D&R: Marshall Islands
I was in 3rd grade when I first met someone from the Marshall Islands and 5th grade when one of them transferred into my class.
The Marshall Islands are a tiny cluster of islands between Hawaii and Australia. Originally, I just thought that they all were Hawaiian and their whole family or tribe must have moved up to the U.S. for some reason. Instead, it was much worse.
As it turns out, my classmate and soon I realized, my neighbors as well, were all refugees that escaped from their islands. What were they escaping from? Water.
Hobe. “MH -Map A.png.” Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons CC0 License, 3 Mar. 2008.
The Marshall Islands are made up of 29 islands that are all within a mile of each other. Today, nearly all of the islands are covered in six inches of water, in some cases, sunk completely.
The majority of my neighbors were made up of children and teenagers. And of them, most of them were orphans. Living with an aunt, uncle, cousin, or grandparents. Some of them didn’t know what happened to their parents and the rest either witnessed them die are found out later that they had.
Out of the 70,000 citizens on the island, over a 1/3 of them have left to the United States or elsewhere aboard.
Around 30 of these citizens lived in the little apartments near my home. They were nice most of the time, but I received a strange amount of racism. I will never forget the day when I was sitting in my Anatomy and Physiology class as a sophomore and one of them just got to me one day. They told me that I had an accent, that I’m not American “you’re not white.” I blocked as much of it as I could out until I told them to stop and they told me, “why? You’re Mexican.” At that moment, I lost all reason, turned towards them and scream in their faces “I’M NOT A FUCKING MEXICAN!” My teacher came over of course after I did that and was able to give the boys a brief lecture on name calling and to respect others.
As strange as this may sound, I never got any kind of racism, at least that I was aware of until my senior year of high school (by the principal of all people) and not again until college.
I don’t know if the teasing they did was because they missed their home and wanted someone, anyone other than all the white people in the school, to reach out to them, or if they were just being jerks. Either way, I don’t blame them. I just wish that they still had their home.
April 21st, 2019 at 7:10 PM
This was super cool to learn about if not super sad. I had only kinda heard about these islands and I hope that there are more solutions in the works for the people there. can’t wait to see what else you bring into class.