Word: volcanoes
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Arguments over the College's language requirement have a life-cycle much like a volcano's. Elementary language courses annually rate least popular in the Confidential Guide, a majority of the students damning them as ill-taught, dull and unnecessary. The resentment erupts, forms into a formal protest, spills over into Faculty Committee and the Student Council meetings, and finally becomes another layer on the already ample pile of slag burying the problem. This process takes about four years each round...
Piglets for Rahabaat. The natives have all the sins of the senses, but no sense of sin. They worship Rahabaat, a god who lives in the local volcano, with frank fertility rites. When Sam preaches his Vermont fundamentalism at the men, they giggle and slip away into the underbrush. When Irma tries to clothe the women in sacklike dresses of her own design, they cut holes in the tops to bare their breasts. After a brief vogue, even this ventilated version goes out of fashion. When the natives hear of Irma's virginity, they laughingly...
...Irma has been caught by the languid charm of October Island. While Sam files reports of "no progress" to his superiors, she scouts around the island and one day digs up an hermaphroditic sculpture. Shocked, she heaves it into the volcano. Her Christian mission, she decides, is to destroy as many of these pagan relics as possible. The natives find her constant digging odd, but since she tosses everything into Rahabaat's volcano, they find her piety admirable. When, in a moment of hunger, she eats a portion of roast piglet left on the altar of Rahabaat...
Lapping up the adulation of her new post as high priestess, Irma is none too happy when Sam takes sick and the mission board orders the couple home for a rest. To invoke her return, the natives toss hundreds of piglets into the volcano and finally even their own infants. Sure enough, back in Vermont Sam dies, and Irma heads for the island again...
...volcano, which has no special name, is interesting to scientists because active volcanos in the western Pacific east of Hawaii are rare; this is the first that has erupted in historical times. But it probably will not last as long as Mexico's other new volcano, the tourist gold mine Paricutin...