The Kwaj Kat Blog

I never knew his full name, only that we all referred to him as Captain Bob. Bob was the Tarlang skipper who shuttled Marshallese workers between Ebeye and Kwaj each day for their jobs on Kwaj. From my observations, most Marshallese were employed in unskilled positions such as taxi drivers, dock workers, and other manual labor jobs. Women often worked as housekeepers, although we never employed one. They would arrive early in the morning on the Tarlang to begin their work, and would ride the Tarlang back to Ebeye in the afternoon near sunset, with Captain Bob at the helm. (more…)

This has been a hard week. I’ve mentioned previously that some of my Kwaj reminiscing is because of changes that are occurring as my parenting days are beginning a slow deceleration now that one child is getting close to college and the other is entering high school. This week marks another milestone in the transition from full-time to part-time parenting as we made the difficult choice to sell our boat. I’ll warn you now that this post has nothing to do with Kwaj, so you can skip it if you’d rather focus on my Kwaj rambling. (more…)

Free movies. The news seemed too good to be true. Another thing my folks told us before we arrived on Kwaj was that the island had several movie theaters, and none of them charged an admission. Long before the days of VHS and DVD, our only option to see a movie was to shell out the cash for a ticket and take our chances. If the movie stunk, our loss. Of course, today we can rent a movie to watch at home for much less than the price of movie tickets, so you haven’t lost as much if it turns out that you rented Gigli…or anything featuring Hilary Duff. (more…)