Eating well, the Hospital, and Utwe again

    Kosraean tangerines and oranges.      

 I must be half Kosraean by now.  At least Stella is helping me along the way.  She knows how to find food growing on trees and harvest it without antagonizing the neighbors.

[Last week, the kids from Sansrik Elementary School across the way sent their risk-taker up the tree in my neighbor's yard to shake the branches and make the tangerines rain down.  Needless to say the neighbor was not happy.  How universal was that?]

At Sterling Skilling's funeral we were given food to see us through the wait.  Here you see the banana leaf wrapper of 'om' cooked hard taro (on the plate).  The taste is smokey.  The consistency is hard (like cooked ??? maybe overcooked brownies) and totally mesmerizing.  I put slices in my bowl of papaya, tangerines and banana; the smokey flavor carried the fruit into another place altogether.   An 'om' is a pit in the ground with a fire at the bottom, food steamed and baked on top of that. 

 The Japanese Farmer (5 minute walk north of me but produce only available for minutes after he puts it out around 8 am) sells wonderful eggplants and okra.  He also often has roma tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, and little red peppers that will blow your top off!

 I got carrots at Nelson's (ACE) grocery, almost always in stock, along with garlic and onions.  This all made a delicious vegetable stew augmented by a spice mix sent to me by Candy: berbere from Ethiopia.  With the little red pepper, the spice mix made the dish HOT!

On top of my frig, thanks to Glenice's insights and advice, sit my Morton's salt and a separate jar containing an aliquot of salt, nestled in rice and clamped shut with a clip.  If not this way, it becomes all a big sloppy liquidy crystal block of salt mess.  Likewise the garlic salt is in a similar situation (on rice, in the bowl).

I also  have on top of my frig my Katadyn water filter from REI.  Last year I swore by it.  This year I loaned it to a neighbor, because --- I didn't need it! Alaina and Alice taught me that heating up a kettle of water in the electric tea pot amounts to boiling the water for a minute.  After that, cooled down, the water is safe to drink.  I usually heat up at least two kettles a day, maybe three.  When cooled I pour the water into a pitcher I keep in the frig, and sometimes I pour extra into plastic bottles I store water in for when I need to wash lettuce, or something else.

Just up the street, there is a little shop that sells sushi and musubi especially for the school kids.  Even though, often, I do not need any extra food, I stop by and buy something because it is good and they are good cooks.  Here you see my sushi rolls and musubi.

They also sell "Ice Schemet" a frozen cup of coconut milk and rice with some sweetenter.  It's delicious. This batch was gifted to me by Delphia of the Clam Farm, she is the pizza maker behind Dominic's Pizza.

       

A standard purchase at roadside shops is donuts or donut holes.  I can hardly resist them, they are very good with coffee in the morning --- which, by the way: I make my morning coffee the night before by dissolving Nescafe in boiling water.  I put the cup in the frig.  In the morning I drink ice cold coffee and am so very at home.

Now, as for these reef fish.  Generally speaking, I have an adventure every time I buy and then cook fish.  These cuties were no exception.  I bought them fresh but because I was going out to the Ka Forest the person who sold them to me put them in the freezer.  When I came back they were nearly frozen, so I put them in my freezer and came back to them recently.  I defrosted them in the frig.  I tried to scale them to no avail.  Glenice suggested to me hot water would help.  She also told me steaming them might be better than frying (for my tummy, which was giving me a little trouble.)  So, I put the fish into the frying pan with some water, and LO and BEHOLD the scales came right off.  The meat was white and fluffy and delicious.  The head/tail/bones went out in a plastic bag to the garbage truck as soon as I could.  The kitchen smelled a little fishy for a couple of days.  I'm working on it.  Learning.  The fish are beautiful and delicious.

Friends stopped by and gifted me a rack of bananas (small, sweet yellow ones) along with coconuts and tangerines.  

My normal breakfast is onion and cabbage stir fried with an egg, spooned over rice with soy sauce.

OK.  Now for a little bit about the hospital!

 This is the entry.  I park there or below, by the sign here naming the hospital after Dr. Arthur P. Sigrah.  The hospital is a one story building that wraps around U shaped.  Just inside the main entrance (where you see the poster boards) is the Records Room where I work.  Across the hall is the Triage/Emergency Room.  The building that I work in is mostly administrative and intake.  What you see in the photo (entry to the right) is the part of the hospital with beds for about 40 patients.  To the left is another building for Public Health and I think, if I'm not mistaken, diabetes care and midwifery.  Beyond this area to the back are a collection of containers that were brought in for Covid isolation units.  They are now used for a variety of purposes including temporary lodging, offices, and storage.

They are on track to build a new hospital.  The picture shows the construction office and there are signs all around warning of heavy duty traffic.  They are excavating the hillside by the quarantine units.  I believe the new hospital will be placed where the Public Health wing now sits.  It will be such an improvement and so supportive of the staff who work here.  The new hospital will have fewer beds but a bigger lab, more equipment and be much better able to serve.

The Records Room, one file at a time (one minute per page, average 15 pages per file, 13,000 files to go) will free itself of paper files and become a modern reservoir of electronic records and retrieval.  I'm glad to have been part of this effort.

         

Last Friday was a most perfect day in Kosrae.  The sky was blue, filled with white puffy clouds.  It was not too hot.  There was a breeze but not windy.  We rented kayaks in Utwe and took off across the bay.  Uh Oh.  The kayak Stella and I were in became way too tippy for the weather/water; we realized we had taken on water through cracks in the bottom.  We tipped and sank!  Nick tied us on to his kayak and towed us back -- the most delightful swim I've had on Kosrae!

We started over.  Went out to the mangroves and pursued a serpentine stream deep into the forest.  It became very quiet, some birds, paddle sounds on the water, a turtle!  Magical.  We almost couldn't find our way out, though Nick utilized his compass on his iPhone and we did find the bay again.

We realized our second kayak was also taking on water, so stopped at a small coral beach to drain it, then continued into Utwe Ma.  This is a protected estuary where there is a Biosphere preserve.  We were the only people there.  An abandoned 'resort' sits at one end of the estuary; we pulled our kayaks up onto the coral beach and took naps or snorkeled.  At one point, we three sat in shoulder-deep water, on the sand, and watched minnows flying silver in the setting sun. 

 A perfect afternoon.

        

One last note, a connect to an earlier post:

Here is the cute little japanese clothes washer I use.  On the left you can see what I saw when I first approached it.  I thought it was digital.  I tried and tried to push the buttons and make it work.  It did not work.  Later, my neighbor See-Tai from Kiribati showed me that in fact it is not digital, lift up the lid and all the controls are manual.

I spend a lot of time looking out the window at the banana trees, coconut trees, geckos while I wait for the tub to fill, or to empty.  The very Hawai'ian jewels in the pink flowers help me feel special while I wait.  Doing laundry is a meditative time.