49 
Alpha Helix has been tricky, for we cannot reach them most of the time. 
Sometimes, however, conditions for receiving are good and we get them 
loud and clear. 
With physical examinations done at four stations by Raymond, Fran^oise, 
Richard and myself, while Paul did the hemoglobins and WBCs with the help 
of Don and the local nurse, Hilda Loe, and with Judy doing measurements 
and identity photos (from where Don and I left off this m^orning) , we have 
accomplished much this morning. At the village Raymond and Frangoise 
located a woman with flaccid paralysis which occured after an acute 
Illness during an epidemic on Merelava about a decade ago, and which 
left over a half-dozen people paralyzed. This may have been the same 
epidemic that struck Frank Adam of A’ota (St. Barnabas). Thus, they had 
a possible severe polio outbreak there a decade ago to look into. 
I have with me five Lemonmon boys and two from Tarasag drawing pictures 
at the school desks, as I write by Coleman lamplight. 1 have just gone 
over our bleeding lists and am beginning to make cross-references between 
family members as far as I can do so. The night is clear, and I shall 
probably sleep out-of-doors again, as I did last night with Moses and 
Jackis of Lemonmon. We have all wanted to hike in to the waterfall of 
Santa Maria, called Lesiriu, but is is a hike of several hours from 
Lemonmon. Everyone also wants to see the crater lake, but is is probably 
a three to four hour walk or more from here, and there is hurricane damage 
to the track inland from Losolava. The lake is deep and has fresh water; 
the people say it is dirty. The crater lake is called Letes. There are 
some fumes emitted somewhere along the trail to the lake. No villages 
or gardens are found near the lake; not even canoes, but bamboo rafts 
are made for lake travel. People do collect large crayfish there, but 
there are said to be no fish or eels in the lake. On the small island 
in the middle of the lake the volcano is still active; there is a little 
fire and hot lava, and much smoke there. 
The walk all around the island is a trip requiring two or three nights 
on the track. It can be made by sleeping only two nights, but people 
suggest three stops. Kuru is a two day walk away, they say. Few Merig 
people have ever walked there, and similarly, few have walked up to the 
lake I 
Jean has been working hard on marriage laws and patterns, finding 
the Merelava/Merig/Gaua system complex and very different from that 
previously described for the Banks. He finds the people divided into 
ten clans of matrillneal descent, the tenth such clan reserved for outside 
immigrants from Fiji, and elsewhere. Clans one to five cannot 
marry at all with clans six through ten; this produces an incredible 
degree of genetic isolation or apartheid. However, one clan of one to 
five "marries wrongly," and this provides the essential genetic mixing 
between the two groups, which by conventionally stated practice do not 
intermingle their chromosomes. Within each mutually exclusive group of 
five clans, there is considerable intermarriage between the five clans 
comprising each, but not between members of any one of the clans. This 
is a system that obviously invites interesting genetic sorting of our 
subjects and I have urged Jean to work hard at assigning everyone we 
have bled to the appropriate clan. 
