It’s been about a month now that we have been living here on
the Majuro Atoll in the Marshall Islands.
School has started, the dry season has begun and Neyla is beginning to
crawl and stand up. It seems as
though we have been here for years.
The community and our colleagues have been so welcoming and kind and it has
been a rather easy and enjoyable transition to our new home and this new
culture. The weather is
brilliant. Each day it gets into
the low to mid 80’s and at night is in the low 70’s. The wind is quite refreshing and waking up each and every
morning and watching the sun rise from bed or our porch never gets old. Each morning, I strategically set my
alarm for 6:15 am, so that I can watch the sun rise over the crashing waves
promptly at 6:30.
Janae
and I have had to pinch ourselves on an almost daily basis. We just couldn’t love our life here
more. Not to say that everything’s
perfect, it’s not and will never be, but we are in our own little
paradise. We love being able to
walk just about everywhere.
We love being able to spend so much time together and being able to eat
all 3 meals as a family. We love
the freedom of having no bills. No
cell phone, no cable, no insurance, no mortgage and on and on. We have no phone and no TV and it
really is quite liberating. I can
focus on my work, students and relationships so much more and it really is a
much healthier life style. That
doesn’t mean we live in a thatched hut without any conveniences of modern life,
it just means that we have sacrificed certain things that turned out not to be
sacrifices at all. Instead these “sacrifices”
have turned out to make us better people.
We have more time to exercise, to talk and to simply just be with other
people.
My
students are great. I greatly
enjoy each and every one of them and I think they enjoy their new ri-belle
(term for white people here) teacher as well. My commute takes all of about 25 seconds to get to my
classroom from home and I have an ocean view the whole way. I teach in shorts and sandals and can
see the crashing waves from the open windows of my open-air classroom. There are some challenges however, as
I’ve stepped into a different culture where many of the students know some
English, but don’t speak it at home.
A majority of my students only speak Marshallese with their family and
friends, but are educated in English as it is seemingly the new Lingua Franca
of our world. Also, we have
learned what “Marshallese Time” is.
Janae was supposed to have a basketball game at 6 the other night. Her ride and team coach picked her up
at 6:05 and we thought this was a bit silly, but as Janae asked her coach about
this, she said, “6:00 in Marshallese time is 7:00.” And she was right.
When they arrived at the lighted outdoor court they had plenty of time
to warm up and prepare before the game actually began.
We
have made new friends, but miss our old.
We love living right on the ocean, but miss the urban vitality of
Chicago and the pristine mountains of Colorado. We love playing basketball and volleyball, but miss playing
golf (okay, that one is just me).
We love having no TV, but miss watching the Illini play hoops (actually
that one is both of us, Janae has become a bit of an Illini hoops fan). As I mentioned, nothing here is perfect
and nothing ever will be perfect, but thus far we are living our dream here in
Majuro. For as long as Janae and I
have been together we have dreamed of living aboard and spending years doing so
and now we have started that dream and fallen into an amazing life on this tiny
sinking island in the middle of the Pacific.
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