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.