LAPTOP POWER!

Adapter is here. Posts up as promised. There’s quite a few because it’s been some time. New pictures are also posted. Again, more than usual because it’s been awhile.

August 4, 2005 – 7:18 PM – Why did the chicken cross the road?

To get run over by me. First driving experience in the Marshall Islands. I went into town to grab some checks in order to pay for my scuba certification. I was driving back to Laura when this large, speckled chicken crossed the road. It never made it to the other side. There was a thud and a poof of flying feathers. We pulled over and got out of the car to assess the damage. The bumper was cracked cleanly through and one of the wheel wells was flapping around. Pretty boss damage for a chicken. I looked back at the road to examine the remnants of a chicken. To my shock, there were none. In fact, as I looked back, I saw the chicken walking back towards the side from which it came and pecking at the ground like nothing had happened. Note to self and others, chickens in the Marshall Islands are sturdy.

Aside from the steel chicken nothing too eventful has occurred in the past week and a half. The six high school teachers from WorldTeach, myself included, are attending a week-long curriculum development conference while the elementary school teachers are practicing their teaching skills on local school kids. Being in a very small country offers some very unique opportunities. Each person “matters” more. For example, the 60 or so people in that conference room are determining the high school curriculum for an entire country. The social security board is something like four people large. The chairman of that board is also leading the Bikini Atoll reparations movement along with heading about a half dozen other organizations. Being in a place like this is an ideal way to quickly get one’s feet deep into a few issues.

Since there isn’t too much to write about, I’d like to add a small academic interlude to remind myself that I did in fact graduate from college with a degree in anthropology. This country’s language, or at least the evolution of its usage, is fascinating. Like most languages, Marshallese has historically been entirely oral. It was never written. Of course, the 19^th century missionaries found that unacceptable because they could not translate the Bible into a language that wasn’t written. Thus, the missionaries actually developed an alphabet for Marshallese. In other words, some 150 years ago a couple of white people sat in a circle with some Marshallese people and tried matching the sounds that emanated from their mouths to Roman alphabet letters. You can see why this method might create some inconsistencies in the future.

I have to give the missionaries credit. The alphabet they created for Marshallese is mostly consistent with the language spoken by the Marshallese people, at least as far as my extremely limited Marshallese ability can discern. Nevertheless, there are numerous instances in which the sounds my Marshallese teacher makes do not match the spelling of the word she is reading. And perhaps most importantly, the Marshallese are not that accustomed to writing their own language because it has never been written before. Consequently, there tend to be multiple spellings for the same word because the Marshallese had to essentially learn the alphabet for their language from foreigners and that type of pedagogy is bound to create some variation. Imagine asking people learning English to spell a complex sounding word. How many different spellings would they produce?

School starts in two and a half weeks. Orientation ends in one and a half. Tomorrow we are staying overnight on an outer island to help prepare the outer island volunteers for their upcoming style of living.

August 8, 2005 – 3:05 PM – I am more tan than you are

Being on a deserted tropical island rocks. After I had been in the lagoon for two hours, I looked around and caught myself thinking, “Man, I wish my friends from home could just see what we’re doing here.” I’ll try to describe the scene. I had just surfaced from the water while snorkeling. Nearby there were a few volunteers splashing each other and generally frolicking in the 83 degree water. There were also two kayaks in the water. One was filled by two people merrily rowing around the water. The other was occupied by a single person who was lying down drifting between sleep and awake. On shore some Marshallese people were ukuleleing while others were roasting some chicken. Throw in coconut trees and water that represented every imaginable shade of blue and green, and you can get some semblance of an idea of what was occurring around the world.

While on the island I tried my hand at spearfishing. It’s not necessarily what you envisage it to be. There is no gun. There isn’t even a spear. The projectile is a rusted dowel and the launching mechanism isn’t even fancy enough to be called a slingshot. It’s simply a bungee with a little bit of string on it where one notches the rusted dowel. Anyways, I carried my spearing implements into the water with a snorkel and proceeded to fish. Fish swim faster than I do. I am a poor shot. I was fishing with a bungee and a rusted dowel. The fish won. Actually, I managed to spear two. Unfortunately, the first I speared right into a cave and when I pulled my dowel out of the cave I also pulled it out of the fish. The second one I speared through the mouth but it managed to tear itself loose before I could secure it.

By the way, night time here is out of control. I’ve been meaning to post about this but I always seem to forget. The second night I was in the Marshall Islands was a cloudless, full moon night. The beach was lit up like it was day but had this eerie greyscale aura about it. Incredibly cool. But perhaps even cooler is that the extreme lack of light pollution (remember when the sky wasn’t purple at night Chicago people?) renders ever single star visible. Moreover, not only are the stars visible, but the Milky Way is visible. That’s right, I can look up and SEE the Milky Way. Every night there’s a large, misty ribbon that meanders across the pitch black sky. Zing! That’s the Milky Way. When was the last time you saw the Milky Way?

But as rocking as it is to be on a deserted tropical island, sleeping on a deserted tropical island sucks. I slept in a ten person tent. Actually, the word “tent” is too generous. It was a raised tarp under which ten people slept. And since we did not have enough sleeping bags for all of us, a few people, most notably me, slept on top of coconut leaves. This actually was not that bad. What was bad were the denizens of mosquitoes that completely violated any of my unsuspecting exposed skin. Completely merciless I tell you. My deep woods formula OFF repellant was absolutely no match. And the humidity is at drowning level. It rained the night I was there (do not mess with tropical rain storms) and though our tarp protected us and our stuff from direct wetness, the indirectness wetness we were exposed to from the humidity made me more moist than any rain shower in the States. I might as well have slept in a puddle.

Deserted islands. Good places to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

August 16, 2005 – 4:31 PM – Like sardines in a can

WorldTeach moved out of Laura this weekend. My permanent and other volunteers’ temporary place of residence is the WorldTeach dorm in the D-U-D. It has nine air conditioned bedrooms and a common living space and kitchen. Unfortunately it also has 30 people in it until the outer island volunteers fly away. They’ll be going to teach on islands on which fewer than 100 people reside and which have no power, running water, telephones, etc. Absolutely crazy. Half the time I wish I were one of them.

As for me, I will be teaching in Marshall Islands High School which, at around 900 students, is the largest school in the country. As it stands I will teach two classes on the A block schedule and three classes on the B block schedule. Four of my classes will be sophomore English while the last will be senior Marshallese government. Read that sentence again. This is Tuesday. School starts on Friday. Yeah, I know.

My classroom is pretty bare bones. All the desks are rusted, some to the point that the legs have snapped off. There are no bookshelves (or books for that matter), or trash cans, or erasers, or chalk. I cleaned it and recognized that for the first time in my life I would be able to determine the seating arrangement of a classroom. We never think about this as students. We just enter the classroom and sit down in a desk. But the task suddenly seemed very daunting. Where should my students sit in there rusted desks? Traditional rows? UChicago style circle? Hmm…

I also get to decorate my classroom. This is much easier since I don’t have anything to decorate it with. Know those periodic tables, and world maps, and timelines that we all had in high school? Yeah, I don’t have any of those. Right now my grand vision is lots of words cut out from construction paper. Awesome.

August 23, 2005 – 10:01 PM – School canceled due to typhoon

The first day of school was last Friday. This year Marshall Islands High School is implementing a new block schedule. Students have a set of classes which they attend on “Block A” days and another which they attend on “Block B” days. The blocks rotate every day. Friday was to be an orientation of sorts, particularly for the incoming 9^th graders. It was only a half day but would send all the students to every single one of their classes in Block A and Block B. Therefore, each class would be roughly twenty minutes long.

The day was hectic to say the least. Students were wandering the campus trying to find their classes which often rendered them late to their already shortened classes. In addition, many students were unable to attend school at all because their travel arrangements would not allow them to do so. Transportation to and from outer islands (which many students visit during the summer because they have family there) is very dependent upon the weather and the condition of planes, both of which can be unreliable.

Given the circumstances, I decided not to count Friday as the first day of school. Instead, Monday would be the first day of school. Unfortunately, on Monday we had a typhoon. OK, it wasn’t really a typhoon. Another quick geography lesson. Typhoons are generally created in the middle of the pacific and gather both speed and strength as they move outwards. Thus, what canceled school here on Monday can be more accurately described as a tropical storm. It rained for about three hours straight (sounded like bombs were hitting the roof) and flooded the campus. Many classrooms became wet due to leaks in the roof or the water level rising high enough that water began to seep in underneath the doors. A learning environment was not to be had that day and thus school was canceled. But if in two weeks or so you hear/read about India being pelted by a typhoon/monsoon, you’ll know that it was the same one that canceled my first day of school.

This all means that the first day of school was today. It went pretty well. The students are very well behaved but also very shy. It’s very different from the American education system which generally promotes active discussion and participation. The rule of thumb is that as students here become older they become more participatory in class, but teachers, administrators, and parents are trying to encourage the students to become active learners sooner to better take advantage of their education. I guess that’s my job.

My living situation has become more stable. The WorldTeach dorm, which is supposed to house nine people, is currently housing fourteen, a drastic improvement from the thirty or so people who were staying here last week. All the outer island volunteers were schedule to be on their islands now but some have fallen victim to the caprices of island-to-island transportation (see above). But nevertheless, I have my own room now with my own bathroom which is only occasionally shared by the volunteers whose bathrooms don’t work. I have my own workspace on which I can lesson plan, grade papers, etc.

The only concern I have is that my living situation detracts considerably from my “experience.” Stepping foot into the dorm is like stepping foot into a mini-America. The people here are great but I can’t help but feel that I’m missing something by being in here and not out there. And since a large part of my deciding to come here was to escape American culture and pursue a “crazy liberal dream” as one friend so aptly put it, I am a little worried about this predicament. However, I will be assigned a host family at the first PTA meeting. Hopefully I can become more immersed in the culture here once that occurs.