The Daily Grind

I feel like my training in the Marshall Islands should have come with a warning label.

WARNING: While you may be in a tropical Micronesian nation, DO NOT expect to participate in any of the following activities — swimming, surfing, snorkeling, diving or spear fishing. You will simply be too busy learning how to teach the Marshallese youth of tomorrow, today. If you experience any negative emotions related to a lack of these activities find a small room where you can shout the following sentence at yourself.

I am not here on vacation, I am here to help!

Repeat as needed.

OK, I know that I am not here to just have fun, but it would have helped to have a little something to cushion my hard drop from “wow, I am in paradise,” to “geez, what does a guy have to do around here to lay in a hammock?”

The label could be big and yellow and it could have a logo of a dog chomping on a tall and skinny man’s rear (that story is for a different column).

My days here are a whirlwind from start to finish and that is fine, but when palm trees surround you, focusing can be hard...

As a group, we usually get up around 7:30 in the morning. We brush our teeth, we take our bucket showers and we eat our plain corn-flakes with our preserved milk. Then there is a few minutes for personal time which means that people bunch up into ones and twos and chat quietly and write letters home.

The ocean is always close and it beats in our ears but there is no time to go to its shores because the group has to head into a small and stuffy classroom trailer designed for kindergarten students where 45 of us sit on the floor (because that is what many people do in the Marshall Islands and we need to get used to it) and we try to listen to the brush-up grammar lessons.
We listen, we take notes, we doodle and we yawn and then we are let out with enough time to go back into our crowded and smelly sleeping rooms to switch our grammar books with our language manuals and then we are back out into the muggy day to sit in small groups and have our Marshallese lessons from high-spirited teenagers who chuckle at us as our mouths stumble over the unfamiliar shapes of their Marshall words.

After that, lunch comes and we pile our plates high with slightly differing mixtures of tofu, rice, noodles, cabbage, chicken and carrots. When we are done eating we clean up and have a few moments to relax. Some people choose to go down to the lagoon, others choose to lay in the sleeping room. In half an hour we meet back up for classes stretching straight until the edge of dawn before we are set free to witness the last dying breaths of the day.

Then we go to sleep and repeat the next day.

Wake, shower, eat, study, study, eat, study, study and repeat.

The other day our schedule was mixed up.

Our group woke up and boarded a bus. We packed our snorkels and sun screen. Our driver took us further down the one road in town than we had ever been before. We got on a boat and it took us out to another island far from anything that has to do with doing.

I disembarked, and set out across the island where I found two palm trees set apart about the right amount. I tied my hammock between these trees and I laid out with Hemingway in my hand and a sea breeze running over my face. I breathed in deep and felt myself sinking into my own skin.

Now this was paradise.

Repeat as needed.

The love you give comes back in the end.
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Dogging It

I used to be a dog person... USED to is the key term here...

Yesterday morning I woke up before the sun rose and stumbled my way out into the courtyard of the building where we are staying (a prison-like head start where we sleep crammed together on thin mats that do little to disguise the hard floor beneath...) and took my camera bag out to catch a glimpse of the sunrise.

Well when I got to the courtyard I found the front gate locked and I couldn’t find my keys.

This should have been a sign to me. Go back to bed. Rest, catching the sunrise is not meant for you. However I ignored it and scaled up the chainlink fence, careful to avoid the section with barbed wire, and hopped down to the dimly-lit street below.

I had been witness to the dramatic sunsets that took place every night on the lagoon so I decided that my best bet to catch the sunrise was to head down the road and over to the ocean side of the island.

Even though the difference between lagoon side and ocean side is a matter of yards in the Marshall Islands, you can only cross from the central road to the beach at certain places because everything else is someone’s front yard.

I hiked my camera bag higher on my back and set off down the road.

In the Marshall Islands there are lots and lots of dogs, and none of them are stray, they all belong to someone. Some are aggressive but most are not. My program coordinator taught us all that the best way to take care of an aggressive dog is to either pretend like you are picking up a rock to throw at them, or at least actually throw a rock at them.

Being alone I chose to carry a whole pocketful of rocks with me.

As I walked along the scenes of the young Marshallese day greeted me. Women tending to fires, men sweeping out front yards and people sitting on chairs with towels around their necks, watching the road after a morning dip in the lagoon.

I was trying to live in the moment, you know breath it all in, when I heard a chorus of barking start up down the drive of a house. Nervously I fingered the rocks in my pocket and picked up my pace. From around the corner of the drive came a pack of five or six dogs growling viciously.

I remembered my training and pretended to wing a rock at them — they barely budged. Next I actually started throwing rocks. The dogs charged on through my volleys of desperation, but somehow I managed to make them back down and was on my way.

I breathed hard and said Yokwe (hello) to the people I passed and got some good photos (I think) of a boy carrying his spear out to the beach to do some fishing.

Then the moment of truth came — I had to turn around and make it back to the head start for a morning lesson. I wanted to take an alternative route around the pack of dogs but that is just the thing, in Majuro there is only one road, so it looked like I would have to go back and battle with the pack of degenerate pooches.

I loaded up my pockets with bits of coral (that is what rocks are here, just broken and crumbled coral) and set back with my jaw set and ready.

When I reached the house of the vicious pack nothing happened so I kept walking. I started to relax. My shoulders drooped. Then, as I was almost onto the next house, I heard a distant howl that sent a shiver up my spine. From around the back of the property came a barking mass of fur and teeth like some sort of bastard creature that God had messed up on but somehow allowed to roam the Earth.

I stood tall. I shouted back. I threw rocks.

And still they came...

Seconds before the lead dog closed in with his mouth aiming for a very important part of anatomy below the belly button and above the knees, I instinctively turned away from him. The problem with this is that it exposed my rump to attack and the lead dog was more than happy to oblige.

I yelped with pain and then with my last rock I turned and threw it into the mass and struck a dog near the back full-on in the face. He shrank away yelping and the others followed suit, leaving me free to walk on nervously.

I made it home alright but something fundamental shifted inside me.

I don’t know if you could classify me as a dog person anymore.

The love you give comes back in the end.
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Guide Me

My journey to the Marshall Islands began in a trashy Greyhound station in Eugene. It was sketchy in all sences of the word. There were people who I didn't trust, busses that never seemed to come and a general feeling in the air that someone was about to get robbed or hit on.

Eventually my bus came though and I said goodbye to my girlfriend and stepped aboard a bus packed almost to the brim with sweating humanity.

The trip was full of slightly unsettling occurrences.

Every single time I glanced at the man next to me, no matter the time of day, he was staring straight back with his high-domed head and thin, snake-like smile. Meanwhile, the bus driver couldn’t seem to keep in one lane and liked to do 80 all of the time and behind me a man kept screaming on his cell phone about how he just got out of jail and he was about to beat people up.

Suddenly the 900 some miles left to go to Los Angeles seemed impossible.

What was I supposed to do though? I had paid for the bus ticket and I had a flight leaving the next day out of LA so I pulled out my Ipod and plugged out the Greyhound with my headphones and soothed my worries away with some Sufjan Stevens and his band.

Through the mountains near Shasta I got deep into my thoughts with Cat Stevens. In Sacramento I had a mid-journey pump-me-up session with the Killers. Taj Mahal got me through a rest-stop in the middle of nowhere and Nora Jones helped me keep my cool when I missed three different buses in a row and wasn’t sure if I would make it to LA.

I made it though, with music as a guide — and my batteries lasted the whole way.

One of the first things I learned after stepping off the plane in the Marshall Islands — after coming to grips with the fact that it is so humid here is feels like you are just stepping out of the shower all of the time — was that before the people of the RMI had the luxuries of modern navigation, they relied on a sort of vocal map passed down through the generations in the form of song. They would literally sing as they rowed and through the lyrics they would be reminded that there was a coral reef to be avoided here, or a swift current to be careful of there.

The songs kept them on course.

I have only been in Micronesia for a couple of days now and all of my time thus far has been spent pushing through an intensive training course designed to get me ready for what lays ahead with a room full of little brown faces peering up at me expecting me to give them direction through the day. While this role has intimidated me in the past, being here so far in the tropics has made me come to peace with it.

I think that I need to be realistic and know that I am not always going to do or say the exact right thing all of the time — but I will do my best.

Sometimes things seem to be completely off the course, like when you are sitting next to a creepy man, riding on a swerving monster bus from hell or trying to take a nap a few rows ahead of a guy who is itching to go back to jail with the fast end of his fist, but if you have a loose guide to get you through, like music, it is possible.

For my little bus journey down south I had singers from Sufjan Stevens to Nora Jones to help me, the people of the RMI long ago had rich oral histories to help them and now, hopefully, 35 little kids at Rita Elementary in Majuro, RMI will have me.

The picture is courtesy of Dan, and is of a sunset literally 30 feet from our house...

The love you give comes back in the end.
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Greyhound, or better said: Grrrrhound

So I just got off a whirwind journy on the Greyhound that had me waiting, waiting, sitting, cramping, waiting, smelling, stinking, and guess what...WAITING.

It was my idea in the first place to go Greyhound and save some money and I convinced Dan to tag along, but after missing bus after bus after bus because they either overbooked it or were very, very late I realized that in the battle of saving money vs. traveling in a sane manner traveling ALWAYS wins.

Here is a log of the texts I sent out to family and friends to keep my mind occupied on the long journy:

July 20, 12 a.m.

Just got into Roseburg. Hope to get some sleep now.

July 20, 1:24 a.m.

Now I am in Grants Pass. Arm hurts from hugging pillow. Old couple next to me is cool. They hold hands and peel apples for each other.

July 20, 2:48 a.m.

Made it through Medford. Have two seats to myself now which is nice. Had to start blowing nose in pillow case. Desperate times.

July 20, 7:10 a.m.

75 miles outside of Sacramento and Cruising. Dan is on a different bus and I have no idea where he is. The whole bus is sleeping and everyone sure looks nicer when they are drooling.

July 20, 8:26 a.m.

Sac town station is clean and safe. I will wait for Dan here. Maybe work on a crossword for three hours.

July 20, 12:34 p.m.

Finally on the road with Dan after 5 hours waiting in Sac town.

July 20, 2:41 p.m.

South of Modesto with Dan and driver who goes a little heavy on the AC. I can see my breath. Flight is in the morning.

July 20, 4:46 p.m.

Hello and goodbye Fresno. Just picked up a new driver. Sorry to see Bruce go. He said some funny things when he talked to himself.

July 20, 6 p.m.

This is slowly turning to hell. Bus is absoultly packed and Dan smells.

July 20, 7:54 p.m.

Out of Bakersfield and 100 miles until LA. Dan has reverted to chewing his jacket out of frustration.

July 20, 10:18 p.m.

In Taxi and on the way to sweet, sweet beds. No more Greyhound hustle and bustle for us.

So there you have it. Now I am sitting with fresh shower water pleasantly drying in my hair, enjoying some of my last US comfort.

The love you give comes back in the end.
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The First Baby Steps

First of all, for any of those out there interested in what Syd would look like as a bride, and I know there are a few of you, I have the first exclusive photos of how he would appear.

Shocking?

Yes.

Astounding?

Of course.

Surprisingly appealing?

Who would have guessed...

OK, enough of these inappropriate jokes...

I said a glut of goodbyes today and yesterday in Portland. My apartment is finally packed away into storage which leaves the wooden, creaky place ripe for echos. My cousins will now be able to do the construction they have wanted to on it. I can’t wait to see how it looks on my return!

I had a going away barbeque which was great, but as is often the case at gatherings where you are the host, you never are able to spend enough time with specific people because there are always others to greet. Regardless, it was a great time.

Leaving on a journey like this is something that sounds exciting in the planning phases, stressful in the preparation phases and terrifying in the doing phases.

I am in the doing phase now and I am still excited but also sad and scared to leave behind most of the people I love for a year and face a new challenge, thousands of miles away.

Tiffany drove me down to Eugene today, and as I wait for her while she is in class, I can’t really comprehend the fact that I will be so far away in a few days time.

Seriously, take a globe and give it a spin, because I will be on the opposite side of it in a few days time.

If it wasn’t scary though, something wouldn’t be right.

In closing, there is a photo of Ellie with her doll. This is my favorite photo so far with my new camera, although it is kind of creepy because of the doll.

The love you give comes back in the end.
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These are the people I leave

Today is my last at the Molalla Pioneer and I am left with a few questions.

They nag at the forgotten corners of my mind and turn my nights into restless bouts with tangled blankets.

First question: How the heck can my editor still have a positive attitude about life?

Here is a guy that didn’t just slip up a bit in his grand life plan but tripped and fell head-first into a pile of crap that is usually reserved for large fertilizer outfits and yet I don’t think that I have ever met a man who smiles quite as much as him.

I have met many average joes out there who have gone through a fraction of what this guy did and they are paralyzed.

Even though his often off-color humor can sometimes illicit steely stare-downs from the news reporter in the office, I think that it is exactly his ability to laugh at himself that has kept him sane up until this point.
Here’s to hoping his trajectory continues upward.

Second question: If our display ad person were in an action movie, exactly how many bad-guys would she kill?

The easy answer to this question is some crazy hyperbole in the 100’s but I am serious about this question. She once demonstrated on me exactly how quickly she would be able to leave me laid out and broken if she wanted to (she is a black belt) and it was quite possibly the most terrifying experience in my life.

Chuck Norris could destroy the whole world with his left thigh if he had half a chance, and I think that if this lady had a meaner disposition the whole office would be leveled and left with a hollow ringing sound — much like the scene after an intense hurricane.

That is just the thing, she doesn’t have that disposition. Not a mean bone in her body. And so, the office survives… At least for now...

Let’s cheer for her to stay on the good side of things.

By the way, my prediction would be 25 bad guys killed and five left without the ability to reproduce…

Third question: If our classified person had better aim, would I be blind?

The answer to this question is a quick and enthusiastic yes. I would have been nailed and in the emergency room in about two seconds if she could shoot rubber bands worth her beans.
As it is, I am safe.

All in all, she is the more “you just quit it!” type.

Anyway, I can’t say that I don’t provoke it — what with my comments about her daughter, my insistence of dancing in front of her desk and my propensity to threaten to report her to corporate, I almost shot a rubber band at myself.

Cheers for putting up with me.

Fourth question: How come our news reporter isn’t an international correspondent for CNN yet?

The basic answer is that most major media outlets are idiots. This girl has so much drive it makes my head spin.

I just vomited after writing that sentence it was so chalk-full of drive.
The real answer to the question is that she is new to the industry, but given a little bit of time and a little bit of luck, she will be a famous TV personality someday and I will be the poor slob begging for a job because I spent my formative years traipsing around the globe.

Fifth question: What is the funniest caption you can think of for this photo?

The best that I can come up with is “Cowboy finishes up on the bottom end of things…”
I am sure there are better ones out there…

The love you give comes back in the end
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One lump, or two?

My friend Humphrey thinks that you can tell a lot about a coffee shop from its sugar.

If the joint serves its sweetener in generic white-cane packets then it is a get-it-and-go type of place. If they are serving raw sugar they are a place concerned with health and naturalness. And if their sugar comes in glass jars that pour sweet white waterfalls into your rich dark lifeblood then you know that the place wants to form a lasting relationship with you. They want you to know that they trust you, so sit down and have a cup of joe at your leisure.

My friend Humphrey thinks that you can tell a lot about a coffee shop from its sugar.

The love you give comes back in the end.
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Goodbye Portland and Molalla, Hello Marshall Islands

I was up until 2 AM last night. I had butterflies bumping heads in my stomach and a cotton mouth that soaked up every last drop of water I slurped down.

I had just received my email from the folks at WorldTeach telling me exactly what school I would be volunteering in during my year-long stay in the Marshall Islands.

Suddenly it was real.

My six-month application had come to bear fruit and I was going to pack my bags with light and loose-fitting cloths and travel half-way around the world to a poor island nation to help underprivileged youth learn English. I was going to be in the front of 30 plus kids every day teaching them a language I am not completely sure I have mastered yet.

I felt like I had received a kick to the stomach and a blow to the head and was left just sitting there stunned with the world spinning around me.

I was excited, anxious and terrified.

What if the kids hate me?

What if they won’t listen to me?

What if I get kicked off the island because I couldn’t get my job done?

For a long time I have been living by the philosophy where I expect the worst and hope for the best and it has served me well. It sheds situations of their grand and bloated expectations and streamlines things into a form of reality that can be surprisingly hard to attain when everyone is focusing on feeling spectacular and you are looked at with concerned eyes when you respond “OK” to the how-are-you question instead of “GREAT.”

The problem with expecting the worst and hoping for the best is that it can result in an attitude where you don’t put everything you have into a certain thing because you expect it to not work out. It would be great if it did, but it probably won’t.

As I laid there in my bed I realized that the main reason I couldn’t sleep was that I was too busy expecting the worst instead of hoping for the best.

My stomach of rebelling against my body and my mouth was having a contest with the Sahara for the most arid place on earth because I expected to fail.

I think that it is OK to have realistic views of what is possible — just as long as it doesn’t cloud out too many other things as impossible.

HOPING FOR THE BEST and expecting the worst is probably the best way to go.

At least I know you sleep better.

The love you give comes back in the end.
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Put Down the Basketball, Kid and Pick Up a Dang Rope

OK, stop me now if I am being ridiculous but it seems to me that things were a lot different back in my heyday of sports. Way, way back when — okay just 10-15 years ago — I thought I could become a professional at any sport I happened to pick up that day from baseball to backyard wagon racing. Man, those were the days.

I was basically in every youth sport opportunity that came my way from soccer to swimming — and I had fun doing it all.

It seems these days that kids are not afforded the same opportunity. At a very early age kids are streamlined into one sporting discipline that they seem naturally inclined towards and from there on out they play with a stamp on their forehead.

QUARTERBACK.

PITCHER.

SPRINTER.

There were symptoms of this when I was young as well.

All that my friend Andrew ever did was swim. Before school and after school he would be doing laps, working on the fine points of his turns and conditioning himself for greatness. He constantly smelled of chlorine and had a tan from swimming outside.

Andrew was a great swimmer — he had the fastest 50 meter sprint time for the whole high school as an eighth-grader — but I often wonder if he would have had fun doing other things as well.

I know a basketball player can learn a thing or two about patience from a baseball player and I am sure that Andrew could have gleaned something from some mean backyard wagon racing.
Right around now the summer rodeo season kicks into high gear and as the PRCA athletes come touring through town we all get to see first hand a sport that celebrates mixing things up.

Kids aren’t pigeon-holed into saddle-bronc riding, they are encourages to spread out their efforts over a variety of events.

Heck, there is even a winner for ‘all-around.’

There are those gifted youngsters who are so naturally inclined toward one athletic discipline that it would be a shame to not foster that; but for the vast majority, it is sad but true, transcendent athletic prowess is not on the horizon so diversifying our sporting outlets is a positive thing.

Getting out of one’s comfort is the best way to really grow.

So to all of the kids focused on being the next Derek Jeter or Michael Jordan, put down your baseball bat and basketballs and take a page from the rodeo book and jump on a steer, rope a cow or tame a bull — it might come in handy down the road.

Then again, I just might be ridiculous.

The love you give comes back in the end.
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