Our translator, Andrew (the preacher from Medan, Sumatra), greets us in the Peace Hotel cafe where our bible study group will be assembling in a couple of minutes:
--Ya'ahowu!
I respond:
--Ya'ahowu (Ahhh, there are those yellow teeth I've been missing for the past thirty minutes)!
His evangelical assistant, Marganda (the lawyer from Sumatra), wears his same incessant grin under the brim of his fishing hat:
--Horas!
Our group, which has for the past few weeks been helping with medical clinics in Lagundri's surrounding villages, sits down at a long picnic table covered with a green plastic tablecloth. The cafe is open to the sea breeze, and each pore on my face is filled with its breath. The floor is dusty. My mind goes back to the fish our hotel family grilled for us earlier in banana leaves. Fried grains of rice stick to the flimsy green covering. There are water bottles and sugar cookies for the group that will be meeting in a few minutes. Alex, Jordan, and Logan all sigh and fan themselves. We all look out toward Sorake Beach as it is illuminated by a generous portion of flickering and rosy light. Surf boards rest against nearby coconut trees.
I remember that Andrew told us villagers will climb up the coconut trees, often inching up to heights of around seventy-five feet to pluck coconuts. Some fall and die. Coconuts are buoyant, they float in the bay and wash up on new beaches further down the island of Nias. The stringy white insides of the coconut is exposed as a small boy slices it open with a machete. Under the sunlight, the coconut milk ferments. Generally the Nias islanders are a strong and hard working people, but some men will waste day after day drinking the alcohol from the coconut, laying out of the beach, unemployed. They just lie out on the sand under the sun and bake away. I remember laughing when I heard all of this. I knew no other way to react. It was all so absurd. People climb up trees for coconuts knowing they could easily fall to their death and then, if they make it down the trees intact, they celebrate by getting trashed off the coconuts.
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