Short entry

Favorite sounds in the Marshall Islands:

- The noise made by geckos at night
- The ping sound of a fishing spear as it hits coral/rocks

Sound I hate in the Marshall Islands:

- The dripping of water from my air conditioner to the linoleum tiled floor

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I start school on Monday, September 3, 2007. I will be teaching 11th and 12th grade computers.

Thanks for all of the comments on my last blog post. I enjoyed reading all of them :)

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.

Jelter, End of Orientation, and Moving Into My New Home

This past week has been packed full of fun, entertainment and change.


On Wednesday and Thursday our group (plus the Dartmouth volunteers) went to an outer island called Jelter on the Majuro Atoll. This was a great experience—especially for the people living on Majuro—to get an outer island-like experience. We husked coconut, people wove plates and baskets out of palm fronds, and we went spear fishing during the day and at night. This opportunity gave me some insight on how people on outer islands live and eat. We ate canned corned beef and rice for lunch, a whole coral reefs worth of fish for dinner and even more fish and coconut crab for midnight snack. Think of the coral reef exhibit in an aquarium and how much each one of those fishes cost…I must have eaten many expensive fish.
Besides the many species of fish I was able to consume, the highlight of the trip was spear fishing. It gave me an opportunity to see many different types of sea creatures and the opportunity to try and bring back a snack…though I am still pretty bad at this activity.
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Friday was our last day of orientation. We arrived here 4 weeks ago and time has flown by. It does not feel like I have spent that much time here, which is probably a good thing since I still have many more months to go. To end orientation we had a dinner and talent show where about half of the volunteers participated. I do not have any talent show talents, so I did not participate (though, I was asked if I would MC the event and I politely declined). I am very impressed with all of the volunteers that in the program, and after seeing the talent show I was surprised at how many talented people we had among us. It was a night with laughs, music, and all around good fun.
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Also on Friday, some of us moved into our permanent housing into the teachers dorm on the Marshall Islands High School Campus (which also includes Majuro Middle School and NVTI—the school I will be teaching at). There are 10 teachers staying on the MIHS campus, but only 9 bedrooms in the dorm. There is a house about 500 feet from the dorm that was supposed to house one or two of the volunteers, however, the day before we were supposed to move in, some construction workers did something to the sewer line and the toilet in the house exploded. As a result there are 10 people living in the 9 bedroom dorm.
People living in the dorm: Me, Dan, Tim, Ben, Courtney, Amy, Mariko, Elizabeth, and Robbye. I will get a group picture of us up at some point so that you all can see.
In the Marshall Islands, nothing seems to go as planned or on schedule. (A little side note, last week the Ministry of Education officially decided that there will be no official start date of school this year). Currently the two airplanes of the Air Marshall Islands fleet are ‘broken’ and as a result, many of the volunteers going to outer islands are unable to leave Majuro. If they do not leave by next Friday, it is likely that many of them will be moving in with us at the dorm. This is good because we are not ready to see everyone leave yet, we won’t get to see our friends until December, or in some cases May, but also they need/want to get to their islands so that they can begin their teaching. We will see what happens in the next few days.
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Thanks for all of the comments on my blog and the emails and facebook messages. I love to hear from all of you. I will try to get more pics up soon.

And yes Becky, it does look as nice as the pics I have placed on here.

Also please feel free to send this blog to anyone you want. I am always up for more readers.
:)

the post is fixed

Okay, I have fixed the previous post. I would like to thank everyone who has been sending in their predictions about my hair length and weight loss/guess predictions, we will see how this plays out throughout the year.

On Friday I get to move into my permanent housing. I am excited to finally unpack. I hope everyone is enjoying themselves at home because I am having a great time here.

-Darren

Hmm....

I will soon be a teacher…

Showering under a million stars…

They call me demon…

Hitching to Laura…

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Those are three blog article titles that I have been meaning to write, but I have been lazy and I did not write them.
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So life here is great. I have met some awesome people and am making great friends. Soon it will be time to move into the teacher dormitory and begin teaching. This past week we have had our teaching practicum to prepare for the school year. While my group was supposed to teach 8th graders, we ended up with two of the smartest 12 graders in the country. This ended up working out well since I was able to move at a much faster pace and introduce more complex topics. While I have been mainly working with just two students I have enjoyed my first experience teaching. School is supposed to start in just over a week. We will see if school starts on time, it rarely does in the public school system here. I haven’t even met my principal yet, so I have no clue what my schedule is going to be like. I hope I find out soon.
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So we take bucket showers since there is not enough running water. As you may have seen in my pictures, our showers are just a couple of tarps put up around a wood frame. The coolest part of the bucket shower is taking them at night under all of the stars. If it is late enough, all the lights in the neighborhood will be off and there is no light pollution. I have never seen so many stars in my life, not even the night I spent on the ferry in Alaska. Anyway showering under the stars is pretty awesome…. J
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Outside of teaching we have kept ourselves occupied by playing with the neighborhood kids. There are always 3-5 kids playing with us whenever we have free time. They are great kids and they enjoy having fun. We are able to teach them English and they are able to help us with our Marshallese, which is pretty cool. As you may have seen in my pictures, some of the little girls have named me ‘Timon’ which translates to ‘Demon’. We spend our time growling and snarling at each other. It is a fun time. I will miss hanging out with the kids when I move to the other side of the island.
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Last Sunday was the first day we had to ourselves, we had no lessons, no instructions, and no real plans. We had heard about a part of Majuro called Laura. It is located at the far western part of the island and pretty much the only place that has sandy beaches. Unfortunately Laura is about 17 miles from Rairok (where we are currently staying) and we only had our feet for transportation. So we started walking in flip-flops and sandals. After about a couple miles we decided to make a sign because we knew there was no way to walk to the end of the island. After another half mile of walking, a nice Mitsubishi sedan stopped and told us to get in—there were 6 of us so it was quite the squeeze. (Hitchhiking is accepted here and is one of the main forms of transportation for people.) The man in the in the car ended up being a Senator from Majuro and was more than happy to take us out there and he became our personal tour guide. Laura (and the drive out there) was much different than downtown. There are more trees, almost a jungle, and lots fewer people. We got to the beach and the weather was awesome…it looked like I had just entered a postcard. We snorkeled and sat in our hammocks.
The only problem with hitching out to Laura is that we did not have transportation back towards town. And with such a large group it is hard to get picked up. We walked for a few miles before a truck came to pick us up. The truck made it a few more miles before it broke down and we were without transportation again, and we started to walk. While it was getting dark, we were lucky enough to have someone pick us up and we made it back to the compound safely…..
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That is all I have for now. I hope everyone is well at home and enjoying seeing and reading my experiences. I am currently working on sending out postcards to everyone who sent me their address. If anyone else would like one, please send me your address at dtnakata@gmail.com

:)

Me again

More pics.....Enjoy

Also I thank everyone who is participating in the weight and hair games...keep your guesses coming.

Marshall Islands part 2

Picture time.

Hi All...this is a slide show of some pics i have taken so far. I hope you enjoy them :)

You can review all of them by clicking on the picture below!

Marshall Islands - the beginning