Searching for Crabs

The next story for our Saturday practice group is about a father and son, providing a warm narrative that frames the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next. This will be one of the longer pieces that we’ve used for our group, and for good reason: we get to see both a small slice of the life led by the father-son pair as well as several sets of instructions that detail the fabrication and use of various types of traps and other implements for gathering crabs under different conditions. And on a more personal note, our friend Dabit will be facilitating several Saturday practice sessions in our stead while we take some time for a loss in our family.

As ever, in this post you’ll find the Chamorro text, an English translation, and an audio narration by Jay Che’le. Footnotes to follow. Happy reading!

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Plants of Guam, Part 2

For this week’s Saturday morning practice group, we will continue reading through the plant book that we’ve used the past two weeks. This book was found in the KPV Collection and has a number of short, interesting comments on flowering plants. But as a reminder, if you want even more about plants found on the Mariana Islands, you can check out the book Trees and Shrubs of the Mariana Islands, available from UOG Press.

In this post we have the Chamorro text, an English translation, and a Chamorro audio narration by Jay Che’le for the last five plants found in the book Tinanom Siha Giya Guam by Carmen C. Blas. Happy reading!

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How Customs Were

Our practice group recently voted on the kind of content that we’re interested in reading. Two themes came out on top: History and Culture, and this week’s story brings us a bit of both. It’s a short piece from the bilingual education programs of the Northern Marianas that gives a narrative account of Mr. Enrique N. Kisa’s reflections on the past and thoughts on changes he was seeing in the late 1970s. This post includes the Chamorro text, the English translation, and a Chamorro audio narration by Jay Che’le. Happy reading!

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