Sunday, September 13, 2009

Recommended Reading ~ A Teacher's Tale

I know. It's been a while. I wanted to share something that may be of interest if you've been following this blog: "A Teacher's Tale," by Francis X. Hezel, SJ, in Micronesian Counselor #78 (September 2009), Adobe Acrobat PDF here. The author, Father Hezel, has been in Micronesia, primarily Chuuk and Pohnpei, since 1963, and I'm sorry I didn't meet him while I was in Pohpnei. I know I intended to.

I can say that there is not a paragraph in "A Teacher's Tale" that I do not relate to, with an experience of my own to share, as a result of living and working in Pohnpei for only six months, and because I lived with a Pohnpeian woman (or tried to) for a few years after that ~ trying to find some kind of balance between assimilation and merger of two cultures, two entirely different world views of how people are intended to live with and among one another. How can it be, I wondered, that getting along with one another is more important than getting ahead? Although their way of social interaction is frustrating and baffling to western eyes, inspiring in its deceptive simplicity at the same time primitive to our hubris in a way that can never be adapted to our philosophies, there are still a few things we can learn from it.

In Guam, I have more than a few Chamorro or "local" friends who consider themselves misunderstood by "mainlanders" or "statesiders" or "haoles" (a Hawaiian, not Chamorro term). "Only on Guam" or "OOG" they say, in that terminally unique way that both expresses pride and explains what is wrong all at once. But they do not know how westernized they are in their expectations, in the way they think and interact with one another; and that in this way they are little different from any other comparably sized community in the United States. They are as easily exasperated and quick to judge islanders from other parts of Micronesia as the young teacher in "A Teacher's Tale" once was, and as I sometimes still am today, although not (I hope) as much as I was five and more years ago.

Sometimes when I make brief returns to the United States, I am looked at as quizzically by my friends and family there by the things I say and do as the look on my face must have been to the people in Pohnpei, baffled as I was by their responses to other people's actions that I believed were inappropriate. While the people I left behind stateside may not always appreciate it, my new friends seem to think me the better man for it.