Doctor, Doctor, Give Me the News

How much did you pay for your last doctor’s visit? A lot? Well, hopefully you had some insurance to help you out and your premium wasn’t too high.

Last year, when I graduated from college and before I worked as a sports writer for the Molalla Pioneer, I entered about six months of uninsured life. I had little to no money and a huge black cloud of debt following me around like a bad dream. The thought of shelling out around 100 dollars a month to be insured made me sick to my stomach. Sad to say being unemployed doesn’t pay a kingly salary so I wondered what I’d have to cut from my diet to be insured. I’m young, I thought, and healthy too so I’ll let it slide for a few months.

I found out quickly what was wrong with being uninsured. Suddenly I was scared in everything I did. I walked down the sidewalk like a little kid sneaking into the kitchen to steal a cookie. Every movement was slow and precise. When cold season came around, and some nasty bug flattened me out and I felt like every cell in my body was rebelling against me, instead of seeing a doctor I just waited it out. I carried Kleenex in my pockets like most people carry spare change. Good thing it wasn’t the bird flu.

Here in the Marshall Islands though, my pockets are a spare-change-only zone. It’s awesome. Everything here at the hospital costs 17 dollars. No joke, 17 bucks opens the doors wide to healing, medicine and operation. Have a runny nose with a nasty flu? Seventeen dollars later and it is all better. Broke your leg? Well, that’ll get that fixed right up for 17 bucks. Need your appendix taken out? Seventeen bucks and it’s all gravy.
When my field director told me that she was in the hospital for a week and came out with her pockets only 17 dollars lighter I was floored.

Suddenly physical injury was just momentary discomfort. I snorkeled shark-infested waters, I took up windsurfing, I gave snotty little kids high-fives – no matter what happened I had a 17 dollar angel at my side.

Now luckily I’ve only had to go to the hospital once in my time here for a skin rash. I walked into a modern building with bone chilling air-conditioning and was led through the usual paper trail and three hours of waiting; but at the end I saw a doctor, got the appropriate medicine and was on my way for – and I know you all are getting tired of this – 17 dollars.

In all of this crazy new country, where government and private citizen are still learning the best ways to work things out and infrastructure is being built from the ground up, here is this thing that makes a ton of sense.
You’re sick? Just go to the hospital.

There are a lot of times when I am in class where I feel sad for my students. I see this amazing group of young people who are so kind, smart and energetic and then I think about their future options and it doesn’t add up. It’s sad to say, but many of them will have a hard time finding work and will deal with issues like poverty for the rest of their lives. It’s almost enough to make you want to go curl up under a coconut tree and wait for the next tsunami.

Now, however, I know they have at least this one thing they can count on – access to health care.

How much did you pay for your last doctor’s visit? More than 17 bucks?

Sick

I have been sick for the last week. I'm talking what-the-heck-just-came-out-of-your-nose-and-should-we-inform-the-government-about-it sick. The good thing is that it gav me a chance to just lay around, the bad thing is I had nothing to do. The headaches made reading impossible so I watched the second season of "24," in, well, a day give or take. With so much tension my nerves are shot.

Here's to the Next Guy

OK so stuff here is starting to wind down and I have to write a letter of advice for the next volunteer coming to my school. This kind of threw me for a loop. I had to think long and hard as to what the heck I should tell the next guy (or girl) to come to Rita Elementary School. The problem I have is there is nothing I can say that would adequately prepare him for this place. I thought about just not writing a letter as a poetic way of telling him to blaze his own path.

However, seeing as I need to write a letter in order to get my 1,500-dollar deposit back, I decided to give it a shot.

One, bring a big stick to scare away dogs, knock down spider webs and poke around fires. If you don’t want to bring a stick because of concerns with airport security fret not, there are sticks here as well.

Two, bring your favorite kind of fruit tree. Fresh fruit is expensive and hard to come by. Better just bring your own dang tree and plant it in the front yard. Yes I know this sounds ridiculous but when your skin is turning the varying shades of yellow on the road to scurvy, who will seem ridiculous then?

Three, you’ll need a raincoat. You think you know rain, and then you come here and you see that what you knew before was just the drizzle they use in supermarkets to keep the veggies fresh. Seriously, it rains here like the sky is holding a grudge. If you don’t have a raincoat you could just wrap yourself up in a trash bag, but I thought we were trying to stay away from ridiculous.

Four, get a good camera. There are things you don’t want to miss or forget. This one time a group of girls started blasting out the “Grease” soundtrack on this ratty boom box and shaking, rocking and rolling like they were on American Bandstand. I didn’t take a picture of it. I wish I would have.

Five, consider getting some sort of little vice. For me it’s sugar. Every time that I feel those pangs of homesickness creep on up through my bones I jam about 15 Snickers bars down my throat and I feel strangely better. I also feel very close to diabetic shock but things in life are all give and take. You’ll learn that here better than anywhere.

Six, get a thick skin. I don’t know how you’ll do this before hand. Maybe take an instrument you’ve never played before, say a bagpipe, and go to open-mic night somewhere and belt out “Little Red Corvette” at the top of your lungs – off-key. There are things here that will scar you if you don’t have a thick skin. Stuff kids say and repeat to you. I will spare the details because this is the classy sort of column, but trust me, get that skin thick.

Seven, learn some new words. You try explaining the concept of a volcanic coral lagoon in print. I’ve tried for nine months and still nobody knows what I’m talking about. Maybe if I had more words…

Eight, bring an open mind. This place has the capacity to crawl up inside of you and change you from the inside out. Let it. The people here are these amazing, generous and loving people that you can learn a lot from. Twenty-five years down the road you will not be lamenting the fact that it was so hot everyday, you’ll be telling about how cool it was to be a positive part of a community.

So there’s the letter – can I get my money back now?

Taxi!

My friends Steve and Ali are the first two people to go home from their year in the Marshall Islands. They are getting on a plane tomorrow and going back to hot water, real coffee and fast Internet.

Oh man, do I feel sorry for them.

The problem is that they are leaving behind the ever-entertaining Marshallese taxi. What are they going to do when they hop in a cab and the driver just takes them where they want to go? Where is the fun in that?

Here you get so much more than a ride. You flag down a cab and the driver is either half-asleep at the wheel or talking excitedly to you about his experience with the American cultural underbelly. Either way you’re riveted.

Then there is always this lady next to you insists on dropping plates of food off at about 35 different houses. At each stop she gets out and pauses to have a word with someone in the front yard and you get to witness first hand how good news and rumors travel so dang fast here.

Plus, the windows of these cabs are so much better than any TV channel you will ever get at home. I zoom by touching scenes of kids playing baseball, swimming or three-legged racing each other down the street. I see lines of kids waiting their turn under the electric razor for a hair cut. I see people playing cards on front steps and the flipper end of a fisherman bringing home his reef catch. I see sunsets gambling their rays out on top of the ocean like a game of dice. I see dogs wrestling each other to the ground and women starting coconut fires.

Then there are also the comedy channels. These are window scenes of kids sucking on rocks and grooving out to the latest Akon rap song. You’re sitting there, laughing your head off, wondering where the heck they get their material. I mean, kids sucking on rocks, who could have come up with that. When the TV stations were hurting for writers they should have just walked around Majuro.

Here’s another great thing about cabs; they are air-conditioned. For fifteen minutes out of your day you get to sit down on a cushy seat and just give your pores a break already. I have been thinking about this; I’ve been sweating for about nine months straight here in this equatorial sun and I don’t know how much longer my glands can hold up.

What’s the warranty policy on these babies?

Then, and here is a real sweet part about taxis, you get a glimpse into the real world! Yes, that’s right, on the most popular radio station in town the BBC splices in ever hour or so to tell you what is happening in the grander scheme of things and you sit back and sigh and know that yes the world is still in fact turning even though you have been caught up in the same summer since last July.

And all of this for a mere 75 cents – how much did your last DVD cost?

I am excited for Steve and Ali to get on with their lives in Boston, but do they realize what they are missing?

Eyebye

Hey, I am going to Eyebye on May 8th. If anyone wants me to check anything out for them, let me know. It is connected to Kwaj the US missle base.

Focus

It’s easy to get blown away by how different my life is today from what it was a year ago. I sit on the beach outside my house and I look down the gentle curve of Majuro framing the lagoon and I remember that a year ago I was holed up against the rain with cabin fever.

Sometimes difference is good.

There are times though when the contrast is bad.

This coral atoll is only 30 miles long and at is widest is probably no more than 200 yards. Trash piles and accumulates with nowhere to go. The problem is compounded because when anyone is done eating anything, they just throw the wrapper down. It’s kind of shocking at first. It used to make sense because before the trash was all coconut husks and pandanous leaves. The Pepsi cans of today are a little bit more ubliqitous.

Now plastic bags roll like tumble weeds and diapers do their best imitation of jellyfish. It’s enough to get me swooning for the pristine state parks of Oregon.

Either way, when I feel myself drifting too far away from anchor and home is a long way off, I just bring my focus in tighter. If you bring your focus in close enough then it doesn’t seem so strange and you can find home most anywhere.

There are pine trees in the Marshall Islands. Yeah, it’s pretty weird but someone brought them in and the trees did what they did and now there are big sweeping pines poking out of coconut tree horizons. This weekend on my walk to Ejit I stopped beneath a pine tree and saw pine needles mixed with sand and it was just like the beach in Tillamook where I go camping every summer. At least a tiny part of it.

My classroom is on the second floor and during recess I lean my elbows on the rail and look out on the small baseball field. The kids all line up to bat. They use an old stick rather than a bat but a pitch is a pitch, a strike is a strike and girls versus boys is a battle we can all get behind.

Coffee is a godsend in the morning. It’s divine. I drink it here same as anywhere.

Sometimes when my students are not behaving and won’t stop talking in class I’ll pace up the rows one by one singing Yankee Doodle Dandy at the tops of my lungs until everyone is cracking up. A clown is always a clown anywhere you are and my voice will be terrible no matter what corner of the map I’m on.

There’s a Salvation Army a few doors down from where I live with a perfect cement basketball court. Right now we are smack dab in the middle of the city league tournament to see who the champion of Majuro is. Sometimes I watch the games from the second storie balcony of the church with my students. We chomp on gum and sunflower seeds and root, root, root for the home team. They are called “The Uglies.”

I went to the hospital and waited for two hours while I killed three pens filling out enough paperwork to make college seem like kindergarten. Heartwarming.

I still like the adventure that living in a different place and culture brings. I still get a kick out of doing unique island things like swimming in one of the deep channels that punch through this atoll like Morris Code. However, there are also times when I just want the familiar, and I have been pleasantly surprised by how I’ve found it.

I guess that old adage that it’s a small world after all is completely true if you bring the focus in tight enough.

A List

Things I thought I’d be but aren’t after living for nine months on an equatorial coral atoll:

A rugged specimen of island toughness – After nine months of never cutting my hair and only rarely shaving, I expected I would look like Johnny Depp from the Pirates of the Caribbean. You know, a suave, rugged individual with majestic locks. Instead people have said that I look like actor Gary Bucci from his police mug shot. My hair puffs out like a cat licking an electrical outlet and for some reason, I blame my Father, I cannot grow facial hair anywhere save a thin strip above my upper lip and all over my neck. It just looks awkward.

A tanned hunk: In a place where the thermostat rarely drops below 80 degrees, I thought that it was safe to assume that my white skin would have turned into a healthy bronze. Well it’s just not true. I have witnessed shades of red reserved only for the internal fires of the sun. My skin skips a step in the burn, peal, tan cycle and simply resets after peal. Flaky is not sexy.

Well versed in island survival: Listen, if you put me and someone else who had never been to Micronesia on a deserted island and saw who would survive the longest, I’d put my money on the other guy. Sure, I have been spear fishing a few times, and sure, I know how to open a coconut, but those are skills that someone with a free afternoon could safely put into his repertoire. When my brother came to the island to visit, he scurried up a coconut tree in seconds – a feat that whenever I try puts my ability to have children at risk.

Used to the heat: I have been here for nine months. That’s enough time to have a baby for goodness sakes, how can I still be sweating this much?

Things I didn’t think I’d be but am after living for nine months on an equatorial coral atoll:

A man with complete disregard for personal hygiene: I think it’s a good day when I can pour a bucket of water into my toilet and have my business go away. All that you need to know about a bad day is that it involves a shower drain and bare feet.

Patience enough to wait out a tree: island time is island time. There are days where my food comes a mere hour after I ordered it and I’ll think to myself “wow, they sure are speedy today.” Added on top of that is the fact that I don’t think anything of taking 30 minutes in a taxi to get somewhere 10 minutes away because hey the lady next to me needs to drop of plates of food to five different houses along the way. I can do waiting now. Not a problem. Bring it on DMV.

Brave in a stupid way: sharks used to be something that I avoided. There was nothing better than sitting on my couch, flipping on the Discovery Channel’s “Shark Week” and getting scared silly. Now, when I’m about to go snorkeling, I’ll think to myself “geez, if I’m lucky, maybe there’ll be a shark!” Somehow I wonder if I have my priorities messed up.

A tolerance for nasty things to rival a garbage man: OK, I know that this was already kind of covered in the toilet one, but seriously, it needs to be touched on again. Things can get disgusting here. Dan and I will be paddling out to the surf and I’ll say casually, “Watch out for the disposable diaper floating there.” I mean, come on, that’s bad.

Super Teacher

All right, in movies you see these phenomenal teachers who love every one of their kids – even the ones who you just know will be spitting in your burger five years down the road. These super-teachers get their students to care about great literature and classical music. They teach them the value of hard work and high moral character. These teachers mold young minds into scholars in the sole pursuit of making the world a better place.

I’m not one of these teachers.

Don’t get me wrong; I try dang hard to be this kind of teacher. I try with all of my might to be patient when a kid is smacking gum in my face and then pretends that he doesn’t even know what gum is when you ask him to spit it out. But man, it’s tough to not snap in that situation.

So here’s the thing; some kids are easier to teach than others. Some kids want to be there, and others don’t. There are kids who will burry their nose in a book and get to work the minute I even think about giving instruction.

There are also kids who, even as 14-year-olds, need someone to hold their hand through even the simplest of stuff like sharpening their pencil.
I’ll say, “hey, Randy, why exactly are you chasing Jear around the room?”
“Nothing, teacher,” he’ll say, “I was just sharpening my pencil.”
Those kinds of kids are frustrating and getting to them is probably the mark of if you are a good teacher or just someone who puts on the collared shirt every morning.

Now there are some days when I am this funny, cool teacher who makes even Randy laugh and bend over his book with the business end of his pencil to get some stuff done. If I could be this guy every single day then I would never have a problem again in my life. I’d win the Teacher of the Universe award like every other week.

Sadly this cannot happen.

Number one, the guy it takes to get to some of these students needs to change it up every single day. One day the funny jokes might get Randy to work, another day it might be stern looks and consequences and still another day it could simply be a pat on the shoulder and a, “hey, I’m glad you made it to class today.” Some days I just don’t know what road to take. Not to mention, it gets really confusing if Randy needs one sort of teacher and Jear needs another.

Number two being a super-teacher is exhausting. There are days when I am tired – enough said.

Sometimes these tough-case kids will figure out ways to get out of my class. “Mr. Tim, I think I have pink-eye,” or “Mr. Tim, my mother told me to go home to clean,” or “Mr. Tim, I think I left my pencil in the other class.”
And sometimes, Lord help me, I just let them go even though their eyes are clear, their mother had no way of telling them to come home and their pencil is clearly behind their ear.

Then, when they leave the class, both of us think we got the better end of the deal.
I know, I know, it’s the wrong way to look at things. And maybe there is a future version of me who will be getting kids to write to their local senator about the environment instead of drawing phallic symbols on their neighbor’s notebooks. Right now though, super-teacher or not, there are just some days that Randy and me need a break from each other.

Hollywood, if you want to make a movie about my teaching, you might have to wait a couple years.

M&M's

"In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, M&M's."
"Mr. Tim, what did you say?"
"I said, 'in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen.'"
"You didn't say 'Amen.'"
"Yes I did."
"You said 'M&M's.'"
"No I didn't."
"Yes you did, and Jesus heard you."
"He did?"
"Yes, and Jesus hate you now."
"Jesus hates M&M's?"
"No, he hates you because you said 'M&M's'"
"I said 'Amen'"
"No you didn't."
"Monica, go sit down."

Ruckus

We’re studying the Titanic in class and I was trying to give the students some idea of how excited the world was to see this ship take off. I decided to do a little role-playing. I divided the kids into two groups, kids who pretended to be on the giant ship and kids who were supposed to be saying goodbye to the ship. Edlynn was the newspaper reporter taking photos, Bella was the mayor christening the ship and Mikaa and Winton were two famous actors eager to be among the first to ride on this fabulous new ship.

“OK, you’ve got to be waving your hats, you’ve got to be blowing kisses, you’ve got to be so excited that this thing is about to sail,” I said.

From the back of the class, Sallyanne raised her hand.

“Oh, you want to be something? Well, OK, I guess that you can be married to Nathan over there on the ship and you’re saying goodbye to him.”

The class exploded. I’m not kidding; the class went crazy. Some kids were covering their mouths and saying “ohhh,” some were on top of desks snapping their fingers and some were laughing so hard that they were on the floor.
It was like Kurt Cobain came back from the dead and soloed for a Nirvana reunion tour. It was like the Marshall Islands just scored a goal in the World Cup final. It was like every kid in the class was just told that later that day Akon was going to play a surprise concert in the lawn.

I’ve never seen anything blow up that big.

Nathan ran from the classroom… I’ve no idea where he is now. Maybe he’s taking refuge with the CIA under the pseudonym “Smith.” Meanwhile, Sallyanne just sank her head into her desk and started balling.

The whole thing was ridiculous.

My stomach twisted. One crying girl, one running boy and the rest of the class threatening to jubilantly riot; it was Wednesday and suddenly the weekend seemed years away.

After a good five minutes I quelled the rebellion and let them out to lunch.

“If you happen to see Nathan,” I called after them, “tell him that I can offer him safety and amnesty.”

Now I was stuck with a pre-teen girl balling in the middle of an empty classroom. I had no idea what to do. Should I try and hug her? Should I sing to her like in the musicals they all love? What if I just gave her a dollar?

“Are you OK?” I asked. “I am sorry.”

She had her head down on her desk and I lowered down until I was eye-level with her.

“You want some candy?” I asked. She sniffed and nodded yes. I gave her some gum and she left rubbing her eyes with the heels of her hands. I walked home to lunch alone.

Then when I got back to class Sallyanne popped out of nowhere with a big smile on her face.

“Hi, Mr. Tim,” she said.

“Hey,” I said.

Kids are so weird.

Nose to the Grind Stone

It took my fellow teacher Dan Caccavano seven hours to upload a video to You Tube this weekend. He started after dinner in the Marshall Island High School office and around 2 am he decided that it would be a good idea to just leave it overnight.
Such is the life on a coral atoll.

The movie is a little over six minutes long. I am no expert on computers, and I have no knowledge of kilobytes, megabytes or snakebites for that matter, but it seems to me that seven hours for a little over six minutes seems ridiculous. That is an hour to upload a minute. I guess more that a minute if you are trying to be exact, and as this is journalism, I suppose I should try. Let’s see, if the movie was six minutes and 20-some seconds then that is about 1.12 hours for every minute of movie uploaded. I don’t know if that is right, but what, you come to me for mathematical precision?

Cut me some slack already.

So that movie is part one of a five-part student-generated documentary series on a Shakespeare play being put on here by the high school. It is done every year and is organized by a volunteer group out of Dartmouth.

Dan is in charge of teaching kids how to edit movies, and make the documentary alongside the play.

I don’t see Dan too much anymore. He spends most days after school hunched over his computer screen, toying with clips and sound bytes, or instructing students who have never even held a camera how to counteract over-exposed frames.

This year’s play is “A Comedy of Errors,” so Dan falling asleep and drooling over his keyboard until 2 am while the screen cheerfully tells him that it will only be a few more minutes seems fitting. However, if you let me get philosophical for a moment, and if you made it this far into the column I doubt you have much choice but to just read on, maybe the seven hours is only appropriate.

In this country nothing is easy. It is the curse of a third-world country desperately trying to pull itself into modern contention in a few short years. Cell phones regularly drop calls, noting ever comes on time, and the internet moves like a snail on a frozen sidewalk. So Dan and his students making this movie was not easy either. There was a lot to learn. A lot of mistakes to take into account. I mean, when you are capturing and importing video for the first time there are bound to be mess-ups. Multiply this by about 20 high school students who have had very limited access to computers their whole life and you can see that there were bumps in the road.

They learned though, they got through it and now part one of their video is on You Tube for the rest of the world to see. Knowing your way around a computer is a vital skill in the developed world, and now these kids who worked will be able to show something online to anyone they want. They can say, “look, I did that.” Plus if people only could put up stuff they had to wait seven hours to upload, then maybe there’d be a lot less crap on the net.

And maybe if you added up all of the hours they put into it then seven hours uploading doesn’t seem so bad.

Dan is exhausted though, I think I’ll buy him a cup of coffee, oh and here is the link to the movie:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akHfCEu_iDg.

Wow

OK, so it is already March 10... Almost exactly three months until I am home... Time is speeding up and on some levels I look forward to going home and on some levels it is scaring me how fast living happens.

Nuclear Victims Walk

Any given day is just a series of moments strung together...
Suddenly everyone started walking. There was no call over a speaker or countdown; everyone just got tired of sitting in the rain so we walked – hundreds of us.

It was still too early in the morning for the sun so we walked by the thin halos of naked light bulbs dangling here and there from houses. People spoke in low, feeling voices that took the place of eyes.

“Mr. Tim, Mr. Tim?” Anahko asked me.

“Yes?”

“Nothing.”

Last Friday was Nuclear Victims Day here in the Marshall Islands. School was cancelled and on Saturday morning, at 5 am mind you, there was a walk from the end of the atoll to the urban center of Majuro.

As I walked my students came and went, talking to me for a few moments before running off. Above us all the stars came in and out of sight as the clouds washed and swirled around. Sometimes rain came.

Every now and then I looked down at my tee-shirt (I was wearing two of them) to try and figure out in this dim light just exactly what its color was.

The reason I was on this walk was that every one of my kids said they would be doing it. So, despite the ungodly hour I was walking. Besides, there was a free tee-shirt for the first 100 walkers.

Long before there was a walk, in February of 1946, Commodore Ben H. Wyatt the military Governor of the Marshall Islands, asked the people of Bikini Atoll for permission to do nuclear testing on their tiny speck of land. He said it was “for the good of mankind and to end all world wars.”

The testing eventually led to this walk.

During the walk dogs barked at the mass of people coursing up the road and I gripped my dog stick tight. My kids laughed at me — they think it’s funny that I’m afraid of dogs. I’d show them the scar from the dog bite I got when I first arrived to demonstrate how unfunny it is to me, but I think that its placement would not have the desired effect. I was bitten on the bum.

Just as the sun was getting around to telling me that my free tee-shirt was maroon in color we reached the end of the walk. Hundreds of people converged on a field from the both directions of the island, people milled around and waited for organizers to hand out the breakfasts of oranges, hard-boiled eggs and doughnuts.
Stuff like this rarely strikes a chord with me. We have a big, dark history as a human race and doing something like a walk very early in the morning, just doesn’t seem to do the actual tragedy justice. My walk was just a bunch of nice little moments capped off with a free tee-shirt. It seemed sort of silly.

Then again, claiming to end all world wars by bombing someone’s homeland into oblivion seems sort of silly too. The Bikinians, as I hope we all would, chose to abandon their home for a greater good. To them it wasn’t silly, they left behind a home that due to radiation of the food supply, they still haven’t returned to. Now, 62 years later, the Bikinians hold “local” Government meetings hundreds of miles from the atoll of the governed. Some spend their days trying to convince the US Government that their injuries due to the nuclear fallout warrant compensation.

Just a bunch of little moments added up...

And so last Friday we just suddenly started walking. It seemed like a good idea, it had started to rain, and maybe everyone on the walk wasn’t doing it for any great and noble reason of remembrance, and maybe it doesn’t add up to the real and terrible tragedy, but maybe you just got to try to piece together little things like waking up early, walking with like-minded people and thinking about it all just a little bit and hope that it adds up to something more.

Let Down

Man, I was planning to go to Arno to go surfing but then some mean sickness came a knocking....

Getting To Know People

I’m beginning to realize something about people. When you first meet them in the grocery store, on the sidewalk or at a party, you are only seeing about one percent of them – if that.

OK, OK, maybe there are moments where lightning strikes and you find yourself being sucked through a wormhole and you are suddenly in love or something. Maybe then you can see something like five percent of who someone is right off the bat — but I doubt that because you need time.

As I get older and older I see my parents as people just like me – not just as infallible beings of love, justice food and warmth.
I recognize that they are people too, with different aspects to their personality that I have never seen before. It is the same for my cousins, my siblings, my friends, and every teacher I have ever had and now it is true for my students.

I started out knowing about zero percent of them and maybe now I am at seven percent— but that’s iffy.

It is easy to never get to know people. There is a huge temptation to write people off with in moments of meeting them. You do it when you cross the street to avoid that group of teenage boys with bandanas and backwards hats. It happens when you decide which seat on the bus you want to take. It definitely happened to me with every single student who walked through the door to 6C.

Well, it happened shortly after I could tell them apart with some consistency as they all wore the same exact school uniforms.
However, right after I knew them by name I placed labels on their foreheads (not literally of course, just in my head).
JD, you who lit a candle in the middle of class, you are forever to be known as “6th Grade Flunkie With No Real Future.” Theodore, you who learned the word ‘loser’ from a movie and called me one behind my back in the first few weeks of school will be “Smart-Ass.” Rebecca, you who secretly listens to dirty rap songs on your CD player while I am giving instruction and then ask me with five minutes left in class what we we’re supposed to be doing, you are christened “The Attitude Kid.”

Well, you may think you know where this is going, some big-life lesson on how I have learned to do a better job of not judging people when I only know a small percentage of who they are, but that is not where I am going at all.

Well, maybe I am going there a little bit, because I do think that it is important not to judge people too harshly for what they may or may not seem to be in the first few moments of meeting them, but more of what I want to talk about it how I have begun to get to know my kids more and more.

JD has some sweet dance moves on top of that candle-lighting affinity, Theodore has not missed one spelling word the whole year so he is defiantly not a loser and Rebecca loves to help me clean up the classroom after school as she pumps herself up with some thick beats.

So, now that I am safely at, let’s say a 10 percent level with my kids, I am excited to get to know what else I have yet to discover about them.

Lets just hope it’s not some hatred for people pale and tall.

Sweet Friday

Well, today was a very good Friday because the kids were all stoked on learning, we laughed a lot, i saw some dance moves from Bryant and then we all chowed down on Valentines candy thanks to the Wilkensons!

Today was the day WorldTeach should have come in and shot promotional photos for their website.

Kind of a Big Deal

Well, there was a big happening this weekend in Majuro. A huge cruise ship, the likes of which have not been seen in this part of the world for the last five years, came and docked for a three-hour stay.

Majuro intended to capitalize on the opportunity and organized a market of local goods for the people who disembarked to get their land-legs back after the four-day journey from Hawaii. There was an article in the paper and a buzz in the air.

I walked down to the shindig at around nine in the morning and as I stepped outside I was surprised to see a cranky, grey day spread out against the sky. Big, bawdy clouds called thunder back and forth and threatened each other with rain; which was strange because it had not rained up until that point for three weeks. Some of the volunteers were actually running out of water.

I thought to myself, naw, there is no way that it is going to rain on the one day that Majuro gets a ship full of rich tourists.

It poured.

At the market everyone was out in full colors. Fresh fruit and baked goods were on display, tables laden with shells were propped up and rows of authentic Marshall Island tee-shirts were hung in rainbow spectrums of color that were clear contradictions to the black day.

When I stepped into the middle of the market, I could hardly believe my eyes. There were more white people crowded into this little place than I had seen cumulatively in the last six months that I have been here. They walked around in pairs and spoke a language I could understand! They were fascinated with the American presidential elections! They needed to wear sunscreen in the Micronesian sun (although not on this day).

My friend Ben and I giddily walked around with our eyes wide and our smiles stretched across our faces like hammocks. I was dying to talk to someone. I felt like I was at a middle school dance.

I talked to some people and some people talked to me. They spoke of a fear of leaving the market because they might get robbed. They talked about how they were eventually headed to Hong Kong. They said it was a shame about the weather.

I found myself bored. Whatever, who needs them?

Who were these people coming onto my island with gold jewelry and completely impractical clothing and talking like they had already written this place off? I wanted to tell them all about the people, how they were so nice and caring it made you feel guilty, I wanted to tell them about the sunsets, how this must be the place where God exhibits his best work, and I wanted to tell them about the dizzying underwater geography of the coral reefs.

Hold on a second. My island? Who did I think I was?

I guess that between touchdown in July and now this has become a little more than a place I work and a place I play. This has become a place I live, a place I have a home.

So even if the cruise ship was a big happening, if they were too snobby to give my home a chance, then good riddance.

I am glad it rained.

Maybe I am being too harsh. I too ere on the safe side when traveling. I know in Europe I had to dig my money out of a small purse-like thing I kept strapped to my bare chest. The Italians still laughed at me though.

I believe this is called localism.

Salmon For All

A Columbia River salmon swam out into the Pacific near Astoria and on his way to the normal Alaskan hunting grounds of his ancestors he took a wrong turn, or got caught in a freak current, and was swept away from the cold waters he had known. Suddenly he found himself around the bright corals and clear waters of Micronesia. He blissfully darted around paradise before a hook yanked him back to reality – well, death really.

OK, so I know that didn’t happen, but how else can I explain the cold hard fact that I ate delicious, fire-toasted, pink and flaky, oh-so-succulent salmon on a Saturday evening on a coral atoll thousands of miles away from the Northwest?
It came from Oregon, and it was fresh, not frozen.

A week before my fortunate stumble into taste-bud heaven, my friend Dan and I had been talking about what our first meal would be when we stepped off the plane into the US again. Hamburgers? Indian food? Italian? Nope, strike all of those; we both said that our meal would have something to do with the Oregon specialty of top-notch salmon.

“I am going to go home, get a sweet cut of Chinook, and grill is up with some onions and a little salt and eat until I fall asleep,” Dan said. And I agreed, nothing sounded better than that.

Alas, our dream was at the very least four months off. That meant four months of ramen, expired Cheerios and 99-cent-a-pound potatoes. Enough to make you want to cut your taste buds out in other words.

Then, God, luck, random chance or whatever other greater power you hitch your life to, decided to step in.

Some friends and I spent the day down at the bridge surfing. I was on shore taking photos when some men came out to watch. We got to talking and they told me that after we were done, we should cross the street and join in a little barbeque they were having. When Dan and company exited the water, exhausted with arms like noodles from paddling so much, free food was the perfect cure.

At the house we were having a few beers when a man drove up with a huge big-eyed tuna in the back of his truck. The thing was every bit as long as 5’11” Dan and so heavy that he could only halfway pick it up.

“This is a Marshallese specialty,” the man said. “If you bought this in New York, you’d be paying big bucks.”

We ate the amazing sashimi that the man skillfully cut from beside the spine of the monstrous fish and thought our luck could not get much better; that is until the man took out his cooler carefully packed with cuts of salmon practically glowing in their sunset-pink hue.

Our jaws dropped.

“Brought this back with me from Portland last week,” the man said. “In a cooler. I would have had more, too, but they took about half from me in Hawaii.”

The rest of the night was spent in a food-induced delirium as we picked our way between two rare kinds of fish.
I had no idea you could check a cooler of fresh fish on a Continental flight. I guess I know now what one of my pieces of luggage will be on the way back.

A big-eyed tuna took a wrong turn East of the Marshall Islands, got caught in a fluke current and found himself swept away from the warm waters he’d known and into the silt-laden, muddy waters where the Columbia river meets the Pacific Ocean. He joyously used his superior speed to feed on the smelt before a hook yanked him back to reality – or death.

I Am Waterman

Well yesterday I took up windsurfing. Add this to surfing, sailing, snorkeling and spear-fishing and I am really not sure what I will do with myself when I get back to the P-Town...

To My Teachers (And for Aunt Laurie)

Dear every teacher I have ever had: I am sorry. I am sorry for any problem I ever caused. I am sorry for eating Doritos in Spanish class junior year of high school, for pushing down Sam Hudson in fifth grade and for sticking my gum to the bottom of my desk in seventh grade science. I shouldn’t have written my name on the wall, I took far too many bathroom passes and throwing wads of paper instead of listening to the lecture is not OK.

From the bottom of my heart, from the greatest depths of my soul and with every tiny cell in my body I apologize.

Teaching is hard – really hard.

I wish I had a better way of saying this. Teaching is like solving a math problem but every time you take your eyes away for a second all of the numbers change. Teaching is like getting to a party too early or telling someone about your favorite book at a basketball game. People nod, pretend that what you say makes sense and then want to get back to their lives already. They’ve got parties to prepare for and games to watch.

Some days are great, don’t get me wrong. Some days I am the funny teacher, and I get through to the kids and we all laugh and go home feeling fuzzy. A lot of times though, that just isn’t how it is. Kids cut class, trick you into saying cuss words in Marshallese and cheat on tests.

It can be very frustrating. For section D, getting to my class on time is a struggle. I am clueless as to why because I am literally right next door to the class they have the period before. They need only to stand up and walk next door. For many of them, mainly the boys, this proves too difficult because of the alluring pull of the stairwell.

Don’t ask me why the stairwell is appealing. It smells of urine, it is dark and I get the distinct feeling it is haunted.

On Thursday I got fed-up and I told my kids that if they came to my class late the next day, then I was not going to let them in. They didn’t believe me and the next day there was a group of six boys who knocked on my door 20 minutes after the bell had rung because they had been hanging in the stairwell.

“No,” I told them in my best impression of a no-BS voice.

“Mr. Tim, what about the spelling test?” they asked me.

“Sorry, I told you yesterday you need to be on time.”

For the next ten minutes the kids I would not let in for class exhibited all of the signs of a 60’s peace rally. They sang unifying songs against me, they rattled my windows and even went so far as to yell out how words were spelled during the test.

“Well, it looks likes the guys outside are giving you all free answers,” I told the class. “That is going to make their zeros seem even worse.”
The yelling of answers ceased.

When class ended the group of renegade students were waiting for me as I walked to lunch. Their leader, a boy named Kersey, told me he didn’t like me and then unleashed a fury of grammatically incorrect English cuss words.
I was shocked and taken aback. I wanted to shout back and show him how real English speakers cuss. Instead, I did the first thing that popped into my mind and I blew him kisses.

Kersey went home for lunch without cussing again.
I felt happy that I had won the battle, but exhausted and worn-out. I didn’t want it to be like this. I wanted to peruse stories at leisure with willing and eager students as we discovered the joys of English.

Now I know that it is not going to be like that. I am sorry, teachers, I know I could have behaved better for you all.