Mo Una Nenema Mawi

Life in Wabuku looks a LOT different than life in America. A huge part of our daily routine is spent outside, doing whatever the people here do. We’ve had a lot of interesting cultural experiences so far, and I thought I’d share a few with you over the next few blog posts to give you a better picture of life here.

One of the most common cultural events for the ladies here is scraping sago, which they call “una” (pronounced: oo-nah). The sago palm is extremely plentiful here and it grows wild, so it’s the perfect staple food. Once it’s scraped out, the inside of the tree can be turned into a flour-like substance which can be cooked several different ways. 

Most ladies will scrape sago at least once a week, if not more. The sago will last several days without refrigeration, so they can use it for a little while before getting more.

The ladies use a specific tool for scraping, which they call a “name” (pronounced: nah-may).

They swing the name up over their head and bring it down, letting just the tip of it scrape the sago. They can scrape through a 2-foot long chunk in probably an hour or less!

When they finish scraping the sago, they take it to a water source where they “wash” it. They set up a trough with a container at the bottom (all out of jungle materials, I might add!) for catching the sago. 

Next, they put some of the sago scrapings into the trough and pour water over them.

Then, they squeeze the sago scrapings to get all of the water to run out of them. The powder that gets caught in the water flows into the container at the bottom and is the substance that they use to cook with. The scrapings that remain in the trough get tossed out. 

They repeat this process over and over until all of the scrapings have been “washed”. Then, they dump all the water out of the container at the bottom. They remove the remaining flour-like substance and take it home in their homemade sago baskets, which they call an “anto” or “antu” (pronounced: ahn-toh or ahn-too). 

It's a lot of hard work! 

Oh, and in case you're wondering, the title of the blog post, "mo una nenema mawi" means, "I'm going to go scrape sago" in Uriay. :)