Surviving Paradise

by Peter Rudiak-Gould

  I wrote the following rather melodramatic journal entry:

  I have reached an epiphany. Ujae is not an island. It is Hell. It is a machine, scientifically engineered to break the spirit. It is an entity, a parasite which latches onto its host and sucks it of all it has. Look there at the shape of the land—that curved bay is the mouth of the beast, clamping down upon its prey. The white beaches are its gums, the coral rocks its jagged, black teeth. It is the siren call—sparkling waters, lush foliage, exotic hues and seductive contours lure the traveler to his doom. For the devil, we know, hath power to assume a pleasing shape. It is the inferno disguised as paradise, and there is no surer sign of Hell than that it will not let you leave.

  Was I alone in my distress? Every Monday, the outer island volunteers checked in briefly with the American program director on the communications radio. Being a short-wave radio and not a telephone, anyone in Micronesia could listen in. Rumor had it that the check-in hour was popular listening among Marshallese pilots.

  Every week was the same.

  “Kelly on Namu, how are you doing? Over.”

  “I’m doing just fine. Teaching is fine, health is fine. Over.”

  “Marcy on Mejit, are you there? Over.”

  “I’m here. Things are good. The teaching is going okay, and I don’t have any medical problems.”

  “Peter on Ujae, how is everything? Over.”

  “Everything’s good. Teaching is going fine and my health is fine. Over.”

  Was this a case of the emperor’s new clothes? Was everyone feigning sanity because they thought that everyone else was sane? Perhaps each outer island volunteer was sitting in her own radio shack wondering the same thing. Perhaps not.

  It was easy to imagine the year as a sort of Survivor: Marshall Islands with twenty-five volunteers testing themselves in an extreme environment. During orientation, there had been serious gossip as to who would be the first to crack. We had even played the Survivor board game, and, ominously, I was the first to be voted off the island. (I liked to think that it was because I was so skillful, the contestant that you hate to lose from your tribe but who must be eliminated because he would surely win. But perhaps it was because I missed that immunity totem.) The omens were not in my favor. But I had survived this long, and it was only weeks now until I would take a break from Ujae for the “winter” vacation in Majuro.

  Sometimes to unwind I trudged to the ocean side to visit Ujae’s natural spa. As the water lowered, the smooth indentations in the reef fragmented into separate pools, and the sun heated the water to hot-spring warmth. Of course, most hot tubs don’t periodically flood with cold ocean water and its resident fish. Also, most spa patrons aren’t given the perplexed look that the islanders gave me when they saw me sitting on the reef with bliss on my face.

  More therapeutic than the ocean-side hot tubs was the day when a student—one of the nicer ones, of which there were a few—looked at me after class, as if we were sharing a common burden, and said, “All student is crazy.” This was another tempting quote for an end-of-the-year WorldTeach T-shirt. (The actual T-shirt taglines turned out to be “One Student at a Time,” which was not the case, and “No Student Left Behind,” which was also not the case.)

  Bright moments aside, there was little I could do to change the situation. After all, I was a guest—in this house, this family, this island, this country, this culture—and I had all the privilege and powerlessness that that entailed. I was given much, but had to take everything I was given. To dislike any of it, or to ask for something different, would be as rude as criticizing your neighbor’s housekeeping. If one thing that makes us people is to have a say in how our world is run, then I was not a person here. I was a persona, a character, a caricature—a perpetual guest, forced to show gratitude for things I didn’t want.

  My mission here was self-contradictory. My duty was to help the community, but also to accept it as it was. As an international volunteer, I had been given these two incompatible goals and had never noticed that quandary until now. If I adopted my host community’s apathy toward education, I would achieve greater cultural integration but fail at making a positive contribution. If I crusaded for education, I could make a positive contribution but fail at integrating into the culture. There was no way around the dilemma: I was a ribelle without a cause.

  Stepping back, I could see the lesson in all of this. If educational apathy—not food shortages or night festivals—was responsible for the failing school, could I fairly blame the community for that? Schooling was a Western import, foreign to local values. Was it any wonder that the school was failing on an island where standard parenting consisted of neither teaching nor even speaking with children? The problem wasn’t that Ujae Elementary School wasn’t well integrated into the local culture. It was perfectly integrated. It followed exactly the ideals of the community, and those ideals made success by any Western definition nearly impossible. A school of pagan sorcery in the United States would meet with similar failure.

  Education was a Western import that existed only in appearance. The motions were there, but not the ideological support beneath them. There was a school, but not the idea that it matters. There were teachers, but not the idea that they should teach. There was a schedule, but not the idea that it should be followed. There were grades, but not the idea that they conveyed some sort of information. If I gave an F to a student for cheating, neither the child nor his parents felt a sting, and that was a telling fact.

  At first, I believed the line between traditional and Western was blurred or nonexistent in this place. But maybe this was a mistake; maybe there was a line, and the line was right between the skin and the heart. Maybe all the bits of adopted America were just bright paint. Western institutions in the Marshall Islands, far from obscuring native culture, put it into clearer focus. The West sent its cultural products to the remotest village of the farthest country, but the receivers were the ones who decided how these things would be used, misused, embraced, rejected, improved upon, or altered beyond all recognition.

  The failure of the school also highlighted a contrasting success. The church functioned perfectly, experiencing not even a hiccup during the food shortage. It was lovingly maintained, impeccably attended, and as firmly scheduled as anything could be in the Marshall Islands. (Its prompt start at ten thirty was nothing short of a miracle on this island, the only time when this American’s nervous punctuality wasn’t two thousand miles from appropriate.) In contrast, the school was apathetically maintained, erratically attended, and scheduled only in theory. Sermons were planned beforehand and delivered with gusto, while school lessons were usually concocted on the spot and delivered listlessly. The minister set high standards for himself and his pupils; the teachers did not. The community cooperated to make religious life on the island something to be proud of, but it wasn’t so with education. While the school was on the periphery of the village’s mind, the church was central to it. The missionaries would be proud. What did they know that the educators didn’t?

  PERHAPS IT WAS APT THAT THE CHURCH BROUGHT THAT HORRID DECEMber’s one happy note. The dance rehearsals were in preparation for Gospel Day, a prelude to Christmas, and I was allowed to participate in this festival in a memorable way.

  The preparations were not limited to dancing in the dead of night. Behind my next-door neighbors’ house, the men were hard at work building a scaled-down model of an American sailing ship. At six feet long and two feet wide, it appeared almost seaworthy. It was complete with masts, sails, and riggings, and a carved figurine of a man kept vigil in the crow’s nest. As usual, the islanders added their own curious twist: the sails were made of dollar bills, and so were the clothes of the little watchman.

  The men told me that Gospel Day was a holiday commemorating the arrival of the first missionaries in the Marshall Islands, at Ebon Atoll in 1857. (“That’s like the Native Americans celebrating the arrival of Christopher Columbus,” retorted one expatriate I met, though I wasn�
��t quite that cynical.) The islanders were honoring more than just the introduction of Christianity: the ship was to be decorated with books of matches, bags of rice, and even a live chicken inside the hold, all of which represented the useful things that the first Westerners had brought to this country. The dollar bills represented a cash economy—and no one appeared to object to the presence of this capitalist imagery on what was otherwise a religious artifact.

  The men asked me if I wanted to be the “captain.” They needed someone to sit in the ship and hold the Bible during the festivities. After all, one of the things that Westerners had introduced to these islands was themselves. Being the only white person on the island, I was the natural choice for the role.

  On the other hand, I also happened to be the only person on the island who wasn’t Christian. The men shrugged this off if they were aware of it at all. A silent “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy had always prevailed on the issue, which suited me just fine. I attended church every Sunday, and everyone must have assumed I subscribed to their religion. The occasional inquisitive soul would learn the truth when he asked me what church I belonged to in the United States. When I said, “None, because I don’t know if God exists,” he would laugh nervously and change the subject. I once went so far as to attempt a theological discussion with a few children. I said that some people don’t believe in God, and others believe in a different God. “A different God?” they repeated incredulously. In a community where children grew up automatically Christian, the youngsters knew of no other possibility. But in their willingness to discuss it, and in the adults’ acceptance of my beliefs when they accidentally discovered them, they showed themselves to be admirably tolerant.

  Gospel Day arrived. The community was dressed to kill, and the cause of death would be sensory overload. The men had founded a new school of color coordination: green pants garishly complemented purple Hawaiian shirts, and the formality of one man’s black suit jacket seemed undercut by the bright orange T-shirt that was beneath it. The women’s clothing, at least, didn’t hurt my eyes.

  The ceremony began with the usual series of songs, sermons, and prayers. By now, after four months on the island, my grasp of Marshallese was decent, but I could still understand very little of this old, formal church language. I had become an expert at daydreaming at strategic times, and now I put those skills to use.

  The men called me out of my reverie and led me outside to the model ship’s hiding place. They stuck a Bible into my hands and told me to sit in the hull. As they had promised, the vessel was fully arrayed with imported goods, although the emptiness of the wire-mesh hold meant they had thought better of their original plan to include a live chicken. With the congregation looking on, first in surprise and then amused approval, the men pulled the ship and its Caucasian passenger into the church, through the door, over the floor, and finally in front of everyone. The men had tied up the dollar-bill sails so they could be released and surprise the onlookers. Now they pulled the strings and the sails unfurled in a flash of money.

  Hard cash and a Bible-toting ribelle—that was enough excitement to last the island all month. But after five minutes of enthusiastic singing, something had already eclipsed the spectacle of the model ship. The collective gaze shifted to the lagoon, and the congregation swarmed out of the church in excitement. I followed them and looked out on the water, where three men from the other church, wearing nothing more than grass skirts, were paddling another fully decorated model ship, this one built out of a bright yellow kayak. They disembarked on the beach and pulled the kayak-ship out of the water with ropes, then up the beach, and finally, triumphantly, into the church, where the singing was now louder than ever.

  Not content with just one reenactment of the arrival of Westerners, the islanders staged two. It had been an impressive effort by both rival churches: the men of the eastern church had arrived by sea, wearing traditional costumes—but only the western church could boast of dollar-bill sails and a real live white man playing the captain.

  I was tempted, on the following Sunday, to attend the eastern church, whose congregation had built a sailing ship out of a kayak and made skirts out of grass. Their church had a reputation for liveliness, and this was confirmed by the minister with his burgundy pants, shiny red silk shirt, and tie that said “Jesus Saves.” There was one thing, however, that made me wary of that church: the previous volunteer had been deaconized there against his will. He was asked to come forward and recite a few phrases, and then he was proclaimed a deacon. I had heard secondhand about this title of his and I assumed he was quite a devout man. I even felt a twinge of jealousy imagining the cultural intimacy he must have achieved in order to be granted that title. But this was before I found out that his deaconhood had been nonconsensual. I decided not to attend that other church.

  11

  A Vacation from Paradise

  CHRISTMAS WAS COMING, AND ONE ISLANDER CHOSE TO MARK IT IN A rather Western way: he put red and green lights on his house. I would not be around to see the festivities, however, because all the outer island volunteers were required to return to Majuro for a brief winter break. (It didn’t seem quite necessary to mandate this vacation. Would a sailor refuse his shore leave? Would an inmate refuse his parole?) On December 23, I stepped onto the same little plane I had stepped out of four months before. After so much time on this tiny expanse of land, ending with the crucible that was December, it was thrilling beyond words to be anywhere but there.

  We sped down the runway and were lifted into the sky. The world changed: the one-dimensional horizon opened into a living map. While the plane followed the perimeter of the atoll, huge expanses of reef passed by below, and their colors were not ones that should exist in the real world. A thousand shades of blue blended into a thousand shades of white. From the deep colors of the lagoon, the reefs rose to brilliant edges and barely submerged peaks. Every depth and underwater feature gave a different color to the sea. From underwater, coral reefs were the most alien landscapes I had seen on Earth; from the air, they were easily the most beautiful.

  The plane landed briefly at Wotho Atoll, home to not much more than a hundred people. The country’s first president, now deceased, had stated his intention to retire there, and some said it was the most beautiful atoll in the world. I couldn’t vouch for the superlative, but it was lovely without question. Even its inhabited islet looked pristine, with houses barely visible between tropical trees, and a fringing reef hypnotically blue. But none of that mattered. What mattered was that this was the first piece of new land I had seen in four months. The onlookers at the airport shocked me simply because they were not the people I knew on Ujae. For a third of a year, I had seen no unfamiliar people, and now my mind turned the faces of these strangers into the faces of my Marshallese friends. I could not look at any of them without imagining that he or she was someone I knew.

  The next stop was one of the country’s more surreal spots: Kwajalein Atoll, site of an American military base. In addition to the odd volunteer, another item sometimes uprooted itself from California, flew across the Pacific, and plopped down in this unlikely place: a missile. Five thousand miles away on the California coast, Vandenberg Air Force Base launched unarmed ICBMs into the catcher’s mitt that was Kwajalein Lagoon, where the warheads were tracked or shot down to test National Missile Defense technology. Fifty years after Bikini, the country’s remoteness was still earning it an unlikely position in geopolitics. Perhaps the missile base was an uncomfortable reminder of the country’s nuclear history, but it was also the entire economy of the neighboring islet of Ebeye, where eleven thousand Marshall Islanders lived in cramped but not desperate circumstances. Between the land lease payments and the paychecks of the islanders who worked at the base, Kwajalein brought cash from the United States at the same time that it brought missiles.

  From the air, the base resembled a tacky retirement community. Next to the paved roads, the manicured grass, and the immaculate condos, palm trees looked more
like Las Vegas glitz than native flora. A nine-hole golf course, two tennis courts, and an artificial-sand beach (complete with barbecues) completed the image. From the ground, the base reminded me more of a university campus: joyless official buildings alternated with student-style dorms, accommodating the few thousand Americans who were stationed here.

  One hundred and twenty-six days before, this bit of America superimposed uneasily on Micronesia had been my farewell to civilization. A Marshallese man had guided me into a little purgatory of a waiting room, where I had experienced my last air-conditioning, bought my last cold soda from my last vending machine, entered my last restroom and gazed into my last mirror, memorizing my face so that I could compare it to what I would look like when (if?) I returned. I had vegetated at my last television; it was tuned to the US Armed Forces Network, so I watched my last episode of Donahue, which, thankfully, was also my first. I saw my last advertisement, a military-sponsored exercise in self-congratulation. “Where would we be without courage, honor, discipline?” it had asked me, perhaps appropriately, before the little plane had growled back to life and taken me to the edge of the world.

  Now, as the same plane landed on the Kwajalein runway, I realized that this ocean of asphalt was larger than the island on which I had just lived. As I walked into the waiting room, I had an overwhelming urge to say “yokwe,” or at least “hello,” to everyone, including the grim-faced military personnel with their extremely unpettable drug-sniffing dogs. It seemed absurd that something as simple as a greeting would be unwelcome, but such was the case.