One day I swear I will be better about keeping this blog up to date. I definitely go up and down with my commitment to it. Which should be evident by how sporadic the post are. Maybe the answer would be making a schedule and sticking to the schedule for the post. I know when I was in Antarctica the excuse was how the site worked on the internet down there. Here the excuse could be that we never get days off work, but who likes excuses anyways.
So after the New Years Texas trip, I returned home and went back to doing what I had to for the new job. I hung out with friends, and family as much as I could while I was home the last month of January. Played too much golf too, and still didn’t get any better. I also finally cut my hair after growing it for a year. I wanted to go into the new job looking professional. So the new job? I was hired as a Firefighter/AEMT on a military base in The Republic of The Marshall Islands!! Talk about a total change, I went from being in an Antarctic desert during its winter to living in a tropical island 6 sq miles in the middle of the Pacific.
So I left home at the end of January headed for Hawaii. To be able to enter The Marshall Islands, I had to quarantine for five weeks….two in Hawaii and three on Kwajalein Atoll (my future home for the next year). The flights were pretty uneventful thankfully. I arrived in Honolulu and caught an uber to the hotel. They had us in a very nice hotel and was giving up a little over $100 a day for expense, which was basically room service. Whatever we didn’t spend, we got to keep. I definitely splurged some days though. During the two weeks in Hono, I received one covid test and twice daily medical checks. Luckily for me I had a room with a ocean view and got to take plenty of pictures of sunsets. Once I got to Kwajalein, things changed. I got two covid test and two daily medical checks during my 3 weeks there. I also had a roommate. Luckily my roommate was a good guy. Unluckily the days of room service were over and we were getting food from the dining facility delivered 3 times a day….it was not so great. That was easily the worst part of the five weeks, the awful food on Kwaj. Luckily I did have a buddy on the outside who was able to get my some pizzas and stuff which helped massively. After quarantine I was put in my own apartment and started working!
So a little about Kwajalein and its Fire Department. We have three stations on three different islands. Kwajalein, Roi-Namur, and Meck. The first two are staffed full time, and Meck when its needed and staffing allows. KFD runs both ARFF and Regular fire protections as well as the ambulance service. A normal schedule would be 48 on, 48 off. Unfortunately due to covid, and it being a lower paying contract. Its not fully staffed. There are 90 something islands total in the atoll, but a majority of them don’t have a population. The biggest population is on Ebeye and it has a little over 5000 Marshallese on it. Several of them catch the ferry between here and there daily for work. The Marshallese I’ve had contact with have all been great to work with. The US landed on the Atoll during World War 2, and after a relatively short but intense battle. They had freed the atoll from Japanese occupation. There are still some World War 2 relics on some of the islands, as well as several boats and airplanes that you can dive and see here.
After a few weeks of being here and on shift, another Middle East contract opened up. People from here left for the more lucrative contracts in Iraq, between that and some unfortunate incidences as well as contracts ending started highly affecting our staffing. Eventually we got to where we were working 24/7, literally 168 hours a week. Thats where we still are at this point. My last day off was over 70 days ago, I’m over 1680 hours straight right now. It does suck at times, but we are paid hourly here so life isn’t that bad I guess. It also helps that even though there are only a few of us now, the people we do have here are a good group to be working with. Even though we are glad to get new hires in to fill the vacancies, its kind of a double edged sword since there is that small worry that they’ll throw off what we have here currently.
The saying we had in Antarctic seems to hold up here as well. The days go by slowly, but the weeks go by fast. I think that may be even more true since we are in our own never ending version of the movie Groundhog’s Day. Having no days off is hard as times, but at this point its been so long since we’ve had normal island lives here that most of us don’t really remember them, and honestly some of the guys have never had them. As long as the paychecks stay good, and the crews stay good, the 168s will still stay manageable.
-Tyler
Artist of the Post – Whiskey Myers
Pitre's Peregrination 