The Island of the Colorblind

Our ragged procession, tipping and swaying through the forest, with children romping and pigs under our feet, finally arrived at the island’s administration building, one of the three or four two-storey cinderblock buildings on the island. Here we met and were ceremoniously greeted by the nahnmwarki, the magistrate, and other officials. A Pingelapese woman, Delihda Isaac, acted as interpreter, introducing us all, and then herself – she ran the medical dispensary across the way, where she treated all sorts of injuries and illnesses. A few days earlier, she said, she had delivered a breech baby – a difficult job with no medical equipment to speak of – but both mother and child were doing fine. There is no doctor on Pingelap, but Delihda had been educated off-island and was often assisted by trainees from Pohn-pei. Any medical problems which she cannot handle have to wait for the visiting nurse from Pohnpei, who makes her rounds to all the outlying islands once a month. But Delihda, Bob observed, though kind and gentle, was clearly a ‘real force to be reckoned with.’

She took us on a brief tour of the administration building – many of the rooms were deserted and empty, and the old kerosene generator designed to light it looked as if it had been out of action for years.[16] As dusk fell, Delihda led the way to the magistrate’s house, where we would be quartered. There were no street lights, no lights anywhere, and the darkness seemed to gather and fall very rapidly. Inside the house, made of concrete blocks, it was dark and small and stiflingly hot, a sweatbox, even after nightfall. But it had a charming outdoor terrace, over which arched a gigantic breadfruit tree and a banana tree. There were two bedrooms – Knut took the magistrate’s room below, Bob and I the children’s room above. We gazed at each other fearfully – both insomniacs, both heat intolerant, both restless night readers – and wondered how we would survive the long nights, unable even to distract ourselves by reading.

I tossed and turned all night, kept awake in part by the heat and humidity; in part by a strange visual excitement such as I am sometimes prone to, especially at the start of a migraine – endlessly moving vistas of breadfruit trees and bananas on the darkened ceiling; and, not least, by a sense of intoxication and delight that now, finally, I had arrived on the island of the colorblind.

None of us slept well that night. We gathered, tousled, on the terrace at dawn, and decided to reconnoitre a bit. I took my notebook and made brief notes as we walked (though the ink tended to smudge in the wet air):