On New Year’s Day, I traveled to the Marshall Islands as part of the Dartmouth Volunteer Teaching Program. We arrived on an atoll called Majuro — the nation’s capital — 30 miles long and a few hundred meters wide. As we drove down the sole paved road on the island from the one-room airport, I took in what would be my home for the next 10 weeks. Dilapidated houses encroached upon one another and clotheslines competed for sunlight. Dogs with no collars sprinted after our truck and then returned to their spot in the shade of a coconut tree. What hit me the most on that first day, though, were the smiles, waves and “yokwe” (hello in Marshallese) greetings we received from the people walking on the side of the road and sitting on the stoops of their homes. These extraordinary demonstrations of kindness and hospitality would become a constant over the course of my time there.
The following Monday, I walked to the high school where I would be teaching. Waiting in the classroom was Joe, the full-time math teacher at Marshall Islands High School. Joe told me he played eight-man for his school in Fiji and we quickly bonded over our shared love of rugby. Then, the morning bell rang and 30 10th-graders entered. Joe introduced me as Mr. Jake from Chicago and told the students I would be teaching them for the next 10 weeks. He patted me on the back, wished me good luck and left.
I had never taught before. I was alone with the kids and had no idea what their skill level was. So I asked the class if someone could tell me what they had studied before winter break. A couple of the more polite girls at the front responded that they had completed chapter six. I told everyone to get a textbook, a task accomplished with almost universal reluctance, and we turned to chapter seven. I quickly realized, however, that quadratic equations and graphing parabolas went far beyond what all but a few of the students could handle. In fact, multiplying was still a struggle for many, and for a few, even spelling their own name was difficult.
That first week, I began to adjust to life in Majuro. When the electricity at the packed laundromat went out one evening, we took it in stride. My Dartmouth friend and I watched the locals and saw that one person stayed with the laundry while the others went home to prepare and bring back dinner. So we did the same. As we ate with a smile on our faces, the machines began to spin and whir again. My complete lack of experience cooking and fending for myself posed few problems, even during the first days since our small but formidable group of Dartmouth undergrads took care of each other. We shared the meal preparation, the chores, a listening ear and a constant sense of humor and good will.
As my time in Majuro flew by with lightning speed, I can’t say that I taught my students everything they needed to know about algebra, but I know I learned a tremendous amount from them. A week into my teaching assignment, I put up flyers advertising a rugby team at the school. Despite being surrounded by Pacific Island nations where rugby is life, the Marshallese public high school had no rugby team. The first afternoon, I was happily surprised when 15 boys met me immediately after school in the “breezeway,” a space between buildings where wind passes through to alleviate the island heat.
The boys trained on a half-grass, half-rock field. Five players were also my students, former troublemakers who had handed in blank pages early in the term. This quintet turned into some of my hardest workers. They learned that if they came to class late or unprepared, they would not be able to participate at rugby practice. The disciplinary part of teaching did not come easy for me. I struggled with the best way to motivate students who became discouraged due to a lack of prior success, but this lesson in the rewards of positive reinforcement was a revelation.
The camaraderie of rugby is what makes me love the game. The kids on the team started to walk with their arms around each other. The local grocery store contributed jerseys, and we experienced the thrill of winning our game against the private school team. Meanwhile, this was one of the few times in my life that I viewed myself as truly needed, and the feeling was incomparable. In the classroom, I aimed to challenge the stronger students while attempting to ensure that their less advanced classmates also gained confidence through the pleasure of solving algebra equations. As my students grasped new concepts in the classroom and on the field, I saw their faces light up and blank stares turn to wide-eyed smiles, which of course led me to smile as well.
Apart from coaching and teaching, new experiences, like spontaneous Sunday adventures to an outer island and “kava sessions” with the Fijian and Tongan adults after adult rugby practice, taught me so much about how I want to treat the people in my life. Similarly, the lessons in acceptance that my Dartmouth classmates and I learned from this Marshallese community that so warmly and inclusively adopted us became the centerpiece of our beautiful experience. Along with Hanover, that place, basically off the map and previously unknown to me, represents what I think it means to develop a sense of belonging.
Yet the feeling did not exist in a vacuum. Emeritus education professor Andrew Garrod exposes Dartmouth students each year to the richness of this experience and commits to the young people of this atoll, where each winter he directs a student-acted play that brings the entire community together and has become a mainstay tradition of island life.
We traveled on our last day in a yellow school bus filled with the kids from the play and a number of my rugby players, all singing songs and telling jokes. When we arrived at the airport, we were given handmade gifts and countless last hugs. It was crazy how loved and appreciated we felt, and how grateful we were for our students and the community which had embraced us so quickly and so warmly. As I took in the chaotic, yet beautiful, scene as the sun set at the one-room, oceanfront airport, I decided that someday I would have to come back.
