Mid-Pacific School

At first, his students understood no English and he could speak not a word of Trukese. For three weeks, teacher and pupils on the onetime Japanese island fortress of Truk groped for a way to talk to each other. Then one day a little girl blurted: "Teacher should not smoke--it does damage in the head." That was the first sign Navy Lieut. William H. O'Brian had that he was getting anywhere with his assignment.

No Beans. He was to get a good deal further. In two years as head of the education program in the Truk District (in the Navy-administered U.S. Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands*), he was to teach hundreds of island boys & girls to read & write, and to build a general school system from scratch. By last week, with his tour of duty in the Pacific ended, 32-year-old Bill O'Brian, a graduate of Wake Forest College with an M.A. from the University of North Carolina, had gone far beyond his original Navy directive. He had founded 46 elementary schools, an intermediate boarding school, a center for training teachers.

A veteran of the Normandy landing who always wanted to be a teacher, O'Brian received his Truk assignment in 1946. He soon found that, for a teacher, Truk was no island paradise. The islanders, an easygoing, coffee-colored people of mixed Micronesian stock, were poor, half-starved and, in Navy eyes, superstitious (one of their taboos: they refused to eat the Navy's beans).

O'Brian opened his first school in two abandoned hospital tents. As his pupils learned English, O'Brian mastered Trukese. He taught them to read their own language, using a Trukese Bible that early missionaries had translated. He got older natives to give classes in planting and canoe-making, and he himself lectured constantly on sanitation. "We must use the toilets and not the school grounds," he would say. "We must never eat food off the ground . . . We must not store our dead fish in our foot lockers" (which the Trukese had gotten from the Navy).

A Little Baseball. During the first year, the Navy assigned another officer to help him. Later, he began hiring officers' wives. One by one, he took over abandoned Quonset huts for schools, built others in the more remote villages. Finally, his domain spread over 750,000 square miles of Pacific. His biggest school: the intermediate, with more than 250 students, six Quonset classrooms, dormitories, and a baseball team.

The natives were eager to learn, but not always easy to teach. At first, he found, students from one island would refuse to mingle with those from another. Also, they had a horror of losing face: a teacher scarcely dared flunk students lest they refuse ever to go home again. Even some of O'Brian's alumni were troublesome. A few got back to their villages and refused to do any work; some even tried to overrule their chiefs. Others flouted ancient taboos in their parents' faces.

That sort of thing was not what O'Brian was after. He does not think that his schools should destroy the island way of life. "Truk doesn't need democracy," says he. "It needs to feed itself, and it needs English to keep from getting fleeced if U.S. protection should end." O'Brian hopes Truk won't change too much. "It's wonderful. If I can, I'm going back there to live."

*A "strategic area" trusteeship under the U.N. Charter, comprising the former Japanese-mandated islands of the Carolines (Truk and Yap), the Marshall's (Kwajalein) and the Marianas (Saipan). Similar education programs are in progress in each of the area's four administrative districts.

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