Before the tide turns, Ening is already ankle-deep in the taro patch behind Ibobang, running a hand along the water line she rebuilt after the last full moon. Overnight, saltwater crept up from a drainage cut for a nearby road, and by morning the youngest leaves in the low corner of the patch have already begun to turn yellow. She has watched this pattern for years and knows without needing to check which square she will lose, and which one — the one furthest from the sea — she can still save.
Ening is the lead woman of the Ngatpang Women's Group, part of the four-state Dmakeiukl alliance in Palau, and a custodian in the fullest sense of the word: of taro patches, of a stretch of reef her community closed off on its own initiative years before any outside program arrived, and of the knowledge — how to level a flooded square, how to read a dying leaf — that keeps both alive. Taro is not just a crop; it is the foundation of Palauan life. "In the old days, before tapioca or sweet potatoes arrived from other lands, taro was the original sustenance. The purple and yellow roots provide carbohydrates; the stems are used in desserts and cooked with coconut milk, and the leaves serve as a protein source. Even without fish, clams, or sea cucumbers, taro alone could sustain our community through storms or lean times", she says. Taro: mother of Palauan existence, the first and last line of resilience.
Fifteen years before anyone called it a conservation area
Long before the arrival of the Kiwa Initiative, led regionally by the Micronesia Conservation Trust (MCT), Ngatpang had already tackled, in its own way, a very different challenge: the depletion of marine resources essential to customary meals and ceremonies. About fifteen years ago, the community closed off part of its reef at Olterukl, hoping to see sea cucumbers, clams, and fish recover. The recovery was minimal. "It would take hours, and we would always come back with very meagre catches," Ening recalls the surveys that came next. What changed things: a proposal from TNC's Yvonne Ueda (The Nature Conservancy) that the conservation plan be designed and led entirely by the women of Ngatpang, followed by a partnership with the Taiwan Technical Mission, whose sea cucumber-rearing cages at Olterukl — the first of their kind in Palau — gave the group something concrete to measure.
For Taro patches, the water must be level
For Taro, the Kiwa Initiative and MCT funding have recently let Ening's group turn improvisation into something closer to a system. A tool shed now holds equipment the group could not previously afford, along with training in the less visible aspects — budgeting, record-keeping, reporting — keeping a small project accountable and alive between grant cycles. “Without this support, we didn't have the resources to restore the taro patches for the next generations,” Ening says. The same funding is now earmarked for the harder, slower work still ahead: restoring the taro patches inland, far enough from the sea to survive it, since the ones nearer the water have already been flooded and abandoned twice. Four village groups make up the wider women's program Ening helps coordinate, each working a different resource — mud clams, giant clams, mangroves, taro — and each returning, once a month, to a shared meeting to report what worked and what failed. It was there restoring, mud clams that women learned they had been doing it wrong. “Pull a clam from the mud and it dies, Ening explains, so instead you cover the site with mangrove leaves and let the clams grow back on their own.” Ening's contribution is at its best about taro. “The bottom of the taro patch needs to be level, because otherwise the water collects in the low spots, and when it gets very hot, the taro dies.”
Passing on what her mother gave her
“This is where we grew up, and this is where our mothers raised us,” she says. As she speaks of her taro field, her voice grows more fragile. She pauses for a moment to collect her thoughts. “We must hold on to this.” It remains difficult to fully engage young women: they often cite a lack of time to commit to the project. But her authority stems not so much from persuasion as from the force of tradition, which, little by little, is regaining its place under Ening’s leadership. "Woman is the manager of the house, she says. Everything — food, money, children, work, customs. Woman is the manager.” In Ngatpang, it is still the men who take on the tasks that the women cannot do themselves — using a chainsaw, clearing undergrowth — and Ening makes a point of asking for this help in public, at community meetings. This is what makes the work a joint effort, in which everyone’s contribution — women and men alike — is fully recognised.
This year, Palau hosts the 55th Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting, its first time at the helm of the region's largest gathering since 2014. Delegations arriving in Koror will pass within an hour of Ibobang, and of women deciding, square by square, which parts of their coastline are still worth saving. Ening does not need the language of summits to make her case. “Taro is the beginning of our breath. Without it, there is no life.”
