Thursday, April 12, 2012

Islands of Contrast

Weno is an island of contrasts. The good, the bad and the ugly are all smashed together on a tiny scrap of land in the wide ocean. As I walk down the main road on Weno, my senses are overwhelmed with positive and negative things that bombard me from every angle. I gaze around at the surroundings and my feelings surge from happiness to despair in a matter of seconds. The conjunctions of heavenly beauty and impoverished disarray are impossible to ignore.
Follow my eyes as I scan the island from top to bottom. Above my head is a baby blue sky with patches of fluffy white clouds. No smog to blur the atmosphere or skyscrapers to block out the sun. The bright blueness of the sky is then abruptly interrupted by a jagged line of brilliant green. The mountainsides of the ancient volcanic slopes are carpeted with a thick blanket of jaded green jungle. Over the sides of the hillsides, I can see the vast expanse of endless water that stretches towards the horizon in all directions. Its blue color is not uniform like the sky, but multi-hued in a tie-dye swirl of cobalt and periwinkle. The pureness of blue and green shades is so flawless that it seems only an artist could have created such beauty. The warm sun caresses my skin and the smell of tropical flowers fills my nostrils. These are the scenes of paradise that children dream of and adults yearn for.
As my gaze lowers below the tops of the mountains, I begin to see scattered buildings nestled into the rain forest. A cell phone tower pokes its metallic head out of the dense thicket of trees and signals the end of untouched jungle. The roofs of the two story buildings have rusted rebar poles sticking up towards the sky and cracked rain gutters drooping off the edges. Corroded tin slats of roofing ward off the pounding sun and drizzling rain. Small windows with half torn security screens and soggy pieces of plywood nailed on the fronts provide some ventilation for the concrete buildings.
By the time I reach street level, the stench of the raw garbage has caught up with me. No sewers and no trash cans mean that garbage piles up in the corners and rots in mounds of disgusting putrefaction. Almost all the buildings are one story and follow the same basic design. The nice ones are concrete boxes with flat roofs and the poor ones are jumbles of wood and tin that form the general shape of a shack. Faded signs are plastered above the doorways of some stores and wire fences mark off the property line of buildings. The muddy ruts that they call streets are pockmarked with construction workers digging holes to fix the drainage problems. The roar of bulldozers and rumble of dusty cars drown out the sound of singing birds and crashing waves.
Amidst the collapsing city are crowds of lounging men and frolicking children. Random people stop me on the street to say hello and ask me how I am doing. Little girls scream hello and waves their arms frantically in excitement to get my attention. The construction workers stop their digging and greet me as I pass by. I am surrounded by smiling faces and a carefree island attitude.
But when I look closer, some more contrasts become visible in those same happy interactions. The man who smiled at me on the road and shook my hand had a mouth of only two black teeth and touched me with a dirty hand crusted in red betelnut spit. The children who cheerfully yearned for my glance had no shoes or shirts and were covered in scars of infected wounds and burst boils. The construction worker who politely addressed me was visibly drunk and hollered an obscene comment at an attractive woman across the road.
Chuuk is a place of contrasts. From one perspective, it can be viewed as a fantastical tropical paradise that fulfills your imagination’s expectations of pure beauty and island relaxation. From another perspective, it can be viewed as a struggling third world dump that is bursting at the seams with confusion and pollution. One’s interpretations of Chuuk depend on where one looks and how one looks. As one of my Peace Corps buddies eloquently stated it, “Welcome to Heaven, Welcome to Hell, Welcome to Chuuk”

No comments:

Post a Comment