First it was the stove. During my first few Liberian food lessons, children from next door would come gawk at the machine that made flames instantly and without charcoal. Many Liberian have gas stoves, but they are apparently rare enough in these rural villages to produce wonder and excitement.

Then it was the table. Because my home came furnished only with bare concrete walls I spent my first five nights cooking from the ground. Soon I had a simple $15 USD wood table constructed by a local carpenter, and by the neighbors’ comments you’d think I just brought home a plasma TV.

None of these reactions, however, compares with the community response from my new gasoline power generator. You’d think they just won the lottery.

Generator are common enough here that the kids knew exactly how to bring it to life. Generators keep the shop/stalls open at night, keep the Akon looping at the nearby “night club,” keep the cell phone towers operating, and power a few homes along my street. But they are still rare and expensive enough to generate an excitement reminiscent of childhood Christmas mornings.

“Thank you!” One of the kid said, standing over the buzzing machine. Your welcome, kid, but I didn’t buy it for you. I didn’t buy it to watch movies and power light bulbs either, as everyone here apparently expects me to use it for. No, I bought the generator, the voltage regulator (which prevents the Chinese machine from exploding my computer), the extension cord, the power strip, and gasoline so that I can charge my iPod and phone, show science videos in class, check email, and post blogs.

There’s no other easy way for me to do so. Powering my computer would mean sitting with it for hours in a rusting freight container while it charges off the phone company’s generator, and paying dearly to do so. Many volunteers visit UN bases or other NGO offices to socialize and leach power, but my village has no such aid presence. My only internet option is connecting through a mobile phone SIM stick; which is both costly and slow. These first few blogs, I’ve calculated, have cost me just over a dollar each to post just in gasoline and internet fees. Then there’s all the equipment needed.

This means I am always sprinting through tasks while online or on the computer. Time really is money, so I apologize for needing to rush through my proofreading phase. I’m just happy to be chronicling my adventures so I don’t ever forget them.

The generator isn’t ALL WORK and NO PLAY. My neighbors will be welcome to join me for the occasional movie night. Our first one happened yesterday.

I readied my laptop on my fine wooden table while a half dozen kids set up chairs in my kitchen. Their mother, let’s call her Mary, sat on my porch outside to keep an eye on the generator and her own open door. Unfortunately I failed to bring from the states any sort of speaker system; these puny computer speakers are no match for the roar of the generator. As soon as Disney’s 101 Dalmatians (my choice because of the audience) began, however, no one seemed to mind not having any effective audio. I’m fairly certain most of the kids had never seen a movie before.

Mary was unimpressed by the Disney cartoon, and before the opening credits ended was already asking for something with “war” in it. The kids whined but mom got her way, and I went instead with Ninja Assassin, also my go-to choice in Tonga whenever guys wanted to watch a movie and not need to follow much of a plot. It’s just the type of American culture Peace Corps loves for us to share. The movie is bloody and violent, though in a painless action-movie way that didn’t have me too concerned for the children. They all loved it, and have already asked when we can do it again. That film might have done wonders for my community assimilation, but I don’t think I have many other mindless action movies available. Or the funds to keep the gasoline flowing.

Let’s wait and see how expensive this new electrical system becomes. You may not be hearing from me very often.

After thirty minutes of riding under the hot African sun in a non-existent seat between the gear shift and the front passenger, with a side window stuck shut and four steaming bodies in the back seat, I began to wonder if those Chicago winters were so bad after all. After wiping another line of sweat from my brow, I mused that the closest I’d be getting to a snowflake in the next 6 months was this cab’s intricately cracked front windshield.

Ten US dollars for an hour long taxi ride doesn’t sound so bad. But here in Liberia, taxis are usually packed four in the back, and three in the front. Sorry for you if you get stuck in front middle like I did – you’ll get hit in the ass every time the driver shifts gears. The cars also tend to be old and dilapidated.

A rough taxi ride is the only way for me to get important supplies, like peanut butter, a colander, a bottle of wine, a bank account withdrawal, and a gasoline power generator. For those precious things, I need to head to big city Buchanan. This past weekend I made my first city run, and my first ever Liberian taxi ride.

The outgoing trip went rather smoothly, despite being crammed in the back with two people to my left and one person to my right; that the young lady next to me alternated resting her hand on my knee and my shoulder was not a sexual advance but spatial necessity. The only excitement came two minutes into the ride when we reached the police checkpoint, which my students tell exist solely as an illegitimate income generator for the police force . As we pulled up, a officer said something stern to the lady riding front middle and then a yelling argument conflagrated between them. If only I understood Liberian-English. For minutes, I assumed that she was refusing to pay her bribe. But soon I watched the policeman trying instead to give her money, which she refused to accept. After ten minutes, we had a Ministry of Justice official arbitrating, and five minutes later we were on our way. I learned later that the woman and policeman were husband and wife and he refused to permit her to travel to the city. He even tried to pay her to get her to stay, but she won. It didn’t look like a happy marriage.

If the trip to Buchanan didn’t allow me to see two other Peace Corps friends teaching in the county’s main high school, then it would only be a chore. There still aren’t good stores and it is so bustling that I’m constantly guarding my giant wads of Liberian dollar bills. Also, without ATM cards, the wait to withdraw my meager monthly allowance at the bank would have taken more than two hours. I waited fifteen minutes, didn’t move an inch forward moved, said Fuck It, and used my American bank’s debit card at the ATM outside.

I couldn’t wait to go back home. But home meant an ever rougher taxi ride.

The car banged, shimmied, and blew a thick white exhaust behind us. At the halfway point, the driver stopped to give the cab a walk-around to make sure nothing had fallen off.

Back on the road minutes later, while I pulled tightly on a hole in the dashboard with one hand to reduce the force of the gear shift against my butt as my other hand again wiped my brow, a motorbike sped past us. I bet the air feels amazing on one of those. AND you get to your destination faster. Why doesn’t Peace Corps let us ride them?

A dozen yards ahead and to the left, the speeding motorbike make a series of tight wobbles and then slammed sideways into the dirt. Our taxi driver swerved aside and continued on, ignoring the crash and the woman in the back seat demanding we stop to help them. Because of the opaque cloud of terra-cotta dust the fall created, I couldn’t see the damage. The closest decent hospital is an international flight away.

OK, Peace Corps…That’s why.

Almost home, I chose to ignore the heat and humidity and just appreciate that my seat-partner had recently used a breath mint.

The students are angry. For the first half of the first week of the second semester, there were barely any teachers in school. The only teacher to actually conduct class every day was the new White Man from America.

The teachers are angry. They hate that in order to receive their monthly paycheck they have to pay money to travel an hour away by uncomfortable taxi to reach the bank. The bank only processes 50 checks per day and the teller queue can take several hours. It can take most of a week, then for all of the country’s government workers to get paid. The teachers are also upset that the ministry was late paying them this month, further delaying the process. It forced them to miss most of the first week of school.

Everyone is angry that the school has no electricity or science laboratory.

The problems are severe and many, but the anger is a good sign. Unlike in Tonga, where the broken system was plenty good enough for everyone and brought no complaints, Liberians would love to tell you all the things wrong with their system. They are not complacent. They want solutions. They want a better school system.

Unfortunately there aren’t any easy solutions right now. The country is rebuilding from twenty years of civil war, and the government must tackle basic issues like constructing a national power grid and promoting peaceful elections before it worries about building science labs.

The solutions may be far far away, but the will is there to fix them, and that makes me optimistic for my service in the Liberian secondary school system.

We were twenty minutes into a ludicrously plotted Chinese Jackie Chan film that had been both dubbed and subtitled – though never with the same translation – when my eyes caught a poster of carnage hanging next to me. Titled, Taylor Soldiers in Action, it was a collage of gruesome civil war photos. I was puzzled, but didn’t say anything. Was my principal making a statement about the war? Why is it hanging in the family room?

“That was a very bad time,” I heard suddenly, “a lot of people died.” My principal, across the coffee table from me, gazed sullenly at the poster. But only momentarily. He quickly returned his eyes to the film and continued sipping his Big Mama. It must just be there as a cautionary memorial, I mused, and I also returned to the film and sipped my Dark Horse. That was the most solemn I had ever seen him, for usually he wore a full smile.

My principal was one of my first Liberian friends, and while my students were busy cooking me Liberian meals, he took it upon himself to introduce me one of his culture’s other important ingredients: alcohol. Big Mama, Dark Horse, and Country Ginger were brands of too sweet and too strong liquors bottled from recycled beer bottles in Monrovia and slapped with cheap, crooked labels using cheap glue so that sometimes the labels fell off in your hand. Army Bitter was too bitter and too strong. Palm wine, brewed I believe like moonshine, was too yeasty and too strong. Perhaps I’ll come around to these flavors, seeing as how each bottle goes for far less than USD $1 and there is no wine available in my town. And I’ll sip almost anything to keep the conversation going.

He has a generator, as do many Liberians. Without an electric grid, it’s the only way to watch Jackie Chan movies. He loves his movies. I can definitely foresee having those rough weeks when just any movie and any serving of alcohol could come as a relief, and I’m glad I have a friend who says I’m always invited. I'll just ignore the gruesome war poster.

Finishing the last round of Savannah Ciders, our small group of Peace Corps Volunteers and NGO workers retired from one of Buchanan’s only beach bars and headed home after an evening of welcome stories – this was my time in Buchanan, my first time in Grand Bassa County, and my first time meeting this cadre of aid workers. They were so helpful in getting me acclimated.

As we shuffled into down the bar’s creaky steps, one of the non-PCVs offered us a ride home (I’d be spending the night with the local PCVS). It would be much faster and much safer that way, everyone agreed . As our friendly driver opened his car door, he slipped a dollar bill to an older Liberian standing beside the car.

“What was that for?” I asked.

“Oh, that’s a little something for him watching our car.” Our driver said.

“Would he get angry if you didn’t pay him?” I asked, assuming it was an empty job like the men who wash your car window when you are stopped at a red light – you didn’t really want him to do that but now that he did, here’s a dollar not to get angry.

“If he wasn’t there then we wouldn’t be a car,” responded one of the PCVs. “It would likely be stolen.”

I was shocked. Peace Corps warned us about crime in Liberia, but I didn’t expect that even a dive bar would have security around to prevent grand theft auto. Why kind of place was I about to jump into? Why was the crime so high?

A Red Cross Worker who once served a year in Liberia described the problem as a lack of Human Capital. After twenty years of civil war and dire poverty, peoples’ morality breaks down and stealing becomes rampant. “Don’t’ bring your DSLR.” She told me. It sounded like chaos.

It’s not chaos. I’ve been a week and a half at site now, and I love these people. My large family of next door neighbors looks out for me all the time. We cook for each other, we talk together, relax together, and trade some chores. My students are almost always around me and make sure I keep my backpack zipped, my money secured, and my doors bolted when I’m inside.

A taxi driver found a pair of expensive Smith sunglasses in his front seat soon after dropping me off. He returned to see if they were mine, but I wasn’t around. He needed to return to Buchanan, so he left them with his cousin, who returned them to me the next day. He so easily could have kept them, and I couldn’t have blamed him.

A student who washed my clothes for me found a wad of money in my back pocket. He returned it to me.

Clearly it’s a few bad apples that gives a population a bad reputation most of my neighbors have been nothing but nice and trusting. That’s not an excuse for laziness, however, so I am always guarded. During my introductory visit to the police station I asked the lieutenant if the community was safe and he responded, offended, with, “Yes, it is absolutely safe here. There are no problems.”

Just thirty seconds into the resulting awkward silence that followed, a second police officer marched to our desk while dragging a young teenager by the arm. The boy had clearly just been arrested. The offended lieutenant barked some Liberian English I couldn’t understand, then told him to remove any razor blades or knives he might be carrying. Well, I guess no place is 100% safe.

I never thought that coming to Tonga would make me an improv comedy performer. Shortly after we moved to Tongatapu last year, I joined ON THE SPOT (OTS), a community-focused arts organization that puts on quarterly performances, offers occasional weekly sessions of film classes, performs modern dance at increasingly frequent charity events around town, and brings together a small core group of talented visual artists, musicians, dancers, and writers. After a full day of something like analyzing cash flow statements, it was a welcome relief to ride out to the old warehouse we use as a practice/performance space and dance or practice improv for three hours, twice a week.

We're all about to go to sleep onstage

I've always appreciated a creative outlet, and frequently used it- whether in designing clothes, painting, printmaking, or writing (including this blog, in fact). But I never thought I'd be an amateur improv comedian. Last month, I performed with a team for about an hour during the OTS December Stage Fright event. Stage Frights happen roughly four times a year put on by OTS members, and are themed differently for each show, whether it's dance, poetry, theatre, or, as the theme was this time, music. For this show, the first act was composed of the practiced performances- a dance by a group of kids that came to a dance workshop, an original song by a member, and other songs and dances we'd practiced throughout the last few weeks. I sang backup in two of the songs, and had my own number- a beat poem I'd written to background music.

Three lions challenge the audience

A musical interlude gives the performers a breakAct two was all musically-themed improvisation- something I never could have done last year. Several months ago, a partner organzation of OTS (in more ways than one- our creative director is engaged to theirs) from New Caledonia came to run workshops with us and in a handful of Tongan secondary schools. Called Pacifique et Compagnie, they specialize in improv, and spent the week training us and sharing their techniques. At the beginning, there were awkward silences and nervous laughter. At the end, there was a full, seamless performance and the only laughter was the appreciative hoots from the audience. Since then, we've continued to practice our improv skills, and have really enjoyed semi-spontaneous performances at various shows, including this one.

But OTS isn't all Stage Fright shows and improv.

Ebonie is the creative directorIn November, one of the members was involved in planning Tonga's first film festival (which, incidentally, we did perform improv as an audience warm-up opening number of the night). The festival was held in a school hall, which increasingly filled up as the night went on. The films ranged from the very polished shorts of the organizer to the home-filmed shaky and charming clips acted entirely by kids. Earlier in the year, several members organized a visual arts show, which was held outside on the waterfront, and one of the members spent most of the year as a crew on the kalia trip that raises environmental awareness called Pacific Voyagers.

What's even more impressive is that all of this is done with very little or no funding, embodying the prevalent reality of Tonga that if you want something to happen, you just go ahead and organize it. On the other hand, the lack of funding availability- no grants offered through the government, no local philanthropic organizations, and a public not willing or not able to pay for art or artistic performances has really limited what the group can do. Next year, we will have to face the hard reality of losing our performance space- the old warehouse is being sold- and we will have nowhere to relocate to without the operating funds to pay rent on another performance/practice space.

Three TV characters ambush a viewerNext year, other than trying to find a new space and funding for it, we'll hopefully be performing in the Pacific Arts Festival in July, a huge event held every four years that brings together arts groups from all around the Pacific, and is an explosion of colour, movement, and talent to assault the senses. Several members are also organizing a more professional night of modern dance we'll sell tickets to, and Stage Fright performances will go on as usual, bringing together crazy performances, good music, and probably, a bit of improv.

Hard-core training at "Lady Gaga camp"

One day, an old man went to the sea.

He'd always dreamt of a holiday Fafa away.

So, he got on this

To go here

He stayed in this

and showered here

after spending the day here

with occasional breaks for one of these

He ate a lot of good things

Grilled red snapper with taro fries

He received a beautiful Christmas Eve present

He enjoyed some of this

And a fair amount of this

He was entertained by fire torches

and Tongan fireworks.

And, all was good in that land fafa away.

HAVE A BLESSED AND PEACEFUL NEW YEAR!

HOW FAFA WILL YOU GO?

Three weeks and counting...three weeks of wet, windy, nasty weather. Three weeks of wet laundry, muddy feet and lots of time indoors. Also, this is peak cyclone season, so we are on alert for cyclone warnings and possible consolidation. Oiaue.

In other news, last week was the beginning of school, although not the beginning of classes. The students at the catering school came in to fill out their school applications and scholarship forms to help pay for their school fees. The teaching staff had meetings with officers from the Free Wesleyan Church offices in Tongatapu, updating us on changes for the 2012 school year. Next week will be our first week with the students. We will start with orientation and field trips to local hospitality establishments.

The beginning of school also marks the beginning of track and field season. I may try my hand at coaching again this year, although coaches are more often found socializing under the mango trees as opposed to actually helping students. If this is the case, I am more than happy to help coach =)

Outside of school, I have been hanging out with my fellow town folks, Dominica and a new Australian volunteer, Jessica. We take advantage of our close proximity to town by eating lots of ice cream and buying lots of DVDs. Good times in Vava'u!

After a glorious month of reunions with family & friends [and of course, lots of delicious food and hot showers] in America, I’m now back in Tonga and starting my 2nd year as a Peace Corps volunteer. I’ve got to tell you…It’s a pretty surreal feeling. Being back in the States for Christmas felt so natural, I kept forgetting that I’d just made a 5,000 mile trek home. Thankfully, it also felt pretty natural to hop on the plane and come right back.

Every blog entry, I feel as though I’m waxing philosophical about how I can’t believe how fast time is flying, how long I’ve been here [15 months OH my!], etc., etc. My Peace Corps experience thus far has been a beautiful and ridiculous trip. There have been experiences that encompass just what I expected Peace Corps service to entail [i.e. making a fool of myself through various cultural faux pas and eating exotic new foods]. But the bits I’ve really loved have been the surprises. Who knew I’d come to this itty bitty country, separated from everywhere else by vast Pacific waters, and meet Tongans who speak Spanish, who’ve met the Pope, and who really love Celine Dion? Those were certainly not predictions I could’ve made about my Peace Corps journey, but the unexpected tidbits are what make this experience pretty phenomenal.

Since it has been QUITE a while since my last entry, I better make this one pretty beefy. In lieu of a verbal recap of my first year I thought I’d post a few iconic pictures of the journey.

October 2010: Mom & I taking a typical airport picture before I headed into the unknown! You can’t see it, but there should be a little thought bubble above my head thinking, ‘Holy moly, what have I gotten myself into?!’

October & November: Now… with my new Tongan family during 2 months of Pre-Service Training. I was incredibly lucky to stay with the Vakalahi family. They treated me as one of their own/a princess. I was the best fed Peace Corps in town!

October & November: This is my host Papa, 'Ofa [which means love in Tongan]. He is an expert diver and fisherman. He'd sometimes head out to sea for days at a time in a little fishing boat and return with LOTS of delicious fish and lobsters!

November 2010: No Barbie cars here….but old lawn mowers are a suitable substitute in Ha'apai.

November 2010: Great thing about Tonga? Totally acceptable to ride in the back of trucks! During training, a kind soul tried to pick up about 9 of us walking along the road to town. Promptly after we piled into his truck.... his two back tires went flat. woops!

December 2010: Training has come to an end and off goes the Vava’u Crew [minus a few who didn’t want to stop for our corny picture] to our next adventures.

December 2010: Welcome to Vava’u [my island]! Unreal views and lovely neighbors galore.

January 2011: It’s finally time for some real work to occur…meet the kiddies of GPS Tefisi!

June 2011: During a 2 week school break, I ventured to New Zealand with some Peace Corps friends. I have never been more thankful for cool weather & grocery stores!

Every day: My neighbor, Mele Lose, graces my front steps and tells me about life. Her specialties include predicting the weather, telling me when the next full moon will be, and giving massages [yep, massages].

September 2011: Need a reason to parade and dance in the streets? We have one….RUGBY! The Tonga Ikale Tahi [Sea Eagles] competed in the Rugby World Cup and invoked some serious national pride in Tongans all over the world.

September 2011: PCVs and Tongan counselors facilitated Camp GLOW, a pretty fantastic Leadership and Youth Development camp for young women! PCVs all over the world participate in Camp GLOW.

October 2011: My class 6 munchkins pose here after taking their High School Entrance Exam. Bless them all for being the guinea pigs during Nola’s first year teaching.

November 2011: School has unofficially ended, so I spent a lot of my time malolo-ing [relaxing] and making flower rings with the neighborhood kids.

December 2011: 'Osi mo ta'u e taha! [Finished with year one!] Ended the year with a phenomenal trip home to the states. THANKS Mom & Dad! :)

*sorry mom, I think you're behind the camera.

So, that about covers the first half of my Peace Corps journey. I count myself among some of the luckiest PCVs. I serve in a safe country with extremely kind and generous people, plenty of delicious food, and [of course] some unreal scenery. I have no idea what the next year will entail, but I'm pretty excited to find out. So, with that..... Cheers to a New Year!!!!

Written by Jim.

One of Jim's counterparts from TIST and TIST students plays draughts under the mango tree.

Well, let us just say that Tongans play American Checkers or English Draughts differently than anywhere else in the world. (Although according to Wikipedia there is a similar variations played in Russia, and another in the southeastern United States.) I was first introduced to this game, while sitting under the mango tree at my school, by my students and co-workers. They were playing with a rustic homemade board and pebbles, big pebbles v. small pebbles, which sometimes caused confusion late in the game if a medium size pebble was involved. Actually, if you look you can find the game being played all over the Kingdom of Tonga. There are usually two games going at the market, each with its own crowd of men around, each taking a turn trying to win a game so he gains control of the board and plays the next game. I have only played one game in the market, and my opponent was, to say the least, most gracious, and surprised that a non-Tongan knew how to play. I digress. Games are played in every schoolyard, in the parks, at the bus depot, or just on the sidewalk. Grab a stone and scratch a board out, make two sets of checkers out of stones, bits of mango skin, pieces of glass, etc., and play. Serious players have a painted board and use bottle caps for checkers. Jim gets beat playing draughts at the market. Since I walk a lot in Tonga and there are always bottle caps on the ground, I started picking them up. Blue ones are easy (water bottles) but a second color was harder. I finally settled on red, more Coke drunk from bottles, besides red is easy to spot. I have now picked enough caps for more than 6 boards and still going. So how do Tongans play Draughts? Well let's see.

Standard 64 square (8 x8) checkerboard, 12 checkers each side, checkers placed so the long diagonal of the squares used runs from lower left to upper right.

Checkers (pate) can only move forward (as in standard checkers), BUT can jump forwards and backwards. Jumps must always be taken. If you have a choice of more

than one jump or jumps, you take the one that you feel will provide you with the best advantage, not always the one that captures the most , but once a sequence is chosen you must take all of the jumps in that sequence. Red's first moveA few moves later red jumps three

Ending up in this position, Blue now must take one of the two possible jumps.

Hey, but that's not all. If you are lucky, or skilled enough, to reach the back or king row, the real fun begins. Kings (called flying kings in some variant games) can move backwards and forwards along the diagonal, as does a Bishop in Chess, but after jumping an opponent's pate (checker) you may change diagonals anywhere after the jump to jump another and another etc. I have seen as many as five (5) go down with one king's jumps.Up the diagonal turn and down into the corner.

Also, if you jump an opponent's checker to become a King you can proceed to continue to jump as many as you can.There is another variation called Foaki were the object is not to end up with all your opponent's checkers gone, but where you manage to give away or lose all of your checkers. All of the above rules apply. I have run into two variations of this one: You must offer a checker if you can and You don't have to move into a jump but can try to setup for giving away as many checkers as you can.

“John… John… John. JOHN!!”

I awoke to my student Charles outside my window. It was my first morning at site, and I could have slept for hours. My watch showed 8:00 am.

“What is it, Charles?” I moaned.

“It’s time to wake up. We go to the market.”

My principal had assigned Charles to look after me during my adjustment to site and school, and he was doing an excellent job. Over the next week he would cook for me, clean for me, wash my clothes, tell me who to buy from and who not to buy from, how to get where and what shortcuts to take, and which important people in town I should know. He kept my doors locked, kept little kids from poking around my room, and he even twice caught me walking outside with my fly down.

“Ok, hold on.” I rose from the mattress, already showing a slight dip where my body had laid, and unbolted the front door. Charles immediately went to work, sweeping and washing my popcorn bowl.

As I reached for the water bucket, an 9-inch long red centipede appeared beside it. Trained for two years to treat large centipedes as the devil incarnate, I jumped back.

“Charles…Charles… is that dangerous?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” He said, unimpressed and unexcited. His tone said, “yeah but it’s the least of your worries.” He killed it and brushed it outside.

I moved to the toilet, undoing the pillow case I had nailed up the low window the night before. The room needed more light. As I relieved myself, I wondered how bad it would be if someone out that large window caught a view of me. Before I had even finished my business, one of my 9-year old neighbors walked into view, squatted over the dirt field, and relived herself less than discretely. Well I guess that answers that question.

Charles took me shopping. I desperately needed shopping. We bought sheets and cooking supplies and containers and other miscellaneous things to help give some character to my drab concrete home. With the place starting to fill out, I moved to more important cultural assimilation.

“Charles, I want to eat Liberian food. Let’s cook a good Liberian dish.” I asked while looking around one of my student’s family “stores.”

“You want Liberian food? Ok.” He smiled, as he reached for pasta and tomato sauce.

“NO! Real Liberian food! Not spaghetti.” As I would come to learn, my impoverished student often ate pasta with tomato sauce and eggs because it was a very cheap meal.

He agreed to make me potato leaf soup with rice. But what kind of protein did I want? “Cold meat,” I answered emphatically. Without any cold fish at the market my first morning at site, that meant a trip to the rubber plantation store. Soon we set out for an adventure that took much longer than I anticipated.

Our village exists because of the enormous rubber plantation nearby. It employs, students tell me, about 75% of the people here. The white people who run the plantation, who everyone here automatically calls “my friends,” shop at a small store within the plantation limits. And to there we ventured.

We soon left the bustling concrete houses of the homely Shire, crossed the stalls lining the center of town, and passed by the Two Towers (our twin cell towers), crossed the railroad tracks, and entered Mordor the plantation.

A terra-cotta landscape suddenly transformed into a thin forest of only rubber trees and low-growing vegetation. Most trees bore candy-cane scars from when workers cut at the bark to allow the white rubber sap to drip down into small collecting cups held to the dry by wires. Some freshly cut trees were slowing dripping rubber into these cups.

What started as a walk through the village became a beautiful hike in the woods, enhanced by a slight lingering morning fog. I could easily seeking solitude in this quiet forest with iPod in tow during weeks when I need to get away.

The walk took us past a small compound of houses for families of some of the plantation workers. These Liberians had electricity and satellite dishes, though their houses weren’t ostentatious. Now on a main road through the property, large trucks kicked up clouds of dirt as they sped past us. We left the road for a forest trail.

Thirty-five minutes into the adventure, we found our store, and it wasn’t at all what I expected. I was the size of a gas station convenience store and sold many of the same things I could find at the town market. Their one prize, however, was small freezer full of hand-wrapped mystery meats and factory-packaged chicken. I went with the chicken.

Returned from our adventure, Charles prepared a delicious soup from “red oil,” a bouillon cube, salt, potato greens, chicken, hot peppers, and fish. I loved it. So many flavours, and so much spice. I just with he hadn’t bent my sharp kitchen knife hacking at the frozen chicken.

We made food for ourselves, for my neighbors, and for the additional students who seemed to arrive just in time for lunch. With full stomachs, I put those students to work cleaning and organizing my house. Those on picture posting duty did their best with a limited supply of tape, though my hands-off guidance means some of them are upside down. Instead of bothering me, it makes me smile. The house is building character, I’m getting closer with the community, and the food is delicious. I can’t wait for the next adventure.

During one of our many medical presentations during training, our medical officer defined stress as the difference between reality and expectation. Sitting alone on my concrete “kitchen” floor, I aimed my headlamp on an empty Heineken bottle and jammed in a fresh candlestick. Without electricity, I’d be making this and all future late night dinners by candle and dad AAA battery. With the same match I lit both the candle and the left burner of my gas stove, all while sitting, again, on my concrete floor. It had been such a long day that I had forgotten to eat, and the only food I had in my house was oil and popcorn kernels. I’m so glad I had such low expectations, I thought. Otherwise I might have been having a panic attack.

That morning I had visited the bank and finished shopping in Liberia’s second largest city, Buchanan, which would be my future oasis when I need a break from my site in the middle of Grand Bassa County. Buchanan is still barely a city, though at least there are stores selling cheap wine. It’s also only an hour away.

That afternoon I arrived with a Peace Corps escort at my new house, was shown my porcelain toilet and adjacent hole in the floor for showering over, my three “bedrooms,” my “storage room,” my common area, and my quaint outside porch. I chose a bedroom and closed the doors of the other rooms, knowing that I would probably never open them again. The place was too big.

I had wanted plop down my new foam mattress on the floor and fall right to sleep, but my entourage had other things planned. First a welcome from teachers and students at the school, which is a fifteen minute walk away. Then an hour and a half long meeting hosted by Peace Corps to explain to the school what actually I was there for. Then a tour around town from some of my high school students. Then a drink with the principal. Then another tour.

I felt loved, I felt welcomed, and I felt incredibly tired, but it wasn’t until late at night that I was finally “home.” And home was a cave of concrete.

The popcorn popped quickly and it filled my large plastic bowl. Picking it up, I began walking to my bedroom to enjoy the meal when a small dark figure scurried across the floor. A cockroach. “So you Fuckers are here too, huh,” I sighed. I was too tired to put up my mosquito net, so I hoped desperately that the nocturnal critters left my alone for my first night.

I barely finished the bowl before I was fast asleep, on my uncovered mattress, next to two unopened suitcases, lying a room away from a “kitchen” that was nothing more than a gas can connected to a two-burner stove on the floor. That could have been a very stressful night. But I slept like a baby.

Sitting under a mango tree (It's always coolest under a mango tree.) and eating a ripe mango. Doesn't she look happy? Starting last week eating mangoes became a national pastime. Last year we had no mangoes on our island of Tongatapu. So many things, I learned, affect the growing of mangoes: wind or a storm when they're flowering, strong winds while they're developing. Everyone has been watching the mango trees--and waiting and hoping.

A mango tree in bloom. Now the waiting begins.

Mangoes almost ready to eat. I'm learning when they're ripe. They still seem hard to me, but, of course, the Tongans are right, and they're ripe when they tell you they are. They're ripe and ripening! Everywhere I look people are eating mangoes. They're throwing rocks and sticks at the trees to knock them down. People are sharing them. Everyone is happy eating them. They either have some or they're looking for some. Yesterday a teacher gave me a 2-litre ice cream container full of already skinned mangoes. What a sweetheart! We eat them with cereal. I've made mango salsa. They're delicious with yogurt on pancakes. We have mango banana bread in the freezer. We just eat them. Some Tongans eat them skin and all--well, not the large pit. That you just suck clean. Mangoes that have ripened on the tree are like eating sunshine. It makes you happy all over. The season is short, and when they're gone, they're gone. Eat on!

Lunch was late for our teachers' workshop, so out came the mangoes as an appetizer. They came out of bags and containers. Everyone was offered one--or more. (We're in the meeting hall of Beulah College, which is a Seventh Day Adventist high school.)

The happy look a mango brings.

We were exhausted, stressed, sleep deprived, jet-lagged, and required in the morning to sing the Star Spangled Banner for the president of Liberia and about half her cabinet. My body cried for sleep, but this was our training group’s last night together and that called for camaraderie. I donated a bottle of an inexpensive South African Pinotage. Using a Swiss Army Knife, I cut six “glasses” out of plastic water bottles (since our hostel/convent’s kitchen was closed and all wine, however cheap, deserves to have its full bouquet) and emptied the bottle for the remaining night owls. We raised our “glasses.”

“Cheers,” we toasted, unimaginatively. Perhaps we were too tired to think of anything better to say, or perhaps there were too many things to say:

“To new friends!”“To a successful week of training!”“To the start of a new adventure!”“To Peace Corps!”“To inexpensively priced wine!”

The “glasses” thudded instead of clinked and the wine tasted like its four dollars. It fit in with all the other inconveniences over the previous few days: living out of suitcases, the constant sputtering of motorcycle noises, the blanket of humidity, the toilets that didn’t usually flush and the showers that had neither heat nor pressure. But this was Peace Corps and you’d never find one of us complaining. Wine, and any water pressure at all were about to become luxuries, and the convent even had electricity! These were Response volunteers, the veterans, the ones who loved their first two years of Peace Corps hardship so much that they signed up again.

It was this experience that allowed Peace Corps to shorten our training from 3 months (for regular Peace Corps) to just five days. It wasn’t an easy five days; they were packed with informational sessions and advice sessions from currently service Liberian volunteers that continued informally into the night. That didn’t leave much time to socialize.

Our two extra days jaunting around Atlanta meant we sacrificed time seeing Monrovia. A few of us made a rushed early morning walking tour on which I was not so kindly instructed not to take any photographs anywhere near either of the two American embassy fortresses. Later that evening we made a short trip to the beach at sundown that ended abruptly once the Frisbee landed in human feces (they did warn us that the Atlantic Ocean is often used as Monrovia’s toilet).

The only whole group event outside the convent’s tall, cement, barbed-wire and jagged glass topped walls, was to Tides bar. Peace Corps told us it had a great view of the beach and city. From its third floor balcony, I sipped a deceivingly strong cocktail of freshly squeezed oranges and mystery alcohols and admired the blackness. Without a national power grid, Monrovia is almost as dark as night as the sea. Faint shadows of scurrying crabs below me, the drone of conversations and the bar’s generator, and someone’s attempt to cover Bob Marley were the only signs of night life in Liberia’s biggest city.

Split six ways, the bottle didn’t last long and people soon began saying their goodnights. A month-long close-of-service window and the lack of any group training events meant that tomorrow’s swearing in ceremony would be our last time all together; that our sites were scattered around the country and required whole days of travel between them in overcrowded taxis on dirty or muddy roads discouraged us from contemplating inter-site visits.

Still, there was too much excitement to be sad. It had been a great training week, and I think we all excited to accept the challenge of six months at isolated sites in what our Country Director called the toughest post in Peace Corps.

As we made our way down the coast, we kept seeing wonderful people, having good conversations, and eating good food together. Our next stop was Portland...

We had nostalgic dinners with old friends - Lebanese food piled high!

... played plenty of games...

... went to plenty of bookshops and twice to our favourite four-story book heaven, Powells Books...

... and reveled in the random, artsy, and interesting culture that is Portland.

One day, we took the Max train down to Beaverton to visit my Auntie Nan, just like we had done many times while we were living in Portland

It was just like old times. We caught up with interesting conversations, cooked in her kitchen, and Mark replaced her lightbulbs.

We had a really tasty final lunch at a very Portland vegan bistro- coconut curry, tofu in peanut sauce. Good for not having meat!

When we got back, our friends had gone to another Portland favourite doughnut shop and gotten us an enourmous doughnut with TONGA!! written on it.

It was just as much of an attraction to visit the supermarkets. The downtown Whole Foods was particularly eye candy.

Our next stop was San Francisco, where we spent the first night doing more of what we love- talking and eating with old friends!

The whole SF crew was ready to hike...

... and of course, ready to have a gourmet picnic mid-hike.

Part of the fun was wandering along streets, window-shopping and talking. No window-shopping in Tonga!

After too-short a time in both Portland and San Francisco, we arrived at our last stop- LA, to visit Mark's grandma and sister.

The hills around LA are beautiful, especially if you imagine that the fog-like haze is fog, and not smog!

Mark's birthday was during our LA stint, so we ate berry pie with his grandma, sister...

... and a large gathering of his "aunties" and "uncles" from Congo.

The day before we left, we played in an ultimate frisbee tournament

Someone brought mustaches, which all the girls promptly put on for "gender confusion" of the other team!Brother and sister were happy to catch up again. As usual, the time went too fast, but was well spent.

And before we knew it, we were halfway back home to Tonga, catching up on reading and sleep on our layover in Fiji.

Tonga welcomed us with blissfully warm, sunny weather, and the usual long lines at Customs.

Being home was nice, and our little kitty was especially happy to see us, spending much of the first day we were back sitting or sleeping on us! Now we're resuming normal life, after a trip better than we could have expected. We had so much fun seeing everyone, and even though we could only spend a couple of days in each place, the time was very well-spent. We're hoping to do another trip in the next year and a half or so, to catch the people we weren't able to see this time and so that it's not another 2.5 years until we see friends and family again!

The time we were away was perfect with the Tongan schedule of life- nothing much happens between Christmas and February. It's nice to be back at home again, and we look forward to next time.

Since we have hundreds (!) of photos and upload time is shower than snail pace (watching paint dry?), and I dislike long travelogues, I've been debating on how to best blog about our trip to New Zealand, as it is something I want to share with all of you. As I looked over all our photos (Jinnet's, too), it's interesting to see what we most photographed--scenery, of course!, waterfront views, meals and food we ate.

All three of us like to cook--and eat. One goal was to eat good food, especially foods we knew we wouldn't get to eat for another year. Many Volunteers tell me that their first stop is McDonalds when they go home or on holiday. That never crossed our minds! We ate lamb, hare, ribs, and venison. We ate whitebait fritters, slices, and meat pies, which are NZ specialties. There was excellent coffee, Guinness, and good affordable wine. Two of our B & Bs served a wonderful hot breakfast, and we never said, "No thank you." Once a day we gathered in a room for a meal that always included good cheeses among other yummy foods we craved. We ate in cafes, fine restaurants, and carry-out eateries. I will spare you the food photos.

What will be our lasting memories? What photos will mean the most in future viewings? Some memories, of course, can't be captured in photos. Those become ours alone, to be savored and brought out at will. Perhaps the sweetest of all.

The North Island: Auckland, Overlander train trip from Auckland to Wellington, and Wellington. Auckland is New Zealand's largest city and sits toward the north end of the island. Wellington is the capital and is at the south end of the north island. We took a 12 hour train ride from one to the other.

On the waterfront with part of the Auckland skyline behind us.

We attended the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at the Auckland Cathedral of the Holy Trinity.

Here we are as Twits. What fun to see this performance, which had an audience full of children, parents, and grandparents out for a special time.On the Overlander and in the observation car in the back.

View of mountains.

Looking backward over a bridge.

We crossed many rivers, and one river many times.

New Zealand's seat of government in Wellington, the Beehive.

Wellington waterfront.

Wellington waterfront with a view of the city.

A Wellington beach.

We took a cable car to the top of a hill to get to the arboretum. This is the view looking over the city. We then walked down through the arboretum and back into the city.

Arboretum rose garden.

Carving of a bee lady at the arboretum.

Te Papa Museum in Wellington.

Maori welcome to the demonstration of their culture.(Te Papa)Maori guide poses with us. (Te Papa) The South Island: Dunedin, which is on the east coast, and quite far south and has the Otago Peninsula nearby; Te Anau, on the west coast and near Fiordland; Doubtful Sound (fiord), and the road to Milford Sound (fiord).

Dunedin's Railway Station.

The rose garden in the arboretum near our B & B in Dunedin.

Yellow-eyed penguin seen on the Otago Peninsula tour.

The boat ride on Manipouri Lake.

During the bus ride to the power plant our bus driver gave us time for photo ops.

Manipouri Power Plant, which is built entirely underground. (Ask us if you'd like to know more about it.)

On the boat on Doubtful Sound.

One day we drove the road from Te Anau to Milford Sound, taking time to enjoy the sights.One the road to Milford Sound.

Gunn Lake on the road to Milford Sound.

Somewhere just off the coast of South Caroline, in rough turbulence at 35,000 feet and an hour into our flight to Accra, Ghana (where we’d connect to Monrovia, Liberia), my seat partner Avery was telling me about her attempt to raise a puppy in her small village in Rwanda. That’s when the pilot came on the intercom:

“We’re sorry about the inconvenience here folks, but we are having a malfunction with our navigation system and we won’t be able to fly over the ocean. We’ll need to turn around and head back to Atlanta. Because we’ll be landing so heavy, you’ll be able to see some maintenance crews outside your window. Don’t be alarmed, that is a typical situation for this type of situation. We’ll be on the ground in 25 minutes”

An hour later, our plane made contact with the runway, flanked by a squadron of “maintenance” vehicles that looked suspiciously like fire trucks and ambulances, full of flashing lights (a pilot I met the next day admitting it was a pretty serious problem). A flight attendant asked the Ghana passengers to switch planes, and told the Monrovia passengers that due to a curfew in Monrovia, we’d be spending the next two nights in Atlanta.

I was actually excited about the next two days; the Peace Corps couldn’t have planned a better ice breaker. Our eclectic group began a blitz of stories from first assignments in South Africa, Tanzania, Mauritania, Micronesia, Tonga, Rwanda, Uganda, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. Each country, I came to learn, had its benefits and challenges; work satisfaction in Azerbaijan was balanced by incredibly cold winters where showers came once a week; an emotionally closed populace in Rwanda was balanced by the opportunity of regional travel and engagement with lessons of the recent genocide. Though everyone had stories to get me both jealous and relieved, I couldn’t help but feel that I had it very easy in Tonga (the Azerbaijan volunteer gave me “the look” when I complained about our frigid 68-degree winter).

So what do thirteen excited strangers do with a pad of Delta vouchers and free reign on a Major American city? Hop on MARTA and visit a downtown microbrew. The wine and beer flowed as quickly as the stories, and we soon realized that however rough Liberia would be, our already strong camaraderie would help. Some volunteers then went to visit the Body World’s exhibit, others to the park or to see friends in the area. I joined a small group to see the Martin Luther King Center, a national museum across from his former Ebenezer Baptist Church, his birthplace, and his tomb. Later I took a solo tour of the CNN world headquarters. Unfortunately I didn't meet any anchors, as Wolf Blitzer's show is in D.C. and the glowingly attractive Robin Meade had already finished her morning show (I had no interest in waiting around for Nancy Grace)

Of all the opportunities allowed by our layover, however, it was the one extra hot bath that was most satisfying. We each had hotel rooms all to ourselves.

After a set of salubrious group meals, I’m looking forward to getting this adventure back on track and truly crossing the Atlantic. That is hopefully just a few hours away.

Huddled under the heat lamps at the DAMEN “L” stop in Wicker Park a few nights ago, teeth chattering, arms shivering, and breath instantly fogging, more pleasant memories came to mind – those of shorts, T-shirts, the beach, the ocean, palm trees, and the sun. And they reminded me that I’ve been neglecting those people who followed me while I made those memories. For that I apologize. It’s been a crazy time.

It wasn’t the transition to “clean life,” as some volunteers call it, that made my life crazy. Last year’s lengthy holiday visit prepared me for what to expect and this Chicago winter has been a heat wave compared to last year. Friends and family have been supportive and reconnecting with them was much easier than the Peace Corps warned it would be – I think because so many of my friends and family are travelers too. Also, I was mentally ready to move on from Tonga to other things. I enjoyed myself there, but two years was enough.

The craziness came instead from time management. Needing some spending money, I took odd jobs from family in between family outings and excursions into the city (I’m so thankful to have friends in fun Chicago neighborhoods). I took advantage of after-Christmas sales, as Tonga had either destroyed my clothes or made them too big on me. And, of course, there was frequent relaxation in the bathtub.

There was an action-packed extended weekend here when Juleigh came to visit (after he week-long vacation in Dallas to see Blair). We immediately dined on deep dish pizza, and then my Chicago friends showed both of us the cool hipster bars in Wicker Park (Velvet Hour for expensive cocktails mixed with egg whites and ingredients I’ve never heard of; The Map Room for imported Belgian beer). We used the “L” to get around, reaching Evanston, Millennium Park, The Willis Tower, Berghoff’s Restaurant, and Wrigleyville (for drinks during a football game). For her last day we sprinted to Milwaukee for a brewery tour and a stop at Mar’s Cheese Castle. It IS the land of cheese heads.

None of these events, however, made my life quite as hectic as the preparations for my next adventure. Tomorrow afternoon, I fly to Liberia to begin a 6-month assignment as a Peace Corps Response Volunteer. The job is the same as in Tonga, but they tell me not to expect running water, electricity, or internet. It doesn’t intimidate me, but it leaves me a little disappointed that there won’t be the frequent blogging that I did in Tonga. There’s not much I can say about my future assignment because Peace Corps hasn’t told me much and I’ve learned from Peace Corps Tonga how little one’s actual assignment resembles their description anyways. I’m going into it with an open mind and a commitment to flexibility. I just wish there was less paperwork and fewer medical hoops to get approved for the program (like getting 5 vaccines in one sitting).

Stay with me for the next 6 months and I promise more fascinating stories.

Sione’s 6 most frequently asked questions:

What was the first thing you ate off the plane?After dropping my bags off at home, we picked up some Lou Malnotti’s Chicago-style deep dish pizza.

What do you miss most about Tonga?The weather.

How’s Banjo?ALIVE. He’s with Kaitlin in Utulau, and she says he’s doing well. He’s already been through his first dog fight, though she didn’t say if he won or lost. I like her story of when he tried to follow her onto the bus and she had to force him off.

What do you like most about being home?The family, the friends, the food, the hot baths, and the iPhone – no, seriously, these devices are magical. When I left the states I was still using a Motorola RAZR, so imagine jumping that far ahead in technology.

Why only 6 months?I’m going to Liberia as a Peace Corps Response Volunteer, which is a program open only for those who have finished an original 2-year assignment with Peace Corps. They post openings for specific openings in specific countries usually with shorter assignments. Otherwise the programs are pretty much the same.

When will you get a real job?Do I have to?

Hello everyone! Sorry for the lack of updates lately, but now that I'm back at my site I should be able to start blogging again.

To wrap up my time in America, I spent a couple days giving presentations about Tonga. I spoke to classes at Highland Middle School, Reynolds High School, and the Sunday School classes of St. Mark's, all of which were great audiences. I loved sharing my stories, and I hope others enjoyed them, too.

When I arrived back in Tonga, I attended a training session with the rest of Group 76. It was great to see all of the other volunteers from different islands and catch up.

Now that I'm back in Vava'u, I'm just cleaning my house and getting ready to start school. Next Monday, we begin planning week and the following week is the first week of school. I'm excited to get back to school, see all of the Mailefihi staff, and meet the new students.

Here's to a great 2012!

Ohey.

So it's been about 5 months. Sorry about that! I got behind on everything and then kept getting intimidated by the prospect of catching up. But it's time to face my fears and deal with it, so I'm going to give you all a brief recap on the major things that have happened over the past 5 months. If there's something that catches your interest and you would like a blog post about it with more detail, feel free to comment and let me know. That way I won't write five million pages about things you aren't particularly interested in, haha.

Augustinsane preparations for both Camp GLOW and the Class 6 Secondary School Entrance Exammy friend Marie's birthday- we went to a resort out on the east side and had a buffet with traditional Tongan food and a performance (in a cave!) filled with traditional Tongan and Polynesian dances. Some of my other Peace Corps friends performed the Tau'olunga (a traditional Tongan dance for single ladies) that they learned during trainingSeptemberCamp GLOWs Tongatapu, 'Eua, and Vava'u were all successful. It was a stressful week (and month in general) for all involved but the girls on each island had a blast and learned a lot despite a couple of unexpected twists in the plans. Yay GLOW!Final preparations for the Class 6 exam. My birthday! I'm 23 now. Cool.Murder mystery dinner with some peeps. 8 of us dressed up as different characters from a murder mystery dinner game set and had soup night while trying to figure out who had killed our fictional host. Costumes were outrageously awesome and the whole dinner was a blast. Great food and great company. Possibly one of my favourite nights I've had here in Tongan.OctoberMore preparations for the Class 6 exam.CLASS 6 EXAM! Two days, two subjects each day. Then Class 6 had two more days of testing along with Class 4 based solely on the curriculum and meant to assess the new curriculum. My involvement in these exams was sitting outside the school in our neighbouring village with another teacher, reading a book and waiting for our students to finish so we could go home, each, and come back for the next exam. It was a party.Rugby World Cup action! This stretched throughout September as well but I'm including it in October because that's when the most exciting part happened: Tonga beating France! (France went on to play in the final game where they lost to New Zealand.) I did not do much watching of the Rugby World Cup because I still don't really understand rugby and have always had a hard time watching sports on TV. But I did wear my red on Fridays to support Tonga and we went to town after we beat France to eva with my neighbours. Town was crazy!! The streets were jammed with cars and people carrying Tongan flags and everyone was yelling and cheering. It was really fun! We left before it got toooo crazy though.A much more relaxed approach to school once the exam finished.The sense of dread creeping up on us Group 76 volunteers as we realized that Group 75 would be leaving very soon and no one new would be coming.A beloved member of our Group 76 also left- Dan Dirks. He got a job working with Doctors Without Borders. While we're all really proud of Dan and know for certain that his wide array of skills will be better utilized in his new job, we miss him a lot. He was our go to guy for pretty much everything. I swear, that man can do it all. "Dan, my fridge is leaking." "Dan, I have rats in my house." "Dan, my tire needs air." He also had a wonderful treasure trove of experiences that he was more than willing to share. Seriously, love that guy.Halloween! Multiple parties, some of which I did not attend as I was too lazy to leave my village. I did go to two, however. At one, I was Daisy Duck. At the other, I was a member of the Spice Girls- I was Pumpkin Spice. There were also Pepper, Sea Salt, Cinnamon, and Ginger. Aren't we clever? My friend Sandy came and stayed at my house a couple nights. One night, there was an explosion of cockroaches! Sandy turned on the sink to wash dishes and they just swarmed everywhere. This had never happened before! So we ran away. Then I Morteined the place to kill them. Then a molokau (vicious carniverous terrifying painful centipede) came out. We screamed more. I dropped my computer- don't worry Mom, it's okay- and Sandy killed the molokau. No one seemed interested in why were screaming, since none of my neighbours came to check on us. The next day my neighbours all said "Oh, we heard you guys playing last night." Playing? PLAYING? We were screaming bloody murder! Although I guess there was some laughter thrown in there, it wasn't all that reassuring to know that was the reaction my neighbours had, haha. NovemberLots of socialness as members of Group 75 departed at various times. The socialness was fun, if a bit wearing eventually. However, we're definitely missing all the wonderful people who are living it up back in America. The end of school! We did a little end of the year ceremony where students got awards and did performances. Biggest part- the entire school acted out the Nativity story in English! It was pretty impressive. I didn't have that much to do with it other than writing the script but the students did a really amazing job with their lines, even the ones who usually struggle a bit with English. I videotaped the whole thing so maybe someday I'll be able to get that up on YouTube for all y'all to watch.I left for New Zealand! Yay!DecemberNew Zealand! It was really fun. We hit up Auckland, Rotorua, Waitomo, Taupo, and Tongariro National Park. Saw glow worms in caves and thermal activity, luged down a mountain (on a wheeled cart thing), went in hot springs, did the Tongariro National Alpine Crossing (during which I almost died because I'm so out of shape), and saw lots and lots of beautiful scenery. I also got to see my friend Claire who was my first and absolutely amazing co-counselor at Camp Kennybrook. Claire is from England but just moved to New Zealand for the year so that was super super wonderful. Hopefully she'll come to Tonga sometime soon!More Christmas youth performances a la last year. That was really really fun.Found out that out of my 8 students, 4 passed to the schools they were hoping to attend. Two will be going to Toloa, the all boys Wesleyan boarding school. One will be going to Queen Salote, the all girls Wesleyan boarding school. And one will be going to Apifo'ou, the Catholic school. The other 4 will be going to the nearby Weslyan middle school for forms 1 and 2 and then will move on to secondary schools. Yay for my students! I'm very very proud of them.Went to my first Tongan wedding. A man from my church got married and Vao, my Tongan 'mom' and the Class 1 teacher at my school, brought me with her. It was a very palangi-like wedding with bridesmaids and the same kinds of vows and stuff, which was interesting and not necessarily traditional but a choice of the bride and groom. It was fun though. There was a big feast after with lots of eating and dancing and speeches.Christmas! Talked to my lovely family on the phone while they were at my grandparents house for Christmas Eve, which was nice. Went to a feast, again for the couple that had just gotten married. That was awkward because I STILL had to sit at the head table even though I barely know them and it was one of the longest feasts I've ever been too. But it was very kind of them to invite me and I enjoyed spending time with some people in my community who I don't necessarily see as much as some others.Went to a resort with my friend Kimberly. She came over from 'Eua for New Years and we spent four days at Vakaloa on the West Side of the island. Beaching it everyday fakapalangi, which means we got to wear our bathing suits and dress however we wanted instead of having to swim in clothes and be completely covered all the time. Kimberly is wonderful company so I really enjoyed spending that time with her.JanuaryNew Years continued at Vakaloa.My camera broke :( It somehow got water in it even though it's supposed to be waterproof. Working on sorting that stuff out.'Uike Lotu. Prayer week. Missed part of it because of Vakaloa. Last year I went to every service at 5 am and 5 pm each day because I was new. This year I stuck with the 5 pm services and bailed on the 5 am ones. I felt kind of bad but my community didn't really mind so it was okay. 5 am is really early to go to a church service for a religion of which you aren't actually technically a part, especially when you are not fluent in the language.Beach day with the youth in my village. We only went for a couple hours but it was really fun. Sadly, that was when my camera broke.Mid Service Training, also known as MST. That was this past week. Had lots of sessions. some were good, some were not, but on the whole it was really nice to be together as a group again and get to see everyone from the other islands. They all headed back today.

Next things coming up: training week starts the 23rd, then school begins the week after that.

That's about it! Sorry this post is so long, but I'll try to be better in the future (she says yet again). Let me know if you want anything to be elaborated upon.

Love and miss you all!xoxok

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What the Fido is going on around here? Just a few days ago I watched Sione build a box out of screws and wood scraps and then proceed to feed me inside of it for a few meals. Then one morning he tricked me inside the box, lifted me into the school van, and took me to the airport.

I never barked, because Sione hates when I do that, but I was thoroughly confused. Two strangers lifted me into the back of the DC-3, but thankfully Sione soon came by and called my name and told me not to worry. I waited there through that terrible earthquake started with loud noises and shimeys until Sione came to sit and pet me behind the ears just the way I like it. He kept asking if I was enjoying my first plane ride.

The Peace Corps office didn’t want me to stay in their apartments in Nuku’alofa, so Sione moved in with fellow volunteers Mark and Elena for his last week in Tonga. Their neighbor’s fat cat attacked me, but otherwise I had a pleasant stay. They kept me locked inside most of my two days in the capital, save for that second afternoon when Sione let me join in on a series of errands in the crazy streets of Nuku’alofa. So many smells! He’s never yelled at me so many times, and I have no idea what he was upset about. I don’t see what was wrong with walking in front of speedy cars.

Then came my first ever taxi ride! Mark and Carolyn joined Sione and me in a drive to Utulau, where Kaitlin lives. I remembered her from her visit to Ha’apai last winter, and she seemed very happy to see me.

That’s when I got confused all over again. Sione gave me a great hug and his eyes started watering, which I’ve never seen before. Then he and his taxi crew drove away while I was locked behind a screen door. Where did he go?

Hours later, when Kaitlin finally let me outside, I ran off after that taxi, but I couldn’t find it. Will it be back? I hope so, but I’m also really happy to be here with Kaitlin. There’s no beach here for me to splash around in, but at least there aren’t many cars. Kaitlin feeds me well and her neighbors, for Tongans, are unusually friendly towards me. I miss Sione but I’m also enjoying my new life in Utulau.

A yellow-orange sky was usually my cue to pour a glass of refrigerated Franzia and stroll to our school’s beach, dog in tow. I’d sit on the fallen coconut trunk and dip my feet in the ocean. Five or so minutes would go by, and the sky would darken. Then we’d return home for dinner.

It happened exactly this way dozens of times.

Tonight’s sunset was different, and the most meaningful. This was my last sunset in Ha’apai, and to celebrate I bought myself a bottle of New Zealand Pinot noir (newly available on the island), put a relaxing playlist on my iPod, and headed to the beach with my camera and tripod. This wouldn’t just be a 5-minute break, but an hour-long cathartic reflection. And Banjo meditated with me.

It had only just hit me that my time in Ha’apai was about to be over. Just hours earlier I had emptied my house into my principal’s house. He became the beneficiary of almost everything I owned. Using my dishes and utensils, he made me one last hearty and delicious meal, finishing just in time for the sunset. This was it.

As the sun peered between clouds and Air played their downtempo electronica, I nearly finished that bottle.

Well, I'm finally breaking down and writing this post, which will be a series. The reason it will be a series of posts is because I have so much to say on the topic. Goody! (For me, since I like nothing so much as pontificating and expatiating. Not so for you, if you don't like reading.)

I'm forcing myself to be disciplined in this series and not go flying off all over the place, so if you'll excuse my absence of inanely irrelevant tangents, I'll try my very best to stay on topic.

I'm frustrated. Why? Because I had such high hopes, and they were dashed, just absolutely dashed. Why were the dashed?

Read on, dear reader. Read on.

I just read The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins.

Hold up, Peaches! Don't jump to conclusions. I'm not disappointed because my gossamer visions of the bearded man in the sky have been rent asunder, but rather because I had hoped to read a reasoned, logical discussion about the existence of God. Ernh! Nope.

[Author's Note: Unfortunately, any human writer cannot hope but have their biases enter their writing, but I will try to be objective as possible. That said, I choose not to tell you my personal beliefs on the matter, because I have no idea who you are (I'm looking at you, family members), and anyway, my personal beliefs don't have anything to do with the following discussion, other than they will necessarily and unconsciously color my commentary even though I try not to let them.]

I'll skip the usual complaint about Dawkins's writing (that it's "strident,") and take in stride his sometimes inflammatory comments. After all, evangelists can be just as inflammatory, if not moreso. Dawkins never threatens you with eternal damnation if you don't agree.

No, no, no. The following commentary focuses on my journey through his book, and how many times I spent more time writing my comments in my notebook than I did reading.

First off, you may be asking, who is Richard Dawkins?

Before the beginning, there was the Preface, in which Dawkins makes the point that, without religion, none of the many terrible things that have been done in the name of God/Allah/Vishnu would have happened.

Quibble: Dawkins means organized religion. All of those things happened because of organized religion. If the warrior Popes hadn't been there with their vast networks of churches and the power that comes from central authority, the Crusades wouldn't have happened. If religious leaders with inordinate temporal powers didn't exist to goad their followers on, none of those would have happened. Tiny groups of animist hunter/gatherers have religion, but they don't start holy wars.

He proceeds to lay out the book's program, as all good prefaces do, and makes a great point that atheists are highly discriminated against, that there are probably many more atheists (or agnostics or people with a queasy feeling about their particular religion's doctrine) than will admit to it, because it's such a toxic environment for atheism in America. Major truth, and majorly unfair. According to Dawkins's reference to a Gallup poll in 1999, 95% of people responded that they would vote for a woman (who was otherwise well-qualified, the same as all the following examples), 92% would vote for a black candidate, 79% for a homosexual candidate, and 49% for an atheist candidate.

There is a great deal of prejudice against atheists, and that should change. Of course it should change! Anybody who thinks atheists are inherently immoral or whatever other negative trait typically attributed to being atheist (even *gasp!* being a Communist) are just as intolerant and ignorant as someone who thinks all black men are adulterers or all Latinos are lazy.

So far, so good. Promoting tolerance and exposing a glaring hypocrisy in American society. I'm feeling good, and still have high hopes. He also talks about people indoctrinated by their parents to be Catholic or Muslim or Hindu, and that those people should step outside their faith to read opposing viewpoints. Agreed. There's nothing more annoying than a Christian fundamentalist who says the Qur'an is nothing but lies--when Surah 3:42 says, "Behold! The angels said: 'O Mary! Allah hath chosen thee and purified thee above the women of all nations.'"

Yup. That's right. Didn't know that the Qur'an affirms the virgin birth of Jesus? Well it does. Better not burn that puppy. You're burning the Christmas story.

And so we begin with chapter one: "A Deeply Religious Non-Believer"

Section One: Deserved Respect

The point that Dawkins makes in this section is that just because it's wonderful doesn't mean it has to have a supernatural cause. That's true. It does not necessarily follow that a beautiful garden has a supernatural fairy attendant making the flowers grow (11). He proceeds to mention famous scientists (Carl Sagan, Steven Weinberg, Stephen Hawking, Martin Rees, Albert Einstein) that did not believe in a supernatural deity.

Quibble: As my politics professor taught me in university (thanks Dr. L!), quoting a human with a viewpoint that coincides with your own (even an extremely well-credentialed expert in their field) is not enough to prove an argument. It weighs heavily in your favor if all the experts in a field agree with you, since they've made a career out of investigating and thinking about the topic, but there are numerous examples of many scientists (or psychologists, or politicians, or popes) finding out they're wrong with time. This is an important point to remember as we continue: name-dropping doesn't prove a point. Even important names, and a lot of them, doesn't prove a point. It points heavily in your favor, but it doesn't prove it. And anyway, you can always procure an expert to say what you want. I'm not saying Sagan and Hawking and Einstein are just any old experts, and I certainly believe Einstein when he tells me E=mc2, and you should, too, but a whole bunch of humans, even smart ones, saying a lamb's tail is a leg doesn't make it so. Go examine the lamb's tail yourself. In fact, Dawkins raises this point himself, in regards to theologians claiming to be experts on the religion/God question (16).

Dawkins defines a few things for us, just so we're all clear.

Theism: the belief that there is a supernatural intelligence "who, in addition to his main work of creating the universe in the first place, is still around to oversee and influence the subsequent fate of his initial creation" (18).

Deism: the belief that there is a supernatural intelligence, "but one whose activities were confined to setting up the laws that govern the universe in the first place" (18).

Pantheism: the belief that there is no supernatural intelligence, "but use God as a non-supernatural synonym for Nature, or for the Universe, or for the lawfulness that governs its workings" (18).

Basically, a theist believes in a god or gods that made the universe and continues to meddle in its workings. A deist believes in a god or gods that made the universe but no longer meddles, and a pantheist believes there are no god or gods, but only an inanimate Nature, meaning the laws of the universe.

Tiny Quibble: According to Concise Oxford's English Dictionary, the definition of "pantheism" is: a doctrine or belief that identifies God with the universe, or regards the universe as a manifestation of God. Just semantics, and not important, really, but that definition does have a more supernatural/mystical feel than Dawkins gives to his definition. Still, not important.

Section Two: Undeserved Respect

Dawkins makes the salient point that people hide under the religious tolerance banner in America. His point in this section is that he doesn't care if people get a little offended with the way he treats religion, because he thinks that too often scientists are forced to bend over backwards or otherwise treat religion with kid gloves, when it shouldn't be.

He gives a few examples, such as the one that giving a religious claim during wartime is the easiest way to become a conscientious objector. Religion is referred to euphemistically in the media, and people often use religious reasons for making laws when the Constitution (supposedly) ensures a separation of Church and State. Also, many people are granted special privileges (his example is a church in New Mexico being able to take illegal hallucinogenic drugs) simply because they believe them to be an integral part of their religious experience.

Quibble: Not a hard-and-fast rule, but anecdotes are also a bit of a sticky wicket, since they can be flung back and forth for either side of an argument. The judges who decided in those cases, who are they? Are they well-respected judges, or are they judges other judges consider a bit wonky? That said, Dawkins is right that people claim crazy behaviors in the name of religious practice. But what sorts of rules can we follow to draw the line? Again, our Constitution guarantees the freedom of religion, so...sorry? There are certain constraints on the freedom of religion the same as there are on freedom of speech (you can't disingenuously yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater, and you can't kill people because Jesus told you to), so I'm sorry that sometimes American courts (and British ones, since Dawkins is a British citizen) and American media are biased, and we should be aware of our bias against atheists, but sometimes we have to let slide minority opinions we personally feel are wrong in the interest of democracy.

Another quibble: I can hang a sword on the wall, or I can run it through someone's gut. That doesn't make the sword intrinsically evil (although it would be a good idea to keep a sword out of my hands, if I make a habit of the latter). That people get fired up about religion and use it for nefarious purposes is nothing new. That doesn't make religion (as opposed to organized religion) evil. People are selfish and do emotional, selfish, greedy, irrational things. They do them because of money, or love, or religion, or pleasure. But, I'm also not worried, because Dawkins has promised to address the argument that religion isn't so bad. I'm willing to wait for him to develop his argument.

Dawkins asks what is so special about religion that we give it such "uniquely privileged respect" (27). Is it uniquely privileged? And who is "we"? He means Western nations, I'm sure. Although, he gives a great quotation from H. L. Mencken: "We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart" (27).

Quibbles aside, I'm still super-excited about the book. We need to actually be tolerant about religion and not just tolerant about our own religion. Yes! Exactly! Dawkins isn't going to pull punches just because people might get offended. Good! Martin Luther King didn't stop giving speeches just because racists got offended. Just because anti-atheists might get offended doesn't mean we have to kowtow to them. And the phrase "under God" should be taken out of the Pledge of Allegiance, because it was added in the 50's, under Eisenhower. (Dawkins doesn't mention that, but I'm sure he would agree.)

Onward!

Chapter two: "The God Hypothesis"

Dawkins writes that whether or not God exists cannot depend on the Abrahamic God, the one god of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Rather, Dawkins has a broader purpose: correctly identify the existence of God as a hypothesis.

Don't get angry quite yet. First, let's define hypothesis (according to the COED, of course): a supposition or proposed explanation made on the basis of limited evidence as a starting point for further investigation.

In that sense, then yes, the existence of God is a hypothesis whose validity can be strengthened or weakened by observable evidence. For some people, this is a very strong hypothesis about the creation of the universe. For other people, it is a very weak hypothesis. But it's still just a hypothesis. No one knows, without the shadow of a doubt, in the same way I know I have ten fingers. (For this reason, many religions put a high and positive priority on faith without evidence.)

A hypothesis is something which scientists give before they gather evidence, perform experiments, or do other research in order to find out whether or not their hypothesis is true or false. This is called a conclusion, as in, "Based on the evidence of having observed and counted five fingers on each of my hands, my original hypothesis that I have nine fingers has been proved false." It's called a posteriori reasoning.

More definitions from my favorite dictionary!

a posteriori: (with reference to reasoning or knowledge) proceeding from observations or experiences to the deduction of probable causes.

It's the Scientific Method, which we all learn in seventh grade (and forget by eighth...?). It's how scientists proceed when filling gaps in our knowledge. It's saying, "We don't know why or how this happens, so let's come up with a hypothesis about why or how it happens, test it, and draw a conclusion."

Also important is that experiments have to be replicated (preferably by other scientists). You have to submit your evidence and conclusions to other scientists. In this way, science is remarkably self-correcting, in a way that religion is most decidedly not. For example, another reputed fingerologist would come and count my fingers. She would also get to ten, which would support my previous conclusion. Part of an experiment is a detailed description of your procedure, step by step, so that other scientists can try it themselves. If everybody gets the same result, hooray! If not, hmm... Let's keep investigating.

Next, Dawkins gives us his scientific hypothesis (remember, "hypothesis" in the sense of something which can be tested and proven to be true or false). He's a scientist, so this makes sense. Whether or not God exists is a huge gap in our knowledge, and so, proceeding as a scientist would, he presents his hypothesis:

"There exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us" (31).

Good, good, and good. We can't move forward if we don't have a hypothesis we can prove true or false. I can write the hypothesis "I may or may not have nine fingers," but that's a poorly written one. It can't be proven true or false. The same with the hypothesis "We actually live in a supercomputer program called the Matrix, which has the exact same appearance as real life." We can't test that, because whether or not we live in the Matrix can't be observed and tested. Because we can't test it (currently...?), it has to be thrown out of scientific discussion. You philosophers and cinephiles can discuss and discuss all you want, but scientists can't. Because it can't be tested. It may or may not be right, but that doesn't matter. It's outside proper scientific procedure.

(That's not to say that we shouldn't investigate it. It may be that, by trying to investigate the matter in a primitive way, we'll stumble upon another, better, way to go about the matter, as often happens in science. Some fringe scientist tries to come up with a way to test a seemingly un-testable hypothesis only to figure out some key piece of information we need to move forward.)

The only way we can test whether or not we live in the Matrix is if living in the Matrix is different from living in the real world.

From this distinction (flashing forward a bit) flows Dawkins's hypothesis and his contention that we need to scientifically examine the God Hypothesis, because it could be that by working on the issue, we'll discover the science we need to investigate it further.

From this distinction also flows a key point in Dawkins's argument: "a universe in which we are alone except for other slowly evolved intelligences is a very different universe from one with an original guiding agent whose intelligent design is responsible for its very existence" (61).

He grants that it may not be so easy in practice to distinguish one kind of universe from the other. Nevertheless, there is something utterly special about the hypothesis of ultimate design, and equally special about the only known alternative: gradual evolution in the broad sense. They are close to being irreconcilably different. (61)

MAJOR Quibble: (Are you quibbling, too?) Ok, ok, ok, so here's where I get supercallifragilistically annoyed. Dawkins is saying that we have to come up with scientific hypotheses about the nature of the universe if we're ever to learn more. So far, so good. Then he gives us a great hypothesis about the existence of all supernatural deities, not just Yahweh/Allah/Brahman. So farther, so better. And then he gives us the above. The two universes, one made by an intelligent creator and one made by gradual evolution, would be "irreconcilably different". Whuh?! How the heck do we test that? We don't have a control universe to compare it to; we don't even have another planet with life on it! (Yet.) We can't test your hypothesis! We have to throw it out! Argh! He admits it isn't easy to distinguish in practice, because it's (currently) impossible. It's the Matrix. How do we distinguish between a universe set in motion by an intelligent creator and one not? We don't have the current technology and scientific theories for the above hypothesis.

But, I'm willing to give Dawkins the benefit of the doubt. He says they're irreconcilably different, so I'll read the rest of the book to see if he pays out on his promise. Less intrepid readers may, at this point, throw the book in frustration, but that's not being fair. He could be taunting us with a seemingly un-testable hypothesis only to provide the proof later. All right. I'm along for the ride, but I'm watching you, Dawkins. Carefully. Don't you keep making logical slip-ups, or I'll write a series of angry blog posts detailing every one of your logical slip-ups and post it for the world to see.

In Addition to the Above Quibble: Dawkins's hypothesis reminds me of a case in natural history that Stephen Jay Gould wrote about in his book The Flamingo's Smile. In the nineteenth century, when Charles Darwin blew everyone's mind with the awesomely explanatory theory of the evolution of the species through the process of natural selection and geologists were finding ancient fossils of trilobites and pterodactyls, many creationists (Christians who believe that the Earth was created 3,000 years ago with all the organisms on it fully-formed from a seven-day--as in literal days of twenty-four hours on the Earth, whereas the Bible doesn't actually specify how long a day in God's life is, and in fact usually mentions that a thousand years for us is but a fleeting moment for God--ZOT! by God) came up with counter-hypotheses about the growing amount of evidence in the geological record for a planet older than 3,000 years.

(Note: You may be wondering where the whole 3,000 year thing came from, since, you may be surprised to learn, the Bible does not claim the Earth is 3,000 years old. Instead, it comes from an archbishop by the name of James Ussher who counted up the generations listed, starting with Adam, that are listed in the Bible and adding up the years Genesis says they lived. Unfortunately, this monk didn't realize that the Biblical Hebrew phrase "father" can mean either a biological father or an ancestral father and a "son" can be a biological son or a distant descendant. Oops. We have no way of knowing if the Bible meant them as literal, biological father-son relationships. It's just one of the many things--like airplanes, chemotherapy, and Cheez-Its--that the Bible doesn't mention. Of course, the Constitution doesn't mention any of these things, either, so don't be too harsh on either of these old parchments.)

One of these creationist hypotheses was that God created the illusion of continuity by creating fossils which had every appearance of being millions of years old but had actually been created by God 3,000 years ago. The man's reasoning was that all processes on Earth are a cycle, and so God had to "break into" that cycle at some point, but any point in a cycle has to have evidence of the previous points in that cycle, and Presto-Chango! fossils were created with the appearance of an age greater than they actually had. Gould elegantly dismisses this argument on the crucial basis of: it's un-testable. If fossils have every appearance of being millions of years old without actually being so, we can't ever know the truth through observation and investigation. Therefore, this elegant hypothesis had to be thrown out of science (but it can still be debated in philosophy classes, alongside whether or not we live in the Matrix).

Now, flashing backwards a little, to section one of the second chapter: Polytheism.

Dawkins makes the point that superficially monotheistic religions like Christianity have three main Dudes (along with Mary and the saints and angels, etc.), and Hinduism, the superficially polytheistic religion, believes that Brahman, Vishnu, Shiva, etc. are all manifestations of one God. His point is that he doesn't care about the particular beliefs of all the various rich traditions of supernatural beliefs in the world. His point is that nothing supernatural exists. At all.

Further, he admits that he will argue most fervently against the Abrahamic God, since he is so prevalent in our society. As Dawkins sums it up: "I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have been or will be invented" (36).

See? We're already back to the more reasonable, logical argument. I knew I should stay with him (even though this section came before the section I complained about, so technically I encountered it first while reading, but never mind that). He's not anti-Yahweh or anti-Ganesh or anti-Allah. He is anti-supernatural.

Definition time!

This is important, so remember it: the COED definition of supernatural is "(of a manifestation or event) attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature."

So he is against anything that cannot be eventually explained by science or by explanations outside the laws of nature. That's important. Remember it. That's his stated purpose. That science can eventually discover the workings of any observable phenomena in the universe, and all things can be understood as operating under some law or another of nature. Therefore, he will not accept the answer, "God did it," as to why black holes exist or bluebirds sing or hydrogen atoms have one proton.

In philosophy, this point of view has the fancy moniker "naturalism". That is, "a viewpoint according to which everything arises from natural properties and causes, and supernatural or spiritual explanations are excluded or discounted." (COED again, of course.)

(If you're already getting hints about what frustrated me so much about this book, good for you, but we'll delve into that point more deeply later on in the series.)

Are you remembering that? All right, then. Moving on.

Section Two: Monotheism

Dawkins writes that Islam, Christianity, and Judaism share the same god, which they do. He writes that Paul of Tarsus opened up Judaism to non-Jews, thus creating the Christian sect, and that both Christianity and Islam were spread with the sword. He says that he won't even consider Buddhism and Confucianism as religions in his discussion, as they are actually systems of ethics.

Quibble: (It was about time for another, wasn't it?) Buddhism has many different sects, the two main ones being Theravada Buddhism and Mahayana Buddhism, that calling it a system of ethics is just plain wrong. Some Buddhists worship the Buddha as a god, and others worship Buddha along with all the bodhisattvas. And anyway, plenty of supernatural things are described in Buddhist texts, such as, um, I don't know...eternal souls?! When reincarnation is a central tenet of your beliefs, it's sort of hard to dismiss it as a "system of ethics". Do your homework, Dawkins. You owe it to us as the author. If you mess something this simple up it doesn't mean that your entire book is faulty (but that's only true for your book; that rule is inapplicable to any other book in the entire universe!), but it does mean I have to read any of your basic "facts" with a grain of salt. Are you really going to shoulder me with the burden of looking up all the things you say are true? Well, you just did.

Section Three: Secularism, the Founding Fathers and the Religion of America

Dawkins asserts that the Founding Fathers were deists at the very stretchiest, but most likely atheists. He quotes Jefferson and others to show that they were apathetic about a personal God, like the one a theist believes in, and that they would be horrified to see the amount of religiosity in today's America.

Quibble: That may well be, and I would happen to agree that we've mixed religion and politics to our detriment, but do you remember that point I made earlier about not proving something with a panel of experts? Really smart people still don't know everything, and they can even believe wrong things (gasp!). For example, Jefferson believed in slavery. My quibble is that you're supposed to be proving that the universe wasn't created by God, and you're telling me what Thomas Jefferson thought about angels. I don't care what Jefferson thought about angels! For someone claiming to be bound by the strictures of the Scientific Method, you telling me what Mr. Famous-and-Smart-So-and-So thought about God isn't very scientific. Now, if you start telling me what Darwin thought about natural selection, I'll start listening, and avidly. Jefferson isn't even a theologian (who anyway Dawkins says shouldn't even have jobs, since they don't have a field to study), and I don't care if you trot out any number of actual, respected theologians. You said that a universe created by an intelligent being is "irreconcilably different" from one created by gradual evolution. What do I care what the Reverend Famous-Pants or Thomas Jefferson have to say about that? I'm trying to find out what you think, and you're making me frustrated with the wait!

But, it's only the opening quarter of the book. Part of any scholarly work is a "literature review," that is, reviewing what other experts in the field have said, and what the opposing viewpoints and competing theories are. I see your aim, even if I don't think evoking the Founding Fathers (however much I revere them for giving us the Constitution, an old document written in a historical context that still manages to guide our behavior today) constitutes asking the "experts". Where are the cosmologists?

Section Four: The Poverty of Agnosticism

Dawkins makes the amazingly true point that, "there is nothing wrong with being agnostic in cases where we lack evidence one way or the other," and that "agnosticism, of a kind, is an appropriate stance on many scientific questions" (46-7).

Yes! He's absolutely right. When you don't have enough evidence to decide one way or the other, don't decide. Wait for more evidence to come in, and then we can decide why there's a 26-million-year extinction cycle in the history of the Earth. Why decide when we can continue to investigate and get a clearer picture?

Dawkins proposes that God's existence is a question for which we can be agnostic, but not permanently. (In fact, he proposes, as stated earlier, to resolve the question by the end of the book.) There are some things we'll never know, such as if chicken tastes the same as it does to me as it does to you, or if my chicken tastes like your pork. We can't ever know that. But, Dawkins asserts, we can make in-roads as to the probability of God's existence.

Here comes his first major point that gets me back into the flow of the book. We can't absolutely prove that something doesn't exist, but we can prove that it's highly improbable. For example, history offers a few examples of humans insisting something doesn't exist (because they'd never experienced it before), only to find out later that it does exist. Black swans, black holes, and North America to name three. We can prove something exists (not philosophically, no, but get out of here, you existential monkey wrenches), because we can see it or hear it or otherwise detect it with our senses or equipment that enhances our senses.

Not so with proving something doesn't exist. You can have a theory that calls something improbable, and the longer we go without finding that thing, it becomes increasingly likely that it's impossible, but we never actually get our pointer over to "impossible". Just really, really, really unlikely.

E.g. (exempli gratia): Because of the law of gravity, we can say that it is very, very, very, very, extremely, super-extremely unlikely that, when I drop an apple, it will float away. Because the law of gravity is a true physical law, it has predictive power (major points in science!), and no one has ever seen an apple just float away from their hand when they're standing on terra firma. But science still can't say it's impossible.

Important distinction. You'll be laughed out of the University of Science if you seriously propose that the apple will float away, and you can go ahead and run that experiment all your life to prove that it is possible, but the odds are catastrophically against you that you will succeed. No one runs that experiment trying to get those results, because the Law of Gravity makes it so incredibly unlikely.

So what Dawkins is saying is that he has scientific laws that are going to prove God to be so improbable that it would be laughable to keep testing for him (or her, or it). And that, as we continue to investigate, God will become (indeed, already has, for Dawkins) more and more unlikely, until the concept will be as laughable as waiting for the apple to float away.

Excellent. I'm back in the thick of it. Bring on the science!

Dawkins! Why are you letting inconsequential (and erroneous) arguments get in the way of a good lead?

He quotes Bertrand Russell at length about how many people assume that it is a skeptic's responsibility to prove the doctrine false, not the doctrine's responsibility to prove itself true. That's not my problem, so much. Maybe they both have a responsibility to investigate.

My issue is when he references Russell's teapot or the famous Flying Spaghetti Monster. Russell makes the point that if he started saying there was a teapot between Earth and Mars, only too small to see with a telescope, and that if he continued by saying that, because you can't prove that something doesn't exist, it would be rude to assert that the teapot isn't real.

Dawkins is making the point that, like God, we cannot ever prove unequivocally that the teapot doesn't exist (only that it's highly unlikely to exist), and yet nobody even gives a passing thought to the teapot.

Quibble: (You knew one was coming up.) The reason no one takes Russell's celestial teapot or the Flying Spaghetti Monster real is because people aren't quite so mindless as that. Of course no believes everything ever in the history of ever from everyone's imaginations combined exists simply because we can't absolutely prove that it doesn't. People are more reasonable than that. The celestial teapot and the Flying Spaghetti Monster are not on the same level as the Bible or the Qur'an:

1) because they don't have the same long history and tradition as the holy books or cherished beliefs of a community

2) because people realize Russell just made the example up to prove a point

I realize Dawkins is making an analogy from the teapot to the Bible, in that, in its infancy, the Bible was just a celestial teapot or a Flying Spaghetti Monster. Yes, yes, I realize the point you're making, that just because a belief persists for thousands of years (I'm looking at you, geocentrism) doesn't make it true.

Dawkins ends by reviewing that all he needs to prove is the extreme improbability of God, and again promises to do so.

I'm going to stop going section by section, because it's about time we got to the meat of the annoying-ness.

As we mentioned a lot earlier, Dawkins is a naturalist, in the philosophical sense. To review, that means that he holds the view that "everything arises from natural properties and causes, and supernatural or spiritual explanations are excluded or discounted" (quoting my early quotation from COED).

For a naturalist, all observable phenomena have a natural explanation, and he loathes (legitimately) the cop-out of "God did it." Basically, as a scientist, he believes that we should search for new scientific laws when we observe something that follows none of the laws we currently understand. If we see something we can't explain, we have to investigate it. We can't say, "Oh, don't worry about that pulsar. That's God winking at us. End of story."

Dawkins says that "the presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question" (58-9).

Just to be clear, science is (thank you COED!) the "intellectual and practical activity encompassing the scientific study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment."

So when Dawkins says that the existence of a "creative super-intelligence" is subject to systematic study using the scientific method, I agree. If we find a creative super-intelligence, we should study it. (If it will let us, since it sounds like it's a lot smarter than us. Maybe the super-intelligent, super-human aliens will just enslave us. All Your Base Are Belong To Us.)

He also makes the point that we should scientifically investigate miracle stories. Of course. Not all miracle stories are miracles. Not all horses are black. Does that mean all horses are not black? No. In the same way, hypothetically, just because some miracle stories are not miracles doesn't mean all miracle stories are not miracles. But should we therefore assume all miracle stories are miracles? Absolutely not, anymore than we would assume all horses are black. There's a matter of degree here, a spectrum as Stephen Jay Gould would call it, that Dawkins is brushing away with a wave of a hand. Dawkins gives the example of the claim that Jesus did not have a human father. Just because we don't currently have enough scientific evidence to decide conclusively about the matter doesn't mean we shouldn't investigate.

I think most moderate people would agree with that. We shouldn't live without questioning. But who thinks we should? He's arguing against a population that probably wouldn't even read his book, so don't insult me by wasting my time telling me why I shouldn't uncritically acquiesce to everything the Qur'an tells me.

So what was that point he made? Not all miracle stories are true miracles. Um...duh. And we shouldn't meekly swallow to the literal letter everything the Bible or any other holy text says. Again: duh. The Bible, for example, speaks in parables like it's its job! The Qur'an is full of metaphorical language! Who, even among the creationists who believe the Earth is 3,000 years old, believes that there was a literal sower and literal seeds from the "parable of the sower" in Matthew?

(For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Gospel of Matthew, from the Bible, Matthew 13:1-9, tells a story about a sower went out to sow seeds. Some seeds fall on a path, and the birds eat them. Some fall on rocky soil, spring up fast, then wither without the depth of soil they need. Some are scorched by the heat of the sun, and some are choked off by thorny weeds. Finally, some fall on good soil and produce lots and lots of other grain.)

Even a biblical literalist is not going around saying that's not a metaphor for different types of Christians. In fact, there's a fancy word for a critical examination of a scriptural text: exegesis. That's what the whole branch of knowledge called theology (whether it's Jewish, Christian, Hindu, or Shinto) is about, and it's full of people critical examining their own religion and others'. But, Dawkins has already summarily dismissed these scholars (except when they agree with him) and made the assertion that science is applicable to religious doctrine.

So, let's review three of his core truths, or axioms:

(Note: an axiom is a "an accepted statement or proposition regarded as being self-evidently true," and there's nothing wrong with having axioms. All belief systems have axioms.)

1) There is nothing in this universe that we can experience that cannot be explained by scientific understanding and the laws of nature.

2) Science can and should investigate claims made by religious groups, whether they are miraculous visions or miraculous events.

3) A universe with a supernaturally intelligent creator is "irreconcilably different" from a universe without such a creator.

Examine those more closely. The first two combined form circular thinking, and the third is un-testable. Because Dawkins presumes that all things observable are the result of natural causes, then anything we observe therefore has a natural cause. That's right. Because he discounts supernatural explanations in his premise, he concludes that there are no supernatural causes. But you can't use your conclusion as your premise. There's a fancy Latin term for that, and it's this:

petitio principii

Let's get a COED definition in there!

petitio principii: a logical fallacy in which a conclusion is taken for granted in the premises

What Dawkins claims he's trying to prove is that there is no such thing as supernatural. (A major problem with that is his definition of supernatural, which relegates supernatural phenomena to those which we cannot observe. If we observe it, it becomes natural, and therefore not supernatural. The proof he says he requires to believe in the supernatural is impossible, because the very fact that it's observable proof renders it non-supernatural.) That's the conclusion he wants. If that's the conclusion you want, you can't use it as your beginning assumption, as one of your axioms. You can't assume something is true from the beginning if you're trying to prove that it's true. BEEP! Logical fallacy, captain.

Is that proof that God doesn't exist? (That he's highly unlikely, technically, since Dawkins never proposes that he can prove God doesn't exist, anymore that we can categorically prove unicorns don't exist or the celestial teapot doesn't exist.) Of course not. Is it proof that God does exist? Of course not. It's, to quote Dawkins's quotation of Jefferson, to "talk of nothings" (42). It's irrelevant, both to science and religion. All you're saying is that the rules of your discipline deny the existence of what you're denying the existence of. Right...

Ballet is another discipline with a set of precise and formalized steps and procedures, but if I then say clog dance moves (or some other equivalent non-ballet step) are highly improbable to be found in a ballet because, one: clog dances have never been witnessed in a ballet, and two: clog dance steps are not allowed in ballet anyway, then everyone would just sort of look at me funny. Yeah, they would say. So?

They might say, as Dawkins did of theologians at a Cambridge conference, that I had defined myself "into an epistemological Safe Zone where rational argument could not reach [me] because [I] had declared by fiat that it could not" (154).

Can't he see he's done the same thing?!

(To be fair, on page 155, Dawkins states specifically that he is "not advocating some sort of narrowly scientistic way of thinking." To which I say, actions speak louder than words, sir.)

Yes, yes, in that example the clog dance is not creating the ballet, but remember Dawkins's purpose: to prove that all supernatural things, "wherever and whenever" are not real (36).

Are you starting to see why I got so frustrated? Here I was promised a logical presentation of evidence to prove a hypothesis, and I'm getting paralogisms and a petitio prinicipii.

Basically, you can stop reading the book right here, if you so choose. There's no need to follow his argument unless you choose to.

I choose to.

Hold up! Don't put words in my mouth! I make no comments on whether or not his hypothesis is true. Just because the logic is bad (or un-testable) doesn't mean that the hypothesis is false. You can most certainly get the right answer in the wrong way, and you can also have a true hypothesis for which you have to wait for the corroborating evidence (just look at Einstein and black holes). I'm just saying that, at the starting gate, his argument seems to be a purely philosophical one in that you either agree with his premises (even agreeing to a certain degree) or you don't. You can't prove his premises are true or false. Nothing wrong with a book about a certain philosophy, but you should realize that's what you're getting.

Feel free to skip down to the bottom, if you're as frustrated as me, or learn about the Mushroom of the Month. If you're still feeling doughty, read on, dear reader, read on.

Let's review a little: Dawkins is "attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have been or will be invented" (36).

That's not saying he's waging some sort of atheist war. Don't get angry quite yet. What he means by "attacking" is that his hypothesis is that nothing supernatural exists.

Further review!

The definition (from the Concise Oxford's English Dictionary) of supernatural is: "(of a manifestation or event) attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature."

So, if we observe ghosts and subsequently have a Law of Ghostly Manifestations, which has true predictive and explanatory power, that doesn't count as supernatural. That's important to remember, and it's an important distinction. He's saying that no gap in our knowledge will be filled with the explanation "Supernatural Being X takes care of that." Why do apples fall? Not because angels pull them down. Because of the law of gravity, which says that all objects with mass have an attractive force, that force we call gravity. The bigger the mass and the closer the mass, the stronger the attractive force.

But, as we learned, that's not saying anything. That doesn't prove God doesn't exist, or even that he's very highly improbable, which is actually what Dawkins is after. All it proves is that all observable phenomena are caused by the laws of nature.

Also important, and to be fair to Dawkins: he freely admits, as we all must, that we can't prove God doesn't exist, anymore than that celestial teapot Bertrand Russell talked about. That's not a basis for proving that something does exist, just because we can't prove it doesn't. What he's after is proving that it's so statistically improbable that it would be foolish to believe in the supernatural in the same way that, it is so statistically improbable that an apple released from my hand (while I was standing on Earth, of course) would float away rather than fall that it would be foolish to believe the apple will float away.

He's saying that simple causes can lead to improbably complex effects. He asserts that the reverse is not true. Improbably complex causes cannot lead to simple effects. A complex cause is at least, if not moreso, as complex as its complex effect. Evolution is the solution to the complex creatures we see around us. Evolution says that a simple cause can slowly, gradually, lead to a complex effect.

(The evolution of the human eye is an oft-cited example. It became more and more complex over millions of years by natural selection, since seeing more clearly and in color gave us the advantage we needed to survive long enough to reproduce. This is true in reverse, where you find cave-dwelling animals with no eyes, because eyes give no survival advantage when you live without light. Interestingly about eyes, many prey animals have great peripheral vision, and their eyes are on the sides of their heads, so that they can better see predators sneaking up on them. Many predator animals have great binocular vision, where the two eyes' fields of vision overlap because the eyes are on the front of the head, which gives great depth perception. Just what you need to land that caribou. Also, since our eyes are on the front, that puts humans in the hunter category. Go us!)

This makes sense to most people, when properly explained. There are more examples than just in natural history. Children develop slowly and become more complex adults. Tadpoles become frogs. Ocean ripples in the wind become huge breakers. This theory, that drops in the bucket eventually fill the Pacific Ocean, isn't so offensive. It seems to be that many things work in this way. In fact, spiritual growth is seen in this same way. No one, upon converting to a particular faith is instantly the group genius. It takes time to grow in understanding, to grow slowly in faith until enough time has passed and everyone around gazes in awe at the person standing on the mountain of knowledge.

In fact, I would go so far as to propose that the God described in the Old and New Testaments fits this profile--working over billions of years in a region so vast we can't comprehend its vastness and yet working with simple, comprehensible laws--than some tiny God who can only work with 3,000 years and only on Earth. If I may be so arrogant as to quote the Bible:

Before the mountains were brought forth or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God. (Psalm 90:2)

Our current cosmological knowledge throws around distances and timescales so far beyond our own comprehension that a good popular science writer has to make analogies of pennies going to the moon and back and other such pictures in order for us to understand. If the Abrahamic God were described as limited, believers in the One God would be in a whole lot more trouble.

Fortunately for these believers, the universe we live in is millions of times more vast and old than we thought. You'd think there would be rejoicing. Rather than having dominion over something unpredictable, capricious, and incomprehensible, we are able to understand more and more about the way the world and the universe around our tiny planet works, to the effect that we can predict the trajectories of our rockets to the moon (if not the weather for two weeks from next Tuesday). The first books of the Old Testament were written down 5,000 years ago, and the New Testament 2,000 years ago, and so it is fortunately silent about the specifics of life today. If the Bible promised us we'd have flying cars in 1999, and we didn't, we'd be in trouble. Fortunately for Christians, the Old Testament only predicts the arrival of Jesus. Prophecy already fulfilled! (You're understandably less satisfied if you're a believer in Judaism. Your Messiah is still on the way.)

What I'm trying to say to biblical literalists is: Nuts! Why you tryin' to drag God down? First of all, the Bible doesn't say Earth is 3,000 years old, Ussher did, and I hardly trust him nearly so well as I trust the Word of God. Second of all, the Bible's filled with metaphors and parables, so why are you reading something literally that was never meant to be read literally? Third of all, science is telling us that the universe is simultaneously simple and complex, that existence itself is governed by simple laws that interact in infinitely complex and improbable ways, and that randomness and unpredictability and irrationality is an inherent component of the universe and still exists side-by-side with predictability and rationality without the whole dang thing imploding on itself. That sounds a heck of a lot more like the God of the Realm than some dinky little Earth-god who's only been presiding over a tiny little rock in the boonies of the Milky Way Galaxy for three grand and change.

Sorry, anti-creationist rant over, and we're back to Dawkins and his assertion that God is the most complex being possible, and therefore he can't be at the beginning of the universe, since the history of the universe works from simplicity to complexity.

Assuming you agree with his axiom that God is complex (as opposed to being simultaneously complex and simple or just flat-out simple), you then have to agree with his assumption that complex causes are always at least as improbable as their effect, which is to say that an effect can't be more probable than its cause. Is that true? You have to decide whether or not you think it is.

Can you think of a complex cause that produces a simple effect? Of something complex causing something highly probable?

If you think awhile I bet you can. I thought awhile, and I decided that I could.

When you touch a hot stove, a series of complex chemical reactions occurs, resulting in the simple effect that you remove your hand from the stove. Complex things can cause simple things. The whole can be simple, and more than the sum of all its discrete parts. And that complex set of reactions in my nerves to my spinal chord when I touch the hot stove will always result in me pulling my hand away. Highly probable outcome, I daresay.

But, you can argue, the human body's nervous system is the result of evolution, which is what Dawkins is arguing, that all complex things are the result of earlier, simpler forms. You're right. Cause to prior cause all the way back to the first cause (unless you don't believe in a linear worldview) at the beginning of the universe, and we're at the same problem. Part of the problem, as we said, is your definition of "complex" and "simple". Which is more complex, an orangutan or a symphony? Which is simpler, the point of singularity inside a black hole or the color yellow?

If you follow that logic, that the current, complex outcome is more improbable than its cause, which is more improbable than its cause, then you increase and increase in probability (or decrease in improbability, same thing) all the way back to the beginning of the universe, which approaches the limit of having a probability of 1, meaning that it always happens, meaning that it must, of necessity, be more probable than all the events that occur after, and therefore it happened because it always happens.

Ok... But is that science? Is that a "crane," as Dawkins calls it, that lifts us up out of our ignorance onto a new platform of greater understanding? No. It has absolutely zero explanatory power. It's the same as saying the universe began because God planned it that way, so it had to happen.

Gopnik, Alison. "How Babies Think," Scientific American, Vol. 303, 1. July 2010, 56-61.

We're programmed to latch onto statistically unlikely things from childhood. Gopnik, in a 2010 article in Scientific American, references a 2008 study out of the University of California, Berkeley, saying that eight-month-old babies were shown a box of Ping-Pong balls, some red, some white, in a certain proportion (58). Gopnik gives the example of 80% white and 20% red. Gopnik explains that

the babies were more surprised (that is, they looked longer and more intently at the scene) when the experimenter pulled four red balls and one white one out of the box--an improbable outcome--than when she pulled out four white balls and one red one. (58)

Gopnik goes on to explain how this is a very scientific approach to the world, examining evidence and paying more attention to those things that don't match our expectations and to use the statistics of everyday events to draw conclusions about cause and effect in the world around them.

So, our brain tends to ignore expected and predictable things (things it already comprehends) and pay more attention to (and thus be more likely to remember) things that are improbable. It's a form of the confirmation bias. You don't remember all the times you thought of a friend and she didn't call you right at that moment, but you do remember the time you thought of your friend and she did call you that moment.

Jumping from science to philosophy, you can hypothesize that this propensity to focus on the improbable; to remember the reasons we believe something and forget the reasons why we shouldn't; to anthropomorphize inanimate objects; and to hold out hope for an improbable event are all reasons different religions take the forms they do. If your philosophical view is that all observable phenomena have natural causes, then it follows you might attribute this wholly to psychology (or to psychology and sociology both, perhaps). If your philosophical view allows supernatural explanations, then you might attribute this to a mark of the design or plan by a divine creator to make us more likely to believe in him (or her or it).

Does that mean we should stop investigating psychology because we believe it was allowed to develop the design it did to better prepare us to believe in the supernatural? No. Most faiths incorporate the tenet that greater understanding leads to greater appreciation, which leads to greater faith. But does the fact that humans mistake curtain cords for cobras because of the way our brains evolved mean supernatural things never happen? No. It means we should take any eyewitness testimonials (both here and in a court of law) with heavy grains of salt and search for other, more solid evidence in the meantime, but it still comes down to your interpretation of the evidence. Either you think all the laws that have functioned elegantly and intricately for billions of years to create such beautifully complex simplicity were created by an intelligent designer, or you don't. Either they are the way they are because they are, or they are the way they are because someone made them. Scientifically, we can't say anything more than that. (Yet.)

Let's do some thought experiments.

First one: let's say that non-biased chemists discover in an accurate experiment that is successfully replicated by other experts in the field of chemistry that the probability of the origin of life is one in one trillion billion(1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, or a 1 followed by 21 zeroes), rather than only one in a one billion billion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000, or a 1 followed by 18 zeroes). That is, it is even more improbable (1,000 times more improbable) than we thought taking account of any and all natural causes, and therefore had to have been the subject of divine influence. Would Dawkins concede that the origin of life is too improbable to account for purely natural causes? My guess is not. My guess is that he would argue that the numbers for the probability are subjective and therefore inaccurate (a good objection in the real world, but this is a thought experiment where the experiment's conclusion is accurate) or that, because of his application of the anthropic principle, it is self-evident, by our existence, that life can be no more improbable than one in a one billion billion, because only natural causes could have been involved. Do you see the fallacy?

It is obvious that no cosmic theory, philosophical or scientific, can be true if it proposes something that means we can't exist. Because we do exist, and so we have to be included in any theory. Theism includes us, and so does atheism. That's as far as the anthropic principle goes. It can only be used to declare invalid theories that don't allow us to exist. Because we do exist, existential crises aside. It is a petitio principii again to use our existence without the aid of an intelligent designer as a beginning premise to later prove that we don't exist because of the aid of an intelligent designer.

Back to the thought experiment above. After testing and testing, all and sundry are only able to conclude that the origin of life is a one in a trillion billion event. Will died-in-the-wool atheists concede the point that an event occurred on Earth that, even accounting for the vastness of the universe and the number of available planets for different outcomes, cannot be accounted for with either statistics or the gradual development of complex results from simple causes? Perhaps. Sophisticated, reasonable ones would. Who would then concede that, because the science proved our existence to be outside the probability of natural causes, life on Earth must have been from a supernatural cause?

BUZZ! That's right. No one. Zip. Nada. (That's my guess. People are always more thoughtful than I assume.)

To a person, the objection would come: it must be the result of a natural law we don't understand. Or perhaps they would just deny the truth of the scientific experiment's conclusion because they would say it can't be true, since it doesn't match the observable universe, where life is a one in a billion billion occurrence. Perhaps they would argue that the scientists were biased or falsifying data or had a secret Christian agenda.

(There's nothing wrong with that reaction, and I think it's just good critical thinking not to believe everything the latest pop science studies conclude.)

You know who that sounds like, a group of people who have defined themselves into a box and refuse to let any evidence contradict their foregone conclusion about the origin of humanity and the universe? That's right: biblical literalists.

Fortunately for us, chemists haven't discovered that the origin of life is too improbable to be caused naturally, because we'd all kill each other fighting over it.

(Incidentally, I don't think the thought experiment above would conclude what I said they would, simply because I think life--not intelligent life, just life--is more prevalent in the universe than just little ole us. Perhaps even intelligent life.)

Many of the other points of the book consist of: If God is perfectly good, why would he do this? If I were God, I wouldn't sit back and let natural laws do my work.

First off, don't you think theologians haven't already seen this seeming contradiction (along with the other points in the Bible that are vague or contradictory) and discussed for as long as people have sat around talking about religion?

Second off, the character of a highly improbable being has no bearing on your argument, since you're arguing against all gods, not just the perfectly good Christian one. (It could be that the God chilling up on his sky-cloud is sadistic.)

And third off, you're not God! What you would or would not do if you were an omniscient being has no bearing on that being's probability of existence. If I were God, I would put a surplus of pink unicorns in Minnesota, but the fact that there are no unicorns in Minnesota doesn't prove whether supernatural events exist or not. Mostly, Dawkins sounds angry that God doesn't do exactly what Dawkins wants him to. But that's no basis for a scientific experiment. Charm quarks don't do what I want them to do, but that has no bearing on their existence. (If charm quarks did what I wanted them to, they would create a surplus of pink unicorns in Minnesota. Absolutely charming.) Absolutely charming.

Which is to say that science has proved that God did not set down all the people and animals on the Earth, fully-formed and functioning, like so many pieces on a chessboard.

Ok, great. Yes. But that's not your stated purpose! Your stated purpose is to prove that supernatural causes are so statistically improbable as to be non-existent. All you've proved is that it's laughably unlikely that God set down all the people and animals on Earth, fully-formed and functioning, like so many pieces on a chessboard, because evolution through the process of natural selection gets us to the same complexity.

I'm sorry, but that's not proving God doesn't exist. You still have to deal with your own version of the infinite regress: where did the laws come from?

Dawkins says of the infinite regress in regards to God breaking

"Geriatric Musical"

That's not one of the words. That's just a phrase I saw on one of the many deliciously hilarious t-shirts that the Chinese shops stock for sale here in Tonga. I wanted to get this party started right (i.e. no centaurs). The geriatric musical way.

Today's post is devoted to words (as opposed to all my other posts, which were devoted to smells), and the slippery meanings thereof.

First, we'll start with a random list of words that were originally coined in the good 'ole U.S. of A. Nothing like a little patriotism to increase the intrigue. This list was compiled by cross-searching my dictionary (what I do in my spare time, because I don't have the internet to show me videos) for the phrase "originally US," which denotes that the word was first recorded in the United States. So what has our great country contributed to the language spoken by Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Cher? 103 words hits come up, but I'll only list a few [read: a lot].

ballyhoobarfbasket casebat (as in one's eyelashes)bebopblizzardbogusbonanzaboogiebosscaboodlecafeteriacageycahootscampuscanoodlecatnip (as opposed to catmint elsewhere)cavortcheapskateconeggs Benedictescalatorfan (as in people are fans of the Yankees)fazegiddy-upgizmoglitchgobbledegookgunkhighfalutinhijackhip (as in being cool)hoodlumhootenannyhornswogglehumdingerhunky-doryjalopyjamboreejinxjive (as in talk deceptively)leveemoolahmoseynerdoodlespowrowdysplurgestompstunt (as in jumping over flaming cars)teensytalkathontelethontizzyva-va-voomvimwidgetyipyuckzapNot so bad, hey? Apparently we love to party, what with our ballyhoos, bonanzas, hootenannies, and jamborees, where we love to bebop, boogie, cavort, mosey, and stomp to our hearts' content. Giddy-up, because we're a rowdy bunch. We like to splurge with our oodles of moolah (unless we're cheapskates), and we pull cowboy stunts like the hoodlums that we are. We're all vim and va-va-voom, and we arrive on the scene like POW! We'll get you in a tizzy, because we're hip. We're the boss. The other bogus glitches don't faze us.

That's all hunky-dory.

More worrisome, to me, is how many words we've contributed that amount to pulling the wool over someone else's eyes. We can be cagey, and in cahoots, we can con and jive and hijack your jalopy. We'll hornswoggle you.

We're a teensy bit nerdy, with our gizmos and widgets, but sometimes it's just a bunch of highfalutin gobbledegook. We created telethons and talkathons, and escalators so we don't have to use the stairs to the cafeteria. Well, you know what? I'm a fan. Yeehaw!

My perverse mining of the dictionary's secrets didn't stop there, my friends. Oh, no. I found this definition by chance:

hemidemisemiquaver: half of a demisemiquaver

Er... Right. Duh. How could I not have known that? And I found all these words, which actually do exist, but are usually seen in their negative forms. Well, I'm an optimist. From now on, these words need to be added back into daily speech. No more will these things be unbeknownst to me. It's not an unwieldy amount, and I refuse to be ruthless with my word choice. From now on, I will be ruthful. I will be ruly. But maybe also a little dauntful, since it's so hard to be fearless all the time.

Use these words! Not those words!

couth (not uncouth), wieldy (not unwieldy), gainly (not ungainly), canny (not uncanny), adulterated (not unadulterated), beknownst (not unbeknownst), blinking (not unblinking), kempt (not unkempt), ruly (not unruly), ruthful (not ruthless), dauntful (not dauntless)

You may be thinking (or talking out loud, I don't judge), what's with all the logophilia up in here?

Well, dearest gainly friends of mine, it all started with a little Review called the Princeton Review. I believe I've mentioned this Review before. Just to bring it to mind for you, this is the Review that brought my confidence to a dauntful, adulterated puddle of teardrops.

Because of the paranoia seed thumbed deep into the soil of my brain by the Princeton Review, I find myself questioning...er, myself...about every vocabulary word I come across. Because of their distinction between words you know and words you sort of know (the difference between words you can give an exact dictionary definition for and words you can't) when learning vocabulary for the GRE, every time I come across one of those highfalutin', fancy-shmancy words them literary writers use, I stop and have a panic attack.

All right, not that extreme, but I've picked up this annoying tendency to ask myself, "Self, can you give an exact dictionary definition for the word 'stridulate'?" And my Self answers, "Self, I can't give an exact dictionary definition for the word 'house,' and you want me to define 'stridulate'? Stop making impossible demands! Start pulling your own weight!" Inner turmoil aside, I start chewing my lip every time I encounter one of these words. Is the writer using it in a unique way that's sort of strange because they're a writer and they're allowed to compare clouds to cotton candy, or am I misunderstanding their true meaning because I've got a false definition of the word in my head?

And, with my embarrassing black-eye incident with the word "laconic" always close to my recollection, I'm questioning myself even on words I thought I knew.

(I thought "laconic" meant lazy, and I learned from Princeton Review that it meant "using few words". It happened again with "plausible," which has an obscure second meaning of "glib, smoothly convincing," and prodigal, which I thought was the adjective form of "prodigy" and learned that it meant "extravagantly reckless and wasteful; lavish." And using my keen understanding of Latin roots, I thought "hortatory" meant "having to do with gardens," and was surprised to learn it meant "aiming to exhort." Oops. And did you know that "die" has another meaning, that of a "device used for cutting or moulding metal or stamping designs on coins or medals," and that, therefore, when Caesar said "the die is cast" [jacta est alea!] he wasn't talkingabout dice?)

For example, I come across the word "eminent," as in an "eminent philosopher". I think to myself, "Self, can you give an exact dictionary definition for the word 'eminent'?"

And my Self answers, "Dammit, Self, no! I'm still trying to think of the name of that band you forgot for the song you heard on the radio, and now you want me to just drop everything I'm doing and start defining things?! Fine! 'Important, noteworthy' Are you happy now?"

I frown. That's not an exact dictionary definition. Those are just synonyms, and I'm not even sure they're correct. After all, how do those words figure into the meaning of "eminent domain"? I think I've found another word for which I've mixed up the meaning by relying only on context clues.

"I'm going to look up the word, just in case, Self."

"Whatever you want, Self," myself responds petulantly.

So I look up the definition in Concise Oxford English Dictionary, and what do you know?

"respected and distinguished within a particular sphere"

I was right!

You'd think I'd feel triumphant that I knew a word I thought I knew, but I just feel slimy. I've wasted all that time typing the word "eminent" into the dictionary on my computer just to find that I could have kept reading the book. I can feel the dictionary laughing at me.

"You don't even know the definition of "eminent"? What are you, obtuse?"

"No!" I cry. "I did know it! I swear I did! But I did!"

Maybe you'd say my real problem is anthropomorphism, and I'll admit to you I do transfer human feelings and qualities to many more things than I should, but in this case I felt too defensive to tell the dictionary to stop laughing at me because it, being a computer program, could feel neither spite nor superciliousness. It happened countless times. I can only come up with synonyms for the words and think I must not know the answer only to find out that I do. All right, not countless times, but enough times that I got frustrated and wanted to balefully tell the Princeton Review to throw itself off a cliff.

Perhaps it's because the dictionary version I have is the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, but I found that their "exact dictionary definitions" turned out to be my synonyms put into a phrase.

Example: I associate "obdurate" with "stubborn," and, if anyone stopped me on the street and said, "Good day to you ma'am, but by chance do you know the meaning of the word 'obdurate'?" I would nod courteously, say "stubborn" and continue on my way. But say that wayward stranger (I'm assuming wayward; strangers always are, but perhaps he knew exactly where he was going and was a very excogitative person by nature) wanted an exact dictionary definition?

"No, ma'am," this perhaps wayward stranger would say, "but I'm studying for the GRE's, you see, and I need an exact dictionary definition to make sure I KNOW the word."

I'd hem and haw then grimace then bite my lip then shrug.

"I'm sorry, but I can't help. You could try the library; it's just down the street."

"Thank you, but I was just heading there now, and then I have a lunch appointment at one-thirty and then I will walk to the park for a fifteen minute stroll."

(I knew he wasn't wayward!)

But, lo and behold, (or maybe just lo will do, beholding after you've already lo-ed is rather repetitive) the Concise Oxford English Dictionary gives me this exact definition:

"stubbornly refusing to change one's opinion or course of action"

Now, I don't know about you, but that sounds a lot like stubborn. Or obstinate, if you prefer. And, again, I don't know about you, but my brain has a limited capacity and needs also to remember facts like when the War of 1812 was and why Andrew Jackson sacked New Orleans after we'd already "won". (If you haven't solved any of the problems you went to war for, does agreeing to stop killing each other really constitute a victory? And when will those damn British finally stop impressing our red-blooded American sailors? And get out of those forts and out of Canada altogether! Oregon is ours, Great Britain! 54-40 or Fight! or, alternatively, Polk for President!)

All right, I know that's about forty years of American history in a few short sentences, but I've always been more of a fox than a hedgehog.

Tangent: If you want to read about a real empire-builder, look up President Polk. He poked across America. Tangent Complete.

If I walk around remembering long-winded--prolix, if you will, and I do hope you will--dictionary definitions when a synonym will do, Andrew Jackson's modus operandi will get squeezed out, and I'll think for the rest of my life that he was just obtuse. A great disservice to Old Hickory, if you ask me.

Tangent: looking up the definitions has been helpful for the pronunciation of many words, which I don't use in polite company--even if they're the absolute perfect word for the meaning I'm trying to convey!--because I'm afraid I'll pronounce it wrong. Tangent Complete.

The point of this post?

To introduce a list of new vocabulary I learned while reading. I won't tell you which ones I already knew and which ones I didn't. I'm trying to learn to care less what others think, and so I don't care if you think I'm stupid for not knowing a particular word you happen to know. Feel superior. Honestly, do. It will help me with my self-improvement efforts when I scoff your feelings away with a flick of my wrist.

Also, though, it helps me learn when I present the information to others, so really you, my faithful readers, are but means to my vocabulary-building end.

So, for all you studying for the GRE or planning to read Catch-22 (where two thirds of these words came from), read on, friend, read on.

[Author's Note: All definitions come from Concise Oxford English Dictionary. As always. Because I don't have internet. There are, as titularly stated, 100 words. Feel free to skip on down, should you not suffer from an inferiority complex with your dictionary, as I acutely do. Alternatively, read only a few definitions, and desultorily, at that. I suggest #9, in regards to how you should feel about this blog, #15, in regards to how you should view my prose style, #75, the group I'm in here in Peace Corp Tonga, and #88, the year I was propitiously born.]

1. acrimonious: characterized by acrimony; angry and bitter

2. acute: (1)critical; serious; coming sharply to a crisis; severe; (2) perceptive; shrewd; highly developed; (3) (of an angle) less than 90 degrees; (4) (of a sound) high; shrill

3. adroit: clever or skilful

4. afflatus: a divine creative impulse or inspiration

5. a fortiori: with a yet stronger reason than a conclusion previously accepted

6. antipodal: the direct opposite of something

7. aplomb: self-confidence or assurance

8. apophthegm: (United States: apothegm) a concise saying or maxim

9. apotheosis: (1) the highest point in the development of something; (2) elevation to divine status

10. apotropaic: supposedly having the power to avert evil or bad luck

11. argosy: a large merchant ship

12. assay: (1) the testing of a metal or ore to determine its ingredients and quality; (2) a procedure for measuring the biochemical or immunological activity of a sample; (3) (archaic) attempt

13. avuncular: like an uncle in being kind and friendly towards a younger or less experienced person

14. babbitt metal: a soft alloy of tin, antimony, copper, and usually lead, used to line bearings

15. badinage: witty conversation

16. baleful: menacing; having a harmful effect

17. bear garden: a scene of uproar and confusion

18. bilious: (1) affected by or associated with nausea or vomiting; lurid or sickly; (2) spiteful or bad-tempered

19. campanile: a bell tower, especially a free-standing one

20. captious: tending to find fault or raise petty objections

21. chignon: a knot or coil of hair arranged on the back of a woman's head

[Author's Note: What the heck, Oxford? Men can't have chignons?]

22. circumspect: cautious or prudent

23. colloquium: an academic conference or seminar

24. concupiscence: lust

25. congeries: (plural same) a disorderly collection

26. convalescent: recovering from an illness or medical treatment; a convalescent person

27. coruscate: flash or sparkle

28. corvée: (1) a day's unpaid labour owed by a vassal to his feudal lord; (2) forced labour exacted in lieu of taxes

29. coryphée: a leading dancer in a corps de ballet

30. crepuscular: relating to or resembling twilight

31. croup: inflammation of the larynx and trachea in children, associated with infection and causing breathing difficulties

[Author's Note: as well the rump of a horse, as we learned last time.]

32. cynosure: a person or thing that is the centre of attention or admiration

33. desultory: lacking purpose or enthusiasm

34. diaphanous: light, delicate, and translucent

35. dissipated: overindulgent in sensual pleasures

36. down: gently rolling hill

37. effulgent: shining brightly

38. effusive: (1) expressing gratitude, pleasure, or approval in an unrestrained manner; (2) relating to or denoting igneous rocks poured out as lava and later solidified

39. eminent: (1) respected and distinguished within a particular sphere; (2) notable; outstanding

40. epigram: a concise and witty saying or remark; a short witty poem

41. ersatz: made or used as an inferior substitute for something else; not real or genuine

42. escarpment: a long, steep slope at the edge of a plateau or separating areas of land at different heights

43. etiolated: (1) pale and weak due to a lack of light; (2) having lost vigour or substance; feeble

44. execrable: extremely bad or unpleasant

45. expiate: atone for

46. farinaceous: made of the flour or meal of cereal grains, nuts, or starchy roots; powdery

47. fatuous: silly and pointless

48. fungible: replaceable by another identical item; mutually interchangeable

49. fustian: (1) a thick, hard-wearing twilled cloth with a short nap; (2) pompous speech or writing

50. gabardine: (1)a smooth, durable twill-woven worsted or cotton cloth; (2) (historical) a loose, long upper garment worn particularly by Jews

51. glib: fluent but insincere and shallow

52. homily: (1) a religious discourse; (2) a tedious moralizing lecture

53. hortatory: tending or aiming to exhort

54. implacable: (1) unable to be appeased; (2) unable to be stopped

55. inchoate: not fully formed or developed; rudimentary; confused or incoherent

56. indelible: (1) unable to be removed; (2) unable to be forgotten

57. ineffable: (1) too great or extreme to be expressed in words; (2) too sacred to be uttered

58. inexorable: (1) impossible to stop or prevent; (2) impossible to persuade by request or entreaty

59. infundibuliform: shaped like a funnel

60. inscrutable: impossible to understand or interpret

61. integument: a tough protective layer, especially of an animal or plant

62. intransigent: unwilling to change one's views or to agree

63. lay: (1) a short lyric or narrative poem meant to be sung; (2) a song

64. lissome: slim, supple, and graceful

65. maudlin: self-pityingly or tearfully sentimental

66. moil: (1) work hard; (2) move around in confusion

67. musette bag: (United States) a small knapsack

68. neoteny: the retention of juvenile features in the adult animal

69. numinous: having a strong religious or spiritual quality

70. otiose: (1) serving no practical purpose; (2) (archaic) idle

71. paddock: (1) a small field or enclosure where horses are kept or exercised; (2) an enclosure adjoining a racecourse or track where horses or cars are gathered and displayed before a race

72. palimpsest: (1) a parchment or other surface in which later writing has been superimposed on effaced earlier writing; (2) something bearing visible traces of an earlier form

73. paramnesia: a condition involving distorted memory or confusions of fact and fantasy

74. parturient: about to give birth; in labour

75. peremptory: insisting on immediate attention or obedience; brusque or imperious

76. perfunctory: carried out with a minimum of effort or reflection

77. peroration: the concluding part of a speech; the summing up

78. phlegmatic: unemotional and stolidly calm

79. plausible: smoothly convincing; glib

80. portentous: (1) of or like a portent; (2) overly solemn

81. prodigal: (1) wastefully extravagant; (2) lavish

82. prolix: (of speech or writing) tediously lengthy

83. propitious: (1) giving or indicating a good chance of success; favourable (2) (archaic) favourably disposed towards someone

84. proprietary: (1) relating to or characteristic of an owner or ownership (2) marketed under a registered trade name

85. pullulating: breed or spread so as to become extremely common; be very crowded; be full of life and activity

86. puissance: (1) a competitive test of a horse's ability to jump large obstacles in showjumping; (2)great power, influence, or prowess

87. raffish: jaunty; dashing; casually confident

88. redoubtable: formidable, especially as an opponent

89. relict: (1) an organism that has survived from an earlier period; (2) (archaic) a widow

90. ribald: coarsely or irreverently humorous

91. sedulous: showing dedication and diligence

92. sententious: given to moralizing in a pompous or affected manner

93. solicitude: care or concern

94. solipsism: (1) the view or theory that the self is all that can be known to exist (2) self-centeredness or selfishness

95. stanchion: an upright bar, post, or frame forming a support or barrier

96. stertorous: (of breathing) noisy and laboured

97. stochastic: having a random probability distribution or pattern that can be analysed statistically but not predicted precisely

98. stolid: calm, dependable, and showing little emotion or animation

99. stridulate: make a shrill sound by rubbing the legs, wings, or other parts of the body together

100. thrall: (1) the state of being in another's power (2) (archaic) a slave, servant, or captive

So what's the peroration of this fatuous, otiose post? Be glad you have internet, or you'll end up like me. A thrall to my dictionary (and an execrably mannered one, at that).

~~~Tyt~~~