Surviving Paradise (12 page)

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:

 

 

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 penlight 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 villagers 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.

These same children had invented ingenious games out of the limited materials of their island, and yet, at school, they rebelled against thought itself. In my classroom, where thinking was encouraged, why did this rebellion persist? I had a feeling it was because I was an authority figure—though unwillingly—and every other authority figure had proven so hostile to young creativity that even my encouragements in the opposite direction met with failure. I tried to change this. I made a large poster that said: