The Guam Dichotomy

It is hard to imagine a place short of Eden embellished more in natural beauty than Guam. Emerald mountains rising out of the blue Pacific Ocean, ringed in coral reefs and beaches teaming with life. The tropical forests are saturated with flowering fauna of white, yellow, blue, red and seemingly every shade of purple. Take for example the Hyacinth, a tree of shiny dark green leaves laden with clumps of flowers. Each blooms appears to be a spark of sunshine in-and-of-itself, starting with a bright yellow core that fades rapidly into white pedals so pure they may be the raw material for celestial robing.

Appreciating the creation that is Guam is hard though. Neighborhoods transform rapidly from palatial gated estate-like homes to shacks saturated with the castoff remnants of years of socioeconomic squalor. At times the island's beauty can seem virtually obscured by the overwhelming volume of household trash, rusting appliances and junk cars. What appears to be symptomatic of sloth and exhaustive environmental disregard is probably more rooted in civic disconnect and political corruption. The Guam EPA struggles with charges of mis-allocation of Federal funding and the removal of it's top administrator under a cloud of suspicion. This purely bureaucratic machine appears to hamper the removal of offending refuse more than facilitating it. Attempts to implement recycling programs are thwarted by arbitrarily implemented regulations just when the process becomes profitable. Hopefully the island will slowly become cleaner as a municipally run recycling program has just begun to gear up and the potential for privateers to thrive may become more viable as the bureaucracy is dissolved.

When you get past the initial discomfort elicited by the debris of civilization and realize that the stark contrast does not belong in this place, Guam is a fantastically beautiful place.

Not bad....just...different.

I started this blog because it was the thing to do. "Everybody is blogging" " Do you have a blog? " I rapidly found out that I didn't think my life was that interesting or didn't want everyone to know every little detail. So the last couple of years I have restrained myself to sparse Facebook status updates often deleted before they are even minutes old.

Three weeks in Guam have given me infinitely more blog fodder.

For example our first trip to the local grocery store forced me to come up with some way to handle the "eeewwwww"s and "gross! these people eat this" comments that were coming with every summit of the freezer divider in the meat department. I attempted a "learned dietary behavior out of necessity of available local resources" explanation that was cut off by a squid at the end of the next isle - followed by an eyeball cast sideways by a nearby Japanese lady.

It then became obvious that since we are now living among them, we were going to have to embrace these things that were so different. Yeah, that's it. Instead of belching the guttural potential dislike for something that we know nothing about we need to realize that things here are not bad...just different. Not only food, but in most aspects of life on a small island in the Pacific. Some of it we will try, and... some of it we will leave for the more...uh, culturally experienced. In the mean time we can remain grounded by McDonald's, Taco Bell and KFC in the event that we are tempted to stray too far from home.