Adapted from
"GHOSTS OF THE PAST....A VISION OF THE FUTURE,"
by Francis X. Hezel, SJ, on the occasion of Xavier's 25th Anniversary
To the tourists in the shiny Continental bus
who have bounced their way over what has barely passed as a road
for the last [half-mile] it is the pause that refreshes. An oasis
of trimmed lawns and colorful hedges greets them as they come
to a stop at the end of the winding entrance. But their attention
is fixed on a two-story squat cement fortress that fairly glowers
at them from among the shrubbery and trees with large concrete
eyebrows tinged in faded blue protruding from above massive iron
shutters.
The tourists leave the bus and follow the tour guide up to the
roof, remarking to one another as they go on the pockmarks in
the sturdy cement walls and the shallow craters in the four-foot
thick roof. "This place was strafed and bombed by British
and American planes during the war," the Trukese tour guide
tells them. They are standing on what the travel brochure that
they carry informs them was a Japanese radio communication station:
a historic monument from World War II. From the roof of this relic
they look out to the old lighthouse, now almost hidden by coconut
palms at the eastern tip of Moen Island. Their gaze shifts to
the nearby islands of Toloas and Fefan in the Truk lagoon, and
then beyond to the thin white line of the barrier reef. It is
a breath-taking view on a clear day, and many of them reach for
the cameras that hang at their side to record the scene for their
friends back home.
A historic monument! Ghosts of the past hang
heavy over the places but it is not a mausoleum either. Mabuchi,
as local people call it, lives on as a school. Where the radios
once [broadcast to] Tokyo, students are now served lunch and dinner.
Not far from the cave that conceals an auxiliary generator, still
dripping oil after 55 years, is a quiet pond where [the senior
boys] bathe in the late afternoon. What were formerly Japanese
officers' quarters are now faculty [offices] and the enlisted
men's barracks is the ["New Learning Center" housing
the Media, Seminar, Computer, and Marine Science Computer Rooms].
The Imperial Admiral's sunken bath has long since been filled
and now serves as the Principal's office. To its 158 Students
and its staff of 14, Mabuchi is not just a school, but the school
... Xavier High School.
Xavier has a history of its own. Br. John Walter,
SJ, a full-bearded Jesuit with a small-town drawl who [once lived]
on Truk witnessed it all. He [reminisced] about the work that
he supervised to turn the gutted, bombed cement hulk into a school.
He [spoke] about tediously chipping away at the thick concrete
walls to widen the narrow windows and constructing a step-down
showerhouse at the edge of the property to allow 15 boys to shower
at once.
Bishop Vincent Kennally, SJ, [before he died]
remembered his long exchange of correspondence with Admirals in
Honolulu and Washington before the land on which Xavier stands
was finally returned to the Catholic Mission. It had been appropriated
by the Japanese military in 1940 without compensation. In 1952,
seven years after the end of war, the Mission's claim was finally
recognized.
The Hellcat fighter dips into its dive as it
approaches its target, Ahead, nestled on the saddle of two gently
sloping hills, sits an oversized bunker completely sealed off
against attack. Three 150-foot radio towers encircle the building
as silent sentinels. As the Hellcat swoops in for the attack,
the wooded hills on each side belch flame and smoke and steel.
Ack-ack fire! The Hellcat now releases its 500-Pounder and its
machine guns rake the coconut groves and then the building. A
second later it is nosing its way up again out of range of the
anti aircraft batteries.
"There were only two high schools in the entire Trust Territory
in those days," says Fr. John Hoek, SJ, the first Principal
of Xavier. "PITTS, the teacher-training school that served
all the districts, and Xavier. Xavier was really a minor seminary
for the first years but soon became an ordinary high school.
But not really ordinary either! The first groups
of boarders rose at 6 a.m. to begin their day with Mass and ended
it with common prayers recited as they knelt beside their beds.
They learned to read imperfectly perhaps, Cicero's orations and
Caesar's account of a far earlier war in the original Latin. And
of course, they also struggled with more prosaic subjects like
English syntax and trigonometry. Once each year, decked out in
singlets and pantaloons, students would present "The Merchant
of Venice or another of Shakespeare's plays, and each month they
produced a mimeographed paper that they called "Three Towers"
(The towers themselves have not survived but the paper has!)
To the tourists who re-enter the Continental bus it is just another
school, the grounds better kept up and the buildings slightly
more ramshackle than most One of the visitors, while waiting for
the stragglers, pokes his head inside one of the classrooms for
a second and notices the usual schoolsy things: blackboards wearing
a thin layer of yellow chalkdust, chairs with attached writing
arms, and a stack of notebooks on the teacher's desk. A school
is a school.
Twelve Xavier students prepare their mask, snorkels
and fins, as they get ready to continue with their survey of the
reef off the Japanese Dock in Sapuk Village. It had been a windy
and rainy March in 1999, and the students were slightly weary
from the daily battle they wage against waves that threatened
to push them onto the sharp coral - a few already wear with honor
the scars inflicted by close contact with the reef. Despite the
difficulties, they know they're doing something worthwhile, and
spirits are high.
"We have the usual boarding school problem at Xavier"
explains the new Dean of Students a thick-set [Yapese] who himself
graduated from Xavier [seven] years ago. "Some drinking now
and then a fight and the normal boredom. But we keep the [students]
pretty busy around here. He points to several groups of students
some way off who are variously engaged cutting grass, [working
on their local huts, cleaning the classrooms, and washing windows
of the library]. Both girls and boys are engaged in the various
jobs collectively called "afternoon work." A handful
of boys are practicing layups on the basketball court [in the
gym], and a couple more are dragging a volleyball net out to a
spot that was probably planted in vegetables 55 years ago.
Past and present blend strangely at Mabuchi. The heavy iron shutters
in the [main school building] are still closed when heavy winds
bring a driving rain from the Northeast. The drops that trickle
from the ceiling in the faculty [offices] every time it rains
are an annoying reminder of the two direct hits that the building
took during the bombing raids of 1944. Then there are exposed
re-bars the cement shaken away during the concussion from the
strikes, and the long spikes that stare out at one from the ceiling,
But a school is a frenetic place and there is not the time nor
the psychological distance to remain infatuated with the past.
The legacy of the Japanese -- the building and all else -- cannot
simply be contemplated; it must be adapted, refashioned, utilized,
and sometimes even overcome.
It is this sort of pragmatism that turns
Japanese fishponds into spare water tanks for a boys' showerhouse,
and ordnance dumps into libraries. At bottom, this was the magic
that transformed an abandoned Japanese radio communication station
into one of Micronesia's foremost schools. "The Eton of the
Trust Territory" is the complimentary way one visiting journalist
put it.
 |
| Bishop Feeney and Students examining bomb
damage to the gym, 1952 |
How can the heritage of the past be best
employed to serve the needs of the present? If this question had
not been asked Mabuchi would be a historical monument now, not
a living institution.
Adaptation to present-day needs is still having a transforming
effect on the school today. In classrooms where the constant drone
of the teacher's voice was formerly about the only sound heard,
a passerby now hears the murmur of students conferring with one
another or their teachers as they work out their individualized
assignments in English and math. Old pictures of the islands and
historical books in the school library are no longer just curiosities
to be thumbed through during spare moments; they are now research
tools for student social studies projects. Work assignments after
class are made and overseen by a student "Labor Manager",
while the study hall and dormitory are prefected by upperclassmen,
not by faculty members as formerly.
"Learning how to survive in jet-age Micronesia
is what the school is all about," says one of the faculty
members. "We want the students to be in touch with their
traditions, but they're getting ready for life in a world that
demands new skills, resourcefulness, and a critical mind. They're
being called on to shape the future and remake their societies."
Many of Xavier's graduates are, in fact, in
a position to wield influence over decisions that are made in
the government and private sectors of Micronesia today. Among
the school's alumni are numerous Congressmen, lawyers, doctors
and other medical personnel, administrators in every echelon of
government service, and managers of several businesses. In almost
every bank in Micronesia there is at least one Xavier graduate
in training for a management-level position. Then there are the
school teachers (including four of the present staff at Xavier
itself), the mechanics and technicians, and the journalists and
radio programmers.
About eighty percent of the school's graduates
went on to college, even before the recent windfall of federal
assistance programs made it possible for almost any high school
graduate to attend a US college. Today the percentage of college-bound
graduates is just about the same as it was 10 years ago. But the
ones who have never gone abroad should not be forgotten either.
There is the young Palauan, for instance, who returned to his
sparsely populated coral island with Gilbert Highet's The Art
of Teaching in hand to help educate his own people. Whatever work
they happen to be doing today, Xavier alumni agree that their
high school experience has been as important for the friends that
they have made as for what they have learned. Some even argue
that the strong current of political separatism in the districts
might have been avoided if there had been more inter-district
high schools like Xavier where Palauans and Marshallese could
have formed solid friendships with one another and with young
people from other districts as well.
The large maroon-and-white sign that greets
visitors to the Xavier campus shows the school seal and the motto:
"Ut omnes umum sint -"That all may be one." The
visitor looks and wonders whether it is an expression of religious
fellowship or wistful political prophecy, almost certainly doomed
to frustration.
What is the future of the school as it prepares to celebrate its
47th birthday? Apart from the ever-present financial worries,
Xavier faces an identity crisis regarding its role in the Micronesia
of today.... Shall it continue to turn out well-educated and competent
Micronesians for a job market that is already over-saturated?
In the consumer-oriented and money-conscious society that is evolving
in all of the districts of Micronesia, can the school possibly,
succeed in educating young people committed to the service of
their fellow Micronesians rather than to the receipt of their
bi-weekly paycheck?
The ghosts of the past may still haunt Mabuchi, but the most frightening
spectres are those of the future. Can Xavier continue? Should
it continue? And yet there is that peculiar vision that originally
fashioned the school and has been refashioning it ever since!
Like the vision of the young, it is a spirit that reaches into
the future and accepts it as challenge rather than threat.
Whatever the tourists who visit Mabuchi ten
years from now may find, you can bet that it will not be an abandoned
war monument.
