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.