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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Getting Tumbled

For the first time in the history of the Marshall Islands Spear and Surf Club charter members Dan “Thinning in the Front but a Jungle in the Back” Caccavano and Tim “Take a Shower Already” Lane financed to have a word-class photographer to come out and shoot a surf session at the club’s highly confidential secret surf spot that is somewhere behind the high school rumor has it. The photographer, Joe “I Only Dress Like a Golf Pro” Fore was primed and ready to get some killer shots of the club shooting the curl and hitting the green room hard. The outing proved to be immensely successful as Joe managed to snap this little gem. It is artfully out of focus and Mr. Fore chose to use an angle that increased Dan’s prominence on the wave and reduce the appearance of the wave’s actual size (which was inching north of 20 feet to be sure).

When the club first paddled out on the frothy surf a crowd of eager young children spotted the shoreline hoping for a glimpse of one of their surf heroes dropping in on a killer wave and hitting the rail hard. Many of them had markers in hand to get an autograph when Dan and Tim resurfaced. The crowd thinned out after a short while however after Dan and Tim failed on repeated attempts early in the session to stand up on the frothy wild beast-like waves. When pressed for an explanation as to why they struggled early in the session, Dan had this to say.

"Listen, I am all about getting the kids excited about surfing, but if they cannot appreciate a good wipe out and washing machine combo, then they are not true Dan and Tim fans because that is just what we do,” Dan said as he repeatedly kissed his fingers, tapped his chest and then pointed to the sky.

Meanwhile Tim was unusually tight-lipped about the beginning session.

“Picasso painted masterpieces, Chef Boyardee made some mean spaghetti O’s, and Dan and Tim, we just get wet,” Tim said in a low mumble.

For the few fans that hung out in the hot sun, they were gainfully rewarded by a couple of slick rides from Mr. Caccavano. Tim struck out however, wave after wave, and so the day was Dan’s. Tim refused to comment on his lack of waves but Dan had this to say about his ever-present partner in crime.

“Some guys think surfing is all about riding waves. It is not. Surfing is in here,” Dan said as he pointed to his heart. “And that means that you have to mess around in the white wash and fall on your face a little, because that is surfing too. Any guy who goes out there and gets killer ride after killer ride without getting smashed up in a mean rinse cycle is no surfer in my book. My
Broseph over there (taps his heart and points to Tim) he is one of the best surfers in the world, because that is basically all that he does. I think that he falls better than he rides – and that is pure.”

The love you give comes back in the end.
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Building More Than Canoes

In the Marshall Islands, as is the case anywhere in the world, there are kids that slip through the cracks. These are kids who do not finish public schooling, often have family troubles and sometimes struggle with alcohol abuse. Due to the new globalized world the Marshall Islands are a part of, kids who would once have a spot in the traditional Marshallese culture are now simply young and unemployed.

Cue the “Waan Aelon in Majel Program” or WAM. Translated into English it means “Canoes of the Marshall Islands Program,” and it is aimed at giving options to kids who do not have many.

Things started in 1989 when Alson Kelen, a Marshallese man who graduated from Chemeketa Community College in 1991, traveled all around the many small atolls in the Marshall Islands on a grant from the Department of the Interior. His job, along with college Dennis Alessio, was to document just exactly how a Marshallese canoe went from logs to speedy outrigger. As they documented the process on atoll after atoll, one thing caught Kelen’s eye.

“We saw on the outer islands that whole groups of people would come together to build these canoes,”Kelen recalls. “Even during that documentary stage we were thinking about how this could be educational.”

So Kelen came back to Majuro with the idea of building traditional canoes. On and off over the next nine years Kelen put together canoes with the help of neighborhood kids and in 1998 they took the then ambassador from Australia out for a ride. He was so impressed with what he saw that he offered Kelen a grant to start a youth program. In 1999, WAM was incorporated.

“That’s when we started to get more serious,” Kelen says.
Kelen started crafting the WAM program into something other than a way to preserve the art of canoe-making but also a way to help disadvantaged kids out. Most of the kids enrolling in the program were basically “street kids,” Kelen says and making them accountable was a crucial beginning step.

“The fact that these kids can come in and punch in and punch out is a huge thing in itself,” Kelen says.

WAM is priming these kids for employment and it starts from the very beginning. Each kid needs to submit an application and come in for interviews. As part of the program all are required to get training in math, English and life-skills along with alcohol abuse counseling.

Students come in for phase one, a sixth-month course of study focusing on building canoe models and working on basic carpentry skills, and then choose whether or not to pursue the program further in stage two, up to two years focusing on advanced wood-working and fiber-glassing.

The changes in the youth have been clear and encouraging.

“When they first come in here they are kind of lost,” Kelen says. “They are kids from the streets. They are nervous, shy and afraid. You see a lot of changes. They start working together as partners and they bond together.”

Each incoming class for stage one is 14 students and seven can eventually move on to stage two. However there has been a problem recently — all 14 kids want to move on to stage two. This is perhaps the biggest signal of change in these kids at risk. They have gone from being undependable and unemployable to kids who simply do not want to stop learning and improving.

“These were kids who would get nervous when I asked them to do work and hide in the bathroom,” Kelen says. “Now they are kids who don’t want to stop.”

Kids slip through the cracks everyplace in the world — unfortunately they do not have a place like WAM everyplace in the world to help them back up to solid ground.

The love you give comes back in the end.
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Kool-Aide and Top Ramen

I knew when I first landed in the RMI that even this remote coral atoll was not immune to globalization. What I didn’t know was just exactly how random those influences seem to be.

For example, my students’ favorite foods is Top Ramen with Kool-Aid. They smash up the package of ramen on the floor with their heel and then sprinkle in half a packet of red Kool-Aid, half a packet of Top Ramon seasoning and shake it up. They pick out the pieces of dry ramen from the package and come away with their lips and hands stained red.

My students also love pogs. The pogs here come from Japan but they are basically the same as the ones that were popular in my childhood. For those of you who are not aware of what pogs are, here is a quick tutorial.

Pogs are little circles of cardboard with pictures and designs printed on them. To play pogs, each player puts in five of his pogs and they stack them up. Then, each player takes turns throwing another pog at the pile to try and knock off as many pogs as they can. The pogs they can knock off they get to keep.

It is a phenomenon that is all over the island. Walk anywhere and you will see kids kneeled, with one knee resting on a flip flop, throwing pogs. In turn their arms cock up over their heads and with a flash they release a throw at the pile.

I have literally had to tell kids in the middle of class to get off the floor and get back to reading.

“Seriously Winton, what made you think that it would be OK to get out of your seat and kneel on the floor and throw your pogs?”

“Sorry, teacher, sorry.”

In addition to ramen, Kool Aid and pogs every boy in the sixth grade is obsessed with hip-hop culture. Everyone owns at least one do-rag, retro jersey or fake gold chain. For some reason out of all of the American influences they see on TV and movies, the youth of the RMI have embraced hip-hop culture. Most students here can recite the words to the raunchy hip-hop song, “Smack That,” verbatim but will get fidgety and nervous when you ask them how their day went.

Top Ramen and Kool Aid, pogs and hip-hop culture are the three main imports I have seen so far in the RMI.

It boggles my mind.

Out of all of the influences getting beamed in, the ones that have stuck most evidently are these three things.

Why exactly is it that the kids here all want to be like 50 Cent? The youth have seen images of the news as well as rap videos. Why are there not legions of little Stone Phillips’s running around with trite smirks and odd inflections in their voices? There are other foreign foods to eat, other foreign things to do and certainly other foreign counter-cultures to emulate.

The answer, it seems, is accessability Top-Ramen and Kool Aid can be bought for less than 50 cents, a pack of pogs are a quarter and hip-hop artists are a lot closer to the reality they face day to day.

Hip-hop is a culture where the predominant players are all dark-skinned and rebelling against establishment in the coolest ways. They sing and rap about coming up big from a poor background. For a dark-skinned Marshallese young person who comes from poverty, that is like shooting fish in a barrel.

Stone Phillips didn’t have a chance.

Globalization has reached even the most remote of places in the world, but who would have known that Kool-Aid and Top Ramen, pogs and hip-hop would be the lasting evidence of it.

The love you give comes back in the end.
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Swimming Into the Great Abyss

On a coral atoll there are two places to go swimming. Ocean-side or lagoon-side.

Lagoon-side is always the safer bet of the two. There are no waves to deal with, the tide is not an issue and there are not as many sharks.

Lagoon-side has its own issues as well though. The water is sometimes murky with sediment and the trash problem of Majuro is very evident under the water. I have seen bottles and cans, plastic bags and diapers, moving and swaying in the water. It is tragic and disgusting but it is not life-threatening.

At least I think it is not — maybe those diapers should be checked out.

Until recently, I stuck strictly to lagoon-side swimming. Aside from the fact that there are less sharks on lagoon-side, the sharks that are there are reported to be smaller than ocean-side ones.

However, as I was leaving my house one day I looked out to the ocean and saw that it was as calm and glassy as a lake and I decided to reconsider. I called my field director to find out her point of view on the issue.

“Hey Tam,” I asked, “do people around here go swimming on ocean-side?”

“Why, are you thinking about going out there?”

“Yeah, I was thinking about it. It seems really calm now.”

“You know, people sometimes use the ocean as a bathroom.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, people do go swimming out there, but I just thought that you should know...”

I went back to my little house and sat on the front steps to think it out. A few yards away, the ocean swayed and pulsed in a gentle and inviting rhythm. On one hand I had big sharks, a strong tide and the knowledge that I would be swimming in someone’s giant toilet. On the other hand I murky water and lagoon trash — including the ever present and always disturbing diaper.

I decided to leave the choice up to fate — fate being one of my neighbors.

I knocked on my friend Courtney’s door.

"Hello?” she said.

"Hello, want to go snorkel on the ocean side,” I asked.

“Sure,” she said.

“Oh good...”

It was decided and I had nothing left to do but swallow my fear and put on a strong front. I ran back to my house and gathered my equipment and we headed down to the water.

We tiptoed out into the ocean, careful to avoid any nasty sea creatures, until we got into deep enough water to strap on our fins. We stroked out side by side and the incoming waves washed over the tops of our snorkels. We blew out the water and kept on going. We started to get into a rhythm where we knew when to dive deep under the incoming waves and soon we were in deeper water where waves were not an issue. Here the water was crystal clear with no trash.
Underwater it felt like being in a cathedral. The ocean made a clicking sound that I have heard is from the coral. Cut into the sea floor were deep channels that were coated in coral and life. I swam into half-enclosed channels that almost formed tunnels and came out the other end feeling like a fish. My visibility went on and on and I imagined that if my sight could echo like my voice then I would hear no refrain from the murky depths into which a stared wide-eyed.

The fish out here were bigger and moved in larger numbers. On the edge of my field of vision, where the blue sank finally into black I saw shapes of fish that were much bigger than any I had seen before. Most of the time I imagined them to be sharks hungry for human, but with longer gazes and more careful eyes, I was able to see that they were just monstrous reef fish.
when the tides started to change Courtney and I swam back to shore. On the way back in I turned over underwater and watched waves crashing from a fish’s perspective. They broke hollow and white. They rose up into cylinder shapes before erasing themselves with a bubbling whiteness.

I came to shore feeling refreshed.

Maybe I would start swimming ocean side more often. You can surf there, the water is clearer and contrary to what Tam warned, it doesn’t feel like someone’s toilet.Plus, I didn’t see a single diaper over there...

The love you give comes back in the end.
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Ballin'

Well, it is ````````````tough times for an aspiring ``writer ````````````````````her`e ``on ````````M`aj`````uro. I opened up my `computer t`he `````````````````````other day and ```````````````found that there was something off. My tilda key was locked down and insisted on splashing itself across my screen in an`noying flashes of persistance. Needless to say that when you are deep within the tangles of your own thoughts and the thoughts of all of your characters, the last thing that you `w`ant or need is to have a giant like of things that look like an apostr`ophie jam out across the screen. I am kind of frustr`ated right now. I have tr`ied everything that I know to fix it but nothing seems to work. I flipped off the key and cleaned out underneath it and it appears that nothing is physically holding it down, so I can only guess that this is the first of many humidity breakdowns that is headed my way... wow, it seems to have slowed down quite a bit. This makes me happy. Very` happy````````````````````````````````````````````````. Damn it. I spoke too ``````````so`o```````````n. anyway, I have started p`laying basketb`all after school in my` flip flops sometimes. It is very fun and I get an automatic excuse any of my shots don’t fall. I am wearing flip flops!

The love you give comes back in the end.
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A Little Football Anyone?

At the end of each Friday class I make everyone stand up and do the “It’s the Weekend Dance.” For some of the kids this is a harrowing experience. They are at the tail end of their elementary career and will be big bad middle-schoolers next year so they are right on the border of being “too cool” to do things like that. Getting up and grooving with your teacher is not really the hippest thing to do.

I still make each and every one of them show me a little shake in their step before they leave the room though. Their bruised and embarrassed young egos will heal and I feel like the dancing breaks down barriers a little bit — between them and me but also amongst themselves.
Plus it always gets me into the weekend laughing and feeling pretty good.

Anyway, this last Friday, while we were getting down on our weekend groove, I told the kids that if anyone would like to play, I was going to be at the high school field with a football at four o’clock.

Of my four sections of sixth graders — that is over 120 kids total — I expected that maybe five would show up. After all, I was the totally uncool teacher who made kids do totally uncool things like dance in class.

After school I went home and took a little power nap before kick-off time. When I woke up it was five minutes to four and I didn’t really feel like playing football anymore. I felt like curling back up and falling to sleep. It was my weekend. Besides, I knew that hardly anyone would show up.

Then I thought about those poor one or two kids that did take the time to come and play, how sad would that be if their teacher ditched out on them?

So I yawned, rolled out of bed and into the hot sun and trekked over to the field. Right when I stepped out of my front door, little Monica Joel ran up to me.

“You are late Mr. Tim,” she told me with more attitude than I thought could have been possible to bottle up in her miniature frame.

“No, I am not,” I told her.

“What time is it?” she asked.

“4:02,” I told her.

“Then you are late.”

I smiled and thought, well it looks like it will just be Monica and I, throwing around the pigskin. This was not necessarily a bad thing because Monica cracked me up. She once told me I looked like a broom because I was super skinny and have bushy hair.

Anyway, Monica led me all of the way to the field, shooting sass the whole way. When I came around corner, to my surprise, the field was chalk-full of kids decked out in Rita Elementary red and blue.

“You’re late, Mr. Tim, you’re late!” kids shouted at me.

It looked like the “It’s the Weekend Dance,” had not, in fact, made all of my kids avoid me like the plague.

There were about thirty kids who showed up. Laijab, the biggest kid at school and only eleven, had somehow gotten his hands on some lacrosse pads, which he thought were football gear, and he lined up opposite of me. He smiled and pointed at my face.

When “hike” was called Laijab ran straight for my chest.

If Monica referred to me as broom, then she would have called Laijab a bowling ball. I toppled roughly to the ground. Laijab cheered.

“No tackling,” I breathed out softly from collapsed lungs.

“Aw, that is so boring, Mr. Tim,” Laijab complained and got off my chest.

Maybe it would have been better if my “It’s the Weekend Dance” had scared my kids away after all...

Marshall Islands Surf Club

It gives me great pleasure and honor to announce the formation of the Republic of the Marshall Islands Surf Club. The Rita Chapter had its first session on Sunday with cofounders Dan “40-Pounds” Caccavano and Tim “He-So-Pretty” Lane taking the club’s one battered and borrowed board out into a killer session of frothy two-foot rollers.

The club’s first outing was a huge success, the effects of which are being widley felt through the community at large. Mr. Caccavano took the majority of the rides in the first day as he netted a couple of intense drop-ins that had the crowd (i.e. Tim in snorkel gear) cheering for more. Tim was not to be outdone however has he jammed on one quality ride of his own that must have lasted north of a second and a half.

The sensation that is the Republic of the Marshall Islands Surf Club, Rita Chapter has caused a particular stir among the forighn community on island as two girls have already offered to be club “groupies.”

For those who have heard rummers swirling around co-founder Tim’s potentially career-ending injury, take heart. It is a mere scratch and was actually sustained when he started swimming in too shallow of water right next to the shore and had nothing to do with a nasty fall or a giant shark (as some have speculated in the many Republic of the Marshall Islands Surf Club blogs out there in the blog world).

The surf club is seeking NGO status and has plans to expand into the community and take the local youth into the waves. Never mind that the local youth far exceed both Dan and Tim’s skills in the water.

The Republic of the Marshall Islands Surf Club is in desperate need of a few things to get the club really off of the ground. Mainly surfboards, booties and rash guards. Other than that we are golden. Any donations are welcomed and can be sent to:

The Republic of the Marshall Islands Surf Club
C/O WorldTeach
P.O. Box 627
Majuro, Marshall Islands
RMI

The love you give comes back in the end.
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If You Build It, They Will Come

Ever since I got here, I wanted to build a chicken coop. It makes perfect sense for me. Fresh eggs, the prospect of building something and the smell of live chickens right outside my door — OK, that last one was more of a detractor than anything else.

Moving on...

As the year progressed, my cohort Darren and I ran out of steam on the whole build-a-chicken-coop idea. We had school all day long and the only thing that we wanted to do when we limped exhausted into our weekends was stretch out our hammocks and relax under a coconut tree.
I rounded up all of the scrap wood we had gathered for the coop and started thinking of things I could use it for.

“Hey, Darren,” I said one day while I was over visiting the dorms. “What would you say if I told you that I think we should scrap the whole coop idea? I could build a shelf out of the wood instead.”

“Um, OK,” Darren said. “I guess that I am cool with that.”

We shook hands because it seemed more professional and I went outside to walk to my house. I read a book as I walked so I didn’t notice the mother hen and her group of chicks standing in my front yard until I had almost stepped on them.

I lowered the book from my eyes and stared in disbelief. Was this some sort of miracle? Some sort of divine intervention?

Laughing, I sprinted back to the dorms.

“Darren!” I shouted. “You have to come and see this!” Darren slapped on some flip flops and ran out to see what I was shouting about.

“Wow,” he said. “Maybe God is telling us that if we build a coop, chickens will come.”

Darren and I had a quick council on whether it was ethical to keep the mamma hen and her little chicks or not. All of our learning about chickens came from a children’s book that was taken from Rita Elementary, but we felt pretty confident in our decision being well informed.

On one hand, the chickens were obviously someone’s, but on the other hand, there were at least six chicks that were small and vulnerable. These little chicks might not even make it to the egg-bearing age so what if we just took a couple of the chicks and raised them safely and properly we would be like their guardian angels. We would be doing a service! And then, after 8 months of fresh eggs, we could even return those chickens to the rightful owner.
The logic worked, at least for us, and Darren and I got a basket and prepared to chase down the chicks.

In our over-grown yard, it is surprisingly difficult to grab a little chick. They routinely disappear under weeds and into thickets. We sweated and labored under the hot, tropical sun trying to corral us a chick.

Finally we got the mamma hen and all of her chicks cornered between a fence and a wall. We moved in low and fast to grab us a couple of birds.

“Yokwe,” came a voice from over the wall. Darren and I stopped in our tracks. We looked up to the wall and peering over its edge was a young man.

“Oh, hello,” I mumbled.

“The mamma hen is chirping because she is worried for her baby chickens,” the young man said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Hey, do you know whose chickens these are.”

“They are mine,” he said.

I coughed.

“Well, good to know,” I said. “We were just capturing them — to give them back...”

“It is OK, you can leave them there.”

“OK...”

Darren and I started to walk back into the dorms. Half-way across the yard I turned back to the young man.

“Hey, you think we could buy a chick or two?”

“For what?”

“Eggs.”

“Maybe you ask again when they are grown up and I know which are girls and which are boys.”

“Sounds good, neighbor,” I said.

So, I guess that if you build a chicken coop, the chickens will come, just make sure they are not your neighbor’s.

The love you give comes back in the end.
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The Bells

In the Republic of the Marshall Islands, militaries have come and left. Ours, and others, have built cement structures with metal cylinders to shoot missiles and rain bombs. Foreign men have been here during hostile times, far away from their loved ones, thinking they could die.
A war came through these islands and atolls and while the shaking of military might has left, there are remnants that still stand.

Outside on the beach in front of my house, there is a rusted machine with gears exposed, the teeth of which are broken and disfigured. Chipped and decayed like the remains of a robot, the ocean will turn this to sand over time --- but it has not happened yet. In the lagoon there are planes that sit swaying with bits of seaweed growing on their hulls. They are stationary ghost figures in gloomy tides.

The military men also left big, hollow shells that simply do not go away. You can burry them, sure, but where?

When the war left his place, it kept its thumb-print here.

These echoes of a not so distant time could be a bitter reminder of when the Marshallese people played host to men who they did not understand and played a part in a war they had no business being in. These relics could be a sore-spot of anger and regret.

Strangely it is not that way — at least from what I have seen.

You will hear bells when you are here. They ring out during the day and sometimes at night. They ring out when church has over and those who have finished worshiping their God make their way home. They chime when school starts and finishes. Some families have their own bells.
Children take up pieces of coral in-hand and bang the bells then they are noddy and when they wish to play tricks. It is a game that never grows tired. Children double over in laughter, collapse in the fun of ringing a bell when it should stay silent.

And so, on this island, you will hear bells at any given time and you will know that something important like school or church has finished, or maybe you will think of cheeky kids having a laugh, collapsed on the ground and it all comes from the bells.

These bells come in one size. They hang from buildings and metal stands. They stand a little more than five feet tall and are long and cylindrical. They are open at one end and they slope closed on the other.

They used to be a tool for the military. Our military or another — I am not sure. They are thick shells and even though they rust in the salty and humid air, they hold up. They will for a while. They used to be evidence that this place was taken by a military, held, contested and passed from one hand to another.

They used to be a thumb-print of a time when foreign men smoked foreign cigarettes as they prepared to fight a foreign war.

They don’t stand for that anymore.

They are just bells and they help people know when they should go to things like church or school. They are not devices that will lay waste to groups of people. Sure there are some that collapse in front of their reverberating strike — but it is children laughing at a good joke and not people dying in an attack.

Militaries have come and left this place, and there are remnants that remain.

There are also bells here now.

The love you give comes back in the end.
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Going the Long Way

There are two ways that I can walk into town from where I live. One goes on the main road and passes restaurants and shops and is on the lagoon side. The other way I can go winds its way along the ocean and through a neighborhood.

Here the houses are crowded closely together and all seem to be growths and extensions from one another. There is a tiny graveyard with little bleached white graves and a basketball court that is squeezed in tightly between two houses and could probably only fit two men standing shoulder to shoulder. There are bare light bulbs dangling from outside walls with orange extension cords and small tables and stoops where the older men and women sit and play a game that is close to checkers but not quite checkers.

The most noticeable thing about this neighborhood though is the people — they are everywhere.
The parents and grandparents line the borders of everything and laugh, work and talk. The kids fill the street and the small ally-ways like water fills a bucket. They hang out of door ways and from the limbs of trees. They pulse in groups of three or five or 20. They run and chase each other or all crouch and lay around some found object to analyze and dissect it. Babies are held by their big brothers and sisters sit on stairs with their siblings and comb out the tangles in their hair. Mothers call children in for dinner and fathers sit in groups with their arms folded and make jokes.

In this neighborhood that sits next to my house, you can feel community pulsing.
I have always known that I live in a section of Majuro called Rita, and I could get home in a cab with this information, but it was not until I went through this neighborhood that I actually felt like I knew where Rita was.

Coming from a place like the United States to a place like the Marshall Islands puts me in a strange spot. I am here to help and volunteer. My job description is to teach the youth so they will have a better future that they might not have otherwise had.

My mission, by its very definition, puts me into a position where I notice what these kids do not have and I attempt to alleviate that — help them onto a more even playing field with the rest of the world. So I find my mind snapping to the mold of noticing only what the people lack.

Every time that I pull water from the kitchen tap I have to first boil it for three minutes to kill any nasty microbes that could be lurking inside. This is just one example of a thing that I put onto the list that has formed in my head of what disadvantages the youth here have. “They cannot simply drink water whenever they want,” I think to myself. “That is so sad.”

When I found the real Rita however, something inside me started to change. While these kids have a lot of things to get over — poverty, poor infrastructure, spotty education and sometimes questionable nutrition to name a few — they also have some highlights to carry with them.
They have community in a trump suit.

In some places in the developed world kids are corralled off into mowed lawns behind white fences because otherwise it is dangerous. They play ball with their friends they invite over or maybe with a brother or sister, but they don’t have what the kids here have. They don’t have a roving and pulsing community of kids that are free to pursue whatever interest captures them on any given day. They do not have parents that line and pad the neighborhood.

Most of them don’t have a place like the real Rita.

So, when I walk to town, I like to walk down the street where the corrugated tin houses are stacked up like matchstick boxes on a store shelf and the children and community ebb and flow naturally like the tide.

The love you give comes back in the end.
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Help!

OK, so my class is in dire need of reading material. We have lots of good books to read but we need news magazines. I think that for a lot of these kids, the outside world is as real for them as the Marshall Islands is for most of you all. This is a situation I think needs to be fixed. So, any newsy magazines (or anymagazines for that matter because pictures are awesome) you should drop in the mail and send my way!

Much Love

Tim Lane
c/o WorldTeach
PO Box 627
Majuro, Marshall Islands
RMI

The love you give comes back in the end.
--------------------------------------------------------

Goodbye

The Marshallese people have a very specialized verb in their language. It came into being as a necessity. The verb is “Lokon wa,” and to my understanding, it means to see someone’s back as they sail away.

The verb is to say goodbye without really ever knowing when you will say hello again.

Long ago, when canoes sailed off on expansive journeys across the Pacific, many Marhsallese people didn’t know if they would ever see their loved ones again. They were left with the lasting image of their friend or family member being swallowed in a vast ocean-horizon.

“Lokon wa.”

It may seem that the word is archaic in our era of cell phones, internet and airplanes, but I am not so sure — at least not here. It seems to me that the Marshallese people are in a cultural transition that will keep this particular verb relevant for a while longer.

There are two things that the majority of Marshallese children want to be — a teacher or a nurse. On this island, finding a steady-paying job other than those two professions can be difficult. People can try to work in shops but upward mobility is hard in this private sector so many people choose to pack up and leave for the land of opportunity — the United States of America.

Through the US Compact with the Marshall Islands, citizens here can move freely to the US and try their hand in our economy with little to no red tape, so people do it. Actually, whole families do it. And when families move to find jobs communities of ex-islanders gel together. There are populations of Marshallese all over the US, but locally there are large groups in Salem and Portland. Sometimes, Marshallese children born to these families don’t see much their home country and are more American than Marshallese. They use American slang, don’t know much of their mother tongue and their parents can’t bring the family home as much as they would like because plane tickets are so much money.

“Lokon wa.”

Until relatively recently the Marshallese were subsidence-livers. They would get by on the things that they could grow or catch in the sea. It was a lifestyle where community pooling was crucial to survival.

This is reflected in the culture here still. People share what they have and they are more comfortable being together than being apart.

This is slowly changing however. People want good health care and a reliable supply of food and water so they leave their outer islands and come into the mainland where they are more guaranteed of meeting these needs, and rightly so. However, they are leaving behind the simple outer island lifestyle of living off the land and having life-lessons like sharing intertwined with their survival.

“Lokon wa.”

This specialized word came to be a long ago, before everything that is happening now was even a glimmer in Father Time’s eye, but the word still holds on grimly to its relevance. The RMI is in the midst of a painful change from a place with just a rich history to a place with a rich history and a future. This change is unavoidable and as it has been with every other place in the world where “progress” has touched, a part the past is left behind. Efforts to hold onto cultural practices like canoe building are underway, but it is impossible to keep everything perserved — it is contrary to the nature of progress.

“Lokon wa.”

The love you give comes back in the end.
--------------------------------------------------------

Goodbye

The Marshallese people have a very specialized verb in their language. It came into being as a necessity. The verb is “Lokon wa,” and to my understanding, it means to see someone’s back as they sail away.

The verb is to say goodbye without really ever knowing when you will say hello again.

Long ago, when canoes sailed off on expansive journeys across the Pacific, many Marhsallese people didn’t know if they would ever see their loved ones again. They were left with the lasting image of their friend or family member being swallowed in a vast ocean-horizon.

“Lokon wa.”

It may seem that the word is archaic in our era of cell phones, internet and airplanes, but I am not so sure — at least not here. It seems to me that the Marshallese people are in a cultural transition that will keep this particular verb relevant for a while longer.

There are two things that the majority of Marshallese children want to be — a teacher or a nurse. On this island, finding a steady-paying job other than those two professions can be difficult. People can try to work in shops but upward mobility is hard in this private sector so many people choose to pack up and leave for the land of opportunity — the United States of America.

Through the US Compact with the Marshall Islands, citizens here can move freely to the US and try their hand in our economy with little to no red tape, so people do it. Actually, whole families do it. And when families move to find jobs communities of ex-islanders gel together. There are populations of Marshallese all over the US, but locally there are large groups in Salem and Portland. Sometimes, Marshallese children born to these families don’t see much their home country and are more American than Marshallese. They use American slang, don’t know much of their mother tongue and their parents can’t bring the family home as much as they would like because plane tickets are so much money.

“Lokon wa.”

Until relatively recently the Marshallese were subsidence-livers. They would get by on the things that they could grow or catch in the sea. It was a lifestyle where community pooling was crucial to survival.

This is reflected in the culture here still. People share what they have and they are more comfortable being together than being apart.

This is slowly changing however. People want good health care and a reliable supply of food and water so they leave their outer islands and come into the mainland where they are more guaranteed of meeting these needs, and rightly so. However, they are leaving behind the simple outer island lifestyle of living off the land and having life-lessons like sharing intertwined with their survival.

“Lokon wa.”

This specialized word came to be a long ago, before everything that is happening now was even a glimmer in Father Time’s eye, but the word still holds on grimly to its relevance. The RMI is in the midst of a painful change from a place with just a rich history to a place with a rich history and a future. This change is unavoidable and as it has been with every other place in the world where “progress” has touched, a part the past is left behind. Efforts to hold onto cultural practices like canoe building are underway, but it is impossible to keep everything perserved — it is contrary to the nature of progress.

“Lokon wa.”

The love you give comes back in the end.
--------------------------------------------------------

First Week

First week of teaching... Is it always this exhausting? My voice hurts, my patience is thin and I am not sure how much longer my weary legs will allow me to walk...

The kids are funny though...

And they seem to have a ton of energy...

Just need to tap that somehow... Some sort of Matrix thing...

The love you give comes back in the end.
--------------------------------------------------------

Kids...

I was sitting on my bed, reading a book, listening to my fan and feeling pretty dang good when I heard a rattling sound followed with a thump outside of my window. I held my place in my book with my finger and I cocked my ear to the side for a moment or two and when the sounds didn’t return, I got back to reading.

Not four lines back into my book, I heard another thump. I leaned up in my bed, pulled my curtain aside, and peered into my back yard. There I saw two kids underneath the coconut tree that sits on our property. One was knocking down coconuts, while the other was gathering them up and throwing them over the fence. One saw me looking at them and yelled at his friend. By the time that I had got outside they had vanished — with my coconuts.

Cheeky kids.

I was walking down the street with a friend when I heard shouting from around a corner. I turned into a side street and saw about eight pairs of kids wheel-barrow racing. Their faces were all alight with smiles. The race started out even, hands slapping the pavement like horse’s hooves around a race track, when a pair that consisted of an older kid and a younger kid took the lead. The older kid just picked up his tiny partner and sprinted to the finish. Everyone laughed at the joke.

Fun kids.

I was eating lunch at a restaurant that overlooked the lagoon. It was a very hot day and outside of my window, I saw a group of kids leaping off of a cement dock into the lagoon. They looked so happy, and most of all very cool, so I cleared out the pockets of my shorts, took off my shirt and ran out to join them.

“Who are you?” one kid asked.

“I am Tim,” I said. “Can I swim with you.”

“Well I am in charge of this,” the kid — all of seven — said to me. “And that will be no problem.”
I hesitated in my jump, pretending to be scared to get laughs from the kids.

“You just got to go like this,” the lead kid said and did a running flip into the water.

Athletic kids.

I was mowing my lawn when a boy came out and started to assist me in pushing the mower. Whenever I turned it off to pick up some trash we had accidently shredded up, he would stoop down with me to pick it up. Then, when the mower engine was turned off, he would make the sound with his lips.

Helpful kids.

I went spear fishing with some friends and we had a pretty successful day. As with any time that you catch reef fish here, we asked some local kids what was good to eat and what was not. Most of the fish we caught were spiny red ones.

“Are these good to eat?” I asked a boy of about 10.

“No, these red ones will kill you if you eat them,” he told me very seriously. I was very disappointed but I didn’t feel like risking it and dying because I had eaten poisonous reef fish so I took them off of my ele, the wire belt I wear to hold the fish I catch, and dropped all of the offending fish onto the sand. The little boy and his friends gathered up those fish and headed away.

“What will you do with the fish?” I asked.

“We will either eat them or sell them,” he told me.

“I thought that you said they were poisonous,” I said.

“Oh, they are, but only in the eye and the tail,” he said. “We will just cut these off before we eat.”

Smart kids.

Anywhere I go I see children and they are always excited about it. They run out of their yards and away from their games to ask me what my name is and to just say hi. They come and they hold my hand and give me high-fives.

Cute kids.

The love you give comes back in the end.
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Here Comes the Navy

The big news in the Marshall Islands this week was that the US Navy ship, the USS Palau, came to town. Seventeen hundred American men and women walking the streets of Majuro. Everyone knew they were coming and people whispered to each other on sidewalks and in stores, “1,700!”
I was less than thrilled at the prospect of the men in white descending upon my new city. A lady told me that the last time a Navy ship came into port, two years ago, they were rowdy, unruly, broke the only ATM in town and threw quarters to the children.

I asked her what was wrong with throwing quarters to the children.

“Well, nothing is wrong with it,” the lady said, “until every kid you see bugs you for money for months after the Navy has left.”

The first night that the Navy was in port, I did not leave my house. I stayed in my room and read a book. I did not feel like walking the streets with my countrymen as they threw back a few to many cold ones and gave my country a bad name.
Plus, the whole quarters thing — I needed my quarters for cabs and coffee — I could not afford to just start flinging them to every kid that asked.

The next day I set out to observe the damage on Majuro. I walked from my house in Rita, along the main road. At first I saw nothing. It was morning as usual in Majuro. Chickens and pigs shuffling in the dirt for food and stray dogs and cats chasing each other. Children swam in the lagoon, which sat like a teal pearl in the bright morning, and men and women sitting in front of their houses, fanning themselves.

I scratched my head and wondered where the 1700 rowdy and unruly sailors were.
About halfway into the center of town I started to hear a low rumbling sound. I thought to myself, ‘OK, here it comes.’

As I got closer to the noise, however, I found that it was nothing like what I had expected. There were no passed-out sailors or doors hanging loosely on their hinges. Instead there were just Navy men and women hard at work constructing playground equipment in front of Uliga Elementary School. I knew that the Navy was going to do some humanitarian work, I just didn’t expect it to be the first thing I saw.

Later on I learned from the USS Palau’s priest that those men and women I had seen working on the playground equipment and the other projects of improvement going on around town had elected to do the work themselves. It was all voluntary.
While the Navy had taken my school, Rita Elementary, off of the list of improvement projects, they still were doing much around the rest of the town — and it was being done voluntarily.

When I finally got to town there was a line of almost 100 Navy men overworking the sole ATM in town. At the Flame Tree bar I heard people from the military getting rambunctious. And then, to my chagrin, a gang of kids asked me for quarters. This was more of what I expected. As I stood there though, an Australian friend came up to me.

“Imagine how rough that is,” he said. “You spend months trapped on a boat and all you want is a cold brew to wash down your throat and you can’t get any money out!”

Earlier, I had the opportunity to go out on the USS Palau and tour it. It is not like these men and women are sleeping in King’s quarters. They are stacked in bunks like sardines and I am sure that even on a ship as large as the Palau, the walls start shrinking after a while and people go stir-crazy.

I still don’t agree with holding off school in the RMI for another week so the Navy can work and yeah, the Navy got a little rowdy and clogged up the ATM when they were here but I can forgive them these offenses. They have helped out Majuro and the RMI and they deserved a little fun.

I will never, however, forgive them for throwing quarters to the children.

The love you give comes back in the end.
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