Laura and Valentino

One of the books I'm reading for my Forced Migrations class is called "What is the What", the story of a man named Valentino Achak Deng, one of the thousands of Lost Boys of Southern Sudan that were resettled in the United States.


I've read some pretty depressing pieces in my life (including lots of them from last quarter, which my last blog post can attest to) - but the story of Achak is beyond tragic. Imagine everything awful in this world coming upon one person in the span of a few short childhood years. I read and I'm shocked and I think that it'll soon be over (like how most of my hardships in life eventually came to an end at some point) - but it keeps going and I keep reading and the tragedy never ends. I keep reading not just because it is assigned for class but because I am beyond belief about his life. Not exactly bedside reading material.

In order to cope with such a depressing topic, and so I can get some decent sleep at night, I decided to pick up another book to finish off my day with - something I can read myself to sleep with. I thought to myself, what is one book that makes me feel the exact opposite of Achak? Not heavy, but light. No violence, but peace. No destruction of childhood, but playfulness and wonder. I knew exactly what I needed: Little House on the Prairie.


One of my favorite books of all time (right behind Little House in the Big Woods). It's been awhile since I have read this children's story, but it still evokes feelings of everything pleasant. I can feel myself bumping along in the covered wagon with Laura as they move out West, and I can smell the prairie plans that she describes so well. I started reading and realized that not everything in Laura's circumstances were perfect, either. First of all, she had to wear a sun bonnet (so that she wouldn't turn into a brown Indian, her mother commented). Second, her family was actually squatting on Indian territory, which was why they eventually were forced to leave. Her mother almost got her leg crushed while lifting one of the logs while building their home. They almost lost their beloved guard dog Jack when they forded the raging river! Intense circumstances for any 10 year old, perhaps, as those stories are still vivid in my mind from so long ago. I love Little House on the Prairie. I love Laura, Pa and his fiddle, and how her Ma is always mending while Mary is minding baby Carrie, but I think what I loved about it the most was the life that they lived. I wanted to travel by wagon out West, live on the Prairie, in a little house that smelled like sweet cut wood. I wanted to run barefoot chasing rabbits and wading ankle-deep in the river with the fish nibbling at my toes. I wanted to eat molasses and enjoy tiny candies that cost a penny a handful and could only be found in Independence, the nearest town 40 miles away. Let me make a correction: I not just "wanted" but I also "want". Still. When we were driving back and forth from Phoenix in December, I told Reuben that I think I would have been one of the courageous adventurers to head out West. At least I like to think I would have. I was, after all, enormously successful at playing the Oregon Trail. And one of my favorite childhood movies was "Far and Away", and my favorite part was when Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise claimed their plot of land once and for all.

I wish wagons still existed and there was still land to claim. Then I would pack up all of my meager belongings (or get rid of most of them) and head out. I'm sure Reuben could learn to make a log cabin. What adventure!

December sunshine

In early december we made the quick decision to go to Phoenix for Christmas. I'm not the "long-drive" kind of person; I fly places. Reuben, on the other hand, loves to drive great lengths. We decided so late that airfares, especially around the holiday season, were insane. So drive we did!



Our first stop on our long trek south was the University of Oregon, to the famed Hayward Field at the University of Oregon in Eugene. That's where Prefontaine made running history, and Reuben was thrilled. We also drove through Los Angeles, and made a quick stop (because we couldn't drive through LA without stopping!) at Griffith Park. It was a lovely visit, but the traffic reminded me why I don't like Los Angeles. Somehow we didn't take any pictures of that stop! We managed to make it to Phoenix unscathed and happy to have arrived. Here are a few highlights of the visit:

A hike to a view of Phoenix


Dave, Benjamin & Reuben built a hardy solar oven


We celebrated my birthday at "my big fat greek restaurant"


We had a great hike to the top of Picacho Peak!


At the top of South Mountain, near Darcy's house


Paige and I put together a puzzle that nobody believed we could!


we made gingerbread houses



Reuben and I spent Christmas eve at Darcy and Dave's, and had an impromptu jam session.


Christmas day we spent a Mary's house, and the present opening was the most chaotic I have ever experienced!


We had a looooong trip home. And a cold one, through Nevada.




Joshua Trees


We stopped at Hoover Dam



We even made a stop in Las Vegas. Las Vegas is probably the number one place I never wanted to go in life, but we were driving right by it, and it was New Years Eve, so I felt we had an obligation to.


We were walking through the mall in Caesars Palace and a huge crowd had gathered in front of a store that Jennifer Lopez was shopping in. Maybe I would have been more starstruck if I had known how great she would be on American Idol!


And....this hotel, somewhere in the middle of NOWHERE in Nevada, is where we spent New Years Eve. What a party.


That's our trip! Seems kinda boring when I go over this, but I'm writing it in retrospect. And I'm tired. Good night!

Back

I'm back to this blog. For the next few minutes, at least. I decided this morning that I needed some processing time. I remembered the days when this blog was an outlet of sorts, for me. I went back to the last few blogs I've made. Yep, I'm still sick of weddings, I'm failing as a naturalist (I haven't even tried), and I'm still trying to process what the last 6 months of my life have been. There has been so much change and so many new things. Overall, it has been wonderful. I love being married. Love love. I could never have dreamed to feel like this. Before our wedding I had no idea what it would be like to be married but I am perfectly content. It's not perfect, and no marriage is, but its challenges make both of us stronger and grow us closer together.

I am also in school again. REAL school, not IslandWood style. I am commuting 4 days a week to UW. Car --> ferry --> Walk to Pioneer Square station --> Express bus --> class --> reverse. Six weeks in to fall quarter, I can say that it hasn't been so bad. Reuben warms my seat in the car every morning (class starts at 8:30am for me 2 days a week so I have to take the 7:05am ferry), and I get work done on the ferry as I eat my breakfast. The bus is only 15 minutes or so, and I enjoy walking the streets of Seattle. There's something quite empowering about commuting. I know exactly where I am going. I can give people directions when they're lost. I walk en masse. The weather has been pretty decent this fall, and I haven't really had any super rainy-day commutes. I think that is about to change.

Classes are challenging. Academically challenging - only slightly, but it is more challenging to me on a more personal front. The classes that I am taking are Curriculum & Instruction (a class which I despise, and is excluded from this discussion), Global Health, and Economics of International Development. The latter two: I love. Global Health is way beyond what I expected. I'm not so much learning about sicknesses and diseases from a medical perspective as much as I am learning about the politics, socioeconomics, and history of the aid industry. It's fascinating. My economics class is hard and I can never wrap my brain around the concepts, but I think that makes a point in and of itself. Economics is confusing. The development industry is caught up in all this confusion, which has created a complicated, bureaucratic and global mess. I am always surprised, often aghast, and constantly being confronted with challenging ideas and points of view. It is a collision of my past experience, what I am currently learning, and (what I thought were) my future goals. It's developed a little bit of a crisis in me. I want to work with the poor, I want to help (as well as so many other good-willed people out there), but how can I do any good when the 'helping,' in and of itself, so often hurts? It would be easy to sit for a million hours straight and talk about everything that's wrong with the industry these days. That we blindly trust big aid agencies to use our tax dollars charitably. Don't get me started on child sponsorship. Is there any hope to be found? Is there such thing as a solution (or solutionS) I'm getting so muddled down and burdened with the crisis that I don't see anything positive coming out of it all. Only lately I've realized that this is exhausting me. What I'm learning is so interesting, but it's a dead end. There are some people out there perhaps that live to confront and critique. Take William Easterly for example. But that's not me. I'm not the confrontational type. What I've realized is that for all of the negative things I have learned, I need to channel them into something positive. And over the past week I've realized that I need to start to volunteer again. For the past few months (ok...year) I've been so caught up in my own life, my work and teaching, planning a wedding, and now being married that I allowed myself to take a break from reaching out to the community. From now on, I'm going to make it a goal to start that up again. It's so fulfilling that every time I go I think, "Why haven't I done this forever?" With all the synthesis that has been happening in my brain lately, it will be exciting to synthesize everything else with current real life experiences. Yay!

I guess that's all I want to say for now. Hopefully I'll be back soon for some more processing.

On being a naturalist

My naturalist skills failed me today. As I was sitting in the backyard a tree started staring back it me. It was an eerie feeling to look at something and not know what it is - like a stranger stalking me. "Stranger Danger!" as a preschooler would say. I sat there for awhile, continually looking over my shoulder, until finally I had enough. I stood up, walked through the soggy grass in my socks, scaled the 5 foot wall like I always did when I was small, and stood up right in its face. Its needles are long and pointy and sharp, and the tree put up its defense by poking me. Ouch! I was undeterred. The night was black and the only light I had to see was from the neighbor's distant lamp post. I ripped off an end from one if its branches. It had enough to spare. I spotted a dark blog resting on one of the branches, and I reached in to grab a mature, open cone. I also groped around the nearby branched that sacrificed itself for my identification purposes, and I also stole a young cone. It wasn't going to ever reproduce, anyway. That tree has been there forever and I have never noticed it. Our beloved family dog, Sable, is buried underneath. So is our cat, Diedra. RIP. And yet all of the times I have been out there, sitting and gazing at the stars, or walking and climbing around the walls for hours, I've never, ever noticed this tree. It stands alone, this big, giant tree amongst my mother's landscaping and flower beds. And our long lost pets.
I jumped down the wall and went on a mission to meet a new friend, and discover once and for all what this tree is. I went straight for my Pojar, which luckily was already sitting on the table on the porch. It's a good thing to have on hand if you live on the Coast, but as I discovered earlier today, it is useless in the deserts of Eastern Washington. The key in the front led me to Pinus contorta: shore pine. Nope. I finally had to pull out the big guns: I ran to my room and pulled out my dusty (all the dust that had gathered from the last 4 years since I had touched it) Hitchcock and Cronquist Guide to the Flora of the Pacific Northwest. It is a beast. I cracked the pages to the index in front and was immediately overwhelmed. I hardly remember what a dicot is, and I certainly couldn't find the pine in here. I was trying hard to identify this mysterious tree of mine as legitimately as I could. But Hitchcock and Cronquist finally pulled me over the edge and I grabbed my computer. Google. "Pine trees in Washington State". That led me to none other than the exquisitely scientific Wikipedia. There was only several options to choose from in terms of evergreen trees in Washington state, so even in the dark, I was able to narrow them down significantly right away. I click one one name and I refer to the picture. Could this be it? Could this be that mysterious stranger leering at me in the night? I think it is. Ponderosa Pine! Pojar must have missed this one, oddly enough.
I use my superior research skills (wikipedia) to investigate. I learn that the ponderosa pine is especially adaptable to climatic conditions, resulting in 4 different 'geographic races'. So which subspecies is this new friend of mine? That question shall be answered another day, hopefully during the light of day. But for now, my hands are sappy and sticky and smells like fresh pine. All these years that we've had a fake plastic Christmas tree I've always missed the fresh scent of pine in our home. I had no idea I could simply venture outside to take in the sweet smell of ponderosa.

Good night, dear friend. See you tomorrow, in the light of day.

the table where rich people sit.

I love Byrd Baylor. I have read her books throughout the year and I never met a kid that didn't like them. However, I think I enjoy reading them more than the kids like listening to them. The Table Where Rich People Sit is one of my favorites. Read it. It will change your life.



I chose to read this book on the last day of my last teaching week. After all, what more do I want students to understand than the fact that life is MORE than the things they acquire? After I read the story, I asked my students: What means more to you than money? What in your life is priceless? Kids, even in 5th grade, get so wrapped up in STUFF, without realizing it. One of the most surprising things that children discover here is that it IS possible to go 4 days without a Wii or a cell phone or an ipod. What a beautiful thing to offer children the gift of appreciation for LIFE.

Last DAY

My last day of teaching! Incorporating every single Thursday theme we had throughout the year, we looked like fools as we walked to the friendship circle for the very last time (we didn't care).



My plan for the day was to do the 2 activities that I love to do the most.




After the final 2 hours in the field with the kids, we sang "See ya later IslandWood" for the last time at the closing friendship circle.



Said goodbye to our LAST school as they headed off on the buses



And had our last celebration of their departure.



Debrief lunch was amazing! Check out that spread!



After we chatted with our mentors and wrapped up the debrief for the week, Ray shared the community agreements that we made as a group from the beginning of the quarter.



What an ending!

Lasts

This week was my last week of teaching SOP at IslandWood, and today was my very last full teaching day. Unbelievable!

It was my last time to write a flow on the board.



It was our last time singing "My Barnacle".



It was my last time forcing my students to lug around peanut butter, turkey, and bottles of mayo and jelly, and my last time eating crate lunches!



The last time exploring the harbor!



And of course, when we needed to go through the gate for the last time, the lock wouldn't budge. Lucky for bushwacking and the end of the fence!



It was my last time to hang out in the prep room after a long field day, sharing stories and laughing at each other's crazy children.




And, (luckily) it was my last time having to eat Wednesday night cheese pizza! Despite the never-changing menu, I will miss eating and hanging out in the dining hall.




It was my last chance to drum the djembe at campfire, the last time singing Rattlin' Bog, doing the fireworks clap, and the kids slideshow.



A FIRST (and a last) for us tonight was our very own instructor slideshow with pictures of us that had been taken throughout the year - courtesy of Ilya and Minna, this week's liaisons. It was followed by a 'campfire' of our own.



Does it really have to end??