Surviving Paradise: One Year on a Disappearing IslandJust one month after his 21st birthday, Peter Rudiak-Gould moved to Ujae, a remote atoll in the Marshall Islands located 70 miles from the nearest telephone, car, store, or tourist, and 2,000 miles from the closest continent. He spent the next year there, living among its 450 inhabitants and teaching English to its schoolchildren. At first blush, Surviving Paradise is a thoughtful and laugh-out-loud hilarious documentation of Rudiak-Gould’s efforts to cope with daily life on Ujae as his idealistic expectations of a tropical paradise confront harsh reality. But Rudiak-Gould goes beyond the personal, interweaving his own story with fascinating political, linguistic, and ecological digressions about the Marshall Islands. Most poignant are his observations of the noticeable effect of global warming on these tiny, low-lying islands and the threat rising water levels pose to their already precarious existence. An Eat, Pray, Love as written by Paul Theroux, Surviving Paradise is a disarmingly lighthearted narrative with a substantive emotional undercurrent.
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Contents
Prologue I | 1 |
Moon Landing | 5 |
A Beautiful Prison | 9 |
The Marshall Islands on | 14 |
A Tropical Paradox | 17 |
Learning to Speak Again | 29 |
Underwater Coralhead Cinderblock | 50 |
No Student Left Behind | 60 |
A Vacation from Paradise | 121 |
Confessions of a Spearfisherman | 148 |
From Island to Mainland | 163 |
On the Waterfront | 180 |
Liberation Days | 194 |
Getting Past Customs | 204 |
To Bring to an End | 219 |
Another Shore | 226 |
The Scent of New Things | 75 |
Gone Sailing | 91 |
It Takes a Village to Break a Spirit | 104 |
Fallen Palms | 229 |
Acknowledgments | 243 |