The Goodbye Islands: Tongan Redux

It was another day at the office. The drawers in my desk were slowly creep open and close. It was a particularly windy on this day, I was on the one hundred and third floor of the world trade center tower two. When it was windy, the building had a built in sway factor of up to four feet in either direction. Some people actually got nauseous from the constant swaying, some would leave the building to get a break. Just another day on the bond trading floor of a major investment bank where I worked. My head hurt from last nights imbibing to the wee hours with friends. I was now in the land of relentless harassment and pressure. Lunch at my desk where I was chained for most of the day. If you ordered a salad to make up for last nights bad decisions, you were endlessly ridiculed. I was very lucky to have the seat I was in, The days were long and tedious but worth the rewards.

The city was becoming bloated, glutted, silly with ambition. The buildings were higher, the morals looser, the liquor cheaper. We all drank the kool-Aid. The city was filled with the ethos of the time relishing in frenzy and moneymaking, it was the eighties in New York City.

There are few desires more deeply human than the desire to escape whatever reality you are in. The problem is not the nicer your life is, the more resources you have to escape it, but rather the limits of being a person. You are stuck with you. Its the precondition of existence. I wanted incredible things to happen to me, not the slow burning let down of adulthood. I was becoming too many parts of myself, starting to break apart, an urban sauce over cooked. Its a very demanding environment that is geared toward survival of the fittest. Your energy level goes up, along with your radar and your prowess. It sparks a certain aggressiveness. It breeds insincerity, pretentions, dishonesty, affectation, ostentatiousness and irreverence. Not very healthy on any level.

Thats when the letter arrived. I had applied to the Peace Corps on an insane impulse, not thinking for a second a Wall Street guy would be of any interest to anybody anywhere in any capacity. The country of choice was the Kingdom of Tonga in the South Pacific. I had never heard of it. I ran off to the library to find out more about this remote island chain in Polynesia. The Peace Corps had accepted me for a two year stint. I would be working for a missionary who would be overseeing the Prison Fellowship International. This was an organization born out of the experience of Charles Colson, former aide to President Nixon. Convicted for a Watergate-related offense, Colson served seven months in prison. During that time he saw and experienced the difference faith in Jesus makes in peoples lives. He became convinced that the real solution to crime is found through spiritual renewal. He wanted to help men and women turn their lives around Through Christ. In 1979, he founded Prison Fellowship International, extending the mission and work beyond the United States. In 1983, Prison Fellowship International received special consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations. Now it's the largest, most extensive association of national Christian ministries working within the criminal justice field. The grassroots presence enables it to minister to prisoners and their families in culturally relevant ways. The heart of the ministry is their volunteers, that would be me. What a complete and utter shock to my system. What were they thinking? Im not religious, nor do I have any experience in this field or anything like it. Im a Bond salesman on Wall Street.

The Kingdom of Tonga was an antidote to New York. It was a type of cleansing. A revival. A chance to see life in the simple light of daily existence. Being there required me to learn how to exist in real life without all the usual escapes and distractions...