Leaf plates and bowl carriers are used as trays, known as syusmung, for carrying food and drink to clan members around the fire pit. During festivities syusmung carrying kava bowls, called a swoasey, are passed around. A swoasey contains swoa, a mildly intoxicating kava-like drink.
Na’vi etiquette and tradition dictates that these syusmung are passed to every participant of a social gathering or ritual. One should not take a swoasey off the bowl carrier for his or her own use. Instead, one must hold the bowl carrier and allow another adjacent clan member to take the bowl and place it before the drinker. Only then can one drink from the cup. During festive occasions, children enjoy following the tray around the circle so that they can be the one to place the bowl in front of the tray holder. One of these trays is roughly one meter in length or Na’vi shoulder-width, and made of animal shell and bone, wood, reeds, twigs, and twine, formed into a wide shallow basket.
Swoasey range in size from hand-held to the equivalent of a Terran punch bowl. Na’vi etiquette dictates that one cannot drink from the large social bowl—called the swoasey ayll—unless more than two other Na’vi are present to hold it steady for the drinker. They are made of various sized seed pods hollowed, cleaned and decorated with paint and colored twine.
‘e’insey, ‘gourd cups’, are hollowed out gourds (right), sometimes decorated but usually unadorned for daily, general domestic use, for drinking. They vary in size and weight. Other drinking vessels are made from the shell of a mollusk-like creature, which is cleaned, stripped and boiled. The Na’vi call these sumsey, ‘shell cups’.
A system made of tightly woven mats, rope and twine is used to capture, store and distribute drinking water throughout the Omatikaya Hometree — a large network that runs throughout the village area of the tree.
When away from Hometree, the fleshy, succulent leaves of the paywll are very popular with the Na’vi as a portable hydration system. They will pull off leaves and carry them along to suck on for water. When a leaf is pulled off, a new one grows in its place. The leaves must be harvested carefully, however, because the top leaves occasionally eject spines in the direction of the stem when too many water-filled leaves are removed.
After rain, clean water can also be found pooling in the cup-like leaves of certain plants, such as the ’ä’o (pitcher, left). Water from dew and fog that runs down and collects in the cup-shaped body of the tawtsngal (panopyra, ’sky cup’) is collected by the Na’vi for a nutritious and healing drink.