Beginning with my June 2008 post "It's Been Five Years," the following is the continuing story of my travels from the United States into Micronesia ~ Pohnpei, Guam and Saipan ~ and my life since June 2003.
Monday, July 21, 2003 ~ Pohnpei
It's been a couple of weeks since I've put pen to paper, or finger to keyboard. Indeterminate difficulties adjusting, physically and mentally.
It's so gorgeous out here, you have to shut yourself down or suffer sensory overload. That's probably why alcoholism and drinking sakau (the local mild narcotic drink made from the pepper plant which I've not tried), and suicide among young males are so prevalent. I've been told if you have problems back home, you'll have them out here, times three.
My household goods and furniture are all still in Montgomery, and I have no real idea if it was ever coming in the first place. The office manager kept saying it was being taken care of, and I've come to find out that she's never taken step one, she's just been smiling at me and saying it was done. I'm besides myself that someone can lie to me (and my boss) and smile at the same time over something that should be meaningless to them and so important to me. Getting straight answers out here about getting anything done is a joke. Which was part of my adjustment problem contributing to me coming to the conclusion that I had to go back, and deal with unresolved issues in Montgomery myself that I'd entrusted to others.
They say that Micronesia teaches you patience. It seems in order to survive in this way of life, what you have to learn is not to care. Maybe it's the same thing. But the way of thinking out here is definitely different from the way we think back home, and if you don't adopt it, unless you're a two-week tourist, you won't survive. It's that simple. And it's taken me nearly a month to begin to understand it.
Questions from home make me think too much about how to share about the difficulties I'm having adjusting, and make it worse. I really think it was, and is, just sensory overload that's gotten to me. I'm told it happens to everyone, although they generally forget it. It's one thing to be a tourist for a week or two to come to dive, live in a hotel, etc.; quite another to be contemplating being here for a few years. I haven't taken any pictures in a while either. Without realizing it, I quit taking pictures as a way to avoid the sensory overload. It's too much. Living on Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands as a military dependent didn't prepare me for this. I can't wait until I adjust.
There's an odd dichotomy here that I've simply not absorbed yet, the culture shock is setting in, in oddly disconcerting ways. It's overwhelming, and underwhelming. People smiling at each other and they smile throughout the day, and then they are somehow sad, reflective, even morose, at night.
There are 150,000 fewer people in this whole country than the town I just left, and yet there's an incredible diversity between the four states (as, frankly, ought to be expected given its geographical expanse). People from Pohnpei don't like people from Chuuk. Yap and Kosrae each keep to their own. I guess it's tribalism, and you see it intra-island too ~ which sounds so primitive as a description. But in fact there's nothing unsophisticated about these people.
The dictionary says the word "expatriate" can mean anything from someone away from their country, to someone who repudiates their country. Here, it's a friendly term, generally meaning the former. I've not repudiated my country, but I did need to get away from it. Too toxic these days, too many angry people.
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