6/1/08
Graduation was excellent. Everything went smoothly. The only real issue was that the kids were handed empty frames because their diplomas had not yet arrived from Jostens. There really isn’t very much to describe – it was a fairly standard graduation. The valedictorian gave an impressive speech that had everyone in tears, including herself. The staff all had matching lime green aloha shirts and mumus. The “dignitaries” were all invited to the library afterwards to eat a cow out of a cooler - no idea where that came from. There were reporters from Kwaj. The buses ran back and forth all day to carry the 400 or so people out.
After graduation, we thought we were done. We were not. The juniors ask the bus driver to take everyone out to the school for them to throw the seniors and departing staff a farewell party two days later. It was mostly an excuse for the seniors to come out unsupervised to Gugeegue and drink at the school. The average age of the seniors is about 20 though, so it was hard to get too upset.
Then, the day after that, the PTA decided to throw a farewell party at the school for the departing staff. The 6 of us that are leaving sat up on the stage, got to stand in line to get meat out of various coolers first, and then stood in a receiving line while all of the students and parents shook our hands, thanked us and said goodbye, and gave us shell necklaces.
Since I am flying out tomorrow, this is my last post. If you have made it this far, thanks for reading, and I hope I have managed to describe my experience here in a meaningful and entertaining way. See you all stateside.
-Mr. Matt
Saturday, May 31, 2008
Sunday, May 25, 2008
5/25/08
Prom was a week ago. We put on our best (unstained blue jeans, the button down oxford I hadn’t worn yet, and a $2 tie I borrowed from the principal of the catholic high school), took pictures in front of our limousine (the new school bus), and headed to the party (at the bar). When I got on the bus, the driver offered me some of his brandy. There were a couple of students on the bus. I said, “no thanks, I’m going to prom!” Then he said “you’re going to prom without drinking?” He’s a reliable bus driver. Most of the time.
The party started at 6, but no one was there except the faculty. We were very bored until about 730, when the sun went down. At that point, the odd student strayed in off the streets alone (even though they all had dates, or “partners”). The girls came in wearing giant potato sack mumus over their skanky prom dresses. The boys came in with jerseys and shorts on, with shirts and pants in plastic bags that they changed into after they came in. It was an interesting and revealing cultural experiment. Thankfully, we had police at the door, and nobody dared come drunk, making it much more enjoyable for the faculty.
About half an hour after they had all come in, though, I almost wished they had done some moderate drinking before they came – not really, of course, but they were completely silent the whole time and it was really boring. Their DJ played song after song to an empty dance floor, and between songs they sat in complete silence. At one point, I whispered to the students at the table where I was sitting “this is the quietest party I’ve ever been to!” Ken, sitting about 5 tables away, whispered back, “we can hear you!”
At about 9pm, an hour before closing, a few couples braved it to the dance floor (including an enthusiastic boomer and ashley), the tipping point was reached, and it finally turned into a party. I wonder how many babies were conceived afterwards…
This morning I woke up early to go to church for the first time in a year for the graduates’ baccalaureate service. In fact, the last time I went was for my own baccalaureate service, and I’m sad to say that my own was much more interesting. Probably has something to do with this one being in a language I don’t really understand. The sermon was something about a bowl of cherries. I think he said that life wasn’t one, but maybe just that they were tasty. We were ushered to the ri-belle (white people) section at the front of the church, distributed flamboyantly dyed pandanus fans, and I sat there sweating and vigorously waving a fan at my dripping face for the entire 2 hour service. There was some entertainment – the assistant minister really enjoys singing – whenever the choir (which was very talented) sang he would stand up and literally inhale a microphone and belt out the song celine dion style at the top of his lungs. It was worth the headache. Also, there were decorative cans of processed meat, like spam and tuna, decorating the alter, which I still don’t quite understand. And, at the end, our students got up and sang a song to the beat of a synthesizer, except they forgot the words and just started laughing in front of the 400 or so people in and around the church watching them. It was symbolic.
The other night, the town police officer told me that they were “this close” to finding the person who came into my house. It has been a couple of weeks since this happened, so I was surprised to hear that it was still on his mind. He continued, saying “last night, we saw someone outside your house evening time.” I asked him if he was conducting a stakeout in the bushes, and he smiled and said “yes, we are.” The question wasn’t serious, but I’m pretty sure he was. The young men that broke into Tristan’s house a month ago have been evicted from our island by the Marshallese community. These kinds of reactions have been very reassuring – I don’t have much contact with the Marshallese Gugeegue community, so it’s good to know there is support, even if it’s indirect.
Tomorrow is graduation. They have come out here every day for the last week to practice the ceremony. Their parents have come out here every day for the last 4 days to cover the new ply-wood stage in various forms of foliage. Ladies in mumus braid palm fronds while men with machetes climb trees to cut more down. We even have a red carpet, except it’s green – it’s made from the trees outside my classroom. It’s past 11pm and the bus is still here – workers are setting up tents and chairs, ladies are frantically sewing matching yokwe shirts (yokwe = Marshallese aloha) and mumus for the faculty to wear. The Americans are hiding. Even Laura has taken a back-seat approach to graduation. In this country, it’s all about the ceremonial, and tomorrow will be no exception.
Prom was a week ago. We put on our best (unstained blue jeans, the button down oxford I hadn’t worn yet, and a $2 tie I borrowed from the principal of the catholic high school), took pictures in front of our limousine (the new school bus), and headed to the party (at the bar). When I got on the bus, the driver offered me some of his brandy. There were a couple of students on the bus. I said, “no thanks, I’m going to prom!” Then he said “you’re going to prom without drinking?” He’s a reliable bus driver. Most of the time.
The party started at 6, but no one was there except the faculty. We were very bored until about 730, when the sun went down. At that point, the odd student strayed in off the streets alone (even though they all had dates, or “partners”). The girls came in wearing giant potato sack mumus over their skanky prom dresses. The boys came in with jerseys and shorts on, with shirts and pants in plastic bags that they changed into after they came in. It was an interesting and revealing cultural experiment. Thankfully, we had police at the door, and nobody dared come drunk, making it much more enjoyable for the faculty.
About half an hour after they had all come in, though, I almost wished they had done some moderate drinking before they came – not really, of course, but they were completely silent the whole time and it was really boring. Their DJ played song after song to an empty dance floor, and between songs they sat in complete silence. At one point, I whispered to the students at the table where I was sitting “this is the quietest party I’ve ever been to!” Ken, sitting about 5 tables away, whispered back, “we can hear you!”
At about 9pm, an hour before closing, a few couples braved it to the dance floor (including an enthusiastic boomer and ashley), the tipping point was reached, and it finally turned into a party. I wonder how many babies were conceived afterwards…
This morning I woke up early to go to church for the first time in a year for the graduates’ baccalaureate service. In fact, the last time I went was for my own baccalaureate service, and I’m sad to say that my own was much more interesting. Probably has something to do with this one being in a language I don’t really understand. The sermon was something about a bowl of cherries. I think he said that life wasn’t one, but maybe just that they were tasty. We were ushered to the ri-belle (white people) section at the front of the church, distributed flamboyantly dyed pandanus fans, and I sat there sweating and vigorously waving a fan at my dripping face for the entire 2 hour service. There was some entertainment – the assistant minister really enjoys singing – whenever the choir (which was very talented) sang he would stand up and literally inhale a microphone and belt out the song celine dion style at the top of his lungs. It was worth the headache. Also, there were decorative cans of processed meat, like spam and tuna, decorating the alter, which I still don’t quite understand. And, at the end, our students got up and sang a song to the beat of a synthesizer, except they forgot the words and just started laughing in front of the 400 or so people in and around the church watching them. It was symbolic.
The other night, the town police officer told me that they were “this close” to finding the person who came into my house. It has been a couple of weeks since this happened, so I was surprised to hear that it was still on his mind. He continued, saying “last night, we saw someone outside your house evening time.” I asked him if he was conducting a stakeout in the bushes, and he smiled and said “yes, we are.” The question wasn’t serious, but I’m pretty sure he was. The young men that broke into Tristan’s house a month ago have been evicted from our island by the Marshallese community. These kinds of reactions have been very reassuring – I don’t have much contact with the Marshallese Gugeegue community, so it’s good to know there is support, even if it’s indirect.
Tomorrow is graduation. They have come out here every day for the last week to practice the ceremony. Their parents have come out here every day for the last 4 days to cover the new ply-wood stage in various forms of foliage. Ladies in mumus braid palm fronds while men with machetes climb trees to cut more down. We even have a red carpet, except it’s green – it’s made from the trees outside my classroom. It’s past 11pm and the bus is still here – workers are setting up tents and chairs, ladies are frantically sewing matching yokwe shirts (yokwe = Marshallese aloha) and mumus for the faculty to wear. The Americans are hiding. Even Laura has taken a back-seat approach to graduation. In this country, it’s all about the ceremonial, and tomorrow will be no exception.
Friday, May 9, 2008
5/10/08
It’s a rainy day in Gugeegue. We are getting ready for exams next week, some planning for next year and prom the week after, and graduation of the 26th. A wave of graduation-mania has hit the school, and everyone is obsessed with preparing for it. Our principal has people out here every day (even Saturdays) building a covered stage in front of the school for the seniors to sit on. Supposedly, the atoll’s King, the RMI President, and the Colonel from the base, and the Kwajalein senators will all be in attendance, making it the most high profile event in Gugeegue history.
Last night my house was broken into. It was 230am on a Saturday morning, and Staci was still at Ashley’s watching a movie. All the lights were off, but I had left the door unlocked for Staci. I was not sleeping well, and I heard the door open. Since my bedroom door is always open (to keep a breeze coming through) I expected to see Staci head into her room…. But no one came in. So, I sleepily got up in my boxers to go close the door, which I thought may have just not been closed all the way. When I got to the kitchen, there was a man walking into the house. He stopped dead for about half a second and then sprinted out the door into the jungle towards Gugeegue’s town. Tristan and his wife had their house broken into (through the roof, while they were home) by a drunk guy at 7am last week, but my intruder was sober… I made that judgment when I decided not to run after him into the woods barefoot – there was no way I could have caught him… plus, then what? This morning I went over to our one police officer’s house and let him know what happened and that I would never be able to ID anybody (it seems silly, but when you only have 250 people living on an island, it’s pretty easy to figure out who the transgressor is) because he had a t-shirt wrapped around his head and face.
Class is going well. I will really miss a lot of the kids. And others, not so much. Speaking of kids, so far 7 girls have been discovered pregnant this quarter alone (we only have about 260 students left). This is always very depressing, and it makes class worse because a couple of them can be quite obnoxious. Teen hormones + pregnancy hormones = a headache for Mr. Matt.
I went diving last weekend on the base. Saw some Japanese boat wrecks from World War 2. Very cool.
I’m heading out on June 2nd. One day in Majuro to stock up on handicrafts and cover my body in tribal tatoos, then out on the 4th. Then I arrive in Honolulu at 3AM on the 4th (international dateline). Then I leave Honolulu at 8pm on the 4th, take the redeye to LAX, arrive at 5am, and leave at 8pm (arg) for another redeye to Newark. Not going to be a fun 4 days.
Alex, one of the Ebeye volunteers, left two days ago because of a stubborn infection of unknown origins that was causing his lymph nodes to be swollen. Hopefully I’ll leave under better circumstances. Although, right now I’m not doing so well. My throat was sore for two days and now I literally cannot make coherent sounds come out of my mouth. I don’t really feel sick… I just can’t talk. But, it doesn’t matter – I am done teaching new material for the year! Monday and Tuesday are review days, and the rest of the week is exams. And then my short career as a teacher is over.
It’s a rainy day in Gugeegue. We are getting ready for exams next week, some planning for next year and prom the week after, and graduation of the 26th. A wave of graduation-mania has hit the school, and everyone is obsessed with preparing for it. Our principal has people out here every day (even Saturdays) building a covered stage in front of the school for the seniors to sit on. Supposedly, the atoll’s King, the RMI President, and the Colonel from the base, and the Kwajalein senators will all be in attendance, making it the most high profile event in Gugeegue history.
Last night my house was broken into. It was 230am on a Saturday morning, and Staci was still at Ashley’s watching a movie. All the lights were off, but I had left the door unlocked for Staci. I was not sleeping well, and I heard the door open. Since my bedroom door is always open (to keep a breeze coming through) I expected to see Staci head into her room…. But no one came in. So, I sleepily got up in my boxers to go close the door, which I thought may have just not been closed all the way. When I got to the kitchen, there was a man walking into the house. He stopped dead for about half a second and then sprinted out the door into the jungle towards Gugeegue’s town. Tristan and his wife had their house broken into (through the roof, while they were home) by a drunk guy at 7am last week, but my intruder was sober… I made that judgment when I decided not to run after him into the woods barefoot – there was no way I could have caught him… plus, then what? This morning I went over to our one police officer’s house and let him know what happened and that I would never be able to ID anybody (it seems silly, but when you only have 250 people living on an island, it’s pretty easy to figure out who the transgressor is) because he had a t-shirt wrapped around his head and face.
Class is going well. I will really miss a lot of the kids. And others, not so much. Speaking of kids, so far 7 girls have been discovered pregnant this quarter alone (we only have about 260 students left). This is always very depressing, and it makes class worse because a couple of them can be quite obnoxious. Teen hormones + pregnancy hormones = a headache for Mr. Matt.
I went diving last weekend on the base. Saw some Japanese boat wrecks from World War 2. Very cool.
I’m heading out on June 2nd. One day in Majuro to stock up on handicrafts and cover my body in tribal tatoos, then out on the 4th. Then I arrive in Honolulu at 3AM on the 4th (international dateline). Then I leave Honolulu at 8pm on the 4th, take the redeye to LAX, arrive at 5am, and leave at 8pm (arg) for another redeye to Newark. Not going to be a fun 4 days.
Alex, one of the Ebeye volunteers, left two days ago because of a stubborn infection of unknown origins that was causing his lymph nodes to be swollen. Hopefully I’ll leave under better circumstances. Although, right now I’m not doing so well. My throat was sore for two days and now I literally cannot make coherent sounds come out of my mouth. I don’t really feel sick… I just can’t talk. But, it doesn’t matter – I am done teaching new material for the year! Monday and Tuesday are review days, and the rest of the week is exams. And then my short career as a teacher is over.
Saturday, April 12, 2008
4/11/08
The week before last was “Education Week” in the Marshall Islands. It was about as ironic as “Disability Week” (which was disabling) because we stopped all normal classes to sit around in the sun in Ebeye for five days.
The first day was the opening ceremony. All of the schools waited together (there are about 8 in Ebeye when you include all the private religious schools) on the cement in Ebeye for a keynote speaker that decided not to show up. Two hours after our planned start time, we had an opening remarks, closing remarks, and a prayer, and then no ride back to Gugeegue. Thanks for that.
Tuesday was supposed to be academic fun day at KAHS, because we decided to boycott the “parade” (i.e. walking around the Ebeye loop in the middle of the day under the sun with a bunch of teenagers). So, Laura delegated planning for academic fun day to me, and I made a schedule that had students rotating to different stations based on what teachers were talented in or passionate about. I was going to take groups up to the pass and look at dead coral and talk about marine biology. At 730am Tuesday morning, we got a note from our oh-so-involved Vice Principal, who had previously given us free reign to do whatever we wanted (he doesn’t care, he has a taxi business to worry about), that we were obligated to attend the parade because our principal was on the Education Week Planning Committee. Although, that seems rather odd given that our principal had been touring the United States for the past 3 weeks as a chaperone for “Close-Up,” a US-paid program that takes Pacific Islander students on whirlwind tours of our country. So my well thought out schedule was canned, and we (very resentfully) got on the school bus to go walk around the Ebeye loop for half an hour, and then drive back.
Wednesday was the infamous spelling bee, where students of each grade level were given a list of 40 words to memorize, and while they had no idea what any of the words meant, they sure could spell them. Each grade level ended up having 3-5 winners out of 10 contestants because, well, memorizing the spelling of 40 words is not that hard. Or educational.
Thursday the kids came out to Gugeegue and we sang songs and watched a mission group from the army base put on a play about Jesus. They did a good job, but I’m not sure how I feel about requiring kids to attend a religious play at a public school… but they are all (really, all) Christian to some degree or another, so they didn’t seem to mind.
Friday we went in for the closing ceremony and talent show. Our school sang a song our music teacher made up about Gugeegue to the tune of Heart and Soul. The Baptist high school did a step dance straight out of Stomp the Yard. The Catholic high school performed a mock spelling bee… in drag. All of this was very educational, of course.
On the flip side, my classes went really well this last week, and except for Miseducation Week, school has been excellent since spring break. In chemistry, we put away the American text books and I have been designing some tailor-made curriculum for Marshallese high school students about energy, which is highly relevant (we have had “4-on, 4-off”, which means 4 hours of power, then 4 hours of no power, for the last 5 days with no end in sight – one of the Ebeye generators is toast). Right now we are still working on fossil fuels, but I hope to make it through to alternative sources before the end of the year. And their chemistry foundation has been really helpful – they already know about combustion reactions, hydrocarbons, and carbon dioxide, so explaining climate change and why their islands are slowly disappearing is a piece of cake.
In Biology, we’re working on genetics and DNA. All of it is background for discussing evolution, which I am both excited and terrified to present to them. I’m not sure how they are going to take it.
Then in my Science “Extra Help” class, which is full of all kinds of learning disorders (ADHD, dyslexia, something dysplasia, I don’t even know…but there are kids that can’t copy down the letters of a word on the chalk board in the right order), some kids who are too-cool-for-school, and the occasional teenage mother struggling to catch up after missing a year of school, we are doing a unit on coral. I am working with the RMI Environmental Protection Agency to actually put together some useful high school Environmental Curriculum. What they had produced on coral education was indecipherable to even my most brilliant honor students, so I am restructuring it and making it more accessible for EFL students, and adding useful activities and worksheets along the way. Also, I get to show them all the awesome pictures of coral I’ve taken here, which is cool because the vast majority of them have never seen it, even they are no further than 10 feet away from it on the causeway every day.
Finally, I have found a new way to motivate students. I make a “Top 5” list of the top 5 students in each of my 5 classes, ranked and with their average next to their name. It has become quite competitive, and as a reward, I took all of last quarters Top 5ers to the Marshallese Cultural Center on the army base, which is pretty much the only museum in the country. The kids really seemed to enjoy it – they were shocked to see the missionary paintings of women without shirts on before Christianity arrived, and they loved looking at the pictures of their great-great-grandparents.
I invited last quarter’s top 5ers to be in the “Science Club.” Every Tuesday we meet after school during detention (detention days are the only days when there is a late bus for them to get home on) and do science-related stuff. Last week the kids made a model solar car from an educational kit. It worked, and the kids thought it was awesome.
The week before last was “Education Week” in the Marshall Islands. It was about as ironic as “Disability Week” (which was disabling) because we stopped all normal classes to sit around in the sun in Ebeye for five days.
The first day was the opening ceremony. All of the schools waited together (there are about 8 in Ebeye when you include all the private religious schools) on the cement in Ebeye for a keynote speaker that decided not to show up. Two hours after our planned start time, we had an opening remarks, closing remarks, and a prayer, and then no ride back to Gugeegue. Thanks for that.
Tuesday was supposed to be academic fun day at KAHS, because we decided to boycott the “parade” (i.e. walking around the Ebeye loop in the middle of the day under the sun with a bunch of teenagers). So, Laura delegated planning for academic fun day to me, and I made a schedule that had students rotating to different stations based on what teachers were talented in or passionate about. I was going to take groups up to the pass and look at dead coral and talk about marine biology. At 730am Tuesday morning, we got a note from our oh-so-involved Vice Principal, who had previously given us free reign to do whatever we wanted (he doesn’t care, he has a taxi business to worry about), that we were obligated to attend the parade because our principal was on the Education Week Planning Committee. Although, that seems rather odd given that our principal had been touring the United States for the past 3 weeks as a chaperone for “Close-Up,” a US-paid program that takes Pacific Islander students on whirlwind tours of our country. So my well thought out schedule was canned, and we (very resentfully) got on the school bus to go walk around the Ebeye loop for half an hour, and then drive back.
Wednesday was the infamous spelling bee, where students of each grade level were given a list of 40 words to memorize, and while they had no idea what any of the words meant, they sure could spell them. Each grade level ended up having 3-5 winners out of 10 contestants because, well, memorizing the spelling of 40 words is not that hard. Or educational.
Thursday the kids came out to Gugeegue and we sang songs and watched a mission group from the army base put on a play about Jesus. They did a good job, but I’m not sure how I feel about requiring kids to attend a religious play at a public school… but they are all (really, all) Christian to some degree or another, so they didn’t seem to mind.
Friday we went in for the closing ceremony and talent show. Our school sang a song our music teacher made up about Gugeegue to the tune of Heart and Soul. The Baptist high school did a step dance straight out of Stomp the Yard. The Catholic high school performed a mock spelling bee… in drag. All of this was very educational, of course.
On the flip side, my classes went really well this last week, and except for Miseducation Week, school has been excellent since spring break. In chemistry, we put away the American text books and I have been designing some tailor-made curriculum for Marshallese high school students about energy, which is highly relevant (we have had “4-on, 4-off”, which means 4 hours of power, then 4 hours of no power, for the last 5 days with no end in sight – one of the Ebeye generators is toast). Right now we are still working on fossil fuels, but I hope to make it through to alternative sources before the end of the year. And their chemistry foundation has been really helpful – they already know about combustion reactions, hydrocarbons, and carbon dioxide, so explaining climate change and why their islands are slowly disappearing is a piece of cake.
In Biology, we’re working on genetics and DNA. All of it is background for discussing evolution, which I am both excited and terrified to present to them. I’m not sure how they are going to take it.
Then in my Science “Extra Help” class, which is full of all kinds of learning disorders (ADHD, dyslexia, something dysplasia, I don’t even know…but there are kids that can’t copy down the letters of a word on the chalk board in the right order), some kids who are too-cool-for-school, and the occasional teenage mother struggling to catch up after missing a year of school, we are doing a unit on coral. I am working with the RMI Environmental Protection Agency to actually put together some useful high school Environmental Curriculum. What they had produced on coral education was indecipherable to even my most brilliant honor students, so I am restructuring it and making it more accessible for EFL students, and adding useful activities and worksheets along the way. Also, I get to show them all the awesome pictures of coral I’ve taken here, which is cool because the vast majority of them have never seen it, even they are no further than 10 feet away from it on the causeway every day.
Finally, I have found a new way to motivate students. I make a “Top 5” list of the top 5 students in each of my 5 classes, ranked and with their average next to their name. It has become quite competitive, and as a reward, I took all of last quarters Top 5ers to the Marshallese Cultural Center on the army base, which is pretty much the only museum in the country. The kids really seemed to enjoy it – they were shocked to see the missionary paintings of women without shirts on before Christianity arrived, and they loved looking at the pictures of their great-great-grandparents.
I invited last quarter’s top 5ers to be in the “Science Club.” Every Tuesday we meet after school during detention (detention days are the only days when there is a late bus for them to get home on) and do science-related stuff. Last week the kids made a model solar car from an educational kit. It worked, and the kids thought it was awesome.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
3/19/08
I’m back from a week long spring break in Pohnpei, one of the Federated States of Micronesia. No, it’s not a fictional place – it’s real and it’s pretty awesome. The trip was great, mostly thanks to my friend Michaela, who is a WorldTeacher there. I tried to jam as much in as possible, and it worked out really well.
I arrived on Saturday, met up with Michaela at the airport, and was immediately dumbfounded by the mountains. I knew that it had mountains, but I could not get over how geologically different it was from the RMI, only a 2 hour plane trip away. There were also mangroves, streams, rivers, waterfalls, and did I mention FRESH WATER?! Everywhere. The capital of Pohnpei is Kolonia, a small city comparable to Majuro in everything except its elevation, which is more than Majuro’s maximum 5 feet above sea level.
On Sunday, Michaela and I had brunch with some expats at the world famous “Village,” an ecotourist’s dream come true. The Village is about a 15 minute car ride from Kolonia, on a paved (wow!) road. It’s a bunch of grass huts built into the side of a mountain, each with two water beds, electricity, and mahogany floors. Their restaurant is completely open and overlooks the water and the famous Sokehs Rock, and probably has the best food on the island. The view was unreal, and when combined with some mouth-watering macadamia nut banana pancakes and bacon… well… life was good.
After brunch, we hit up Lididuniap Falls, one of the many waterfalls on the island. I’ve heard that Pohnpei is second only to Kauai in terms of annual rainfall, but we were lucky enough to get hit by the rain while we were swimming in the waterfall, which made it more enjoyable.
On Tuesday, I hiked Sokehs Ridge by myself, which is a huge rock formation often compared to diamond head. It overlooks Kolonia. After the hike, I met up with Ken and Debbie, the American couple that lives on Gugeegue, for dinner at the Village. They also decided to spring break in Pohnpei.
Wednesday was scuba day number 1. Diving turned out to be much harder to arrange than expected. When you get off the plane in Pohnpei, you can get a free travel pamphlet that has a directory of about 10 dive shops on the island. After going through all of them and getting nothing but disconnects and confused wrong numbers, I realized they were not real dive shops, but dive shop ideas that existed at some point in ambitious Micronesian’s mind but were never followed through with. I went to the Village to ask if they could help me out – since I would be going alone, they offered to take me on a two tank dive for $200. Ouch. That is over $100 an hour. Sorry, can’t do it. Michaela to the rescue – she knew someone who had been diving here with someone who might work at more than just a dive shop idea. Well, it was much more. Tony, a half Pohnpeian half American ex-marine ran a small business that ran out of a shack with 3 old, empty-hulled boats propped up on trailors in the front yard. We made arrangements to meet Tuesday morning and he never showed up. On Wednesday, he was more than an hour late, and we weren’t in the water until eleven. He never asked to see my certification card and he never made me sign anything. Very unusual. We were about to get in the water at our first dive site when he asks me how long I’ve been diving. Then he asks what the deepest I’d been to was. I told my certification was only to a maximum of 60 feet, but that in Majuro they’d taken me to 75. He sad okay, and flung himself over the side of the boat. I had only just managed to catch up with him under water when I started to realize something was very wrong. We were very deep. I looked at my depth gauge: 105 feet. Hmm, I thought, that’s very deep,
…… but look at that really cool sea anemone. Wow, this is soooo coooooollll…. I’m under the OOOOcean… look, you can’t even see the top!!! I wonder if I can do a back flip down here with my gear on? What a neat fishy …….
I was narc’d. The technical term is nitrogen narcosis. Basically, when you go too deep too fast and your brain doesn’t get enough oxygen. It happens often, but usually you’re expecting it and they train you for it when you get advanced diving certifications. It didn’t even register with me until we were on our way back up that I had been diving under the influence of nitrogen. Yikes. Thankfully, nothing too exciting happened on the first dive anyway – the place we went to had been largely wiped out by the invasive coral-eating crown-of-thorns starfish, which has been known to destroy entire reefs. The second dive of the day was at Manta road, a place with two underwater cliffs on either side of the diver that manta rays often swim through. Our boat ride there was treacherous. The boat, which was not a dive boat but just an empty fiberglass shell with tanks sliding around inside, was slamming up against the waves at high speed. At one point a life jacket flew out of the back and Tony never even noticed. When we got to manta road, I hurried into the water, worried that if I hesitated that my conscience wouldn’t let me do another dive with him. I had my gear on, floating in the water, when I noticed a black mass with a 7 foot wingspan soaring by about 40 feet below me. I told Tony to hurry please, we’re missing the show, but he couldn’t find his mask. Apparently it had blown off the boat with the jacket. He looked over the side at me and said, “well… why don’t you just go ahead.” Uh…. What? “…I’m… I’m not doing the dive alone.” He said “What are you scared? Ha ha ha ha.” I didn’t say anything. Instead I sat there floating, angrily imagining driving back in his boat at breakneck speed without diving while the mantas laughed at me from below. I waited. He finally found a spare. We descended. At a 7 foot wingspan, the midsized manta did a flyby from about 5 feet away from me. I was humbled. It is now my goal to see a full sized adult before I leave the RMI.
Thursday, my Gugeegue friends and I took a tour with the Village to see the Nan Madol ruins. It is a man-made archipelago built on a coral reef from about 500-1500AD. Each island served a difference purpose, and all of them were connect by canoe-accessible canals, making it the “Venice of the Pacific.” The coolest island was, of course, the king’s, where huge boulders of basalt had been cut out of a nearby mountain and piled on top of each other to create walls, tombs, and a meditation chamber. No one knows how the boulders were transported to the islands… some weigh over a ton, and there’s no evidence of any kind of tool being used. Island legend tells of levitation powers. At the end of the tour, I went back to the Village. My friends and I played scrabble on the outermost deck of the restaurant while watching the sunset on Sokehs Rock before ordering dinner.
Friday was scuba day number 2. This time Tony was two hours late, but he gave me a free polo to make up for it. While I knew that I was lucky to be alive after a first day of diving, he was my only connection, and I had conceded that scubadiving in Micronesia might not be such a bad way to go. He took me to a site called Black Coral, which during March is a Grouper sanctuary. When we got in, at about 70 feet you could see all of the 2-3 feet long groupers fighting over spawning territory at the bottom. It was like Planet Earth. The highlight of the trip, however, was seeing 3 rather large Gray Reef Sharks cruise by us in formation. Seeing a small white tip or black tip is pretty much guaranteed on every dive, but these Grays were a special treat. While Tony estimated them to be at about 9 feet, I guessed somewhere from 6 – 8 feet. They were not interested in us, and simply continued cruising in formation. Sharks are not aggressive. Unless you are chumming or carrying around a bloody fish in your hand, you are not likely to get noticed unless it’s a tiger shark, whom I would not be opposed to eradicating from the worlds’ oceans.
Saturday was Sokehs Rock climbing time. Sokehs Ridge is a fairly easy climb that can actually be driven most of the way, providing a good view of a massive rock between it and the ocean. The Sokehs Rock hike puts you on top of that massive rock, and is perilously dangerous. At one point in the hike I used a hanging vine to traverse a gully. At another point I was clinging to a rusting metal electrical pipe (that was once used to bring power to an antennae at the top of the rock) while trying to find a foothold on a 75 degree rock face. When we got to the top, two weary endemic owls flew off the edge. If you google pictures of Sokehs, imagine me standing on top of the huge rock.
On Sunday, a few WorldTeachers went to the south end of the island (about 45 minutes in the car) to try hiking the legendary six waterfalls. Our guide (one of the teacher’s students) wasn’t there, but we wandered around the tiny rural area until we ran into his brother and a friend, who took us. I didn’t know that places like that actually existed. All of the waterfalls looked fake, like they were CGI’d into fantasy movies. For the last one, the grand finale, we swam through an 8 foot wide and 30 yard long canal of unknown depth, with towering sheets of flat rock rising up on either side of us, in the middle of the jungle, and finally ended up in a pool fed by water coming down 20 feet from a huge heart shaped hole in a rock. It was a great way to end the trip.
I’m back from a week long spring break in Pohnpei, one of the Federated States of Micronesia. No, it’s not a fictional place – it’s real and it’s pretty awesome. The trip was great, mostly thanks to my friend Michaela, who is a WorldTeacher there. I tried to jam as much in as possible, and it worked out really well.
I arrived on Saturday, met up with Michaela at the airport, and was immediately dumbfounded by the mountains. I knew that it had mountains, but I could not get over how geologically different it was from the RMI, only a 2 hour plane trip away. There were also mangroves, streams, rivers, waterfalls, and did I mention FRESH WATER?! Everywhere. The capital of Pohnpei is Kolonia, a small city comparable to Majuro in everything except its elevation, which is more than Majuro’s maximum 5 feet above sea level.
On Sunday, Michaela and I had brunch with some expats at the world famous “Village,” an ecotourist’s dream come true. The Village is about a 15 minute car ride from Kolonia, on a paved (wow!) road. It’s a bunch of grass huts built into the side of a mountain, each with two water beds, electricity, and mahogany floors. Their restaurant is completely open and overlooks the water and the famous Sokehs Rock, and probably has the best food on the island. The view was unreal, and when combined with some mouth-watering macadamia nut banana pancakes and bacon… well… life was good.
After brunch, we hit up Lididuniap Falls, one of the many waterfalls on the island. I’ve heard that Pohnpei is second only to Kauai in terms of annual rainfall, but we were lucky enough to get hit by the rain while we were swimming in the waterfall, which made it more enjoyable.
On Tuesday, I hiked Sokehs Ridge by myself, which is a huge rock formation often compared to diamond head. It overlooks Kolonia. After the hike, I met up with Ken and Debbie, the American couple that lives on Gugeegue, for dinner at the Village. They also decided to spring break in Pohnpei.
Wednesday was scuba day number 1. Diving turned out to be much harder to arrange than expected. When you get off the plane in Pohnpei, you can get a free travel pamphlet that has a directory of about 10 dive shops on the island. After going through all of them and getting nothing but disconnects and confused wrong numbers, I realized they were not real dive shops, but dive shop ideas that existed at some point in ambitious Micronesian’s mind but were never followed through with. I went to the Village to ask if they could help me out – since I would be going alone, they offered to take me on a two tank dive for $200. Ouch. That is over $100 an hour. Sorry, can’t do it. Michaela to the rescue – she knew someone who had been diving here with someone who might work at more than just a dive shop idea. Well, it was much more. Tony, a half Pohnpeian half American ex-marine ran a small business that ran out of a shack with 3 old, empty-hulled boats propped up on trailors in the front yard. We made arrangements to meet Tuesday morning and he never showed up. On Wednesday, he was more than an hour late, and we weren’t in the water until eleven. He never asked to see my certification card and he never made me sign anything. Very unusual. We were about to get in the water at our first dive site when he asks me how long I’ve been diving. Then he asks what the deepest I’d been to was. I told my certification was only to a maximum of 60 feet, but that in Majuro they’d taken me to 75. He sad okay, and flung himself over the side of the boat. I had only just managed to catch up with him under water when I started to realize something was very wrong. We were very deep. I looked at my depth gauge: 105 feet. Hmm, I thought, that’s very deep,
…… but look at that really cool sea anemone. Wow, this is soooo coooooollll…. I’m under the OOOOcean… look, you can’t even see the top!!! I wonder if I can do a back flip down here with my gear on? What a neat fishy …….
I was narc’d. The technical term is nitrogen narcosis. Basically, when you go too deep too fast and your brain doesn’t get enough oxygen. It happens often, but usually you’re expecting it and they train you for it when you get advanced diving certifications. It didn’t even register with me until we were on our way back up that I had been diving under the influence of nitrogen. Yikes. Thankfully, nothing too exciting happened on the first dive anyway – the place we went to had been largely wiped out by the invasive coral-eating crown-of-thorns starfish, which has been known to destroy entire reefs. The second dive of the day was at Manta road, a place with two underwater cliffs on either side of the diver that manta rays often swim through. Our boat ride there was treacherous. The boat, which was not a dive boat but just an empty fiberglass shell with tanks sliding around inside, was slamming up against the waves at high speed. At one point a life jacket flew out of the back and Tony never even noticed. When we got to manta road, I hurried into the water, worried that if I hesitated that my conscience wouldn’t let me do another dive with him. I had my gear on, floating in the water, when I noticed a black mass with a 7 foot wingspan soaring by about 40 feet below me. I told Tony to hurry please, we’re missing the show, but he couldn’t find his mask. Apparently it had blown off the boat with the jacket. He looked over the side at me and said, “well… why don’t you just go ahead.” Uh…. What? “…I’m… I’m not doing the dive alone.” He said “What are you scared? Ha ha ha ha.” I didn’t say anything. Instead I sat there floating, angrily imagining driving back in his boat at breakneck speed without diving while the mantas laughed at me from below. I waited. He finally found a spare. We descended. At a 7 foot wingspan, the midsized manta did a flyby from about 5 feet away from me. I was humbled. It is now my goal to see a full sized adult before I leave the RMI.
Thursday, my Gugeegue friends and I took a tour with the Village to see the Nan Madol ruins. It is a man-made archipelago built on a coral reef from about 500-1500AD. Each island served a difference purpose, and all of them were connect by canoe-accessible canals, making it the “Venice of the Pacific.” The coolest island was, of course, the king’s, where huge boulders of basalt had been cut out of a nearby mountain and piled on top of each other to create walls, tombs, and a meditation chamber. No one knows how the boulders were transported to the islands… some weigh over a ton, and there’s no evidence of any kind of tool being used. Island legend tells of levitation powers. At the end of the tour, I went back to the Village. My friends and I played scrabble on the outermost deck of the restaurant while watching the sunset on Sokehs Rock before ordering dinner.
Friday was scuba day number 2. This time Tony was two hours late, but he gave me a free polo to make up for it. While I knew that I was lucky to be alive after a first day of diving, he was my only connection, and I had conceded that scubadiving in Micronesia might not be such a bad way to go. He took me to a site called Black Coral, which during March is a Grouper sanctuary. When we got in, at about 70 feet you could see all of the 2-3 feet long groupers fighting over spawning territory at the bottom. It was like Planet Earth. The highlight of the trip, however, was seeing 3 rather large Gray Reef Sharks cruise by us in formation. Seeing a small white tip or black tip is pretty much guaranteed on every dive, but these Grays were a special treat. While Tony estimated them to be at about 9 feet, I guessed somewhere from 6 – 8 feet. They were not interested in us, and simply continued cruising in formation. Sharks are not aggressive. Unless you are chumming or carrying around a bloody fish in your hand, you are not likely to get noticed unless it’s a tiger shark, whom I would not be opposed to eradicating from the worlds’ oceans.
Saturday was Sokehs Rock climbing time. Sokehs Ridge is a fairly easy climb that can actually be driven most of the way, providing a good view of a massive rock between it and the ocean. The Sokehs Rock hike puts you on top of that massive rock, and is perilously dangerous. At one point in the hike I used a hanging vine to traverse a gully. At another point I was clinging to a rusting metal electrical pipe (that was once used to bring power to an antennae at the top of the rock) while trying to find a foothold on a 75 degree rock face. When we got to the top, two weary endemic owls flew off the edge. If you google pictures of Sokehs, imagine me standing on top of the huge rock.
On Sunday, a few WorldTeachers went to the south end of the island (about 45 minutes in the car) to try hiking the legendary six waterfalls. Our guide (one of the teacher’s students) wasn’t there, but we wandered around the tiny rural area until we ran into his brother and a friend, who took us. I didn’t know that places like that actually existed. All of the waterfalls looked fake, like they were CGI’d into fantasy movies. For the last one, the grand finale, we swam through an 8 foot wide and 30 yard long canal of unknown depth, with towering sheets of flat rock rising up on either side of us, in the middle of the jungle, and finally ended up in a pool fed by water coming down 20 feet from a huge heart shaped hole in a rock. It was a great way to end the trip.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
2/24/08
The sense of relief brought to me by looking out my back window to see two giant catchments full to brim with clear, beautiful, freshwater is hard to explain. I feel like I won something. Dry season isn’t technically over, but we got hit by a relentless storm that has put most of Gugeegue under water. I was explaining how weird it was to turn on the faucet and wonder if water would come out (the catchments were down to about 6 inches before the storm) to my dad – “yeah, but when you get back, you’ll be shopping at Ralph Lauren and wondering if you should swap out your kitchen counters for granite.” While I don’t plan on owning a kitchen any time soon, I am curious about how I will reintegrate into other parts of American life. I think it will be pretty hard to spend $50 on polo after living on $300 a month for a year.
I am a softball coach. We are playing in the intramural league on Kwaj. It’s fun, and when there aren’t enough kids I play too. There’s no place to practice on Ebeye or Gugeegue though (there isn’t enough space) so we just go to the games and do our best – sometimes we have about 5 minutes for warm up before the game, and on the boat over I make them review their positions and batting order.
Times on the base are stressful. The commander is “reducing the footprint” because of budget cuts, and the axe is falling on about 30% of jobs this summer, and people are starting to find out who’s getting the boot. While it’s stressful enough for the Kwajalites, it’s also going to have a huge impact on the Marshallese in Ebeye. Everyone household employs a Marshallese maid, and most departments getting cut are serviced by Marshallese employees. In the long run, it’s probably good for the RMI not to be dependent on this unreliable service economy, but the structural adjustment is going to be harsh, as if unemployment issues weren’t bad enough already.
In other news, I’m meeting with all of the seniors at KAHS individually to discuss their plans for next year. For better or for worse (and it’s certainly arguable), almost all of them have the option to slide in to classes at the College of the Marshall Islands (CMI) in Majuro next year. I say “slide” because it doesn’t require any prerequisites – they take a placement test which determines if they can take credit classes or remedial pre-credit courses. No one is denied admission. The college has nursing, education, business administration, computer, and “liberal arts” programs, but their accreditation was just reinstated after being revoked a couple of years ago, and the quality and efficacy of the school is questionable, especially given its role as a one-stop-shop for all higher education in the country. There are very few other viable options for these kids. One is the University of the South Pacific (USP), which has a Majuro satellite campus and is based in Fiji. I’m not too familiar with it yet. About 40 kids start there every year, while 600 start at CMI (only about 9% of which will receive their AA degree in 2 years). Another 20 or so kids head out to Palau Community College (PCC), in the Micronesian island nation of Palau. PCC is more vocationally oriented, and the standards of education are generally higher in Palau than any other Micronesian country. Because this is our first year with a graduating class, most schools aren’t aware we exist. PCC responded to my request to send out a recruiter by promising to mail out admissions and financial aid info, which is a start.
What about the states? Well, there are a few problems with that. The first is – they are not academically prepared. They haven’t taken the TOEFL, or the SATs, or the ACTs, and don’t have the resources (financially or even physically) to take them. If they were prepared for a 2-year community or junior college or vocational school, which wouldn’t require those tests, there are other problems. The money is the first one. They can use American federal financial aid (like Pell Grants), but anyone who has gone through the college admissions process lately knows that compared to the costs of education those grants are a joke, especially if you can’t even scrounge up $50 for an application fee. Scholarships are available from their own government, but like everything else here, they are unreliable, inefficient, and you have to tear through a mess of beauro-web just to get any information about them. One important piece of information about RMI scholarships, however, is that students who have performed well at CMI already are given preference. Finally, even if they have the money, the cultural transition is often insurmountable. Responsibility, accountability, and motivation are not words used to characterize much in schools here, and expecting an 18-year-old to become a student over night in the midst of new temptations like broadband internet, cable tv, cheap drugs and alcohol, and seven elevens is as ridiculous as thinking the student is likely to come back to the RMI if he or she succeeds in the states.
For now, it seems like the most responsible thing for me to do is direct them into any college and encourage them to have a plan, and ask them to talk to their parents about it. The only concrete objective of the meetings is to make sure they all have an email address.
The sense of relief brought to me by looking out my back window to see two giant catchments full to brim with clear, beautiful, freshwater is hard to explain. I feel like I won something. Dry season isn’t technically over, but we got hit by a relentless storm that has put most of Gugeegue under water. I was explaining how weird it was to turn on the faucet and wonder if water would come out (the catchments were down to about 6 inches before the storm) to my dad – “yeah, but when you get back, you’ll be shopping at Ralph Lauren and wondering if you should swap out your kitchen counters for granite.” While I don’t plan on owning a kitchen any time soon, I am curious about how I will reintegrate into other parts of American life. I think it will be pretty hard to spend $50 on polo after living on $300 a month for a year.
I am a softball coach. We are playing in the intramural league on Kwaj. It’s fun, and when there aren’t enough kids I play too. There’s no place to practice on Ebeye or Gugeegue though (there isn’t enough space) so we just go to the games and do our best – sometimes we have about 5 minutes for warm up before the game, and on the boat over I make them review their positions and batting order.
Times on the base are stressful. The commander is “reducing the footprint” because of budget cuts, and the axe is falling on about 30% of jobs this summer, and people are starting to find out who’s getting the boot. While it’s stressful enough for the Kwajalites, it’s also going to have a huge impact on the Marshallese in Ebeye. Everyone household employs a Marshallese maid, and most departments getting cut are serviced by Marshallese employees. In the long run, it’s probably good for the RMI not to be dependent on this unreliable service economy, but the structural adjustment is going to be harsh, as if unemployment issues weren’t bad enough already.
In other news, I’m meeting with all of the seniors at KAHS individually to discuss their plans for next year. For better or for worse (and it’s certainly arguable), almost all of them have the option to slide in to classes at the College of the Marshall Islands (CMI) in Majuro next year. I say “slide” because it doesn’t require any prerequisites – they take a placement test which determines if they can take credit classes or remedial pre-credit courses. No one is denied admission. The college has nursing, education, business administration, computer, and “liberal arts” programs, but their accreditation was just reinstated after being revoked a couple of years ago, and the quality and efficacy of the school is questionable, especially given its role as a one-stop-shop for all higher education in the country. There are very few other viable options for these kids. One is the University of the South Pacific (USP), which has a Majuro satellite campus and is based in Fiji. I’m not too familiar with it yet. About 40 kids start there every year, while 600 start at CMI (only about 9% of which will receive their AA degree in 2 years). Another 20 or so kids head out to Palau Community College (PCC), in the Micronesian island nation of Palau. PCC is more vocationally oriented, and the standards of education are generally higher in Palau than any other Micronesian country. Because this is our first year with a graduating class, most schools aren’t aware we exist. PCC responded to my request to send out a recruiter by promising to mail out admissions and financial aid info, which is a start.
What about the states? Well, there are a few problems with that. The first is – they are not academically prepared. They haven’t taken the TOEFL, or the SATs, or the ACTs, and don’t have the resources (financially or even physically) to take them. If they were prepared for a 2-year community or junior college or vocational school, which wouldn’t require those tests, there are other problems. The money is the first one. They can use American federal financial aid (like Pell Grants), but anyone who has gone through the college admissions process lately knows that compared to the costs of education those grants are a joke, especially if you can’t even scrounge up $50 for an application fee. Scholarships are available from their own government, but like everything else here, they are unreliable, inefficient, and you have to tear through a mess of beauro-web just to get any information about them. One important piece of information about RMI scholarships, however, is that students who have performed well at CMI already are given preference. Finally, even if they have the money, the cultural transition is often insurmountable. Responsibility, accountability, and motivation are not words used to characterize much in schools here, and expecting an 18-year-old to become a student over night in the midst of new temptations like broadband internet, cable tv, cheap drugs and alcohol, and seven elevens is as ridiculous as thinking the student is likely to come back to the RMI if he or she succeeds in the states.
For now, it seems like the most responsible thing for me to do is direct them into any college and encourage them to have a plan, and ask them to talk to their parents about it. The only concrete objective of the meetings is to make sure they all have an email address.
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
2/14/08
This last weekend was a 4-day weekend because of Liberation Day in Kwajalein Atoll, the day when the Americans came and killed all the Japanese occupying it during World War II. It was supposed to be a fun weekend. It did not go as expected.
The projector in my house broke. The lamp burnt out, and a replacement costs $500. The dvd-rom drive on my computer stopped recognizing discs. I now have no way to watch movies in my house. Very sad.
On Saturday morning, someone came to the door at 800am trying to use the minibus they gave Conor and Alex for the commute since they are now homeless and are sleeping on the furniture in our living rooms. It was the same guy who is a teacher at the elementary school and brings his budweisers with him to class and tried to fight the principal. I answered the door and told him to go away and then shut the door in his face.
On Sunday morning, my principal knocked on the door at 615am, wearing dress pants, a tank top, and a winter jacket, and wanted to know if he could borrow our projector. I told him it was broken but the other one was in Laura’s house. I guess he decided it would be better not to wake Laura, because he drove all the way back to Ebeye without a projector.
On Sunday, I cleaned my entire house. I did this because our WorldTeach assistant field director invited the Senator of Kwajalein, the Ambassador to the RMI from USA, and our whatever-of-education from Ebeye schools guy to my house for breakfast on Monday. The primary purpose was to discuss the future of the program with the Senator, since we haven’t been receiving much outreach from the community in terms of helping Conor and Alex do their jobs in Ebeye. Anyways, we were ready with coffee, tea, muffins, and sliced apples, and an immaculate house. No one showed. They completely blew us off. It was just as well – I have met all 3 of these people before, and no meeting involving any of them could ever be productive.
The rest of Monday was also disappointing because we were unable to get into Ebeye to see the festivities. Our school was involved in athletic events, and there were all kinds of races, tournaments, and an outrigger sailing competition that we missed because no one bothered to provide us with transportation even though we had all expressed interest.
One part of the festivities on Monday was a 7-mile run from the far end of Gugeegue to the far end of Ebeye along the causeway. I had been excited to run in it for months. Word on the street was that it would start at 3, but when I went out at 3 no one was on the causeway, so I went inside. Mr. Ken came over at 4 to say that he just saw about 30 people leaving on the run. I quickly changed clothes, put on my shoes, and grabbed my ipod after just having eaten a pb&j sandwich, and started sprinting down the causeway. I caught up with the last place person (who had already begun walking) after about 1 mile. I found out later that I started about 6 or 7 minutes after everyone else did. I finished the 7-mile race in 6th place in 50 minutes. It was fun, but I was a little disappointed because I’m certain I would have been in the top 3 if I had been able to start with everyone else. There was serious prize money involved – first place was around $100, and I received $15 for 6th. The race was mostly Marshallese men, but there were some Filipinos that ran and one enterprising American high schooler from Kwaj that came in second. I got to run parts of the race with a few students of mine who were brave enough to run, and tried to keep up in their bare feet. We offered them shoes but they are apparently more comfortable running without them. About 1/3 of the men ran without shoes. I almost broke my ankles 5 times with shoes – I wouldn’t have made it a quarter of a mile without them. About 2,000 people lined the streets of Ebeye to watch the race. They were very encouraging, which was great. My hope is that maybe some of them will now know my name, and call me Matt instead of just ripelle (American, or literally “person who wears clothes”) next time I’m in town.
This last weekend was a 4-day weekend because of Liberation Day in Kwajalein Atoll, the day when the Americans came and killed all the Japanese occupying it during World War II. It was supposed to be a fun weekend. It did not go as expected.
The projector in my house broke. The lamp burnt out, and a replacement costs $500. The dvd-rom drive on my computer stopped recognizing discs. I now have no way to watch movies in my house. Very sad.
On Saturday morning, someone came to the door at 800am trying to use the minibus they gave Conor and Alex for the commute since they are now homeless and are sleeping on the furniture in our living rooms. It was the same guy who is a teacher at the elementary school and brings his budweisers with him to class and tried to fight the principal. I answered the door and told him to go away and then shut the door in his face.
On Sunday morning, my principal knocked on the door at 615am, wearing dress pants, a tank top, and a winter jacket, and wanted to know if he could borrow our projector. I told him it was broken but the other one was in Laura’s house. I guess he decided it would be better not to wake Laura, because he drove all the way back to Ebeye without a projector.
On Sunday, I cleaned my entire house. I did this because our WorldTeach assistant field director invited the Senator of Kwajalein, the Ambassador to the RMI from USA, and our whatever-of-education from Ebeye schools guy to my house for breakfast on Monday. The primary purpose was to discuss the future of the program with the Senator, since we haven’t been receiving much outreach from the community in terms of helping Conor and Alex do their jobs in Ebeye. Anyways, we were ready with coffee, tea, muffins, and sliced apples, and an immaculate house. No one showed. They completely blew us off. It was just as well – I have met all 3 of these people before, and no meeting involving any of them could ever be productive.
The rest of Monday was also disappointing because we were unable to get into Ebeye to see the festivities. Our school was involved in athletic events, and there were all kinds of races, tournaments, and an outrigger sailing competition that we missed because no one bothered to provide us with transportation even though we had all expressed interest.
One part of the festivities on Monday was a 7-mile run from the far end of Gugeegue to the far end of Ebeye along the causeway. I had been excited to run in it for months. Word on the street was that it would start at 3, but when I went out at 3 no one was on the causeway, so I went inside. Mr. Ken came over at 4 to say that he just saw about 30 people leaving on the run. I quickly changed clothes, put on my shoes, and grabbed my ipod after just having eaten a pb&j sandwich, and started sprinting down the causeway. I caught up with the last place person (who had already begun walking) after about 1 mile. I found out later that I started about 6 or 7 minutes after everyone else did. I finished the 7-mile race in 6th place in 50 minutes. It was fun, but I was a little disappointed because I’m certain I would have been in the top 3 if I had been able to start with everyone else. There was serious prize money involved – first place was around $100, and I received $15 for 6th. The race was mostly Marshallese men, but there were some Filipinos that ran and one enterprising American high schooler from Kwaj that came in second. I got to run parts of the race with a few students of mine who were brave enough to run, and tried to keep up in their bare feet. We offered them shoes but they are apparently more comfortable running without them. About 1/3 of the men ran without shoes. I almost broke my ankles 5 times with shoes – I wouldn’t have made it a quarter of a mile without them. About 2,000 people lined the streets of Ebeye to watch the race. They were very encouraging, which was great. My hope is that maybe some of them will now know my name, and call me Matt instead of just ripelle (American, or literally “person who wears clothes”) next time I’m in town.
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