By J. Ngoriakl
09/28/2024
In his last public speaking appearance, Ngirakebou Roman Bedor, talked about his experience and thoughts on civic duty. I was there in the small conference room at Ngarachamayong, profusely taking down notes. I remember somewhere along his talk, he mentioned the phrase, “Nation’s Conscience.” I wrote it down on my small notebook and underlined it a few times so that I can come back to it. This was around April 2018, right before his daughter came to the event and took him to his doctor’s appointment. It turns out that, that public appearance would be his last. Moved by the series of events surrounding this public figure whom I admire deeply, not only as a writer and author, but more importantly as an example of a Palauan thought leader and change-maker, I wrote a tribute poem in his honor. The poem goes:
Chief Ngirakebou, A Tribute
Like a rare comet that comes along every few hundred years, so did he who was Ngirakebou Roman Bedor.
Like the steady hills of Babeldaob that stand immovably, he stood with might and courage for our people during the darkest of days.
Like the stars that guided the old seafarers through the stormy seas, his voice steered our nation at our most turbulent times.
May our Chief Ngirakebou rest in well deserved peace, may his life serve as the golden caliber of service, and may his memory always be the nation’s voice of conscience.
I wrote those words as a young Palauan, like the rest of my generation, privileged to stand on the shoulders giants such as he and countless others. While we dote on such figures and write tributes to their service and memory, I’ve heard that at their heyday, they weren’t seen as heroes; but rather trouble making activists who stood on the way of progress. Perhaps that’s only the glimpse of what I know about him and others at the time, and maybe what I’ve heard is wrong; but one thing I know for sure is that the dedication to what Mahatma Gandhii called Satyāgraha — the committed work for social and political reform through nonviolence — can be quite unpopular, isolating, and even hopeless at times. I know this through first-hand personal experience, albeit, not as tragic as that of Ngirakebou and others whose houses were bombed with others paying the ultimate price of losing their lives.
Today as I sit in the quietness that is my home and sanctuary, thinking about the upcoming Independence Day in a few days, I wonder what Ngirakebou Roman Bedor would say if he was here today. I wonder what it he meant when he said to listen to the nation’s conscience. Is it listening to popular opinions and sentiments thrown about in Facebook groups? Is it reading, assessing, and analyzing complex laws and national fiscal reports—making sense of the numbers using pie graphs and colorful charts? Or is it something entirely different. I feel like it’s something entirely different, but I just can’t put my finger on it.
Perhaps a nation’s conscience, is a sort of high function of logic—like the brain is to the body. Maybe it could be that, but when I think about it in this approach, I start to picture a certain type of people in our Palauan society. I picture people in small meeting rooms, discussing grand ideas and policies. I picture elected officials in their island formal attire, talking to each other about some abstract concepts like equality, progress, development, and national strategy. While these things are important in every society, they seem to be the functions and worries of a few—those in the upper echelons of our social pyramid — like senators, delegates, directors, governors, and so forth. They seem to be things reserved for a small group of people who have the privilege to talk about them with peers of the same stature. To be quite honest, I can probably say I belong in that small exclusive group. I’ve sat in such rooms and meetings.
Like others in this group, I have the time, training, and headspace to read, analyze, and critique national policies. I can even do this from the comfort of my bedroom slash office, while my young son is playing online games in his own bedroom next door. I can sit around and craft lengthy comments and posts on Facebook about our taxes and how it exacerbate life for the average Palauan family, while my son interrupts me a couple of times with his ideas about a good user interface for his future game that he plans to build when he learns how to code. Or the times he would ask me about things like “blackface” or “what happens to Jesus if Adam and Eve didn’t eat the apple,” you know, things that an 11-year old boy living in Palau would probably not flesh out with their parents; but because of our luck, financial standing, and being able to homeschool him, we are able to talk about such things in our household. And so, can I claim to understand what the nation’s conscience is? In my current state of affairs and social standing, can I safely assume to know what the nation’s conscience is? I do not believe so.
In fact, I believe that my current circumstances blinds me from the task of seeking to understand our nation’s conscience. Rather, it’s when I look back to last year, 2023, and how much I struggled to put food on the table and keep the lights on, when I feel like I inch closer to understanding our collective conscience. It’s when I think back to my childhood and how we lived in a small tin house, relying on my mom’s minimum wage paycheck and the little side income my folks get from selling fresh clams on the weekends, that feel closer to grasping the nation’s conscience that Ngirakebou talked about. And so, for me it’s clear that the very concept of our collective conscience is something more than a function of logic; it’s something more than a small exclusive group of people who can afford to think and talk about policies over high-priced coffee and afternoon tea, before going back to the safety and security of their homes, equipped with high-speed internet, air conditioned rooms, and a well-stocked fridge.
Quite the opposite, the nation’s conscience is the faint beating heart of the people. Instead of logic, like that of the brain is to the body, it’s a lot more basic in that it’s the veins and arteries in which the heart pumps with blood without our brain having to think about it. It’s a lot messier and bloodier than abstract thoughts, ideas, and policies; instead, it’s more about survival and making ends meet, in a quiet and subtle way. Thus, this is probably why when I think back to the times I lived in constant anxiety of how to provide for my child for the given week, or when I was a kid overhearing my parents lament over blals and loaning money from relatives to buy rice and odoim, is when I feel closer to understanding the nation’s conscience. Could this be the reason why moments and eras of struggles and hardships bring about people like Ngirakebou Roman Bedor? That being able to hear a nation’s conscience is to feel its messy beating heart? I believe so, and this brings me to a paradox—the paradox of struggle-born leaders. For a leader to try and solve our big problems, to truly understand and hear the faint beating heart of the people, and to understand our collective conscience, he or she has to live a life of struggle and hardship; however, those who live such life of struggles seldom become national leaders. This leaves us with leaders who are unable to listen and empathize with the struggle of the many.
I truly believe that the messy and bloody reality of Palau today, is invisible and quite opaque to those who live in comfortable homes, stocked with an assortment of food, and unbothered by the constant anxiety of whether or not they can keep the lights on until the next payday. You know, people like me today, in 2024, having secured some savings and income for foreseeable future. I can only hear the faint beating and fully grasp the nation’s conscience in hindsight. And not really long range hindsight to the time when I was a little girl, wearing hand-me-downs from my better off relatives, but to last year in 2023 when I had to panic each time I realized that my water would be disconnected if I don’t find money to pay it before the end of business day. To the times I had to reach out to my relatives abroad and ask for a loan, “but I will pay you back once I get paid from a project,” I would say. I can hear the nation’s conscience like a loud beating drum when I think back to last year when my son asked me, “Mom, are we poor?” To which I replied, “Yes we are, and I won’t be able to buy your games or all the snacks you want but don’t worry, mommy will find a way.” The saddest part of that difficult conversation is not that, but rather the ending when he replies, “Okay mom, I understand,” and walks into his room with a visible sense of defeat and hopelessness. Oh God, my heart is breaking now just writing about it.
My heart breaks even more when I think about all the children and families that are not so lucky like mine, who live with that never-ending struggle and worry of whether or not they’ll have healthy snacks to bring to school tomorrow. Or the single mom hustling to make sure her children have something to eat for dinner, since at least their lunch is covered in school. Or, and I say this with as much respect for the departed as possible, the parent who woke up one day and decided that they have failed and that the only way out is to tie a rope around their neck. Or the young adult who has heard enough lamenting from their family, who feels like their existence is a burden and a strain on their loved ones and therefore, the only way to solve everyone’s problem is to tie a rope around their neck. Yes I know, these are things that shouldn’t be said out loud or forever immortalized in this essay, but because of where we stand today in our history, they must be said out of necessity.
“A kelel chelechang a kelel chelechang, ea klukuk a dirka mei,” these were words my father used whenever we had enough money to splurge on luxury or an expensive dinner. They became words I lived by in my early 20s as a young, naive, college student living and partying it up in Denver. These words, this motto said in our mother tongue became the justification for my careless spending on luxury goods and trips to Palauan parties in other states. Now that I look back, I realize how foolish my actions were; moreover, I realize how reckless my father’s motto was. Why did he not teach me to save up and put money in a savings account where it earns interests? Why didn’t he teach me to monitor my credit so that I can have access to better loans? Or to hold off on splurging on an expensive one-night dinner so that I can stretch my budget out a bit more and feel a lot less anxious about money? I think I know why he didn’t teach me such things. I think he didn’t teach me what he didn’t know himself.
You see, while my father is the son of an Ibedul, he lived in luxury in the early years of his life until one day, he lost everything. The then young father and husband, lost the assets and business his father handed down to him and had to reach absolute rock bottom. Around that time, I came along, a daughter in need of safety and security in the midst of hardship. Unlike my older siblings who lived in the apartments of Rock Island Cafe, who wore clothes ordered by my mother out of a fancy catalogue, or the famous pizza story they used to tell me where my dad flew to Guam just to buy pizza for my brother because he saw a Little Caesar’s commercial and demanded pizza for days — unlike them, I lived in a small tin house. My first memories are of the tiny one-bedroom tin house in Nandeng. My babysitter was a cheap floaty that my dad tied to the side of our small Indian boat while he and my mom harvested wild clams to sell for extra money. I listened with starstruck eyes to my older siblings’ stories when they talked about their stylish clothes they received in the mail. Or the expensive bike my dad bought for our eldest, my late sister Joann, and how she would take it out for a spin while wearing clothes from JC Penny. I loved listening to their tales of luxury and comfort. I remember feeling some sort of mixed feeling of envy and hope that one day, maybe my dad would find his fortune again and I too can wear off-island clothes.
Those were the days. Little did I know that my hardship-stricken childhood became my biggest teacher. It’s from growing up like that and later, living a somewhat middle-class lifestyle in high-school that anchored me to certain values that stayed with me until today. That life and childhood gave me the gift of empathy and solidarity to those with less. And my experience last year in 2023 where I had to loan money and ask for bail out from my family and friends, further cemented my values and drove me to make a personal and political decision — to work as much as I can against a new tax system that has made life much harder than it needs to be for so many families across Palau. I would not have made such a hard decision to burn bridges and align myself with the opposite side of the isle if I had never experienced first hand the struggle of hardship and living in survival mode — both as child growing up and later as a single mother hustling to make ends meet last year. I would not be able to hear the collective beating heart of our people, or as Ngirakebou puts it, the nation’s conscience.
The nation’s conscience as it turns out, is a lot more visceral and messy than that of abstract thinking and high level discussions about policies and agendas. Instead, it is the clear understanding of what it’s like to struggle and live each day not knowing whether or not there will be running water tomorrow. It’s the young parents who have to put off paying for their PNCC bill this week so that they can buy school supplies for their kids. It’s the father, grandfather, and Ngerkesoaol chief who said, “A kelel chelechang a kelel chelechang, ea klukuk a dirka mei,” because living in survival mode has no room for ideas such as setting up saving accounts and making trade offs. Because living in survival mode doesn’t allow one to think about complex systems and policies, for life becomes entangled with worries and anxieties of whether or not the kids can have dinner tonight.
And thus, I end this reflection essay by saying, we need to learn to listen to those in the margins, and more difficulty, to the faint beating heart of our people, in order to unveil the nation’s conscience. This corporal beating heart is only loud when you live a life of struggle, but faint and quiet when you live a life of comfort where your children have food to eat, not just today, but for the foreseeable future. Where they have savings account and can be taught a separate set of rules than those of their peers who live in struggle. And thus, to understand and solve our most pressing societal problems, one must either live in struggle, not just in childhood memory, but in today’s world with today’s price of food and goods, or learn to listen with empathy. I hope this coming independence day, those in power can hear the resounding beat of today’s Palau—a paradise that’s become too expensive to live in for many families. I hope this independence day, we can reflect on where we come from and where we need to go from here, and to reflect with the guidance of the nation’s conscience.