Put yourself in this situation. You are a grandparent whose daughter and granddaughter live on an island in the Pacific. Not only do you miss them, but also you worry about how they must be living in such a faraway place. Imagine your excitement when you receive a recorded tape from them. You put it into your tape player and turn it on, anxious to hear the voices of your daughter and her family. One of the first words you hear is your toddler granddaughter yelling “woach!,” followed by the sound of a child’s foot smacking the floor.
The island was Okinawa. The time was the 1960’s. The child was my oldest daughter. The “woach” was real, as was the tape. We lived on Okinawa for almost two years. It was an interesting time for us, to say the least. It was also a place with many insects, not the least of which was the large, flying roaches that seemed immune to the spray the Navy gave us to kill them.
Living on Okinawa was an adventure. Our house was bounded on one side by an Okinawan cemetery. On another side were rice paddies which stretched almost a half mile to the edge of the South China Sea. To get to work I walked through a local village and caught a very crowded bus each day. We used the same buses to take us to and from the army base where we did our shopping. We boarded up the entire house for each typhoon that was coming our way, although none hit while we were there. And yes, we killed roaches.
One of the first words our daughter learned was “woach.” Maybe that’s why she moved from Texas when she grew up. After all, we have the same kind of “woaches” here.