Doctor, Doctor, Give Me the News

How much did you pay for your last doctor’s visit? A lot? Well, hopefully you had some insurance to help you out and your premium wasn’t too high.

Last year, when I graduated from college and before I worked as a sports writer for the Molalla Pioneer, I entered about six months of uninsured life. I had little to no money and a huge black cloud of debt following me around like a bad dream. The thought of shelling out around 100 dollars a month to be insured made me sick to my stomach. Sad to say being unemployed doesn’t pay a kingly salary so I wondered what I’d have to cut from my diet to be insured. I’m young, I thought, and healthy too so I’ll let it slide for a few months.

I found out quickly what was wrong with being uninsured. Suddenly I was scared in everything I did. I walked down the sidewalk like a little kid sneaking into the kitchen to steal a cookie. Every movement was slow and precise. When cold season came around, and some nasty bug flattened me out and I felt like every cell in my body was rebelling against me, instead of seeing a doctor I just waited it out. I carried Kleenex in my pockets like most people carry spare change. Good thing it wasn’t the bird flu.

Here in the Marshall Islands though, my pockets are a spare-change-only zone. It’s awesome. Everything here at the hospital costs 17 dollars. No joke, 17 bucks opens the doors wide to healing, medicine and operation. Have a runny nose with a nasty flu? Seventeen dollars later and it is all better. Broke your leg? Well, that’ll get that fixed right up for 17 bucks. Need your appendix taken out? Seventeen bucks and it’s all gravy.
When my field director told me that she was in the hospital for a week and came out with her pockets only 17 dollars lighter I was floored.

Suddenly physical injury was just momentary discomfort. I snorkeled shark-infested waters, I took up windsurfing, I gave snotty little kids high-fives – no matter what happened I had a 17 dollar angel at my side.

Now luckily I’ve only had to go to the hospital once in my time here for a skin rash. I walked into a modern building with bone chilling air-conditioning and was led through the usual paper trail and three hours of waiting; but at the end I saw a doctor, got the appropriate medicine and was on my way for – and I know you all are getting tired of this – 17 dollars.

In all of this crazy new country, where government and private citizen are still learning the best ways to work things out and infrastructure is being built from the ground up, here is this thing that makes a ton of sense.
You’re sick? Just go to the hospital.

There are a lot of times when I am in class where I feel sad for my students. I see this amazing group of young people who are so kind, smart and energetic and then I think about their future options and it doesn’t add up. It’s sad to say, but many of them will have a hard time finding work and will deal with issues like poverty for the rest of their lives. It’s almost enough to make you want to go curl up under a coconut tree and wait for the next tsunami.

Now, however, I know they have at least this one thing they can count on – access to health care.

How much did you pay for your last doctor’s visit? More than 17 bucks?

Sick

I have been sick for the last week. I'm talking what-the-heck-just-came-out-of-your-nose-and-should-we-inform-the-government-about-it sick. The good thing is that it gav me a chance to just lay around, the bad thing is I had nothing to do. The headaches made reading impossible so I watched the second season of "24," in, well, a day give or take. With so much tension my nerves are shot.

Here's to the Next Guy

OK so stuff here is starting to wind down and I have to write a letter of advice for the next volunteer coming to my school. This kind of threw me for a loop. I had to think long and hard as to what the heck I should tell the next guy (or girl) to come to Rita Elementary School. The problem I have is there is nothing I can say that would adequately prepare him for this place. I thought about just not writing a letter as a poetic way of telling him to blaze his own path.

However, seeing as I need to write a letter in order to get my 1,500-dollar deposit back, I decided to give it a shot.

One, bring a big stick to scare away dogs, knock down spider webs and poke around fires. If you don’t want to bring a stick because of concerns with airport security fret not, there are sticks here as well.

Two, bring your favorite kind of fruit tree. Fresh fruit is expensive and hard to come by. Better just bring your own dang tree and plant it in the front yard. Yes I know this sounds ridiculous but when your skin is turning the varying shades of yellow on the road to scurvy, who will seem ridiculous then?

Three, you’ll need a raincoat. You think you know rain, and then you come here and you see that what you knew before was just the drizzle they use in supermarkets to keep the veggies fresh. Seriously, it rains here like the sky is holding a grudge. If you don’t have a raincoat you could just wrap yourself up in a trash bag, but I thought we were trying to stay away from ridiculous.

Four, get a good camera. There are things you don’t want to miss or forget. This one time a group of girls started blasting out the “Grease” soundtrack on this ratty boom box and shaking, rocking and rolling like they were on American Bandstand. I didn’t take a picture of it. I wish I would have.

Five, consider getting some sort of little vice. For me it’s sugar. Every time that I feel those pangs of homesickness creep on up through my bones I jam about 15 Snickers bars down my throat and I feel strangely better. I also feel very close to diabetic shock but things in life are all give and take. You’ll learn that here better than anywhere.

Six, get a thick skin. I don’t know how you’ll do this before hand. Maybe take an instrument you’ve never played before, say a bagpipe, and go to open-mic night somewhere and belt out “Little Red Corvette” at the top of your lungs – off-key. There are things here that will scar you if you don’t have a thick skin. Stuff kids say and repeat to you. I will spare the details because this is the classy sort of column, but trust me, get that skin thick.

Seven, learn some new words. You try explaining the concept of a volcanic coral lagoon in print. I’ve tried for nine months and still nobody knows what I’m talking about. Maybe if I had more words…

Eight, bring an open mind. This place has the capacity to crawl up inside of you and change you from the inside out. Let it. The people here are these amazing, generous and loving people that you can learn a lot from. Twenty-five years down the road you will not be lamenting the fact that it was so hot everyday, you’ll be telling about how cool it was to be a positive part of a community.

So there’s the letter – can I get my money back now?

Taxi!

My friends Steve and Ali are the first two people to go home from their year in the Marshall Islands. They are getting on a plane tomorrow and going back to hot water, real coffee and fast Internet.

Oh man, do I feel sorry for them.

The problem is that they are leaving behind the ever-entertaining Marshallese taxi. What are they going to do when they hop in a cab and the driver just takes them where they want to go? Where is the fun in that?

Here you get so much more than a ride. You flag down a cab and the driver is either half-asleep at the wheel or talking excitedly to you about his experience with the American cultural underbelly. Either way you’re riveted.

Then there is always this lady next to you insists on dropping plates of food off at about 35 different houses. At each stop she gets out and pauses to have a word with someone in the front yard and you get to witness first hand how good news and rumors travel so dang fast here.

Plus, the windows of these cabs are so much better than any TV channel you will ever get at home. I zoom by touching scenes of kids playing baseball, swimming or three-legged racing each other down the street. I see lines of kids waiting their turn under the electric razor for a hair cut. I see people playing cards on front steps and the flipper end of a fisherman bringing home his reef catch. I see sunsets gambling their rays out on top of the ocean like a game of dice. I see dogs wrestling each other to the ground and women starting coconut fires.

Then there are also the comedy channels. These are window scenes of kids sucking on rocks and grooving out to the latest Akon rap song. You’re sitting there, laughing your head off, wondering where the heck they get their material. I mean, kids sucking on rocks, who could have come up with that. When the TV stations were hurting for writers they should have just walked around Majuro.

Here’s another great thing about cabs; they are air-conditioned. For fifteen minutes out of your day you get to sit down on a cushy seat and just give your pores a break already. I have been thinking about this; I’ve been sweating for about nine months straight here in this equatorial sun and I don’t know how much longer my glands can hold up.

What’s the warranty policy on these babies?

Then, and here is a real sweet part about taxis, you get a glimpse into the real world! Yes, that’s right, on the most popular radio station in town the BBC splices in ever hour or so to tell you what is happening in the grander scheme of things and you sit back and sigh and know that yes the world is still in fact turning even though you have been caught up in the same summer since last July.

And all of this for a mere 75 cents – how much did your last DVD cost?

I am excited for Steve and Ali to get on with their lives in Boston, but do they realize what they are missing?

Eyebye

Hey, I am going to Eyebye on May 8th. If anyone wants me to check anything out for them, let me know. It is connected to Kwaj the US missle base.

Focus

It’s easy to get blown away by how different my life is today from what it was a year ago. I sit on the beach outside my house and I look down the gentle curve of Majuro framing the lagoon and I remember that a year ago I was holed up against the rain with cabin fever.

Sometimes difference is good.

There are times though when the contrast is bad.

This coral atoll is only 30 miles long and at is widest is probably no more than 200 yards. Trash piles and accumulates with nowhere to go. The problem is compounded because when anyone is done eating anything, they just throw the wrapper down. It’s kind of shocking at first. It used to make sense because before the trash was all coconut husks and pandanous leaves. The Pepsi cans of today are a little bit more ubliqitous.

Now plastic bags roll like tumble weeds and diapers do their best imitation of jellyfish. It’s enough to get me swooning for the pristine state parks of Oregon.

Either way, when I feel myself drifting too far away from anchor and home is a long way off, I just bring my focus in tighter. If you bring your focus in close enough then it doesn’t seem so strange and you can find home most anywhere.

There are pine trees in the Marshall Islands. Yeah, it’s pretty weird but someone brought them in and the trees did what they did and now there are big sweeping pines poking out of coconut tree horizons. This weekend on my walk to Ejit I stopped beneath a pine tree and saw pine needles mixed with sand and it was just like the beach in Tillamook where I go camping every summer. At least a tiny part of it.

My classroom is on the second floor and during recess I lean my elbows on the rail and look out on the small baseball field. The kids all line up to bat. They use an old stick rather than a bat but a pitch is a pitch, a strike is a strike and girls versus boys is a battle we can all get behind.

Coffee is a godsend in the morning. It’s divine. I drink it here same as anywhere.

Sometimes when my students are not behaving and won’t stop talking in class I’ll pace up the rows one by one singing Yankee Doodle Dandy at the tops of my lungs until everyone is cracking up. A clown is always a clown anywhere you are and my voice will be terrible no matter what corner of the map I’m on.

There’s a Salvation Army a few doors down from where I live with a perfect cement basketball court. Right now we are smack dab in the middle of the city league tournament to see who the champion of Majuro is. Sometimes I watch the games from the second storie balcony of the church with my students. We chomp on gum and sunflower seeds and root, root, root for the home team. They are called “The Uglies.”

I went to the hospital and waited for two hours while I killed three pens filling out enough paperwork to make college seem like kindergarten. Heartwarming.

I still like the adventure that living in a different place and culture brings. I still get a kick out of doing unique island things like swimming in one of the deep channels that punch through this atoll like Morris Code. However, there are also times when I just want the familiar, and I have been pleasantly surprised by how I’ve found it.

I guess that old adage that it’s a small world after all is completely true if you bring the focus in tight enough.

A List

Things I thought I’d be but aren’t after living for nine months on an equatorial coral atoll:

A rugged specimen of island toughness – After nine months of never cutting my hair and only rarely shaving, I expected I would look like Johnny Depp from the Pirates of the Caribbean. You know, a suave, rugged individual with majestic locks. Instead people have said that I look like actor Gary Bucci from his police mug shot. My hair puffs out like a cat licking an electrical outlet and for some reason, I blame my Father, I cannot grow facial hair anywhere save a thin strip above my upper lip and all over my neck. It just looks awkward.

A tanned hunk: In a place where the thermostat rarely drops below 80 degrees, I thought that it was safe to assume that my white skin would have turned into a healthy bronze. Well it’s just not true. I have witnessed shades of red reserved only for the internal fires of the sun. My skin skips a step in the burn, peal, tan cycle and simply resets after peal. Flaky is not sexy.

Well versed in island survival: Listen, if you put me and someone else who had never been to Micronesia on a deserted island and saw who would survive the longest, I’d put my money on the other guy. Sure, I have been spear fishing a few times, and sure, I know how to open a coconut, but those are skills that someone with a free afternoon could safely put into his repertoire. When my brother came to the island to visit, he scurried up a coconut tree in seconds – a feat that whenever I try puts my ability to have children at risk.

Used to the heat: I have been here for nine months. That’s enough time to have a baby for goodness sakes, how can I still be sweating this much?

Things I didn’t think I’d be but am after living for nine months on an equatorial coral atoll:

A man with complete disregard for personal hygiene: I think it’s a good day when I can pour a bucket of water into my toilet and have my business go away. All that you need to know about a bad day is that it involves a shower drain and bare feet.

Patience enough to wait out a tree: island time is island time. There are days where my food comes a mere hour after I ordered it and I’ll think to myself “wow, they sure are speedy today.” Added on top of that is the fact that I don’t think anything of taking 30 minutes in a taxi to get somewhere 10 minutes away because hey the lady next to me needs to drop of plates of food to five different houses along the way. I can do waiting now. Not a problem. Bring it on DMV.

Brave in a stupid way: sharks used to be something that I avoided. There was nothing better than sitting on my couch, flipping on the Discovery Channel’s “Shark Week” and getting scared silly. Now, when I’m about to go snorkeling, I’ll think to myself “geez, if I’m lucky, maybe there’ll be a shark!” Somehow I wonder if I have my priorities messed up.

A tolerance for nasty things to rival a garbage man: OK, I know that this was already kind of covered in the toilet one, but seriously, it needs to be touched on again. Things can get disgusting here. Dan and I will be paddling out to the surf and I’ll say casually, “Watch out for the disposable diaper floating there.” I mean, come on, that’s bad.