We Have Everything

Jada was the first person I interviewed for this project and the last person I returned to before writing it. Our first meeting was at a steakhouse in Seattle—my first time interviewing a Marshallese person, and I was nervous. She and her husband came through the door slowly. She wasn’t tall; black-framed glasses sat above gentle eyes, her thick dark hair was pulled into a high bun, and a purple skirt showed beneath a light gray coat. She put you at ease on sight: she smiled before she spoke, asked how you were before saying anything about herself, and greeted me with a warm hug, eyes crinkling. Her English was fluent and she never raised her voice. You could not read sixty-two years of weather in her face—only a polished, settled calm.

Jada lived in Majuro and had been in Seattle visiting family; after she went home, we stayed in touch. Our first interview did not go well. Inexperienced, I had chosen a noisy restaurant, and Jada spoke so softly that the recording caught almost nothing of her. So before I began writing this book, I called her again, across the Pacific, because her story deserved to be told: born on an outer island, settled in the capital, traveled through cities east and west; a carrier of her generation’s traditions and one of its few university-educated women. And, more than anything, the keeper of a particular calm. Whenever I asked whether she had faced hardships, or feared the future, she would smile and answer softly, “No. All very good.”

When the call connected, Jada’s voice had the same familiar softness, though it was a little hoarse from a cough. Because of her cold, we had postponed our conversation by a week. I asked whether she was feeling better.

“Yeah, a little bit of coughing, but it’s okay now,” she said.

July in Majuro had been brutally hot. “Yeah, really hot. Because too hot, some days raining—really big rain. Maybe that’s why we get flu-like coughing.” She associated the cough with the alternation between heat and heavy rain. Yet the rain also sustained her livelihood.

Jada had spent years managing the household and raising her children. After they grew up and left home, she opened a small self-service laundry. The laundromats of Majuro run mainly on rainwater.

Freshwater in the Marshall Islands is extremely scarce. The country’s low coral atolls have no rivers or lakes. Usable water arrives mainly in two forms: rain collected from roofs and other catchment surfaces, and thin freshwater lenses formed when rain filters through porous coral and floats above denser seawater. In Majuro, the public system collects runoff from the airport runway and stores it in reservoirs; households maintain their own tanks; and the freshwater lens beneath Laura Beach provides an additional reserve. Even with substantial annual rainfall, limited storage and periodic drought make rationing common. The 2011 census found that nearly four in five outer-island households relied on rainwater tanks for drinking water.¹

Climate change places pressure on both sources. Hotter conditions increase evaporation, while drought reduces the rain available to refill tanks and lenses. Sea-level rise and wave-driven flooding push salt into groundwater. The United States Geological Survey’s research warns that between 2030 and 2060, most coral atolls may no longer have potable groundwater.²

Jada explained that households generally reserved their stored rainwater for cooking, bathing, and boiling for drinking; doing laundry elsewhere thus allowed them to conserve that supply. Because most residents did not own washing machines, self-service laundromats had become a practical part of daily life in Majuro. Their use was not limited to wealthier households. “For everybody, everybody can do laundry.”

At the shop, Jada had installed large catchment tanks. “I have big water catchments to get the water. We use the rainwater or sometimes government water. It’s a long time I didn’t use the government water because it’s rainy.” Eight washing machines stood inside, each charging two dollars per load. “$2 for one load...when they put the money in the machine, it’s automatic. Water will come and it washes.”

Jada owns the business, minds the store, and employs one other person. “I work for myself. I work from Monday to Saturday,” she said. “Only Sunday I take a rest. If I don’t want to work Saturday, I will close.”

Majuro has many laundries, and customers move among them. “It’s very competitive. Sometimes they come here, sometimes they go to the Chinese laundry.” Jada did not describe expansion or large profits as her goal. The shop gave her independence, work she controlled, and Sundays free for church. “Yeah, it’s enough.”

With unmistakable joy, Jada called herself a “Busy lady.” She ran the laundry six days a week and organized much of the seventh around church. During the summer, a two-week church conference added more meetings to her schedule, but she spoke of the activity with evident pleasure.

Every Sunday, she attends worship. “Our service is from ten in the morning up to twelve o’clock.” The weekly calendar includes other gatherings as well. “Like Thursday, that’s ladies’; we go six o’clock for the service, from 6:00 to 7:30. And Wednesday, men and women, we go together. Yeah. And then Sunday for everybody.”

Jada had been a believer for more than twenty years, following her mother: “My mom was a Christian before.” She summarized the relationship plainly: “Religion is part of the culture.”

Congregational missionaries from the United States and Hawai‘i established the first permanent mission on Epoon Atoll in 1857. From those beginnings grew the United Church of Christ—Congregational in the Marshall Islands, now the country’s largest denomination. Catholic, Assemblies of God, Jehovah’s Witness, and other congregations also fill Majuro. Jada’s own branch belonged to one of the oldest Protestant mainstream denominations on the island. As she put it, there are “so many kinds of religion you know.” Generations of Marshallese pastors and congregations had made Christianity part of local institutions, kinship, music, and public life. Nearly the entire population identifies as Christian, and prayers routinely open and close public meetings and school events.³

The church also connects communities separated by water and migration. Jada described the large conference held in Majuro each summer; that year, it ran for two weeks, from mid-July through August 2. “So many people, two thousand...they come all the one member from all the islands, like our neighboring island, and from the U.S. mainland. Those they come from Hawaii, from Guam.” Participants attend what she called “conference, schooling, conference, like study the Bible like that.” Beyond studying, the event also is a reunion, a gathering, a summer when family and friends who are scattered across the Pacific come back together. Every other year, it is the youth conference’s turn. For two weeks, brothers and sisters from north and south crowd together, listening to sermons by day and singing hymns at dusk. During the Christmas season, Kūrijmōj, church groups known as jepta—from the English word “chapter”—prepare songs and dances for performances that may last through the night.⁴

The weight of faith goes beyond comfort and gathering. In the long Marshallese struggle for nuclear justice, church networks have carried their political claims beyond the islands. The Pacific Conference of Churches and the World Council of Churches have supported a “nuclear-free Pacific.” At the World Council of Churches assembly in Vancouver in 1983, Marshallese activist Darlene Keju described radiation exposure and the severely deformed infants remembered as “jellyfish babies.” Her address became one of the best-known international presentations of Marshallese testimony about nuclear harm. Churches continue to participate in “Nuclear Victims Remembrance Day” each March 1 through prayer, memorial services, and public discussion.⁵

Jada did not present herself as an activist. For her, faith was located first in the repeated practices of ordinary weeks: two hours of worship on Sunday, Thursday evening with the women, Bible study, conference, and song. Those practices connected spiritual belief to the people with whom she lived.

Jada was born and raised on Ailinglaplap, an atoll in the western Marshall Islands. She described her homeland in one sentence: “No electricity in all the island, but we have everything.”

Ailinglaplap consists of a broad lagoon ringed by dozens of islets. Travel within the atoll required a boat. “You go by boat to boat like two hours to one island, one hour to the other island.” Access remains difficult. Flights now connect the atoll to Majuro, but airport roads are flooded at high tide. Some piers, like the one at Bouj, have corroded and have been damaged by tides to the point of being unusable. Solar systems provide power in some places, but supply remains uneven. Modern infrastructure has arrived without eliminating the practical importance of boats, household production, and local ecological knowledge.⁶

Jada was one of twelve children, the siblings now scattered from Majuro and Ailinglaplap to Seattle and as far as Norway. Large families were common in her childhood. “My mom, [like other women] before, they can make babies up to ten, 12, 13. But they don’t get sick. Yeah. It’s a different kind of life.” It was, she added, “before than now.” She remembered motherhood, health, and household life as belonging to conditions different from those her children knew.

Her father ran a retail store and assigned work to all the children. Jada described the rhythm of a day: “Our routine... like my brothers and sisters... we’d wake up early in the morning, go clean before we go to school. Like when they said OKAY, you go out and clean cause we have so many fresh fruit nearby our house… and you know bananas. So we clean. And like seven o’clock we’d have to eat breakfast and then we’d go to school. After school we’d come back, we’d go play around, we’d go swimming at the lagoon and then like five o’clock we’d get ready for dinner and whatever. Yeah, life when we were young was so happy, we really liked it.”

Jada remembered her mother through what her hands could make. “The Marshallese lady before, they don’t stay in the house,” she said. Women’s work extended beyond the walls of the home. “They’re like the one busy and make those stuff you can sleep on. It’s like a mat, like that.”

Her mother prepared pandanus leaves and wove sleeping mats. Marshallese mats vary in form and use. Jaki can refer broadly to woven mats, while jaki-ed names the finest clothing mats, made from carefully processed pandanus and distinguished by decorated borders. Weaving is also social: women work together, talk, teach, and pass patterns from one set of hands to another. By the late 1990s, only four women were known to retain the most elaborate jaki-ed techniques. A revival program begun in 2006 has since taught more than two hundred weavers.⁷

Jada’s mother also wove coconut leaves into thatching for the family’s cooking house. “They weave. And then they make our cooking house—they make the roof with the coconut leaves. So many, so many kinds.” Leaves became sleeping surfaces, baskets, and roofs. The skill involved knowing which plants to use, when to harvest them, how to prepare them, and how to make a structure withstand wind and rain.

In the Marshall Islands, weaving has traditionally been women’s work, taught by mothers to daughters. Its transmission reflects a broader matrilineal order: Marshallese descent and many land rights pass through the bwij, or matrilineal clan. The skills Jada learned from her mother thus connected her not only to a craft but to the women through whom family membership, cultural knowledge, and claims to land endure.⁸

Jada’s mother also left her memories and skills around food, and Jada likes to cook and bake. “Yeah, I cook, I cook soup, I cook barbecue, I cook whatever, oh, whatever I can cook.” When she has time, she cooks every day. “If I’m not busy, I cook. Because I like cooking, I like baking.” Fish, clams, and other reef foods remain central to her table. Breadfruit, another staple, can be fermented underground into bwiro, allowing it to be stored beyond the harvest season. Even at her daughter’s home in Seattle, Jada returns to familiar dishes. “Soup and BBQ... this is how I cooked from when they were young.”⁹

Clothing formed another part of that inheritance. Jada and other women on Ailinglaplap commonly wore long skirts called momo. “We seldom wear pants.”

And what has held it all together has also been song. “Oh, we’re always singing,” Jada said, her voice brightening. I asked her favorite song. “All our traditional like everybody is using when we get together, we sing every time if people get together they sing.” Then she sang it for me—a melody arriving suddenly out of the receiver. “This is our singing, everybody knows.” She explained the meaning: “This is a good time. Long time we didn’t been together but now we all together.”

Marshallese performance traditions include biit, a dance influenced by Spanish folk forms and performed in parallel lines to intricate rhythms, and Jōbwa stick dances, which are associated with particular atolls and reserved for special occasions. Jada’s song belonged to a more informal repertoire, sung when relatives reunited after a long separation. “Yeah, like if we get together and with this came from Seattle, we came like and we family together that they sing the words of this song.” In singing, the voices of relatives returning from Seattle joined those of family members who had remained at home. The song did not simply describe reunion; it enacted it: “we are together.”¹⁰

I asked Jada whether she had friends or relatives whose health had been affected by nuclear testing.

“Yeah, yeah, one of my... so many. Because it’s Marshall, you know, we are like relatives. We are really close to each other. Like plenty of family connect, connect... like everybody knows everybody.”

She began to offer one example, then hesitated and changed the answer to “so many.” In the Marshall Islands, Jada explained, the category “friend or relative” was too broad. It extends through dense networks of kinship, marriage, church, and island affiliation. “Everybody knows everybody,” she said. At a wedding or funeral, “everybody will come and see you”; in trouble, “everybody can help each other.” “The people living around are mostly related and will gather together very often,” Jada continued. Illness therefore does not remain an individual experience.

Jada had encountered many forms of cancer. “Yeah, too many cancers when we go to checkup disease. People have cancer with, thyroid cancer, lung cancer, breast cancer... so many kinds of cancer.” She had heard radiation offered as an explanation, but she retained uncertainty about individual cases. “So, some people they say, maybe it’s from the nuclear bomb, but I don’t know... you know, plenty of cancer here.”

Her generation had not grown up with a detailed account of the testing program. “Before, we don’t really talk about that, because we don’t really concern it.” Nuclear knowledge circulated unevenly. Ailinglaplap lay far from the four atolls formally recognized by U.S. programs, while official information about exposure, fallout, and long-term health effects remained limited and contested. Many families possessed memories of illness without a shared framework for interpreting them.

When I asked whether faith helped people live with these uncertainties, Jada said yes. Church conferences offered spiritual support while also connecting congregations with government officials and agency representatives. “Then you know sometimes when we have the conference, the people came from the agencies and government, they come and talk to us, explaining whatever.” These gatherings joined worship and reunion with discussions of radiation, health, and compensation.

Jada saw a generational change. “The generation now, they are really concerned about the nuclear.” One of her daughters-in-law worked for an NGO that brought Pacific Island communities’ concerns about nuclear testing to international audiences. “It’s like helping the youth as they have something to connect with other country and they talk about the nuclear on the Pacific island.”

“They understand more than me,” she continued. “I know that we are nuclear, but I don’t know about everything... before we don’t really talk so that’s why I don’t really understand but they really understand, my kids.”

Jada has four children and seven grandchildren divided between the Marshall Islands and the United States. Two daughters went to study in America and later established families in Seattle and Portland. Two sons remained in the Marshall Islands; one works for the government and travels frequently, while the youngest holds a secretarial position with a foreign company. Her oldest granddaughter, eighteen, had graduated from high school in Majuro and entered the University of the South Pacific. Her youngest grandson, five, was born in Seattle. When the family gathers, children and grandchildren fly back, and they sing, eat, and talk.

Jada attended college. Her husband, Teddy, studied at a selective school in the Federated States of Micronesia and completed university there before returning to work for the Marshallese government. Together they traveled repeatedly to the United States as well as to Guam, Taiwan, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Macau. Of the last journey, Jada remembered, “We went there by boat.”

Well-traveled, Jada and her husband raised their children with both Marshallese traditions and Western influences and accepted the lives they chose for themselves. When the children reached adulthood, Jada told them, “You grow up, you take care of yourself now.” When they left to study, she and Teddy’s attitude was, “Okay, up to you.” Some established careers and families in the United States; others completed school and chose the islands: “We like to stay here,” they said. Jada accepted both decisions.

She viewed broader Marshallese migration with the same equanimity. Some young people wanted “different kind life, different kind thinking,” she said, and she saw no reason to prevent them from leaving. Those who remained also had viable lives. “But we stay here, we are still okay.”

When I asked whether she feared that culture would disappear as people moved, she quickly answered, “Not really.” Then she added, “We still care about our culture.” Her father had died years earlier, and her mother more recently. “My mom, she passed away three years ago.” The skills Jada associated with her mother now survived through memory, practice, and institutions created to teach them deliberately.

Jada acknowledged concerns that Marshallese language and traditions were fading, but she pointed to the institutions already working to preserve them. “We have a radio program regularly teaching people about the culture by Marshallese language…there is a women’s united group that tries to preserve the culture and the rights of women. There are also other NGOs. The women’s united group try to teach the women and children about the culture.” Radio remains especially useful across outer islands where internet access is uneven.¹¹

The organization Jada described was Women United Together Marshall Islands, or WUTMI. Established in 1987, it now has chapters across most inhabited atolls and islands, with affiliated organizing also emerging among women in the United States. Its work joins “safeguarding cultural knowledge” to women’s rights, family wellbeing, health, education, and environmental protection. This knowledge is often described as Mantin Majōl, a term encompassing Marshallese customs, values, social obligations, and ways of life. WUTMI regards women as central to passing it on and draws upon it in addressing contemporary concerns.¹²

Jada and Teddy had attended such activities when they were younger. Women from across the country gathered in Majuro and in outer-island chapters to learn from elders: weaving, songs, language, and other practices. As fewer young people acquired this knowledge routinely at home, these programs provided another setting in which it could be taught and practiced.

Near the end of the interview, I asked Jada what she loved most about the Marshall Islands.

“All of them.” The beaches, flowers, sunsets—“All of them are good for me.”

When she is not busy, Jada likes to drive to the Laura, the public beach at Majuro, and sit for a while. Many Majuro residents go there to swim and spend time with family. “If you want to see something even more beautiful, you could take a small plane to the outer islands—it’s very nice,” she added.

I asked Jada whether the sea was rising and whether some small atolls might disappear. “It is rising in years. But now there are laws try to protect. People are afraid of... sea rise.” She paused before the final words. In a nation composed of low-lying coral atolls, rising seas threaten habitability before the land is fully submerged: erosion narrows shorelines, flooding damages homes and crops, and saltwater contaminates the freshwater lens on which communities depend.¹³

But there was no alarm in her voice. “Not disappear yet but like you know, the beach is like get little by little but it’s not really go disappear, still.” The beach was narrowing, but Jada distinguished the erosion already underway from a disappearance she did not believe was imminent.

Outside narratives often place the Marshall Islands in the future perfect—as islands that will have disappeared and a culture that will have been lost. Jada spoke in the present tense. The beach was smaller but still there. Her family was dispersed but still gathered. Her mother had died, but the skills she taught remained in use. Life had changed, but it had not become only a story of decline.

Again and again, Jada returned to the same words: “We are still okay.”