A Few Things

- Kiersten, a Dartmouth teacher on the small Island of Ejit (which you can walk to, across the reef, from the end of Majuro) has a puppy! Its name is Poky and it is absolutely adorable.

- We all got to meet Poky when Kiersten brought her out to Laura for last week's Dartmouth Homecoming party at Laura. We had a small bonfire and some pong games, and most of the Dartmouth volunteers on-island came. The next morning I made pancakes for everyone...until the power went out mid-batch. We lay around in the stuffy heat for a while and then went to the little Payless grocery store, which has a generator, for some ice cream and cold drinks.

- Payless ice cream is pretty awesome. You get two big scoops in a styrofoam cup for only $1.30. Payless in general is pretty awesome: all the necessities, like flour and sugar and eggs and ice cream, plus a small but important produce section(cheap onions and potatoes, garlic, ginger, locally-grown cabbage, cherry tomatoes, and cucumber, and some overpriced apples). Payless is also good for entertainment. Last week I went there one night and saw a little gray striped cat running around the aisles. It apparently belongs to the owner. The same night, I noticed that the new doorbell not only rings but says-I swear-"asaalaam aleikum!" I figure they must've gotten a discount doorbell not knowing that it said hello in a foreign language...

- One of my students won a poetry contest through the Ministry of Education! The subject was "climate change," a very important issue for small, low-lying islands that could easily be destroyed by rising sea levels. Unfortunately, most Marshallese people (including high school kids) know next to nothing about the issue. So most of the submissions were well-intentioned but uninformed drawings about the ozone layer and stories about how Marshallese people were destroying their islands by burning plastic and styrofoam. True, this is the way they dispose of trash here. But I couldn't bring myself to tell them that even if the RMI bans styrofoam (an idealistic but impractical suggestion currently being considered by the government) and stops burning trash, and people here stop driving cars and produce absolutely NO greenhouse gases.....they're still screwed. It's the big, industrialized countries like the US and China that are dooming the RMI to be swallowed up by the ocean in a century or so, and there's really not much this country can do to stop that. So Heather and I were happy when our student wrote a poem talking about how the world needs to wake up and pay attention to climate change, because it was a really good poem and shows a much better understanding of what's going on. And she won! She was the only student from a public school to win anything, which is impressive.

- Today Eric and I spent an hour waiting for the bus to town. Not that interesting but I just thought you should know the sort of ordeals I have to endure to come here and write these updates for you all.

- There's a new teacher at Laura High School! Thank god, because some classes were being taught by the Vice Principal and Principal, who are often too busy with administrative duties to run a class. The teacher's name is Kevin, and he was a WorldTeach volunteer on the outer island of Ailuk two years ago. Now he's a contract (paid and hired by the Ministry of Education) teacher in Laura, doing one class of Teacher Academy and three classes of Geography. It's great to have a new person around to hang with (and Kevin is really great), and it's also really good to have a strong geography teacher: the kids think Hawaii, Arkansas, and California are countries, guess "Guam" when asked what the biggest country in the world is, and make it through all of middle school without learning what a "continent" is. Kevin also plans to do a geography project about Laura itself, which is good for ME because I still don't completely know my way around the place!

- Today is Halloween. Most of the volunteers are going to a party in town tonight, but Heather and Eric and Allison and I are staying in Laura so we can save money, have a more chill night, and go to our students' movie night. Should be entertaining! We might even go in costume, if we can scrounge up something creative out of our limited supplies. I'll let you know how it goes!