teenage musings in Kosrae

Recently, my students read a story about first dates. We may be on an island in the middle of ocean, but these quickwrite responses show we’re not too far from any typical high schooler in the States. Oh to be young.

On being stood up and feeling insecure:

“Me myself, I just hate my skinny arms. I want to be a big guy, not just toothpick arms. This is why I never liked a girl before. Most of them beautiful girls are bigger than me.”

“Actually, I did have someone but it was generations ago, like 2 (two) months ago.”

“Some of the things that I feel insecure were my nose is too big, my hair is not so long and my face looks terrible, my butt’s too big for my size “I think so?” and also my clothes are not that fanzy.”

“I have met one girl once, and I stood up for her many times. I always told her how she looks, how she smells, or the way she smiles with shiny lip gloss on her lips. I didn’t think it would feel nice, but it was so good… there are some things that I don’t feel insecure (don’t like) about her. The “pinballs” (pimples) on her face. It wasn’t bad, but I don’t feel comfortable when she will pop out the pinballs and the liquid inside will come out. Eww that’s disgusting.”

“I’ve stood up a boy- just once. And it was really funny. I laughed my guts out when I heard he waited for me that day. He really thought I was going to show up.”

“I don’t have anything that I felt insecure about, because the lord is the one that create me, so even though others said that I look ugly, I will kept that face.”

“yes, it feels so sad and it makes me feel like I am lost. So what I’ve did was I stood there for almost 20 minutes waiting for her. I think it was when I was 15 years old just last year.”

Leaving on a Jet Plane

My mother shipped a copy of the Economist over to Kosrae. It came packaged between anti-itch ointments and an external dvd drive. This was connection with the outside world, mosquito control, and entertainment. Essentially, it was Christmas in a box.

The Economist is one way of getting me to think of places other than Kosrae, but in truth, thoughts of faraway places are never far away. Namibia, the Netherlands, Oman, Ireland, Japan, Chile, and Singapore are frequent dinner conversation references with friends here.

Lately, it has been a season of coming and going. It took a lot to get to Micronesia, but a lot of us are starting to put in effort to getting out and going to other places. An unsurprising shared characteristic about the expats on the island is our willingness to propel ourselves into random, and not so random, corners of the Earth. Peace Corps applications to the Middle East and South America are frantically being completed via haphazard Kosrean internet. Grad School essays to international universities are being written. People are returning to Japan, getting married and moving on the next phase of their lives. Someone is ready to teach English in Macau (the land of my ancestors!), while another is ready to return back to America to recharge for Southeast Asia. Older volunteers are wrapping up their 2 year stint here and have thoughts on Africa.

For most of us, this island life is transitory. How transitory it is, well, that’s left up to the individual. We’re a bunch of travelers whose paths happen to cross on this tiny island; soon, we’ll be dispersed like dandelions, and going wherever the wind blows.

I think it’s great that many of my coworkers and friends have figured out what is best for them and are making plans to continue their adventure. However, I don’t know if I’m ready to go back to Asia (notice how I didn’t write America), or anywhere for that matter. It’s still a new relationship, me and Kosrae; it’s exciting to have no idea where things will lead. So far, we’re in the initial great stage of euphoric happiness. It’s super attractive, given its truly beautiful stretches of white sand and coconut palm façade. We have a lot of fun together, and our kayaking/snorkeling/hiking/swimming dates never fail to be amazing times that bring us closer together. But, having fun is not going to be enough (for me anyways, I don’t know about Kosrae) to turn this fling into a lasting, sustainable relationship. What is it going to take for me to stay with Kosrae for another year after this one? I’m definitely not ready to call it quits yet, and want to find out. More on this later.

Something entirely unrelated: I am now a SAT prep teacher. Fancy that.

To fan or not to fan-

-should never be a question in Kosrae. It is neither the howling puppy, nor the howling karaoke that commences upstairs. The single greatest complaint from the visitors who frequent our apartment is that our place is a human oven. That is true. Mackenzie’s and my place rivals a furnace.

Recently, Mack finally got on the ball and bought a fan. Sure, we had to duck tape it to keep it intact, but that’s normal in Kosrae, and a fan is a fan. I on the other hand, have been (irresponsibly) avoiding the logistical complexities of transporting a fan on a bike. We’ve rehearsed it, but the one handed lopsided bike ride sounds, and looks, so un-fun.

But like the grasshopper that played all summer, here I am, sans fan in the early A.M heat wave; while the roommate is sleeping with a light breeze. Normally, the heat is bearable; a winter when compared to a Cambodian summer. Cambodia however, did not have a puppy or karaoke within the vicinity of my living quarters. When heat is combined with howling coming from either source (in tonight’s case, karaoke to Clapton), it makes for a sleepless night. I think it’s another night on the (slightly cooler)couch for me. Tomorrow, booking it to Ace to buy the last fan there.

At this point, life in Kosrae has in a way, transitioned to level two. We’ve secured the fort: mental energy is no longer needed to grasp the basics of survival on this island. We know which rain catchments are safe for drinking, we’ve learned some practical easy high energy foods (like peanut butter and rice), become familiarized with the 2 or 3 stores and 2 or 3 restaurants, started some semblance of a teaching schedule, and relearned (very quickly) the merits of sun block and mosquito repellent. The question now is: what next? Some volunteers have begun to divert their attention elsewhere, like taking time to learning the fishing ways of the locals and successfully beginning to catch their own seafood. Some have taken up diving courses, while others (myself included) have grown fond of the ukulele, a popular instrument played here.

I can’t speak for others, but my days in Kosrae have been filled with activities that have been very restful. Even teaching is restful and therapeutic in a strange way. Ironically, all this restfulness is making me restless. Now that the fort has been secured, the question of what next? What next?- has been growing. For the first time, I am actually craving a math problem or two.

Tonight, I made my first decent dinner meal. This is a huge milestone. In the past, my experience with dinner prep during the periods of independent living often consisted of saying the phrase “I’ll take this to go” and Styrofoam boxes in ThankYou plastic bags. In Kosrae, there aren’t many restaurants where you can say that, because there aren’t many restaurants, period. This leaves the hungry with two options: learn how to cook, or continue current plan of eating canned pork & beans.

I’m fairly spoiled by the fact that I get care packages of food sent to me. In all honestly, we don’t really need care packages of food to survive on this island; the basics are here. Severely limited and over represented by canned meats and ramen, but here. The unintended purpose of food care packages are to serve as reminders of my ineptitude in the kitchen.

Cooking is physically hard work. I blame food blogs like Tastespotting and people like Rachel Ray who somehow led me astray believing that cooking is an easy, beautiful process, and one can do it with nice hair and take wonderful pictures throughout the process. It’s false, false to the extreme.

Episode 1: Cooking ground beef with Nate, another WorldTeach volunteer.

With lofty goals of preparing a grand meal to thank the people who have been hospitable to us thus far in Kosrae, Nate and I instead nearly caused food poisoning to half the community. How ground beef can be burnt black outside, but bleeding red inside, is a feat that can only be accomplished by the most inept of inept. Two hours of cooking resulted in blood burgers and WWIII in the kitchen. Luckily, no one died that night, and we have not been excommunicated from the community.

Episode 2: Scaling a fish with Kristen, a roommate.

Kristen, one of my three wonderful roommates, just graduated from college in the East Coast and her arms are seasoned from her life’s commitment to athletics thus far. Still, with Kristen’s arms and my knife, we were no match for the fish we were trying to gut and scale. That night, the blood of three was taken: Hers, mine, and the fish. Gutting a fish is disgusting. There is nothing FoodNetwork-y or FoodBlog-esque about this part in food prep. Gutting, or rather, engaging in a tug of war battle with fish guts, resulted in gills and guts spewed about a blood spattered countertop. Still, this process was better than scaling, which was me dangling a fish upside down, trying not to gag, and causing scales to project themselves to distances that reached the dining table. Hours later that night, I was still picking scales out of my hair.

With these two episodes as the back story, you hopefully understand why earlier tonight was momentous. I took a chicken through the whole shebang: defrosting, washing, cutting, washing some more, marinating, cooking, seasoning to taste, eating. And it was good and edible. Sure, I forgot an ingredient or two, but the operative word is edible. On the stove is a pot of fully cooked chicken that can be eaten without fears of food poisoning, which is a lot more than what I could have said earlier. This moves mountains, because if a person can successfully cook a chicken, there isn’t much that she can’t do now is there? =)

On laundry

While coconut trees and stunning sunsets over calm seas are part of daily life here in The Micro, one can't ALWAYS be thinking about trees and looking into the sky. One does, occasionally, get interrupted by the more immediate responsibilities she must tend to, and even those can be a handful. Take the example of doing laundry, a simple chore at most. Maybe it is medium hard if it was cashmere (non applicable in this region). It then never ceases to amaze me how this simple chore can cause such complex problems.

Let it be known that our laundry machine is a raging beast. It ingests perfectly normal clothing of typical proportions, chomps on it some, and then spits back a pile that resembles the original, but maybe stretched out, stained (where there weren't stains), ripped, bleached (when there wasn't bleach).

So now that my clothes are effectively over-stretched, spotted all over with mysterious black dots, ripped, and bleached in awkward places, I'm thinking that this doing laundry business needs to be re examined. Serious consideration is being placed on the hand washing route: time consuming, but perhaps the preventative solution to the black dot mystery.

It's possible that I may be the worst Micronesian laundry washer, ever. People who have a knack for it seem to possess an intuitive gift of timing. Taking the clothes off the line too early will lead to a moldy stench entrenched into the fabric that will decrease your likability at an exponential rate. Taking the clothes off too late will lead to it becoming re-drenched by the next onslaught of rain, thus ruining your efforts to produce clean clothes. Laundry timing skills are clutch for survival, and go hand in hand with cloud watching skills (something I also lack at the moment).

Cloud watching skills are equally, if not more important, than the former; mostly because skilled cloud watchers are able to reduce the number of sticky situations they find themselves in. Aside from producing consistent and excellent laundry results, a seasoned cloud watcher can reduce the occurrence of a larger situation, like getting stuck on the opposite side of the island because of a thunderstorm. At the very best, my cloud watching skills can be currently classified at the basic CloudRunner level. CloudRunners are not able to predict the movement or severity of the clouds at a preferable distance, but see the oncoming heavy clouds right about the cross over the island, acknowledges their presence, and then engages in a heart pounding bike vs. nature race home to see who can first get to the clothes on the laundry line.

Since we're on the topic of clothes, my tastes have changed considerably. Granted, I've never really had an affinity for fashion. Nonetheless, a recent desire to add more frills, sequins, and bows to the already colorful knee length potato sacks we call "nuk nuks" was nonexistent prior to arriving the Micro. A typical conversation exchange concerning daily attire goes something like this:

"Hey, I really like your nuk nuk. The two buttons at the bottom really complement the sewn apron at the collar."

“Thanks. Are you thinking of asking your host mother to make you another nuk- nuk?”

“Yeah, she’s great with frills at the skirt bottom. I bought the floral fabric yesterday. Do you think I should add more sequins across the top, or sew a flower across the skirt middle? Would doing both be too much?”

Clearly, it's a silly question, because we all know that there is no such thing as it being too much.