For the children

Love these little ones…

While they are at your side, love these little ones to the uttermost. Serve them; care for them; lavish all your tenderness upon them. Value your good fortune while it is with you and let nothing of the sweetness of their babyhood go unprized. Not for long will you keep the happiness that now lies within your reach. You will not always walk in the sunshine with a little warm, soft hand nestling in each of yours, nor hear little feet pattering beside you, and eager baby voices questioning and prattling of a thousand things with ceaseless excitement. Not always will you see that trusting face upturned to yours, feel those little arms about your neck and those tender lips pressed upon your cheek, nor will you have that tiny form to kneel beside you and murmur baby prayers into your ear.

Love them and win their love and shower on them all the treasures of your heart. Fill up their days with happiness and share with them their mirth and innocent delights.

Childhood is but for a day. Ere you aware it will be gone with all its gifts forever.

George Townsend
“The Mission of Baha’u’llah” pg. 145

What's Next?

WWOOF is Willing Workers On Organic Farms, and although I believe it has changed a lot since its inception, it is fundamentally a program devised to help teach people about organic farming and growing methods. It does so by bringing together people who have a desire to learn with farmers who have a desire to host them. The trade is the work, usually four to six hours a day, provided by the wwoofers, for meals and a place to stay, provided by the hosts. It doesn’t seem to be regulated, and consequently, anyone who employs “organic” methods, even if it is only on their private garden, is able to be listed as a host. But whether that actually is detrimental to the original aim of the group—I don’t know.

When Ashley and I arrive in Auckland, New Zealand around 7:30 am on the 28th of January-as a side note we leave Rarotonga on the 27th at 3:40 am and it is only a three and a half hour flight!-we will take some form of public transport to one of the ferry stations. There we can store our luggage for the day in a locker, and go out and explore the city. That evening, we will come back to the ferry station and try to meet up with our first wwoof host as she takes the five o’clock ferry home from work. Home is Waiheke Island, about a thirty-five minute ferry ride from the Central Business District of Auckland city. (Another side note: all these times and distances are based on what I have read about Auckland, so if I am wrong I apologize) We will have that evening and the following two days to get to know the family we will be staying with.

Our hosts are a husband and a wife and their two children. They need someone to help watch after their two children and transport them to and from school. The work is for six hours a day, Monday through Friday. They also will have some carpentry work for us. They mentioned something about some flower beds and a chicken coop in one of our emails. The weekends we have free, and it is until mid-March, six weeks total. Those are the details that we have so far.

The first weekend we are there, the 31st of January and the 1st of Feb, is the Baha’i Regional Conference for all of New Zealand. So we will be heading in to the city for that and making contacts with people and getting an idea of what the country needs in terms of service from us. It’s a great chance for us-wonderful timing-to be able to meet Baha’is all over the country and get their stories and advice on places that need help and what they like about their regions. We also will learn about the study circles/Ruhi courses that are happening around the country. All in all, our first week is going to be a whirlwind, and we are really looking forward to it.

For now, we are still relaxing on Rarotonga. Nine more days of life on a tropical island and we are trying not to rush ourselves. It’s great here. A little hot for both of us. And maybe a few more bugs than we are used to. Ashley found a giant spider behind the couch cushions today…but there are no poisonous bugs, animals or plants on Raro, so don’t worry about us...;)

Coming Home

For close to thirty years I had heard of a place called the Cook Islands, with only a few family pictures and a large aerial photograph to give me an idea of the island on which I was born. I was given stories too, and a birth certificate and social security number that didn’t look like any of the others I ever saw. Along with those, I got a name that was so unique that I was eighteen before I met another person with the same one. The difficulty of my own name was matched by the difficulty of the name of my birthplace-Rarotonga. For years it has only lived in my mind, since I remember nothing from my short time here. Less than two weeks ago, on December 28th, my wife and I landed at the Rarotonga International Airport-one runway and a few small buildings-and for the first time since I was a newborn child I was back in the land of my birth.

I am not sure what I was expecting. I had joked with others about feeling some sort of connection; about rediscovering my “roots”. I can say that as I turned with Ashley and looked at the inland peaks of the island, covered with dense jungle, rising up directly behind the Air New Zealand flight we had just disembarked from, I felt a sense of awe and wonder. This was a beautiful scene, and it felt amazing to have the chance to return to it.

Having been here now for almost two weeks, I have realized something. There was nothing wrong with wanting to see my birthplace or feeling as if I was missing something because I hadn’t yet seen it. I wanted to associate myself with this tropical island paradise because it further cemented my “difference.” I really thought that maybe I needed to visit this place to somehow complete myself…

I feel at home now, but not because I returned to the Cook Islands. My home was already with me when I stepped off that flight onto the tarmac. I first found my “home” over five and a half years ago, and on November 8th of this past year Ashley and I got married. That feeling of being “at home” has been there ever since. Coming back to this island was great, but my home isn’t a place anymore…it is my wife.

Raro

Just for an update…Ashley and I are currently in the Cook Islands, on the main island of Rarotonga. We have been here since the evening of the 28th, which was actually a little strange since we left New Zealand to fly here around noon on the 29th.

We left Cambodia and traveled back to Thailand via bus where we finally arrived in Bangkok. We were both starving, and Ashley had progressed from a little hungry, to a lot hungry, to get-away-from-me-I’m-hungry, to giggling and laughing to herself and ranting about food hungry…but we made it through and got ourselves some food finally. We spent the night in the Queens Garden Hotel near the airport, the same place we spent our first night in Bangkok when we arrived with Randi & Tyra and met Jen. We were a little more thai-saavy and so we didn’t load up on weird seaweed flavored snacks at the 7-11 this time. We had a nice breakfast—actually that is an understatement-we spent almost 600 baht on the two of us, eating an omelet, stir-fried veggies and rice, spring rolls and a banana shake—but it was good after the starving we had endured on the bus the prior day. The hotel shuttled us to the airport, and we said goodbye to Thailand, and in doing so it really felt like saying goodbye to a “home” we had grown to love.

Our flight was on Royal Brunei Airlines, from Bangkok to Auckland, with a stopover in the capital of Brunei Darussalam-Bendar Seri Bengawan-and Brisbane, Australia. We arrived in the Muslim country around 6:00 pm, and after finally getting our hands on our luggage, had to take a taxi into the city since the buses stop running at six. Brunei is not a cheap country. In fact, it quite possibly is one of the most expensive places in southeast Asia. The cheapest lodging we had been able to find using the internet and guide books was a place called the K.H. Soon Resthouse for $39 Brunei dollars a night, which translates roughly to around $20 US dollars. Food was not cheap either. In fact, the sultan of Brunei is a very wealthy man, living in the largest occupied royal residence in the world. We dropped our bags off at the musty resthouse, and then headed out to explore the tiny central area of the city. Not a whole lot happening in Brunei. Alcohol sales are forbidden, so there isn’t much nightlife to speak of. A few twenty-four hour restaurants and cafes were all we found.

We stumbled across a family night party in the courtyard of one of the “malls”, complete with inflatable moon bounces and slides. An Australian family stopped us and chatted for a few minutes, giving us a little advice on where to eat and confirming that we had, in fact, seen about all there was to see. We strolled around the Omar Ali Saifuddien Mosque, with its spires illuminated by green light in the night. The water surrounding the mosque and bordering it’s outer walkway was filled with more trash then we had seen even in Thailand. We stopped an ate ice cream and watched a football match at an outdoor café, and then we headed to bed. We went out for breakfast the next morning, and as we left the restaurant, realized that we had forgotten to adjust our clocks ahead on hour since leaving Thailand. We had only ninety minutes until our flight rather than two and a half hours. We grabbed another cab and bid adieu to the city without seeing much else of what little it had to offer.

From Brunei we flew to Brisbane, and spent about an hour stopped there, before we re-boarded and flew on to Auckland. We arrived in Auckland at about 4 am on the 29th, although to our internal clocks still accustomed to Thailand time, it was only 10 o’clock in the evening. We spent the morning in the New Zealand airport, grabbing some food, and attempting to sleep amongst large families of Maori seeing each other off and young children running around. We finally boarded our flight at 11 am and three and a half hours later we were at Rarotonga Airport.

Dusty Roads

Did I mention that it was really, really dusty in Cambodia? The main road between Bangkok and Siem Reap is a heavily traveled road by tour buses, and in Thailand, although the road is deteriorated, it is still in pretty good shape compared with its continuance in Cambodia. It starts off as a freshly paved highway, and for the first 30 or 40 kilometers I wondered what all the fuss about Cambodia’s roads had been. And then, it became apparent, when the bus hit a huge bump as our road transformed from freshly paved asphalt to recently graded gravel and dirt. Our buses speed didn’t falter much, and there was even the occasional water tanker spraying the dirt roads to keep down the dust, so it wasn’t too bad right away.

We rolled along at about 80 or 90 kilometers an hour, swerving left and right on this gravel road-to-be with no delineation or imposed order, other than the steady honking from our bus drivers horn. The rule seems to be honk when you are coming up behind someone, honk when you are passing someone, honk at the oncoming traffic when you are in their lane…Strangely enough, our driver rarely honked when he was stuck behind a slower moving vehicle, until he was about to pass them. This main highway was a straight shot, and it blasted right through the center of towns and villages. Whether they were a result of the road or the other way around I am unsure, but stalls and shops lined the dirt track that was a constant site of construction.

I began to notice that the dust from the roads layered everything. The structures along the road, made of different types of building materials-from concrete, to wood, to bamboo, to sheet metal- they all began to blend together in a mass of red-dust colored shambles. The corrugated metal roofing had long ago had its silver luster obscured by brownish-red dust. The continuous traffic even left a cover of dirt on the foliage along the road-from the low-standing brush to the tall palm fronds-everything melded in color with the dirt. Even some of the people, who spent their days sitting at a stall on the roadside, would begin to match their surroundings in color, their hats and scarves leaving only a slit for their eyes, and their clothing consisting of long pants and shirts. But these people were the exception. For everywhere along the way I saw children in brightly colored t-shirts playing with each other. I saw young men sitting on their freshly washed motor bikes waiting to offer a ride to the next person who walked by. I saw men showering by means of bucket and water in their yards in the evening, and during the day saw the same men working hard in the fields. Often a line of rice farmers would be visible in the distance as they worked the fields, their rattan hats all that was visible of them as they bent over and cut the plants near the water. The people’s color was in stark contrast to the dinginess of their surroundings, and it may just be an indication of the Khmer people’s resilience and ability to see a bright side to their plight in recent years.

The roads actually got worse, graduating from newly-graded gravel to washed-out, rutted dirt that hadn’t received any maintenance since the rainy season ended. The speed did lessen here, but the ride was still akin to taking a jeep four-wheeling-only with Cambodian music blaring in the background, accompanied by the driver’s singing and horn-honking. The bus ride in Cambodia from the border to Siem Reap took us about five hours, and it wore us out, both going and coming back. But it was real travel, among real people, sometimes without aircon or another white face anywhere in site-it was another country, and the people were quite friendly and accommodating. So if you are planning on visiting, save some money, take a land route, it’s about 100 dollars cheaper, and if you want to you can learn some Cambodian for free on the trip in.