Day 10

January 9, 2010

 

Day 10:

 

            I guess my body’s just used to waking up around 6:15 because I slept in this morning and still woke up before 7.  I was the first one up and in my attempt not to wake anyone else up I just sat on the floor and did some writing on my computer. By the time I finished that Anna and Derek were up but the rest of the house was still asleep. I began reading “Purpose Driven Life” by Rick Warren Friday and so I continued in reading that as I waited for time to go to MIR (Marshall Islands Resort) for breakfast and my Skype dates.

            When I got to MIR Derek was already there working on some of his class stuff. It’s ridiculous how prepared Derek is for his classes. He was apart of Youth In Government and has tailored the curriculum for that to his Government classes at the high school. I think I mentioned that I sat in on one of his classes last week in which he got them to debate apples and oranges (literally), coconuts and oranges, soda and water, and cable tv and movies. I was very impressed by how he did this and I could tell that he put a lot of work into his classes.

            I ordered silver dollar pancakes, bacon and hash browns which I ate while I Skyped with Elani, the family and then Sam Abrams back at Dartmouth. I’ll make it a note to eat breakfast before I begin Skyping next time because apparently my eating habits are quite controversial. LOL. It was nice seeing everybody though. Even though my reception of them wasn’t nearly as good as theirs was of me. Likewise, even though the audio was spotty at best, it was good to hear their voices.

            Feeling good about the morning, and wanting some sun, I decided to walk back to the room from the resort. It’s about a 35 minute walk but by this time it was about 1:00 p.m. and the sun was high and strong. Harry Enten’s weather blitz forecasted mostly cloudy in Majuro but there wasn’t a cloud in the sky on my walk home. I got about halfway and felt myself getting light-headed. I could literally feel the sun sucking energy from my body. I stopped briefly to get out the Gatorade in my bag. I drank that the rest of the way home and felt fine by the time I got back but walking home in the heat of the day is probably not a good idea for me.

            I piddled around the apartment until it was time to go to our welcoming barbecue at Tide Table. Eric and I were the last ones to leave the apartment because I was in a very important game of Tetris. We caught a taxi and headed to Tide Table. Now, most taxis on the island are $.50 for a trip; if you have to cross the bridge it costs $1.00. So Eric and I are in this taxi and we get to Tide Table and he tells us its $1.75 a piece. And we’re like “Dude you’re kidding.” And he’s like “No im a $1.00 taxi so when you cross the bridge its $1.75. So we were pretty salty on that one, we paid him and vowed to never get in his taxi again because he had to be the only taxi on the island that still charged $1.00.

            The barbecue was nice. We had some BBQ chicken, some ribs, some sort of tuna that was decent, some really good potato salad and some oriental chicken noodle type-thing. A lot of the Dartmouth alumni were there: Malcolm, Tricia, Molly, Lee, Peter, Jonathan and a few others. And then some of the World Teach people came as well: John, Amy, and  like two more people. I don’t know all of their names yet but I think I’ve met all the volunteer teachers on Majuro, Laura, Ejit, Kili and even a few on Wotje. After taking lots of pictures of the boats on the lagoon in front of the sunset, Ben and I left to buy some beer and hopefully go out with some of the grad students. We found out that a case of Heineken at Formosa would cost us $42 so we left there to go to Payless. We caught a taxi to Payless and found the other only taxi on the island that charges a dollar for a trip. So we paid a dollar to go from Tide Table to Payless which, given island funds, is ridiculous. Little did we know that 24 beers at Payless would cost even more. I don’t appreciate the deception in their name. Especially since it cost us a little less than $50 to buy a 24-pack of Heineken. We caught a taxi to bring the case back to the house. It was dark out by now, and the street light right outside payless randomly went off so we were standing in the dark on the side of the road with a case of Heineken trying to find a taxi to take us back over the bridge to our apartment. We saw several taxis turn right before they got to us but after about five minutes of waiting, one came and guess who it was. Dollar taxi number one guy. We somehow managed to ride in two one-dollar taxis three times in one day. Realizing that fate was against us, Eric and I decided to have the driver drop us off right before the bridge so we saved ourselves $.75 a piece. We hadn’t considered that most of the country was drunk by then considering it was Saturday night. And people being drunk means people driving drunk. There was a plethora of drunk drivers on the road. We only had to walk about a thousand yards but we were nearly hit by a car about six different times.

            We made it back to the apartment and ended up staying in and watching Wedding Crashers. What a great movie! We had another meaningless debate somewhere in there, this time it was Peter outside raving about how bad mainstream film is. He was saying how bad of a movie Wedding Crashers was. I didn’t take part in this debate, in fact, I didn’t know the debate was going on until I heard Derek’s voice from the porch through the window.  After the movie, Professor Garrod, myself, Derek, Eric and Ben spent about an hour deciding what the title to my article should be. Professor Garrod volunteered me to write an article for the Marshall Islands Journal and the title that I chose he said was too wordy: Embraced by Another Culture. The piece is about how the class tooke me in as their teacher very, very shortly after arriving at school and making me feel at home although I’m thousands of miles away from my house. Finally, Derek came up with “An Unexpected Lesson” which 1) refers to the way the Marshallese children taught me a lesson on their language in a setting where I would usually be teaching them, 2) it’s only one word less than the title I chose which pertains more to the actual point of the piece. That goes down as the first time I’ve ever had someone else write a title for a piece that I’d written. I was pretty upset that Professor Garrod didn’t like any of the titles that I came up with but I decided to bite my tongue because he has a history of keeping me awake with mostly non-urgent conversations right when I want to go to sleep. We ended up seeing midnight for the first time since we’ve been on the island. After Wedding Crashers, everyone else passed out but I was kept awake by a record breaking game of Tetris. And then I fell asleep.