Where’s Fran? – Page 14 – The Official Website of Francis X. Hezel, SJ

Exploring Early History on Saipan

Saipan was a happening place this past week, even apart from the election campaigns that are in full swing. A team of archaeologists under Mike Carson and Hsaio-chun Hung has been working on an excavation site at Laulau Bay. The pit in which they were digging is one of the oldest settlement sites on the island. We watched them bring buckets of dirt to be sifted through a fine screen. We saw small bits of red pottery, sometimes even a sharpened stone cutting tool or two, and a curious looking stone ear pendant that looked like a miniature fishhook.

The Governor of Guam has taken measures to return certain convicts from FSM to their home island, as we know from the wide media coverage. The individuals haven?t been ?deported? exactly, although that?s how the FSM government sees it. They have been provided with a one-way ticket home and told they may never return to Guam in exchange for a commuted sentence that gets them out of the Guam jail a year or two earlier.

July 31, the feast of St. Ignatius, was the first of the two. On that morning, just a few days after celebrating my cousin Ken?s 50^th anniversary of priesthood on Saipan, I landed at Newark to begin a couple weeks of visiting friends and family in the US. I spent the whole day at the province infirmary, Murray-Weigel, where a growing number of my peers are to be found. Fr. Dick Hoar, who spent years in Palau, has just moved there from Buffalo this past year. Joe Billotti and Jim Gould, who both spent years in the Marshalls, are among the more active residents. We shared stories as we sipped coffee together that morning. Read More

A Week on Kosrae

I was in Kosrae for a week, just to give a speech on FSM Law Day that took less than an hour. What was I going to do with all that time on my hands, I wondered? Kosrae is a small place with only 6,000 residents. Chuuk and Pohnpei are bustling cities by comparison, with their population, their traffic, their ?glitter.?

Somewhere between 2000 and 1500 BC, around the time that Abraham was moving out of the Chaldees to his new home in what was later to be Palestine, another movement was taking place. Sailing canoes from the west arrived bringing the first people to settle in Micronesia. In fact, these newcomers could have been the first to settle anywhere in Oceania?other than the Papuans, that is, who had paddled the short distance to nearby Melanesia thousands of years earlier.

How long had the dispute been going on? None of us could remember exactly, but we knew that for some years now there had been two mayors of Tol (the largest municipality in Faichuk, the west part of Chuuk Lagoon). Maybe the split between the two sides of Tol occurred after the death of Susumu Aizawa in 2006. He had been the undisputed leader of Tol while he was alive?-as much for the reputation he acquired as a pitcher in the Japanese baseball league as for his success in business and expertise in traditional history.

Dan Berrigan may have acquired his fame as a peace activist, but I first heard of him as an inspiring high school teacher and budding poet?but that was in 1956 long before most Americans knew where Vietnam was. A couple of my new friends, teenagers who had entered the Jesuits just as I had, boasted about Dan as their teacher at Brooklyn Prep.

?Here are your favorite enemies,? someone said before the photo above was snapped. Right he was. The two are my favorite duelists: Tony DeBrum and Peter Christian. One of them is a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize for the work he has done on calling attention to climate change in this part of the world. The other is a former student who is now President of FSM. Both sharpened their debating skills at Xavier High School a few decades ago, and have practiced on me over the years.

Francis X. Hezel, SJ, is a Jesuit priest who has lived and worked in Micronesia since 1963. At different times he has served as high school teacher, school administrator, pastor, and regional superior to the Jesuits of Micronesia. He spent thirty years directing the Micronesian Seminar, a non-profit, non-governmental organization based in Pohnpei, Micronesia.

He has written and spoken widely about social change and its impact on island societies. He has also written several books on Micronesian history, including The First Taint of Civilization, Strangers in Their Own Land, and The New Shape of Old Island Cultures. His most recent book, Making Sense of Micronesia: The Logic of Pacific Island Culture, is available through University of Hawaii Press.

The official blog of Rev. Francis X. Hezel, SJ

Exploring Early History on Saipan

Dear FSM: Don?t Go to War with Guam over Deportation

Two Feast Days and Everything Between

A Week on Kosrae

Before We Began Counting Years

A Channel of Peace: The President?s Peacemaking Mission to Tol

Dan Berrigan, Prophet of Peace… and More

Team of Rivals