This is a story of dedication. Now, for those of you who know Mike and me, you understand that we’re dedicated to the core of our mission to help blind people, to help all people, to teach martial arts, to further the knowledge of the Merpati Putih arts.
And it started from the beginning. The very first time that we helped bring an Indonesian contingent of Vibravision, demonstrators, and teachers over here, which was in the fall, August of 1999. It was a very interesting time. Not only were our minds blown by seeing these blind people and these demonstrators doing things that, by all rights should be considered completely impossible, which now we know they’re completely possible and provable and duplicatable, blah, blah, blah. But, at that time we’re just sitting there and just completely beside ourselves seeing these amazing individuals do these amazing things.
And when I went to Washington D.C. with this team to meet the Indonesian Ambassador and to watch a demonstration of Vibravision there, and then we came back. We never thought that we’d be allowed to learn Merpati Putih or Vibravision at all. They had never trained a non-Indonesian before us, not officially. And so that was kind of out of our mind. And they did teach us a couple of energy work exercises though, breath work and breath-holding exercises, tension exercises for energy and for health. And the day before they were going to leave, they presented us with uniforms and they said, “We would like you to train.”
What! Seriously. Wow, what an honor to be able to help bring this to America. And we did something pretty interesting. Mike and I grew up in the small town of Huntsville, Utah. And right now Huntsville is in a massive state of growth.
But when we were growing up, there were more cows than people here, and they’re probably still more cows than people, but there are a lot more people and I think a lot more cows. But when we went and brought these people over here and they said, “You’re going to become the first-ever people, but first you have to be initiated.” Were like, “Okay, what’s that mean?” They’re like, “Okay, well, is there a beach?” Were like, “Okay.” So we live on Pineview Reservoir, for people familiar with that. There are quite a few beaches, none of which are public anymore.
But at this time there were and being residents we could go there and still can, but that’s beside the point. So we go down there and they have these uniforms and we’re just in our clothes. And so they have us do these exercises. We’re crawling in the sand, like army crawl. We’re doing cartwheels and forward rolls and throwing kicks. And then they said… After a while, we’re all sweaty and they said, “Okay, you need to put on your uniform, take off your clothes.” And we’re like, “What? We’re on the beach.” Now, granted it was cold. It was the end of August and we were having like a hail storm come in on us.
Mike and I just looked at each other. We’re like, “Okay, there’s nobody on the beach, it’s cold.” We just stripped down, butt naked. We’re just butt naked on the beach and we’re like, “Give us uniforms fast before a cop sees us come on.” And the Indonesian people were like, “Oh man, really! You know what, that’s not what we mean really meant, but okay.” And we’re like, “You don’t speak English very well, we don’t know what you meant. So we’re here to put on our uniform.” So that’s our story about wearing our Merpati Putih uniform for the very first time.