I Want to Help
I started my journey with this simple statement: “I want to help Guahan.”
As a teenager, I was surrounded by peers with substance abuse problems, emotional problems, social problems and I am more familiar with our devastating suicide rates than I would like to admit. I lost a friend or classmate to suicide in each year of high school, I lost my cousin to suicide after he returned from Afghanistan with PTSD and I had so many friends with substance abuse problems, I cannot even begin to recall the numbers. I did my best to keep a positive attitude and to maintain my sense of self-worth. I enrolled at the University of Guam in hopes to achieve my bachelor’s degree in psychology. In 2010, I met the goal I set for myself and started to work in the community in order to fulfill my dreams to reach my greater purpose; to help Guahan. My first community roles were played as a teacher in a classroom setting and as a coach for sports. I’ve had contact with hundreds of our island’s children ranging from 14-18 years of age. In my four years of contact with Guahan’s teenage demographic, I have lost two students to suicide, mediated and assisted with eight suicide attempts, counseled fourteen sexual abuse victims and addressed countless drug and alcohol problems. I found myself feeling as if there was nothing I could do but to help treat the symptoms of our island’s problem. I thought maybe if I could just touch the lives of the two hundred or so teens that I have contact with each year, it would cause a ripple effect that would eventually spread, producing the good island I so desperately longed for. As my research moved forward, my attitudes and ideas connected me with mentors and teachers. I started to realize that our knowledge of our identities were greatly important in finding who we are and what we stand for. Knowing these things were a common denominator in the students that thrived. I recognized that before I could teach a child to find themselves, I first needed to find myself. I reconnected with culture which lead me to reconnect with language, family, the land and our people. I feel that I have purpose, I feel that I belong and I feel connected. I want to teach this to our island’s children, I want to help Guahan. In my research and mentor contact, I found that our social issues connect closely to those of other colonized Pacific Islanders and Native Americans. We cannot afford to stay divided as a people. We cannot afford to allow Guahan to move forward with this build up. The answer to our social problems is not militarization nor is it avoiding our rights to self-determination. Our island’s leaders have an obligation to me and the rest of the island to explore other options with us. Can they not use their brilliance in business and their connections to the world to HELP us dig up the weeds of colonization so that our people’s roots can run deep and flourish with TRUE quality of life? Our family members are dying of cancer and our children bleed out mental illness and hang themselves from sorrow. Is there no place in their hearts that is not blackened by the colonial demon? Can they not connect with us? Unite with us? Each day I pray that love will conquer greed, that they will reconnect to the people they promised to speak for. Until that day, we will be the grass that will grow on the tops of their twenty-five story hotels, the flower petals that land on the windshields of their BMWs, we will be the beautiful roots that break the concrete on their sidewalks, the floods that reroute their bridges and the earthquakes that shake their foundations. Our roots WILL grow over the weeds of colonialism. And them? They will be but bumps in the road. We must continue to teach our children to connect with who they are. We must do what we can to revive Guahan and her people. OUR ISLANDS ARE SACRED