Sunday, March 7, 2010
Surviving Paradise
If you want to know more about the Marshall Islands and the adventures I've been having, you should check out Surviving Paradise, a book that just came out. It's by Peter Rudiak-Gould, a WorldTeach volunteer on the small island of Ujae a few years ago. He also wrote the language manual Dartmouth and WorldTeach volunteers use to learn Marshallese. His observations about Marshallese culture and the difficulties and joys of being a teacher here are funny and really interesting, and they reflect our experience here in Laura a lot, even though Peter was on an isolated outer island.
America's Next Top Model- Marshall Islands
I am so far away from the fashion world right now. You know how America's Next Top Model brings the top five or so girls to some exotic location, like Japan or Thailand or something? I live in a place ANTM would never visit.
Of course, as soon as that thought occured to me I started to picture it: Tyra and the girls doing a show in the Marshalls. Posing with the coral reef. Trying to make muumuus and guam dresses sexy. You know how there's a girl on every season who has a complete breakdown because she refuses to pose nude? Well, this time a girl would have a breakdown because she refused to pose with her shoulders and knees covered ("I just...I didn't get into the modeling world to do something so...so degrading!"). Inevitably, one girl would be hospitalized for dehydration and exhaustion. They'd film a commercial about Spam and the girls would have to smile on camera while choking down a bite of the stuff. The Jade character (the crazy one) would go drinking at Flame Tree and get into big trouble. They'd all go to Eneko for a day and spontaneously strip down to nothing.
Haha. Yes I'm crazy.
Of course, as soon as that thought occured to me I started to picture it: Tyra and the girls doing a show in the Marshalls. Posing with the coral reef. Trying to make muumuus and guam dresses sexy. You know how there's a girl on every season who has a complete breakdown because she refuses to pose nude? Well, this time a girl would have a breakdown because she refused to pose with her shoulders and knees covered ("I just...I didn't get into the modeling world to do something so...so degrading!"). Inevitably, one girl would be hospitalized for dehydration and exhaustion. They'd film a commercial about Spam and the girls would have to smile on camera while choking down a bite of the stuff. The Jade character (the crazy one) would go drinking at Flame Tree and get into big trouble. They'd all go to Eneko for a day and spontaneously strip down to nothing.
Haha. Yes I'm crazy.
Good Stuff
So you don’t start thinking I’m miserable these days, here are a few recent highlights:
- The power outages really increase our appreciation of island life. We open the doors to catch breezes, cook up our own Marshallese barbecue (chicken marinated in soy sauce) in our fire pit, listen to Heather’s guitar playing and the silent of an electricity-free night, and look at the stars. We enjoy the surprisingly bright moonlight. We lay outside on the prickly grass under the moon instead of staying holed up in the house watching TV shows on our laptops. We go swimming to cool off or buy ice cream from the generator-powered Mecca of Payless.
- Teaching is going well, despite the obvious obstacles of the 3-classes-a-week schedule and the daily blackouts. I’ve been reading aloud to my classes, and I chose a perfect book for my rowdy 9B: There’s a Boy in the Girl’s Bathroom. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it. (It’s way smarter and more touching than the title would imply.) For a final project, the kids could choose either to draw or act out a scene from the story, and the results were awesome: some great drawings and some incredible, spot-on performances that showed they really understood the story and had learned how to use expression and feeling in their public speaking.
- Only two kids showed up for my 9C final exam period…and it was two boys who never come to class and are unbelievably disruptive when they do. I had to hunt around to find the rest of them, who seemed confused about the finals schedule (which, of course, had only been posted the day before). Why is this a highlight? Well, I eventually rounded up most of the students and they were able to produce mostly-comprehensible drawings and descriptions of things from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which I’m reading to them. And it was very entertaining to see those two little brats show up on time, telling me they were ready to take the exam.
- Alison and I have started running again, and now we go almost every day. This is a little rough with my inability to shower, but I’m dealing with it. It helps that I’m not a clean freak- once the sweat dries, I stop feeling gross and dirty and just accept that I’ll have to go to bed dirty again. Better than going to bed hungry, a phenomenon some of my students are unfortunately familiar with. But I digress! The running is going really well and it’s great to be exercising regularly. We’ve found a mostly dog-free route and we’re running farther and longer every day.
- My students never cease to amaze me. Often this is because I find their behavior a continual surprise and shock: what made you think it was ok to flick your lighter on in class? How is it at all acceptable to torture a wounded bird? Why do you even bother showing up to class if you’re coming 60 minutes late? But just as often, they amaze me in positive ways, with impressive drawings or detailed, interesting stories or touching poems. Jakira, an aggressive, disruptive, hilarious girl in my 9C, has done a complete 180: she’s lost the attitude and now SMILES at me in a totally genuine way. She shows up to every class, on time, and usually at least tries to do the work. Despite her (occasionally willful) low comprehension, she’s getting a solid C in a class that is mostly Fs, just because she, unlike most of her classmates, has decided to come to class and participate. It’s a small triumph, but a really surprising and rewarding one. And by rewarding, I don’t mean that I know this will make a huge difference in Jakira’s future. I don’t know that at all, especially in a place where academic competence or even excellence is no guarantee of success. It’s rewarding for ME, because I’ve gained her respect and her interest and her willingness to participate and try, which shows I can do it. And I hope that it makes a difference for her too, at the very least showing her that her self-worth rests in more than just her awesome dance moves (I’m not kidding) and her sassy attitude. At the very least, she was visibly proud and happy when I told her how great a job she was doing this quarter. That high-five made up for quite a bit of the exasperation she’s caused me over the course of the year.
- Yesterday Heather, Alison, and I took a trip to the nearby island of Enemanit (a few islands past Ejit) with the yacht club. Usually the yacht club has a race on the first sunday of the month, but there weren't enough boats so we had a picnic instead. The three of us hitched into town and got there just in time. It was a beautiful day for sailing and snorkeling and bocce ball and picnicking. The fish on the reef at Enemanit were different from the ones at Laura, and for once we could swim without guam dresses on! It was great. At the end of the day we had to hitch back to Laura, because there are no buses on Sundays, and we really lucked out: after taking a taxi out of downtown and getting a short ride to the airport from this woman who was a senator's daughter, we were walking by the airport when a guy pulled over and said he was going to Laura! We literally shrieked with joy. Great luck. He drives a taxi in town but lives in Laura, and of course he happens to know Amanda- they played together as kids. Small island!
- The power outages really increase our appreciation of island life. We open the doors to catch breezes, cook up our own Marshallese barbecue (chicken marinated in soy sauce) in our fire pit, listen to Heather’s guitar playing and the silent of an electricity-free night, and look at the stars. We enjoy the surprisingly bright moonlight. We lay outside on the prickly grass under the moon instead of staying holed up in the house watching TV shows on our laptops. We go swimming to cool off or buy ice cream from the generator-powered Mecca of Payless.
- Teaching is going well, despite the obvious obstacles of the 3-classes-a-week schedule and the daily blackouts. I’ve been reading aloud to my classes, and I chose a perfect book for my rowdy 9B: There’s a Boy in the Girl’s Bathroom. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it. (It’s way smarter and more touching than the title would imply.) For a final project, the kids could choose either to draw or act out a scene from the story, and the results were awesome: some great drawings and some incredible, spot-on performances that showed they really understood the story and had learned how to use expression and feeling in their public speaking.
- Only two kids showed up for my 9C final exam period…and it was two boys who never come to class and are unbelievably disruptive when they do. I had to hunt around to find the rest of them, who seemed confused about the finals schedule (which, of course, had only been posted the day before). Why is this a highlight? Well, I eventually rounded up most of the students and they were able to produce mostly-comprehensible drawings and descriptions of things from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which I’m reading to them. And it was very entertaining to see those two little brats show up on time, telling me they were ready to take the exam.
- Alison and I have started running again, and now we go almost every day. This is a little rough with my inability to shower, but I’m dealing with it. It helps that I’m not a clean freak- once the sweat dries, I stop feeling gross and dirty and just accept that I’ll have to go to bed dirty again. Better than going to bed hungry, a phenomenon some of my students are unfortunately familiar with. But I digress! The running is going really well and it’s great to be exercising regularly. We’ve found a mostly dog-free route and we’re running farther and longer every day.
- My students never cease to amaze me. Often this is because I find their behavior a continual surprise and shock: what made you think it was ok to flick your lighter on in class? How is it at all acceptable to torture a wounded bird? Why do you even bother showing up to class if you’re coming 60 minutes late? But just as often, they amaze me in positive ways, with impressive drawings or detailed, interesting stories or touching poems. Jakira, an aggressive, disruptive, hilarious girl in my 9C, has done a complete 180: she’s lost the attitude and now SMILES at me in a totally genuine way. She shows up to every class, on time, and usually at least tries to do the work. Despite her (occasionally willful) low comprehension, she’s getting a solid C in a class that is mostly Fs, just because she, unlike most of her classmates, has decided to come to class and participate. It’s a small triumph, but a really surprising and rewarding one. And by rewarding, I don’t mean that I know this will make a huge difference in Jakira’s future. I don’t know that at all, especially in a place where academic competence or even excellence is no guarantee of success. It’s rewarding for ME, because I’ve gained her respect and her interest and her willingness to participate and try, which shows I can do it. And I hope that it makes a difference for her too, at the very least showing her that her self-worth rests in more than just her awesome dance moves (I’m not kidding) and her sassy attitude. At the very least, she was visibly proud and happy when I told her how great a job she was doing this quarter. That high-five made up for quite a bit of the exasperation she’s caused me over the course of the year.
- Yesterday Heather, Alison, and I took a trip to the nearby island of Enemanit (a few islands past Ejit) with the yacht club. Usually the yacht club has a race on the first sunday of the month, but there weren't enough boats so we had a picnic instead. The three of us hitched into town and got there just in time. It was a beautiful day for sailing and snorkeling and bocce ball and picnicking. The fish on the reef at Enemanit were different from the ones at Laura, and for once we could swim without guam dresses on! It was great. At the end of the day we had to hitch back to Laura, because there are no buses on Sundays, and we really lucked out: after taking a taxi out of downtown and getting a short ride to the airport from this woman who was a senator's daughter, we were walking by the airport when a guy pulled over and said he was going to Laura! We literally shrieked with joy. Great luck. He drives a taxi in town but lives in Laura, and of course he happens to know Amanda- they played together as kids. Small island!
Power and Water
While the whole country of the Marshall Islands is experiencing a bit of a water shortage, here in Laura we’ve got our own particularly frustrating brand of water shortage. Most of the country’s water comes from rain that falls onto roofs or the airplane runway and is collected in reservoirs or catchments. But this is supplemented by wells dug down to the “Laura lens,” a pocket of groundwater under Laura that is, apparently, lens-shaped. Our house has a pump that brings up water from this well, which is too brackish and mineral-laden for drinking (it might even contain contaminants like embalming fluid) but which supplies plenty of water for toilet-flushing, showering, and cleaning needs.
Problem: the pump requires electricity. Did I mention the daily power outages? For most of the year we had to deal with a power outage maybe once a week or once every few weeks, maybe a cluster of them when something went wrong at the power plant or a line went down nearby. But now the island is experiencing rolling blackouts, because only three of the power plant’s seven engines are functioning….not enough to provide power to the whole island, even at off-peak hours. So we get to trade around: power in Rita (downtown), no power in Laura. SWITCH. And repeat.
So my school days are now punctuated by a sudden silence, darkness, and groan (from both myself and the students) at around 9 am when the power dies for the day. Usually it comes back by 7 pm or so, though one day we had no power until 10:30. We can’t make photocopies. We can’t use computers (my laptop has 30 minutes of battery life, at best). We can’t listen to music, watch movies, cook on the hotplate, or charge our cellphones. Our barely-functioning fridge becomes useless, and UHT milk (pasteurized, lasts forever) begins to go bad. Air-conditioned classrooms in the main building become warm, dark prisons where learning and teaching, not to mention any semblance of classroom management, become even more difficult than usual.
But that’s not the worst of it. No power, no pumps: no water. We can’t wash dishes, take showers, or flush toilets at the Laura house, unless we want to fill buckets with our precious catchment water, used for drinking. And when the power comes back on, the situation remains the same. This never used to happen, but now whenever there’s a power outage the water pump freaks out and needs to be “reset” when the power comes back on. Our neighbor/landlord Sammie is the only one who knows how to fix it, and he isn’t usually around. If we can’t find Sammie before the next blackout hits, we might go for days with no water, as the power goes off and on and we sit right over a lens full of water that we can’t use. It’s incredibly frustrating. Thank god we have our makeshift catchments, and enough hours of electricity to boil catchment water for drinking.
I realize I am complaining a lot in this post. But I am beginning to feel like I’m on an extended camping trip. Camping is a lot of fun, and it’s great to rough it for a while. But at the end it feels really great to go home and wash your hair and finally feel clean again and sleep in a real bed. It’s making me want to go home, and I don’t WANT to want to go home- I’ll be ready to go home in May and there’s plenty of things I miss, but I like it here and I want to enjoy it for the rest of the time.
Heather reminded me of something I said at the very beginning of the year when we visited fellow Dartmouth teachers Kiersten and Malcolm on Ejit, a little island past Rita (downtown) that you can get to by walking across the reef. Ejit is home to some of the Bikinians displaced by the nuclear testing in their atoll, and Ejit is very much affected by the money they receive from the US government. Kiersten and Malcolm’s house is incredibly nice, even by US standards: air conditioning, two bedrooms with their own large beds, fridge, cabinets, linoleum floors, table, shelves and shelves of books, bathroom with HOT running water…and all of it functional! When the three of us first saw it we couldn’t believe the Ejit teachers had such a sweet deal, and I remarked that I could put up with anything, teaching-wise and culture-wise, if I lived in a place like this. Kiersten was back for a second year, and I said if I lived in the Ejit house, I’d come back too!
Heather and I talked it over tonight: it’s not that the house is what makes the experience. If you asked Kiersten her favorite part about being here or what brought her back for a second year, she wouldn’t say “our nice house!” But the house, and its amenities, and its convenience and functionality, ALLOW Kiersten to enjoy everything more, and allow her to cope better with the things that suck. The house is one less thing to worry about. If the outside world is frustrating and teaching is nearly impossible and the people are inscrutable and the language is confusing and the heat is unbearable and the mosquitoes are ridiculous….if you at least have a comfortable, private, functional space to call home, you can handle it. If, instead, after a day of frustration and craziness you come home to a space that smells (because the bathroom hasn’t been flushed for two days) and that’s uncomfortable (because there’s only one bed and one futon for three people, and the air conditioning is broken), where your food goes bad (the broken fridge) and you can’t shower (no water)…all the other things that are difficult get to you a lot more.
Problem: the pump requires electricity. Did I mention the daily power outages? For most of the year we had to deal with a power outage maybe once a week or once every few weeks, maybe a cluster of them when something went wrong at the power plant or a line went down nearby. But now the island is experiencing rolling blackouts, because only three of the power plant’s seven engines are functioning….not enough to provide power to the whole island, even at off-peak hours. So we get to trade around: power in Rita (downtown), no power in Laura. SWITCH. And repeat.
So my school days are now punctuated by a sudden silence, darkness, and groan (from both myself and the students) at around 9 am when the power dies for the day. Usually it comes back by 7 pm or so, though one day we had no power until 10:30. We can’t make photocopies. We can’t use computers (my laptop has 30 minutes of battery life, at best). We can’t listen to music, watch movies, cook on the hotplate, or charge our cellphones. Our barely-functioning fridge becomes useless, and UHT milk (pasteurized, lasts forever) begins to go bad. Air-conditioned classrooms in the main building become warm, dark prisons where learning and teaching, not to mention any semblance of classroom management, become even more difficult than usual.
But that’s not the worst of it. No power, no pumps: no water. We can’t wash dishes, take showers, or flush toilets at the Laura house, unless we want to fill buckets with our precious catchment water, used for drinking. And when the power comes back on, the situation remains the same. This never used to happen, but now whenever there’s a power outage the water pump freaks out and needs to be “reset” when the power comes back on. Our neighbor/landlord Sammie is the only one who knows how to fix it, and he isn’t usually around. If we can’t find Sammie before the next blackout hits, we might go for days with no water, as the power goes off and on and we sit right over a lens full of water that we can’t use. It’s incredibly frustrating. Thank god we have our makeshift catchments, and enough hours of electricity to boil catchment water for drinking.
I realize I am complaining a lot in this post. But I am beginning to feel like I’m on an extended camping trip. Camping is a lot of fun, and it’s great to rough it for a while. But at the end it feels really great to go home and wash your hair and finally feel clean again and sleep in a real bed. It’s making me want to go home, and I don’t WANT to want to go home- I’ll be ready to go home in May and there’s plenty of things I miss, but I like it here and I want to enjoy it for the rest of the time.
Heather reminded me of something I said at the very beginning of the year when we visited fellow Dartmouth teachers Kiersten and Malcolm on Ejit, a little island past Rita (downtown) that you can get to by walking across the reef. Ejit is home to some of the Bikinians displaced by the nuclear testing in their atoll, and Ejit is very much affected by the money they receive from the US government. Kiersten and Malcolm’s house is incredibly nice, even by US standards: air conditioning, two bedrooms with their own large beds, fridge, cabinets, linoleum floors, table, shelves and shelves of books, bathroom with HOT running water…and all of it functional! When the three of us first saw it we couldn’t believe the Ejit teachers had such a sweet deal, and I remarked that I could put up with anything, teaching-wise and culture-wise, if I lived in a place like this. Kiersten was back for a second year, and I said if I lived in the Ejit house, I’d come back too!
Heather and I talked it over tonight: it’s not that the house is what makes the experience. If you asked Kiersten her favorite part about being here or what brought her back for a second year, she wouldn’t say “our nice house!” But the house, and its amenities, and its convenience and functionality, ALLOW Kiersten to enjoy everything more, and allow her to cope better with the things that suck. The house is one less thing to worry about. If the outside world is frustrating and teaching is nearly impossible and the people are inscrutable and the language is confusing and the heat is unbearable and the mosquitoes are ridiculous….if you at least have a comfortable, private, functional space to call home, you can handle it. If, instead, after a day of frustration and craziness you come home to a space that smells (because the bathroom hasn’t been flushed for two days) and that’s uncomfortable (because there’s only one bed and one futon for three people, and the air conditioning is broken), where your food goes bad (the broken fridge) and you can’t shower (no water)…all the other things that are difficult get to you a lot more.
Water Shortage
The rainy season starts sometime in summer and peaks in December, followed rather abruptly by the dry season. This year is an El Nino year, so we were warned that the dry season would be even drier than usual. All the fresh water in the Marshall Islands comes from rain, so you need access to well-water that’s not really fit for drinking, your own water catchment, or paid water services that come from runoff at the airport. Our house has well-water which we use for washing, and we made our own “catchments” out of trashcans placed strategically under the gutter spouts.
As predicted, we began to have a bit of a water shortage. The newspaper reported only three days of water left in the reservoir that supplies town, and people were driving to relatives’ houses to get water from catchments. Alison’s host mom, Piki, had to give out lots of her water to relatives. And when I say “had to,” I mean that culturally there is a sense of obligation…if someone asks you for something, especially a necessity like water, it is incredibly rude to say no. Alison was getting worried about the water levels at her house- it hadn’t rained for weeks Piki kept giving out water. When she asked, Piki said her mother had always told her that when you are generous and share out your water, when you get to the bottom of the barrel God will fill it up again. It rained that afternoon, while Alison and I were taking a walk, and we had to laugh about how this would prove to Piki that she was right.
The same attitude is visible in my students’ work. A student writing in an essay explained that the water shortage was a result of “the bad thing” that people do. When I asked her what “bad thing” she was referring to, she looked uncomfortable, shrugged, and said “burn plastic?” Oh boy. They’ve gotten plenty of lectures on the evils of burning plastic, and I think she was connecting the dire warnings about depletion of the ozone layer with increasing temperatures and reduced precipitation. (Sadly, she and most of her country don’t seem to realize that even if the whole country stopped burning plastic and driving cars, they’ll still be doomed to rising sea levels because of global warming resulting from the emissions of much larger countries). Her solution? We should pray to God for more rain.
Teaching moment, right? So I tried to explain that the Marshall Islands get plenty of rain, it just all comes in the rainy season. If there’s too much rain in the rainy season, and not enough in the dry season, what do we do? As she eventually realized, we need to collect rainwater in catchments and save it for dry season. It was tougher to get her to realize the true solution for this so-called “water shortage”: we need to collect and save more of the rainy-season abundance, so we need more catchments and bigger catchments. So “God” provides the water, but we have to be smart enough to meet God, or the weather, halfway: get something to collect all that water!
It’s bad enough that a ninth-grader doesn’t understand this. What’s worse is that the country’s leaders don’t understand it either. I read in the newspaper that the government would save tons of money that it spends treating water-borne diseases if it provided poor households with catchments for clean water. Worse, the government of Japan has offered the Marshall Islands a huge reservoir, no charge. It would vastly increase the water collecting and storing capacity of the country, and probably would’ve avoided this year’s water shortage. The problem? No one is willing to provide the land for the reservoir. I guess this isn’t a particularly Marshallese problem at all. It’s the same story everywhere: political squabbles and shortsightedness get in the way of real, simple, significant change.
As predicted, we began to have a bit of a water shortage. The newspaper reported only three days of water left in the reservoir that supplies town, and people were driving to relatives’ houses to get water from catchments. Alison’s host mom, Piki, had to give out lots of her water to relatives. And when I say “had to,” I mean that culturally there is a sense of obligation…if someone asks you for something, especially a necessity like water, it is incredibly rude to say no. Alison was getting worried about the water levels at her house- it hadn’t rained for weeks Piki kept giving out water. When she asked, Piki said her mother had always told her that when you are generous and share out your water, when you get to the bottom of the barrel God will fill it up again. It rained that afternoon, while Alison and I were taking a walk, and we had to laugh about how this would prove to Piki that she was right.
The same attitude is visible in my students’ work. A student writing in an essay explained that the water shortage was a result of “the bad thing” that people do. When I asked her what “bad thing” she was referring to, she looked uncomfortable, shrugged, and said “burn plastic?” Oh boy. They’ve gotten plenty of lectures on the evils of burning plastic, and I think she was connecting the dire warnings about depletion of the ozone layer with increasing temperatures and reduced precipitation. (Sadly, she and most of her country don’t seem to realize that even if the whole country stopped burning plastic and driving cars, they’ll still be doomed to rising sea levels because of global warming resulting from the emissions of much larger countries). Her solution? We should pray to God for more rain.
Teaching moment, right? So I tried to explain that the Marshall Islands get plenty of rain, it just all comes in the rainy season. If there’s too much rain in the rainy season, and not enough in the dry season, what do we do? As she eventually realized, we need to collect rainwater in catchments and save it for dry season. It was tougher to get her to realize the true solution for this so-called “water shortage”: we need to collect and save more of the rainy-season abundance, so we need more catchments and bigger catchments. So “God” provides the water, but we have to be smart enough to meet God, or the weather, halfway: get something to collect all that water!
It’s bad enough that a ninth-grader doesn’t understand this. What’s worse is that the country’s leaders don’t understand it either. I read in the newspaper that the government would save tons of money that it spends treating water-borne diseases if it provided poor households with catchments for clean water. Worse, the government of Japan has offered the Marshall Islands a huge reservoir, no charge. It would vastly increase the water collecting and storing capacity of the country, and probably would’ve avoided this year’s water shortage. The problem? No one is willing to provide the land for the reservoir. I guess this isn’t a particularly Marshallese problem at all. It’s the same story everywhere: political squabbles and shortsightedness get in the way of real, simple, significant change.
The New Building
When we first started teaching at Laura High School, I didn’t get my own classroom but the principal explained that I would get one when the new building was finished. We were beginning to learn how things work here, so we assumed that this “new building” wasn’t going to be finished in the next decade, let alone within the school year. Things got even worse in the second semester, when Heather’s classroom was taken away and given to a new local teacher who doesn’t seem to actually teach (he’s teaching world history, it’s March, and he’s still on Ancient Rome), and Heather was stuck holding her classes in the gym, already used as a classroom for Kevin (another American teacher here). But the construction continued steadily, and now two beautiful new buildings, situated so they take advantage of ocean breezes (and a terrific view) are ready.
Sort of. I was expecting last-minute delays, and I was right. Kevin asked if he could trade classrooms with me, on his students’ request. Theoretical classrooms, of course: potential classrooms in the new buildings. I told him I didn’t think we’d ever move into the new classrooms, and if we ever did we could talk then about switching. He was confused…wasn’t the inauguration in a few days? I explained that the classrooms had no chairs or desks or any furniture at all, and I knew it would be a while before things were ready
We had the inauguration last week, missing several hours of school (in the week before finals) for a big event attended by various important people and very few students and parents. The worst thing about it was the demands placed on the families: for each student, the family had to send 6 bottles of water, some sodas, several loaves worth of spam and egg sandwiches, fabric for the chairs of important people, and a basket of traditional Marshallese food. I’m sure that accounts for the poor attendance: families who couldn’t afford all this stayed home out of shame. But the ceremony was pretty short and painless, and it really started to look like the new buildings would be ready. Kevin and I decided right then and there to choose classrooms and stock them with the white plastic lawn chairs the school uses for assemblies. Who cares if there were no desks or shelves- it’s way better than the gym.
The next day we were excited to start using and decorating our new classrooms. Heather even started class in hers. Then we got the unfortunate, though not at all unexpected, news that the Ministry of Education had called to tell us not to use the new classrooms yet- the construction company was still working on a few things. Of course. So I’m stuck moving around, to classrooms that become dark saunas in the now-almost-DAILY power outages, and Heather and Kevin are stuck in the gym. Lesson learned: we should never have gotten our hopes up.
Sort of. I was expecting last-minute delays, and I was right. Kevin asked if he could trade classrooms with me, on his students’ request. Theoretical classrooms, of course: potential classrooms in the new buildings. I told him I didn’t think we’d ever move into the new classrooms, and if we ever did we could talk then about switching. He was confused…wasn’t the inauguration in a few days? I explained that the classrooms had no chairs or desks or any furniture at all, and I knew it would be a while before things were ready
We had the inauguration last week, missing several hours of school (in the week before finals) for a big event attended by various important people and very few students and parents. The worst thing about it was the demands placed on the families: for each student, the family had to send 6 bottles of water, some sodas, several loaves worth of spam and egg sandwiches, fabric for the chairs of important people, and a basket of traditional Marshallese food. I’m sure that accounts for the poor attendance: families who couldn’t afford all this stayed home out of shame. But the ceremony was pretty short and painless, and it really started to look like the new buildings would be ready. Kevin and I decided right then and there to choose classrooms and stock them with the white plastic lawn chairs the school uses for assemblies. Who cares if there were no desks or shelves- it’s way better than the gym.
The next day we were excited to start using and decorating our new classrooms. Heather even started class in hers. Then we got the unfortunate, though not at all unexpected, news that the Ministry of Education had called to tell us not to use the new classrooms yet- the construction company was still working on a few things. Of course. So I’m stuck moving around, to classrooms that become dark saunas in the now-almost-DAILY power outages, and Heather and Kevin are stuck in the gym. Lesson learned: we should never have gotten our hopes up.
Update
Update: We are now borrowing our landlady's hotplate and using a new extension cord- the old one got so hot that it fused to the old hotplate and we couldn't pull it out! This hotplate is sort of finicky....sometimes it is NOT as hot as it says it is, so cooking is more frustrating than before. But it works well enough, and we're grateful to have something to cook with.
My student Meritaake who was embarassed to come back to school came back the Monday after I wrote. I'd like to think I had something to do with it- I found a student who knows her and lives near her house and asked him to go tell her we really want her back. Who knows. The important thing is that she's back, which makes me really happy. One thing I learned is that she is not Marshallese, but from Kiribati (pronounced "Kiribas"). When I talked to the school counselor about her, she said Meritaake had trouble "with the language," and I assumed she meant English so I said "Oh her English isn't that bad." But no, she meant Marshallese, which really threw me- I hadn't even thought about the fact that she might not speak Marshallese. Which means she can't really communicate with her peers...and I'm sure that feeling of isolation contributed to her reluctance to come back to school.
My student Meritaake who was embarassed to come back to school came back the Monday after I wrote. I'd like to think I had something to do with it- I found a student who knows her and lives near her house and asked him to go tell her we really want her back. Who knows. The important thing is that she's back, which makes me really happy. One thing I learned is that she is not Marshallese, but from Kiribati (pronounced "Kiribas"). When I talked to the school counselor about her, she said Meritaake had trouble "with the language," and I assumed she meant English so I said "Oh her English isn't that bad." But no, she meant Marshallese, which really threw me- I hadn't even thought about the fact that she might not speak Marshallese. Which means she can't really communicate with her peers...and I'm sure that feeling of isolation contributed to her reluctance to come back to school.
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