Saipan Sunday

We gathered at the beach yesterday evening to welcome Angelo's mother, Donna, back to Saipan for a visit, accompanied by Jim and Katie and Kevin. It was a typical Saipan event, in that two dozen people represented half-a-dozen nationalities and ethnicities. I love this place.

Arman spent the afternoon with his new buddy, Norman, learning the intricacies of Chamorro grilling. There's the half-eaten hotdog to prove it.

Walking on the sandbar with Kian.

A slightly below average Saipan sunset.

Friends watching the sunset.

Angelo and his mom. (This is actually Brad and Kat, who are more interested in my camera than the sunset. I didn't take a single picture of Angelo or his mom, so this one will have to do.)

The bonfire to end the day.

Nava Khorram: Environmental Champion

At last nights Beautify CNMI! concert with Jake Shimabukuro, Nava received an "Environmental Champion" award for being the initiating force behind the restoration of the lighthouse. It was very cool for Nava. She was the first to be called up, and was recognized along with some other powerful forces of change on the island. We're proud of her. She's a force, and she's only nine (eight when she set this all in motion).

Here is the background about the award, taken from the Marianas Variety.

The winners of this year’s Beautify CNMI! Steward and Champion awards will be announced at the Saipan World Resort on March 27.

Beautify CNMI! volunteer Angelo Villagomez said the two recipients of the awards will be recognized for their contribution as exceptional environmental leaders during the last 12 months.

“Beautify CNMI! is celebrating its second anniversary and we will be giving out two award categories: the Environmental Steward and the Environmental Champion,” Villagomez said.

The Steward Award is given to an individual or an organization who has demonstrated real concern for the islands of the CNMI.

The Champion Award is given to a person or group who shows the true spirit of Beautify CNMI!

Among the criteria used for picking the winners are volunteerism, innovation, cooperation, creativity and the ability to spread the “beauty virus” all over the island.

Here are a few snippets from the Beautify CNMI! website about the Lighthouse and Nava, along with before and after photos.

Tuesday, November 28, 2006 (From the Beautify CNMI! blog)

Volunteer of the Week

From the Brilliant Star School Newsletter:

Over the summer, Kinney and Nava Khorram learned how to collect water samples using tools from the Stream Team. This year, one of the elementary student’s service projects will be volunteering for that group. They will be monitoring and collecting samples from designated streams in Garapan and turning those water samples in for testing at the DEQ. They will also plant trees and collect trash around our adopted streams. The Stream Team is a new volunteer organization dedicated to monitoring and improving the quality of the water flowing off the land and into the ocean around Saipan.

We have been throwing around the idea to restore the Navy Hill Lighthouse for a few months now, but we always came up with an excuse to ignore it.

Recently Nava asked her Dad to ask us to take the lighthouse on as one of our projects. He relayed her request to me over the weekend. Nava helped me collect water samples over the summer, so how could I say no?

Nava Khorram is the Beautify CNMI! volunteer of the week. Thank you, Nava, for providing the spark to get this worthy project underway. It took a kid...sorry, young adult to get us to finally do something. Now you have to prove your Volunteer of the Week status by bringing all of your classmates to the restoration event this weekend!

For those of you not on the Beautify CNMI! mailing list, this weekend we will be cleaning up garbage, clearing weeds, and possibly painting over graffiti and planting trees in the area in and around the Navy Hill Lighthouse. We will meet at the lighthouse Sunday, December 3 at 10:00 AM. The only thing you need to bring is two friends. Beautify CNMI! will provide all the tools.


Saipan Tribune, Wednesday, November 30, 2006

Beautify CNMI! sets upcoming activities

Beautify CNMI! is set to begin work on its holiday activities:

- San Antonio Beach on Saturday at 8am. Volunteers are asked to use Aguas Street (road between the school and PIC). The cleanup will head north toward Chalan Piao. This event is the monthly DEQ cleanup brigade.

“Want to be famous? We will be filming our first Beautify CNMI! commercial at this event,” said Beautify CNMI!'s Angelo Villagomez.

- Garapan Tourist District on Sunday at 8am. Participants will meet in the parking lot of the American Memorial Park. This is Beautify CNMI's third cleanup of the tourist district. It is being led by volunteer group MOVER.

- Navy Hill Lighthouse on Sunday at 10am. “You asked for it, you got it. David & Mara Khorram’s daughter, Nava, asked us if we could clean this historical area up. How could I say no? We are going to pick up trash, remove some weeds, and if allowed, paint over some graffiti,” said Villagomez.

Sunday, September 09, 2007 (From the Beautify CNMI! blog)

Lighthouse Cleanup

We painted the lighthouse from about 7 AM until 4 PM. A huge thanks goes out to Ken Kramer, Marianas RC&D Coordinator. He helped me all week coordinate today's rather large event. He was also the first volunteer to show up and the last volunteer to go home today.

Thank you, Ken.

We managed to apply a layer of primer on most of the Lighthouse and got a layer of paint on about two rooms worth of walls. We're not finished. We have to go back in a week or two.

Here is the lighthouse before we really got started:

...and here is the lighthouse at the end of the day:

We are about half way done. We're going to have to go back and add a little more primer and then paint over the whole thing with a final coat of paint. Here are a few more pictures:

BEFORE:
AFTER:
BEFORE:
AFTER:

BEFORE:
AFTER:
BEFORE:
AFTER:

The money for the paint was donated by the Marianas Visitors Authority. They donated $10,000 to Beautify CNMI! about a year ago, but it wasn't until this week that I was spurred to action.

There were two things that made me finally get off my butt and paint the lighthouse. The first one happened last Saturday when Dr. David Khorram's daughter, Nava, handed me an envelope full of dollar bills and coins totaling $49.02. She told me that she had collected the money at school to pay for paint for the lighthouse. I felt so guilty.

The second thing that made me decide that it was time to paint the lighthouse was one of the music videos from the Fiesta Pop Music Festival. The video was shot at the lighthouse and the whole structure was just covered in graffiti. It was time to do something about it.

Fasting Thoughts

Mara and I had a nice dinner last night with Angelo, who joined us in fasting for a day yesterday. Great food, great company, and we were all happy to eat.

It's the seventh day of the fast today, and I've been doing well. Every year during the fast, I seem to gain some insight. One of the things that I've been mulling over this year has been about my relationship with "whatever you call it," you know, that thing well all so flippantly call "God."

One of the quotes from the Baha'i writings that I read said in effect, fast not out of fear of punishment, or out of some hope for self, but fast out of the love of God. As a result of thinking about this -- the motivations for fasting -- I realized, I really had no idea why I was fasting, and it would be a good thing to understand. So, after letting the thoughts incubate for a few days, I sat down with paper and pen to try to sort this out. I do best concentrating when I write it all out.

Here's what I came up with. There is definitely some element of fear involved when I fast. Not like a fear of punishment, but more like a fear that I'll miss out on something if I don't fast. Okay, I can shed that line of thinking. Next, I realized that I am definitely motivated by some hope that the fast will do me some good. After all, it's supposed to be a time of turning inward and reflecting and of spiritual recuperation. I guess those are all great outcomes, but as I came to understand it, they should not be the motivation for fasting. So, I kind of decided to shed that attitude too.

Do I fast for the love of God? I have never really thought about that. It opens up a bigger can of worms, because, it calls into question the whole issue of "God." It evokes questions like, "How does one love God?" and "What, really, is God?"

I thought about my image of God. Despite knowing that God is an "unknowable essence," there is a part of my brain that developed an image of God during my childhood, and that image remains. This is going to sound crazy, but it's this sort of giant head, like the Wizard of Oz (not the guy behind the curtain, but the big floating head). Years ago, I read some of the writings of Rabbi Kushner, the guy who wrote, "When bad things happen to good people," and he stated that in all his years as a Rabbi, any time a person came to him in a theological crisis, it was because they were thinking of God as a person -- as having human-like thoughts, reactions, emotions. They had an anthropomorphized image of God. And why not. That's the language with which much of religious literature depicts God.

I've written about this before, this difficulty with the "God as dude." And despite knowing that this is not accurate, that green wizard head comes pretty quickly when I say the word, "God." Honestly, it's hard for me to think of loving that God, or that God loving me. My experiences with authority figures hasn't been exceptionally loving, and I think that it carries over to this anthropomorphized God in my mind.

Parallel to this, is an image of God that has been developing for me over the past few years. It's an image of God as "The Force" -- the benign loving essence of the Universe that binds things together, gives life to all things and uplifts all things. "The River" in the story from Illusions. I really like this image of God, and although I know that any image I conjure up is of necessity just my imagination, this image serves me well. I can actually love this God, the Force. I can love it for my life. I can realize that it lives within me. I can thank it for the portions of its limitless blessings that it has showered upon me through my family and friends and the love that surrounds me. I can fast for the Force. I can fast as a sign of my love for the Force. The Force says, "fast, as a sign of your love for me," and it makes sense. (Of course, I get thrown off the minute that the Force "says" something because that requires a mouth of some sort, or uses the word "me," because that requires some sort of individual identity that seems human, and then that ridiculous Wizard head pops up in my brain, but in any event, it's a start to a healthier approach for me.)

Well, that's as far as I got. It was a relief to dissect my thoughts and bring them to the forefront of my own consciousness. I need to gradually let the Force supplant the Wizard. Next I have to grapple with the idea of the Force having consciousness. I have more time.

What's your image of God?

The Critics Have Spoken

Angelo has started this blog tag where you're supposed to review five blogs, and then those five blogs review your blog, and tag five others, and on and on. He reviewed my blog with this single sentence:

Marianas Eye: If reading the Saipan blogs makes you want to scratch your eyes out, this is the guy who can put them back in for you.

He's been publicly bugging me to review his blog. I generally consider a "review" as something more substantial than a sentence, so I'm not up to review five blogs. I was tempted to review Angelo's blog as such:

The Saipan Blog: A blog about Saipan, that is occasionally worth reading.

But, despite Angelo's lame-ass review of my blog, I'm going to do a decent review of his.

The Saipan Blog is one of the two blogs that I read every day. You can generally count on new content on a daily basis. The posts are diverse, interesting, and have excellent subject-verb agreement. He covers topics that reflect the eclectic nature of the man -- topics such as the environment, local controversies, and scantily clad chicks. More than anything else, you get a sense of how much one person, possessing dedication and drive, can do to change his hair ... I mean the world... to change the world. A dedicated blogger, community member, and a role-model for aspiring environmentalists, Angelo's blog is informative, entertaining and inspiring. (There, happy now?)

I now tag Angelo to write a real review.

Year in Review 3: Fun and Friendship

Part and parcel of this transformation from being achievement oriented to just being present, has been my shift to pursue some things just for fun. Probably the biggest new pleasure for me this past year was playing on the co-ed soccer league. And our team very much fit my state of being. We all enjoyed learning the game, no one was too set on winning, and we just went out and had a good time. I hadn’t really been involved in a purely recreational sport since college. The co-ed league inspired me to try out for the men’s national team which in turn inspired me to get into better shape. Angelo and I took up running together a few mornings a week, and it’s been something that I’ve come to really look forward to. It’s a time to just run, like a kid (well, at least for the first 100 yards), and to socialize and solve the world’s problems. It’s been a great new friendship.

Blogging has been another source of new friendships. The blogging itself has been fun, but at times, it seems like a pain, and every time I feel the pressure of having to post something, I just sit back, and let the week go by, trying not to get anxious about the lack of posts. Boni, Jeff and Brad are friends that I’ve gotten to know through blogging, and although I hardly spend time with them, I enjoy their perspectives, and being in touch with their lives, radically different from my own. Any year with new friends is a great year.

I’ve also adopted a new set of criteria before engaging in new endeavors. I get a lot of requests from people to join their cause, or to pursue various business opportunities, and although I’m almost always tempted, I’ve been successfully sticking to the criteria that emerged during the year: Will this be fun, and will this simplify my life? If not, then I let it glide by. For 2008, one of my major goals is in a way a non-goal – to have fun. Woooohooooo!

Darth Chamaole

It was bound to happen. Every Jedi is tempted by the Dark Side. Every Potter is a potential Voldemort. Angelo has turned. I am among the proud "desaparecidos" - those forces of light who have disappeared from the face of his blog.

To quote the notable Gomer Pyle, "Shame, shame, shame!"

Can he be wrestled back from the throes of Darkness? Will he link to the Light again? Will an eye doctor be available to treat his forthcoming eye injury? The answers will emerge as the veil lifts from the future.

First Person in America to own Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

How does a guy on an obscure island in the South Pacific become the first person in America to own Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows? By virtue of a twist of geopolitical and publishing circumstances. My friend Angelo Villagomez picked up his copy on US soil, hours before the rest of America. How? Angelo lives on the US island of Saipan, located in the Western Pacific, in a time zone that is 15 hours ahead of the east coast of the United States. Bestseller bookstore in Saipan was permitted to begin sales the same time as the book went on sale in London, hours ahead of the US release. At 9:00 AM on what here was already Saturday, July 21, Angelo, who was the first in line, became the first person in America to own the coveted book. Right behind him were the next 40 people in America to own the book. Congratulations Angelo.

Now for the real news. I've never read any of these books. Can someone loan me a copy of the first one?

harry potter

CNMI Blogs Master List

Angelo is a guy with way too much time on his hands. Thank goodness for guys like him. He's compiled a master list of all the blogs on Saipan, Tinian and Rota -- 81 total!

Here's a link to the list: CNMI Blogs Master List.

If you're in the CNMI and not already on the list, leave a comment to be added.