Surviving Paradise by Peter Rudiak-Gould Page A

of limited experience, this mundane vessel was a visitor from another planet. At two and half stories tall and sixty feet long, it was by far the largest man-made object I had seen in a month. At five hundred feet from shore, it would be the farthest I had ventured from the island. I had to set foot on it.
    The crew edged the metallic hulk as close to the island as they could. The lagoon remained shallow enough to bathe in for hundreds of feet from shore, but then it dropped abruptly into its deeper center. It was at this eerie divide that the ship was anchored while motorboats ferried the villagers to and fro. I did what I had to do: I invited myself along. After a few minutes sandwiched between islanders and their bulging sacks of soon-to-be-sold copra, I was aboard the ship. Ujae Island was now thrillingly distant. The ocean was impossibly far below me. The can of Coke I was given on board was miraculously cold. (Natives of temperate climes conceive of paradise as warm. Here coolness had the same godly aura. Heaven is most definitely air-conditioned.)
    The cabin sported a sink, a refrigerator, and cabinets, and I could not avoid a certain feeling of déjà vu. I was startled to see unfamiliar Marshallese faces. I knew only a handful of Ujae dwellers well, but I had unwittingly memorized the appearance of all of them. The faces of the ship’s crew were as conspicuous to me as if they had been painted green. They, in turn, were happily surprised by my presence in this place.
    Several of the islanders were savoring canned beverages with the same rapture I had. But instead of throwing the empty cans in the trash, they casually tossed them into the lagoon. I was appalled. Then I realized that, until very recently, all of their garbage had been biodegradable. Was it perhaps our fault for making the can, and not theirs for disposing of rubbish as they always had?
    I watched as my host family and others loaded the motorboat with rice, flour, grease, shortening, coffee, sugar, and kerosene. This was the last chance for several months to buy staples in any large quantity. Itemscould be ordered on the radio to arrive on the plane, but the cargo capacity was small and the price was high. The islanders had to stock up on essentials now, to last them until the next supply ship arrived.
    The other teachers—four men named Mariano, Kapten, Steven, and Simpson—had come on this ship, and they were as relieved at their arrival as I was. They had been living on the boat for the previous three weeks as it made its rounds selling food and buying copra among the outer islands. They did not have a cabin—they slept on the deck regardless of the weather. The Ministry of Education, they said, was strapped for cash.
    Now all the teachers were here, and I could beg and cajole Robella to relieve me from teaching the lowest grades. Or I could get very sick once again, stay incapacitated in my room, and fail to be informed as they met to plan my schedule and my fate, which were the same thing. The latter happened, but the outcome was miraculously the same. No longer would the first, second, and third graders torment me. From here on out, it was grades four through eight, which upgraded my job from hellish to merely awful.
    Teaching still presented a few challenges—or let us just call them problems. (“Challenges,” after all, is a word used in retrospect for what at the time is better described as “pain.”) Lack of a common fluent language was one obvious hitch. Another difficulty was the rock-bottom starting point. I had already discovered they could speak no more than a few words and phrases of English and could understand next to nothing in my language. Then I discovered that their written skills were on par with their oral ones. Even in their native Marshallese, virtually all of the students had to sound out every word as they spelled or read it; in English, they were worse still. One eighth grader once