Lessons Learned of Late; or "April is the cruellest month"

Lessons Learned of Late…

I title this blog entry in honor of one particular section we get to fill out on our beloved T---------- Report Forms. Now, most of this form-filling out involves remembering and recording all of the specific, minute details of our work (yawn) and math (gah!! And I thought I was done with you forever after sophomore year of college!). There is, however, one section which amuses/befuddles me greatly: (the oh-so-fuzzy, I love it) “Lessons Learned This Quarter” section. Now, I say “amuses” because, without fail, whenever, in filling out the report, I stop and remember all of the “lessons” I’ve learned during that past four months of Peace Corps, I can’t help but smile at my own ridiculousness (who could?). Okay, you say, that explains “amused,” but “befuddled”? Que? That’s because, somehow, someone in the US government (evidently) sincerely believes that I can boil all of the trials, the tribulations, the skinned knees, the tears, and the “aha!”s down into a space THE SIZE OF THE PALM OF MY HAND. Hahaha…so not going to happen.

And so, I present here, for your reading pleasure, a few of my Lessons Learned This Quarter (Or, April is the cruelest month…). Enjoy!

Lesson #1 Sharks>Clifford the Big Red Dog

Huh? you may be wondering. Was there a fictional vs. non-fictional creature throwdown in Ngeremlengui I never heard about?

Well, sort of. Here’s how it happened. Once a month, several teachers, the 1st-4th graders, and I pile onto the school bus and head merrily down to the beach for our Friday noontime meeting of the Book & Lunch Club. It’s fun: everybody brings their bento (boxed lunch), a book to read; I bring dessert [this, incidentally, was previously the site of another lesson learned: ice cream ≠good non-messy snack choice—well, not, at least, if you value your books, your clothes, or the summer house].

Anyway, on this particular Friday, the tide is really in.

“It’s perfect for swimming,” the kids point out, oh-so-subtly hinting their intentions.

[I scramble.] “Well, you can come swimming any time,” say I, “but you can only read now.” [I’m sure any logicians reading this would love to list the ten ways I just—rather blatantly—lied to my students.] When the kids start talking about “tides,” I pretend I can’t hear them, shutting out their “reasoned explanations” and concentrating really hard on the book J’s in the process of reading me, Clifford’s Christmas.

Well, eventually, the kids accept the fallacy with which I’ve presented them and settle down to read. I sigh my relief inwardly, continuing to listen to the tale of Emily Ann and her large, oddly-colored canine. Then I hear it.

“Chedeng! Chedeng,” a small knot of students cries excitedly from the dock. The others, infected by their enthusiasm, put their books aside and run over.

“Hey,” I yell. “You can see a shark any time, but…” The words die away on my lips. Even my intrepid third grade reader J has dropped Clifford to the ground.

Ah, well, I think. Some of them you just can’t win.

Lesson #2 Masseuses Can Read Minds. Really.

In honor of my birthday (in case you don’t know me, this is my favorite holiday of the year. But birthdays aren’t holidays, you say. Really?, say I. I’m sorry you haven’t yet had the pleasure of meeting me.), I decided to treat myself to a massage. Now, after taking (the extremely demanding!) Massage Therapy my second semester senior year, I went through pretty heavy withdrawal from those weekly, hour-long “full-body rubdowns” [to quote myself]. By the time I arrived on Kosrae in late September, I was hurting so bad for them (no pun intended, haha), that I repeatedly suggested, “hey…maybe I can teach the ladies of Kosrae to do massage therapy as an, um…secondary project. Yeah! It would promote…health and wellness on the island!”

Though no one had the gumption to tell me straight up, “um, Megan? Women aren’t actually allowed to show their shoulders or thighs here, so massage therapy…? Uh, yeah. Maybe not gonna fly, so much,” that pet project idea never really did pan out.

So, you can imagine how excited I was for my birthday massage. Imagine, then, my reaction, when I strip down, lie on the table, and my masseuse starts…talking to me. Sure, yeah, she was giving me a good massage, but what I really wanted was just to Zen out. Anyway, she asks me the usual cursory small talk queries: how long have you been on the island, what do you do here, etc. Well, once I had successfully supplied the answers to these questions (8 months, I am a teacher here), my masseuse takes the hint (from the curt nature of my responses) and remains silent for quite some time. Some minutes later, I am nearly asleep on the table when, suddenly, I am jolted by pain. Huh? She’s working my upper back. She comments that I hold perhaps the most tension that she’s ever seen there.

And then: “so do you teach little kids?” I love it. How did she guess?

Lesson #3 Puppies are not conducive to Zen.

I think one of my earliest actions out of the cradle rather beautifully illustrates the way I feel about canines. Now, I was my parents’ first child; thus, they baby-proofed the entire house, read volumes of books on how to take perfect care of me, sanitized all of my toys, etc. Imagine their reaction, then, when they found that I had rolled from my cradle, crawled over to our Dalmatian, and had proceeded to suck on Banjo’s paw!

When Bonnie, my dog on Kosrae, got hit by a car and broke both of her legs, I splinted them and fed her painkillers. After a couple of days of rest, my host dad suggested that I put her through a multi-faceted rehab program: taking her to the beach to swim every other day, and massaging her injured legs on the alternating days. Now, knowing my dad, I’m not sure whether his suggestion was sincere or in jest; however, the fact remains that, every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I could be seen walking the street of Kosrae, carrying my dog in a basket down to the beach for our “rehab swims.” (I’m sure, also, that I quickly gained the rep among the locals of “crazy dog lady.”)

Yeah, I love dogs. I think the term “dog person” doesn’t quite do justice to the way I feel about them. I think the best way to put it is that I feel the way about dogs that people are supposed to feel about babies.

Thus, when our new puppy, Hunter, arrived a few weeks back, I was thrilled (kind of like, oh… “a little kid with a puppy”). Now, it has long been the tradition of our Siamese cats to join me in my yoga exercises—walking, rubbing up against me, but, mainly, just sitting around on my yoga mat in that very glazy way that cats will do. At first, it was, admittedly, slightly off-putting to (eyes closed) move into plank pose and find—ho, shit—I am planking on a cat! However, I’ve gotten used to their presence; I’ve even grown so accustomed to the cats’ quiet, furry presence that I sort of miss them when they’re not there during my exercise sessions.

Now, I don’t know whether Hunter got the idea from the Siamese twins, or all on his own, but one night he, too, decided to assist me in my yoga practice. Picture it: I’ve just warmed up, I stand up, breathe, exhale slowly down into downward dog and—my hair is being yanked (practically out of my head!) by an unseen force below.

“Hunter,” I say warningly, before continuing my exercise, “you be a good boy.”

Well, I guess if you translate from Human to Dog, “good boy” means “good boy! Pull my hair some more, MORE! That’s it!” because that’s exactly what he starts doing. I sincerely try to keep my calm, but each time he does it, I get madder and madder.

Finally, I stand to my full height and explode. “HUNTER!!” I yell. “Do NOT do that!!!”

The veins stand out on my neck. My crazed voice reverberates back at me from a thousand angles off of the metal roof of the carport above us. Well, I think, I’ve sure Zenned out this yoga session!

Lesson #4 I am a force to be reckoned with!

My school is really cute: we have assemblies every Monday and Friday, each classroom is labeled with its appropriate grade level sign, the kids wear attractive, matching uniforms, and we all brush our teeth together at 12:45 each day. (It seems eerily, in fact, like Lake Wobegon of the Pacific, where all of the men are hard-working, and the women are pretty, and all of the children are above average.)

Anyway, going along with this Twilight Zone-worthy, Americana perfection, we have an actual physical BELL (kind of like the Liberty Bell, only small, not cracked, and maybe—just maybe—slightly less historically significant) which we ring at the end of each period to signal a change in classes. Well, I must have been doing something really good that Tuesday, for—for the first time in my eight months here—I was asked to ring the bell.

Now, I hate the super-loud noise the bell makes when the kids (invariably) SLAM it in turn so, I resolved, I would hit the bell as lightly as possible to still produce a sound. I hit the bell, producing the familiar clang. Quite pleased with myself, I hang the hammer back up and stroll back inside the office.

“Teacher Ngchui!” I hear awestruck children’s voices outside the office. I walk back outside. “Look what you did!”

And I look. HALF OF THE HEAD HAS FALLEN COMPLETELY OFF OF THE HAMMER.

Certain that the kids are just punking me (ha, it must have been like that before, and I just didn’t notice), I walk back over to the bell. Sure enough, the forlorn other-half-of-the-hammer-head lies useless on the ground below. Well done, Megan.

Lesson #5 I am ridiculous.

Yeah, yeah…I know (for those of you who know me personally), this is not at all news. However, there was such a brilliant and amusing recent illustrative example of this fact that I could not, in good conscience, omit it from this blog entry.

It’s Wednesday afternoon, second grade library time. To everyone’s delight, we’re starting out with (that old, time-tested favorite) Simon Says. O, one of the boys, is now Simon. Now, this kid is something of a class clown.

“Touch your butt,” he says. Whoa! Did he really just say that? Honestly, I am just so amused that a seven year-old just told me to touch my butt that I forgot to scold him and just go ahead and, well, touch my a**. After this direction, however, he seems to have run out of ideas. He scratches his head, stalls for time. Eventually, my impatience (and semi-awkwardness) prompts me to speak up.

“Okay! Now give us a new one so we can all stop touching our butts!”

My friend A turns to me, “Um, he said ‘back.’”

General laughter. Nice, Megan, nice.

Lesson #6 Do not dyslexify directions.

Now, I’ve never been diagnosed with formal dyslexia for reading or anything. I do, however, occasionally have troubles with numbers. This explains, for instance, how, on Kosrae, where you only have to remember four numbers in order to call any person on the island, I REPEATEDLY (we are talking maybe 50 times) called the taxi company while trying to reach my friend G. I just couldn’t get those four numbers, IN PROPER ORDER, to work their way into my Permanent Record.

So, I have a lurking suspicion that, on occasion, I do the same thing with directions. After all, if you have to travel northeast to get somewhere, does it really matter whether you go north or east first? In this particular instance, I learned that, sometimes, yes, it matters a lot.

It’s Sunday morning. I’m excited because, for the very first time, I am going out SPEAR-FISHING! (I have wanted to do this my entire time in Palau.) My enthusiasm builds as we approach the reef: ooh boy! Ooh boy! I am a dog, wagging his tail at 90 mph; I am a warrior, getting ready to wage a battle against the creatures of the sea; I am—so not listening to the directions M, my companion, is issuing.

I dive in. Operating the gun is surprisingly easy, I soon learn. All you have to do is draw back your spear into a slot, secure it with two rubber bands, and ka-ching! you are armed and ready to go spear some unsuspecting aquatic life. I shoot once. A miss. Reload. Shoot again? Miss.

For my third attempt, I decide I will sneak up really, really close on the fish before going for it. I swim over a big coralhead and spot my target: a blue-green parrotfish a few yards away. He sees my spear, he starts making for the deep water…hey! Not so fast! I chase him down, take aim, pull the trigger and…miss. The difference, however, between this and my previous attempts, is that this time I shot into a huge abyss of water that I can’t even see the bottom of. I can’t even see my spear, let alone retrieve it.

I pop to the surface. “Um, M?” I call. “Don’t kill me, but…”

And that’s when I learned why you shoot from deep water into shallow. Ah. Now it ALL MAKES SENSE.

Lesson #7 “There are nice things in the world…We’re all such morons to get so sidetracked…referring every goddamn thing that happens right back to our lousy little egos.”*

*Wish I could claim credit for the quote, but it’s actually from J.D. Salinger’s Franny & Zooey. In fact, I urge each and every one of you to read the whole book; it does more justice to the quote.

I remember, back during PST (Pre-Service Training, for the uninitiated), the PC staff showed us this graph. Now, I’m not really one for math, but what it really reminded me of was the graph of a sine wave, only superamplified, like y=300 sin (x), or something like that. It’s this crazy roller coaster of a graph.

I leaned over the table to one of my fellow training mates. “What is that?” I whispered.

Imminently, my question was answered by our PC doctors, who were leading the session: “That’s your mental health during Peace Corps,” they explain.

And how true it was. Never have I ever experienced such vast, continued mood swings as during my service over here. It is like a rollercoaster: on high days, I swear to everything that I have the best f***ing job in the entire world! But, on low days, tears and anger flow freely.

The past couple of weeks had definitely been a long ride down the roller coaster hill, it was a (storm-threatening) Saturday afternoon, and I was attempting to hitch from Koror (our capital) out to Ngeremlengui (my home). Now, this drive only takes about 45 minutes; however, I had not had the good fortune in town of running into anyone from my place. So, three separate rides, a little patience, and a lot of tekoi er Belau later, I had managed to land myself at the compact road turnout to Ngeremlengui (thus putting myself maybe a 3-4 mile walk from my home).

At first, I stood there, just waiting. However, as the minutes ticked by and not a single car passed by on the compact road (going anywhere), I decided, well, might as well start walking… This was easier thought than done, though, so to speak, for my personal articles included:

a) My backpack, loaded with clothes, toiletries, etc.
b) My full bag of groceries
c) An (open—you really think I could wait to see what I got in the mail? Hahaha, think again.) box

A couple of cars go by, both traveling in the opposite direction from me. One stops. It’s a white car with A plates, a woman (whom I’ve never seen before) driving.

“Do you need a ride?” she asks.

Just as she does so, I spot a car coming off of the compact road travelling in the same direction as I am.

“Oh, no,” I say. “Ke daitsob. It looks like they’re coming this way—I’m sure they’ll stop.”

Satisfied that I am taken care of, the woman continues on her way out. The incoming car, however, does not stop for me. The b******s! Can’t they see all the s**t I’m carrying??

However, I brush aside my anger and continue walking. Well, I think, only 2.75 more (hilly) miles to my house…My (bitter) thoughts are interrupted by the sound of a car behind me. I turn: it’s my old friend, the white car!

“Hop in,” the woman tells me, in perfect English. “It looks like you’ve got a lot of stuff there.”

I gratefully assent. As we ride in, we chit-chat. She was here visiting the SDA missionaries. Yes, she knows B, the Peace Corps from her place. She asks me questions: how do I like Palau? Am I thinking of extending to a third year? What exactly do we get out of Peace Corps when we’re done, anyway?

I think about my own circumstance. Hm, I don’t want to work in a government job. I’m not doing the Masters International Program. In fact, my “real job” will probably have absolutely nothing to do with PC. She breaks my thoughts—

“Is it just for the value of helping people?”

“Yeah,” I answer, slightly awed at the newfound revelation of what a good person I am, “it is.”

L then goes on to say, “Sulang. [Thanks.] Maybe you don’t hear that too much, but we are so grateful you’re here, that you would leave our country, your family, to make things better for us here on our small island. (Pause) In fact, when I look at you guys, and all you’ve sacrificed, it inspires me to do more for Palau, for my country.”

Honestly, I almost couldn’t open my mouth and produce the sounds requisite to thank her, knowing that, if I said more than a couple of syllables, I would certainly start crying. Somehow, in those few minutes, L, a complete stranger, had made everything worth it: the tears, the sweat, the difficult moments we all have when we bang our heads against the wall and honestly wonder how it is that we do this job sometimes.

As I walked up the hill to my house that afternoon, despite the rain, I swear I was radiating sunshine. Zooey was right. There are goddamned nice things in this world, and we are morons to get so sidetracked. It is for these moments that I joined the Peace Corps.