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.

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.