10/14/07
One of the weirdest (and coolest) parts of my life here is the causeway. It’s a 4 and a half mile stretch of coral reef that was dynamited and then mixed with garbage and stacked up to form a somewhat solid surface connecting Ebeye and Gugeegue. It is by no means a road. Even a hummer would struggle to surmount its copious sand dunes and jagged craters. It is miraculous that the school buses get here on time as often as they do… which is not often.
Last week, nature did her best to reclaim the causeway as her own. The winds reversed, and the waves from the lagoon side came splattering over the fringe of the causeway, leaving rocks, sand, coral, and tires all over the gravel. The buses had to take turns shoving and pulling each other through the thickest parts of the sand to make it through. On Thursday, we had golf as usual. It was a lot of fun – but on the way back, it was insane. The plan was for me to take the scooter back with Lorie, an 11th grader who lives on Gugeegue and needed a ride home. I am still new at riding the scooter, much less with another person on board. When we got back to Ebeye from Kwaj it started to monsoon. It was not rain. It was sheets of solid water. There isn’t a working drainage system in Ebeye. The road was soon under about a foot and a half of water. It was dark outside. Every little kid has come out to dance naked in the streets. Imagine, literally hundreds of kids screaming and dancing in the road that now looks like a swimming pool, the majority of them completely naked. Lorie and I got on the scooter, and tried to navigate through the river of children, constantly honking the scooters horn. The horn, however, only got them more excited, and a mob soon formed around the scooter, and they began to run alongside us in the pouring rain, with me not really even able to see if we were on the road or someone’s front porch (there are no yards). Finally, we got out of Ebeye, and slowly maneuvered our way back to gugeegue. Occasionally I just started laughing at how ridiculous it was – a wave would splash me as I tried to avoid a huge crater filled with water only to plow through a pile of rubble, causing my entire body to ache. Where else in the world?
Some funny stories about teaching. In biology, we learned about protists last week. One example of a protist is an amoeba – it is the textbook example, and so I had them draw the little guys in their notebooks. Halfway through their class, Jonathon raises his hand and says “Mr., it’s 9’o’clock, may I go drink my medicine?” Sure… come back immediately. After class, I asked Jonathon, who showed me his Ziploc full of antibiotics, “hey, are you okay – what did the doctor say you have?” “An amoeba.” Haha. Who says microbiology isn’t applicable to Marshallese life?
Next to my house, a little workshop has been set up by our carpenter, who usually builds desks for us, but has recently been cannibalizing our deceased truck. Students usually hang out in the workshop during the day because it’s shady and teachers avoid it. The other day, I went to check out what was left of the white whale, only to find “ionic bond” carved into the left side of the hood and “molecular bond” carved into the right side. At least my chemistry students are remembering some of the terminology….
In my biology class, we are learning about cells. One part of the cell, the cilia, are tiny hair-like structures that help the cell move and sweep food inside. On the wall of the workshop there is a pornographic drawing that was recently added. I noticed, however, that it had been labeled. The private areas of the pornography were not-so-privately labeled as having cilia….. How could I even be mad? An educated allusion – that’s just hysterical.