Called to Chuuk

“My goal is to go back and be an encouragement and serve them. Basically to serve them.”

Tisaleen Hernist, 25, is from the generation some see as self-centered, but that may be the way the old often look at the young. Hernist is completing her master’s degree in education and then hopes to be a teacher on Chuuk, an island in the Federated States of Micronesia, where she spent the first three months of her life.

An island paradise? Hardly. Hernist said Chuuk is poor and crime-ridden, not a place she wants to call home.

“A lot of people are robbing others, getting money, and stealing because there’s no jobs,” she said.

Nevertheless, Hernist believes God has called and prepared her to go. “My heart is for them,” she said. “I know moving could be a hard thing. I like to embrace whatever God has in store for me.”

Hernist—who goes by the name Teesa—had a Western upbringing on the island of Saipan, where her family moved for better opportunities. She didn’t even know she was from Chuuk until she was in fourth grade. Her dad adopted Western ways, which made things confusing at family gatherings.

“When we go to Micronesian or Chuukese family gatherings, I would go with girls and my brother would sit with the guys,” Hernist recalled. “I didn’t know what was going on because I didn’t understand it.”

Hernist grew up speaking English, so sermons in a Chuukese language church were hard to understand. “They preached the gospel in Chuukese. I had no clue,” she said. “I didn’t understand. I just joined when they sang English church songs.”

Not until she moved to Guam to attend Harvest Baptist Bible College did Hernist realize how disconnected she was from traditional Chuukese culture. At Harvest, students come from all the neighboring islands. They share some traditions—like drums on New Year’s Eve—but each island has its own language, dialect, and culture.

Hernist realized she was ignorant about “traditions or cultural stuff.” When she tutored one student in English, and he tutored her in her native language, he’d say to her, “You’re a girl, you cannot say that.” Hernist learned that, in Chuuk culture, it’s taboo for women to say some things that men say.

“Culturally boys and girls do not just hang out … together,” she recalled learning. “With my brother, I cannot sit with him or fight over the remote on the couch with him.”

Her mom regrets not teaching Hernist more about Chuukese culture, but her dad figured she’d move to the States and wouldn’t need to know those things. Her new cultural understanding will be especially important when she goes back to Chuuk to teach. She’s seeing how Micronesians’ niceness can be an obstacle to the gospel.

“If you tell them, ‘Come, you want to receive gospel? You want to have Jesus Christ in your heart?’ they will come to you because they are so nice,” Hernist said. “They do not understand what the gospel is. It’s the kindness that’s a killer or a curse. They are so kind. They want to please you.”

Hernist knows she will have to fight the temptation to act like many islanders who get office jobs.

“They can’t get their hands dirty,” she said. “They have to be in the office. Basically on the islands if you have an office job, you’re just awesome, you’re rich because you work in the office.”

But Hernist wants others to be rich by gaining “Christ as their personal Lord and Savior.”

Listen to Susan Olasky’s report on Tisaleen Hernist and her desire to teach on the island of Chuuk on The World and Everythingin It.