A Day in The Life

I am at a transition point in my 27-month service. The first few months were pure excitement. Adventure and exhilaration were around every corner. Everything that I saw and did was special and new. Each day I was surprised to find a unique thing about the culture or an oddity that I never expected to encounter. I was accosted by awkward situations and inappropriate behaviors. Everything was weird, but everything was exciting.

            The novelty has begun to wear off and I have become accustomed to many things that I would have viewed as crazy a few months ago. My curiosity about many things has been satisfied and I am no longer a deer stuck in the headlights. In many ways, you could say that I have integrated into the society. I understand the language fairly well, I follow the local customs, and I have even adopted the mannerisms and style of the locals. I still have leaps and bounds to go in my integration process, but I have made it over the first hill and am now comfortably acclimated to my environment.

            It is a very good thing to be integrated into my community, however there are a few downsides. I no longer feel like I am on an adventurous voyage around the world. The initial naïve enthusiasm has worn off and things go along at a relatively normal pace. It is no longer an adventure, its just life. But its still a pretty weird life.

            I am going to attempt to give a general overview of a standard day of mine here on Fefan. The details will be dumbed down and most of the embarrassing and foolish interactions will be glossed over, but I think it will give my readers a basic picture of how I live. In some ways my life may seem extremely dull, but when I look at it from a larger perspective I realize that my life is anything but dull. My activities are falling into a routine, but my existence is not very routine. I still live in a 3^rd world country on a tiny island where the lifestyle, language and culture are far different from anything that most of you will ever experience.

            I usually wake up at around 6:30 am. I don’t use an alarm and I seldom look at a watch. My internal clock accompanied by crying babies is suffice to make sure that I awake at an appropriate hour. The first activity of the day is usually one of three possible things. They each take about 30 minutes. Option 1: I do some exercise/working out type stuff. Pushups, situps and rubber band stretchy things. Option 2: I do my meditation/ breaking exercises that I learned from the Art of Living program. Option 3: I sleep some more. Unfortunately, I have been opting for number 3 more than I would like. My body is still staunchly resisting the normal hours of sleep that most of the world adheres to. My muscles and mind are still accustomed to the lazy college life of noontime breakfast and midnight escapades.

            At about 7am, I step out of my little room and saunter over to the bathroom. Depending on my selection of morning activities and level of sweat dripping off my body, I will either take a shower or wash my face. When I say take a shower, it’s probably not what you imagine. I used to envision showers as a relaxing time to let the warm water trickle on my head as I relished in the steam-filled ecstasy of a soothing escape from the pressures of the outside world. Showers are no longer a sought after experience that calms the soul and warms the body.

There is a large bucket on the ground full of cold water that comes from a spring up the mountain. I dip a smaller bucket into the big bucket and pour it on my head. The first few buckets are a shocking wakeup call and I barely refrain from shrieking each time that I do it. After several well placed bucket pours, I scrub myself from head to toe. Especially toes. Feet get incredibly disgusting here in Chuuk because sandals are always worn and mud is a common foe. Then a few more cold buckets to wash off the soap, and I am good to go. Unimaginable conditions for some people, but normal life for all of us.

Then I make myself a cup of instant coffee and sit down on my favorite chair (its actually a large paint bucket). I rarely drank coffee in America, but I had no choice but to adopt the habit over here. People of Chuuk love coffee. They drink coffee at all times of the day. It is the standard social invitation to ask someone to sit down and drink a cup of coffee. I am given a boiling cup of coffee every time that I enter anybody else’s house. Nobody seems to care that it is 700 degrees outside and everyone is dripping sweat. A hot cup of coffee is a constant mainstay at all homes in Chuuk. And its always instant coffee. I have yet to see a coffee machine anywhere and the stores don’t even sell normal coffee grounds. Even though the Chuukese are coffee aficionados, I don’t think that most of them even know that coffee is usually made in a different way from just scooping a spoonful. Ooooh, that reminds me. I need to explain how they make coffee. The standard cup of coffee in Chuuk consists of three heaping tablespoons of sugar, two spoonfuls of powdered creamer, and a half spoonful of coffee. I will not go into detail about the excessive sugar intake of Chuukese, I will leave that for another blog about food. Suffice to say, they use a lot of sugar. I tend to stick to a one, to one, to one ratio.

I sit on my little bucket chair and talk to my host father or whoever else is also sipping a cup of Joe in the kitchen. On a regular morning, about 5 neighbors will come in and drink a cup of coffee. We are rather wealthy and always have coffee, so our house is kind of a free coffee shop for friends and family. The Chuukese have an odd custom of drinking their coffee (besides the obscene amounts of sugar). The normal method of drinking coffee is with a piece of bread in hand. You dip the bread in the coffee and munch down the soggy remains. On occasion, donuts or crackers replace the bread, but the general process of saturating a doughy product in a cup of coffee is called “pechan”. It is very popular. After my coffee, I eat a little bit of breakfast. Breakfast usually consists of rice along with some other main course. That main course is ramen, tuna, spam, or some fishy type product.

At around 8am, I exit my house and walk across the path to our school building. Luckily, it is very close, the building is actually visible from my bedroom. School doesn’t start until 8:30, so I hang out on the porch of our office and watch as the students and teachers trickle in. I smack the rusted iron gas tank that we use as a bell at 8:15 and then once more at 8:30. The teachers of my school are usually all on time, which is extremely rare for schools in Chuuk. However, students are often very late and come straggling in until around 9 o’clock.

Our class schedule is divided amongst 45 minute periods for each subject. I have a free period during the 1^st session and sit in on the class of 6^th grade language arts to help out. The kids slowly struggle through some exercises for a while, then I go out and ring the bell to start the next period. I have a 90 minute period with 8^th grade first. My 8^th graders are wonderful and quite smart. They are very attentive and well-behaved. I speak almost entirely in English during their class and have been making my lessons more difficult as the year has progressed. My next 90 minute period with the 7^th graders is a little more strenuous because they lack the focus and motivation of the other classes. I try to do similar lessons with both grades, but usually end up reverting to something simpler for the 7^th grade.  I won’t go into details about school functioning at this juncture, that can also wait for another blog post.

After school I sometimes hold extra class for my 8^th graders to prepare them for high school entrance exams. If there is no extra class, then I chill on the office porch for a little while and watch the kids play volleyball and Frisbee. I bought them volleyballs and Frisbees. There is no lunch time, school just ends around 1ish. All of us teachers usually gather together in one of the classrooms and eat lunch together. Everybody brings one item and we all eat together potluck style. Well, Chuukese potluck style. No plates, no forks, no spoons, no cups. Just piles of food that we grub with our hands. We usually have canned mackerel, pounded breadfruit, rice, and a mystery item of either tuna, ramen or fish. This is a tradition that I fully support. One thing that makes our staff special is that we eat together and socialize after school. Most other teachers at other Chuukese schools hurry home and never interact with their fellow teachers. We have a tight bond here at UFO school. That is partly due to the fact that most of us are family, haha.

The after school hours from 2-6 is the variable time in my schedule. On Tuesdays, I gather all the students, staff and parents and go work on our farm down the road. The agriculture project is going well in some regards, but the plants are struggling to survive.  On Wednesdays, I usually walk down to the next village and work on my language skills with my tutor/mentor. Our sessions are supposed to be 2 hours, but we often talk longer about social issues or philosophy or some current state of affairs. My language tutor is quite a brilliant man and I am lucky to have him as a Chuukese mentor.

The hours of 2-6 are what I would usually consider my hours of boredom. However I have come to embrace boredom. In fact, one of the main reasons that I joined the Peace Corps was to be bored, haha. I know it sounds crazy, but it’s true. I have very rarely been bored in my life. I am an extroverted person and always seek the company of others to play around with. I have always been surrounded by friends, family, TV, video games, sports and a wide variety of activities to keep me busy. I wanted to get away from all of that for a while and be bored. I wanted to have time to myself. I wanted to have time to think, to read, to write, and do nothing. Well now I have plenty of that time.

Ideally I would fill these hours with basketball, hiking and fishing. However, each of these has its obstacle. The closest basketball court is a 45 minute walk. Fishing has been forbidden because of funeral customs. I do hike sometimes, but I have to find the right guy to be my guide. It’s not kosher for me to wander off in the jungle by myself. Since I cannot engage in any of these activities on a regular basis, I revert to simpler things. I read a fair amount. Though my room is a sauna during the day time and is not very conducive to comfortable reading conditions. I sometimes study Chuukese, sometimes lesson plan, and sometimes nap. However, usually I do nothing. Nothing usually involves sitting.

I sit a lot. I sit and listen to conversations that I barely understand. I sit and stare at trees and ponder their chemistry and growth patterns. I sit and think about things. All kinds of things. My usual themes are about spirituality, philosophy, science, sociology, friends, family, food, and many other things that relate to my wild experiences on this island. I used to be an avid extrovert. It was hard for me to sit and listen to a conversation without butting in and saying my two cents every few seconds. In America, I was constantly talking and constantly doing. In Chuuk, I am constantly thinking and constantly chilling.

In the afternoons, I sometimes walk around my village and check the happenings of the locals. I might find something fun to do or I might find a scalding cup of coffee to burn my parched tongue. I will often play with the kids and mess around with them in their games of rocks, sticks and other local materials. I like to walk down to the dock and look at the ocean and the surrounding islands. Whenever I am in a mental slump, I walk down to the ocean and remind myself of the amazing beauty that I am surrounded by. I can never be sad for long because I simply have to give myself a little jolt and take heed of my surroundings. I am in a place that most people dream about. I have tropical rain forest everywhere that I look and stunning coral reefs encircle my island paradise. I may be bored, but at least I’m bored in paradise.

Around 6pm, the sun drops below the horizon and darkness enshrouds the island. Luckily, my family has lights. We recently installed solar power, and use a generator when a rainy day hasn’t provided enough energy to power our solar panels. However, this is very rare for my village. Most people have no power source. No lights, no nothing.

In the evenings, I usually eat a meal of rice along with some meaty type product. More often than not, it is a canned meat such as spam, mackerel, tuna or corned beef. My host mom is pretty good about spicing up our bland canned meats with veggies from the local gardens. Lately, we have been eating the produce from my little garden in front of my house. Makes me feel pretty cool.

After dinner, I usually sit on my bucket and talk with my host father for a bit. He is a well-educated man that speaks perfect English. He is very concerned about social improvement and we always discuss different ways to help our schools or community. As a Peace Corps volunteer, I am fortunate to have someone who is motivated to make things happen and work for a better society. We have been working on all kinds of ideas like public restrooms, trade schools, farming projects, school changes, infrastructure improvements and many others.

We have a 4 inch portable DVD player that is usually up and running most nights. The kids of our house, and often of other houses as well, come and gather around the little screen to watch some American movies. Most Chuukese don’t understand what anybody is saying in the movies, but they still love them. Slap stick humor and hardcore action movies are the most popular. I probably watch a movie 2 or 3 times a week. I try to abstain from making it a nightly habit.

Depending on my movie watching preference, I will go into my room between 7-9pm. I flop down on my yoga mat/mattress and read until I fall asleep. My eyes tend to droop down and close between 9-10pm on a nightly basis. I have insanely vivid dreams and actually look forward to the obscure adventures that my dreamworld brings me every night. I drift off into dreamland and await the craziness of the next day.

As I alluded to before, I have simplified my daily routine to a standard model of living. I want to make sure you understand that my life is still crazy. I still have weird experiences on a daily basis. I still learn new things every day. I still see something or hear something that I have never seen before on almost a daily basis. I am still a confused young man in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.