VHS Riptide Online

After spending 37 years if her life as a teacher, Perry is going to do some traveling, volunteer work, catch up on relaxing and being open to opportunities that come along. Perry has lived on Vashon for half of her life and can’t imagine living anywhere else.
“I’m visiting Michigan in the fall to see the fall colors; I’ve missed that the last thirty-three years. While I’m there I’m going to see a Michigan State football game too. I’m also traveling to Germany in the spring and a few other short trips,” said Perry.
After leaving VHS, Perry said she wouldn’t miss cleaning up after students and trying to get students to do things they don’t want to do.
“I will miss working with students and their enthusiasm, high energy, creativity, compassion, etc. I will also miss my colleagues—what a wonderful group of people,” said Perry.
Although Perry will no longer be teaching at VHS, we can probably count on seeing her on a few random Thriftway visits. Perry had a few last words to leave VHS with,
“Thank you all for making my time at VHS so memorable. You are an amazing group of people. Good luck in achieving all of your goals and dreams.”

Of the places he’s traveled, his favorite is Amsterdam, but don’t jump to conclusions. He said that he enjoys Amsterdam because it is internationally diverse and you can stop and have an intelligent conversation with anyone on the street.
The bus puttered on and he divulged that he hates small talk; it immensely bores him. Sometimes he doesn’t talk to people for months because of his disgust with small talk. He told me that his favorite activity was hitch-hiking.
“The places I go and the people I meet. And they tell you things they’ll never tell other people because you’re a complete stranger. I learn about humanity,” Leo said.“Most human beings are good and decent people.”
He seems like one of those people who would have good stories to tell. He finally dishes. When he was in his mid-twenties he lived with three different women and he was “romantically active’ with all three. He said he would, “never ever do [it] again, too much hard work.”
“The ego-feed was the best part about it. Not what everyone thinks. The psychic energy from three different women makes you that much stronger than from just one,” he said.
He also had some thoughts on today’s young people. “I don’t think there’s any difference from today’s youth culture to any other one,” he said.
He said that any young person he meets who doesn’t rebel is unhealthy. He believes that they are more likely to flip out and do something violent when they are older.
Not surprisingly Leo has an unconventional view on love and marriage
“ Yeah, [I’ve] never been married, don’t believe in marriage, never would get married,” he said.
He went from having twenty years of an abundance of lovers to ten years of celibacy.
These unconventional ideas of his also stream into his thoughts about drugs.
Speed, cocaine, and heroine creates violence and I won’t associate with anyone who does any one of those three,” he said.
Leo said he believes that psychedelics and marijuana, if used correctly, can teach you something, or at worst a person can have a good time. He said the greatest lesson he’s learned from drugs is, “To learn to get over the fear of death.”
He sits steady and easy, looking out the window of the bus. Leo offers this piece of advice.“ Life is good, life is happy, life is enjoyable, life is only what you think it to be.”
“This is my stop,” he said
Leo pulls himself up and steps off the bus.

The Johnsons and other teens from around Washington involved in the youth group, The Edge, built houses for needy, homeless people in the poverty-stricken community of Tijuana. While there, they interacted with the “tight-knit community”, as Betsy described it, stayed in an orphanage and not only partook in the exhausting physical labor of building houses, but got to know the people that inhabit this city that is so vastly different from our own.
The Johnsons have been involved with The Edge for the better part of their teen years. They got involved with the group through the Presbyterian Church. Activities such as the trip down to Mexico is just one of many community service programs kids in this group are involved in. This is Robbie’s second time traveling down to Mexico with this group and the first time for Betsy. Both agreed that this program was perhaps one of the most gratifying and touching activities they have been involved with.
“It is hard to understand and realize the extreme situations people are living in [down there], until you go and experience it first hand,” Betsy said.
Unfortunately, the benefits of giving back to this deserving community did come with a price. Besides all the hard work they both endured while there, the realization that they could only do so much took its toll on Robbie.
“There is a waiting list that people must be on before they qualify to have a home built for them. It is very hard to look around and realize that we are only going to be able to help a small percentage of people when there are so many more that are just as deserving,” Robbie explained.
During their six-day stay Robbie and Betsy helped build 110 houses. That is 110 families, roughly 440 men, women, and children, that are now off the streets and have an adequate place to sleep. The Johnsons gave themselves not only a spring break to remember, but a worldly experience that truly meant the world to the families they helped.

But there were high points in doing drugs besides the high itself.
“Before I did drugs I wanted to kill myself. Drugs made me feel different, and took my mind off of that,” Hagerty said.
Looking back, now in Fiji, she realizes how out of control she was.
“In all honesty, what I loved at the time, and hate now, is that I didn’t know what I was doing,” she said.
Hagerty is in Fiji because of the decision her parents made for her. After lots of research, her mother, older sister, father, and step dad found Coral Island Academy, a boarding school for adolescents who are struggling in school or in their community. Pitiger and Hagerty’s father drove down to the Oregon campus.
“It was relatively simple, it wasn’t plush. No TV, no radio, no magazines, it’s real deprivation. They want you to focus on yourself, not the outside world and what they are thinking or wanting you to do,” Pitiger said.
Once deciding Coral Island Academy was right for Hagerty, they waited until five days before Hagerty was to leave to tell her that she was going away.
“She wasn’t too freaked out about it. She thought ‘Oh I’m going to rehab everything is fine. I’ll go away for six or eight weeks and come back and everything will go back to normal’ or what normal was,” Pitiger said.
Hagerty’s recollection of this is almost identical to what her mom remembers.
“My mom told me I was going to rehab for 20 to 30 days, and I was almost happy. I thought ‘Okay I can go away and I won’t be grounded like here and I will come back and go back to the things I used to do,’ ” Hagerty said.
But Hagerty was about to experience something far different from what she imagined.
“I was sure that I could keep doing drugs because you can find drugs anywhere, but it wasn’t like that at all,” said Hagerty.
Pitiger received letters and phone calls from Hagerty describing what an awful place they had sent her to.
“She said to me ‘You don’t know the kinds of girls that are here; there are some really bad girls here. You put me in the wrong place; you just don’t know what you have done.’ I would say, ‘I’m sorry but you have to be there,’” Pitiger said.
Although a child up and leaving the family would seem disruptive, the family found it harder while she was living with them.
“It was a great relief for all of us to know that she was safe, that she couldn’t do her bad behavior anymore, and that she would learn to love herself,” Pitiger said.
At one point Pitiger became suspicious of the Oregon Campus when she heard the kinds of rules and consequences that were used there.
“You could get a 250-word essay for leaving your pencil on the table, for touching your fork without announcing to the table that you were going to use it, for leaving soap bubbles in the sink. But everything has a reason. I didn’t realize how strict the rules were, but I knew she needed something really drastic, so we took a risk,” Pitiger said.
Months after arriving at the Oregon Campus, Hagerty’s family made a decision to send her to the next phase in the program in Fiji, where she would stay until reaching level five. Hagerty was notified she was going to Fiji one hour before she left.
“[They tell you] to pack and that your leaving. You aren’t allowed to sleep the night before or on the way to the airport, and then once you get on the plane you can. The transition to Fiji is when most of the kids try to run. We have to wear bright yellow clothes and large flip-flops so we stand out,” Hagerty said.
After spending time in Fiji, something in Hagerty changed, something so big that it would change the rest of her life.
“Three months after I got here I decided I didn’t want to do drugs, and that I loved who I was,” Hagerty said.
In a letter Hagerty wrote, she describes how living in Fiji has helped her make that change.
“I noticed everyone around me was so pure and loving. Living in a tropical country with no American influences or Bush’s political instability to interrupt my studies or working on myself, has allowed me to be only two classes short of graduating from high school.”
In another letter to her mother, Hagerty realized the amount of money that was spent to send her to Coral Island Academy.
She wrote, “I figured out it’s about $64, 000 a year. Do you realize what you could have done with that money? You could have put braces on Justin, you could have bought a new car, you could have done a lot of things with that money and you gave it to me. I want you to know that I’m always going to be there for you.”
After 19 months, Hagerty is at a level four. She has one more level to complete before she will return to Vashon. Although coming home is exciting, returning makes both Hagerty and her mother nervous.
“She’s going to come back here with the ability to be a mentor and help people, but there is part of me that is fearful that she will come back and try to fix them which would be really devastating because obviously it won’t work,” Pitiger said.
But for Hagerty, the friends issue is what makes her nervous. She told her mother that she will just have to make one friend at a time.
Once Hagerty returns home, if she does fall back into her old ways the academy has helped create a contract that the family will have. For every mistake there will be a consequence.
As Hagerty looks back on Coral Island Academy, she describes it as her second chance in life.
“I am still young, life has so much to offer, and I am only in the first phase.” Said Hagerty.