Here Goes Nothing

I am always nervous about doing new things with my class here. For some reason I fear that my kids will think it is lame and boring and not want to participate. It is probably some lingering self-doubt from my middle school days when I couldn’t sit at the “cool” table in the lunch room. So when I had the thought of starting a new club, I didn’t know if it would fly.

Two weeks ago I swallowed my doubts and I started a fitness club. On Tuesdays I meet with the girls and on Wednesdays I meet with the boys. We start off with some stretches and then move to some strength exercises like pushups, sit-ups and lunges. Most of them complain, but much to my relief, many show up. After that I lead them in whatever game I feel like playing on that particular day.

Lately, what with the Duck football season down the tube, we have been playing soccer. Now I love soccer but I have always been horrible at it. Most of the kids here however have never played and that makes me the best player on the field — plus I double most of their size.

It might sound mean, but when else am I going to be able to score a hat-trick in a game?

Anyway, all of the kids and I have a great time. There is usually a lot of good-natured trash talking between the two teams and some pretty ridiculous after-goal celebrations.

These kids will know English when I am through — or at least they will know how to say “in your face!”

This is some of the most fun I have had with my kids while being on-island. I get to see their personalities and senses of humor. I get to see how they interact with each other outside of class. They, in turn, get to see that their teacher is a normal enough guy — when he isn’t waving his shirt over his head after a particularly sweet goal — and is concerned with more than if they brought in their homework like they were supposed to.

After every Fitness Club meeting I bring back all of the kids to my place and get them water and we sit around the front of my house and chat. They usually try and teach me Marshallese and then laugh their heads off as I mispronounce everything. Meanwhile I ask them what word after word in English means in Marshallese.

While I know a lot more than when I got here — nothing — I still have not gotten much past the caveman stage of “I hungry, I tired, I thirsty.”

The other day after fitness club, one of my boys named Parent even climbed the two and a half storey coconut tree in my yard and knocked down some good eating for me. We hacked open the fresh coconuts and passed the milk around — delisious.

The whole thing about Fitness Club so far has been that it is a laid-back way for me to get to know my students, and I love it. It has not flopped like I feared it might and maybe I can put these middle school insecurities to bed already.

One day in class last week I had every student share with the whole class what their favorite sport is while I was taking role. There were some kids who said basketball and volleyball and then we got to Bobby Lucky.

“My favorite sport is Fitness Club,” he said.

I was smiling too big to tell him that Fitness Club is not actually a sport.


The love you give comes back in the end.
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Did it just get wierd in here, or is that just me?

Really weird stuff happens here in the Marshall Islands.

I think that it has something to do with the fact that we are only a few degrees away from the equator. My theory goes something like this: As we are sitting on an island that is situated at the earth’s widest spot, we are spinning faster, which in turn makes normally impossible things run-of-the-mill-normal.

Case-in-point one — glass bottles act like rubber balls.

A few weeks ago my friends Katie, Robbye and I were sitting on the dock, waiting for a boat to take us to the island of Eneko for the night. As we sat there we all saw a glass beer bottle fall from the sky, bounce up off the parking lot, fly over an idling car and skitter to rest a few feet away completely unharmed. By all conventional standards that bottle should have been shattered but it was totally fine. I don’t know what is weirder about this case, the fact that after looking all around none of us could see where in the world this bottle could have dropped from, or the fact that we almost didn’t mention it to each other after it happened.

I think another side-effect of this weirdness is that while you are here, it seems normal.

Case-in-point two — I have super powers.

One day in class my student Bobby told one of his classmates to do something very vulgar to his mother.

“Get up out of your chair Bobby, and come talk to me outside,” I said to him in the sternest voice I have. Bobby didn’t move. “Bobby,” I said, “the whole class will just have to wait until you get up and talk to me outside.” Finally Bobby got up. He knew that he was in big trouble now and tears started pooling in his eyes. “I can’t believe you said that, Bobby, we are going to have to talk with your parents about it.” When I went to open the door to the outside hallway to have my little chat with Bobby a man was standing there.

“Can I help you?” I asked.

“Can I see Bobby?” the man asked. “I am his father.”

Yep, that is right, it was his father. Through some freak side effect of spinning so fast on the earth’s equator I now have the power to instantly call students’ parents to my door with thought. The rest of the students quaked in their seats.

Case-in-point three — old women fight like professional wrestlers on HBO.

One morning as I was prepping my classroom for the inevitable flood of shoving and shouting that is the sixth grade I heard a commotion outside. I opened my door and looked off the second floor balcony to the field below. There in the grass were two very old ladies, maybe in upwards of 75 years old, and they were vehemently spitting insults at each other like it was a rap battle.

“Everyone get back in class,” I shouted at my students. Reluctantly, heads bowed and feet shuffling, they filed into my class. Then, as I started to close the door on the last student the shouting erupted even louder. I turned around in time to see Old Lady One deck Old Lady Two in the face. Kids from other grades ringed the two ladies and the school-yard brawl was on. It digressed from there into a bunch of hair pulling as two teachers pulled them apart.

I only remembered to tell anyone about it a full three weeks later.

This place makes the impossible seem everyday — if only it could be applied to things like curing cancer instead of making beer bottles into rubber balls, giving me super powers and making old ladies pummel each other.

The love you give comes back in the end.
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A Three-Day Trip

The day was cranky with rain and wind. Majuro’s coconut trees bowed in each passing gust, their branches flailing outward like the arms of teenagers at a rock concert. With my bag packed I headed over to the Roxanna. For 17 dollars I bought my way over to an island named Arno. The Roxanna is a twin-engine speedster. It is built with a long nose and a boxy behind. It splits its way through waves rather than over them and on the ride to Arno my blue rain coat caught wind like a plastic grocery bag in a supermarket parking lot. Behind me Majuro shrank into memory and Arno rose up, a thin ribbon of flat land packed to the brim with coconut trees. The town I headed to was named Ine. On this island one of my fellow volunteers worked and I was set to spend a long weekend with him, observing the differences between volunteering on an outer island and an inner island. I was the only “repelle,” or foreigner on dock when we arrived. It was a Friday and I found the captain of the Roxanna and asked him if he was going to return Monday. “Yes,” he told me. I shouldered my black Adidas bag of belongings and picked up the plastic bag of groceries I had brought for Greg’s host family and surveyed my surroundings. Everywhere I looked would have been perfect for the cover of a magazine. White-sand beaches, coconut trees and barely anyone in sight. I walked into Ine town, with its total of 35 houses, and looked for Greg’s house. When I found where Greg lived, I approached with numbers as neighboring kids flocked and joined rank. “Repelle,” they said to me with their 100-dollar smiles. “Rimashall,” I said back. Greg’s house was about 30 feet from that of his host family’s and sat low and huddled to the ground as if anticipating a storm. On the inside it was just possible for me to stand up straight. Greg showed me all around his little town. The day pouted all around us and the grey clouds threatened rain. As we walked everyone stopped to chat with Greg. He knew everyone. People chopping up the pandanous, a fruit with a hard, pointy outside that always looks like it is ready for battle, paused with machetes held loosely in-hand to ask who I was, shake my hand and tell me hello. There were kids playing hop-scotch on squares drawn in the mud-path and others climbing high in trees. They all shouted things to Greg. That night Greg’s host mother made us dinner and we all squatted on the floor and made small talk about the election that was set to happen the next day. It was in Marshallese and it was simple. “You will vote tomorrow?” “Yes, I will vote tomorrow.” Her smile was brilliant. For the next three days I was Greg’s shadow. We snorkeled over a reef that dropped off so sharply into a black abyss I got vertigo. We saw a shark. We played baseball with a broken paddle for a bat and an old foam buoy for a ball. We made jokes about girls with Greg’s oldest host brother and I read books with his youngest — a first-grader named Rino with a smile from a Crest commercial and the happiest disposition I have seen this side of Mr. Rodgers. At the nights, before we slept, I watched Greg practice his “step” dancing with the rest of his community. Step dancing is a Marshallese Christmas tradition where groups within the community learn a quasi line dance with moves meant to resemble traditional Marshallese work. The dance choreographer made the joke that he was looking for a Marshallese wife for Greg. Everyone laughed. When the weekend was supposed to end, the Roxanna didn’t come for three days, so I hopped a truck and went to the other side of the island to catch a different boat. When I said goodbye to Rino we traded necklaces. He got a small pendant of a saint and I got an old key hung on some fishing line. On the third day of the Roxanna not showing up I hopped a truck to the next town over, Arno, Arno, just before the sun set. I was going to catch a different boat the next day. I stayed with a lady who put me up in a cabin right on the sand. I slept in my hamock and watched the sunrise the next day. Before I left she gave me shells she had gathered. The boat ride back was bright.

The love you give comes back in the end.
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Musical Marshallese

One of my favorite things to do during class when my students are working on something like a journal or definitions for our spelling words is to walk around singing popular songs and changing the words.

“Beautiful Girl” becomes “Beautiful 6C,” and “Nobody Want To See Us Together” becomes “Nobody Bothered With Homework.”

I usually get a pen or a ruler to be my microphone and I channel my best sleazy lounge-singer act and I close my eyes and belt out the tunes. I trample through pitches way too high for me and I dabble in tones much too low. I usually sound like a teenage kid going through puberty who is giving a speech.

“You are so bulaat, Mr. Tim,” my kids say as they laugh and giggle hard. Bulaat is the Marshallese word for tone-deaf.

The reason why it is such a crack-up to these kids for me to be singing at the top of my much-less-than song-worthy lungs is because they themselves are such good musicians.

All of my kids can sing more songs from memory than a DJ spins in an hour. Not only do they know all of the words to these songs, they also can sing them well. They move from high to low with the unfettered freedom of birds.

This is in stark contrast to how things where when I grew up in the states — nobody wanted to be heard singing. Unless you were a good singer anyway and went to voice lessons, kids kept their voices tucked away. Maybe you would sing to yourself when you were in the shower, or maybe you would sing along in a duet with the radio in the car, but you would never just sing with a bunch of your friends.

This is definitely not the case here in the Marshall Islands. A common sight are kids of all ages, boys and girls, to be walking down the street with their friends, strumming on a ukelele and singing a song beautifully. Men sit with their wives in door stoops and pick through a new song, or sing an old one. English or Marshallese, it doesn’t matter, it is all music and they are all good at it.

One of the best times to walk here is right after the sun has set. First of all that is the time of night when there is a soft light coating everything — attaching itself to people’s faces, window and mirrors in one final stand against the darkness. Also there is the smell of smoke from cooking fires hanging in the air and playful sight of kids running around chasing each other in a never-ending game that I still don’t understand. And finally, over it all, there is the soft pattern of music.

For the kids, it is surprising that I can’t sing. For them, everyone simply can sing — at least on some level.

Maybe everyone here can sing because having things like radios, CD’s and iPods is so recent. Maybe 100 years ago, before there was radio in America, everyone could sing in the states too. Maybe we just all got lazy because we could have music with a flick of a switch.

Or maybe Marshallese have some sort of singing gene. They did use singing as a way of navigating long-ago, so it would be a desirable trait.

Whatever it is, I am bulaat and they all think that it is hilarious. Meanwhile this place has made the malfunction of my iPod less relevant. Walking through neighborhoods and past benches is like tripping through different radio stations with you feet being the tuner knob. When you find something you like, you just stop moving your feet and sit and listen a while. If they are kind people, then you might sing along as well.

Bulaat.

The love you give comes back in the end.
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PenPals

Yesterday was a big day in grade six, section A. Those 28 students got letters in the mail from their brand-new pen-pals. These Marshallese kids who have never needed to wear anything heavier than a long sleeve tee-shirt were about to meet kids who live in Beaverton, Oregon, where owning a heavy fleece is a prerequisite.

The concept of fleece is not even in the Marshallese frame of reference.
These were definitely two different worlds and I was not sure if my kids would be able to relate or if their new Oregonian pen-pals would even hold their attention.

Anyway, along with the letters from rainy Beaverton came actual photos of their new pen-pals that their teacher Ms. O’Looney had sent along. On the back bulletin-board of my classroom I made a big presentation of the letters. I photo-copied the class letter that Ms. O’Looney had sent and then I hung up all of the photos under the heading “6A Pen Pals.”

The reaction among my group of sixth-graders was akin to what might happen if Brad Pitt walked into a teenage burger joint. The students clambered to get in close to the photos of their new friends. They ringed out three and four deep to get just a tiny glimpse of these kids thousands of miles away.

Word of warning to Ms. O’Looney’s class: be prepared for mobs, cameras and unparalleled attention if you should ever happen to come out Marshall Island way because you have pushed aside Eminem, 50-Cent and Kayne West as the most talked about foreign people in my sixth-grade classrooms.

Suddenly 6A, a group of kids who often have trouble focusing on assignments and paying attention, was a solid group of scholars quietly and intently focused on writing a quality letter in English to their new pen-pals.

This phenomenon didn’t stop in section 6A either. As is often the case with new celebrities, word of mouth spread fast. Soon kids from other sections were poking their heads in and asking to see the photos of the “repelles.”

In section 6D, myresident funny-man, Laijab frantically motioned me back to the photos of the Americans.

“Mr. Tim, you see this girl?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said.

“She will be my wife.”

“Go back to your seat, Laijab.”

Suddenly other kids in other sections were asking if they could write to section 6A’s pen-pals. I asked them when they were going to find the time to write a letter.

“We will do it after school, Mr. Tim,” they told me.

I felt like calling the hospital and arranging a group check in for my sixth-graders so the doctors could examine their heads.

“What seems to be the problem,” the receptionist would ask.

“Well, my sixth-graders actually want to stay after school so they can work on their English,” I would answer in a concerned tone.

“We are sending an ambulance right away,” he would say. “Just stay calm.”

After school I was reading through the letters that my 6A had drafted. It was the neatest, most thoughtful and carefully written collection of prose I had ever received from them. I sat back in my chair and scratched my head in wonder about the drastic change that had swept over my class.

Then I heard a knock at my door. It was Laijab.

“Can I borrow a book?” he asked. I nodded my head yes and walked back to my desk. When I turned and sat down there was Laijab, down on one knee, proposing to a picture on the wall.

“Go home Laijab,” I said, laughing.

“Sorry, Mr. Tim, sorry,” he said, grinning from ear to ear.

Turns out that holding their attention was not an issue— now if I could only get them to talk about something else.

The love you give comes back in the end.
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We Want Candy

There is always lots of talk about Christmas miracles, about how it is a magical time of year but what about Halloween miracles? Those can happen too, right? I mean, sure it doesn’t have the same emotional pull as a Christmas miracle, what with the snow and bells and everything, but it would still be something special.

On Halloween, I told my class that whoever came to my house with a costume at 5 pm would get candy.

At 4:30 there were about ten kids crowded around my front door.

“We want plenty, plenty candies, Mr. Tim,” Joseph shouted.

“Give me candies for me and my friends,” Laijab joined in.

I scratched my chin and examined all of their faces one by one.

“Wait, wait, wait,” I said. “Didn’t I say that I would only give candy to people in costumes?”

“Yes, but we don’t have money to buy costume!” Kenny said. He crowded in close.

In my head an internal battle was set off. I wondered, was I being incredibly cruel to deny these kids candy simply because they didn’t have access to buy a costume? Would giving them candy despite a costume constitute a Halloween miracle?

“Hold on,” I said. I walked into the house and found my friend Dan reading a magazine in the front room.

“Dude, there is going to be a riot out there,” I said. “All of the kids are shouting for candy.”

“Don’t give it to them,” Dan said over the top of his magazine. “If you do then they will be asking for candy all of the time.”

“Dan, it is Halloween.”

“Oh, really? Wow, I forgot about that. Well, yeah give them candy. Only if they have costumes though.”

“Yeah, that is what I thought.”

These kids were never going to have the means to get a lot of things in life, so if they wanted to succeed despite that they would have to start thinking outside of the box.

I went back out to the front steps of my house and addressed the eager crowd. I waited for them to be quiet and they shushed each other. They wanted to hear what I had to say. After all, I was the man standing in front of them and their sugar.

“It is 4:37 now,” I said grandly with a sweep of my arm. “If you want candy you have to go dress up as something and come back at 5.”

“But Mr. Tim!” the students groaned.

“Be creative!” I shouted and went back inside.

At 5:05 I was sitting in my room, rocking out to my iTunes when there came a frantic knocking on my door. It was a fellow teacher named Darren.

“Uh, you had better come,” he said.

“What?” I asked.

“There are lots of kids calling for you.”

When I went back outside, there was the posse of my kids. All of them had their faces covered in flour and they were growling out in monster voices.

“Hey great job,” I said and I handed out candy.

“We want more,” Joseph said.

“Don’t be ungrateful,” I told him.

“What if we come back with a new costume?” he asked.

“Well, then maybe we could talk.”

I went back inside. I made dinner, I drank a cup of coffee and played some guitar. Then at 7:30, a giant knock came at my door. This time it was Liz.

“There are more kids that want you.”

I came back outside to an even larger roaring than before and there were my kids, augmented in numbers, with face paint of all kinds and colors smeared on their faces.

I was very impressed with their determination to have gone from having nothing to making not one but two of their very own incarnations of a costume. They made their very own Halloween happen.

I joined them as we pranced around in front of my house — a gang of monsters terrorizing a tropical island.

A Halloween miracle — who would have thunk?

The love you give comes back in the end.
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