... or Pretzels for the anglophones. Every now and then you stumble across an unexpected cultural intersection that's just so much fun. A case in point: baking Brezeln with my Marshallese friends. I am pretty sure this very blog is the first time the adjective + noun combination Marshallese Brezeln was used. Ever! And in spite of the skeptic looks on our faces, the Brezeln were actually very good. Or, in Marshallese: enno! |
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My central European middle-class goggles are much more firmly in place than I thought. A case in point: Joghurt.
I have been happily using a pot of joghurt as a standard comparative price indicator across my travels, complaining about the bland and expensive $1.50 Hawaiian as compared to the lovely €.50 real alpine milk joghurts you can still find in Germany or - until recently - the Greek stirred loveliness at only slightly more expensive. When faced with a dearth of joghurts in Thailand or Vietnam, I simply told myself that, given the high levels of lactose intolerance, locals don't tend to consume milk products and my world-view was saved. At weaving yesterday, I was having joghurt as a desert (the kind you get in the supermarket chains here is the over-processed american type (sorry!) that mainly consist of ingredients that, to my German purist tastes, should have no place in joghurts -- why would anyone put eggs in a milk product??). As I was peeling off the lid, one of the weavers asked me what I was eating in the same way I had asked them when they were unwrapping their 'ju' (sprouting coconut) or their steamed breadfruit. Disbelievingly I said 'a joghurt' (I didn't quite know how to pitch my voice on this one). She asked 'what is this?' And here is where my world view crumbled: I was eating this joghurt as a desert, an unnecessary add-on to an already nutritious and varied meal (vegetables, tofu, egg, brown rice). And the desert alone cost me almost $2. I was talking to a woman who was eating white rice and meat for every meal of the day, every day of the year, a diet which will almost certainly leave her diabetic like so many of her fellow islanders (see my earlier post). Not only did she not know about many of the food choices that are available to the more fortunate - she had probably never come close to the aisles where they stock the foods for the ri-belle (meaning 'white foreigner') because there was nothing in there she could afford (or would know how to eat). Just because it's widely available in the supermarkets does not mean it's available to the people who shop in the supermarkets. Got it. Seraphim tells me he is shocked at how naive I am - I am shocked too. During the last two weeks, I have been spending a lot of time in training courses for science teachers run by the Marshallese ministry of education. The comittment of the Marshallese government towards training their teachers is commendable and - apart from acquiring knowledge about climate change and sea level rise - I also learnt a lot about the educational system as seen from the inside.
Truancy especially is a huge problem in the Marshall Islands. According to the educational minister, Hilda Heine*, net enrollment in primary school is 100%. But attendance rates decline to 68% at lower secondary and only 50% at secondary school. High school completion rates are at 43%. Talking to the teachers and the facilitators reveals that apart from a gaggle of social factors (such as lack of family support, teen pregnancy, bullying or issues of self-esteem issues) there are two infrastructural reasons for the dwindling rates of attendance: - the students often lack the funds for transportation. The cheapest taxi fare anywhere in Majuro is $0.5 one way (or $1 if you cross the bridge to Long Island). Since Marshall Islands High School, the largest high school in the country (and one of two on Majuro), used to be a boarding school, students didn't have to rely on cabs. Once the school moved to non-boarding, the school board acquired a school bus that would pick up students on the single road the travels the length of Majuro atoll. This bus broke down a few months ago and there are no spare parts on the islands, nor money in the system to bring in parts from the US. - Food is also an issue. Some children do not have access to breakfast and consequently they come to school hungry. This is exacerbated by the fact that, since there is no refectory, students have to go back home to eat lunch. Catching a taxi is an expensive (see above) and often time-consuming exercise since the one road that skirts Majuro is often clogged with traffic and it can easily take 20 minutes to go to Long Island. If students come back after lunch at all, they often miss a whole class. When Marshall Islands High school was a boarding school, its refectory fed all students breakfast and lunch. Now they don't have it anymore. Surprisingly, the business opportunity to feed up to 1000 students seems not to have caught on. Only a few ladies sell the standard street food: rice plus chicken meal in styrofoam containers. All of this makes me quite nostalgic for the olden days .....Indeed I did see a statistics somewhere that standardised testing scores went down. Let me see whether I can dig this out. * speech given a the World Education Forum 2015 in Icheon, Korea. I have often heard Europeans say that they find it hard to judge the age of Asian people - and I have often assumed that it is simply lack of exposure that prevents folks back home from picking up on the typical ontogenetic signs of aging amongst unfamiliar features. A bit like me getting all upset if my poor husband cannot tell the difference between different types of apples (he has gotten much better at it!)
But the last few days have been eye-opening: A few of the Marshallese women I hang out with have been calling me bubu, meaning 'grandma'. I thought this was an affectionate term (after all, the French call each other 'cabbage' and the German 'snail' ... and yes that's a term of endearment). But when Eskella called me 'mama' I decided to ask. Making a type of coconut pattie (similar to Kartoffelpuffer but far nicer) I enquired why they called me 'bubu' and they told me because of my advanced age. And here is why they think we are older: Cause we are taller?!? I found out that I was younger than many of my fellow bakers - and now it is them that I call 'bubu'. But it gets worse: Saturday, Seraphim and I were asked by the cashier lady whether we were 'seniors' (meaning senior citizens!!!). When we burst into mortified giggles of laughter and asked how old the check-out woman thought we were she guessed mid-50s. We even got $1.52 senior citizens discount! We also got another explanation, this time courtesy on Carter, a science outreach fellow: (a) we wear glasses, something Marshallese almost never do (and if yes only very old people) and (b) Seraphim is loosing his hair, which again is only ever seen amongst very old people here. Riddle solved, money saved, cracked self-esteem. Oh well .... Dear world - I am having difficulty reaching you. The Gods of technology are not kind.
Two days after I arrived in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, my laptop died peacefully and suddenly. The local IT cracks at Majuro computer services could not do anything to bring it back to life. So was stranded in the middle of the Pacific without a computer. Luckily, our friend and benefactor Karl offered his old PC and I was back in action. Even then, connectivity is not always a given. Frequent tropical storms and other weather-related mishaps (like someone at Fidgi headquarters forgetting to switch on the air con and the system overheating) mean that internet is rather erratic at times. Yesterday - to top it all off - I lost my phone. This is particularly annoying since I have just taken a whole bunch of photos from lovely Laura, the rural end of the atoll with its palm fringed sandy beaches. So you will simply imagine paradise until I go again next time. In he meantime, send me a message in a bottle. Etymology unclear, probably from Cantonese tai fung (simplified Chinese: 台风; traditional Chinese: 颱風; pinyin: táifēng, meaning 'great wind'), but there are also possible Arabic and Persian sources. Given the interest in etymology in my immediate family, I was particularly chuffed to read wikipedia's explanation that "Τυφῶν (Tuphôn, "Typhon, father of the winds") is unrelated but has secondarily contaminated the word". Obviously, according to my lovely husband, this is a Greek term pure and simple.
Whatever the etymology, we've had a mild one here recently. I thought I'd share some pictures of the aftermath - and the trail of destruction even a very small typhoon can leave behind. This same little typhoon, btw, traveled across the Pacific and developed into a super-typhoon by the time it hit Japan about a week later: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2015/07/15/after-a-4000-mile-trek-across-the-pacific-ocean-typhoon-nangka-to-batter-japan/ I am volunteering at the Wellness Center, a wonderful institution run by the Canvasback Mission, which aims to reduce and reverse diabetis (the Marshall Islands have the highest diabetic rate in the world!) via lifestyle intervention, cooking classes and educational programs. They also run a fabulous canteen / catering service and I am fortunate enough to have been taken under the wing of Bedan, the baker and Weng, the kitchen wonderwoman (see the whole wonderful kitchen team in the pics below)
One of the ancient art forms in the Marshall islands is weaving. The link below leads to an article about the circle of women practising weaving in the Woman's Weaving Hut Jined Kiped here at the University of the South Pacific, Majuro: http://www.pacificarts.org/node/946
I have been fortunate enough to be introduced to the master weavers and they have taken me under their wing. Thus far I how to weave long strings called 'bokwaj'. Hopefully, one day, I will be able to try my skills at the wonderful big mats (pronounced 'jaki', I will post photos soon!). Here are two pictures as evidence: you hold the finished string with your toes while you weave the long pandanus fibes . |
My name is Isabelle Buchstaller
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