Easter in Fallalop Ulithi

My lovely friend Jane works at the Catholic High School that just opened this year. She invited me to go with her to the outer islands for Easter where she would be recruiting students for the next school year. We would stay in the Priest's quarters near the church, adjacent to the ocean. Being our first trip to the outer islands, we brought a cooler full of food. I brought lots of sugar canes and pineapples. The sugarcane, oddly, helps my motion sickness and vertigo which sporadically show up during traveling. I brought the pineapple, because the garden was overflowing with it and I thought, why not? Our trip started at the airport, getting on to a small prop engine plane provided by PMA. PMA provides medical care to the outer islands, flying to Fallalop weekly.

As the flights to Yap all occur in the wee hours of the morning, I've never seen Yap from the sky. The plane ride offered beautiful views of the island that I call my home.

(Picture of an aech or fishing weir. Although many are abandoned, in the past at low tide, people would go out and collect the fish trapped in the weir.) When we landed on Falalop we met the priest, our host, and jumped into the ocean! The water was amazingly clear and translucent. While swimming, we met a group of outgoing, curious youngsters. They wanted to pose for the camera!

One morning, while swimming we found a WWII tanker. Just sitting at the bottom of the ocean. According to some folks on island, after the war the U.S. dumped a lot of equipment in the ocean around the islands. Ni-ce.

The most amazing part of the trip was the people we met. People invited us to their homes and were so accepting. The women were awesome, cooking for us and teaching us some local skills.

We were sad to leave the island. The people, the land, the ocean. It was an amazing experience. .

Yap greeted us with a beautiful view of Colonia and we settled back into our lives on the Island of the Stone Money.