Day One on the Island

It might have been more honest to title this blog post “Getting to the Island” since that’s how I spent most of the day. I was chosen last October to be on an accreditation site visit team to the College of Micronesia-FSM, which is located on a small, rather isolated island in the Pacific, somewhat closer to Australia and the Philippines than to the United States. Getting there takes some time, and there’s only one major airline that goes there, United. Nine members of the team were at the airport in Honolulu for a 7:25 a.m. departure, and everyone was sleepy. I’d managed to get some sleep the previous night in the hotel, but nothing could prepare me for the next ten hours on a plane. I watched Star Wars, Episode VII: The Force Awakens on the monitor on the back of the seat in front of me. I’d already seen it in theaters, of course, but the choices were somewhat limited. I’d also already seen Creed, the three short films from the Tribeca Film Festival didn’t take very much time, I had no interest at all in seeing Alvin and the Chipmunks: Road Chip (or whatever the actual title is), and most of the rest were either Japanese or Korean or Hong Kong films with subtitles and I wasn’t in the mood to read. I tried watching The Internship (the one with Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson), but each time the plane landed, all of the movies would start over from the beginning and I never got past the scene with the Quidditch match. The first stop was the atoll of Majora, which seems to have a landing strip and little else. It’s the capital of the Marshall Islands, but there doesn’t seem to be much there to attract visitors. The airport was tiny, and the snack bar offered liquor from bottles that were already open and lined up like a low-rent bar shelf. It was the only one of the islands where we were allowed to depart the plane while the security check took place. We were joined by new people from Majora, and the plane was now fuller.

 

Next the plane landed at Kwajalein, another atoll. We weren’t allowed to get off the plane while the security check was underway. Apparently, the landing strip at Kwajalein is primarily used by the adjacent U.S. military base, and you’re not even allowed to take pictures of the atoll through the windows of the plane. I’m not certain that everyone complied with these restrictions, though, but since I couldn’t see anything from my seat, I was perfectly willing to let the opportunity pass. Enough people did get off the plane to allow some folks to move around a bit. I was not one of them, unfortunately. Our section of the plane was full for the entire trip. We reached the first of the islands in the Federated States of Micronesia, Kosrae, and encountered a quick rainstorm. Once again, we were asked to stay on the plane during the security check since we wouldn’t be able to do much during the 40 minutes or so that we would be on the ground. A tenth member of the team (who had been conducting a site visit on the campus there) joined us on the plane, as did a government official who seemed to know everyone and vice versa. He shook hands with almost everyone as he walked down the center of the plane. When we landed in Pohnpei, our final stop, we were greeted by the president and one of the vice presidents of the college we will be evaluating this week, and we received laurels of flowers to wear on our heads. It’s the equivalent to the lei in Hawaii, I suppose. The laurels were beautiful, quite colorful. I also received the first stamp in my passport during the customs process. You have to fill out forms that you aren’t bringing in anything like drugs or firearms or food to the country, so I was questioned about the snack bars in my backpack. Actually, I wasn’t really asked about the snack bars. I was really asked if I brought any other food into the country. I hadn’t, naturally, so I was allowed to enter the Federated States of Micronesia without further incident.

We drove through the countryside to our hotel, the Cliff Rainbow Hotel, and checked in. The college president and vice president offered to take us on a quick tour, and six of us took them up on the offer. As we drove through the villages and neighborhoods, the president (in whose car three of use rode) pointed out some restaurants we might want to try and some other areas of local interest. We got to see the college’s renovated track, its tennis courts, and the swimming pool, all of which had been used in the Micro Games of 2014, a sort of mini-Olympics for the islands. I immediately began thinking of the similarities between Pohnpei and my home state of Mississippi. There’s incredible poverty here too, and there are homes that look like they’ve been assembled from whatever material was available. Dogs seem to be everywhere, none of them on leashes, and people walk down roads that have no sidewalks. And the humidity was strength-sapping. It truly is like being back in the country of my youth.

 

By this point, I’d only had breakfast on the plane, a couple of in-flight drinks, one packet of almonds, and two of the snack bars I’d picked up in Honolulu. I was not the only one who was hungry, so we agreed to meet for dinner at the restaurant in the hotel. It’s a nice place to eat. I had a fish sandwich, which was pretty tasty, but it took us quite a while to get our food. Service is not particularly tourist-oriented here on the island, and you have to be very patient waiting for your food. Not everyone got served at the same time. In fact, the first group had already finished eating by the time the last two people got their food. It’s no matter, though, when you’re surrounded by people who are good conversationalists and with whom you have some common backgrounds in community college education. The dinner was good, but the plane trip had exhausted me. I guess it was my first real case of jet lag. I went upstairs to my room, not quite the lush accommodations of Hawaii but still quite serviceable as far as hotel rooms go, and unpacked everything in anticipation of needing to find stuff quickly the next morning. I turned on the television, but the service is horrible here and only CNN and ESPN are actually being broadcast “live.” The rest of the few available channels (fewer than ten) are mostly repackaged shows from American television. “Repackaged” means, of course, “reruns.” There’s also a delay in the audio signal, so the image and the sound are not quite in sync with each other. I read a few chapters in Rob Sheffield’s autobiographical book about his relationships and karaoke—it’s far more interesting than my description would suggest—and then fell asleep. It had been a long day, so even through it was only about 9 p.m., I was too exhausted to last any longer.