You can't always get what you want...

So, my mother has commanded that I update more frequently. And you don’t want to disobey 5 foot, three and a half inches of pure mettle. Not unless you want to set yourself up for a guilt trip the likes of which has been unrivaled in modern times. (Think Mary to Jesus: “Oh, so Mr. Big Shot’s got time to part the seas and doesn’t have time to visit his own mother. No, don’t worry about me. Go. Tend to the lepers and whores. I’m only the one that gave birth to you is all.”) BTW, hi Mom.

I think it’s hard to talk about life in Palau because I can assure you that it is nothing like what I expected. Which is not to say that Palau is a horrible place or that my decision was wrong. It’s just that Palau is so unlike anything I’ve ever experienced that I simply lacked the frame of reference and imagination to even conceive of what it would be like. My best guess about what I would find when I got here was necessarily painted with an American brush.

The only way I can do it justice is to say that Palau is, in virtually all respects, a developing nation. And anyone who’s ever visited a developing nation now automatically knows exactly what I mean. It’s the little things you notice. Nothing refrigerated is cold enough. The roads aren’t well paved. There are stray dogs everywhere because there are no vets to neuter them. But the overarching thing I’ve noticed is that there is not the same "want:have" attitude of instant gratification you find in the U.S. or among Americans (myself included). There’s just no room and no resources for such a luxury here. If you want something, you wait for it. You may have to go to five stores to find it. And even then, you may not be able to find what you’re looking for, in which case you either settle for something that’s not exactly what you wanted or you try and order what you want and you wait even longer for it. I’m learning patience at an alarming rate (paradoxically so).

What strikes me most, having been here almost a month now, is the total isolation. I mean, there’s no escaping that Palau is one of the most remote places in the world. That means that all of your contact with places outside of Palau is solely dependent on a technological infrastructure that, at best, is temperamental and, at worst, exists for the sole purpose of taunting and teasing me with an unreliable tether to family and friends. This is, for instance, why there are four of the same posts on this blog. Technological hiccup owing to the fact that the page that tells me these things post never actually loads on any computer in Palau. Not on a work computer, not on the home computer, not even at the internet café, which boasts the “fastest” internet connection on the island (if it is an any time appropriate to refer to 24K dial up as “fastest”). You just have to guess whether the page loaded long enough before it crashed to load your page. Likewise, I can’t load that portion of the blogger site that would enable me to delete the three superfluous entries. I find such limitations maddening. But in a good way.

The isolation also means that virtually everything (excluding fish, wood and illegal tortoise shell jewelry) is imported. And imported, really, at the whim of somebody or something else, be it weather or corporate magnate. Sometimes we get things because there is enough demand, like Diet Coke or Budweiser. But then there’s too much demand and a boat gets sidelined in Saipan and you find yourself in the middle of a two-month drought of diet soda of any kind. (The other ex-pats refer to this tragedy as the Great Diet Coke Shortage of 2004. Thank God I missed it. One upshot of the shortage was the establishment of an underground Diet Coke black market, which ensures that anyone with enough money will never have to be without Diet Coke ever again. I’ve already got an emergency Diet Coke fund stashed under my mattress just in case.)

And for other items that lack that level of name recognition, well, we just get what we get. And it really appears to be quite random. It almost feels sometimes like we are the subject of some great experiment or sick game. As though some greater authority is out there saying, “look at this funny little group of islands. How cute. Lets send them Tabasco Prawn Chips and see if they eat them.” (NB: We will.) And part of this experiment/sick game seems to be toying with the subjects through inconsistency. For instance, among the random items left on the West Coast Trading Company boats that actually make it to Palau there might be some glorious item of real food. Like cheese (or, to be honest, milk). You know, honest to God, made-from-real-milk-from-real-cows cheese that hasn’t been frozen, thawed, re-frozen and re-thawed out of recognition. And The Powers That Be will continue sending this glorious cheese with regularity to these funny little islands until the natives just about get used to it. And then, suddenly, the cheese will be gone, leaving in its place nothing but a vacant, dusty shelf in the rattling refrigerator in the grocery store. And The Powers That Be will keep the cheese away for a long time, never sending it to the funny little islands, even though the islanders beg and plead and offer money and beads for it. And then, just when the funny little islanders forget even what cheese is or what they were begging for in the first place and finally stop pleading, the cheese will come back, uninvited, to taunt them some more. Sadistic bastards, those Powers That Be. I bet they’re Republicans.

Anyway, my point is: There is no want:have here. You learn to make do or do without. And that kind of makes it sound bleak on this funny little island, but it’s actually quite the opposite. Life’s amazingly less stressful when you’re not able to get what you want right when you want it all the time. Time has a way of making you think about whether you really wanted it in the first place.