Surviving Paradise (11 page)

The children had another habit that didn't do worlds of good for the “exotic untouched tribe” atmosphere I was trying to manufacture in my photos. The downside to (marginal) literacy was that the children had become monomaniacal signature-writers. Damn near every surface on the island was emblazoned with the children's half-capital, half-lowercase autographs. I didn't know who “Sailas” was, but I knew he was a boy with a mission—specifically, a mission to leave his John Hancock on every wall, floor, chair, table, and, perhaps eventually, every tree trunk on the island. He had single-handedly laid claim to a large percentage of the island. Saying “I don't see your name on it” would not be an effective way to dispute his ownership of anything, because chances were that the object in question did, in fact, have his name on it.

An army of children had left their calling cards at the school: walls had been signed in pen, desks carved into, even the ceiling monogrammed in chalk. The door to my bedroom had been stricken too, and so had the rest of Ariraen. Everywhere were declarations of “[Name] love [Name]” and the cryptic “[Name] vs [Name].” Versus? What could this mean?

The children were overwhelming, always, at good times and bad, yet some of my best hours were spent with them. There was the day I rose several notches in coolness by teaching the kids Spanish pop songs. Soon they were butchering that European language with an accent it had rarely if ever been subjected to before. There was the day that I described snow to three fascinated siblings: Does it hurt when it touches your skin? Does it fall as fast as rain? Can you play with it? There was the day a particularly clever nine-year-old invented a linguistic game with me, taking advantage of the proliferation of doubled words in Marshallese and his familiarity with the mathematical concept of squaring numbers. He was no longer Junjun; now he was “Jun squared.” One was no longer
bwebwe
(“stupid”); one was “
bwe
squared.” So
tutu
(“take a shower”) and
nana
(“bad”) and
jeje
(“write”) and a host of other words were transformed, and we talked to each other like this: “You are
na
squared and
bwe
squared and I am going to go
tu
squared and then
je
squared and then
ki
squared.”

And there was the day when all the pain of isolation and exposure seemed to wash away in the high tide as I carried a girl named Mercy piggyback through the lively lagoon waves. As the sunshine soaked the sea, it was difficult to find anything to be upset about, and I was convinced that, as hard as this new life was, it also offered moments more sublime than anywhere.

I had been on Ujae for a month. It had been a wild ride, the opposite of everything I had been led to believe. Here in faraway nowhere, I had triumphed over loneliness. Confined to an island smaller than many college campuses, I had defeated boredom. And yet in this picturesque backwater, I still craved aloneness and quiet. Living with islanders that any travel brochure would call gentle and agreeable, I was still almost comatose with culture shock.

And I hadn't even started teaching.

 

 

 

 

I KNEW BEFORE I ARRIVED THAT UJAE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL WAS LESS
than perfect. I was aware that it was in fact one of the worst schools in the Pacific Ocean. The United Nations had ranked the Marshall Islands dead last in educational achievement among Pacific Island nations. Of the eighty-two elementary schools in the Marshall Islands, Ujae was ranked seventy-eighth. It was the worst school in the outer islands and the lowest ranked school to which any of the twenty-five WorldTeach volunteers had been assigned.

Every year, the government administered a test to determine which eighth graders would be offered a spot in one of the country's three small public high schools. It had been half a decade since any student on Ujae had passed. Some had managed to scrounge together enough money to attend a private high school in Majuro. The rest had cut off their studies at grade eight, having received only the barest rudiments
of a primary school education. Bluntly summarized: I was going to teach at a very, very bad school.

I took this as good news.

My teaching experience was close to nil, so it was heartening to know that I could hardly make things worse than they already were. Success was unlikely, but failure was impossible. How liberating! If even a single eighth grader passed the high school entrance exam, then the year would have proven wildly successful. Rising from zero to one was, technically, an improvement of infinity percent. If I could coach a single child to success, then I could, for the rest of my life, with perfect mathematical justification, boast on my resume that I had achieved infinite improvement in public education in a developing nation. Teaching at Ujae Elementary would be almost too easy.

This is what I thought.

I had been on Ujae for a month, and the beginning of school was already well overdue. The Ministry of Education, from on high in distant Majuro, had decreed that classes would start one week after I arrived on Ujae. But at that time only one out of the six Marshallese colleagues I had been promised was on island. The lone teacher, a man by the name of Nathan, explained that the others were attending government-mandated courses in Majuro. Apparently, these education classes took precedence over education itself. Nathan promised that the head teacher would arrive by plane “pretty soon.” But he couldn't promise even that for the other four teachers, who were forced to make the return journey on one of the country's glacially slow supply ships.

In the absence of anything else to do, Nathan gave me the grand tour of Ujae Elementary. The school consisted of two low buildings facing each other grimly across a field of coral gravel. One of the buildings was older and had four absurdly huge rooms. The other building was newer and had four absurdly tiny rooms.

One of the latter rooms, called the “lounge,” was an eight-by-eight-foot expanse furnished only with a Lilliputian table covered entirely by a short-wave radio that didn't work. Lounging did not appear feasible. Another room, the “library,” was a dark, musty space inhabited by a hundred brand-new, glossy, useless English textbooks with
stories about snowmen, road trips, and other topics not apropos to a tiny tropical island.

On the wall of one classroom, breaking the copious empty space, were posters of nursery rhymes in obsolete English. It was a good thing that no one had actually used them. If they had, the kids would have been asking each other “Have you any wool?” and calling each other “knaves.” On the opposite wall an alphabet exercise started well enough:

Hello. My name is Annie, and this is my husband, Andrew.

We come from Arkansas and we sell Apples.

Hello. My name is Brenda, and this is my husband, Bob.

We come from Boston and we sell Balloons.

But it succumbed to a phonetic meltdown by the end:

Hello. My name is Qaffy, and this is my husband, Qonky.

We come from Quigla, and we sell Queens.

Hello. My name is Xort, and this is my husband, Xibber.

We come from Xampo, and we sell X-rays.

Two weeks into my Ujae stint, with the other teachers still en route, Nathan took matters into his own hands and assigned me to one of the absurdly large rooms. For the next few weeks, I could only sit in that dank cave masquerading as a classroom and wonder how I was going to fill 180 schooldays with educational material, or something vaguely resembling it.

A month in, the head teacher, Robella, finally arrived on the plane. That made three of us to teach six subjects to 120 students in eight grades. But we were already so far behind schedule that Robella decreed that we would start school with this skeleton crew. Until the other teachers arrived, I was responsible for teaching English to all eight of the grades.

(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:

 

 

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.