Cultural Day and Graduation

Internet is working. So...

Last week was the week after final exams, and it was a busy one. The main event that the students have been preparing for for many weeks was Cultural Day, an event that happens here at Xavier every two years. This is when each island nation (6 of them) plus any other nations that are represented at Xavier (Indian and Japanese this year) perform cultural dances for everyone to see. You do not know how lucky I am to be at Xavier because not only am I on Chuuk experiencing that culture, but I am with students from all over Micronesia: Palau, Yap, Chuuk, Pohnpei, Kosrae and the Marshall Islands. They span a total of 3000 miles, yet the combined land mass of all these small islands is still less than Rhode Island. Yet the cultures are completely different, and the dances, foods, costumes and languages are more diverse than any other region in the world.

I'll take this opportunity to let you all know that I have updated the best of the Cultural Day photos on my webshots. Please check them out. I have titled them appropriately as well so you can distinguish between each island nation dance...


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(Sorry for the delay. Since the last time I updated my blog, a week and a half has passed. The internet literally started working – albeit slowly – the day before we left. I will explain below what was going on the days leading up to me leaving for the Marshall Islands – where I am writing from right now – but I will continue from May 10th, Cultural Day)

The first part of the day consisted of exhibits and food. Different classrooms were assigned to the different island nations (again, from East to West: Republic of the Marshall Islands, (Federated States of Micronesia) Kosrae, Pohnpei, Chuuk, Yap, Republic of Palau). Each classroom had many things on sale as well as for display. The Palauans had the actual immunity monkey statue they used in the show Survivor, the Yappese had all of their costumes up for display, as well as a lot of betel nut (the best betel nut comes from Yap) the Kosraeans, although the smallest group at Xavier (only 4 students) had a lot of food, including some great banana cinnamon pie. The Chuukese weren’t selling anything, but they had tons of food. The Marshallese and the Pohnpeians had the most crafts to sell. I did buy a lot of authentic and beautiful things, but I wont be sending them home any time soon because I don’t trust the postal service system here any more. I’ll send it home with my brother when he comes here during Christmas (you should think about joining him).

All of the dances that were performed were not really new, since we’ve seen bits and pieces of them for the WASC visit, but everyone, especially us first years, were especially excited. Unfortunately, we missed the first couple of dances because the teachers and I were getting dressed and ready for our multicultural dance in one of the classrooms. That consisted of getting our thu ready. A thu is basically a long red sheet that you tie around your waist. You’re not supposed to do this, but we wore underwear underneath, just in case. We also put on body paint, but we did not smear ourselves with oil, which other students did for their dances. After a few dances were performed in Callaghan hall, in front of many visitors and families (who were also there for graduation) and even tourists, since this day was advertised down town, the faculty was ready to perform. It was really fun, and everyone got a kick out of it. They loved to see many of us white people dressed up and trying to do traditional Chuukese dances. I think most of the students loved the New Zealand dance we did (the one we learned from one of the Australian volunteers). It’s a dance used by the New Zealand rugby team before a match to intimidate the opponents. It’s pretty hard core. I’ll teach everyone both dances when I get home. I’m still trying to figure out how to send home some of the videos that were taken of the dances.

All of the other dances were amazing as well. The Yappese were the best, I think, because Yap is known for preserving its culture better than any other island nation in Micronesia, and they take their traditional ways seriously. All of their costumes, from their special grass skirts to the paint they put on their bodies, come directly from Yap and cannot and should not be gotten from anywhere else. All of the middle island nation states have stick dances, which includes wacking long sticks against others’, almost like a sword fight, and they’re all pretty fascinating how the students can keep a rhythm without hitting each other in the head. The Pohnpeians can do it the fastest, the Kosraeans do a cool move when they move the stick under their legs to hit their partner’s stick, but the Yappese do more complex movements that includes jumping and twirling while holding sticks. All in all, it’s an amazing sight, and viewing dances like this really make me fully aware that I am truly in a different place, a very unique and beautiful part of the world. There are always remnants of Western culture everywhere, but these cultural dances are pure Micronesian culture, and it is very moving to see how serious these students perform them. Please check out the pictures to get an idea of what I’m talking about, although those pictures and this blog do not do them justice.

The last notable thing was the Sakau pounding in the Pohnpeian hut. I think I mentioned how we drank Sakau during Christmas, when the two Pohnpeian JVs came to visit. Some Pohnpeian parents brought the Kava root, and the students showed us, in the hut, how they traditionally prepared the drink. On a big flat rock, the pounded the root as much as they could, turning it into stringy dust. Next the put clumps of this crushed root in soaked hibiscus bark. They soaked this for a while, then squeezed out all of the juice, which was the drink Sakau. The students also explained that they prepare this for guests or big feasts, and females never prepare it. The son must also always prepare the Sakau if the father is present. There is also a special way of passing the Sakau (which is drunk from a dried out coconut shell), and you must close your eyes when you drink it. My mouth turned numb when drank some, and apparently you are supposed to get a relaxed buzz from it. It’s pretty nice, although it has this slimy feel to it. Overall, it was pretty cool.

That’s about it for Cultural Day. I wish I took time to write my blog immediately after the day occurred, because I’m sure that I am forgetting some details at this moment, almost 16 days later. But it was a very busy time. Although I was done with grading, I still had to do a lot of clean up with my office and my room, as well as help with the Baccalaureate mass and Graduation. Chris’ parents were also visiting, which was great. Mrs. Dwyer even taught some of us authentic Irish Dancing, and if the Dwyers showed up a few days before Cultural Day, we would have performed it in front of everyone. Why not, it’s a cultural dance! I wish I knew some authentic Spanish or Cuban dances to show off. Next time.
The Bacc. Mass was nice, and getting ready for graduation was mostly the job of the students. I was not that close with the senior students, so I was not as sad or emotional as some of the other teachers. I spent the last remaining days of the year hanging out with the Dwyers, resting, or just running around from meal to special meal with the graduating seniors.
Like everything else at Xavier and Chuuk, everything was unorganized and a mess, but I just sat back and let the confusion that usually ensues for big events like this happen. Graduation was outside on the courts, with everyone under tents. However, while walking towards the tents for the first time that Saturday morning, the whole setup looked like an outdoor Hawaiian themed tag sale. There were colorful balloons and decorations everywhere, as well as shirts hanging from all of the tents. Apparently it’s a Marshallese tradition to hang out up newly bought shirts for the kids to grab after the event is over. There was also island music blasting from the stereo system (which, of course, went out due to a power outage in the middle of the event).
That night, also on the court, there was huge dinner for all of the graduates, students, families and guests. Apparently there was enough food prepared for about 1000 guests! I don’t know if that was true, but there were a lot of people (who I assumed brought food themselves); even the entire field was covered with cars. There were tables for people to sit at under the tents, plus a live Chuukese band (consisting of some relatives and, of course, the most popular instrument nowadays, the keyboard), plus some room for dancing. The students sat in the outskirts of the tables, and the seniors sat at tables at the special stage/tent. There were some speeches made by our deacon and director and some random parents (thankfully there was no alcohol, or else the speeches would have gone on forever). There was some dancing, as well. Some random Sapuk kids, who were also hanging out on the outskirts of court, dragged me out to dance, which was pretty funny. Sunday, the next day, involved a lot of nothing: for the first time in a long time, there was really nothing to do.

Monday was the debate, round two. First of all, I appreciate everyone’s sympathy from the first debacle, but I’ve learned a lot from that experience. I taught me a lot about organizing events and working with different groups of people. It also led me to recognize and deal with frustration. Now this second time was a piece of cake, because we had 6 judges in total, which was very helpful. SDA backed out (which was fine with us), and Chuuk High, who said would participate, did not show up that day. So it was just us and Saramen, the site where the new JVI community will be starting at the end of the summer. We had two rounds against Saramen, and they were very, very good. We won the first, lost the second, and lost by ONE point overall! But I didn’t mind, because I was glad it was all over, but more importantly, both teams gave very great debates. I’m glad the score was so close, because both teams deserved to do so well. My debators were not that disappointed, since they were also glad it was over, but they also knew that both teams did very well, and it also deserved to be close. However, with the debate over, my summer vacation officially started.

Tuesday was also incredibly busy. Not only did I have to finish cleaning up my office, but I had to clean up my room, pack everything for the summer, and attend a 5 hour student government meeting, since I am moderator. I am very excited about working with the Senate next year, and I wish I was around longer to work with the students more. I have many ideas, and I want to see that they do well. Anyway, it was a very busy day, and I found out that later that afternoon the internet came back on. That’s when I quickly updated my blog, and wrote emails to let everyone know I was alive.

Early the next day we all left for the airport, and everyone was there to see us off. Even my sponsor family came just to say goodbye to me. Then, after many hours of island hopping, we arrived in the Marshall Islands, where I am right now, and I’m pretty tired, so I need to go, but I will update you guys later with what Majuro is like. It is totally different from Chuuk, I’ll say that much.

Yokwe (hello, goobye, I love you – Marshallese)

Power Problems and Debate: Part 1

Where to begin...

It is Tuesday night right now. Let's see what has happened in the past couple of days. The theme for tonight: Ridiculousness. Capital 'R'.

First of all, for the first time here with my stay on Chuuk, we, at Xavier have had NO power, none whatsoever, for TWO WHOLE DAYS. I'm sure you have heard about the power situation here, and how it goes off and on at random times. It's incredibly frustrating, but honestly, after a few months of it, it is as normal as the sun rising and setting. Our two sources of power are the school's own generator and "island power"; power that comes from the main deisel fueled power plant downtown which generates power to the whole island. When island power goes out, our generator is turned on (only if it is during school hours and meals, not, let's say, during unimportant hours like Saturday and Sunday afternoons).

So what made the past two (and a half, actually - no power today until 6) days different. It just happens that our generator broke and the island power plant, well, ran out of fuel. For our Xavier generator, something broke that cannot be replaced for months because it is in Guam. The question most of us have been asking ourselves is: Why isn't the spare lying around somewhere. I mean, the generator is a pretty important thing, especially since the power situation is very sketchy here at best. It's like saying when you buy a car "Spare tire? Why would I need that? I have four perfectly good ones right here. Here, you can keep it." But, that's the ridiculousness of the situation that we have to appreciate. Plus is didn't help that this week is finals week, and a certain number of teachers (aka ALL of them) need to type up and print their finals.
Now, when I say that the island plant ran out of fuel, I need to elaborate. Here on Chuuk, that means that the government either ran out of money to pay for gas. Or, in more precise terms, the people who pay the money for this fuel have been so behind in paying Mobil that they got pissed and denied the plant fuel. So, for the past two and a half days, the whole island was without power (to be fair, it's not the WHOLE island; some houses and individual stores have their own generators, like we HAD, but theirs work).
Joe made a good observation today: When power goes out in America, people's work is ruined, and their jobs are messed up. I mean, when there is a blackout, that hurts the business we have to do. Apparently that's not the case here. Power goes out here all the time, some times (as I have experienced in the past few days) for an extended period of time. How do they function? What types of jobs are here - or I guess to be more accurate - what types of mentalities towards work is here that people can casually allow the power not to be on for days? That's the world that I am in. That is what Chuuk is like.

Now, for more ridiculousness.

Today is Tuesday, the day of the Chuuk State Debate, which I am in charge of. First of all, I took on the responsibility from Anne, the principal, because she had way too much on her plate, and I felt bad, but also because I wanted to experience working for an extracurricular activity that involved many schools. However, it is also noteworthy to mention how this guy at the FSM Supreme Court, Harry, was supposed to run this whole thing to BEGIN with, but he dumped it on Anne. We are certain he did this because, well, he's probably lazy (surprise) and she's American, so she would work hard at it. That's not an exaggeration.
So, after many months of desperately trying to get people to participate in this debate, after many phone calls that have gotten no where, after two meetings that I called and attended (once I rode downtown on my bike, second one when I barely made it down in the truck since I was still learning how to drive stick shift - I'm an expert at it now, thank you) NO ONE SHOWED UP, and after a week, just one week, of preparing my Xavier students to cram and take all of their extra time to work incredibly hard for both sides of the proposition (to state it simply, should FSM have dual citizenship), the day finally arrived. It was us against Saramen Chuuk Academy (the second best school - Catholic school - here on Chuuk) and SDA (Seventh Day Adventist).
However, there was a problem going into this whole debate (and this is the beginning of the problem, so pay attention). We had no judges. That was also a problem last year (no one showed up when they said they would, so Xavier's assistant principal had to do it last minute). Basically, after trying EVERYONE we possibly could (Anne did most of this work), these potential judges have turned us down, are off island, or just gave us some lame excuse why they couldn't help. Lame. Capital "L". Mind you, there are only two criteria for a judge in this case: you had to be a competent English speaker and unbiased towards a certain school. Alas, we couldn't find anyone. We needed SOMEONE. So I asked each school to bring one judge from their school. That would cause the problem of people being biased, fine, but everyone agreed to it, because we had no one to judge, and it was the best we can do at this point.
Besides, we're all adults here, so even though there may be some bias, we can all judge a simple debating event pretty fairly, considered this is an important event that the students worked hard on, and they deserve the best judging to adequately decide who should represent Chuuk for the Nationals. Also, we're all educators, so we would judge fairly in the name of respect for education.

Oh, how I can be so wrong.

Tuesday morning, we're all psyched and ready to go. I wore pants and my only dress button down shirt, tucked in, rolled up sleeves, business casual. I got a lot of great comments from the students in the hall way. Eugene and Desi, two of my brightest and hardest working students, both Pohnpeian, were the ones who would debate, and they were also looking very sharp in formal clothing. So, after we frantically scrambled to print out our debate briefs from the lone computer in the main office that was hooked up to a back up miniscule generator (the generator was so weak, that once started printing something, the battery backup turned on on the computer, meaning we had literally a minute to print before the computer shut down), I drove everyone down (stick shift, thank you) to the FSM courthouse. We also brought along 5 other Juniors who are alternates, but really part of the team who helped Eugene and Desi along the way, and Nick and Jeremy, the Australian volunteers (right out of high school) who volunteered to judge and help (they don't really have anything better to do now, since their only job was to grade the Entrance Exam, and that's been done for months).

We get to the courthouse early, then the other two teams arrive, I find out that I'm the moderator, so I'm basically making all of the decisions on how this runs, and I ended up addressing the whole crowd (it got pretty big, with spectators from each school) and controlled the time and everything like that. So Jeremey was our judge, a teacher John Martin (whom I've met before, nice guy) from Saramen was their judge, and from SDA ... no judge! They didn't do what they were supposed to do. No one wanted to help, the coach told me (surprise). However, right before we began, their principal volunteered to help. Fine. I gave them grading sheets, as well as a sheet with a detailed explanation on how to judge. They were set. The teams were set. I got the event started, reading off the procuders we would follow and everything else, and we flipped coins, and Xavier went first against SDA. The debate began.

Now, how this works, is the loser of the Xavier-SDA would go against Saramen, and the winner of that one would play the winner of the first one. If you don't know debate, it goes like this: introduction, about 4 minutes, main arguments, up to 15, rebuttal, then response to rebuttal, followed by a summation. So about an hour total.

Let me speed up this story...

The debates went fine, but the problem happened with the judging. Let me reiterate something for all of you at this point (I've been reiterating things to people all day, so I'm getting good at it): I KNOW that we didn't have perfect judges, and I REALIZE that they may be biased, but we had the best we could work with. What I, and I guess everyone else, didn't expect was for the SDA principal - PRINCIPAL! - to be so blatantly biased and basically, well, an idiot! I'm sorry, but that's how I still feel. Let me explain.
SDA clearly did not know how to debate well. They did not have an organized format, they did not have strong or logical reasoning, their speaking was very informal, but most importantly of all, they provided no evidence. None (my Xavier students were very good to point that out in the rebuttal, thank you). But that's not the point. The SDA judge CLEARLY favored SDA over Xavier, causing Xavier to win by only one point (actually SDA won first - much to everyone's surprise, but the SDA judge can't add up his point correctly. Luckily, I recounted, and found his errors). Still, we should have blown the SDA team out of the water. Fine. We won, we had to move on.
SDA vs. Saramen next. Same proposition, but SDA was now the Affirmative team instead of the Negative team, which they were for us. Same thing. SDA did not give any reasonable arguments, lacked complete evidence, used emotional appeals some times (you dont do that in a proper debate), and were very unorganized. They even didn't do the summation correctly at all. Remember that. Saramen, however, did incredibly well (they might have beaten us, even). Result: SDA barely won. But they won. Why? Because the SDA judge decided to give them perfect scores for half of their entire debate.

Pure ridiculousness.

And that's when the fighting started.

The Saramen judge, coach, other teachers, students (the poor girls, they were crying because they were so shocked) and even Harry, the FSM supreme court guy (still havent figured out his title yet) surrounded me to address complaints (some formal, some informal, like when one Saramen teacher kept repeating bull s***) about the judging. How could SDA win? This judge is biased! He doesn't know what he's doing! Blah blah and so on. As the moderator, I had to listen to all of these complaints from the losing team. If both teams were very close, I would have to just dismiss it and stick to the final judgement.
However, as the moderator, as the Xavier coach, as a teacher of debate, and as someone who hates it when adults are completely biased and incompetent, I had to agree with everything they were saying. There was NO way they were close, and I didn't want Saramen to be denied to move to the next round. They probably worked as hard as we did, and they followed the proper procedures, like us, and unlike the SDA team. Now I feel sorry for the SDA team and I hope they are better prepared and coached next year, but to reward them but not the two teams that tried hard and did everything correctly...I didn't think so. So I got all the judges and coaches together in a meeting and we tried to work everything out.

For those of you who know me, I'm not a confrontational guy. I'm pretty laid back and I just want everyone to get along. You would have been proud and surprised of how I handled this. The SDA judge, this principal, was amazing! He kept dodging an explanation regarding how in the world he can judge his team the way he did. Pure ridiculousness.
Anyway, this is taking some time to tell, so, in the end, after almost a 30 minute meeting (while the students were waiting for the third debate to happen) we decided that the best thing to do - the best thing for the students - is to reschedule the debate and have ALL teams find a competent and UNBIASED judge. We have to start all over. So after 5 hours of debating and waiting and getting organized, we have to start all over again. All because this one man had to disregard all and any notions of evaluation of a proper debate to blatantly favor his own school. All because of this one man's inconsiderate, idiotic judging do we have to do all of this again. This is why I'm so upset. We the judges expected to be perfectly unbiased? No. But not to this ridiculous extent. It's also a sad statement of the situation of some of the schools in this area. This is the type of principal that runs their institution, and SDA is one of the better schools in Chuuk.

At least I'm proud of my students, who rocked out there, and probably would have won. So we're going to do this again! I'll let you know how THAT goes. Now I know how Joe feels, who is in charge (well, as you may have guessed, the responsibility was dumped on his by someone who was supposed to be doing their own job in the first place) of all the sports in Chuuk. He organized basketball, vollyball, and track and field. He had to deal with the same crap as I had to. This is how lax and unorganized everything is here. While the poverty may not be completely obviously in the physical landscape or possessions, the whole system is corrupted with uncarring and unorganized people. This does not go for everyone, of course, but I hope this gives you a better understanding of how things work here. I bet next year this will be very normal for me. But from a college student from New England, this is almost surreal. At least I'm learning how to confront people and gain patience.

Part 2 to come soon. Take care, and I hope my ridiculousness makes your seem like nothing. Peace out.