Manit Week

This week is devoted to celebrating the Marshallese culture, or manit. We celebrate this Monday through Thursday at school and then culminate with a national holiday on Friday (this means no school)! Today the middle and high school classes hosted volunteers who taught us various aspects of manit. This involves canoes, clans, music, and dance to name a few, and of course, food. Two foods that I learned about today are the coconut and the breadfruit.

Every part of the coconut tree is useful in some way. The Marshallese use the leaves or fronds to make plates (enra) and baskets. The coconut itself is used in various stages of ripeness. We drink from the young coconuts. As they age the juice turns into a semi-solid that is used for eating and making a coconut candy. Of course there is the meat that is shredded. The coconut is inside of a thick fibrous husk. The men husk the coconuts by shoving them onto a sharp stake and tearing off the outer shell. These husks make great kindling. The hard shell is used like our charcoal because it will burn for a long time. There is also another part of the tree that holds sap. The Marshallese drain this sap from the tree and boil it into a syrup. If left more than a couple of days it ferments into an alcohol; left longer it turns into a vinegar of sorts. This was the islanders’ source of sweetener before the missionaries brought sugar to the islands. Our volunteers boiled down the sap and added shredded coconut to make a type of candy. They rolled it into balls and then wrapped it in saran wrap. They gifted me with a necklace of the candy balls and was I ever popular today!

Another pair of volunteers taught us how to preserve breadfruit. Breadfruit is a green fruit about the size of a small acorn squash. It is a starchy fruit that ripens around May. The people here bake it and deep fry it into chips. But it can also be made into a pudding/paste type dish called bwiro that will last indefinitely. This was useful in times past because food supplies were limited. Also, they needed foods that would last on long canoe journeys. The process of preparing the dish was fascinating! The first thing I learned was that women take the ripe breadfruit, pare and seed it, and put it into a bag such as a pillowcase. There it sits. Once a month the bag is put into the lagoon where the saltwater takes care of any insects and bacteria. Meanwhile, the breadfruit softens, so that by the end of the year it is ready to knead.  Coconut milk is made from water and grated coconut and added to the kneaded breadfruit. The mixture looks like cake batter. Breadfruit leaves are washed and formed into cones and secured with ties made from the branches of pandanus trees. The cones are filled with the batter. The women gather up and turn down the top of the cones and tie with more pandanus ties. These are then put onto a fire created with the coconut husks and shells, along with pieces of coral to hold the heat. After a couple of hours in the fire, the sweet paste is ready to eat. You can eat it right away or save it for a later date.

I don’t know if I have been able to convey how interesting all of this was today, but I have included several pictures that I hope you enjoy! Tomorrow we go to a canoe exhibit and on Thursday we get to see a display of finely crafted mats. What a fun week!

I hope you all are well and enjoying life! Take care, Becky

husking the coconut

kneading the breadfruit

making the "twine" from the pandanus branch and looking cute

the ribelle teacher, Adam,  sits on the bench and grates the coconut

making the breadfruit leaf cones

making the cone packages from the breadfruit leaves

straining the cococut milk from the shredded coconut and water mix

cooking the breadfruit on the fire pit with the coconut shells and coral