Mark's Pages

October 24, 2005:

In a cottage on the grass behind the beach you sit at a table in gathering dusklight enjoying your conversation.

She's small, thin, very bright, very kind. She's suffered, she has a painful physical ailment. But, she's not bitter. She's joyous and warm, and when she learns of your interest in the people and their lives before the missionaries came, she tells you this story.

Up the mountain through the jungle on dirt trails not usually mapped there's a marae with a ti'i that yet lives. Visitors don't go there, even the archaeologists who've rebuilt other sites. Only locals. And not very often.

One time the pain from her illness was so great that her family took her to the old marae. She made an offering, praying to the ti'i for relief. She slept there that night, and when she awoke she had no pain, none, the first time without suffering in many months. It lasted three full days.

"Don't go there alone!" she says. "The trail is slippery, it's been raining. And anyway. Don't go there alone."