FEATURE STORY
The lisåyu, the techa, and a Chamorro tradition passed from one generation to the next
Lisåyu is familiar across generations of Chamorro families: voices gathered in prayer, one person leading and others answering, words repeated often enough to become part of memory. At moments of death and remembrance, the practice brings relatives, neighbors, and community members together around prayer for a loved one and support for those left behind.
At the center of that gathering is the techa—the person entrusted to lead. The role requires more than knowing the sequence of prayers. A techa must know how to carry the group through the lisåyu: when to begin, how to pace the responses, which prayers or songs belong, how language is used, and how to respond to the circumstances of the family and gathering.
Through conversations with Dolores Aldan, a respected elder and longtime techa, and Kyle Manalo, a younger techa, we explore how that knowledge is learned, how different leaders develop their own ways of guiding the lisåyu, and what happens as the practice passes from one generation to another.
Learning to Lead
For the techa who lead it, the lisåyu is first an act of faith and prayer. Tan Dolores speaks of invoking the Holy Spirit before she begins, preparing herself not simply to recite the prayers, but to lead others in praying them. For her, that spiritual responsibility is inseparable from the way a techa guides the gathering.T
To lead a lisåyu is to know the prayers, but it is also to know how to bring people into them. The techa must listen as much as speak—setting the pace, giving others room to respond, and recognizing when a familiar prayer or song needs little instruction because the people gathered already know their part.
That relationship between leader and community can be heard in the way Tan Dolores speaks to those gathered for the rosary. Before beginning, she invites everyone to follow along with the copies they have been given: “Ya tafanhita, tafana’gang, tafangånta, ya tafanmanoppi, ya tafamparehu”—roughly, “Let’s be loud, let’s sing, let’s respond, and let’s be the same together.”
Her words reveal something easily missed when the lisåyu is understood simply as a sequence of prayers. The techa may lead, but the prayer belongs to everyone in the room. Voices answer one another. Songs are carried together. The familiar cadence helps people know when to speak and when to listen. Leadership, in this setting, is less about standing apart from the gathering than helping the gathering find its voice.
And that kind of knowledge is learned over time. It lives not only on the printed page, but in listening to other techa, joining the responses, learning the songs, and eventually knowing how to guide others through them. The result is a practice in which knowledge passes quietly from one person to another—often within families and across generations—each time people gather, pray, sing, and answer together.
Words That Carry Meaning
For Tan Dolores, leading well also means understanding the weight of words. A prayer can be read correctly and still fail to reach the people gathered. She distinguishes between simply reciting what is on the page and speaking with enough intention that the words are heard, understood, and felt.
She describes this responsibility through a Chamorro expression:
“palåbra numana’maguf, palåbra mamumu’unu, palåbra numana’piniti”
Roughly Translated: words that bring joy, words that kill, words that bring pain
For Tan Dolores, the lesson extends beyond ordinary conversation. What a person says—and how it is said—can affect the person receiving it. In prayer, that makes meditation, clarity, and intention especially important. The techa is not simply reading aloud; the words are being offered for the deceased and carried by a congregation praying together.
That is why Tan Dolores pays such close attention to pace and cadence. She says a techa should be clear, audible, neither too fast nor too slow, and attentive to the voices responding. She recalls being taught to think of the techa as “a captain on a ship”: the leader must steer carefully so that everyone can move together.
The rhythm, she says, is something the techa must both “feel and hear.” The response of the congregation tells the leader whether that rhythm is working. In this sense, cadence is not ornament added to the prayer. It is part of the relationship between the voice that leads and the voices that answer.
Learning Young
Kyle Manalo’s path to becoming a techa began long before anyone called on him to lead a lisåyu. He remembers being five years old and eager to bless the food at family gatherings. “Can I bless the table?” he would ask. His family let him, and what began as a child’s enthusiasm for prayer gradually became a responsibility within his family and community.
His mother encouraged that interest. In Kyle’s family, he says, each generation had someone who served as a techa, and his mother wondered who might carry that responsibility in his. Kyle began opening the Lasåyu book on his own and wanting to understand it. His aunt helped him practice, particularly when he encountered Chamorro words he struggled to pronounce.
Then, at eleven, practice suddenly became responsibility.
A cousin had died, and the family gathered at the hospital chapel. They needed someone to lead the rosary, but the techa they ordinarily might have called was unavailable. Kyle had never led a lisåyu for a deceased person before. He had practiced privately, reading and going over the prayers, but now the chapel was, as he remembers it, “jam packed.”Faced with the need, he volunteered: “Let me do it. You know, since I’ve been practicing, I might as well just do it.”
That first lisåyu did not make Kyle a techa all at once. What followed was continued learning—family members helping with pronunciation and songs, experienced techa offering guidance, and opportunities to accompany others as they led. He remembers older techa Vicky Saures Fitial inviting him to follow her to rosaries and sing with her. Those invitations mattered: they told a young practitioner that others recognized what he was learning and trusted him to continue.
Today, families find Kyle much the same way cultural knowledge often travels through an island community: someone knows someone who knows whom to call. He estimates that he leads about two rosaries a month, although there have been days when he has led three. People pass along his telephone number, and families who may never have met him entrust him with leading prayer at one of the most difficult moments in their lives.
For Kyle, that trust is part of the reason for doing it. Asked why he wanted to become a techa, his answer was simple: “I want to help.” In times of grief, he explained, there are families who may not know what to do or whom to call. If he can step into that moment and offer what he described as “spiritual guidance,” then the knowledge he learned from others becomes something he can give in return.
A Language Practiced Together
For Kyle, learning to lead the lisåyu has also meant learning through language. Chamorro was his first language, spoken in a household where he grew up among manåmko’. But he recognizes that many younger people are having a different experience—and that fewer are learning to speak Chamorro with the same familiarity.
That makes the lisåyu important to him for another reason. Its prayers and songs create occasions when Chamorro must be spoken, listened to, practiced, and understood.
“If you learn the rosary, you learn your language as well,” Kyle says. Even someone who does not already speak Chamorro, he explains, can begin encountering the language by learning to read the prayers or listening to the songs.
The idea is simple, but significant. Language in the lisåyu is not encountered only as something to be studied or preserved for the future. It is being used for a purpose in the present—to pray, sing, comfort, remember, and respond to others. A person learning the words is also learning when those words are spoken, how they sound among other voices, and what they mean within a gathering.
Tan Dolores describes that communal dimension from another generation. Her invitation before prayer—“ta fana’gang, tafangånta, ya tafanmanoppi, ya tafamparehu”—calls upon those present to raise their voices, sing, respond, and come together in the prayer. The language survives in that exchange not because one person possesses it, but because people continue using it with one another.
Kyle sees younger people as essential to whether that continues. At the end of his interview, he returned to the responsibility of families and younger generations to practice Chamorro alongside the faith and customs associated with the lisåyu. “We need to always keep our Chamorro language with us everywhere we go,” he said. For him, what has been passed down must continue to be practiced so that another generation can receive it.
And perhaps that is one reason the lisåyu remains such a powerful place for cultural transmission. Each gathering creates the conditions for something to happen again: one voice begins, others answer, and words learned from those who came before are spoken once more.
About the Lisåyu Interviews
The practice of leading the lisåyu is carried by many techa throughout the Marianas, each bringing knowledge and experience shaped by faith, family, community, and those from whom they learned. This story is not intended to represent every techa or every way the lisåyu is practiced.
For this inaugural feature, Council staff spoke with Tan Dolores Aldan and Kyle Manalo, two techa known to us who were available and willing to share their experiences during the period in which the story was being developed. Their conversations offer two perspectives on a much broader living practice. We are grateful to them for sharing their knowledge and experiences and recognize the many other techa whose devotion and service continue to sustain the lisåyu in our community.
