11/22/07
Unfortunately, our internet has not been working at all for the last month or so. It’s hard to get motivated to blog if you can’t post it. The National Telecommunications Authority is the telecommunications monopoly here in the RMI, and they are the most incompetent, unreliable, ignorant organization I have ever interacted with, plagued by a dearth of technical expertise and utterly lacking any form of work ethic. Fortunately, our principal has stopped payment for our defunct internet, which makes me feel better about this country’s failure to benefit from capitalism.
Anyway, school continues. Sort of. The buses have deteriorated. We have not had a normal schedule day for the last 2 weeks, and they are few and far between. Our “emergency 1-bus schedule” has become the norm, and even it has occasionally been abandoned when neither bus is functioning, and the kids have no way to get across the 5-mile causeway. The lunch program, which was cancelled by the government because the vendor contracts were not advertised using the proper procedures (let’s punish the kids and teachers for a mistake that had nothing to do with them), has since been reinstated, but the vendors have stopped showing up, most likely because they haven’t been paid, leaving hungry kids and frustrating the teachers that have to cope with a classroom that can’t learn because they haven’t eaten all day. Our principal informed our senator of the dire transportation and lunch program issues, and he felt that the best thing to do would be to just close the school… permanently… which would mean there would be no public high school available for a city of 14,000. Our principal, however, is admirably refusing to cancel any school, (he went to a conference in guam for administrators called “Breaking Rank II” on how to reform struggling schools and came back slightly inspired) so we start whenever the first bus can limp over and adjust the schedule accordingly every day. It makes it hard to plan a lesson when your class could be anywhere from 30 to 55 minutes long, but we are still learning. My chemistry classes have mastered predicting ionic compound formulas using oxidation numbers and my honors biology class can tell you the chemical equation for photosynthesis.
We had our first report card night 4 weeks ago, and it was a very interesting experience. The meeting took place in the “library” of the elementary school on Ebeye, which is carpeted, so everyone had to leave their flip flops outside the door. At the front of the room was a table with a karaoke microphone and amp, where laura sat, and then behind that were a dozen or so chairs for the teachers. The parents, maybe about 70 or 80 of them, all sat on the floor in front of us in mumus and tank tops. After some announcements were made regarding the new no mercy attendance policy, which has turned out to be somewhat of a bluff, the teachers were each handed a stack of report cards to distribute. The parents were mostly all too afraid to say their child’s name loud enough for me to hear (clearly I am very intimidating), let alone ask questions (it was also supposed to be time for them to conference with us), but some were curious. Some “parents” picked up 5 or 6 report cards – they are all related anyway, so it really doesn’t matter… we were just happy someone cared.
A few weeks ago I went to one of the two established “bars” on Ebeye. It’s called Mon-la-Mike, or place of the handsome Mike, named after its owner, and the above mentioned senator, Michael Kabua. While interesting, I would not call my time there fun. There are tables, a dance floor, and even a bar where you can buy Budweiser, bud light, or tamiroff vodka (a Smirnoff knockoff) for $4 a drink. The music was all synthesized and in Marshallese, although some were American songs translated and set to an “island beat.” After each song, the music would stop for a minute and everyone would leave the dance floor. Then, another song would come on, and every man would get up and ask someone to dance. Staci was asked to dance every song, mostly by men who had children or grandchildren. I was asked to dance by the married women we came with, who are in their 30s and 40s, and whose husbands paid for all our drinks and drove us there. That was fun, but other than that it was sad to see the alcoholism, the grown women brawling, and the bathroom that looked like it was from the set of the horror flick Hostel. But the senator is surely making bank.
I am a coach. Sort of. I take 8 boys to the army base once or twice a week to play games in their intermural B league, which consists of us, the army high school kids, and 3 adult teams. We are 4-0, and I sometimes play and do very little advising since Marshallese people pretty much have their volleyball skills under control. Hold on, have to interrupt this by informing you that while I am sitting here writing this, Staci is scooping cups of ant-infested sugar into a pile of apples smuggled from the army base to prepare apple pie for thanksgiving dinner tomorrow. Such is life on gugeegue – we need the extra protein anyway. Back to volleyball – while watching the games and seeing the 5 foot kids whomp on 6 foot white guys (most of whom are pretty ignorant when it comes to the country they are squatting in) is entertaining, the hassle of logistics is unbelievable. The scooter cannot be driven at night because the headlamp is broken already (surprise, it’s a POS “Kinetic” made in India), so I have to sit in the hot stairwell of the packed bus after school, praying I don’t fall out of the open door into one of the muddy craters, and arrange for the vice principal to pick me up at the dock after the game and drive me back to gugeegue. All in all, I leave at 330 for a 630 game and don’t get back until 1030. It’s a huge time commitment, and it would be fine but I am stressed the whole time we’re there because the kids want to wander all over the place when they aren’t on the court. I may or may not be the coach for the softball team.
I am a member of the 2nd largest scuba club in the world. And the best part is, I don’t have to pay membership fees, because the president “Cowboy,” likes that I am volunteer and decided to waive the $300 annual fees. I have the combination to the tank room and unlimited access. I did my orientation dive with Cowboy himself and was lucky enough to accomplish one of my life goals: swimming with a manta ray. He was just a 4ft baby (they get to be about 12-14 feet across), but it was still a humbling experience. I have a short video of him, but I was very distracted by the animal itself, so the camera is not usually pointed at him.
Last Sunday, I was enjoying the sun at our defunct dock on gugeegue, doing flips off the pier and watching the big fish eat the little ones, as I often do on weekends, when a small boat approached. As the people on board came into focus, I recognized a blonde head – the son of my sponsor on the army base – he and his father, a visiting boat inspector from Guam, and the captain of the Worthy (the main boat that monitors all of the missile testing and has huge radar towers on it and is away for weeks at a time) had come north to do some surfing. They saw me from the boat, realized who I was, and decided to invite me. We went to the reef they usually surf at, and I got to do some bodyboarding and snorkeling on a new reef, and then hang out on a completely deserted sandy beach. It was an unexpectedly awesome day.