A Comedy of Errors

No, not your love life.

I'm talking about the Shakespeare comedy. It's the perfect play to put on in the Marshall Islands. It involves a boat arriving at an island. Two of its passengers have identical twins on the island (but unknown to them). Thus ensues a travesty of mistaken identities.

A group from Dartmouth College in New Hampshire has made it a tradition of coming to Majuro to put on a Shakespeare play for the past few years. My good friend Dan Cacavano, a volunteer high school teacher, has gotten involved through the making of a 5 part documentary series outlining the making of A Comedy of Errors. He's using the opportunity to teach a student media team basics about interviewing, storyboarding and editing (in IMovie).

Here is the link to Part 1, which acts as a backgrounder.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akHfCEu_iDg

It took Dan 7 hours to upload this file. So if you watch it, enjoy every second.

Social Studies Lesson

I was roped into the Curriculum Committee a while back, which is responsible for reviewing a draft of each subject’s curriculum from kindergarten to eighth grade. Science and math were already done; we had just begun working on social studies. It’s painstaking work.

But it’s been a great opportunity for me to learn a little about Marshallese culture. One of the Ministry’s priorities is to majol-ize the curriculum, which means making the curriculum relevant to a kid that grows up on an outer island here in the Marshall Islands. Social Studies is obviously a relevant subject for this, where students can learn about Marshallese culture and history (rather than the imported American version).

In grades 1 and 2 kids have to learn about their clan or jowi. This is really important because a lot of kids in high school know little about their family, even though the jowi is not just a group of people you eat with at Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner (just kidding). The jowi is a political entity with dispute settling mechanisms. Land and title are passed along through the jowi. Marshallese society is matrilineal, which means that unlike in our patrilineal society, inheritance occurs through the mother. That means that I stand to inherit things from my mother’s brother, or my maternal uncle – not my father. His stuff gets passed along to his sister’s family.

Think of feudal Europe. If the king died, his eldest son would inherit the throne. In Marshallese society it works in similar ways, except remember that it’s matrilineal. Therefore, when the king dies, one of his sister’s children stands to gain.

But what’s strange with the modern age is that people travel a lot more. So let’s say I travel to a different atoll when I get married. Then my uncle dies and I become the head of the jowi. But my younger brother, who stayed behind, starts making decisions in my place. This might irk me because I think he’s usurping my rightful role.

There are a lot of disputes in traditional courts related to this kind of issue. It wouldn’t have been as much of a problem 50 years ago, when people didn’t travel as much between atolls (or to other countries). But today there are boats (and there used to be a domestic airline, what happened to it??) plying the sea routes of the 29 atolls.

It’s all very confusing, I know, especially when you interlace the modern political state (with mayors, senators and a president). I’m no where near understanding how it all works. Suffice to say that the Marshall Islands is in a process of flux, whereby traditional institutions are being challenged (and complimented) by new institutions (and values).

End of Social Studies lesson.

The Place where No Pandanus Grow

Beyond the island of Enecko lies the place where no pandanus grow. It is a land barren of trees; a rock-riddled wasteland inhabited by eels at the high tide. As we gaze out across the expanse, a group of islands are visible in the distance. On the ocean side, the breaking waves cause a mist of salt air, like water poured onto red bathhouse coals.

Sharp rocks protrude precariously in every which direction, making each step awkward and clumsy. We step slowly, carefully, aware that the ground is either spiky or smoothly slick. A tumble in this place would cut and scrape.

A coconut crab scuttles three quick steps off the edge of a mushroom shaped rock and does a clawed breast-stroke till safely in its shadow.



Then we came upon an eel, grey and snake-like. Its head was deep inside the cleft of a rock, hunting for food. As we splashed towards it, our water shoes’ rubber soles protecting our feet from the rocks, the eel pulled its head out slowly and then stared at us suspiciously. We were standing but a few feet away.

After sizing up the situation, the eel decided it was cornered. It sprang at Ali and she leapt as high as possible with our unsure, rock-riddled footing. Despite Ali’s yelp, the eel was more afraid. In the shallows, the eel writhed a zig zag swim, making a sound like

whoosh whoosh whoosh!

I freed my breath because it had been caught in my throat. We kept walking. I silently marvelled at how far Ali had come, since she had never even liked camping before.

The water was beginning to rise. Waves began to tickle our ankles. It was like the land was tipping towards the lagoon and the ocean water started to seep in.

Picture a pan three-quarters filled with water. But imagine that the pan is sitting in a sink, itself filled with water, but just below the edge of the pan: two separate bodies of water. If I should pour more water into the sink, however, the sink water would overcome the pan edge and fill it completely, creating a single body of water.

Now imagine that the ocean is the sink and the pan’s edge is islands surrounding the lagoon. The space between islands becomes land at the low tide as the water recedes. But at the high tide the water from the ocean flows over the space between the islands.

An atoll is a strange place.

Nuclear Victims Day

Friday February 29th was Nuclear Victims Day in the Marshall Islands. I don’t know if the holiday is only celebrated in leap years, but I’ll hazard a guess that it’s simply the last Friday in February. Though detonating 64 nuclear bombs in the Marshall Islands was certainly traumatic to the environment and the people exposed to cancer in the aftermath, it was a day with little fanfare.

I’m used to the pomp and circumstance of Remembrance Day (Veterans Day to Americans), where we wear poppy flowers, hear poetry about Flanders Field and otherwise feel grateful to the folks that fought in the world wars. But I guess an active group of veterans can keep things alive. Somebody has to stand on the street corner and exchange the red and green flower I pin to my jacket for a small donation.

In this case, there aren’t “veterans” of the nuclear testing done by the Americans in the 50s and 60s. Just victims.

It was fitting that Ali and I should find ourselves living on solar power on Nuclear Victims Day. We trekked across the lagoon to Enecko for a getaway from the every day. Both of us have things coming to a head at work, a lot to plan for when we get back to North America, and were in dire need of a swim in clean water. We stayed for the whole weekend.

The picture depicts the solar panel behind the chalet at Enecko. The chickens are responsible for guarding it.