I joined the kids on their adventures in an inflatable raft. So many naked children crowded onboard that it was hard to tell which brown limb belonged to which brown head. In America, the number of passengers would have exceeded the safety limit. On Ujae, there was no safety limit, because all the kids were expert swimmers. In America, the parents might have been less than pleased to see a soon-to-be-schoolteacher playing with naked children. Here, the parents didn’t mind in the slightest.
Many of the pastimes resembled my own childhood games, and probably the games of children everywhere. But there were others that could have been played nowhere else but here. One of these I dubbed Underwater Coralhead Cinderblock Soccer Wrestling.
It reminded me of a Calvin and Hobbes strip. Hobbes pitches a snowball to Calvin. Calvin hits it with a bat, jumps on a sled, and slides down a hill while Hobbes tries to tag him out with more snowballs. Declares Calvin: “I love a good game of speed sled base snow ball!”
In case the game’s title does not give you a clear picture of the activity, I will spell it out. A pair of children swim to a spot in the lagoon where two coral outcrops grow ten feet from each other. One of the contestants dives down and retrieves a heavy cinderblock that is lying on the sea floor. Each child stands on one of the coralheads, and then they both jump in the water. (Their eyes are wide open, completely accustomed to the salt water that made my eyes burn.) The child holding the cinderblock quickly sinks to the bottom, then tries to move the concrete slab toward the other coralhead, while the other child does everything possible to stop him. It is a test of wrestling skill, swimming strength, and, above all, lung capacity.
It was through these games that I came to know the children as something other than an invasive mob. They were less like neighborhood playmates and more like a single enormous family, two hundred strong, presumably the result of an over-successful fertility experiment. Most had known one another their entire lives, making them de facto siblings. This didn’t guarantee harmony, of course—they had their insults and hurt feelings and occasional fistfights, and they would taunt each other with the inexplicable English refrain, “ Yo yeah, King Kong, monkey!” But none of the children was consistently popular or unpopular, included or left out, flattered or teased. The boy who had been born with a square face, dry yellowish skin, and a fused neck that could not be moved independently of his torso had as many friends as anyone else. It was an egalitarian system, even if that sometimes meant equal mistreatment. (The children also showed one other family resemblance: two of them had eleven fingers. In both cases, the extra digit sprouted from the middle of the thumb, small and inoperable but complete with its own fingernail. The first time I noticed this, the individual in question had all eleven of his fingernails painted bright orange. He even used that extra thumb to count on.)
The minimal parenting the children received had only reinforced their bond. By the age of four, these children were beyond the age of parental attention. Since that time, they had raised each other. Their worlds were intimately tied to one another and to the island they lived on. All of the adults had set foot on Majuro or Ebeye, the country’s two urban centers, at least once. A few had been to Honolulu for medical treatment or to the US mainland to perform their traditional dance at an arts festival. But none of the children had been outside of the Marshall Islands. Many of them had never been outside of Ujae Atoll. Some had never been off Ujae Island.
Their whole lives had unfolded in this tiny arena. They had never seen a mountain, felt a cold breeze, or eaten in a restaurant. This bit of geological exotica—a tiny, flat islet of a coral atoll—was all they had ever known.
This could explain some of the questions they asked me:
CHILD:
So, America is really big, right?
ME:
Yes, it’s very big. Much bigger than Ujae.
CHILD:
So, in America, how far is it from the ocean side to the lagoon side?
Or:
CHILD:
I heard that some Marshallese people go to America, and live in a place called Arkansas.
ME:
That’s true.
CHILD:
So how are the beaches in Arkansas?
Or:
CHILD:
Where in America do you come from?
ME:
California.
CHILD:
What about Patrick?
ME:
Colorado.
CHILD:
How far is it from California to Colorado?
ME:
Pretty far. It takes two hours to fly there.
CHILD:
How long would it take in a boat?
They betrayed the same ignorance when I showed them photos from home. When they saw a body of water, the question was always this: “Is that the lagoon?” When I said that it was not, they concluded that they had merely mistaken the ocean side for the lagoon side, and the lagoon (which must exist) was simply not visible in that particular picture. It was clear that these children conceived of America as an archipelago of fifty coral atolls called “California,” “Colorado,” and so forth. I could tell them that, in addition to warm weather and beaches, my country had cold air and mountains as tall as five hundred palm trees, but that only made them picture a hilly, chilly island. There was no other possibility for them. Even their language reinforced this. The word for “land,” ane, also meant “island,” and the word for “country,” aelon, also meant “coral atoll.” How could I tell them that America was land but not an island, that it was a country but not an atoll? I received truly baffled looks when I told the children that America was not an island.
It eventually struck me that it was perhaps I who was confused. My home, like every other, was surrounded by water—walk in any direction and you will find it, even if you have to travel to the tip of South America to do so. The Americas are just an enormous island divided into two regions called “continents” and referred to as “mainland” only because of their size. One could even say it is an atoll with a filled-in lagoon and a single islet stretching along its eight-thousand-mile length. In my failed attempts to convince the children that the world was not made of islets and atolls, I ended up realizing that they had been right all along. Their mental geography was just an opposite look at the same phenomenon, and their nomenclature was as logical as my own. Everything is an island, everything is an atoll—it’s the truth.
This still left the question of cultural awareness. How did they think that people lived in other countries? Again it was their questions that shed light on the issue:
CHILD:
Why do you have only two siblings?
Or:
CHILD:
When you’re in America, do you talk to your family in Marshallese?
Or:
CHILD:
Are there ribelles in Hawaii?
ME:
Yes, there are a lot of them.
CHILD:
What are their names?
Or:
CHILD:
What do you eat in America? Rice, and what else?
Or:
CHILD:
So, your skin is white. Is your poop also white?
The first question was as reasonable as my question, “Why do Marshall Islanders have so many children?” And the last question, I readily admit, has a kind of logic to it. All things considered, however, it was clear that the children thought the entire human race lived in small Marshallese villages. In the same vein, they were amused by the hair on my arms and legs, although there was not particularly much of it, and by my pointy nose, although I believe that if there is a global database of nose pointinesses, mine would come in at around average.
They had, after all, seen little of the outside world. The crude explanations from the rare volunteer like myself were the majority of the information they had received. The rest came from the movies they watched. These films were not educational documentaries about life in other
countries. They were movies such as the following, which reveal more about the random things that end up on remote islands than they reveal about life in the outside world: The Thin Red Line, Babe, The Passion of the Christ, Leave It to Beaver (the movie), Rapa Nui, The Land Before Time IV: Journey Through the Mists, Robinson Crusoe, and Pooh’s Grand Adventure: The Search for Christopher Robin. (They must have also seen Rambo, because they once asked me what state he was from, and RoboCop, because one boy was fond of adopting a robotic voice and saying, “Drop the gun, motherfucker.”)
They would watch these films on afternoons when someone had decided to sacrifice gasoline for entertainment, fire up their aging generator, and let their empty living room host as many children as it could fit. It was a tribute to the youngsters’ attention span that they could sit through these movies, which I don’t need to tell you were not subtitled in Marshallese. They didn’t understand a word of the dialogue and laughed only at the occasional pratfall, but even The Passion of the Christ, not generally noted for its slapstick humor, witnessed few walkouts.
It might have been through these occasional films that the children acquired one of their more unexpected habits. They knew gang signs. Yes—straight from the ghetto, still recognizable after their journey through unknown channels across five thousand miles of ocean. “West side” and “east side” were both part of their repertoire. If they had known the meanings, these gestures would have been perfect for indicating one’s allegiance in the half-serious rivalry that existed between the two halves of the island. They could even have indicated whether one lived in the Ralik (west) or Ratak (east) chain of atolls in the country, with their slightly different dialects and histories. But the children had no idea what these hand signals meant, and they chose to proudly flash them at the one time when I couldn’t pretend they didn’t exist: while taking their photograph. So there I was, on a remote island of an obscure Pacific country, taking pictures of the picturesque native children, and they were throwing gang signs at me.
The children had another habit that didn’t do worlds of good for the “exotic untouched tribe” atmosphere I was trying to manufacture in my photos. The downside to (marginal) literacy was that the children had become monomaniacal signature-writers. Damn near every surface on the island was emblazoned with the children’s half-capital, half-lowercase autographs. I didn’t know who “Sailas” was, but I knew he was a boy with a mission—specifically, a mission to leave his John Hancock on every wall, floor, chair, table, and, perhaps eventually, every tree trunk on the island. He had single-handedly laid claim to a large percentage of the island. Saying “I don’t see your name on it” would not be an effective way to dispute his ownership of anything, because chances were that the object in question did, in fact, have his name on it.
An army of children had left their calling cards at the school: walls had been signed in pen, desks carved into, even the ceiling monogrammed in chalk. The door to my bedroom had been stricken too, and so had the rest of Ariraen. Everywhere were declarations of “[Name] love [Name]” and the cryptic “[Name] vs [Name].” Versus? What could this mean?
The children were overwhelming, always, at good times and bad, yet some of my best hours were spent with them. There was the day I rose several notches in coolness by teaching the kids Spanish pop songs. Soon they were butchering that European language with an accent it had rarely if ever been subjected to before. There was the day that I described snow to three fascinated siblings: Does it hurt when it touches your skin? Does it fall as fast as rain? Can you play with it? There was the day a particularly clever nine-year-old invented a linguistic game with me, taking advantage of the proliferation of doubled words in Marshallese and his familiarity with the mathematical concept of squaring numbers. He was no longer Junjun; now he was “Jun squared.” One was no longer bwebwe (“stupid”); one was “bwe squared.” So tutu (“take a shower”) and nana (“bad”) and jeje (“write”) and a host of other words were transformed, and we talked to each other like this: “You are na squared and bwe squared and I am going to go tu squared and then je squared and then ki squared.”
And there was the day when all the pain of isolation and exposure seemed to wash away in the high tide as I carried a girl named Mercy piggyback through the lively lagoon waves. As the sunshine soaked the sea, it was difficult to find anything to be upset about, and I was convinced that, as hard as this new life was, it also offered moments more sublime than anywhere.
I had been on Ujae for a month. It had been a wild ride, the opposite of everything I had been led to believe. Here in faraway nowhere, I had triumphed over loneliness. Confined to an island smaller than many college campuses, I had defeated boredom. And yet in this picturesque backwater, I still craved aloneness and quiet. Living with islanders that any travel brochure would call gentle and agreeable, I was still almost comatose with culture shock.
And I hadn’t even started teaching.
7
No Student Left Behind
I KNEW BEFORE I ARRIVED THAT UJAE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL WAS LESS than perfect. I was aware that it was in fact one of the worst schools in the Pacific Ocean. The United Nations had ranked the Marshall Islands dead last in educational achievement among Pacific Island nations. Of the eighty-two elementary schools in the Marshall Islands, Ujae was ranked seventy-eighth. It was the worst school in the outer islands and the lowest ranked school to which any of the twenty-five WorldTeach volunteers had been assigned.
Every year, the government administered a test to determine which eighth graders would be offered a spot in one of the country’s three small public high schools. It had been half a decade since any student on Ujae had passed. Some had managed to scrounge together enough money to attend a private high school in Majuro. The rest had cut off their studies at grade eight, having received only the barest rudiments of a primary school education. Bluntly summarized: I was going to teach at a very, very bad school.
I took this as good news.
My teaching experience was close to nil, so it was heartening to know that I could hardly make things worse than they already were. Success was unlikely, but failure was impossible. How liberating! If even a single eighth grader passed the high school entrance exam, then the year would have proven wildly successful. Rising from zero to one was, technically, an improvement of infinity percent. If I could coach a single child to success, then I could, for the rest of my life, with perfect mathematical justification, boast on my resume that I had achieved infinite improvement in public education in a developing nation. Teaching at Ujae Elementary would be almost too easy.
This is what I thought.
I had been on Ujae for a month, and the beginning of school was already well overdue. The Ministry of Education, from on high in distant Majuro, had decreed that classes would start one week after I arrived on Ujae. But at that time only one out of the six Marshallese colleagues I had been promised was on island. The lone teacher, a man by the name of Nathan, explained that the others were attending government-mandated courses in Majuro. Apparently, these education classes took precedence over education itself. Nathan promised that the head teacher would arrive by plane “pretty soon.” But he couldn’t promise even that for the other four teachers, who were forced to make the return journey on one of the country’s glacially slow supply ships.
In the absence of anything else to do, Nathan gave me the grand tour of Ujae Elementary. The school consisted of two low buildings facing each other grimly across a field of coral gravel. One of the buildings was older and had four absurdly huge rooms. The other building was newer and had four absurdly tiny rooms.
One of the latter rooms, called the “lounge,” was an eight-by-eight-foot expanse furnished only with a Lilliputian table covered entirely by a short-wave radio that didn’t work. Lounging did not appear feasible. Another room, the “library,” was a dark, musty space inhabited by a hundred brand-new, glossy, useless English textbooks with stories about snowmen, road trips, and other topics not a
propos to a tiny tropical island.
On the wall of one classroom, breaking the copious empty space, were posters of nursery rhymes in obsolete English. It was a good thing that no one had actually used them. If they had, the kids would have been asking each other “Have you any wool?” and calling each other “knaves.” On the opposite wall an alphabet exercise started well enough:
Hello. My name is Annie, and this is my husband, Andrew.
We come from Arkansas and we sell Apples.
Hello. My name is Brenda, and this is my husband, Bob.
We come from Boston and we sell Balloons.
But it succumbed to a phonetic meltdown by the end:
Hello. My name is Qaffy, and this is my husband, Qonky.
We come from Quigla, and we sell Queens.
Hello. My name is Xort, and this is my husband, Xibber.
We come from Xampo, and we sell X-rays.
Two weeks into my Ujae stint, with the other teachers still en route, Nathan took matters into his own hands and assigned me to one of the absurdly large rooms. For the next few weeks, I could only sit in that dank cave masquerading as a classroom and wonder how I was going to fill 180 schooldays with educational material, or something vaguely resembling it.
A month in, the head teacher, Robella, finally arrived on the plane. That made three of us to teach six subjects to 120 students in eight grades. But we were already so far behind schedule that Robella decreed that we would start school with this skeleton crew. Until the other teachers arrived, I was responsible for teaching English to all eight of the grades.
Surviving Paradise Page 7
