Sabalu Market

They look like retired couples, earning supplemental income from home gardens to retirement fund or SS benefit; or they are farmhands who are CWs on island putting in Ag production but dependent on an annual renewal to stay in spite of having American citizen children still to young to petition them.

They sell at the gathering every Saturday from 6am to 12noon locally grown vegetables and fruits at the Susupe Civic Center across the Multi-Purpose Center, with competition from the former Nauru building, the ground level of the 360 Business Center’s festive atmosphere held under canopy into the night. The crowd seemed bigger at 360 than the one by the children’s playground, and the greens are getting fresher, too.

I remember Sabalu as the time when Tony Pellegrino sold tank-grown shrimps inviting everyone especially those in Kagman to do likewise. Peripatetic published writer Walt Goodridge (who will lead a writer’s workshop at the library on Saturday, Jan. 23, from 9am to 12pm) quietly be a demo to his vegetarian lifestyle. That was when the Sabalu Market was a community node; neighbors came to gossip, or, at least, traded news on the supply-and-demand of veggies, fish, and meat.

We have became so functional that the communal gatherings of old, the Friday paseo promenade, and the Thursday evening market across Kristo Rai Church, were reduced to gouging the tourists of their traveling moo-lah. Young adults from Korea, Japan, and China, driving rented Camaros and Mustangs, or the pedestrian newlyweds walking hand-in-hand on their honeymoon, are the target consumers these days. Young Micronesian dancers honing their skills at Kilili pavilion, undulated their trained hips Tahitian-style over a dinner course at a hotel, or on a make shift stage. They swayed graciously to ocean waves.

Sabalu might disappear as local markets stock more greens into their refrigerated shelves and the practicality of food supply take precedence over communal visits and gatherings but that’s a price to pay for the absence of familiarity with vendors. We are now what we eat, no longer seeking familiar growers of what we eat.

A pity. It was fun when we can recognize each other’s face and call each other by our first names! My beef and my grief as an old guardian of ways is that our social sense has been replaced by the unending chase of the mighty denarii!

But the Sabalu Market will not die as it is one of our island traditions as well as the outlet of produce from island farms that will not bend to the cheaper variety flown in from elsewhere, not to mention the frozen ones on containers via Guam, and Shanghai for those coming from many parts of China.

With a local Mart associated by implication with recent attempts to smuggle drugs into the country from China, I was not surprised to a thorough inspection of one of my bags coming through Customs at the CNMI airport on a recent trip originating from Shenyang via Shanghai to Saipan. I had two plastic containers full of photos and negatives that accumulated through the years before I disposed of my SLR camera and lenses for the sparse resolution of digitized images, and the custom officer looked at all the envelopes and packages in case I slipped a couple of packets of the white stuff.

Earlier in 2009, I was going to farm in Papago with abundant water from a natural spring on an 11-acre land. I bought a bush cutter, a saw and other farming tools from NY, but the farming urged dissipated when I noticed my partner growing a bed of marijuana in his yard. I did not have any moral problems with his robust garden save that I wrote for the dailies and the high profile left me vulnerable if associated with the illegal weed. Besides, it did not take long before the tools were stolen from his house shortly after I brought it to him.

The weed was to be decriminalized in the Commonwealth with a bill that failed though the reefer is widely puffed; the CNMI by Federal estimates is the second top per capita inhaler of psychotropic drug. The Feds allow States to decriminalize the use of cannabis. CNMI’s initial thrust was stemmed.

In one of my recent classroom appearances, a student introduced herself Jamaican. A person who neither stopped talking, or cannot restrain herself from moving about her desk, claimed that she was born and raised in Kingston. I commented that in the Blue Mountains, ganja abundantly grew, and the first of only three times I smoked MJ was from ‘dem hills. She went home and told her mother about my comments, and Mom immediately dialed the school to insist that the teacher refrain from encouraging students to smoke the weed.

I understand that the increased presence of sports car riders at Sabalu has to do with sales of Mary Jane, the price originally at $2.50 per ounce on locally grown weed has multiplied 10 times as the item are smuggled in from ‘Pinas, or cultivated by Pinas on island. I am sure it is only a rumor, but where there is smoke, the habit is not too far behind.

See you Sabalu.