Here's the basic background of the place. The people who settled here were mostly all of Polynesian decent, mostly from Hawaii. Anyways, they built a small city there and for several years, it was one of the best kept cities in Utah. They named the city Iosepa (Yo sepp a) which is Hawaii for "Joseph." The people endured several trials with the elements and such and then they left to Hawaii to help build the La'ie Temple in Hawaii. If you want more info than that, here's a little more history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iosepa.
We arrived Friday evening and met up with the Peck family, a family that I was able to help prepare their daughter for baptism. I used to play racquetball with them after my mission also. Anyways, we get there and it's this place in the middle of nowhere. Just farm land and cows. At the actual site, there was a pavilion and cemetery for the settlers of Iosepa that the children would clean up and decorate with flower leis every year. We set up our tent next to the Pecks' camper and just hung out for the night, making new acquaintances and renewing old ones. My wife had not been around many Polynesians before and felt completely as if she were surrounded by family right away, even though she had never met any of these people.
Saturday was the main festivities day. We volunteered to help out and ended up stationed at a booth were the kids could give up "Iosepa bucks" to buy things such as coloring books, candy leis, kukui nut bracelets and some kind of fuzzy leis. We also collected money for a few surrounding booths. At one, you could make flower headbands or wristbands. At another, you could make Ipus (something with gourds, I never did find out). At another, you could make your own bookmark with a piece of special wood and sandpaper. Most made them into surfboard shapes. I got creative and made an example of a wavy bookmark and put them together for a surfboard on the waves! It was lots of fun.
In the evening, the Imu was opened up. For those that don't know about Imus, it is a traditional way of Polynesian cooking, basically a huge steam cooker, but it's a hole the ground. It is started in the early morning and usually is ready to be buried after 3 hours. The hole is a couple feet deep, and rocks are placed in the fire to be the main heat source because they retain heat better than coals. We used steel girders because it works better. I was able to help bury and unearth the Imu. The favorite dish is kalua pork, basically cooking whole pigs to the point where the meat falls off the bone and is very tender and juicy. Ours was just slabs of the pig already cut up and wrapped in foil. If you want more details about the Imu, go here: http://www.primitiveways.com/Imu1.html.
The dinner included the kalua pork, chop suey, taro (kind of like a potato, but very dense), macaroni salad, a cole slaw dish that had crab in it, another kind of cole slaw with raw fish and peppers in it (it's actually one of my favorites), steamed rice, teriaki style chicken, and tons of other stuff that I can't really remember right now. It was DeLiCious! Marie loved it too. Polynesian food is one of our favorite kinds of food. There are a few restaurants out here that specialize in it, and Marie and I go to them when we feel a bit rich (not too often).
It rained pretty hard that evening and we found a pool of water in our tent. Luckily we had some towels and were able to soak it up and it didn't damage anything. I tried to adjust our tent fly so it would block the rain but it was so windy that rain was still coming in the tent. We decided to just leave it to the Lord and prayed that we wouldn't have any more rain in the tent somehow. Right after we said "Amen", Brother Peck shouted at our tent "Anybody home?" He was just checking on us and making sure we were doing alright. We mentioned we were a bit wet and couldn't seem to figure out how to keep the rain out and a few minutes later he was putting a tarp over our tent. Isn't it nice when God answers your prayers quickly through his servants? The rest of the evening was spent trying to sleep and drown out the loud music from the dance the youth were having under the pavilion all night.
Sunday morning, it was still raining but we had Sunday services under the pavilion. It was just a big testimony meeting with the Utah Polynesian Choir singing several hymns in the various Polynesian languages (Samoan, Tongan, Hawaiian, Tahitian, etc...). It was a great service and afterwards was another authentic Polynesian meal and then Marie and I took off since we had to get back to Provo and wanted to dry out our tent.
All in all, it was a great experience that neither of us will forget and we plan on doing it again next year. Marie loves the Polynesian people and we would like to visit the Islands someday to scout them out for possible retirement. :-)
No comments:
Post a Comment