Marshall Islands Blog

YOKWE B...

2006-08-11T09:10:00.000-07:00

I guess this is it. I'm only a few hours away from getting myself into a great ordeal of taking 7 flights and traveling for 48 hours. Considering the latest news, this should be quite an adventure. I'd like to think everything will be fine, and I'm actually looking forward to reading and thinking about what just happend during the past 2.5 months.

Ebeye Hospital staff gave us a very warm fairwell celebration. There was singing, dancing, thankful speaches, and of course gifts. It was great to hear what our presence meant for the hospital from the staff's perspective, and the whole ceremony of saying goodbye was rather sad - in a good way.
To my left is Joseph Dizon, hospital's new IT Director, who just arrived from the Phillippines last week. To my right is Clann Clament, his assistant, Marshallese dude who we worked with most of the time here. It is up to these guys now to keep the hospital's network alive and the satellite equipment in good shape. I guess good luck, and kommol tata.

Burmese Dinner - Part 2

2006-08-10T04:36:00.000-07:00

In addition to cooking us lunch everyday this week, the doctor (Cho Cho) and house husband (Maung) prepared another dinner for us. Cho Cho cooked everything, while Maung was entertaining us with his excellent stories he overheard on Fox News channel. The food was great as usual, and none of the dishes were the same as during last dinner. In this picture Cho Cho is wearing a traditional Burmese dress - unfortunately, Maung has changed from his traditional Burmese skirt by the time the picture was taken. We're obviously wearing traditional stupid U.S. summer clothes. The moon was huge today and probably full, so I tried to take pictures and this is probably the least terrible one. Their house is right on the ocean, and it's great to just sit on the porch and stare at the ocean and enjoy the cool breeze. Maung says if you do that for a few hours, you'll taste salt on your lips.

Party at Rihna's House

2006-08-08T17:49:00.000-07:00

Along with the webmail service we deployed in the hospital, we created a "formal" bboard. E-mail now works lightning fast, so people post all the time. They also don't read everything before they post, so same things get posted a lot. Here's a third or so re-post about the party:

Sailing on Mali

2006-08-06T02:27:00.000-07:00

Somehow we got invited to go sailing on a really sweet boat called Mali, owned by two coolest / weirdest guys ever. Due to yesterday's fun night, Conrad didn't quite make it, but I did - and had a blast. Seven of us sailed north for about 3.5 hours to get to Bigee - an island, which Marshallese believe to be haunted, so no one lives there.
We anchored a few hundreed feet away from the island, and I swam and explored the jungle, snorkled around the coral heads and all the other fun things. The top picture is overlooking Kwaj on our way back, while this one could be called "that's what danny looks like when he's steering a boat he had no idea existed a few hours ago, with people he has never met, to an island he's never been to at 9am on a Sunday morning."

Roi-Namur

2006-08-04T23:31:00.000-07:00

Today we finally made out to Roi-Namur, which is another, smaller army base at the north side of the atoll. We took a 20-person plane there, and the 20-minute ride was quite shaky. Especially on the flight back, which happened during the storm, but we made it - the flights are standby, so doing this trip with no official business is quite tricky because there's not enough room on the plane.
The island is a lot more lively and has a lot more vegetation than Kwaj - jungle style. There's also old bunkers like this one that were left here since the times of conflict between U.S. and Japan in the Pacific. The bunkers are nothing special, but deserve a picture I guess.
About a 100 feet from the airport there's this Parrot~ something bar, which if you can read the sign, is a place where people just bring their own stuff to drink/eat and hang out. People there are way more chill and laid back. On this picture you can see Conrad playing some lame dice game where you loose money.
There's a few really big dishes there, the biggest one pictured here. According to people who may or may not have any idea what they were talking about, but were the only ones around, it is used for "tracking stuff in space." Either way, it's pretty huge - the effect from waves can be seen even in this picture.

International Brestfeeding Day

2006-08-04T15:52:00.000-07:00

As we are wrapping up our work here at Ebeye hospital, we find some more or less useful things we could do besides completing our main projects. Earlier during our term, Conrad gave a bunch of presentations about Excel, and on this picture you can see me teaching doctors and administrative staff how to use PowerPoint. Doing that feels really weird for some reason, but it's helpful.
Right after my PowerPoint workshop, all hell broke loose, as it turned out to be the Inter national Breast feeding Day. With at least on delivery each day (!) on the island, hospital staff thinks it's necessary to promote breastfeeding. So they get a bunch of toys, sing Brestfeeding songs, and make a party out of it.
The "baby show" consists of mothers with their babies walk out on stage and collect their bucket with toys from the hospital director, while everyone is clapping. Because breastfeeding is where it's at I guess. This guy Allen had the coolest baby we thought. We're thinking of making him a new network administrator, because he's always happy and optimistic, and with the network here, it's probably the best qualification for the job.

Sailing After Work

2006-08-03T03:35:00.000-07:00

The very first time we went sailing here in June I met this guy Jim who was pretty cool and likes sailing. He was only learning how to do it back then, but by now he is already licenced, which is more than I can say about myself:) Recently, he got bought a Cat 20 boat and for a while we were trying to go sailing together.
So today we were finally able to go out after work. Even though it wasn't very windy, it was still really sweet and relaxing. The boat is kind of small, and is appropriately called "Menehune," which is little people of Hawaii - Hawaiian leprecons. It's slow, but it can be rigged in a matter of a few minutes. I want one.

Burmese Dinner

2006-07-31T14:49:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we were invited to one of the doctor's house for dinner in honor of her birthday. This couple is from Burma (a country currently known as Myanmar), and they live on Ebeye not far from the hospital. The food was amazing and there was way too much of it, so we got quite a few leftovers boxed for us, as the hosts wouldn't leave anything on the table. A younger woman on this picture is their neighbor.
She's also Burmese and her name is Ei Ei. On Ebeye residents of lagoon side and ocean side get electricity for 4 hour periods only and take turns. On this picture you can see how as soon as the light bulb starts shining, Ei Ei hurries inside her house to make the best use of the 6pm-10pm power window. During the World Cup, people here could watch the interrupted AFN (American Forces Network) signal from Kwaj. Due to the power situation, they would have to watch one half of the game at someone's lagoon side house, and then relocate to the neighbor's ocean side house for the second half.

3 am Soccer

2006-07-30T00:15:00.000-07:00

After the last call yesterday, which was around 2am, we decided to go kick the ball around. The lights on the field are controlled by a regular on/off switch, like the one in any room. And the best part is, that switch is outside, so anyone can turn it on. The guy on the picture is our friend Josh (who claimed his arm was long enough to take this picture).

Barge Time

2006-07-29T02:43:00.000-07:00

It's that time of the month, when a huge cargo barge comes into Kwajalein Atoll, unloads full Matson containers and picks up the empty ones. We wanted to go to Roi Namur this Saturday, but the whole trip was very ill planned, and since we din't make reservations at the airport, there weren't enough seats available on the airplane. So instead, I watched this barge being docked by two tug boats.
These Terexes are used to handle the containers, as well as other huge metal things, which are plentyful on this island. There's quite a variety of heavy machinery here used for cargo handling, construction, cleaning, discovering and blowing up ammo left from WWII. There's also army dogs that sniff people's bags at the airport in hopes of finding drugs and explosives.

Tough Week

2006-07-27T04:30:00.000-07:00

This week started out with everything suspiciously working, and the trouble came as soon as Tuesday morning - when one by one most of the rooms would loose network connectivity. After tracing and testing cables and hubs, Conrad was finally able to pin point the broken ports and wires, and now it's all suspiciosly working again. With the help of our Hawaiian friends, I even fixed the wireless network, which is way too good to be true.
A few weeks ago there was a post with a picture of me and a puppy. I got a chance to see the puppy again last weekend, so there's another one. He got bigger, but he's still cute and stupid. He still can't bite the meat - he licks and nibbles:)

Hospital Network

2006-07-25T14:28:00.000-07:00

The network here acts up on us like it's its job, which I suppose is true, but it gets really frustrating at times. Things break every day; they don't work in one office, but work in the other; cables and outlets break and get chewed up by rats; entire parts of the hospital get disconnected from the servers; cockroaches that live in power supplies get melted etc. That's in addition to 4-5 power outages a day, while there's not enough UPSs for as much as a quarter of the equipment, and most of them have pretty old batteries. When for some reason the network works properly, the issues with the satellite equipment come in, such as water in the dish motor, or simply bad signal for numerous possible reasons. We are obviously not having enough fun with all this, so we put good old cal9000 printer on the network. Since BUTTERS on Computer24 is less reliable, cal9000 is now our default...

Signs on Kwaj

2006-07-24T00:57:00.000-07:00

The airport takes up most of the island's area with the air strip stretching for about two miles. It goes by the golf course (yes, there's a golf course), so that people have to stop playing when some occasional aircraft is landing or taking off. I was obviously not allowed on the strip, as I do not own a secured hat.
This sign gives a rough idea of how far this place is from everything else. Not sure what the reference selection was based on, but now I can safely say that I'm about 2645 unindicated units (miles I'm guessing) from Petropavlovsk, a whooping 7156 uus from D.C., mere 3325 uus from Kodiak (no clue where that is) etc.

Gugeegue Camp

2006-07-22T05:31:00.000-07:00

Quite a few members of the hospital staff are managing some sort of a kids camp this weekend, which is at the Gugeegue island a few islands north of us. They invited us to come over, and we ended up hanging out with people from Fiji, Solomons etc. and had a soccer game going on while the food was cooking. I'm not in this picture of cooling down during the break, since no one could figure out how to work my camera...
There I finally managed to picture a more or less decent image of the amazing sunset they get here. The island is a lot more narrow than the ones we're used to, and both the lagoon and the ocean side can be seen from anywhere, unless the palm trees block the view. I wish I had some more camera skills. Or at least more than 32 MB of memory in my camera.

Free Jughed!

2006-07-20T04:57:00.001-07:00

There was a mission that terminated in Kwajalein Atoll yesterday which I went to see, but none of the pictures came out. Missions here are pretty much just bright flashes in the sky and a lot of warnings throughout the week all over the island. This picture however makes up for the bad mission ones - it's Jughe'a'd, a 750 pound Bronx Zoo grizzly bear! I guess they spelled it with an 'a' in order to avoid the confusion. This one is kind of an old picture, but one could still see the resemblance. I am wearing my Free Jughed t-shirt btw.

Fishing

2006-07-16T14:28:00.000-07:00

This past weekend was once again full of water related activities for me. Besides the usual hanging out at the beach and going sailing, I also had a chance to go fishing with one of the doctors who is known for going quite a bit and winning the fishing tournaments and such. This is the boat we went on - it's much like a water taxi with two 115 Yamaha engines and it can definitely haul!

So when I wasn't busy being seasick or daydreaming I actually participated in catching these two. We also caught a shark, but let it go. That's probably a good thing since there wasn't any place for it to go inside the boat but right next to me and it probably wouldn't die from just clubbing it on the head...

Here's What Happened...

2006-07-13T15:06:00.000-07:00

Since I don't have any new exciting pictures of anything, I thought this could as well go up on the blog. There's just too much controversy about this, which is best resolved by a video replay:)

Action Shots

2006-07-12T15:07:00.000-07:00

So now that the World Cup is over, the sleep schedule is back to normal (in order to fight back against those who call without bothering to think of a time difference I just unplug the phone for the night). And no matter what they say, the final match wasn't all that dull.

And this is the picture of President Путин kissing some little boy during the visit to Kremlin. I guess it has recently made it to the news due to all the attention Russia gets because of the G-8 summit. Either way, it's pretty funny.

Weekend Entertainment

2006-07-10T14:46:00.000-07:00

During the weekend there was a band playing in one of the bars here, which was a huge social event on the island and everyone showed up to listen to some poor covers of most popular American hits. You know how these random cover bands are... It was good time though:-)

Phi Bar

2006-07-08T17:06:00.000-07:00

Many people have asked me what this important component of any properly aged Sigma Nu's life lookes like in Marshall Islands. Here it is, in all its beauty. It's called "Ocean View Club" or "Snake Pit" as locals like to call it. Its most striking feature is that it's on the ocean shore of the island, so if it's light outside you can see the ocean, which is sweet. If it's dark you can hear it, but imagining it is usually easy at this point as well.

And this is just a reminder I guess. Do not forget to go to the PHI BAR BEFORE THE FINAL if you haven't already. You only have under 24 hours to do so as of now. FORZA ITALIA!!!

And that's me on an elephant. There're also camels and some other really weird looking things, that may or may not be turtles and perhaps something else. Unfortunately, in addition to geckos and flies this is all there is to wildlife in Kwaj.

Finally, nice weather

2006-07-07T01:32:00.000-07:00

After having lots of rain and grey skies, we finally got some sun. As the semi-finals were thoughtfully scheduled so that we still get up early, but miss the last boat, we took water taxis again this week. This is what the world looks like from the back of the parked water taxi. Exciting, I know.

July 4th

2006-07-05T02:53:00.000-07:00

After having fun in the sun with our server last Saturday, we had a great 3-day weekend due to the Independence Day celebrations. We were invited to a party at one of the bubble-looking domes on Kwaj, where there was lots of food, drinks, and guitar playing.

Sometime in the midst of it, we discovered a bag of gummy bears! And furthermore, it turned out that pretty much everyone there hates gummy bears. Oh well. I did get the clear ones:)

On July 4th there were various activities, most of which we have successfully slept through as they were happening pretty early in the day and we had a fun night the night before. It rained quite a bit too, but luckily there was still a rain-free window for fireworks, although it did start pouring immidiately after that.

Working Saturday

2006-06-30T14:59:00.000-07:00

So in order to get the server up and running, we had to go to work on a Saturday. And in order to have tech support from Hawaii, we had to get here pretty early too. After watching Germany-Argentina (:-(), which started at 3.00am, we headed over to work and are still here. Shorts and t-shirts - it's Saturday! Evidently, we got it to work.

At least we got to see the sunrise. This right here could very well be the first picture of the sunrise on Saturday, July 1st. That is unless someone took a picture on the outer islands before I did. But let's just say they didn't.

Random Stuff

2006-06-30T02:47:00.000-07:00

This box is stored in the conference room, right next to the PEACESAT VTC equipment we're working with. It belongs in the Family Planning division of the hospital, but on Ebeye free space is an issue. A 23kg box of condoms doesn't exactly fit...

Last weekend I was invited to a double anniversary of some hospital staff members. It was a great experience, but as I didn't have my own camera, I pretty much don't have any pictures from the party. Regardless, this is Clann, the tech support guy, and this puppy someone found. And me.

Once every month (or even less often, I'm not sure), a huge barge comes to the Atoll to unload supplies. Even considering the density of population on Ebeye, the amount of cargo still looks pretty impressive.

Here's another picture of four hardworking men. Note the laptop screen. There's little time for fun at work, but some people manage to play a quick game while the server is down and various versions of Windows are being installed on every machine available.

Camera is Here!

2006-06-29T04:20:00.000-07:00

Finally, my camera is here - it's only been about 18 days since I ordered it. At least it's here all in one piece. I haven't quite learned how to use it yet, but this is what I got in the last fiew moments it was light outside. This is our trailer.637.
That's a palm tree. Palm trees are very rare around here.

Not really; I think there might be more palm trees on Kwaj than there are Marshallese on Ebeye.
And this is that I ride around. And look for when it gets stolen or "borrowed" by someone who needs a quick ride. This week Conrad and I are 1-1 in terms of how many times our bikes got stolen - in fact, he still hasn't found his at this point.

The Ocean

2006-06-24T22:19:00.000-07:00

While my own camera is still not here, here's another picture from Conrad. This is the "dock" at the yacht club for small boats and windsurfing boards. That's right, it's just a beach. Looking at the ocean at least a few times every day is one of the undisputable benefits of the island life. Even though the views are not always especially remarkable, there's still something captivating about the huge mass of water, and the eyes never get tired. I guess that's it for this post. Go Argentina!

Ghana vs. U.S.

2006-06-22T19:31:00.000-07:00

Last night we woke up as usual to see the 2am game - this time it was Ghana vs. U.S. The Adult Recreation Center here was open for this occasion and about 10 of us watched the game there on a nice TV. Well, I guess there's no point of talking about the game; at least Ghana will go on... I blame CONRAD.

Water Taxi

2006-06-22T02:27:00.000-07:00

So today we had to take a water taxi, which is what happens when we're late for that early boat. It's not that big of a deal (in fact it's considerably faster), but it's a whole $4 as opposed to the free ferry, and it's in general pretty hard to predict when the taxi will be there; what's more unpredictable, is whether it will have fuel so you can actually use it. Anyway, so we watched Argentina - Netherlands at 7 am, hopefully the lamest game of the Cup - hard to tell when we only saw so few. This picture of us with Clann (the younger guy, in charge of IT here until they fill the IT Director position) and Maung, a Burmese volunteer helping with IT since his wife is a doctor here and they want to be in one place.

Another Sunny Weekend

2006-06-19T02:05:00.000-07:00

This past weekend we went sailing again, both days actually, so that was quite nice. We had some problems with the equipment the second day though, so we'll have to fix a couple of things before we can go again. Hopefully, we'll try to get licensed by next weekend though, so hopefully we'll be able to rent a bigger boat that time. Until I get my camera (which is on its way!), enjoy Conrad's masterpieces. That's probably me in the process of de-rigging.
After we got back, we came across sime fire fighters cutting the fish they caught that day and... feeding the sharks with the scraps. There's little rocks right by the water - you just stand there with a piece of fish in your hand, dip it into the water, after which like 20 sharks are bumping into each other while trying to get to the spot where your hand just was. And then if you're that guy, you try to catch it's tail. Don't be that guy.

Sailing

2006-06-14T03:43:00.000-07:00

So they had some sort of a Yacht Club open house or something, during which we could go to the beach, take the boats, and procede to have fun while roasting ourselves in the hot sun. It took some convincing of the Yacht Club people that we know what we're doing, but they made us pass some test or something, so we could rent the boats in the future.
Apparently, it wasn't that easy - after we passed the test it turned out we had to sit through a 2-day class and then pass some written tests and G-d knows what else in order to actually get licensed. The good news is I think we can get the motor boat license with that as well. Motor boat, motor boat...

Ebeye. Our first impressions

2006-06-13T03:58:00.000-07:00

We work on an island called Ebeye, which is the second most overcrowded place in the Pacific. I think. Ebeye population is disproportionally young, and children are pretty much everywhere - including this beach, where they spotted us and wanted us to take a million pictures of them and with them...
This is the ferry we use to get to Ebeye from Kwaj where we're staying. It's an ex-landing vessel, kinda like the ones you saw in Saving Private Ryan. I don't really mind the 25 minute ride one-way; the only problem is the schedule. We have to get up at 6.30am in order to catch one on our way to work. The worst.

Training in Hawaii

2006-06-13T03:42:00.000-07:00

I guess there is a lot more that could be said about our training, but here's the only pictures I have that are really worth posting. We happened to be in Honolulu for the Memorial Day, and it appears there's a tradition of letting lots of candles float into the ocean (they put the candles on little boats and use some crazy big boats to actually push the candles into the ocean. Some candles don't make it and get back...)

This one is from our last dinner together with all the people who were there from CMU, i.e. instructors, mentors, program assistants, as well as all the student consultants who were soon heading towards various locations in Micronesia. Hawaiian 1lb burgers aren't worth it by the way. It's hard to skip something on the menu when it says 1lb and when it's meat though...