Wel­come every­one to the first ever inter­view here on Travel-Junkie. A few days ago I pub­lished a book review of “Sur­viv­ing Para­dise” and now we’ve had the oppor­tun­ity to ask Peter Rudiak-Gould, the author of said book, a few ques­tions. If you haven’t read the review yet, I sug­gest you head on over there first as it gives you a little bit of back­ground information!

What made you decide to live and teach on the Mar­shall Islands in gen­eral and Ujae in particular?

Mostly it was an obses­sion with faraway places that began in my teens, the same obses­sion that still makes me pin­point remote islands on maps and then look them up online.

I also wanted to get a sense, firsthand, of whether mod­ern­iz­a­tion was a good or a bad thing. And I was more than a little bit in love with the idea of a Shangri-la in the Pacific. The outer Mar­shall Islands (and Ujae was about the out­er­most that I could visit) seemed like a per­fect place for this.

Now you speak flu­ent Mar­shallese. What make this lan­guage unique and how dif­fi­cult was it to learn?

Some of the dif­fi­culties are also what make the lan­guage unique. At first, Mar­shallese seems pretty man­age­able. Sure, it’s got some tricky pro­nun­ci­ation, like two dif­fer­ent rolled r’s, three dif­fer­ent n’s, two dif­fer­ent l’s, and some unusual vow­els, but it’s easy enough to put sen­tences together. Before you know it you’re speak­ing in the past, present, and future tense.

Then comes the trouble. You find that it’s hard to build your vocab­u­lary because words that you assume must have an equi­val­ent in Mar­shallese don’t, and vice-versa. When we have many words they have one, and when we have one word they have many.

The word for ‘will not’ also means ‘can­not’ — how can this be? But it is. Such things are dif­fi­cult to get one’s head around. The lan­guage chops real­ity into such dif­fer­ent cat­egor­ies than Eng­lish, and this dif­fi­culty never really goes away.

In “Sur­viv­ing Para­dise” you write a lot about the chil­dren on Ujae. What is it like for a child to grow up there?

In many ways, it’s idyllic. A lot of their day is free and unstruc­tured. They can go any­where — no one will kid­nap them because there are no strangers, and no cars will run them over because there are no cars. They get into fights, but no kid is an outcast.

On the other hand, the chil­dren don’t always get enough food, and they are shouted at and insul­ted fre­quently by the adults. A lot of chil­dren seem to have a pent-up resent­ment towards author­ity fig­ures as a result.

Why was teach­ing at Ujae Ele­ment­ary School so challenging?

No elec­tri­city. No bath­room. No bell. Next to no sup­plies. No firm sched­ule. Little enthu­si­asm on the part of teach­ers. Little com­munity sup­port. Low start­ing point of stu­dents. Poor beha­vior. So, pretty much everything. The fact that I didn’t know what I was doing didn’t help, either.

You say that Ujae blurs the line between the tra­di­tional and the mod­ern. How does it do this?

We’re used to think­ing that you can divide the world into tra­di­tional things, which come from inside the coun­try and have been the same for thou­sands of years, and mod­ern things, which come from out­side the coun­try and are recent inventions.

There was almost noth­ing on Ujae that would com­fort­ably fit into either of those cat­egor­ies. Know­ledge of local plants seems to be the per­fect example of tra­di­tion, but what if they are using that know­ledge to clean their snorkel­ing marks? Fish­ing with spears also seems tra­di­tional, but what if I told you that the spears were made of iron or fiber­glass, and they used swim­ming flip­pers at the same time? What about the name “Bob­son”: tra­di­tional, mod­ern, both, or neither?

Another example is Chris­tian­ity, which has been around for long enough that you could almost call it traditional–and people do talk about it as part of being Marshallese–yet is also the quint­es­sen­tial for­eign import.

What are some cent­ral Mar­shallese val­ues and how do they help people sur­vive in a con­fined space?

I’ll men­tion just two right now. One of them is avoid­ance of open con­flict. Liv­ing in the Mar­shall Islands is a bit like rid­ing in a crowded elev­ator. The con­fined space makes things a bit tense, but is also the reason that this ten­sion must be kept in check. Most dis­putes fester in private, which keeps the com­munity out­wardly har­mo­ni­ous yet also pre­vents cer­tain issues from being resolved.

Another value is con­ser­vat­ism. As a Mar­shallese per­son, you would be com­mit­ting social sui­cide if you insul­ted Mar­shallese tra­di­tion. It is axio­matic that it is good and must be fol­lowed. This dis­cour­age­ment of tinker­ing with the status quo was prob­ably valu­able in a pre­cari­ous envir­on­ment where a single mis­take could lead to death. Of course, people do break rules, and cus­toms have changed, but this is almost always spoken about as a bad thing.

How are the people of the Mar­shall Islands deal­ing with the threat of global warming?

In some ways, they are like us: they are com­ing closer and closer to accept­ing the real­ity of the prob­lem and plan­ning ahead, but they still have a long way to go. Most Mar­shall Islanders have heard the idea of global warm­ing, and many see envir­on­mental changes that seem to con­firm it. But they are not yet forced to believe in it. It is prob­ably #10, at best, on people’s list of worries.

Some say that they don’t trust what sci­ent­ists say, that God is more trust­worthy and that he prom­ised to Noah in the Bible not to flood the earth again. But cer­tain local organ­iz­a­tions have tried to raise belief and aware­ness, and suc­ceeded to some extent. Inter­est­ingly, though, rather than blam­ing indus­tri­al­ized coun­tries for the prob­lem, these organ­iz­a­tions are more likely to place blame on all people, includ­ing Mar­shall Islanders, who (they argue) con­trib­ute to the prob­lem. This self-blame is empower­ing in that it gives loc­als some­thing they can do to help, yet also detracts atten­tion away from the much lar­ger culprits.

Do you have any trav­el­ling plans at the moment, maybe back to the Mar­shall Islands?

I’m sure I’ll go back to the Mar­shall Islands–for some reason, I can’t keep away for too long–but not for sev­eral years. I’m still fas­cin­ated with the Pacific’s most remote spots, and I’d love to travel through Melane­sia, espe­cially Vanuatu. For now, I’m just happy to liv­ing abroad in a place (the city of Oxford, Eng­land) where I feel like I’m trav­el­ing every day.

Do you have any advice for our read­ers when it comes to liv­ing in a for­eign cul­ture for an exten­ded period of time?

There is often an idea about liv­ing in another cul­ture that equates under­stand­ing with lik­ing, and respect­ing with enjoy­ing. I.e., if you don’t like a cer­tain aspect of another cul­ture, all you have to do is come to under­stand it, and then you will like it. And if you don’t enjoy that aspect, you must not respect it.

I don’t agree with this. A cul­ture is like a per­son. Some parts of them will delight you, while other parts will drive you mad. You will agree on some things and dis­agree on oth­ers. That does not mean that you dis­respect them; it only means that you are dif­fer­ent from them. To say that you can, and should, enjoy everything about another cul­ture is like say­ing that you can, and should, jet­tison your entire per­son­al­ity and all of your beliefs. It’s not pos­sible, and prob­ably wouldn’t be a good idea even if it were possible.

Finally, name three things you could not live without on a Mar­shallese island!

Let­ters from home, sun­screen, and more let­ters from home.

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Peter has also agreed to a guest post here on Travel-Junkie, so stay tuned for that! If you have any ques­tions for Peter or remarks about the inter­view, then leave a comment…