The Island of the Colorblind

But Pohnpei’s satellite atolls are able to turn to the mother island in such times, and thus there are separate enclaves in the town of Kolonia, Pohnpei’s capital, of refugees from other islands – Sapwuahfik, Mwoakil, Oroluk, and even the Mortlock Islands, in the neighboring state of Chuuk. There are two sizeable Pingelapese enclaves on Pohnpei, one in Sokehs province, the other in Kolonia, first established when Pingelap was devastated by the 1905 typhoon, and enlarged by subsequent emigrations. In the 1950s there came yet another emigration from Pingelap, this time in consequence of extreme overcrowding, and a new enclave was established by six hundred Pingelapese in the remote Pohnpeian mountain valley of Mand. Since then the village has burgeoned to a population of more than two thousand Pingelapese – three times the population of Pingelap itself.

Mand is isolated geographically, but even more ethnically and culturally – so that forty years after the original settlers migrated here from Pingelap, their descendants have avoided, largely, any contact or marriage with those outside the village, and have maintained, in effect, an island on an island, as homogenous genetically and culturally as Pingelap itself – and the maskun is, if anything, even more prevalent here than on Pingelap.

The road to Mand is very rough – we had to travel in a jeep, often slowing down to little more than a walking rate – and the journey took more than two hours. Outside Kolonia, we saw occasional houses and thatched sakau pubs, but as we climbed, all signs of habitation disappeared. A separate trail – traversable only by foot or by four-wheel drive – led off from the main road, climbing steeply up to the village itself. As we got higher, the temperature and humidity diminished, a delightful change after the heat of the lowlands.

Though isolated, Mand is a good deal more sophisticated than Pingelap, with electricity, telephones, and access to university-trained teachers. We stopped first at the community center, a spacious, airy building with a large central hall used for village meetings, parties, dances. Here we could spread out our equipment and meet some of the achromatopes of the community, and distribute sunglasses and visors. Here, as on Pingelap, there was a certain amount of formal testing, and we explored the details of daily life in this very different environment, and how much this might be helped with proper visual aids. But, as in Pingelap, it was Knut, quietly open about himself, who could do the deepest, most sympathetic probing and counselling. He spent a good deal of time with the mother of two achromatopic children, five years and eighteen months old, who was deeply anxious that they might go completely blind – fearful too that their eye condition might have been her fault, that it was something she had done during pregnancy. Knut did his best to explain to her the mechanisms of heredity, to reassure her that her daughters would not go blind, that there was nothing wrong with her as a wife or a mother, that the maskun was not necessarily a barrier to receiving an education and holding a job, and that with the proper optical aids and eye protection, the proper understanding, her daughters could do as well as any other child. But it was only when he made clear that he himself had the maskun – she suddenly stared at him in a new way at this point – that his words seemed to take on a solid reality for her.[28]

We moved on to the school, where a busy day was in progress. There were twenty or thirty children in each class, and, in each, two or three were colorblind. There were a number of excellent, well-trained teachers here, and the level of education, sophistication, was clearly far better than on Pingelap; some of the classes were in English, others in Pohnpeian or Pingelapese. In one class of teenagers, we sat in on a lesson in astronomy – this included pictures of earthrise from the moon and close-ups of the planets from the Hubble space telescope. But admixed with the latest astronomy and geology, the secular history of the world, a mythical or sacred history was given equal force. If the students were taught about shuttle flights, plate tectonics and submarine volcanoes, they were also immersed in the traditional myths of their culture – the ancient story, for example, of how the island of Pohnpei had been built under the direction of a mystical octopus, Lidakika. (I was fascinated by this, for it was the only cephalopod creation myth I had ever heard.)

Watching two little achromatopic girls doing their arithmetic lessons with their noses virtually touching the pages of the book, Knut was reminded powerfully of his own school days, before he had any optical aids. He pulled out his pocket magnifying loupe to show them – but it is not easy, unpracticed, to use a high-power magnifying glass to read with.