Summer (part 2)

PART 2

The highlight of my summer was when 3 of my Peace Corps friends came out to the Mortlocks to hang out for a few weeks. Johnny, Julie, and Becky are all Volunteers in Chuuk, but they are in the lagoon meaning they are a solid 25 hour boat ride from me. Needless to say, I don’t see them very often, so it was really awesome that they decided to come out to visit.

If you have read my previous blog posts, you know that ship rides to and from the Mortlocks can be, well…interesting. I have had my fair share of awful ship rides, but nothing compares with the horrific ship ride from Hell that my 3 friends had to endure to visit me. For a detailed version of the story you can check out Johnn's blog, but to make a long story short, it sucked. Big time. It rained the whole time and they had nowhere to take cover. (Side note: Johnny updates his blog way more often than I do and he’s a pretty awesome writer, so if you’re interested in reading more fun stories about Chuuk, I highly recommend checking it out.) You can imagine that when I picked them up from the ship, they were incredibly excited to see me—not because I’m they’re friend or anything like that, but because my presence meant that they could finally GET OFF THE FREAKIN' SHIP!

The people of Satowan had been eagerly awaiting the arrival of 3 new white people to the island for some time, so that had outdone themselves in making a giant welcoming party for my friends. Unfortunately, they scheduled this party for the moment that my soaking wet, sleep deprived, seasick friends stepped onto the island. So, instead of taking a shower and lying down for a few hours, the 3 amigos had to endure almost an hour of singing and speeches welcoming them to Satowan. I finally had to stand up and explain to my Satowan friends that my American friends were very cold and wet and were very sorry but that they would have to excuse themselves because they kind of felt like they were gonna die.

After this less than perfect start to the trip, we all had an awesome time hanging out on Satowan. We walked all around the island, met a bunch of my friends, and even played a white people versus brown people game of basketball (no need for jerseys…). After about 4 days on Satowan, we packed up our stuff and headed over to Lekinioch island to meet up with another one of our Peace Corps friends, Farrah.

Farrah is one of my very best Peace Corps friends and I always enjoy hanging out with her. I have been to her island a couple of times for various events, so I know her host family pretty well too. We have fun jibing each other about our respective islands which usually goes something like this:

Me: Your island is full of homies and gangsters.
Farah: Yea, well… ummm…
Me: Punks and knuckleheads and homies and gangsters.
Farrah: Shut up.

This is kind of an inside joke between me and Farrah, but this exact conversation happens verbatim approximately every time we talk. Farrah keeps telling me that she’s going to come up with a comeback one of these days, but I’m still waiting.

But there is one thing that Lekinioch has on me: it always seems to get the better of me. Although I really enjoy going to visit the homies and gangsters, my past trips to Lekinioch have not been very successful. Something always seems to go wrong when I go there (iPod disappears, cut my arm on rusty rebar), and this trip was no exception. One night when all of us were getting ready to go to bed, I walked outside to brush my teeth. Farrah only has one light in her house, so as I walked around the corner of the house to spit, I was completely in the dark. Now normally this isn’t a problem—I walk around my house in the dark all the time because I know where everything is. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize that there was a stack of broken window panes stalked beside the house (side note: Really Farrah? Broken glass right beside the house? Which gangster came up with that brilliant death trap?).

Well, dear reader, you can imagine what happened next. I kicked the pile of glass and cut the top of my foot pretty bad. Although it didn’t hurt that bad, the side of the house resembled a murder scene. After cleaning up the wound and the pool of blood, I noticed that my middle toe was drooping below the others. I’m no doctor, but one look at something like that and you can pretty much tell that something is amiss. I called the Peace Corps doctor on my SatPhone the next day, and he told me that I should come in to Weno ASAP to get it checked out.

So I waited another six days until the next ship arrived.

In that time, we all had an awesome time hanging out. My droopy toe wasn’t hurting, so I didn’t really think too much of it. My friends started calling me “Droopy Toe” and all sorts of permutations on that name (“Droops,” “The Droopster,” “Droopy the Clown”). We spent a few more nights on Lekinioch and then headed over to Oneop to our friend Naavid's house. Unfortunately, we could only spend one day on Oneop because the ship showed up without warning. After a delightful 40 hour ship ride back to Weno, I could finally get my toe checked out…