Party!

Written 11/8/09

Thursday night, there was a send-off party for Mr. Jacklick, a speaker of the house in the RMI government. He has been on our island for a while and was returning the following day to Majuro. The entire staff of JHS was invited to attend, along with, as I was soon to find out, the entire Jabor community. We were notified of the party during class, when a notice was sent around to all the staff. It said the send-off would be 6pm “Marshallese time,” meaning nowhere near 6. I asked a couple other teachers what time would be reasonable to show up and they said 7 or 8. We also asked if there would be food and they said, “probably” or “I think so.” So Morgan and I held off cooking dinner and at 7:30 headed over to the party. We arrived to the smell of roasting pig and knew we were in the right place.

Unfortunately, 6pm Marshallese time does not mean 7 or 8. It means about 9:30 or 10. So we hung out for a couple of hours, getting hungrier as we watched women from the community bringing plate after plate of food to supplement the roasting pig. After what seemed like an eternity, we were finally seated. I still don’t know why they bothered even putting a time on the notice, since they very well could have just said “tonight” and it wouldn’t have made a difference.

Because Morgan and I were foreigners, we were seated at the “VIP” table and were told to get our food first. I took as many things that I didn’t recognize as I could. All of them turned out to be basically the same thing: breadfruit with some sweetish coating over them. It was good, but I certainly didn’t need that much of one thing. I also got a drumstick and a small bit of pork, which were fantastic. We sat down to eat and had a view of the food table and the line of people marching through it. The queue stretched from where we were, in the shelter of a building, out into the darkness out of sight. For about an hour, the line moved slowly along. It was comically long and was the sort of thing I’d imagine being in a Dr. Seuss book. People just kept marching in from out of the darkness. It became apparent that most of Jabor, Jaluit (my town) and Jaluit, Jaluit (the smaller town about 40 minutes away) had showed up. When the line finally ended, the music was set up and there was a little dancing. The musicians were one of the JHS teachers, who played the keyboard, and one of my grade 12 students, who sang wonderfully.

We finally went home at about 11, stuffed with home-made food. I can’t wait until we get to say goodbye to someone else important.