As I searched for a place to live, I came across a woman by the name of Jackeline Rapu Tuki. Her face was sprinkled with wrinkles, the kind that only a cherished few acquire from too much smiling. Her face shape was traditionally Rapa Nui—polynesic lines strengthened with a specific ratio from the nose to the corners of the mouth—but her skin tone and eyebrows betrayed the Nordic genes left by a Norwegian adventurer in the 50s.

When I first met Jackeline, I noticed a perfectly placed hundred dollar bill peeking from the center of her colorful bra. The one-zero-zero in that immediately recognizable, mighty American green was the only visible part of the paper growing out of her breast. I thought it was a social cue signaling power, or class. And her demeanor was that of a matriarch. The combination intimidated me. Maybe this was an ornament linked to some kind of mafia. That day, I approached her with nervous deference.

I told her I was interested in learning about Rapa Nui contemporary art and culture, especially in relation to the February Tapati festival preparations. I had heard that her family was one of the ‘artistic’ families of the island. She was elated; she told me her clan was indeed the one that championed the ancestral Rapanui arts most passionately, and her family had won the Tapati every year for decades now. But her excitement was fueled even more because she was in need of help—she was the mother of Vai, one of the two female candidates for Uka, or queen, of the Tapati 2018. Her house had already become a workshop and central hub for all that the Tapati entailed, even though the competition was more than 5 months away. This, I learned, was standard Rapanui timing for preparations to start gathering full force. Both families had started working on preparations, including costumes, sculptures, original songs, and dances, in March, right after the previous Tapati finished.

The day of that first encounter, she invited me to stay for lunch at her taupea, outside of her house, along with about 15 of her relatives and friends. I ate in silence as, when I attempted to make a contribution or two, they were not successful. My native Spanish was perfectly functional. But for much of the conversation the rhythm of the jokes and dialogues was still too foreign for me to converse at ease. After lunch, I was guided to the pae pae, the workshop next to her house where the costumes for the Tapati were made. A makeshift structure, made out of tree trunks and tin sheets as roof, it was decorated with purple sheets and with fake soccer field grass and children's carpets (with animals and shapes and colors) as floors. Little did I know that this pae pae would become the center of my world, the backdrop of most of my laughter and cries as I sailed the cosmos on a tiny island in the Pacific. When I left the pae pae that day, all I could think of was the magnificent placement of that 100 dollar bill.