Life Story # 30 --- Surviving With the "Others"

Just before I start my North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida travel reminiscing posts, I am feeling the need to post a little bit about my life with the 'Others' while living on an island group in the South Pacific that the "Survivors'" cast actually visited one season.   I have been scanning slides, of course.  I am not in the photo below, but I took the picture.

I have remained in touch with two of the people in this photo but the lady in the hot pink dress has since passed on.  She was a red-hot momma and full of interesting stories, and the only one that I knew there that swam in the ocean nude, which I pretended did not shock me at all at the time.  She had two teenage or twenty-something boys from whom she was estranged as they led drug-delaying lives in Southern California.  Her husband was sharp as a tack and was a former pirate and smuggler of rare animals into the U.S. before actually taking an honest job on this island running the tuna cannery.  He reminded me of John Wayne or Hemingway with his larger than life personality and body size.   I was a twenty-something farm girl and it didn't take much to keep me fascinated during those years.   The baby in this photo is my daughter. 

This apartment building, as you will remember if you read prior posts on my blog, is where I lived.  They were called the 'Pink Apartments ' by the expats and they only had running water and electricity every other or every third or every fourth day.  It all depended on whether the drunk who ran the generator remember to add fuel or whether the other local islander remembered to turn on the water that day, as water was rationed.  The fact that we all remained friends was a miracle, but it does explain the need to use alcohol and sex to soften the tension.  The stenciled numbers above the door makes it look like some military base or certainly the location of the 'Others.'  (Maybe that little boy in the foreground is a current producer of "Survivor" or "Lost" and this is where his vision for one of the television series first took form.)  

Actually living there was more like "Desperate Housewives" than "Survivor."  The affairs and flirting and babies...I would spill all, but some of it is really X-rated, such as the American nymphomaniac nurse that eventually got kicked off the island.  I guess that I actually got sophisticated fairly rapidly having friends all over the spectrum including the missionaries who were there and didn't really get along with each other and the priest who was an alcoholic but a gentle old soul.

I have probably forgotten the best stories.  Should have kept a diary.