"Surviving Paradise: One Year on a Disappearing Island," by Peter Rudiak-Gould

Interested in a book about life in the Marshall Islands? A new one just came out – an easy beach read (no pun intended). Peter Rudiak-Gould was a WorldTeach volunteer on an outer island in 2003-4. He’s written a terrific, funny book that really captures a lot of the spirit of this place, without ducking the tough issues (Bikini nuclear testing disaster, grim global warming predictions, etc.). He’s now an anthropology grad student with an interest in linguistics; both of these disciplines feature prominently in his highly readable, witty memoir.

My experience is slightly different from Peter’s, for at least two reasons. One, I live on a rural island next to one of the two large population centers of the Marshall Islands, while Peter was on one of the remotest outer islands. Two, he’s male, and was therefore included in a lot of canoeing and spearfishing that were not available to me. Taking women on fishing expeditions is considered bad luck. Some Marshallese will break tradition to take a ribelle, but being a non-fisherman, I wasn’t particularly interested in breaking a cultural taboo on this one.

A few things that Peter writes about that don’t match my experience: I haven’t noticed any of the mistreatment or ignoring of children he talks about at some length. Neither have I seen the lack of activity on the part of the men. That’s probably a function of the rural outer island environment vs. the “urban” environment of Ebeye. Neither do men and women sit separately in the churches I’ve attended (Mormon and Catholic). Finally, the educational system here is challenged, but not as pathetic as the one he had to deal with on Ujae. We do have a school bell (an empty air tank clobbered several times a day with a hammer), and many teachers actually do teach. Among the Kwajalein Atoll High School teachers are several Filipinos, a Fijian, and a handful of Marshallese, as well as we two American WorldTeach volunteers.


Sorry, I don’t get a WorldTeach discount on the book; neither do I personally know the author to get you an autographed copy! But it’s a great book for understanding a WorldTeach year in the Marshall Islands.

“I Have a Dream” for my Marshallese students

Students watching a video biography of Martin Luther King. Notice the face of King on my computer giving his stirring “I Have a Dream” speech, while the students watch the projector screen. (Yes, we have easy access to the school’s laptop and computer projector, but we’ve been without a functioning copy machine for days, without a functioning printer for weeks, without internet access for months, and without a useable student bathroom for longer than that (that’s what the ocean is for). One of the many paradoxes of teaching in the Marshall Islands.)

 

It’s one thing to support Brandeis college students to come up with great activities to celebrate Martin Luther King Day, as I have done in the past. I’ve been inspired by Brandeis students’ creativity and passion for all that King stood for.

It’s quite another thing to teach about Martin Luther King to Marshallese high school students who are coming to understand his story for the first time, even if they might have heard of him before.

MLK is not in the curriculum, but I’m getting used to making up my own materials here. We spend the week studying new vocabulary words: “slavery,” “segregation,” “discrimination,” “justice,” and “nonviolence.” With no corresponding chapter in Marshallese history, students have a tough time understanding the two worlds in the American South in MLK’s time. One world for whites and one for blacks, intersecting at hot flashpoints, divided by centuries of bloody, shameful oppression and prejudice.

I write a skit to help them understand. We stage a nonviolent protest in the front of my class. A beautiful Marshallese-brown Martin Luther King (who happens to be a girl, even) sits at a lunch counter and won’t budge until she gets her hamburger and cola. The class laughs while other student actors haul her away to jail. I watch one of the boy’s eyes widen as he begins to get it.

“Ms. Marci, if we were there then, would we be treated like that too?”

“Yes, I’m sad to say. The whites called them ‘black,’ but what they really meant was ‘non-white.’”

“What about him?” The student points to the lightest-skinned boy in the class, whose skin could pass for a beach tan.

“Yes, even him. Some people said ‘one drop of black blood makes you black.’”

I watch the ripples of understanding – terrible understanding – go through the class, punctuated by the slap of the ocean waves hitting the shore outside my window. Another hand goes up.

“Ms. Marci, if Martin Luther King hadn’t done that, would . . . ” I see him struggling to finish his sentence, and I try to help by guessing what he’s thinking. “Would Obama be president? Not likely,” I say.

“No . . . would. . . would you have come here?” he asks simply.

“Oh yes. Of course I would. It would take more than discrimination and segregation laws to keep me from being here with you. And if anyone tried to stop me, we’d all go to jail together!”

One girl says, “I know a song about that.” She starts singing. Other students join her. I add my voice, and thirty-six voices in a high school classroom in Kwajalein Atoll sing together:

Heal the world. Make it a better place
For you and for me and the entire human race.
There are people dying. If you care enough for the living,
Make a better place for you and for me.

Excerpts from student essays:

“Martin Luther King taught me about kindness and being good to people even if they’re not from the same island. It was interesting about those people (blacks & whites) not sharing anything.”

“I think he was afraid of troubles.” (a student responding to MLK’s nonviolent tactics)

“To fight for something isn’t easy. He didn’t care if they kill him but he just wanted his children to live in a better place where there is no fighting when they grow up. Hurting people isn’t a way to have a better world.”

“You breathe, I breathe, so what’s the difference? ‘Beneath the skin is all the same.’” (a quote from The Cay, my 11th grade class textbook)

“Martin Luther King is the highest great of dream.”

Marshallese Medical Customs

 

Marshallese friend and co-teacher Donna, catching a few zzz’s after helping to get me set up at the hospital

Here are some interesting things I learned from my (largely unnecessary) 3 ½ day stay in Ebeye Hospital. I was admitted for observation after bumping my head. I’ll describe these insights in approximately the order I discovered them.




* AIR CONDITIONING (called “aircon” here). It’s turned up to the max. I FROZE the whole time, which kept me quiet and under the covers just to stay warm, having not brought a sweatshirt or other warm clothing to the RMI.



* BEDDING. There is none in a Marshallese hospital. My discovery of this fact is related to the previous discovery about the aircon. While the doctor was stitching up my forehead, and I was shivering, with teeth chattering, I asked for a blanket. “Ejelok (there are none).” I thought, “there are HOW many beds in this hospital and NO blankets?” A nurse found a clean curtain and draped it over me, while the Guegeegue neighbor who drove me to the hospital walked over to his sister’s house near the hospital to get me a blanket. There is a good reason for this lack of bedding, which is:



* COMMUNAL HOSPITAL STAYS. Coming from an individualistic society, it took me awhile to realize that although all 5 beds in my room were continuously occupied, they were not necessarily occupied by patients. No Marshallese stays in the hospital alone. In fact, one of my students was more upset that I had stayed in the hospital alone than that I was in the hospital in the first place. If all the beds did happen to be filled with patients, the companion slept either on the floor on a sleeping mat, or in the same bed (depending on the size of the individuals involved).

This applied even to the domestic abuse victim in bed #4 (remember there’s no privacy here of any kind). Her husband and two of their three sons slept in the bed next to hers. (FYI: 93% of Marshallese women are abused either physically, sexually, or emotionally, often while the man is drunk.)




These live-in hospital companions explain the lack of bedding: if a bed is empty, someone will sleep in it. Everyone brings their own bedding. Hospital companions are useful because of:



* NURSING CARE. Adequate, but minimal. Nurses dispense medications and take vital signs. That’s it. No nurse call buttons anywhere, or nurses making rounds just to check on patients. Companions fetch nurses when needed. Companions also do such things as deliver stool samples to the lab. My nurse was helpful but slightly put out that she had to take care of this for me. Most of the medical staff were Filipino, with one doctor from Yap, one from Burma, and a few Marshallese. All seemed to be quite knowledgeable, and I always felt like I was in very good hands.



* WEEKEND HOURS. Checking in around 4:45 a.m. on Saturday morning meant that nothing whatsoever happened until Monday, because no one is in the lab or radiology over the weekend. I’m sure if I had been in critical condition they would have found me the hospital personnel needed, but since I kept insisting I was fine, they were happy to just let me stay bundled up under the covers for 72 hours instead of 24.



* FOOD. Although the doctor ordered a bland diet for the first 24 hours, the plate of food that arrived was the same as everyone else’s. “We don’t have special diets,” a nurse explained, “because we have no dietician. The food is cooked by women in the neighborhood.” Three times a day, a styrofoam plate covered with foil arrived with a traditional Marshallese diet:

Breakfast - bread or pancakes, plus meat (a hot dog, Vienna sausages, or ham), and an egg (either hard boiled or scrambled, which might come with or without green beans!!! Why are green peppers OK to put in scrambled eggs, but canned green beans look weird in there?)

Lunch: rice & fish, or rice & chicken.

Dinner: rice & chicken, or rice & fish, whichever one we didn’t get for lunch.



Both lunch and dinner had a vegetable on the side, but not so fast . . . remember “macaroni salad” and “potato salad”? In the Marshall Islands, these are taken literally and are equivalent to a green salad. So lunch might be rice and fish with macaroni salad, and dinner might be rice and chicken with a baked potato for a vegetable.



* VISITING HOURS. Posted at 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., but in reality, it was anytime friends wanted to drop in. Over the 3 ½ days, I had no fewer than 53 visits from students, neighbors, church friends, and fellow teachers. Visitors came as early as 6:30 a.m. or as late as a few minutes after midnight. It didn’t matter, though, because with nurses coming in at 1 a.m. and 5 a.m. to take vital signs, and with new patients arriving anytime night or day and the resulting displacement to clear out the bed, I slept anytime I could. Visitors seldom arrived empty-handed, so I had quite an assortment of snacks, fruits & drinks in gargantuan quantities, because of course they weren’t meant for just me, but for sharing with everyone in the room whenever I decided I wanted to break into them.



* GENERAL CONDITIONS. Of course my room was oceanview. On a narrow island, almost everything is oceanview or lagoonview. On the plus side were the air conditioning, hot running water for showers instead of the cold bucket showers I take at home, and sometimes-functioning flush toilets instead of the bucket flushing I do at home. The cockroaches and general cleanliness were a minus. I gather that keeping the room and bathroom clean is largely the hospital companion’s job, and I gather that my roommates’ companions weren’t particularly fastidious.



I have little to compare to the Ebeye Hospital, having never been hospitalized in the US except to have babies, when I had a lot of other things on my mind than the hospital itself. Even the most recent of those hospital stays was 30 years ago (take a bow, Evelyn). But having lived here in the RMI, I realize cockroaches are a fact of life, regardless of how clean one is. In fact, the ants I’m “used to” in my apartment were noticeably absent. I never thought I’d say this, but I was surprised to realize that I sort of missed the ants. I swear, without a speck of food on the counter EVER to attract them, I think the ants stay around just to keep me company.



* COST. If I were Marshallese, the inpatient stay per night would be the same as an outpatient clinic visit: $5. That hardly covers the food, much less the lab, X-ray, round-the-clock nursing care, daily doctor check-ins, and even a month’s supply of whatever prescription medicines I’m on (whether or not they’re related to the inpatient stay), plus any routine meds needed, like a fresh tube of Bacitracin ointment for my two forehead stitches. For me, the ribelle rate was $17 a night – a whopping $51 medical bill for my hospital stay, which will be completely reimbursed by WorldTeach’s insurance provider. Naturally, medical costs are heavily subsidized by the Ministry of Health (which is heavily subsidized by the US government. Thank you, US taxpayers). But even at $5 per visit, many Marshallese women skip prenatal care until close to their due dates because of the cost.



* SUBSTITUTE TEACHER TO COVER MY CLASS WHILE I WAS OUT. No such thing. If I’m there, students have class. If I’m not there, students have a free period to hang out, making it all the more surprising to receive “I miss you and promise I’ll never skip your class again” notes from my students (particularly the 7th period class, who got to take the early bus home at 2:30 instead of 3:30 when my class usually ends).



* THE RESULT. Like I said, I’m fine. This fact is confirmed by blood tests, stool analysis, a skull X-ray, and even a quick 3-day trip (a week after I came home from the hospital) to the capital Majuro for a CT scan. All came back perfectly normal. I’m fine, and I have a swell Harry Potter-esque small forehead scar as a souvenir of my investigation of Marshallese medical customs.

My excuse note this time

No, I haven’t posted anything for ages. Yes, I’ve written plenty – BUT, the internet has been down since mid-November (2 ½ months and counting), with short exceptions. AND, I spent a little time checking out the Marshallese healthcare system from the inside. I’ve had a lifelong condition of passing out from time to time, which has been well-controlled by medication for many years. Either I need to tinker with the dosage, or the medicine was compromised by the heat, but I passed out last weekend and hit my head on the way down. I expected to go to the hospital for a couple of stitches, but instead they admitted me for observation for 3½ days. Without access to my medical records, they were much more interested in my fainting episodes than I was. I’m FINE – perfectly fine. But I learned a lot about interesting Marshallese medical customs! I hope to have an account ready for posting soon.

I also hope the internet will stay up, and I’ll start posting the backlog of pieces I’ve written – and I’ll try not to overwhelm you!

Excuse notes

Every day I get scraps of paper explaining my students’ absences. From the signatures I learn a little bit about which students are living with their parents, and which students have come from outer islands to live with a relative on Ebeye so they can attend high school.

Some excuse notes are standard high school rubbish. Yesterday I intercepted a note being passed in class. Instead of the usual high school gossip, it was an excuse note she was forging for her friend. After class the note writer asked for the note back. “It’s my friend’s excuse note. She needs it.” I asked, “Who wrote it?” She giggled and said “Me.” That’s one thing I’ve noticed about Marshallese students so far – they do all kinds of mischievous stuff, but if you ask them if they did it, they’ll say “yes.” I haven’t had any students lie to me yet that I know of. (No, I didn’t give the note back to her.)

Here’s a composite from actual phrases from excuse notes from my students: “He was absent yesterday because he was haveing a stomach age. I thing he is okay now. Please accuse him.”

Here’s another: “Sorry Miss Marci I can’t be in your class today because I am having a girl sickness.” Yes, up to 50% of my class is absent for up to 5-7 days every month. I think, but do not say, “Buck up and take it like a woman!”

But some excuse notes tell even more about the tough lives some of these kids lead.

“Please excuse her absence yesterday. She had to take her daughter to the hospital.” Let me get this straight. My 10^th grader is old enough to have a daughter, but not old enough to cover her own absence in school. She needs her mother to write her excuse note, to explain that she needs to take her baby to the hospital. Through it all, she’s staying in school.

Here’s another one: “She had to get her tooth pulled. It’s been hurting for a long time, but we didn’t have the money. Now we have the money, so she got the tooth pulled yesterday.” Many older adult Marshallese I’ve met are missing teeth. I’m no dentist, but even among my 10^th and 11^th graders I can see cavities, even on their front teeth. Lack of dental care and a terrible diet with lots of sugar all day long contributes to the problem. A favorite snack is Kool-Aid powder, served on a licked finger right out of the package. One day one of my students mixed the Kool-Aid powder with a ramen noodle spice packet and offered me a taste. “Thanks, but no thanks.”

One more excuse note: “Please excuse my son’s absence yesterday. He had to go to his cousin’s funeral.” I recorded the excused absence in my book and handed back the note to the student with a gentle “I’m sorry to hear the news.” He found me after school to talk to me. He explained that his cousin had committed suicide, using gestures to indicate disemboweling himself. The cousin was in his late twenties, leaving behind five children, the youngest of whom would have been a year old next month. “We all tried to talk him out of it, his friends and me, but he was stubborn and wouldn’t listen.” Suicide is the leading cause of death among Marshallese young adult men, in a remote land with few jobs or educational opportunities, and no way to ever afford getting off the island. The future often seems a bleak dead-end as a subsistence fisherman. I keenly felt my student’s burden, not only grieving for his cousin, but perhaps wondering whether he might have thought of the right thing to say so that his cousin would be alive today.

These are not your ordinary high school excuse notes.

On My Porch

The view from my oceanside porch

Let’s see – 100 minus 18 equals 82, a really good score for her. She must have studied hard. I add “Good work!” in my green pen next to her grade on the top of the test paper.

Today I picked a new place for grading tests: the oceanside porch, out my back door. Nearly every house here is beachfront property; it takes 1 minute 57 seconds to walk at a comfortable pace across the island from ocean to lagoon (yes, we timed it). The populated part of the island is a 15 minute walk end to end.

After grading every few tests, I put my pen down and treat myself to a moment looking out over the blue-green sea, topped with an occasional white-crested wave. Palm trees, lazily swaying in the salty, sticky ocean breeze, dot the rocky shoreline. During the two hours I’ve been out here on this late Saturday morning, I’ve seen one pickup truck and one bicycle go by. While weekday traffic is a little more than one vehicle per hour, it feels at this moment like I have this tropical island spot largely to myself.

A chicken clucks by, inspecting the grass for any bits of rice from yesterday’s school picnic celebrating the end of the first quarter. A tiny black lizard inspects my kicked-off zories, then skitters across the porch, steering around an empty condom package and broken condom I hadn’t noticed before. I never thought to wonder what happens on my secluded back porch during the school picnics; I guess everyone has their own way of celebrating the end of the quarter.

Youth find far less privacy on their overpopulated home island of Ebeye (12,000 people on 0.14 square miles of land; one of the most densely-populated places on the planet). It’s a half-hour school bus ride on the rocky, bumpy causeway to the island of Guegeegue on which the school is located. Guegeegue is a pleasant contrast with its population of about 100 and spacious tropical forests. We teachers carefully report to the attendance officer those students who cut classes on this open campus, but I wonder if it’s simply documenting what’s already happening.

Teen fertility rate in the Marshall Islands is among the top ten in the world, with 14% of teen women giving birth every year. Condom use among all ages is very low here, with the primary objectors being women, oddly enough. If her man uses a condom, the unspoken message is that a) he thinks she’s dirty, and b) he may be using a condom with someone else, too.

But at least one couple believes in using a condom.

I shrug my shoulders and go back to grading tests on my oceanside porch. 

Ribelle teacher learns about sharing, Marshall Islands style

Student Jamie Shem gives Marci a traditional Marshallese welcome necklace, made by Jamie’s mother from seashells and pandanus fibers.

“When you live on a small island that is sometimes no wider than the road you are walking on, and at high tide only inches above sea level, your only two choices are to change the way you think and live, or go home.” – Jack Niedenthal, For the Good of Mankind: A History of the People of Bikini and their Islands, xi. (Bikini is one of the Marshall Islands)

It took me awhile to realize that the children were calling to me when they chanted “ribelle, ribelle!” (“white person” in Marshallese). Getting used to that has been a little easier than getting used a few other things about teaching English in the Marshall Islands, located about halfway between Hawaii and Australia, surrounded by miles of ocean in every direction. Sometimes called “the friendliest people in the Pacific,” the Marshallese have a communal way of thinking which has made for some surprising moments in my classroom.

Marshallese people share everything. I have to be careful not to compliment someone on an article of clothing or a piece of handmade seashell jewelry, or they’ll try to give it to me. While I was picnicking at an oceanside park, a family at the next picnic table came over to see what I was eating. It’s expected that I’d share what I brought and they’d do the same. I keep my questions to myself about how long their food has been sitting out in the tropical heat. I make my own decisions about what to eat, all the while smiling and saying a warm “kommol” (thank you). Then I slip the iffy potato salad to a passing pig or rooster while the neighbors aren’t looking. (The pigs are quite clean here.)

The sharing mentality extends to family structure. Marshallese families are fluid conglomerates with loosely connected bloodlines. Under the same roof you may find as many as 16 or 17 relatives – nieces and nephews who come from an outer island to go to high school; ailing grandparents; a brother who lost his job because he drinks too much; and children from different fathers. In this matrilineal society where marriage is rather irrelevant, a common Marshallese saying translates as “You can have several fathers, but only one mother.”  There is no homelessness here; one of my students was visibly shaken when she discovered the concept.

Sharing can even extend to the children themselves. My Marshallese friend tells me about her sister-in-law who couldn’t have children, so she gave her her youngest son to raise shortly after birth. Every Thursday she talks to her son, now 9 years old, by phone through an interpreter. He’s grown up on a different island nation in Micronesia and doesn’t speak Marshallese. The son knows who is who, but he only sees his biological parents about every year or so.

In the classroom, the idea of sharing gets more complicated. I have to be very clear about what is group work which can be done with friends, and what must be a student’s own work. In preparation for last week’s final exams to end the first quarter, one of my sharpest students asked me for a blank copy of one of the chapter tests she’d taken, saying “I gave it to [another student] so she could study for the makeup test, but she didn’t give it back. I want to look at the questions so I can study for the final.” I thought, no wonder the other student got a perfect score on the makeup test. Both students were quite matter-of-fact about it, not at all trying to hide it as they might if they thought they were cheating. Of course the school administrators tell me that the students know the boundary between “sharing” and “cheating.” But I find that I’m teaching a different kind of thinking as well as teaching English, while simultaneously admiring the Marshallese and their open hearts.