I Keep House In

Tahiti

By Shirtey A. Chidsey, who wrote from New York City to the editor of the “PIM”: “If you pay anything for this story , please turn the money over to whatever agency buys cigarettes for your soldiers SINCE we first, with great excitement and in a deluge of tronical rain, came down the passenger ladder of the Messageries Maritimes “Commissaire Ramel to stand at last upon the quay in Papeete, we have gone away and come back three times.

So we are still “tourists”. We own land and furniture in Tahiti, and we are planning, when the war is over and prices of building materials have come down out of the sky, to build a house.

But we are foreigners and we go home once a year or so and our housekeeping problems are still those of a tourist in Tahiti. And that’s what you wanted to know about, isn’t it?

Well, first, of course, there has to be a house. A small house is easy to find, at a rental of anywhere from 250 francs to 2,500 francs a month, furnished. There is no charge for water, which is plenti ful and good; the garbage, you toss into a pit and burn. The main utility is oil: for stove, for lamps or for electric plant.

Oil costs about fifty francs a gallon tin, and the franc is worth about two cents, now.

THE first house we had was in Taunoa, about a mile from the centre of Papeete. The next was in Pirae, three miles away. For the first, we paid 600 francs. The second, we rented from an American and paid for in dollars— fifty of them per month, which is too much to pay for a roof over your head in this country.

Finally, we moved out to Punaauia, 12 miles from town and thoroughly in the country (no electric lights, no stores, a telephone every two miles . . .). Most of the tourists live in Punaauia or in Paea, a few miles further along, and a great many of the French fonctionnaires and business people have week-end houses here along the white coral beach between the Broom Road and the lagoon. A stretch, perhaps an eighth of a mile wide, between the mountains and the sea, and the mountains cleft now and again by deep valleys and rivers, winding back into the rainy, jungly and uninhabited interior of the island: that is Punaauia.

I thought, since a maid of all work is available for 400 francs a month (about £2 Australian) that we should have one I have since tried a great many. They are nearly all abominable cooks. They are usually untrained—it is hard to train a servant, even if you speak French very well, when she speaks only a little French and no English. And, for this reason, too many Americans have thought, as I thought on my first trip to Tahiti: “Oh, well, what’s the use: it’s only for six weeks”, and they have put up with the bad cooking, the careless table setting, the inevitable Tahitian indiffer ence. The Tahitian girls know, too, that we are lenient.

Now, I have a girl, or at least any one of a family of six girls, who comes at ten or thereabouts (“ten o’clock Punaauia time” as we say out here, where if you have a clock at all, it has probably been stopped for several days) every morning to wash the dishes, clean the house and make the beds. For this I pay 150 francs a month. This work is well done. The girls have had to do it at home from earliest childhood; they are essentially

clean themselves, and they are strong and thorough.

ISEND our wash to a woman down the road. I pay by the piece and it is a little expensive (comparatively) but it is carefully washed and ironed, and it is called for and delivered with unfailing regularity (except in the rainy season, when drying, which must be done out doors. may take several days). Laundry is a big item here, where all clothes are washable and where heat and perspira tion make frequent changes necessary every day. To do it yourself, you must be able to manage with a charcoal iron, and the floor for an ironing board! For the two of us (including our household linen) we pay about 200 francs a month.

I am my own cook. I buy vegetables, fruit, eggs and bread from a Chinese who comes around every morning in a cart, blowing on what appears to be a large conch shell, to announce his arrival at the door. The grocery store in Papeete (another Chinese establishment) sends out meat and fish along with any can ned goods I may order, every other day, on the “truck”. They will send ice, too, but usually I order meat for two days, cook it immediately it arrives, and so get along without ice, which is expensive here. (If they do put electricity out to Punaauia. which they say they may do next year, we shall buy an electric re frigerator, and then, oh then, what a life of luxury! We may even someday have an electric stove to replace our well-worn oil burner.) TWICE a week, or so, I,get up at 5.30 and go to town on the “truck”, to vary our rather monotonous round of vegetables and fruit with something

from the Papeete market. The “truck” is a great, lumbering open bus, with ten or twelve seats holding five people each, and an uncounted number more sitting on their laps. The buses go to the market place and are supposed to arrive before the market closes at 8 a.m. If they don’t break down en route, they do get there; some even pass through Punaauia around 3.30 and 4 a.m., which carry Tahitians and their produce in for the opening of the market at 5.30.

I have never seen a native market anywhere in the world which was not worth a visit, whether you were there to buy or not. There are strings and strings of fish; there are sacks containing nearly two dozen oranges, for ten francs; there are baskets woven of palm fronds, full of avocados (five francs for six or eight in a basket); the same baskets full of mangoes in their season, and papayas; there are stacks of plantain, bananas, taro and yams. There are butchers’ booths full of meat; there is an assort ment of vegetables: parsley, string beans, carrots, baby-sized eggplants, lettuce and tomatoes, radishes, occasionally corn on the cob. All are amazingly cheap. Market ing expenses for two persons per day run between 5 and 10 francs —unless you buy a chicken or duck, which often will cost as much as thirty francs.

It is the imported things in cans which are expensive in Tahiti.

At nine-thirty I catch the home-going truck, which passes through Punaauia on its rambling journey, delivering people and packages and mail through the dis tricts from Papeete to Tautira, some sixty miles away.

WE are a gay crowd going out—we have a day’s work (many of the

Tahitians from far out got up at 2 a.m. to make the trip) behind us, and before us a day of sitting on the shady verandah, singing songs, re-telling the gossipy bits heard at the market, drink ing from coconuts or eating the ripe mangoes that will surely have fallen from our big tree by that time. No Tahitian house is without a mango tree, and palms full of fresh green coconuts for drinking, a guitar player and a dozen ears to bend eagerly to the news of the preceding night and day. News travels always by this coconut wireless in Tahiti —there is no other means—and every one in the farthest district knows every thing that goes on on the island.

What do we do there all day? How many times I have been asked that! Well, perhaps swim or fish in the lagoon, per haps weed in my garden, read or go riding on my bicycle. Perhaps play bridge or sit around Rivnac’s (Punaauia’s hotel) cool terrace with a cooler drink.

Perhaps nothing—nothing but enjoy liv ing that day—and that is something in deed!

Miss Vera Cannon, a nurse at the Methodist Mission’s hospital on Choiseul Island, Solomon Islands, arrived In Sydney recently and later proceeded to New Zealand on furlough.

Nurse Dorothy Holmes has been accepted for mission service by the Methodist Mission and will enter the George Brown College, N.S.W., for train ing next April.

Lieut.-Colonel H. E. Woodman, lately one of the best known District Officers in New Guinea, is now Commanding Officer of the 3rd Pioneer Battalion, Wallgrove Camp, NJ3.W.