(When I signed up for my South Seas adventure, I was often asked why children living on a miniscule isolated island needed to learn English. The short answer I gave was that it was the key to the lock on the rest of the world. Many of these children would probably choose to remain in their island home, living the quasi-traditional, quasi-Western lifestyle of their parents. But a few might want other opportunities: they might want to attend high school or college, which were taught in English; they might want to emigrate to the United States; they might want to communicate with other Pacific Islanders, whose linguistic common denominator among hundreds of local languages was usually English; they might want to travel elsewhere in the world, where English was the lingua franca; or they might want to read books, of which there were millions in English and only a few dozen in Marshallese. They might merely want to read their own national newspaper, which was written mostly in English. Or perhaps teaching English was linguistic imperialism, Western paternalism, or worse. I still don’t know.)
The day before school began, only one issue remained to be resolved (other than the absence of supplies, proper facilities, teachers, and teaching ability). My classroom had a leaky roof, which was problematic on an island where it rained more days than not. Robella agreed to let me move to one of the absurdly small rooms. The only defi-ciency of the absurdly small room, other than being absurdly small and proportioned more like a hallway than a classroom, was that it was locked, and no one had the key. A crude but effective solution was proposed: break the lock open with a hammer. Nathan performed the deed with grim efficiency. So this was the state of education on Ujae, I thought: teachers breaking open classrooms with hammers in order to start school three weeks late with fewer than half the required teachers and no principal.
The first day of school was something of an eye-opener. In the morning, I taught the youngest students. I showed them photographs from home in the naïve hope that they would realize I was a human being and therefore behave well out of compassion. I demonstrated my five makeshift classroom rules which, at the time, I believed might actually work:
Kautiej doon.
Respect each other.
Kautiej rukaki eo.
Respect the teacher.
Kautiej kein jikuul ko.
Respect the school supplies.
Ne rukaki eo ej kajutak pein, jab keroro.
When the teacher raises his hand, be quiet.
Komman ta eo rukaki eo ej ba.
Do what the teacher says.
The children not only broke all the rules, but found ways to break them all at once with a single action.
I led the children in an enthusiastic rendition of the ABC song, which most of them had learned in Head Start. Schoenberg would have been proud of the atonal harmonies that resulted, and Spinal Tap would have been proud of the volume level. I couldn’t think of anyone, however, who would have been favorably impressed with the lyrics, which came out as follows:
Ay-pee-chee-tee-ee-ep-chee. Etch-ee-jie-kay-elemeno-bee.
Koo-ar-etch, dee-yoo-bee, tubba-choo-kitch, wine-ah-jee.
No-ah-no-my-ay-pee-chee, ah-choo-pet-ee-pow-tuh-mee.
I wasn’t at all convinced that the children knew where one letter ended and the next began, or if they were even aware that they were singing letters.
Somehow I survived four class periods with that admittedly cursory lesson planning. Then the older students came. I discovered their almost complete lack of knowledge in all areas of the English language. I found that the vast majority could point to neither their country nor mine.
There was one girl who could. Something felt wrong, though. She looked different; she looked older. Then she blew her cover.
“So Peter,” she asked in impeccable English, “are you a public worker or a private worker?” I didn’t know the meaning of the question, but I knew the meaning of her being able to ask it.
“Are you really a student at this school?” I asked.
“No,” she replied, and burst out laughing. “I’m lying. I’m a student at Assumption High School. I’m just visiting Ujae.” Assumption was a prestigious (by local standards) private school in Majuro.
I sent her out.
That was the last of the students who spoke English.
My first two weeks in the classroom passed in a shell-shocked haze of noise and misbehavior. I was an alien on a speck of land in a lonely corner of the world—but all of that combined wasn’t half as hard as teaching. I am more impressed with veteran teachers than I am with expats who have gone native. As a teacher, I was one part instructor, two parts disciplinarian. The first part of the job I loved. The second part I hated. One might fancy that in this exotic milieu, children might magically lack the tendency to misbehave when sequestered indoors in regimented rows and ordered what to think about for six hours a day. It didn’t. Children were children, and the “grace period” of good behavior that I had been promised by every teaching manual lasted about four minutes.
The younger children in particular were an exercise in stress management. What insane sadist, I wondered, had decided that six-year-olds should be in school? In the back of the class, they were forming little conversation parties, making no effort to hide their complete disinterest in this whole “school” business. I had to admire that irreverent independence. Meanwhile, the other youngsters were indulging in a charming pastime: removing the wood paneling from inside their desks and tearing it into neat strips to be used, during class time, openly and unapologetically, as toy swords. When I asked or yelled for quiet, the well-intentioned little girls in the front row took this to mean that I wanted them to scream that dreadful Marshallese syllable, a nasalized aaaaaaaaaaa that sounded like the Coneheads’ call of alarm or a pig being slaughtered and that could go on for nearly as long, all of which was intended to shut the other children up but was in fact far louder and more horrible than what it was trying to stop. When I did achieve quiet for a short spell, it could be shattered at any moment by a baseball landing on the corrugated tin roof, making a sound akin to a bombing raid.
Outside the classroom (directly outside, for maximum irritation), children who had been released from their hour-long class period a few dozen minutes early enacted the following endless drama, using the same nightmarish vocalization as my students:
CHILD 1:
Aaaaaa. [Angry accusation.]
CHILD 2:
Aaaaaa. [Resentful defense and recrimination.]
CHILD 1:
Aaaaaa. [Restatement of the original position, more stridently.]
CHILD 2:
Aaaaaa. [Restatement of the defense and recrimination.]
On Ujae, this was engaged in more or less constantly for one’s entire childhood, near as I could tell.
The noise was a rusty chainsaw on my skull, until one day it got worse. An afternoon dip in the lagoon earned me a double ear infection right as I came down with the inevitable exotic flu. (“Ribelle belly” was the name for the intestinal counterpart to this expat-exclusive plague.) Between noise and disease, I was fairly certain my head would actually explode. For me, getting sick on this island always combined the fear of death with the hope of being medevacked back to civilization.
It was also an opportunity to explore the exciting world of outer island health care. The Marshallese government had built a sturdy three-room health dispensary in the center of the village. You didn’t need an appointment to walk in. Maybe that was because the door had been removed and the windows smashed. The clinic was also admirably well stocked. I could tell because all of the brand-new syringes, pills, vials, and pamphlets were plainly visible in heaps on the floor.
The health dispensary had been abandoned.
The medic used a small room in her house instead. That was where I showed up next with my distressed ears. I tried to communicate to her that my head felt like it was about twice its normal size, and that this couldn’t possibly be a good thing. She had to peer into the mysterious depths of my ears with a p
enlight in order to make the diagnosis. Unfortunately, the batteries in said penlight were dead, and she couldn’t replace them because there were no others on the island. I had to wait a week until the plane arrived with medical supplies.
Batteries in hand, the medic was able to examine my ears. She confirmed that yes, the searing pain hadn’t been psychosomatic. She gave me eardrops, which worked almost immediately. I forgave the lack of batteries, the belated diagnosis, the abandoned health dispensary, the wasted supplies. I was healed.
But the other teachers still hadn’t arrived on the boat, and I had become desperately impatient. “When are the other teachers coming?” I asked Robella every day.
“Any day now,” she always said.
For two weeks, they had been coming “any day now.” Perhaps Robella knew exactly when they were coming. Perhaps she didn’t. Either way, her Marshallese duty was clear: don’t tell me the truth—tell me what I want to hear. I soon learned that in this country “yes” meant “maybe,” “maybe” meant “no,” and “no” meant “hell no.”
When the ship at last plowed into view one sunny afternoon, I was not just relieved but awestruck. In this world of limited experience, this mundane vessel was a visitor from another planet. At two and half stories tall and sixty feet long, it was by far the largest man-made object I had seen in a month. At five hundred feet from shore, it would be the farthest I had ventured from the island. I had to set foot on it.
The crew edged the metallic hulk as close to the island as they could. The lagoon remained shallow enough to bathe in for hundreds of feet from shore, but then it dropped abruptly into its deeper center. It was at this eerie divide that the ship was anchored while motorboats ferried the villagers to and fro. I did what I had to do: I invited myself along. After a few minutes sandwiched between islanders and their bulging sacks of soon-to-be-sold copra, I was aboard the ship. Ujae Island was now thrillingly distant. The ocean was impossibly far below me. The can of Coke I was given on board was miraculously cold. (Natives of temperate climes conceive of paradise as warm. Here coolness had the same godly aura. Heaven is most definitely air-conditioned.)
The cabin sported a sink, a refrigerator, and cabinets, and I could not avoid a certain feeling of déjà vu. I was startled to see unfamiliar Marshallese faces. I knew only a handful of Ujae dwellers well, but I had unwittingly memorized the appearance of all of them. The faces of the ship’s crew were as conspicuous to me as if they had been painted green. They, in turn, were happily surprised by my presence in this place.
Several of the islanders were savoring canned beverages with the same rapture I had. But instead of throwing the empty cans in the trash, they casually tossed them into the lagoon. I was appalled. Then I realized that, until very recently, all of their garbage had been biodegradable. Was it perhaps our fault for making the can, and not theirs for disposing of rubbish as they always had?
I watched as my host family and others loaded the motorboat with rice, flour, grease, shortening, coffee, sugar, and kerosene. This was the last chance for several months to buy staples in any large quantity. Items could be ordered on the radio to arrive on the plane, but the cargo capacity was small and the price was high. The islanders had to stock up on essentials now, to last them until the next supply ship arrived.
The other teachers—four men named Mariano, Kapten, Steven, and Simpson—had come on this ship, and they were as relieved at their arrival as I was. They had been living on the boat for the previous three weeks as it made its rounds selling food and buying copra among the outer islands. They did not have a cabin—they slept on the deck regardless of the weather. The Ministry of Education, they said, was strapped for cash.
Now all the teachers were here, and I could beg and cajole Robella to relieve me from teaching the lowest grades. Or I could get very sick once again, stay incapacitated in my room, and fail to be informed as they met to plan my schedule and my fate, which were the same thing. The latter happened, but the outcome was miraculously the same. No longer would the first, second, and third graders torment me. From here on out, it was grades four through eight, which upgraded my job from hellish to merely awful.
Teaching still presented a few challenges—or let us just call them problems. (“Challenges,” after all, is a word used in retrospect for what at the time is better described as “pain.”) Lack of a common fluent language was one obvious hitch. Another difficulty was the rock-bottom starting point. I had already discovered they could speak no more than a few words and phrases of English and could understand next to nothing in my language. Then I discovered that their written skills were on par with their oral ones. Even in their native Marshallese, virtually all of the students had to sound out every word as they spelled or read it; in English, they were worse still. One eighth grader once asked—in Marshallese of course—“How do you spell ‘I’?” I wanted to make a shirt with that written on the back and “Marshall Islands Volunteer Teaching 2003–2004” written on the front.
My students employed what I will euphemistically call “alternative orthography.” They wrote “epdipadi” for “everybody” and “kol” for “girl.” Many attempts were so far from correct that I couldn’t tell what word the student had been trying to spell. How much relation does “niperparl” bear to “anybody,” “camitame” to “something,” “farty” to “after”? The idea that words have one correct spelling was a foreign concept. Some students rendered even their own names according to the day’s whim. Was it Mordiana or was it Mortiana? Steep or Steve? Croney or Groney?
The handwriting was atrocious, often bordering on the illegible. A typical fourth grader’s penmanship might pass for a kindergartener’s in the United States. Many had only a tenuous grasp of the difference between upper- and lowercase letters. A few couldn’t even copy words off the board reliably; r’s became v’s, h’s became n’s, and everything else emerged bent and distorted. One student would copy each word off the board backward—not just with the letters in reverse order, but with each letter a mirror image of its correct form. The students copied sentences not word by word, not letter by letter, but rather stroke by stroke, and they did it so slowly and deliberately that they might as well have been transcribing Egyptian hieroglyphics. By First World standards, four-fifths of my fourth graders suffered from profound dyslexia.
On a worksheet, the question “Where do you play baseball?” might be answered, simply, “baseball.” The question “When are you going to Majuro?” might be answered “NoIamMejro,” or perhaps “D-IMteSWiyinorvy.” One student answered every question on the worksheet with the same cryptic word: “no’t.” Or a whole paper might be turned in bearing only a sort of Dadaist poem:
Who we you raar bwebwen
Why you raar yes Rule
Who raar you we I am you
Who you semam CamPa fime P.
I admit that one of my favorite parts of teaching was privately laughing over the written work of my students. When I felt guilty about this, I just remembered the following fact: no school on the planet allows students in the teachers’ lounge. And the reason for this is that the main activity in that room is gossiping about said students, and not always in flattering terms.
Another pastime was perusing my students’ names. Better than fiberglass fishing spears or grass huts sporting solar panels, these names embodied the commingling of foreign and native. A few of the names were purely Marshallese: Jaiko, Alino, Joab, Jabdor, Rilong, Aknela, Jela, Jojapot. A few were purely English: Mike, Rosanna, Steven, Susan, Ronald, Solomon, Marshall. But most lay in a bizarre nether region between the two languages: Shisminta, Stainy, Rickson, Mickson, Bobson, Wantell, Bolta, Maston, Lobo, Rostiana, Leekey, Ranson, Brenson, Alvin, Almon, Jomly, Franty, Anty, Henty, Kenty, Hackney. (The last one emerged from the Marshallese mouth sounding either like “acne” or like “agony.”) Other names were English in origin, but Marshallese in their use as names. Yes, there really were people named Cement, Superman, and Souvenir. There were rumors of vil
lagers on other islands named Radioshack and Tax Collector, and a father-son pair named Typewriter and Computer.
I didn’t let my personal feelings toward my curiously named students sway my grading. Satan was a brilliant student, so I gave him As. The sweetest, loveliest child in the universe didn’t know any English, didn’t learn any English, and didn’t try to learn any English, so I gave her Fs. But when obnoxious behavior and abysmal academics coincided, the grades could fairly stand for both. Reading: F. Writing: F. Spelling: F. Oral: F.
Don’t misunderstand me: the students were not dim. Okay, a few of them were, and one or two made me marvel at their ability to function in daily life. But most were intelligent, and several would have been worthy of the Ivy League if they had been given half a chance. The eighth graders in particular caught words like fish in a net and seemed incapable of forgetting them. Their only fault was being born in a place where the education system was still in its birthing contractions.
Their upbringing didn’t help either. Draconian parenting at home and rote memorization at school had taught them to think as little as possible. Their role was to obey their parents and get out of the way, and any unauthorized cognition was a threat to that. If there was any doubt about that, it was laid to rest by the numerous Marshallese legends about disobedient children coming to bad ends. In my class, this translated into an intense phobia of thinking unless it was absolutely necessary. If they could copy something instead of creating it from scratch, they would copy it. If they could generate a sentence by rote instead of thinking it out, they would generate it by rote. It didn’t matter if what they were saying was absurd, incorrect, or irrelevant; this was a small price to pay for a chance to not think.
Surviving Paradise Page 8
