On the way home from work two weeks ago, the clouds were looking especially spectacular. I decided to stop the car and take a picture.

Adventures of the Traveling Mumu

Once, in a faraway place in a not-so-faraway time era, there were four girls bound together by the constraints of a vast ocean preventing their freedom of movement. It was like this for a year, and it was adventurously great on many levels.

Fortunately, a traveling mumu exists to continue the documentation of these four girls' globally spanning adventures, post-island.

Most recently, the mumu found its way from the cooler lands of Minnesota to (in theory) sunny Southern California. More specifically, it found its way into an elementary school classroom, where the students were celebrating International Children's Day.

Apparently, Ms. Mumu brought along her friends to join the party, including Ms. Nuk-Nuk and Ms. Liberation Day Skirt.



What places will this mumu see next? Oh, the places you will go, Ms. Mumu!

surfing

Why is it that the 20s can feel more tumultuous than the high school years? I thought the days of feeling like the world was coming to an end had hit its peak when my first love broke up with me at the beach. I spent the next months feeling inadequate, unwanted, and insecure. But the post college years thus far have revealed themselves otherwise. I feel like I’m trying to ride a wave to dry land. I’m paddling, paddling; positioning myself for the right wave to attempt. Waiting patiently, but swimming around, always on the lookout for the perfect crush. Then in the distant, there it is. A slow mound powered by the moon is gaining momentum on the horizon. The feeling of “just go for it” pushes my body to position itself. Then go time comes, and the rising sounds of the ocean make my arms instinctively try to propel the board, and ultimately my body to shoot ahead.

Something isn’t quite right, proportionately. I think it’s the lack of any muscle in my arms. I haven’t been able catch a wave and stand up. In a faded scrapbook, the picture of me doing it in Maui in the 6th grade is but an irretrievable sense memory. Right now, waves are knocking my face left and right, and eventually one side sweeps me like a bitch slap and I fall off the board completely, swallowing salt water with the fall.

I still have a long way to go before I can surf.

< 3 more months

This initiative to fire up the blog again has been sparked by a visit to a fellow volunteer’s blog earlier tonight. I have less than 3 months left in Kosrae, year 1.
Over the past 7 months, it would be fair to say that a lot has happened for me on this pretty little island. I’ve seen more nature, logged more biking miles, and swallowed more salt water than I have in the past 23 years of living.

Perusing through other volunteer blogs and learning about all the great things that are happening around the world is inspiring, but causes me to second guess my own experience as a volunteer. Aside from making an adventure hungry 20-something like myself want to jump on a plane to whatever remote destination, I will admit that blog reading had previously playing a role in shaping my expectations of volunteering.

The incorrect trajectory went something along the lines of this: Apply for program -> Make a blog -> Post picture of oneself wearing local garb posed with naked children smiling at the camera -> have everyday be awesome, amazing, and life changing -> come back with hair in dreads preaching about the dire effects of western centric foreign policy and have a big enough adventure to write a book.

I’ll just tell you right now that I have zero pictures of me with any naked children, my hair is not in dreads, and I think any recent grad who wants to have a published memoir sitting on a Barnes & Noble shelf after 10 months of international volunteering is silly in this global age. It just doesn’t work that way. Here are some other things I’ve learned, or rather was reminded of, while being a volunteer.

Lesson #1: If the school didn’t have problems, then it wouldn’t need volunteers.
Lesson #2: Not getting paid does not equate to working fewer hours.
Lesson #3: Being inexperienced in the States will not make one more experienced in a foreign country.
Lesson #4: Organizational politics don’t go away, even in faraway places.
Lesson #5: Teenagers will be teenagers anywhere on the globe.

I feel really lucky to be in Kosrae. I don’t function at the constant level of spectacular, but the time spent here is unlike any other time in my life.

Tsunami warning

This week marks the end of quarter 1. Students are quietly completing their English final assignments lost in a swirl of thoughts, and scribbling madly in transcribing them to readable form.

I am in the front of my classroom, thinking about what is for lunch while the students are working. Everything is going swimmingly, but then another student peeps his head inside my classroom and mutters something in Kosrean, their native tongue. Immediately, pencils are dropped and backpacks are gathered, and my students are literally fleeing the classroom. I peer outside the classroom, and my students have apparently joined in on a mass exodus as they leap onto the departing buses. Half finished final assignments lay about the room; some have already been blown onto the floor by the slight breeze.

By this point, I am no longer angry, but confused. Finally, I hear the English translation of what is going on:

“TSUNAMI WARNING!! TSUNAMI WARNING!! RUN FOR THE HILLS!!”

There WOULD be a tsunami warning on Kosrae during finals. Some places have snow days, we have tsunami days, where everyone makes a break for higher ground and prays that the huge moving water mass (started from an earthquake around neighboring islands) does not reach Kosrae and engulf the beach front homes. Lunch looks like a no go. Like the last time this happened, I start contemplating what to bring for my own clamor up the hill.