I tend to skew towards the sentimental. So now that I am on my way out of the RMI I wanted my last week to be filled with happy tears, lot’s of laughs and a house-full of hugs. Anything that would have fit into a TV sitcom montage would have been perfect.
Things didn’t work out that way – let me tell you what.
First of all I was robbed.
A few nights ago, while I was sound asleep, someone crept into my yard, peeled back the security screening on my living room window like a can of tuna and rifled through my roommate’s room. They stole his money and I pod.
That wasn’t so great. I felt pretty alarmed that someone would go through all of the trouble to rob volunteers.
Then, a few days later I went to school. While I was taking role my principal came whirling through my room, stick in hand, demanding to know who was late. I told her that every single student was on time (a lie) and that she needed to leave my classroom (the truth). She yelled at me for a while in the hallway. I asked her if we could talk about it later. She told me I had no control over my class. I said she was handling this the wrong way. She told me to go back to my class. I somehow ended up with the stick.
I examined this stick from end to end and was disgusted to see the end was studded with nails sticking out like jagged teeth from a bad dream. She had intended to hit my kids with it and had actually half-heartedly tagged one on the shoulder on the way out.
To get rid of the stick I went to the window of the bathroom – a deplorable place with no running water that over the course of the year has turned into a haven for hellish smells – and looked out my two-storey vantage point for a good place to toss the stick.
That was when I saw John. John is a student whose most consistent quality is that he skips every single class every single day. I’ve had him in class maybe five percent of the year. Anyway, I saw this kid sitting against the fence behind the school. He kind of looked like he was in pain. I couldn’t make him out clearly so I leaned out further. It was only then, to my terrible, horrible and scarring surprise that I saw he was feverishly completing the rite of passage all young men do on their way to manhood. Instead of being in the darkened corner of his own bed, he was in broad daylight behind an elementary school.
I took the stick and threw it in the bushes near John without him seeing me. He ran away with wild eyes.
Killed two birds with one stick.
I went home and fell asleep, homesick and frustrated.
I woke up to the sound of rocks being hurled at my door, the sign that some of my students want to come and hang out. I got up and let Billis and Paul in. they immediately set to work with hammer and nails and fixed my window. Then they saw how messy my room was.
“This is no good, Mr. Tim,” they told me.
“I know guys, but it’s been a tough couple days.”
Well, they fixed my window, cleaned my room and afterward we threw a football in my front yard.
Positive montage scene worthy of sitcom: Check.
Next mission: Adjusting to life in America.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Monday, May 19, 2008
Dear Diary
While in Ebeye I made sure to keep a detailed diary. Here is it:
5/8/08 – It was immediately apparent to everyone when I got off the plane that this was my first visit. Can’t go anywhere here without police escort. Am the only white person waiting to go to Ebeye. Got driven to docks in a Port Authority van and saw all the wide open spaces and manicured lawns of the base. Swimming pools, tennis courts, skate park, basketball courts, and all of them deserted. American style homes stacked down the street with square lawns. Got a burger and chips at a lunch counter from one of the saddest looking dudes I have ever seen. Tired Marshallese workers lounge around and wait for 2:40 shuttle to leave. Entering Kwaj, Marshallese workers have to scan their hands in a finger print scanner like something from Star Trek. Wierd. Read in paper that it averages two degrees hotter in Ebeye than back in Majuro…
5/9/08 – One road rambles around this dirt and tin place. Taxis everywhere. Don’t know why. You could walk from one end to the other in 20 minutes. Everything has surprisingly clean and organized feel. Kids are less outwardly friendly than in Majuro. Only really “nice” place in the whole town is the King’s place. Private boat launch. Dogs don’t bother anyone and every little kid asks for a quarter. Water was supposedly tested positive for E. Coli and Conner and I both had Kool Aid today. Am not sure why. I might have some sort of bug or worm.
Found out that five kids from Ebeye get the privilege every year of attending school on the Army base. The chosen start in kindergarten and go all of the way through.
There are abandoned military installments across the lagoon that Marshallese families have moved in around. There are locked doors that they cannot break into but inside there are machines that continue to run…
5/10/08 – There is a road build of dynamited coral that connects Ebeye to Gugigoo – a nice place with space. Some people say that it was built by the king because he has a house out there and wanted an easier way to get there. Some say that it was built because they were trying to get people to live out there and alleviate crowding on Ebeye.
Walked to next island over from Gugigoo and it was deserted. Strange to think that you can go from third highest population density to deserted tropical island in about 40 minutes.
5/8/08 – It was immediately apparent to everyone when I got off the plane that this was my first visit. Can’t go anywhere here without police escort. Am the only white person waiting to go to Ebeye. Got driven to docks in a Port Authority van and saw all the wide open spaces and manicured lawns of the base. Swimming pools, tennis courts, skate park, basketball courts, and all of them deserted. American style homes stacked down the street with square lawns. Got a burger and chips at a lunch counter from one of the saddest looking dudes I have ever seen. Tired Marshallese workers lounge around and wait for 2:40 shuttle to leave. Entering Kwaj, Marshallese workers have to scan their hands in a finger print scanner like something from Star Trek. Wierd. Read in paper that it averages two degrees hotter in Ebeye than back in Majuro…
5/9/08 – One road rambles around this dirt and tin place. Taxis everywhere. Don’t know why. You could walk from one end to the other in 20 minutes. Everything has surprisingly clean and organized feel. Kids are less outwardly friendly than in Majuro. Only really “nice” place in the whole town is the King’s place. Private boat launch. Dogs don’t bother anyone and every little kid asks for a quarter. Water was supposedly tested positive for E. Coli and Conner and I both had Kool Aid today. Am not sure why. I might have some sort of bug or worm.
Found out that five kids from Ebeye get the privilege every year of attending school on the Army base. The chosen start in kindergarten and go all of the way through.
There are abandoned military installments across the lagoon that Marshallese families have moved in around. There are locked doors that they cannot break into but inside there are machines that continue to run…
5/10/08 – There is a road build of dynamited coral that connects Ebeye to Gugigoo – a nice place with space. Some people say that it was built by the king because he has a house out there and wanted an easier way to get there. Some say that it was built because they were trying to get people to live out there and alleviate crowding on Ebeye.
Walked to next island over from Gugigoo and it was deserted. Strange to think that you can go from third highest population density to deserted tropical island in about 40 minutes.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
CAMERA!
OK, this is great; I just refound a digital camera that Tiffany left me. I know, I am an idiot; I waited until I only had 17 days and counting to whip out the digital camera but the fact remains, it is awesome. I take it out in class and there is an instant clamoring for pictures to be taken. Suddenly everything I tell you guys are real, and it is not just some ongoing elaborate story that I am making up. I mean, let’s be honest, I could have been hanging out in some house in Tigard this whole time and making up everything I say that happens to me, but now I can give you proof. Here is proof that Lejab really is the funniest kid around, as this picture shows. All of a sudden he just whips out this crazy wig to go out into recess with… it is so great. Then there is a bunch of kids who showed up to my house soaked and playing in the water catchment’s overflow… it was really awesome because let me tell you, some of these kids need a shower… In related news, the Salvation Army here just received a bunch of pudding from some American donor, which means that all my kids are suddenly ingesting copious amounts of milk product and the flatulence in class is really ramping up… Well, that’s all from here… I’ll be home so soon it makes my head spin…
Monday, May 12, 2008
Black and White
It’s easy to paint things in black and white. I took my last big trip here in the Marshall Islands to the Kwajalein Atoll to visit a friend on Ebeye. When I told people I was going, all they could say was Ebeye was too crowded and hot and Majuro was good. “Stay,” they all said, “why go somewhere bad, when you can stay somewhere good?”
Kwajalein Atoll is notable for two very different things. It is the home of a US military base involved in missile defense research and site of WWII battles with Japan and it is also home to one of the most notorious slums in the Pacific, a place called Ebeye.
Getting on the plane, I was surrounded by army base employees coming back from vacation and trading stories: what was good, bad and funny. Some complained about going back to work on the base – getting back to the daily grind.
When I got off the plane I was escorted by a base policeman through what amounts to an American suburb in the middle of the equatorial Pacific. Strange.
Here I was, used to tin shacks and plywood walls, being driven in a Chrysler mini van through mowed lawns lined up perfectly for a paperboy route. Among the skateboard park, golf course and swimming pool people leisurely rode their bikes around in the afternoon sun.
The difference made my jaw drop. Not in the fake way people sometimes say to express shock, but in the literal way where drool gets on your shirt.
I was brought to a secure little dock where I went through the metal detector yet again and led to a small diner to wait for the next shuttle over to Ebeye. The shuttles, big army personal boats, come every few hours. One had just left so I sat down to wait. The army base on Kwajalein employs hundreds of Marshallese men and women, a main reason for the crowding on Ebeye as people flock there to work on the base, and I waited with a few of them for the next transport. A group of women shared an order of French fries and laughed their heads off.
Finally my time came and I got on one of the big barges and headed over to Ebeye. The trip took less than 20 minutes. At the dock I got off and asked where my friend Conner was staying. I was led by one of his students through a series of thin alleys in between ramshackle housing. We stepped over pools of mysterious liquids and ducked our heads under rusted tin over-hangings.
Again a shock to my system. I went from the suburbs into a more crowded version of Majuro.
While statistics vary, the most conservative numbers put the packed little town as having the third highest population density of anywhere in the world. Roughly 14,000 people are packed into an area of less than 0.14 square miles. The houses crowd each other like people in line for a concert. Everything is rusted. Kids climb over walls and onto roofs like the whole place is their own, personal jungle gym. Near the end of Ebeye is a section appropriately called Dump Town.
It is exactly as advertised. Rows upon rows of metal trailers that the base has sent over once they’re deemed “unlivable” sit in crooked rows with backyards of rolling hills of refuse. Here and there piles of used diapers and soda cans burn off a noxious smoke. As I walked by, a group of young boys picked among the trash for something suitable to clean themselves and then squatted and did their business.
I felt the strange sensation of not being able to turn away, but disgusted in myself for staring.
The weirdest part was that while there were scenes that made your stomach sink, the whole situation somehow didn’t feel hopeless. There were men sitting outside small coffee shacks, joking with old friends, there were kids swimming and playing basketball and men and women out for their evening strolls.
The sun that evening set into the sea in brilliant oranges and reds and dressed everything in curtains and shades of its fiery color. So much for black and white.
I will explore other aspects of Kwajalein in the next few columns...
Kwajalein Atoll is notable for two very different things. It is the home of a US military base involved in missile defense research and site of WWII battles with Japan and it is also home to one of the most notorious slums in the Pacific, a place called Ebeye.
Getting on the plane, I was surrounded by army base employees coming back from vacation and trading stories: what was good, bad and funny. Some complained about going back to work on the base – getting back to the daily grind.
When I got off the plane I was escorted by a base policeman through what amounts to an American suburb in the middle of the equatorial Pacific. Strange.
Here I was, used to tin shacks and plywood walls, being driven in a Chrysler mini van through mowed lawns lined up perfectly for a paperboy route. Among the skateboard park, golf course and swimming pool people leisurely rode their bikes around in the afternoon sun.
The difference made my jaw drop. Not in the fake way people sometimes say to express shock, but in the literal way where drool gets on your shirt.
I was brought to a secure little dock where I went through the metal detector yet again and led to a small diner to wait for the next shuttle over to Ebeye. The shuttles, big army personal boats, come every few hours. One had just left so I sat down to wait. The army base on Kwajalein employs hundreds of Marshallese men and women, a main reason for the crowding on Ebeye as people flock there to work on the base, and I waited with a few of them for the next transport. A group of women shared an order of French fries and laughed their heads off.
Finally my time came and I got on one of the big barges and headed over to Ebeye. The trip took less than 20 minutes. At the dock I got off and asked where my friend Conner was staying. I was led by one of his students through a series of thin alleys in between ramshackle housing. We stepped over pools of mysterious liquids and ducked our heads under rusted tin over-hangings.
Again a shock to my system. I went from the suburbs into a more crowded version of Majuro.
While statistics vary, the most conservative numbers put the packed little town as having the third highest population density of anywhere in the world. Roughly 14,000 people are packed into an area of less than 0.14 square miles. The houses crowd each other like people in line for a concert. Everything is rusted. Kids climb over walls and onto roofs like the whole place is their own, personal jungle gym. Near the end of Ebeye is a section appropriately called Dump Town.
It is exactly as advertised. Rows upon rows of metal trailers that the base has sent over once they’re deemed “unlivable” sit in crooked rows with backyards of rolling hills of refuse. Here and there piles of used diapers and soda cans burn off a noxious smoke. As I walked by, a group of young boys picked among the trash for something suitable to clean themselves and then squatted and did their business.
I felt the strange sensation of not being able to turn away, but disgusted in myself for staring.
The weirdest part was that while there were scenes that made your stomach sink, the whole situation somehow didn’t feel hopeless. There were men sitting outside small coffee shacks, joking with old friends, there were kids swimming and playing basketball and men and women out for their evening strolls.
The sun that evening set into the sea in brilliant oranges and reds and dressed everything in curtains and shades of its fiery color. So much for black and white.
I will explore other aspects of Kwajalein in the next few columns...
Friday, May 9, 2008
Here on the Big E
So I am here in Ebeye which is where all of the Marshallese people live in the Kwajalein Atoll. This small island is right next to the US Army base and supposedly has the 3rd highest population density of anywhere in the world. Very interesting. More later when I have better internet and time to think.
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Monday, May 5, 2008
Why Sports Here Rock My World
Over here May 1 is Independence Day. To celebrate, the government sets up a series of competitions for area schools and I got the day off to watch. I came away with one general impression – I love sports here in the Marshall Islands.
First of all, tug-of-war is serious competition here. There are strategies, rivalries and fortunes won and lost along that taut line. My students, especially now that summer is knocking on our door, are sometimes impossible to round up in class. They are more interested in spitballs and Bruce Lee kicking. However you put them along a rope with another school at the other end and there is not an army in the world with more discipline. They all know their special positions, they got their signals down pat and when push comes to shove they will sacrifice the skin off their palms to win.
No joke. It is serious fun to watch.
Second thing that is great about the sports here is trash talking. Yeah I know that the US is the country that invented trash talk, but it is nowhere as entertaining as it is here. I was watching the high school basketball championships and I can honestly say I haven’t laughed that hard since my sister shaved her cat (true story). For most of the game these kids were the epitome of composure. Then, all of a sudden, they break into some ridiculous dance or do some crazy face. One kid, after a particularly crucial free throw, did a chicken dance back to mid-court. His fans copied. The place was suddenly a chicken coop with bleachers full of people flapping their bent-elbow wings. Phenomenal.
The third greatest thing about Marshall Islands sports are the fans. Anytime there is a ball and more than one person there will be a crowd of people watching. Strike that, if there is a person and a ball and a wall there are people. Strike that, if there is a ball, there are people. Every single event venue I went to on Independence Day was filled to the brim with fans ready to boil over. And this is for all levels, even the younger ones. I know for a fact that at the majority of middle school games in the US the entire fan base could car pool home together – in a Pinto.
At the volleyball championship here, the referee stopped the game towards the end because there were too many kids sitting on the floor because it was packed everywhere else. His solution? Well, get the score table stick and walk back over to the kids brandishing it over his head. Instantly the floor cleared.
In my head I imagined the TV announcer’s call. And here we are in the championship game to decide volleyball supremacy and it’s Arno’s serve. Wait. What’s this? We have a whistle blown, and… yes, the referee has gone to the score table and he has the stick. The kids are running folks, you should see them run…
The last reason why I love sports here in the Marshall Islands is also a biased reason. My student, Solomon Riklong, won the sprint championship in the 100 meters. He is the fastest person in all of Majuro for anyone sixth grade and younger. You’ve heard of people running like the wind? Well this kid runs like a Ferrari. I actually don’t know if a sports car is faster than the wind but the point is that he is fast. The best part was, he won fifty bucks. I asked him what he was going to do with all of his money. How many five-cent gums and 35-cent popping fireworks can that buy?
“I will give it to my family,” he said.
I love the sports here.
First of all, tug-of-war is serious competition here. There are strategies, rivalries and fortunes won and lost along that taut line. My students, especially now that summer is knocking on our door, are sometimes impossible to round up in class. They are more interested in spitballs and Bruce Lee kicking. However you put them along a rope with another school at the other end and there is not an army in the world with more discipline. They all know their special positions, they got their signals down pat and when push comes to shove they will sacrifice the skin off their palms to win.
No joke. It is serious fun to watch.
Second thing that is great about the sports here is trash talking. Yeah I know that the US is the country that invented trash talk, but it is nowhere as entertaining as it is here. I was watching the high school basketball championships and I can honestly say I haven’t laughed that hard since my sister shaved her cat (true story). For most of the game these kids were the epitome of composure. Then, all of a sudden, they break into some ridiculous dance or do some crazy face. One kid, after a particularly crucial free throw, did a chicken dance back to mid-court. His fans copied. The place was suddenly a chicken coop with bleachers full of people flapping their bent-elbow wings. Phenomenal.
The third greatest thing about Marshall Islands sports are the fans. Anytime there is a ball and more than one person there will be a crowd of people watching. Strike that, if there is a person and a ball and a wall there are people. Strike that, if there is a ball, there are people. Every single event venue I went to on Independence Day was filled to the brim with fans ready to boil over. And this is for all levels, even the younger ones. I know for a fact that at the majority of middle school games in the US the entire fan base could car pool home together – in a Pinto.
At the volleyball championship here, the referee stopped the game towards the end because there were too many kids sitting on the floor because it was packed everywhere else. His solution? Well, get the score table stick and walk back over to the kids brandishing it over his head. Instantly the floor cleared.
In my head I imagined the TV announcer’s call. And here we are in the championship game to decide volleyball supremacy and it’s Arno’s serve. Wait. What’s this? We have a whistle blown, and… yes, the referee has gone to the score table and he has the stick. The kids are running folks, you should see them run…
The last reason why I love sports here in the Marshall Islands is also a biased reason. My student, Solomon Riklong, won the sprint championship in the 100 meters. He is the fastest person in all of Majuro for anyone sixth grade and younger. You’ve heard of people running like the wind? Well this kid runs like a Ferrari. I actually don’t know if a sports car is faster than the wind but the point is that he is fast. The best part was, he won fifty bucks. I asked him what he was going to do with all of his money. How many five-cent gums and 35-cent popping fireworks can that buy?
“I will give it to my family,” he said.
I love the sports here.
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