two quick things: 1) scathesedays.blogspot.com - a blog about the happenings at Saramen Chuuk. Good pictures and regularly updated.
2) www.chhukreform.org - a website keeping up with what's going on in Chuuk for those interested.
so if you're curious as to what life out here is like, this could help you fill in the many blanks.
-matt
Monday, September 7, 2009
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Most of the summer
Well, it has been a while. Usually when I start a blog post I know what I am going to write about, but for this one I have no idea. I have gotten several emails and messages telling me to get it in gear, so here it goes. I don’t even know when the last post I wrote was. So I will just start with the summer.
Luke Lavin a Pohnpei JV who was also my friend from Gonzaga, we were in the same class, decided to come and teach at Saramen Chuuk for the summer. So we were roomies and it was a blast. But we did get black magicked. Hard. I mean really hard. Let me paint this picture for you. We get back from our end of the year retreat (Re-o/Dis-o) to find that we have no running water. Now, there was a group of about 100 people from the outer islands staying in the classrooms of the school, and one of the women decided that she could siphon some water from our pump. Then in the course of this she sat on it and broke our water pump. Hence, no more running water.
I think that this warrants a quick explanation of our water situation. We live on the second floor. On the ground level there is a very large water catchment that catches rain water and stores it. We then have a little 1 hp pump that we plug in, when we have power, and it pumps the water to a much smaller catchment on the roof. We need to fill it about every week. But when there is water in the catchment, we have running water. So we start the summer with an empty roof catchment and no way to fill it.
This means that we bring garbage bins downstairs and fill them at a faucet and then carry the full, heavy, buckets up to the room so we can flush toilets and at least think about doing dishes. But one of the best parts of living with Luke this summer is that we just saw eye to eye on everything. And at this point we realized that it was survival and dishes came secondary… or lower.
Despite this we had a rocking summer, we adopted the motto “refuse to lose,” Griffey came back and it just made sense. Then about 9ish days after the water ran dry (like Boys II Men… who also got plenty of play time this summer!) we got it fixed. Now I know what you are thinking, but you just wait.
Before the water came back we hit another rather large snafu. Namely, our refrigerator/freezer died. In Chuuk everyday is 85-95 and 90% humidity with about a 30% chance of showers. It is the steadiest climate in the world. And while that steadiness is great, it is not good for keeping food. And without water that leads to really weird stuff growing in our kitchen… and bathroom. The fridge is still not fixed to this day. FYI.
So maybe you don’t believe in the black magic yet. That’s fine, I’ve got more. But before I continue I really want to reiterate that this was one of, if not the, best summer of my life. A lot of things went wrong but Luke and I just had so much fun. We were pretty flexible and just rolled with all of these setbacks. It was so much fun and after a year of not much laughing, it seemed like I was constantly smiling.
So anyways more black magic stories. Now we get to health. This paragraph is not for the squeamish, and I will spare many of the gory details. So just remember that everything I say here should be multiplied by at least 800%. Luke got a horrendous full body rash, several times. I got a bug bite that turned into a boil and I now refer to it as the tumor. Plenty fevers. Occassional diahrrea. And I have a pretty bad fungal toe. There’s the short and sweet of the health list.
Now to the ghosts. One night I am fast asleep and Luke walks into my room. He leans in halfway and is looking for something. He has his white shorts on, the ones he always wears, and no shirt. It’s like 3:30 in the morning. His door is adjacent to mine and I figured that he might just need some goldbond because we used a LOT of goldbond this summer… it is just so cooling and medicinal. But he kept looking around so I said his name a few times and he didn’t respond. Then finally I yelled it. From the other room I heard him say, “What?” in the most annoyed and sleepy tone. I blinked hard and realized that Luke was not standing at my door, nor was he ever. He was laying in his bed sleeping and I was seeing things. We both quickly canvassed the whole apartament. No one. It only added to the black magic feel of the summer.
Now a word about black magic. There is traditional local black magic here that certain families supposedly possess and it can be anything from a love potion to make someone fall in love with you, to a fatal curse. Traditional families will still place their hair in a banana tree after it is cut so no one can take it and black magic them. Right before re-O/Dis-O I cut off 12 months of hair and about 4 months of beard. The beard was nasty and huge, but Luke and I had a side burn competition going. The jury is still out on who won but he loked like Millard Fillmore and I looked like someone who really really REALLY likes Ziggy Marley.
Ok, I’ll stop with the black magic stories but hopefully by now you get the drift. I could go on with health issues or the time we met aliens, but it just doesn’t seem right for this forum. Other notable things from the summer include a wonderful visit from my parents. We got to go off island for the 4th of July weekend with mom, dad, Luke, and Jake (a local Peace Corps). It was a blast and I cannot express how wonderful it was to see them. I keep realizing what a home boy I am. Now let me qualify that statement, Chuuk is amazing. I am beyond lucky to be here and have this placement. I have learned so much and am actually getting decent at the language (there will be a story about that in a few paragraphs). I feel like I am still in school because I am learning so much. Everything from practical boating tips, to teaching tips, or even how to respect each other. Chuuk is wonderful. With that said, Tacoma made me. It is my home and I feel like I need to work my way back to that place so that I can give back, if that makes any sense.
Summer school ended Friday July 24. I went to the docks to see what the boats were doing. Turns out that there was a boat going to the Hall Islands, locally known as Bafung, but it was leaving that night. I came back and after a little discussion, Luke and I were off.
It was a 14 hour boat ride and it was perfect. We left at about 7:30 pm. It was dark and clear, but there were clouds to the north. Luke and I sat on the bow and had the hardest time deciding whether to admire the stars or the phosphorescence in the water. As if to make up our mind for us a dolphin started playing with the bow of boat and the colors of the phosphorescence played with its body under the water so much that we couldn’t tell if it was a thousand air bubbles making the light show or the phosphorescence. It swam amazingly. I stood there in awe. But the night continued to get later and we needed somewhere to sleep. We found a spot. It was on 3 different coolers and all at different heights, but it was surprisingly comfortable.
We awoke just as the sun was rising and we were spotting the first glimpses of land. There are not words for everything I was feeling and seeing. It was the perfect culmination of the summer. All the people spoke almost exclusively Chuukese, so I had to struggle to communicate, but I think it really helped me. That Saturday we stayed on the boat all day as it went from island to island until we finally ended up at the middle of the 3 islands, called Ruo. A woman named Anna offered us a place to stay at her house… and by offered I mean something closer to demanded. We obliged and went ashore on her skiff. We initially thought that we would only spend one night there so we only brought food for one night. She led us through the village and the jungle until we arrived at her house; mind you it was dark. She placed a bucket out back below her catchment and informed us we could shower. Luke went first. As he did I talked to her and she explained that her and her sisters would sleep in the same room with Luke and I. This is a cultural no-no. And I subtly told Luke. We didn’t freak out but we did decide to go with the flow and see where the night took us. There were kids outside dancing the Macarena, so we weren’t too concerned. Then, out of no where this skinny old man with gray curly hair and a thick gray beard walked up, holding a flashlight. He wore jeans with a piece of twine for a belt, no shirt and lacked teeth. He was our savior. Dougie took us back to his house and gave us a room. Little did we know that this was the best thing to happen to us… possibly ever.
Dougie is the man. We stayed with him for 3 nights. He took us all over the island, fed us, and talked to us. He spoke pretty good English so we conversed a lot. It was simply perfect. We ate delicious fish, breadfruit, taro, bananas, and all of the coconuts we could drink. Heaven could not be much different than this.
The mayor, a wonderful and gregarious man, that we had met and befriended on the boat asked us to come over to his house one night and “watch TV”. Luke and I had the same reaction. “Absolutely”. We arrived and sat on his porch as the kids pulled out a table, a TV and a DVD player literally putting it in the middle of a banana grove, in the middle of this jungle, in the middle of the island Ruo, in the middle of the Pacific. Before I knew it there were over 50 people around (yes I counted). I heard the roar of the generator and on came the TV. It started up and it was a concert DVD. There was a band and a slightly older white guy with greasy hair and a big guitar sitting at the microphone. He started acapella. I didn’t quite recognize the lyrics. It was familiar but I couldn’t quite catch it. Then as he hit the chorus I realized what it was just as white cursive writing appeared on the bottom of the screen Bryan Adams, “Heaven”. Luke and I look at each other as if to say “of course.” We went back to Dougie’s with unbreakable smiles.
There are plenty of stories from this trip and I will be happy to email them if you want to know more, but as for now I think I will get on with the boat ride home and the New JV’s.
The wind shifted. It usually comes from the east, but on the day we left it started coming from the west. The people out there told me that wind from the west means a typhoon will come (shortly thereafter Taiwan and China, I think it was there, were hit by a typhoon…) But it also made the seas very angry. This was not good because our 48’ boat was now carrying 2000 lbs of fish it had caught and about 85 people. Luke and I wound up seated upright on a cooler. The whole trip. Not so bad right... wrong. We were sandwiched between 3 pigs, and perched right above a bag of preserved breadfruit. It tastes great but smells like death. Moreover the 7’ swells made just about everyone on the boat vomit. But it was too crowded so no one could get to the gunwales. They just 'hit the deck,' if you catch my drift (no, I did not vomit thank you very much!). The smell was not so pleasant. The boat ride back took much longer. Upon arriving at Saramen Chuuk, our home, we realized that we had been up for a little over 32 hours straight. And we both agreed that even though the boat ride was kind of miserable it was a wonderful experience and capped the perfect trip.
Luke went home, unfortunately, and Megan Bell came back from Pohnpei. She stayed down at Saram and we cleaned and prepped for the newbies by watching R. Kelly’s urban hip-hop opera on my computer (Katie Childs, if you read this I am SOOOOOO sorry! I don’t know where it came from but I just found it on there the day before Megan got back. We will watch it together someday, I promise). The new ones came and they are very very cool. My community is a blast and I cannot wait for Megan Hendricks to get back and complete it. We stay at the dinner table for hours every night laughing and talking and we stay up much too late simply because we like hanging out with each other so much that we don’t want to go to bed. I am so happy and it is in such stark contrast to last year where things were so quiet in the community. It is a very different feel. I think we successfully broke the black magic.
Things are going great thus far and I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone, once again for all of your care and support. I appreciate you taking the time to read this massive massive work I just wrote, and I miss you all! Thank you again. Fokkun Kinamwe, tong, me pwa pwa ngeni kemi menisin. Ai tong Ngoruch!
-Matt
Luke Lavin a Pohnpei JV who was also my friend from Gonzaga, we were in the same class, decided to come and teach at Saramen Chuuk for the summer. So we were roomies and it was a blast. But we did get black magicked. Hard. I mean really hard. Let me paint this picture for you. We get back from our end of the year retreat (Re-o/Dis-o) to find that we have no running water. Now, there was a group of about 100 people from the outer islands staying in the classrooms of the school, and one of the women decided that she could siphon some water from our pump. Then in the course of this she sat on it and broke our water pump. Hence, no more running water.
I think that this warrants a quick explanation of our water situation. We live on the second floor. On the ground level there is a very large water catchment that catches rain water and stores it. We then have a little 1 hp pump that we plug in, when we have power, and it pumps the water to a much smaller catchment on the roof. We need to fill it about every week. But when there is water in the catchment, we have running water. So we start the summer with an empty roof catchment and no way to fill it.
This means that we bring garbage bins downstairs and fill them at a faucet and then carry the full, heavy, buckets up to the room so we can flush toilets and at least think about doing dishes. But one of the best parts of living with Luke this summer is that we just saw eye to eye on everything. And at this point we realized that it was survival and dishes came secondary… or lower.
Despite this we had a rocking summer, we adopted the motto “refuse to lose,” Griffey came back and it just made sense. Then about 9ish days after the water ran dry (like Boys II Men… who also got plenty of play time this summer!) we got it fixed. Now I know what you are thinking, but you just wait.
Before the water came back we hit another rather large snafu. Namely, our refrigerator/freezer died. In Chuuk everyday is 85-95 and 90% humidity with about a 30% chance of showers. It is the steadiest climate in the world. And while that steadiness is great, it is not good for keeping food. And without water that leads to really weird stuff growing in our kitchen… and bathroom. The fridge is still not fixed to this day. FYI.
So maybe you don’t believe in the black magic yet. That’s fine, I’ve got more. But before I continue I really want to reiterate that this was one of, if not the, best summer of my life. A lot of things went wrong but Luke and I just had so much fun. We were pretty flexible and just rolled with all of these setbacks. It was so much fun and after a year of not much laughing, it seemed like I was constantly smiling.
So anyways more black magic stories. Now we get to health. This paragraph is not for the squeamish, and I will spare many of the gory details. So just remember that everything I say here should be multiplied by at least 800%. Luke got a horrendous full body rash, several times. I got a bug bite that turned into a boil and I now refer to it as the tumor. Plenty fevers. Occassional diahrrea. And I have a pretty bad fungal toe. There’s the short and sweet of the health list.
Now to the ghosts. One night I am fast asleep and Luke walks into my room. He leans in halfway and is looking for something. He has his white shorts on, the ones he always wears, and no shirt. It’s like 3:30 in the morning. His door is adjacent to mine and I figured that he might just need some goldbond because we used a LOT of goldbond this summer… it is just so cooling and medicinal. But he kept looking around so I said his name a few times and he didn’t respond. Then finally I yelled it. From the other room I heard him say, “What?” in the most annoyed and sleepy tone. I blinked hard and realized that Luke was not standing at my door, nor was he ever. He was laying in his bed sleeping and I was seeing things. We both quickly canvassed the whole apartament. No one. It only added to the black magic feel of the summer.
Now a word about black magic. There is traditional local black magic here that certain families supposedly possess and it can be anything from a love potion to make someone fall in love with you, to a fatal curse. Traditional families will still place their hair in a banana tree after it is cut so no one can take it and black magic them. Right before re-O/Dis-O I cut off 12 months of hair and about 4 months of beard. The beard was nasty and huge, but Luke and I had a side burn competition going. The jury is still out on who won but he loked like Millard Fillmore and I looked like someone who really really REALLY likes Ziggy Marley.
Ok, I’ll stop with the black magic stories but hopefully by now you get the drift. I could go on with health issues or the time we met aliens, but it just doesn’t seem right for this forum. Other notable things from the summer include a wonderful visit from my parents. We got to go off island for the 4th of July weekend with mom, dad, Luke, and Jake (a local Peace Corps). It was a blast and I cannot express how wonderful it was to see them. I keep realizing what a home boy I am. Now let me qualify that statement, Chuuk is amazing. I am beyond lucky to be here and have this placement. I have learned so much and am actually getting decent at the language (there will be a story about that in a few paragraphs). I feel like I am still in school because I am learning so much. Everything from practical boating tips, to teaching tips, or even how to respect each other. Chuuk is wonderful. With that said, Tacoma made me. It is my home and I feel like I need to work my way back to that place so that I can give back, if that makes any sense.
Summer school ended Friday July 24. I went to the docks to see what the boats were doing. Turns out that there was a boat going to the Hall Islands, locally known as Bafung, but it was leaving that night. I came back and after a little discussion, Luke and I were off.
It was a 14 hour boat ride and it was perfect. We left at about 7:30 pm. It was dark and clear, but there were clouds to the north. Luke and I sat on the bow and had the hardest time deciding whether to admire the stars or the phosphorescence in the water. As if to make up our mind for us a dolphin started playing with the bow of boat and the colors of the phosphorescence played with its body under the water so much that we couldn’t tell if it was a thousand air bubbles making the light show or the phosphorescence. It swam amazingly. I stood there in awe. But the night continued to get later and we needed somewhere to sleep. We found a spot. It was on 3 different coolers and all at different heights, but it was surprisingly comfortable.
We awoke just as the sun was rising and we were spotting the first glimpses of land. There are not words for everything I was feeling and seeing. It was the perfect culmination of the summer. All the people spoke almost exclusively Chuukese, so I had to struggle to communicate, but I think it really helped me. That Saturday we stayed on the boat all day as it went from island to island until we finally ended up at the middle of the 3 islands, called Ruo. A woman named Anna offered us a place to stay at her house… and by offered I mean something closer to demanded. We obliged and went ashore on her skiff. We initially thought that we would only spend one night there so we only brought food for one night. She led us through the village and the jungle until we arrived at her house; mind you it was dark. She placed a bucket out back below her catchment and informed us we could shower. Luke went first. As he did I talked to her and she explained that her and her sisters would sleep in the same room with Luke and I. This is a cultural no-no. And I subtly told Luke. We didn’t freak out but we did decide to go with the flow and see where the night took us. There were kids outside dancing the Macarena, so we weren’t too concerned. Then, out of no where this skinny old man with gray curly hair and a thick gray beard walked up, holding a flashlight. He wore jeans with a piece of twine for a belt, no shirt and lacked teeth. He was our savior. Dougie took us back to his house and gave us a room. Little did we know that this was the best thing to happen to us… possibly ever.
Dougie is the man. We stayed with him for 3 nights. He took us all over the island, fed us, and talked to us. He spoke pretty good English so we conversed a lot. It was simply perfect. We ate delicious fish, breadfruit, taro, bananas, and all of the coconuts we could drink. Heaven could not be much different than this.
The mayor, a wonderful and gregarious man, that we had met and befriended on the boat asked us to come over to his house one night and “watch TV”. Luke and I had the same reaction. “Absolutely”. We arrived and sat on his porch as the kids pulled out a table, a TV and a DVD player literally putting it in the middle of a banana grove, in the middle of this jungle, in the middle of the island Ruo, in the middle of the Pacific. Before I knew it there were over 50 people around (yes I counted). I heard the roar of the generator and on came the TV. It started up and it was a concert DVD. There was a band and a slightly older white guy with greasy hair and a big guitar sitting at the microphone. He started acapella. I didn’t quite recognize the lyrics. It was familiar but I couldn’t quite catch it. Then as he hit the chorus I realized what it was just as white cursive writing appeared on the bottom of the screen Bryan Adams, “Heaven”. Luke and I look at each other as if to say “of course.” We went back to Dougie’s with unbreakable smiles.
There are plenty of stories from this trip and I will be happy to email them if you want to know more, but as for now I think I will get on with the boat ride home and the New JV’s.
The wind shifted. It usually comes from the east, but on the day we left it started coming from the west. The people out there told me that wind from the west means a typhoon will come (shortly thereafter Taiwan and China, I think it was there, were hit by a typhoon…) But it also made the seas very angry. This was not good because our 48’ boat was now carrying 2000 lbs of fish it had caught and about 85 people. Luke and I wound up seated upright on a cooler. The whole trip. Not so bad right... wrong. We were sandwiched between 3 pigs, and perched right above a bag of preserved breadfruit. It tastes great but smells like death. Moreover the 7’ swells made just about everyone on the boat vomit. But it was too crowded so no one could get to the gunwales. They just 'hit the deck,' if you catch my drift (no, I did not vomit thank you very much!). The smell was not so pleasant. The boat ride back took much longer. Upon arriving at Saramen Chuuk, our home, we realized that we had been up for a little over 32 hours straight. And we both agreed that even though the boat ride was kind of miserable it was a wonderful experience and capped the perfect trip.
Luke went home, unfortunately, and Megan Bell came back from Pohnpei. She stayed down at Saram and we cleaned and prepped for the newbies by watching R. Kelly’s urban hip-hop opera on my computer (Katie Childs, if you read this I am SOOOOOO sorry! I don’t know where it came from but I just found it on there the day before Megan got back. We will watch it together someday, I promise). The new ones came and they are very very cool. My community is a blast and I cannot wait for Megan Hendricks to get back and complete it. We stay at the dinner table for hours every night laughing and talking and we stay up much too late simply because we like hanging out with each other so much that we don’t want to go to bed. I am so happy and it is in such stark contrast to last year where things were so quiet in the community. It is a very different feel. I think we successfully broke the black magic.
Things are going great thus far and I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone, once again for all of your care and support. I appreciate you taking the time to read this massive massive work I just wrote, and I miss you all! Thank you again. Fokkun Kinamwe, tong, me pwa pwa ngeni kemi menisin. Ai tong Ngoruch!
-Matt
Saturday, April 4, 2009
It has been a long time since I have written anything on here, so I am at a bit of a loss as to where I should begin. First off, I am officially a year older and I would like to thank everyone for their kind words and deeds and support. Things in Chuuk have been busy as ever. In fact, just last week there was a bank robbery. Yes, you read that right. You can jog around our entire island in maybe 6 hours (as you all should know, I am not much of a runner, so this is something I do not know first hand). And everyone either knows, or is related to, everyone else. Yet some people tried to rob a bank. They were caught shortly after when they stopped to buy alcohol at one of the maybe 4 places on the island that sell it. They are currently being held in police custody. It was not exactly Ocean’s 11.
That made last week very exciting. That and the Zags run to the sweet 16. I still do not understand how any team, even UNC, can shoot 57% from the field in a sweet 16 game. I wish I could have seen it.
As the end of the year quickly approaches I catch myself marveling, more and more, at how fast this year went. I also am growing more and more excited for the summer and next year. It looks like Luke Lavin (a friend from Gonzaga and a volunteer in Pohnpei) will be in Chuuk for the summer and we are going to have a great time. I have so many ideas of things we can do, and knowing Luke he will have some great things in mind of his own. We even have been given initial approval to put a team in the local canoe race around the lagoon that will happen in July! I could not be more excited.
We have also gotten some positive initial responses about a grant that Saramen Chuuk put in to the USDA Rural Development program to obtain some desperately needed solar panels for the school. Also, the group that Jake, a local Peace Corps, and I have been working on, called the Chuuk Local Food Community, has officially been formed and we should have the Strategic Action Plan completed by the end of the week. That, unfortunately, is moving a little slower than we all hoped, but it is still moving and I honestly believe that an organization centered around supporting local food is much needed here, not only for health reasons, but also economically.
Classes are going well and our community is abuzz with post-JVI ideas for both of the girls. It is an exciting time to be in Micronesia, particularly Chuuk. They are beginning to pave the roads (in some instances repave) and we are currently awaiting the results of the Chuuk Gubenitorial election. Apparently there is a runoff in the works soon.
Our Easter Break is coming up and Caitlin and Jessie are headed out to an island group far far away from home. It is about a 24 hour boat ride to get there. Which means that I will be home all alone for break. I have some pretty good plans in the works though. Some different island visits in the lagoon and some practice on the local canoes before the possible race in July.
Well that is enough for now, I realize that this isn't the greatest but I just wanted to put a quick update because I have gotten some emails asking about the blog.
That made last week very exciting. That and the Zags run to the sweet 16. I still do not understand how any team, even UNC, can shoot 57% from the field in a sweet 16 game. I wish I could have seen it.
As the end of the year quickly approaches I catch myself marveling, more and more, at how fast this year went. I also am growing more and more excited for the summer and next year. It looks like Luke Lavin (a friend from Gonzaga and a volunteer in Pohnpei) will be in Chuuk for the summer and we are going to have a great time. I have so many ideas of things we can do, and knowing Luke he will have some great things in mind of his own. We even have been given initial approval to put a team in the local canoe race around the lagoon that will happen in July! I could not be more excited.
We have also gotten some positive initial responses about a grant that Saramen Chuuk put in to the USDA Rural Development program to obtain some desperately needed solar panels for the school. Also, the group that Jake, a local Peace Corps, and I have been working on, called the Chuuk Local Food Community, has officially been formed and we should have the Strategic Action Plan completed by the end of the week. That, unfortunately, is moving a little slower than we all hoped, but it is still moving and I honestly believe that an organization centered around supporting local food is much needed here, not only for health reasons, but also economically.
Classes are going well and our community is abuzz with post-JVI ideas for both of the girls. It is an exciting time to be in Micronesia, particularly Chuuk. They are beginning to pave the roads (in some instances repave) and we are currently awaiting the results of the Chuuk Gubenitorial election. Apparently there is a runoff in the works soon.
Our Easter Break is coming up and Caitlin and Jessie are headed out to an island group far far away from home. It is about a 24 hour boat ride to get there. Which means that I will be home all alone for break. I have some pretty good plans in the works though. Some different island visits in the lagoon and some practice on the local canoes before the possible race in July.
Well that is enough for now, I realize that this isn't the greatest but I just wanted to put a quick update because I have gotten some emails asking about the blog.
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