Not everyone wears pants

It has almost been one week since we moved into the dorm. The dorm is fairly similar to college dorms back home, probably a step down, but our living quarters are pretty nice by the local standards. I have my own air conditioned room and bathroom and share a common room and kitchen with about 9 other people.

While there are 9 bedrooms in the dorm, there are currently 10 people living here relatively permanently. But, in this country, things don’t always go as planned. The two airplanes of Air Marshall Islands are broken and some roomers say it may take up to 10 days for the planes to be fixed. This means that many of the volunteers going to outer islands are stuck here in Majuro with no place to stay and no idea of when they will be leaving. As a result, many of the stranded volunteers are moving into the dorm. The upcoming weeks will be interesting.

Because we live in the dorm (which is located on the high school, middle school and vocational school campus) we do not live in a neighborhood. However, our living quarters are located right next to one of the poorest parts of the country and maybe the poorest part of Majuro. In that neighborhood there are many children who are always playing outside all day long since school has not started yet. Yesterday Rachael (a stranded volunteer going to Jabut) and I decided to take chalk outside to draw on the pavement. Being the crazy ri-belle (the Marshallese word for American/white person—so this term doesn’t always apply to me, but I can pretend) that we are, all of the kids came running to see what we were up to. Being kids they are very interested in what we are doing. Being Marshallese none of them want to speak to us or participate in the drawing on the ground. The best we can do is hand them the colored chalk and they hold onto it for about a minute/minute and a half and they hand it back to us. After about 10 minutes of having little kids stare at us, one little girl decides to draw a line on the ground. As soon as we look and recognize what she did, she stands up and runs to the back of the group and hides. We go back to drawing on the ground and in about 5 minutes all the kids begin to draw and they all want to show us what they have drawn.

Well word must have traveled around the neighborhood that the crazy foreigners had come out to play because our group of kids had began to grow larger. There was one little boy in particular who came wearing a blue striped shirt and what appeared to be really, really, really short shorts—or I was hoping he was wearing short shorts or at the very least underwear. Well as it turns out, he didn’t have shorts or underwear and the other kids were making sure that we knew that he didn’t have any on. We told the kids ‘Jaab’ (the Marshallese word for ‘no’). They stopped, sorta…..

There are plenty of famous people who didn’t wear pants, most notably Donald Duck and…well I can’t think of anyone else who doesn’t wear pants. I guess that is just part of the reality of living in Marshall Islands. At least that little boy must be cool in this hot and humid weather. Sometimes it is just so hot here I wish I could walk around without any pants.