Surviving Paradise (5 page)

Modern changes had rid the men of their most onerous responsibilities—canoe building, sea voyaging, warfare—but they had done little to reduce women's work. If anything, modernity had created more work for them: hand washing all those T-shirts had not been necessary in a time when everyone went topless, and taking care of six youngsters was unlikely when many children died in infancy and any offspring past the third was killed as a population control measure.

The next-door neighbors often left their four-year-old by himself, and he would howl horribly for his mother. There were two problems with this. The first was that it was a heart-wrenching spectacle, this child crying himself hoarse for an absent parent. The second problem was that it occurred right outside my house, and the noise wasn't doing wonders for my state of mind. I didn't want to go out there. It wasn't my responsibility to comfort him, and I knew that if I did it once, I would have to do it a hundred times. Eventually, auditory exhaustion and a guilty conscience forced me to take action. I played catch with the boy until he cheered up. How had this become
my
job, I wondered? Just as I suspected, he attached himself to me. He clung to me in that way that emotionally starved children do to adults who show them affection. I had to ignore him for weeks, doing the same cruel thing his parents had done to him, before he stopped thinking of me as his caretaker.

This was one of the many ways in which, on Ujae, I was an asshole. If I wanted privacy, I had to snub people. If I wanted control over my property, I had to be secretive and stingy. If I wanted autonomy, I had to make myself insensitive to the sobs of toddlers. I was not happy with myself, morally, in this place. I often wondered if the islanders felt the same way about me.

Of course, I could escape all of this—the yelling, the crying, the moral angst—by leaving the De Brums' property and taking a soothing stroll through the village. But wait. That symphony of cries was being performed everywhere. Walking along the path, I could hear each household conducting its own version of that pandemonium.
Away from the De Brums' plot, it was even worse, because these children weren't used to me yet. So they swarmed to me—five, ten, fifteen at a time. There was no shortage of them. Every family had an infant, a toddler, a youngster, a preteen, and an adolescent. These neighborhood children were a broken record that even Elina might envy:
Kwoj etal nan ia?
(“Where are you going?”),
Kwoj itok jan ia?
(“Where are you coming from?”),
Kwoj ta?
(“What are you doing?”). These were questions I had learned during orientation in Majuro. Now I wished I hadn't.

The first question was especially popular. On this pint-sized islet there was nowhere at all to go, but still they asked me where I was going.
Kwoj etal nan ia? Kwoj etal nan ia? Kwoj etal nan ia?
This was charming only the first two thousand times. I would be ten feet from the lagoon beach, walking toward it, wearing a swimsuit, swimming flippers, and a snorkel mask, when a ten-year-old would ask, “Where are you going?” Or a quartet of toddlers would spy me walking down the road and begin their chorus of attempts to get my attention. Today, my name might be
ribelle
(white person) or
belle
, the toddlers' version of the same word. Or they might say “Pedge-er-ick,” their attempt at saying “Patrick,” the name of last year's volunteer (who I must be because, after all, my skin is white). Or, if I was lucky, today they would call me “Peter,” but with the
r
alarmingly rolled for half the duration of the word, or the whole thing somehow rendered as “Pee-tar.” My back was already turned to them, but that made no difference; I was required to acknowledge each of them. They wouldn't let me wave to them with my back turned or acknowledge them en masse. If I wanted these children to leave, I had to stop walking, turn around, look each kid in the eye, and wave and say “hello” to each one in turn.

I established a few ground rules. First, I would not turn my head more than ninety degrees to acknowledge a child's greeting. If I had already passed him and would need to crane my head backward to say hello, then he had missed his chance—better luck next time. Second, I would not respond to “Patrick” unless absolutely necessary. Third, under no circumstances would I respond to Marshallese equivalents of “white boy” or “whitey.”

I once conducted an experiment. If I passed a group of children without acknowledging their existence in any way, how many times
would each one say my name before giving up? The answer was twelve.

Another day I saw Erik and Tamlino rooting through my trash after I dumped it on the De Brums' garbage pile.

I was learning what it is like to be famous. I was fed an intoxicating sense of importance, but I also lost all privacy. Being a big fish in a small pond also meant being a big fish in a small fishbowl. It had not occurred to me that what I might crave more than anything on this far-flung islet was solitude. For the first time in my life, I understood that anonymity was a luxury. It was a godsend to be ignored. All the honking cars and rushing bodies of a typical American street began to seem transcendentally relaxing compared to this place where everyone knew everything I did.

Even in the center of a crowd—especially there—I was attacked by horrific loneliness. Not the least of my problems was that I couldn't speak. I had landed on Ujae with a miniscule Marshallese vocabulary and a handful of stock phrases of the “hello,” “thank you,” and “are there any sharks over there?” variety. If the conversation involved anything other than greeting, thanking, and carnivorous fish, I was at a loss.

A sad verbal dance began whenever an adult approached me for conversation. The islander would speak. I would listen, but not understand, and then not be able to say that I didn't understand. The islander would repeat the statement more slowly, and I would still not understand. Then I would have to consider my options. Should I let on that I still don't understand, thus increasing the awkwardness to an excruciating level? Should I attempt to read the context and hazard a desperate guess? Or should I simply say
emman
(“good”) and hope that the person hadn't said, “My aunt died of diabetes last week”? I learned to play the odds. I developed the statistical intuition of a blackjack player, giving the response that yielded the highest probability of success. In the end, I was gambling, not communicating.

What did this inability to speak do to me? Did it lock away my inner thoughts, reducing me to a hollow exterior? Not really; it was more the contrary. It was the flashy surface—or the attempt at such—that was gone, and now my inner self was all too visible. I couldn't put on a social show. I missed superficiality.

So here I was, unable to connect, unable to disconnect, both isolated and stifled. I had neither intimacy nor anonymity; I had all the loneliness of solitude with none of its privacy. I was becoming painfully aware of just how much I had sacrificed.

Whenever I was in danger of developing a bit of self-confidence, the villagers would begin to compare me to the previous volunteer. I freely admit that my grasp of the Marshallese language after a week was less than my predecessor's after a year. So you can't fault the children for telling me how much better he spoke the language than me, and reminding me repeatedly of my linguistic ineptitude. That previous
ribelle
must have been some sort of mythic creature incapable of fatigue. On every day of my stay, I learned something new that he did on every day of his. He fished every day; brought his guitar to class every day; played basketball with his countless friends, baseball with his adoring students, and ping-pong against awestruck opponents—all the while romancing the young women and planning yet another day of thrilling education for every child on the island, every day. His skills in all of these areas were, of course, vastly, unquestionably superior to mine. Oh yes—and he was better looking than me too. The children were not being mean. They were just telling me the truth about my obvious inferiority in every category to that brilliant, beloved, omnicompetent model of humanity that came before me.

I could understand little of what people said, but with the adoring pantomimes, the word “Patrick,” and that repeated phrase
aolep raan
(“every day”), I got the gist all too well.

Already I had developed a feeling of ownership of the island, a jealously guarded possession of the experience. Ujae belonged to me and the islanders only. And, like a jealous lover, I was painfully attuned to any sign that her affections might fall elsewhere. My unspoken quest was to outshine any other expatriate who had been in my position. My ostensible reason for requesting an island with no other foreigners had been to experience a more traditional lifestyle. Perhaps I had also wanted to be as far as possible from any rival. Now I saw the mistake I had made: there
was
a rival here, and he visited every day in the children's memories.

Later, when I got in contact with my American predecessor, he told me that he had experienced the same thing. Since his year was the
debut of WorldTeach in the Marshall Islands, the children couldn't participate in the unflattering comparison, but the adults were only too happy to dredge up the memory of a decade-past Peace Corps volunteer and all of
his
stunning accomplishments.

So I was not alone, but I didn't know that at the time. I was a newbie comedian coming to the stage after an old pro, and the audience was not pleased with the change of entertainment. I was the island's new beau, and she was comparing me unfavorably to her old lover.

It would have been nice to drown my sorrows in hedonism, but, alas, that too was impossible. The Ujae diet was a reverse Atkins: the four Marshallese food groups appeared to be starch, starch, starch, and starch. For breakfast, the starch was flour made into zestless pancakes (edible), uninspired donuts (edible), bare-bones bread (edible), or flour soup, packed in worm-like strips (inedible). (The soup,
jaibo
, was named after the giant squishy slugs that vegetated in the lagoon—an apt comparison.) If I was extremely lucky, I would be served instant ramen, but that is only starch in another form.

For lunch, there would be rice. It came in two varieties: plain (bad) and drenched in coconut oil (worse). On the side there might be a cooked breadfruit, which was as exciting as a football-sized unbuttered baked potato. Or the whole meal might be replaced by two boiled green bananas, which were—in keeping with the theme—mealy and insipid. Dinner was the same, perhaps with a fresh but unseasoned fish on the side. Occasionally the monotony would be broken when Lisson harvested some taro—a bland, starchy root.

These were most definitely not the Spice Islands. The Spanish were heading for those other, tastier isles when they happened upon Marshalls, but they didn't bother to drop anchor—there was no flavor to be found here. It was telling that the word for “tasty”—
enno
—also meant “edible.” They were the same thing. The idea seemed to be that if it doesn't kill you, that's the best food you're going to get.

My room, which thankfully was mine alone, offered little solace. Upon my arrival, it had been empty except for a mattress and a plastic lawn chair. Now it was empty except for the mattress, the chair, my paltry luggage, and a veritable field guide of critters. I shared my space with centipedes, cockroaches, and entire colonies of ants. I quickly
realized that there were two things that were true at every moment in the Marshall Islands: a part of my body was itching, and there was at least one bug on me. There are few feelings worse than waking up with a cockroach on one's chest. It was especially lovely when the cockroaches used their wings. Are cockroaches not horrible enough as it is? Must they also be able to fly? Sometimes I would find spiders in my room so large that I could
hear
them scurry. They were as big as my hand with the fingers spread wide, and they moved as fast as mice. Outside, the problem was flies, namely that a dozen of them were on my feet at all times.

I began to wonder why the words “tropical” and “paradise” were so often conjoined. Were Westerners so adverse to cold weather that they preferred the stupefying heat of the tropics? On Ujae, the sun was no friend. It was a fiendish adversary, appearing in the morning when the temperature was just fine, thank you, and then steadily heating the air to something significantly above just fine. At noon, it sent down its rays from an oppressive height. I could not read books on the beach, because the sunlight reflecting off the white pages burned my eyes. And I knew that there was no winter to look forward to on this island. My Caucasian body was not built for this, nor was my gear: every cut, no matter how tiny, became infected, and the bandages I had brought would not stick to my perpetually moist skin. Meanwhile, my envelopes quietly sealed themselves without my permission.

All of this—the heat, the bland diet, the shadow of the previous volunteer, the language barrier, the loneliness, the claustrophobia of fame, the nerve-grating noise—was rolling around in my head as I stood at the airport, waiting for the plane to land as it had done one week before when it brought me here. It was Airplane Tuesday, the only day of the week that rivaled Church Sunday for festivities. Tuesday afternoon saw a large portion of the village relocated to the airport. The villagers took the event as an opportunity to rest, arriving long before the scheduled landing.

Before there was any sound of a motor, everyone somehow knew that the plane was coming. Then it was suddenly on the ground. The men unloaded shipments of rice, sugar, flour, coffee, and flashlight batteries, then quickly replaced them with a new cargo of live crabs, ripe
pandanus, and preserved breadfruit wrapped in palm fronds. Hungry outer islanders and homesick urban relatives had made a mutually beneficial exchange.

Would I join that living cargo, cut my losses, and leave this place? I had the motive, the means, and the opportunity. The volunteer director had ensured that each outer island volunteer had enough cash on hand—185 dollars in the case of remote Ujae—to hop on a plane if need be. There was something called “Early Termination”—not, as the phrase suggested, an untimely death or overanxious assassination, but rather leaving before the year was up. The volunteer manual I had received guilt-tripped me against even considering such an action, and I began to suspect that using the sinister phrase “Early Termination” was part of that plan. I wouldn't be the first volunteer in history to have jumped ship, though. Seven of the previous year's participants had aborted their missions. And not one of the volunteers who had lived as the only Westerner on their island opted to extend their stay after that first year was up.