Mandy, Cats, and Church

This week Thursday marked the first full month that I have been in Majuro and I feel like I am really getting into the swing of things (read: I have only been sick once, I can cook food for myself even with limited supplies, my fear of dogs has gone down immensely, and no one -- including any of my students -- has died). My classroom has a rhythm to it, I made it through the month under budget (barely), and I am a making a name for myself in Rita--the end of Majuro that I live and teach in. I could tell this today as I walked around on a jambo (which pretty much just means an aimless walk) and I ran into a couple of my students. I even stopped to play volleyball for a while with them! That being said, I was fairly disappointed in the majority of my students who did not do well on the quiz I handed out on Friday on the material we have been covering for the last two weeks. I plan on giving them a pep talk of sorts to start out the new week to get them back on track and trying new strategies in the classroom to get all of the students engaged.

The big news this week is that The Bungalow (as we are now calling the dorm we live in) has some new residents. Mandy is one of the many World Teach Volunteers who was staying with us waiting to get to her island. She became the last WT volunteer left at the beginning of the week but was told soon after that there is a conflict on the island she was supposed to go to between the landowner of the school and the principal so she won't be going anymore. Now she is staying with us permanently and will be teaching at Majuro Middle School with me. She is a great asset to the house--a wonderful cook, a playing card guru, and a graduate from a teaching/social work college where she focused in special education.

The other, even more exciting residents that we got this week are two kittens! Mandy saw some kids literally throwing these few week old kittens across the sidewalk in front of our house. After the WT Field Director, who happened to be around at the time, yelled at them in Marshallese, the kittens ran away, later to be found by our garbage can. We did not see their mother but left them there for the day. That evening we talked about the kittens so much that we got worried about their wellbeing and went out to look for them. We found out one them in our yard, hiding in the underbrush. We took her in and named her Coconut. She is very small and has gray fur with black stripes and a hint of orange. She looked pretty sickly and terrified. We looked up things to feed abandoned cats but realized that we did not have any of them since we were in the RMI. So, in a panic, we called Anna, the DVTP Field Director and resident cat lady (she has saved many abandoned cats herself in a country where dogs rule the streets), who advised us to feed her tuna and rice mixed with water. She seemed to like it. We made a home for her out of flat rate UPS boxes and sheets that had been left behind by previously volunteers. Coconut has had a weird paw twitch and was very thin but since being with us she seems to have gotten healthier. We hope she will be okay, since there is no vet on the island. The next day, while I was away, the girls decided to find one of the other kittens. The second one they found we named Papaya. She is a little bigger and looks like her sister but lacks the orange in her fur. She is also much more active. I have never had real pet (my sister and I had red eared slider turtles when we were younger but we couldn't play with them since their natural defense was to be covered in slime that carried salmonella poison--their names were Kiwi and Mango...so I guess I am making my way through the entire fruit section). The cats have been here together for two days and the seem to have taken to our new home. They also seem to have taken to me because I spend hours petting them. I have never liked dogs but always wanted cats. I guess in the RMI all kinds of dreams can come true.

Today I went to church in the RMI for the first time. Justin and Alex have a church on Ejit that is United Church of Christ, and while my family and I have never been big on denominations, we current go to UCC church in Chicago, so I figured it would be fun to compare (I don't know if I have explained about Ejit and now you can walk from the end of Rita across the ocean at low tide to the island...I truly enjoyed "walking across water" to get to church today, haha). I found immense comfort in the fact that Protestant churches everywhere around the world seem to be the same. There are always irreverent children, fancy hats/head gear, and loud singing. The kids in the church were highly entertained by the dogs that ran in and out of the service and the other ribelles (foreigners) and I. The men and women sat on opposite sides of the church so I was able to admire the variety of woven flowers and hair decorations that the women wore with their highly colorful muumuus. The singing was the most amazing part to me. The entire service, except for a welcome from the pastor to the ribelles, was in Marshallese, including the songs. The songs, however, were old traditional Church of Christ hymns. My family used to go to one of these churches since my mom's mom is a member of the Church of Christ denomination so I recognized many of the hymns. As I wrote in my previous post, the Marshallese are impressive singers. One person can create an incredible amount of volume. While most of the singers have a nasal tone, the Marshallese appear to have this innate skill with harmony. Every song broke into perfect harmony and filled the sizeable church. Afterwards, Alex, Justin, and I went to the post service brunch where we were served chicken and lobster soup made by the congregation and made to sit at the head table with the other church dignitaries. We were all asked to introduce ourselves and the sense of welcome I felt was overwhelming. The church experience was yet another extension of the Marshallese kindness that I have grown to know and love so well.

A few more observations about the RMI:

13 .Everyone knows everyone. If you want to find someone, you can literally drive down the street and look for them or ask if people in an area where that person usually is hanging out and you will learn their whereabouts pretty quickly. Anne, one of the WT Field Directors needed to find Mandy's principal to figure out what was going on on the island she was supposed to go to and told us that she was just going to drive down the street and track him down. Impressive.

14. We have been told to be careful about what we say about others by many people because of something called "coconut wireless" which is how information spreads on the island. Everyone finds out about everything soon after it happens by word of mouth.

15. Kids are kids everywhere! Before coming we were told that we would never really have discipline problems in the classroom but that we would instead have problems with passivity. I have had the opposite problem. My kids have really enjoyed the team game concept I came up with and have been participating in class (or at least a good handful of them have) but there has been a lot of talking/coming in late/hitting. I guess middle school kids are the same everywhere, rebellious, disinterested in learning, and starting their interest in the opposite sex. Sigh...it's does wonders for my classroom management.

Now, off to grade papers before class tomorrow...

Bar Lo Kom,

Andrew