2/24/08
The sense of relief brought to me by looking out my back window to see two giant catchments full to brim with clear, beautiful, freshwater is hard to explain. I feel like I won something. Dry season isn’t technically over, but we got hit by a relentless storm that has put most of Gugeegue under water. I was explaining how weird it was to turn on the faucet and wonder if water would come out (the catchments were down to about 6 inches before the storm) to my dad – “yeah, but when you get back, you’ll be shopping at Ralph Lauren and wondering if you should swap out your kitchen counters for granite.” While I don’t plan on owning a kitchen any time soon, I am curious about how I will reintegrate into other parts of American life. I think it will be pretty hard to spend $50 on polo after living on $300 a month for a year.
I am a softball coach. We are playing in the intramural league on Kwaj. It’s fun, and when there aren’t enough kids I play too. There’s no place to practice on Ebeye or Gugeegue though (there isn’t enough space) so we just go to the games and do our best – sometimes we have about 5 minutes for warm up before the game, and on the boat over I make them review their positions and batting order.
Times on the base are stressful. The commander is “reducing the footprint” because of budget cuts, and the axe is falling on about 30% of jobs this summer, and people are starting to find out who’s getting the boot. While it’s stressful enough for the Kwajalites, it’s also going to have a huge impact on the Marshallese in Ebeye. Everyone household employs a Marshallese maid, and most departments getting cut are serviced by Marshallese employees. In the long run, it’s probably good for the RMI not to be dependent on this unreliable service economy, but the structural adjustment is going to be harsh, as if unemployment issues weren’t bad enough already.
In other news, I’m meeting with all of the seniors at KAHS individually to discuss their plans for next year. For better or for worse (and it’s certainly arguable), almost all of them have the option to slide in to classes at the College of the Marshall Islands (CMI) in Majuro next year. I say “slide” because it doesn’t require any prerequisites – they take a placement test which determines if they can take credit classes or remedial pre-credit courses. No one is denied admission. The college has nursing, education, business administration, computer, and “liberal arts” programs, but their accreditation was just reinstated after being revoked a couple of years ago, and the quality and efficacy of the school is questionable, especially given its role as a one-stop-shop for all higher education in the country. There are very few other viable options for these kids. One is the University of the South Pacific (USP), which has a Majuro satellite campus and is based in Fiji. I’m not too familiar with it yet. About 40 kids start there every year, while 600 start at CMI (only about 9% of which will receive their AA degree in 2 years). Another 20 or so kids head out to Palau Community College (PCC), in the Micronesian island nation of Palau. PCC is more vocationally oriented, and the standards of education are generally higher in Palau than any other Micronesian country. Because this is our first year with a graduating class, most schools aren’t aware we exist. PCC responded to my request to send out a recruiter by promising to mail out admissions and financial aid info, which is a start.
What about the states? Well, there are a few problems with that. The first is – they are not academically prepared. They haven’t taken the TOEFL, or the SATs, or the ACTs, and don’t have the resources (financially or even physically) to take them. If they were prepared for a 2-year community or junior college or vocational school, which wouldn’t require those tests, there are other problems. The money is the first one. They can use American federal financial aid (like Pell Grants), but anyone who has gone through the college admissions process lately knows that compared to the costs of education those grants are a joke, especially if you can’t even scrounge up $50 for an application fee. Scholarships are available from their own government, but like everything else here, they are unreliable, inefficient, and you have to tear through a mess of beauro-web just to get any information about them. One important piece of information about RMI scholarships, however, is that students who have performed well at CMI already are given preference. Finally, even if they have the money, the cultural transition is often insurmountable. Responsibility, accountability, and motivation are not words used to characterize much in schools here, and expecting an 18-year-old to become a student over night in the midst of new temptations like broadband internet, cable tv, cheap drugs and alcohol, and seven elevens is as ridiculous as thinking the student is likely to come back to the RMI if he or she succeeds in the states.
For now, it seems like the most responsible thing for me to do is direct them into any college and encourage them to have a plan, and ask them to talk to their parents about it. The only concrete objective of the meetings is to make sure they all have an email address.