day 29

January 28, 2010

 

Day 29:

 

            Today’s the four week mark of us arriving in Majuro. And today is also the first morning that I woke up in my own bed. I slept pretty well. Relatively speaking, I slept great as opposed to sleeping on the hardwood floor at the apartment. We don’t have hot water in the trailer yet though. Cassiano, the person in charge of facilities with the Ministry of Education, doesn’t know when we’ll have it. So for now we can’t take showers in the trailers. I didn’t realize this until I woke up this morning. So I decided to go to the resort, workout, shower and grab breakfast there before school. They were showing a repeat of the South Carolina-Kentucky game on ESPN Australia. Big ups to Devon Downey, he was a monster in that game. I got a quick upper body workout in and a quick shower before heading to breakfast. Breakfast came in like ten minutes. I’ve never gotten food that quick anywhere on the island. It was nice though, because it allowed me to get back to school with time to spare before I taught my first class.

            In class we worked on conflict resolution and conclusion today. Some of these stories are going to turn out really well. A lot of them finished up their stories today. So tomorrow I’m going to start individual conferences with them and Monday the illustrations begin. After class, I headed back down to the apartment to clean it out as the last stage of our move out. When I got there, Eric and Ally had already dusted and cleaned everything and all I had to do was collect the stray items that were left behind and bring them back to the apartment. It ended up being a pretty heavy garbage bag of mostly books, lots of which were mine. Derek joined me shortly to give me a hand and after about ten minutes of him arriving, we left the apartment forever.

            After that, I just chilled at the trailers doing lesson planning, taking naps, Marshallese lessons and playing chess on the computer. For dinner, Ally made a beef based chili with peppers and onions and then some cornbread. It was a very good meal. The cornbread was on point. After that we hung out around here. Had a huge debate which I’ll go into now.

            Now, I’ll begin by saying that the sides were me and Eric versus everyone else. Garrod wasn’t there, he was at a movie premier. So the point that Eric and I were making was that Dartmouth will always be a second-tier Ivy league school because we don’t attract the bigger named scholars. Dartmouth is a GREAT faculty composed of professors who are teaching other people’s research. The top tier schools are Harvard, Yale and Princeton. The professors at those schools are teaching their own research. Students at those schools have direct contact with the people who devised theories, wrote books, are leading in their respective fields. The counter-argument was that Dartmouth is a better school because of that very reason because Dartmouth focuses on Undergraduate learning and bringing in bigger names doesn’t mean that teaching is good. I don’t disagree with that point at all, Dartmouth is an amazing school with a great faculty but one point that I made was, with all of the reading that we do at Dartmouth, how much of that reading was written by a Dartmouth professor? Sure, sometimes they are written by Dartmouth alums but where are the alums? Harvard, Princeton or Yale. Princeton has big name people like Tony Blair, former Prime Minister of England; Toni Morrison, prominent author, writer of Beloved and the Bluest Eye; Cornell West, leader in Black religion education and black current issues. All of those people among MANY others are teaching about the things that they are experts in. And sure Dartmouth was ranked #1 in undergrad education by US News and World Report. Go Green!! But who was #2? Anybody know? Princeton was. So the point I’m making is that, Princeton has the big names and their undergrad education doesn’t suffer. It only makes sense for Dartmouth to try to bring in some of those same names.

            Anyway, for some reason, we couldn’t get anyone else to see our side of the argument so we just stopped talking after a few people walked away upset. After that, everyone did some more lesson planning. I went to the girls trailer and went over some Marshallese with Anna and Edie. While we were doing that Ally had a run in with our first cockroach. This fool was HUGE! This thing was the size of half of my hand. And I have big hands. I ain’t never seen a bug that big. Anyway, there was one in the cabinet and then Ally tried to Raid around her room and found another one. I had to kill that one because she was afraid to. After that, I decided to return to our trailer.

            Now before I said that was our first encounter with a cockroach. I take that back. Derek had quite the night last night. Derek was staying in the white cottage with Professor Garrod so he had his own room and what seemed to be a great situation. The following is as close to Derek’s words as I can remember: Well Professor Garrod doesn’t like A/C so he turned it off and damn near steamed Derek to death in his room. So Derek moved his bed to the living room. So there was a point when he was falling into a deeper sleep but was still slightly conscious. And he wasn’t sure if he was asleep or not but his mouth felt weird. So he came a few steps closer to consciousness and realized that there was a cockroach in his mouth. So he screams and throws the roach from his mouth and Raids it to death. Completely freaked out from this, and understandably so, he opened up his phone to see what time it was and hoping that it was late enough in the night to just stay awake, he saw that it was merely 2:00 a.m. It was then that the light from his phone shone on another cockroach climbing up his mattress. Again, he killed this guy. After sitting in the bed awake for another hour or so he begins to finally fall back into unconsciousness (I don’t know how)! So he doesn’t fall asleep very deeply. Every few minutes he wakes up. Around 4:00 a.m. he wakes up and here’s a ticking sound in the room. He , again, opens up his phone to see what lurked in the darkness. A 20” rat was not what he was expecting. So he screams yet again and chases the rat with a broomstick. And the rat goes to hide under his bed. So he finally chases him out and into the kitchen. Apparently, that was good enough for him. I’m pretty sure I woulda shooed him outside but Frankl once said, in Man’s Search for Meaning, “an abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal”. So he sat up in his bed completely freaked out and somewhere in there Professor Garrod came out and saw him, “Are you sitting up Derek?”  Derek answered, “Yes, Professor.” They exchanged some other words briefly and Garrod went back to his room. It wasn’t until the sun came back up around 6:15 that Derek fell back asleep and he had to wake up around 7:30 to teach this morning. He’s going to sleep in our trailer from now on.

            Two of the Dartmouth graduate volunteers decided this week that they were leaving the program. They announced it on Tuesday and they leave tomorrow going back to the states. They said that they didn’t feel safe. Apparently they had been groped in a taxi before and one time a boy faked – or really did - masturbating while watching one of them walk into their dorm. Also, they felt like they weren’t supported enough by Anna Z and Garrod while they’ve been here. They also had TERRIBLE living quarters before in the dorm. Garrod got them to move into the first trailer that was finished which is another reason we couldn’t move in for so long.  So they’re leaving tomorrow and announced their departure Tuesday. They’ve been here since Late July –Early August. If I woke up with a cockroach in my mouth, I’m pretty sure I’d just go to the airport and catch the first thing leaving the island. There’s no way. I’ve already notified Garrod that if anything like that happens ONCE, I’m catching the Continental back to Honolulu ASAP. Forget the groping, and sleeping situations, and lack of support, the roach in the mouth is all I need to throw up the deuces to Majuro.

            So after Ally’s ordeal with the cockroach, I left their trailer and Derek, Eric and I went to chill with Tricia and Molly before they fly out tomorrow. All of the other World Teach teachers were there sipping on champagne. We stayed for about a half hour before coming back to our trailer and getting ready for bed. Ben beat me in a game of chess while we talked about his girl situation. After that I went to bed.