Pitcherz

The whole WorldTeach group

Laura, a region at the other end of my island

Riding out to Laura with Hannah, Connor and Courtney

Jelter I

Jelter II

Jelter III: The Camp

Jelter IV: Fish on a Stick, kind of

Jelter V: Dan and Marshallese dude doing some fish stuff

End of orientation dinner with Pete and Wang; our trifecta ruled our end of the trailer

The dorm

My new home

My new room

The backyard

The Last Few Weeks

A lot has happened since Practicum. During the last week of orientation, we had an overnight outing to Jelter, one of the outer-island like islands in the Majuro atoll. The island is beautiful and pristine. It was an amazing two days. We spent a lot of time kayaking, snorkeling and just chilling out on the island. I finally learned how to properly husk a coconut, which is a ton of work with the big, fleshy coconuts that have good coconut water. We took a boat out to some coral where there is a crashed bomber in the water from WWII. It was really cool to see, and the coral around there had more fish than I have seen since coming here. It was kind of daunting to get to the fish, since you have to basically float over coral in really shallow water, occasionally grazing against the anemones and pushing off on them with your hands. I saw several schools of really large fish and some small schools of really colorful fish, including some clown fish. On Jelter, we slept in little canopies set up on the ground after laying down some big leaves and putting some sleeping bags over them. The bugs still got to all of us and there was a bunch of rain from showers during the night and in the morning. For some reason, I still ended up sleeping really well. Overall, the overnight trip was one of the best times I’ve had here.

There were a few times during the trip where I definitely felt a little scared in the water. I am apparently not a very strong swimmer anymore, which is kind of ridiculous for living on an island. It’s a little sad that I’m so bad in the water now given that I was a (uncertified) lifeguard at a summer camp. We had little races between all the weak swimmers as a joke, it was pretty fun stuff except for the times I ran out of air and sank like a log. A few times on the trip, I have found myself fairly far out in the ocean with a malfunctioning snorkel and kind of freak out. It’s really kind of eerie snorkeling out in the deep water, it’s just a whole sea of clear blue in front of you with visibility limited to a few feet. Apparently there are also a few sharks around and a couple of guys in the group have run into them; they weren’t fazed, but it would probably give me a panic attack.

After Jelter, we spent a few days more in orientation sessions, and finished with orientation on Friday exactly a week ago. We ended with very end-of-camp style festivities. We had a closing dinner at one of the hotels, and a talent show and dance after dinner. The talent show was great – I was amazed how talented and funny everyone in the group is. I did a little rendition of Abbot & Costello’s “Who’s on First” with Rachel as a homage to summer camps gone by. We slacked off on preparing for the act, and ended up memorizing nearly the whole script the day of the show. Rachel has some experience acting and is part of an improv comedy group back home, which was definitely useful. At seven pages, the script was surprisingly long and actually a really hard act to memorize because of the all short lines and cues. We even tried to add a few improv sections of our own and included a Marshall Islands spin to the act by pretending it was a phone conversation with me calling her on an outer island. The act went well enough, and I am still impressed that we memorized it all in so short of a time. We all went out drinking after the end-of-orientation dinner and had a blast. We hung out by the water, sang a bunch of karaoke and all ended up at The Pub dancing till early in the morning. It was a great way to send everybody off.

The next day, 10 of us moved into faculty housing ("the dorm") on the school campus that includes two high schools and a middle school that most of my roommates are teaching at. It was really weird taking my first real shower in a month (though still with cold water) and sleeping on a real bed instead of a mat. Some of my roommates have already started school and everyone else is trying to find something else to do. Unfortunately, my school doesn’t start until September 3rd at the earliest. I have dropped by the building a few times to help set up the school, but there isn’t too much to do. Apparently, some of the teachers who were supposed to come to the school are at other schools, so right now we only have 3 out of 8 teachers (two of whom are WorldTeach). I’ve been keeping myself busy by fixing up the dorm and wandering around town. I am supposed to volunteer with a vet clinic next week, which I am really looking forward to. We are basically going to go around and capture a bunch of dogs. The dogs here are absolutely insane and I have already been chased several times - I'll provide some more detail in another post.

All of the volunteers on the outer islands were supposed to ship off this week. Some of them have left, but most are still here (a bunch are crashing in the dorm with us). There are two planes in the Marshall Islands used for inter-island transport, and as of now both of them are down. It’s pretty much a national crisis at this point since the only other way to move people or supplies are on a few ships that take a really long time. Apparently a bunch of wealthy tourists are stuck on Bikini atoll up north after one of the chartered scuba trips and a bunch more are stuck here in Majuro waiting to go to Bikini. It's a pretty bad situation given the economic hope that the Marshall Islands might at least emerge as a niche scuba adventure tourist spot. The government is looking into chartering a plane from Fiji to get back the tourists and help out with emergency situations. Some of the volunteers might take ships out to their islands, but a lot of the trips would take 4 days or more, which is a really tough thing on tiny cargo ships. It looks like it might be a while before all of our volunteers actually ship out to the outer islands. If anyone has a spare airplane engine, definitely send it over. Over and out.

Catch Up - Teaching Camp

This is a journal entry I wrote a few weeks ago, during the third week of orientation, but didn't get to post until now:

I just finished our second day of Practicum, a sort of summer camp World Teach holds for teaching kids and practicing lessons before the actual school year starts. My first day teaching actually went really well. I had prepped for a long time, reading a bunch and spending over three hours making maps for the unit I am doing (Geography). Our class was supposed to be a bunch of 8th graders, but it rained a lot on Tuesday and very few students showed up. We ended up with two 12th graders we stole from another class, who are apparently two of the best students on the Marshall Islands. They are both really smart girls, but definitely lack a lot of the knowledge star students in an American high school would have. We spent all of class identifying continent shapes (which were amazingly hard to trace and cut out) and putting them up on a globe and guessing their names. The girls had some concept of most of this, but struggled with a lot of the details. I found it very interesting that they could immediately identify all of the world’s oceans (a task I probably could not have accomplished before yesterday) but struggled to recall the names and/or locations of most countries. I guess that is what is to be expected in such a water-driven culture. The students couldn’t name any country in Asia besides China and had no idea where any country is located, which I thought was crazy for such bright kids, but I guess it is something that is just not taught here.

After the first session on Tuesday, I spent three or four hours prepping for today’s lesson and felt really prepared. However, today ended up as a much more difficult session than yesterday. I was trying to teach hemispheres and time zones, but overestimated the students’ prior knowledge. I basically spent all of class reviewing the locations of the continents and trying to explain why different parts of the world are different times. I forgot to bring balls to explain how the earth revolves around the Sun and it was way too abstract of a concept to explain in the short amount of time I had allocated. The class was supposed to focus on an activity / game I had created for learning time zones, but the students definitely were not ready for it. Overall it was a pretty exasperating class and I am wondering if I should repeat the lesson tomorrow or just accept that it was a bust.

-- I ended up having much more success with my last two days of class and was really glad to have spent the week teaching some of the best students in the country. It was a good chance to prepare for what I’m sure will be a very challenging year.

Photos

The Compound

The trailer I'm sleeping in

Our colorful scavenger hunt team


Hitching a ride w/ Chuck, Cassy and Jodi

Darren, Lauren and Dan - Karaoke Magic

Unbelievably Cute Children Shot 1

Unbelievably Cute Children Shot 2, with Pete

Unbelievably Cute Children Shot 3

The island where we had our weekend outing 1

The island where we had our weekend outing 2

Katie and Greg getting down on the Island

Darren and Dan on the Island - we're all going to be roommates

Weekend Update

On Friday night we had a Ministry of Education (MoE) welcome dinner. All of the volunteers (WorldTeach and Dartmouth) were there to meet principals and teachers from our schools. No one from my school was actually able to make it, but it was a fun event with a lot of silly speeches and singing. I was also able to duck out in the middle of it to get a beer at a local hotel bar purely to gain access to their complementary buffet. Unfortunately, most of the food wasn’t vegetarian – but I was able to snag 9 or 10 egg rolls before going back to the party.

After the welcome party, a big crew of us went back to the hotel bar to get some drinks. Karaoke is huge here, and for some reason our group really embraced it. I think the staff was really scared of the 20 or so ripelles crammed in a little room singing American songs for 3 hours. After getting ourselves back to the orientation site (the Compound), we ended up piling a bunch of mattresses in the yard and watching Dazed & Confused outside on my computer. We also discovered that five people can indeed fit inside a 5’ by 3’ tent. There are pictures of all of this somewhere, and I am going to put up a few today.

Last night, we had our mid-Orientation dinner. It was an amazing change to sit down around a table and have a real meal. We all once again karaoked after the meal, and eventually a few of us decided to check out The Pub – the only nightclub in the country. The place is incredibly dark and smoky, and was packed full of people. There is a little dance floor with some neon lights – I might go back just to get some photos of it. The actual mechanics of the dance floor are really odd. The music was mostly insane techno with a few pop hits in between, and after the playing of each song there was a 5-minute pause, during which all the Marshallese would leave the dance floor to sit at their tables, and then return to the dance floor a few minutes later for the next song. Definitely an interesting experience.

I’m putting up a few photos of the RMI so far. Hopefully this works.