FaleFor two years I lived with a Samoan family…and as many crazy stories I have to share about them, I am sure they have equally as many to tell about me. I loved living with them because they made my life so simple and easy. Food was almost always taken care of, the house was always cleaned (or in the process of being so) and there was always people to talk to. It was real enjoyable. Now, I am living on my own (until I can get a lock on the door to my bedroom and then I will have a few roommates). It is a big house and like all big houses it has a lot of upkeep. It is nice in some ways to be on my own again, but there is sometimes not enough hours in the day to get everything done. There aren’t doorknobs on most of the doors, allowing you sometimes to get locked inside a room….A huge problem if you are there by yourself. Also, mosquitoes swarm into my room, even though there is mosquito wiring on the windows….because I can’t shut my door and there is not mosquito wiring on the other windows. One of the bathrooms currently doesn’t have water for the toilet. The electricity runs on cash power, in which you put money on the meter to let the electricity run, and when your money runs out, your power also runs out. And because of having a full size refrigerator, my money goes quickly! I haven’t been there a week and have already run out of power twice! (The first day and again today.) The box to check and see how much power I have left is so high up that I have to climb on the windowsill to check it. The other difficult problem I am having is that I loved half of my stuff into my new house the day I arrived, but because the Peace Corps office hours and my office hours conflict with each other, I have been unable to retrieve my boxes. But the worst of my problems is in my kitchen. I currently have a giant slip and slide there….and no one can figure out while. Each day it looks as if several gallons of water have been spilled on the floor and as many times as I try to mop it up, more and more water shows up. It seems strange because it is coming from under the carpet (not real carpet, Samoan carpet!) I have had so many days of sliding around almost falling.With all of these problems to start off, it makes me miss having a nice stable family.

FaleFor two years I lived with a Samoan family…and as many crazy stories I have to share about them, I am sure they have equally as many to tell about me. I loved living with them because they made my life so simple and easy. Food was almost always taken care of, the house was always cleaned (or in the process of being so) and there was always people to talk to. It was real enjoyable. Now, I am living on my own (until I can get a lock on the door to my bedroom and then I will have a few roommates). It is a big house and like all big houses it has a lot of upkeep. It is nice in some ways to be on my own again, but there is sometimes not enough hours in the day to get everything done. There aren’t doorknobs on most of the doors, allowing you sometimes to get locked inside a room….A huge problem if you are there by yourself. Also, mosquitoes swarm into my room, even though there is mosquito wiring on the windows….because I can’t shut my door and there is not mosquito wiring on the other windows. One of the bathrooms currently doesn’t have water for the toilet. The electricity runs on cash power, in which you put money on the meter to let the electricity run, and when your money runs out, your power also runs out. And because of having a full size refrigerator, my money goes quickly! I haven’t been there a week and have already run out of power twice! (The first day and again today.) The box to check and see how much power I have left is so high up that I have to climb on the windowsill to check it. The other difficult problem I am having is that I loved half of my stuff into my new house the day I arrived, but because the Peace Corps office hours and my office hours conflict with each other, I have been unable to retrieve my boxes. But the worst of my problems is in my kitchen. I currently have a giant slip and slide there….and no one can figure out while. Each day it looks as if several gallons of water have been spilled on the floor and as many times as I try to mop it up, more and more water shows up. It seems strange because it is coming from under the carpet (not real carpet, Samoan carpet!) I have had so many days of sliding around almost falling.With all of these problems to start off, it makes me miss having a nice stable family.

Truly FamousYesterday while meeting up with some of my Samoan friends, I learned that my friend’s brother had watched me on the news. I usually talk in English to my Apia friends because that is basically all I knew when I met them. It was really funny because his brother was impressed that I knew the language, and was understandable from my interview. It was nice for my more English speaking friends to see what I can do. (It would have been nice to have a television to watch it on….)Also he told me that before the dateline change, my friends from group 82 and I (and some from 81 and 79) had our picture in the paper. It was about how Samoa was switching from the last sunset in the world to the first sunrise in the world. The picture was us in Falealupo enjoying the last sunset of 2009. My mission is to see if I can still find a copy of the article.

Coral Reef Academy You seem them around town, and can be amazed at what these kids can do. The Coral Reef Academy is a program for “troubled” children in the US, in which they come to Samoa to learn coping mechanisms. Hearing what they are, first gave me the impression of ulavale, horrible teenagers, but it is far from the truth. The children that attend school there always put their best foot forward and show the best mannerisms. Today, they came to visit my school, and put on such a nice musical performance. It was wonderful, because they brought a piece of their own cultures, which showed the children the diversity that lives in America. It was truly beautiful as all of the Coral Reef kids were of different races. Most of the people here think that if you come from America you are white and it is nice that they are able to go around showcasing the cultural diversity in the United States. They also shared some of the different musical styles in the US, and even had the children from my school join in with them. Without them realizing it, they are helping the Peace Corps out tremendously with our goals of showing Samoans what the people in the United States are like. Fa’afetai Coral Reef!

Another year begins…

I went to afternoon church the other week. That was unusual because I haven’t been to afternoon church for at least 6 months. Although the interminable Sunday afternoons can sometimes feel like “the long, dark tea-time of the soul” (thank you Douglas Adams), I really enjoy having that time entirely to myself.

This time, church was a special occasion. It marked the beginning of the school year. The tradition is for students to wear their school uniform, and the pastor says a special blessing for them and reminds them of their duties and whatnot as students in the upcoming year. I didn’t catch most of it because my Samoan isn’t up to it, but I got the gist.

However, I was surprised at how I felt. I went to the afternoon service out of a sense of obligation; I went to the service marking the beginning of the school year because I am a teacher at the school, but when I got there, I felt connected. I am a part of this routine, this ritual. Moreover, I’m ready for it. I know what is coming this year. I don’t even remember this service from last year, except that a bunch of kids were in pink and green, and the older kids were in shades of blue. This year, it mattered. Of course not all the students from my school were there, and not all the students at church were from my school (I don’t teach at the secondary school), but I felt so proud of my students. I want them to begin the new school year with a fresh outlook, a positive attitude, and the belief that they are improving themselves by trying their hardest at school. I also felt horribly sentimental and on the verge of tears at one point because – as many people in my village have already pointed out to me – this is my last year. This is the last year I can hope to pass something on to my students. This is the last year I can hope to make them love reading as much as I do. This is the last time I will lead my students into their new endeavors and ideas at school – or really the first year I will lead them at school because I didn’t know what I was doing last year. And then I’m gone. I won’t be at that church service next year. 26 months was unfathomable, but 10 months…is nothing. This is it.

Brida – Paulo Coelho

Brida is the story of one woman’s search for magic – for meaning in life, to find a way to love others, and how to relate to the world. Set in Ireland (read the introduction – I’m not sure if this is a true story or not), Brida tells us about the spiritual journey of the main character, Brida. She sets out looking for a path to follow. She finds the Tradition of the Sun, which in turn leads her to the Tradition of the Moon, commonly known as witchcraft. As she learns the secrets of the tarot, practices ceremonies and ritual dances, and learns to listen to her soul in an effort to awaken her Gift, Brida struggles with the difficulties of trying to pursue one path in light of vague lessons and a personal desire to remain free to choose any path. The story culminates with her Initiation into the Tradition of the Moon. She learns to combine both male power (the Tradition of the Sun) and female transformation (the Tradition of the Moon) into Wisdom that helps her to understand that we can’t understand the world. Brida is a great story in places, but it didn’t grab me like The Alchemist. Personally, I think the idea of magic and tarot cards and rituals are fun, but I have a hard time accepting them as reality. While I can relate to her story – especially the part about not wanting to limit herself to one path when there are so many other potential paths to take – I never really felt connected to the story the way that I did with The Alchemist. Brida goes through personal struggles, deals with disappointment, and has difficulty making decisions – everything from normal life that people can always relate to – but I was never really grabbed by a sense of pathos. I never got pulled into the story. I can relate to her, but I couldn’t relate to the book. What is the shape of the overall story? What is her primary struggle and why do I want her to overcome her challenges? There was too much emphasis on the magic and the rituals, and not enough information about Brida’s life, so I felt it lacked direction and connection. However, Paulo Coelho is still an amazing author, and it was a fairly quick read, so I would still recommend it if you find it lying around somewhere.

Malaga+falavelave=vacationI left Colorado on a snowy Sunday morning.  It was weird to see snow, since the previous day I was walking around in just a t-shirt, since it was so warm.  I was ready for my four flights and day and a half of traveling so I can arrive on my new island in Samoa.  My first flight left without a problem and I landed in Salt Lake City, which also had their mountains covered in snow.  I waited for my flight, and when the flight was supposed to board, we were notified about a problem.  The maintenance crew was onboard fixing something and they said they had to wait for a part to come in from Atlanta.  We were delayed by a few hours.  The good news was that I would be able to watch some of the NFL playoff game on TV (They switched off CNN news for it!), but the bad news was I was going to miss my connecting flight in Hawaii.  The problem with heading to this area, is there are not many flights a week.  To get to American Samoa there are only two flights a week.  Sunday and Thursday.  I was told that while I waited for the next flight I would be put up in a hotel in Waikiki Beach.  So my falavelave allowed me to have a little mini vacation in Hawaii.I tried to make the most of my time there, since it isn’t everyday that you are FORCED to vacation in Hawaii.  I did everything I possibly could fit in during that time period.  I went to the USS Arizona, which is always an interesting place with a great museum.  The following day I decided to scuba dive and explored a shipwreck.  The shipwreck was awesome as we were able to swim through the inside of the ship.  There were also the friendliest turtles on the ship.  They just swam right next to our shoulders and hung out with us.  After diving, I decided there was still plenty of time to do something else, so I went to the zoo.  The Honolulu Zoo is pretty nice, but my highlight there was spending time with the goats in the children’s petting zoo.  The following day I awoke before sunrise to hike Diamond Head.  Diamond Head is a beautiful hike that was carved into the mountain, making the ground completely uneven and rocky.  I should have been smart and brought my flashlight, but for some reason I went against my better judgment.   It was fun having the stars to guide me as I hiked the trail.  It was beautiful at the top and the sunrise was nice.  Afterwards, instead of resting in my nice, comfortable hotel room, I went to Sea Life Park.  At Sea Life Park, besides having amazing aquatic life, they have the world’s only wholphin.  The wholphin’s dad was a 2,000 pound killer whale and the mom was an ordinary dolphin.  They created a huge 900 pound wholphin.  She looks like a normal dolphin, just much bigger and stronger.  The dolphins and the wholpin seem friendly and are extremely talented in basketball.  I also got to spend time with my cousin whom I barely see because of geographical reasons.   When my flight was finally ready to take off, I was “adopted” by a Samoan family, who had me stay with them the entire time at the airport.  When I got on the plane, I was fortunate enough to get two seats to myself…My adopted family saw this, and the little 8 year old girl decided to join me…and talk to me for the entire 5 ½  hour flight.  I went through customs with my new family but said my goodbyes as we parted ways..me to another hotel, and them to their family’s house.  That flight was such a great experience as I got to review my Samoan and met so many friendly people.  A had many offers for rides while I was there.  The following day I was off again.  Back through customs, I was ready to arrive in Samoa.  Although I left on Friday, I arrived in Samoa on Saturday.  It was strange how one short half hour flight is the difference between a work day and the weekend.Although I am in a new setting, it is nice to be back to the country that has provided me with a nice home for the past 2+years.  It’s good to be back.

New Office Switching jobs can always be an interesting and rough period. Where in the last I would stare at the lush green plantations, now I have a view of the mountains (and a parking lot.) In my old school, it sometimes was so quiet you can hear the mice and other creatures hiding; now I have the Samoan Police Brass Band practicing all of the time next to me. In my old workplace, the hours were laxed, and people ALWAYS lied about their hours to show that they arrived early and stayed late. Now it is a strict 9-5 job (until next week when school starts…)In my old workplace someone would take a half day every other Wednesday to go to the bank for all of the staff members, now the bank is a ten minute walk (or less depending on your bank).In my old workplace, food was provided, and eating was often more important than teaching. Now, it is rare for someone to break for lunch.This city job is pretty different from rural working.

Let’s begin this with a pop quiz: Which of the following is not a typical Samoan name given to a boy? A.) Fale B.) Alofa C.) Fatu D.) Kyle

And since you all answered D.) that leaves me with this story to tell: I arrived in my village to begin my service on December 9, 2009. The very next day, there was a baby boy born in my village, and I found out that same evening that the mother had named him Kyle. I never fully appreciated what that meant at the time, but as the two years progressed, it started to become clearer.

Samoans give from their hearts. Kyle’s mother, naming her son after me, gave a gift from her heart, and a sign of respect towards me, as a new member of their community who had arrived to work within their village. As the two years passed, Kyle was a measure of my time in Samoa, as I was able to watch him grow. To tell myself I was going to live in a Samoan village for two years was an abstract concept. To watch a child grow during that same amount of time, served as something concrete.

And so the time passed…we had pictures together along the way, and I came to know their family better. As my last week in Samoa approached, Kyle’s mom came to me and invited me to join them for Kyle’s 2nd birthday celebration. It was Saturday, December 10th! Considering most Samoans don’t do much for their birthday celebration, I was so happy to see that Kyle’s dad went to town that morning to buy a birthday cake for his son. We also had a big spread of food to enjoy, before getting to dig into the cake! I had made Kyle a birthday card, and was sure to get some pictures of us together, some of which I later printed off and gave to his parents.

Now that I’ve left Samoa, I feel even more honored, to have a small child on the other side of the world, who was named after me. It’s another one of those lasting connections which will remain with me and that country I love so much. Perhaps Kyle will be able to look at those pictures when he’s older, and hear the story about a Peace Corps Volunteer who arrived in his village the day before he was born. And someday when I go back to visit my village, I hope to meet Kyle again, and remember the day his life began.

Kyle getting ready to blow out the candles on his birthday cake!

Kyle was warming up to me quite a bit on the day of his birthday, running over to me and wanting to sit near me. Here he even stood still for a picture.

Kyle and his dad.

SuperstarAbout two weeks ago I was on the jumbotron at a Nuggets game. It was really exciting, not only because I won an awesome prize and got to be courtside to see how tall the players really were, but it is always cool to see your face somewhere else.Last week I was on TV (Altitude), since I was at the location where they were filming the fans for the Nuggets away game against the Knicks. (Are you sensing my Nuggets pride yet?)I just finished being interviewed by TV3 about my current job assignment. The interview was conducted in English, and was pretty intimidating since I am still brand new to the job. Afterwards they asked if I wanted to try the interview in Samoan, they told me it is okay if it is broken Samoan with incorrect grammar. After the first question about my job, the rest of the questions were about learning the language and how I plan to use it in the future.I am a complete superstar, who knows where you will see my face next? Maybe a movie?

Back to WorkWow this feels strange….after a month and a half of just looking for things to do, here I am back to work feeling overwhelmed! I just started at my new job at Samoan Victims Support Group and I can already see how challenging of a year it is going to be. My job title is the Home School Coordinator. I knew it would be a lot of work, but after one day, I feel like I jumped into the deep end and I hope I can tread water long enough to survive!The school is basically for foster children who live in a shelter behind my house. Last year was the first year of the school, and it struggled, but it made it by. Like most schools in Samoa, sometimes there were teachers, but more often than not the older students watched the younger students. There was no curriculum and volunteer teachers came in to teach whatever they felt like. Often the entire school was placed together for lessons. Primary through College level learning the same thing….There is one full time teacher under me, and I have put her to work to help me try and devise a curriculum. I am going to piece together a curriculum for math(s), English, Social Science, Basic Science, Art, Physical Education, Technology and Library Education. The other teacher will do Christian Education and Samoan. After spending waaaaaaaay too much time on the internet, I have a guide on how I plan to do some of the curriculum and am just hoping that I can get the first week (or few) planned out before the start of school on Monday! I wasn’t thrown into the wild completely….we did receive a “curriculum” of some math worksheet, English tests and biblical stories.It is Tuesday and we decided to give a test to place the students into the multilevel, multi-ability classes. I have finished my sections of the English and Math for the two primary classes, and have a math test for the college level, and now I am just waiting for the other teacher the Samoan section of her tests. In addition by Friday, I was told to interview each student to help guide their placement.Yesterday we decided on a school schedule, as we are adding two additional hours to the school day from previous years. We are making progress…slowly but surely….I am just hoping I can keep my head above water long enough to pull it off!

Now that we are back from our vacation in New Zealand and have finished despidering our house, we have some time to make a few posts on our vacation. We started out in Auckland.  We went to The Loving House … Continue reading →

Greetings from the westernmost place on Earth...American Samoa. It has been a long trip back to Samoa, since I left on Sunday, and although I leave in just a few short hours back to Samoa on a half hour flight, I won't arrive until Saturday. This is do to many factors...The first getting to Samoa is much harder than a year ago when there was a nonstop flight from Los Angeles. I had to take four flights to get to the mainland, and 4 flights to get back to Samoa. On Sunday while I was waiting for my flight in Salt Lake City, Utah (I never realized how beautiful those mountains are...it is a perfect view right outside the airport.) my plane broke. It had maintenance issues and while we awaited a new part, many of us were scrambling around to figure out our connecting flights. Most people were just heading to other Hawaiian islands, which is easy as there are many flights out a day, and I think I was the only exception. "You know there aren't many flights to PaGo PaGo" the airline attendant told me as I chuckled with the hard emphasis on the G's. The next flight was not until Thursday, so I would have to wait it out in Honolulu until then (what a hard task!).

Hawaii was full of adventure. I packed so much into those four days that I made it really worthwhile. I went to the USS Arizona, scuba dove a ship wreck, went to the zoo to visit the lion from Denver (and hang out with goats in the petting zoo), sunrise hike up Diamond Head, and a trip to Sea Life Park (where I got to see the only wholphin in the world-Mom was a dolphin and Dad was a Killer whale which made a gigantic dolphin weighing 900 pounds.), and hung out with my cousin who for geographical reasons, I barely ever see. I also continued on my quest to eat America and eat everything I can possibly....which was so delicious!

Thursday came, and upon arriving at the airport, I was thrilled to see so many happy Samoan faces. (Not to say that Hawaii isn't full of them as well!) I got myself adopted into a family, and when no one was sitting next to me on my flight, a little girl name Katie decided best friends sit together. Katie talked to me the entire trip, quizzing me on my Samoan and telling me about EVERYTHING! It was really cute how the father was always waiting for me to catch up so we can do everything together, even going through customs.

Thursday night, I recieved my last treat of airconditioning and hot water in a hotel in Tutuila (American Samoa), and today, Friday, I travel back to Western Samoa.

As you probably know, while I was away Samoa decided to skip a day (Dec. 29th) and go into the future by moving the international date line. Fridays are good days to skip as you go directly into the weekend. I am glad I can follow their advice and go straight into Saturday.

It will be nice to be back in Apia, and I am really looking forward to the next year.

Let the adventures begin!

Hotel Babylon – Imogen-Edward Jones and Anonymous Hotel Babylon is over a decade of behind-the-scenes gossip, scandal, and excitement in the luxury hotels of London squeezed into one 24-hour shift. Set in the fictional Hotel Babylon with some name changes to protect privacy, everything else in the book, we are assured, is completely true. Hotel Babylon is told by a man working the reception desk. As the reader, we help check-out all the guests – inspecting all their bills – answer phone calls from mad hotel guests, scan the crowd for goods dealers who supply the hotel with black market wine and caviar, and keep track of anything that could potentially harm the reputation of the hotel – whether it’s prostitutes, homeless people, drunks, or angry guests. We also get to hear the back story of the VIP customers who routinely drop as much in tips as they spend on a night at the hotel, or are so regular at the hotel that it is hardly a shock when they die in their room. We learn the difference between the chambermaids and the house cleaners, why the head chef always acts crazy, and how hotels finally manage to sell all those ridiculously expensive wines that have been sitting in storage for years. Basically, the more money you spend, the more you can get away with, and this book documents all the scandal.

This book is a record of the entire day, and because it is ten years condensed into a 24-hour shift, we see how the dynamic of the hotel changes from day to night. It reads like a journal, and moves quickly from one topic to the next. Whether it is relaying stories of celebrities behaving badly or reporting actual incidents from the hotel, we get it all, and it just keeps coming. It is highly entertaining, often unexpected, and quite a ridiculous look at how people behave so differently when they are away from home and think they have no limits.

I am not a competitive person. I refuse to play sports with or against the competitive team. I refuse to play games to see who will win. I only like competitions when they are ridiculous, the outcome doesn’t matter, and nobody talks about it as soon as it is finished. Competition takes all the fun out of any activity. However, I do live a very comparative life. I am always checking out who is doing what, how well they are doing it, and making sure that I am doing better than anybody else. This probably explains a lot about my grades and why group projects frustrate me so much, but it can be absolutely detrimental in Peace Corps.

Before I came to Samoa, I asked the few people I knew currently serving in Peace Corps what their experience was like so I would have an idea of what to expect. The gist of all the answers I got back was “I can’t really explain it – everybody is different.” I understand that completely now. Every time I see another PCV, I always have a million stories to tell because even though we are all rural primary school teachers in Samoa, my life is so vastly different from what any other PCV in Samoa is experiencing that I always have news. It is really great to share stories because I usually get new ideas from other PCVs every time I talk to them. I also take comfort in the fact that other people are struggling with parts of their PC service, and feel so lucky that I don’t rats that invade my room and bite the skin off my toes at night (that happened to another PCV), I don’t have a principal who threatens to get rid of me because I interfere with corporal punishment at school (that happened to another PCV), and I don’t have to eat pisupo (canned corned beef) on a regular basis (whereas some other PCVs do get it on a regular basis). But mostly, I don’t like to talk about PC life with other PCVs because I can’t help but feel that everyone else is doing so much better than me.

Nothing cements that feeling better than coming straight off a long vacation into a mid-service conference full of lesson planning, reading strategies, and…success stories. Success stories from other PCVs make me want to hide in a deep, dark cave on the other side of the world, and even that might not be far enough away to protect me from feeling inadequate. I live a perfectly wonderful, effective, helpful PC life as long as I don’t talk to anybody else about it. But as soon as I hear what other people are doing, all those great things I think I may have achieved lose their luster. However, I’ve also noticed that other PCVs feel this way too. Great, but not even marginally helpful to pull me out of that fifty feet of crap beneath rock bottom.

Whereas this effect was particularly devastating at our training last year, I seem to have more of a buffer to it this year. I think this is due to a lot of things. Some mix of feeling more confident in my achievements, seeing the progress of my students over the course of the year, seeing how much I am a part of my village, how much I can talk to other people in Samoan, etc., etc. – everything has improved over the course of a year. I think the most important part though is that Peace Corps has been a huge lesson in focusing only on what you are doing and not concerning yourself with what other people are (or are not) doing. I learned this at school because it does me no good to get frustrated when all my teachers show up an hour and a half after me, but still sign in saying they got there ten minutes after I did. I also learned this because some people are better at teaching drama to their students so they can put together a play for the whole school at the end of the term. I haven’t taught high school drama for a couple of years. I don’t have that experience. I’m not great at making other people do what I want them to do, I’m not great at playing rugby (I haven’t even tried, actually), and I’m not great at swimming. I like sitting on the beach, I like reading books, and I like as much conversation as I can handle (sometimes that is a lot, sometimes that is very little). There are too many things in the world beyond our control – basically everything. I’m learning not to concern myself with it so much, and as a result, I’m not as upset by it. I wish I had learned this earlier, but with my comparative nature, I think this is one of those things that I can only learn by blunt and brutal force. It seems to be working.

My last picture with year 8, after

their prize giving--Dec. 2, 2011.

As I believe I've said in the past, year 8 and I had a unique relationship over the past two years. When we first started our journey together in February of 2010, I was still reaching for the reigns on teaching in a foreign country and they were perhaps still grappling at how to respond to a tall white guy who wore glasses and called himself their teacher. But nevertheless, we made it through the challenges and growing pains of the beginning and quickly came to love our time together. I spent the most time with those 8 students during my teaching assignment at the primary school. I am so grateful for their smiles, persistence and patience as we traveled together each and every day.

Looking back now, it's hard to believe that they were all strangers in the beginning--so much so that I was forced to take their pictures that first week of school with them holding their names in front of them, so I could study their faces. Now they are people I will remember for the rest of my life.

As one of my going away gifts to them, I printed those first pictures of them, which most of them had long forgotten about. I will share them now with you, so you can see how they have grown, comparing them to their current pictures from 2011! I'll also take this opportunity to share a little bit about what I'll remember about each of them! Congratulations to Year 8!

Penina

Penina was like the mother of the room. She was looking out for others along the way--including helping them cheat on a couple occassions. Of all the kids, I think she shows the most signs of wanting to become a teacher someday.

Salote

Salote was the one I could always count on to answer a question I had asked, or to offer to come up to the board to write out an answer. She's a great reader as well.

Christopher

Christopher was one of my weaker students, but the amount he grew during our time together was so amazing to see. This kid never gave up, and he fought hard each and every day--with a smile on his face!

Luisa

Luisa was my steady worker who I always could count on. If I needed to trust someone with a certain task, she was the one I'd ask.

Saulo

Saulo was my translator in times of need. He also made a great aid, helping the slower learners after he was finished with his work--a very gifted student.

Neueli

Neueli was the one who kept my spirits high on a bad day. He always came bouncing into my room every morning with a smile on his face and wasn't afraid to give me a hug.

Perise

Perise arrived a term late in 2010, having moved from American Samoa, so I didn't get an early picture of her. She was my librarian. Anytime I needed the books organized, or supplies from the library, she was my go-to person.

PRIZE GIVING PICTURES

In a previous blog I posted on December 3, 2011, I wrote about this year’s prize giving ceremony at my school. However, at the time I wasn’t able to post any pictures from that special day, so I wanted to take this opportunity to tie up that loose end. I’ll post the pictures below with a short description about each one. Again, prize giving is the last day of school for Samoan students where they receive their awards for the school year. This year I found myself holding back emotions as I knew that day was the official end of my work at the school. We had a great celebration, and the kids were as happy as ever!

The evening before prize giving all the year 7 and 8 kids came up to the school to decorate and clean for the event. Here the kids are placing palms around the outside posts of the school for decoration.

The national flower of Samoa, the Teuila, was used for decoration at the school. All the kids were responsible for bringing a few to help with the cause!

The kids are seated and ready for the program to begin. They were told by the principal to have their school uniforms clean for the special day. Notice that the boys and girls are seated separately.

The mayor of the village was asked by the principal to help pass out the awards to some of the kids.

After prize giving with teachers, principal and school committee members.

With teachers, Letaulau and Maria after prize giving.

Not only one of my year 8 students, Saulo was also my personal Samoan tutor, and more importantly, one of my best friends in the village. Here we are together with his gift to me, which his father made and he was so proud of!

The candy necklaces I received from students and parents during prize giving.

January 23, 2012

This Thursday, an fellow Samoan Peace Corps Volunteer, John, and I begin our trip from Fort Lauderdale to the various Caribbean ports and Panama Canal aboard the Holland-American ship, Zuiderdam. John is an old U.S. Navy salt with lots of sailing and sailboat experience, but never has gone to the Panama Canal. Me? Well, why not? There may even be some good stories to put on this blog.

Mary, not very comfortable at sea, is going with some friends to celebrate their mutual friend's 60th in Seattle.

i've come up with this really amazing ability to channel my old friends into my current existence. i take people like dan and brad and all the great conversations i've had within my tribe back home and sometimes when i'm pushing through my own questions i see them in my head and i simply keep my ears open for their ideas.

sometimes old conversations come back to me in beautiful flashbacks to my life back when i was a younger me. i remember sitting on my kitchen floor with some friends asking what we were meant to do in this world. my friends were and are great people with great potentiality and i was always humbled by them. i have friends whose purpose is to preserve the world so we may not doom our species; its true. i have friends who can write in the way that we can only narrate in our heads. not surprisingly it was in these moments that i first fortified my plans to become a teacher; one who believes they may not be able to save the world alone yet they can teach others.

and i have asked, 'is it better to inspire or to be inspired?'

some of my conversations are no longer in english. this presents a unique problem/opportunity to begin anew in an almost child-like fashion. learning turkish began as a means of ordering food without being laughed at and has thus progressed into a functioning and usable force in my life. it allowed me to travel the norther and far south east as a resident instead of a foreigner. now it puts me at the same table as those who have much to say about this country. as many curves as my life has taken it has swerved me into a house that is lived in and frequented by many persian folk as well as many kurdish people too.

as i've said i'll have no opinion (or at least a speakable one) so long as i can't vote in this country and this puts me in the position of being a completely neutral set of ears and a mouth only to ask questions. i have to admit thought that i never saw things like this coming six years ago when i sat on the kitchen floor of the trumbul house. it makes me wonder how far away my head will be when i come back home again and if people will be at all interested.

when i first landed here i came in search of a home. i was nearing the end of a year i had spent touching a handful of different continents that would end at a new years eve party on the rooftops of cairo (but thats another story). i could get into details about what took me here but its no different than the other bits of interwound web that fashions our lives in every other instance. soon enough i found a home and i unpacked my bags at long last.

and now i look at alice, my faithful backpack friend, and i think about where she is taking me next. i'm about to set off on a multi-national, multi-continental voyage into the slightly known and complete unknown yet i'm not that concerned; its not like i haven't done this before.

i love this city though and i love this country. i love the people and i love the streets i walk on. in that same love i know i'll come back and begin a new chapter but for now i'm reading maps from a different corner of the forest.

learning another language is cool but being more than functional in three is a blessing and a sign of dedication. i'm excited. i'm moving to south america and i'm passing a few old loves on the way in the form of ancient temples and nicaraguan flor de cana. i'm keeping centered and staying in tune because if i do...

...well i'll finally get my dream of seeing an end to this world :)

The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Life, the Universe and Everything, So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, and Mostly Harmless In the first five books (I discovered in Australia that there is now a sixth book out) of a three-book series (yes, it’s a three-book series – read the introduction), Adams crafts multiple universes where everything is so illogical, or blatantly obvious, that anything is possible. You MUST read these books. I read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by itself, but the rest of them I read together in the compiled format of The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. As a result, I always read them assuming it was one continuous story, but this time, I read them with the intention of seeing each book separately, and I liked them much more. Which is saying something because I already love these books. The stories follow Arthur Dent, from Earth, Ford Prefect, from a planet near Betelgeuse, Tricia McMillan/Trillian, from Earth, and the first few include Marvin the Paranoid Android and the antics of the galactic president, Zaphod Beeblebrox, also from a planet near Betelgeuse. The series starts off with a bang, literally, as the Earth is demolished to construct a hyperspace bypass. Afterwards, our heroes wander the galaxy for a few stories, accidentally getting themselves out of disastrous and deadly serious situations, eating steak from a cow that asks to be eaten, and saving the universe on multiple occasions. Everything happens haphazardly, with much miscommunication and misunderstanding, and although it seems that the characters blunder around blindly, they always end up in the right place. Eventually, Arthur returns to Earth, Ford returns to wandering, and Tricia/Trillian takes up another career. They all reconvene in a parallel universe in the fifth installment, and plenty of excitement ensues. Adams is spectacular. His characters are amazingly crafted, and his writing in general is brilliant. He has sharp satire, biting wit, and the physics of his science fictional universes makes perfect sense (as far as I can follow it, that is). His metaphors are so completely unpredictable (“the yellow constructor ships hung in the air exactly the way that bricks don’t”) or his reasoning so blatantly obvious (“the trick to learning how to fly is learning to throw yourself at the ground and miss”) that his universe makes perfect sense even if it doesn’t seem possible. In that way it reminds me of Catch-22 – so perfectly argued with illogic that you can’t make a competent comeback. Adams also creates a world so fantastic that it almost compares to Harry Potter – and that is ridiculously high praise coming from me. Read these books. They are entertaining, unexpected, and will make you laugh out loud.

Into the Wild – John Krakauer

Into the Wild details the account of Chris McCandless, a college graduate who donated his entire savings to Oxfam, burned the remains of his cash, and took to hitchhiking around the States before he was found dead in Alaska. For two years after finishing college, McCandless tramped around the US, camping, occasionally picking up odd jobs, and meeting other vagabonds. He never stayed in one place for more than two months, although there were a few locations he returned to multiple times. Influenced by Tolstoy and Thoreau, McCandless adopted an ascetic lifestyle, shunning mainstream US culture and beliefs. He was drawn to the wilderness, and told everyone he met that he was planning a grand adventure in the wilds of Alaska. He adopted the name Alexander Supertramp during his travels, but used both names intermittently. After years of hitchhiking, McCandless finally made it up to Alaska, and set out on what he thought was a remote trail to live off the land for a few weeks during the Alaskan spring and summer. Through some mistake or accident, it is thought that McCandless starved to death, and he was found dead at his camp site by some other hikers a few weeks later.

John Krakauer is an excellent writer. He is quickly making it to my list of favorite authors. His pieces are very thorough, well-researched, and always gripping. He paints pictures with his words, and though sometimes I could complain that his descriptions are too detailed, that rarely ever happens. His story about McCandless mostly pieces together his travels before he went to Alaska. McCandless kept a terse journal and had no other communication while he was in Alaska, so one can only speculate about what happened. From interviews and letters, Krakauer retells McCandless’ journeys and his relationships. Krakauer also compares McCandless to other infamous weirdos/hippies/vagabonds who wandered into Alaska and perished, and even tells his own story of stupidity on Alaskan mountains. In the book, Krakauer makes the argument that McCandless was not just another stupid hippie on a trip to lose American society and find himself in the Alaskan wilds, and his reasoning is fairly convincing. Again, it is speculation at most, but it is nice to hear someone give McCandless credit amidst all the accusations of stupidity.

Actually, I am guilty of calling McCandless stupid, reckless, and unprepared. I watched the movie before I read the book, and I thought McCandless was rather callous and selfish in the movie. The book tells a different story. While the movie focuses on McCandless as he drifts towards Alaska, the book brings in his relationships. By talking to the people McCandless met, Krakauer brings in another dimension to the story. I still think McCandless was rather cold in his relationships – he seemed to view the wild not quite as a replacement for human relationships, but as a source of contemplation and understanding that he couldn’t achieve through interactions with others. The wilderness had a higher priority on his list of relationships than other people. He seemed most focused on completing his own plans and not letting others interrupt or deter him. The question is, does that make him cold and self-centered, or does it make him determined and independent? It’s open for interpretation. The whole story is open for interpretation as most of it is speculation. It’s an excellent story, and one of the first I’ve read that I can’t really compare to the movie because it seems like they are different stories – or at least different perspectives on the same story.

whereas the sun cycles in patterns aligned to the rotation of plants, we follow cycles akin to that of the moon; perhaps thats why you and i cross paths in the way that we do.

January 16, 2012

Today I took a number of foreign exchange students, mostly Muslims, to an MLK event sponsored by the Minneapolis Park Board at Powderhorn Park Community Center, located in one of the most multi-cultural areas of the city. I asked them if they had ever heard of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in their native countries and what they knew about him. I also asked the students to be observant of the attendees and to see who sat with whom at the tables.

All the students had heard of Dr. King in their native countries, many had listened to his "I Have a Dream" speech and were aware of his efforts to help black people. They observed the people at the event were mostly white and that blacks tended to sit together.

The Community Center was filled with people and a free meal of fried chicken, collared greens, corn bread, rolls, rice and beans was served to the hundreds in attendance. The program consisted of an African drummer, hip-hop dancers, a folk singer, an Aztec dance group, a gospel group, and Powderhorn Park's drum corps. The performances were excellent. The only program reference to Dr. King was a question to the audience as to how old Dr. King would be today (83), answered by one older person, and for the entire audience to shout, "Happy Birthday, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr".

After the program I gathered the students to recap the event and give my thoughts on what Dr. King meant to me. I said that Dr. King's achievements were not through political office, but through non-violent means of raising people's awareness of injustices done to others and being able to organize people who shared his vision of inequality.

On my way home, it struck me that MLK Day may have become a chance for some to talk about togetherness, free food, entertainment, or a day off from school to go on a long weekend trip. As for Dr. King's "Dream", it seemed more of a dream than ever before.

Last January when I started my second year as a teacher, I made the point of hanging a world map in my classroom. I knew by doing so, the kids would be able to dream a little bit larger than they had before. They might ask questions and wonder about other continents, countries and cultures. The map led me to develop our theme for the entire school year, “We are the World.” That theme idea came about from the popular song with the same name, by Michael Jackson. It often plays on the radio in Samoa, and the kids have always loved it.

However, I also knew of another Michael Jackson song which I can remember fondly from my own childhood, “Heal the World.” Riding in the car at an early age, I remember listening to it on a cassette tape which got played over and over again. This past school year I decided that it went nicely with our theme, and hoped that in teaching it to the kids, they might be able to carry a new memory with them, about our time together.

In late September I decided to begin teaching my year 7 and 8 students the song. Each week I would have them work on learning a new portion of the song, which I had written on large sheets of newsprint, as well as on a piece of paper I had made and photo copied for them.

At one point during our song rehearsals, I made the decision to choreograph a dance for the song which I would teach to them. Singing and dancing are both a huge part of the Samoan culture, although I hadn’t utilized it as much in my classroom as I would had liked to over the past two years. So this final project gave me a chance to step out of my regular comfort zone and really leave a gift for these kids to remember.

In November they were getting familiar with most of the words, and it was time to start teaching them the dance. Each night I would listen to the song over and over again on my i-pod and rack my brain on different dance moves I could create for the song. The following day I would take it to the kids and have them practice the dance with me. There were definitely moments of frustration as I tried to keep them focused. I kept reminding myself that their excitement was in large part due to the fact that they don’t always get the opportunity to do activities like this with their other Samoan teachers, and that they were really enjoying this new opportunity.

I would always get a smile on my face after teaching a particular dance move where I heard kids saying in Samoan, how cool the dance was. They laughed, argued, and made up several times throughout the two months of our project. It was a great opportunity to have them work together as a team, especially requiring them to break their own insecurities in terms of girls interacting with boys and vice versa. For example, Samoan kids will normally sit with members of their own sex; the boys on one side of the room, and the girls on the other. So when asking a girl to shake hands with a boy during our song, I first got a lot of resistance, but over time was glad to see that they got past that and worked well together.

One night while laying in my bed listening to the song on my i-pod, I realized that we needed some props to go along with the dance. I got the idea to make a huge globe to hold up, and smaller ones for the kids to use. On a weekend trip to the capital I went dumpster diving for old cardboard boxes and found some great ones to use. Once back in the village I traced a globe and used left over paints from my house to make the water and soil with blue and green paint. In class one day I had the kids draw their own smaller globes which were incorporated into the dance.

Although this was my project, I wanted to include the other teachers who had always been supportive of my activities in the past. I went to them and explained our work on the song. I told them that I’d like to record it to show to friends and family back home. They were all on board and eager to help. They had the girls make flower headbands for the day of the filming, and had the guys wear flowers in their hair too (not uncommon for boys in Samoa for special occasions).

In late November we were finally ready for the big performance. The kids came to school that morning with a lot of excitement. It was a beautiful sunny day (during the rainy season) and we began the taping. I had also taught them “He’s got the Whole World in His Hands,” and we also sang “We are the World, with the teachers assigning Saulo to be Michael Jackson and stand out in front with a fake microphone. The kids loved every minute of it.

With the ocean as their back drop and a beautiful mountain to their side, they sang and danced with smiles on their faces. As I was filming I could see my fellow teachers were enjoying the moment just as much, and I was hopeful that I had passed something onto them as well. All the younger kids from all the other grades sat quietly alongside the school and watched on. I think all of us, teachers and students alike, got chills at some point during that day, as we saw all our hard work come to fulfillment.

In the end, I was so thankful I took the leap of faith and taught them the song and dance. I later found out that not only had the song touched them, but the younger kids who hadn’t even sung or danced to it. Several evenings I would be walking through the village and hear a five or six year old singing the song with near perfect English. So many of the kids from years 7 and 8 came up and told me in our final days together that they would sing that song after I left Samoa and it would remind them of me. Now that I’ve left Samoa, and am reflecting back on our time together, I now realize that whenever I hear the song, I will be thinking of them!

Feel free the watch the video of one of our rehearsals for "We are the World." Due to the large size of the video file for "Heal the World," I am unable to load that video to this space.

Kids ready for first note of song!

The flowers looked great that day.

"Make a little space...to make a better place."

The boys and the girls finally got over their "fear" of holding hands!

Christopher, although one of my weaker students, had his moment to shine and did an awesome job!!

The smaller globes worked out well and they never fought over who got which one!

Great work, kids!

One of my teachers, Maria, acting as D.J.

All of us together after a very hot day out in the sun. We were all ready to head for shade!

In the classroom with our globes, standing in front of the "We are the World" bulletin board.

Saulo acting as Michael Jackson for our singing of "We are the World."

life is an open-ended book with blank pages. perhaps the most interesting thing about this book is that it writes itself in whichever style the author chooses and it leaves no room for a sequel. i'm so tickled by this fact that i often tend to indulge in the limitless possibilities of life only to see what would happen next. sometimes i want to shake people and urge them to realize how many opportunities are out there both good and bad. i'm actually a fan of a little trouble once in a while because it keeps things interesting.

what happens in this life in no coincidence.

we are colorful people and it baffles me that we leave room for things in our life that hold us back. perhaps the greatest setback of all would be 'fear'. i dont have time for fear. sure i'm afraid but i dont let it bother me. if we all acted out of fear alone we'd never leave our house; and its a nice day today :)

My time in Samoa is finished. The ending came and went like the setting of the sun, like the final notes of a grand orchestra composition. I knew all along that the final days were playing out, and that they were days I would remember for the rest of my life. Just as we realize the change in the sky’s brilliant colors before an unforgettable sunset, or hear the final crescendo on a masterpiece of music; so too, was I aware of how those last moments with my village, were marking the end of something great!

That final day in Samoa was now a month ago, which may leave some wondering why I’ve written so late about something that affected me so much. I’ve thought of this very question, and believe it took that month, to process what happened, and what it meant for me and those I left. Perhaps at times like this, I’m most concerned about getting the words just right, working harder than ever to portray what my thoughts, emotions and feelings really are. Nonetheless, today I am ready to embark on that journey, to explore those last days and relive their new place in my life.

I can’t properly bring closure to a 26 month blog in just one entry, so I’d like to invite you to continue checking in over the next couple of weeks as I tell the stories in several posts. I believe this will most accurately reflect my final memories and events in Samoa. Over the past two years, you’ve come to know many of the people that were a part of my life during my Peace Corps service, so let me tell you about our goodbyes and how we celebrated our last days together. Thank you as always for reading, and for your interest in this ongoing journey.

The Hurricane Analogy

Writing in my journal my last week in Samoa, I found a way of describing how I thought the process of saying goodbyes might play out—and it later proved to be spot-on. As the week started closing in on me, I felt like I was preparing for a hurricane. Recall those news and weather reports shown on T.V. of families and businesses boarding up, packing up, and then waiting for the winds and rains to come. When I started my packing, and later took part in multiple trips with my bags to the capital, I felt like I was boarding up, and getting things in order before the storm hit. After my house was packed and things moved out, I had a couple of days to just relax and be with my village as I tried to keep things normal, yet knew they really weren’t. This felt a bit like the waiting just before the first wind bands arrive on shore.

Later, the eve of my departure would arrive, and emotions and feelings became so great that I knew the winds had arrived. Then there was a quiet stillness that last night, before my final morning, as if the calm eye of the storm had passed over. But then the next day arrived, and the back side of the storm came and thrashed. My village and I were strong though, and in the end we were able to ride it all out, and make it through together.

Thoughtful Silence

Throughout my time in Samoa, it was common for me to have visitors to my house. They would come over, kids and adults alike, and we would visit. When the adults came over, the conversation was normally upbeat and lively. When the kids stopped by we might listen to music, dance, play cards or cook food. But during my last week, one thing that struck me as different about my visitor’s time was their longer stays at my house, and more silent presences.

I can easily remember my last week when my friend Saulo came over to visit. I was busy working around the house, doing laundry and packing things. I spent some time in conversation with him, and we played a card game, but after a period of time, when he normally would have left to go home, he didn’t want to. He said he wanted to stay longer. He ended up sitting there for two or three hours as I did my work at the house. We didn’t say much to each other that day, but I think we both knew what was on the other’s mind. It was almost as if we were reflecting in silence about our last two years together, and what it meant to us, and what the future might hold.

As the days continued, I had similar experiences from others in the village I had been close to. My good friend Milo came over and sat as I organized and sorted. They all would come over and just want to be present. They would sit and just be content with little fuss over the topic of conversation. Looking back, I realize those were really our last moments together, as friends and neighbors, before the business of those last couple of days. I am so thankful to all those who came over to visit, who wanted to be with me just because they could be.

The End of Hoarding

As volunteers, we sometimes had a tendency to hold onto things that might have been useful someday, although we weren’t sure what that use might have been. I don’t know if that instinct came about from many of us living in remote areas in cultures different than those we grew up in, but I often heard of other volunteers stashing things away for the day they might really had needed them.

I use to feel a bit embarrassed that I was saving old glass jam and spaghetti jars, until another volunteer said they were saving old peanut butter containers. I felt more secure. But in the end, I never had a use for the jars myself, so when I was cleaning out the house, I offered them to neighbors, who quickly snatched them up—especially the ones that still had lids—because they said they were going to use them to put tea in them.

Routines are Hard to End

One part of life that helps many Peace Corps Volunteers keep their feet steady throughout their service is a well oiled functioning routine. In the beginning when everything feels foreign, the routine may be the only thing that you can count on to be predictable or feel comfortable. Of course, after time, we adjust and become more in tune with the day-to-day life in the village, yet that routine we once began always sticks with us.

For me, that last week was about doing that routine one last time. That involved cooking my favorite meals one last time in Samoa, although they weren’t the most amazing meals, they were the meals that I had become so accustomed to: pasta, pasta and more pasta, and then maybe one night of homemade tortillas.

Exercise was also a huge part of my routine, so I made sure to get out for my evening runs which led me down the most beautiful road overlooking that awesome ocean. The last run I had ended up turning into a soaker, forcing me to take cover under the broad leaf of a banana tree until the rains let up.

When I first arrived at my site in 2009, I never thought that I’d have the ambition or physical strength to run some of those steep hills near my house, let alone even enjoy it. However, as with many other parts of my life, I slowly realized what I thought was impossible was actually quite doable when I set my mind to it.

Another part of my routine, which falls under the category of a “chore,” was doing laundry. I remember thinking that week of how easy life was about to become for me in terms of keeping my clothes clean. Not only was I returning to a country where washing machines are as plentiful as coconut trees are in Samoa, but I was returning to a climate where sweating doesn’t take place for five months out of the year. Washing clothes, and towels, and sheets in Samoa taught me a lot of patience. The first few times I did it I couldn’t believe it, but after a while I found it to be a nice time to think about life and reflect on the day or week. Loosing that slower part of my life that final week reminded me I was about to return to a routine that would be different.

Saulo, during one of his visits to my house the last week.

During one of my last laundry sessions.

Milo always came and sat on the water tank outside my bathroom window to visit while I did laundry. Here he is on my last laundry day.

I literally had a "bench press," as part of my daily exercise routine!

White Sunday weekend in the capital of Samoa

During my Peace Corps service I made trips into the capital of Apia to buy fruits and vegetables at the market, and do other shopping I needed. This video was taken on October 8, 2011, the Saturday before White Sunday. White Sunday is a day that celebrates the kids, and gives them the chance to say prayers, and perform songs and skits at church, before receiving several candy necklaces and sometimes, even ice cream!! This Saturday is typically the busiest shopping day of the year for Samoans. From: behappy701 Views: 6 0 ratings Time: 04:46 More in Music

Day 1: No problem

Day 2: I return from my morning walk to put on more sunscreen, so I take off my sunglasses, watch, rings, etc. in the process and set them on the table in the room. Or so I thought. As I was trying to gather everything on my way out again, I could not for the life of me find my sunglasses. I picked up everything off the table, checked under the covers on my bed, and couldn’t find them any other place I thought they hadn’t ended up, but would be worth checking just in case. So I left with the mission of finding a replacement pair of sunglasses at the first store I could find. The problem with this goal is that this all occurred on Christmas Day in Australia, where most of the country shuts down to celebrate the holiday. The only shops that were open were the little convenience stores where everything is at least double the cost of what it is in a regular grocery store. After looking at approximately 4 pairs of sunglasses in 9 different shops, I decided to stall the purchase until at least the next day when more stores would be open and I would have more to choose from. Good choice. When I got back to the room, I went to open the window, and saw my sunglasses sitting on the ledge right next to the window. I immediately took back all my wishes of bad karma on the girl in my room who I figured must have grabbed them as she left the room 30 seconds before I did – why else would I not be able to find my sunglasses? Somebody else must have them, right?

Day 3-Day whatever: No incident

Fourth to last day in Australia: I went to the Blue Mountains, and was very thankful for having my sunglasses with me, as the weather was quite conducive to easy forest walking – warm and sunny that is. As I walked back through the town to the train station, I kept noticing all the sunglasses displays and thinking back to my second day in Sydney when I had been convinced my glasses had been stolen and went out on a fruitless search for replacements. Good thing I hadn’t jumped the gun on that one.

Third to last day in Australia: My sunglasses have been lost/potentially stolen again. I remember distinctly taking them off inside the hostel room the night before, but my memory stops there. I have no idea where I’ve put them, and because I can’t find them, they’ve obviously (but accidentally) been taken by someone else in the room. I set out on another mad search for a replacement pair of sunglasses. More shops are open now that the holidays are fairly well past, and most still have sales going on. I settle on a reasonable pair (not the perfect sunglasses, but you can’t get those every time) and purchase them as my first errand of the day. The rest of my day commences, and I return to my room late afternoon and find my sunglasses oddly tucked away in my traveling pharmacy. Since I still have the tags on, and the receipt, and am well within the deadline for returns, I make a quick dash back to the store where I purchased the sunglasses to return them, seeing as a second pair of sunglasses is utterly superfluous when you already have a perfectly functional pair.

Penultimate day in Australia: My sunglasses break. One of the ear pieces snaps off. I ask for glue at the front desk, but they only have stick glue. She jokingly suggests just wearing them as they are, and surprisingly, they still work with just one ear piece. True, I do have to adjust them a lot more and hold them when a stiff breeze comes up, but I’m only spending another 36 hours in Australia, I can just buy a super cheap pair of sunglasses when I get back to Samoa.

Last day in Australia: I’m getting frustrated with having to adjust or hold my sunglasses all the time. I wander into one of the larger discount markets thinking to myself “I will only buy sunglasses if I can find an exact replica of my current pair of sunglasses – although one with two ear pieces instead of one – and for a good sale price.” Well, the very first stall I come across is a huge display of sunglasses. I get sucked into the first rack, trying on practically every pair to find the one that fits best. Then I realize there is a second rack for the same sale price, so I have to extend my selection. Then I realize there is an entire wall for the same sale price, and there I find – yes – the exact replica of my current sunglasses. Granted, my current sunglasses have a green border and the replacement pair will have a black and white border, but the size and shape of the lenses is exactly the same, and the fit is just as smooth and perfect. So after a trip bookended with sunglasses drama, I ended up with basically the same pair I started with, although one came from Target in the States and the other came from a discount/wholesale market vendor in Australia. Perfect!

Sydney Take 1

Locations: Harbour Bridge, Sydney Opera House, Botanic Gardens, Art Gallery of New South Wales, various parks and grocery stores

Discoveries: Vending machines, ice cream trucks, the future (this requires a brief explanation. I was walking out of the hostel and saw a girl sitting on the stairs with ear phones in talking to what looked like a piece of paper. I realized it was an iPad and she was using Skype. The thought baffled me that she could just carry this piece of technology around with her and talk to whoever it was that was probably halfway across the world), Woolworths (grocery store)

Difficulties: Remembering to greet and respond to others in English instead of Samoan, adapting to air conditioning (but really, there’s no such thing as a comfortable temperature, especially if more than one person is involved)

Food: Cheese, almonds, cheesecake, sandwiches, pasta, crackers, tea, meat pies, burritos (which weren’t as good as I was hoping they would be. Oh well, that means it will just be that much better when I get to Qdoba or Big City in a year!)

Other notes: I ended up on a photo adventure with two older men who happened to be photographing the Sydney Opera House at the same time I was – just after 6 in the morning. They were very knowledgeable tour guides, and they even bought me breakfast and invited me to dinner. To be continued...

Melbourne

Locations: Federation Square, free tourist shuttle, free city circle tram, Australian Center for the Moving Image, Art Gallery of Victoria (both the international and the Australian buildings), Queen Victoria Market, bookshops, hostel rooftop, Target Center

Discoveries: Free wi-fi, Target, local fruit and vegetable marketsj, ALDI’s (which I think is roughly the Australian equivalent of Costco, but the stores are much smaller – at least in the big cities where space is limited)

Difficulties: Laundry, cooling down. I hit summer in Melbourne (and Canberra) and temperatures reached up to 40 Celsius, or over 100 Farenheit

.

Food: Falafel, peaches, blackberries, strawberries, yogurt, granola, sangria, hummus

Other notes: New Year’s Eve – I went with one of the girls from my hostel room to watch the fireworks in Federation Square. Fireworks came from the city skyline, the stadium, and a couple other places. The big show was when one of the buildings that had been shooting off fireworks caught on fire. It was only a small fire, and we waited to watch it for about 20 minutes after fireworks ended. The first response was a news helicopter. Fire trucks followed closely thereafter, but the fire was at the top of a tower, so it wasn’t exactly reachable, and eventually it just burned itself out.

The two girls in my room who I hung out with a bit kept giving me crap about having both a backpack and a suitcase for only 2 ½ weeks in Australia, when they were both topping 3 months and had managed to pack in one backpack only. I would like to point out that their backpacks were at least twice as large as mine is and packed beyond bursting. And, I pointed this out several times, but it didn’t seem to have quite the rationalizing power for them as it did for me, I had to bring chocolate back for about half the people in my village. That’s not going to fit on top of all the stuff I brought with me to Australia inside a backpack that’s designed for short camping trips. Again, I would just like to point out that this was much more convincing to me than it was to them.

I did laundry in a machine for the first time in over a year. Everything came out of the dryer nice and toasty (not that I needed it at 36 Celsius by 9 in the morning), and super soft. It looked great until I got to the new sweatpants I had bought while in Sydney. I purchased them because they were long pants (Sydney was cold), but lightweight, so I could still potentially use them in Samoa. I held them up, and there was definitely something wrong. I put them on, and they were at least 4 inches shorter. I would like to blame this on not having done laundry using a washer and dryer in over a year, but I think I had this problem many times in the States too. It turned out OK, they were fairly successfully converted to capris with some handy scissorwork on my part back in Samoa.

Canberra

Locations: National Library, National Portrait Gallery, movie theater, some shopping center

Discoveries: Movie theatres (they’re ridiculously hard to find if you’re used to looking for a ginormous megaplex – they don’t look the same from the outside when they’re buried in a city), another Target, more wi-fi

Difficulties: Canberra was the only place I could not find my way around with a map. The two main parts of the city are set up as circles, so many of the streets go around in rings and intersect in weird ways, and I just could not follow it. I also attempted to donate blood at a mobile station set up in the city center, but was told it would be too much trouble because I was only in Australia for vacation. I tried. And to top it all off, wi-fi is fairly scarce in Canberra. At least the free kind is.

Food: Doritos, popcorn, pasties, Breadtop (a chain that specializes in all kinds of bread, rolls, muffins, cookies, and other baked goods. Basically, Heaven), more peaches, more yogurt

Other notes: I went to see Sherlock Holmes 2 in theatres because a movie theatre was fairly high on my list of things to do. Magik Cinema is acceptable, but it’s not quite a great movie experience. This was a great movie experience. And to top it off, I saw a preview for the Hunger Games!

Sydney Take 2

Locations: State Library of New South Wales, Hyde Park, Sydney City Library, Blue Mountains, various parks and shopping areas

Discoveries: More Wi-fi, another Target (in case you haven’t noticed, Target is my Mecca), free movies twice a day at the hostel (I watched Mr. Popper’s Penguins, Red Dog (Australian movie, very cute), Captain America, X-Men First Class, and Harry Potter 7.2)

Difficulties: I was on tour overload by this point. I returned to Sydney wondering how to face five more days of museums, galleries, parks, local markets, and everything else I had been doing for what was beginning to feel like eternity, so this time around, I tended to wander more, window shop a bit more (shopping on vacation isn’t as fun when you’re in Peace Corps. I would look at a store, decide I either couldn’t or wouldn’t wear whatever it was in Samoa, or it would disintegrate within a week, and completely pass the store over). It kinda turned into a lazy vacation at this point, hence all the movie watching I think.

Food: more cheesecake, more peaches and yogurt, Berry Weetbix Bites, focaccia sandwiches, pizza, “lemonade,” gelato, and delicious Chinese food, including prawns (gasp!)

Other notes: I reunited with my two photo adventure buddies for a home-cooked dinner. The dinner party consisted of them, their wives, and myself. The one hosting us all has a Chinese background, so he made us a superb Chinese meal. It consisted of cabbage soup as the appetizer, three entrees of chicken, fish, and prawns, split between us all, and dessert of cut up fruit, cookies, and chocolate. I have never had prawns before in my life. Coming from Colorado, a state with a noticeable lack of oceanfront areas, seafood never really had a role in my diet. It wasn’t until I came to Samoa that seafood even really entered my vocabulary, not to mention my menu. I was wary of the prawns because they looked like shrimp, which have tried on a few occasions, most of them now in the distant past, and I distinctly remember spitting the shrimp out after two bites. But I’m working on my food flexibility, and I told myself I could get through at least one bite, and then one bite turned into two, which turned into an entire serving. I just couldn’t think too much about how the prawns looked, because doing so tended to trigger my “disgusting” reflex. Additionally, I got all the leftovers from the dinner (the rest of the prawns and chicken, the fruit from dessert, and the rest of the two wine bottles). I managed to finish it all in my three days left in Australia. Did I mention yet that the food was excellent?

My very last afternoon in Australia, I treated myself to a mani-pedi at one of the several spas around Sydney. As soon as I sat down in the special chair they put you in when you get a pedicure, I just melted. It was bliss. The 45 minutes it took to finish both the manicure and pedicure were way too short. And, I managed not to do major damage to the pain job until I got back to Samoa. Even now, I would only consider it minor damage. That’s impressive.

Me with a handful of my students after the Prizegiving ceremony. It has been a month and two days since I boarded the plane leaving Samoa and headed home. Every day I have thought to myself, “I should really write that final blog entry,” yet self denial of the finality of my time as a Peace Corps volunteer prevented me from sitting down and concluding this twenty-seven month blog. Even today, I find myself at a loss for words. How does one summarize twenty-seven months of service? And how do I capture the lessons learned? The beautiful thing is that this blog has already captured so many of those memories and experiences. Coming home, I expected more culture shock. I thought that I would be overwhelmed by speeding cars, technology, supermarkets, and of course, the mall at Christmastime. But when it came down to it, coming home felt more like waking from one dream to begin a new one. You might say I eased my transition a bit by road tripping through New Zealand for 16 days before coming back to New York, and maybe that is the reason I was not so overwhelmed by American life. I had anticipated a fear of driving, yet that has not been the case at all. I have been driving every day, and even took a few trips into Manhattan already! I have upgraded my Samoan monochrome cellphone to the iPhone (4s) and am LOVING the apps, games, and easy flow of information. I miss being able to throw my rubbish (oops, trash!) out my back door, but I am appreciative of the regular garbage collection, recycling collection, and composting going on here. And I cannot stress enough how amazing it has been to come home to a snow-less winter! My tan is still holding true, and I still wear my jandals around the house (so weird to wear shoes inside!) but for the most part, I am embracing boot fashion, jeans, and bubble jackets. I have seen Phish twice, Mamma Mia of Broadway, celebrated my birthday in a posh NYC nightclub, eaten pizza, sushi, bagels, and wings, and have visited the Jersey Shore. I have made cookies in an oven and washed clothes in a washing machine. And I have stopped float-testing all eggs before consumption. I have also put away all fans and embraced indoor heating. Job-wise, I am not sure what is next. I have picked up two part time jobs from my past: dog walking (yes, dogs are friendly here!), and I will soon start working the front desk at the Rockland Conservatory of Music, now in their new location. I am slowly readjusting to the strange sensation of living in my parents’ full house once again, but I am savoring the moments we all have together and am happy to have arrived home when I did. In a way, I now feel that I have two homes: Skyview, and Samalaeulu. I find myself missing my village and Samoan life to the point where it literally hurts my heart, yet tears do not come to me when I think of leaving. Instead, I feel gratitude for the two years I was fortunate enough to spend living in such a loving village in the South Pacific. The friends I made there and students I taught feel like a family, and thanks to technology, I have been able to stay in touch with many of them; one students, unaware of the time difference, has been calling the house at 3am in the morning! I do not know when I will return to Samoa, yet I do know that when I do, it will not be the same as my two years spent as a Pisikoa. However, the experiences shared there will forever remain in my heart. I am a proud Returned Peace Corps Volunteer! Today, the 960 photos I selected out of thousands should arrive and I will be able to relive my 27 months as a volunteer as I create my largest scrapbook to date. This concludes my blog…. until the next adventure :)

... It seems I forgot to post this back in November, so enjoy!Pulega and I at Culture Day in Sasina. With the end of service so near, many families have been inviting me over for dinner as a final farewell. It has been a great way to spend some quality time with those families that have become such an important part of my life. Last week, I ate with two families, this week I have plans with another three. My first dinner last week was with Pulega’s family, and it was as comical as ever. Pulega has a large presence. He is very fat and a flamboyant fafafine who lives with his sisters family. He is also Ali’s principal. Ali and I often joke about the two sides of Pulega. She knows him as a firm and demanding teacher, who always wears a pristine floral shirt and ie’konga (black wrap around skirt - - - business-wear for Samoan men.) For me however, I know him only as a friend in the village – a laughing, joking, shirtless man, who has a cat and two dogs. Which brings us to the brief yet somewhat horrible (and hilarious!) story of the cat. I showed up for diner just before sa, or evening prayer, was to begin. The sun was setting and short bursts of heavy rain were blowing through the village. I sat with Pulega in the large open fale that makes up his home, while behind the house, Pulega’s sister and children busied themselves preparing our feast in the fale kuka (cooking house.) The rain was really picking up, so I helped Pulega to lower the tarps, creating instant makesift walls surrounding the fale. The sound of the rain beating down was immense, and for half a moment I worried that the river might come, thus cutting me off from my home on the other side. I quickly brushed the worry aside, knowing full well I would have a place to stay if that was to happen. Pulega’s cat, which he affectively calls Pusi (meaning cat), crept under the tarp to avoid the rain with us. It was clear that she knew meal time was approaching and lurked closely around Pulega’s chair. He spoke to it, pet it, and showed affection towards it. And then the meal came. Pulega transformed from a loving pet owner into a ravenous territorial man almost instantaneously. The formerly loved cat looked up with begging eyes for a scrap or two and “Whack!” Pulega kicked him in the side. I was so startled I almost couldn’t eat! Then, with bravery and perhaps a bit of stupidity, the cat continued to beg with a similar outcome every time. Finally Pulega had had enough. He called over a child, who picked up the cat, and through it out of the house. The routine continued for the whole meal, and although it sounds terrible in writing, the kicking and throwing never seemed over the top animal abuse – more just comical. When Pulega wasn’t looking, I slipped the cat some chicken bones. At the end of the meal, I was walked home by Pea (Pulegas sister) and her two children. Senara, the eldest child, held a beach umbrella sized umbrella for the three of us to walk under. Jason, to the horror of his mother bounced a ball, and she kept hissing at him “Aua! Sa!” apparently afraid of attracting the attention of ghosts with his noise at night. I walked in the middle of the three of them. Pea held my hand, as we walked home, and although it felt unnatural to be walking holding this motherly womans’ hand, I just went with it. It is common in Samoa to see two grown men walking down the street holding hands, or two girls holding hands while walking to church. As awkward as it felt, there was something really touching about the moment. I will miss Pulega, Pea, Senara, and Jason. I hope our paths will cross again one day, as they have so generously included me in their family for the past two years. Tofa soifu lo’u aiga!

January 9, 2012

Ruby Tuesday server, Cari, and bartender, Joshua, presenting two Wink Eyes in West Plains, Missouri

West Plains, Missouri is an Ozark town in the Southeastern part of the state about 10 miles from the Arkansas border. It is the hometown of the author, Daniel Woodrell, who writes country noire novels, the most famous being "Winter's Bone" which was also made into a movie and nominated for four Academy Awards in 2010. I just had to drive there to check out the place, being warned not to look anyone in the eye and stay away from meth labs.

My quest to possibly meet the author, known to be secretive, and interview meth technicans proved to be futile. Equally futile was my quest to meet anyone who knew what "wink eye" described in another West Plain-based novel by Woodrell, "The Death of Sweet Mister I wondered whether anyone in the Ozarks had ever heard of the dish, "wink eye", so I started asking anyone I met.

At the local Ruby Tuesdays I quized the server, who then quized restaurant patrons, bringing a curious bartender and nacent author to the table. No one had ever heard of a wink eye. I described what it was and much to my surprise they later appeared at the table with two wink eyes. They had to go out to a nearby Walgreen's to get the eggs, the restaurant not having any. Now that was service!

Most people refer to the dish of "Wink Eye" as "Egg in the Basket" with a lid or "Toad in the Hole. For anyone wishing to learn more, here is the Wkipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_in_the_basket

Please also check out the bartender and young writer, Joshua's blog at todayisee.blogspot.com .

"A nun."

This is the most original answer to the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" that I've gotten from a Samoan student.

When I've asked students what they want to be when they grow up, most of them don't really have an answer. "A job," is usually their reply. Their bland answers are not due to an English ineficiency. They're just never asked this question. Often one wonders what makes American culture and answers are usually hard to come by since our country is a mosaic of other cultures. However, asking children this question about their future is something very American (if not just very un-Samoan.)

Not only are kids not asked this question, but they often lack the ability to imagine a creative answer because they simply aren't aware of the outside world. When asked if they would ever leave Samoa, a lot of my students say, "No. I want to stay here. In my village." They are also baffled when I tell them I don't know the people on "American Idol."

"But, you live in the same country."

"But it's such a big country!" Then I pull out the world map and try to explain how big the world is. (Poor grammar here, I know.)

One way to give these kids an idea about the rest of the world is the Post Card project. So here's the pitch:

If you read this blog regularly or if you just stumbled upon it, send us a postcard from where you live!!! Write a short message about whatever you want, speak to the students directly or talk about where you live, but make sure the picture on the front shows something about your neck of the woods, as we like to colloquially say here in Minnesota. Write the message in English, but a greeting in the language of your country would be wonderful. (Most likely, I'll use the postcards with my Year 7 class- roughly ages eleven to thirteen.) Address postcards to me:

Samantha Maranell, PCV

Peace Corps

Private Mail Bag

Apia, (Western) Samoa

South Pacific

As postcards come in, we'll put pins on a world map of the places we get postcards from. Let's make these kids a little more worldly.

I've been called the literary snob of Peace Corps Samoa and as I gear up to travel back to the island after a rejuvenating Christmas break at home in the USA, I once again find my suitcase with, perhaps, a few too many books. Over the past fifteen months, I've read many a book; here are what I think were the best and the five worst.

The Best:

-Stiff by Mary Roach

-The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

-Columbine by Dave Cullen

-The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the OED by Simon Winchester

-Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer (You cannot go wrong with this book.)

-The Hunger Games Trilogy by Suzanne Collins

-The short story "Fantasy for Eleven Fingers" by Ben Fountain (Found in the book Brief Encounters with Che Guevara)

-Life of Pi by Yann Martel (!!)

-The Reader by Bernhard Schlink

-Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

-The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possibly by AJ Jacobs

-Ishmael by Daniel Quinn (!!)

-The Help by Kathryn Stockett (The movie does not do justice to this amazing book; two thumbs down to the movie; two thumbs up to the book.)

The Worst:

-The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larson (Ok, so it was published posthumously, but wasn't the editor aware that the first and last one hundred pages of the book were completely unnecessary?)

-Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen (The three person love triangle was genious in Sophie's Choice and this book was a sad attempt. Just rent the movie.)

-The Romance Reader's Book Club by Julie L. Cannon (It's as bad as the title implies. You take what you can get when on an island in the middle of the ocean.)

-The Other Side of Haight by James Fadiman (Ken Kesey, if you hadn't had a positive review on the book, I wouldn't have picked this up at all. Damn you Ken Kesey.)

-Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay (Genocide and Holocaust studies fascinate me, but I really don't see how books that offer nothing new to literature in general or the genre in particular still get published.)

For anyone considering the Peace Corps, here are a few recommendations from the 15 month book list:

-The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time by Jeffrey Sachs (Aid is clearly the answer.)

-The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by William Easterly (Aid is clearly not the answer.)

-Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There is a Better Way for Africa by Dambisa Moyo (Perhaps not the best book on the subject, but one of our Peace Corps staff members said this book "changed her life.")

-American Taboo: A Murder in the Peace Corps by Philip Weiss (The true story of a 1970 murder of a volunteer by another volunteer on the nearby island of Tonga. Face it, it can be dangerous at times. -This book may never have been published; we have an editor's copy going around Samoa. I recommend looking up the case if really interested.)

-Dear Exile: The True Story of Two Friends Separated (For a Year) by an Ocean by Hilary Liftin and Kate Montgomery (This epistolary Peace Corps book is a quick read with many relatable moments.)

-Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal by Ayn Rand (Altruism vs Egoism. Personally, I consider both to be very legitimate reasons for joining the Peace Corps. In fact, if I didn't have egoistic, or selfish, reasons for joining, I might have quit long ago. The cliche is kind of true: I feel like I'm getting more out of it than those I'm supposed to be helping; if I had purely altruisic reasons, why would I have stayed?)

-The forward, introduction, or whatever it was to the book Through Painted Deserts: Light, God, and Beauty on the Open Road by Donald Miller (For anyone who may be hesitant about leaving their pre-Peace Corps comfort zone, this book's forward will motivate you to get out there.)

-Ishmael by Daniel Quinn (This book will make you question everything.)

sometimes i think we were put here by aliens.

its really wild how you can strive for hours and days on end to find answers to important questions and all of a sudden when you stop thinking about the answer, answers hit you from nowhere.

somehow thats where winter fits in.

you are stuck in the cold during days of extended hours of sleep and you hide from reasons to leave the house. you eat a lot more than you normally would and dont move as much but the worst part is that you (or at least I) question everything in the winter. summer is much more relaxed and you dont care so much about the purpose of things but the winter draws you inward.

i'm a person of hidden paranoias. i have an exterioral defense mechanism that puts on an image of complacency but it seems that there is always a trouble somewhere; almost always, and i'm careful not to jinx trouble by saying her name.

but its got me thinking why? why are we (am i) paranoid and overslept in the winter? i guess i just look at it differently from the obvious which tells us that it is in our animal background to adapt to different climates and conditions but i think there are some answers we can only find when we are in this state.

ironically it hit me in a hot shower which was the first showed i'd had in days. i think we were put here by aliens. its the only answer one can create that you cant argue. why would we be forced to spend so much time asking and arguing over meaningless philosophical questions should they not actually be any different from the bantering of animals? i guess i'm tired of wasting energy and i have been for a while.

somewhere, sometime long ago i became a quiet observer. its in the nature of observers to prone to new discoveries.

sherlock holmes once said, 'i see everthing, that is my curse.'

slug once said, 'i only hear the words for what they mean? know what i mean?'

and i'm still persuaded to believe that it does not cause sadness to not have opinions. *i also live in a country where i have many opinions but am not yet permitted to vote - thus politically and even sociologically i do not have opinions.* maybe its the idealism wearing off, i was never really in it for the money anyway.

i dont really (not a hundred percent at least) believe we were put here by aliens but actually its quite a comforting thought. if there were any shread of me that believes we were put here by a supreme being i'd have to say its been a pretty strange day in the fish tank, or hamster cage, or bird feeder.

ratatat "wildcat" playing at a bar

arya talking to his friends on skype in farsi

a cat yelling

a television that is showing the news

the bathroom sink

wet hands splash

people talking from different distances away

two turkish people having sex downstairs

two people fighting downstairs (maybe its the same room)

a youtube video of a standup commedian

someone tapping on something

laptop keyboard clicking

a doorknob

my toe knuckle cracking

floor squeeking

For the past few weeks I have escaped the heat of Samoa and have been visiting my parents and brother in NYC. I have learned there are a lot of differences between New York and Samoa which at some points might have gotten me confused......Here are some of the differences about public transportation.

The Staten Island ferry is always a smooth comfortable 30 minute boat ride. The Samoan ferries can often often make you feel a bit seasick. Depending on the boat, and the water conditions, the ride can be anywhere from 1-2 1/2 hours.

Colorful Samoan buses . Sleek looking buses in NYC.

About public transportation:In Samoa the buses are amazing as the bus drivers "pimp their rides" and have it decorated in so many different ways from posters to flags, to a billion mirrors to anything else they can find. In New York, they are not decorated at all-except with the occasional poster letting you know about the holiday schedule. In Samoa people don't worry about the bus timetable. They know about when it comes, and it might mean waiting outside for several hours, or maybe hitchhiking if you missed the last bus, but no one worries as they know they will find a way to get where they need to. In New York, people check the timetable religiously. They will make every effort to complain if the bus, train or ferry is even 5 minutes late. In Samoa, there is a ferry schedule, however you never really know if there is a 10:00 or noon ferry, as one of them is always skipped and you might have to wait an extra two hours if you show up for the wrong ferry. In New York, ferries run 24/7 quite frequently so there SHOULD be no reason to complain.In Samoa, if you see someone who is older you will give your seat up to them. Why would you want someone who you should respect look for a seat when you can find one in the back yourself. Fuggedaboutit in NY. Although there are signs saying for people to do it it is rarely done, only if the person is extremely old. In Samoa the buses are made completely of wood, which can make for a soar bum for long trips. Often there is a screw digging into your side or knee, but you can usually get used to the indent there. In NY, the buses are completely modern and the seats are so comfortable-you can easily go to sleep on them.In Samoa you get to enjoy wonderful (sometimes) music blasting on the bus making you want to stand up and dance. In NY, you have to provide your own music....and make sure there are headphones because otherwise there might be a fine. In Samoa, if you run out of seats, people pull you around to have you sit on their laps. If you are already sitting, you start grabbing kids and babies, as they are much lighter to be on you that some adults. In New York, if you grabbed someone's baby you might get arrested. There is also no lap sitting on the bus. No people sitting 5 to a double seat...In Samoa you will often hold things for other passengers. It may mean a bowl of soap, a bag of groceries, or more often than not a purse. In New York, if you grabbed someone's bag to help them out so it will not be on the floor they might smack you. In Samoa, people go out of their way to sit next to you. Personal space does not exist. In New York if you sat directly next to someone, it will usually cause them to get up and look for another seat. In Samoa, anywhere on the route is your bus stop, and the bus can stop 20 times in a 100 foot area. In New York, only use the designated bus stops.In Samoa the taxi prices go off of a fare sheet and are predictable. In New York the meter never stops running!In Samoa the taxis are all white. In NY the cabs are all yellow (except in outside boroughs).In Samoa, if you forget something on the bus, the bus driver will try to get it back to you. In NY consider it lost forever.In Samoa, you know everyone on the buses. In NY, you only know the people you are traveling with.In Samoa, if you don't know a person on a bus, there is no fear in talking to them. In NY don't talk to strangers.In Samoa the buses are used to transport things to stores and huge items to households. This may mean the floor of the bus is full or concrete, bags of rice, boxes of chicken, or have all the passengers helping to hold pvc piping out of the window. You can stop the bus driver and give him money to shop in the city for you. In NY, people travel light with only small personal items. Stores can get their own items and people need to find their own way to get to the store.In Samoa the bus drivers assistant helps everyone around the bus with bags, making sure there is a seat, or a lap to sit on. In New York, you are on your own.In Samoa the sides of each bus are decorated amazingly with funny phrases to let you know the difference between each bus. There is the Bon Jovi bus, the Beautiful Savai'i bus, The Forget Me Not bus, and so many more. In New York, the only difference between the the buses are the numbers letting you know the route. In Samoa you sometimes have to worry about the status of your bus. There is always a chance it may break down. Sometimes it is a quick fix and the bus may just "be a little thirsty", other times you can be at the side of the road for longer. No matter what people don't leave the bus as they know the bus driver will tell them everything they need to do. In NY, people would be running off of the bus IF it did break down (they are in much better condition than Samoa). The only time I was on a bus that became inoperable, one of the wheels fell off and we got on a new bus within two minutes. In Samoa the ferries carry cars back and forth. In NY because of terrorism (I think that was the original reason for stopping it), cars can not go on the boats. You need to take bridges and tunnels.I am sure there are many more differences in transportation....but Samoa and NY differ quite a lot!

where i live there are easily five languages echoing through my aparment at any given time. one of my roommates is from Iran and he speaks farsi and english as well as a decent amount of turkish. he has many friends over who typically have a good handle of english yet his girlfriend is from russia. one of his friends has a girlfriend from spain and of course there are the endless masses of kurdish people who frequently pay welcomed visits to our apartment from the cafe downstairs. in reality english isn't the primary language in my life anymore except for when i'm at work however ironically i'm usually explaining things in turkish half of the time anyway.

i once heard from my dear friend back in the states that you should learn a language, if for no other reason, to read the newspaper. i think about him every time i pick up a copy of 'Haber' or 'Cumhuriyet' while waiting for the pleasant moments to pass on the ferryboat connecting the two continents i live on. this language business is becoming a huge role in my life whereas i have taken to charging a decent amount of money for private lessons in my native tongue should i give them in turkish. some people read books to pass the time but i stare at a seven-tabbed window of Google Chrome swapping between two languages that aren't my own while trying to perfect the tongues of my upcoming travel destinations.

..but in this note, which is truly just to myself, i'd like to add that it is absolutely so much fun to learn a new language. in fact, the fears that people have of approaching someone and asking for directions or asking about items in a shop are actually quite the opposite in effect. i love being the goofy foreigner who takes bold steps at speaking a language very different to that of my own and i love the mistakes i make. a slight mistake can be a big one but if you catch yourself you can turn it into a really funny situation.

a few weeks ago i was helping a friend buy tickets to bulgaria and at the bus station he said the word in turkish 'your village' which i misheard as 'sheep' which believe it or not is actually quite close in turkish. i thought he was referring to the confused and nervous foreigner standing next to me who had absolutely no grasp of turkish and i proceeded to tell the man at the bus station that i was his shepheard and he was my lost sheep. of course i caught the error and somehow it worked out to be a story we both took home.

furthermore i feel it is your responsibility as a traveler and as a foreigner to make an attempt to speaking the language of the country you travel to. it is so stupid to watch people point at their mouth and grunt in a restaurant or not even know how to say 'thank you'. i feel that those people have missed the point of travel in general. it is of course our purpose as travelers to learn more about the places we travel and also to represent our own cultures as best as we can. surely we americans dont want to prove that we are knuckle dragging apes any more than we do in other instances.

i love this.. i love this lifestyle and i never want to leave it. it is so cool to experience different corners of the world and through language you can truly dive deeper into realms of humanity that no travel book can offer to you. language is a beautiful new mask that you can wear proudly and i urge everyone (native english speakers especially) to break the already well-known stereotype of being stubbornly monolingual and try to learn the tongues of other countries. it is of course true that language and culture are very similar in the end and you can learn so much from one another.

Beautiful Samoa

During my Peace Corps service in Samoa, I climbed the 754 meter (about half a mile) high mountain next to my house on two different occasions. Both trips I had great help from people in my village, and on the second trip, some of my students from school came along with us. My house can be seen at 47 seconds into the video. From: behappy701 Views: 1 0 ratings Time: 02:14 More in Music

although i do think that some questions are pointless i am still reminded of those which have danced in my brain long ago. i never signed up for philosophy and i never question why we are here. i'm not much of a religious man either. it is actually in the curiosity of randomness and how strangely functional it is in our lives that i cant help but wonder a few things. my question, as i said, is not "why we are here?" however "why are we here now?".

i suppose one should first look to the past before forming any thoughts on the present. it was of course several million years ago that we began to faintly resemble who we are today; and in fact some people show much more evidence than others in both their physical appearance and their behaviors. we dont need much to survive but out lives are much more comfortable for obvious reasons with a few added bonuses in life like for example hugs or laser tag.. i for one am not sure how i'd make it through rough days without the 1TL snickers bar habit i have.

furthermore it is perhaps in this freedom that we find a wide variety of paths upon which we can draw for our lives. i've taken an endless path as a traveler and a learner. for so long it has been a recurring phenomenon in my life that i wake up having no idea where i am that i've simply gotten used to it. this is the path i drew. others draw different paths. it is in these differences that i am marveled and much more respectful than i used to be. my path has taken me so far away from my origins that i'm not sure many people recognize me anymore. i dont even act the same or speak the same but i think we are all marveled by the vastness and endlessness paths can be.

i guess my question (or shape of a question) i began writing about was the matter of "why now?" and i really have no answer to this. sometimes i think i was born in the wrong time and i'd be much better off in the times of epic seafaring journeys into the unknown. i'm guiltily disappointed by the coca-cola stands i see in every single village i've ever been to but i shouldn't be.. i'm a bit of a coke fan myself.

actually i feel that we are living in a very wonderful time to be alive. what was not even conceptually possible only a hundred years ago is now part of our reality. i'm marveled greatly by the ability one has to jump on a plane as if it were a portal into the world with virtually limitless possibilities. we can go anywhere and we can travel to the wildest of faraway places to come home and share what we've discovered with each other in that same week. it is in these limitless possibilities that i first became tickled by the idea of being a lifetime traveler. why not, right?

yet... among all this endlessness and vastness and boundlessness i realize how small i am and i've never been saddened by it. i love you for how small and seemingly pointless you our to our earth and species yet you mean the universe to me. i cannot urge you, my friends, enough to wander far away and see this same gem from a different angle and i hope one day you too realize how small you are - there has never been a better time in our history to do so than now.

"for small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love." - Carl Sagan

It has been awhile (as always since I last posted) so instead of dwelling on this fact, I thought I would just get into the grits it.

As our past year has ended and the new one recently began, I started to pause a bit and think about the past few months. Jim and I still are a bit in shock that we have been married for a little over a year. We finally sent out Christmas cards this year. At first I really wanted to hand write each one, but as Christmas was fast approaching and I had only written around 10, and I still had around 100 more to write, I finally caved in and included the little insert on the year in review. Why had I never thought of this earlier?!? It's quick, easy and I can fit a crazy amount of details in anything ever written by hand. Now, I admit it was my first go at it, so they were really rough around the edges and not so pleasing on the eye. Next years' will be awesome!

Right after New Years we had some visitors come out. When I was in Samoa I lived on the school compound with another volunteer from Japan. In fact, when I finished my service, I visited him and his family in Japan. Well, he came out for a visit with his new wife. We had such a blast taking them around Annapolis. We introduced them to the Maryland Blue Crab in the form of crab cakes. They fell in love with Maryland crab cakes and cream of crab soup. His wife tried some local raw oysters and loved them as well. They enjoyed sitting in a local coffee shop drinking coffee and eating biscotti, and wandering around the town with it's brick roads and history.

One of the things we did when they were visiting was tour the Naval Academy. I had never toured the academy before their visit. If you have never been, it is amazing. There are so many amazing facts about the academy I never knew. Example, all the midshipmen live in the same dorm building which is the second largest dorm building in the world. The largest is in Russia. Our friends really enjoyed the tour as it was something quite unique to the US and Japan does not have military academies like the United States. After the official tour we wandered around the campus and found our way into the Naval Museum. As a history major I must recommend this museum to anyone ever visiting the academy. It displayed the naval history of the US from the beginning of the country until current day. It is a very well layer out museum. My friends enjoyed that museum very much. It was such a blessing having them visit. It even gave us an excuse to finish the bathroom in our basement. (which they referred to as a hotel bathroom).

Tonight is 12th night. Also known as Epiphany. It is supposedly the night that the Wise men reached the baby Jesus. I can't tell you if it's historically accurate or not, and to be truthful, I don't care. My family has been celebrating this since I was born. My grandparents on my dads side celebrated it. Maybe it was a family thing they brought with them from Germany, who knows. Either way, I love it. Traditionally my family gets together, eats stew, and has cake with 2 beans hidden inside of it. Whoever gets the piece of cake with the bean becomes the King or Queen of the family for the year. I never got the bean as a kid. I remember lamenting this fact to my grandma one year and that year I for the cake with the bean! Never mind there was a large hole where a finger most likely had inserted that bean. After the food has been eaten and king and queen determined, everyone cuts a branch from the Christmas tree and throws it into the fire while making a wish for the new year. Well, I have not been around my parents or my dads family in a long time, so my current version of 12th night has been somewhat modified. This year only my husband and I are celebrating. A cake seems somewhat ridiculous considering we know we would get the king and queen. So, no cake. Also, after Christmas my husband made turkey soup. It is amazing soup. Much better than most stews. Therefore, we are having the soup. And lastly, we have a fake tree. It is still up, but I had to go outside and cut twigs from our bush so we could throw them in the fire and make wishes for the new year. It was different, but it was special. And it's ours.

So, here's wishing everyone a very happy 12th night. Or epiphany if you will, and I trust that you will.

White Fang - Jack London Following the learning, growth, and adaptations of a wolf, White Fang tells of the resilience of animals as they try to find balance between nature and nurture. From the very beginning of a newborn puppy testing the limits of the physical world to the point where White Fang becomes a father himself, the novel tells of the learning process of an animal throughout his life. When White Fang first joins humans, whom the narrator dubs “gods” because of their power and ability to dominate the world around them, he immediately becomes an outcast. Picked on by the rest of the puppies, White Fang learns the limits of the laws of the gods so he can bend the rules without breaking them, and he learns how to establish his role in relation to the pack. Eventually, White Fang becomes the dog of a new, evil god who tortures White Fang out of all his training. White Fang reverts to “the call of the Wild,” relying on a killer instinct rather than a desire to prove loyalty to a god. Just when his situation seems hopeless, White Fang is rescued by a new god, who shows him love and kindness. Under this new ruler, White Fang re-learns the laws of the gods, how to show loyalty, and how to care. I was not thrilled by White Fang. The story starts off with a tangent that eventually leads into the story of White Fang (tangents in general tend to frustrate me. According to my Kindle, I was almost 30% of the way through the book before White Fang was introduced, although it did move faster once that happened), and the way the story focuses on White Fang felt almost childish at times. I could picture it playing out as an animated movie, with White Fang voiced by some famous actor. As a result, I felt this book would be appropriate for kids – and an excellent lesson in vocabulary for them – because it focuses so much on White Fang. The omniscient narrator describes what White Fang feels without reasoning through it because he is only an animal and does not have the means to draw conclusions. The narrator talks about everything from the difference between a reproving bite and an attempt to kill, to the thrill of the hunt and the desire for meat. There were times when, being an animal lover, I felt strongly connected to and pulled in by what White Fang was doing. I felt anguished when White Fang was being tortured, truly despondent when the nice god went away, and satisfied at the fairy tale ending. Spoiler alert – it does have a happy ending. It doesn’t follow the entire life of the animal the way Marley and Me does.

The main thing I didn’t like about White Fang was how the narrator placed humans as gods. I still find myself reflecting constantly about Ishmael and how the desire to dominate leads to the destruction of the world, and by placing humans as gods in control of everything, White Fang reinforces the idea that humans are meant to dominate the world. Furthermore, the narrator talks about how white-skinned gods have more power than the dark-skinned god that provides the first home for White Fang. Yes, this book was written a long time ago, but that is not an excuse and it should not be read without acknowledging the racism. One redeeming factor I liked about the book was that the god who comes in to save White Fang from his horrible circumstances shows how those in power have the responsibility to protect those weaker than them, which in this case means humans should not torture animals. Given my personal views and opinions, it was hard for me to read the lessons of the book in just the context of an animal growing up and adapting to different life circumstances. I felt the book would have made for a great discussion because there were so many lessons in there about human relationships in general, and too many prejudiced and stereotyped ideas for my taste. However, the novel mostly redeemed itself by the end. Overall, it comes out as an OK book.

Dear Exile (I can’t remember the names of the authors) is a compilation of letters between two friends “separated for one year by an ocean.” One went off with her new husband to be a Peace Corps teacher in Kenya, and the other struggled through the post-college-but-still-pre-adult stage of life in New York City.

I found the book very relatable. The Peace Corps side of the story felt exactly like what I am going through – struggling to move from strange to familiar in a new village, learning how to make local foods by way of local traditions, making mistakes with language, and trying to do something at school. Her water problems were probably a bit worse than mine because her water constantly made her sick, and she was also living with her husband, so there was somebody there to blunt the impact of the Peace Corps experience, but otherwise, it felt familiar. Similarly, the letters from the friend in New York were just as relatable for anyone living anything remotely resembling a regular life in the States. Embarking on the journey of adulthood, she needed her own apartment, she was just beginning a new job in the city, and she muddled through the endearing and heartbreaking relationships of a tattered family and always finding Mr. Not-so-right on the search for Mr. Right

I don’t have much more to say about the book. It is a quick and engaging read because it is a compilation of letters; it’s the guilty pleasure of reading somebody else’s mail.

The Devil in the White City – Erik Larson

The Devil in the White City is a tale of the enchantment of the World’s Fair hosted by Chicago at the end of the 19th century. Amidst a quickly industrializing world, Chicago is out to prove itself to the rest of the United States of America by hosting a fair that can top all previous records of attendance and revenue. This goal is extrapolated to a national level as the US tries to put itself on the same level as European countries and cities. The fair is constructed in an unbelievable timeline, resulting in a new (or rather old) influence on architecture in the US and all sorts of innovations, from Cracker Jacks and Shredded Wheat to the Ferris Wheel, now a central part of all fairs across the States. However, just past the enthralling World’s Fair lies a charming man responsible the modern definition of a psychopath. This story tells the true story of how the World’s Fair was built in Chicago, and how one particularly suspect character took great advantage of the flurry of motion.

Larson’s work is very well researched and filled with quotes, excerpts from newspapers and letters, and interesting statistics about cost. However, sometimes his writing comes off more as a report and less as a novel. The book is known for its description of the architecture of Chicago and the fair, and it is chock full of architectural descriptions. I felt some of that could have been left out because I don’t remember the difference between the types of column, and without any background in architecture, it was hard to visualize some of his descriptions, so I found myself caught up in details. Larson also has a tendency to end sections, paragraphs, or chapters in the book with a sentence like “Later, he would realize that this was important,” or “Much would be made of this observation in the future.” Sometimes he would tell you why in the next sentence, and sometimes he didn’t address it until 250 pages later. It felt like a simple, overused method to hook the reader. The other thing that annoyed me about the book is that Larson assumes a base level of knowledge that I don’t think everybody has. He continually mentions specific locations in Chicago by giving the intersection in street names, and I don’t understand the necessity of the street names in the rest of the book. Also, he mentions three kids – Alice, Nellie, and Howard – who were so well-known that everybody in the US knew them by first name only. He doesn’t come back to tell us why until the end of the book. His methods of trying to keep the reader hooked left me a little frustrated – I felt the story could have been more straightforward and just as compelling without so many interruptions, assumptions, and details.

Overall, the book was surprisingly interesting. I even found myself as frustrated about landscape architecture as one of the architects in the book. The story of the madman is sparsely interwoven until the end of the book, but makes for interesting little tidbit reads. While I can see how it relates to the World’s Fair, I would also be interested to read a book solely about him because his story encompasses much more both before and after the World’s Fair in Chicago. The Devil in the White City is a fairly compelling read, surprisingly interesting, and reads like a novel because some of the facts are so unbelievable.

The Famished Road – Ben Okri The Famished Road tells the story of a spirit child who chooses to remain in the human world. Normally, spirit children live only a short while before returning to their idyllic spirit world, but Azaro chooses to remain in his African village life. He must fight to remain in his life, for all his spirit companions are constantly trying to lure, persuade, and trick him into returning to the spirit world, and there are several occasions where they almost succeed, but with the help of his parents, herbalists, witches, and others, he is always called back to Earth. While Azaro wanders the roads of his village and the spirit world, his parents endure the daily struggles of poverty and trying to raise a family in a world of broken dreams and false promises from corrupt politicians. The Famished Road is an epic novel of struggling through everyday life. The beauty of The Famished Road comes through in every page and in every sentence. Okri’s language is poetic, and he evokes vivid imagery by crossing the senses, so that the reader feels the color green and tastes the sorrow of the villagers. His descriptions are vivid, which is needed to describe the world of the spirits and the spirits in the world. One of my favorite passages, near the end of the book, describes why the people in the spirit world are endlessly building a road that meets with destruction as much as it does progress “There are many ways to be dead…the prophet’s people are the dead. Heaven means different things to different people. They wanted to live, to be more alive. They wanted to know the essence of pain, they wanted to suffer, to feel, to love, to hate, to be greater than hate, and to be imperfect in order to always have something to strive towards, which is beauty. They wanted also to know wonder and to live miracles. Death is too perfect.” Okri’s words are lyrical, and the imagery vibrant, but because of that, I tried to find symbolism in every sentence, and I frequently had to remind myself to step back and read the book and not analyze the meaning behind every word. Also, I had a hard time following the book because the storyline was not always clear, and the book does not always obviously move towards a theme or lesson or climax. Particularly in the beginning of the novel, the spirit world mixes strongly with the real world and it is hard to tell what is really happening. There were times when the story moved quickly because it was so compelling, and times when I got completely lost because I couldn’t make sense of everything. Do you need to read this book? Probably not, but if you’re up to it (it’s 500 pages), it’s beautifully written and has some parts that really shine.

Hocus Pocus – Kurt Vonnegut

Hocus Pocus tells the story of how the narrator came to be imprisoned in the library where he is composing the novel. After graduating from West Point, he joined the war effort in Vietnam (might have been Korea, I can’t remember at this point). Upon his return to the States, he took a job teaching science at a public college to students who hadn’t been accepted anywhere else for various reasons. Across the lake from the college stood a state prison, and after he lost his job at the college, the narrator (I would tell you his name, but I can’t remember it exactly either – it’s relevant to the story, so rather than get it wrong, I’ll just leave it out) accepts a teaching position at the prison. After a mass prison break, he is then accused of providing information to the inmates (describing the lakes and trees outside) which made the escape possible, so he is now an inmate at the prison. The population of the prison expanded so much that it took over the college, which stopped was no longer a college after the prison break made it too dangerous.

This is my new favorite Vonnegut book – Timequake has been pushed into second place. The satire is noticeably subtle, and sometimes blatantly obvious. Brilliantly written, highly recommended.

Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

I’ll be honest here…I don’t think my book-lover status qualifies me to summarize and comment on Tolstoy. As far as I can tell, Anna Karenina is a long story set in Russia. It reminds me of both Pride and Prejudice and Gone With the Wind because it follows many characters who are all somehow related. The uniting theme behind all these characters seems to be how they deal with guilt – how their moral misbehavior influences their thoughts, actions, and relationships and whether they use their experiences to improve themselves or just ignore anything and everything that doesn’t please them. That’s the best I can give you.

Through the Looking Glass – Lewis Carrol

The follow-up to Alice in Wonderland. I liked Through the Looking Glass better, but I still couldn’t tell you the point of the book.

River Town – Peter Hessler

A Peace Corps novel from a Volunteer in China in the mid-90s, only a year or two after China reopened its borders to the world after the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward. The author studied literature and wrote articles for newspapers, so sometimes the book gets a little dry, but he generally has excellent descriptions. He taught English at a teacher training school, and interspersed with his writing are excerpts from student papers. This enhances the story because you have the US perspective from the author experiencing China post-communism, and comments from the students that show the emerging Chinese youth perspective balancing parental demands, political propaganda, and personal desires.

I also liked this book from the Peace Corps perspective. I feel like I can relate to his story – there is the initial awkwardness, the growing comfort, what it’s like to have people visit from the States, and adjusting to a new, slower lifestyle. In terms of PCV books I’ve read, this one gets second place. I still highly recommend The Ponds of Kalambayi.

Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams

Dirk Gently has been hired to solve a murder. He believes in a holistic approach to the problem, so instead of just solving the murder, he figures out how everything about the case – even the parts that seem innocent, inconsequential, and not at all related – are connected.

Fans of Hitchhiker’s Guide everywhere will love this book. Beyond the first 3 chapters (40 pages or so) it is a quick read. The beginning introduces various characters and scenarios that don’t make a reappearance until later in the book, so it’s hard to keep track of what is going on and what information is important. Well-written, intriguing, moves fast, and plenty of satire. It’s like Douglas Adams with a hint of Vonnegut – if you like one or the other, you will probably like this book.

Ishmael – Daniel Quinn

Yes, I read Ishmael again. That makes it the second time I’ve read it this year, the third time I’ve read it total. If you take this book seriously – which you should – it’s one of those books that sticks with you. Ishmael talks about the mythology that guides cultural development; how the stories we learn and act out impact our relationships and the world. It begins with an ad in the paper – a teacher is seeking a pupil with an earnest desire to change the world. The classrooms and lessons aren’t quite conventional, but you find yourself following along with the narrator asking the same questions, struggling with the same answers, and having the same Aha! revelations. Very highly recommended book, especially for those with an earnest desire to change the world.

The Alchemist – Paulo Coelho

The Alchemist is the story of a journey. After having a recurring dream, the main character, Santiago, leaves his life as a shepherd to follow the omens that will lead him to his Personal Legend (I think that is the terminology from the book). Santiago sells his flock to leave Spain and cross the sea into Africa in search of the pyramids of Egypt. His journey stalls, but as long as he continues to listen to his heart, he can see the omens that lead him to the next step.

I felt The Alchemist was a good follow-up to Ishmael if you consider the spiritual aspect of Ishmael. It’s one of those books that sometimes you feel embarrassed about advocating because it’s a cheesy story that makes you believe in your own dreams and destiny, but I love those stories that emphasize the importance of living life. I heard a song the other day that had a line “everybody dies, but not everybody lives,” and The Alchemist is about living your life – facing the challenges and taking the risks to find what makes you happy and fulfilled.