Still Here

People keep asking why I stayed. The answer has a deadline.

The question comes more often than a visitor might guess. Across a restaurant table, in the food court at the mall, on a bench while our daughters work out the rules of some game: so what brought you to Guam?

The truthful answer is chance. A series of ordinary calculations, none of them about this island in particular, arranged themselves until Guam was the logical place for my family to be. Looking back, I do not think chance is the whole of it. I trust that God guides the ordinary details of a life, and I believe we were led here.

Then, always, the second question: so why are you still here? I give the easy answer, and the easy answer is true: my daughter wanted to stay. The fuller answer is that I stayed hoping to take some small part in a turnaround, a decision that has never been financially sound and is not one now.

Wanting to be part of that is not the same as being able to. Arriving late gives a person no standing. Men and women who know this island in their bones, who buried their parents in its soil and sat through decades of hearings, have tried to fix what is broken and have not managed it. If the problem were a shortage of love or talent, it would have been solved long before I got off the plane. I think a place turns when enough ordinary people decide to stay and go on expecting more of it, and the only qualification is willingness.

I have come to believe this is the last election in which a turnaround is still available, and I know how that sounds. Every cycle produces someone saying it. The phrase is cheap, nothing about it can be checked, and it is usually a way of pressing the already tired. Anyone who has heard it four times may discount it the fifth, and I cannot prove this November differs from the last. What follows is the arithmetic, beginning with the number that suggests nothing is wrong.

Estimates place Guam's resident population near 167,800 in 2024, above the last census count, lifted by military expansion and regional arrivals.¹ Someone could look at that and conclude the island is not emptying.

But a total can hold steady while the households that anchor it leave, and the schools are where the difference shows. A family with children enrolls before it settles and withdraws before it goes, which makes the schools the earliest warning this island gets. Enrollment stood at 31,243 in the fall of 2011.² By the 2024 to 2025 school year it was 23,413.³ That is 7,830 fewer children, close to a quarter of the district. Those are not abstractions. They are classrooms, and some of them belonged to the families who used to be at the other end of the table.

What is owed, meanwhile, does not shrink. Guam's public debt was $2.5 billion in September 2023.⁴ The island's only public hospital closed fiscal 2024 with a deficit above $308 million and $312 million of patient billings written off as uncollectible.⁵ Each family that leaves raises the per-household cost of everything the rest still owe, which makes leaving more reasonable for the next, which raises the cost again. Nothing in that sequence reverses on its own.

A point of no return is not a population number. It is the loss of the capacity to use help.

Puerto Rico is the case, a warning written in the same federal language Guam speaks. Its population fell 11.8 percent between 2010 and 2020, a loss of 439,915 people.⁶ The island was not abandoned. After the 2017 hurricanes and the earthquakes that followed, the Federal Emergency Management Agency awarded roughly $23.4 billion for permanent recovery work; by mid-2023, Puerto Rico had spent about $1.8 billion of it, near 8 percent.⁷ The money was there. It largely sat, because awarding a grant and finishing a project are different acts, and the second needs a government able to procure, contract, inspect, and close the books. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, studying the same decline, found that reversing it would take fiscal reform and livable conditions as much as jobs.⁸ Money is necessary and nowhere near sufficient.

The threshold does not announce itself. It arrives on the day the engineers who would design the work, the tradesmen who would build it, and the accountants who would close it out have all taken jobs elsewhere. After that, effort does not rescue a place, because effort requires hands, and a larger grant does not either, because a government that cannot spend $23 billion will not manage $30 billion. The island would be offered help it could not use.

Set against that, some things are improving. The same hospital closed fiscal 2025 with a clean audit and one significant deficiency.⁹ Nothing here requires a miracle, only ordinary competence applied on schedule by people who expect to be asked about it afterward.

Procurement is where that competence is built or lost. A bill to digitize and open the system has been written, has failed once, and waits for a public hearing.¹⁰ The obstacle is not money, or expertise, or federal permission. It is a calendar. The capacity to spend well is the thing being decided, and it is the one asset Washington cannot appropriate.

In the August primary, 22,852 of 57,406 registered voters cast a ballot, a turnout of 39.81 percent.¹¹ Two years earlier, registration had hit a record 62,091.¹² Rolls are pruned periodically, so part of that gap is housekeeping rather than departure.¹³ Part is not.

That turnout does not read to me as apathy but as a conclusion. Many who stayed home had decided the outcome would not change their lives, a view they reached honestly, by watching. The difficulty is that the conclusion builds what it predicts. On November 3 the island fills a governor's office the incumbent cannot seek again, an attorney general's office, and all fifteen legislative seats at once.¹⁴ Whatever else is said about the ballot, it is the cheapest tool on an expensive island.

I do not know what I am meant to do here. It may be that my whole part is this, writing things a few people are patient enough to read, on the chance a sentence lodges with someone holding a decision that is not mine to make. Or I may be meant to roll up my sleeves and work at closer range than writing allows. I pray about it daily, and what comes back is not a plan, only the next thing in front of me, which I have come to think is how guidance mostly arrives.

None of it matters if the governor's office, the attorney general's office, and the legislature settle for the arrangement they inherited. I cannot imagine this island absorbing another four years of that, and if November gives me no reason to expect better, I will have to ask what is left for me to do here.

Hope, if the word is to mean anything, comes with a date and a number attached: audits current within the first year, a procurement system any resident can search, a share of awarded federal money actually spent by a stated date. A promise nobody can grade is not a promise, only a mood. And I am asking for nothing I would not need myself: a government that finishes what it starts, publishes what it does, and can be checked by the people who pay for it.

My daughter wanting to stay was the easy answer, and it was true, and it was also a way of not answering the question underneath it. What has kept me here is a glimpse: that a turnaround might be possible, and that there might be some small part in it for me. If that glimpse closes, we will go, and we will run the arithmetic just as every departing family has. Every household here keeps a version of that deadline, whether or not anyone says it aloud.

Leaving would not be entirely about money. I would want the same thing in another place: work worth doing, and reason to believe it matters, whatever it happens to pay. What I cannot do is ask my family to pay for a hope that is gone.

I believe we were led here, and what I want is plain: to have some hand in making life on this island better, and to keep at it while there is still hope. Someone will ask again, at a table or on a bench while the children argue over rules, and for now the answer is that I am still here. November will say a great deal about how long that holds.