Marshall Islands: Sitcom Expectations (cont.)

The best times were getting to know my students. They were beautiful, funny, and smart little people who gave me a run for my money every single day. One of my favorite memories was playing American football with them. The first time we played, there were about thirty kids who showed up. Laijab, at only eleven, was the biggest kid at school and had somehow gotten his hands on some lacrosse pads, which he thought was football gear. He lined up opposite of me, smiled and pointed at my face.

When 'hike' was called, Laijab ran straight for my chest. Some of my kids used to say I looked like a broom. If I were a broom, then Laijab was a bowling ball. I toppled violently to the ground. Laijab cheered.

“No tackling,” I breathed out softly from collapsed lungs.

“Aw, that is so boring, Mr. Tim,” Laijab sighed as he got off my chest.

Through the good and bad times, I never anticipated it would all be so strange. Eventually, however, time passed like a string of novelty Christmas lights: one bizarre occurrence after another, and I found myself approaching the end of my time, getting ready to say goodbye. I’d soon be back to a place with potable tap water, seasonal differentiation and elevation. But before I left, a few more surprises lay in store for me

To start things off, I was robbed. While I was sound asleep, someone crept into my yard, peeled back the security screening on my living room window like a can of Spam, and rifled through my house. They stole money and electronics. I felt pretty alarmed that someone would go through all the trouble to rob volunteer housing.

Then, a few days later at school while I was taking roll, the principal came whirling through my room, stick in hand, demanding to know who was late. I told her that every single student was on time (a lie) and that she needed to leave my classroom (the truth). She yelled at me for a while in the hallway and told me I needed to have better control of my class. She handed me the stick, told me to use it, and walked away.

I went to the bathroom—a deplorable place with no running water that over the course of the year had turned into a haven for hellacious smells—and looked out my two-storey vantage point for a good place to toss the stick.

That was when I saw Charles. Charles was a student whose most notable quality was his propensity to skip all his classes every single day, and for reasons unknown to me, still show up at school. He was sitting against a fence behind the school and looked like he was in pain. I couldn’t make out what was going on, so I leaned out further, and it was only then, to my terrible surprise that I saw he was feverishly undertaking a certain rite of passage all young men participate in.  Only instead of enjoying the privacy of his bedroom, he was in broad daylight behind an elementary school. I took the stick and threw it in the bushes near Charles. He never saw me and ran wildly away, in shock. Disheartened and more homesick than ever before, I returned to my apartment after school and went to sleep almost immediately.

The next morning I woke up to the sound of pebbles being hurled at my door; two of my students wanted to come and hang out, and so I pulled myself together. I got up and let my students, Billis and Paul, come in. They immediately set to work with hammer and nails and fixed my window. Then they saw how messy my room was.

“This is no good, Mr. Tim,” they told me.

“I know guys, but it’s been a tough couple days.”

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