Clothing on Ulithi:

Laundry lines on Falalop, displaying mostly lavalavas.

“Our island’s small,” Juanito begins, “that we don’t do other things and maybe we just leave some things that we can survive by. We really get hung up on these outside materials that come to us. Like we think men don’t wear any more of this lavalava, men’s lavalava; they go for clothe because it’s easier to wash and things like that."

Older men in Ulithi still tend to wear a very brief thew, in the traditional style.

 

“For thews we were using a piece of clothe, a very short one,” Ignathius points out. “That’s the type we used before. This type now, we adapted from Yap, but usually we just pulled up that one very short piece so that you can wrap around. But now we use these four yards, you can put down this end here and that end there.

“When you became a young man, you’d wear two different colors, I remember. They still do it in Yap. But not here any more. The easy way is just one. But in Yap they used to wear two as they grow, then three, and then they used this hibiscus thing that signifies that they become a man, an adult.”

“The young tend to wear shirts or t-shirts,” Juanito continues, “especially the young women, young girls, because they go to the other islands where it’s okay, they can wear them. When they come here, it’s a problem because we have to take our t-shirts off and they’re all complaining. And even some of them defend that the church doesn’t like us to go bare on top. But that’s something that church doesn’t say—‘You have to wear Western clothes.’

“Plus here we don’t have much water. We depend so much on rain water. The groundwater that we have is brackish. When we wear clothes, we have to have soap, more things will add to it. Plus the fact that when we have clothes, we don’t like to live like the beach bums, wearing clothes until they have holes in them. So we have to have soap and other things that we don’t have the money to buy. That’s one part of it."

Outer Island High School youths wearing the long a full style of thew prominent today. Yaad states that this style was begun by a teacher here who had ringworm. and wanted to cover over the marks.

“The chiefs and the community agree that we don’t need to wear Western clothes. It’s not approved here, because of a lot of things involving showing off and things that. That’s why we still keep that tradition. We cannot allow for us to wear clothes unless necessary—we work under the sun, so we have to wear some hat. So people don’t wear Western clothes here, while in Falalop, almost everybody wears Western clothes. There’s a difference. And Falalop, Fedraey and Asor are all the same.”

Pacific Worlds > Yap: Ulithi > Onwards > People