Just a quick note here.

A storm approaching a tropical depression is heading this way from the East. Below is a satellite photo of it approaching us - it's pretty big, no?

http://www.prh.noaa.gov/guam/satellite.html

Choose the satellite loop for Yap - the island is quite small - about 37 square miles, so it's easy to miss.

I hope it's not another Typhoon Sudal, the super-typhoon that hit Yap in April.

Lorenzo came over around 0600 on Saturday morning, and we took a hike up Mount Medeqdeq north of Colonia.

Tropical mornings never cease to amaze me. I remember my first few trips to Honolulu when I lived in Hilo and I would wake up before dawn to go walking on the beach. There is a freshness to the air that exists at no other time of day - a new day is fresh with possibilities. The usual big-city buzz -- traffic, the hum of electrical lines, the chatter of people seated in cafes, facing the water, airplanes droning overhead, off to destinations in the Outer Islands, Asia, and the Pacific -- is less at dawn and builds as the day progresses.

There is no hum in colonia. I live on the busiest street here, and during the height of the day, perhaps 40 cars an hour pass in front of the house. At night, I've woken up, lying in bed, listening to the rain, and there are no cars. There are no barking dogs. The only rowdy beings are misguided chickens that begin crowing at 0200. Eventually they figure out that dawn won't be coming for another 4 hours, and they quit. The level of quiet is absolutely unreal.

I've been sleeping exceptionally good - in fact, on the average of 8 hours a night, which for me is unheard of. I'm withdrawing badly needed sleep from the bank, and for the past two weeks have been sleeping very soundly. I put my head on the pillow, and I wake up 8 hours later with no waking up in between - I haven't slept like this in years. And I've been having very intense dreams about nothing in particular.

Lorenzo is one of my language consultants. He's a friendly man in his early forties, educated, and speaks English very well. He and I have been working on a translating a Satawalese text entitled "Fioangon Meram me Aenet" 'The story of the Sun and the Moon.' It's about nine pages long, and we've done about 4 pages so far, and it's a cliff-hanger on every page! I can't wait to work on more of it to see what happens. By the way, working with texts is a fine way to find out more about how language works. It's one thing to elicit sentences like "My uncle has a red pencil box" or "His fishhook is bigger than mine." Of course, those sentences serve a purpose, but one can get a lot of data by reading and working through texts. Or so I'm going to argue in my MA thesis!

Lorenzo and I are climbing up the hill. We fall silent as we pass through a Yapese village. The road to the summit is a common path, and one doesn't need permission to use it, but we respect the Yapese by postponing our conversation until their buildings are behind us. Both of us used a fair amount of insecticide before this trek- Lorenzo says that even though Dengue might be going away, "it's always better to use precautions" so I heed him - and he heeds his own advice. Midway, we look back, and the bay and ocean are glassy, or 'Nupupup' in Satawalese - I make a mental note to enter the word into Shoebox. By the way, I am trying every trick in the book to remember words and phrases here, and I'm still struggling a bit with the Ssatawalese sound system, partly because of the orthography - the writing system - used to represent it. The Satawalese orthography has adopted the following digraphs (two graphemes, or characters that represent a single sound) to represent the Satawalese vowels:

Here's a copy of the International Phonetic Association's vowel chart that attempts to represent the major vowels in most of the world's languages:

hyperlink to sounds

oa - open-mid back rounded vowel like the au in 'caught' or if you're looking at a cute baby, kitten or puppy 'Aaawwww...." - the backward c on the chart
iu - a high central unrounded vowel (no English example, sorry!) - the i with a line through it in the middle of the chart
ae - the vowel between the Open-mid and Open vowel that sounds like 'sat' - on the chart above, it looks like an a and e stuck together
eo - a middle central rounded vowel  - looks like this

Satawalese also has short and long a,e,i, o, and u which I'm okay with.

Follow the hyperlinks to hear the sounds.

Satawalese is an intensely vowelly language. While trying to wrap my tongue around their words, at the same time I'm trying to train myself to read their orthography to produce the sounds above, and it's hard. They have three consonant sounds that are tricky - a trilled "spanish' r, a retroflex r (not quite how a person from India would say it but different from the American r - perhaps how a very distinguished pirate would say it - Arr! Arr!), and the ng sound (like in sing) - the ng isn't hard to produce - what's hard about this one is distinguishing it from the regular n in fast speech. I'm sure Filipino speakers and Indonesians would have no problem - then again, Filipinos sometimes have trouble distinguishing between /f/ and /p/, Germans between /v/ and /w/, Japanese between /l/ and/r/... This reminds me of Arrerente speakers in Australia, who distinguish between dental and palatal /t/s - almost impossible for English speakers to hear, though Victoria Anderson can produce both effortlessly and tried to teach me in her phonetic field methods class how to produce them myself, which I eventually did, but trying to dinstinguish them hearing them uttered by someone else was impossible - and so it goes.

Oh, and satawalese has a p, pw, m, and mw sounds - again, the pw and mw are digraphs representing a rounded p and m respectively - Satawalese words pwin 'brother of' and  pin 'taboo' may sound the same to untrained ears, but are very distinct to Satawalese.  

So you see kids? Every language has something wild and wooly.

Back to Lorenzo. He's been living on Yap for about 7 years. He supervises the administration of schools on Satawal, Elato, and Lamotrek here on Yap, and makes occasional field visits. Though we are separated by about 10 years in age, we think a lot alike. He tells me about life on Satawal, and how it's changed, and how it's remained the same. A microwave tower was erected on Yap last Friday, and by sometime next week, Satawal gets email! They won't have the Web for awhile, but from what I understand, email will be routed through Guam to here - a guess it's a matter of time before the Web DOES make it there, though. [I'd much rather have the Web available to them than cable TV] Satawal has a computer lab with 10-12 stations, all running on solar. It has a well-equipped clinic, and the Chuukese travel to visit Satawal's dentist!

I asked him dozens of questions about his life. He's one of those guys that has a firm foot in two worlds - the Western and his own, though I think he has a softer spot in is heart for Satawal. He reads novels, and loves to hear Satawalese, Ulithian, and Woleaian singing and chants (I played him my CD entitled "Spirit of Micronesia"). Though he wears shorts and T-shirts, I think he'd rather be wearing a thuw - they're more comfortable anyway. If I wouldn't burn like a crisp, I'd wear a thuw every day - on Satawal I probably will wear one. He showed me how to tie it.

He told me what work detail is like on Satawal - men show up at the men's house in the morning, pour themselves a cup of coffee, and sit down to discuss the day. Work details are written up (though it sounds like any work unit that's got stuff to do - it really reminded me of my kibbutz days, especially the coffee ritual, which in Israel was a very long and pronounced preparation activity beginning with the igniting of the Samovar - I'll spare you the countless details that followed)
 

This morning I awoke at 0530 to get ready for my first immersion in Yapese waters since my arrival two weeks ago. Those oceanography types reading this (and they're a lot of you) can retract that scolding finger right now that says "You'd BETTER get out there and get wet if you're going to be there a month - Yap's got the best diving in the world!" (Some will argue that Palau is the best, but more on the debate below). The linguists would concur with my preference to be at home going through the data, as I'm on a tight time frame and am trying to get as much as possible (and NOT get stressed out about it). And after all, I came to Yap to work.  But I probably should take a break, and wat better place to take in in the ocean at one of the world's premier reefs?

So I show up at the dock around 0645, less than a ten-minute walk from the house. The full moon was about an hour from setting, and it was magnificent. We picked up two other divers, and headed to Mi'il Channel, through the center of Yap. [Notice the map says "Mill channel," but it's actually Mi'il Channel ]

I felt alternately that I was riding through the Everglades and through the Amazon, as our boat traveled through thick mangrove patches - a Satawalese man named Kintu (cousin of Kensley, nephew of Lorenzo - I'm starting to get more familiar with the geneaology of everyone here) expertly piloted the boat through, with a cheek full of betelnut.

An aside. I was told that I didn't describe the effect of betelnut in one of my earlier posts - well, it's definitely a different sensation than I've ever had before. Wait a minute. [Being a scientist who wishes to relay accurate information, Kevin goes to get betelnut to give you, gentle readers, a truthful description]. Pepper leaf + lime + betelnut - insert in mouth, chew, chew, chew. Well, it's a cross between (spit) a hit of tobacco and marijuana and a very strong cup of coffee (spit). A feeling of well-being and contentment (spit) follows almost immediately.

The other two dive masters were also chewing, and darn - I left mine at home (spit). But better I experience my first Yap snorkel fueled with nothing more than a good cup of Peet's.

The landscape widened as we entered bays and narrowed again as we traversed the "German Channel," a channel cut through the mangroves by, uhm, Germans, during their colonial rule to get more easily to the North tip of the island.

Here's a map - we left from Colonia and went through a channel in the center of the island (it still looks attached in this picture but it's not - barely)


The ride took about 15-20 minutes, and it's been years since I've been on a small boat like that, and haven't had fun like that since I was airboating on a river in Nebraska with my brother-in-law in the late 60's.

One idea I have never liked about scuba, though I haven't tried it so I should disparage, is all of the STUFF needed to do it - regulators, tanks, wet suits, etc. It's like windsurfing - lots of stuff. [I'm a boogieboarder - all I need is my board and fins]. And then there's the timed descent, the timed decompression, the ascent. It's a lot of work, coupled with the fact that I have excruciating pain in my ears trying to equalize so I've always thought that it wasn't for me. Someone pointed out here that you don't have to equalize in scuba, as the equipment provides you air to keep your breathing passages open. Never thought about that one, but they're right. [Note to myself: check out how to become a certified diver when I get back to Hawaii]

I got a good look at the Island of Rumung, the "forbidden island." There is no connection to any other island - no bridge. The Rumungese do not allow anyone there, and I respect that - more on this topic in my next blog. Back to the boat.

I had to wait until the Canadians were done suiting up, and then I entered the water.

Wow. It was very clear, and I was off. I got off on the reef side of the boat, and for 20-30 minutes, paddled around looking at the bursts of color all around me - suffice to say, I didn't know a single species I was looking at, but I lost count after 40 species - it's just like National Geographic underwater!

What I thought were hard tough corals turned out to be anenomone-like - I didn't touch anything, but to test whether some kind of growth was hard or soft, I waved my fins in the direction of the object and saw it either stand firm or wave back at me with thousands of tentacles. I cruised in large circles, keeping my eye on the boat. There was some current, and I wanted to NOT have to get rescued because it took me far away from where I was supposed to be.

I was unprepared for what happened next - I was swimming along, and suddenly it got very dark ahead, and I realized I was on the edge of the reef's dropoff, and gasped - I had the sensation of being on top of a very tall building, and in this case, could "walk" right off the edge, and not fall - I swam along the edge of the reef, gazing at the abundant life attached to, swimming, and lurking at the edge. I estimate the depth to be around 50-80 feet directly below and the depth kept going and going down off to the side. As my dad would say, "Holy COW."

Back on the reef, I realized there were coral communities, separated by either die-off zones or other natural breaks, reminding me of green zones in cities and between cities. Of course, the big draw is the large mantas, and the dive masters took the two divers to see them some 40-60 feet below the surface. We were near their "cleaning station" where these marvelous, peaceful behemoths swim into view, almost as on a catwalk in a beauty contest to be cleaned of any attachments by fish in the area. I want to see them sometime. I used to surf with mantas at Pohoiki Bay, so I've seen them in the wild before, but I was told these mantas are very very large ones.

Two of the guides were Palauan. I had a chance to talk to one of them for about 20 minutes. Gordon was a very affable, softspoken man. He is Palauan, but prefers Yap, and has been here 19 years. Palau is completely driven by tourism (Yap only opened its doors to tourism officially in 1989) and the dive business on Palau is intense - read cutthroat. Other people I have talked to here don't have a high opinion of Palau - they say that traffic is bad, tourists get ripped off, people are only out for a buck - but those may be the sour grapes of people who had bad experiences. I'm not here to diss Palau, but Gordon prefers the more friendly attitude of dive companies here - indeed, at one point during the morning, there were several boats from at least three companies moored at the same float. Gordon probably loves his home, but like me, has seen it change too fast and is saddened by the hopelessness of it never being able to return to what it once was.

The work that lies ahead is both exciting and daunting.

I only have a month on Yap, and I'm trying to accomplish a lot in just a short time. Like any scientific work, one must be incredibly organized - snippets of data have to go somewhere, and deciding whether it goes here, or there, or somewhere else, is never a sure thing.

Fortunately, my consultant and officials at the Yap Department of Education are giving me readily prepared amounts of data in the form of words, sentences, stories, and grammatical and morphological phenomena.  Folding this all into one piece of work, and then verifying it a number of times with different speakers will be the surpreme challenge.

As most of you know, I am very interested in working with languages that appear to be threatened. In fact, a quote I have on my academic Web site by the late Stephen Wurm sums up how I feel about the work at hand::

"Each language reflects a unique world-view and culture complex, mirroring the manner in which a speech community has resolved its problems in dealing with the world, and has formulated its thinking, its system of philosophy and understanding of the world around it. In this, each language is the means of expression of the intangible cultural heritage of a people, and it even remains a reflection of this culture for a while after the culture which underlies it decays and crumbles, often under the impact of an intrusive, powerful, usually metropolitan, different culture. However, with the death and disappearance of such a language, an irreplaceable unit in our knowledge and understanding of human thought and world-view has been lost forever."
   
Wurm, Stephen. Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger of Disappearing. UNESCO Publishing, 1996.

I wondered whether Satawalese is considered threatened, as it is fairly isolated - isolation does provide a certain barrier to rapid language change, but it is currently experiencing language erosion. A language consultant told me the other day that parents on Satawal are more concerned about correcting their children's English than correcting their childrens' Satawalese. Though the first several grades on Satawal are taught in the language, at either grade 4 or 5 children are taught in English for one or two hours a day. Even the isolation of Satawal does not fully protect the population from the tremendous amount of pressure that English appears to be exerting all over the world. Since a number of children move from Satawal to Ulithi to attend high school, and then on to University in Hawai'i at elsewhere, many opt to stay and not return. Unfortunately, children will not obtain accounting degrees, medical and law degrees, and then return to Satawal and live in a culture that still heavily relies on substinence. I was alarmed to hear this, and even more surprised to hear that cell-phone coverage might be available soon there!

Adding to my problem is the Trukic language continuum, a series of languages and dialects stretching from Chuuk in the East to Sonsorol in the West, a distance of 999.9 nautical miles, 1150 mi, 1851 km. Mutual intelligibility, not an exact science by any means, attempts to determine to what degree speakers of one language can understand speakers of another. Simply, a speaker of language A is recorded, and played to a speaker of language B. B is asked to summarize what A said, and a determination is made using a percentage system (it's a bit more complicated than this, but I'll spare you the details). As one might suspect, intelligibility is higher on the Chuukic side, but diminishes when Sonsorolese and Chuukese are compared.

What I'm trying to find out is: what is unique to Satawalese? What grammatical, morphological, and phonological features have they retained with other languages in the Trukic family, and what features do they have that no other language has?

To be continued.

Last night I attended a party at the assistant to the Attorney General's house, and met some Peace Corps volunteers.

And I thought the Reagan or Bush Senior Administration had done away with the Corps, declaring their mission either completed or no longer worth funding. I'm very glad I was wrong, and that the Peace Corps has survived and appears as robust as ever. 

I met several young women who are in different phases of their two-year commitments. Some are old timers, while others are new arrivals. 

Sarah is working in an educational capacity - she's been to Satawal, which she describes as "awesome."

Lisa just finished her MS in Biology and is working with the island's EPA equivalent. She urged me to visit the Peace Corps office, which has a supply of Outer Island dictionaries to consult if I want. Lisa is concerned about the health of the reef here - compared to other places in the world where the coral reef has been seriously compromised or damaged, Yap's reef is holding its own. But Lisa's distressed to find the ocasional discarded car battery carelessly thrown in Yap's beautiful water, or the soda can thrown out the window here. Those kinds of things bum me out too.

Thea is an anthropologist, and started working last Monday at the Historic Preservation Office. She's a native Spanish speaker, and was raised in Argentina, London, and couple of other places I can't remember at the moment. Her father was a correspondent for several leading US newspapers.

I don't know much about the Peace Corps other than they seek individuals who 1) want to make a difference in the world and 2) those who want some adventure living in a culture completely different from their own. Naturally, this attracts people just like me - after all, I did run off to a kibbutz in Israel before I finished high school. Thea's growing command of Yapese is impressive, though she's currently plateaued a bit and is worried about future progress. I told her I had the same problem while learning Hawaiian with mastering the art of the relative and sub-ordinate clauses - it took me a long time to understand when to insert the anaphoric particle ai at sentence's end to mark the presence of a noun in a relative clause - and advised her to keep hammering away at it. I don't know much about Yapese, but she has the sound system down. Like most multilinguals her fluency in Spanish, Italian, and English gives her an edge.

She's learning the inclusive and exclusive pronoun system of the language, which I will admit, is challenging. Hawaiian's pronoun system is like this, so it's not completely foreign to me. Such pronoun systems require you to acknowledge whether the people you are talking to, your 'hearers,' are included or excluded in a particular action.  In Hawaiian, the dual (2) forms are: kaua 'you and me'; laua 'those two (neither you or me)' 'olua, 'you two (hearers in front of me)' and maua, 'him/her and me (but not the hearer(s)).' The inclusive forms for more than two people: kakou 'all of us, including the hearer'; lakou 'all of them (excluding the speaker and hearer'; oukou 'all of you (excluding the speaker)'; and makou 'all of us (excluding the hearer). It sounds complicated, and takes a while getting used to, but they eventually sink in and make sense..

Thea taught me three important Yapese words: wech, gabuy, and bu: 'white,' 'pepper leaf,' and 'betelnut' respectively. Thea then showed me how to chew betelnut, on the doorstep of the assistant AG's house on a moonlit night in a Colonia neighborhood. She climbs trees for her own betelnut, which is no mean feat - most of these nutty treasures grow just below the tree's canopy at 15-25 feet - and the tree bows when a human scales it. Unfortunately, there have been accidents here where people have fallen, suffered concussions, brain damage and worse. Thea's a snowboarder, and has learned to boogie-board here (she HAS to show me where!) so the young woman is in good shape.

Like rolling a cigarette, there's a ritual to the preparation of a betelnut chew. First, all, or a portion of the gabuy serves as a base. Next, the knobby tip of the bu is shorn off with the teeth, and the whole bu is inserted under the molars to crack it length-wise. The bu is removed, and the slightly slimy innards discarded. The bu is opened like two half shells, and placed on the gabuy. Next, one sprinkles wech over both exposed bu halves. Close both sides together, wrap the gabuy around the bu, and put it into your mouth. Chew. And chew. And chew some more. Then get ready to spit the juice somewhere, keeping the fleshy contents in the mouth for the maximum effect. I felt like a ruminating cow, chewing, and chewing, and...chewing.

Thea spits much more expertly than I, though she confided that she really wants to learn how to arch and spit, like the Yapese. There is an art to spitting here - who knew?

All of these Peace Corps women are passionate about making a change, and a couple of them are very surprised (and even shocked!) at the level of expertise they are being asked to do in their jobs. It's not just typing and filing. They're being asked to make major decisions about how things should be done here - it's exciting to them, and scary too. One woman admitted to me that she wished she had paid more attention in the class she got the 'B' in, as the content in the class could have helped her in one instance here. But thanks to the Internet, they are consulting with their professors, and are building a network of contacts in which they can seek advice.

It's women like these than make me breathe a little easier that our world will be inherited by young, intelligent, concerned people who want to work hard to make a positive change in our world.

The Micro-Spirit is the field trip ship that travels monthly between Yap and the Outer Islands, taking people, goods and services between the Outer Islands and Yap. It's the lifeline to the many islands and atolls that make up Yap State.

The ship can travel for emergencies too - one man at the Department of Education I was to meet had a critically ill father on Elato, and the ship took him home to be with his father. I know how important that is, having lost my own father more than a year ago.

All sorts of cargo travel - the corpses of Outer Islanders who die on Yap are often taken back for burial. OIs are permitted to be buried here, but many families want the bodies brought back home for internment.

It used to be that people on Satawal were 'buried' in the ocean. To me, a much more logical arrangement than the Catholic church's requirement that they be buried in the ground on land. When there's only .9 of a square mile of land, and 600 living people living on it, you are correct in thinking that the availability for the land to support a large cemetery is rapidly diminishing - in other words, no more room. The cemetery is reaching that point now, according to my sources, and families are now burying their dead near their houses instead. 

A number of people have told me about Satawal, both natives and visitors, and with each new story, my vision of it changes. Yesterday I heard that walkie talkies and field radios are a hot item there, as their range is sometimes greater than 60 miles, meaning that the Satawalese can speak to the Lamotrekese some 40 miles away. Much more technology is available there now.

Joe told me that the Micro Spirit is "the highway to my home." In a diagram of his island, he showed me that only two approaches are possible, and that the geography is such that the ship can only come within several hundred yards of shore, so people and goods must wade or be floated to the beach.

Passage on the ship is inexpensive, and billed according to the mile (about .05 per mile) Satawal is 600 miles away, so the fare is about $30.

Perhaps one day you will see me on the bow of the Micro Spirit, as I voyage to Satawal to see for myself only what I can imagine at the moment. 

Everyone here carries a beautiful, intricately woven basket, containing pepper leaves, lime, and -- betelnuts.

Everyone chews betelnut here, and I mean - *every*one. Receptionists in government offices, clerks in the post office, policemen, store clerks, computer programmers, educational curriculum designers, people on the street, children - nearly everyone.

Except Lorenzo. Lorenzo has beautiful dentition, something that betelnut will ensure you *will not have* if you chew regularly. A chemical reaction of the pepper, lime, and betelnut causes the chew to go red. Chew it enough, and it stains your teeth. And unfortunately, habitual use slowly rots your teeth. Add tobacco and alcohol as an additional garnish (and others use garlic or ginger instead of tobacco and alcohol) and the combination can be more powerful or flavorful. Lorenzo doesn't chew, nor does he want his children to chew. He offers no explanation why, and I don't press him. I think I know why. But very few people here do not chew.

Lorenzo, and later Rosa, who does chew and offered me my first chew, answered the curious questions I had about this ubiquitious nut.

It's simply "Wisdom in a Basket." Preparing and chewing a betelnut provides the time needed to think about something before responding. Rather than put your foot in your mouth prematurely in reaction to a situation, people here pull out their betelnut from these beautiful baskets, and arrange the pepper leaf, lime and cracked nut in a sandwich like roll. They insert it into their mouth, and begin chewing.

While chewing, the effect of the nut is felt, contemplation begins, and later, words flow. People also chew during a conversation. I'm learning how to listen to someone talk to me with their mouth full of betelnut. If a person has a strong Yapese (or Ulithian, Satawalese, or Woleaian) accent, it's a challenge to understand them, but I'm a linguist after all.

Anthropologists can't be judgmental...nor should linguists. We report what we see as accurately as we can.

One tour book I read said that the sidewalks of Colonia were stained with betelnut, leading the reader to believe that s/he would be stepping on betelnut remains everywhere. I'm here to tell you that observation is dead wrong. You might see a little red splat here and there, but certainly its not like a paint job. And there is no gum on the sidewalks here - noone to my knowledge chews that stuff.

Eventually, the remains of the spent betelnut must be spat out. I have seen just a few (and believe me, I've done a lot of people-watching here) spit in my presence, but they're polite and discreet, and aim it expertly into a nearby receptacle. Mind you, there are spitoons everywhere - outside and inside.

I can count on one hand with three fingers missing the number of people I've seen here who smoke. It's almost non-existent. People chew instead.

Yap is known for its high quality betelnut, and it is the number one agricultural export. Sudal hurt production for awhile, but everyone is chewing again, I suspect the betelnut trees have all recovered and are producing like mad.

Rosa described what a first experience might be like, so I declined when I was offered some in the computer room of the Department of Education, where she is the Director. I have a pretty strong constitution, but I didn't want to get red-faced and dizzy in front of her colleagues. Though I was tempted.

I will try it, but preferably in someone's back yard. 

I will say one thing - between living in a society of smokers, where I have walked through too many choking clouds of smoke in my life, or betelnut chewers, where I've navigated through spitoons that are very similar to plastic mounted rubbish cans on city streets, I'll take the chewers any day.

[the above photo is a betelnut tree just after sunset, with the waxing moon]

I've been thinking about my father a lot since my arrival on Yap. My father, Walter Francis Roddy, aged 93, passed on to the Summerland on 10 August 2003.

I didn't come from money. My parents simply didn't have it. But what they did have, as the saying goes, "money cannot buy." They had dreams for their kids - the big difference was - they allowed their kids to develop their own dreams. They told me that I could be anything I wanted to be, do anything I wanted to do, and quite frankly, if you would have told me five years ago I'd be doing what I'm doing now, I would have said you were crazy.

Moving to Hawaii has been like that. I've been a resident for exactly 13 years to the day TODAY (November 18 was my first day at UHH), and when I look forward in time from my arrival in Hilo in 1991, I have accomplished a number of things that I would have said were either impossible or crazy. This is what my father and mother both taught me - keep going, chase what you think is impossible, work hard to get it, because, just maybe, you can make it reality. 

Dad was always apologizing to me for not being able to give me the $$ he thought I should have to "have a good life." Having been a child of the Depression, he saw and experienced things I cannot really comprehend. He was ashamed he couldn't put me through college. I'm glad he wasn't able to, frankly. I sure appreciated it more having paid for it myself. They liked my choice of colleges to attend - Georgetown and UC-Berkeley. And they didn't admonish me for taking time off between each as I went through my well-paid blue collar experiment as a cable splicer for Pacific Bell. The money was good - everything else wasn't.

I turned a deaf ear to Dad and Mom's "money will make everything better" approach to life. They came from a different generation where money was extremely coveted. Each week they made a big deal of buying lottery tickets, hoping to win. I learned early on not to put my hopes in having a lot of money, because 1) most of us never will be fabulously rich anyway; 2) sometimes one has to do awful things to others and the environment to make lots of money; and 3) there's more to life than money. Frank jokes that I should write a book "Everything I learned about life I learned on the Kibbutz," but it's true. That glimpse into a totally socialist lifestyle at age 17 changed my life forever.

My father's estate was settled this past spring, and his heirs - my sister, brother, and I - received enough to retire our debts and have a nest egg with which to build a dream. Granted, I could have borrowed the money to make this trip and pay my research assistants. But Kenny and Frank finally got through to me that interest is an evil thing, especially credit-card interest, and now I refuse to pay interest on anything except my house note. Yes, I will seriously look into applying for grant money when I finish my MA thesis to return here for my PhD research.  

I was more materialistic when I was younger, and had  my father given me money earlier, I might not have spent it on the wisest things. But my father's inheritance now is the greatest monetary gift I could have received from him posthumously, because it has enabled me to come here and do what I'm doing. I sense my father's presence here. I can see the smile on his face in my mind. I hear him in my mind, laughing and encouraging me. In fact, I was laughing at a joke the other day with Lorenzo, a Satawalese man I befriended, and I heard myself laugh, and thought "I'm starting to sound like Dad!"

What is remembered, lives.

I love you Dad, wherever you are. Thanks!