Teaching on Kaben | Marshall Islands

About Kaben

The Marshall Islands are located in the Pacific Ocean about midway between Hawaii and Papua New Guinea. They formed as volcanic peaks which, over time, eroded. Coral reefs grew up on the sunken edges making low, flat islands around central lagoons.

Kaben is in Maloelap Atoll, a little over 100 miles from the capital city, Majuro. I taught at Kaben Elementary School from January to May 2010 through the WorldTeach program. My classes included English for grades 3-8, in combined classes, and 8th grade math.

Kaben is one of the windiest islands, with big waves at the ocean side and sizable waves at the lagoon. Yachts almost never visit and, as it turns out, the broken-down government supply ships rarely do either. On the island – about 1.1 sq. miles in area – everyone lives along the lagoon. The rest of the island is open forest, with an airstrip cutting across diagonally.

(Map of Kaben, from Google Maps)

The biggest gatherings to happen at the school and the Protestant church. School runs Monday through Friday, and for most of the third quarter we also did half a day on Saturdays. On the field behind the school, kids play baseball and other games. They make their own gloves out of cardboard boxes, as I learned the first week when they swarmed me asking for tape. Sometimes older men hold a baseball game there, where lots of people come out to watch. A group of men constructed a basketball court in front of my house not long after I arrived (a coconut tree post and old wood for a backboard). It was popular for a while, but I think they ran low on balls. Church takes place once a day, twice on Sunday. I started off going every day with my host mother and then settled on only Sundays. A smaller church sits at the other end of the island, but I’ve never been to it.

My host family’s house serves as the “hospital,” really just a dispensary. Another family’s house doubles as a “store,” but it was out of supplies for much of the time I was there.

Except for sorely missing rice, flour, and sugar when the ship doesn’t come, the island is remarkably self-sufficient. Local foods include fish, chickens, pigs, coconuts, breadfruit, pandanus, pumpkins, and a few lime trees, banana trees, and papaya plants. Shallow wells provide fresh water for showering and washing clothes. We catch rain water in tanks for drinking. I also use a steripen, just in case. One day my neighbors had to empty one of their tanks because, as my mother told me, a rat had fallen in and died and was giving off a smell. When I let out a loud “Ewwwww!” she added that maybe it wasn’t a rat, just a piece of salt fish that had fallen in. Who knows.

The only real form of communication is radio. Occasionally, I’ve seen a large group waiting at the school or another house, to talk to their kids who are away at high school. I have a shortwave radio that, with the help of stereo wire, picks up international stations across the Pacific. I listened to a lot of Radio Australia (Pacific news, Sunday mornings with Macca) and Radio New Zealand, and I LOVED (*sarcasm*) the English broadcasts of Voice of Korea and its stories of Kim Jong Il….

My house is made of 2x4s and plywood, with a tin roof and concrete floors. A few concrete blocks sit on the roof to keep it from blowing away. Some houses have solar panels. My host family uses theirs to, among other things, charge a large battery for my house that powers a tiny light-bulb. Cockroaches, mice, spiders, lizards, moths, mosquitoes, centipedes, scorpions, and ants come in and out at will, unless I spray them with Mortein (death in a can, not sold in the U.S.). A teacher joked that sometimes people spray it over their heads to get rid of lice… possibly true? The wood of the house is being eaten away by ants or termites, and when it rains outside, it rains inside, through numerous holes in the tin. Other houses are made of concrete block, wood and tin, a patchwork of materials, or thatched pandanus leaves.

The school is made of concrete blocks. My classroom is nice, except for the rain. When the rain is too bad, which happened maybe twice, the school has to stop classes for a while. The water pours in the wall from the lagoon side, not just through the open windows but also through various cracks. The plywood windows that we prop open with sticks have to be closed, and since the windows have no glass, the room becomes too dark to see.

Otherwise, the school has decent facilities and plenty of paper and chalk. The biggest problem that I ever noticed was health and nutrition. Open sores, swollen fingers, persistent pinkeye, bites and cuts… none of it ever seems to get proper treatment. The kids complain a lot of being sick and tired, that their heads don’t work or that their stomachs hurt. Even teachers are sick a lot. One had eye problems from a botched (?) laser surgery in Majuro. Another went to Majuro for medical tests and got stuck there for months (no plane or boat). Another died, unexpectedly, early in the fourth quarter, and we had a long, sad, funeral. It was hard for us to get back on-track after that. I’ve been moderately sick too, off and on, but enough for now. That comes later.

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