Yap Day

Combine Christmas, Thanksgiving, and any other holiday you can think of together and you have the excitement for Yap Day.  My students have been telling me about Yap Day since the first week of school. “Ms. have you heard of Yap Day” “Are you going to Yap Day” and their favorite question, “Will you go local?!”. Yap Days are the first two days of March and it is the biggest cultural celebration on the island.  Culture is extremely important to Yap.  Out of all the islands in Micronesia they have held on to their original culture more than any of the others as all the westernization started to sneak in to everything.  One of the ways they have tried to protect their unique culture is by creating this holiday.  No matter how much TV people start watching and how American they start to dress every year for two days everyone returns to their old ways.  There are lots of competitions and cultural displays including many dances.  Each year it is held at a different village, and all the villages must take part.  All of the locals are supposed to dress traditionally.  Many people still dress traditionally on a regular basis, but not everyone.  It is common to see the older generation dressed in their thus and lava lavas grocery shopping.  Rarely, however, do you see younger people dressed traditionally in town, usually they only dress that way in their village; except on Yap Day.


Thursday morning we loaded up the van and headed into town for Yap Day!  We met one of the church members when we arrived and they loaned us traditional grass skirts to wear for the festival.  The grass skirts are made out of hibiscus and died bright colors.  They are very big and very heavy.  It takes a very long time to make them, it was so nice of them to loan them to us.  They told us that they were making one for each of to keep; I can’t describe how giving and kind this family is.  Now that we were dressed in grass skirts and had bright flower leis on our heads we were ready for the festival.  As we entered town people were everywhere! I didn’t know there were that many people on this whole island!  Most were dressed “local” as they call it.  This means the Yapese men were wearing thus (kind of like loin clothes) and the woman were topless with the grass skirts and several leis.  For the outer islanders the men also wore thus (just tied differently) and the women wore their woven lava lavas topless.  The outer islands are all considered a part of Yap, but the people hold a big distinction between “Yapese” and “Outer Islander”.  I have students who have lived here their whole life but they are not Yapese they are Outer islander.  Anyways, they are proud of their origin and they are only allowed to dress from their island.  You can see why our students were obsessed with the question “will you go local?”.  To go local means to dress traditionally.  Obviously, we did not go all the way local!  Some of my students didn’t come to the festival simply because they didn’t want to have to go local and their village requires they do if they attend.  While others who have grown up more traditionally don’t find it weird at all and gladly join their village dressed “local”.


We spent the next couple days enjoying every aspect of the Yapese culture.  We watched some men carve out canoes and make wood carvings, saw women weave skirts and the baskets they sell in the store every week.  They had coconut tree climbing contests and swimming races.  My favorite part was the dances.  Each village presented one of the traditional dances.  They get all dressed local and spread a yellow colored coconut oil all over their body.  They have different dances for different stories of their history.  A woman’s sitting dance where they literally sit the whole time chanting and telling a story with hand motions.  They are telling a story, but not in a language that anyone understands.  They aren’t speaking Yapese or Outer island; but a ghost language that is supposed to be from their ancestors who first came to the islands.  My favorite is the bamboo dance.  It tells the story of WW2 on the island.  It is a very fast paced dance with lots of yelling, they fight each other with the bamboo.  I had 5 different students in the dance with their village.  It was even cooler to see my students participating.  We drank lots of coconuts, collected lots of handmade souvenirs, and witnessed the culture first hand. It was a unique experience.  One of my favorite memories came from an older village lady sitting under the coconut leaf hut we were watching the dances from.  She had been sitting there for hours in her grass skirt humming and carving away at the coconut leaves.  I don’t think she spoke any English, but she kept smiling at us.  She carved and folded the leaf into the shape of a small bird and attached it to a piece of grass.  Then she began to sing in Yapese and motion how to make the bird fly.  She smiled big and handed one to me and one to Sabrina.  I think it is a local kid’s toy.  She sat their making them all day, handing them to each child that passed and giving them to us as long as we sat there.  Even though the culture here is drastically different from what I am used to, even a little shocking, it’s beautiful.  It’s so cool to see a way of life so different from what I am used to.