudes of the set of meetings that led to my selection procedure was due more to the local selection group than the organization in general, although it is worth revisiting the experience for it coloured my initial ideas about travelling and living abroad. There were three animateurs at the first meeting, somewhere outside Halifax in Nova Scotia, but I only remember one of them. Sandy was particularly memorable because she was very controlling and manipulative. As well, I had met her before at the Atlantic Earth Festival in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia on the weekend that my girlfriend and I broke up. That wasn’t a pleasant weekend, and although I didn’t remember meeting Sandy or speaking to her, she had her own ideas about me from that point onward. She tried to hijack the meetings’ proceedings to this effect, but we made our way through the meeting relatively unscathed.

Like the others, I was suspicious that the weekend of fun and exercises, such as icebreakers and other social games, were part of the judging process. One of the exercises came right after they told us we were already accepted into the program. We are no longer judging your suitability, Sandy told us. Everyone present was going overseas and we should just enjoy ourselves.

Perhaps she thought we were being too wooden, or that she was not getting to the heart of each person’s unfitness, in Sandy’s terms. In any event, the evening before the session ended, we were encouraged to take large pieces of paper and draw our life line. We were to make a road map of where we had been, our traumas and history, and our hopes and fears for the future. Each person dutifully got their coloured pencils and set to.

The participants took Sandy at her word, and they were embarrassingly open as they disclosed their greatest fears about going overseas. Some of them disclosed personal information that it was apparent they felt sensitive about afterward. Perhaps because I had been a foster kid, I wasn’t inclined to trust Sandy’s statement about the animateurs suspending judgement. I took the exercise for what it turned out to be.

I was suspicious because the exercise sounded like such a great way to get to the heart of something people would be reluctant to say if they felt they were being judged. I drew a picture of a face, and then wrote some of the lines of a poem I was writing that went on to become the book-length poem in dialogue called Multiple Personality Disorder. After, we were encouraged to hold up our timeline and tell the rest about it. Mine revealed little about my personality, except perhaps that I was interested in writing and was a terrible sketch artist. Other people talked about abuses they had suffered, their fear of people not liking them, recent breakups, medical issues, and a host of more mundane issues. I watched Sandy, but she gave no sign that any of this concerned her.

The animateurs sat down after all of the prospective travellers went home, and decided who they would allow to go. Another of the animateurs, Tim, told me later that he was uncomfortable with the lying to the volunteers, and that he felt they deserved more respect than that. Unfortunately, Sandy shouted him down and achieved the result she wanted. They sent out letters after that weekend to all who attended, telling them that the weekend was a success and informing them of whether or not they had been found fit or judged to be wanting.

Lou had told me that Sandy’s stove had two settings, hot and off. Because Lou knew Sandy she was privy to the meeting which happened after the weekend was over and we had gone home secure in the knowledge that we had all been accepted. In the meeting Sandy said she had misgivings about all of the candidates from Fredericton. I had gone to the meeting with two other women who weren’t associated with the university but were nonetheless in their early twenties. They were quite conservative, although that didn’t stand out amongst those at the weekend session. Most of the candidates were urban, middle-to-upper middleclass, and conservative in their values. This was not seen to be a problem since the animateurs were the same. Unfortunately, the two women from Fredericton were also not very friendly, and seemed standoffish to the animateurs, although I think most people thought they were merely shy.

The committee felt that Sandy might be right about them, and they suggested that the two women be questioned about whether they were ready for the jump of living in another country with a local family. The committee differed on the question of my fit, however. Sandy pushed for rejecting me from the program entirely, although she was vague about her reasons. She had taken a dislike to me in the summer at the festival, but she could hardly use that as proof, so she suggested that I also didn’t fit in with their demographic. The other animateurs disagreed. They thought since I had gone around and said goodbye to the people I’d become friends with before I left, and shared hugs, that I was more than open. Sandy said she thought I was tricking the system, and she didn’t like me, but that didn’t prove convincing enough—luckily for my trip—for them to agree that I should be excluded.

Once this information which proved my suspicion was shared with our group of three, the two women were understandably dismayed. They had already received their warning and had begun to suspect that Sandy had lied about not being judged just before the exercise where people were encouraged to be vulnerable, and now they had proof, of a kind. They didn’t make their decision right away, but they soon dropped the program.

I’m not a fan of such lies, but the program itself looked worthy of support, so I began to fundraise on the campus and in community clubs. We were responsible for raising two thousand dollars to pay our share. The rest of the cost of the flight was paid for and we were guaranteed a stipend which was meant to pay our living expenses. Although two thousand was a lot of money, I had the dual advantage of being the only recipient from my year at my university, and of doing my fundraising as the fiscal year came to an end in March. The Office of the Dean of Students, for instance, gave me over a thousand dollars just because they had earmarked funding for someone else who couldn’t use it and they needed to use up their money or lose it for the following year.

The University of Women’s Club gave me fifty dollars, and the Odd Fellows Club two hundred. If I remember correctly the Student Union gave me some money as well, and perhaps a couple of other service clubs on campus. In the end, I only had to put in a hundred of my own money, and I could report to the main office in Halifax that I had raised the money required.

We were encouraged to select what countries or continent we might want for our placement, and I picked somewhere in Africa—so that I could travel around after my volunteering stint—and South East Asia, as well as somewhere in South America. I wasn’t overly surprised that I was given the Cook Islands, although it didn’t match anything I had expressed interest in. The departure from my stated interest didn’t really matter, however, for I had never been overseas and only rarely outside the country—such as trips in the United States—so any place was bound to be interesting.

We were leaving in the early summer, so we still needed to have one more meeting in late winter with the animateurs before we all met in Toronto for our last meeting and various flights in different directions.

The last meeting in the Maritimes was held in a beautiful retreat east of Halifax on the coast of Nova Scotia. There we met with the same two animateurs, Sandy and Tim, and a new one, Colin, who was eating only fruit and was quite passionate about that diet, although it didn’t prove to last very long. We began to talk more seriously about what we needed to be prepared for in our various countries, and although I only remember fragments of those meetings, I recall a few of the exercises and some of the stuff that was said. For instance, we were told that we were going to encounter behaviours we would not be able to explain. The people overseas were going to be irrecoverably strange, and some of their habits, behaviour, and cultural ways of being were going to be opaque to us. They told us that would be the case, but that we should persevere. There were always going to be things we would not understand, but we must learn to accept that.

I objected to this belief, at first to myself and them more loudly as the jingoist implications of the statement sunk in. I couldn’t help but believe that people overseas were not that different than us, and that if they did something we didn’t understand it would take little explanation in order to make out why they were doing it. I didn’t expect to find the entirely different order of being that we were being warned about, although I was cautioned that I had never travelled and therefore could not expect to guess what we might encounter. That was true, and although the idea repulsed me, I had to admit I didn’t know enough to argue against it.

The animateurs had also chosen exercises in which we were responsible for another person in a blindfold game. I blindfolded Kelly from Toronto who would end up in Accra, Ghana, and led her around the grounds of the retreat on the Nova Scotia coast, encouraging her to put her hands on dead jellyfish and in other ways having fun.

Another memorable exercise was one in which we played the part of either someone in a developing nation or the global north in a fairly standard feast or famine exercise. I was awarded the chance to sit at the table with the other rich representatives, with all the food we wanted, while others sat on the floor and ate with their hands out of one pitifully inadequate bowl of rice. We were to feel how those in developing nations felt, although the people at my table took their status more seriously than I was comfortable with. They bragged about the amount and quality of their food and made fun of those on the floor. In that way, they perfectly mimicked the wealthy people they were to represent, as well as their own exalted status as a middleclass white Canadian.

I had argued that I belonged on the floor when I was chosen to represent the wealthy, and finally, becoming annoyed at the behaviour of my rich peers, I began to throw cookies to those who requested it from amongst the world’s poor. This was not received well, and I was told I was ruining the exercise. I told them I was an aid truck, arriving in a village and dispensing foreign aid. I was thrown out of the rich table, so, mining it for transportable snacks, I joined my compadres on the floor where I was better appreciated, and I felt, better understood.

Although the lies from the previous meeting had caused some discussion amongst the volunteers, no one was prepared to mention it when they were so close to leaving on their trip. I was more annoyed than most, it seemed, for I despise being lied to and I felt it was so unfair to trick this vulnerable group under circumstances in which they felt safe. At the next meeting, I watched carefully as Sandy approached a fellow volunteer and asked her to draw a card for someone who couldn’t attend. After everyone signed the card, Sandy (not being able to resist showing her consummate skill at manipulation) announced that the artist also had to leave early and Sandy had asked her to make the card so that she would feel included. For me, this confirmed that Sandy was a person for whom manipulation was as natural as breathing and as toxic as mustard gas to everyone else.

Later, still on the first evening of the second meeting, we were asked to tell the group our greatest fears about going overseas. Of course, people were much more circumspect now; they remembered what had happened the last time they were asked to divulge and no longer believed the claim that we were no longer being judged. I spoke up finally, about what had been bothering me. I said, I am concerned that Crossroads has lied to us. That bomb dropped solidly into the now-silent room.

What do you mean? an animateur asked me while Sandy glowered in the background.

We were told at our last meeting, months ago, that we were no longer being judged, just before an exercise in which we were asked to divulge our greatest hopes and fears.

Sandy adjourned the meeting immediately by calling everyone to go into the other room, but a few curious people—even ushered along as they were—asked me about it and I told them what I knew. Sandy requested a meeting with me and the other animateurs where she told me I was sabotaging the weekend. I was told not to mention that they had lied and that Lou had no business uncovering the falsehood. She took no responsibility for her actions, and although the other animateurs looked uncomfortable with their complicity, she seemed proud of what she’d accomplished.

More than a few others approached me for information, but we knew were powerless unless we wanted to scupper our chances at the trip. Tim privately agreed that Sandy’s behaviour was unethical, and said he’d spoken against it, but that it was done and we must move on.

I met with Darrell a few times, who was another participant who was going to the Cook Islands. He was a bit pretentious, and immature, but otherwise seemed nice enough. He sounded a few sour notes, such as when he got Tim’s guitar and then dominated the social time and prevented conversation by playing pieces of songs. He was very interested in his ability on guitar, and skipped from song to song to show how many styles he knew, without letting his impromptu audience hear a song all the way through.

For me, however, the more telling feature of his personality was his comment about a fellow participant. The room he was staying in was attached to and behind another room with participants, and he gleefully told me that he had gone to his room and found one of the women changing. She was apparently pulling her shirt down over her head when he walked through, so he had a full view of her without her underwear. For him this was a furtive delight, although I only thought about how these were fellow participants and we’d already discussed how a woman might be treated differently overseas than a man.

The meeting wrapped up with no more drama, and we went to our homes fully expecting