I'm a blogger

byCubworld1

47 followers

2 years ago

What I am passionate about: Creating podcasts on Anchor that end up on Spotify.

I have two podcasts on Spotify:

Pacific Tales

Enabling the Neurodiverse

Pacific Tales includes real-life stories from anyone who has lived on the islands and then left for whatever reason. I lived in the South Pacific Islands for 36 years. I was born in the desert state of Utah. Before that, I never knew much about the Pacific except that Hawaii was the 50th state to become part of the United States.

After I graduated from high school and began working in the Pathology Department of a big hospital, I met an island boy. His culture, language, and traditions were very foreign to me. After our courtship which lasted nearly a year, we married and on our honeymoon, he decided that we needed to move to his country of Tonga to serve his people. He had made me think that Tonga was similar to Hawaii, so I was quite excited. I thought that perhaps I could get a job in the Pathology Department of the hospital in Tonga. I had given birth to our daughter who was six months old when we traveled over 5,000 miles to our new home in the Kingdom of Tonga. There were no mountains, runway at the airport, no paved roads, and no pathology department in their so-called hospital. I felt I had traveled in a time machine into the past at least 50 years. My brain could never have conjured up such land so poor nor so completely different from my own home than what I was witnessing. It was so surreal that it took me several months to wrap my mind around what I was experiencing. Nine months after our arrival, I gave birth to a baby boy in a so-called hospital where they woke you at 5:00 am to bathe your baby in cold water, and where you had to hand wash the diapers in a small sink in your tiny room. There was no nursery to help with the baby because in Tonga, the mother’s family would come and do all the things I had to do, but my family and my husband’s family were miles away. I was discharged from the hospital with a high fever and a sick baby. Fortunately, my husband’s auntie was willing to come and stay with me and help take care of my new baby all the while taking care of two other grandchildren in our home. Bugs and insects were larger and more lethal than any I had experienced in Utah. Centipedes, fleas, lice, flying cockroaches, kamikaze mosquitos, and millipedes became part of my everyday life. To say I was experiencing culture shock is putting it very mildly. I wondered if I had made a huge mistake and started to plan my escape. (to be continued)