Fr. Fran Hezel, SJ

Today’s guest writer for Remembering RMI is Fr. FRAN HEZEL, SJ, who has been a regular visitor to the Marshall Islands since 1965.

My first visit to Majuro in 1965 was memorable. On Sundays Fr. Len Hacker would hop in his bus to pick up the Sunday mass-goers and bring them to his porch where mass was held in those early years before the new church was completed. Then, too, I remember sitting at table with Fr. Bill McGarry, both of us stifling laughter as we listened to Fr. Tom Donohue, in his midwestern drawl, go on about his canned food diet on Jaluit.

What about the Marshallese themselves? Everyone I met during my three-week visit there confirmed the impression I had formed of these islanders from my first students–the boys I encountered at Xavier High School when I began teaching there two years earlier. They were quiet and deferential, never the trouble-makers that boys from other islands could be. How could anyone harbor suspicions about Michael Konelios, or Bryant Zebedy, or Walter Myazoe?

Over the years my visits to the Marshalls grew more frequent as I turned from teaching to become the full-time director of the Micronesian Seminar. The landscape had changed radically in the meantime. Assumption Church and the new school building were completed; the new airfield was finished; the classy government office had become a landmark; the Marshall Islands Resort was relocated and rebuilt as the centerpiece of a dreamed-of tourist industry. It was as if Majuro had come of age, even as the Marshall Islands achieved independence.

The new republic, in its struggle to develop a viable economy, had filed a suit against the US tobacco companies for millions of dollars in damages. I was incredulous that the islanders, whose overwhelming Protestant population had been trained not to smoke, could blame Big Tobacco for their health problems. Weren’t there more damaging forces at work–like the atomic testing conducted in the area for 20-some years? So I wrote an article on victimization, asking if the Marshallese were always going to present themselves as victims.

I should have known better. Soon after the article appeared, on my next visit to Majuro, I found myself seated at the Tide Table with no less a person than the President. He scolded me for what I had written, suggesting that I stick to my own field: saying masses and hearing confessions and reciting prayers. Once that was off his chest, he grabbed my shoulder and assured me that we were still friends. The mix of sharp criticism and affection went on for a while, until finally I excused myself and stopped over at the next table to say hello to some old friends. There five women pounced on me. They were sharper in their criticism than the President had been. How much did Big Tobacco offer you as a retainer, they asked. I told them, but added that I had donated the money to the new Assumption High School. “Ha! Just like a guy taking a bribe and giving it to his wife,” one of them chided.

I slunk away from the ladies, wondering what had happened to those quiet and deferential Marshallese I had known back when I was teaching at Xavier. It seems that more than the landscape had changed in Majuro. 

Remembering RMI is a series that appears in The Marshall Islands Journal. The author has permission to reprint the series on this site. You can subscribe to the Journal by visiting the newspaper’s website: marshallislandsjournal@gmail.com.