yolland said:
Is the school you teach at a Seventh Day Adventist school? How would you describe the "mission" of the school itself, and how does that mission fit into the context of Saipan? (religion-wise, social-service-provision-wise or otherwise)
Yes, it is a Seventh-day Adventist school. Like the Catholic church, our denom, has a very large bureaucratic organization (though it is strictly bureaucratic. . .for example, the president of our church has no special spiritual authority, nor do any of the other church "workers.") which includes schools all over the world. The "mission" of the school (simply put. I think we have an eloquent mission statement but I can't remember what it is, sadly) is to provide a wholistic Christian education to the students who attend there. The school wants to give the kids a solid academic, physical, and spiritual foundation (This approach emphasizing good health in addition to academic success and spiritual growth is generally a feature of all Adventist school and most of SDA schools have something to that affect in their mottos or mission statements). Also there is the hope that students will develop a relationship with God, accept Jesus as their Savior, and ideally, become members of our church. In fact, one of my wife's primary reasons for wanting to build a new campus, and expand to a full high school (we end at 9th grade right now) is that generally older kids are more likely to be in a position to join the church than younger kids are.
How we fit into Saipan, is that we provide a private school education, which many parents want since the local public schools are not that great. We do have competition, probably about a dozen other private schools (including two that are decidely non-religious), but I think what we offer is a Christian education without ramming it down the kids throats (the way some of the other religous-based private schools do) and because we are one of the smallest schools on the island, we provide a "family" type atmosphere and an excelletn student/teacher ratio. The teachers, students, and parents at our school, are unusually close, I think.
yolland said:
Also, I see from Wikipedia that 86%(!) of Northern Mariana Islanders speak a language other than English--Tagalog, Chinese, Chamorro, Carolinian--at home (though I'm guessing that figure is probably a little lower in the Saipan area). Does this create any problems for the schools? Are language barriers a significant issue socially in any way?
Language is generally not a problem with the indigenous students (which is the majority of oru student population). If anything, there is more the concern that the younger generation is losing their language because so many of them don't speak Chamorro or Carolinian very well, and many times don't speak it much at home. One thing our school lacks which I wish we had, was a program to teach the local language so that we could be contributing to keeping it alive. A good marker is that in Chuuk you encountered many people who didn't speak English at all, and as a result I learned a fair amount of Chuukese during my year there. But in Saipan, after 8 years I only know Hafa Adai (hello) and Si Yuse Mase (Thank you) in Chamorro, and nothing in Carolinian. That gives you a sense of how little the local languages are spoken.
Right now, contract workers from the Phiippines and China especially, outnumber indigenous people so that contributes to a large part of that percentage, and in truth the percentage is probably highest on Saipan. It's the most populated island and thus the one with largest concentraton of contract workers. Most of these people are adults having left family behind in their home countries, so they are in the minority in the schools. For the Korean and Chinese students in our school, the language barrier is definitely a challenge.
yolland said:
And...again just based on quickie online research...I gather much of the history of the Marianas follows the usual (for that region) one-colonial-land-grab-after-another trajectory...with the usual associated unpleasantries--forced evacuations and conversions, land dispossession, forced labor, etc. Does this have any lingering aftereffects on social relations among the various groups? (e.g., the way in some areas of Hawaii there are serious tensions between Native Hawaiians and more recently arrived groups)
There's DEFINTELY tension between the indigenous people and the Filipinos and Chinese as well as other ethnic groups that make up contract workers. The racial hieracrchy, IMO, runs something roughly like this:
At the top, Chamorros, followed by
Carolinians
Japanese
Other Micronesians like Paluans
Americans (white, or black doesn't seem to matter. It's wonderful!)
Generally, there's not a lot of prejudice amongst these groups, though it's never totally gone.
But next down are the Filipinos followed by
the Koreans
Chinese
Bangladeshi's looked down upon by all.
Again this is an extreme simplification (and may reveal some of my own prejudices and stereotypes as well) but it gives you a rough approximation. A lot of the tensions come from the simple fact that the locals are "outnumbered" and of course the misunderstandings that come from different languages, customs, and cultures. A common stereotype is the Chinese garment worker who wanders into the road and gets hit by a car, the sentiment being that "these people" don't know how to walk down the road without getting themselves killed.
Local culture, though has become a mixture of all that has come before--Spanish, German, Japanese, Filipino, and Korean, as well as various other Micronesians. Paluans and Chuukese in particular seem to have a good sized population on Saipan. Intermarriage is extremely common, and very few "locals" are "pure Chamorro" (such a thing basically have disappeared during Spanish rule anyway) or "pure Carolinian."
However, this does NOT mean that there aren't distinctions made. According to Article 12 of the CNMI constitution, only those of Chamorro or Carolinian descent may own land in the CNMI. So, essentially, all land on Saipan is either owned by the government, or by indigenous people. The rest of us rent or lease. This was set up as a safeguard to prevent outsiders from buying up all the land and displacing the locals.
awesome stuff! Thank you for the detailed sharing. A great encouragement to reach out and do more!!
Hi sula, welcome back BTW
