LOMAN: A Three-Day Trip

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

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.