Surviving Paradise

by Peter Rudiak-Gould

  Even centuries ago, outsiders were hitting the same wall. Adelbert von Chamisso, who marveled at local seamanship, also deplored what he perceived as local poverty. He decided that the islanders were “good, needy people,” in the same mix of compassion and paternalism that, nearly two hundred years later, spawned charities like the one that had sent me here.

  Out of principle and inclination and from real sincere love we endeavored to neglect nothing that we could do for this people. On our first visit we had put our friends on Otdia [Wotje] into the possession of swine, goats, and domesticated fowl; yams were planted, and melons and watermelons had sprung up and were thriving. When we returned after a few months the garden spot on the island of Otdia was desolate and empty. Not a single strange plant remained to testify to our good intention.

  It wasn’t surprising that these well-intentioned ventures had failed. The soil was poor and unsuited to nonnative crops. The women were too busy to garden and the men were accustomed to getting food in irregular spurts of fishing, not daily weeding sessions, and nothing could tear them away from conversation-coffee. A garden—whether led by a German botanist, a Marshallese philanthropist, or an American volunteer—didn’t fit with local routines, so it failed.

  Ujae’s food shortage continued. But one man, the island’s radio operator, claimed that the problem was illusory. “There’s no famine,” he explained. “People are just lazy. There’s plenty of Marshallese food—fish, bwiro, coconut meat. People are just unhappy that they don’t have any of the imported food left. Once they put their mind to collecting food in the traditional way, the hunger will end.” This was how it was with so many things. The islanders appreciated the convenience of Western goods. But when those goods were not forthcoming, tradition provided a viable fallback. Bwiro replaced rice, sap replaced sugar, thatch replaced plywood, fire replaced electricity. The islanders made do during the famine.

  So it was a time not of desperation, only of harder work and fewer pleasures. It also happened to be the heart of the dry season. Although the Marshalls stayed hot and humid year-round, there was a rainier and less windy season corresponding to North American or European summer, and a drier, windier season corresponding to our winter. The water in the rain barrel was sinking low. I fancied myself an expert at showering with a bucket, but the sudden shortage of water required me to raise the task to the level of an art form. In the heyday of my expertise, I could perform a complete head-to-toe wash with only two gallons of water. (Hint: to wash your armpit with as little water as possible, you must hold the full dipper with the same hand, apply soap with the other hand while twisting the first hand to let the water run down over its target.)

  In anticipation of an empty rain tank, I resolved to acquire another one of the long list of much-more-difficult-than-it-appears Marshallese skills. This was drawing water from the well. One would expect that even the most talentless novice could lower a bucket eight feet down on a string and fill it with water. But one would be mistaken. When the bucket reached the bottom of the well, it floated lazily on the surface of the water and made no effort to fill itself. The water-drawer had to give the string a sudden pull, with a specific speed and direction, which jerked the bucket up before sending it careening back into the water at an angle. Like most everything, it was all in the wrist. (Why the wrist has acquired such a disproportionate importance in human activity is beyond me.) Alfred took pity on me and attached a weight to the bucket; now it would dip into the water without the fiendishly difficult jerking motion. I was saved from my incompetence.

  The village’s problems began to seep into the school. Several of the students were surly from the lack of food and resented the fact that I had rice to eat while they had nothing but bwiro, three meals a day. But this new reason for resentment was just a small exacerbation of a problem that had begun at day one. The children had a schizophrenic view of me: on the one hand, I was a fascinating exotic friend to talk to, play with, and please; on the other hand, I was an authority figure to be pushed and tested, taunted if weak and feared if strong. In the classroom, despite all of my efforts, the latter view dominated.

  One student made a point of telling me, at the end of each day’s class, “Goodbye, and by the way, I don’t like you.” Those who were better at sensing my insecurities would tell me instead that they liked Patrick much better than me. One boy told me that a clumsy toddler had killed the kitten I had grown fond of—a malicious lie, delivered with a grin. Middle fingers were raised at me (that was not the native Marshallese way to say “hello”—it was the imported American way to say you-know-what). Rocks were “accidentally” thrown in my direction. When the students got especially bad, I would yell, and when I yelled, they laughed. In myriad other charming ways, they poked and prodded my dragon scales to see where the weaknesses lay, sharpened the daggers and drove them home, punished me until I was a monster and then punished me for being a monster, and tried to convince me, for my efforts, that I was a bad person—selfish, unreasonable, inept, dishonest. And here I had thought I was being generous! School for me was a factory: in goes any mood, out comes a bad mood.

  The bitter paradox of the situation was that I treated the children far more gently than any other adult in their lives, and, for this, they treated me far more harshly than any adult in their lives. But that riddle contained its own solution. The children didn’t resent me; they resented their parents, and I became the focal point for the pent-up frustration of all of them. The parents harshly punished misbehavior, whereas I gently corrected it. Therefore, in a 180-degree reversal of justice, I was the whipping boy for the children’s hostility.

  And what a perfect target I must have seemed. I was easy. I lacked the Marshallese armor that kept troublesome emotions in check. Every arrow hit its target, and I turned the other cheek instead of slapping theirs. The children felt powerful when, all their lives, they had been powerless.

  The adults, of course, had a ready solution for my disciplinary woes. “The kids have been giving me some trouble,” I would report.

  “So hit them!” they would answer cheerfully.

  Yes, corporal punishment was an option. The parents not only accepted it, but encouraged it. But no, absolutely not. I could not do that. There were limits to cultural integration. Living abroad was an opportunity to test-drive foreign values, but it was also a time to notice my own values—and occasionally, horror of horrors, reaffirm them. I could have embraced the local belief that pain is a legitimate tool of control, and it would have been a cross-cultural success. But it would also, in my opinion, have been an ethical failure, and ethics trumped cultural integration on any day of the week. The Westerner at home is encouraged to heed his conscience; abroad he is expected to silence it. I stubbornly stuck to the first route. Ethnocentrism or courageous conviction—it was always hard to tell the difference.

  Short of hitting the students, there was another possibility: I could report the worst offenders to their parents. But this amounted to the same thing. If I reported a child to his parents, the result would not be a heart-to-heart or even a stern lecture. The result would be a beating. And I, all too aware of this fact, would be complicit. Whether the student was struck with my own hand or with his father’s, the fact remained that I had caused it. This put me in a vexing bind: either bow down to egregious misbehavior, or be indirectly guilty of hitting children.

  The worst case was that of Henry. His behavior begged for parental intervention, but his father was widely acknowledged to be abusive even by local standards. Approaching the father would only lead to more abuse, which was the very cause of the boy’s misbehavior in the first place. Cracking down on misconduct only fueled its source. Such was the Catch-22 of physical discipline.

  My life on Ujae had become a crash course in applied ethics. Cultural relativism, indirect responsibility, and the justifiability of violence were no longer abstract debates. In America, moral dilemmas had always felt distant and cerebral. Here on Ujae, they were close and visc
eral.

  I eventually realized the total, exasperating impossibility of it all. There was no solution. All exits were locked; impossibility reigned. Hitting the misbehavers was unthinkable. Removing the bad apples from class every day was unprofessional. Reporting the children to the parents was tantamount to hitting them. Failure to do so meant a never-ending parade of misdeeds. Detention would extend my time with the miscreants, threatening to unravel that last precious thread of sanity. I had no physical items with which to reward good behavior, and praise was futile. Attempting to explain to the offenders the value of respect—to engage their conscience, to make them behave well not to win a prize but because it was the right thing to do—was fruitless, for the simple reason that the misbehavers were incapable of embarrassment. They could feel fear but not shame. Teaching manuals reassured me that I could win over that last adorably rebellious little imp by engaging his underappreciated kinesthetic learning style. I wasn’t so sure.

  Somewhere lurked a deep and unacknowledged problem. I wanted to teach English, and the children wanted to learn it, yet there was only conflict. The helper and the helped are supposed to be partners, but instead they work at cross-purposes. If teachers want to teach and children are naturally curious, then where does it go wrong? Perhaps veteran educators have grown numb to this reality, forgotten or surrendered to its heartbreaking absurdity. But I, as a first-time teacher, had not. The classroom was not about learning; it was about power. And I wondered if these troubles—which even experienced educators learn only to deal with, not to eliminate—revealed that something fundamental in education was being missed or perverted. It should not be this hard.

  I decided I wasn’t meant to be a teacher of children, a job so unforgiving of my weaknesses; a job, in fact, where so many good qualities—sympathy, egalitarianism, a thoughtful pause before making decisions—became liabilities; a job that rewarded authoritarianism and punished sensitivity; a job that turned me, for my best efforts, into the worst version of myself; a job where good intentions were not only inadequate, but often counterproductive. Pedagogy texts told me how to become a good teacher. They rarely mentioned that some people simply weren’t cut out for it.

  It was tempting to feel proud for failing: for not being the drill sergeant who could keep the kids in line, for not being the thick-skinned stoic who could tolerate endless disrespect. But in any case, my job was hell, and I was a failure at it.

  And I was the best teacher at the school.

  The food shortage, in addition to bringing the children’s disrespect into clearer focus, was also bringing the normally shabby Ujae educational system to an all-time low. School officially began at eight in the morning. During the first few weeks this drifted, unof-ficially, to a quarter after, then half past. Now it was around nine. Did the teachers stay after school to make up the missed hour? No. Between starting every period late and ending every period early, the teachers were in class about half the required hours. The head teacher was fond of reprimanding the students for their tardiness, but never said a word to the other teachers. Perhaps it was because she herself arrived late.

  In my country, a job existed because a task needed to be done. In the Marshall Islands, a job existed so that someone could get paid. In my country, the salary was a means of convincing someone to do the job. In the Marshall Islands, the salary was an end unto itself. Government jobs, after all, dated to the days of American administration, when it seemed that the surest way of improving standards of living was to pay locals to do, well, anything—or nothing. It wasn’t that Marshall Islanders with waged employment never performed their job descriptions. It was just that they regarded it as an optional extra. The teachers on Ujae didn’t need to teach.

  So I would show up at the schoolyard at eight o’clock to a post-apocalyptic quiet, with perhaps two students and zero teachers having arrived, and wait a good thirty minutes before I reached my unofficial quorum of half my first-period students. Meanwhile, the children who should have been in the other classes would gravitate to my classroom, where the funny ribelle was on display.

  Predictably, the school had no bell. The church was just next door, so I suggested to Robella that we use its bell. The answer was an uncharacteristically blunt “no.” I took matters into my own hands and installed a primitive bell of my own making: it was a tin can hanging from a tree, sounded with a stick. One day, at the end of the first recess, I tried it out. Almost none of the students heard it. The ones who did just laughed.

  This was not a case of Marshallese Time; this was a case of not caring. Marshallese Time allowed flexibility, not perennial neglect. One time, a Ministry of Education employee arrived on the island to inspect the functioning of the school. She met with the teachers and asked them to fill out an anonymous survey regarding the school’s quality on a scale of one to seven, where one is “poor” and seven is “excellent.” The answers ranged from four to six. That made me laugh. The Pacific Islands were not known for excellent education. Among Pacific countries, the Marshall Islands ranked low, and among Marshallese elementary schools Ujae was near last. On what possible grounds, by what conceivable standard, was Ujae Elementary School good or even mediocre?

  This was not a conspiracy of the teachers. The community was complicit in it. A PTA occasionally met, but the meetings were as fruitless as they were rare. Parents and teachers began every comment with long-winded introductions emphasizing their desire to kautiej aolep (respect everyone) and offend no one, but then found various subtle ways of excusing, ignoring, or deflecting the school situation. The parents blamed the teachers and the teachers blamed the parents, but deep down it did not appear that anyone cared. The school continued to run like a never-oiled machine.

  The excuse during that month of December was the food shortage. The teachers had to cook bwiro in the morning and the evening, and it was very time-consuming—hence the late starts and early finishes at school. But the tardiness had begun before the famine. And when the next supply ship finally arrived, the teachers’ behavior stayed the same. Now the excuse was different—they were rehearsing their church dances late at night. It just so happened that those rehearsals formed the other trial of that month.

  For many weeks, the adults had practiced their church songs next door in the evening, and the quiet harmonies were soothing in the balmy night air. But with Christmas and Gospel Day approaching, they began practicing their piit: “beat,” or Western-inspired dancing. For reasons I could never fathom, these rehearsals took place from around midnight to two AM, and their venue was the path in front of Loto, a hundred feet from my house. Every night, they would lug out a pair of two-foot-tall speakers and an electronic keyboard, powered by Fredlee’s generator and precious quantities of the island’s scarce gasoline. The power of this sound system was far more appropriate for a rock concert than a tiny coral island. So, in the most intimate part of night, the calming sounds of wind and sea were smothered in booming bass, shattered with the blaring chords of the keyboard’s automatic accompaniments, and beaten out of memory by loud singing, barked instructions, and an overenthusiastic whistle.

  I can imagine nightmares accompanied by this music. Hitchcock might have used this cacophony to represent the cheerful murderous insanity of a serial killer. The contrast between the bouncy, saccharine songs and the distress they caused me at two in the morning was sickening.

  If not for the timing, the custom would have charmed me. They danced in two parallel lines, young men opposite young women. The moves suggested neither tradition nor importation, but rather recent invention. One man sang into the microphone, and at key points the dancers interjected a short chorus. There were as many people watching as dancing, children and adults, and everyone was having a wonderful time. Sleep, apparently, was no object.

  I couldn’t quite share their enthusiasm. I desperately hinted to some of my friends that perhaps the rehearsals could be held at a different time or place. “The noise is bothering me,” I would say. “I can’t get en
ough sleep and neither can my students.”

  “Patrick didn’t complain about it last year,” the inevitable answer would come. “He learned to do the dance. He liked it.”

  I asked Fredlee, “Why don’t you start earlier, maybe eight in the evening instead of midnight?”

  “People have to eat dinner first,” he replied.

  “But they eat dinner around sundown.”

  “They come late.”

  “Four hours late?”

  “Yes. Marshallese Time.”

  I was well aware of the islanders’ willingness to bend time, but this seemed extreme even for them. Nevertheless, the time and place for the dancing were nonnegotiable. I crossed off “sleep” from my short list of remaining sanities. My life on Ujae had taken an ugly turn. At times like these, it was very important to not look down—which, in this situation, meant to not contemplate the vast depths of time that remained before leaving.

  Under the combined stress of school and sleep deprivation, I caved. I resorted to reporting the misbehaving children to their parents. “Your son misbehaves in class,” I would say.

  “Okay, I’ll hit him,” the parent would nonchalantly reply.

  “Um, okay . . . But you could also explain the importance of school, respect, and that sort of thing.”

  “Yeah, I’ll hit him,” they would say, still sunny and obliging. “He’s really going to hurt!”

  This was not what I had come to this island for. I had come here to listen to tales told around campfires, to hunt crabs in jungles, to savor a quiet lagoon breeze, to help the children with their English—not to wander around the village on a hot afternoon, signing up nine-year-olds for ass-kickings, feeling bitter at the students and guilty at the same time, while children mobbed me to ask who was the next to be dealt my swift and terrible justice (or was it vengeance?), then retiring at night to ear-shattering pop ballads at two AM and showing up in the morning, deliriously sleepy, for another round of torment-the-teacher. The contrast between the dream image and the reality was so huge during that awful month that I couldn’t help but laugh. It was ludicrous, excruciating, hilarious. This was tropical paradise, this was island harmony, this was the natural life. Let the travel brochures be burned.