Word: truk
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...cultures he studied have no taboo against premarital promiscuity, Professor Murdock jumps to the conclusion that the taboo is out of place in this culture. This is not a scientific conclusion on his part. You can't transplant the sex habits of the inhabitants of Truk and the Samoa Islands into Christian industrial America unless you transplant the meaning those sex habits have there ... It may well be that in a society like ours-where we are more insistent than are other cultures that sex have in it mutual affection, a sense of belonging and a sharing...
...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...
...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...
...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...
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...