7/26/07
Yesterday morning I went to make breakfast, and I cracked three eggs open into a bowl, all of them yellow, and then the fourth turned the bowl a bloody orange with a little embryo. I didn’t end up eating any breakfast. In fact, I almost gave back dinner from the night before. The eggs, oddly enough, were from California.
Less than 24 hours after the water was turned on, it mysteriously went off again, so we’re back to bucket flushing and washing our dishes in giant tubs of rainwater collected from a rusty gutter off the tin roof.
We visited the Ambassador at the American Embassy yesterday. He seemed pretty unimpressed by his own posting. He introduced the staff, then fed us pizza. The security was very intense, although no one was sure why that was the case. The day before I had been walking, and pulled my camera out to take a picture of the Embassy building from the main road. An Australian girl advised me to put my camera away quickly, but it was too late – I was summoned to the guard at the gate, a Marshallese man with little English, and had to explain to him I had not actually taken a picture yet, which apparently is not allowed. I flipped back and forth from pictures of Davidson to pictures from down the street until he was convinced there was no image of Embassy.
They are trying to teach us how to be teachers. I’m not sure it’s working.
I went snorkeling yesterday during a break. Even though we’re on Majuro and the beaches are filthy, there is still some living reef and amazing marine life. You just have to ignore the dirty diapers hanging off the fan coral and the stray desks and tires strewn about.
Tonight I walked the couple miles to the Payless Grocery store with two guys who just graduated from Kenyon and will be working on Ebeye next year, maybe living with me in Gugeegue. We carried rocks with us because you have to throw them at dogs when they come at you. This morning a guy was running and was bit by a dog. Not good. Anyway, we got to the grocery store and I bought a Snapple and some Dreyers’ Expresso Chip ice cream. It’s a pretty well-stocked grocery store. On the way back, we hailed a cab ($.75 per person) and it stopped, but there were two people in it already. The driver told us to come in anyway. So Connor got in the front seat, and Alex (who has a good 25 pounds on me) sat on me in the back. The driver found this hilarious. So we all had a laugh – the three of us, the two rando’s next to me, and the driver. The guy next to me said, “crazy driver, crazy driver.” Then the driver said “make-money driver!” We had been hustled.
There is a fenced off Mormon church down the road that cost $1.2 million to build (I talked with the Kiwi in charge of construction at a restaurant last night) and a fenced off basketball court that no one ever plays on. The other churches, however, which are dilapidated, are always hoppin’ every night of the week. Oddly enough, the Mormon church is by far the nicest building on the island after the American and Japanese Embassies and the government building.
Today while we were doing a workshop outside in the yard of the kindergarten a Marshallese guy came in to talk to us – they are in and out all the time, especially little kids. This guy was different though – it was 4pm and he was wasted. He fell off of his chair, and then started touching a girl inappropriately on the leg (a Marshallese way of asking for sex). She got up to move and then our field director, who didn’t know he was there until I told him, asked him to leave. He yelled things and slowly stumbled out of our barbed-wire entrenched kindergarten, and the door was subsequently chained closed. It was our first experience with the oh-so-fun unemployment-alcoholism-teen pregnancy triad in the RMI.