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...