Surviving Paradise Quotes

“Coconut trees were fireworks that arced into the sky and exploded in green. Pandanus trees, angular and mop-headed, seemed cut from the pages of a Dr. Seuss book. Breadfruit trees cast generous shadows. The lagoon, never more than twenty feet away, fulfilled every postcard cliché of tropical paradise. On the beach, muscular island men were beaching their wooden sailing canoe after a morning on the water, strings sagging with the weight of colorful reef fish.”
― Peter Rudiak-Gould, Surviving Paradise: One Year On A Disappearing Island

“The greatest insights I had gained were into my own culture; the only true realization was that, as inscrutable as they were to me, I was just as strange, if not stranger, to them.”
― Peter Rudiak-Gould, Surviving Paradise: One Year On A Disappearing Island

“So I learned some important Ujae lessons: never throw away anything that could possibly be useful, look at everything as multipurpose, and never say that something is impossible with what you have.”
― Peter Rudiak-Gould, Surviving Paradise: One Year On A Disappearing Island

“Tuvalu took advantage of its fortuitous Internet country code (.tv) and sold domain names to anyone who would buy them. It capitalized on its obscurity by selling postage stamps to philatelists who couldn’t bear to have a single country missing from their collections. It sold passports to people who needed a nationality, and it used its 688 area code for a phone sex line that eventually supplied a tenth of the government’s budget. Internet domains, stamps, passports, and phone sex: the staples of any sound economy. Of course, the passport sale stopped when people discovered that terrorists might have been buying them, and the phone sex line was shut down after the church complained. But you had to admire the resourcefulness.”
― Peter Rudiak-Gould, Surviving Paradise: One Year On A Disappearing Island

“worked for a “large multinational organization,” which of course described the United Nations and international crime syndicates equally well.”
― Peter Rudiak-Gould, Surviving Paradise: One Year On A Disappearing Island

“Every native wanted to meet me because I was a foreigner, and every foreigner wanted to meet me because, well, I was a foreigner.”
― Peter Rudiak-Gould, Surviving Paradise: One Year On A Disappearing Island

“came tantalizingly close to receiving a private audience with His Excellency himself, for no other reason than that I spoke the language.”
― Peter Rudiak-Gould, Surviving Paradise: One Year On A Disappearing Island

“Hitting the misbehavers was unthinkable. Removing the bad apples from class every day was unprofessional. Reporting the children to the parents was tantamount to hitting them. Failure to do so meant a never-ending parade of misdeeds. Detention would extend my time with the miscreants, threatening to unravel that last precious thread of sanity. I had no physical items with which to reward good behavior, and praise was futile. Attempting to explain to the offenders the value of respect—to engage their conscience, to make them behave well not to win a prize but because it was the right thing to do—was fruitless, for the simple reason that the worst misbehavers were incapable of embarrassment. They could feel fear but not shame.”
― Peter Rudiak-Gould, Surviving Paradise: One Year On A Disappearing Island

“People are just unhappy that they don’t have any of the imported food left. Once they put their mind to collecting food in the traditional way, the hunger will end.”
― Peter Rudiak-Gould, Surviving Paradise: One Year On A Disappearing Island

“Put more concretely, Marshallese Time meant that if someone said that X would happen at Y time, then there was a 40 percent chance that X would happen, and 5 percent chance that it would happen at Y time.”
― Peter Rudiak-Gould, Surviving Paradise: One Year On A Disappearing Island

“There seems to be a rule that the more a food item is considered a delicacy in one culture, the more revolting it is to people from other cultures.”
― Peter Rudiak-Gould, Surviving Paradise: One Year On A Disappearing Island

“I grew accustomed to the island’s isolation and found that I enjoyed the lack of newspapers. I liked being out of touch. I no longer felt obligated to mourn every tragedy in every far-off corner of the globe, to feel guilty that X was disappearing and Y was being destroyed and I was doing nothing to stop it. Perhaps this was a healthier way to live.”
― Peter Rudiak-Gould, Surviving Paradise: One Year On A Disappearing Island

“The English textbooks, which the ministry had handpicked and shipped to every school, were intended for American children learning to read in English, not for foreign children learning English itself. “Splish splash,” a story might declare on one page. “Jane got soaked by the hose.” In one sentence the book had managed to combine a pseudo-word (“splish”), an irregular past tense (“got”), a passive construction (“got soaked by”) for speakers of a language in which there was no such thing, and three words that should not be at the top of a basic vocabulary list (“splash,” “soaked,” and “hose”), one of which (“hose”) referred to an object that didn’t exist in this world. This was supposed to be appropriate reading for second graders, merely because the words were easy to sound out—and this at a school where, on a very good day, my second graders were working on the grammatical complexities of the sentence “I walk.” I”
― Peter Rudiak-Gould, Surviving Paradise: One Year On A Disappearing Island

“privately laughing over the written work of my students. When I felt guilty about this, I just remembered the following fact: no school on the planet allows students in the teachers’ lounge. And the reason for this is that the main activity in that room is gossiping about said students, and not always in flattering terms.”
― Peter Rudiak-Gould, Surviving Paradise: One Year On A Disappearing Island

“Marshallese duty was clear: don’t tell me the truth—tell me what I want to hear. I soon learned that in this country “yes” meant “maybe,”“maybe” meant “no,” and “no” meant “hell no.”
― Peter Rudiak-Gould, Surviving Paradise: One Year On A Disappearing Island

“experience was close to nil, so it was heartening to know that I could hardly make things worse than they already were. Success was unlikely, but failure was impossible. How liberating!”
― Peter Rudiak-Gould, Surviving Paradise: One Year On A Disappearing Island

“would hazard the opinion that no indigenous society suffers from a lack of entertainment, no matter how isolated or austere its homeland. There are always possibilities for recreation, and people have had thousands of years to find them. If the options are limited, that only means that the locals will be incredibly skilled at the few things they do.”
― Peter Rudiak-Gould, Surviving Paradise: One Year On A Disappearing Island

“Pijkor didn’t mean “Peace Corps volunteer.” It meant “American living on the island for a long period of time, trying to help.” So”
― Peter Rudiak-Gould, Surviving Paradise: One Year On A Disappearing Island

“(The coconut tree was a machine: a solar-powered, self-building factory that required no maintenance and cost no money—a clean-running, noiseless manufacturer of useful things. In went soil, air, and water; out came food, drink, fuel, building materials, rope, medicine, and, yes, pillows.)”
― Peter Rudiak-Gould, Surviving Paradise: One Year On A Disappearing Island

“meant both “coffee” and “to sit around drinking coffee and socializing.” It was acceptable Marshallese to say “I’m coffeeing with the guys.”
― Peter Rudiak-Gould, Surviving Paradise: One Year On A Disappearing Island

“If Westerners enjoyed the mixed blessings of radical individualism, Marshall Islanders enjoyed the mixed blessings of radical communalism.”
― Peter Rudiak-Gould, Surviving Paradise: One Year On A Disappearing Island

“I had prepared myself to forego modern luxuries, only to find that the true sacrifice was primal needs: privacy, intimacy, comprehension, control.”
― Peter Rudiak-Gould, Surviving Paradise: One Year On A Disappearing Island

“It was telling that the word for “tasty”—enno—also meant “edible.” They were the same thing. The idea seemed to be that if it doesn’t kill you, that’s the best food you’re going to get.”
― Peter Rudiak-Gould, Surviving Paradise: One Year On A Disappearing Island

“cooked breadfruit, which was as exciting as a football-sized unbuttered baked potato.”
― Peter Rudiak-Gould, Surviving Paradise: One Year On A Disappearing Island

“rooting voyeuristically through my trash after I dumped it on the De Brums’ garbage pile. I was learning what it is like to be famous. I was fed an intoxicating sense of importance, but I also lost all privacy. Being a big fish in a small pond also meant being a big fish in a small fishbowl. It had not occurred to me that what I might crave more than anything on this far-flung islet was solitude. For the first time in my life, I understood that anonymity was a luxury. It was a godsend to be ignored.”
― Peter Rudiak-Gould, Surviving Paradise: One Year On A Disappearing Island

“Modern changes had rid the men of their most onerous responsibilities—canoe building, sea voyaging, warfare—but they had done little to reduce women’s work. If anything, modernity had created more work for them: hand washing all those T-shirts had not been necessary in a time when everyone went topless, and taking care of six youngsters was unlikely when many children died in infancy and any offspring past the third was killed as a population control measure.”
― Peter Rudiak-Gould, Surviving Paradise: One Year On A Disappearing Island

“Even Sunday was no respite. It was a day when no labor was allowed—except, of course, necessary tasks like cooking, cleaning, and childcare, which were women’s work.”
― Peter Rudiak-Gould, Surviving Paradise: One Year On A Disappearing Island

“felt simultaneously invisible and too visible—anything”
― Peter Rudiak-Gould, Surviving Paradise: One Year On A Disappearing Island

“A sign placed prominently in the cockpit declared “No Acrobatic Maneuvers Allowed,” as if the pilots daily fought the temptation to pull a barrel roll just for the thrill of it.”
― Peter Rudiak-Gould, Surviving Paradise: One Year On A Disappearing Island