Kool-Aide and Top Ramen

I knew when I first landed in the RMI that even this remote coral atoll was not immune to globalization. What I didn’t know was just exactly how random those influences seem to be.

For example, my students’ favorite foods is Top Ramen with Kool-Aid. They smash up the package of ramen on the floor with their heel and then sprinkle in half a packet of red Kool-Aid, half a packet of Top Ramon seasoning and shake it up. They pick out the pieces of dry ramen from the package and come away with their lips and hands stained red.

My students also love pogs. The pogs here come from Japan but they are basically the same as the ones that were popular in my childhood. For those of you who are not aware of what pogs are, here is a quick tutorial.

Pogs are little circles of cardboard with pictures and designs printed on them. To play pogs, each player puts in five of his pogs and they stack them up. Then, each player takes turns throwing another pog at the pile to try and knock off as many pogs as they can. The pogs they can knock off they get to keep.

It is a phenomenon that is all over the island. Walk anywhere and you will see kids kneeled, with one knee resting on a flip flop, throwing pogs. In turn their arms cock up over their heads and with a flash they release a throw at the pile.

I have literally had to tell kids in the middle of class to get off the floor and get back to reading.

“Seriously Winton, what made you think that it would be OK to get out of your seat and kneel on the floor and throw your pogs?”

“Sorry, teacher, sorry.”

In addition to ramen, Kool Aid and pogs every boy in the sixth grade is obsessed with hip-hop culture. Everyone owns at least one do-rag, retro jersey or fake gold chain. For some reason out of all of the American influences they see on TV and movies, the youth of the RMI have embraced hip-hop culture. Most students here can recite the words to the raunchy hip-hop song, “Smack That,” verbatim but will get fidgety and nervous when you ask them how their day went.

Top Ramen and Kool Aid, pogs and hip-hop culture are the three main imports I have seen so far in the RMI.

It boggles my mind.

Out of all of the influences getting beamed in, the ones that have stuck most evidently are these three things.

Why exactly is it that the kids here all want to be like 50 Cent? The youth have seen images of the news as well as rap videos. Why are there not legions of little Stone Phillips’s running around with trite smirks and odd inflections in their voices? There are other foreign foods to eat, other foreign things to do and certainly other foreign counter-cultures to emulate.

The answer, it seems, is accessability Top-Ramen and Kool Aid can be bought for less than 50 cents, a pack of pogs are a quarter and hip-hop artists are a lot closer to the reality they face day to day.

Hip-hop is a culture where the predominant players are all dark-skinned and rebelling against establishment in the coolest ways. They sing and rap about coming up big from a poor background. For a dark-skinned Marshallese young person who comes from poverty, that is like shooting fish in a barrel.

Stone Phillips didn’t have a chance.

Globalization has reached even the most remote of places in the world, but who would have known that Kool-Aid and Top Ramen, pogs and hip-hop would be the lasting evidence of it.

The love you give comes back in the end.
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