Law Clerk on Gilligan's Island
Chapter 1 -- Preparations
Those friggin' castaways had it easy...
...after all, they only had to plan for a three hour tour. Hell, I could pack for a three-week tour, dressing sharp enough every night to woo Ginger over coconut smoothies, and still carry less luggage than either one of the Howells. But this was different. This was a whole year I was staring at, in a place that, six months ago, I had never even heard of.
I was determined to do this right, so I started off with some research. At first, Lonely Planet's travel guide to Micronesia sounded promising: "Palauans are among the most Westernized of all Micronesians." Great. "Tourism tripled over the last decade to 40,000 visitors per year," "consumer-oriented sales outlets are flourishing." Terrific. And, of course, "the world's first nation to issue an Elvis stamp."
I liked that last one. Any nation that loved the King that much was a nation I was happy to be associated with. Even more impressive were the details of Palau's greatest engineering marvel: connecting Babeldaob, the biggest island where the airport is, and Koror, the main island where most people live, is the "1272-foot cantilevered K-B Bridge, which at the time of its construction [in 1979] was the longest bridge of its type in the world."
Cool. State-of-the-art bridge, tropical paradise with westernized
influence, veneration of Elvis. This sounds like my kind of place.
Then one night, reaching the end of of Lonely Planet, which
was published in 1995, I came across this addendum:
Update: November 1996: In September 1996, the sagging K-B Bridge, which links Koror and Babeldaob, collapsed. The government immediately reverted to the old-fashioned way of dealing with water crossings and put a ferry into service. The government is still in the process of determining whether to build a temporary pontoon bridge or rebuild the K-B Bridge. At any rate, things aren't likely to change soon.
Yep, from "state of the art" to "decorating the bottom
of the ocean" in about 15 years. I scoured the internet for info, hoping that the
collapse was the result of a hurricane, volcano, or international terrorists, rather than
simple negligence or shoddy construction. "Force majure,"
I could always tell people. But nothing suggested an Act of God was behind the collapse.
Instead, a former court clerk explained that the bridge collapse had turned into a
lawsuit of monster proportions-- the engineers pointing the finger of blame at the
contractor; the contractor blaming the architect, and so on.
Great. Not only was I deprived of the ability to throw around an archaic French legal term like "force majure" when explaining the situation to friends, but I also had to worry every time the roof in my apartment creaked and every time the wind around the courthouse picked up. On top of the bridge issue, I was further troubled by one of the cases that the Court had recommended I read in preparation for my clerkship. In 1990, a consortium of banks had loaned the Palau government millions to build a power plant, and the government had defaulted on the loan less than two years later.
Oh, and the first President elected in the newly independent Palau was assassinated.
And the second one committed suicide.
I decided that you're never too young to have a will.
Two days later, a re-reading of the travel guides revealed some additional facts that I had overlooked the first time through:
International phone calls can be made 24 hours a day from the Palau National Telecommunications Center (PNCC) office in the center of Koror. Per-minute rates to the USA are $3.
Three bucks a minute for phone calls? And the language there is ambiguous-- does that mean that the PNCC is the only place overseas phone calls can be made? What about incoming calls, what does one do about those? And since when does "Palau National Telecommunications Center" become "PNCC"?
Time to start thinking about alternative methods of
communication. I figured e-mail was a good option, if it existed. After asking
about the situation on the internet, I got an e-mail from one woman who had spent a few
years there married to a Palauan. She didn't have much light to shed on the ISP situation,
but we exchanged a few e-mails about Palau.
Ignorance really is bliss. She explained that the salt air and
humidity ruins electronic equipment pronto. Petty burglaries and drunken brawls are
not uncommon. Romance with a native is off-limits unless you've been living there a
while, since every local girl has a brother or ex-boyfriend who might not take too kindly
to some Haole hitting on her. No drinking the water, since contamination from
adjacent sewer pipes was common.
Reality finally started to set in. Until now, I had kind of envisioned Palau as being like the outer islands of Hawaii-- Michele and I had gone to Kauai on our honeymoon, and I had found Kauai, the westernmost Hawaiian island, to be the canonical "tropical paradise": quiet, laid-back, and rural, but with all of the amenities of home. Palau was going to be my "home" for the next year, but it was time to start rethinking just what "home" was going to mean.
Let's stop here, for a minute. This story has taken a turn for the worse, and I'm not even on the plane yet. I'm worried that, by the time I get there, every Palauan will recognize me as "that guy that slagged our little islands on the internet." So let me emphasize that, as I'm writing this, I'm sitting in New York State, a full 6 days and a hemisphere away from Palau. I've done a small amount of international traveling, but it's only been to tourist friendly places-- Barbados, Jamaica, and other countries that go out of their way to spare visitors the inconvenience of having to witness anything that wouldn't look good in a t.v. commercial.
I admit it. I am the classic "ugly American" that the rest of the world curses at. I recently had that point driven home to me in a conversation with Jill, one of my soon-to-be co-clerks. Jill's resume lists the year she spent in a school in France and "world travel" among her interests. Her boyfriend is already working in Palau, so I asked her if he had told her what Koror was like.
"Hmmm," she said, trying to come up with the perfect analogy. "Let's see. Have you ever been to Belize?"
Needless to say, I hadn't.
She ticked off a few other places, not realizing that just about any place she could think of that was anything like Palau was somewhere I have managed to not even consider vacationing. "Jakarta? Southeast Asia? Bali?" After a while, she started to realize just what an unsophisticated rube I was.
"Ever been to Mexico?" she finally sighed. I could imagine her thinking I might blurt out "Yeah! Cancun was great! I was there for Spring Break! Woohoo!"
But I hadn't even done that. The best I could manage was "Once. I went to Tijuana for the day while visiting San Diego. With my parents."
The point is, the descriptions you're getting now are colored by my lack of exposure to anything but the Epcot Center-version of life in other countries. One of the reasons I'm excited to take this job is to finally shed the stereotypes that result from my only exposure to other cultures being "The Facts of Life Goes to Paris" and articles on obscure jungle tribes in National Geographic. Part of the reason I'm keeping this diary contemporaneously is to record my honest thoughts before this trip. Hopefully, after it is all over, these initial chapters will benchmark my prejudices about Palau as of September, 1998, so that I can see just how far (if at all), I've come from them at the end of the year.
Now, with that pseudo-apology out of the way, back to the story...
A few more
things...
Eventually, I came to learn that Palau does indeed have e-mail
and web access, but rather than being unlimited on-line time, like most U.S. ISPs, users
are limited to 2 hours of online time a month. I started to wonder about the healthy
amount of spam I get now, and whether I'll eat up my monthly quota downloading ads for
porn sites and get-rich-quick schemes. I've exchanged several e-mails with the
Court, but never had any "private" e-mail correspondence, leading me to wonder
whether it's even possible to hook up to the internet using ordinary home phone lines.
(That "international calls from the Communications Center" thing sticks in the
back of my mind. Maybe regular domestic lines don't have high enough transmission quality
to carry modem traffic. Or am I needlessly denigrating the place? After all, snooping
around the PNCC website revealed some 1997 document
about a cutting-edge project with AT&T to lay some high-tech phone lines underwater to
connect everyone in Palau.)
I should mention that furniture and appliances were not an issue,
since the Court provides furnished housing. It's a tremendous perk, saving me both the
difficulty of finding a place to live and the burden of shipping even my admittedly
miniscule household overseas and back. Instead, I need only bring basic household goods--
linens, dishes, small appliances, etc. At first, I was informed by the Court that I'd be
living in a four-story apartment building full of American expatriates, known as the
"Haole Hilton" ("haole" is a Hawaiian word, meaning mainlanders.
It's got a vaguely disparaging connotation).
Then, plans changed and I was assigned a 3-bedroom government-owned house. I have no idea where it is, nor what I'm going to do with three bedrooms when even my one bedroom apartment here looks empty, but that's a problem for another day. I'm told it's only a couple of miles to the courthouse, but even then, there's traffic. The car situation is puzzling to me. I've been told that a car, while not essential, is helpful to have, and that it's easy to pick up a used car from someone moving away. Apparently, there's a constant exchange of personnel between the U.S. and Palau, and it's always possible to find someone moving out to buy stuff from, and someone moving in to sell stuff to. Of course, with my luck, I'll spend a couple thousand dollars on a used car and won't be able to sell it when I leave. Well, we'll cross that bridge later. Assuming that bridge is still standing by then...
Well, there's little else to say. The one other thing I did to prepare was to take scuba lessons. The consensus among divers seems to be that Palau is the best location for scuba diving on earth, and it would be a waste to spend a year there and not dive.
A recent PBS special highlighting the reefs of Palau seems to bear out that belief. Everyone in my firm watched "Palau: The Living Edens" on PBS the other night, waiting for a glimpse of where I was headed. They were treated to 55 minutes of weird underwater sea life: parrotfish sleeping in cocoons of mucus, coral polyps pumping out a foamy cloud of eggs, and a weird freshwater lake filled with millions of stingless jellyfish.
Only one human being was shown on screen in the entire hour-long documentary. Some kid jumps off his bamboo raft on an empty beach and forages in the water until he finds a sea cucumber, a little lump resembling an elongated jelly donut. The kid squeezes the little fleshy loaf until it squirts strings of sticky, white goo out onto his feet. The narrator explained that the kid is creating a pair of makeshift shoes to protect his feet from the sharp coral.
This is the enduring image that my co-workers will have of life in Palau-- people squirting sea cucumber intestines all over their feet for shoes. They think I'm deranged for wanting to go there. I'm starting to think I might be, too.
O.k., I'll spare you the mundane details about packing, booking a flight, and getting shots (Hepatitis A and Typhoid vaccines are recommended by the Centers for Disease Control), and at this point, we'll declare the preparations complete. The next update to this website will recount the trip there, probably written in real time on the plane. Expect it in late September or early October. To get notified as soon as subsequent chapters are posted, join my mailing list with the link on the home page.
This page uploaded on 9/20/1998.
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