Saturday, June 25

Today was pretty low-key. The gals wanted to do some more shopping and errand-running.

After a quick carb-full breakfast, we split up, the girls taking taxis around town visiting more shops, getting some stuff done before the imminent end of the trip. Noticed also that my leg was just about back to normal. After this morning's pill, I've only got a couple left, so tomorrow should be the end of the run of antibiotics. The discoloration is about gone, and the swelling is just down to one tender spot.

The other mother's visa is en route, and while the status hasn't changed in a full day from “forwarded for delivery” in Guam, it's probably a safe bet that it will be delivered on Monday. Whether she'll get the call from the embassy on Monday remains to be seen, but she's already planning on calling them if either the tracking information indicates delivery or it just gets too late in the day. We're trying to be patient, but this is like seeing the waiter come out of the kitchen with a tray of food, and you've been waiting so, so long for your order to arrive, and they've not come by to refresh your beverage or otherwise check on you.

I chose to again stay back with Grace at the hotel. I don't fancy running around to all of the handicraft shops, especially if we have to try to find a taxi with room for three adults, two kids, and who knows what kind of baggage.

Grace, for the most part, slept. She was awake for little bits a couple times. We chatted, inasmuch as newborns chat, and I held her and helped her look around. She's pretty much holding her head up and looking around by herself, but she has't quite got sitting or standing by herself. With a little help, she can do both, but it's really mostly the help, and a little bit her effort.

While she slept, I ran back over my running copy of my blog posts. We've been authoring off-line and then taking bits and pieces and publishing them on our blogs. I've been writing with little abstractions, like “the other mother,” but have been keeping a little more real detail, like using her name properly, in a larger, now about 140-page document.

I've also started putting photos in the running document. I'll probably go back to the blog and inject some, but bandwidth being what it is, and the slightly quirky way my blog software handles uploading and embedding images in posts, it is a bit time-consuming and cumbersome, so I've been putting it off until we get home. I figure if I do it in the running document, I can have a better template for updating the blog posts. Additionally, I've noticed a large number of misspellings and grammar errors in my hasty writings. I'm trying very hard to leave the content of the document as it was originally written, as my goal has been to capture my impressions, and if I edit those out, I'll lose some of my original flow.

For example, in my earliest post, I noted some impressions about the homes closest to the airport and industrial ranges and so on. Getting to know the island layout a little better, I can tell how far off my first impressions were. More of the industrial area is on the airport edge of “downtown,” and what I thought was more industrial there was simply a bit of clutter, or perhaps a fence made of corrugated roofing.

Similarly, as for the housing getting nicer, it's all interspersed. There are a few parts where clusters of nicer or clusters of less nice homes are grouped, but they abut each other, the nice and less nice. And this is done throughout the island.

Things like that in my early writings show me how some of those first impressions, even with as much filtering turned off as I could possibly have, are still skewed by expectations and other experiences. We tried to prepare ourselves, but you can't escape your own experiences. We've been to rich places, and poor places, in the U.S., and in other countries. I grew up mostly a “have not,” although my mom tried very hard to have or do well with what we did have, but not as much of a “have not” as could be. Really, in the scale of things, even just in the U.S., we were always somewhere in the middle. Even now, as mostly a “have,” I know there are plenty of more well-off “haves” than me. I've just shifted to the other side of the middle.

Here it seems that the division between “have” and “have not” is both very noticeable, but also that it isn't so geographic. They can very often be neighbors here. Just a short walk down from the manicured lawn surrounding the two-story home with a garage and drive filled with new cars, is a one-room tin shelter, with its coral landscaping, cluttered with garbage.

The middle is much more broad, as well. There's a lot of middle here, just thinking of shelter and comfort and stuff. The houses may be built of better things, or more solidly assembled. The yards may or may not be more clean. There may or may not be more stuff. The creature-comforts may exist or be a little better. There may be a car, and it may be nicer or not.

It seems, though, that there isn't as much concern about these things that are easy go glimpse as you skirt along the road at 25MPH. While there may always be a little bit of wanting or needing more, there's a lot more gratitude and appreciation of what is available.

We sat, trying to observe and not judge, in our birth-family's home, and were confronted with a bunch of big differences. Where live, boys and girls  of certain ages, and children and adults in general, aren't allowed to sleep in the same rooms together. Some weird puritan throwback, I guess. With little kids, it's no big deal, but when they reach about school-age, they're supposed to be separated at least by gender. This means at least three bedrooms for homes with one or more of each gender child; one for the boys, one for the girls, and one for the parents.

Our birth-family had one big room, and come bedtime, everyone claimed a little floor. Oh, yeah, where we live, you can't sleep on the floor. Well, if you do sleep on the floor, the sleep police won't bust your door down and tuck you in. But you need to have a bed that would be normally where you sleep. And one-each to a bed. Again, little kids or parents are allowed some slack, but by school-age, everyone needs to have their own slab of sleep space. I'm not sure if our birth family uses any kind of mat or blanket or anything to sleep on, either. We didn't feel right asking.

Of course, most of the U.S., and really wherever the “haves” are, there's a glut of stuff. We have chairs and sofas and tables and shelves and lamps and knick-knacks and hanging pictures and electronics galore. Most of the rooms of our house are carpeted. There are windows, that can be opened, with screens, in every room. There are curtains or whatever over every window.

I've digressed, but these are the kinds of observations I don't want to loose by editing my older writings. So I'm trying to be strict and only correct spelling and grammar errors. And even then, really only the heinous ones, or ones obviously done by my fervor to try to get things into the keyboard.

I had planned to leave the room with Grace if housekeeping came knocking, but she had just nodded off when the knock came, so I turned them away, after having the trash emptied. We're putting about a dozen diapers in the pile every day. I'm not sure what a sanitary alternative is, but diapers seem to be such a wasteful collection of, well, waste. They're supposed to be more biodegradable, but does that mean they'll only linger for dozens of years instead of hundreds? Even so, when the containing material dissolves, there's still the contained material to contend with. Washable diapers don't seem to be any better. Sure, you get rid of the diaper part, but there's the additional sanitary concerns of cleaning them, and storing them until you can clean them, and making sure all of that is clean.

In the mid-afternoon, Claire returned with a couple of plates from the Best BBQ booth, and stories of their zig-zag travels across the downtown area in taxis.

The other day I noted that the gym roof was falling apart, and that it had disrupted our plans to see the boys play some basketball. The main road is closed on the counter-clockwise direction, and this has made us aware of a second road past this part of the island. There are some wider parts of the island and some secondary roads on those parts. The end of the island, the area they call Laura, has a small grid of roads that we've seen, but didn't drive on. The detour has made it tricky to access the businesses between the hotel and the Payless, which are the ends of the second road.

The main road, driving past the hotel on the lagoon side, is more industrial, with the hotel and businesses, and spans of just lagoon. The other road, on the ocean side, is more residential, with homes and little shops. The little shops are everywhere, and are more akin to a convenience store. Most of them have little bank-teller styled windows, where it seems you approach, make your order, complete your transaction, and then your purchase is passed through the window. A lot of them have a single door, but small or no windows. The homes on this road are the same blend of manicured lawn surrounding well-maintained structures, and nearly collapsing tin tents. Most, though, are somewhere in the middle, with a fairly solid structure, probably in need of some paint or other attention, surrounded by coral, and some degree of litter.

She also told of their adventures trying to find the handicraft supply store, which had moved from where they'd been told it was, so they had to zip back and forth. Ultimately, they ended up at the store next to the Best BBQ, which is how we came to have that.

Outside the hotel (and I mean literally...at the pool) they had been getting ready for a kemmen. A kemmen is a first-birthday celebration., where the child is supposed to be honored by the clan's highest chief and all of the clan members. I think it's lost some of its tribal significance, but has maintained its cultural importance. As coincidence would have it, the kemmen was for a relative of the other adopting mother's birth-family. We weren't disappointed to not be invited, especially since it would be happening outside our balcony so we could still observe, and since the other adopting mother would be attending and could tell us all about it later.

One of the things they'd done was put a ring of tents around the pool. At first we thought this might be for protection from the sun, but as it was raining off-and-on (mostly on) all day, it seemed more for protection from the rain. Also, Claire had learned while out and about, the party wasn't planned until after 8PM. We're used to late lunch or early dinner birthday parties for kids. This is mostly to take advantage of when everyone is awake and still has energy to be social for the party. Here, of course, much of the socializing waits for the sun to set, so there are a lot more activities after dark than it seems happen before. Well, work or school or whatever may also interrupt socializing during the day.

Time passed, and we shared the computer for various tasks, and caught a little bit of stuff on television. After a while we realized it was late enough that the party should have started, but noticed that no one was out there. Island time might be responsible for guests arriving later than even the socially expected tardiness, but we thought at least whatever staff would be helping would be putting the finishing touches on things. They had strung spotlights yesterday, but they weren't on, nor were any kind of accent or other lighting, as far as we could tell. It hadn't rained in a while, but we thought perhaps they'd postponed it due to the all-day rain.

We turned on a DVD of The Big Bang Theory, and after a while realized we hadn't eaten, or really wanted, dinner. We had a snack of cheese and crackers, and that seemed to hit the spot. We finished a whole DVD, which goes by quickly when there are no commercial interruptions, and you can skip the end-credits, and your only interruptions are the occasional coos from your sleeping child. She had been awake for the early episodes, but I think she just hit her wall before we were done with the disk.