A Day in The Goggin

You find that you have peace of mind and can enjoy yourself, get more sleep, and rest when you know that it was a one hundred percent effort that you gave - win or lose. -Gordie Howe

Passion is a funny thing. It can drive you to travel the world, to dedicate your life to a cause, and it drove me to get to The Goggin at 7:30 in the morning. We were playing Michigan State of all teams. It was not a huge game, it was not a particularly important game, but it was a Miami hockey game, and that was enough to get me to drag myself out of bed and walk to The Goggin before the sun rose.

For those of you who have not been to The Goggin early in the morning, it really is a tranquil place. Walking in while the lights are still off, I feel incredibly peaceful as I begin what will become a very long and tiring day. Unsurprisingly, there is no one else in line; in fact no one else is walking around except for a few employees. I set my stuff down and take a deep breath. I love the Goggin early in the morning. There is just me, the ice, and lots of hope for the evening game. There are some young girls in the rinks practicing figure skating to an old show tune and the place becomes filled with life for a few brief moments while the song plays. And then, again, silence. The cold linoleum tiled floor offers little comfort, but the life on the ice, that is the true Goggin. It is not the bricks, the stairs, or even the ice that make that building what it is, but the things that happen there. It is the games and the skaters on the ice this define that building; it is the little kids running around with excitement before they take their beginning classes.

I have never been able to get my homework done in line. I spend on average seven hours in line for a hockey game, and never manage to do any work. So this seems an ample opportunity to finally accomplish something. My productivity lasts less than half an hour. I have one friend who is almost always the first person there. She is a fiery, passionate person who loves hockey and dedicates her entire weekends to the RedHawks as well when the games are at home. In fact, she has probably motivated most of us in our “Hockey Family” to truly appreciate RedHawk Hockey. She arrives at 8:00 and from that point on, I do not do any more work. She walks up wrapped in a Wall-e blanket, her sweatshirt hood pulled above her head, and carrying a pillow wrapped in a green pillowcase. If you want to see true Miami Hockey fans, don’t wait for the game to start, come early in the morning when there are two people sitting at the top of the stairs, curled up in balls trying to sleep.

Time in line is a chance to socialize and catch up with friends. It is a break from busy work schedules, classes, and stress. We sit together with shared hopes and excitement and create strong bonds and friendships. We realized last year that for our entire time here, the people who have been most dedicated to RedHawk Hockey, who have showed up and sat in the same seats for years, waited for hours and hours in The Goggin, were always the same people. So we began talking and spending our time together rather than apart, eventually creating the network that is now our “Hockey Family.” We spend all day together in line waiting to get our wristbands and sprint to back to our respective seats. We still keep our places, the same seats we have sat in for years, but now we have a network, our Family, spread about the arena to look at, yell to, and with whom we can share silent jokes and looks during the game. But I should get back to that particular day.

My friend and I watch as little kids flood into the building. Children run up and down the stairs and hallways laughing and screaming while their parents follow in tow. We get looks of surprise, approval, and disbelief as they follow their children to take them to their lessons. I recognize some of the kids from the entertainment in between periods, especially one boy who is the only male in a figure skating class. I happen to think he has the best trick of all. He manages to waddle forward on the ice, waver a little, and then bend over and put his hands on the ice as he basically uses four limbs to stabilize himself while moving. It is impossible not to smile while watching this kid. Other kids run around with miniature hockey sticks hitting pucks down the hallway while girls go up to the pictures of the synchronized skaters and admire the sparkling costumes and twinkling smiles. There is so much life and hope, and excitement in this building not just for the nightly hockey game, but for future games, and future dreams and aspirations. The boys who want to play Miami hockey and the girls who want to skate like the synchronized skating team are as much a part of this building as the fans who sit here in the morning watching them.

More of the “Family” shows up throughout the day. In fact the first group of people who were not a part of the family shows up at noon, four and a half hours after I first entered the building. The line does not really grow until 3:30. But that is the nature of lines in the arena. If you come with the masses, you take a risk. By the 6:30 on our side of the arena, half an hour before they hand out wristbands, the line extends down the stairs, out the door, and all the way to the parking garage across from The Goggin. There are limited seats in the arena and the lines are so dense that only those inside the arena have a chance at seats. The others will have to stand in the back for the entire game.

We spend our time talking, watching movies and coming up with random ideas and innovations. For example opening a food station somewhere in the building while the people are in line seems like a very lucrative plan, and yet the school has not, nor has an aspiring entrepreneur. And sometimes we come up with crazier ideas, inspired by lack of sleep and hours on end of fluorescent lights gleaming off linoleum tiles, such as ordering thousands of foam blocks, filling the lobby with them, and jumping from the second floor into the soft, foamy glory. Eventually though, slowly or quickly, time passes in The Goggin. The lines become more crowded and people get angry as others join their friends, or come back to relieve others from waiting shifts. It is a tense balancing act, maintaining order and sanity in that line, with all of the emotions built up in hundreds of fans, but we make it work.

We celebrate my friend’s birthday at this particular game so time passes fairly quickly. We sing much to her chagrin, eat cake and gluten free cupcakes (which for the record were as delicious as normal cupcakes), and joke with her for turning thirteen (one of the staff workers once told her that based on her looks, she could not be more than twelve years old). We work out runners who will get seats, laugh a little at new students who know little about hockey, and drop our jaws as one girl walks in wearing a rainbow colored poncho, short neon orange shorts, and neon green plastic sun glasses. This oddity is more descriptive of the school as a whole than The Goggin in particular.

We get our wristbands, rush into our seats and finally realize our exhaustion. After a little under twelve hours of waiting, we get to our seats feeling weak and tired. We sit down and wait as the arena fills up and get our second wind as soon as the team skates out onto the ice. There is no exhaustion during the game, just adrenaline and exhilaration. The games themselves are incredible and individual. I could not possibly describe them in this post, article, whatever this stream of consciousness is, but we dedicate our weekends to them. We watch as our classmates, who have devoted their lives to hockey, play for their pride and futures. We watch as our school’s most successful team (currently) vies for another opportunity to go to the NCAA championships and finally win the title that we deserve. Our moods on “hockey weekends” are often decided by the outcomes of the games. And sometimes, fifteen hours in The Goggin ends in dissatisfaction.

We lost that game to Michigan State 3-2 in overtime. After an incredible comeback to tie the game, the Spartans managed to break through our defense and get one last shot through our goal. Heartbroken, our fans felt anguish wash over them as our long day of waiting ended in defeat. Most left, but the Family stayed in our sections and claped for the team as they circle around and finally skate off the ice. In victory or defeat, we are Miami Hockey fans and we support our team. We may get frustrated, we may get upset, and we may feel that our whole night has been ruined. But in the end, as we sat together in Buffalo Wild Wings that night and blamed “Poncho Girl” for everything, laughing away our disappointment, we all knew that we would be there to do it again at the next game and the next, for the rest of the season.

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.

Kaohsiung

We travelers are in very hard circumstances. If we say nothing but what has been said before us, we are dull and have observed nothing. If we tell anything new, we are laughed at as fabulous and romantic.- Mary Wortley Montegu

I am currently in the port city of Kaohsiung, having taken a three hour train ride through mountains, from coast to coast. The city is so different from Taitung and different from Taipei as well. Taipei is more modern looking, but it does not not have the same cosmopolitan feel. Here, I can tell from the way people dress, from the nice restaurant (nice and inexpensive) where I got pasta with pesto, that there is more youthful influence and perhaps a foreign one as well.

I’m staying in Mrs. Kao and Celeste’s Aunt’s home in a Japanese style room. Therefore, I have sliding screen doors, nice wooden floors, a low wooden table at which I sit on the floor and read, write, type, and do whatever other work I may have. My bedroom adjoins this little sitting room with its own set of screens and my bed is literally a mat on the floor. I prefer this though to the mat on a frame. If I’m going to sleep on a mat, it should be on the floor. It is much more comfortable that way, though I will admit, I had a little difficulty falling asleep last night.

I went out with Celeste and Shawn (who is back in Kaohsiung from Taitung for summer school classes) to see the new Harry Potter film in an incredible new complex. Much of Kaohsiung has been rebuilt for the world games being held Right Now in the city. How do I know they are being held here? Well aside from the plethora of commercials on television, the billboards plastered all over the city, and the new metro system that was built with its own world games stop (this system rivals Taipei’s, I think it is actually better), I have been running into random athletes coming back from training, perhaps events. I have yet to talk to them, but I might try to strike up a conversation next time.

There are a fair amount of tourists here for the games, so I am no longer the only white person in a million, which is kind of nice, but at the same time, I am not there just to see the world games. In fact, I am only passing through, and the fact that it happens to coincide with the world games is pure coincidence, and I like it that way.

I’m off to enjoy a day of relaxation and perhaps exploration in this new, hot city. If there is anything eventful, I will let you know.

Butterflies

A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it. -George Moore

I walked into a fairy tale the other day. I went for a hike with Cash and Jeff into one of the mountains along a trail made seemingly of old rail ties. There was not a single bird in the entire place, only hundreds of butterflies. As we started our ascent we were surrounded by groups of yellow butterflies that gradually turned into groups of black butterflies as we got higher and the light grew dimmer. We emerged into a pavilion that looked out on the ocean and the mountains in all their glory, made more powerful by the contrast with the dark mountain woods. As we began our descent down the other side, the butterflies changed to dark emerald and blue and were much larger than their yellow and black brethren. But as we got further down the other side, they turned again into the yellow butterflies that had welcomed us initially. It was very surreal.

Welcome the Harvest

A child on a farm sees a plane fly by overhead and dreams of a faraway place.
A traveler on the plane sees the farmhouse and dreams of home. -Carl Burns

The past couple of days have been pretty eventful, though all days here are eventful really. But I’m pretty sure most of will you not have read about something like this before…I had certainly never done anything like this before. Yesterday we moved up to the fourth floor of the building since there was a meeting being held in our classroom that we weren’t told about until that very morning fifteen minutes before class started. No worries though. The fourth floor has good accommodations for the class, so we all piled into furnitureless room (it reminded me of home), pulled out chairs and cushions for the closet and laid out. We did some worksheets and vocabulary at first, but eventually we began watching Monsters Inc. in English with Chinese subtitles. It was a big hit.
That afternoon Mrs. Kao and Celeste went to work at the shelter for girls who had been physically and sexually abused. Concerned that my presence there may be more detrimental than helpful, we decided it was best for me to stay back at the center. So each afternoon I go downstairs and eat lunch with the other employees. Cash insists on getting or making lunch for me every day (like I said, coolest woman ever), and I have to struggle to let her let me wash dishes or help out.

Anyway that afternoon, since I had some free time, I met a couple of the secretaries from the second floor who were anxious to speak English with me. So we talked a bit in Chinese and a bit in English (our skills were fairly comparable) and then I was off with Cash to go shopping for ingredients for the next days baking. We went to an underground department store/supermarket to buy our supplies. Food is expensive here. With the exception of fruit which is grown locally, the prices are intimidating as Cash pointed out several times. Cereal, dairy products, chocolate, and especially peanut butter are all incredibly expensive. We bought eggs, butter, and some fruit for the pancakes and waffles we planned to make and headed back.

Cash explained more of the work that the TFCF does for the children, which was very tiring and difficult for her since she did not know many of the words in English, so I really appreciated her talking to me. I know exactly how frustrating it is to try and carry on a conversation in a foreign language and one as serious and technical as this one was incredibly daunting, but she tried anyway. We used Google translator actually to get some of the technical words.

So if I haven’t already explained this yet I really should. The Taiwan Fund for Children and Families provides a plethora of services all over the island and here in Taitung makes an incredible impact on the community. They provide health and nutritional aid, education services to young children, sponsor older children to go on to high school and university, take care of orphans, physically and sexually abused children, send out a mobile library to the surrounding villages in the mountains and much more. I could not possible explain everything that they do. But it is absolutely vital to these people’s lives. The people who work at the center are completely dedicated; the social workers are on duty twenty-four hours a day seven days a week. Cash originally worked in the government but left to work for the TFCF and works to help teach parents about saving money and basic accounting and money management. It is this function that we are hoping to expand as well by incorporating a micro-credit venture in the existing infrastructure that offers the necessary education to support the project.
So hopefully you guys found that interesting, but if not I promise it gets more intense from here. We went to a village in the middle of the mountains today to celebrate a festival for the harvest with one of the tribes. The second we got there we were greeted by a drunk sixty-six year old lady dressed in tribal celebratory garb who grabbed Celeste and me by our arms and marched us to a nearby house all the way saying “I love you, I love you” (in English mind you). Cash couldn’t stop laughing at her, at me, at the situation really. It was incredibly bizarre. We asked her name but she said just to call her Ama (which means grandmother). We were thrown into a circle of people dancing around and left to follow everyone else. It was incredible, and awkward, and exciting all at once but we managed to escape after fifteen minutes. Of course, our escape was momentary.

We then ran into the village chief, equally drunk, who desperately wanted to give me “a huggie.” He only gave me a handshake fortunately but none of us could really understand what he was saying. And so we escaped yet again, walking past a house where children and adults were playing a drinking game where they stripped off their clothes. It was only the beginning of the game though I think, since no one was nude. Like I said, it was an interesting experience.

We went next to the only school in the village, an elementary school where there were children playing in the back. From what I could see, it was a good facility and it was nice to escape from the excitement of the festival for a little while. We met and played with the local kids, who were shocked by how white my skin was compared to theirs. They were really curious about me, about whether I could play baseball and drive a car. They also wanted my stuff. It was funny when they asked for my hat, a little less funny when one of the kids maybe five years old sincerely asked for my eyes.

Jeff, the guy from the mobile library who used to be in the military took us to the ancestral home of the village where there was a medicine women and the village elder. The medicine woman (who had a master’s degree and had just one an award from the government for being one of the most influential community activists in the country) performed a ceremony to the ancestors, explaining who we were and why we had come. Then things got a little tense. The village elder, who was also drunk, asked Jeff and Mrs. Kao what we were doing there and was worried that we would disgrace the ancestors. Jeff and Mrs. Kao explained why we were there, what we were doing, Jeff explained that he was half aboriginal and that we all worked with the TFCF and the elder said that he would give an offering after we left to appease the ancestors and apologize for us being in there. The medicine woman was from a younger generation than the elder and so though she tried to speak and explain that it was alright, he held rank above her. But then there was a rather rapid transformation and the man invited us to look around and take our time. It was very confusing. It was only later that we learned that the man was not the village elder but just a drunk man pretending to be and having a little fun. But since he was still from an older generation than the medicine woman, she could not speak out against him. It’s kind of funny actually, but it did reflect a change going through the community, a balance between modernization and tradition.

In the past, the tribes were self-sufficient, grew their own crops in the mountains, and hunted in the mountains for their food. After the government came in and introduced running water, electricity, even satellite dishes for limited television, there also came taxes and the hunting grounds were closed as nature preserves. Modernization has brought better living conditions, but the traditions are dying. The middle schools and high schools are both boarding schools in other villages or in the city, and once the children leave, they can never really come back and keep the traditions.

As we were trying to leave, Jeff and Mrs. Kao were approached by the principal of the school (also drunk, yes just about the whole village was drunk), who kept talking to them and wouldn’t let them go, asking why no one every came to his village to teach the children for the summer, they needed help, the village needed help. Mrs. Kao couldn’t promise anything, the TFCF cannot afford to send teachers out to every village, and she can’t speak for them anyway. It was sad that we couldn’t help them, but the principal kept talking and talking until both Jeff and Mrs. Kao were desperate to escape. We all did eventually and hopped in the van to head back down the mountains. They view really was stunning. I am still constantly impressed with the beauty of the peaks, or of the ocean peeking through a gap in the ranges.

Like I said, it was an interesting and unforgettable day. If any of you ever get a chance to participate in a traditional festival do so, but be prepared.

Farming

The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see. ~G.K. Chesterton

Ben the farmer, not exactly what I had in mind when coming here, and not really something that I have ever imagined, but it felt really good to just do some hard labor and to give back a little to Cash and her family for the food that they had given us. There were a few things to know about planting rice in her fields. One, it gets hot, so keep hydrated and be careful not to get sun sickness. Two, there are some pretty nasty snails that likely have diseases and eat the crops, so we don’t like them. Supposedly there were some bloodsuckers too, but I didn’t see any of them. Third, learn to walk through the mud, or else you will get stuck. Anyway, I learned a whole bunch of lessons on my morning of work. Cash and her brother Eric supplied me with boots, gloves, a poncho (for the first couple of hours when it rained) a thumb tool to dig into the grass and plant it, and Shawn gave me a long sleeved shirt to wear.

I did four jobs for the most part. Cash’s father ran the machine, which takes the rolls of grass and seeds and turns gears in the back to plant rows in the field. However the machine is not perfect, and turns around the field tend to mess things up, so it was our job (Cash’s and mine) to go through the paddies and plant by hand where the machine had missed. I can understand why this would be back breaking work when working from five in the morning until seven at night as Cash and her family did. I only worked four or five hours so I didn’t feel too bad. They were all worried that I might crumble, but I’m a bit tougher than that, even if I don’t look like it. So I planted a rice field by hand, that was pretty cool. After that I took a rake and walked along the fields and removed excess sticks and debris that would get in the way of the planting. Then I used a hoe of sorts to go through the fields and spread out clumps of mud so that the machine would not have difficulty getting through and planting. This work was pretty difficult, especially navigating through the mud while not stepping on any of the rice. I almost got stuck a couple of times, but I made it out and around without too much difficulty. The last job I did was the most difficult and probably the most frightening. I got on the back of the machine while Cash’s father was driving and fed the rolls of grass into the back as it planted them. That machine bucks and moves so erratically that I almost fell off several times despite having good balance. I really thought I was going to fall at first. It was terrifying. Fortunately, I never fell, and I got the feel of the machine after a minute or two and was able to help plant the field. I watched as the grass levels go lower and then grabbed a role, positioned it in the slot and fed it down a little chute. It was more tiring than bending over in the field.

The time went by fairly quickly. Before I knew it, we were taking a break for lunch and local motorcycle ice cream salesmen had come around to sell his merchandise. That is a brilliant idea. Going around selling ice cream to sweaty farmers has to be a successful method. I’m not sure what kind of ice cream I ate, it didn’t look normal, seeing as it was brown and purple and red, but it was cold and it tasted fine, so I didn’t ask too many questions. Cash, her father and mother, Eric, Shawn, Mrs. Kao, and I all sat in the shade eating bento boxes for lunch and chatting (they mostly chatted, I mostly listened), and then we were off. They would continue in the fields and I would continue on with my day.

Tonight had one interesting point. There was a parade and festival going through the city tonight honoring one of the local gods, (actually apparently the god is from China and is here visiting and the festival was a sendoff) asking for rain and good crops. It was really cool. There were trucks with lots of people playing traditional music with large drums, cymbals, and statues of the god. It was a really cool feeling to walk down a street with signs written in Chinese, a festival to a foreign god going by, and the sounds of a foreign city. It felt really surreal. Then I heard lots of pops. People from the trucks were sending fireworks up into the air about ten feet away from us. I’m really glad that woke me, otherwise what came next would have been too much of a shock.

I saw them before I heard them. Large brightly colored trucks with thousands of flashing lights and floats and animals and dragons and phoenix’s which would have been cool and traditional except that they were mixed with crazy looking pigs and reindeer and random assortments of things. And blaring from these trucks was intense techno music that was in complete contrast to the traditional part of the parade that had preceded it. The parade was circling the city, which is not too large, so I kept running into it wherever I went. And there was no escaping that techno music. Little children were covering their ears, people were just laughing. Even the locals thought that the techno floats were weird and ridiculous.

So yeah it’s been an interesting day. I planted three rice paddies this morning as an undocumented laborer and saw a festival that comes once a year tonight, so I’ve had a couple of unforgettable experiences. I don’t know if I will do any more farming in the future, but Cash’s family was nice enough to invite me back to work for the harvesting season.

School and More

No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow. ~Lin Yutang

Classes are going well, but I think my favorite work, albeit the most tiring work, is going out with the mobile library. We visited one village where about twenty-five to thirty kids came out too see us. They were all really excited to see me and kept asking again and again if I was really American. We had a lot of fun. A little girl read a couple of books to me, the boys jumped on my back and played around and they all drew pictures for me. They were a lot of fun, and they were so excited for the mobile library to come around. But at the same time, I had to put things in perspective. These kids who looked so happy, only got this experience once a month. When at home they were helping their parents with work and taking care of siblings. They live in small, often dirty homes, and they have an immense disadvantage to students in Taipei or other cities for pursuing careers in the future since their schools are under funded.

We went out for dinner that night with the director to a restaurant atop one of the mountains. It was a traditional aboriginal restaurant, so while we waited for our food, in the center of the place (it was all outdoors by the way) there was traditional music and dancing. I took more video, though not too much to be obnoxious, and sat and enjoyed the full moon, food, and dancing. It was a good meal. Once again, I was limited by the rapid Chinese being flying across the table, but I understood that the director was leaving for Mongolia, this coming week now to work at a TFCF chapter out there. He told us about a trip where he once hunted coyotes with the people there after Mrs. Kao mentioned that a coyote had once eaten one of her cats. He is a funny guy. Always joking and laughing, but he does very serious work and has seen some sad and terrible things with the children he helps.

The next day we went out with the mobile library again and there was one girl very eager to improve her English, so Celeste and I helped her read through an English storybook. She did pretty well. I liked this girl a lot and I really hope she can get out of the life she is in right now. If she works hard in school and gets into a University maybe she can, that’s why TFCF exists really. Her dream, or at least what I could understand of it, was to get into hotel management and to one day visit Finland. I don’t know why she wanted to go to Finland but why not, we all have dreams…her name was Winnie. I really liked Winnie.

Anyway, I thought I should share some of the food that I have eaten on this trip. Perhaps I have mentioned some if it before, I lose track, but I know there is a lot of stuff to add. I have eaten shaved ice with red beans (I personally prefer the mango kind, but this was pretty good), duck feet, fresh octopus, sea cucumber, “100 year old” black eggs, and chicken in a thick rice wine sauce that tasted…well it is an acquired taste and I have yet to acquire it. There are others as well that will come back to me I’m sure. I have eaten chicken heart soup (though I didn’t eat the hearts), numerous vegetables and fruits that I cannot for the life of me name, and just about every day I try something new.

Speaking of something new, Celeste and I tried drumming with the kids. The school has a set of snare drums, tom toms and bass drums that the kids and teachers learn to play from the only black person I have seen on the entire island. I don’t know where he is from but he looks like a stereotypical Rastafarian who teaches the kids to drum and dance in enthusiastic Chinese. Chinese with a Caribbean accent is pretty cool.

As different and incredible as all this has been, none of it would have been possible without Cash. Cash has driven us to every location, gotten us meals, made us meals, brought us food from her family’s farm, helped out with kids, equipment, everything. The other night, about seventy kids from the TFCF were going on a camping trip. So we went out to help set up tents and cook meals. I helped Cash prepare a soup in the largest pot I have ever seen in my life. It would have to be since it needed to feed 70 kids. She lit fires, played with kids, cooked; she’s awesome. That night was fun. I met Shawn that night, a TA from the school last year with Mrs. Kao and Celeste, and he came with us to camp. So after we helped to cook the soup, we set about cooking our own meal. It was fun sitting around our little campfire roasting meat and vegetables. All of the kids routinely brought us food from their fires and then ran away shyly, giggling. It was pretty cute. We tried to buy marshmallows to teach them how to roast them, but all we could find were fruity knockoff marshmallows that tasted more like candy. The kid liked them though, so we managed to give those out and everyone was happy.

We found out that Cash, who had just driven us up a mountain and made soup for seventy people, was getting up at four in the morning the next day to plant rice on her family’s farm. I really wanted to give back in some way, to thank her for all she did for us, so I started my next great adventure…I offered to help plant rice in her fields. I didn’t get up at 4:00 am with them; I started at 8:00 instead. I think they would have been too worried if I had started working with them at 5:00. They constantly worried I would collapse the heat, but I actually handled it quite well. I have a new, educated, respect for farmers and their work and for Cash and her family. But I should probably tell the full story.