Surviving Paradise (3 page)

Alfred introduced everyone with gestures. The older woman was Alfred's wife, Tior. The younger woman was their daughter Elina. The man on the ladder was Elina's husband, Lisson. The boys, looking about seven and nine years old, were Tamlino and Erik. The toddler was Easter, and the baby was named Nakwol. Elina and Lisson's two other children, and Alfred and Tior's five others, had left the island for the urban centers. These were the De Brums: a Marshallese family with a European surname.

I pointed at myself and said “Peter.” Alfred corrected me: “Peter De Brum.” We didn't speak each other's languages, but we had managed to communicate one thing: I was already a member of a Marshallese family.

It was late evening. I went to my room, hung my mosquito net over my mattress, and climbed into this feeble fortress. As I lay in the humid darkness, I considered my situation. I was already lonely to the point of physical pain. I had been ignored and welcomed, avoided and stared at, indulged and deprived. All I had learned was that I knew nothing.

 

 

 

 

I WOKE UP THAT NIGHT IN THE DARK—;THE TOTAL BLACKNESS OF AN
overcast moonless midnight on a remote island—and, in my drowsy delirium, I had no idea where I was. Feeling the concrete contours of my room, my first thought was that I had been locked in a cell. It was a long moment before I remembered the particular circumstances of my sentence.

I drifted off, and the next thing I was aware of was a tidy little cliché of a country morning: roosters crowing, sunshine streaming through the window, and the sounds of early risers starting their chores.

Then Elina came to my door and called out, “
Mona
!” This was one of the few Marshallese words I knew; it meant both “eat” and “food.” So I came out of my room, sat down at the little table Elina pointed to, and proceeded to
mona
the
mona
: plain pancakes.

My mind drifted to the previous morning, when life had been so different. I had been in the same country then, but not in the same
world. I had been 250 miles away in Majuro, a city with electricity, plumbing, restaurants, hotels, and, should the mood strike, a bowling alley. I had the company of twenty-four other Americans who had come as volunteer teachers through a nonprofit organization called WorldTeach. During our month of orientation, we had received a celebrity's welcome. We met the US ambassador, the secretary of education, and a chief who had once been the country's president. We visited uninhabited islets, snorkeled on pristine reefs, and sipped cold beers while sitting in the bathwater warmth of the lagoon. We cured ourselves of gentle misconceptions—coconuts plucked from the tree were not the brown spheres of tropical island cartoons, but rather egg-shaped, leaf-green fruits—and imagined that every surprise would be as innocuous as that one. We had supervised contact with the locals and fancied ourselves to be bravely crossing cultures. We lived in the electrified, plumbed classrooms of an out-of-session elementary school and thought we were roughing it. And always we had our Western bubble: the community of volunteers, the Internet café, the orientation classes on pedagogy and shark safety. The joys ahead seemed obvious, the challenges pleasantly abstract.

Not that I hadn't received any warnings. There were stories of a volunteer teacher in the Canadian Arctic who had prepared himself for round-the-clock darkness, but not for the fact that the natives hated white people. Locals told him he couldn't leave his cabin (where he lived alone) because polar bears would eat him. Then, one night, he became convinced that there was a village conspiracy to kill him. He packed a bag of food, planned his escape over the tundra, and braced himself for ambush. No one came. There was no conspiracy. He survived, but his sanity had taken a hit. Another story told of a Peace Corps volunteer on an outer Micronesian atoll who snapped one day and started rowing a boat into the middle of the ocean. When a helicopter arrived to rescue him, he tried to fight off the rescue team with a pair of oars.

I had heard these stories. But, as I stood on a tropical beach framed with a double rainbow, playing Frisbee with young, pretty Americans, deprivation was not the first thing in my mind.

The idyll ended when one of Air Marshall Islands' three tiny planes announced its schedule to fly to Ujae. Like eleven of my fellow volunteers,
I had been assigned to an outer island rather than an urban center. The former was a far cry from the latter. Of the country's sixty thousand citizens, two-thirds lived on the urbanized islands of Majuro and Ebeye. The rest of the populace was scattered across dozens of rural islands where fire was more vital than electricity and land more coveted than money. I wanted that second world—a backwater in a country that was itself a backwater—and when I applied to the volunteer program, I stated this preference in the starkest possible terms. My wish came true: my placement was Ujae—and Ujae was extreme.

I had signed on the dotted line and now I was here, finishing breakfast on my first outer-island morning. Except for a brief interlude in Majuro during the school's winter break, I would not leave Ujae for the next ten months. This was my new world, so I decided to explore it. After making some hand signals to Alfred and Tior to explain what I was up to, I stepped onto the beach and embarked on a bold oneman expedition: to circle the entirety of the island's shore.

Forty-five minutes later, I wondered what else I could do for the rest of the year.

I tried again. I crossed the uninhabited interior of the island, certain my first foray along the beach had bypassed some vast swath of hidden territory. It hadn't, I realized five minutes later, when I reached the opposite shore. I tried a third time, walking along the lagoon-hugging village, searching for spots that I hadn't passed yesterday when Alfred guided me from the airstrip to his house. There were none, I realized as I reached the airport fifteen minutes later. Uncharted had become well trodden. I had circumnavigated the world before lunch.

I now understood on a visceral level why this region of the Pacific was called Micronesia, which means “small islands.” In the United States, there might well be parking lots bigger than Ujae. In the Marshalls, Ujae was unusually large at a third of a square mile. This was a country of 1,225 islands totaling only seventy square miles of land—it was Washington, DC, shattered into a thousand pieces over an area the size of Mexico. Ujae was five times larger than the average Mar-shallese islet, most of which were uninhabited.

I returned to my host family, ate a lunch of plain rice, made awkward nonconversation, and set out again. This time I aimed to see what there was, not how little there was.

There were several dozen cinderblock houses, and, interspersed with them, a few thatched huts: the classic image of exotic paradise, if not for the solar panel on the roof and the bicycle parked by the door. There were two churches. There was an ungracefully decaying elementary school and a tiny Head Start building. There were two motorboats and three sailing canoes, plus the orphaned hulls and outriggers of half-made watercraft lying around the village. I spotted a few generators, rusty and long neglected. There were a handful of solar panels, a small number of electric lights, and a larger number of kerosene lanterns. There were a few seabirds, a few dozen dogs and cats, a few hundred chickens and pigs, a few thousand mice and lizards, a few million flies, and approximately eighteen trillion ants.

Ujae Island was part of Ujae Atoll, which, like every coral atoll, was a thin ring of reef studded with islets surrounding a lagoon. Ujae sat perched between the inner lagoon and outer ocean, and I quickly understood that the essential axis of the island was ocean-lagoon, not east-west or north-south. Walking to the two ends of that axis brought me to the island's extremes. The lagoon was calm, shallow, and so transparent as to be color-coded by depth; its beach was smooth, sandy, and fringed by houses. The ocean was violent, mile-deep, and impenetrably opaque; its beach was rough, rocky, and utterly deserted. There were two sides to this island, and they couldn't have been more distinct.

At low tide, I ventured onto the now exposed lagoon reef. Close to shore, a tide pool hosted a microcosm of life: tentacled anemones, black-and-yellow-striped snails, and iridescent blue fish that endlessly circled their kitchen sink–sized world, searching for an exit that didn't exist. It was a tiny, beautiful prison, like this island.

I returned to the ocean side. I didn't dare to swim in the open sea, where the waves dashed themselves against the rough edge of the atoll, but, at low tide, with the ocean reef exposed and extending a hundred feet outward before plunging into the sea, I walked to the very edge of that underwater precipice and felt I was on the summit of an unfathomably tall mountain—which I was.

I found the highest point I could—a three-foot-tall dune—and scanned the horizon, but I couldn't see any other islands. There was only ocean in every direction. To the north, Bikini Atoll was invisibly
distant at 150 miles. To the west, there was nothing until Ujelang Atoll, almost three hundred miles away, and, to the south, the next stop would be one of the smallest countries in the world, Nauru, seven hundred miles away. Even Lae Atoll, thirty miles to the east, was hidden completely behind the curvature of the Earth.

Leaving the ocean behind, I set off to explore Ujae's interior. Tiny hills wrinkled the land, but the tallest of them couldn't have exceeded eight feet. Like its tiny size, Ujae's flatness was typical for the country. The highest point in the Marshall Islands was a nameless hillock of sand on Likiep Atoll, towering thirty-two feet above sea level—a veritable Everest in a country with an average elevation of seven feet.

Between Ujae's sweet-tempered lagoon and ruthless ocean lay the jungle. It was an overgrown palm forest crisscrossed with small paths and dotted with shadowy ponds. I walked to the center of the jungle, as far as possible from the shore, but I could still hear ocean waves in stereo. There was no escaping the smallness of this world.

As the sun set, I returned to the De Brums' property. Alfred and Tior were lying outside on woven mats, enjoying the balmy night with mosquito coils smoking next to them. The stars were brilliant in a way that only immense isolation can allow. Out on the beach, away from the family's one electric light, they were ten times more so. There were no airplanes in the sky, nor had there been the night before, nor did I expect to see one the night after. If I saw one it would only make it clearer how distant this place was from everything, only invite questions as to what had brought those people in the sky to this faraway corner of the world.

I ate another meal of plain rice and retired to my room. The cinderblock walls had absorbed the day's heat and were re-emitting it into the room's uncirculating air. The concrete was for withstanding typhoons, not regulating the temperature. I was living in an undersized, overheated tide pool.

I had spent my first full day on Ujae. As I retreated to bed, Alfred and Tior bade me a barely recognizable “good night”—a piece of America that, like me, had somehow found its way to this world.

 

 

 

 

SCHOOL WOULDN'T BEGIN FOR ANOTHER MONTH, SO, FOR THE TIME
being, my only job was to watch, learn, and be fed. I could say only a few words, but I was praised for the effort. I could contribute nothing to the community except accidental comic relief.

I was an infant.

So I worked on acquiring the basics of my world. I learned the island's daily rhythm, which was a steady one. The tide came and went, drowning the reef under restless waters, then withdrawing to let large sections of the lagoon floor bake in the heat. The sun rose fiery, shot up to directly overhead, and then was quickly gone. Day was brighter and night was darker than I imagined they could be. Each morning, the men left for their chores: spearfishing, netfishing, linefishing, coconut fetching, coconut husking, coconut scraping. The women kept the grounds immaculate, the fire burning, and the children
working—until the youngsters were let go for midday games on the beach. Then, at dusk, everyone returned to their homesteads.