He's coming.

Baby Boy Johnson

coming 12-2006

***

Cliff & Amber Johnson

Hettick Thanksgiving 2006

Our son's video tour of Thanksgiving and family.

On September 1, we moved into our first home in Chicago. We're thrilled to have found a place in West Humboldt Park that fits us and will grow with our family. There's a guest bedroom waiting, so let us know if you're ever in town. Here are some shots of our lovely little abode (notice our baby's future island paradise).

All Good Things Must Come to an End

Our calendar presently reads May 5, 2005. And despite the fact that your calendar probably reads May 4, 2005, we should all be able to agree that June 20 is not all that far away. That’s when Cliff and Amber begin the journey home. It’s been two years already, and we thought a few reflections on the past and thoughts on the future might be in order.

Cliff’s Reflections:

Two years. One hundred and four weeks. Seven hundred and thirty days. Seventeen thousand five hundred and twenty hours. A stint in Peace Corps may feel like a decade to some or like a week to others. In our case, I would say two years in Tonga felt…well…like two years. Enough time to learn a language, begin to understand another culture, and establish some relationships. Not enough time to truly change a community, make a foreign land feel like home, or forget all that was left behind. Having now completed my third two year experience since finishing college (an internship at Emmaus House recovery program, graduate school, and then Peace Corps Tonga), I will say this: nothing is exotic after two years.

Whether one is sharing a bathroom with former prostitutes and addicts or relocating to a remote South Pacific island, everything seems normal after a year or two. You get used to people showering and dancing in the rain. You get used to hurling banana peels and old leftovers toward the pigs out back. You get used to stepping over coconut husks and bananas every single day. When I spent a month in Yettebon, Ethiopia during college, the trip’s leader advised taking photographs of the mountains right away; apparently, after three or four weeks people tended to forget just how breathtaking the view truly was. Human beings have an amazing capacity to adjust their expectations, to accept as typical things they had never even imagined only moments before. In another six months, Tonga will feel like a lifetime ago and Chicago’s overpopulated streets will seem commonplace. People evolve. People adjust. People stretch. So two years of something completely new may feel like a lifetime or feel like a brief second, but I assure you it almost always feels worthwhile.

Amber’s Reflections:

Now that our countdown calendar is registering just over six weeks, I’ve started trying to reflect on the things I’ve learned while being here. There are the obvious things: how to dance Tongan style, how to speak a language spoken by only 100,000 of the world’s inhabitants, how to make a raw fish salad, how to get to the outhouse and back during a cyclone without getting soaked. But there are also a lot of intangible lessons that will serve me well outside the South Pacific. Here are a few:

• I’ve learned how easy it is not to appreciate what you have. We see this in the Tongans as they make the awkward adjustment to a consumer-based society, and we see it in ourselves as we overlook the spectacular views available just a block from our house.
• I’ve learned how easy it is to develop tunnel-vision, and how quickly that tunnel-vision can lead to feeling stressed. My first year and a half here was overly stressful because I couldn’t slow down enough to move at the pace of Tongan society. Cliff and I worked together to adjust that attitude, and now I’m pretty good at the Tongan malolo (restful) style.
• I appreciate families and the support system they provide more. There are no homeless people in Tonga, no orphans, and no one goes hungry. The extended family works together to care for each other. Being away from our families has made us miss them, and watching Tongan families together has made us appreciate more all the things our own parents and grandparents have done for us.

It is impossible to condense two years of unique experiences into a few simple lessons; the few I’ve listed above barely scratch the surface of all that could be said. As we expected when we signed up for the Peace Corps, our two years of service was not easy and wasn’t always fun, but it was very good for us, and perhaps useful to the Tongans around us as well.

Up next…Around The World:

There are two main options regarding travel home. We could just fly direct from Tongatapu to Los Angeles to Chicago. Or we could travel home the other direction, stopping off in various exotic locales for fun and relaxation. Shockingly enough, we’re opting for itinerary number two. So first we’ll be meeting up with our good friend and former Chicago neighbor Aaron Clements to drive around New Zealand for a couple weeks, check out Sydney, Australia for four or five days, and then explore Bangkok, Thailand. After that, it’s off to South Africa and Mozambique to visit with Ernie and Sharon Doering, friends from Chicago who are presently serving with the Mennonite Central Committee there. Then, we’ll spend a day or so in London en route to Orlando, Florida where we’ll stay with Amber’s Grandpa for a week and visit some friends and family in the area. Finally, we’ll arrive in Springfield, Illinois to begin the long, arduous, and slightly less exciting process of resuming life in America. Here’s the present itinerary for those who are interested:

June 20 Tonga to Auckland

July 5 Auckland to Syndey

July 8 Sydney to Bangkok

July 11/12 Bangkok to Hong Kong to Johannesburg

July 20/21 Johannesburg to London

July 22 London to Orlando

July 28 Orlando to St. Louis to Springfield

Up next…In America:

After our around-the-world travels, our immediate plan is to sleep and eat well for a few days. After that, though, I’m afraid we’re going to have to settle down a bit. Cliff, who graduated from college in 1999 and has yet to have a salaried job, will start interviewing for social work positions in the Chicago area. (After, of course, he has recovered from his hip surgery.) I will return to work at World Vision, with much the same job as before. (Conveniently, the woman who took my position when I left is leaving World Vision in June, and my boss is willing to hold the job for me until mid-August.)

We hope to buy a used car shortly after returning to the Midwest and to find an apartment (possibly on the north-west or south-west sides of the city) as quickly as possible. During our time in Tonga we’ve both developed a long list of to-do items that we’re eager to tackle once we’re back in the city. These include using our new biking skills on the paths along the lake; improving our Spanish-speaking skills; publishing some of the short stories and plays we’ve written while here; and make frequent visits to movie theaters, supermarkets, the Chicago public library, and the houses of family and friends.

Even better than helping little birdies.

Peace Corps recently asked us to submit stories from our time in Tonga for publication in their various PR booklets. I brainstormed a bit, and this is what I came up with. Enjoy.

Cliff

Perhaps someday I will attend a function for returned Peace Corps Volunteers in America, during which everyone will stand up to recite their favorite tales of service and hope and hugs across the globe. There will certainly be descriptions of wells that were dug, children that learned to read, and small helpless birds that were rescued from the jaws of predatory snakes. Then all eyes will look toward me, Clifton Johnson - Peace Corps Tonga 2003 to 2005. And sure, I will be tempted to critique western development strategies or to explain that living overseas is about far more than inspiring tales or to simply make up some story about saving a mangy dog from the neighbor boys’ underground oven. But then I will come to my senses and remember Aivenhou.

The Kingdom of Tonga is an island archipelago in the South Pacific, and my wife Amber and I have called the island of Vava’u home for almost two years now. Amber acts as the manager for a local youth and community center, and in addition to assisting Tongan counterparts with various programming I act as Amber’s trusty sidekick. Throughout the hottest and hardest weeks here, we often find ourselves looking forward to Tuesdays. It is on Tuesdays when the Vava’u Youth Center borrows a local vehicle, picks up youth with disabilities from nine local villages, and brings them back for a few hours of activities the participants fondly refer to as “school.”

I suppose the Vava’u Youth Center’s program for people with developmental disabilities is rather measly by American standards: “Hey, let’s get nine people with completely disparate challenges, have them all color and count to ten in unison a few times, feed them a little lunch, and then ship them back home!” Nonetheless, it is a highlight of every participant’s week. I know it is. Because their options are as follows:

• Sit at home inside and be ignored

• Go someplace where people are nice, I actually fit in for once, and sometimes they show movies

Were I choosing between these options, I would come to the Youth Center every week and pretend that coloring was not somehow beneath me too.

So our class is not exactly revolutionizing indigenous programs for populations with special needs; we are just biding our time till we get enough resources or vehicles or volunteers or training to change things. We hope to someday improve local communities’ ability to help residents with disabilities, to speak about individuals instead of “handicapped people,” to assist participants in living fully for more than just an hour a week. Those goals are a ways off, but our programming is all that is available for the outer villages of Vava’u and it does keep Amber and I looking forward to Tuesdays.

Aiveni is a young man with an infectious smile and cerebral palsy; his condition is debilitating enough that he is in a perpetual fetal position with little to not control over his hands or legs. In Vava’u that means sitting inside alone a lot, waiting for people to carry you from place to place, and dealing with misguided neighbors who think that talking slower might somehow assist you. Aiveni may often be the smartest person in the room, but he will probably never know what it feels like for the whole room to see him that way. He is usually stuck on the hard floor working just to hold a crayon near the white page he has been given and wondering when someone will let him count to a thousand instead of ten.

But then, on a Tuesday much like any other, Amber and I walked up the Youth Center’s gravel driveway and Aivenhou met us on the porch. He MET us on the porch. A wheelchair collection had been gathering dust for months at a nearby office before someone brought one to our Center and gave Aiveni a chance to control his own destiny for a few hours a week. I must say, the smile on his face made saving a nest of birds seem pretty tame. I cannot say I came up with the idea or donated that wheelchair, but I am proud simply to say that I was there that day, that I was a part of something so much bigger than grant writing for equipment that will break in a year. Aivenhou smiled…and we cried. For months now, Aivenhou has been getting rides in his chair, courtesy of his classmates. He has been writing at a table instead of on the floor. He has been deciding when it is time to leave a room, rather than waiting to be carried by someone else.

So, perhaps someday I will tell that story, and the other returned volunteers will wipe their eyes when I am done. Amber and I will know that in the end Peace Corps is not necessarily about warm fuzzy stories…but we will also know that two years of difficulties for that single moment on the porch with Aivenhou is not a bad trade at all.

Adventures of a Failed SCUBA Diver

I come from a long line of worriers. If worrying were a sport, my grandmother, mother and I could be the first three-generation family to represent the US in the Olympic Games. We’re such worries that we actually debate whether or not to drive with the car doors locked. Locked car doors are better protection from car-jackers, purse-snatchers, and other deviants. But unlocked doors provide easier access to EMTs responding to a car accident. It’s a Catch-22 that would make Joseph Heller proud.

I’ve been working hard to fight my own personal fear-factors and leave worrying along the roadside while I drove quickly past with the doors unlocked. So when it came time to decide whether or not I was going to take SCUBA lessons with Cliff, I swallowed the grapefruit sized ball of fear in my throat and handed the instructor my money. “It’s a $100 experiment,” I told Cliff: worth it just to see if I could do it.

To be honest, I’ve always had some hang ups about water. I like to swim, and feel confident about keeping myself afloat, especially in salt water where pretty much everyone floats with little or no effort. But there’s something about the deep end of the ocean that is a wee bit scary. You can’t actually see the bottom, first of all. And if you could, there might be things there – moray eels, sharks, the bad kind of snakes, jelly fish, etc. – that could cause genuine concern for both me and my grandmother. Plus, I have this thing about my nose. Ten years of swim lessons and 14 summers at the lake, and I’ve never been able to shake the need to hold my nose when I go under water.

So, you can see why I considered this SCUBA diving course to be an experiment and not the guaranteed return on investment that it was for Cliff.

As an outsider, diving always looked like a complicated and risky activity. Especially the equipment: the buoyancy control unit (BCU), the first stage, the second stage, the tank, the computer. It turns out the most complicated thing about the equipment is actually walking while wearing it. (It’s so heavy that at one point I bent down to pick up my snorkel and discovered I couldn’t stand up. The instructor actually had to come and lift me up by the back of my BCU.)

The buoyancy control unit turned out to be just a life jacket that you can inflate or deflate depending on whether you want to sink or float. It attaches to a pipe that runs into the tank. That pipe provides your air, which goes directly into your mouth through a little mouthpiece that looks vaguely like a football player’s mouthpiece attached to a big hose. There’s an extra mouthpiece and hose, as a safety precaution, and a little computer that tells you how deep you are, how long you’ve been underwater, and how much air you’ve got left in your tank.

Operating a VCR is actually more complicated than SCUBA diving.

The above statement should come with an asterisk on the end, and a notation that says *for most people. I, however, am not and have never been “most people.” There are a rare number of us who have some little complication. Mine happens to be my nose (which some people might argue isn’t so little, right Logan?). My nose and I have a co-dependent relationship. It likes to breath. It’s had 29 years of activity, and doesn’t quite understand why I would ask it to stop breathing and let my mouth do all the work. My nose is an independent thinker and a take-action kind of guy, and pretty much nothing I do can stop it from doing its work.

Now the mask you wear is pretty water tight, so my free-breathing nose isn’t too much of a problem when I’m diving. I take most of my air in through my mouth, and my nose just chugs along happily at a somewhat reduced rate of inhalation. So diving wasn’t a problem. However, to be certified you have to pass skills tests, which involve filling your mask full of water and flushing it, and taking your mask off underwater and putting it back on. It doesn’t take a genius to see that this wasn’t going to go well for me.

Joseph, our Zen-like dive instructor, was patiently insistent that I could get past this hang up. “You’ve just got a little man in there what wants to do all the breathing for you, and what we have to do is just keep trying until eventually that little man gives up,” he told me. Unfortunately, stubbornness is as dominant a family trait as worry is for me, and my little man wasn’t about to give up. He also wasn’t too fond of choking on salt water, which is what he spent most of our underwater sessions doing.

Our final day of the course arrived. Joseph agreed to let me do the day’s dives, and then come back for extra sessions to practice the skills. So, with my skills tests un-passed and my anxiety level reaching Himalayan heights, I boarded the boat and promptly got seasick. Now the little man was not only breathing, but nearly hyperventilating.

In what I consider an act of great courage, I strapped myself into my gear and jumped overboard. The motion sickness was immediately better, and I had a brief glimmer of hope that today was my day. The little man might just agree to take a sabbatical and let my mouth do the work, allowing me to get through the dives and skill tests.

With the instructor, Cliff, and the two other students at my side I deflated my BCU and slowly descended to 6 meters. The water was an amazing crystal blue color, like the shade of transparent blue glass, and in just the few minutes of initial swimming I saw a jelly fish, starfish, coral, and a rainbow’s worth of little fish. (I’ve come to refer to Tongan fish as “fish in prom dresses” because of their colorful scales. Some even have polka dots that sparkle like sequins. I also like to joke that the fish prefer strapless dresses, because you know, they don’t have shoulders.)

Three minutes in I was doing great. We swam a bit and then Joseph had us drop to our knees on the rocky bottom to practice our skills. And that’s when it started: the little man started kicking. He also started making up stories, which because of his convenient position in my nose he could feed directly into my brain, about how my mask could fill with water and I’d be 18 meters underwater and choking and unable to come up for air. He started making up stuff about pressure in my ears, my sinuses, and headaches. Somehow he even got my heart to start pounding in irregular rhythms that brought a quick return of the feelings of motion sickness. And I panicked. I flagged Joseph down, gave him the international SCUBA signal for “get me the freak out of here,” and made a beeline for sea level.

Back on the boat I unzipped myself from my wetsuit (which, of course, made me look just like a Baywatch actress), took my SCUBA equipment apart for the last time and wondered if I’d made the right call. Could I have gotten the little man to shut up? Maybe I should have at least finished the first dive before I quit. What was I missing down below?

These are questions the little man and I will never be able to answer. What I do know is that some people just aren’t meant to be SCUBA divers. We’re meant to enjoy the ocean from the safe confines of a sturdy boat, preferably with a life jacket handy in case one of those big waves gets a little out of control. Occasional excursions from the boat in order to snorkel or swim are permissible, as long as the life jacket is still handy, the water is calm, and no morai eels have been sighted in the area.

Possibly the moral of this tale is that I am my grandmother’s daughter, but I prefer not to think of it that way. I like to think of myself as an independent thinker and a take-action kind of gal, just like that little man in my nose, who knows her limits and isn’t afraid, on occasion, to test them. So I’ll drive with my doors unlocked, swim in the deep end of the ocean, and try to use the international SCUBA signal for “get me the freak out of here” as infrequently as possible.

Postscript: if you want the real story on SCUBA diving, ask Cliff, our family’s only certified diver.

Amber

Change of Address

In yet another cost-cutting maneuver, Peace Corps Tonga will no longer be paying to ship our mail from the capital island of Tongatapu to our island of Vava'u. As a result, any mail sent to us after this week should be sent to:

Cliff & Amber Johnson, PCVs
Peace Corps
PO Box 136
Vava'u, Tonga
South Pacific

We're hoping to post some updates on our site in the next few weeks with new stories, tales of our SCUBA certification, and the many challenges of getting back to work in Vava'u.

Thanks,
Cliff & Amber

5 weeks in America, 5 more months in Tonga

Amber and I are heading home to the Kingdom of Tonga tomorrow following five weeks in the United States over the holidays. We arrived to Chicago on December 7 in the hopes of visitng with some sick family members, enjoying time with loved ones, and finding some relief from the sweltering heat of Tonga in the summertime. While our time at home has been difficult at points, we were able to achieve all those goals.

On December 16 Amber said goodbye to her grandfather Leslie Cooksey, and on December 25 Cliff said goodbye to his grandmother Florence Hoffman. We are incredibly grateful to have been able to be with our families during those times, and our last few months of Peace Corps service will be far less stressful knowing that Grandpa and Nana are no longer enduring pain and suffering.

As we return to Tonga, our first and foremost goal is to effectively transition the Vava'u Youth Centre from being managed by us to being managed by our Tongan counterparts. The entire point of our coming months in Vava'u is teaching the skills that will keep the VYC growing long after we leave. As always, we'd love to hear from you as we labor on far from home. Feel free to check out all our former entries at the recently re-published www.nowteam.com/johnson website, write our e-mail addresses of cliftonofun@yahoo and aminchicago@yahoo, check out this new weblog we're trying, or simply to send us cash and gifts. :)

Somewhere around mid-June we hope to close our service in Tonga, commence with some travelling throughout the globe on our way home, and then return to the Chicago area to seek out new employment and get Cliff a new hip. Once we're back, we look forward to touching base with all of you.

Thanks again for caring,
Cliff

Our house is a very very very fine house...but I suppose you've probably heard that one before. This is where we live. It may not be very weather proof or resistant to mosquitoes or have indoor plumbing, but it's still our favorite place to relax after a long day at the Vava'u Youth Center.

This is the biggest town on our island. Our home is just out of view in this photo, but it's about a five minute walk from "downtown." Neiafu probably boasts a population of somewhere around 2000-4000.