1/9/08

Happy New Year. Mine is.
I got to spend Christmas in Honolulu with my family. While I was there, a couple of RMI related things happened. One was sad, one was uplifting. A waitress at the hotel restaurant was also a teacher at the local Waianae homeless shelter. Apparently half of the homeless kids are Marshallese, and the other half are Chuukese (sp?), another Micronesian place (Chuuk). That was sad. Many of them save enough money to buy the plane ticket, but arrive with no skills and no connections – hence the homeless shelters. The other thing that was unexpected was finding a wall of Marshallese handicrafts for sale in the Turtle Bay Resort Gift Shop on the North Shore, all labeled “Polynesian Handicrafts,” an assaulting inaccuracy. The bags that I bought my mother and sister for $30-something were only $175…. If anyone is in the market for starting a non-profit, setting up connections between American retailers and Marshallese handicraft makers might be fruitful. The handicrafts are awesome – Oprah has purportedly listed the “Kili bag” as one of her 100 favorite things ever. Google it. Shockingly, the Marshall Islands were not able to provide 100 bags within a week for her audience as requested. Zeut.
One would think that my return to the United States would have been shocking and culturally stimulating. Alas, returning from international sojourns has become a bit old hat. Much more startling was my return to Majuro, the capital city of the Marshalls where I spent my first month here orienting. When I arrived in Majuro the first time in August, I noticed poverty, was overwhelmed by the lack of modern conveniences, and felt very uncomfortable. After having spent five months in Ebeye, Majuro is a thriving metropolis. There are stores, small businesses, hotels, restaurants, a jewelry store, handicraft shops, car dealerships, dive shops, a “college”, a conference center, and, well… it’s almost a real city.
My time in Majuro, however, was not all that exciting. In Gugeegue, I have my own bed, my own kitchen, and running water. When I got to Majuro, WorldTeach put us into an apartment that had barely enough floor space for everyone to have their own mat and no water. Not entirely their fault – we were supposed to have water – who knows what happened – the owner said it ran out. But, for the outer islanders who sleep on concrete because it’s too hot to sleep on a mat and haven’t eaten anything but rice for the last 4 weeks because of food shortages, it was awesome. For me… I wanted to go home. Thankfully, that was only for two nights. We were then relocated to the Marshall Islands Resort (formerly the Outrigger), infamous for its brief mention in The Sex Lives of Cannibals (I only had to kill one cockroach though), for the WorldTeach mid-service conference. The conference was mostly for the benefit of the outer islanders’ sanity. We got to see New Years in Majuro, though, which was … interesting. They close down the main strip and sell shots of liquor on the street while children run around throwing firecrackers up in the air and waving glow sticks in your face. After the countdown (which was 6 minutes early) all of the white people on island started dancing in front of the band, followed by eager Marshallese children on sugar highs, and observed by a distinctly non-participatory somber semicircle of Marshallese adults. The division was only broken by the occasional hammered Marshallese 30-something man attempting to sexually harass an American woman.
I just want to clarify something before continuing – while all this was going on, the nation is in the middle of a crisis. The election in November had not been sorted out yet (it made Bush/Gore in 2000 look good), so the country had no government, and the planes have been grounded since septemeber, leaving the outer islands reliant on completely unreliable shipping boats for food supplies, which (surprise) have not been reliable. On top of that, the US military has announced plans to drastically pull out of Kwajalein within the next few years, leaving GAPING holes in the Marshallese service economy on Ebeye, which is second only to the government in terms of number of Marshallese employed. But great, let’s celebrate!..
Now I’m back in Gugeegue. The buses are apparently working… although I am very skeptical. Our head-teacher has devised a bus schedule that will allow us to have school at the same time every day even if there is only one bus working, so hopefully this quarter will be more productive than the last – it wouldn’t be hard.
I’m optimistic though. Something weird happened yesterday, our first day of class - I was really happy to see the little hooligans when they got off the bus. I guess I missed them.