Coconuts Aren't Free

“What kind of a crazy fool of a foreigner are you?!”  I’m being yelled at by a 12-year old Fakaravan girl on a bicycle by the side of the road.  She’s yelling in French, so I’m really just guessing at her words, but the meaning is clear enough.  Her tone is of exasperated incredulity.  And, I’m trying to figure out where things went wrong.

I first met Sandra about a mile down the road toward the wharf where we came from.  Glenn was going for a run to see how far he could get, and I had decided to walk instead.  There is only one road on this large but skinny atoll, so there was no danger of really losing each other.  But, by the time I saw Sandra and her sisters in the coconut grove, Glenn was well out of sight.

Sandra’s sister beckoned to me from across the road as I was passing.  They were pulling coconuts off the trees with a long pole.  “Do you want one?”  She asked in French.  I stopped.  She pointed at some green coconuts in the tree which are full of juice and coconut jelly.  I was definitely feeling parched.  “Well, yes.  Okay.”  Sandra pulled one down for me while two of her little sisters brought over a machete.  She hacked off the top and made a little hole in the side so that I could drink the juice without spilling too much of it down my front.  The whole operation took less than a minute, and I was impressed.  They handed me the coconut, and I took a sip.  The girls gathered around me, and I tried to pass it back to them to share.  They said no, which surprised me.  So, I shrugged, deciding that it was meant just for me.  “Merci beaucoup,” I said and carried on down the road to share the coconut with Glenn.

“What?  Did you think I would just give you the coconut?  That was hard work!  I had to pull it down and hack at it with the machete…” she continued her diatribe in French, embellishing her arguments with mimed gestures as though we were playing an angry game of charades.

Our conversation had begun pleasantly.  She had ridden up behind me on her bicycle.  I smiled and said, “Bonjour.”  And, we talked for 5 – 10 minutes about who we were and our families.  I told her about our travels so far.  She was very interested in hearing about the Marquesas Islands.  At some point, she decided to talk about the coconut, which I had stopped drinking.  I explained to her that I was going to share it with my husband who was running.  She clearly thought that was odd, and that sidetracked our conversation for a bit again.

“Oh!  You want me to pay you for the coconut!”  She looked at me as though I was a very slow foreigner indeed.  I proceeded to explain my confusion to her.  “You see, in the Marquesas Islands, fruit was given to us all of the time.”  Incredulity again dominated her expression.  “Really!  There was so much fruit – mangoes, guavas, bananas, coconuts, and limes – we couldn’t go anywhere without people giving us the fruit from their trees. “  “And, they didn’t want money?  They must have been rich villages,” she decided.  I explained that the people in these villages were not any richer than Fakaravans as far as I could tell, but that they had an overabundance of fruit.  They wanted to talk with us, and to trade with us.

I decided that the Tuomotus were different from the Marquesas Islands because of tourism.  It seems to be a much larger proportion of the economy in Fakarava is based on accommodating rich tourists in particular.  It is not cheap to get here, and it is definitely not cheap to buy most things here either.  I reached for my money bag.  “How much do you want for the coconut?”

She drew herself up to her full height of 5’4”, looked me in the eyes, and stated with a straight face, “One thousand francs.”  That’s over ten dollars for a coconut!  It was my turn to look incredulous.  She continued her rant from before, “You are rich and I am poor.  You should be supporting our economy!”  She carried on, saying something about her little brothers and sisters and trying to demonstrate how desperate their situation was.  I wasn’t buying it.  This was starting to feel like a hustle.

“I’m sorry, Sandra.  But I don’t have a thousand francs.”  This was true.  Our support of the town’s economy had reduced our stock of French Polynesian cash to just a few coins worth less than two dollars.  I gave her what I had, but she was unsatisfied.  She insisted that I should be able to make a phone call and get the money sent to me.  Or, I could go to the post office which is where the islanders do their banking.  I explained that I didn’t have anyone to call and that the post office only worked with the Tahitian banks, not American ones.  She was flummoxed.

Then I tried to describe to her the difference between those tourists who arrive by airplane or on the giant charter yachts and those sailors like us who are slowly exploring the Pacific.  Unfortunately, the topic of limited budgets and dwindling finances is not only boring for a 12-year old, but it is exceedingly difficult to explain with a grasp of French equivalent to a 2-year old.

Finally, Glenn reappeared and she gave up.   She said, disheartened, “The coconut is free.  I am giving you the coconut.”  I expressed my thanks, but I noticed that she was not offering to return the money I had already given her.  I didn’t really mind though.  I think she got a fair price for the coconut and I also got about twenty minutes of practicing my French speaking and comprehension.  She rode away as Glenn and I walked together sharing the warm juice of the coconut.