9/29/07

The scooter is awesome. A lot of fun. It is a surreal experience to zoom down a causeway made out of dynamited reef and garbage avoiding potholes at 45km/h and look out on one side to see a calm lagoon and some islands in the distance and on the other side huge waves and endless ocean.
We had soccer again on Tuesday. Our numbers went down to 15 or so, but that made it much easier because boomer was sick, so it was just me coaching and reffing. I have officially challenged Father Hacker’s High School to a scrimmage. It should be fun. If it doesn’t work out, the kids seem to be having a lot of fun anyway, even though they keep asking me when they are going to kwaj to play the army kids, which isn’t happening this year because of a miscommunication.
We had our Manit Day (Marshallese custom day) school picnic on Thursday. The kids and some of their parents came in and set up loud speakers that blasted Akon and that song about beautiful girls that make that guy suicidal all day. The kids played volleyball, soccer, and basketball. They are really really good at volleyball, although they play a little differently – there is no need to take all three hits to set up a good spike because none of them are tall enough to do that, so it usually goes over in one or two hits. Boomer and I went swimming at the dock after playing with the kids, and some of them joined us later. I pushed one of my 10th graders off the dock. It’s a 7 foot drop, but he was already swimming. I felt a little bad, but then 5 minutes later he pushed me off… “F in biology this quarter, eh Jojabot?” The day was followed by hours of a game called Flick that we play with the Fijians that live on Gugeegue. Flick is kind of like playing 8-ball pool, but with checker sized pieces that you slide across a wooden board by flicking a bigger checker sized piece at them and trying to knock them into holes. It’s very relaxed to begin with, but when you mix it with ritual Kava drinking, it’s a sedative. Kava is a drink that comes from a root found in some pacific islands (not RMI, I don’t think) that they grind up and then filter through a sock into a big bowl, and then scoop it out using half coconut shells. There is much rhythmic clapping each time someone receives a shell from the distributor, and you are supposed to clap once before and once after you drink it or something like that. I just clap all the time to be safe. I was kind of excited to see what effect it would have, but besides being very zen-like, it just made my throat feel like I had sprayed some vick’s chloroseptic in it.
Yesterday was actually Manit day, all of the teachers and administrators from the public schools were invited by the assistant secretary of education to take a boat out to an “outer island.” It took about an hour to cross the atoll, and when we arrived, it was literally a seen from Lost. There were abandoned radar stations and huge white spheres on towers (presumably with satellites inside) that reeked of the Dharma Institute, and a 4-story, 50 yard long rotting freighter lodged eerily against the dock. Apparently the army used to have 100 people living there, along with the 100 or so Marshallese that still do live there, but in the early 90s they were able to switch over to remote access, and now the Army just pops in once and a while on a helicopter to make sure the Marshallese people know they can’t use the antennae as clothes lines.
The picnic was alright. I’m actually not a huge fan of most traditional Marshallese food. A lot of breadfruit was consumed. The way the food was prepared and served also made me a little nervous. Before we left, everyone took their raw meat they brought, unwrapped it, and dumped it into a huge cooler on the boat to let it all marinade together in the sun…. Staci started vomiting at about 11 pm last night – 12 hours later, she’s still not out of bed.
The snorkeling was good though – clownfish, huge schools of giant rainbow parrotfish, and a few eagle rays. And while we were eating a pod of dolphins swam by. Just another day.