I was, undoubtedly, a superstitious child. It was probably a result of paranoia and an overly active imagination. I thought clowns wee agents of pure evil. I not only believed in Santa Clause, I set up elaborate traps to catch him. I was convinced that bad things would happen to me if the total number of steps I took on a single slab of concrete did not equal an exponent of 2 (If I crossed the school oval on the way home I would sometimes mark time to reach 256). The most embarrassing of all of these was my mother’s university graduation, which I spent on the front steps of the all telling people there was a witch inside. My childhood was filled with invisible lasers, non-specific threatening forces and a need for me to act in eccentric ways to cope with the intricate and malevolent universe in my head.
However I remember the exact moment that this stopped for me. My final superstition of any note was one that had spread to me from my sister who got it from her friend. It was the belief that if someone did not hold their breath whole passing a graveyard. My sister and I dutifully carried this out for several months, even modifying it to include not touching the floor of the car. It was a rather ridiculous act to look at.
This came to a halt on a family holiday when we drove lengthwise along one of those giant country graveyards that take up a whole field. Immediately, my sister and I performed our strange ritual, and my parents looked back at their children who sat with limbs splayed and cheeks puffed. They decided to end this. They braked. The car sat in the middle of a country road as my parents patiently waited for us to give in. My sister shot me a quick look and I continued my pose until m sides hurt. But soon we spluttered and slammed our feet to the bottom of the car.
The next breath of oxygen brought with it a line of reasoning that I have continued to use to this present day. Namely, that all forms of superstition and magic are rubbish.
To this day, I do not touch wood when I tempt fate. There is no need and I feel no obligation. I do not read my astronomy charts though apparently I am a Scorpio. UFOlogists are bonkers as is anyone who predicts catastrophe based on the calendars of ancient civilizations. I do not consult psychics. I do not observe Friday the thirteenth. I do not believe in miracles. My mother’s back is in fine condition despite me regularly stepping on both lines and cracks. I do, however, allow myself to continue the exponent of two activity, however I fear no retribution if this is not achieved.
So you can imagine my reaction when Randy told me not to pack any red clothing for the junior retreat that I was supervising.
“Why?”
“We’re going to Udot, it’s famous for black magic.”
“And…”
“You can get cursed for wearing red.”
I felt the urge to ask him whether Udot was an island or a nightclub, but he had already left.
Micronesians are big on black magic. In my first week at St Cecilia’s a girl asked me if I believed in it and I replied ‘no’. This shocked the entire class and they spent the rest of the class pestering me about it. From my perspective it seemed more humourous than malicious. Most of the time it was discussed in the context of love spells like a failed joke in a Harry Potter book. Once or twice someone would attribute the state of the local nutjob to black magic. I would have liked to explain that it was, in fact, petrol sniffing that produced such a result but I tire of being culturally insensitive sometimes and just let it go.
However, it’s control over the students should not be underestimated. Approaching Udot by boat, there was an odd moment where the passengers, the vast majority of whom were sixteen-year-olds, all simultaneously sat down quietly. I wandered about for a little bit but was abruptly stopped when Mike, a second-year volunteer in charge of the retreat, asked me to sit down.
“Why?”
“Because we’re going to Udot, it’s famous for black magic.”
“And…”
“If you don’t sit down, the students will go beserk.”
Udot, for the record, was beautiful. Spectacular even. The water was transparent, the air was fresh and instead of roads they had precisely manicured grass stretching from the church to the school, a distance of about a hundred meters. The people were happy and friendly and they crowded at the shore to meet us. Tom and I made certain we pointed out people in red t-shirts if we saw them. For an island famous for black magic, it certainly was very lovely.
However, this was a school trip and any joy to be had by being there was soon siphoned off through the hectic schedule and the terrible burden of responsibility. It was exhausting, particularly monitoring students late at night. In addition there is the Chuukese penchant for, shall we say, marathon events. Four hours straight of what is known as an entertainment leaves one exasperated no matter how much goodwill or joy is behind it.
The students themselves helped to give the weekend a shambolic feel, particularly in the entertainment that they had planned for themselves. They delayed the start by two hours because of audio difficulties and ended every performance in a desperate rush to the back of the stage to avoid embarrassment. The evening ended with fire-dancing, which was performed so haphazardly that it actually set one of the audience members briefly on fire. It was all a little overwhelming.
So, later that night, Tom and I took some initiative and sat with a couple of locals our own age. Tom speaks Chuukese, I can’t, it didn’t seem to matter. One kid pulled out a ukulele and started playing; he was incredible. He just sat and played for us for about an hour, it seemed to go on forever. The night was cool; the sky went on forever as it can only do in the middle of the Pacific. It was a great moment and it was hard to turn back to the community hall were we all slept.
The next morning felt groggy. Most mornings feel like this for me, but this one in particular left me feeling disjointed and tired. I scrambled around the hall looking for privacy, a futile effort in any case. Students had begun to wander around in a similar haze; for some reason we let them drink coffee (coffee in Micronesia is consumed from preschool onwards). The staff that were up began methodically waking up the rest of the students. Most of the boys, considering that they had slept in the same room with a concrete floor, were up, but the girls who had stayed in tiny rooms to the side were only beginning to file out. Somehow, I managed to gain some privacy and got changed. Re-entering the hall, I was greeted with low, discomforting moans from one of the rooms. They seemed to echo out of the furthest to the left and stopped everybody in their stride. A few female staff leapt in to try and find out what was happening. The girl wasn’t waking up and was instead hyperventilating and moaning. A crowd of other girls sat around her, cradling her head, massaging her limbs and generally looking supportive. It didn’t seem to do much. She kept moaning and hyperventilating. The students stood around awkwardly in the hall for there was no other more adequate reaction. And then a different girl fainted.
At this point the local doctor was called. This sounds like the right decision, except that the local doctor was more of a magician than any Western concept of a medical professional. But he was, apparently, very good and well trusted by his community. And, if the students had suspected, it was the work of black magic than indeed it would be of some psychological support that he had been the first on the case. His first instruction upon seeing the two girls was to order all of the males out of the hall. The practical reasoning of this was beyond me. So, grabbing teenage boys as I went, I exited the hall as soon as possible.
What followed I can easily claim to being the strangest few hours of my life. We sat on the lawn in front of the hall and watched people filing in and out looking concerned and carrying strange objects. The sounds that came from the hall alternated between crying, moaning and chanting. Meanwhile the boys sat like stones on the manicured grass. I have never seen sixteen-year old boys sit like this. Amongst them there was barely a fidget of movement or a whisper of conversation.
The most dramatic moment came about forty-five minutes into the ritual, as a strange smelling smoke started to pour out the windows of the hall. It was accompanied by ear-splitting screaming, the most terrifying screaming I’ve ever heard. A few of the more composed boys formed a prayer circle and eevn managed a few lines of consolation. But it couldn’t stop that screaming, in my imagination, nothing could stop that screaming. It was a scream from the old ways, long before we came here with ou concrete and our crucifixes. A scream filled with the terror of the islands at night. A scream that curdled with extraordinary pain. It came from the hall, which was no longer of our world, but that of the local doctor. We were only sitting on its lawn.
The call came from Xavier to get the girls off island and into real medical care. The problem was that the ‘doctor’ disagreed. He said that a trip back to Weno would only exacerbate the problems. To the Chuukese, the spirits of the dead, like the ones that had apparently infected two of our students, live in the water. A water-borne voyage thus risked further infection. However, Mike was insistent. Medical help was needed. It’s a curious difference, that to us the problem was a medical one yet to the locals it was a mystical one.
The evacuation was a blur. We were allowed into the hall and we removed everything at a furious pace. The gear was loaded into small boats that were in turn loaded onto the larger boat moored off the reef. I remember only one thing distinctly. As we told the boys that we were to begin to pack, one gave me a look that stopped me dead. I’d previously heard him complaining to others that we were making the problem worse by leaving, that we weren’t respecting the judgment of the local doctor. When e looked at me, his eyes had a misted quality, a curious mix of fear and anguish. And a sense that this was not our world. I don’t think I will forget that look.
There have been many moments in my time here where I have genuinely entertained the thought that this is not real. Perhaps someone slipped something in my drink, that I’m really just sitting on my couch at home staring at the ceiling. Or perhaps, Fight Club style, I have invented my own reality that I have gradually slipped into to deal with stress from the HSC. I these moments, I appeal to the anonymous corner of my consciousness that knows, with certainty, that this is a lie.
And how I dug. Standing on the boat and looking back to that beautiful island, I scoured every millimeter of thought I had ever had. And I arrived, rather bluntly, at the moment by the cemetery that had abducted me from the bizarre fantasies of my childhood. I wondered if I could ever reconcile that cold breath of air, my relentless skepticism, with what I had just seen. And I decided that it was neither the malevolent universe of my childhood nor the firmament of logic that I was familiar with. It was not of my world. I had stumbled through someone else’s terrifying childhood. It was all very strange.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Sunday, August 29, 2010
The Street-sign
It was five minutes, probably less, into my holiday that I saw it. I was in a car, travelling from the airport along an exceptionally smooth road. After five months of living on Weno speeds above 40km/h terrified me and we were at least doing 60; I was gripping my seat. But this was Pohnpei, the capital of the Federated States of Micronesia and the next state along from Chuuk. I was warned that things would be different.
Brother Tomi indicated right and swung the car off the street. It panned across my sight, hypnotically staring back at me. I swallowed slightly, loosened my grip on the car-seat and sighed almost inaudibly. It was at this moment, after I had taken a few seconds for my mind to appropriately respond to its beauty, that I thought, ‘Everything is going to be just fine.’ I followed it in the rear-view mirror until it passed out of sight. I turned to Tomi, who was also a Xavier High School resident on break, and swooned, ‘There are even street signs.’
It took me a while to understand my shock at the sight of street signs. I had not spent long hours pondering their absence; unlike barista coffee, uninterrupted electricity and public transport. For us children of the first world the appreciation of street-signs is a deeply subconscious affair. They provide a necessary service, but are almost invisible within the structure of the suburban environment. Seeing them again is kind of like finding a favourite childhood toy again. Life was not overly difficult without it, but upon its rediscovery one is more likely to fully understand its emotional sway. Thus I found myself agape at a simple aluminium pole with a metal oblong inscribed ‘Kasalehlie St’.
This sight alone could have made my holiday. I will admit that my focus on it could have been seen as extreme. Just about everyone I talked to on the island –Jesuits, volunteers, embassy staff, locals, nuns, embarrassingly drunk compatriots at the ‘Rusty Anchor’ bar- were treated to my philosophical musings on the topic of street-signs. By the third time it came up in conversation with the Jesuit Volunteer community on the island, one of them finally confessed that they were a little freaked out by my obsession with them.
And so I feel obliged to explain it. Street-signs represent the order and logic that seems absent from Weno. Even the steps involved in erecting a street-sign imply this. Firstly, one has to have something that can be classified as a road. His applies to very little of the ‘road’ system on Chuuk. The majority of Chuuk’s ‘roads’ would be more aptly described as a humourous line of dirt or a collection of potholes in a concentrated line. Only a few brief strips of tarmac fit the given description.
Secondly, someone has to actually name the aforementioned street. In Chuuk, the ‘roads’ are simply named after where they go to. Mostly, it’s to town. Other examples include: the ‘road’ to the Korean Research Center, the ‘road’ up to Xavier High School (which could just as easily be classified as a small mountain range) and the ‘road’ that goes past the Stop and Shop. No amount of public awareness of government intervention could ever shift the practical basis of this naming system. And I can never imagine anyone fitting ‘The ‘road’ that takes you past that strange Peace Corp building with the concrete sphere on top of it’ onto a street sign anyway.
And finally, the sign was clean and shiny and set at a perfect right angle to the pole. Nothing is ever clean and shiny on Weno. Period. The signs that are there, mostly for stores and a few government offices, look as if someone had gone on a mad spree of sign making I the early nineties and had briskly given up since then. The more recent of signs tend to be either hand painted or, as is becoming increasingly popular, stenciled. In any sense, it is a long way from the shiny metal Helvetica of Pohnpei.
In the end, Pohnpei reminded me of one of those sleepy towns on the Central Coast where the populations swell over the summer months. There were small blocks of quirky housing that felt vaguely suburban. Here was a main street, a few supermarkets and a couple of restraints. It had one of those small, two projector cinemas that played movies that had come to the rest of the word months go (Inception came out the day I left and I missed Toy Story 3 entirely). The moment where this felt strongest was when I visited the Australian Embassy to vote. It looked like every small government office I had been in my entire life. There was the dull white paint, the rectangular lobby filled with government-issued brochures and posters, the inoffensive cubicle layout. If the office wasn’t staffed mostly by Pohnpeians I could have been waiting in any tax office, any Centerlink, any Legal Aid branch (and I know those well).
That’s not to say that I didn’t find the island beautiful or unique; I loved it. But whereas the other tourists might just be awed at the spectacular cultural sites, I was in awe at the beautiful sealed roads that lead to the cultural sites. Whilst most tourists were amazed by the view from the restraints there, I was amazed that I could order a sandwich on bread that did not taste like sugared cardboard. To them, the island was a curious and magical slice of life in the Pacific. To me, it was also a curious and magical slice of life back home. Perhaps it was the restoration of subconscious symbols of the developed world, things I had taken for granted my entire life, that gave me an inexplicable sense of the familiar.
Leaving behind 24 hour power and decent internet is never easy. Add to this a strange feeling of home and the prospect of return may seem daunting. But I missed the staggering mess that is Chuuk. Three days later I walked back from St Cecilia’s after our first day planning the new school yea A plastic, vertical rectangle read ‘Welcome to Yongku Peninsula’. Hs sign had been erected during my second month on Chuuk. It is the closest thing to a real street-sign we have over here.
The ‘n’ in ‘Yongku’ was back to front.
It was nice to be back.
Brother Tomi indicated right and swung the car off the street. It panned across my sight, hypnotically staring back at me. I swallowed slightly, loosened my grip on the car-seat and sighed almost inaudibly. It was at this moment, after I had taken a few seconds for my mind to appropriately respond to its beauty, that I thought, ‘Everything is going to be just fine.’ I followed it in the rear-view mirror until it passed out of sight. I turned to Tomi, who was also a Xavier High School resident on break, and swooned, ‘There are even street signs.’
It took me a while to understand my shock at the sight of street signs. I had not spent long hours pondering their absence; unlike barista coffee, uninterrupted electricity and public transport. For us children of the first world the appreciation of street-signs is a deeply subconscious affair. They provide a necessary service, but are almost invisible within the structure of the suburban environment. Seeing them again is kind of like finding a favourite childhood toy again. Life was not overly difficult without it, but upon its rediscovery one is more likely to fully understand its emotional sway. Thus I found myself agape at a simple aluminium pole with a metal oblong inscribed ‘Kasalehlie St’.
This sight alone could have made my holiday. I will admit that my focus on it could have been seen as extreme. Just about everyone I talked to on the island –Jesuits, volunteers, embassy staff, locals, nuns, embarrassingly drunk compatriots at the ‘Rusty Anchor’ bar- were treated to my philosophical musings on the topic of street-signs. By the third time it came up in conversation with the Jesuit Volunteer community on the island, one of them finally confessed that they were a little freaked out by my obsession with them.
And so I feel obliged to explain it. Street-signs represent the order and logic that seems absent from Weno. Even the steps involved in erecting a street-sign imply this. Firstly, one has to have something that can be classified as a road. His applies to very little of the ‘road’ system on Chuuk. The majority of Chuuk’s ‘roads’ would be more aptly described as a humourous line of dirt or a collection of potholes in a concentrated line. Only a few brief strips of tarmac fit the given description.
Secondly, someone has to actually name the aforementioned street. In Chuuk, the ‘roads’ are simply named after where they go to. Mostly, it’s to town. Other examples include: the ‘road’ to the Korean Research Center, the ‘road’ up to Xavier High School (which could just as easily be classified as a small mountain range) and the ‘road’ that goes past the Stop and Shop. No amount of public awareness of government intervention could ever shift the practical basis of this naming system. And I can never imagine anyone fitting ‘The ‘road’ that takes you past that strange Peace Corp building with the concrete sphere on top of it’ onto a street sign anyway.
And finally, the sign was clean and shiny and set at a perfect right angle to the pole. Nothing is ever clean and shiny on Weno. Period. The signs that are there, mostly for stores and a few government offices, look as if someone had gone on a mad spree of sign making I the early nineties and had briskly given up since then. The more recent of signs tend to be either hand painted or, as is becoming increasingly popular, stenciled. In any sense, it is a long way from the shiny metal Helvetica of Pohnpei.
In the end, Pohnpei reminded me of one of those sleepy towns on the Central Coast where the populations swell over the summer months. There were small blocks of quirky housing that felt vaguely suburban. Here was a main street, a few supermarkets and a couple of restraints. It had one of those small, two projector cinemas that played movies that had come to the rest of the word months go (Inception came out the day I left and I missed Toy Story 3 entirely). The moment where this felt strongest was when I visited the Australian Embassy to vote. It looked like every small government office I had been in my entire life. There was the dull white paint, the rectangular lobby filled with government-issued brochures and posters, the inoffensive cubicle layout. If the office wasn’t staffed mostly by Pohnpeians I could have been waiting in any tax office, any Centerlink, any Legal Aid branch (and I know those well).
That’s not to say that I didn’t find the island beautiful or unique; I loved it. But whereas the other tourists might just be awed at the spectacular cultural sites, I was in awe at the beautiful sealed roads that lead to the cultural sites. Whilst most tourists were amazed by the view from the restraints there, I was amazed that I could order a sandwich on bread that did not taste like sugared cardboard. To them, the island was a curious and magical slice of life in the Pacific. To me, it was also a curious and magical slice of life back home. Perhaps it was the restoration of subconscious symbols of the developed world, things I had taken for granted my entire life, that gave me an inexplicable sense of the familiar.
Leaving behind 24 hour power and decent internet is never easy. Add to this a strange feeling of home and the prospect of return may seem daunting. But I missed the staggering mess that is Chuuk. Three days later I walked back from St Cecilia’s after our first day planning the new school yea A plastic, vertical rectangle read ‘Welcome to Yongku Peninsula’. Hs sign had been erected during my second month on Chuuk. It is the closest thing to a real street-sign we have over here.
The ‘n’ in ‘Yongku’ was back to front.
It was nice to be back.
Monday, June 28, 2010
The Mormon
A crucifix can tell a lot about a place. In terms of religious symbols, it allows a certain measure of interpretation which is rare in such objects of devotion. In my highly subjective experience, I have found the pattern to generally go as follows; the more realistic the crucifix the more rational the institution’s perspective on religion tends to be. The ones at my old school were a solemn affair, that whilst not plagued by hyperbolic suffering that I have seen in some (never a good sign), it is still clear that Jesus isn’t having a great day. He’s slung low, looking down despondently in a rather touching expression of his humanity. This, I feel, corresponds to my old school’s somber and meditative take on the whole thing.
Compare this to the one in the Holy Family church, one of the largest on the island. First of all, it is gigantic, taking up the entire wall of the church. Secondly, Jesus looks like he’s having a grand old time up there. He’s fully clothed, has excellent posture and generally looks pretty pleased with himself. There is no evidence that he is suffering one of the most excruciating forms of execution ever devised. I can think of no better introduction to the manner of faith on the island than this.
The community I am surrounded by is overwhelmingly Catholic. I have no problem with this. Catholics have always deserved my respect, and ones such as these who travel halfway across the world to help people even more so. This is, however, an abrupt change from my home life where I was exposed to about one religious person for every two non-religious people, and none of them were particularly over-zealous about it. Between the Jesuit Volunteers, Jesuits in training and people from countries with high rates of practicing Catholicism such as the Phillipines, we non-Catholics are firmly in the minority. As comfortable as I am with that, there also an unspoken desire for us not to openly practice or lack-of-faith and to particularly avoid teaching anything that openly criticizes Church doctrine. Having gone to a high school where even the priests discussed their issues with Christianity and atheist teachers were out and proud, this seemed strange.
However, when placed in the context of the society the school operates in this comes as no surprise. It’s not that being non-religious is frowned upon, it is simply that it is not comprehensible. Walking across the oval with a Xavier student (a group that represents some of the most intelligent and Westernized people on island) I was asked in a scandalous tone, “Is it true that some teachers are… atheists?” One might have been mistaken for him asking me whether we hid dead bodies in the teacher’s lounge. I looked at the kid, remembering that I was a card-carrying atheist at his age, and told him that we had weekly Wiccan sacrifices and that he was more than welcome to join.
My most intimate view of Chuukese society, my students, have revealed some of the truly bizarre manifestations of this. For example, the ability for religion to turn up in topics for which it has no relevance amazes me. One of my favourite examples was in a comprehension test about an extract describing the Californian Gold Rush. The question was, ‘Why do you think this article compares the lucky and unlucky stories of miners?’
“Because the good thing they were lucky to find gold. Unlucky some don’t find gold and they think too much about money but they don’t think of going to church and if they die they will go to hell. They are happy in earth but when they die they are sad in hell.”
And this student is by no means the least intelligent or most conspicuously religious I teach. Another time was when I took remedial reading for the seventh grade. The students were, on the whole, not great in their behavior. That was until my second week of it when I discovered that they paid much more attention when I made them read books about Jesus. After that, I came to school every day armed with children’s bibles and religious education texts. Their favourite, which couldn’t really be described as a page-turner, was a book of saints subtitled ‘Superheroes of God’. After going through every saint in the book whose adventures simply weren’t nearly as captivating as the stories of my childhood, I asked what sort of books they wanted to read next. I suggested the categories that had fascinated me as a kid: space, adventure, history, science. These were met with a decidedly dull reception. My Jesuit co-teacher, Brother Patrick, who had supplied all of my religious books and was quite enamoured of ‘Superheroes of God’, suggested, “What about books about Jesus?” The response was rapturous. More books about Jesus was exactly what the doctor had ordered it seemed. It should be noted that these are probably the same kids who draw swastikas on the teacher’s desk in permanent marker.
This irony is telling. It is arguable that they view the crosses that they draw elaborately in my class in the same manner they view the desk swastikas. They are both powerful symbols and are hence worthy of expression, but they are clueless as to what their meanings are. This complete lack of critical thought can easily be dismissed as some self-important non-Christian’s intensely biased view on the whole matter, but it was a strongly Catholic teacher who suggested it to me. And when one of your 8th Grade students at a Catholic school asks you what the definition of a Christian is, there is generally something seriously wrong.
This inability to view faith in a critical sense explains some of the eccentricities of the local brand of Catholicism. It explains the ‘Jesus-having-a-dandy-ol’-time’ crucifix. It explains the fact that my students cannot get their head around the idea of a non-Christian perspective on a passage about Easter. It explains the many devotional pictures of Caucasian Jesus. A Peace Corp I talked with even suggested that the state’s political apathy is a side effect. Yet again this can easily be dismissed as one of those ‘religion-is-responsible-for-everything-evil’ arguments that Dawkins and his crowd are rather fond of, but the patterns in behavior are pretty stark. I really do believe it is one of the fundamental problems about this place.
I struggled with all of this for quite a while. However, it was the awkward words of a young Mormon that lead me to come to an acceptance of the way things are and my place within it.
This chance occurrence happened at the airport. This is apt because it always draws an eclectic crowd of people on the island and is about the only time you see locals and tourists in the same room. This particular day we were bidding farewell to Sam, an American volunteer. It was an emotional time; I told him to do his best jagger, he said we’ll catch up some time and drink red wine out of the bottle. At the same time, the Mormons were saying goodbye to one of their own. As everyone knows, you can spot a Mormon at a thousand paces, particularly a group of them (I wonder if there’s a collective noun for Mormons?) and they did not disappoint. All of them were dressed identically: white shirts, black ties, black pants and personalized nametags. My favourite part is a local addition to this uniform, where the faithful can choose between black leather shoes or black crocs. Now Chuuk being the ecumenical place it is we had virtually nothing to do with the Mormons. Readers of my earlier posts may remember my obliviousness to their existence for my early months, and my awareness of them has increased only marginally. They always travel in at least pairs, and they always drive very shiny cars. They never give lifts. Beyond this, however, I was blind to their presence on island.
It came as a surprise then to find that they were closer to home than I had thought. As both Sam and his Mormon travelling companion went through check-in, a young Maori in the party came and sat by the ragtag mob of Xavier volunteers that had come to say goodbye. He began striking up a conversation with Tom, my fellow Australian. Turns out they had met at the Sapuk Elementary graduation. Turns out he was twenty years old. Turns out he was from New Zealand. This is a pretty big deal. I can name Peace Corp volunteers I have never met on islands that take days to reach on a boat. But here was someone from the country next door, who was the closest non-student in age to me apart from the two other gappies and who was living in the same village as me.
And he was nice. The conversation was pleasant indeed. He compared Tom’s looks to the lead singer of Evermore. We discussed the strange relationship between New Zealand and Australia. We talked about the island itself. I decided to ask him what he was doing on the island. His response was that he was here preaching the gospel, which I really should have seen coming but figured that if he had travelled this far to do that at least he’s devoted to the task. He asked me the same question and I told him I was teaching. He asked if I had anyone with me to translate, I said no. He asked where ,and I told him St Cecilias.
He gave a slight look away and in an absurdly casual tone, asked me, “So do you get to church much?”
Half in shock, I gave Tom and Lydia (neither of whom are of the religious bent) and he seemed to pick up on that.
“So you’re not a Christian.”
“Well that’s a complex question.” I said in an attempt to be diplomatic.
“You’re not a Christian but you teach at a Christian school?”
It was at about this point where the conversation, which I had been rather enjoying, went into a steep decline. I acknowledged that this was ironic but that I was comfortable with the arrangement. Had I been in a slightly less forgiving mood, I might have rushed into a bout of self-righteousness, comparing my attempts to genuinely help the Chuukese to his bible-bashing. But it wasn’t the right time or place, and it wouldn’t have achieved anything in the long run. He quickly peeled off and rejoined his throng of Mormons. They all looked incredibly happy, even as one of their own walked past the security guards and into the purgatorial waiting area next to the tarmac. As we left I said goodbye. I invited him up for a meal sometime, though it’s probably unlikely he’ll take me up on that.
The odd thing is, walking away from the airport, I felt more comfortable not being a Christian here than I have since I arrived. So if you’re out there, my Mormon friend, thank you.
Compare this to the one in the Holy Family church, one of the largest on the island. First of all, it is gigantic, taking up the entire wall of the church. Secondly, Jesus looks like he’s having a grand old time up there. He’s fully clothed, has excellent posture and generally looks pretty pleased with himself. There is no evidence that he is suffering one of the most excruciating forms of execution ever devised. I can think of no better introduction to the manner of faith on the island than this.
The community I am surrounded by is overwhelmingly Catholic. I have no problem with this. Catholics have always deserved my respect, and ones such as these who travel halfway across the world to help people even more so. This is, however, an abrupt change from my home life where I was exposed to about one religious person for every two non-religious people, and none of them were particularly over-zealous about it. Between the Jesuit Volunteers, Jesuits in training and people from countries with high rates of practicing Catholicism such as the Phillipines, we non-Catholics are firmly in the minority. As comfortable as I am with that, there also an unspoken desire for us not to openly practice or lack-of-faith and to particularly avoid teaching anything that openly criticizes Church doctrine. Having gone to a high school where even the priests discussed their issues with Christianity and atheist teachers were out and proud, this seemed strange.
However, when placed in the context of the society the school operates in this comes as no surprise. It’s not that being non-religious is frowned upon, it is simply that it is not comprehensible. Walking across the oval with a Xavier student (a group that represents some of the most intelligent and Westernized people on island) I was asked in a scandalous tone, “Is it true that some teachers are… atheists?” One might have been mistaken for him asking me whether we hid dead bodies in the teacher’s lounge. I looked at the kid, remembering that I was a card-carrying atheist at his age, and told him that we had weekly Wiccan sacrifices and that he was more than welcome to join.
My most intimate view of Chuukese society, my students, have revealed some of the truly bizarre manifestations of this. For example, the ability for religion to turn up in topics for which it has no relevance amazes me. One of my favourite examples was in a comprehension test about an extract describing the Californian Gold Rush. The question was, ‘Why do you think this article compares the lucky and unlucky stories of miners?’
“Because the good thing they were lucky to find gold. Unlucky some don’t find gold and they think too much about money but they don’t think of going to church and if they die they will go to hell. They are happy in earth but when they die they are sad in hell.”
And this student is by no means the least intelligent or most conspicuously religious I teach. Another time was when I took remedial reading for the seventh grade. The students were, on the whole, not great in their behavior. That was until my second week of it when I discovered that they paid much more attention when I made them read books about Jesus. After that, I came to school every day armed with children’s bibles and religious education texts. Their favourite, which couldn’t really be described as a page-turner, was a book of saints subtitled ‘Superheroes of God’. After going through every saint in the book whose adventures simply weren’t nearly as captivating as the stories of my childhood, I asked what sort of books they wanted to read next. I suggested the categories that had fascinated me as a kid: space, adventure, history, science. These were met with a decidedly dull reception. My Jesuit co-teacher, Brother Patrick, who had supplied all of my religious books and was quite enamoured of ‘Superheroes of God’, suggested, “What about books about Jesus?” The response was rapturous. More books about Jesus was exactly what the doctor had ordered it seemed. It should be noted that these are probably the same kids who draw swastikas on the teacher’s desk in permanent marker.
This irony is telling. It is arguable that they view the crosses that they draw elaborately in my class in the same manner they view the desk swastikas. They are both powerful symbols and are hence worthy of expression, but they are clueless as to what their meanings are. This complete lack of critical thought can easily be dismissed as some self-important non-Christian’s intensely biased view on the whole matter, but it was a strongly Catholic teacher who suggested it to me. And when one of your 8th Grade students at a Catholic school asks you what the definition of a Christian is, there is generally something seriously wrong.
This inability to view faith in a critical sense explains some of the eccentricities of the local brand of Catholicism. It explains the ‘Jesus-having-a-dandy-ol’-time’ crucifix. It explains the fact that my students cannot get their head around the idea of a non-Christian perspective on a passage about Easter. It explains the many devotional pictures of Caucasian Jesus. A Peace Corp I talked with even suggested that the state’s political apathy is a side effect. Yet again this can easily be dismissed as one of those ‘religion-is-responsible-for-everything-evil’ arguments that Dawkins and his crowd are rather fond of, but the patterns in behavior are pretty stark. I really do believe it is one of the fundamental problems about this place.
I struggled with all of this for quite a while. However, it was the awkward words of a young Mormon that lead me to come to an acceptance of the way things are and my place within it.
This chance occurrence happened at the airport. This is apt because it always draws an eclectic crowd of people on the island and is about the only time you see locals and tourists in the same room. This particular day we were bidding farewell to Sam, an American volunteer. It was an emotional time; I told him to do his best jagger, he said we’ll catch up some time and drink red wine out of the bottle. At the same time, the Mormons were saying goodbye to one of their own. As everyone knows, you can spot a Mormon at a thousand paces, particularly a group of them (I wonder if there’s a collective noun for Mormons?) and they did not disappoint. All of them were dressed identically: white shirts, black ties, black pants and personalized nametags. My favourite part is a local addition to this uniform, where the faithful can choose between black leather shoes or black crocs. Now Chuuk being the ecumenical place it is we had virtually nothing to do with the Mormons. Readers of my earlier posts may remember my obliviousness to their existence for my early months, and my awareness of them has increased only marginally. They always travel in at least pairs, and they always drive very shiny cars. They never give lifts. Beyond this, however, I was blind to their presence on island.
It came as a surprise then to find that they were closer to home than I had thought. As both Sam and his Mormon travelling companion went through check-in, a young Maori in the party came and sat by the ragtag mob of Xavier volunteers that had come to say goodbye. He began striking up a conversation with Tom, my fellow Australian. Turns out they had met at the Sapuk Elementary graduation. Turns out he was twenty years old. Turns out he was from New Zealand. This is a pretty big deal. I can name Peace Corp volunteers I have never met on islands that take days to reach on a boat. But here was someone from the country next door, who was the closest non-student in age to me apart from the two other gappies and who was living in the same village as me.
And he was nice. The conversation was pleasant indeed. He compared Tom’s looks to the lead singer of Evermore. We discussed the strange relationship between New Zealand and Australia. We talked about the island itself. I decided to ask him what he was doing on the island. His response was that he was here preaching the gospel, which I really should have seen coming but figured that if he had travelled this far to do that at least he’s devoted to the task. He asked me the same question and I told him I was teaching. He asked if I had anyone with me to translate, I said no. He asked where ,and I told him St Cecilias.
He gave a slight look away and in an absurdly casual tone, asked me, “So do you get to church much?”
Half in shock, I gave Tom and Lydia (neither of whom are of the religious bent) and he seemed to pick up on that.
“So you’re not a Christian.”
“Well that’s a complex question.” I said in an attempt to be diplomatic.
“You’re not a Christian but you teach at a Christian school?”
It was at about this point where the conversation, which I had been rather enjoying, went into a steep decline. I acknowledged that this was ironic but that I was comfortable with the arrangement. Had I been in a slightly less forgiving mood, I might have rushed into a bout of self-righteousness, comparing my attempts to genuinely help the Chuukese to his bible-bashing. But it wasn’t the right time or place, and it wouldn’t have achieved anything in the long run. He quickly peeled off and rejoined his throng of Mormons. They all looked incredibly happy, even as one of their own walked past the security guards and into the purgatorial waiting area next to the tarmac. As we left I said goodbye. I invited him up for a meal sometime, though it’s probably unlikely he’ll take me up on that.
The odd thing is, walking away from the airport, I felt more comfortable not being a Christian here than I have since I arrived. So if you’re out there, my Mormon friend, thank you.
Monday, June 7, 2010
The Finer Pont of the Language Barrier
Every day, no matter what amount of activity or inactivity that day involves, I am confronted with the fact that English is not the principle language of this island. I can talk to as many Americans and as many fluent Chuukese people as I like, but ultimately the language barrier pervades my lifestyle here. This was something I prepared for upon arrival, I had been to foreign countries before and even stayed in the houses of people who barely spoke English; it wasn’t until being here that I began to notice more curious sides of the language barrier.
One such element is the way that scraps of another language, almost entirely remote from their original tongue, can be as effective, if not more effective, than fluent language. This is highlighted every day on two levels for me on my walk home from St Cecilia’s. The first is a group of kids around the village of Peddia (as mentioned in my last post). Everyday these kids play on the road and everyday they greet me as I walk home from school with a hearty ‘good morning’. When I was still in high school, I often used good morning at odd times of the day for comical effect. These kids, however, do not. They genuinely are wishing me a good morning at four o’clock in the afternoon. I often give them back a carefully pronounced ‘necurier annim’ which in English means ‘good time-around-three-or-four-o’clock’. Then the next day, they will greet me with a hearty ‘good morning’. I figured it is an act of courtesy. It doesn’t matter that the white guy knows enough Chuukese to greet us. We hear Chuukese greetings all the time. We’ll give the white guy a greeting in his own language; maybe he’ll respect us for it. I like to think I do.
This, as all things to do with the language barrier, goes both ways. Whenever I am on the walk home, people will always ask me questions in Chuukese. A Xavier staff member once explained it to me like this. “You are a white guy who is not in a car. You are therefore an object of curiousity.” Unfortunately, my Chuukese is so limited that I generally have no idea what they are talking about. People invariably have told me on many occasions various terms such as ‘where are you going’ or ‘I don’t understand’ that I could recognise or use. However, my mind never retains them. Instead, my response to all questions from the local people is to point up the road and say ‘Xavier’. At this point they always respond with an ‘aaaah’ and a nodding of the head. I figured that this answered the majority of the questions they could of asked; where I am going, where I live, why I am dressed so funny. And even if it does not answer their question it explains why I can barely speak Chuukese. The consistency with which this answer has satisfied countless questions in another tongue is a mathematical marvel.
***
Another thing that I have discovered is that the English language is so complex that even for fluent speakers there are still aspects of it that are only truly accessible to native speakers. Teaching a class where the majority of kids are fluent English speakers has allowed me to view this element first hand. Sometimes this appears in the way kids frame a particular phrase. But the most curious is when it shows up during the handling of areas of our language considered taboo. This was highlighted during one particular lunchtime spent in the company of Caroline, an American teacher, and Mary Helen, one of my students. Mary Helen speaks English as well as I do. She can impersonate my accent better than any of the Americans on island. However, this particular lunch she casually turned to another classmate and with the lightest possible intonation called him a particularly derogative term for a homosexual man beginning with the letter f. The only people in the room who seemed to register the gravity of the word were Caroline and I. The eight graders seemed surprised at our response. We tried to explain that it is an extremely offensive term and that it should be abstained from on all occasions. Her reply was simple and blunt:
“In Chuuk, it’s not a bad word at all.”
Another of these incidences occurred in an essay by one of my students on the topic of whether foreigners were good for Chuuk. During my study skills lessons we had drawn up a basic map of the topic, a couple of possible points and a crash course in essay structure. Whilst in order to pass only a paragraph with three arguments and an opinion was needed, the higher end of these essays had well constructed essays with a strong structure and an attempt at explaining their points, not simply listing them. The majority of these essays ran along simple lines, saying either that they were good or bad and following a similar line of argument that either involved Christianity for the good and drugs for the bad. A couple attempted to merge these arguments into a ‘both equally good and bad’ line of reason and was done quite well. But nothing compares to the bizarre and compelling viewpoint presented by an unusually bright student named Jonvan.
Jonvan is one of those students who knows that he is too smart for the school he’s in. He’ll come to Xavier next year and be challenged academically for the first time in his life, but during his time at Cecilia’s his extraordinary intellect manifested itself in bizarre ways, from the self destructive to the overly affectionate (interrupting my class by shouting ‘I love you Mr Joe). So when he handed his essay in and explained that he had used arguments he learnt in study skills class, I should have braced myself for something interesting. What resulted was an opinion that was so left field, yet so incredibly clever that it took my breath away. Jonvan’s argument was essentially that the foreigners that came to Chuuk ultimately were driven by a need to dominate in all aspects of their occupation. In five small paragraphs and two handwritten, A4 pages, my eighth grader had produced an interpretation of Micronesian history better than any I had heard.
However controversy abounded in a particular paragraph about the early colonists treatment of Chuukese women. It showed this theme of dominance in a sexual light. That’s pretty delicate material for an eighth grader and on all accounts it’s quite a valid point. It impressed me that he had chosen to grapple such a topic.
Unfortunately, in order to portray it, he used the ‘F’ word. Twice. My mind was immediately struck by the implications of using obscenities in essays (my Hamlet essay in year 12 sure would have been more interesting) and, more importantly, how I should mark it. If it was put in there gratuitously to stir a reaction, the kid deserved to be failed. But if he used it to describe the act and could not find a suitable euphemism, perhaps the term might even earn some merit. I consulted a few of the other Xavier faculty on the matter and their response was pretty consistent. Fail him. It was Sam who took the dissenting view. He put it better than anyone.
“It’s kind of rough, sure, but when you consider the way that Chuukese women were treated when the first Westerners came, there’s not really anything else you can use to describe it.”
So I ended up giving him an A. A low one at least, I wasn’t going to give him full marks even though his essay deserved it. I took him aside the next day at school. I asked him why he thought I wanted to talk to him. He looked completely bemused. I told him it was about his essay. He replied “Oh, did I fail or something?” I explained that no, he hadn’t.
“Then why am I here?”
“Jonvan, you used the F-word in your essay.”
“Oh yeah.”
“Jonvan, you can’t do that.”
“Yeah I know, but I was right wasn’t I?”
“Yes, Jonvan, you were right.”
***
The third way in which the language barrier appears in life here is in the moment where the language barrier is entirely transcended. These moments are rare but memorable. The best of these was the evening I was stranded downtown with Randy. It’s a fairly regular thing for us faculty folk to get a lift with the girls on the busses down to the rest of the island to pick up supplies. The bus then returns from its drop offs, picks up the staff and returns to Xavier. This has worked extremely well, except once. This exception occurred when Randy and I were told that pirated copies of a British TV show ‘Skins’ were at a particular shop next to the airport. We then told the driver to pick us up from the shop, and went about in search of our British TV show.
It was at around six-thirty while waiting out the front of the shop that alarm bells began to ring. With the realisation that at least the first bus to return had forgotten we began to wait by the road for the later busses. By the time it was dark, we realised that we had missed the bus. Readers of my last post may have picked up on the idea that Chuuk isn’t very safe after dark. It really isn’t. Cheap alcohol and high unemployment mean that we aren’t advised to be off the Xavier campus after dark. So, more than being stranded on the other side of the island, we also were in a pretty dangerous situation. Randy decided he would go back to the store and ask to use their phone. I was to wait to see if any late coming busses passed us. The distance between my vantage point and the store was no more than a hundred metres or so, and nobody was around. So, I was left on my own.
It was about two minutes into my solitude that I saw a shadow across the road. I convinced myself that it was imagination. However, as it began to move and eventually start crossing the road, my mind went from denial to worst-case-scenario. The annoying thing was that I was going to beaten up and Randy wasn’t going to be there. I think in a life threatening situation, the least you can ask for is a witness. There’s something strangely reassuring in a witness. I took a few deep breaths, closed my eyes for a second, and opened them to see a middle aged Chuukese man, who was now standing next to me.
“Nepong (good evening).”
“Nepong.”
(something in Chuukese)
“(with finger pointing up road) Xavier.”
“Ahhh.”
Randy returned, and after realising that the middle aged man wasn’t going to beat me pulp, used his more extensive knowledge of Chuukese to gather more information. His name was Iyam, a name I remembered because it sounded like Liam without an L. Randy somehow conveyed the idea of a bus, lateness and impressively, the idea of being forgotten. Iyam replied by inviting us over to his house for rice and fish. But the conversation soon ran dry, the extent of our cross-lingual knowledge could only last us ten minutes. But Iyam stayed and waited with us. Eventually, his son joined us. So did his best friend. By the time a car from Xavier arrived, the three of them had waited with two complete strangers who didn’t speak their language for two whole hours. Though they barely spoke to us for the whole two hours, it was the kindest gesture I have been showed in my time here.
Leaving the place we had waited for so long, I thought about the way that Iyam and his companions had picked up on such a basic human thing; two anxious white guys on the side of the road. And in their actions, the language barrier is forgotten. Nothing needs to be said. Just stand next to them. Moments like these make all the small, trivial aspects of the language barrier that I am exposed to every day look rather inconsequential.
One such element is the way that scraps of another language, almost entirely remote from their original tongue, can be as effective, if not more effective, than fluent language. This is highlighted every day on two levels for me on my walk home from St Cecilia’s. The first is a group of kids around the village of Peddia (as mentioned in my last post). Everyday these kids play on the road and everyday they greet me as I walk home from school with a hearty ‘good morning’. When I was still in high school, I often used good morning at odd times of the day for comical effect. These kids, however, do not. They genuinely are wishing me a good morning at four o’clock in the afternoon. I often give them back a carefully pronounced ‘necurier annim’ which in English means ‘good time-around-three-or-four-o’clock’. Then the next day, they will greet me with a hearty ‘good morning’. I figured it is an act of courtesy. It doesn’t matter that the white guy knows enough Chuukese to greet us. We hear Chuukese greetings all the time. We’ll give the white guy a greeting in his own language; maybe he’ll respect us for it. I like to think I do.
This, as all things to do with the language barrier, goes both ways. Whenever I am on the walk home, people will always ask me questions in Chuukese. A Xavier staff member once explained it to me like this. “You are a white guy who is not in a car. You are therefore an object of curiousity.” Unfortunately, my Chuukese is so limited that I generally have no idea what they are talking about. People invariably have told me on many occasions various terms such as ‘where are you going’ or ‘I don’t understand’ that I could recognise or use. However, my mind never retains them. Instead, my response to all questions from the local people is to point up the road and say ‘Xavier’. At this point they always respond with an ‘aaaah’ and a nodding of the head. I figured that this answered the majority of the questions they could of asked; where I am going, where I live, why I am dressed so funny. And even if it does not answer their question it explains why I can barely speak Chuukese. The consistency with which this answer has satisfied countless questions in another tongue is a mathematical marvel.
***
Another thing that I have discovered is that the English language is so complex that even for fluent speakers there are still aspects of it that are only truly accessible to native speakers. Teaching a class where the majority of kids are fluent English speakers has allowed me to view this element first hand. Sometimes this appears in the way kids frame a particular phrase. But the most curious is when it shows up during the handling of areas of our language considered taboo. This was highlighted during one particular lunchtime spent in the company of Caroline, an American teacher, and Mary Helen, one of my students. Mary Helen speaks English as well as I do. She can impersonate my accent better than any of the Americans on island. However, this particular lunch she casually turned to another classmate and with the lightest possible intonation called him a particularly derogative term for a homosexual man beginning with the letter f. The only people in the room who seemed to register the gravity of the word were Caroline and I. The eight graders seemed surprised at our response. We tried to explain that it is an extremely offensive term and that it should be abstained from on all occasions. Her reply was simple and blunt:
“In Chuuk, it’s not a bad word at all.”
Another of these incidences occurred in an essay by one of my students on the topic of whether foreigners were good for Chuuk. During my study skills lessons we had drawn up a basic map of the topic, a couple of possible points and a crash course in essay structure. Whilst in order to pass only a paragraph with three arguments and an opinion was needed, the higher end of these essays had well constructed essays with a strong structure and an attempt at explaining their points, not simply listing them. The majority of these essays ran along simple lines, saying either that they were good or bad and following a similar line of argument that either involved Christianity for the good and drugs for the bad. A couple attempted to merge these arguments into a ‘both equally good and bad’ line of reason and was done quite well. But nothing compares to the bizarre and compelling viewpoint presented by an unusually bright student named Jonvan.
Jonvan is one of those students who knows that he is too smart for the school he’s in. He’ll come to Xavier next year and be challenged academically for the first time in his life, but during his time at Cecilia’s his extraordinary intellect manifested itself in bizarre ways, from the self destructive to the overly affectionate (interrupting my class by shouting ‘I love you Mr Joe). So when he handed his essay in and explained that he had used arguments he learnt in study skills class, I should have braced myself for something interesting. What resulted was an opinion that was so left field, yet so incredibly clever that it took my breath away. Jonvan’s argument was essentially that the foreigners that came to Chuuk ultimately were driven by a need to dominate in all aspects of their occupation. In five small paragraphs and two handwritten, A4 pages, my eighth grader had produced an interpretation of Micronesian history better than any I had heard.
However controversy abounded in a particular paragraph about the early colonists treatment of Chuukese women. It showed this theme of dominance in a sexual light. That’s pretty delicate material for an eighth grader and on all accounts it’s quite a valid point. It impressed me that he had chosen to grapple such a topic.
Unfortunately, in order to portray it, he used the ‘F’ word. Twice. My mind was immediately struck by the implications of using obscenities in essays (my Hamlet essay in year 12 sure would have been more interesting) and, more importantly, how I should mark it. If it was put in there gratuitously to stir a reaction, the kid deserved to be failed. But if he used it to describe the act and could not find a suitable euphemism, perhaps the term might even earn some merit. I consulted a few of the other Xavier faculty on the matter and their response was pretty consistent. Fail him. It was Sam who took the dissenting view. He put it better than anyone.
“It’s kind of rough, sure, but when you consider the way that Chuukese women were treated when the first Westerners came, there’s not really anything else you can use to describe it.”
So I ended up giving him an A. A low one at least, I wasn’t going to give him full marks even though his essay deserved it. I took him aside the next day at school. I asked him why he thought I wanted to talk to him. He looked completely bemused. I told him it was about his essay. He replied “Oh, did I fail or something?” I explained that no, he hadn’t.
“Then why am I here?”
“Jonvan, you used the F-word in your essay.”
“Oh yeah.”
“Jonvan, you can’t do that.”
“Yeah I know, but I was right wasn’t I?”
“Yes, Jonvan, you were right.”
***
The third way in which the language barrier appears in life here is in the moment where the language barrier is entirely transcended. These moments are rare but memorable. The best of these was the evening I was stranded downtown with Randy. It’s a fairly regular thing for us faculty folk to get a lift with the girls on the busses down to the rest of the island to pick up supplies. The bus then returns from its drop offs, picks up the staff and returns to Xavier. This has worked extremely well, except once. This exception occurred when Randy and I were told that pirated copies of a British TV show ‘Skins’ were at a particular shop next to the airport. We then told the driver to pick us up from the shop, and went about in search of our British TV show.
It was at around six-thirty while waiting out the front of the shop that alarm bells began to ring. With the realisation that at least the first bus to return had forgotten we began to wait by the road for the later busses. By the time it was dark, we realised that we had missed the bus. Readers of my last post may have picked up on the idea that Chuuk isn’t very safe after dark. It really isn’t. Cheap alcohol and high unemployment mean that we aren’t advised to be off the Xavier campus after dark. So, more than being stranded on the other side of the island, we also were in a pretty dangerous situation. Randy decided he would go back to the store and ask to use their phone. I was to wait to see if any late coming busses passed us. The distance between my vantage point and the store was no more than a hundred metres or so, and nobody was around. So, I was left on my own.
It was about two minutes into my solitude that I saw a shadow across the road. I convinced myself that it was imagination. However, as it began to move and eventually start crossing the road, my mind went from denial to worst-case-scenario. The annoying thing was that I was going to beaten up and Randy wasn’t going to be there. I think in a life threatening situation, the least you can ask for is a witness. There’s something strangely reassuring in a witness. I took a few deep breaths, closed my eyes for a second, and opened them to see a middle aged Chuukese man, who was now standing next to me.
“Nepong (good evening).”
“Nepong.”
(something in Chuukese)
“(with finger pointing up road) Xavier.”
“Ahhh.”
Randy returned, and after realising that the middle aged man wasn’t going to beat me pulp, used his more extensive knowledge of Chuukese to gather more information. His name was Iyam, a name I remembered because it sounded like Liam without an L. Randy somehow conveyed the idea of a bus, lateness and impressively, the idea of being forgotten. Iyam replied by inviting us over to his house for rice and fish. But the conversation soon ran dry, the extent of our cross-lingual knowledge could only last us ten minutes. But Iyam stayed and waited with us. Eventually, his son joined us. So did his best friend. By the time a car from Xavier arrived, the three of them had waited with two complete strangers who didn’t speak their language for two whole hours. Though they barely spoke to us for the whole two hours, it was the kindest gesture I have been showed in my time here.
Leaving the place we had waited for so long, I thought about the way that Iyam and his companions had picked up on such a basic human thing; two anxious white guys on the side of the road. And in their actions, the language barrier is forgotten. Nothing needs to be said. Just stand next to them. Moments like these make all the small, trivial aspects of the language barrier that I am exposed to every day look rather inconsequential.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
The Truck Ride
I have always felt that when experiencing a place, the mode of transportation is equally important as the place itself. For example, to experience Sydney the most effective mode of transportation is the trains. It is the harbor that strikes you as you burst out of the underground tunnels of Wynyard that I am mildly homesick for.
In Chuuk, this form is the flatbed truck. With its absence of public transport and affinity for unnecessary fuel consumption, the island seems to revolve around the passage of these machines. The island’s economy (if it can be granted such a term) is completely dependent on it, but even more curiously is their role in the social life of its citizens. If one considers the number of people in flatbeds at any given time compared to the number of people on the island who actually need to go anywhere, one gets the impression that many of the passengers simply ride on the back of the truck to remind themselves that the other sections of the island are still there.
My daily commute back from Cecilia’s has made me particularly enamored of the flatbed lift. Originally, due to a combination of Ivan Milat and a vague knowledge of drunken Chuukese violence, I only accepted lifts from English speakers without handlebar moustaches. However, both fatigue and the local dogs led to relaxing such standards. They currently stand at ‘sober and non-threatening’. Even these less stringent terms have been applied creatively on the occasion.
The flatbed allows you an open air feel for the place. It is a view that allows you to admire the eccentricities of the buildings whilst fast enough to deny you the opportunity to ponder their structural integrity. The added bonus is the company, which, whilst wildly varying, generally does not speak English but remains strangely comfortable of this arrangement. On top of this, of course, is that it is fun. The shoddy roads are not nearly as nauseating as being in a closed vehicle and the feeling of wind through hair can be liberating after a tough days teaching. Best of all is the rain, to which you are completely and utterly defenceless and are thus led to an odd acceptance of your saturation. Overall, it’s a bit of a thrill ride.
But for all the wonderful things you see along the side of those metal rafters, nature demands that you are exposed to its wild negatives in almost equal parts.
By far the most eventful truck ride in my two months here has been the return from the inter-school athletics carnival. The carnival itself was, in true Chuukese style, bizarre. The competition included such events as coconut husking and basket weaving, but it was eclipsed by the crowd that came to watch. IT was gigantic. Considering that this meet is the closest thing to a regular sporting event on the island, the numbers attending are mind-boggling. Even the Chuukese police force, whose underwhelming policing methods deserve their own article, made an appearance on the pretence of crowd control. It’s the sort of non-threatening situation that they thrive on. To complement the size of the crowds was the style of cheering. It was enthusiastic, to put it gently. Whereas Western sporting events use rhythm and control to produce cheering (Aussie Aussie Aussie etc…) the Chuukese prefer to scream at the top of their lungs. Particularly animated were the women who run around the front of the crowd either dancing in an almost violent manner or smashing something on the ground, preferably somebody else’s umbrella, into small pieces. The most adept are able to do all of this at the same time.
Therefore, still in a state of slight culture shock, the day ended with me being bundled into a large red flatbed with a few staff and a multitude of Xavier boys. I soon learned that the truck’s distinctive colour was due to the incredible amount of rusting, which invariably ended up on my pants. And as the sun began to set on the Pacific, we began the trip back to the other side of the island.
The first notable instance was on the road that runs parallel to the airport runway. Roadworks has reduced the traffic to a sluggish pace at all times of the day but the flow from the athletics carnival exacerbated this. So, as we found ourselves filing along the lethargic road, we became aware of amazingly loud gangster rap behind us. The setting sun afforded us a glance at the source, another flatbed with a smattering of young-ish men with T-shirt’s on their heads (the height of fashion here) with their heads rising and falling in time with the music.
The students, with a strong disposition for hip-hop (though this stuff wasn’t quite as pasteurized and auto-tuned as their preferred variety), began joining. A couple of heads nodded, a couple of hands waved in sync with the sub-woofer driven beats. When the occupants became aware of this, they gave a sudden expression of joy. Had you seen them, you would have judged that this group of teenage boys, the majority of which don’t speak Chuukese, joining in with their gangster rap was simply the best thing ever. I find it difficult to describe the sheer ecstasy of this moment, but it was exhilarating to watch. Oh the small and simple things.
The traffic flowed on, and the car to our rear turned away, much to their disappointment. Along the roads we plodded; a few recognizing the school and shouting out name, even offering a few war-cries. For the boys, who had experienced these war-cries for twelve hot hours straight, their response was understandably muted. The truck rolled on.
Further ahead, we heard shouting and screaming. This is certainly not uncommon and even with only two months exposure the extent to which I am desensitized to it startles me. Even on the Xavier campus such noises barely grant the batting of an eyelid. However these were of an exceptionally loud quality that defied even our trained ears. It took a good couple of minutes until the source of the shouts came into view. At last we turned a corner to see a large crowd of people. And within it two young women. The whole scene was filled with a frenetic jostling. But even considering the shouting, screaming and jostling does not adequately express the fury of this sight. There was a wildness to these two girls; hurling what I assumed were obscenities at each other in Chuukese. It took at least twelve people to restrain them. The scene was most effectively summed up by one of the Americans, Sam, who said bluntly:
“I hope that she puts that rock down.”
But on a flatbed, you maintain your distance. You are not directly confronted by the sights you see. You are only an observer. Perhaps this explains my affinity for them. As we passed a village called Mitchitin there was the familiar sight of a makeshift wall of palm fronds in front of a house. It signaled the ubiquitous sight of a Chuukese funeral. Two of my students sat among the scattered crowd in formal dresses. We went past the lake, past the school I teach at. The sky was darkening, twilight was approaching.
We drove into the village of Peddia. I pass it every day in my walks from Cecilias. It stretches around a bay of polluted water and ends with an unspectacular bridge across an even more polluted river. I looked out for a few of my students who live in it.
Before the bridge a crowd of drunken men loitered on the road. This corner generally bears such a crowd, and they dispersed awkwardly to avoid the truck. Crowds of drunks generally begin appearing at five, though individual drunks can roam at just about any imaginable hour. Their cans of cheap Filipino beer litter every street. As we turned into the bridge, one heavily intoxicated man remained in the center of the road. The truck slowed down and the man turned towards us. It was only then that I saw the contents of the man’s right hand. It was a pachinko.
The pachinko is a local weapon. However I fear that I may disappoint you in revealing that it is in reality, just a slingshot. It is not far removed, and possibly less complex, than the type wielded by Dennis the Menace and appropriated by Bart Simpson. However, they are just about the most dangerous thing on the island. If their darts hit a particularly weak spot in the body such as the temple or the throat, death is pretty instant. Otherwise it can cause huge injuries. These things are vicious. The fact that slingshots, for us associated with lighthearted childhood mischief, instills significantly more fear than the gigantic machetes carried by all the men is one of the many odd things about this place.
So, brandishing such a comically dangerous weapon, he turned to the truck, raised it to his eye level, and with enough time for a desperate cry of ‘duck’, fired straight at us. From my newly acquired vantage point face down in the tray of the truck, I could not see how the shot eventuated. However, another teacher’s cry of “Is anyone hurt?” yielded no results. When I sat up, I saw through the back window that the window was cracked from top to bottom. This didn’t seem to faze the driver. As twilight grew we began the gradual ascent up to Xavier.
That’s why I like seeing Chuuk on a flatbed. You are thrown into both its joys and its horrors doled out in an approximate equilibrium. You share the same air, the same rain and the same dust as these things. But they are mere observances. The truck goes on. And all going well, you are still on it.
In Chuuk, this form is the flatbed truck. With its absence of public transport and affinity for unnecessary fuel consumption, the island seems to revolve around the passage of these machines. The island’s economy (if it can be granted such a term) is completely dependent on it, but even more curiously is their role in the social life of its citizens. If one considers the number of people in flatbeds at any given time compared to the number of people on the island who actually need to go anywhere, one gets the impression that many of the passengers simply ride on the back of the truck to remind themselves that the other sections of the island are still there.
My daily commute back from Cecilia’s has made me particularly enamored of the flatbed lift. Originally, due to a combination of Ivan Milat and a vague knowledge of drunken Chuukese violence, I only accepted lifts from English speakers without handlebar moustaches. However, both fatigue and the local dogs led to relaxing such standards. They currently stand at ‘sober and non-threatening’. Even these less stringent terms have been applied creatively on the occasion.
The flatbed allows you an open air feel for the place. It is a view that allows you to admire the eccentricities of the buildings whilst fast enough to deny you the opportunity to ponder their structural integrity. The added bonus is the company, which, whilst wildly varying, generally does not speak English but remains strangely comfortable of this arrangement. On top of this, of course, is that it is fun. The shoddy roads are not nearly as nauseating as being in a closed vehicle and the feeling of wind through hair can be liberating after a tough days teaching. Best of all is the rain, to which you are completely and utterly defenceless and are thus led to an odd acceptance of your saturation. Overall, it’s a bit of a thrill ride.
But for all the wonderful things you see along the side of those metal rafters, nature demands that you are exposed to its wild negatives in almost equal parts.
By far the most eventful truck ride in my two months here has been the return from the inter-school athletics carnival. The carnival itself was, in true Chuukese style, bizarre. The competition included such events as coconut husking and basket weaving, but it was eclipsed by the crowd that came to watch. IT was gigantic. Considering that this meet is the closest thing to a regular sporting event on the island, the numbers attending are mind-boggling. Even the Chuukese police force, whose underwhelming policing methods deserve their own article, made an appearance on the pretence of crowd control. It’s the sort of non-threatening situation that they thrive on. To complement the size of the crowds was the style of cheering. It was enthusiastic, to put it gently. Whereas Western sporting events use rhythm and control to produce cheering (Aussie Aussie Aussie etc…) the Chuukese prefer to scream at the top of their lungs. Particularly animated were the women who run around the front of the crowd either dancing in an almost violent manner or smashing something on the ground, preferably somebody else’s umbrella, into small pieces. The most adept are able to do all of this at the same time.
Therefore, still in a state of slight culture shock, the day ended with me being bundled into a large red flatbed with a few staff and a multitude of Xavier boys. I soon learned that the truck’s distinctive colour was due to the incredible amount of rusting, which invariably ended up on my pants. And as the sun began to set on the Pacific, we began the trip back to the other side of the island.
The first notable instance was on the road that runs parallel to the airport runway. Roadworks has reduced the traffic to a sluggish pace at all times of the day but the flow from the athletics carnival exacerbated this. So, as we found ourselves filing along the lethargic road, we became aware of amazingly loud gangster rap behind us. The setting sun afforded us a glance at the source, another flatbed with a smattering of young-ish men with T-shirt’s on their heads (the height of fashion here) with their heads rising and falling in time with the music.
The students, with a strong disposition for hip-hop (though this stuff wasn’t quite as pasteurized and auto-tuned as their preferred variety), began joining. A couple of heads nodded, a couple of hands waved in sync with the sub-woofer driven beats. When the occupants became aware of this, they gave a sudden expression of joy. Had you seen them, you would have judged that this group of teenage boys, the majority of which don’t speak Chuukese, joining in with their gangster rap was simply the best thing ever. I find it difficult to describe the sheer ecstasy of this moment, but it was exhilarating to watch. Oh the small and simple things.
The traffic flowed on, and the car to our rear turned away, much to their disappointment. Along the roads we plodded; a few recognizing the school and shouting out name, even offering a few war-cries. For the boys, who had experienced these war-cries for twelve hot hours straight, their response was understandably muted. The truck rolled on.
Further ahead, we heard shouting and screaming. This is certainly not uncommon and even with only two months exposure the extent to which I am desensitized to it startles me. Even on the Xavier campus such noises barely grant the batting of an eyelid. However these were of an exceptionally loud quality that defied even our trained ears. It took a good couple of minutes until the source of the shouts came into view. At last we turned a corner to see a large crowd of people. And within it two young women. The whole scene was filled with a frenetic jostling. But even considering the shouting, screaming and jostling does not adequately express the fury of this sight. There was a wildness to these two girls; hurling what I assumed were obscenities at each other in Chuukese. It took at least twelve people to restrain them. The scene was most effectively summed up by one of the Americans, Sam, who said bluntly:
“I hope that she puts that rock down.”
But on a flatbed, you maintain your distance. You are not directly confronted by the sights you see. You are only an observer. Perhaps this explains my affinity for them. As we passed a village called Mitchitin there was the familiar sight of a makeshift wall of palm fronds in front of a house. It signaled the ubiquitous sight of a Chuukese funeral. Two of my students sat among the scattered crowd in formal dresses. We went past the lake, past the school I teach at. The sky was darkening, twilight was approaching.
We drove into the village of Peddia. I pass it every day in my walks from Cecilias. It stretches around a bay of polluted water and ends with an unspectacular bridge across an even more polluted river. I looked out for a few of my students who live in it.
Before the bridge a crowd of drunken men loitered on the road. This corner generally bears such a crowd, and they dispersed awkwardly to avoid the truck. Crowds of drunks generally begin appearing at five, though individual drunks can roam at just about any imaginable hour. Their cans of cheap Filipino beer litter every street. As we turned into the bridge, one heavily intoxicated man remained in the center of the road. The truck slowed down and the man turned towards us. It was only then that I saw the contents of the man’s right hand. It was a pachinko.
The pachinko is a local weapon. However I fear that I may disappoint you in revealing that it is in reality, just a slingshot. It is not far removed, and possibly less complex, than the type wielded by Dennis the Menace and appropriated by Bart Simpson. However, they are just about the most dangerous thing on the island. If their darts hit a particularly weak spot in the body such as the temple or the throat, death is pretty instant. Otherwise it can cause huge injuries. These things are vicious. The fact that slingshots, for us associated with lighthearted childhood mischief, instills significantly more fear than the gigantic machetes carried by all the men is one of the many odd things about this place.
So, brandishing such a comically dangerous weapon, he turned to the truck, raised it to his eye level, and with enough time for a desperate cry of ‘duck’, fired straight at us. From my newly acquired vantage point face down in the tray of the truck, I could not see how the shot eventuated. However, another teacher’s cry of “Is anyone hurt?” yielded no results. When I sat up, I saw through the back window that the window was cracked from top to bottom. This didn’t seem to faze the driver. As twilight grew we began the gradual ascent up to Xavier.
That’s why I like seeing Chuuk on a flatbed. You are thrown into both its joys and its horrors doled out in an approximate equilibrium. You share the same air, the same rain and the same dust as these things. But they are mere observances. The truck goes on. And all going well, you are still on it.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
The Resource Room
For two weeks now I have been working at a small school called St Cecilia’s co-teaching seventh and eighth grade reading and spelling with a Jesuit novice called Patrick. This has been wonderful, the kids make me laugh and they seem to listen to
me. And Patrick’s meticulous planning makes everything that goes on during those two periods remarkably smooth sailing. And with only a few falters such as my inability to give a convincing prayer at the start of class or work out how the faculty toilet flushes everything has been fine.
Complications occurred however on the matter of me teaching my own subjects. At one stage, I could of ended up teaching science. Considering that I had dropped Science at the beginning of year eleven and hadn’t really taken it seriously since year eight, I found this difficult to swallow. At another point I was going to take over Social Studies, much more favourable to my humanities flavoured taste; however the majority of the Social Studies course consisted of the history of Micronesia, of which I was certain the students would know more of than I do. I eventually ended up teaching a subject with the abstract title of ‘study skills’, which seems to defy description even of the people who teach it.
The one thing I was certain I was teaching was music. The first time I met Caroline, an American volunteer who teaches Maths at Cecilia’s, was on a sideline at a Cecilia’s vs Xavier soccer match. I was introduced as the new guy who was teaching there.
“Oh cool,” she said, “what can you teach?”
“I dunno,” I replied.
At this moment a long line of possibilities entered my head, from Ancient languages to basic psychoanalysis. It arrived, rather bluntly at a conclusion.
“Maybe music?”
It was an odd choice for me. There was no doubt I could teach it, I’d played instruments longer than I could remember and had helped teach my brother as well. But I had conflicting feelings about music since I knew what a treble clef was. I loved playing but loathed practising. I adored composing yet found theory about as enjoyable as removing my own pancreas. My music teachers were some of the best teachers I ever had, yet my time with music had also revealed a litany of eccentric weirdos who should be locked up, from my tyrannical Primary School bandmaster to the androgynous Nazis of the World Youth Day orchestra. I wasn’t sure I could teach a subject that I feel so conflicted about.
But I understood why I wanted to teach music on this island. The first Sunday mass up at Xavier blew my mind. The boys who lived in the dorm provided the music. There weren’t booklets of sheet music or pages of lyrics or even an overhead projector that I associate with mass music back home. Instead they sang the songs a cappella, breaking into three part harmonies with no directions whatsoever. Everyone on this island can sing and what’s more, can play my instrument of choice, the ukulele. They are all unbelievably musical, but they look completely lost at the sight of five-lined paper. Teaching music on this island was going to be the sort of opportunity I probably would not see again.
And so, with that moment of slight indecision, I ended up being the music teacher at St Cecilia’s. Of course, it still needed to be approved by the school, time was still needed to be made for me, and certain elements needed to be smoothed over. But by the beginning of last week it was settled that, at the start of the new quarter than began after Easter, I would teach eight grade music. And so I spent the week planning. And in order to plan, I had to actually find music.
I began by asking one of the nuns. I have had a life-long respect for nuns, they have an odd way of knowing exactly what is going on. It’s probably one of the perks of being married to the creator of the universe. I approached an old Chuukese nun who seemed to run a large proportion of the school’s affairs from a table in the teacher’s lounge. She opened up a room next to the teacher’s lounge that was dark and musty. As my eyes grew focussed to the light, I saw that the entire room was filled with books. It looked like the mother of all garage sales. She propped the door open with a piece of wood to let the light in and left me to my own devices.
It became clear to me that the entire contents of the room were donated to the school. Some of these boxes were even marked by the group that donated them, mostly community groups or other schools in America. It was very clear from the outset, however, that most of these donations were a failed venture. Whilst there were some extremely useful looking piles of textbooks the majority were clearly donated without any sense that these books were destined for a small Elementary and Middle school in the middle of the Pacific. As I looked further and further, I started to develop a list of favourites in my mind. They included...
> How to Program Your Atari Computer (circa 1980)
> How to Make Money in Local Real Estate
> The History of the American Negro (circa 1970)
> The Christian Approach to Sexual Education (circa 1972)
> A variety of ‘shock fiction’ novels from the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s (with tag-lines such as ‘I am your regular all-American girl next door, addicted to alcohol at seventeen’)
And my personal favourite, a music teaching program on vinyl records.
Despite spending a day foraging in the twilight of that room, I was only gifted with a series of music textbooks for a program clearly designed to get children to hate the subject of music. I spent the next day working through the music shelf in the library. The contents of the shelf were...
> SEVEN books of hymns
> One book of nursery rhymes (circa 1962)
> One outdated music textbook (circa 1973)
> One biography of David Bowie
I made a bet with myself that I would go through all of the books and leave the Bowie biography as a treat at the end. I began with the music textbook from the seventies. I am afraid that you readers will never be able to appreciate the book in the flesh, but to give you an idea, think interracial preteens in matching sweaters representing time signatures. Oh yeah. The highlight was a double page collage of pictures entitled ‘The Music Teacher’ wherein a middle aged man with mutton chops in a suede suit and a paisley shirt undertook various activities with teenagers dressed in the fashion of the day in what was then considered music class. I showed Caroline this and said that this was exactly the kind of music teacher I wanted to be. She told me that while she would be impressed if I could grow the mutton chops, western culture had already messed up the island enough without tan suits and paisley shirts.
I only made it half-way through the first hymn book. It blew my mind. I had previously believed that Anglicans had consistently the most boring hymns of all the Christian churches. The Anglican hymnbook is nothing compared to the mind-numbing blandness of the Mormon Church’s hymns. If I had to endure that once a week I would demand multiple wives. I gave up on the book of nursery rhymes when I realised that a song entitled ‘America’ had directly stolen its tune from ‘God Save the Queen’ (the anthem not the Sex Pistols song). I was so disgusted that I refused to read it any more. I spent the rest of the day reading the David Bowie biography to make myself feel better.
The third day called for the final frontier. It was a room next to the library, they called it the Resource Room. It was perhaps more aptly described as the ‘dump everything that looks vaguely useful’ room. I asked the nun for the key. She handed it to me, looked me in the eye and said simply, “Good Luck”
Oh how I looked.
I looked until it hurt to look anymore.
I levelled mountains of miscellaneous textbooks. I searched caverns of teacher’s guides to every possible form of mathematics humanity is yet to discover. I saw the word literacy so many times I felt unwell. At last, my eyes fell upon a box, the binding was fading. It read...
Music...
Of the Church of the Latter-Day Saints.
“Bloody Mormons” I shouted to myself, “there aren’t even any of you on this island anyway.”
And I collapsed in frustration behind a pyramid if textbooks.
I woke up at lunchtime. It’s actually quite hard to tell when it’s lunchtime because the younger years seem to run around playing no matter what time of day it is. But
when I spotted my eighth graders outside I knew for certain that it was. I gained my composure and walked across the room to the door, preparing to spend a good half an hour eating a peanut butter sandwich, talking to a couple of students and generally feeling sorry for myself. I turned the knob, pressed against the door, and realised to my upmost dismay that I had been padlocked inside the resource room.
My first thought was “who would actually want to padlock this room? What are they afraid of? Are the Mormons going to come and steal back their mass books? Is there anybody on this island who would actually want to read about basic algebra so badly that they would steal from a school?” After this series of rhetorical questions passed my mind, I then realised, with a touch of horror that I could actually be here for a very long time. I had not seen anyone else enter the room the entire time I have been working at the school. If there was any form of campus security then that was the first I knew about it. I wasn’t even sure if I was going to spend only one day before anyone would check the room, I would have to rely on someone noticing me missing and I had only been on the island for two weeks, that wasn’t exactly guaranteed.
Rather than resigning myself to this fate, I went up to the window to see which of my students I could possibly contact to get me out of here. Outside I noticed a particularly amiable eighth grader named Ratul. Ratul was a plump little guy with an odd haircut and a stupid smile that never seemed to leave his face. He said “yeah man” in an almost identical manner to a friend of mine from high school and we’d already created a secret handshake. I decided he was a pretty safe bet to get help.
“Hey Ratul!” I shouted a little bit pathetically out the window.
“Mr Joe? ”
“Hey Ratul, I’m stuck in the resource room. Go tell Ms Caroline I’m here.”
“Yeah man.”
Ratul ran off, presumably to find Ms Caroline. I waited several minutes to be rescued, but there was no sign of either of them. I later found out that this delay was due to my accent, for what Ratul had heard was “Her Ratul, I’m stuck in the resource room, DON’T tell Ms Caroline I’m here.” He ran off, quite happy to follow my orders but a little puzzled as to the bizarre variation of hide and seek we were playing. This, however, got me no closer to rescue.
It was Jerry, a local Chuukese teacher who also taught eighth grade that eventually found me. He was walking into the library when I pleaded to him. “Jerry, Jerry, I’m stuck, get me out.” Whilst about equally bemused as Ratul before him, he pulled out his keys and gladly freed me from the educational Bastille I had been stuck in. And as I walked into the fresh smell of outside, I thanked him for his efforts and shelved my plans for a battering ram made out of Mormon hymnbooks. And I was a little more determined to teach music at St Cecilia’s.
me. And Patrick’s meticulous planning makes everything that goes on during those two periods remarkably smooth sailing. And with only a few falters such as my inability to give a convincing prayer at the start of class or work out how the faculty toilet flushes everything has been fine.
Complications occurred however on the matter of me teaching my own subjects. At one stage, I could of ended up teaching science. Considering that I had dropped Science at the beginning of year eleven and hadn’t really taken it seriously since year eight, I found this difficult to swallow. At another point I was going to take over Social Studies, much more favourable to my humanities flavoured taste; however the majority of the Social Studies course consisted of the history of Micronesia, of which I was certain the students would know more of than I do. I eventually ended up teaching a subject with the abstract title of ‘study skills’, which seems to defy description even of the people who teach it.
The one thing I was certain I was teaching was music. The first time I met Caroline, an American volunteer who teaches Maths at Cecilia’s, was on a sideline at a Cecilia’s vs Xavier soccer match. I was introduced as the new guy who was teaching there.
“Oh cool,” she said, “what can you teach?”
“I dunno,” I replied.
At this moment a long line of possibilities entered my head, from Ancient languages to basic psychoanalysis. It arrived, rather bluntly at a conclusion.
“Maybe music?”
It was an odd choice for me. There was no doubt I could teach it, I’d played instruments longer than I could remember and had helped teach my brother as well. But I had conflicting feelings about music since I knew what a treble clef was. I loved playing but loathed practising. I adored composing yet found theory about as enjoyable as removing my own pancreas. My music teachers were some of the best teachers I ever had, yet my time with music had also revealed a litany of eccentric weirdos who should be locked up, from my tyrannical Primary School bandmaster to the androgynous Nazis of the World Youth Day orchestra. I wasn’t sure I could teach a subject that I feel so conflicted about.
But I understood why I wanted to teach music on this island. The first Sunday mass up at Xavier blew my mind. The boys who lived in the dorm provided the music. There weren’t booklets of sheet music or pages of lyrics or even an overhead projector that I associate with mass music back home. Instead they sang the songs a cappella, breaking into three part harmonies with no directions whatsoever. Everyone on this island can sing and what’s more, can play my instrument of choice, the ukulele. They are all unbelievably musical, but they look completely lost at the sight of five-lined paper. Teaching music on this island was going to be the sort of opportunity I probably would not see again.
And so, with that moment of slight indecision, I ended up being the music teacher at St Cecilia’s. Of course, it still needed to be approved by the school, time was still needed to be made for me, and certain elements needed to be smoothed over. But by the beginning of last week it was settled that, at the start of the new quarter than began after Easter, I would teach eight grade music. And so I spent the week planning. And in order to plan, I had to actually find music.
I began by asking one of the nuns. I have had a life-long respect for nuns, they have an odd way of knowing exactly what is going on. It’s probably one of the perks of being married to the creator of the universe. I approached an old Chuukese nun who seemed to run a large proportion of the school’s affairs from a table in the teacher’s lounge. She opened up a room next to the teacher’s lounge that was dark and musty. As my eyes grew focussed to the light, I saw that the entire room was filled with books. It looked like the mother of all garage sales. She propped the door open with a piece of wood to let the light in and left me to my own devices.
It became clear to me that the entire contents of the room were donated to the school. Some of these boxes were even marked by the group that donated them, mostly community groups or other schools in America. It was very clear from the outset, however, that most of these donations were a failed venture. Whilst there were some extremely useful looking piles of textbooks the majority were clearly donated without any sense that these books were destined for a small Elementary and Middle school in the middle of the Pacific. As I looked further and further, I started to develop a list of favourites in my mind. They included...
> How to Program Your Atari Computer (circa 1980)
> How to Make Money in Local Real Estate
> The History of the American Negro (circa 1970)
> The Christian Approach to Sexual Education (circa 1972)
> A variety of ‘shock fiction’ novels from the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s (with tag-lines such as ‘I am your regular all-American girl next door, addicted to alcohol at seventeen’)
And my personal favourite, a music teaching program on vinyl records.
Despite spending a day foraging in the twilight of that room, I was only gifted with a series of music textbooks for a program clearly designed to get children to hate the subject of music. I spent the next day working through the music shelf in the library. The contents of the shelf were...
> SEVEN books of hymns
> One book of nursery rhymes (circa 1962)
> One outdated music textbook (circa 1973)
> One biography of David Bowie
I made a bet with myself that I would go through all of the books and leave the Bowie biography as a treat at the end. I began with the music textbook from the seventies. I am afraid that you readers will never be able to appreciate the book in the flesh, but to give you an idea, think interracial preteens in matching sweaters representing time signatures. Oh yeah. The highlight was a double page collage of pictures entitled ‘The Music Teacher’ wherein a middle aged man with mutton chops in a suede suit and a paisley shirt undertook various activities with teenagers dressed in the fashion of the day in what was then considered music class. I showed Caroline this and said that this was exactly the kind of music teacher I wanted to be. She told me that while she would be impressed if I could grow the mutton chops, western culture had already messed up the island enough without tan suits and paisley shirts.
I only made it half-way through the first hymn book. It blew my mind. I had previously believed that Anglicans had consistently the most boring hymns of all the Christian churches. The Anglican hymnbook is nothing compared to the mind-numbing blandness of the Mormon Church’s hymns. If I had to endure that once a week I would demand multiple wives. I gave up on the book of nursery rhymes when I realised that a song entitled ‘America’ had directly stolen its tune from ‘God Save the Queen’ (the anthem not the Sex Pistols song). I was so disgusted that I refused to read it any more. I spent the rest of the day reading the David Bowie biography to make myself feel better.
The third day called for the final frontier. It was a room next to the library, they called it the Resource Room. It was perhaps more aptly described as the ‘dump everything that looks vaguely useful’ room. I asked the nun for the key. She handed it to me, looked me in the eye and said simply, “Good Luck”
Oh how I looked.
I looked until it hurt to look anymore.
I levelled mountains of miscellaneous textbooks. I searched caverns of teacher’s guides to every possible form of mathematics humanity is yet to discover. I saw the word literacy so many times I felt unwell. At last, my eyes fell upon a box, the binding was fading. It read...
Music...
Of the Church of the Latter-Day Saints.
“Bloody Mormons” I shouted to myself, “there aren’t even any of you on this island anyway.”
And I collapsed in frustration behind a pyramid if textbooks.
I woke up at lunchtime. It’s actually quite hard to tell when it’s lunchtime because the younger years seem to run around playing no matter what time of day it is. But
when I spotted my eighth graders outside I knew for certain that it was. I gained my composure and walked across the room to the door, preparing to spend a good half an hour eating a peanut butter sandwich, talking to a couple of students and generally feeling sorry for myself. I turned the knob, pressed against the door, and realised to my upmost dismay that I had been padlocked inside the resource room.
My first thought was “who would actually want to padlock this room? What are they afraid of? Are the Mormons going to come and steal back their mass books? Is there anybody on this island who would actually want to read about basic algebra so badly that they would steal from a school?” After this series of rhetorical questions passed my mind, I then realised, with a touch of horror that I could actually be here for a very long time. I had not seen anyone else enter the room the entire time I have been working at the school. If there was any form of campus security then that was the first I knew about it. I wasn’t even sure if I was going to spend only one day before anyone would check the room, I would have to rely on someone noticing me missing and I had only been on the island for two weeks, that wasn’t exactly guaranteed.
Rather than resigning myself to this fate, I went up to the window to see which of my students I could possibly contact to get me out of here. Outside I noticed a particularly amiable eighth grader named Ratul. Ratul was a plump little guy with an odd haircut and a stupid smile that never seemed to leave his face. He said “yeah man” in an almost identical manner to a friend of mine from high school and we’d already created a secret handshake. I decided he was a pretty safe bet to get help.
“Hey Ratul!” I shouted a little bit pathetically out the window.
“Mr Joe? ”
“Hey Ratul, I’m stuck in the resource room. Go tell Ms Caroline I’m here.”
“Yeah man.”
Ratul ran off, presumably to find Ms Caroline. I waited several minutes to be rescued, but there was no sign of either of them. I later found out that this delay was due to my accent, for what Ratul had heard was “Her Ratul, I’m stuck in the resource room, DON’T tell Ms Caroline I’m here.” He ran off, quite happy to follow my orders but a little puzzled as to the bizarre variation of hide and seek we were playing. This, however, got me no closer to rescue.
It was Jerry, a local Chuukese teacher who also taught eighth grade that eventually found me. He was walking into the library when I pleaded to him. “Jerry, Jerry, I’m stuck, get me out.” Whilst about equally bemused as Ratul before him, he pulled out his keys and gladly freed me from the educational Bastille I had been stuck in. And as I walked into the fresh smell of outside, I thanked him for his efforts and shelved my plans for a battering ram made out of Mormon hymnbooks. And I was a little more determined to teach music at St Cecilia’s.
Saturday, March 6, 2010
The Seven Year Itch
By far the greatest moment of my first week at Xavier was the moment I was given the keys to my office. This moment did not occur on the first day of my time here and in fact only occurred about four days in. It started with Father Martin’s entry into the faculty staff lounge. The faculty staff lounge, despite the term faculty staff lounge, is really just used by the American volunteers and us Australians. The Jesuits, bar one or two of the younger novices, rarely if ever make any appearances there. The Principal walking in meant that something big was about to happen.
At this stage, the occupants of the lounge were indulging in what seems to be the primary activity of the volunteers here, playing annoyingly simple games whilst waiting for the hideously slow internet to load. At the time, the game that was in vogue was called ‘Super Text Twist’, which involved forming as many words out of a certain sequence of letters as humanly possible. The fiery passion with which this was played had astounded me upon first arrival. Randy, my fellow Australian who hails from Riverview, had a particular aptness for the game and at the time of Martin’s arrival was furiously typing into the computer as the clock in the bottom right hand of the screen approached zero. When it did, Randy snapped back his head in disappointment and became immediately aware of Father Martin’s presence.
The priest held up a set of keys. Randy smiled, as if this entire conversation had progressed telepathically. He stood up immediately and looked at me. I had to come to. And wordlessly the three of us exited the lounge and began walking down the hall.
We walked into a section of the school that I had never entered before, where the walls seemed thicker and with no windows letting in any natural light. I later found out that when the power goes out (which is a daily occurrence) that this section of the school is pitch black, even in the middle of the day. The school is a converted Japanese signal station, and such quirks are rife throughout the building. It is, for interest’s sake, completely bombproof, a point highlighted as we walked through a metal door about as thick as I am. The priest stopped at an innocuous wooden door, turned to look at both of us, and inserted the oldest, brownest key into the doorknob. He smiled, and turned.
As he opened the door and watched our eyes widened, he simply said “Boys, your office.”
It was gigantic upon first sight, the white walls and green tiled floors seemed to extend into an absurd gargantuacity that reminded me of Alice in Wonderland. It was twice the size of any of the other volunteer’s offices, which we had envied while we had stuffed our work into the corners of the teacher’s lounge. It had a row of book cases, with one shelf full of missals but the rest empty for us to place our books that we had brought from home (between the two of us we have quite a considerable collection). There was a window overlooking the school’s lawn that bathed the whole office in beautiful natural light. And best of all, two antique desks in the far corner of the room. After a quick round of scissors, paper rock to decide who would get the larger one (Randy won) we sat back behind them and contemplated the satisfaction of calling this office ours.
We made plans immediately. There was a fridge, we would have drinks. There was enough room for dancing, we need a disco ball. If we could hook up a sound system... oh the possibilities. We told Sami, the chief partier of the faculty, about our new office.
“Ah yes, that was the party room.”
And with a strangely poetic look into the distance he followed up.
“The parties will return to that room.”
This was the high point of the week. The low point was what followed quite quickly as we returned to the faculty lounge to report back what we had seen. We described the size, the light, the parties, the location, everything. We were babbling almost incoherently. At this point Lydia, one of the Americans who taught literature (and had a passion for Sylvia Plath which gave TJ and I no end of pleasure) turned to us and broke our poor little hearts.
“Oh that room, I know that room, that’s the scabies room.”
Of all the things you don’t want your room to be called, the ‘scabies room’ must place around the bottom of that list.
“When a kid in the dorm had scabies we had to put him in isolation. And we put him in that room.
“Are scabies infectious?”
“Incredibly.”
This all seemed to convenient to be true. However, the Americans have a generally limited capacity in understanding straight-faced humour. Tom had reported to me that you have to go “Jokes” every time you employ sarcasm otherwise they just think you’re weird. I then asked Sam, a burly Math teacher who was also dorm moderator, about the room.
“Oh yeah, the scabies room. You should be alright though, Scabies is only infectious for up to four months.
“When was the kid in isolation?”
“December.”
After that, the room lost some of its shine. We worked there, but we didn’t move much stuff in.
I checked scabies on Wikipedia. It seems pretty nasty. The article told me that the symptoms of scabies (known as the seven year itch) take two to six weeks to show after infection. It then had a picture of a Norwegian AIDS patient with scabies that almost made me vomit.
So I guess I’ll just have to wait 2-6 weeks.
And I’ve switched to medicated soap.
At this stage, the occupants of the lounge were indulging in what seems to be the primary activity of the volunteers here, playing annoyingly simple games whilst waiting for the hideously slow internet to load. At the time, the game that was in vogue was called ‘Super Text Twist’, which involved forming as many words out of a certain sequence of letters as humanly possible. The fiery passion with which this was played had astounded me upon first arrival. Randy, my fellow Australian who hails from Riverview, had a particular aptness for the game and at the time of Martin’s arrival was furiously typing into the computer as the clock in the bottom right hand of the screen approached zero. When it did, Randy snapped back his head in disappointment and became immediately aware of Father Martin’s presence.
The priest held up a set of keys. Randy smiled, as if this entire conversation had progressed telepathically. He stood up immediately and looked at me. I had to come to. And wordlessly the three of us exited the lounge and began walking down the hall.
We walked into a section of the school that I had never entered before, where the walls seemed thicker and with no windows letting in any natural light. I later found out that when the power goes out (which is a daily occurrence) that this section of the school is pitch black, even in the middle of the day. The school is a converted Japanese signal station, and such quirks are rife throughout the building. It is, for interest’s sake, completely bombproof, a point highlighted as we walked through a metal door about as thick as I am. The priest stopped at an innocuous wooden door, turned to look at both of us, and inserted the oldest, brownest key into the doorknob. He smiled, and turned.
As he opened the door and watched our eyes widened, he simply said “Boys, your office.”
It was gigantic upon first sight, the white walls and green tiled floors seemed to extend into an absurd gargantuacity that reminded me of Alice in Wonderland. It was twice the size of any of the other volunteer’s offices, which we had envied while we had stuffed our work into the corners of the teacher’s lounge. It had a row of book cases, with one shelf full of missals but the rest empty for us to place our books that we had brought from home (between the two of us we have quite a considerable collection). There was a window overlooking the school’s lawn that bathed the whole office in beautiful natural light. And best of all, two antique desks in the far corner of the room. After a quick round of scissors, paper rock to decide who would get the larger one (Randy won) we sat back behind them and contemplated the satisfaction of calling this office ours.
We made plans immediately. There was a fridge, we would have drinks. There was enough room for dancing, we need a disco ball. If we could hook up a sound system... oh the possibilities. We told Sami, the chief partier of the faculty, about our new office.
“Ah yes, that was the party room.”
And with a strangely poetic look into the distance he followed up.
“The parties will return to that room.”
This was the high point of the week. The low point was what followed quite quickly as we returned to the faculty lounge to report back what we had seen. We described the size, the light, the parties, the location, everything. We were babbling almost incoherently. At this point Lydia, one of the Americans who taught literature (and had a passion for Sylvia Plath which gave TJ and I no end of pleasure) turned to us and broke our poor little hearts.
“Oh that room, I know that room, that’s the scabies room.”
Of all the things you don’t want your room to be called, the ‘scabies room’ must place around the bottom of that list.
“When a kid in the dorm had scabies we had to put him in isolation. And we put him in that room.
“Are scabies infectious?”
“Incredibly.”
This all seemed to convenient to be true. However, the Americans have a generally limited capacity in understanding straight-faced humour. Tom had reported to me that you have to go “Jokes” every time you employ sarcasm otherwise they just think you’re weird. I then asked Sam, a burly Math teacher who was also dorm moderator, about the room.
“Oh yeah, the scabies room. You should be alright though, Scabies is only infectious for up to four months.
“When was the kid in isolation?”
“December.”
After that, the room lost some of its shine. We worked there, but we didn’t move much stuff in.
I checked scabies on Wikipedia. It seems pretty nasty. The article told me that the symptoms of scabies (known as the seven year itch) take two to six weeks to show after infection. It then had a picture of a Norwegian AIDS patient with scabies that almost made me vomit.
So I guess I’ll just have to wait 2-6 weeks.
And I’ve switched to medicated soap.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
The Queue
It has been my experience that people don’t talk while queuing for an airport check-in. People have larger things to worry about; whether their passport has been copied by Israelis, whether they’ll get away with smuggling that koala, whether they’ll sit next to some idiot in a window seat who needs to pee or the time, whether the drug smuggling dogs bite, or whether their luggage is just slightly overweight, leaving them with the Sophie’s Choice between paying an exorbitant fine or the indignity of shoving clothing from one bag to the other in front of the entire terminal. All of these worries prevent conversation.
This preconception (formed from a minimal amount of overseas travel) was disproved today as I waited in the queue for a flight from Cairns to Guam. Two people stood in front of me, knowing each other clearly. One was an American, whose accent and demeanour was exemplary of the reasons people hate American tourists. The other was a middle aged Australian who clearly had more money than reason and a desperate need to convey this to the people around him. They were having an overly loud conversation ahead of me. I learnt information about their business dealings, about their trip in Australia. I was making careful note of these details just in case they were tax frauds and the police needed an affidavit from me. My preconception of Guam was a place where you were either in the witness protection program or a tax fraud. However, the conversation turned surreal when a third party was involved.
A third person. An Australian woman who lived in England. She didn’t know either of them. I stood in shock of this new development. Further still, the woman was behind me. Geographically, I was the centre of a conversation of a type that I previously considered was impossible. Realising this, I was slowly drawn in.
“And you, why are you going to Guam?” It was the American, he gave me a kind smile.
“It’s just a stopover for me.”
“Where are you going to?”
“Chuuk, Micronesia.”
“What are you doing there?”
“Teaching in a school.”
Normally, I would be compelled to give a much more interesting answer than the truth with strangers I’ve met in a queue. The people who processed my details in Sydney had all assumed I was in the military from the haircut administered from my uncle seven hours previously, I could run with that and say I was special ops, and that I could give no more details. But I was still in shock that people were talking to me, and I didn’t really have the figure to justify such a claim.
Furthermore, my imagination was in ‘switched off for safety reasons’ mode. The airport is the place where having a sense of humour is brutally prohibited. I had a dressing down from my mother before I went on this. “Don’t do it, Joe,” she had pleaded with me, “no good will come of it.” So during the entire process of going to Micronesia, I had strictly forbidden myself from having any fun whatsoever.
The hardest point in this process was filling in the visa to stop in Guam. On the form, the American Government asked me earnestly whether “between 1933 and 1945 were you involved, in any way, in persecutions associated with Nazi Germany or its allies?” I had to physically restrain myself from clicking yes. If they had asked me if I was ever a member of the Weather Underground I don’t think I would have had the same willpower.
Although my reply was not imaginative, it still warranted a response from a man ahead of the American. He was clearly a local.
“What school?”
“Xavier College”
“Ah, these two men are graduates.” The two men next to him nodded at me simultaneously. “So you go to Chuuk?”
“Yeah.”
“Dangerous place. You bring gun. That shuts kids up.”
And I think it is in this piece of advice that the terror and the sheer unknowing of this entire experience reveals itself. I decided not to try and sneak a gun past customs, I consider this a good idea. However I vowed that the next time I ran into wireless internet, I would at least read the Wikipedia article on kung-fu. Which I did.
Because you never know what might happen.
This preconception (formed from a minimal amount of overseas travel) was disproved today as I waited in the queue for a flight from Cairns to Guam. Two people stood in front of me, knowing each other clearly. One was an American, whose accent and demeanour was exemplary of the reasons people hate American tourists. The other was a middle aged Australian who clearly had more money than reason and a desperate need to convey this to the people around him. They were having an overly loud conversation ahead of me. I learnt information about their business dealings, about their trip in Australia. I was making careful note of these details just in case they were tax frauds and the police needed an affidavit from me. My preconception of Guam was a place where you were either in the witness protection program or a tax fraud. However, the conversation turned surreal when a third party was involved.
A third person. An Australian woman who lived in England. She didn’t know either of them. I stood in shock of this new development. Further still, the woman was behind me. Geographically, I was the centre of a conversation of a type that I previously considered was impossible. Realising this, I was slowly drawn in.
“And you, why are you going to Guam?” It was the American, he gave me a kind smile.
“It’s just a stopover for me.”
“Where are you going to?”
“Chuuk, Micronesia.”
“What are you doing there?”
“Teaching in a school.”
Normally, I would be compelled to give a much more interesting answer than the truth with strangers I’ve met in a queue. The people who processed my details in Sydney had all assumed I was in the military from the haircut administered from my uncle seven hours previously, I could run with that and say I was special ops, and that I could give no more details. But I was still in shock that people were talking to me, and I didn’t really have the figure to justify such a claim.
Furthermore, my imagination was in ‘switched off for safety reasons’ mode. The airport is the place where having a sense of humour is brutally prohibited. I had a dressing down from my mother before I went on this. “Don’t do it, Joe,” she had pleaded with me, “no good will come of it.” So during the entire process of going to Micronesia, I had strictly forbidden myself from having any fun whatsoever.
The hardest point in this process was filling in the visa to stop in Guam. On the form, the American Government asked me earnestly whether “between 1933 and 1945 were you involved, in any way, in persecutions associated with Nazi Germany or its allies?” I had to physically restrain myself from clicking yes. If they had asked me if I was ever a member of the Weather Underground I don’t think I would have had the same willpower.
Although my reply was not imaginative, it still warranted a response from a man ahead of the American. He was clearly a local.
“What school?”
“Xavier College”
“Ah, these two men are graduates.” The two men next to him nodded at me simultaneously. “So you go to Chuuk?”
“Yeah.”
“Dangerous place. You bring gun. That shuts kids up.”
And I think it is in this piece of advice that the terror and the sheer unknowing of this entire experience reveals itself. I decided not to try and sneak a gun past customs, I consider this a good idea. However I vowed that the next time I ran into wireless internet, I would at least read the Wikipedia article on kung-fu. Which I did.
Because you never know what might happen.
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