Home sweet home

It's been over two months since my last post, and much of that is due to being a bit overwhelmed by computers and instant communication since coming back. Early June (right after getting back) was when this reverse culture shock hit me most strongly. I was in Hanover for a week to see friends and meet the next year's DVTP volunteers, and I was suddenly using phone calls, texting, facebook, email, and face-to-face conversations to try to coordinate every minute of my day at the same time that I was trying to make more long-term plans for later in the summer. Keep in mind, I was used to communicating predominantly via snail mail, and I was entirely unaccustomed to making *plans* at all, so it was quite a challenge to immediately return to what people here do without even thinking every day.

Now that I can sit clear-headed at my computer again, however, I'll give a quick summary of my last few days in the Republic of the Marshall Islands.

Morgan and I finished all our finals and grading on May 27 and had tickets to get on the Air Marshall Islands (AMI) flight on Friday, May 28. The hour long flight was supposed to leave at about 2pm, getting us to Majuro to catch a Continental flight out of the country at 7:30pm. This would be a perfectly reasonable connection to make in the States, but was considered insanely tight here. As somewhat expected, we got a text from our field director at about 10am saying that all AMI flights for that day had been canceled. No one knew why or when the next flight would be, either. (As it turned out, the pilots were over their weekly hour limit AND the plane was broken down.) Her recommendation was to get on a boat as soon as possible. Fortunately, the weekly boat was sitting at our dock, scheduled to depart 2 hours ago. We quickly confirmed that it was still there and frantically gathered the rest of our belongings and ran to the dock. Our two WorldTeach friends were already there, ready to catch the boat as well. Happy to have arrived in time, we quickly got the bad news that the captain had told them that there was no room for passengers. Now although the boat was not huge, this was just untrue. You can always squeeze a few more people onto a boat. After another hour or so of very tense waiting around and looking at pitiful as possible, the captain did change his mind. GREAT. Or so we thought. The boat was about 70 ft long, and when on the open ocean, it quickly became obvious that a better size for a boat would have been about 700 ft. The ride was 25 hours long, and believe me, we were counting every minute of it. The ride made me seriously consider whether we should have just waited for the next plane, even if it meant not leaving for another 2 weeks and missing out on our Hawaii and Hanover plans. The encouraging thoughts going through my head at the time were counting the ways the ride could have been worse: It could easily have been longer, colder, more crowded, or on a smaller boat. Of course, for the crew, this ride was nothing unusual, and we arrived in one piece in Majuro Saturday afternoon.

Instead of making our Friday Continental flight, Morgan and I were now booked on a Monday night flight from Majuro to Honolulu. This meant that instead of having 5 days in Hawaii, we had 2. The other three days were split between our day-long boat ride and then two days hanging out in Majuro. As it turned out, this was a quite enjoyable time. Most of the other DVTP volunteers were back and we all got to go through the initial stages of readjustment together in the "big city" of Majuro. We told plenty of stories from our second semesters and boarded the Continental flight together Monday night.

Because we crossed the international date line, we arrived very early (about 2am) MONDAY morning in Honolulu. We crashed for a few hours in a hotel and then had the rest of Monday and Tuesday to explore and enjoy the island. The things that struck me most, in order of discovery were:

-People in the service industry really are there to serve you. They even say please and thank you, which just leaves everyone feeling happier. The amount of information that passed between me and the lady at the hotel's front desk at 3am was more than had passed between another professional and me in the last 10 months combined. At the end of the interaction, she even held her hand out to take some trash I happened to have in my hand and throw it out behind the desk. IN A TRASH CAN! At the time, it took me a couple of seconds to realize why her hand was open in front of me. Maybe the fact that it was 3am contributed to that as well.

-Looking out of my hotel window the following morning, I could see far more capital than was on my entire island. A parking lot of school buses, plenty of jets in the airport waiting to be used, buildings with multiple floors, and all the roads paved. It was astounding to see so much.

-I had a bite of Morgan's omelet Monday morning which had some bacon in it. I had forgotten what bacon was like. Just forgotten.

-Around midday we found ourselves sitting by Waikiki Beach just watching things going on. There were people having picnics, playing volleyball, talking to their children, surfing, windsurfing, walking, running, walking dogs, sunbathing, swimming, playing Frisbee, a police officer was patrolling on a bike, there were helicopter tours going on above us, there was a constant stream of airplanes we could see in the distance, and there were stores packed with people shopping and eating. All of this was just what we could see from our one spot by the beach, and all of this was happening SIMULTANEOUSLY. In the Marshall Islands, only one thing really happens at a time. Maaaybe two.

-Draft beer tastes like nectar.

-There are words written on almost every conceivable surface in the States. Advertisements, signs, storefronts, everywhere.

-Wealth in the States is NOT tied to the amount of land you have. In the RMI, the more land you have, the more coconut trees you have, and the more copra you can make and sell. No land means no money. But here, that's not true for most people.

-Another thing I really noticed about land in the States is how so much of what physically occupies the land here has been brought in from elsewhere. Clearly, this is not a new discovery, but I saw it more clearly than I ever had before, since living on an island it's so difficult to import things, and most traditional houses were made entirely from material gathered from that person's land. (That's another reason why more land means more wealth.)

I think I've pretty much gotten over the reverse culture shock at this point, but it still hits me on occasion. Yesterday, I went shopping for a couple shirts to replace the ones I had worn out in the RMI. A few hours into it, I had been drained of all my energy and wanted nothing more than to get away from big retail box stores. Seeing so many things in stock made me realize that it would be truly impossible for all of it to be sold and go to use. I was overwhelmed by how much waste there must be in that industry. This low point in my day was quickly offset a bit later when I went to a bar to enjoy some live music. The group performing was Filligar, a Dartmouth group, and the evening encapsulated so much of what I missed in the RMI: social drinking, a crowd of people my age (the audience was heavily Dartmouth), and, most of all, great music.

This will be my last post. I hope you've enjoyed reading what I have to say here, and if you want to find out more, please feel free to give me a call or email me. Also, there's a book I highly recommend that was written by a guy who volunteered in the Marshall Islands a few years back. He was placed on an island much smaller than mine and had more (often quite comical) challenges that I didn't have to deal with, but he provides some very good insight into the cultural and historical background of the country, which is the same across all the islands. It came out some time in the fall of 2009: Surviving Paradise, by Peter Rudiak-Gould. I read in about 3 days in June and now own a copy, which you are welcome to borrow.

Peter