7/31/07
Today we were at the Outrigger hotel again doing teacher workshops and conferences. They taught us how to teach reading and writing in a few hours. Then a doctor came and told us about health risks we might face. He told us that most of us would get amoeba’s or travelers diarrhea while we were here. We would know if it was an amoeba by our bloody stools. Then he talked about scabies and lice, both of which we should also expect to welcome onto our persons. Then we were warned about tuberculosis, but don’t worry, it’s “not the kind that kills people … yet.” Then the prevalence of the common cold, strep throat, bronchitis, the flu, and if you have a rash, go to the hospital because it’s Dengue fever, “but not the really bad kind.” Then some people from the Marshallese Environmental Protection Authority talked to us. The first guy talked to us about the water quality, and told us that all the water we drink needs to be boiled because according to tests, more often then not the water is contaminated by fecal matter. Good.
Then another guy from the EPA came to talk about environmental education and the state of the environment on the RMI. Did you know that most climate change scientists are predicting the Marshall Islands will not even exist in 50-80 years? It would only take a sea level rise of about 4 feet. There are minimal recycling programs for cans and plans for plastic on Majuro, but when I asked about Ebeye (the island all of the kids I will be teaching will commute from), he laughed and said “good luck.” That’s about as frustrated as I have been since I got here (including last night when I threw a roach off my back at 3AM) because it doesn’t make sense that the government has this huge, beautiful, glass capital building, and that Taiwan is donating money for this prestigious Pacific Islands Conference Center, but one of the top five most densely populated cities on earth (it’s something like 14,000 people in .12 square miles) has no recycling program. I was actually really disturbed. Ebeye frequently seems to get passed over when it comes to resources, even though it is the only other urban center outside of Majuro. No one seems to know or care what the situation is there. This is the first year WorldTeach will have more than 3 volunteers on the atoll.
After the conference, we had dinner at a seedy restaurant and then I checked email at the National Telecommunications Authority, and then hitched the 4 or 5 miles back to our compound in the back of two different pick-up trucks (one stopped half way back, so I got off and hopped onto another one).