9/23/07
I’m going to try to put less comma splices in this next one. Sorry.
On Tuesday Boomer and I coached the first meeting of the club soccer team. We will be meeting once a week until basketball season starts. Usually there is an actual team that gets to go to kwaj to play the military kids, but some form of communication failure occurred and they didn’t schedule us in. So, we are playing each other, and maybe the kids that go to the much smaller private catholic high school on gugeegue. The first meeting was hysterical. There is only one place on this atoll that isn’t inside the base that is suitable for soccer. The catholic high school has a field (no goals, no lines – just lots of open space with rocks and some weeds), and since I am friends with the principal there, I just asked him if we could use it. So, there were about 30 or so kids who were interested in playing. All of them were guys. They showed up in their school uniforms. Two kids brought shirts to wear. They all were wearing pants. No one had sneakers – they all were wearing flip flops or playing barefoot. The school had some used sneakers donated to it but I told them that they needed to bring their own socks to borrow them. There were about 3 kids that could dribble the ball and pass it in the direction they wanted it to go. We used backpacks as goals. We only had one soccer ball because there is only one on this entire atoll besides what is on the base. We are meeting again on Tuesday.
This week was kind of crazy. I had the kids make models of atoms out of modeling beeswax that was sent to me by my wonderful mother. I gave each lab group a Ziploc bag with blocks of wax and some toothpicks inside and a post-it note with an element symbol on it and told them to show me the protons, neutrons, and electrons. They all seemed excited, so I went back to my desk to take attendance. When I looked up, I noticed that all of the guys in the class had pulled out switchblades to cut up even chunks of beeswax. While the resourcefulness of this was admirable, it was a little disturbing. Why are they all carrying switchblades to my class? They all got As that day. Just kidding. Sort of.
Another strange thing happened to me on Friday. I had given out a test, and a girl raised her hand and I walked over. One of the questions on the test asked specifically about the “lab” where we modeled atoms – a trick I have been using to try to get them to come to all the classes. Anyways, I knew earlier that the girl had missed the day because she was signing adoption papers at court to give her 1 year old child to her parents (she’s 16) so that it (he) can live on the army base as a dependent of her parents – if you are Marshallese but you work on the army base, you can live there… sometimes. So, her absence was technically “excused.” Should I let her skip this question because she made some unfortunate life decisions and consequentially missed school? I decided I wouldn’t… and that’s my new policy… I’m not going out of my way for kids that miss class for any reason… it’s overcompensating, but there need to be consequences. Right now my bio regular is doing better than my bio honors class because honors is first period and I only get half a class every morning because they all sleep through the first bus. Too bad they are all going to fail first quarter. Maybe an F will help wake them up.
Some awful things have happened this week as well that have reminded me that I do not in fact live in a perfect island paradise with extra helpings of garbage, but an actual real city with real problems. The school has two special education students, one of whom cannot really speak. It came up in a teacher’s current events class that on Wednesday night, that student was raped by several men, which is why she has not been to school in the past couple of days. The students did not seem particularly disturbed by this, so Staci decided to start a young women’s club to talk about these issues and nominated boomer and me as faculty advisors to the new young men’s club. Yikes.
Also scandalous and almost as appalling, it was reported in another class that one of our students’ girlfriend (who is not a student) met an American visiting ebeye from the army base on Kwaj, had sex with him, and allowed him to videotape (or perhaps it was done without her knowledge), and he is now selling the tape to people on Ebeye, and several of the students have seen it. Yikes.
Just in case anyone here is reading this – I don’t know the validity of either of those incidents, they are just things that have been said by students at the school.
In other news, today a truck delivered solar panels and a motor scooter to the school for us. The motor scooter has been supplied to replace our pick up truck with recently and mysteriously lost its front windshield after spending the day with the school’s maintenance/construction/all-purpose workmen crew. It had already lost its rear windshield, and had no brakes, and with only 26000 miles on its 2004 body, it’s very sad to think that it will not sit and rot for eternity on gugeegue because it’s not worth the cost of replacing the broken parts.
One more troubling tidbit. The country’s only newspaper (or printed periodical for that matter) headlined last week with a story that will put your sense of Marshallese Christianity into a better perspective. Apparently, there are 6 Muslims in the Marshall Islands and as far as the nitijela (government body) is concerned, that is 6 too many. Someone recently proposed a bill that would ban Islam here because of the “terrorist threat” it represents to the Marshall Islands. Then someone pointed out that their constitution, which is modeled after ours truly, provides freedom of religion. So, they decided to created a congressional committee to discuss getting rid of that clause in the constitution. Yikes.