35 
William Tule, the 13 year old St. Paul's boy who has identified most 
closely with me, tore a severe laceration in the sole of his right foot 
on our way here and I have only been able to bandage it with a cloth I 
purchased here (again lOc) after washing it off with water. 
Alban's family has made tea for us! Alban is our host. Now as I write, 
the villages are dancing to guitar music. It is largely European-style 
party dancing, and they enjoy it. Pairs of girls usually dance together 
as do small boys. Some boys of only 8-10 take large adolescent girls 
as partners. Don has danced one round and returned to his language record- 
ings. Thus we work by kerosene lantern and listen to the guitar music. 
Alban's family has prepared hot tea for us, given us sheets and clean 
pillows and seen to it that we have fine mats and bedding and we are to 
have a breakfast made for us by them. I have told them we will stay 
to examine Erik again, see other sick and to interview the two old sisters 
who remember the ancient, now extinct language (dialect) which was formerly 
spoken here at A'ota. I find Alban one of the most helpful and charming 
of all the lads of the island. If I were to stay with any of them for 
long it would be him. He is mature for his 13 years, and could well be 
15 years old already, which is far along for the 6th grade. His English 
is good and precise and he is a reliable informant. His English perfection 
seems to interfere with his comprehension of my New Guinea Pidgin, for 
others do rather well with it and he does not, doing excellently if I 
speak English distinctly. 
This village has very beautifully constructed houses made of native 
matierials only or of only a minimum of sheet metal and they thus have 
a far more traditional appearance than most of the houses of St. Paul and 
St. John. There is no landing here at A'ota and only in the best of weather 
is a landing from a ship's boat possible. Nevertheless the people do have 
canoes which they launch in good weather. We have spotted interesting 
styles of out-of-door benches and a log-cabin pyramidal bird trap at house 
sites on our way into Matliwag. We also visited Dorothy, one of the two 
old sisters who still recall some of the ancient A'ota language. Don 
plans to interview them both tomorrow. 
I wish I had brought with me extensive dressing material and injectable 
Bicillin for Erik Por and to dress William's cut foot. Luckily I do have 
the broad spectrum antibiotics with me. I have left the others to carry 
out responsibly the completion of our program at St. Paul's and will see 
just how well they do now that I have really deserted them by rushing off 
to St. Barnabas this evening. If tomorrow we can land a shore boat load 
safely and without too much risk and get 100 more venules and needles I 
shall bleed a group of adults (some 30-50) and those further children 
whom we can round up, such as the dozen I find here who do not go to 
school but who stay in the village and did not come yet to see us at 
St. Paul. Among them a Class 6 graduate of only 15 years of age, John 
Paama Ronlimetluau, is obviously facing the classical adolescent dilemma 
of all such partially acculturated villagers who have remained subsistence 
agriculturists and fishermen and yet have in their religion and schooling 
glimpsed the outside world. Back at home he has no choice but to become a 
fully integrated villager once again, but to abandon the vaster horizons 
