Stories by Christopher Leonard
Photographs by Benjamin Krain

Education is no academic matter to the Marshallese, who seek survival skills in a cash economy.

“Can you give me a future?” The question hangs in the air. A young American woman named Amelia Balaji paces before a classroom of silent children. She asks again: “Who wants to give me a future? Timothy? No?”
Balaji is a volunteer teacher who works on a remote atoll called Arno in the Marshall Islands. There is no electricity or running water. Her recent lesson in English class dealt with past, present and future tense. She prodded her students to say a sentence in the future tense. Finally, a student replied: “Tomorrow, I will walk.”
The question of tomorrow is a pressing one for the 12 students in Balaji’s class. They are in the seventh and eighth grades and at a crossroads in their lives. At the end of eighth grade, they will take a standardized test. Those who pass can attend public high school. Those who fail will be finished with education unless their families can afford private schooling.
Odds are against a passing grade for most kids in Balaji’s class. None of the kids in Arno Elementary School passed the test during the 2002-03 school year, according to government figures. Students on the urbanized islands of Majuro and Ebeye had failure rates of 52 percent and 72 percent, respectively.
Education is no academic matter for the Marshallese. The majority of them have abandoned fishing, collecting fruit and growing a few crops in tiny plots — a traditional way of life that sustained the population on these tiny islands for generations. Today, the Marshallese seek skills to survive in a cash economy. They search for jobs instead of breadfruit.
The Marshallese school system is a rickety stairway to this new world of opportunity, said Biram Stege, secretary of education for the Marshall Islands. The system was built largely by the United States when it ruled the islands as a trust territory after World War II.
“There was a lot more resources and qualified people back then,” Stege said. When the Marshall Islands became independent in 1986, the United States pulled out its teachers, administrators and financial support for the schools, she said. “What we were really left with — the infrastructure — was in really bad shape. We did get some people that were educated but not the number that we need to take over the system,” Stege said.
Thousands of Marshallese have simply given up on their country’s school system by migrating to the United States, where they can live and work indefinitely without visas. That immigration right was negotiated by their government when the islands became independent, and it opened the door to U.S. schools. The largest community of Marshallese outside the islands themselves is in Springdale, where 623 students are enrolled in public school.
For Marshallese who don’t want to leave home — or can’t afford the airfare — getting an education is an uphill battle. Schools on Majuro and Ebeye are so overcrowded that kids attend half-day sessions, allowing teachers to educate two classes of students in the same schoolroom.
“My class is really full now, but they just keep coming,” said an exasperated Sholla Riklon, who teaches second grade at the Ebeye public school. When Riklon arrived the morning of Sept. 7 to teach her 35 students, there were an extra six kids sitting in the classroom, ready to learn. Classes had started a week earlier, but Riklon said families were still moving to Ebeye to send their children to school and to seek jobs at a nearby U.S. Army base.
She wrote down the new arrivals’ names and marched to the principal’s office to register them. “Six new students this morning — I don’t know about tomorrow,” she said. “Maybe I will run away to Arkansas and find a job with Tyson,” the Springdale-based meat company.
The schoolhouse on Arno atoll is much less crowded and sits in a grassy field surrounded by jungle. Balaji said her students are eager to learn and are highly motivated. Eighth-grader Judy Robord often stays after school and was delighted when Balaji gave her a copy of multiplication tables to memorize. “She treated it like gold,” Balaji recalled.
Teaching kids what they need to know to pass the admissions test amounts to a guessing game for Balaji, who hadn’t seen the previous year’s test. She cannot get a copy of the test because it is rarely changed, and school administrators keep copies under lock and key. She said the public school has no curriculum, so she’s been writing lesson plans on her own. As Balaji’s class was under way recently, 16-year-old Jefferson Thallur sat in a nearby shack. He watched his aunt stoke a fire under a blackened kettle, preparing the day’s food for a family of nine.
Like many youths, Thallur has seen his opportunity for higher education come and go. Thallur said he failed the high school admission test, was granted a second chance and failed again. He says he is now “stuck” with an eighth-grade education. With schooling out of the picture, Thallur has gone into the main business on Arno — copra production.
Copra is dried coconut meat used for making coconut oil. A large boat periodically goes to Arno and picks up burlap sacks of copra that are taken elsewhere for processing. Making copra is laborious. Thallur collects fallen coconuts, husks them, splits them, removes the meat and cooks it over an open fire. He can produce one large bag of copra in two days. He says he makes $11 to $12 a bag. Thallur has many friends on Arno and laughs easily. He says he loves the atoll. But he learned at school that the world is full of jobs and opportunities he will never see on Arno.
As he husked a pile of coconuts recently, Thallur stopped and sat down with a groan. He looked out at the sapphire-blue lagoon. “I’m tired. Tired all the time,” he said. “I’ve been working every day. I wake up and work. Just work. Do you have any idea what I can do for my life?” One idea that has spread by word of mouth through the Marshall Islands is packing up and moving to Springdale.
It’s not hard to see why when visiting a kindergarten class of Parson Hills Elementary in the Northwest Arkansas city. The kindergarten classroom taught by Betty Jean Curren is a stark contrast to most facilities in the Marshall Islands. With sparkling clean tile floors, three working computers, a television set and a private bathroom, the classroom is nicer than many government offices in the Capitol building on Majuro. Curren has a college degree. Many high school teachers in the Marshall Islands have only a high school diploma.
Among 18 children in her class, seven are Marshall Islanders, Curren said. Oplana Latior and Tahiri Anerjerok, two Marshallese girls in Curren’s class, recently chatted in their native language during a classroom exercise. But when other classmates approached them, both girls effortlessly switched to English.
Speaking English could play a critical role in their future success, said Hilda Heine, a senior scholar at the Pacific Resources for Education and Learning, a nonprofit organization based in Hawaii. Students like Oplana and Tahiri have an advantage over most of their peers, said Heine, who is Marshallese.
Starting at a U.S. school early helps children develop the English skills crucial for educational success. It also teaches them early on how the school system works and what is expected of them. The Springdale public schools don’t offer as much for older youths who have immigrated, Heine said. Dropout rates are sometimes higher than they are in the Marshall Islands, reaching 80 percent for islanders in some U.S. classes, she said.
More than half of the Marshallese students enrolled are between kindergarten and fifth grade, according to the Springdale School District. That indicates that the islanders’ impact on the schools will grow in the future. Assistant Superintendent Marsha Jones said the Marshallese haven’t had a huge impact thus far, since the 623 students now enrolled represent only about 4 percent of the 14,385 students in the school district.
But the Marshallese have changed the environment and influenced the children with whom they study, she said. The islanders perform traditional dances and sing songs at holiday assemblies. They pass on stories from home in casual conversation. It’s the kind of cultural exposure people travel thousands of miles to experience in the Pacific islands, Jones said.
Springdale schools were well positioned to assist these students because of an influx of Hispanic students during the 1990s. The schools developed an English as a Second Language program and added a Marshallese component as more students arrived from the islands. Abacca Anjain-Maddison, the only female senator in the Marshall Islands government, said her country has high expectations for students in Springdale schools. “The Marshall Islands needs them,” Anjain-Maddison said. “We’re watching for them, so they can be the next Ph.D.”

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