Our Paradise

It was a bright and sunny day, like every other day here in paradise. Kids were splashing in the pool and teens surfing the huge waves. All was as it should be here… well for the most part...

Let me tell you a little secret. Come here, now you must promise to tell no one about what I am going to tell you. Ok. Good.

Now paradise is a little island off the coast of somewhere. Where exactly it is I don’t know. And don’t bother to get your map out and look. It won’t be there. As I was saying, there is no school here on Paradise Island. Nope, shocking, I know. You should have seen my face when I found out there was no school here. But yup, we still read and stuff so we are not dumb. But we love to party. Every night in fact. Huge parties with bonfires, bands, and contests. The whole package.

We do not have to worry about adults here.. Well the ones kids don’t like being around. We do have families around here and everyone is well taken care of. You don’t have to worry about curfews. Everything is perfect, and beautiful.

Well things are not always as they seem, ya know what I mean. Well about 15 years ago this island was discovered. And to make things worse it was discovered by the military. I think they were from someplace called America. But that’s beside the point. They told their leader and he decided to do something about us. He thought that we needed their help. So they sent some people… if that’s what you wanna call them. If you ask me they are monsters… but that’s just the view of everyone on this island.

Some of them were teachers… they said we was uncivilized. So what if we live up in tree houses and grass huts. I see you rolling your eyes. They are really comfy… well except the bugs. Anyways, back to the story. They sent architects to build us houses and that stuff. And they sent doctors, advisors, and the list goes on. And word got out that we were here to the general public. So they started flocking here and staring at us like we were animals in a zoo. We’re not, we’re humans, ya know.

The real problem is when they wanted to move here. We did not want new people here. The American government wanted other people to live here. What could we do? I mean we only have a population of 807 people. It is not like we have a huge army, we couldn’t exactly threaten them with war. Besides we are a peaceful nation. We never had a problem with anyone. No crime, no nothing.

They like totally destroyed the island with cars and ships and that stuff. We didn’t even have much clear water after other people moved here. We couldn’t do anything we use to. We tried protesting, but that got a lot of us arrested by the military. And eventually we realized our old way of life was gone, Fineto, done, just a memory. A lot of us decided that if we didn’t want to lose our way of life we had to do something, and fast.

The original citizens of Paradise Island decided that maybe we should build a ship and if we sailed around the ocean enough we could find a new place to call home. And this time we would make sure no one finds out about it.

We hired somebody to build us a ship to accommodate about a thousand people. Hey we have to have enough space to be comfy. We wanted it to be luxurious and extremely comfortable. We made a committee of our own people to help design the interior of the ship. And might I take this time to add that they did a remarkable job. They made it look like home, with the tree house look and nature scenery in all the rooms. The floor had a fuzzy material that felt like grass. And in some rooms they had sand. We had two pools, a room where we can have our parties. On the deck we had a place where we can set off fireworks and hold bonfires. We decided to call it ‘Our Dream Paradise’.

Even with all the luxuries we all still had a hard time. We had a few people who were seasick. We kept running out of freshwater and food, and everyone was restless and bored. You would be bored after living on a ship for almost a year. Some gave up on our dream of finding a new home where we could be carefree like we use to. And sometimes when we stopped for supplies, someone would leave us to live inland. I think we lost about 87 people that way. And we had someone fall overboard. And a few deaths. It was really hard on us. But we had to keep going. About a year after we left we found another uncharted island. Ahh. I remember that day like it happened yesterday. It was a clear day, warm with a little breeze. About lunchtime someone saw the island about 20 miles north of our position. When we got there we were disappointed to see some people already lived there.

The natives didn’t want us at first. But after a while they said we could stay as long as we wanted. They felt we brought something new to their culture. We finally found our promised land. We decided to call it hannu-luki. That’s their word for ‘Promised paradise’.

We love it and even though some things will never be the same we realized something important. Home is where you make it.

Well that is my version of the Paradise Island and what happened. Hopefully you enjoyed it.