Can the new girl speak English..?

On my first day at work at WAM I bounded into the canoe house with all the enthusiasm of a Labrador puppy and excitedly introduced myself to the WAM young people who were doing the vocational training course:

"Hi I'm Aylssa, I'm from England, and I'm the new Jessica so if anyone needs anything just come see me, and if you could keep me on the right track that would be fab! Thanks!!" *big happy smile*

2 months later I discovered no-one in the canoe house that day understood a word I said... as Alson, my boss, later told me 'they asked if you could speak English, I told them you were from England so you spoke proper English!' What really?! Why didn't they tell me...oh right they thought I couldn't speak English!


It wasn't just the Marshallese people, the Americans couldn't understand me either. For years I wondered what the funny thing was about the English people depicted in Family Guy was about. If you've never seen it basically the recurring sketch is an English bloke guffawing and grunting basically then laughing. That was me. I'm flipping hilarious to be honest but all people heard was a guffaw of noises me manically laughing at myself!

Let me explain...I'm a Geordie which means I'm from Newcastle upon Tyne (well Gateshead really but that's by the by) and we have a distinct accent recently made famous by the lovely Sarah Millican and gorgeous Cheryl Cole, AND which was *ahem* recently voted the sexiest accent in the UK... oh yeah check it out http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/7578061/Geordie-accent-sexiest-in-Britain.html.

However 'sexy' it's fair to say I do not, with any stretch of imagination, sound like the Queen or the woman from BBC World News. A former colleague told me once about his family emigrating to Newcastle from Ghana who were appalled by the way Geordies spoke! To be fair I can't understand most of them! The best thing I ever heard about the Geordie accent was from a stand-up comedian who said our accent goes so high pitched sometimes only the whales and dolphins can understand us!

I learnt to speak really slowly (for me) and start saying 'me' instead of 'iz'; 'us' instead of 'wu' - I'm not even entirely sure where this comes from in Geordie but it confuses people no end! Didn't quite unlearn the 'ooooo' sound, and didn't try to speak American English even though 8 year olds took the mick out of my accent no end! I did however start saying some very British things like 'I'm terribly sorry but...' and 'bloody awful' and picked up a couple of crazy sayings from Val like 'holy moly' straight out of 1950s Batman with my now 'Irish' sounding accent must have sounded very strange!

I did leave them with Mint! though which I'm very proud of! For some more Geordie slang check out the video below... Aaaaaam gannin tee kip. 

His names 'Mental'? You can't be serious...

Mentil (left) and Ijikar the WAM Trainers

Jessica,  was waiting for us at the airport and took us round to the pick up truck...oh my god they have a pick up truck how cool-please tell me at some point I can ride in the back! and introduced me to one of the WAM trainers who had given up part of his Saturday to pick us up. I shook his hand and tried to get a grasp on his name, after the third attempt of trying Jessica told me: Mental. What? Surely not? Mental? To this day I'm convinced you don't actually pronounce his name like that. It's spelt Mentil, and JJ Jay (my favourite of all the Marshallese names I heard) one of the WAM trainees laughed at me once and declared 'his name's not Mental' and made the international sign for a bit crazy, 'it's Men-dil its a bird!' I apologised to Mentil but he claimed I was saying it right all along...so that's what I called him. He always smiled at me though, the kind of smile you would give to a child who was trying their best but was still making a mess of everything.

They drove us to the Marshall Islands Resort, a hotel we were staying at until Jessica left and gave us her apartment, and I was super excited just to take off the hoodie. She offered to drive us round Maj to show us the sights but my mind was only on getting my jumper off and getting a shower. We explored the 'resort' for about an hour, grabbed some food and promptly fell asleep. Damn jet lag.

Welcome to Majuro-do you have your visa? Er no...

Landing at Majuro airport is literally like landing in the sea. The strip of land which houses the airport is super thin and looking out the window we got our first glimpse of what would be our home for at least the next 12 months. We'd obviously googled it before leaving but looking out of the window was a mixture of crapping my pants and extreme excitement. Kinda like being on a roller coaster but without the ability for it all to be over in the next 2 minutes if you can just close your eyes and hang on a little longer. We'd filled in our customs declarations on the plane with Jay as a 'dependant adult' a title which led him to imagine he was some kind of play-thing for a rich mistress rather than the partner of a charity worker!

About 2 minutes before we landed I got a horrible sinking feeling - the kind where you know you have done something really stupid (again) and now have to pay the price for it... no it wasn't moving away silly...it was flying into Majuro with a vest-top on! We'd been warned that you have to cover your shoulders and knees at all times, and my only option was to stick my hoodie on and get off the plane to 30degrees heat and sweat, sweat, sweat. Well it did look kinda cold and rainy out of the window...it was definitely a bit drizzly but the heat and humidity were intense.

The baggage was taken off the plane by hand and practically given to you. No conveyor belts or x-ray machines in this airport! We made our way through customs really easily as there was no way the Marshallese guy was going to go through each and every item we had with us but then got to the desk. Do you have your visas? the guy asked. Urm no I replied, apparently there's someone at the other side who has them... I don't think he believed us. We were holding up the queue. The young Americans looked fidgety. They wanted to get on. Who were these people with strange accents delaying their adventure? I don't really think he knew what to do with us so made a couple of phone calls while my heart was in my mouth thinking surely we can't get turned away? Not now... Phew it was okay he was sending us through. Then some woman jumped out in front of me with a camera... 'You World Teach or WAM?' 'er WAM' I replied 'oh Jess is through there...you want your photo taken?' No I most certainly do not!

So off we went to find Jess, a woman we'd never met before who held our lives in her hands.

Who are these Americans and why are they so bloody happy!?

So let me just fill you in on the journey so far... we leave our house at around 11am on Wednesday morning for a 6 hour drive down to London Heathrow, from which we fly to Newark which takes bloody ages but I'm asleep for most of it (missed duty-free on the plane but thats okay we can get an adapter on the next one...of course we didn't so we couldn't plug anything in when we got there). US Customs ask me FOUR times where I'm going and why... I'm going to work in Majuro in the Marshall Islands...4 times. Either he didn't know where that was, or was perplexed as to why, who knows. I was geared up for a time in a customs cell though. Luckily it didn't happen.

So we get offloaded at Newark which means we are stuck in the airport for 12 hours as we can't check our luggage back in so we fill in a lot of time by ensuring all our bags are exactly within weight restrictions fuelled by Dunkin Donuts coffee - by gosh when I said put sugar in it I didn't mean that much. I broke the scales at Newark (walk away slowly so no-one notices!), and also stupidly repacked our toiletry bag into hand-luggage at which point everything basically got taken off us. I guess I could've shampooed some random on the flight - I am prone to a spot of hairdressing! I don't remember too much about Newark apart from the sky train thingy and travelling on that a lot. Oh and being practically unable to get around with the bike boxes cos for some reason Americans think its a good idea to build lifts directly behind massive pillars. And no-one smiled. Wired on about 4 massive cups of coffee and sleep deprived I smiled at around 400 passengers at 6-7am and got a handful back...(to be honest I do the same thing on the Tube in London cos it's funny watching people desperately avoid eye contact!)

The difference when we got to Hawaii though was amazing - I struck up a conversation with a woman at the airport and she was so warm and friendly. Really lovely - that's my impression of Pacific Islanders generally, and the contrast from Newark was immense. Hanging about outside the airport  before our morning flight I catch wind of a conversation. The bloke has a cockney accent. I think no! surely not... the first person I meet in the RMI can't be a Cockney...please I'm travelling to the other side of the world. Yep. Captain Ken. Not a superhero Captain but a fishing boat captain. I was slightly disappointed...

Then we spied all the Americans waiting to board the plane. There were loads of them. All young. All fresh-faced, wide-eyed and so bloody enthusiastic. And they all looked clean. Well in contrast to us who were on our 4th day of travelling, and we, in true Brit fashion, were grumpy! Luckily we weren't sat next to any of them; but then again a couple of them became my best friends on island a couple of weeks later but I wasn't to know that at the time. All I knew was I needed a shower and a new pair of knickers drastically...

(they were all World Teach volunteers if you were wondering:
http://www.worldteach.org/site/c.buLRIbNOIbJ2G/b.6150615/k.55F4/Marshall_Islands_Year.htm)