Orientation

Written the evening of Monday, 8/10:

We had a day off Sunday and it was the coolest day in about a week, so I was able to sleep in until about 10. Normally I can’t really sleep past 7 because it gets too hot. At 11, we went on a boat for about an hour and then hung out at another island in the Majuro atoll all afternoon. The island is owned and has been developed a little by the richest family in Majuro, but they allow anyone to go out and use it. There’s a nice beach, a few shaded tables, and a swimming raft with a diving board a little ways out on the lagoon side. We brought snacks and snorkeling stuff. There was a half an old USAF plane just off shore near the raft, which we explored, then went snorkeling out on the ocean side. It was really cool to be bobbing in waves while looking at the reef and the fish. I would oscillate between being about two feet from the reef and six feet from the reef. And the fish would move back and forth along the reef, too. I watched one guy eating and he would nibble at the coral, then be pulled in to shore five feet. In the brief time he was switching directions, he’d get another nibble or two then would be pulled five feet back out towards sea and repeat the process. Very entertaining.

Today, Morgan and I finished up the bulk of our shopping. We spent $1300 on about 700 lbs of food at the wholesale store and another $500 or so at the retail grocery store. The real hard part of the day was taking 8 trips each from the store to the dock where the boat will bring it out to Jaluit. No, not really. The store delivered all of it for us to the boat, but I imagine it won’t be quite as easy to unload it on the other end. To add to that, the boat will only come a week or two after I fly there (on Friday), and I can only bring 35 lbs with me on the plane. We’ll have to rely on our principal and his wife to feed us in the meantime (we live next to them).

Orientation other than this has been filled with workshops and things designed to help us be better teachers. Every morning local HS students our field director knows give us an hour and a half language lesson. The rest of the day is a combination of free time to shop and eat, workshops having to do with teaching, workshops having to do with the Marshallese culture and successfully living in a new community, trips to important sites in Majuro such as the government building and the US embassy, and perhaps most importantly, teaching three practice classes attended by local HS students. I typically am awake at 7 and our last workshop end about 12 hours later, at which point we still need to cook dinner before crashing. The 15 of us are living in two small houses where we sleep mostly on mattresses on the floor. The kitchens are barely functional. The electric stove sometimes makes our arms tingle when we touch the handle of a pan.

I finally found out, with a bit of guessing, how exactly and atoll forms:
It starts with a volcano that pokes up high above the water. Coral reefs form in the shallow water all around it. Over millions of years, the volcano subsides and disappears back below the water. The reef, however, continues to grow upwards as fast as the land subsides. This means that the end result is a tall cylindrical column of reef reaching from the ocean floor to just below the water’s surface. Somehow (my guess is just natural variations in sea level in the last hundred thousand years or so), the top of the reef breaches the surface in many places and the atoll is inhabitable.

Something interesting I learned the other day is that the Marshall Islands are not in the path of hurricanes, and because there is no gently rising continental shelf, large waves pass by as harmless swells instead of growing into destructive tidal waves. That’s how they can exist with the highest point being about 8 ft above sea level.

The group I’m here with is really great. I’m sorry I’ll have to leave them all soon, but we’ll stay in touch with radios and see each other over winter break.

That’s all for now.

Peter