See

My first Easter Sunday on Tamana Island began with one word.
“I-Matang.”
It meant “foreigner” and it was a word I was used to hearing while I adjusted to life as an American volunteer teaching in the Republic of Kiribati. For the last eight months, I had been working tirelessly to belong; to be considered a Kiribati person. But when I entered the big stone church on the beach, the heat already sealing my pores and christening my new yellow muumuu with sweat, I heard people murmuring the word and realized they weren’t talking about me.
A glance out the large open windows revealed a luxury yacht docked in Tamana’s swimming channel.
The church was a fever dream of color and smell that day, as if everyone had anticipated this odd visit. Men wore sarongs of bright, stiff fabric in yellow, orange and red and everyone was coated with the latest Australian knock-off perfumes. Women’s baby powdered necks craned to look at the yacht woman in a royal wedding- appropriate black hat and a transparent white sundress with the wispy straps I’d been warned against in my volunteer manual.
So this was the I-Matang.
When the service wrapped, the well-groomed woman introduced herself an American author who was retracing the path of Robert Louis Stevenson for her latest book. I lapped up her English and greedily accepted her invitation for Easter brunch on her yacht. There was a moment’s pause when I realized no one else had been invited, but I tried to shake it off.
Aboard the boat I gorged on quiche, fresh mango and turned down champagne in a crystal glass. I told stories of men singing in the tops of coconut trees as they cut toddy and my host mother’s dirty joke- telling prowess. I talked until I saw the crew’s eyes glaze over. I self-consciously adjusted my muumuu sleeves and wished for the rowboat to return to take me back. The chic woman loaded my arms with magazines and wished me luck like she thought I needed it. I did the same.
When I was back on land, I found my friends. They were sitting cross- legged on the dirt floor, waiting for me to return. I was handed a piece of rank salt fish that curled over my hands and they fanned flies away from me while I ate. I told the tale of the yacht people in great detail. We looked at magazines and laughed loudly without holding back. It was as if the joke was that, in trying so hard to belong with them, I missed the fact that I already did.
The only person in Kiribati who’d ever considered me an
I-Matang was me.