Back to School

"Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes." -Oscar Wilde

I’m sitting in my new apartment at school a little more than a month after I got home from Taiwan and about three weeks since Typhoon Morakot hit Taiwan. I can’t really help but thinking back. It is hard to get information about what is going on. Sean told me that Kaohsiung was hit hard but that he was safe. Cash told me that Taitung was hit very hard and that they were very busy trying to help people with recovery and everything. But it was pretty hard to get a lot of information from them as they are clearly busy. What other information that I have gotten so far is rather disturbing though. Apparently two of the villages I visited were washed out into the pacific and another covered in mud. Da wu, where I saw the butterflies was cut off when the bridge leading there was destroyed and Jeff was stranded there helping people to function and survive on air drops until they could get them out of there.

This is the information that I get from people who are there; the news sources are just as troubling. Almost two hundred people have been reported killed and five hundred are reported missing and will likely not be found. Over a thousand schools were destroyed and billions of dollars worth of crops lost. It is difficult to find more information on this. I’ll search Taiwanese newspapers and talk to people in Taiwan but still information is hard to come by here and I worry. Alex, one of the kids in my class, was from one of the aboriginal villages and his home and village were both lost. According to Mrs. Kao, Alex’s mom would ride her motorbike with three kids fifty minutes every day into Taitung city just so she could take them to the English classes that Mrs. Kao was teaching. And now they have nothing. It is unimaginable to me.

I am sitting here in my nice new apartment at school, comfortable, reasonably well fed, and reasonably happy and my image of Taiwan is still the cities, towns and villages that I left just a short while ago. It is unfathomable to me that some of them no longer exist.

I have gotten a few new emails from Cash and Sean, Cash letting me know that the children are fine and that the TFCF is working hard and Sean letting me know that Kaohsiung city is fine and he is getting back to his intense studies (if he can work so hard to learn English, I must put in at least as much effort to learn Chinese). But I am struck by one line that Cash left me with-“Just pray for us, and everything will be better.” I am picturing all of the work ahead for them. Getting temporary housing, rebuilding roads, bridges, villages, clean water supplies, electricity, schools, and hundreds of other issues large and small that still needed improvement before this catastrophe. And she says just to pray, and it will work out. I pray, they work, and everything is better? That is not enough. To you twelve people who may or may not read this, but mostly to myself, I must say that I have to do something. I cannot simply sit idly by. I still have a proposal to work on after all and a hope of helping people, but that may have to wait for the weekend when I have a little more time. We shall see.

As for school, I suppose I should share some of my happenings here since this is my first school post. I am taking a light load this semester, just five classes instead of my usual six, however two of them are rather advanced classes with a lot of reading and large papers (as classes in my senior year should be) so I still have my work cut out for me. I am taking classes centered around East Asia and China to finish off my East Asian Languages and Cultures (focus on China) double major.

The apartment is great. I like being separated a bit from the school. I can always walk there whenever I want, but here I have my space, to remove myself briefly from the hectic life of Miami University. I am living with three of the best guys at this school all of whom have been putting in their share of cooking and cleaning and we have so far had a great time living together. Or at least I have had a great time. I should not speak for anyone else. My room is a bit sparse, the usual furniture, a bare floor, and some pictures and a flag on the wall. But still whenever I look up I see a little bit of Venice and a little bit of Taiwan, and I still see a bit of it in myself. It is easy to get sucked back into the same school mode and routine that I have had and not really liked, but I can feel the changes from the summer, and as long as I am conscious of them and work towards my new goals, I think I will be very happy here in my last year.

I will have much more to say later and I do not like to force posts since it tends to produce uninteresting results so I will end this now, but I will be back soon with new thoughts and ideas no doubt. College here is like living in a bubble (cliché, but true) and I am trying to break free while still remaining a part of the institution in my final year. So I am branching out to try many new things, even in my senior year to see what I can experience and what I can learn. I will share them as they come.