Happy Lucky Welcome Fun 8

                                   “The bikini waxing, after we go there you can't turn back.”
                                                                                                Khloe Kardashian


Our Continental ‘island hopper’ flight left the ‘sunset’ western Ralik chain, for the Marshall Island eastern ‘sunrise’ Ratak chain and capital, Majuro. On the map, it didn’t really look like a country. It looked like a large expanse of empty blue nothingness, with the very odd circular flyspeck of sand, as if you took the number of people visiting Disneyland every day and dusted them over Mexico. There were only seventy square miles of land, chopped into 1200 islets, over an area of three quarter of a million miles.
As well, Marshall Island life existed in one dimension. The narrow sand halos, around most of the vast lagoons, allowed its inhabitants to live only in single file. The pig our taxi hit, on the one ribbon road that encircled Majuro, had nowhere else to run.
Robyn and I had actually landed at Amata Kabua International Airport after sunset. I’m still not sure that Continental had informed our hosts that we were coming. If they had, no one was really paying attention. Its not as if we were bringing them anything they could use. The ‘downtown’ was actually a linear connection of three smaller settlements, code name D-U-D, not a totally inappropriate acronym, given what we were about to experience. In the middle of the dud of Delap-Uliga-Diarrit was our Continental-approved accommodation, the Outrigger Hotel.
The lobby looked promising, with a large central bouquet of flowers beneath a large illuminated inverted breast of a chandelier, under a mural of hand-painted fish stuck on a powder blue ceiling. The desk clerk handed us a room key, and noted that we would have to hurry to the restaurant, if we wanted anything to eat.
Bright and cheery disappeared down a gloomy hallway lined with food scraps, to a dingy box with battered and faded furniture. The carpet was sticky, with the unmistakable musty odor of old vomit. Water dripped from the floor above. The roaches scurried to escape the flick of the bathroom light switch, but the ants continued to circle the sink, headed for no specific destination and less purpose. The water that came out of the tap was brown, and the shower piping had come away from the wall, likely in self-defense. There were no towels. To flush the toilet, Robyn needed to hold down the handle, long enough for me to be given the task to get towels and sort out the water problem. I returned to the front desk.
“There are no towels in the room.” I said.
“People steal them.” He said, handing them over. They were stained. I promised I wouldn’t steal them.
“The water is brown.” I said.
“So is the swimming pool.” He said, handing me a bottle of water, and noting that we would have to hurry to the restaurant, if we wanted anything to eat. I clubbed a roach to death on my way to fetch Robyn. She told me there was now no water, of any color.
The only anything to eat in the restaurant turned out to be pizza, which hadn’t arrived after half an hour of waiting. I asked about the delay.
“The oven is broken.” She said. And then she brought the pizza. It was sticky, and smelled like the carpet. Also, we weren’t supposed to be there.
The Americans we had met had been under the impression that the Marshalls had been ‘taken back’ from the Japanese, but the islands had never been under Washington’s administration, prior to the initiation of the US Trust Territory of the Pacific, after WWII. In fact, the Marshallese had been treated as Japanese subjects, which made perfect sense, since most had been educated in Japanese schools, spoke Japanese, and blended Japanese and local customs in their daily lives. A third of the islanders had Japanese ancestry. At the time of the U.S. invasion, some were applying for full Japanese citizenship, and were likely to have it granted. Some are still nostalgic for the life they enjoyed in the pre-militaristic Japanese era. I know Robyn and I were. If things had been different, we might not have ended up eating soggy pizza, after midnight, in the tropical heat.
Between the complex carbohydrates and the simple light of dawn on the lagoon, was insomnia. I rolled out of bed, and told Robyn I needed to see what I could of Majuro, before out next Continental adventure whisked us on to Kosrae, later that morning. I needed to see the result of how an ambiguous clause in the League of Nations Mandate had elevated the Marshallese into ‘liberated persons under American wardship.’
The beach, that had appeared so paradisiacal, in the first rays of my twilight awakening, was strewn with trash and broken glass. There was a feeling of poverty, and indifference, and indifference to poverty. There was no indifference from the marauding packs of feral dogs, however. They were aggressively alpha American, and I quickly secured a heightened awareness, a bamboo cane, a pocket full of rocks, and an attitude, in order to continue my explorations.
The hand-painted closed shop signs conveyed no small optimism. There was the Welcome Fun Store, where the offer existed, without spaces, to discover the special lowpriceherecanrefundcanchangplywoodclothingsoreforsale. Along the only street possible, I found the Lucky Store, the Happy Store, and the Happy Garage. But then, outside the pastel concrete colors and glass block windows of the Crazy Price Mart was a life-sized plastic facsimile of a coconut tree, with a yellow trunk, and six bright yellow coconuts hanging under as many lime-green fronds, sticking out the top at odd angles, just down the street from a row of real ones. Somewhere, someone, was mass-producing giant plastic coconut trees. These people were doomed.
It turns out that the Marshallese may have been doomed for more than their free association with the extended nuclear family. On Christmas Day in 2008, the government declared a state of emergency in Majuro and Ebeye. Unprecedented extreme waves, from storm surges and high tides, caused widespread flooding and the displacement of hundreds of residents from their homes. The floods hit the cemeteries, dramatically increasing the alarm about public hygiene, and the risk for contagion. The most immediate problem for people that live less than a meter above sea level, is not that their homes will soon be underwater, but that they will be uninhabitable, in less than fifty years. Even occasional ‘overwash’ will salinate the fresh water, and kill the land that their agriculture depends on. Climate change is also slowing the normal annual centimeter vertical coral growth in the protective fringing reefs, through ocean acidification and thermal bleaching. Even the stainless steel flushing mechanism on the urinal in the airport, was cobalt blue corroded from the Southern Sea.
If the Marshallese can’t live on their islands, they will have to relocate; if they relocate, they will no longer have their country. They will lose their identity.
There is one final reason why the Happy Lucky Welcome Fun is about to become a quadruple oxymoron. In September of 2012, the first Ahmadiyya mosque opened in Majuro. The mosque’s imam, Matiullah Joyia, was quick to publicly reject ‘jihad by the sword,’ a reassurance that was undoubtedly received with the most relief by Majuro’s marauding packs of feral dogs. The Muslim community had committed instead to an ‘intellectual jihad of the pen,’ whatever that implies. Meanwhile, the bikini is now banned from the Miss World contest, and Iran is about to get nuclear weapons. Which brings us full circle to Diana Vreeland’s remark. The bikini is the most important thing since the atomic bomb. No, Diana. Bikini is the atomic bomb, and the Marshallese have not only been designated ground zero, they’re about to have zero ground.
In the three-way inundation race between Washington, Wahhabism and water, in the Marshall Island sea world of Happy Lucky Welcome Fun, it’s awash.




   “I now have absolute proof that smoking even one marijuana cigarette
    is equal in brain damage to being on Bikini Island during an H-bomb  
    blast.”
                                                                                        Ronald Reagan