#fanihi

Quick little fanihi sketch, just because they're too dang cute. We see lots of these around Rota where they're thankfully still fairly abundant and serve well in their fruit-eating, seed-dispersing role on the island.

Back to the Marianas next week! Here are two field sketchbook pages I didn't manage to post yet, of fanihi (Mariana fruit bat) and sali (Micronesian Starling).

Fanihi were kind of everywhere on Rota, and I saw more of them in five days there than I have in all my time working on Saipan over the years. It's good to know that their population is healthy there, though the locals said that they were seeing them more than usual also because of a behavioral change. Typhoons in 2023 had stripped the trees of flowers and fruit and delayed the new fruiting season, so part of the reason fanihi were so visible was that they were spending a lot more time than before having to find food.

Never seen a fanihi outside of a controlled setting!…they’re endangered!!! and this lil cutie graced me with their presence <3

It’s not easy to love yourself.  Society trains us from when we’re little to not be satisfied with what has been passed down from our parents.  We grow up with all of these insecurities and then we go to school and point out what we view as flaws in others in order to help ourselves feel better about what we dislike about ourselves. We’re always too much of something. We’re fat, skinny, tall, short, messy hair, straight hair, curly hair, brown, white, yellow, funny looking toes, big noses, big eyes, small eyes, yellow teeth, crooked teeth, wrinkles, freckles, skin blemishes, moles, eye lashes too long, eye brows too think, belly too round, legs too big,  butt too flat—if we focused as much attention on our inner development, the world might be so beautiful, we wouldn’t even notice the too muches we have lingering all over our bodies. 

I didn’t realize that I looked different from anyone else until my older sister told me I was adopted because I was not the same color as she and Christine.  I think I was four or five.  I started to notice that my cousins would joke about me being vanilla and they were chocolate, my oma would say “OOOH!  My little German girl!”  At this point in my life, I took these differences with a shrug and carried on thinking about Barbie Dolls as I imagined being discovered by Walt Disney himself to become the singing voice of Ariel (I didn’t know that a singer doesn’t continue to record music after the movie was done). 

It wasn’t until elementary school that I was called “haole” and that references to my white skin were made to be something terrible.  Apparently white people are believed to have a large array of illnesses amongst the 5 year old population as of 1991.  So it started… the distaste for my light skin.  As time passed, my 7 year-old palate maintained a love for Ichiban, Chef Boyardee, fried chicken and dunkaroos.  Because I had no one to play outside with and I wasn’t much of a loner, TV became my best friend and the names referencing my color were grouped with names referencing my weight. Development was further against me as my baby teeth fell out revealing crooked teeth that seemed to jut out in all directions.  If my teeth were landscape, one would need an all-terrain vehicle and some repelling rope to get from Point A to Point B.   Pre-teen years changed my thick straight hair with curly ends into a mess of coconut husk-like poof balls.  By the time I hit high school, the sight of myself in the mirror was completely displeasing.  I thought I was fat and ugly and I pretty much felt convinced that everyone else thought so too.  The insults were frequent enough for me to believe it. 

Awkward years and a life story later, I’m able to wake up, look in the mirror and tell myself “Damn girl, you cute!”  Of course some rugby weight loss, braces and hair reform has helped me feel a little better about myself, but there’s still that challenge of overcoming the taught mentality of being completely displeased with one’s appearance.  So how’d I do it?                                           PRACTICE.