The trouble was not all mine. The island was experiencing one of its periodic food shortages. This was another difference between American food and Marshallese food: there was much less of the latter. Many families had run out of rice and flour in the two months since the last supply ship, and breadfruit was out of season. When I walked back to my house with a half-dozen squirrelfish that a man had given me, an eight-year-old girl begged me for just one of the cookie-sized creatures. The De Brums’, thankfully, were one of the families that still had rice. Even so, Lisson and Elina were working unusually hard to supplement the dwindling supplies of food. I was hardly pulling my weight, and so, in a fit of guilty generosity, I told Lisson I would kakijen (gather food) by learning to fish and raanke (scrape dry coconut meat out of the shell). Lisson smiled at my offer, but then again he smiled at most everything I said, no matter how ridiculous. Later that day, I overheard him telling Elina what I had said, and both of them laughed.
