November 2, 2003

Letter 16

Hello from Vanuatu! The past month has been a full one, with plenty to think about. As always, this letter will tend to tell you more than your really want to know, as if you were family members sitting around the old table in the kitchen, and hearing a detailed update from one of your siblings who's been on a trip and needs to debrief. I won't be insulted if you nod off once in a while, and I certainly think that you have the right to tell us what you've been up to lately, too. Please let us know!

At the end of September, Lora and I went to Australia so that Lora could have a knee operation. She had torn a cartilage dancing with her kindergartners, and needed to have it repaired so she could walk without pain. You would have laughed to see us on the airplane. We specialized in culture shock! There we were in business class, for the first and probably only time in our lives. The insurance company had reserved the first-class seats to give us extra legroom, which was thoroughly appreciated, but we were poorly prepared for the other amenties: the offered champagne, the linen tablecloth that I thought was a napkin, and the little platter of fancy cheeses. You would have laughed even harder at our night-time arrival in Brisbane! I will never forget the ride from the airport to the hotel. There were streetlights along a four-lane freeway! And we were traveling at 100 kph (about 60 mph)! And we had seat belts to wear! So, we arrived in the hotel room, took a minute to play with the air-conditioner, and the phone rang. We just stared stupidly at each other. We knew exactly no one in Brisbane. I answered, and it was John Mavor, a pastor from Sydney, calling to see how we were. We had met him at Onesua's golden jubilee celebration. Caroline, an Austalian volunteer teacher at Onesua, had tipped him off that we would be there. It's a nice illustration of how the Christian community works. We had been in the city less than an hour before we were given the name and phone number of the local pastor, as well as directions to the church, which turned out to be about three blocks from the hotel. Lora's doctor appointment confirmed the original diagnosis from Vanuatu, but then we had to wait for an MRI appointment and a surgery date, so we were "stuck" in a luxury hotel in a pleasant town at no cost to us for the next week or so.

We spent most of our time just gawking at the hotel room (hot-water shower, lights that stay on as late as you like, TV), the city (tall buildings, clean streets, orderly traffic), and the people (hurried, unsmiling, richly dressed, and white.) How strange the modern, Western world looks to someone who's been away for over a year!

You have so many choices in your supermarkets! You have so many styles of clothes, some of them amazingly immodest! You have so many riches, and you are so frivolous with them! You have so much noise, both literally and figuratively, in your lives!

We visited the malls and shopped for the girls, bought some gifts, and got to know a tiny little bit of Brisbane. I was amazed by the beautiful parks with blooming jacaranda trees, enchanted by the ferries weaving across the river, and entranced by an Aborigine street musician playing his didgeridoo. Lora got to hold a koala at a koala reserve just a short boat-ride up the river, and we saw kangaroos, Tasmanian devils, and dingoes, too. We spent an absolutely extraordinary day with a whale-watching tour. Humpbacks calve in the tropical water along the Great Barrier Reef in June or so, and then swim leisurely south along the coast while the babies nurse and grow and put on blubber for the November trip down to Antarctica, where the adults break their six-month fast by feasting on krill. We were fortunate enough to travel on a boat specifically designed for whale watching, with no oil leakage and very quiet engines that do not disturb the whale communications. It was captained by the first woman to be a fully certified captain in the South Pacific. She gave us a running commentary on whales as we carefully crept close to several small groups of whales. We were astonished to learn that whale babies, just like toddlers anywhere, are very clumsy. The mother surfaces and breathes and dives in a single graceful arch, followed by the baby, who blows and splashes its flippers and might even turn sideways! It's quite endearing, although I'm not sure “endearing” is an accurate word for an animal already weighing a ton. Meanwhile, the young adults were frolicking around, splashing, and turning their white bellies up, and sometimes fully breaching. We don't really know why whales breach. Maybe it's to attract attention, or to make a big noise, or even just to dislodge barnacles, but it looked to me like it was for fun. It was like watching kids dance or play volleyball—the same combination of grace and power, the same willingness to try it just because it's a challenge and it feels so good once you get the moves right. The babies, of course, did not have it figured out yet. They would bob a bit and wallow and sink. I imagine them dreaming of the day when they could play as well as the big athletes. Both Lora and I felt that seeing the whales was a spiritual experience, similar to watching grizzlies or wolves in Yellowstone Park. It is a miracle that such creations exist, and it is almost a miracle that we humans have allowed them to survive. The humpback population along the east coast of Australia is estimated to have originally been about 10,000 animals. They were hunted so efficiently, here on their calving grounds that the population was down to about 500 before the slaughter was stopped. It has now rebounded to about 5000 and will be secure as long as humans are careful. Stopping whale hunting was controversial at the time (It still is in some places!), with people arguing about economic rights, but whale-watching businesses now pay about $250,000 (Australian) in taxes just to the Queensland government each year. And beyond any economic reckoning, we are grateful to those brave voices in the early conservation movement, before ecology became fashionable, who saved these marvels for us to witness.

Lora had her arthroscopic surgery, and she amazes me (again) with her courage and her strength. She was sitting in the recovery room and eating a little from the food tray, when she noticed a small bottle on the tray. Through the last bit of the anesthetic haze, she wondered what part of the lunch it was. It turned out to be the piece of cartilage removed from her knee! (We did not ask for a doggie bag.) After being gone for 12 days, it was great to return to the girls. It is a compliment, the very highest we can give, to Caroline that we trusted her and the rest of the community to care for Kinsey and Emily. Lora is now walking about 4K per day with very little pain, and the knee is beginning to feel more stable. We are very grateful for the opportunity we had to take advantage of modern medical facilities and personnel, and we are very aware that most of our neighbors in the villages, if they tore up a knee, would simply limp for the rest of their lives.

Interestingly, both Lora and I suffered culture shock in reverse on our return. This place is backward and slow and dirty and hot. There are a lot of bugs. Classes had not been covered, plans had not been followed, opportunities had not been grasped. There are a lot of frustrations that make life hard here, and there really is no good explanation for most of them. It's just the way life is in this part of the world. It was strangely dislocating for us. We had a treasured homecoming as a family, but at the same time went through a transition to a foreign culture that specialized in aggravation. It was a challenge, and we found ourselves crabby and depressed. Our email inbox was full of mail we didn't feel like answering, lesson plans tended to be sketchy and last-minute, and we let the baby acacia trees take over the garden. But we responded by being very intentional about our life together. The girls and I now walk with Lora in the mornings as she recovers strength in her leg, and it is a valued together time, often with spectacular sunrises and laughter as we complain about getting up at 4:45. We still haven't seen dophins along the reef, but Emily reminds us to look every morning. Kinsey keeps a strict eye on our diet, and challenges us to eat sensibly. We have been more careful of our other exercises and our prayer life, and we have begun meditating together in the evening. And we make sure that there are plenty of chances for laughter in each day. There are a lot of things that we cannot control, but we are now doing a better job of using our freedom wisely. And now, after a couple of weeks, we feel better. I don't dwell on missing the hotel carpet that made exercising so nice. I just sweep the dead cockroaches out of the way and put a folded blanket down as an exercise pad. The situps do me just as much good. We are grateful for the many people, both friends and family, who have patiently kept writing even when we were slow to respond, and who by teaching or by example over the years have provided us with strong models of coping. You have given us the habit of carrying on.

Friday was the end-of-the-year party for Lora's kindergarten. Lora officially resigned, leaving the way open for next year's kindergarten to be run by the Ni-Vanuatu, and she was given gifts of carved wooden decorations and woven mats. The kindergartners were given certificates, and the childen graduating into first grade each received a small present. Kinsey and Emily helped paint the kids' faces, and then all the students took turns trying to break open the pinata that Lora and I had made the night before. It was a lot of work, especially blind-folded, with laughter and groans as mighty swings hit or missed, balloons popped, and the plastic bag holding all the candy gradually deteriorated under the onslaught. Eventually, spinning with the impact of repeated blows, it burst open, and brightly wrapped candy showered in a glittering spiral over everyone, enough for the kindergarteners, their families, and even the visitors who had stopped by.

For me, the past month has been a time of finishing up the year's teaching and revising. I look back at the progress my year-ten class has made in math, and I am very proud of them and how hard they have worked. They started a long way back, and made some mistakes the size of belly-flopping whales, but they have learned and grown. This week they begin the national exams which will determine their educational opportunities for the rest of their lives. The top students will be offered places in year-eleven classrooms, with some of them continuing here at Onesua. The rest will be looking for work in Vila or returning to their villages. Yesterday was the awards ceremony. Traditional dancers led the graduating tenth graders into the assembly hall, and we listened to speeches and prayed and sang and handed out certificates. The students then formed a long receiving line and shook hands with the rest of the community. All the girls and most of the boys were crying. Onesua has been their home for the past four years and, with opportunities limited and transportation costly, they do not know if they will ever see their friends again. Like all commencements, it was a celebration and a goodbye at the same time.

Yesterday was Kinsey's fifteenth birthday. We celebrated with some of the other expatriot teachers here, with Caroline, Robert (Scottish/Canadian), and Maki (Japanese). We baked Kinsey's birthday cake in a heavy aluminum pot in our fire pit, and told silly stories from my days as a Boy Scout leader with Jerry Hutch, who was a master of Dutch-oven cookery. Kinsey opened her presents, Robert played some wonderful guitar music, and we sang and laughed long after the lights went out. As we stood out on the lawn under the bright moon, I realized that I was happy again. This is home, the place where we blow out candles and enjoy watching the glowing night sky for fruit bats, the place where God has given us meaningful work that not only matches our gifts but stretches them. This month has been a stretching time.

So now, as we near Thanksgiving, I would like to remind you to live in gratitude. And not just some quiet, private gratitude. Say it aloud, both for the past and for the present. Thanks, Jerry! Thanks, Caroline! Thanks, Robert and Maki and John! Thank you, doctors and boat designers and environmentalists and flight attendants and people who work in insurance offices! Thank you to all who have taught us to transform challenges into wonder, to tranfigure pain into inspiration. Keep whacking away, even if you can't see clearly, and eventually sweetness will spill abundantly into your life and the lives around you. And maybe, once in a while, you might breach the ceilings of this world and catch a glimpse of wonder beyond imagination. It feels good.

Love and peace,

Bruce Whearty

The 2003 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 191