Returning to Pride Rock

            This is it.  The final countdown until I return home begins today.  1 month.  31 days.  744 hours.  44,640 minutes.  2,678,400 seconds.  I can hardly remember what life was like back in May 2012.  I would have been preparing myself for the heartbreak of leaving Scranton.  I would have been spending nights surround by best friends waiting for the sunrise.  I would have been singing Celine Dion’s “It’s All Coming Back to Me” and drum pounding to F.U.N.’s “We Are Young.” I would have been saying my teary goodbyes.  I would have been wondering what the heck was waiting for me here on Yap.

          

             Now it seems I am in the same boat once again – preparing to leave the place that I have called home for the past two years. The only major difference is that now I am singing Spawnbreezy’s “Don’t Let Go” (youtube it – you will thank me) and spending my evenings talking softly with Yap friends and family as we slowly chew our betelnut or drink our tuba.  It is incredible how much things are able to change in such a short time.  I do not think I am ready to leave this place – but I don’t think I will ever be ready.  Friends are here.  Family is here.  Hope is here.  Love is here.

            But I know that when my heart breaks – that as I have to let go of this love, allowing it to change and to grow – all of that love is going to pour forth and make room for more love.  That is the most beautiful thing about God’s blessing that is a broken heart – it reminds us about what it means to be human – to be able to love so deeply.  And while it may hurt, it may bring tears, it may seem like the end of the world – I know that I will fall in love all over again and again.

I love you, Yap.  Gu ba’adagem Waab.

“Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” – Alfred Lord Tennyson

Agape II

            As I figure out what I would like to do when I return the states – I have been constantly flipping between college campus minister positions and high school teaching positions.  We shall soon see where I end up!

            With that being said – YCHS ran its annual junior retreat on Friday, April 25 and Saturday, April 26.  Agape II had so much love and so much God.  This year – the seniors led the retreat with some guidance and preparation from myself, Mr. Lupo, and Mr. Kelly.  Fr. Mulreany handled all that we needed from the parents (I don’t want to spoil any surprises by saying just what that may mean!) Preparing the six senior leaders for the retreat was one of my favorite experiences on Yap – we even spent a day off over Easter choosing a retreat song and making up an absolutely wonderfully ridiculous dance to teach the retreatants.  The song was “Hall of Fame” by The Script – and “Be a Champion” was a common retreat theme.  We all went out for lunch specials at Oasis Restaurant afterward as a thank-you for all of the students hard work.

            The retreat itself was simply God.  The love was palpable.  There was so much sharing, so much honesty, so much trust.  I held myself fairly well together throughout the retreat – but during a moment of shared prayer with the small group I was supervising, they pulled out all of the loving stops to make the tears flow.

            Thank-you for all of the prayers and love being sent from back home in the States.  We were praying for Search 73 and sending all of our love as well.

Check out the pictures on facebook/ some on the last post!

“Will you come and follow me if I but call your name?
Will you go where you don't know and never be the same?
Will you let my love be shown? Will you let my name be known,
will you let my life be grown in you and you in me?”

-The Summons

A Year of Blessings

As my time on Yap is rapidly coming to a close – I am spending more and more time reflecting on how blessed I have been these past two years living on this beautiful island of stone money.  I am spending as much time as possible with my local friends and family, and even just the late nights sitting and chatting with my Yapese nina nge waleg ni piin (mom and sister) are meaning more and more to me each day.  I am set to fly home on June 4^th – and my mind and body are still in denial of this fact as I am keeping them both as busy as possible right up until that bittersweet date.

            The last few months have been especially filled with God’s grace and little wonders.  In March, we celebrated Yap Day in Tomil – which involved thuws, so much incredible local food, a tremendous display of Yapese culture – and some of the most fantastic dances I have ever seen.  My village, Nimar, did not dance at Yap Day, but they did perform for a cruise ship that brought over 1,000 visitors – this group will be headed to France over the summer to perform as well – I am not supposed to brag because that would be Un-Yapese – but my village’s bamboo dance is by far the best – just saying.

            For Easter – I was all set to head off to Ulithi again (you may remember my stories of the “suicide run” boat ride in the middle of the night with dying motors and huge swells for the Easter Vigil) – but those plans changed the week before Easter when I was asked by my Yapese family if I would be the Godfather for Dafrad, my Yapese nephew.   I of course immediately canceled my flight reservation to be here for Alfonso Joshua Dafrad’s big baptismal/ first communion day!  The Holy Week masses on Yap were simply awe-inspiring.  Good Friday included a local tradition that involved funeral wailing, the Holy Saturday Easter Vigil involved a candle light procession into mass and a fantastic local woman’s standing dance.  Instead of shaking hands at the vigil mass – everyone was exchanging nunuws/marmars!  Mary made all of ours, and I in exchange made one for her – which let’s just say it was a good thing she got to swap it out halfway through mass.  Easter Sunday was the big day – and I joined Dafrad’s godmother and his other godfather, my good friend Martin Ruwniyol (I am the American godfather, he is the Yapese godfather – we were a very accepting Godfamily) in welcoming Dafrad into the Catholic Church.

            In other exciting news of blessings - one of our seniors, Domclancy, was a winner of a Gates Millenium Scholarship!  This scholarship covers the educational expenses to any school that the scholarship winner has been accepted – so Domclancy will be headed to the University of Portland.  Check out more info/picture at http://www.ychs.net/apps/blog/entries/show/42164221-tiliwebug-wins-gates-scholarship!  As a side note – he was also accepted to the elite University of Scranton, but he is studying engineering so Scranton was not a logical choice.  I could not possible be more proud of him and how far he has come.  It is moments like these that make me want to stay here and teach at YCHS forever.

“Not where I breathe, but where I love, I live.”  - Robert Southwell, S.J.

My night camping at YCHS

Senior Retreat Leaders Dancing

The sweetest trust walk of all time

Trust Walk - Best Picture - Look Closely

Agape

Agape II - Blue Group

Agape II - Senior Team

Agape II - Be a Champion

Dafrad's Baptism

Dafrad's Baptism

A Toast to Teachers

          Coming to Yap has forced me to face many realities of life that we work so hard to cover up so we never have to see them until we are confronted with some major catastrophe in life, most often the death of a loved one.  Most of these lead to the great unanswerable questions that have been asked since the beginning of mankind:  Where do we come from?  Where are we going?  What happens when we die?  However, while contemplating these can lead to all sorts of wonderful, life-altering epiphanies laced with layer upon layer of confusion – the realities that I find the most invigorating to explore are the ones that I can directly relate to – the ones that I can change – the ones that I can experience right here, right now, and I can use them to make this world a happier place (don’t even get me started on the great question of what is happiness… but, it is probably the most important question that all of us can ever ask ourselves in this life.)

            The past few weeks, I have noticed how often we as human beings take some of the most important people in our lives for granted.  The people who sacrifice so much for us – who dedicate their time, energy, talents, and support – who help us grow – who encourage us to struggle through challenges – who instill in us the drive to never accept anything but our own personal best from ourselves.  These people are our teachers.  I have now officially been a teacher for 18 months, and the amount of respect and gratitude that I have for all of the teachers who have believed in me – who have had the patience to deal with me – who have shown me how to be a man – has multiplied infinitely.  I have experienced wanting nothing more than for a struggling student to reach their full potential – even if that full potential may be a 75% on a test.  I have experienced the heart break of when that same student seems to be trying their best to reach that goal, comes so close, and then slips right back into their old habits.  I have experienced the unbelievable frustration of explaining a concept in about 74 different ways to try to make something click in a student’s mind, and then out of nowhere, the student comes up with a response that shows the most complete understanding of something that moments before they could barely pronounce.  I have experienced the loving bond of trust that forms between a teacher and a student, and I am slowly learning that the greatest part of that love is the ability to let it go when the year is done so that the student and the teacher can go on to share that love with others.

            Teachers never seem to get the respect, recognition, or gratitude that they truly deserve.  Want to argue with me?  Let’s just take a look at a teacher’s salary compared to.. well… to anyone else’s salary.  Think teachers have it easy having a work day that ends at 2:30, and all of those glorious school vacations?  Well, yes – it would be nice to officially get out of school at 2:30 – but since you are pretty much teaching all day, that means that you still have all of the grading and prepping to do for classes.  I am not writing this to gripe about things that I am personally experiencing – I am writing this because I now recognize just how underappreciated these incredible human beings we call teachers are.  They change lives.  They work selflessly day in and day out – never giving up. 

            So – for all of those teachers who I have had the blessed opportunity to be guided by, to be molded by, to be challenged by – I would like to say from the bottom of my heart – “Thank-you.”  You have all had an immense impact on me.  You cared enough about me to show up every day and try your best to make me into a better person.  I would just like you to know, that even though I may not have shown it at the time, or never said it out loud, that I care deeply about you, too.

            

“What the teacher is, is more important than what he teaches.” 

                                                                                                                      - Karl A. Menninger

Living Yap

     Sirow, sirow – I know that this whole blog thing has fallen into the taro patch (that is not a real expression here – but I think I could get it started… kinda like “fetch” from Mean Girls.) I was trying to come up with some fantastic excuse about why I have not been updating the “world” with tales of chivalry, tree-climbing, spear fishing, barefootedness and adventure – but I realized that while I have been stretched a little thin the past few months, the true reason for my lack of communication is much more exciting – at least for me.

     Now – I have been quite busy, so here is a quick little update on what I have been up to. For school, the eternal volleyball season ran from August to December and YCHS came in third in the Varsity games against COM, Yap High School, and SDA. Our team has certainly come a long way from last year. On top of that volleyball league, I played for Maap in the island-wide men’s league as well as reffing. To top off all of the volleyball fun – I have been training with the Yap State team for the 2014 Micro Games, which are essentially the Olympics of the Pacific.

     I also have been teaching an extra class, which has made my days at school incredibly packed, but they fly by. Picking up the Senior Trigonometry class proved to be quite the challenge, but I will thankfully be returning back to a more normal schedule in the 3^rd quarter as we welcome a new teacher to our staff.

     Now for the fantastic, true reason that I have seemed to literally have fallen off the face of the earth. See – I know the real fun of reading this blog is to hear stories that seem wild, crazy, ridiculous – but I have hit the point that the things that used to seem so absurd and strange have just become part of my everyday life. The simplicity, the local food, the betelnut, the tree climbing, the dirt, the smell of cooking fires, the stone path jungle hikes to the store, the roosters, the heat, the language, the Yapese, the love – it is all part of my life now – it is all part of my heart.

I am no longer simply living on Yap – I am living Yap.

Gu ba’adagem, Nina

              Sirow for the long delay in between posts.  Things have been quite busy on the island.  A super quick update on things:  I spent my 3 ½ weeks between summer session and the regular school year coaching some volleyball clinics at the Yap Community Center 4 times a week.  The YCHS Boys and Girls teams both went on to take home the Championship Title in the end of the summer Junior League tournament.  It was a hectic weekend of coaching, driving a pick-up truck without mirrors, and reffing – but it was an unforgettable experience with my kids.

            School has been phenomenal this year.  I adore my classes.  I can’t believe how much love and laughter my students bring into my life.  I could not be in a better place right now.  I am even beginning to feel like a real math teacher and actually feel like I know what I am talking about.  Oddly – I also am getting way too comfortable teaching chemistry and surprise myself with the random tidbits of knowledge that have stuck with me over the years.

            And finally- for the blog-inducing event of my adventures – the birthday of my indescribably perfect Yapese mother.  Mary Guchol has been my rock since I have come to Yap. Honestly, I do not think I could have survived without her and all of the love and support she has given me.  She welcomed me without hesitation into her Yap family, and I could not be more proud to call her my “Nina.”  Tonight, we celebrated her 67^th birthday over at Stan and Sheryl’s place (the amazing Australian couple who lives right across from us) in typical island fashion with heaps of delicious food.  I meant to make the famous Mrs. Behe’s BBQ, but due to a ground beef shortage on island, I settled with making my mother’s even more famous chocolate chip cookies (they weren’t quite as good as hers – but they still made the impression they needed to.)  Mary’s one daughter traveled all the way from Guam to surprise her for the week, and it was a fantastic dinner party with close friends from the village.

            This blog post is dedicated to you, Nina.  Gu ba’adagem – I love you.  Thank-you for being my mother on Yap so that my mother back in Pennsylvania knows I am in good hands.  You are an angel.

Martin modeling some zucchini bread all the way from the states

Nina birthday celebrations!

Nina cutting her birthday cake

Summer passing out after all of the festivities

“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.”                                                                            -Lau Tzu

Camp Yap

          When I returned to Yap, I knew that our summer session would be starting approximately 30 hours after I stepped off of the plane.  What I did not know was that our staff for summer session consisted of Fr. Corcoran, Fr. Mulreany, myself and… oh wait – it was just the three of us.

            Now – my year of experience as a math teacher helped me to quickly figure out that with only three teachers, and four classes of students (first year with Freshmen through Seniors!) – we could not logistically cover all of the necessary classes.  So we did what we do best here on Yap – we improvised.  We combined the Junior and Senior class in to the Super Sunior class which would focus primarily on SAT prep.  Mickey then adjusted the schedule so that each of us had a homeroom and would teach two classes as well as proctor a silent reading period – all of which would be 55 minutes (that’s a LONG time in a teacher’s world.)  We adapted quickly to our morning schedule of teaching/ working non-stop from 7:45 AM – 11:40 AM (with a quick bathroom break in the middle) – and it actually ended up being a great experience.

            The real fun began after classes… Mickey basically gave me free reign of what to do with the students from noon til the end of the day at 4:00 PM.  That is how Camp Yap was born.  Now – the term “Camp Yap” was never used in an official sense, but it is certainly what I called it in my head and sometimes accidentally out loud – but the term pretty much summarizes our afternoon activities and shenanigans.  I went into Program Director/ Community Outreach/ Scranton mode and began making calls, e-mails, lunch dates, walks around the lagoon, and random chitchats after masses as I recruited a great variety of incredible presenters who would come in and direct different activities and sessions with the students.  We had Americans, Italians, Australians, Yapese, Outer Islanders.  We had sign language, nature hikes, lawyers, martial arts, local cooking, basket weaving, dancing, singing, canoe demos, lei making.  We played every camp game/ ice breaker that I had in my repertoire.  And the entire time – we had a blast.

            It was so inspiring and rewarding to work with such a diverse and amazing group of people who gave so self-lessly of their time and talents.  Camp Yap was exhausting… but at the end of the day – we were excited to come back and see what adventures were waiting for us tomorrow – just the way any good camp should be.

Intense Game of "Ninja"

Team Builders

Rufus and Jonah showing off their lashings by the "crying Buddha"

Eunice and Bradley dominating the 3-legged races

Joslyn sad to be going home on the Apocalypse Bus

Practicing the local dance that Martin Ruwniyol taught us

Lupo and I attempting to teach modern line dances (Cotton Eyed Joe featured here)

Sophomores and Juniors with Dr. Margie

Freshmen working on nunuws/marmars 

Mary Guchol (my Yapese mom!) teaching delicious new local cooking

The Lovely Agnes and her nunuw/marmar class

More Team Builders

Our kids just being kids... the best.

            “Whatever form it takes, camping is earthy, soul enriching and character building, and there can be few such satisfying moments as having your tent pitched and the smoke rising from your campfire as the golden sun sets on the horizon--even if it's just for a fleeting moment before the rain spoils everything.” 

                                                                                -Pippa Middleton