Totally here

October 5, 2006 – 9:43 PM – Pictures count as posts

For the sake of keeping up with my promise to update bi-weekly, I’m going to say that those pictures I uploaded count as posts.

So let’s see, what’s going on in Majuro. I cooked my first coconut crab a few weeks back. I wanted to take pictures of it but my camera was out of batteries and there was no way I was going to wait three hours for them to charge before I ate that thing. Thus, I ate it and didn’t take any pictures. Sorry. But let it be known, it was damn good. Coconut crabs differ from your typical American (read, not Alaskan) crab in two distinct ways. First, they’re enormous. Coconut crabs eat, wait for it... coconuts. This might not seem like a big deal until you factor in the size of a full, unhusked coconut. Remember, the coconuts that fall from trees don’t come in ready to eat form, i.e. just the brown shell with three dark spots on it. They fall with husks, think Tom Hanks in Cast Away. These crabs are large enough to chomp through the coconut husks in order to get to the coconut inside. Moreover, if you’ve ever seen video clips of non-island people trying to husk coconuts, you know that actually husking a coconut is quite simply the most difficult thing in the world to do. Coconut crabs have claws that are big enough to cut through coconut husks. In short, they’re very big crustaceans. If a fully grown one jumped on my face Alien style, its claws could touch on the back of my head, and remember I have a huge head.

The other primary difference between a coconut crab and an American crab is that a coconut crab has, for lack of a better term, an ass. All the crabs I’ve ever seen before I arrived here had a roundish body with six legs and two claws sticking out of it. Coconut crabs have the roundish body with six legs and two claws sticking out of it, but they also have this ass part dangling from the roundish body. Marshallese crush the ass part and squeeze the juice out of it to eat as gravy. I tried doing that but all I got was a crushed crab ass.

Nevertheless, even without the ass gravy, it was a mighty tasty crab. Cooking it was lesson in resourcefulness. I didn’t have a steamer, and even if I did it wouldn’t be big enough to steam the damn thing. The only pot or pan that I had which could fit the crab was my wok. Thus, I folded the claws and legs underneath the crab and dropped it into my wok and filled it with a few inches of water, thinking that once I covered it most of the crab would steam while a little bit of it would boil. Unfortunately, the crab was way too large to cover with any conventional lid. My solution was to use the deep plastic tub that I use to wash clothes as a lid. I flipped it over on top of my wok and voila, I had a crab steamer.

School’s going well. Teaching is much easier this year and I am much better at it given the experience I had last year. Undoubtedly what helps the most is that I’m doing this year what I already did last year which saves me countless hours trying to create lessons, and I already know what’s going to work and what won’t. TOEFL prep class is in full swing. More students will probably take the test this year than last year, and early practice scores indicate that they will probably do better than last year’s group too. The government interns hit a bit of a rut due to the extremely busy schedules of their supervisors, but we’ve recovered and they’re on the rebound right now. They had a photo shoot today and tomorrow are being treated to dinner by a senator and a UNDP volunteer. Furthermore, the national newspaper (also the only newspaper) contacted me and we’re working on getting an intern in that office as well.

I’ll end with another Jane and Jean update. Jane is doing very well in Taiwan. She’s sharing an apartment with the three other Taiwan Scholars from the Marshall Islands and, judging from her pictures, is really opening up (note to everyone, living in a developed country apparently means being able to wear tank tops). She also sent me an e-mail over the weekend. It was in Chinese.

Jean was selected to join Upward Bound, the same after-school program I will soon be working for. In the Marshall Islands Upward Bound is seen as a golden ticket to bigger and better things. Jean was selected to join based upon her test scores and grades. Unfortunately Jean’s parents would not let her join Upbward Bound because she is the oldest child in the household and is expected to shoulder a good deal of the household responsibilities after school. She cried for hours when her parents told her.

Also, when she was in my office at 6 PM typing her Upbward Bound application essay, I noticed that she had a hard time seeing the monitor. She couldn’t even open Microsoft Word because she couldn’t read the names of the start menu icons. Then, when she tried typing her essay, she struggled because she couldn’t see what she was typing. She was forced to write out her essay long hand and ask her friend to type it for her. When I suggested to her that she get glasses, she said she didn’t want to look like a nerd. I told the girl’s guidance counselor this and she called Jean’s mom to inform her. Jean’s mom said that they went to the eye doctor last week and he said she didn’t need glasses. Soon after I talked with another teacher at my school who is related to Jean’s mom. That teacher informed me that the doctor actually did tell Jean and her mom and Jean needed glasses. However, both Jean and her mom were too embarrassed to admit it. They were embarrassed because Jean’s family doesn’t make very much money and Jean is consequently malnourished, which is what the doctor said was causing Jean’s vision to deteriorate.