Life Goes On

Pohnpeian Word of the Day: keteu = “rain”

Well, it seems that once again I have let far too much time pass since posting anything here. I hope mom hasn’t begun calling the National Guard – though I’m still getting over my cold, I am otherwise doing fine. Mostly, I’ve just been too drained to write, and I haven’t had much to write about. Anyway, here goes…

I hear that everyone had a bit of a touchy time last week with Hurricane Fay, and I hope you’re all alright. I realize I haven’t said much about the weather here – they say that the island has only two seasons: the rainy season, and the rainier season. We haven’t entered the latter yet, although I believe it starts soon, and I’ve heard horror stories about nonstop rain for days at a time. At the moment, the rain is frequent but always light – you might say that it rains kittens and puppies. Sometimes it will shower for only a few minutes at a time, sometimes it will fall on only one side of a street … but eventually, it falls everywhere at some time or another. Considering that the alternative is a sweltering heat, you quickly learn to love it when the sky goes grey.

Last week, the USNS Mercy, a former oil tanker converted into a hospital ship, docked at Chuuk and sent a fly-away team here to Pohnpei. This is the last leg of their four-month tour, known as Pacific Partnership 2008, which has already taken them to the Phillipines, Vietnam, Timor-Leste and Papua New Guinea. On Niare (Tuesday), they had set up shop in Kolonia Elementary School, which is next to COM. I remember walking past it on the way to the grocery store around ten in the morning, and seeing a couple hundred people waiting in line to get their teeth pulled or be treated for scabies, all for free without any medical insurance. Obviously, these guys are providing a much needed service and demonstrating the often unreported positive side of a well-funded military.

My classes are marching along – I finally introduced the idea of a variable to my MS96 classes, although MS95 has yet to get to negative numbers (grrroooaaan). I gave them their first test, and one of the classes (Prealgebra) had an 87% average, so I’m either doing something right or just going way too slow. I have still yet to figure these kids out, and not feeling like I know what I’m doing is at alternate times frustrating and enjoyable.

Some of my kids listen intently, never taking their eyes off me and taking careful notes, while others have begun to goof off incessantly. Today, for example, I had somebody leaving or entering the class every two or three minutes, and they kept switching seats for some reason. They also move the chairs around, disrupting the nice little grid by pushing the back row all the way to the wall and grouping together in isolated little groups.

Of course, they almost never answer my questions – Micronesian culture is very collectivist, and people are reluctant to do anything seen as standing out from the group. In general, they will only speak up for simple queries (like “three times seven”) where they can be sure that a large number of their fellows will arrive at the same answer. Questions which require a more phrased answer or some kind of critical thinking receive little more than crickets.

Of course, losing my voice last week didn’t help much. I had to cancel one class on Niepeng (Thursday), but I forced myself to make it through the others, and this has slowed my recovery. When I’m not teaching, I’m often too tired to do any of my grading, so it has built up a bit. Nonetheless, I am keeping in good spirits despite these setbacks, and I am looking forward to getting out of the learning phase.

When I haven’t been teaching in the last few days, I’ve begun pouring myself into the study of Japanese. I ordered a couple books from Amazon, and while I wait for them to arrive I’ve been researching the language on Wikipedia and making flashcards. I want to learn to read and write the language as well, and this is going to prove very difficult.

For one, written Japanese incorporates a composite of two syllabaries (hiragana and katakana), borrowed Chinese ideograms known as kanji, and letters and numbers taken from the Latin alphabet – there are complex rules governing which to use in any situation. The syllabaries contain a distinct symbol for each of the hundred or so syllables in Japanese, and are used to spell out words phonetically. There are, on the other hand, more than 50,000 kanji symbols, with each typically standing for a single word.

The Japanese Ministry of Education has helpfully organized these kanji into several nested lists, with the smallest being the set of 1006 kyōiku kanji which are taught to Japanese students in the first eight grades – it is said that you can read most Japanese text if you know this small set. I have made flashcards beginning with these, having a computer printout of the glyph on one side and the English and Japanese translations on the other. Using them, I have already learned the 80 kanji typically taught in the first grade.


Yesterday, as I went to grab a towel from my closet, I spotted a wolf spider that had to be three or four inches across in it, which I promptly sprayed into oblivion with Raid. This is the second time this has happened – I also saw a slightly smaller one in the sink when I was shaving. Liz says she doesn't kill them because they eat mosquitos, but I haven't had any mosquito bites at home yet, and personally I'd prefer they bite me to that thing. I’ve already lost track of the cockroaches we’ve killed … nature is invading us as best it can.

Today, I sat in Namiki restaurant eating bacon and eggs and watched us win the silver in water polo. Now that is a weird sport – it’s like soccer for people that don’t want to overheat. I guess everything is coming to a close now, and I’ve barely seen any of the Olympics, but in a way I’m somewhat proud of the isolation that demonstrates. It reminds me that I am somewhere really far away, and this can be easy to forget sometimes.