The Daily Grind

I feel like my training in the Marshall Islands should have come with a warning label.

WARNING: While you may be in a tropical Micronesian nation, DO NOT expect to participate in any of the following activities — swimming, surfing, snorkeling, diving or spear fishing. You will simply be too busy learning how to teach the Marshallese youth of tomorrow, today. If you experience any negative emotions related to a lack of these activities find a small room where you can shout the following sentence at yourself.

I am not here on vacation, I am here to help!

Repeat as needed.

OK, I know that I am not here to just have fun, but it would have helped to have a little something to cushion my hard drop from “wow, I am in paradise,” to “geez, what does a guy have to do around here to lay in a hammock?”

The label could be big and yellow and it could have a logo of a dog chomping on a tall and skinny man’s rear (that story is for a different column).

My days here are a whirlwind from start to finish and that is fine, but when palm trees surround you, focusing can be hard...

As a group, we usually get up around 7:30 in the morning. We brush our teeth, we take our bucket showers and we eat our plain corn-flakes with our preserved milk. Then there is a few minutes for personal time which means that people bunch up into ones and twos and chat quietly and write letters home.

The ocean is always close and it beats in our ears but there is no time to go to its shores because the group has to head into a small and stuffy classroom trailer designed for kindergarten students where 45 of us sit on the floor (because that is what many people do in the Marshall Islands and we need to get used to it) and we try to listen to the brush-up grammar lessons.
We listen, we take notes, we doodle and we yawn and then we are let out with enough time to go back into our crowded and smelly sleeping rooms to switch our grammar books with our language manuals and then we are back out into the muggy day to sit in small groups and have our Marshallese lessons from high-spirited teenagers who chuckle at us as our mouths stumble over the unfamiliar shapes of their Marshall words.

After that, lunch comes and we pile our plates high with slightly differing mixtures of tofu, rice, noodles, cabbage, chicken and carrots. When we are done eating we clean up and have a few moments to relax. Some people choose to go down to the lagoon, others choose to lay in the sleeping room. In half an hour we meet back up for classes stretching straight until the edge of dawn before we are set free to witness the last dying breaths of the day.

Then we go to sleep and repeat the next day.

Wake, shower, eat, study, study, eat, study, study and repeat.

The other day our schedule was mixed up.

Our group woke up and boarded a bus. We packed our snorkels and sun screen. Our driver took us further down the one road in town than we had ever been before. We got on a boat and it took us out to another island far from anything that has to do with doing.

I disembarked, and set out across the island where I found two palm trees set apart about the right amount. I tied my hammock between these trees and I laid out with Hemingway in my hand and a sea breeze running over my face. I breathed in deep and felt myself sinking into my own skin.

Now this was paradise.

Repeat as needed.

The love you give comes back in the end.
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