It was the day we had all been waiting for- the inauguration of the new school building that will serve as a home for my refugee students who had taken up temporary residence in the school gym, a hot, loud, and truly dismal place for any kind of learning to take place. Our new classroom stands on the second story of the building facing the ocean, blue sky, palms, and most importantly, a refreshing breeze that will keep the space cool during hot Marshallese days. Other than the piles of trash on the beach, this is prime real estate for any school, and I feel like an extremely lucky teacher to have been graced with such a classroom!
In preparation for the inauguration, which was attended by the MOE officals, US Embassy, and Irooj chiefs of the atoll, students were sweeping the school grounds and clearing it of leaf debris. As a part of the decorations committee, I was going with Amanda to collect flowers that we would use to make wuts, the flowered headdresses that would be given to the honored guests in attendance at the inauguration. Not exactly sure of what this would entail, I walked with Amanda to her house.
We arrived to find Meldena cooking round donuts, and Grandpa tuned into the news on TV, as usual. Elta, 13 months, was sitting on the floor in an adorable baby guam gurgling to herself. I sat down cross-legged next to her and said, “Mejam!” (Do your eyes), to which she quickly squinted her eyes and scrunched her nose at me. Meldena showed off a new trick of Elta’s that Amanda taught her. Meldena stuck her tongue out the side of her mouth, which Elta mimicked perfectly with her tiny tongue, while simultaneously squinting her eyes. She is a very smart little baby and I might just smuggle her home with me.
Then Amanda called to me from outside the side door, “Heather, you need to climb the tree for flowers!”
Darcy looked to me and laughed, saying, “You don’t have to, she just doesn’t want to do it because she’s too fat!”
But I was eager to find out if I still possessed the same savvy kind of tree climbing ability I had while growing up around tall trees and brothers, so I meandered out the side door in order to size up this tree.
The tree’s branched extended up past the tin roof of the house and had beautiful white flowers, with an explosion of canary yellow coming out from the center. I easily hopped into the crook of the tree and gingerly ascended through the branches, knocking the blooms off with my hand while Amanda collected them in a plastic payless bag below. I got higher and Amanda passed a piece of pvc piping to me, which I used to knock off the flowers that my arms couldn’t quite reach.
Many of the flowers I knocked were taken with the wind onto the corrugated tin roof of the house. Amanda said I could step onto the roof, so I reached my leg across the air beneath me to step onto the roof, while squeezing beneath a knotted branch. Amanda tossed me a bag and I collected the mother lode of blooms from atop the house. Dwayne and Nicholas came outside to play, and laughed and waved when they saw me, the Ri-belle atop their house. Two 12th graders from the school arrived, also with the duty of collecting flowers. When they saw me atop the house, they yelled in surprise, “Hey Miss Heather-ah! Get down from there!”
Proud of my climbing and flower collecting abilities, I stayed for another 15 minutes, filling the bag completely. I climbed down, and then engaged in a few minutes of ninja stick fighting with the PVC pipes, Dwayne, and Nicholas, then wandered back inside the house. Inside, Meldena treated me to donuts and a Styrofoam cup of coffeee.
Amanda handed me the baby and directed me to get into the car. Compliant, yet not sure where we were going, I got into the front seat, carefully juggling the baby and my steaming cup of coffee. Nicholas and Dwayne climbed into the backseat, and Meldena handed me another baby guam to dress Elta, now wearing only a diaper. I put it over her head, and we drove off.
I can’t describe how totally content I was for the next hour, with quirky Amanda driving beside me, Lucky Dube blasting from the speakers, a happy, bubbly baby on my lap, and two of my favorite toddlers joyously standing in the backseat with their heads out the windows. With their hair blowing in the breeze, they had the same look my dogs would get while riding in a car with their heads out the window.
I propped Elta up so she could stand on my lap and grip the window frame to gaze outside. (sidenote: Most of the seatbelts in this country don’t function and laps seem to replace the necessity of baby carseats…)
We dropped off the flowers we had collected for a woman to make the wuts. Then we made a circle of Laura, stopping at every little store along the way to see if they sold Splenda for some reason unknown to me. None did.
The next night, I went with Darcy to the protestant church for a youth group celebration. After sitting through three hours of a sermon in Marshallese (which I still can’t understand for the most part), it was 11 pm and I was wiped out and starving. Then, the minister approached me and asked if I would sit at the guest table with the Irooj, the chiefs and landowners of the island. I was honored and sat down to a humungous plate (seriously, the size of a beachball on steroids) full of chicken, pork, ribs, potatoe salad, sashimi (raw fish in soysauce and lime), taro (a mashed bitter root), a variety of breadfruit, coconut liquer ( a mashed up coconut milk drink that they use the spongy insides of coconut seedlings in old brown coconuts to make), and much more. I watched the kids in my host family make iced coconut liquer the other day. This is the only place where I can feel at all comfortable around small children wielding large knives. I got home from church at 2 am, but it was definitely worth it!
March 1st was Nuclear victims day, a day I wish the states would honor as well, but instead we tend to sweep these kind of things under the rug. It was March 1st, 1954, when the U.S. tested the Bravo hydrogen bomb near Bikini Atoll, destroying their home, and sending nuclear fallout to the neighboring islands. The even sadder consequence has been that the destruction of their land, along with the reparations from the U.S. intended to help, have taken away their independence, making Bikinians dependent on money from the U.S. to function, rather than surviving off the land.
Even though I haven’t even met some of the kids in my own family back in the states, I spend a lot of time with Nicholas, Dwayne, Elta, Jessyanne, Ruby, Rose, and the twins, Joyce and Joyous, all of whom are the kids in my host family ages 5, 3, 1, 11, 2, 4, and 9 years old respectively. The make-up of the family and the house they share is really interesting. Darcy (22) and Daniel (22), are Nick’s parents and share one room in the house with Tatyana 12th grader at LHS. Meldena (27), is Dwayne and Elta’s mother and they, along with her husband, share the 2nd room. Jessyanne, Joyce, Joyous, and their mother live in another room. Ruby and Rose live with their mom and dad in a small house adjacent to the property, and Grandpa dominates the living room. WOW! Their land plot extends from lagoon side to ocean side, so the house we live in and Amanda’s house across from ours are all part of the family’s property. So basically, they have three times the amount of people as Sarah, Eric, and I, living in about the same size house. They really seem to make it work though, and it helps that privacy is not the same prized value that it is in the States. I brought the kids play dough last night and they all played so nicely with it together. It was like a circus- Marshallese people are really good jugglers from what I’ve seen, so the kids were juggling, putting play dough on their noses like clowns, and putting it on their faces like eye patches pretending to be pirates. Very creative! I am so lucky to have been integrated into such a nice (and big!) family that really makes me feel welcome here.
My friend Kiersten, who teaches on Ejit, one of the Bikinian communities on the other end of the atoll, came to visit last weekend, and was trying to convince me to stay another year because she was astounded at the number of people I know in the community. It is too bad that I’m really starting to feel more at home here as soon as it’s almost time to go. I’ve been contemplating staying for another year as a contract teacher, but the urge to figure out where my next path will take me is drawing me back. I enjoy life here, but I know I don’t want to be a teacher, so spending another year teaching when I could be figuring out and starting some sort of career seems counterintuitive. If the internet was more accessible, I could start researching and applying for things while I’m here, but it’s not. So, the best thing to do for now seems to be to come home, even though it’s starting to feel more and more like a home here. Why isn’t it possible to be in two places at once?! I’m thinking of applying for a MSW (Masters in Social Work), looking at Berkeley School of Social Welfare and some other schools maybe, and would start Fall 2011. I hope to spend the year in between now and then getting some quality time in Humboldt, couchsurfing, and visiting you fools in your diverse locations!
I might have said this before, but see if you can find “Surviving Paradise” by Peter Rudiak-Gould, an alum of world teach and now linguistic anthropologist. He wrote a great account of life here as a volunteer, which would be great to shed some more light on the experience I’ve been having here, especially since I’m so bad with updates.
I have found myself settling into the conservative, calm, and slow way of life here, a way of life I previously would have characterized as uber-boring, but each day becomes more entertaining.
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