7/24/07
Hello from the Republic of the Marshall Islands! My year long adventure as a volunteer teacher with WorldTeach has finally begun. Hopefully you guys will be able to keep up with this blog as much as possible, but being able to post it may be problematic.
Right now, I’m sitting in a trailer with 25 2-inch mattresses and 50 suitcases. We are currently in the orientation and training section of our trip, and there are 43 other volunteers, mostly recent college graduates. We’re all staying outside of Majuro, the capital city of RMI, in 3 trailers that are used to teach kindergarten during the school year.
It’s hot, but the ocean is less than 50 yards of us on either side, so it’s easy to cool off, although the beaches are disgustingly trashy. The toilets were not connected to the water supply when we first got here, which made for some fun bucket flushing, but now they work, and if you can make friends with the spiders and roaches, it’s not such a terrible experience. Our shower water comes from the roof. It drains into a gutter which drains into a giant jug. Right now we are drinking bottled water, but as soon as our supply gets tested for amoeba’s and e.coli we’ll be bleaching and drinking it instead.
The food has all been catered from one of three or four restaurants on the island, and so far it has been a lot of carrots and tofu. I have a whey protein shake for breakfast everyday, hoping it will keep me from wasting away.
The people are all really great. We’re being trained by two field directors, former volunteer teachers. The training so far has been cultural sensitivity stuff and some teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL) strategies.
On the first day, we were warned that during the adjustment period we might experience flu-like symptoms. That night, I woke up every hour shivering in bed – I had on my jeans, 4 t-shirts, and a jacket, and a sheet. Turns out it wasn’t the flu, the air conditioning was set on 50 degrees in our trailer and everyone was feeling the same. Last night I adjusted the thermostat… we still froze, but it turns out air conditioning provides a little bit of a deterrent (but not a lot) for roaches.
Last night I went into town with two guys that will be teaching at an elementary school near my high school to visit the only non-alcohol related entertainment on the island – a movie theater. The town is about 8 miles away, so for $2 each, we took a cab. We saw Transformers, which was unexpected and odd. The people are friendly, and no one seems to be utterly impoverished. We are the second largest foreign population on the island (second only to 51 Mormon missionaries (?!)) so everyone knows who we are already. Tonight we went a few miles down the road to the Payless Grocery Store to buy ice cream, and the shopkeeper let us in even though the store had closed.
Other than the roaches (one just appeared on a girl’s bed sleeping one person over from me), life is good.