Going the Long Way

There are two ways that I can walk into town from where I live. One goes on the main road and passes restaurants and shops and is on the lagoon side. The other way I can go winds its way along the ocean and through a neighborhood.

Here the houses are crowded closely together and all seem to be growths and extensions from one another. There is a tiny graveyard with little bleached white graves and a basketball court that is squeezed in tightly between two houses and could probably only fit two men standing shoulder to shoulder. There are bare light bulbs dangling from outside walls with orange extension cords and small tables and stoops where the older men and women sit and play a game that is close to checkers but not quite checkers.

The most noticeable thing about this neighborhood though is the people — they are everywhere.
The parents and grandparents line the borders of everything and laugh, work and talk. The kids fill the street and the small ally-ways like water fills a bucket. They hang out of door ways and from the limbs of trees. They pulse in groups of three or five or 20. They run and chase each other or all crouch and lay around some found object to analyze and dissect it. Babies are held by their big brothers and sisters sit on stairs with their siblings and comb out the tangles in their hair. Mothers call children in for dinner and fathers sit in groups with their arms folded and make jokes.

In this neighborhood that sits next to my house, you can feel community pulsing.
I have always known that I live in a section of Majuro called Rita, and I could get home in a cab with this information, but it was not until I went through this neighborhood that I actually felt like I knew where Rita was.

Coming from a place like the United States to a place like the Marshall Islands puts me in a strange spot. I am here to help and volunteer. My job description is to teach the youth so they will have a better future that they might not have otherwise had.

My mission, by its very definition, puts me into a position where I notice what these kids do not have and I attempt to alleviate that — help them onto a more even playing field with the rest of the world. So I find my mind snapping to the mold of noticing only what the people lack.

Every time that I pull water from the kitchen tap I have to first boil it for three minutes to kill any nasty microbes that could be lurking inside. This is just one example of a thing that I put onto the list that has formed in my head of what disadvantages the youth here have. “They cannot simply drink water whenever they want,” I think to myself. “That is so sad.”

When I found the real Rita however, something inside me started to change. While these kids have a lot of things to get over — poverty, poor infrastructure, spotty education and sometimes questionable nutrition to name a few — they also have some highlights to carry with them.
They have community in a trump suit.

In some places in the developed world kids are corralled off into mowed lawns behind white fences because otherwise it is dangerous. They play ball with their friends they invite over or maybe with a brother or sister, but they don’t have what the kids here have. They don’t have a roving and pulsing community of kids that are free to pursue whatever interest captures them on any given day. They do not have parents that line and pad the neighborhood.

Most of them don’t have a place like the real Rita.

So, when I walk to town, I like to walk down the street where the corrugated tin houses are stacked up like matchstick boxes on a store shelf and the children and community ebb and flow naturally like the tide.

The love you give comes back in the end.
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