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.”
Sunday, October 25, 2009
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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