Sunday, August 30, 2009
Sitting in Anna’s House after a night full of awkward Marshallese dancing at Pub and kittens!
First of all, I apologize to my most loyal of fans that have been eagerly awaiting my next, non-existent blog post (ahem, calvo and ML!). Last night I went out with Kiersten and her girlfriends for a girls night out…after dancing awkwardly at the pub while everyone stood around and made fun of our moves (I was doing signature Heather dance moves, such as the mashed potato and shopping cart, so I have no idea what they were laughing at) we went back to crash at Anna’s house since Kiersten was house sitting for her. At 4:30 in the morning Sarah woke us up whispering excitedly, “kittens!” Anna’s one-year old cat was pregnant and actually crawled onto the couch where Sarah was sleeping to have her four kittens! I have never really seen anything like it.
By the way, I made it through my first, exhausting week of school but that also means that since school started I am involved in a vicious cycle of lesson planning, teaching from 8-3:30, napping, eating, sleeping, and then doing it all again. Which means I fail and haven’t really had time to write much. We have Ri-Jerbal Day (labor day) next Friday though, so I will come back to town to use internet and hopefully give you a more elaborate update. In the meantime, it’s back to Laura for me and another week of teaching with no internet. More to come next week! How is everyone!? I except your updates by next week when I am back online! Peace, Love, Unity-- Heather
Saturday, August 29th, 2009
Across from me a thin Marshallese woman holds a small girl on her lap wearing a worn green Teletubby t-shirt with wispy black pigtails sticking out on the top of her head. Her little hands grasp at the palm leaf her mother fans herself with. I am bouncing along in the “bus” from Laura to Rita, which is really a van with four rows that takes about an hour and a half to make the 45 minute long journey from one side of Majuro (where I live in Laura) to Rita, on the opposite end. The van slows as the driver pulls to the side of the road and gets out to open the back trunk for a man to deposit a large fruit before he himself gets into the clown-car van which is becoming more and more packed every stop we make. I didn’t get a good look but I think the fruit is pandanus (bob), judging from the sweet smell that fills the van.
The warm breeze from the open window brushes my face as I look to my left, where an occasional break in the palm trees lends a glimpse of the blue lagoon, a delicate baby blue deepening as it extends to the small islands beyond. To my right is ocean side; tide appears high as the waves lap up over the sandy rocks and close to the tree line. The bus hurtles along as we pass first through the town of Woja, then Ajeltake, slowing only for speedbumps and swerving to avoid stray chickens, dogs, coconuts, children and pigs. The road narrows and a cement wall stands to our right but our driver doesn’t let that cramp his style! He puts the pedal to the metal, bumping us up somewhere around the high speed of 45, to pass a truck in front of us holding a pile of gravel in the bed and a man smoking a cigarette (which only cost $3 a pack here by the way! Too bad girls aren’t allowed to smoke). Just another typical day on Majuro!
Vocabulary of the week:
Ij kiki ilo Laura. (I live in Laura)
Elekuun emman (excellent)
Saturday, August 29, 2009
Monday, August 3, 2009
Yokwe!
Tuesday, August 4th, 2009 11:44 AM
drinking a cup of coffee in Tide Tables, the Ri-belle (American)-dominated restaurant that has free wireless Internet.
Yokwe! I’m alive!! So, we have even less Internet here than I had previously anticipated, which explains the lack of my online presence going on almost a week now. But for all you Dartmouth peeps and other Internet addicts out there, let me tell you- it’s very freeing to not have Internet! Instead of defaulting to the old ‘open my laptop and check blitz’, I’ve actually picked up my guitar more than three times this week and have been making my way through reading Franny and Zooey (sidenote: did you know that apparently JD Salinger lives near Hanover? I think he's the old man I've seen wearing around a Yale sweatshirt while I've been working at Baker Info...just my theory though) and I'm also working on Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book.
I’m already becoming quite used to flicking little bugs, like gnats and ants, off my arms and legs. In the classroom yesterday during a class management teaching session we noticed a tiny crab crawling in the light fixture. My favorite animal so far is the tiny lizard inhabiting our little house- he’s got this awesomely quick zig-zag crawl across the wall and loves to fill his little belly with the mosquitoes that have been destroying everyone’s ankles, so props to him! Not to be left out are the scrawny, free range dogs and chickens running around everywhere and the rooster outside the house that serves as our alarm clock every morning around 6:30 AM. I went for a (very hot) run the other day and had to throw pebbles at a dog that started chasing me down the road.
I'm getting ahead of myself though because you don't have any clue of where I've been living, who I've been with, or what I've been doing for my first week here in the Marshall Islands (or, in German- der Marshall Inseln...I was just reading a pamphlet about the Germans and the Marshall Islands, which I'll talk about later). There is only one main road here that runs the length of the island. The easiest way to get around is to walk or hop in one of the taxies. Taxies cost one dollar no matter where you're going, unless you cross the bridge going towards Laura, and then it's two dollars. I prefer to walk, especially in the early evening, because everyone is out talking to each other, playing volleyball, kids running and playing, etc. It's obvious that having a sense of community is important to people here.
Lots else to update on that I don't have time to get deep into, including but not limited to:
-my crazy night in Honolulu in which I meta '73 Dartmouth alum sitting next to me at the bar in Duke's world famous bar and restaurant, who picked up my whole dinner and bar tab!
-Hanging on the beach outside Duke’s with some fun local Hawaiians who really appreciated the Damian Marley songs I had on my cell phone and are now planning on going to Reggae on the River in Humboldt next year.
-the flight into Majuro, in which the skinniness of the atolls was finally, truly apparent to me. Damn, these islands need to eat something, they're skin and bones!
-the rat that ran through the dorm room we were meeting in today.
-the World Teach volunteers, about 30 of them that are also teaching in various atolls
-Guam dresses- I bought 2 for $6.99 each. They're thin polyesterish baggy dresses with many different patterns. Marshallese women use these to swim in since they cover your whole body nicely, providing good protection from the sun, despite the oddness of going into the water wearing so many clothes. The colorful patterns make this seem like the equivalent of bathing suit shopping in the U.S.
-how scandalous my knees and thighs are→ Not only are women required to wear skirts and dresses here because it’s the polite thing to do, but also because the outline of the thigh is considered sexual/erotic.
-Cornbeefing→ looking through windows (similar to peeping toms). There is a constant feeling of being watched here. As long as you can see the sky, be carefully because you are probably being watched. The people here are not afraid to just come right up to our door and look inside. Can't blame em- we are a bunch of weird, foreign people that just moved into the neighborhood and they're curious, but it can definitely get a little weird. If I see somebody looking at me funny I am already in the habit of pulling my skirt down to make sure my knees are covered!
-Pay day was last Friday and the neighborhood seemed extra wild. Apparently alcoholism is a big problem here and Marshallese drink to get wasted, especially on pay day.
My Digs
For orientation, the 15 of us are sharing two gorgeous (haha) houses on Marshall Islands High School property. And by gorgeous, I mean nasty green little shacks with paint peeling on the walls and dusty tiles covered in rat droppings. Outside are two large cylindrical water catchments that catch rain water which we use for taking bucket showers, but must boil before drinking. 10 feet away from the house is the fence enclosing the school and literally 40-50 feet beyond that is the ocean side! The houses are within the fence of the MIHS and right near a pathway which many of the people who live in the neighborhood (which I'll talk about later) on the other side of the fence use as a shortcut to the other side of the school. One of my first impressions of the area surrounding our houses and in the RMI in general is that people here remind me of the SIMS! I often see them wandering by our house, arms swinging by their sides, looking like they are going no place in particular. Even the Marshallese language sounds a bit like sims mumbo jumbo to my still untrained ear. When you walk down the main street, there are people sitting in chairs in the middle of a field doing not much of anything. I suppose that is island culture, partially induced by the sweltering heat, and such leisure is definitely something I could get used to!
Saturday, August 1st, 2009
sex talk from Nathalie in the Melele (understanding) room in the Marshall Islands Resort. She enlightened us on Marshallese issues around sex and gender.
The cultural standards of sex differ among different peoples, but I was quite astonished to learn about some of the drastic differences between the way American and Marshallese people think about sex. Sex is one of THE BIGGEST taboos in the RMI and therefore it can be difficult to do sex education outreach in a culturally sensitive way. The issue does not necessarily lie in lack of resources as one might typically think of a third world, typically under-resourced country. Actually, the RMI has even better programs than the U.S., offering free contraceptives and family planning to a large extent. There are severe issues with promiscuity, probably even more so than in the U.S., however Marshallese people do not talk about sex in the open way many people do in America due to the large taboos surrounding it. I'm not talking about your typical "tee hee! I giggle when sex is talked about" kind of taboo, but rather a taboo that provokes severe shame if sex is discussed or if a woman is accused of promiscuity. In the United States, it is typically men who are less likely to want to wear a condom since it "doesn't feel as good", but in the RMI, women refuse condoms because to them it insinuates that they are dirty, or that the man they are sleeping with is sleeping with other women. Due to the strength of the sex taboo, such insinuations are more important to them than the dangers of pregnancy or STIs.
Despite this taboo, a lack of morality is less connected to teenage sex and pregnancy as it is in the States, where teen pregnancy is looked down upon (as seen in somewhat recent scandals like Sarah Palin's daughter or Britney Spear's sister, both teenage mothers).
In the Marshall Islands if I am able to conduct sex education unit, obviously I won't be able to change the deeply embedded taboo surrounding sex, but hopefully I can promote healthier
Anna told a story about a volunteer who taught an adult sex education class and used bananas to represent how to correctly put condoms on. One day she was out walking and one of her old students approached her angrily. She was upset because she said she had done everything Betty had tolder her to do when putting on a condom but she had still gotten pregnant! Confused, Betty told her she was sorry and didn't know what could have gone wrong, so she asked her to show her how she had put the condom on. The woman brought her out to a a banana tree in the backyard, on which each banana was covered with condoms! I guess I should be careful about the literal interpretations of things during my teaching here!
What most surprised me is that it's not unheard of for volunteers to date or have sex with their students! Natalie told us of one man she knew who lost his virginity at age 14 to a Peace Corp volunteer! Definitely not something condoned by locals (or me) however.
Sex Ed. Vocabulary
coco= penis
bibi= vagina
pek= semen (literally, little swimmers)
lip= egg
alin= moon, month, period
tabi= sex
imajpek= ejaculation
Following sex ed, we went bowling with World Teach then proceeded to do what we weren’t supposed to by getting smashed at Tide Table. Although it would be somewhat disrespectful to a culture in which women aren't supposed to drink heavily to be drunk in public, we were told that it was more okay to drink at Tide Table since it is a restaurant/bar for Ri-belles. I had a large shot of 151 on Lee’s recommendation and was set for the night! When we got home, Malcolm passed out sitting straight up in his chair and was too out of it to get into his bed haha.
Sunday, August 2nd, 2009
Today all 15 of us piled into the back of a sturdy pick up truck and drove 30 miles out to Laura. The weather was beautiful with swirly cotton candy clouds above us and the oppressive mugginess disappearing into a light breeze and perfect temperatures, probably around 83 or so and cooling down later.
As we drove west towards Laura the sparse streets of Majuro turned into luscious, jungle-like terrain and the water in the lagoon became even bluer than I thought possible! Bob Marley’s music drifted out the window of the cab and Matt’s ‘One Love’ tattoo on his bicep was visible out the passenger window from my perch on the back of the truck.
We stopped and bought coconuts for 50 cents each from two children selling them on the side of the road. When we got to the beach area for our picnic, we learned how to shave off the top of the coconut to drink the sweet water inside and then cracked them on the side of the palm tree to eat the gelatinous coconut meat inside, which sounds gross since typical coconut isn’t jello-like, but it was truly delicious and I must have eaten at least 3.
On the way home, we ran into 4 World Teachers hitching a ride into Majuro and somehow managed to squeeze them in the back of the already full truck with us. Standing up on the truck, I leaned on the back of the cab, took my hair out of its pony tail and let the warm wind whip my face.
'Kids' mgmt
The water is warm,
but its sending me shivers.
A baby is born,
crying out for attention.
Memories fade,
like looking through a fogged mirror
Decisions to decisions are made and not fought
But I thought,
this wouldn't hurt a lot.
I guess not.
The feeling I had while sitting on the bus to leave Dartmouth last Monday was one of the most melancholy ones I have ever had. I glanced back at the green with the clock tower rising above it and knew I would miss the place but mostly miss the people I’m leaving there. My headphones were blasting Kids by MGMT as I left. Today on the way home from the beach on Laura, I was sitting in the back of the truck with all the other volunteers as we filled up our water jugs and Kids came on again…I realized that I am once more in a beautiful place surrounded by wonderful people and can’t help thinking how lucky I am to be living my life!
Vocabulary:
Riit: coconut
Monday August 3, 2009
We begin our days of orientation with Marshallese language lessons for an hour and half. Four high school students from Marshall Islands High School are our enthusiastic yet shy teachers. Unfortunately we realized the first day into our lessons that the thick and heavy yellow language manual that we all transported here has many of the letters switched due to a malfunction in Anna’s language settings on her computer. Therefore, 8 of the 26 letters are switched with the wrong letter through out the entire book, making it nearly impossible to understand the language manual, as if it weren’t extremely difficult enough already.
We all hopped into the back of the pick up truck once more today to visit the U.S. Embassy. We waited in the hot sun as the man behind the window at security checked each of our passports and led us in to a room where we had to empty our bags of cameras and put everything through the x-ray. Once inside, one of the more beautiful buildings I’ve seen so far on Majuro greeted us, complete with tennis courts (too bad I didn’t bring my racket!).
“Sometimes people get frightened and do things they wouldn’t otherwise do”
-U.S. Embassy visit, justifying the nuclear testing on Bikini Atoll. In 1946 the Soviet Union declared that it had nuclear weapons. The representative from the Embassy who spoke to us compared the U.S. fear about such a thing to the fear felt after 9/11, which resulted in bad things happening to some American citizens or Japanese internment camps during WWII. He talked about the tests that the Department of Energy is running now (such as trying to grow fruits and vegetables) to make the Northern Atolls once again inhabitable. After being at Laura on Sunday, I can’t imagine anyone looking out beyond the gorgeous green palm trees to the atoll and thinking, “this would be a great place for a nuclear test!” It is just horrifying, and more so to me that the embassy made such pitiful attempts at lamely justifying it.
As I’m writing, the shore wind is blowing the palm tree visible outside the grate of the window and for a moment I thought it was a cornbeefer creeping up to my window. Since it’s late and I've got to start preparing lesson plans for the teaching Practicum which begins Wednesday, I’ll peace out for now (also so the inside of my room can be dark in case any phantom corn beefers decide to become real!).
drinking a cup of coffee in Tide Tables, the Ri-belle (American)-dominated restaurant that has free wireless Internet.
Yokwe! I’m alive!! So, we have even less Internet here than I had previously anticipated, which explains the lack of my online presence going on almost a week now. But for all you Dartmouth peeps and other Internet addicts out there, let me tell you- it’s very freeing to not have Internet! Instead of defaulting to the old ‘open my laptop and check blitz’, I’ve actually picked up my guitar more than three times this week and have been making my way through reading Franny and Zooey (sidenote: did you know that apparently JD Salinger lives near Hanover? I think he's the old man I've seen wearing around a Yale sweatshirt while I've been working at Baker Info...just my theory though) and I'm also working on Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book.
I’m already becoming quite used to flicking little bugs, like gnats and ants, off my arms and legs. In the classroom yesterday during a class management teaching session we noticed a tiny crab crawling in the light fixture. My favorite animal so far is the tiny lizard inhabiting our little house- he’s got this awesomely quick zig-zag crawl across the wall and loves to fill his little belly with the mosquitoes that have been destroying everyone’s ankles, so props to him! Not to be left out are the scrawny, free range dogs and chickens running around everywhere and the rooster outside the house that serves as our alarm clock every morning around 6:30 AM. I went for a (very hot) run the other day and had to throw pebbles at a dog that started chasing me down the road.
I'm getting ahead of myself though because you don't have any clue of where I've been living, who I've been with, or what I've been doing for my first week here in the Marshall Islands (or, in German- der Marshall Inseln...I was just reading a pamphlet about the Germans and the Marshall Islands, which I'll talk about later). There is only one main road here that runs the length of the island. The easiest way to get around is to walk or hop in one of the taxies. Taxies cost one dollar no matter where you're going, unless you cross the bridge going towards Laura, and then it's two dollars. I prefer to walk, especially in the early evening, because everyone is out talking to each other, playing volleyball, kids running and playing, etc. It's obvious that having a sense of community is important to people here.
Lots else to update on that I don't have time to get deep into, including but not limited to:
-my crazy night in Honolulu in which I meta '73 Dartmouth alum sitting next to me at the bar in Duke's world famous bar and restaurant, who picked up my whole dinner and bar tab!
-Hanging on the beach outside Duke’s with some fun local Hawaiians who really appreciated the Damian Marley songs I had on my cell phone and are now planning on going to Reggae on the River in Humboldt next year.
-the flight into Majuro, in which the skinniness of the atolls was finally, truly apparent to me. Damn, these islands need to eat something, they're skin and bones!
-the rat that ran through the dorm room we were meeting in today.
-the World Teach volunteers, about 30 of them that are also teaching in various atolls
-Guam dresses- I bought 2 for $6.99 each. They're thin polyesterish baggy dresses with many different patterns. Marshallese women use these to swim in since they cover your whole body nicely, providing good protection from the sun, despite the oddness of going into the water wearing so many clothes. The colorful patterns make this seem like the equivalent of bathing suit shopping in the U.S.
-how scandalous my knees and thighs are→ Not only are women required to wear skirts and dresses here because it’s the polite thing to do, but also because the outline of the thigh is considered sexual/erotic.
-Cornbeefing→ looking through windows (similar to peeping toms). There is a constant feeling of being watched here. As long as you can see the sky, be carefully because you are probably being watched. The people here are not afraid to just come right up to our door and look inside. Can't blame em- we are a bunch of weird, foreign people that just moved into the neighborhood and they're curious, but it can definitely get a little weird. If I see somebody looking at me funny I am already in the habit of pulling my skirt down to make sure my knees are covered!
-Pay day was last Friday and the neighborhood seemed extra wild. Apparently alcoholism is a big problem here and Marshallese drink to get wasted, especially on pay day.
My Digs
For orientation, the 15 of us are sharing two gorgeous (haha) houses on Marshall Islands High School property. And by gorgeous, I mean nasty green little shacks with paint peeling on the walls and dusty tiles covered in rat droppings. Outside are two large cylindrical water catchments that catch rain water which we use for taking bucket showers, but must boil before drinking. 10 feet away from the house is the fence enclosing the school and literally 40-50 feet beyond that is the ocean side! The houses are within the fence of the MIHS and right near a pathway which many of the people who live in the neighborhood (which I'll talk about later) on the other side of the fence use as a shortcut to the other side of the school. One of my first impressions of the area surrounding our houses and in the RMI in general is that people here remind me of the SIMS! I often see them wandering by our house, arms swinging by their sides, looking like they are going no place in particular. Even the Marshallese language sounds a bit like sims mumbo jumbo to my still untrained ear. When you walk down the main street, there are people sitting in chairs in the middle of a field doing not much of anything. I suppose that is island culture, partially induced by the sweltering heat, and such leisure is definitely something I could get used to!
Saturday, August 1st, 2009
sex talk from Nathalie in the Melele (understanding) room in the Marshall Islands Resort. She enlightened us on Marshallese issues around sex and gender.
The cultural standards of sex differ among different peoples, but I was quite astonished to learn about some of the drastic differences between the way American and Marshallese people think about sex. Sex is one of THE BIGGEST taboos in the RMI and therefore it can be difficult to do sex education outreach in a culturally sensitive way. The issue does not necessarily lie in lack of resources as one might typically think of a third world, typically under-resourced country. Actually, the RMI has even better programs than the U.S., offering free contraceptives and family planning to a large extent. There are severe issues with promiscuity, probably even more so than in the U.S., however Marshallese people do not talk about sex in the open way many people do in America due to the large taboos surrounding it. I'm not talking about your typical "tee hee! I giggle when sex is talked about" kind of taboo, but rather a taboo that provokes severe shame if sex is discussed or if a woman is accused of promiscuity. In the United States, it is typically men who are less likely to want to wear a condom since it "doesn't feel as good", but in the RMI, women refuse condoms because to them it insinuates that they are dirty, or that the man they are sleeping with is sleeping with other women. Due to the strength of the sex taboo, such insinuations are more important to them than the dangers of pregnancy or STIs.
Despite this taboo, a lack of morality is less connected to teenage sex and pregnancy as it is in the States, where teen pregnancy is looked down upon (as seen in somewhat recent scandals like Sarah Palin's daughter or Britney Spear's sister, both teenage mothers).
In the Marshall Islands if I am able to conduct sex education unit, obviously I won't be able to change the deeply embedded taboo surrounding sex, but hopefully I can promote healthier
Anna told a story about a volunteer who taught an adult sex education class and used bananas to represent how to correctly put condoms on. One day she was out walking and one of her old students approached her angrily. She was upset because she said she had done everything Betty had tolder her to do when putting on a condom but she had still gotten pregnant! Confused, Betty told her she was sorry and didn't know what could have gone wrong, so she asked her to show her how she had put the condom on. The woman brought her out to a a banana tree in the backyard, on which each banana was covered with condoms! I guess I should be careful about the literal interpretations of things during my teaching here!
What most surprised me is that it's not unheard of for volunteers to date or have sex with their students! Natalie told us of one man she knew who lost his virginity at age 14 to a Peace Corp volunteer! Definitely not something condoned by locals (or me) however.
Sex Ed. Vocabulary
coco= penis
bibi= vagina
pek= semen (literally, little swimmers)
lip= egg
alin= moon, month, period
tabi= sex
imajpek= ejaculation
Following sex ed, we went bowling with World Teach then proceeded to do what we weren’t supposed to by getting smashed at Tide Table. Although it would be somewhat disrespectful to a culture in which women aren't supposed to drink heavily to be drunk in public, we were told that it was more okay to drink at Tide Table since it is a restaurant/bar for Ri-belles. I had a large shot of 151 on Lee’s recommendation and was set for the night! When we got home, Malcolm passed out sitting straight up in his chair and was too out of it to get into his bed haha.
Sunday, August 2nd, 2009
Today all 15 of us piled into the back of a sturdy pick up truck and drove 30 miles out to Laura. The weather was beautiful with swirly cotton candy clouds above us and the oppressive mugginess disappearing into a light breeze and perfect temperatures, probably around 83 or so and cooling down later.
As we drove west towards Laura the sparse streets of Majuro turned into luscious, jungle-like terrain and the water in the lagoon became even bluer than I thought possible! Bob Marley’s music drifted out the window of the cab and Matt’s ‘One Love’ tattoo on his bicep was visible out the passenger window from my perch on the back of the truck.
We stopped and bought coconuts for 50 cents each from two children selling them on the side of the road. When we got to the beach area for our picnic, we learned how to shave off the top of the coconut to drink the sweet water inside and then cracked them on the side of the palm tree to eat the gelatinous coconut meat inside, which sounds gross since typical coconut isn’t jello-like, but it was truly delicious and I must have eaten at least 3.
On the way home, we ran into 4 World Teachers hitching a ride into Majuro and somehow managed to squeeze them in the back of the already full truck with us. Standing up on the truck, I leaned on the back of the cab, took my hair out of its pony tail and let the warm wind whip my face.
'Kids' mgmt
The water is warm,
but its sending me shivers.
A baby is born,
crying out for attention.
Memories fade,
like looking through a fogged mirror
Decisions to decisions are made and not fought
But I thought,
this wouldn't hurt a lot.
I guess not.
The feeling I had while sitting on the bus to leave Dartmouth last Monday was one of the most melancholy ones I have ever had. I glanced back at the green with the clock tower rising above it and knew I would miss the place but mostly miss the people I’m leaving there. My headphones were blasting Kids by MGMT as I left. Today on the way home from the beach on Laura, I was sitting in the back of the truck with all the other volunteers as we filled up our water jugs and Kids came on again…I realized that I am once more in a beautiful place surrounded by wonderful people and can’t help thinking how lucky I am to be living my life!
Vocabulary:
Riit: coconut
Monday August 3, 2009
We begin our days of orientation with Marshallese language lessons for an hour and half. Four high school students from Marshall Islands High School are our enthusiastic yet shy teachers. Unfortunately we realized the first day into our lessons that the thick and heavy yellow language manual that we all transported here has many of the letters switched due to a malfunction in Anna’s language settings on her computer. Therefore, 8 of the 26 letters are switched with the wrong letter through out the entire book, making it nearly impossible to understand the language manual, as if it weren’t extremely difficult enough already.
We all hopped into the back of the pick up truck once more today to visit the U.S. Embassy. We waited in the hot sun as the man behind the window at security checked each of our passports and led us in to a room where we had to empty our bags of cameras and put everything through the x-ray. Once inside, one of the more beautiful buildings I’ve seen so far on Majuro greeted us, complete with tennis courts (too bad I didn’t bring my racket!).
“Sometimes people get frightened and do things they wouldn’t otherwise do”
-U.S. Embassy visit, justifying the nuclear testing on Bikini Atoll. In 1946 the Soviet Union declared that it had nuclear weapons. The representative from the Embassy who spoke to us compared the U.S. fear about such a thing to the fear felt after 9/11, which resulted in bad things happening to some American citizens or Japanese internment camps during WWII. He talked about the tests that the Department of Energy is running now (such as trying to grow fruits and vegetables) to make the Northern Atolls once again inhabitable. After being at Laura on Sunday, I can’t imagine anyone looking out beyond the gorgeous green palm trees to the atoll and thinking, “this would be a great place for a nuclear test!” It is just horrifying, and more so to me that the embassy made such pitiful attempts at lamely justifying it.
As I’m writing, the shore wind is blowing the palm tree visible outside the grate of the window and for a moment I thought it was a cornbeefer creeping up to my window. Since it’s late and I've got to start preparing lesson plans for the teaching Practicum which begins Wednesday, I’ll peace out for now (also so the inside of my room can be dark in case any phantom corn beefers decide to become real!).
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