I pointed at myself and said “Peter.” Alfred corrected me: “Peter De Brum.” We didn’t speak each other’s languages, but we had managed to communicate one thing: I was already a member of a Marshallese family.
It was late evening. I went to my room, hung my mosquito net over my mattress, and climbed into this feeble fortress. As I lay in the humid darkness, I considered my situation. I was already lonely to the point of physical pain. I had been ignored and welcomed, avoided and stared at, indulged and deprived. All I had learned was that I knew nothing.
2
A Beautiful Prison
I WOKE UP THAT NIGHT IN THE DARK—;THE TOTAL BLACKNESS OF AN overcast moonless midnight on a remote island—and, in my drowsy delirium, I had no idea where I was. Feeling the concrete contours of my room, my first thought was that I had been locked in a cell. It was a long moment before I remembered the particular circumstances of my sentence.
I drifted off, and the next thing I was aware of was a tidy little cliché of a country morning: roosters crowing, sunshine streaming through the window, and the sounds of early risers starting their chores.
Then Elina came to my door and called out, “ Mona!” This was one of the few Marshallese words I knew; it meant both “eat” and “food.” So I came out of my room, sat down at the little table Elina pointed to, and proceeded to mona the mona: plain pancakes.
My mind drifted to the previous morning, when life had been so different. I had been in the same country then, but not in the same world. I had been 250 miles away in Majuro, a city with electricity, plumbing, restaurants, hotels, and, should the mood strike, a bowling alley. I had the company of twenty-four other Americans who had come as volunteer teachers through a nonprofit organization called WorldTeach. During our month of orientation, we had received a celebrity’s welcome. We met the US ambassador, the secretary of education, and a chief who had once been the country’s president. We visited uninhabited islets, snorkeled on pristine reefs, and sipped cold beers while sitting in the bathwater warmth of the lagoon. We cured ourselves of gentle misconceptions—coconuts plucked from the tree were not the brown spheres of tropical island cartoons, but rather egg-shaped, leaf-green fruits—and imagined that every surprise would be as innocuous as that one. We had supervised contact with the locals and fancied ourselves to be bravely crossing cultures. We lived in the electrified, plumbed classrooms of an out-of-session elementary school and thought we were roughing it. And always we had our Western bubble: the community of volunteers, the Internet café, the orientation classes on pedagogy and shark safety. The joys ahead seemed obvious, the challenges pleasantly abstract.
Not that I hadn’t received any warnings. There were stories of a volunteer teacher in the Canadian Arctic who had prepared himself for round-the-clock darkness, but not for the fact that the natives hated white people. Locals told him he couldn’t leave his cabin (where he lived alone) because polar bears would eat him. Then, one night, he became convinced that there was a village conspiracy to kill him. He packed a bag of food, planned his escape over the tundra, and braced himself for ambush. No one came. There was no conspiracy. He survived, but his sanity had taken a hit. Another story told of a Peace Corps volunteer on an outer Micronesian atoll who snapped one day and started rowing a boat into the middle of the ocean. When a helicopter arrived to rescue him, he tried to fight off the rescue team with a pair of oars.
I had heard these stories. But, as I stood on a tropical beach framed with a double rainbow, playing Frisbee with young, pretty Americans, deprivation was not the first thing in my mind.
The idyll ended when one of Air Marshall Islands’ three tiny planes announced its schedule to fly to Ujae. Like eleven of my fellow volunteers, I had been assigned to an outer island rather than an urban center. The former was a far cry from the latter. Of the country’s sixty thousand citizens, two-thirds lived on the urbanized islands of Majuro and Ebeye. The rest of the populace was scattered across dozens of rural islands where fire was more vital than electricity and land more coveted than money. I wanted that second world—a backwater in a country that was itself a backwater—and when I applied to the volunteer program, I stated this preference in the starkest possible terms. My wish came true: my placement was Ujae—and Ujae was extreme.
I had signed on the dotted line and now I was here, finishing breakfast on my first outer-island morning. Except for a brief interlude in Majuro during the school’s winter break, I would not leave Ujae for the next ten months. This was my new world, so I decided to explore it. After making some hand signals to Alfred and Tior to explain what I was up to, I stepped onto the beach and embarked on a bold oneman expedition: to circle the entirety of the island’s shore.
Forty-five minutes later, I wondered what else I could do for the rest of the year.
I tried again. I crossed the uninhabited interior of the island, certain my first foray along the beach had bypassed some vast swath of hidden territory. It hadn’t, I realized five minutes later, when I reached the opposite shore. I tried a third time, walking along the lagoon-hugging village, searching for spots that I hadn’t passed yesterday when Alfred guided me from the airstrip to his house. There were none, I realized as I reached the airport fifteen minutes later. Uncharted had become well trodden. I had circumnavigated the world before lunch.
I now understood on a visceral level why this region of the Pacific was called Micronesia, which means “small islands.” In the United States, there might well be parking lots bigger than Ujae. In the Marshalls, Ujae was unusually large at a third of a square mile. This was a country of 1,225 islands totaling only seventy square miles of land—it was Washington, DC, shattered into a thousand pieces over an area the size of Mexico. Ujae was five times larger than the average Mar-shallese islet, most of which were uninhabited.
I returned to my host family, ate a lunch of plain rice, made awkward nonconversation, and set out again. This time I aimed to see what there was, not how little there was.
There were several dozen cinderblock houses, and, interspersed with them, a few thatched huts: the classic image of exotic paradise, if not for the solar panel on the roof and the bicycle parked by the door. There were two churches. There was an ungracefully decaying elementary school and a tiny Head Start building. There were two motorboats and three sailing canoes, plus the orphaned hulls and outriggers of half-made watercraft lying around the village. I spotted a few generators, rusty and long neglected. There were a handful of solar panels, a small number of electric lights, and a larger number of kerosene lanterns. There were a few seabirds, a few dozen dogs and cats, a few hundred chickens and pigs, a few thousand mice and lizards, a few million flies, and approximately eighteen trillion ants.
Ujae Island was part of Ujae Atoll, which, like every coral atoll, was a thin ring of reef studded with islets surrounding a lagoon. Ujae sat perched between the inner lagoon and outer ocean, and I quickly understood that the essential axis of the island was ocean-lagoon, not east-west or north-south. Walking to the two ends of that axis brought me to the island’s extremes. The lagoon was calm, shallow, and so transparent as to be color-coded by depth; its beach was smooth, sandy, and fringed by houses. The ocean was violent, mile-deep, and impenetrably opaque; its beach was rough, rocky, and utterly deserted. There were two sides to this island, and they couldn’t have been more distinct.
At low tide, I ventured onto the now exposed lagoon reef. Close to shore, a tide pool hosted a microcosm of life: tentacled anemones, black-and-yellow-striped snails, and iridescent blue fish that endlessly circled their kitchen sink–sized world, searching for an exit that didn’t exist. It was a tiny, beautiful prison, like this island.
I returned to the ocean side. I didn’t dare to swim in the open sea, where the waves dashed themselves against the rough edge of the atoll, but, at low tide, with the ocean reef exposed and extending a hundred feet outward before plunging into the sea, I walked to the very edge of that underwater precipice and felt I was on the
summit of an unfathomably tall mountain—which I was.
I found the highest point I could—a three-foot-tall dune—and scanned the horizon, but I couldn’t see any other islands. There was only ocean in every direction. To the north, Bikini Atoll was invisibly distant at 150 miles. To the west, there was nothing until Ujelang Atoll, almost three hundred miles away, and, to the south, the next stop would be one of the smallest countries in the world, Nauru, seven hundred miles away. Even Lae Atoll, thirty miles to the east, was hidden completely behind the curvature of the Earth.
Leaving the ocean behind, I set off to explore Ujae’s interior. Tiny hills wrinkled the land, but the tallest of them couldn’t have exceeded eight feet. Like its tiny size, Ujae’s flatness was typical for the country. The highest point in the Marshall Islands was a nameless hillock of sand on Likiep Atoll, towering thirty-two feet above sea level—a veritable Everest in a country with an average elevation of seven feet.
Between Ujae’s sweet-tempered lagoon and ruthless ocean lay the jungle. It was an overgrown palm forest crisscrossed with small paths and dotted with shadowy ponds. I walked to the center of the jungle, as far as possible from the shore, but I could still hear ocean waves in stereo. There was no escaping the smallness of this world.
As the sun set, I returned to the De Brums’ property. Alfred and Tior were lying outside on woven mats, enjoying the balmy night with mosquito coils smoking next to them. The stars were brilliant in a way that only immense isolation can allow. Out on the beach, away from the family’s one electric light, they were ten times more so. There were no airplanes in the sky, nor had there been the night before, nor did I expect to see one the night after. If I saw one it would only make it clearer how distant this place was from everything, only invite questions as to what had brought those people in the sky to this faraway corner of the world.
I ate another meal of plain rice and retired to my room. The cinderblock walls had absorbed the day’s heat and were re-emitting it into the room’s uncirculating air. The concrete was for withstanding typhoons, not regulating the temperature. I was living in an undersized, overheated tide pool.
I had spent my first full day on Ujae. As I retreated to bed, Alfred and Tior bade me a barely recognizable “good night”—a piece of America that, like me, had somehow found its way to this world.
3
The Marshall Islands on
One Dollar a Day
SCHOOL WOULDN’T BEGIN FOR ANOTHER MONTH, SO, FOR THE TIME being, my only job was to watch, learn, and be fed. I could say only a few words, but I was praised for the effort. I could contribute nothing to the community except accidental comic relief.
I was an infant.
So I worked on acquiring the basics of my world. I learned the island’s daily rhythm, which was a steady one. The tide came and went, drowning the reef under restless waters, then withdrawing to let large sections of the lagoon floor bake in the heat. The sun rose fiery, shot up to directly overhead, and then was quickly gone. Day was brighter and night was darker than I imagined they could be. Each morning, the men left for their chores: spearfishing, netfishing, linefishing, coconut fetching, coconut husking, coconut scraping. The women kept the grounds immaculate, the fire burning, and the children working—until the youngsters were let go for midday games on the beach. Then, at dusk, everyone returned to their homesteads.
A few days passed, and I was sure I had absorbed the rhythm. Then there was a bump. Sunday changed the rules, and Alfred and Tior took their new American charge to share in the festivities.
That morning witnessed grand preparations. Whereas the day before the men might have been spearfishing on a coral reef, sailing on outrigger canoes, or hunting crabs on a far-off islet, now their hair was slicked back with coconut oil and they were sporting clean Hawaiian shirts and slacks, or even suits. The day before, the women might have been preserving breadfruit in a salty tide pool or weaving pandanus-leaf mats, but today their hair was arranged and decorated, their dresses bright and spotless. And the children, who yesterday had been rolling in the sand, splashing in the lagoon, and clambering through the forest, were now impeccably presentable.
The clang of the makeshift church bell—an old scuba tank sounded with a hammer—was audible throughout the island. Soon everyone was ambling to church, a sort of leisurely parade with no audience. They were carrying Marshallese Bibles and hymnals—the only books, I was quite sure, that most of them owned. We arrived at the white-walled church, whose twenty-five-foot steeple was the tallest man-made structure on the island. The congregation seated itself on sagging wooden pews. Men sat on the left side of the central aisle, women on the right. There were no exceptions.
The minister approached the podium. He was a rotund, charismatic man with a piano-keys smile. He began with a song, a missionary hymn rendered in Marshallese. The women were shrill sopranos, entering a range previously reserved for cartoon chipmunks. The men heaved out their voice at the beginning of every musical phrase, producing a sound almost like a grunt. Each individual started and stopped singing when he pleased, and the chaos of these multiple whims created a rich texture. The minister then preached, thrusting his body forward with each emphasized phrase. Then everyone recited the Lord’s Prayer in mumbled Marshallese.
The service continued: song, sermon, prayer, repeat. A curious mix of formality and informality prevailed throughout. Men put their arms up on the backs of their seats and balanced their feet on the pews in front of them. The women fanned themselves with old brown breadfruit leaves. No one paid any attention to the children running amok in the aisles or the crying babies who refused to be calmed.
The congregation sang a final song while the collection plate made its rounds. A quarter or two seemed to be standard, while a dollar was generous. I hadn’t brought money with me, but Alfred bailed me out. He discreetly stuck two quarters in my hand, and I made the donation in his stead.
The service concluded. The congregation strolled back home, even more leisurely than before. For the rest of the day there was only rest, conversation, and sleep. But tomorrow the rhythm of work would return.
4
A Tropical Paradox
I WASN’T SURE I LIKED THIS PLACE.
My fantasy was of gentle, prosaic islanders drifting through life in quaint isolation. They would give me an all-access pass to a cultural amusement park. They would entertain me with colorful festivals and noble traditions, and I would emerge wiser, calmer, kinder.
The reality was different. The islanders wore T-shirts and drank coffee. They attended church on Sunday. They played basketball and ping-pong. They listened to the world news on the radio. One was a police officer, another an airline agent. How different were they, really, from my friends back home?
I was disappointed. I wanted more fire and less electricity, more thatch and less concrete, more ignorance and less knowledge. I wanted them to know nothing of the outside world—to have no conception of baseball or Britney Spears, to be startled when I flipped on a flashlight or clicked a camera. I wanted them to be charmingly oblivious to all outside things, exotic in every step, breath, and word. They were not.
Nor were they particularly unmaterialistic. I would not learn from them the virtues of the simple life. A few days after arriving, I was sitting by the road when I heard the sound of an engine emanating from the jungle. I had already learned that, on Ujae, the din of machinery always indicated important events. (If it wasn’t an airplane, then it was a motorboat expedition or a generator being put to rare use for a party.) The source of the noise was revealed when a man came speeding out of the jungle on a moped. He drove onto the main footpath and followed it east, coolly unappreciative of the absurdity of the scene. What on earth was this man doing with this toy on a mile-long, fuel-scarce island?
“What a bike,” I heard a boy say in English. He looked at me, and pointed again at the ridiculous vehicle as it sputtered into the distance. “What a bike!” he repeated, more emphatically. What a bike i
ndeed, I thought, but how had this child failed to learn to say “thank you” in English and yet managed to idiomatically praise a motorcycle in the same language? It wasn’t until several months later that I learned the Marshallese word for motorcycle: watabaik.
The anonymous man’s moped was merely an extreme example of an island-wide habit. In the lengths they would go to in order to acquire modern technology, they showed themselves to be even more addicted to it than Westerners. I was invited one evening to mupi—watch a movie—which, after three days on Ujae, already seemed like technological wizardry from another planet. I stepped into my neighbors’ house and found it bare save for a TV/VCR, a stack of videos, and an alarming proliferation of small children. There was no television reception on this island, but the villagers had made up for that with home movie systems, often at the expense of such things as furniture. I was given the seat of honor, the only chair in the house, and my hosts started screening the ultraviolent war epic The Thin Red Line to an audience of entranced toddlers. The adults fast-forwarded through the sex scenes but left the horrific bloodshed intact.
The day after, I stumbled upon a man playing Super Nintendo. His hands, strong and calloused from a life of physical labor, took the controls of this foreign artifact with ease. He was as adept at shooting enemy spacecraft in Gradius III as he was at husking coconuts.
Surviving Paradise Page 2
