a betrayal of trust, or, living with the oppressed is easy until they start breaking into your house

there are numerous kids that hang out around our house. we give them drinks of water and they laugh at our attempts at marshallese. its a symbiotic relationship. one of the boys we were the closest to was Kan. he was in 5th grade at assumption elementary. he is really outgoing and often helpful. sometimes bridget would wash his uniform and we would help him with his homework around our kitchen table.


two weeks ago mike noticed some of his money was missing. then, last saturday evening, i came home from church to drop off my guitar before going to a fijian baptism party (if you ever get an invite to one, go. fijians know how to have a good time) and i noticed that the lights in our bedrooms were on. curious. the next morning shannon noticed that she was missing some money as well, not all of it, but half of her stash was gone. sunday afternoon, the lights all mysteriously turned on of their own accord again and the rest of her money was gone.


the pieces started to come together. our roof/cieling are still in the state of (dis)repair that they have been since late november and a panel of the cieling in the roof was broken. a chair that didn't used to be there was found under it, dusted with bits of wood which was curious because shannon had just swept the porch. hmmm. fr. rich had seen kan after someone broke in eating an apple and was pleased and surprised that he had made such a healthy snack choice. we had just gone grocery shopping. hmmmmmm. then kan started walking around with a new bike and new clothes, including a oversized black gangsta shirt with a huge sequined dollar bill sign. hmmmmmmmmm. then there was the realization that before someone broke in, kan was asking all of us where everyone was. hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.


we set a trap for him, telling him that we were all going to church monday evening while fr. rich hid in our bathroom. he didn't show, but the next day, he did. bridget saw the light go on from far away and ran to the house, catching him on his way out. we got our man.


there was an ensuing mess with meetings and consequences that i wasn't a big part of because thankfully, nothing of mine disappeared. i figure i only have two things anyone would want to steal, my ipod and my guitar. the guitar never would have made it out the ceiling and i keep my ipod camouflaged. so while it didn't effect me in that way, it did in others.



just the idea that we considered kan a friend and trusted him and that he would betray that just hurts. that he would sit at our table talking with us, knowing that he was going to come in and rifle through our belongings when we were gone feels so bad. on a different level it sucks because at least part of why we're here is to serve. it makes it much harder to do that and to openly embrace this place and people when things like this happen. by no means has this soured me on the people of the marshall islands, it just makes it a little more difficult to be welcoming to the kids that frequent our porch. my friend Jeremy, who lived in intentional community in the Camden House once told me something to the effect that making the oppressed your neighbors and living in community with them is easy until your neighbors start breaking into your house. what is most foul about this situation is not that kan stole from us, but that he would steal; that we live in a world that makes children into thieves.

i am a part of something big, or, my thoughts from this morning

in september i started getting up early to pray with the sunrise. i have a flat chunk of concrete i spread a towel out on and i meditate, calming all the worrying and planning about the many stresses that buzz through my brain all day long. i listen to the waves and the wind and God. sometimes i have deep, moving experiences but mostly i don't.

this morning i had a great feeling of joy. i opened my eyes after meditating and was overcome with how beautiful life is. i am a part of this huge, minutely detailed, incredible patchwork of life with God running through it all. i looked around and saw the ocean and the sun and the clouds and the houses of Small Island and the coconut trees and i just couldn't help smiling and even laughing a little. this is all so amazing! not the tropicality of my location or what i'm doing here in majuro, but this whole earth is such an unbelievable place and i get to be a part of it. i get to see and taste and draw meaning from all of this incredible creation. what more could a guy ask? there's no reason in this crazy world to be angry or sad or anything you don't want to be for more than a second!
its simple but it absolutely set me on fire.

public library, or, books on bata's porch

in the weeks leading up to this fall’s election, a series of large deliveries were made to assumption schools. aa man running for office (mayor, i think) arranged for mass quantities of books to be donated to the school. i’m not certain how expected these deliveries were but every time one was made there were so many books no one knew what to do with them. unfortunately, most of them were things that we didn’t need. some boxes made their way to the library, but many boxes were full of outdated textbooks in poor condition. i think most of them came from hawaii. eventually the majority of them were thrown away. the thought of so many pages going to waste makes me sad. however, before they were disposed of, all these boxes full of words sat stacked on the porch of fr. rich’s house, next door to ours. instead of playing “iraq” (a war game involving two teams and toy guns with rubber bands that fling pop can tabs at high velocities), the throngs of little boys who haunt the neighborhood would sit on the porch rifling through this public library, for that is truly what it was. it did not have shelves and dewey would surely have scoffed at the lack of organization but anyone was free to take anything they wanted. one day i was coming home from school in the afternoon and saw a father and daughter going through the volumes, picking out one here and one there to take home and become memories.

where' waldo? sucks when somebody already circled waldo.

gender relations or lack thereof and outgrowing reflections

one of the facets of life in the marshall islands that has been getting under the skin of the collective JVI community is the relationship between male and female people. men and women do not talk to each other unless they are going to sleep together. they do not make small talk and they are definitely not friends. there is this strange seperation between the sexes that is hard to breach. the women that work in the cafeteria at school will say "iokwe" when i greet them but that is about it.

clearly this is frustrating. while i want to avoid stereotyping the gender roles prominent in marshallese culture, the things that men do and the things that women do are very exclusive and clearly defined. i sympathize with my female community mates who are frustrated by the constraints these gender roles put on their behavior. men are allowed to do pretty much whatever they want, while women are held to a much higher standard including, but not limited to, not showing anyone your knees. i hesitate to write much more about if, for fear of coming off as judgemental.

as far as this sort of cultural examination goes, i realized the other day that i don't do that much of it. while i do not automatically accept every aspect of marshallese culture as good i do not think about such things as much as i would have expected. my peers struggle over what their response to cultural standards and attitudes that they do not agree with should be. should they speak out against them? should they accept them simply because they are a part of this place?

i find my own examination of such things to be lacking. its not that i don't notice things that make me uncomfortable or that i do not see the value of. there are things that bother me about how life is conducted here. for instance, the adjustment to marshallese time (everything starting 2 hours later than scheduled) can be an annoyance. however, for some reason my reactions to these things are very much internal. the thought of speaking out about values of the marshallese people that i do not agree with is not something that occurs to me often. i don't feel it is my place. i am not here to change or fix anything external. the only thing that i can legitimately expect to change through my time here is myself. it is my place to examine my own view of the world in light of the marshallese culture and not the other way around. certainly there are aspects of life here that are destructive to people, just as there are in any culture. but how can you remove the speck from one culture when you have not removed the plank from your own?

it is thinking like this that leads me to see my future work and vocation as being geographically (and culturally) located in the united states. it is hard enough to work for change in a social environment governed by cultural standards you are more or less familiar with. to be an outsider ostensibly working for social change in a literally foreign environment seems impossible to do effectively. also, i miss my friends.

a continuation!

last time my photographs stopped uploading, so i gave it another go today.

here is tsuyoshi, our kitten. he's dead now.

some of the friendly locals.

here is the desk of one of my colleagues, Pablo after I put CAUTION tape all around it!! its not exactly a stapler in jello, but some people laughed.

this is something i found the last time i was correcting my biology students' notebooks. also pictured is my response.

finally, here is a picture of me and my mustache, Robespierre.

someday i'll write something

recent developments, or, a smorgasbord of images

here are some pictures.


first up is our community christmas picture. this was taken christmas eve by a 2nd grader, so it is a bit skewed, but ocean did a pretty good job. this was right before we went out to eat before midnight mass.






this is some bread i baked:




this is the view from my desk in the faculty room. notice the stacks of notebooks to grade and the multitude of file folders. also the I CLOSED WOLSKI'S bumper sticker. i usually put my feet up and so things tend to get a little sandy.





there were a few more i wanted to add as well. i will try again at a later date.