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.

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.

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!