Adventurers and Adventuresses

Kolonia, Kolonia, God shed his grace on thee. But we had to leave that little harping magpie of a city for fairer pastures in that great municipality of Kitti. In case you were wondering our village is called Dioan and nobody's sure if it's in Sokehs or Kitti because the Nahmwarki's disagree about the boundary lines. As Saxon so eloquently stated, however, nobody knows what the hell we're talking about...so there you go.

But like I said we moved, we love our new house, and it's my idea of perfection. The house has a water catchment system that collects rainfall from the roof a puts it in a 2000 gallon container. We have zero water pressure because they put the tank only slightly higher than the plumbing. I thought everyone new that you have to have some elevation in order to have high pressure, but you can never count on anyone knowing anything. That might be one of Coglan's laws. Due to the water pressure issue, we have to take bucket baths and flush the toilet with a bucket (not at the same time). Both of these things takes practice but I'm definitely getting the hang of it.

We also don't have a stove, which doesn't bother Trieste but I'm finding it kind of difficult. I do have two portable butane burners which so far is really all I need, but I really want a toaster oven to round out the mix of appliances.

Also, some of the lights don't work. Only the lights in the bedrooms and the bathroom. I'm not sure why, so far I don't care, but I wish that I'd taken better notes when I was an Electrician for NASA.

Also, we have several fruit trees near the house, lime, three kinds of coconut, breadfruit, banana, papaya, giant swamp taro, a kind of mango that's crunchy and peppery. We are just waiting for things to get ripe.

So long,
JP

When you know you're doing a great job

I've been teaching remedial English for three months now. It's been a challenge but I feel like I'm doing a good job. And then I get this for a one paragraph essay on health...

"What are some ways that people stay in shape?

The people can write the shape of your face and color of the shape. Shape is what you like or what is the beautiful in your eyes. The color in your eyes is beautiful. Shape for something beautiful. The Shape of the house. The shape of the earth and the globle warming. The something you buy the shape you looked first. Then you liked it. The shape look like a square or a blue sky."

Actually, now that I've read this paragraph a few times, I am starting to see some sort of logic in it. It's like a secret code. This student is trying to tell me something, and I'm too stupid to figure it out. The shape of the house. The color of the shape. The shape of a blue sky. WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

When it rains...and other cliches.

So I guess that Trieste and I are on the same wavelength about the blog situation and how it's been a long time. My only contention with what Trieste posted was the caption next to Kolonia. Kolonia is that small and beautiful and if you come and visit us we will take you to our lagoon side villa where we have a Dolphin for a butler and Sea turtles will sing you to sleep.

Actually we as in I have taken to calling Pohnpei Temptation Island but not for the reasons you may think and not for reasons that I'm going to go into right now. Mysterious enough for you?

ON TO THE NEWS:
News item number one: We think the trade winds have started up but we've thought that every few weeks because it'll cool off to 80 degrees and seem like it'll snow any second and the next day it'll be one hundred with humidity.

News item number two: A few nights ago we went to see our host family for the first time in a long time and we got to watch a disney channel show which took me an hour to figure out. Here's what I learned... teenagers are awkward and gross and Miley Cyrus is Hannah Montana but with a wig or something. Floyd "Oh my god I forgot" Doses who is our host brother quoted both episodes of this strange show from beginning to end. Every time I looked away he hit me and told me to watch. That guy is a riot.

News item number three:
Stop what your doing, stop reading this and wasting time on the computer. Get in your hot little hot rod and drive to the nearest dairy. Ask to speak with the owner of the dairy and make sure it's a mom and pop operation and not some weird multinational conglomerate of dairy cattle owners who live in France or some bullshit. So ask to speak with the dairy farmer and when he comes up, kiss him or her right on the mouth and say "thank you for making cheese and milk and sour cream and butter that isn't expired." Because when it all goes to shit and we don't have fresh heavy whipping cream year round, you will wish that you had. That being said our saintly friend Mike brought us Tillamook Sharp Cheddar cheese and sour cream from Guam! I don't know how that happened...and frankly I don't care. Was it sustainable?...hell no... but I ate a cheese sandwich and put sour cream on my lentils so I'm all good.

Well...that's it.
jp

Some photos of things we did a long time ago

A while ago we mentioned that Lenard, our favorite baby, turned one. And we loved his party. We had "Phillipino style pig," which means we ate a whole pig, and all the youngest kids (and Jonathan and Trieste) got a big kick out of the creepy face, which was thus:

Don't feel bad if you look at that and don't immediately think "food," or if you think other things also. It's not that you're not cosmopolitan or culturally sensitive enough. We all loved the pig head. AJ got entertained by his mom for awhile by getting whirled in near the pig face and then pulled, screaming and laughing, back away from it. That might have been my favorite part. Anyway, shrieky pigs' heads can be entertainment AND food, is what I'm saying, as long as you're not trying to be cool and culturally sensitive. Obviously, Jonathan and I took photos of the food and shrieked along with AJ, so we were being neither.


I keep trying to upload a close-up, but the Internet and/or Photoshop won't let me. So you'll have to Photoshop it yourself. We should have a contest! Who can do the most creative/creepy thing with a close-up photo of a pig's head? The winner gets 10% of my daily salary and blog glory. And maybe a special spot in heaven for entertaining me while I'm this bored.

Here is Lenard playing with the toy we got him for his first birthday. It's tradition, we found out, to give kids clothes on their first birthdays, so we committed a mild faux pas by bringing him a Strawberry Shortcake jingly ball. But the ball was fun.

Oops! No photo of Lenard for you! It won't upload.

A while ago, Jonathan and I also took a boat trip along the length of the island. Here is Kolonia from the lagoon:






Kolonia is bigger and dirtier than it looks from the lagoon, but not much bigger.

Here is what we look like at the end of a day on a boat:

I am not trying to do anything, by wearing a towel on my head, other than keep the damn sun off my exposed skin. The sun is just so much background info until you come to the equator.

I will try to upload one more photo. This is Sokehs Rock, the "Diamond Head of Pohnpei." Pohnpei draws lots of comparisons to Hawaii, which is awesome. Anyhow, Sokehs Rock is really pretty and you can see if from EVERYwhere, and everyone loves it, just like Diamond Head:

I don't think the photo will upload...Maybe from school, maybe next time.

This past weekend Jonathan and I went with a few friends to a fresh water waterfall...It was a double waterfall, with a 20-foot waterfall falling into an almost perfectly round pool that was ideal for swimming in (and jumping 20 feet into), and then from there it fell another 35 or 40 feet to another pool that was ALSO great for swimming. The best thing about these waterfalls is that they are within walking distance of our house. I'd show you pictures but 1) our friend lost his waterproof camera in the lower waterfall, and 2) they wouldn't upload anyway. But it was a good day. We invented a new game, called "Throw a Rock at a Rock and Try to Make it Hit Another Rock." We played it for a long time. We also played, "See What Trash You Can Find at the Bottom of the Pool." We found a car battery and a lawn mower motor; that was also fun. Too bad we couldn't find the camera.

The last few days since the waterfalls have been a struggle between life and death...When we first moved here, our Field Director told us that there was "a lot of life." This means, really, there's also a lot of death. Two days ago a dead cockroach fell out of my coffee pot first thing in the morning. Yesterday a gecko caught a cockroach and left its parts all over the living room. This morning a swarm of ants managed to kill a roach and they're still dismantling it in the hallway (far be it from me to interfere!), and this afternoon Jonathan accidentally shut another gecko in the back door. It crawled to the window, stuck itself to the sill, and then it died, still sticking to the window. Awesome. Also! The constant flood in our kitchen and hallway (did I tell you about that? Our hallway and kitchen are constantly flooded--I mean, they splash. It's because our fridge sucks, but our landlord insists it's because I don't stay home and clean enough) has proven to be an ideal place for mosquitos to lay eggs. We are now tormented, all night, every night. Tormented. I've bleached the floors twice in two days, and it's helped moderately. Any advice?

That's it! I've been trying to upload this blog for three days. That's why it's so long.

Love,Trieste

Bloggy blog

I taught my students BINGO. You cannot throw a rock in Kolonia without hitting a freaking BINGO hut, so I was not expecting to have to teach my students BINGO. But it took TWO DAYS. They kept saying they got it, and then an hour would go by without anyone getting a BINGO, and then I'd explain the rules again, and then again they'd say they understood, and then another whole. class. period. would go by. With no BINGO. Did I ever tell you that it's culturally taboo to say "no" in Pohnpei? To say "no" to anything. This didn't seem like a big deal before we came, but it's becoming more so. Like, when you ask certain questions, you really want to know the real answer, even if it's "no." Like: "It's Sunday afternoon and I'm in an outer municipality. Please send a taxi?" (Even the taxi companies. They'll say yes, but only because they can't say no, and then you'll spend hours waiting for a taxi that was never even dispatched, because the business is closed, and the lady at the other end just uses the business cell phone for her personal phone so she'll always answer the phone and tell you yes, even when they're closed, or something.) Or, "we have an exam tomorrow. Do you understand?" Or: "I have spent the last 60 minutes calling out BINGO letters and numbers, and no one has gotten a BINGO, even though you must be able to cover your entire card by now. Are you SURE you know how to play BINGO?" You have to rephrase everything so that they can answer "yes." Like, instead of 'do you understand?' you can ask 'do you want me to explain that again?' But I did. I did. I explained BINGO a dozen times.

I finally got my best student (who is also the shyest), who also speaks the best English (coincidence?) to explain it in whispered Ponapean to my most gregarious student, who then explained it in Ponapean to the whole class. Who spent the next ten minutes laughing hysterically and arguing with each other. And then we played. And someone got a BINGO inside of five minutes after that. Two days.

Anyway, what's with all the BINGO huts? Phillipinos only? Are all my students Protestant? Are Protestants against BINGO?

But! One of my students just emailed me to ask if we were going to play again today (we are not). Got their attention, anyway. I had cash as one of the prizes. It was $4. It got them really excited--one girl screamed like Alicia would when I threw it down on the table.

Also, because I can't stop thinking about this stuff, I'm going to try and puke it out: Cheese, microbrew, cute boots, shoes in general, wool skirts, FALL FASHION, clothes in general, real pork chops, a haircut, cheese cheese cheese, cheeseburgers, pine needles, cold rain, hot showers, deciduous trees, talking about science, doing scientific research, arguing about science, teaching science, learning something new, hugs from Joni, Toby (yes, Toby), walking into my lab, hot tea/whiskey/wine/coffee on a cold day, espresso, 16-hour work days and how they make you feel (tired and hard core. I never feel tired and hard core anymore. Lethargic and sickly is the closest I come.), friends. A circle of friends. being near my family, sour cream, sweater tights, a quilt, the bathroom heater, talking to Justine five times a day, my books, daydreaming that my brother is going to surprise me by showing up at campus with Lauren and Carver (I seriously used to have this daydream every other day, especially when I was so lonely during the thesis-writing months, and I don't ever have it here, because the chances of my brother showing up to College of Micronesia Pohnpei Campus with Lauren and Carver are about 1 in seven thousand, which is how many dollars it would take for him to come here and surprise me with them).

Spear Fishing, Chicken Pox, and an Update on Captian Crocodile

Menseng Mwao,

This weekend I went on a men's only camping this trip. Except one guy brought his wife and Trieste was going to come but she got sick at the last minute. Like a good husband I selflessly went on the camping trip anyway to give her time to recuperate and take care of herself.

The canoe was an outrigger, which means that it has a stabilizing side bar to prevent capsizing. Traditional canoes are very narrow because they are usually made from dug out tree trunks and thus need a little more stability. These things are extremely complicated to operate, and although I've done a my fare share of canoeing and kayaking I still couldn't make the damn thing do what I wanted it to. Plus you can only reasonably hold three people plus luggage and if there is a third person the paddlers are very angry at that person for getting a free ride. We had six people which meant that three of us had to swim.

We got to Joy Island which is a coral islet that's on the barrier reef of Pohnpei at about 1:00 or 2:00 and met Herbert and Rambo, the guy and his dog who live on Joy island. You heard me, one guy and his dog live on this stunningly beautiful island off a stunningly beautiful island in the middle of the pacific. We made camp and swam a half mile back to the area where we could start spear fishing.

Spear fishing is hard. Spear fishing is very hard. Spear fishing is also dangerous. I will only say that on my 20th attempt I got one fish that was too small to eat and I had to bite it's head and send it to Davy Jones. You have to bite their heads or they attract sharks. Spear fishing is hard.

We made a shelter out of fallen limbs and palm fronds, which in hind sight is laughable and had it not been 80 degrees outside one of us surely would have gotten hypothermia or succumbed to exposure. I say this because we live in the rainiest place on earth and of course it rained all night and into the morning. At one point at about 5:00 in the morning Tony and I just laid in the ocean because it was warmer than the rain.

The important thing is that I slept on the beach and got chicken pox, or what I thought was chicken pox for three days until I went to the doctor and she told me that it was either sand flea bites or scabies. I'm still not sure which it is.

Finally the crocodile has caused enough of a stir that people have closed all the swimming holes in Nett including our favorite, Awak Pah. So far I haven't caught the croc, but I'm not giving up now. I've got a load of dynamite coming full steam from Chuuk, and I'm not going to let that croc get away next time.

Later days, better ways,
jp

swim, swam, flim flam

Yup,

It was Trieste and I's one year anniversary on Sunday. But actually you all will be celebrating it on Monday because the dateline screws everything up and we still can't understand it no matter how much we try. In addition we are still trying to figure out exactly where we are in relation to fixed areas like Australia and Japan. The truth is that maps are inaccurate and no one in a major country really gives a shit about this place so it will probably remain a mystery. Trieste may be right that the dateline was put here because nobody lives here, and nobody who does live here cares anything about dates or time.

Whoa, heady.

But we had a great day anyway. We happened to get invited to join an excursion to the the southern tip of the island and swim and snorkel and generally just relax and have fun on a boat. We saw a bunch of dolphins and it was surreal and incredible. I saw a stingray bury itself in the sand and that really freaked me out because it completely disappeared. I tried using a paddle board which is a big surf board that you stand on and use a paddle to move around. Trieste was really good at this, I could not stay on this thing for more than a few seconds. We had sandwiches and got bizzaro sunburns from being outside so much.

We ate a nice dinner at a hotel with the captain of the boat, we shared a pork chop and fish teriyaki dinners. It was delicious and much needed after so much exercise. Since we had to be at school on Monday we just watched a movie and went to bed.

I hope everyone is doing well.

jp