At a Christmas party thrown by the archdiocese on December 30, I was surprised when a number of people approached me holding copies of a booklet that had just been published and asked for my signature. It seems that the pastors and the heads of schools had received wrapped copies of the book at the party. For me the luncheon quickly turned into a book signing event.
?Peace on earth, good will to men? are the words of the old Christmas song echoing the hymn of the angels. Isn?t this everyone?s wish as we again celebrate the event that was said to have ushered in?the New Age?
?Where America?s day begins,? is how they used to describe Guam years ago. That?s what I once thought, too, during my early visits to the island in the 1970s. Guam always seemed like a marvelous shopping mall to those of us coming from Chuuk, Pohnpei, Yap and less developed islands. We could find everything there we couldn?t access in the smaller islands?air-conditioned movie theaters, fast food places, good restaurants that offered the tomatoes and lettuce and other delights we yearned for back on our own islands.
Paul spent much of his adult life in Yap doing parish ministry, but with so little fanfare that many Yapese wouldn?t have been able to tell you much more about him other than that he was a priest. He was quiet, something of a church mouse, unless he was riled. But if you made friends with him, you had a friend for life. For most of his life he smoked a pipe. Sometimes the only way you could tell he was around was the curl of pipe smoke from his room.
What?s the possibility that small island societies like FSM and the Marshalls can grow their economy enough to make their countries self-supporting? That?s a question that many of us have been debating for years. It?s a question that haunts the leaders of these countries as they move closer to the end of the Compact funding in 2023.
This film opens with a man and his 20-year-old son out in a small boat fishing off Kosrae. It closes with the man fishing, this time alone. What has happened to the son? That?s the story behind this unusual visual tale filmed by Nathan Fitch, who served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Kosrae not long ago.
I was sitting in the back of a village church waiting to say mass when a teenage girl asked how old I was. When I told her that I was 76, she scrunched her eyes in disbelief, looked at me again, and then said ?I thought you were much older. You look at least 90.?
I really did feel like 90 a couple days earlier after three one-on-one games with a basketball buddy from the Philippines. I felt at least that old many times during this trip to Pohnpei as I tried to remember the names that wouldn?t come, as friends came up to offer their good wishes. But, whether 76 or 90, I couldn?t help but be rejuvenated by the return to my old stomping grounds. At times, I felt as if I were 24 again?my age when I first arrived here in 1963.
Giff Johnson?s latest work is a call to serious planning and more. The author summons leaders to recognize that life has changed in the Marshalls and the status quo is the road to disaster. There was a time when this might not have been true?when people who wanted to kick back and live a simple island life could quietly opt out of school and retire to the family land to provide for themselves as their ancestors had done for generations in an island society that offered the resources, physical and social, to support its population.