September 10, 2011 Southern Taiwan. A Mountain Breeze

Mountain Breeze________ Thank God for my Guide

We ate in the clouds        as the Eagle and the Wheat Chaff joined the the wind for a midday dance.
                                           Eagle to Hunt                Chaff        to be.

A lunch gathering of 20 or so in the jungle mountains after a morning swim in the waterfall pool.

The language I hear: voices- chattering music spiced with laughter...  only in the laughter do I understand with my ears.

The language of smiles and faces flashing with animation, the sort that can only come from excitement and freedom-  that I understand     and it is as filling and refreshing to my soul as the mountain breeze is to my body.

A mountain breeze never felt so good than after an ascension from days in a valley of humidity- thick as soup.  The valley's air below from whence we came is congested with people- working amid scooter exhaust.

Go and find your own jungle mountain with a waterfall for swimming and a breeze to sooth you as you eat and laugh some afternoon.  Go and find it while you are still breathing- maybe I will meet you there.  

First Post in Taiwan

August 15, 2011

Greetings to you, my friends and family; from a train on Taiwan’s western coast.   I’m en route from Taipei where I dropped Jana off at the airport this morning, to Pingtung, about 5 hours south by train, where I will be living and working for the next 12 months!

Fast forward 2 weeks and now it is Sunday night and I’ve just been told there is no school tomorrow because of the typhoon.  I got caught up in some rain yesterday on the way back from the monastery, but I have yet to see anything that would warrant school cancellations.  However, who doesn’t relish a day off work?  Immediately after hearing news of the cancellation I thought to myself, “Four years ago this would be a great excuse to get really good and drunk, but now you can use this time to actually write that letter to all those people you love who said they wanted to hear how you were doing.” 

I landed in Taipei Thursday, July 21 and stayed for two weeks with my sister Kara and at the initial writing of this letter I had trained one official day at Chiba Language School.  It is a small private school with roughly forty students between the ages of two and seven.  There are another twenty or thirty students aged eight through fifteen who attend Chiba in addition to another regular school.  At least that’s what I believe; there is a lot about my school, and my job for that matter, that remains vague to say the least.  This is frustrating, but I’m told that’s just the way it is here with the way westerners are communicated with so I say the Serenity Prayer and just behave as if I was a substitute teacher.  My roommate is the other English teacher and tells me he will be only the second English teacher in SEVENTEEN YEARS to complete a one year contract at Chiba. Yikes.  However, knowing that, I really am like a substitute teacher.  The students are here to learn Japanese and English, there are three Japanese teachers, and two English teachers.  There are two Taiwanese teachers designated to assist the Japanese teachers and two assigned to the English teachers.

The school provides a three-bedroom two-bathroom apartment with a balcony and washing machine for me and the other English teacher (Adrian- he’s been a huge blessing out here) to stay and only charges for utilities (roughly $100 USD a month unless we use more electricity.)   The school has been very generous and arranged a tour of a Buddhist Monastery while Jana was here, took us out to dinner and even prepared a translation/direction booklet for us when we went to a little tropical island off the coast for a night!   So I take some of the frustrations, like gaping holes in the curriculum that I don’t find out about until a day before or 10 minutes before the start of class, in stride…or at least I try to =).  They also gave me a cell phone that I just buy my own minutes for and a bicycle so, it is what it is and it’s only 11 more months.

Observations about Taiwan: 

The humidity is not as bad as August in New Orleans or Florida, but the sun is punishing and respite from the heat only comes from showers in the afternoon or an occasional glorious breeze (often manufactured by a bicycle ride) and I don’t know how I’d get by without air-conditioning in my room.  My third night in Taiwan, Kara and I slept on the beach under the stars with nature’s AC and that was awesome, but bugs do like to nibble.  

If you’ve ever seen a movie shot in Southeast Asia where there are tons of people milling about in street markets that have an organization that can only be observed by the rhythm through which everyone moves, and the buildings seem to sweat dirt, and there are plants everywhere and almost as many scooters as people…yeah it’s like that.

Architecturally, the buildings are (all sweating dirt by outward appearance) either soviet style and very boring with a lot of concrete (the walls in my room… yup concrete), thrown together with no apparent design for longevity or structurally supportive code approval, or in some state of abandonment.  Many of the buildings here that collapse partially for whatever reason are just left there so little plants can grow there and look interesting without being flattened for something new to take their place right away.  In a way some of these dilapidated buildings remind me of seeing New Orleans’ Lower 9^th Ward last summer (five years after Katrina), however in New Orleans it was infuriating tragedy and here it seems to just be the norm.   Parts of Taipei are very nice, generally wherever there’s a lot of money among the people the buildings don’t seem to sweat dirt anymore.  Taipei 101 was a sight to see.  Massive; a very impressive architectural accomplishment and aesthetically pleasing, but the mall inside was a big swanky, slick, and expensive mall full of overpriced designer goods from Europe and the US and frankly I’m a little unimpressed and, on a bad day, disgusted by the disease of materialism so Jana and I went straight to the book store when we visited Taipei 101.  Chang Kai Shek Memorial Plaza was equally massive and aesthetically pleasing in a way one might associate with Eastern culture’s unique beauty more so than another gaudy, towering skyscraper.  Here too I was reminded of the beauty this building shared with the temples that can be found literally ANYWHERE there are people in a 20 km radius.  The temples are beautiful in every way. Ornate, billowing incense and in the mornings you can hear nuns chanting prayers at the larger temples.  They usually have a public restroom too!

And there is another small yet huge difference:  toilets.  You know how we sit down on a “seat” to conduct our affairs in the bathroom stall?  Yeah, they have squatters here.  Little more than a sophisticated hole in the wall that flushes somehow.  I don’t think I could ever get used to that and, no, the bathroom in my apartment (the one that counts most of all) does not have a squatter.

Just like they love scooters here they also love 7 Elevens.  Similar to Starbucks on the west coast or Dunkin Donuts on the East Coast in the US, in any metropolitan area in Taiwan, it would not be surprising to find a 7 Eleven for every five blocks, sometimes less.

Palm trees are plentiful and, as far as I’m aware, native (sorry California).

There’s nothing like being able to see coconuts in their original green shell sold at the street vendors, or seeing pigs and chickens right on the rack fresh from or about to be butchered and sold.  Not friendly for vegetarians or anyone squeamish, but at least we are not shielded from the process by which we eat here.

The garbage truck here comes every night and makes a sound with its siren nearly identical to our ice cream truck back home.  I’m not kidding; no exaggeration and I will never hear that tune without thinking of Taiwan again.

The garbage casually tossed upon beaches, streets and parks and often deliberately thrown into the forest is a very sad and very upsetting thing here.  I suppose more than anything else though it is ugly.  At Chouliocho (a small tropical island in the south) I went from a small temple, which had immaculate and shiny floors to the beach not ten yards away which had garbage strewn carelessly all over it and locals just sitting at the top of the beach selling as much to whoever would make a purchase. Vendors hand out a plastic bag with EVERYTHING here.  And if you buy something that can be drunk you better believe you’re gonna get a straw.  People can trash the beaches and forests and even parks, but their temples are super clean.  Makes me agree with the sentiment that humans really are a pestilence to this earth when we can’t treat the temples of nature with the same sanctity that we so readily and actively reserve for our hand made monuments to religion.

Kara actually started a group on Facebook called keep Taiwan Beautiful after getting so upset by swimming in garbage on one of our outings that she stared fishing trash out of the sea while others snorkeled away not even noticing when their head brushed by bits of garbage.  By the end of it she had half a dozen people picking up with her and guess who got to carry the garbage bag full of trash back to civilization in the hot, humid sun over the boulder covered beach? Might have been the longest two miles I’ve ever walked, but it was worth it to see my sis so motivated for a good cause.

The general kindness and generosity of the people here is remarkable.  I really can’t count the number of times I have been either lost or just given off the appearance of being lost (apparently) and someone has come up to offer help.  The willingness to engage a stranger in conversation among so many of the people here is astounding to me.  It is just as refreshing as the incense that wafts through my window or out of buildings here throughout the day.  They are a deeply spiritual people and seem to include their ancestors in their many shrines.  Many people have a room in their home that has a shrine in it. 

Having Jana here was a joy and an adventure.  We traversed the island by train, watch the sunset on a tropical island that minutes before we had cruised all around on a scooter.  We hiked the second largest mountain in Taiwan with Kara and a couple friends.

In most stories, not all- but most, there is a guide of some sort.  For me in this journey, there have already been a handful of them.  My guides here have been a poignant reminder of God’s consistent presence through the kindness of other humans. These guides themselves have been touchstones for a journey that has only just begun just as mush as the places and experiences they have guided me through.  Adrian, my roommate, who is a Navy vet and a graduate of Evergreen in Olympia (crazy combo right?) has already provided invaluable perspective on the ins and outs of my school and the frustrations that come with the job.  Beyond that he has shown me good places to eat and is genuinely good company, a great conversationalist and a clean and tidy roommate; I may even learn how to properly iron a shirt under his tutelage.  He worked on computers back in the states so my technological incompetence has yet again been met by grace and aid.   Betty, a friend of Bill’s, who has been teaching here in Pingtung for ten years I found by checking the website for friends of Bill.  Hers was the only number listed for Pingtung and I’d been told by a couple expats I met in Taipei that the website may not even be up to date. But God saw fit for me to have a buddy in recovery for a guide and she has driven me down to Kenting, shown me good local markets and even taxied me home from the train station in the rain with a bag of groceries to boot. George is our Taiwanese friend who took us up the mountain and brought us to Shuifen, a mountain town where we stayed at a hostel and I played guitar and sang for the townspeople by the sidewalk and shop-lined train-tracks before I took the show out to the footbridge under the shooting stars and above the river.  The next day he took us out to the Waterfalls and a section of the River that no one else seemed to know about. It was just like a lagoon from some really sweet movie.  Nothing beats having a local who speaks the language and knows all the cool spots show you their favorite places.  Learning Mandarin maybe rough as they speak a distinctly different dialect of Taiwanese down here and my job is to speak and teach English everyday for a year, but one day at a time right?  And last but certainly not least, is a guide named Hue Shou (pronounce WHEE shao).  Originally from Austria, he became Buddhist when living in South Africa and came to Taiwan in order to be ordained as a monk.  He has been living here in the monastery (roughly an hour from my apartment by train and bus) for just over 11 years and among his duties there are to give tours to westerners as he speaks fluent English and German as well as Taiwanese.  He was the guide for my tour with Jana and when I came back for a second visit he said in a wonderfully thick Austrian accent, “It seems so unnatural to speak English to a man with the name Benz!”   He has helped me in my efforts to practice meditation.  Between, Worship, Fellowship, Service, Scripture Study, Prayer, and Meditation- meditation has always been the weakest link in my faith life and journey.  I’ve heard more than once that Prayer is talking to God and Meditation is listening.  Me, bad at listening?  Imagine that!  It’s not at all easy for me to shut my mind off and be silent with no thoughts, not to mention that the meditation pose is not easy for me, but meditation does seem to be an important part of one’s relationship with God and good hygiene for the brain.  We’ll see how it goes.  We’ll see how this whole thing goes.  I love you all very much and may Peace be with you always.