Taking the Blinders Off

March 28, 2007

5 PMish

I think it was about that time, that someone pulled or rather ripped the blinders off of my eyes. I think I have been able to sit too long staring comfortably out at this new world that I have now come to call home, as I wrote in the absence of recognition of the poverty that tucks itself into the nooks and crannies of Chuuk, making it a an even more difficult task to see. So you can imagine how difficult something almost invisible is to see, when you have blinders on to the world. It was time for them to come off, but it wouldn’t be anything that I could do myself. I feel like I am in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, yet the realizations after coming out of the cave aren’t a world of beauty and awesomeness, but rather, a hidden world of challenges and struggle that plague the people of this land.

I have discovered my heart here in Chuuk, on an island that sits on the edge of the lagoon kissing the Pacific Ocean, as the immense waves crash upon the reef that sits yards away from the shore. As you walk around the island at night, often all that you hear from anywhere you stand is the thunderous sounds of the oceans waves. A sound that takes me home to the beaches of El Porto and Point Dume. It is here that I have found my reason. I had the image that if I were Peter Pan, it would be a combination of magic fairy dust and the Island of Piis that would make me fly. When I am there, I feel like I can fly.

This weekend marks the third trip that I have made out there, each time to help lead a weekend retreat. From the first moment that I stepped on Piis, there has been an incredible feeling in my heart. There will always be a piece of me in Piis, and I will always have Piis in my heart (a little funny since Piis is pronounced just like Peace). Every time that I have gone there, my heart has been moved and ignited by the Holy Spirit. A feeling indescribable with words, but one so strong and so powerful, they do not happen often. But each time fueling the fire within my heart, giving me strength to keep going, to move forward, beyond challenges and difficulties, Piis is my reason.

This last visit was different though. It didn’t carry the same fuzzy warm feelings with it. It was a new challenge, a challenge to take a bigger step forward in offering up myself, and sharing God within. Usually on these retreats we would be accompanied by Sr. Erencia, who would plan and lead the whole weekend, yet due to her being called to Guam we would be doing this one without her. Here is where Kathy comes in to the picture. Kathy is the whole reason why I was ever able to go to Piis in the first place. It is her island, and her home, she invited us to come and be with them, and has been remarkably incredible and making Piis feel like home. She is an incredibly strong and intelligent young woman, and has an amazing presence of God within her, that she shines no matter what she is doing. And now with the absence of Sister, she would have to step forward, take the reigns and lead us.

Now, this does not come without its challenges. You see, the Chuukese culture is a male dominated one, which means that women follow the men’s lead. Of course with the influx of western culture, things here in the lagoon change slowly, but there is still a huge level of respect that each sex carries for the opposite, that even I as a feminist have grown to admire. It isn’t always a form of oppression to the women, but rather a symbolic way of showing respect to one another. I know this sounds strange and difficult, and in no way have I lost my care for women’s equality, but I think you must experience life here before you judge it. And so this task of standing up in front of 70 or so youth, a multitude of people mixed in with relatives of both sexes who are older than her. This could cause a huge cultural breakdown of respect, and in instances that I have both witnessed and heard of, often times people might reject to partake in something like this. But in this case, they did not, instead her uncles, and brothers, partook in this opportunity to grow in many ways, and stood by Kathy in support and respect.

Needless to say, Kathy’s natural ability to lead and guide, and allow the Spirit to work through her made for an incredible retreat, yet within myself there was an absence of one of those moments, that blindsides you on a random Tuesday, no…that’s from a song. But, there wasn’t this big movement in my heart like past times. We spoke in our community about this, that life is filled with these large moments of extraordinary worth, the days that we remember and stay with us for the rest of our lives. But then in between all of those are the ordinary days and often bad days where nothing spectacular happens, these days will probably fill up the majority of our lives. I said that I try to live my life from these big moments to big moments, basking in its glory and letting it carry me on a high for as long as it will let me. But my community mate made a great point saying, that life is filled with these regular moments that often times don’t leave you on a high or carry you anywhere, but there is still joy and grace to be found in them, in the unspectacular. This reminds me of something Brendan Busse shared with me. He spoke about the beauty and spectacularity of the sunrise and sunset, yet how much of an ordinary thing it is. We don’t have to wait for the kairos moments in our lives to experience God’s grace. Sometimes God is lying waiting for us in the most ordinary and mundane of things. In something so common as the rising and setting of the sun, in the placement of the stars and moon, find God in all things.

And so beyond the extraordinary ordinary of this trip lay a challenge waiting to reveal itself to me, the removal of the blinders that I had managed to carry with me for the past 8 months of my living here.

After the retreat had ended, we had an opportunity to walk around the whole island with the president of the youth, Alfred, who I have come to see as a brother. The island, approximately the size of two football fields, took us about an hour or so to walk around. But for that hour Alfred opened his heart and shared a lot of the struggles that the youth and the island of Piis are facing. The removal of the blinders.

I used to think that for the most part people here in Chuuk are doing okay. Living here on Weno, where we have somewhat paved roads, some times power, some resemblance of supermarkets with mainly lots of cans or long ago expired products, cars and a Mobil run monopoly on gasoline, you can get this idea that life here isn’t so bad. Sure it has its problems, but if you need something you just run to the store and grab it. Or at least that’s how it goes for us. We have hardly ever had to put our feet in the shoes of what it might be like for someone who doesn’t live on Weno. You see, Weno is the only island with everything I just described. As the capital of the state, you can call Weno, the metropolis of Chuuk. Its not much when you compare it to huge metropolis’ like Los Angeles, New York, or San Francisco. But here in Chuuk, its is the equivalent, which isn’t saying much, since there is no where anything close that would give you that impression of it being in the same ball park as those big cities. But the other outer islands are further steps away from that ball park. On the other islands, there are no roads, there are no cars, there are no markets, there is no power. Everything on the other islands runs on self sustenance. If that means, fishing or farming okay, some people do that. Others have resorted to getting jobs, or attempting to sell things on Weno to make money, so that one can pay for the gasoline for their fiberglass boats, buy the bags of rice that has become a central part of the diet here, and buy the canned goods of SPAM and Mackerel or Tuna, which have also become a central part of the diet here. For majority of the people here in the lagoon, it is the latter. Of course there is still a large consumption of the local food that has been eaten here since the first days of the Chuukese people here, but as western culture begins to influence and slowly dominate, the younger children are turning away from the local food, and are acquiring tastes for things that cannot be grown but must be bought. This may come with severe problems, as I discovered this weekend.

What is a family to do if they have no way of making any money?

The plight of the poor continues to slap me in the face, as I continue to get my blinders ripped off my eyes, leaving that painful feeling of having duct tape ripped off your mouth, especially with a moustache.

Sitting with one of my students who admitted to not wanting to go home for the sake of escaping his parents yelling at him, and the negative environment, of marijuana and alcohol infested relatives, I feel nothing but stupid for the naivety of thinking that life here, even in Weno is okay. This whole talk about Weno being the capital of the state and being better off…guess what…I was wrong again.

So turning back to Piis, and the struggle that they face. With the lack of ability to make money, comes the lack of ability to buy anything. Talking with Alfred this weekend I for the first time had my eyes opened to the struggles that people here are facing. I was pushed to look beyond myself and realize that not everyone here is eating and living comfortably the way that I am, even if I am taking a step away from my “normal” American comforts to attempt at what we call Living Simply. There is no way that I will ever be able to experience fully what it is to be poor, and its only now, 8 months into being here in Chuuk that I am beginning to see this. I was blind and now I see? I don’t think this is as fabulous as singing the words to Amazing Grace, but to have this eye opening experience is as important.

People here are struggling. People here are going hungry. And what does that mean, so they have food, not much of it, but what good is aged, old, breadfruit going to do for you. There is no source of meat or protein, or calcium or sugar, or much else for that matter. For the people out on Piis, there is no opportunity to farm and grow things that may be sold in the market for money. The only resource available to them is the big ocean blue filled with tons of fish, but catching them presents a whole new task in itself. You see, the people do not use the canoes of ancient days as they did before, the navigating skills have been lost to the gas powered fiber glass boats. And so now they are subject to paying the exorbitant price for gas, due to the monopoly on gas run by Mobil® here in the islands. Being that Piis sits on the edge of the reef it is one of the farthest islands away from the capital island of Weno, so it costs the most amount of money to get to, add on the cost of going out into the ocean for a few hours to be able to battle the large ocean waves in order to catch fish, then to be able to take them into the market, hopefully to be able to get a decent pay for those fish. In the end, you are stuck still needing to pay for more gas to go back to the island, and hopefully buy a few supplies for your family, now where do you draw the line between food and other amenities, like kerosene for light at night, food products, soap, toilet paper, the simple things that we may take for granted. When it comes down to it, there just isn’t enough money for everything, and in the end, all that is left is the little bit of local food that they have here. No meat, no rice, no mackerel, these staple foods that have now become central to their diet are now a struggle to come by. And as Alfred put it to me on Sunday, these people are facing a famine. With lack of ability to make money, comes a lack of ability to buy food, and soon, he says, there will be no more food on the island. What are the people to do then?

You ask: Why doesn’t the government step in to help? I say: Excellent question! A Local Says: The government isn’t doing anything! The elected mayor gets money to help his island, yet after collecting the money, he then distributes only to his family saying that this money is for him and his family. The problem is that the Mayor is sadly, not related to everyone on the island, and so in the end there is more than ¾ of the island that are left struggling and wondering “what good does this new system established by the Americans, do me if all that ends up happening is no one taking care of me?”. This sort of corruption is not only unique to Piis, but has been a huge problem through out every level of the Chuuk State government for years. We recently heard a story of the Chuuk State Director of Finance accidentally losing 1 million dollars in a 2 million dollar transaction to the Chuuk state. All funds were frozen to the state until the money was paid back, and so rather than looking for the money, they just took the money from already existing funds. Whatever happened to that money is anyone’s guess, but my community mates were treated to many beers by that guy at a bar not too long after this event…a little fishy?

Yet it does not end there. Like the problem of governmental corruption is not unique to Piis, nor is the hunger and lack of jobs. Even here on Weno, the capital of DVD players, Cars, Cell Phones, nice stereos and anything else that can make you look like you have money, mixed up among all this, are a population of people who are going by on rice and water, sometimes mixed with salt, maybe sometimes a family member might bring by a can of meat, if they’re lucky, but luck doesn’t seem to be on the peoples side here. The original thought I had was lots of stores equals lots of jobs, right? Well apparently not so, because even here in the capital there are people that will go without vitally important sources of nutrition. So to say that people aren’t starving is one thing, but would you call surviving off of meals of only rice and water living large?

My world around me is being shaken up again, once again, and my heart is left restless and torn. Torn and broken for sitting in this place so long, blinded by the thought that people here weren’t too bad off. Sitting here in my comfortable apartment, eating my comfortable and delicious meals, absent minded to the fact that people just outside my door are suffering and struggling. I don’t have any answers and in no way do I feel like I have a right to make a social commentary on what Chuuk should do to solve their problems. I have no idea what to do, nor how to deal with all this in my heart, but it doesn’t sit well, I don’t think any injustice ever should, and this is only the beginning I know, forgive me for not touching upon the struggle of education for these kids, and the problems of alcohol and drugs that they turn to. My picture of a world of beautiful sunsets, and coconut palm tree filled beaches has just become a lot more real, and a lot more serious, but its about time that the blinders were taken off.