12.8.09
You know how in my last post I said nothing much had really happened? I am an idiot. One particularly blog-worthy event did happen, and somehow I forgot about it until I read Pshell’s excellent post about it. On Friday Dec. 4th, which is a public holiday in the RMI called Gospel Day, I got a chance to tag along with the JHS Environmental Health Club on a field trip to Pinglap, an island across the lagoon which is partly owned by our school registrar, who accompanied us as a boat pilot and guide. For a much better and more detailed description of most of the trip, see Peter’s post “A Great Adventure” at petershellito.blogspot.com. However, at one point in the woods our paths diverged, and it made all the difference in what tasty local food we got to sample.
We had struck inland as a group to see some wetlands, but we reached some lands that were a bit too wet to navigate, and while Peter’s half of the expedition pushed on to the right side, I lagged behind with Jabuwe, who grew up on this island and who I trusted more as a guide than the other guy with us. We veered to the left. One might say I took the low road and Peter took the high road, but in the Marshall Islands, the distinction is a matter of inches.
NOTE: Think of this like one of those “Choose Your Own Adventure” books from middle school. You come to a fork in the road. If you choose to go with Peter, turn to page (petershellito.blogspot.com). If you choose to go with Morgan, just keep on truckin’.
We bush-wacked inland for a while longer, as I stumbled along in my flip-flops. I hadn’t counted on Indiana Jones-level jungle navigation, and my footwear was woefully inadequate for the coconut-carpeted ground. Ever tried to walk on top of half-decayed coconuts with muddy, slippery flip-flops? I don’t recommend it. However, all the Marshallese seemed to be doing alright in their flimsy sandals, so I sucked it up. As students with machetes cleared the way up in front of the column, I marveled at the tropical flora and fauna. There were some really incredible spider webs strung between two trees along the trail, which made me glad I wasn’t walking up front.
After an hour or so of forging trail, we began to see blue sky through the trees, which meant we were near the ocean, and we were all glad to get out of the stifling jungle, even though we hadn’t found the wetlands. Upon reaching the shore, however, we found that we had come back out about 200 yards south of our initial starting point, having made a neat horseshoe-shaped trail through the forest. Damn. We were supposed to have come out on the other side of the island. I then realized that although our guide did grow up on Pinglap, he’s also over 60 years old and it’s been a long time since he actually lived there.
Our principal, who had stayed with my group, was tired out after our trek, so he headed back along the beach with the girls to start getting lunch ready. The man likes his vittles and I can certainly appreciate that. I decided to stick around with the fellas, though I was not at all sure what we were going to do. Something about a shipwreck, and fishing? Sure, I was game. We started walking down the beach. Well, the “shipwreck” turned out to be a strangely isolated six-foot anchor on the beach, supposedly from a Japanese warship, and the only success from fishing was one three-foot black-tipped shark, dazed from a machete blow to the head. The kids discarded it on the beach, and in true bleeding-heart white-guy style, I grabbed it by the tail and brought it back out into the shallows, and tried to get it moving out. It was moving slowly when I left, so I think it might have been okay. I figured somebody should try to protect the sea life from the Environmental Health Club.
We were now on ocean-side, opposite of the lagoon-side spot where we had landed and set up camp. Jabuwe decided we should cut across the island through the jungle, and as we started struggling through the foliage again, I noticed big breadfruit trees, which have amazing hollows inside of them. One of the trees could have comfortably fit two adults in its trunk. Every time we encountered one of these trees my guides would start a small, smoky fire of dry palm fronds inside the trunk, and I discovered that they were trying to catch a coconut crab, a local delicacy. I was thrilled, but the first efforts were fruitless. Finally they found a breadfruit tree that seemed to have a lot of scrabbled earth around the roots, and definitely looked like something was living inside the cavity below. Using a lit palm-frond torch, they again began trying to smoke out whatever was living within. After 10 minutes of fiery prodding, a few huge armored legs started to emerge, followed by the rest of a monster, grey-blue crab. I stood well back as one of the students expertly flipped the big guy over and picked him up, with his hands supporting the carapace, safe from the powerful claws. A little later, I got to hold the big guy, who easily weighed in at 15-20 pounds, and was extremely docile once on his back.
Awesome. It was one of the highlights of the last four months.
Successful hunter-gatherers all, we kept moving through the jungle, but soon reached an impassable tangle of fallen trees. Jabuwe decided we should head back to the beach, and almost immediately after, my right foot flip-flop gave its last protest to my sliding everywhere in the mud, and the straps snapped. Now I was in the middle of the jungle with one bare foot.
I limped my way back out to the beach, carefully choosing my path, and we traveled along the beach for a while until we found a path that Jabuwe had created a while ago. It seems cliché to me to comment on the amazing speed of the jungle in reclaiming everything done by humans, but I’ll do it anyway. Peter and I often wonder why the Marshallese spend so much time raking gravel or picking up fallen leaves by hand, but it has become obvious that it’s part of a daily battle to stop the jungle from encroaching on their living spaces.
12.14.2009 Monday
I’m sitting in my classroom, having given up trying to review for the final exam with my 11C class. It’s seventh period, I’m losing my voice from talking all day, and it just started pouring rain. The big drops beating on the tin roof above make teaching nearly impossible, so I asked them to do some practice in the workbook. Little unexpected reprieves like this can be nice.
Meanwhile, outside my window, which looks out to onto a basketball court, a few low buildings, and the ocean about 100 yards away, eight utterly naked little boys are running around in the downpour, using small sheets of plywood to glide across the huge, shallow puddle that is the basketball court during a rainstorm. That looks really fun. If I’m not mistaken, there is a similar sport on West Coast beaches called skimboarding.
That's all for now, heading to Majuro in a day or two to see my parents! Hope everyone is looking forward to the holidays as much as I am...I get to spend them with my family, a good friend, and perhaps a well-traveled turkey, so I really can't complain.
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Friday, December 11, 2009
Happy holidays!
12.3.09 Thursday
If you will permit me another gripe, I have a serious issue with hairballs in my classroom. More than anything else, more than three-inch spiders, trails of ants, salt grime, balls of dough squashed on the floor or spilled Kool-Aid, it’s those creepy hair balls that really get all up in my grill. If you think cats are the culprits, you wouldn’t be wrong that it’s the result of grooming, but I think most of the cats get eaten here, so it’s not them. This hair is decidedly long, black and greasy, right off the combs of my students, and for some reason, it makes me retch every time I see a pile of it in the corner. It’s long because I think it’s mostly from the girls, it’s black because that’s the only hair color here, and it’s greasy because the slick, shiny gloss on most of the kids’ heads is achieved with large quantities of hair oil, haphazardly applied. GRIM! Didn’t hair oil die out at the same time as the word “swell”?
I don’t remember any point in my high school experience when I saw human hair piling up in a classroom, and I have my students clean the room twice a week. It’s awful to sweep up, too, because it naturally sticks to the bristles of the broom. Admittedly, this is not a real problem, but not much happened in the last couple weeks, and I wanted to write about something.
12.7.09 Monday
The Mormon missionaries here kindly distributed a large number of Bic ballpoint pens (the ONLY ballpoint pen, as far as Peter is concerned) to the school and community. Good writing utensils are always welcome around here, so I appreciated the gesture. Written on the stem is “Grand Resort, Tunica, MS,” evidently from some resort in Missouri. Upon closer inspection, though, I found the writing looks like this:
Grand
Resort
Tunica, MS
I noticed that a word between “Grand” and “Resort” had been carefully scratched out with a knife – “Casino.” Some diligent LDS member, possibly the guys here, had spent who knows how long erasing this word that was so incongruous to their message. That’s all well and good, but now I have an image of finding some pious Mormon in our bathroom, huddled over my deodorant, making sure that the manufacturing company is only “Procter & ______.” With a lack of outside stimulation, these are the things I think about. I need a magazine or something.
12.10.09 Thursday
While trying to refresh my students on proper nouns, I taught them the word “unique.” I didn’t realize, however, how important it was to teach them the correct pronunciation right off the bat. Now I have a whole class of kids saying “eunuch,” and I REALLY don’t want to explain the difference between the words.
12.12.2009 Saturday
Aside from the pet peeves, things are going well, just trying and failing to keep myself motivated to teach with finals a few days away. I’m done reviewing, for the most part, and I still have Monday and Tuesday classes, so I’ll have to figure out something to do with the kids for a couple days until exams. Rookie mistake.
Finals start on the 16th and finish on the 18th, then we’re (hopefully) off to Majuro. My parents are flying in on Thursday, which seems ridiculously soon. Getting a boat out of Jaluit is still not looking great, but they say that during the Christmas season, there are a lot of boats. We just haven’t seen any of them yet.
Depending on the boat schedules, it’s possible that I won’t post again until after Christmas, so if that’s the case, I wish you all a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year! Appreciate the snow for me, and I wish I could be there to celebrate with you!
11.30.09 Monday
Some sage words from our principal at our weekly school assembly:
(Addressing the students) “Some of the boys are still wearing earrings. Boys, if you want to wear earrings, I’ll give you a dress to wear as well. Girls wear earrings. Some men wear earrings, but those are men who don’t know what to do with themselves.”
If you will permit me another gripe, I have a serious issue with hairballs in my classroom. More than anything else, more than three-inch spiders, trails of ants, salt grime, balls of dough squashed on the floor or spilled Kool-Aid, it’s those creepy hair balls that really get all up in my grill. If you think cats are the culprits, you wouldn’t be wrong that it’s the result of grooming, but I think most of the cats get eaten here, so it’s not them. This hair is decidedly long, black and greasy, right off the combs of my students, and for some reason, it makes me retch every time I see a pile of it in the corner. It’s long because I think it’s mostly from the girls, it’s black because that’s the only hair color here, and it’s greasy because the slick, shiny gloss on most of the kids’ heads is achieved with large quantities of hair oil, haphazardly applied. GRIM! Didn’t hair oil die out at the same time as the word “swell”?
I don’t remember any point in my high school experience when I saw human hair piling up in a classroom, and I have my students clean the room twice a week. It’s awful to sweep up, too, because it naturally sticks to the bristles of the broom. Admittedly, this is not a real problem, but not much happened in the last couple weeks, and I wanted to write about something.
12.7.09 Monday
The Mormon missionaries here kindly distributed a large number of Bic ballpoint pens (the ONLY ballpoint pen, as far as Peter is concerned) to the school and community. Good writing utensils are always welcome around here, so I appreciated the gesture. Written on the stem is “Grand Resort, Tunica, MS,” evidently from some resort in Missouri. Upon closer inspection, though, I found the writing looks like this:
Grand
Resort
Tunica, MS
I noticed that a word between “Grand” and “Resort” had been carefully scratched out with a knife – “Casino.” Some diligent LDS member, possibly the guys here, had spent who knows how long erasing this word that was so incongruous to their message. That’s all well and good, but now I have an image of finding some pious Mormon in our bathroom, huddled over my deodorant, making sure that the manufacturing company is only “Procter & ______.” With a lack of outside stimulation, these are the things I think about. I need a magazine or something.
12.10.09 Thursday
While trying to refresh my students on proper nouns, I taught them the word “unique.” I didn’t realize, however, how important it was to teach them the correct pronunciation right off the bat. Now I have a whole class of kids saying “eunuch,” and I REALLY don’t want to explain the difference between the words.
12.12.2009 Saturday
Aside from the pet peeves, things are going well, just trying and failing to keep myself motivated to teach with finals a few days away. I’m done reviewing, for the most part, and I still have Monday and Tuesday classes, so I’ll have to figure out something to do with the kids for a couple days until exams. Rookie mistake.
Finals start on the 16th and finish on the 18th, then we’re (hopefully) off to Majuro. My parents are flying in on Thursday, which seems ridiculously soon. Getting a boat out of Jaluit is still not looking great, but they say that during the Christmas season, there are a lot of boats. We just haven’t seen any of them yet.
Depending on the boat schedules, it’s possible that I won’t post again until after Christmas, so if that’s the case, I wish you all a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year! Appreciate the snow for me, and I wish I could be there to celebrate with you!
11.30.09 Monday
Some sage words from our principal at our weekly school assembly:
(Addressing the students) “Some of the boys are still wearing earrings. Boys, if you want to wear earrings, I’ll give you a dress to wear as well. Girls wear earrings. Some men wear earrings, but those are men who don’t know what to do with themselves.”
Friday, November 27, 2009
Happy Thanksgiving!
For Peter Shellito’s impressions of the experience (my roommate/colleague/friend here…aka “Pshell”), please check out . Double your pleasure!
11.25.2009 The Audacity of Flies
Why are flies in developing countries so much more impudent than their first world relatives? The blue-bottles here often amuse themselves by flying directly into my face or ears, instead of giving me the wide berth that they do in the States. I don’t really want to make an effort to kill them, but they’re forcing my hand here. The American flies certainly don’t ask for it like that. Have we so completely cowed them with sticky traps and electric zappers? There’s no question that our fly-killing technology is light years ahead of the Marshall Islands, and I say, more power to us; instilling the fear of Man into the little bastards makes me proud to be an American.
One day a couple months ago we were cooking spaghetti and either it was a peak in the hatching cycle, or something in the sauce attracted them, but there were at least 10-15 fatties buzzing around the stove at any one point. With my standard reaction to adversity, I started jumping around in the kitchen, swinging frantically at every fat black plague-carrier droning heavily by. The fatigued plastic of our fly-swatter gave out within the first hour of use, in the middle of a particularly epic slaughter session, so I have since adjusted and refined my technique. Short, controlled swats from the wrist are the ticket, using the flexibility of the plastic to whip the end back and forth for those tough midair attacks. Peter, somehow, does not share my revulsion/enthusiasm (it’s complicated), so he wisely stepped aside until I was spent.
When it got dark things slowed down, and the remains of at least 30 flies were scattered around the kitchen (seriously). No more than a couple were in the pasta sauce (kidding). The ants, our resident cleanup crew, were already dragging the evidence away. Who needs a Roomba when you have a constant stream of ants through the kitchen? They are infinitely preferable to the roaches, which are tropical-sized at a good two inches long, leave mouse-sized droppings everywhere and have permeated some of our cabinets with their stench. They don’t go down without a fight, either. Ants, on the other hand, are clean, odorless and eat only the food we don’t want anymore.
11.27.2009 Krack
At first I thought a lot of the students, boys and girls alike, were wearing a garish red lipstick. Then I saw their mouths were bright red as well, and worried that they were bleeding from the gums. A popular vice here is chewing betel nut, an addictive stimulant that enters the bloodstream through your raw gums as you dip abrasive powdered coral. I’m still trying to figure out the appeal. But anyway, that wasn’t it either, because the red was more of a red 40-candy red than a bleeding-gums red.
So what comes in crystal form, is terrible for teeth, and is addictive and cheap? If you answered “meth,” that’s only half the answer. The other half is Krack, with a capital “K”: I’m talking about Kool-Aid. Cherry flavor, specifically. Marshallese kids love it to death, almost literally, if you consider the high incidence of diabetes. Rarely do they dilute it by adding water. Instead, they cut out the middleman and lick the tart sugar directly from their palms, and when someone opens a new packet, they crowd around like a group of junkies trying to get the first hit. Then they flit away with all the telltale signs: mouth and fingers stained red, erratic movements and dilated pupils (okay, maybe I’m imagining that), a spike now and a crash later. It would be funny if it wasn’t such a problem. The kids, especially the boys, appear generally skinnier and healthier than American high school students, but the adults are almost uniformly overweight, probably because serious exercise is rare after high school.
11.27.2009 You want to do WHAT?
We were warned at the beginning that Marshallese students are exceptionally shy, and although there has been some loosening up in class, most are still painfully timid when they ask for a hall pass to go to the bathroom, especially the girls. They stand several feet from the desk and mouth words at me with a significant look on their face, like it’s a secret between the two of us. It’s annoying when I have to ask them to repeat their requests and strain to hear, but it’s not a big deal.
However, I am a stickler for “please” and “thank you,” and whether it’s a cultural thing or something else, the kids don’t use those words nearly enough. I try to reinforce the use of these valuable words. When someone now comes up to request a hall pass and breathes a single word at me, almost as a demand, I make them repeat it until I can hear. Then the following exchange occurs:
Mr. C: “Okay, but what’s the magic word?”
Student: *barely audible whisper* “Bathroom.”
Mr. C: “Um…okay, you want to go to the bathroom WHAT? Say ‘Please!’”
Student: *whisper* “Hall pass for bathroom.”
Mr. C: “Yeah…but, hall pass WHAT?”
At this point, the student, usually female, is giggling helplessly from embarrassment and retreats to his or her seat. Problem solved.
11.28.2009
I think I’ve reached the root of my problem with teaching English here: it’s supposed to be a composition class, as far as I understand, but for most of my students, I don’t feel like their English or critical thinking skills are advanced enough to do a typical high school English composition class. Plus, there’s a separate English Reading class taught by a different teacher, and it’s hard to teach composition if you can’t really assign a lot of reading. As a result, I’m teaching an English language class instead, which is appropriate for many but not all. My Chinese courses at Dartmouth involved short essay-writing, but they also assumed we knew how to write coherently in at least one language. I guess I’m trying to teach within the framework of what I’m used to, when I should be combining the two classes into some sort of English super-course.
11.25.2009 The Audacity of Flies
Why are flies in developing countries so much more impudent than their first world relatives? The blue-bottles here often amuse themselves by flying directly into my face or ears, instead of giving me the wide berth that they do in the States. I don’t really want to make an effort to kill them, but they’re forcing my hand here. The American flies certainly don’t ask for it like that. Have we so completely cowed them with sticky traps and electric zappers? There’s no question that our fly-killing technology is light years ahead of the Marshall Islands, and I say, more power to us; instilling the fear of Man into the little bastards makes me proud to be an American.
One day a couple months ago we were cooking spaghetti and either it was a peak in the hatching cycle, or something in the sauce attracted them, but there were at least 10-15 fatties buzzing around the stove at any one point. With my standard reaction to adversity, I started jumping around in the kitchen, swinging frantically at every fat black plague-carrier droning heavily by. The fatigued plastic of our fly-swatter gave out within the first hour of use, in the middle of a particularly epic slaughter session, so I have since adjusted and refined my technique. Short, controlled swats from the wrist are the ticket, using the flexibility of the plastic to whip the end back and forth for those tough midair attacks. Peter, somehow, does not share my revulsion/enthusiasm (it’s complicated), so he wisely stepped aside until I was spent.
When it got dark things slowed down, and the remains of at least 30 flies were scattered around the kitchen (seriously). No more than a couple were in the pasta sauce (kidding). The ants, our resident cleanup crew, were already dragging the evidence away. Who needs a Roomba when you have a constant stream of ants through the kitchen? They are infinitely preferable to the roaches, which are tropical-sized at a good two inches long, leave mouse-sized droppings everywhere and have permeated some of our cabinets with their stench. They don’t go down without a fight, either. Ants, on the other hand, are clean, odorless and eat only the food we don’t want anymore.
11.27.2009 Krack
At first I thought a lot of the students, boys and girls alike, were wearing a garish red lipstick. Then I saw their mouths were bright red as well, and worried that they were bleeding from the gums. A popular vice here is chewing betel nut, an addictive stimulant that enters the bloodstream through your raw gums as you dip abrasive powdered coral. I’m still trying to figure out the appeal. But anyway, that wasn’t it either, because the red was more of a red 40-candy red than a bleeding-gums red.
So what comes in crystal form, is terrible for teeth, and is addictive and cheap? If you answered “meth,” that’s only half the answer. The other half is Krack, with a capital “K”: I’m talking about Kool-Aid. Cherry flavor, specifically. Marshallese kids love it to death, almost literally, if you consider the high incidence of diabetes. Rarely do they dilute it by adding water. Instead, they cut out the middleman and lick the tart sugar directly from their palms, and when someone opens a new packet, they crowd around like a group of junkies trying to get the first hit. Then they flit away with all the telltale signs: mouth and fingers stained red, erratic movements and dilated pupils (okay, maybe I’m imagining that), a spike now and a crash later. It would be funny if it wasn’t such a problem. The kids, especially the boys, appear generally skinnier and healthier than American high school students, but the adults are almost uniformly overweight, probably because serious exercise is rare after high school.
11.27.2009 You want to do WHAT?
We were warned at the beginning that Marshallese students are exceptionally shy, and although there has been some loosening up in class, most are still painfully timid when they ask for a hall pass to go to the bathroom, especially the girls. They stand several feet from the desk and mouth words at me with a significant look on their face, like it’s a secret between the two of us. It’s annoying when I have to ask them to repeat their requests and strain to hear, but it’s not a big deal.
However, I am a stickler for “please” and “thank you,” and whether it’s a cultural thing or something else, the kids don’t use those words nearly enough. I try to reinforce the use of these valuable words. When someone now comes up to request a hall pass and breathes a single word at me, almost as a demand, I make them repeat it until I can hear. Then the following exchange occurs:
Mr. C: “Okay, but what’s the magic word?”
Student: *barely audible whisper* “Bathroom.”
Mr. C: “Um…okay, you want to go to the bathroom WHAT? Say ‘Please!’”
Student: *whisper* “Hall pass for bathroom.”
Mr. C: “Yeah…but, hall pass WHAT?”
At this point, the student, usually female, is giggling helplessly from embarrassment and retreats to his or her seat. Problem solved.
11.28.2009
I think I’ve reached the root of my problem with teaching English here: it’s supposed to be a composition class, as far as I understand, but for most of my students, I don’t feel like their English or critical thinking skills are advanced enough to do a typical high school English composition class. Plus, there’s a separate English Reading class taught by a different teacher, and it’s hard to teach composition if you can’t really assign a lot of reading. As a result, I’m teaching an English language class instead, which is appropriate for many but not all. My Chinese courses at Dartmouth involved short essay-writing, but they also assumed we knew how to write coherently in at least one language. I guess I’m trying to teach within the framework of what I’m used to, when I should be combining the two classes into some sort of English super-course.
Friday, November 13, 2009
Freezing in 70 degrees
11.7.09 Saturday
I had a pretty funny moment while running with Pshell today. Peter has been a really excellent motivator to get in shape…his high fitness level was a little disheartening at first, but I’ve gotten to the point where I can keep up with him for most of the route. We really only have one place to go running here, which is south, to the end of the airport runway and back. In some places, any deviation of more than ten feet either way from that course would have us waist-deep in the ocean or lagoon. On Tuesdays and Fridays, we have to watch out for the plane landing on our heads, so we keep an eye on the sky (“White People on Strange Running Ritual Slain by Plane,” the local paper might say). Some days we’re too busy to work out, but I manage to run 3-4 times a week, which is pretty good for me. But I digress.
As we were running out of Jabor heading toward the runway, we passed a few little boys playing near the town dump, which is just a cleared space next to the road just outside Jabor. They had found some empty cardboard 12-packs of Coca-Cola, and one of them had put a box on each leg and arm, and he was small enough that they covered his entire extremities. Man, I wish I had had a camera. He looked like a kickass Transformer, if the Transformers had run into financial difficulties and found it necessary to take on a corporate sponsor. Then he started running with us, and was able to keep up for a little way, despite his encumbrances. He really made my day, not only because he looked sharp in his fresh Coke kicks, but also reminded me of how much fun it is to be a little boy.
11.10.09 Tuesday
I would say I spend a majority of my time and energy in class figuring out what the students already know, and what they don’t. If they don’t know something I expected them to know, I scramble to come up with an explanation that they will understand, which works less frequently than I would like. If they already know something I planned to explain, it means I wasted my fairly limited time planning a good way to teach it. It was suggested that I give pre-unit tests to establish what they know, but committing to another level of test-writing and grading is daunting, and the range of academic ability within each class might make the pre-testing useless anyway.
Sometimes I envy Peter a little for teaching physics and chemistry, because he can pretty much count on the fact that none of them will have previously learned any of it, so he knows he has to start at the beginning…at other times, however, it’s nice to find out that the students have an English base on which to build.
11.11.09
I just had the most amazing coconut. Considering that we are surrounded by coconut trees, every day risking a fatal nut to the noggin, we get surprisingly few, primarily because the Marshallese are far more able and wily gatherers. When we get them, they are so delicious that I am very close to giving extra credit in my class for every coconut delivered to my door. Today, after a short run and workout, I broke the seal of one that I had been keeping in the fridge, and I am here to tell you that there is NOTHING like fresh, chilled coconut milk after working out.
11.13.09 Friday
Friday is the day that the students do a general cleanup of the campus after school. They divide by grades, and as a “class advisor” to the juniors, I help supervise them during the 20-30 minute cleanup (I “advise” them to pick stuff up, and that’s about it). Apparently, though, the Marshallese seem to find the browning leaves that drop from the trees extremely aesthetically displeasing, because they’re all the students pick up, at the encouragement of my co-advisor. Well, this would be all well and good, if the students didn’t completely ignore the Styrofoam, metal and plastic that is scattered among the detritus. The artificial refuse, which is so offensive to my Western sensibilities, just doesn’t seem to bother them as much. Consequently, I end up spending most my time picking up the wrappers and cans, while the students squat and pick up the things that would disintegrate in a couple weeks, moving them to a bonfire. I have to admit, the team effort makes things a lot tidier.
Last week, a representative of the Ministry of Education visited the school to see how things were going, and apparently he said that JHS is one of the cleanest campuses he’s seen. Upon hearing this, though, I wondered whether we actually have the least trash or if we are just the most bereft of vegetable matter.
One of the WorldTeach girls came by today, almost always a welcome change of routine. However, I realized today how little I like talking shop. I remember a reading from a class at Dartmouth that described a teacher’s lounge as a nest of tired people, hunched over coffee and making dry, ironic comments about their students, and I also remember how repugnant that sounded to me. I try to limit the negative things I say about people around me, and that should certainly include my students. I certainly break my own rule, usually when I am frustrated, and Peter and I regularly vent to each other, but no more than is necessary for our sanity.
However, I’m getting slightly off-topic…I was trying to say that when we have WorldTeach visitors, inevitably we talk about our respective experiences. No surprise there, but I think about school and talk about it with Pshell so much that when I’m talking to another person, it’s really the last thing I want to deal with. I think my ideal teacher’s lounge would prohibit talking about students or school in any way. It might be that this school is a bigger part of our life than is the case with other teachers, though…we simply don’t have much else going on, so it’s all we think about. Maybe the case would be different in Majuro, where we might have a life outside of school.
I had a pretty funny moment while running with Pshell today. Peter has been a really excellent motivator to get in shape…his high fitness level was a little disheartening at first, but I’ve gotten to the point where I can keep up with him for most of the route. We really only have one place to go running here, which is south, to the end of the airport runway and back. In some places, any deviation of more than ten feet either way from that course would have us waist-deep in the ocean or lagoon. On Tuesdays and Fridays, we have to watch out for the plane landing on our heads, so we keep an eye on the sky (“White People on Strange Running Ritual Slain by Plane,” the local paper might say). Some days we’re too busy to work out, but I manage to run 3-4 times a week, which is pretty good for me. But I digress.
As we were running out of Jabor heading toward the runway, we passed a few little boys playing near the town dump, which is just a cleared space next to the road just outside Jabor. They had found some empty cardboard 12-packs of Coca-Cola, and one of them had put a box on each leg and arm, and he was small enough that they covered his entire extremities. Man, I wish I had had a camera. He looked like a kickass Transformer, if the Transformers had run into financial difficulties and found it necessary to take on a corporate sponsor. Then he started running with us, and was able to keep up for a little way, despite his encumbrances. He really made my day, not only because he looked sharp in his fresh Coke kicks, but also reminded me of how much fun it is to be a little boy.
11.10.09 Tuesday
I would say I spend a majority of my time and energy in class figuring out what the students already know, and what they don’t. If they don’t know something I expected them to know, I scramble to come up with an explanation that they will understand, which works less frequently than I would like. If they already know something I planned to explain, it means I wasted my fairly limited time planning a good way to teach it. It was suggested that I give pre-unit tests to establish what they know, but committing to another level of test-writing and grading is daunting, and the range of academic ability within each class might make the pre-testing useless anyway.
Sometimes I envy Peter a little for teaching physics and chemistry, because he can pretty much count on the fact that none of them will have previously learned any of it, so he knows he has to start at the beginning…at other times, however, it’s nice to find out that the students have an English base on which to build.
11.11.09
I just had the most amazing coconut. Considering that we are surrounded by coconut trees, every day risking a fatal nut to the noggin, we get surprisingly few, primarily because the Marshallese are far more able and wily gatherers. When we get them, they are so delicious that I am very close to giving extra credit in my class for every coconut delivered to my door. Today, after a short run and workout, I broke the seal of one that I had been keeping in the fridge, and I am here to tell you that there is NOTHING like fresh, chilled coconut milk after working out.
11.13.09 Friday
Friday is the day that the students do a general cleanup of the campus after school. They divide by grades, and as a “class advisor” to the juniors, I help supervise them during the 20-30 minute cleanup (I “advise” them to pick stuff up, and that’s about it). Apparently, though, the Marshallese seem to find the browning leaves that drop from the trees extremely aesthetically displeasing, because they’re all the students pick up, at the encouragement of my co-advisor. Well, this would be all well and good, if the students didn’t completely ignore the Styrofoam, metal and plastic that is scattered among the detritus. The artificial refuse, which is so offensive to my Western sensibilities, just doesn’t seem to bother them as much. Consequently, I end up spending most my time picking up the wrappers and cans, while the students squat and pick up the things that would disintegrate in a couple weeks, moving them to a bonfire. I have to admit, the team effort makes things a lot tidier.
Last week, a representative of the Ministry of Education visited the school to see how things were going, and apparently he said that JHS is one of the cleanest campuses he’s seen. Upon hearing this, though, I wondered whether we actually have the least trash or if we are just the most bereft of vegetable matter.
One of the WorldTeach girls came by today, almost always a welcome change of routine. However, I realized today how little I like talking shop. I remember a reading from a class at Dartmouth that described a teacher’s lounge as a nest of tired people, hunched over coffee and making dry, ironic comments about their students, and I also remember how repugnant that sounded to me. I try to limit the negative things I say about people around me, and that should certainly include my students. I certainly break my own rule, usually when I am frustrated, and Peter and I regularly vent to each other, but no more than is necessary for our sanity.
However, I’m getting slightly off-topic…I was trying to say that when we have WorldTeach visitors, inevitably we talk about our respective experiences. No surprise there, but I think about school and talk about it with Pshell so much that when I’m talking to another person, it’s really the last thing I want to deal with. I think my ideal teacher’s lounge would prohibit talking about students or school in any way. It might be that this school is a bigger part of our life than is the case with other teachers, though…we simply don’t have much else going on, so it’s all we think about. Maybe the case would be different in Majuro, where we might have a life outside of school.
Friday, November 6, 2009
Partytime
Hi everyone!
It was a busy week, and a very successful week food-wise (oh no, here I go again...). On Wednesday night, we were just sitting down to our weekly bowl of fresh chili. Yes, Wednesday night is chili night, and if that ain't marital bliss, I don't know what is.
So anyway, so we were sitting down to hot chili, and a kid shows up with about a 10-pound loin of fresh, bleeding yellow fin tuna. This called for a rearrangement of dinner plans, to say the least. Fortuitously, we already had some hot sushi rice cooked, so we finished our chili and dug into sashimi with a will. Fresh tuna doesn't need a thing but a little rice, soy sauce and a touch of wasabi. We ate until we couldn't move, and then we ate a little more. About half of the loin still remains, so we're going to sear it up tonight, I think.
Continuing the food streak, the next day we received an invitation, along with all the teachers, to a party thrown by the newly elected Speaker of the Nitijela, the Marshallese governing body. They elect senators from each island or atoll, and then the senators elect a president and a speaker. At least that's my understanding. They recently had a vote of no-confidence for the former president and speaker and relieved them of their positions, so they just elected these new guys, and the new speaker is the senator from Jaluit. But, to get back to how this affected us and our taste buds, he had a Marshallese party on Thursday night. Since alcohol is illegal here, parties are mostly about eating a lot, some singing and some dancing.
We arrived about an hour and a half after the advised start time (6 pm), and ended up waiting another solid hour and a half until it was time to start. Marshallese time, everyone says. Well, it's hard to be philosophical about time when you've postponed your normal 6:30 pm dinner time to 9 pm. I observed to Pshell that eating is one of those few pleasurable things for which the anticipation of it is NOT as good as the actual event. But hey, volunteers can't be choosers.
When it finally got started, we were ravenous, and there was a pretty impressive spread, including 10-15 dishes involving breadfruit and coconut, a whole roast pig (a revelation of fatty goodness), some fish dishes, and fresh, glorious, tiny bananas. As guests of honor (read: white people), we were seated at the head table with the host, the other American teacher, the two Mormon missionaries, and the Catholic priest. Motley crew. The benefit of being a guest of honor is that you get to go through the line first, of which we took full advantage. But once we were through, a never-ending line formed, stretching off into the warm darkness. Saying that nearly everyone on the island (except for the high school students, so maybe 500-600 people) came through that line would not be a gross exaggeration.
Towards the end, they set up a keyboard and mic and showed off some of the Marshallese skill for music. I don't like their music very much, but I do admire how everyone seems to be very musical. One of the older women came to our table and was trying to get one of us to dance, and I didn't want her to go away disappointed so I danced with her for a minute or two. After that, things wrapped up, everyone lined up to say thank you and shake the hand of the host in the traditional way, and we left shortly after.
That's about the extent of happenings in the last couple weeks...our Field Director is coming for a visit in a week or two, which we look forward to as a change of pace. Also, we have a short week the week after next, and we're REALLY looking forward to that. Thanks for reading!
It was a busy week, and a very successful week food-wise (oh no, here I go again...). On Wednesday night, we were just sitting down to our weekly bowl of fresh chili. Yes, Wednesday night is chili night, and if that ain't marital bliss, I don't know what is.
So anyway, so we were sitting down to hot chili, and a kid shows up with about a 10-pound loin of fresh, bleeding yellow fin tuna. This called for a rearrangement of dinner plans, to say the least. Fortuitously, we already had some hot sushi rice cooked, so we finished our chili and dug into sashimi with a will. Fresh tuna doesn't need a thing but a little rice, soy sauce and a touch of wasabi. We ate until we couldn't move, and then we ate a little more. About half of the loin still remains, so we're going to sear it up tonight, I think.
Continuing the food streak, the next day we received an invitation, along with all the teachers, to a party thrown by the newly elected Speaker of the Nitijela, the Marshallese governing body. They elect senators from each island or atoll, and then the senators elect a president and a speaker. At least that's my understanding. They recently had a vote of no-confidence for the former president and speaker and relieved them of their positions, so they just elected these new guys, and the new speaker is the senator from Jaluit. But, to get back to how this affected us and our taste buds, he had a Marshallese party on Thursday night. Since alcohol is illegal here, parties are mostly about eating a lot, some singing and some dancing.
We arrived about an hour and a half after the advised start time (6 pm), and ended up waiting another solid hour and a half until it was time to start. Marshallese time, everyone says. Well, it's hard to be philosophical about time when you've postponed your normal 6:30 pm dinner time to 9 pm. I observed to Pshell that eating is one of those few pleasurable things for which the anticipation of it is NOT as good as the actual event. But hey, volunteers can't be choosers.
When it finally got started, we were ravenous, and there was a pretty impressive spread, including 10-15 dishes involving breadfruit and coconut, a whole roast pig (a revelation of fatty goodness), some fish dishes, and fresh, glorious, tiny bananas. As guests of honor (read: white people), we were seated at the head table with the host, the other American teacher, the two Mormon missionaries, and the Catholic priest. Motley crew. The benefit of being a guest of honor is that you get to go through the line first, of which we took full advantage. But once we were through, a never-ending line formed, stretching off into the warm darkness. Saying that nearly everyone on the island (except for the high school students, so maybe 500-600 people) came through that line would not be a gross exaggeration.
Towards the end, they set up a keyboard and mic and showed off some of the Marshallese skill for music. I don't like their music very much, but I do admire how everyone seems to be very musical. One of the older women came to our table and was trying to get one of us to dance, and I didn't want her to go away disappointed so I danced with her for a minute or two. After that, things wrapped up, everyone lined up to say thank you and shake the hand of the host in the traditional way, and we left shortly after.
That's about the extent of happenings in the last couple weeks...our Field Director is coming for a visit in a week or two, which we look forward to as a change of pace. Also, we have a short week the week after next, and we're REALLY looking forward to that. Thanks for reading!
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Life Goes On
10.20.2009 Tuesday
After a tasty lunch of amazing fresh-baked bread and tuna salad, comforted by a few days’ breathing room in my lesson plans and nearly finished with the grading for the first quarter (I may never give extra credit work again…what a headache), I am feeling pretty good…basking in a job relatively well done, I suppose. As I walked across the field that serves as the center of campus on the way to my classroom for my second daily round of classes, I was reflecting on the attractions of this lifestyle.
Taxes here hover around 10%, nobody is really required to work that hard, and the weather is (so far) a smooth 80 degrees. In the hot afternoon sun, everyone stays in the shade except the weird masochistic white guys who go running after school. By 5 p.m., the evening has begun, and there is always a game of softball or volleyball going on at the field near the dorms. The older women, though no longer the pictures of girlish athleticism they once were, are actually surprisingly good at softball. Great defensive plays come out of nowhere.
The only required uniform for women is a colorful guam dress, essentially a mumu, and shoes are very much optional. It’s pretty fun to watch these ladies slide into third base or catch a base-runner in a pickle and force the out. I have a feeling that my mom, a former softball player herself, will take a number of photos when she visits, and there is a better than even chance you will see a painting of it on her website in a few months. Hell, I’ll even tell you the title: “A League of Their Own.”
The main concerns here are getting enough to eat, avoiding disease, and not running out of water. Food is expensive, so fresh fish are the main supplement to flour-based foods and rice. Teachers, for a change, are probably the best-paid people on the island (except for me and Peter, of course), mostly because they actually have an 8-4 job, which no one else really has. Medical treatment, while basic, is also basically free…Peter paid 50 cents for his one doctor’s visit, and the medicine was on the house. As for water, it’s going to be an El Nino year, which means there is less of it. They are predicting about 15% less than normal, but of course we have no idea what normal is.
Being on the second floor, I can see the ocean or lagoon from either side of my classroom… how many times in my life will I be able to say that about my office? Not ever, I’ll wager. So, with all these benefits of island life, am I going to give up on civilization and set up shop here? Not likely, and there are two main reasons. One is that there really isn’t much mental stimulation of any kind. Peter is literally the only person my age with whom I can have a conversation about things that interest me. Even if I spoke Marshallese fluently, I can’t imagine a dialogue going much further beyond fishing and the weather… there’s just not much else happening. We’re kind of amazed that the WorldTeach volunteers are able to go solo for so long.
The second and primary reason, of course, is that almost everyone in my life is back in the States somewhere… scattered, yes, but not separated by 4000 miles of the Pacific Ocean. If my whole extended family was within an hour’s boat ride, and my childhood friends still lived next door (as is the case with many of my students), I could see the appeal. But then again, never having experienced anything close to that, I can hardly imagine what it would be like. Anyway, my point is, if you’re reading this blog, I probably miss you. Send me a letter! I like having the paper in my hands, and in some ways it’s easier to respond to snail mail.
Morgan Cawdrey
C/O DVTP
P.O. Box 673
Majuro, MH 96960
10.22.2009 Thursday
Something that can get me down from time to time is hearing about my students’ future goals…ugh, I’ve read and graded “future goals” so many times in the last two weeks that I’ll never see it the same again. I recently did a biography project, starting with interviewing classmates about their pasts and culminating with a mini-poster. I don’t know how serious the students are about their futures (I know I wasn’t in high school…wait, I’m not even NOW), but so many of them express ambitions to be doctors, pilots and other prestigious professions, it is depressing to realize that only a very few, upon graduating from Jaluit High School, will have the necessary educational foundation to pursue something like that.
It seems to me that in many developing countries, you do not always have to have a strong command of English to proceed to higher education, because many other people outside the country speak the native language. The problem here, though, is that nobody speaks Marshallese outside of the RMI. If they want to get out of here, which they basically have to do if they don’t want to break coconuts for the rest of their life, they have to speak English pretty good. I meant “well.” Puts a lot of pressure on me! But I’m not too worried about it…if I had to worry about these kids being ready for an American university, I’d give up right now.
HOWEVER, I don’t want to end on a downer note. So, here’s an excerpt from a biography of a short kid in the junior class…not sure if it was intended to be funny, but I laughed:
“Jael John was born in January 2, 1992. He was very cute, when he was born. When he grew up he was very short and people loved him because he was cute. Jael knew that it was time to make new friends.”
After a tasty lunch of amazing fresh-baked bread and tuna salad, comforted by a few days’ breathing room in my lesson plans and nearly finished with the grading for the first quarter (I may never give extra credit work again…what a headache), I am feeling pretty good…basking in a job relatively well done, I suppose. As I walked across the field that serves as the center of campus on the way to my classroom for my second daily round of classes, I was reflecting on the attractions of this lifestyle.
Taxes here hover around 10%, nobody is really required to work that hard, and the weather is (so far) a smooth 80 degrees. In the hot afternoon sun, everyone stays in the shade except the weird masochistic white guys who go running after school. By 5 p.m., the evening has begun, and there is always a game of softball or volleyball going on at the field near the dorms. The older women, though no longer the pictures of girlish athleticism they once were, are actually surprisingly good at softball. Great defensive plays come out of nowhere.
The only required uniform for women is a colorful guam dress, essentially a mumu, and shoes are very much optional. It’s pretty fun to watch these ladies slide into third base or catch a base-runner in a pickle and force the out. I have a feeling that my mom, a former softball player herself, will take a number of photos when she visits, and there is a better than even chance you will see a painting of it on her website in a few months. Hell, I’ll even tell you the title: “A League of Their Own.”
The main concerns here are getting enough to eat, avoiding disease, and not running out of water. Food is expensive, so fresh fish are the main supplement to flour-based foods and rice. Teachers, for a change, are probably the best-paid people on the island (except for me and Peter, of course), mostly because they actually have an 8-4 job, which no one else really has. Medical treatment, while basic, is also basically free…Peter paid 50 cents for his one doctor’s visit, and the medicine was on the house. As for water, it’s going to be an El Nino year, which means there is less of it. They are predicting about 15% less than normal, but of course we have no idea what normal is.
Being on the second floor, I can see the ocean or lagoon from either side of my classroom… how many times in my life will I be able to say that about my office? Not ever, I’ll wager. So, with all these benefits of island life, am I going to give up on civilization and set up shop here? Not likely, and there are two main reasons. One is that there really isn’t much mental stimulation of any kind. Peter is literally the only person my age with whom I can have a conversation about things that interest me. Even if I spoke Marshallese fluently, I can’t imagine a dialogue going much further beyond fishing and the weather… there’s just not much else happening. We’re kind of amazed that the WorldTeach volunteers are able to go solo for so long.
The second and primary reason, of course, is that almost everyone in my life is back in the States somewhere… scattered, yes, but not separated by 4000 miles of the Pacific Ocean. If my whole extended family was within an hour’s boat ride, and my childhood friends still lived next door (as is the case with many of my students), I could see the appeal. But then again, never having experienced anything close to that, I can hardly imagine what it would be like. Anyway, my point is, if you’re reading this blog, I probably miss you. Send me a letter! I like having the paper in my hands, and in some ways it’s easier to respond to snail mail.
Morgan Cawdrey
C/O DVTP
P.O. Box 673
Majuro, MH 96960
10.22.2009 Thursday
Something that can get me down from time to time is hearing about my students’ future goals…ugh, I’ve read and graded “future goals” so many times in the last two weeks that I’ll never see it the same again. I recently did a biography project, starting with interviewing classmates about their pasts and culminating with a mini-poster. I don’t know how serious the students are about their futures (I know I wasn’t in high school…wait, I’m not even NOW), but so many of them express ambitions to be doctors, pilots and other prestigious professions, it is depressing to realize that only a very few, upon graduating from Jaluit High School, will have the necessary educational foundation to pursue something like that.
It seems to me that in many developing countries, you do not always have to have a strong command of English to proceed to higher education, because many other people outside the country speak the native language. The problem here, though, is that nobody speaks Marshallese outside of the RMI. If they want to get out of here, which they basically have to do if they don’t want to break coconuts for the rest of their life, they have to speak English pretty good. I meant “well.” Puts a lot of pressure on me! But I’m not too worried about it…if I had to worry about these kids being ready for an American university, I’d give up right now.
HOWEVER, I don’t want to end on a downer note. So, here’s an excerpt from a biography of a short kid in the junior class…not sure if it was intended to be funny, but I laughed:
“Jael John was born in January 2, 1992. He was very cute, when he was born. When he grew up he was very short and people loved him because he was cute. Jael knew that it was time to make new friends.”
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Nothing much
Well, this one won't be as long. I have been hoping to post pictures along with the posts, but no dice so far. I have also set up an account on Picasa.com, with a few pix, but I haven't figured out to link this blog to it yet. I'm surprised; for the last few years, the Googlenet (gmail, google calendar, OMG who's excited for Google Voice???) has anticipated my every need and desire, creating conveniences I didn't even know I needed. This is the first time it has let me down.
The most eventful thing that happened lately was starting our shift at the cafeteria a couple weeks ago...Peter and I have "volunteered" to be the adult monitors/helpers at dinnertime on Fridays, at the cafeteria where all the students eat. Two Fridays ago, the dinner special was room-temperature Spam and a heaping portion of white rice. What could be better? I'll tell you what; all that, PLUS a sizable dollop of ketchup administered by yours truly. Yep, I was CKO, chief of ketchup operations, and it's a more complicated job than you might at first think. How much ketchup is appropriate for a hefty slice of Spam and about two pounds of rice? You tell me. And do I give more for boys and bigger people? How much does difference does ketchup make to one's calorie intake? Is there enough for 350+ kids at my current rate of dispensation? Should the condiment grace the expanse of white rice like a bloody wound, or would a well-behaved dollop be more aesthetic?
These questions and more ran through my brain as I stood at the end of the line and sized each individual up for their respective ketchup consumption. I certainly knew what I would want (symmetrical dollop, 2 inches in diameter, directly in between Spam and rice for optimum distribution, of course. But I'm not picky), but I couldn't read their minds.
Pshell, meanwhile, was on guard duty, making sure kids didn't walk out the exit still holding cups or silverware. No small job, to be sure, but it didn't have the far-reaching consequences and manual labor (literally...my hand was sore for two days) of mine. Anyway, at the end of the meal service, after about 45 minutes of looking at and smelling this food, we were quite ready to dig in to our double portions; apparently teachers need more processed pork product than growing teenagers. With all the practice, I raised the squeezing of ketchup to an art form for my own plate.
Apart from that, we're working hard and there's no foreseeable end in sight to that part. We are finishing the quarter this week (Oct. 16), but it's pretty much business as usual, trying to laugh a lot and keep things fun. Well, mostly they laugh at things I do, both intentionally and unintentionally...it turns out that when I am trying hard to explain something, I have tics of which I was never before aware. And then there are the times that my voice rises in pitch uncontrollably, like a puberty-stricken young boy. They enjoy that as well.
So, I hope my effort to make the minutiae of our daily life more interesting was successful, because there ain't much else to tell. My best to everyone, and I'm sure I'm forgetting something, but it's late and there's grading, not to mention eating, to do. But no ketchup...no ketchup.
The most eventful thing that happened lately was starting our shift at the cafeteria a couple weeks ago...Peter and I have "volunteered" to be the adult monitors/helpers at dinnertime on Fridays, at the cafeteria where all the students eat. Two Fridays ago, the dinner special was room-temperature Spam and a heaping portion of white rice. What could be better? I'll tell you what; all that, PLUS a sizable dollop of ketchup administered by yours truly. Yep, I was CKO, chief of ketchup operations, and it's a more complicated job than you might at first think. How much ketchup is appropriate for a hefty slice of Spam and about two pounds of rice? You tell me. And do I give more for boys and bigger people? How much does difference does ketchup make to one's calorie intake? Is there enough for 350+ kids at my current rate of dispensation? Should the condiment grace the expanse of white rice like a bloody wound, or would a well-behaved dollop be more aesthetic?
These questions and more ran through my brain as I stood at the end of the line and sized each individual up for their respective ketchup consumption. I certainly knew what I would want (symmetrical dollop, 2 inches in diameter, directly in between Spam and rice for optimum distribution, of course. But I'm not picky), but I couldn't read their minds.
Pshell, meanwhile, was on guard duty, making sure kids didn't walk out the exit still holding cups or silverware. No small job, to be sure, but it didn't have the far-reaching consequences and manual labor (literally...my hand was sore for two days) of mine. Anyway, at the end of the meal service, after about 45 minutes of looking at and smelling this food, we were quite ready to dig in to our double portions; apparently teachers need more processed pork product than growing teenagers. With all the practice, I raised the squeezing of ketchup to an art form for my own plate.
Apart from that, we're working hard and there's no foreseeable end in sight to that part. We are finishing the quarter this week (Oct. 16), but it's pretty much business as usual, trying to laugh a lot and keep things fun. Well, mostly they laugh at things I do, both intentionally and unintentionally...it turns out that when I am trying hard to explain something, I have tics of which I was never before aware. And then there are the times that my voice rises in pitch uncontrollably, like a puberty-stricken young boy. They enjoy that as well.
So, I hope my effort to make the minutiae of our daily life more interesting was successful, because there ain't much else to tell. My best to everyone, and I'm sure I'm forgetting something, but it's late and there's grading, not to mention eating, to do. But no ketchup...no ketchup.
Monday, September 28, 2009
Fishing, funerals and farms
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This is a long one. It's been tough to get online, but otherwise things are good! I'll spare you the updates about our food rationing, and let you get to the good/wierd stuff.
9.19.09 Friday
At around 9 p.m., I ran into the school nurse heading out to the reef with some students to go fishing, and asked if Peter and I could tag along. In Marshallese custom it is very impolite to say “no,” so I realize now that I left him with little choice, but I think he enjoyed our company, despite our inexperience.
We grabbed our Tevas, headlamps and the machete, and followed them out onto the reef at low tide. Minus, the nurse, brought a powerful waterproof flashlight, and he illuminated the shallow water for the students, who would either try to stun the hapless fish with their machetes or spear them with a long, thin, rubber-propelled trident sort of thing.
The night was absolutely perfect. The sky was clear and full of bright, unfamiliar constellations, including one that looked exactly like those science textbook diagrams of a ball accelerating upward, reaching the apex, and accelerating back down. I pointed it out to Peter. We laughed at the fact that he knew exactly what I meant, and then we pushed our glasses back up, wiped our noses on our sleeves and adjusted our pocket protectors. NERDY. Meanwhile, the students were catching dinner, slowly filling up a bucket with a number of different kinds of fish, all of which averaged about the size of your hand.
The Milky Way is really incredible here, a soft gash that spans the entire night sky only a few degrees northwest from directly overhead. Combined with the balmy, dark tropical breeze and the warm reef water that rippled like velvet under the flashlight, the whole scene was more than a little surreal. I had one of those increasingly infrequent moments of thinking, “Whoa. I’m in the very middle of the Pacific. How did I get here again?”
As we strolled along the reef, keeping an eye out for fish but more just trying to avoid spearing ourselves on sharp coral, Minus, a Jaluit native, told us that there used to be beautiful sand beaches where we were walking, and a lot more fish. The sand is eroding, apparently, moving to other parts of the atoll or washing into the ocean, and overfishing is hurting the fish population. While we were out on the reef, we ran into four or five other groups doing the same thing, and saw many other groups’ flashlights. On a small island, even a thousand people can put a lot of pressure on their natural surroundings. The capital atoll of Majuro, with a population of 25,000, has few beaches, trash piled everywhere, and almost no edible fish.
We finally arrived at our destination, a tidal pool about 30’ X 100’, and one of the students put on a mask, grabbed the trident and the flashlight and went in the shallow water. The flashlight flicking around under the dark water was completely eerie; I imagine it looked completely awesome underwater. Once here, he averaged about one fish per minute. Having made sure my valuable skills of standing and quietly watching were not in dire need, I went off to another part of the pool to kill me a fish.
I felt like a little kid playing in the shallows again, poking at things with a stick and jumping lightly from rock to rock, squealing if I saw an ugly sea creature. This was the adult version, though; my stick was a three-foot machete, the jumps were a lot heavier, and it was way past bedtime. The squeals were the same, however.
After 30 minutes of fruitless slashing in the water, Peter and I finally managed to tag-team assault one particularly slow, 12-inch fish, but it didn’t go down until about the fourth round. By the time we were finished, the poor guy looked like he’d been caught in the prop of a boat. Following the epic hunt, we carried the fish back to the bucket and proudly dropped our one heavily mangled contribution on top of the 20 pristine fish already there.
9.23.09 Wednesday
Mr. Robert’s two-year-old son died of a cold this morning, and it was announced in the daily school bulletin that there would be a service after school. Mr. Robert is a teacher at JHS.
Knowing only that we are culturally obliged to bring a dollar with us to these sorts of things, Peter and I wandered over to the administration building, not really sure what to do or where to go, and certainly a little nervous about our lack of cultural knowledge. It eventually became apparent that the teachers were going over to the house as a group to pay our respects to the family.
The Robert family lives in their own wing of the student dorms, very near the social center of the entire campus, and little kids were running and playing everywhere. The atmosphere outside when we headed over, therefore, was more similar to a party than a funeral. Peter and I followed as all the teachers took off their sandals and went in to a hushed, dim room.
I was not prepared to actually see the body, never having been to an open casket funeral before, but there he was, laid out in the middle of the floor on a white sheet with another white sheet covering everything but the head and flowers draped around. After an unexpected flip of the stomach, I sat down against the wall with Peter. The family sat on a mat near the body, the mother entirely absorbed in her grief.
The paying of respects had all the parts that most similar rituals have…we sat in silence for a while, and then the vice principal stood up and said a few words in Marshallese, then another one of the teachers, and finally one of the school’s security guards, who spoke with such apparent passion that we assumed he was closely related. The webs of relation in a small community are more complex than we can know. When the words were said, after 15 minutes or so, people started to get up and file out, first pausing in front of the mother to put a dollar or a bar of soap on the ground and shake her hand.
When Peter had his birthday a couple weeks ago, the ceremony was actually almost identical, albeit much less hushed and somber. Well-wishers gathered in our living room, sang some songs and ate some cake, and then filed out at the end, shaking his hand and giving him a dollar or candy. It is interesting that the rituals for events of life and of death are so similar.
9.25.09 Friday
If you sat inside our apartment and closed your eyes, shutting out the appliances, modern paint job and crappy Ikea-wannabe furniture, you might think we live on a farm. The boasting roosters that run free on the island never fail to wake us up in the morning, feral cats and dogs are in a loud, seemingly perpetual cycle of either fighting or loving (within their species, of course), and a pig we christened as “Fred” wanders by our balcony all day. To complete the atmosphere, babies tend to go off at any random time during the day or night.
Why do I associate a crying infant with the barnyard? Not sure about that, but I definitely do. I recently realized I have never lived near even one baby, much less the five or six that are living in the buildings surrounding us. My gut-churning, wake-from-the-middle-of-a-deep-sleep reaction to even the faintest crying leads me to assume that there is something very biological and evolutionary in the power of the scream over me. Something about the preservation of the species, etc. Sometimes the air raid siren on the island sounds for unknown reasons, and at first I mistake it for the rising wail of an infant, or vice versa.
Speaking of air raids…while the Japanese were occupying the Marshall Islands up until WWII, Jaluit was one of the main headquarters of command, and there are a number of buildings left here, including a couple barracks (or some kind of housing), a water tower and other catchments, bunkers and a large dock. These structures are all made from reinforced concrete, and it is proof of the Japanese engineering and logistical skill that they are all still in use. We walked underneath the 60-foot water tower a couple weeks ago and saw the kanji characters still written on the underside of the basin. The underground water catchments they built 70+ years ago, in fact, are much larger and still more functional than the brand new catchments that supply our apartment’s water, and are highly prized by their owners. The dock is actually more recently built, as a form of war reparations from the Japanese, but it's quite excellent. I’m sure it is the main reason that Jabor is the hub of Jaluit Atoll. The Marshallese may not have liked having the Japanese here, but they certainly left some useful construction behind.
Totally unrelated…there are some pretty funny names here, probably the results of a combination of cruel parental jokes, lost bets and a limited knowledge of English. Peter has a male student, first name Sweet, last name Melon, and Tricia, one of the other DVTP teachers who is working in Majuro, has a Dick Dick, a Handy (they sit next to each other), a Jellyann, and, my personal favorite, a Stiffany.
9.27.09 Saturday
Quote of the day
“Man…cooking Spam in olive oil is the equivalent of driving a Ferrari to the corner store.”
Pshell
Also: Pshell makes a good point. If, in fact, Kraft Mac and Cheese wishes to be, as the packaging boasts, “The Cheesiest,” why don’t they just make the “cheese product” portion twice as big? The superlative is suspect. These are the things we think about.
Friday, September 18, 2009
First!
Hi all!
I’ll begin this blog, with my very first blog post ever, clutching to my position of skepticism about this whole new-fangled Internet 2.0 business. Once a blogger, how far are you from ceaseless Twittering? Nevertheless, I have decided that this is best way to update friends and family on my Marshall adventures, so here goes:
Quick summary so far (skip if you have been getting letters) – I am working as a teacher in the main village of Jaluit Atoll, called Jabor, and Jaluit is a part of the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI). The program in which I’m participating is called the Dartmouth Volunteer Teaching Program…there are other teaching programs, like WorldTeach, which take people of all ages, and place teachers in a number of countries. DVTP is basically limited to Dartmouth graduating seniors, and only places us in the RMI, and nowhere else. Why the Marshall Islands? Because the Dartmouth education program has had a relationship with this government for a while, and they are in need of English speakers, inexperienced teachers as they may be. So here I am, after two weeks of orientation on the main island (Majuro) and a little over a month on the outer island of Jaluit, teaching English writing and grammar to juniors and seniors at a boarding high school, and living with my co-worker, former fraternity roommate, and good friend, Peter Shellito. What follow from here should mostly be my experiences, observations and thoughts about life here.
First of all – I like to establish a short philosophy early on when I am beginning a new experience. For high school, when I was stressed (admittedly, not often), I told myself, “It’s all good.” When I went to China for the first time, I described it as “one huge mistake,” but in a very positive way. So, at the first staff meeting of the school year here, we were trying to come up with a school mission and motto (because someone misplaced the previous, apparently solitary copy…no, I’m not kidding). One of the working groups suggested “no struggle, no progress” as a motto, in the vein of “no pain, no gain.”
What Peter and I quickly realized about that suggestion (which was not chosen) was that with the low level of English here, it could easily be misinterpreted to say, “No struggle and no progress,” which is, of course, a hilariously terrible message to give to students who are already often unmotivated. At this point in time, Peter and I were also frequently freaking out about school starting and not knowing anything about teaching, so we decided that we would adapt this motto to our own uses: “No struggle. No progress.” Isn’t English subtle and fun? Don’t get me wrong, we are working pretty much all the time, but whenever one of us is really struggling with lesson planning or something, the other can say these four words and basically remind them that there is only so much we can do in one year, and that we’re not here to stress out about our job. We have our whole lives for that.
9.14.09
Everything here is on island time, including the school bells. The bells themselves are actually big, hopefully empty CO2 tanks left over from WWII, and when it is time to change classes, someone comes out with a hammer hits the tank on the side five or six times. And it’s not just the high school; the elementary school and the churches use the same method. Picture a tranquil Sunday morning, everyone dressed in their nice clothes and milling around on the green waiting for Mass to begin…then a little kid tears around a corner and starts banging the hell out of a rusty old gas tank.
On a different note, it turns out that Marshallese students REALLY don’t like to speak in front of their peers. One day last week, I was trying to introduce a little public speaking to our normal activities by having them read their homework in front of the class. To get the first three people up was like pulling teeth, and after about 15 minutes of threatening zeros, wheedling, and awkward silences, I was tired of my own voice and simply said, “Okay, if people don’t start volunteering to speak, we’re just going to have a quiz instead. So what’ll it be, reading two sentences, or taking a quiz you’re unprepared for?” Unanimously, the class shouted, “Quiz, quiz!”
Ah. Touché, my young friends, you called my bluff. I had a quiz ready, but I didn’t want them to fail it, so we spent the rest of the class doing review. They won this round, but the year is really, really far from over.
However, that shyness does not always extend to their classroom participation; at times, when I ask for an answer from the class, one particularly garrulous and enthusiastic girl, depending on her mood, will start shouting out potential solutions at increasing speed and volume, barely taking time for a breath between each wrong answer. I completely lost control last week, unable to teach for a good three minutes as I tried to stop laughing. But hey, sometimes she gets one right. As Sun Tzu, or maybe some bad Chinglish packaging I read recently, said, “One Hundred Shots Can Not [sic] Miss.”
9.17.09
Some nice guys from Sweden that we hadn’t met before stopped by our apartment in the afternoon on the 17th to hand off some mail for delivery to WorldTeach. Yes, that’s us, the white people’s post office. Neither shark nor rust nor gloom of typhoon stays these couriers...etc.
Anyway, we invited the guys to hang out for a bit, and we had a very refreshing conversation…they were here with the EPA for about a week, but they’re actually graduate students working on their thesis (something about ocean erosion on Pacific islands…Peter, who majored in Environmental and Earth Science, nearly had a nerdgasm). One was 32, getting a degree after a few years spent working on cruise ships and other odd jobs…30 is the new 20? I sure hope so, that sounded pretty interesting to me. The other was 25.
Supposedly, they were getting data from the local islands, which have suffered a lot of erosion recently (not many sandy beaches left in Jabor), but they already have all their data from previous researchers, so they mostly tooled around the local islands with the local EPA representative and the EPA’s boat (using the EPA’s gas, a valuable commodity). The 32-year-old said they went camping on a few islands, explored the old Japanese HQ island, and he also mentioned that he attempted an eighty-foot solo SCUBA dive to see a sunken WWII plane with less than 700 psi of ancient, leftover air in the tank he borrowed. That is only about two minutes of breathing time at that depth, so it was a very quick trip, and one that he described as “the stupidest [most dangerous] dive I’ve ever done.” What I’m ultimately saying is that they were doing all the things I wanted to do here if we had more disposable time and income. They left the day after we met them, so bon voyage.
Their temporary and friendly presence reminded me that we’re not the only young ri-belles (white people/non-natives) staying semi-permanently on the island…there are a couple of Mormon missionaries about our age from New Zealand who arrived around the same time that we did, and are staying, I presume, for the normal two-year missionary stint. We pass them occasionally on the way to something, us in shorts and sandals, them in the standard black tie, white shirt and black pants and shoes, and nod hello. The uniforms stick out here more than they do in most places. They’re nice guys, but since we introduced ourselves to them, no more than a few words have passed between the four of us. They always seem vague about what they’re doing…not really sure what they’re all about. Well, Mormonism is probably what they’re all about. Anyway, my point was that I wish we had more in common with the other ri-belles here.
9.18.09
Funny incident yesterday; in order to practice future tense, I was setting up a “dream trip” planning activity in class, and we were brainstorming destinations as a class. A couple students suggested Batto, which is an island just 100 yards from Jabor, separated by a deep, narrow channel through which all the large boats must enter the Jaluit lagoon. I wasn’t sure how to spell the name, so I asked them to spell it for me, and I wrote it as I heard it and ended up with “bato” written on the board. Apparently the second “t” is an important distinction, because the entire class lost it, and it took me a couple minutes to restore them from pandemonium. Yeah, you guessed it: “bato” is a Marshallese word for “penis.” Of COURSE it is.
I’ll begin this blog, with my very first blog post ever, clutching to my position of skepticism about this whole new-fangled Internet 2.0 business. Once a blogger, how far are you from ceaseless Twittering? Nevertheless, I have decided that this is best way to update friends and family on my Marshall adventures, so here goes:
Quick summary so far (skip if you have been getting letters) – I am working as a teacher in the main village of Jaluit Atoll, called Jabor, and Jaluit is a part of the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI). The program in which I’m participating is called the Dartmouth Volunteer Teaching Program…there are other teaching programs, like WorldTeach, which take people of all ages, and place teachers in a number of countries. DVTP is basically limited to Dartmouth graduating seniors, and only places us in the RMI, and nowhere else. Why the Marshall Islands? Because the Dartmouth education program has had a relationship with this government for a while, and they are in need of English speakers, inexperienced teachers as they may be. So here I am, after two weeks of orientation on the main island (Majuro) and a little over a month on the outer island of Jaluit, teaching English writing and grammar to juniors and seniors at a boarding high school, and living with my co-worker, former fraternity roommate, and good friend, Peter Shellito. What follow from here should mostly be my experiences, observations and thoughts about life here.
First of all – I like to establish a short philosophy early on when I am beginning a new experience. For high school, when I was stressed (admittedly, not often), I told myself, “It’s all good.” When I went to China for the first time, I described it as “one huge mistake,” but in a very positive way. So, at the first staff meeting of the school year here, we were trying to come up with a school mission and motto (because someone misplaced the previous, apparently solitary copy…no, I’m not kidding). One of the working groups suggested “no struggle, no progress” as a motto, in the vein of “no pain, no gain.”
What Peter and I quickly realized about that suggestion (which was not chosen) was that with the low level of English here, it could easily be misinterpreted to say, “No struggle and no progress,” which is, of course, a hilariously terrible message to give to students who are already often unmotivated. At this point in time, Peter and I were also frequently freaking out about school starting and not knowing anything about teaching, so we decided that we would adapt this motto to our own uses: “No struggle. No progress.” Isn’t English subtle and fun? Don’t get me wrong, we are working pretty much all the time, but whenever one of us is really struggling with lesson planning or something, the other can say these four words and basically remind them that there is only so much we can do in one year, and that we’re not here to stress out about our job. We have our whole lives for that.
9.14.09
Everything here is on island time, including the school bells. The bells themselves are actually big, hopefully empty CO2 tanks left over from WWII, and when it is time to change classes, someone comes out with a hammer hits the tank on the side five or six times. And it’s not just the high school; the elementary school and the churches use the same method. Picture a tranquil Sunday morning, everyone dressed in their nice clothes and milling around on the green waiting for Mass to begin…then a little kid tears around a corner and starts banging the hell out of a rusty old gas tank.
On a different note, it turns out that Marshallese students REALLY don’t like to speak in front of their peers. One day last week, I was trying to introduce a little public speaking to our normal activities by having them read their homework in front of the class. To get the first three people up was like pulling teeth, and after about 15 minutes of threatening zeros, wheedling, and awkward silences, I was tired of my own voice and simply said, “Okay, if people don’t start volunteering to speak, we’re just going to have a quiz instead. So what’ll it be, reading two sentences, or taking a quiz you’re unprepared for?” Unanimously, the class shouted, “Quiz, quiz!”
Ah. Touché, my young friends, you called my bluff. I had a quiz ready, but I didn’t want them to fail it, so we spent the rest of the class doing review. They won this round, but the year is really, really far from over.
However, that shyness does not always extend to their classroom participation; at times, when I ask for an answer from the class, one particularly garrulous and enthusiastic girl, depending on her mood, will start shouting out potential solutions at increasing speed and volume, barely taking time for a breath between each wrong answer. I completely lost control last week, unable to teach for a good three minutes as I tried to stop laughing. But hey, sometimes she gets one right. As Sun Tzu, or maybe some bad Chinglish packaging I read recently, said, “One Hundred Shots Can Not [sic] Miss.”
9.17.09
Some nice guys from Sweden that we hadn’t met before stopped by our apartment in the afternoon on the 17th to hand off some mail for delivery to WorldTeach. Yes, that’s us, the white people’s post office. Neither shark nor rust nor gloom of typhoon stays these couriers...etc.
Anyway, we invited the guys to hang out for a bit, and we had a very refreshing conversation…they were here with the EPA for about a week, but they’re actually graduate students working on their thesis (something about ocean erosion on Pacific islands…Peter, who majored in Environmental and Earth Science, nearly had a nerdgasm). One was 32, getting a degree after a few years spent working on cruise ships and other odd jobs…30 is the new 20? I sure hope so, that sounded pretty interesting to me. The other was 25.
Supposedly, they were getting data from the local islands, which have suffered a lot of erosion recently (not many sandy beaches left in Jabor), but they already have all their data from previous researchers, so they mostly tooled around the local islands with the local EPA representative and the EPA’s boat (using the EPA’s gas, a valuable commodity). The 32-year-old said they went camping on a few islands, explored the old Japanese HQ island, and he also mentioned that he attempted an eighty-foot solo SCUBA dive to see a sunken WWII plane with less than 700 psi of ancient, leftover air in the tank he borrowed. That is only about two minutes of breathing time at that depth, so it was a very quick trip, and one that he described as “the stupidest [most dangerous] dive I’ve ever done.” What I’m ultimately saying is that they were doing all the things I wanted to do here if we had more disposable time and income. They left the day after we met them, so bon voyage.
Their temporary and friendly presence reminded me that we’re not the only young ri-belles (white people/non-natives) staying semi-permanently on the island…there are a couple of Mormon missionaries about our age from New Zealand who arrived around the same time that we did, and are staying, I presume, for the normal two-year missionary stint. We pass them occasionally on the way to something, us in shorts and sandals, them in the standard black tie, white shirt and black pants and shoes, and nod hello. The uniforms stick out here more than they do in most places. They’re nice guys, but since we introduced ourselves to them, no more than a few words have passed between the four of us. They always seem vague about what they’re doing…not really sure what they’re all about. Well, Mormonism is probably what they’re all about. Anyway, my point was that I wish we had more in common with the other ri-belles here.
9.18.09
Funny incident yesterday; in order to practice future tense, I was setting up a “dream trip” planning activity in class, and we were brainstorming destinations as a class. A couple students suggested Batto, which is an island just 100 yards from Jabor, separated by a deep, narrow channel through which all the large boats must enter the Jaluit lagoon. I wasn’t sure how to spell the name, so I asked them to spell it for me, and I wrote it as I heard it and ended up with “bato” written on the board. Apparently the second “t” is an important distinction, because the entire class lost it, and it took me a couple minutes to restore them from pandemonium. Yeah, you guessed it: “bato” is a Marshallese word for “penis.” Of COURSE it is.
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