It’s been exactly one week since we arrived back in the Marshalls from vacation, and I’m already in the groove of “reverse commuting” back and forth between Roi and Kwajalein. What a privilege to have 10 weeks off in the summer! This is the first time since living here that I have had the chance to spend some time really reflecting on life and enjoying the island without any responsibilities. Between working on my college degrees, raising kids, and then working full-time over the last decade, I’m not used to arriving back from vacation and still having a month to settle in without heading back to work, so technically I’m not really a commuter, but I have been taking the early plane a couple of days a week to take care of errands “downtown” as the Roi residents call it, and preparing for the start of school and my kids arrival back on island at the end of the month. Most of the commuters live on Kwaj and work on Roi because there are no schools or housing available for children on Roi, so managers and engineers who have families cannot both work and live on Roi. Commuting here means taking a 20 minute flight on a 19 seat metro liner propeller plane twice a day to go back and forth to your office. Normally, I’m anxious to just get in the air and back down again because I have to get to work when I’m returning from Roi for the weekend, but this morning I was able to relish the sites as we flew. Because of the small size of the plane, we do not fly as high as commercial jets, and it’s a gorgeous ride right through the clouds. On the 6:30 am flight, the sun rising and shining through the cotton ball cloud mountains is soothing to me. When the clouds part, you can see the dots and lines of coral islands covered with green flora all along the way. As far as commutes go, I’m sure most would say it’s better than the potential road rage incidents and traffic jams in the states.
Once firmly planted on the ground again, I have a chance to look at some materials in the teacher work room to prepare my ELL classroom (English Language Learning) for the upcoming school year. I am most interested in the Manit Day (Marshallese Cultural Day) materials from a couple of years ago when the school used to have an official school event and observance of this holiday. I would like to see this event brought back this school year, and my mind started planning in advance the details of setting this up as I tend to do when an idea is put in my head. It would require a lot of after school work from our Marshallese aids and students as there’s not enough time in the school day to plan such a large scale event for the entire elementary school, but therein lies the rub. You see, I feel privileged to have so much time off here, and considering our teacher’s schedule during the year (8:15-3:45) with only a 5 minute commute to and from our homes, on bicycles no less, those who live and work on Kwaj are really quite blessed. The relaxed pace, short or no commute, annual month long vacations, the weather, safe environment, and excellent water activates right outside your door are the advantages of life here. But, it’s not that way for all the employees.
We have almost the same amount of Marshallese employees and students who come from the island of Ebeye every day as we do resident employees and students. The commute and life for these Ebeye residents is not quite as relaxing or luxurious as our own. They start their day before the sun has even risen to catch the LCU (landing craft units from the military outfitted with wooden box benches for seats) before it’s full and to ensure they get to work on time. Some arrive a couple of hours before they are due to be at work because if they don’t get one of the early morning boats starting around 5 am, they will have to pay money to catch a water taxi if one is even available or they risk missing work or being late. The kids who are privileged enough to go to school on Kwaj (5 a year from Ebeye are admitted at the kindergarten level through a special Marshallese student program offered by the base), often have to get ready for school under the supervision of another relative because mom and dad had to catch the early boat. As for breakfast, they may be provided with a few dollars to get something at the local snack shop or they may have some packaged, highly processed snack or nothing at all before getting on the boat to head to school. After a 30 minute ride at 7 am, they catch the bus from the dock to the school, and then it’s straight to class. After school, many participate in sports, so they go to homework clubs and have a small snack, then head out to games taking place between 5-7 pm. This means they can’t get on a boat back home until 8 pm, and then there’s still dinner and any homework they didn’t get done at school to complete, and that’s an extremely long day on their own for K-6th grade students on an island away from home where everyone speaks a foreign second language to what they have grown up with. Okay, I realize kids in the states are overscheduled and probably are away from home and commuting back and forth to sports and extracurricular activities just as much as these kids are, but the difference for American kids is that they go home to relax in a climate controlled home with running water and full-time electricity and a refrigerator full of food. They usually have their own bedrooms or share them with only one sibling, and they have access to books, the internet, and all kinds of things considered luxuries for Marshallese on Ebeye who often live with 5-10 people in plywood shacks with intermittent power and water obtained from a jug carried back and forth to Kwaj every day to refill as there’s no running, clean water from the tap. These conditions are partially due to the presence of the base out here.
More and more Marshallese move to the tiny, overpopulated island of Ebeye every year to try and find one of the few jobs available to Marshallese on Kwajalein, and if they can’t, they simply live off the generosity of their family members and friends who do have jobs on Kwajalein. The Portuguese, Germans, and Japanese were all here before we took the islands from the Japanese during WWII, and decided it would be a good place for a military base, and you can see their footprints as surely as ours in the last names of the local families and in the concrete and rebar bunkers and pillboxes decaying around the islands. I am not placing blame on anyone for the way the Marshallese live today as it is a convoluted combination of factors which contribute to the present day issues; I simply wish I could do something more to help as most of my work over the years here has been teaching English to the Marshallese, and they are the most patient, generous, kind, and fun-loving culture I have ever been blessed to know and work with, but there are very few who are willing to stand up and fight for better living conditions with their own leaders in particular. Americans are known for their power, and I don’t think most of us realize how far and wide our influence reaches and how many cultures and countries attain to have the power we do.
Many of us live in a secure, middle class, consumerism lifestyle in the states where we enjoy freedom of speech, and we are raised to question everything, to fight for what we want and need and not give up until we have it, and my only regret is that this is sometimes at the expense of others, whether or not we even realize it. Not everyone else is educated and brought up as Americans are, and I am the first to be thankful for being an American, and I love the determination and “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps mentality,” we’ve developed to survive. These are the types of traits I would love to see others adopt, our good qualities, but our ways of running a country and preserving a culture may not be best for everyone else. I would like to see us come into whatever new countries we are negotiating with for one reason or another and have an honest, equal discussion of values and understanding of what makes each country great and then decide how we can help them become the country they want to be, not what we think they should be because that’s what has worked for us. I know, we probably wouldn’t have the power and privileges we have if we had handled ourselves like this in the past with other countries because not every country is going to respond equally honestly and diplomatically to us, so call me an idealist, a hippie if you want, but a world governed by the principals of love could be so much more peaceful than one governed primarily by who has the most power and money.
There are wonderful things that have been accomplished for others because of America’s generosity and concern for others, and I am proud of that. I just hate to see my friends who are not American suffer due to our footprint on their land. It’s the way of the world, I know. We do the best we can and leave the rest to God, fate, and free will. I pray someday the RMI will find a way to pull itself up by its own bootstraps as America has to give its people a better life than they have now. There is no less corruption in their world than in ours, but maybe we have been better equipped in our education and culture to overcome it faster than they have. And guess what, if the Americans had not come to lease these atolls, I probably would not have been blessed to have the opportunity to fall in love with the people and culture here. I just wonder sometimes what it would be like today if everyone had just left the islands alone, lazy days of tending garden in the mornings and making palm frond mats in the heat of the day while the men fish for their family’s sustenance, then talking story around a fire and eating traditional foods from the land and sea at night. Thank God these elements of the culture have sustained the test of time as many stories are still passed down and traditional foods and mats still prepared for us to enjoy today and share with others who come to the islands and take the time to get to know this beautiful island culture.
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