NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

Ti siña mumaigo’ yu’ achokka’ gof yafai yu’. I can’t sleep tonight even though I’m exhausted. I’m in Sacramento at the NAISA (Native American and Indigenous Studies Association) Conference. I spent the day hanging out with some Chamorro graduate students, attended some panels, walked around downtown Sacramento. Now I’m back in my hotel room, finding myself missing someone terribly, but unable to sleep. I was going through my computer, looking through the digital equivalent of ancient, dusty files, seeing if I could bore myself to sleep. I came across a folder which I hadn’t look at in quite a while, full of the lyrics to old Chamorro songs. These are songs that all older Chamorros know in some form or another, but which aren’t as popular nowadays for obvious reasons as changes in taste and the decline of the language in general. When I was going through the lists of songs whose lyrics I've collected over the years, I remembered a story involving one of them. Many years ago,