From my journal: March 30, 2010
The World Teach radio in Majuro is broken; at check-in I can only hear about half of what my field director is saying so I’m not getting much in the way of news. My family’s radio which I used last year to listen to the BBC World Report has gone missing, and my field director’s news updates usually just consist of brief headlines or entertainment and sports news which I don’t care about anyway. I vaguely heard about another tsunami warning after the fact, but I didn’t know the details.
Sarah has sent me a few Time Magazines so I can keep up with what’s happening in the world. These two-month-old magazines are about my only link to what’s going on in the outside world. I love reading these magazines. I devour every word, cover to cover. Someday, when I’m in a location where it is possible to receive frequent mail, I would like to get my own subscription. Maybe next year in AM Samoa I’ll be able to access it on-line (what a luxury!)
The last two issues I read contained stories about the earthquake in Haiti. I tried explaining this tragic event, showing pictures from the magazines, and earthquakes in general to some of my students. One of the 5th grade girls, who is one of the top students in her class, could give me the textbook definition of an earthquake (in English), but when I asked her what all those big words meant, she had no idea. Apparently, her teacher never actually explained in Marshallese what an earthquake is. In class, the students just learn a bunch of useless definitions without really understanding their meaning. So I explained as best I could in Marshallese. But the idea of the ground shaking, causing buildings to crumble is so foreign to them that they had a hard time grasping the idea. Then they asked me why it happens, which turned into an impromptu geology lesson where I learned just how lacking their science education is. It started to get too complicated, so I just left it at “the ground shakes.”
When I told them that over 100,000 people died, they were just appalled because that is more than all the people that live in this entire country. That number surprised me, too, because Haiti is also a fairly small island country, but with so many more people living on it than in all the Marshall Islands. Sometimes I really wish there were five of me so that I could teach all the kids all the subjects because there is so much they don’t know about the world that I could share with them.
