Thoughts...

No pictures in this post – my camera has passed on. Curse you, humidity! We’ll see how long my other electronics can hold out in this climate.

I’ve been enjoying using stories from my childhood in the classroom. Last quarter we read part of a Ramona book. If you never read those books, Ramona is a little girl who gets into lots of trouble, with humorous results. Despite her brattiness, Ramona is supposed to be a likeable character, but not so in Micronesia, I’ve learned. In their responses to the book, almost everyone said they hated Ramona for being so “naughty” (one of the vocab words for the chapter). Considering how some of them have behaved this school year, I was a little blown away by the moral outrage (and hypocrisy, in some cases). But I’ve learned my lesson – no more Ramona.

A few weeks ago I tried out a different book, Keep the Lights Burning, Abbie, which my sister and I enjoyed. It’s about a girl who takes care of her lighthouse during a storm while her father is away. This one was a hit. They loved Abbie for helping her family – “I want to be like Abbie,” one of the girls wrote.

This is all just one example of the importance of family here in Micronesia. Again and again, students mention how they are motivated to succeed in school so they can find a good job and help their family. (Did you know that citizens of FSM can serve in the United States military? Just one more detail of the complicated Compact Agreement. Lots of the boys want to join the military, always adding “to help my family” when they state the goal.)

Childrearing is very different here, partially just because of the role of the extended family. There was an awesome article in Newsweek last year (my awesome mom sends me magazines a few months late to keep me up to date on the world, but now I learn that Newsweek has switched to digital-only! Curse you, Newsweek!). Anyway, the article… It was about childrearing practices in hunter-gatherer societies. There were so many similarities with family life here. Kids are given a lot more freedom and less supervision. They use machetes, play with the fire, swim and play unsupervised – everything that would completely freak out an American parent. I’ve been watching my 3 year-old host sister learn how to swim – she goes down to the river while the older kids swim, jumps in and flaps around to stay above water. Now she knows how to swim! It seems inconceivable to the American mentality that children could just teach themselves to swim (what would happen to the swimming lesson industry?!), but obviously that how the species did it originally.