that-island

Postings

2007-01-21T15:20:00.000+11:00

Since it is now January I would like all of you to know that I have another blog....so just type in pohnpeicat.blogspot.com and you will find a new blog that is focusing on the last 5 months (actually more like 4 months) that I am in Pohnpei.

Sorry for the confusion,

Have a good day :)

Where's Waldo, I Spy, and Crazy Rummy

2006-12-24T10:19:00.000+11:00

Saturday night: As I am writing this time is ticking, but to be sure...I will finish before midnight.. I just had the best time. The guys Jay and Mitch came over again tonight (I know big surprise)…and they made us supper. Which was so fun to watch, Marla and I had to get pictures…many pictures actually…because how often do guys volunteer to make supper? Not too often…although we had to supply them with flour, water, salt and baking soda…but they brought the refried beans and did all the work making tortillas. After we ate Jay and Marla started going through the Where’s Waldo book…I brought out the I Spy book for Mitch to look at. I looked over his shoulder and was constantly like “Found it!” and then I gave him clues as to where they were…and when he found the item first he was like “Yes! Yes…Yes!…Yes! You want a hint?” Being stubborn I would say "no!"...until I couldn’t find it and then I would tell him that I wouldn’t mind a hint…it didn't take long...maybe a little more then an hour to realize that we were sick of that book…we kept trying to give it to Jay and Marla…but they wouldn’t trade books. So Mitch and I played card games until Marla and Jay were ready to play a card game…crazy rummy…Which happens to be a very crazy card game, but a lot of fun…Now I am probably going to explain this all wrong...but we started out with like 7 cards and we had to get two sets, then the next round we got 8 cards and had to get 2 runs, then 9 cards and 1 run and 1 set, then two sets (had to be different suits) and a run (or maybe that was the other way around), then 11 cards and 2 sets and 1 run, with no discard at the end. Very complicated and I lost, but that is alright…I am pretty used to losing card games…It was just a really fun evening...full of card games and laughter...

Christmas Shopping

2006-12-24T10:13:00.000+11:00

Friday:
I don’t think that I will ever complain about Christmas shopping ever again. Shopping in the islands is so much different then in the states. First off everything is outside and the shops that you want to go to are so far away from each other. And it is hot outside and you are always walking, so Marla and I went Christmas shopping…we had Joan drop us off and then we started walking everywhere…we went to Kapinga and looked at the shops there…I got something for my mom and sister and a Christmas gift for Tim. Then we met back up with Joan and she dropped us off in the middle of town and we walked down to a little shoe store that is like a mile or so from the drop off point…down a hill towards the road to the airport, but instead of turning left on the road we went right and walked along…we didn’t find anything in the shoe store and kept walking in the hot sun. Then we happened upon two adorable old ladies and their skirt shop. The skirts were beautiful so I picked one out for Felicia and one out for Jenny her housemate. (They are so beautiful) Then we walked past Yoshie’s and headed back up another road towards town…we had to go to a T-shirt shop. We were also getting Mitch and Jay something for Christmas…I got a T-shirt for myself and then I got one for Mitch (same design as mine…only a different color…he wouldn’t look good in pink), Marla got T-shirts for her family, one for herself, and one for Jay (which was the same style as her’s, but a different color). Then we headed to the store next door to look for something for Becky, we got her a big purse (she stuffs so much into the one that she has now…and we decided that she needed a new one) and then we looked around and saw two blue purses that were exactly the same…they were just two cute so we bought each other the same purse for Christmas. Then we headed off to Palm Terrace. We got the boys slippers that say Pohnpei on them, they are also like the best slippers ever…then we headed home. Oddly enough the pastor stopped his car and asked if we wanted a ride…the boys were in the car, but by then we so hot and sweaty and probably smelled just wonderful that we declined and told them that home wasn’t that far away…Once back at the apartment Marla took a shower while I got photo copies made of the grade form, then I took a shower and tackled my grades…they had to be in by sunset. Redoing 18 grade sheets that were actually almost done the day before is such a joy. But after 3 hours of hard work, I turned in my grades with 30 minutes to spare…Marla gave me a back rub and then we got ready for vespers.

Grades, Ruins, and Broken Toes

2006-12-24T10:11:00.000+11:00

It is so hard to start writing when your first few days of break have been packed with a bunch of really fun things…Originally I thought that this Christmas was going to be a totally awful, meaningless...etc…because I am…very far away from both family and friends…and in a completely different country, in the state of Pohnpei (yes Pohnpei is a state, a very beautiful and rainy one actually). But as I am finding out this might actually be one of my favorite Christmases…like something I will really want to remember…hence why I am writing about it.
Thursday was my first day of vacation, and I was ready to be completely and totally free of all teaching and school related things…except for the fact that I had to do grades…I wandered down to the office to see if they had any whiteout…I messed up on my grades the night before and needed to whiteout a bunch of grades, this often happens when you put the reading grade where the language grade is suppose to go…anyway as I came back to my apartment I saw the guys, Mitch and Jay (you might recall that I mentioned them before), they had just arrived from the Pastor’s house and were wandering around campus…in a rather confused manner I might add…I waved and continued on to my apartment…after all I was a teacher on a mission…to complete grades. 15 minutes later I walked back down to the office and found the guys sitting outside the office door…again I said hi, went inside…returned the whiteout and walked out the door and talked to the guys…they were waiting to go on the day trip that Mr. B had planned so that the “friends” as he puts it could see the island…Jay wanted to know if I would go (after all I have been there before...and I wasn't sure that I wanted to go yet again), I had a tough choice to make...I stood next to the yellow truck and thought about it for about 30 seconds. To sit in my apartment all day doing grades or going to the ruins and waterfall...15 minutes later I found myself in the back of the yellow truck bumping down the “main street” of Kolonia and generally wondering what I had just gotten myself into.
The truck ride to the ruins takes forever…and well before you get there your bottom is very sore from sitting on the wooden benches in the back of the truck. Maggie and I kept moving around, complaining about how hard the benches were and how rough the road was. Eric and his girlfriend were standing holding on to the roof of the truck and just chatting away (they by the way are the cutest couple ever…so adorable), Maggie and Seth (her boyfriend) talked together, Jay, Mitch, and Seth’s friend (I can’t remember his name) were all talking together and I just sat and watched the scenery go by. Everyone kept asking Maggie and I if we were getting closer…but every time they asked us we had to remind them that we had never driven to the ruins before…(we went by boat the first time)…soon the guys were shifting and grunting as we hit bumps...it seemed to have dawned on them that their bench wasn't really all that comfortable...it is hard not to find a comfortable possition in the back of those trucks...either way by the end of the trip you will be sore…Too soon we reached the end of paved roads and found ourselves bumping along Pothole Lane and Trench Road...The ride was generally awful and there were small groans that could be heard from those sitting on the benches…Anyway once we got to the ruins I realized that I had forgotten my money…so Maggie paid for me, $4.00 really isn’t that bad of a deal. The trail through the mangrove swamp wasn’t bad, we past a little house that had a sea turtle swimming around in a bucket…poor thing…as we past I thought about Mr. Harshman and turtle soup…it was such a cute little turtle…in a big and awesome way...such a shame that it most likely was going to become supper. Finally we were at the ruins and all we really had to do was wade across the small channel and we would be there…or there was a boat, but hello the water only came a little past my knees and I wanted to get wet…so Jay and I waded in and climbed up the opposite bank and went off exploring. Now there are things that we do here that would never fly in the states…can you even imagine what state park rangers would think if they saw a bunch of people climbing up the walls of very ancient ruins? They would have a cow! But here no one cares…all the people care about is that we pay them $4.00 and come back again with friends. So Jay and I climbed up the walls and wandered looked at the view…then we climbed back down and I went off to find Mitch. He was on top of the wall…he has a really nice camera and well had to take a picture of me (I doubt that it was a very good one)…then asked where the wall went…I told him that it was just a square, so he climbed down…being careful not to fall on me…then we wandered to one of the outer walls…once up there we took as many pictures as we wanted and then just enjoyed the view. Soon Seth’s friend started waving at us and told us to hurry over, well the quickest way to get there was to climb down the wall, which is probably 10ft-15ft tall…Mitch didn’t want to at first, but I threw my flip flops off the edge and started down…telling him that it wasn’t bad, rather easy actually. At the bottom I waited for Mitch and then we headed over to where Seth’s friend was shouting…down in the water was a ray…just cruising around, probably looking for lunch. I took a picture of it, but I know that it isn’t the best picture. And since we were there, we decided to wander on the broken up ruins, the boys found a nice large rock to sit on and I joined them. We talked probably for an hour before it was time to go.
Once back at the truck all of us in the back decided to eat a mango. Now I have never eaten a mango like an apple, first you peal off some of the skin, cause you don’t want to eat that. Then you just eat it…and soon my face was sticky, my hands were sticky, and I had mango fiber stuck in my teeth…for some reason Seth’s friend brought floss…which was much appreciated. At the waterfall we all paid and then walked down a little path and then there right in front of us was the waterfall…the widest one in Pohnpei (not the highest though). I pealed off my camelpack and literally fell into the water…it was so refreshing…I just tried not to think about the possibility of eels. Then I saw Mr. B’s oldest son leading those that wanted to up the side of the waterfall…not to be outdone by Maggie I clambered after them…the hike turned into a straight climb up slippery rock. (I’m sure that this is something that every parent wants to hear). It took a lot of effort and patience but soon I was at the top. Mitch was talking to Mr. B’s oldest son and Jay was lying on a rock (he isn’t big into rock climbing), I asked Mitch if Jay was tired or something…he shook his head and informed me that he just broke his little toe (I never found out how) and was feeling rather sick. Poor boy, two days into break and already stuck with a broken toe…also stuck at the top of a waterfall. We sat up there for awhile and then I followed Mitch down (he took the easiest route down) and then decided that I was rather muddy and decided to jump back into the small pool of water under the waterfall to rinse off. Maggie had climbed back down earlier and was now enjoying the water. I joined her and we splashed around for quite some time…and then we climbed out of the water hoping to dry off before having to get back into the truck.
Mitch and I sat on a rock and talked about scuba and life guarding and other things too. Then it was time to go. Maggie was getting sunburned so she and her boyfriend sat inside the truck. Jay and Seth’s friend sat on one bench and Mitch and I sat on the other. Jay told me all about his adventures in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina and what all they did down there. I told of what I did in Mississippi and about past mission trips when asked about them. Then we joined Mitch’s conversation about school subjects and soon all of us were laughing and talking.
As soon as we got back I got tape for Jay so that we could tape his little toe to another toe, then Jay asked if I had any pain killer…Mitch was like “She’s a lifeguard she has everything.” I told them to come on up and I would see what I had. I filled their water bottles, gave Jay some Tylenol and then invited them over for games later that night…actually they kinda invited themselves over, but that was alright.
That night we played card games and had so much fun…Mitch was really sun burned, but then so was I…since I forgot to put on sunscreen…but sometimes a little sun is a good thing...

Christmas concert and other things...

2006-12-24T10:04:00.000+11:00

Christmas vacation has officially started. It is Thursday morning and I am sitting in my apartment…totally enjoying the fact that I don’t have to teach for a full 10 days. The last 2 ½ weeks were beyond hectic...and I now have time to write.
I believe I spoke to soon…it is now Saturday, my writings were interrupted by the invitation to go to the ruins (again) and a waterfall (which I have been to before)…but I got to spend my entire afternoon with two very awesome guys. So I am definitely not complaining. I suppose before I tell about Thursday I should mention about the last 2 days of school and of how these guys came to vacation on our island.

Tuesday night was our Christmas concert. And I’m not sure if any teacher was really looking forward to it…I just couldn’t wait for it to be over. We had been practicing for such a long time…I was so tired of singing We Three Kings with my kids and I was tired of practicing with my kids during every morning recess. Tuesday morning dawned and there was my little class in our class room all lined up in order singing We Three Kings at the top of their lungs as I made them practice the timing of the song over and over again, since their practice in the gym Monday morning was less then wonderful…I was making up for that, since we only had one more practice before the performance. I told all 17 of my students (one was absent) that I wasn’t going to let them sit down until they got the song perfect…so 45 minutes later I let my kids sit down for 5 minutes while I got ready to take them down to the gym for their final rehearsal. I am not going to mention all that went on in the gym, because it was a long process and rather boring. But my kids knew their song and that was all that mattered to me.
Tuesday evening found me sitting in my classroom waiting for my kids to come. I told them to be in the classroom at 5pm, people here on the island generally run late…if you want them to be on time you have to tell them to be there an hour before the program actually starts. In true island fashion most of my class didn’t arrive until 6:15 p.m. and the program started at 6:30p.m. Once I had all but three of my students we headed down to the high school (that was “backstage” and also where we were going to be waiting until it was our turn to go and sing) the first grade classes were in the science room and I spent my time yelling at both classes and telling them to be quiet (ha telling 36 first graders to be quiet is like telling a rock concert to keep it down) Thankfully Jen is also a strict teacher, and even though she was else where at the time it didn’t take long for her kids to listen to me. I got them quiet and then ran outside to find Jen…I was unable to find her…but somehow Alex made it downstairs (apparently he left his class with Eric…poor guy) and was talking to two guys that looked somewhat familiar, except I knew they were not SM’s from our island. Unfortunately I was unable figure out who they were…because Allie (the biology teacher) ran into the science room with a shriek when she saw two of my boys looking at probably the only working microscope there. I rushed inside…apologized to Allie, scolded my boys, then looked up to see the shorter of the two guys looking into the classroom. Flustered I told the first graders to keep it down…and left my aid in charge. Outside the classroom I again searched for Jen and asked her if there was anything that I could do. She sent me upstairs to talk to the teachers up there. I ran upstairs to find out from the 5th and 6th grade classes if they were missing any students. Mark (one of the 6th grade teacher’s) had no idea and told me that maybe 3 were missing. Then I walked into the room where all the 5th graders were…things were insane…the teacher in charge wasn’t doing a very good job of watching the kids, chalk board erasers were flying, kids were decorating their faces and the faces of others with chalk, soda was on the floor and generally everything looked awful and was out of control…he also had no idea and I left him to deal with his class…As I trotted down the stairs I was like “Alex, Alex, Alex it wouldn’t hurt to discipline your kids once in a while.” But I didn’t have time to think about that…we were already running late. …After that Jen and I ran back to her classroom hunting for two missing kids, but they weren’t there…as we past the gym I looked inside to see if I could see those guys…but I didn’t have time to really search. Back to the science room we went and lined up our kids. Once my kids were all in line it was time to go. Jen lead her class and I tried to lead mine…except my kids were not paying attention…Triston appeared to be frozen in place. Thankfully Raz shooed my class through the hallway and soon my little brood was running after me, just like it was practice... As the first row filed onto the stage, I was like…well this is it…please don’t blow it.
I don’t know why I worried, everything went really well. They were all so cute…up there just singing away, twisting back and forth (exactly the thing I told them not to do), looking everywhere but at teacher and generally not paying attention at all…but they didn’t go faster or slower then the piano and when they finished I was beaming just like any parent would. I led my 18 little ducklings off the stage as if I was a proud mother duck (although I would never wish 18 little ducklings on any duck) I was so relieved that it was done with…I went to the back of the gym, told my kids to find their parents and then talked to Becky and watched the rest of the program.
After the program the guys found Marlawat and I. Suddenly it all came back to me. These were the same to guys that were in Hawaii…fellow SM's, who we met while swimming in the ocean...Anyway Marla had to leave and so left me to entertain the guys. I invited the guys to come to our classrooms the next day during our class parties. I knew things were going to be crazy, but I figured that since they were also teachers and use to the noise. Things were pretty much chaos in my classroom and I didn’t have time to talk to the guys, cause my kids were just going nuts…but I think they had fun...really I don’t particually feel like remembering Wednesday…just think of small kids at a birthday party…only that they are all giving and getting gifts...that would have been my classroom...and I was very glad to leave it at 12:30 p.m.

Part 2: Flying, Climbing, and the Truth

2006-12-11T20:29:00.000+11:00

More fun stories from my classroom :)

Flying: It is a quite well known fact, that what goes up must eventually come back down. Now with my kids this is something that is very, very hard to understand…I am sure that none of you ever had the urge growing up to fling yourself off your house roof in the desperate attempt to learn how to fly, feel free to correct me if I am wrong. But today as I was watching the first graders play on the playground I witnessed one of my students, by name of Kota, throw himself off the slide. He hit the ground with a plop and just lay there. I naturally freaked out and ran over to him, expecting to see broken bones or at least a bloody nose. But instead I was greeted by a very stunned Kota who contented himself by pulling the grass at his feet up by the roots and grunting out answers as I dusted off his shirt and pants and told him sternly to never do that stunt again.

Climbing: Boys have to climb; they must climb up anything that is climbable, whether it is the radio tower on Sokeh’s Ridge or the railing in front of my classroom. They must climb it. Now Miss Cramer, my comrade on the second floor, was on duty during lunch recess one day when she suddenly saw Wolfgang standing on the railing as if this was something that was quite normal for anyone to do. Now the only thing below our second story room is concert and a ditch full of mud. Naturally Marla freaked out and rushed to Wolfgang who was very oblivious to his danger. Wolfgang is generally oblivious to just about everything that goes on in the world around him, he is a born wanderer and loves to climb…usually he will climb over the wooden railing and slide down the fire like pole (that probably holds up something really important) to ground level and run around the playground until I notice that he is missing.

Telling the truth: Being truthful appears to be something that is very hard for a 5 or 6 year old to understand or even comprehend. This is especially true when they know that they have done something dreadfully wrong. For example, today after lunch recess two of my boys were playing at the drinking fountain. And I watched them from the top of the stairs as they splashed and dunked their heads under the water and were generally having a good time. Now my kids know that it is a great sin to play in the water and not drink the water…generally when they are playing in the water I will have to go and fetch them…which doesn’t put me in all that good of a mood. So today when I had collected my two lost sheep by name of Marson and T.M. I asked them if they had been playing in the water…
“No teacher!” T.M blurted out…I think I should interjected and tell you that both T.M and Marson had water dripping from their heads, their shirts where wet, they were slipping around the sidewalk on wet slippers…yes they had been playing in the water fountain again. I looked down at them and sternly said.
“I believe that you are lying to teacher.”
“No! No Teacher we weren’t!” both little boys shook their heads and tried to pull off their most pathetic looking little doggie eyes possible. At this point I looked them from head to toe.
“Your hair is soaking, which in turn is dripping onto your shirt, you legs are wet from the knee down, you have been slipping on the sidewalk because your slippers are soaking…now are you sure that you haven’t been playing in the water?”
“Teacher we haven’t been!” They both squeaked out.
“Is that your final answer?”
“Yes.”
“Well then, you are going to Miss Cramer’s classroom to stand in the corner, I want you to think about your answer that you have just given me.” With that I gently sent my two naughty boys to stand in the corner. Fifteen minutes later I collected my very tired little sheep from the third grade classroom. Once again I asked them if they had been playing in the water at the drinking fountain.
“We weren’t.” choked T.M. He was looking frantically at Marson, who was looking everywhere except at T.M. Finally T.M with head hanging said, “We were.” With that I lead them to the classroom and their language test.
There are times when it is hard to figure out if they are lying or not, but sometimes it is very obvious.

Thanksgiving

2006-12-03T11:38:00.000+11:00

It occurred to me the other day that I had forgotten to tell about my thanksgiving. Unlike how it is in the states, were everything is shutdown and school is out, we had to teach…and everyone was excited. My students were excited because we weren’t going to have school the next day (Friday), the teachers were excited because we were going to have a feast that night at Mr. B’s house. Pretty much everyone was excited.

My students were generally annoying and loud and about as hyper as they could be, needless to say teacher was rather frazzled by the end of the day. I had to continually tell them to stop talking, and to sit down and to listen to teacher. I am surprised by the fact that I can be very strict with my kids and they still love me, if I was a soft teacher they would walk all over me (something that I don’t want to have happen). Anyway when the school day was finally over I went back to the apartment and took a well deserved nap…I had been staying up late that entire week, so I was generally tired.

After my nap and a nice refreshing shower, I went into the kitchen to help Becky with the last minute cooking, which included things like mashing potatoes, stirring gravy, getting the stuffing readying, making sure that the pies were ant free, making apple crisp…just small things like that. As it neared 7:00 we were nearly flying around the kitchen trying to get things done. Finally we were ready (even though we were a little late), the only problem that we had now was to get all of the food to Mr. B’s apartment. Now if we had as many arms as an octopus has…this wouldn’t have been a problem, but since we didn’t…we had to ask for help…Marla went first to ask some of the boys to help out…on her way over she bumped into Eric who was on his way to Mr. B’s, he came to our aid…and Becky and I were very happy to see him.

There were like 30 plus people crammed into Mr. B’s apartment…there was so much food too…there were two turkeys, fish, rice, a salad (a rarity let me tell you), fruit, random noodle dishes, vegetables, mashed potatoes and gravy, deserts (more pumpkin pies then anything else…but our homemade pies were by far the best). There was quite a feast and all of us couldn’t wait to eat it. The SM’s were scattered throughout the room sitting on the floor or on the different types of furniture…everyone was hungry and by the looks of things there was plenty of food to go around…for several servings. The food was really good; I haven’t had a thanksgiving meal like that for quite some time…it totally hit the spot...was very different…but good. Now Cabel decided to teach us this really annoying song…like it was stuck in my head for an entire week…but it was so funny to see him, Rusty and Raz singing it…these are the words:
Gobble, Gobble, Gobble
I’m here for a living
Not for thanksgiving
Gobble, Gobble, Gobble
Fat turkeys are we!
He sang it over and over again…so by the end of the night we all new it very well. When it was time to get desert, Marla and I sampled all of the different pumpkin pies and had some apple crisp. By then we were so full…all we could do was sit on the full and talk. I thought about my Aunt Janet, the girls wanted to take pictures so we took pictures and talked and laughed and had to wait for all the cameras to go through…it was just so fun. The boys got a little bit bored and decided to play this basketball video game, we all just sat there and laughed and watched the game. It was just so funny to see…finally it was time to go…all of us were full and were kinda sleepy (eating a lot tends to do that to you)…it was actually a wonderful Thanksgiving and oddly enough I wasn’t terribly homesick…

Part 1 - goings on in the classroom

2006-11-28T21:08:00.000+11:00

It has come to my attention that I haven’t written about how things have been going in my classroom as of late. And since I seem to have a great amount of time this evening, I thought that I would fill you in a bit.
My thoughts about teaching still haven’t changed, I don’t particularly enjoy it…I like to teach, but I don’t like myself when I am teaching…might just be the age of my students or the fact that by the afternoon I am just as tired as my little students and rather short tempered.
Tattle Tale: An on going problem in my class at the moment is that my kids must tell me everything that is happening…whether or not I see the “problem” or not. As an example let me introduce you to Marson, now Marson gives me a lot of trouble during the day…he is a smart little kid, but he MUST tell teacher anything that goes on in class whether it is as small as Wolfgang singing to himself or as big as McRon punching Trumaine in the arm…His voice will pierce the silence or uproar “TEACHER! Wolfgang is talking!” Now I should interject at this point and tell you that Wolfgang is a very quiet boy…he cries a lot, talks or sings to himself through out the day, will wander out of my classroom at any time he pleases, and has an attention span of three seconds. On the other end of the scale Marson is always disobeying teacher, and he knows it. So why not blame the disruption on someone else? Wolfgang happens to be a wonderful target, because he is never paying attention… unfortunately for Marson his plan usually back fires. Since I happen to know my class pretty well and I am extremely tired of this telling teacher stage, I ignore his complaints and continue teaching, but if it gets too loud I remind Marson of our number one rule in our classroom which is “No talking when teacher is talking” and our number three rule which is “Raise hand before asking a question” By the time I am done reminding the entire class of the rules, Marson has already forgotten what indeed was so important to tell…but that only lasts about three minutes, oddly enough whenever I see Marson I am reminded of Christopher.
Back Sale: I personally hate Friday schedule and I despise back sale. There is nothing worse then pumping a bunch of sugar into little five and six year olds and then giving them back to their teacher to deal with for the rest of the day. Because then they are more hyper then usual and will not listen to teacher even if teacher threatens to take away bake sale, which happened this week. Since we had Friday off Varsity held a bake sale on Thursday, and my students of course had to go to bake sale, and had to buy lots of brownies and cake and ice cream and cup cakes…and eat that along with their lunch…so not only did they have rice and chicken smeared all over their faces they now had chocolate and frosting…their fingers were sticky and the last thing on their to do list was to listen to teacher. So Teacher simply told them as they were packing up their backpacks and sitting down at their desks…that if I had to tell them one more time to be quiet and sit quietly (I was getting their papers ready) that I would take away their privilege to go to the bake sale. Oh it might seem harsh, but I dislike dealing with very hyper kids...besides my kids don’t need sugar, by the time they turn ten they won’t have any teeth inorder to eat sweats…and since they didn’t pay any attention to me or my aid…I simply told them that they lost their privilege. And that made them quiet.
Listening: This appears to be an art that none of my kids can master. I mean why listen to teacher? If they listen to teacher they might miss out on some fun that is happening without them. This happens to be a problem at recess…like most children, they want to stay out as long as possible, but there is also another problem…there is always a fight between my students as to who is going to be first and who is going to be last. We have a line leader to take care of the problem of who was going to be first…but I haven’t been able to come up with a set plan for dealing with the “I’m last” issue. My two problem children at recess happen to be Loriann and T.M. Now they aren’t the only ones that don’t come when I blow the whistle or yell at them...we have Chad who is usually running around the gym looking for one or both of his slippers, Wolfgang who is off in his own world wandering around the gym softly singing to himself, there is often a fight between Triston, McRon, and Marson on who is going to be last…in the line we have girls playing “patty cake and lemonade” the boys are shoving each other and informing teacher of all the things someone did to them at recess…there are other teachers yelling at their kids…and then there is my class in complete disarray. But I know that in the end they will be quiet, so I leave my class and walk out into the gym, gently pushing my lost little sheep towards their line. But T.M and Loriann make things difficult, they will run off and hide or play tetherball or if we are on the playground continue to swing…they won’t even come when I walk towards them telling them that recess is over and that they must come in NOW. They wait until I am about 5 feet away from them, then they run up to me and look up at me with big round eyes in the most pitiful look that they can muster…for those of you who have seen Sherk 2 (not my favorite movie) think of the “Puss in Boots” and how he would look up at his enemies with those sad unblinking eyes…I hate it when they do that…because it is so cute, but I can’t reward them for disobeying me…
The case of the missing slippers: Now you wouldn’t think that it is all that hard to keep track of slippers, I mean they are suppose to be on your feet right? Then why is it at the end of every recess we have to go slipper hunting? I will tell you why, the elementary students take off their slippers and run around in their bare feet, they will throw their slippers at other students, those students will take the slippers and chuck them outside or throw them at the ceiling of the gym until they are stuck. So lost and mismatched slippers are usually scattered all around the gym by the end of the day, and everyday at least one of my students head home without their slippers…which is unfortunate, but luckily most slippers are very cheap.
Trash and the fight for who will take it: This is something that I can never figure out. Why on earth is it so important for my kids to be the one to take the trash out at the end of the day, which is usually the last thing I want to carry to the dumpster. But at the end of the day, no joke, I have all 18 of my students yelling at me and asking me if they can take out the trash…I of course tell them that I will choose a quiet person to take out the trash…but they are persistent. They must take out the trash…and will not leave teacher a lone until they get their way.

That is all for part 1, tune in next time for part 2

5 waterfalls and a memory :)

2006-11-19T11:29:00.000+11:00

Waterfall #1

Becky and I infront of waterfall #1

Waterfall #2

Still Waterfall #2

Me, Maggie, and Becky infront of Waterfall #2

Me infront of really cool waterfall

oh so pretty

Same waterfall

The girl's walking across the bridge, with Mr. B in tow

getting closer...Maggie, April, Ashley, Jamie, and Mr. B

Waterfall #3

See I really was there :)

Jen and Maggie

Waterfall #4

It was pretty, but I liked #2 best

me infront of waterfall # 4

Waterfall # 5

Becky and I

Becy and I infront of waterfall #5

oh so pretty

Waterfall #6 I have no pictures of...that is where the memory comes in...It was totally wonderful and you all would have loved it. :)

Five dollars, Five hours, and six waterfalls

2006-11-19T11:25:00.000+11:00

It sounded like a great deal, I mean normally we pay three dollars just to see one waterfall, but to only have to pay five bucks to see six beautiful waterfalls seemed like a wonderful opportunity to get out of the apartment. I didn’t really give much thought to the five hours part. I love the outdoors and I love to hike, and if I have to hike five hours in order to see six beautiful waterfalls, then so be it. I was told by Raymond that we would be leaving at 7a.m. sharp (which actually never happens, we never leave on time…cause we are going by island time, not American time) which was fine by me, cause hiking in the early morning coolness is a lot better then hiking in the hotness of the afternoon. Becky and I were the only ones from our apartment willing to get up really early and hike all day long. From the other apartments we had: Maggie, April, Jamie, Ashley, Jen, Mark, Gene, Raymond, Emily (Mr. B’s daughter) and Mr. B. When Becky and I walked down to the truck Rusty and Alex were griping about how they wanted to go surfing not hiking (but they go surfing every single week, this wasn’t going to kill them). In the end they decided not to go. We waited around until like 7:30 and then we were off.
It took about an hour to reach a little narrow road that was to take us to the house of the guide (who was going to go with us). He was a very quiet man, we met him on the road, he was out hunting with his gun was over his shoulder…his machete was by his side. He more or less grunted his answers, I had to wondered how many times a month he guided people through the jungle to see the six waterfalls…must get old after awhile.
The first part of our trip was uneventful, we walked up a dirt road, following Mr. B…with our guide bringing up the rear. We suddenly came across a water buffalo that was covered in mud and standing in at least 3 inches of rather smelly/gross looking mud. Mr. B told us that we were going to look like that buffalo when we got out of the jungle later that afternoon. We all laughed and Becky snapped a picture as we walked by.
Now I should interject at this point in time and mention a few things. First off I have found that tevas are good when walking in water, they aren’t particularly that great when sliding down slippery jungle paths. They are great to have when your foot slips into a foot of mud, but when they get wet they tend to rub on your feet and the end result is blisters. The people on the island where slippers when hiking, the slippers that they wear have wonderful grip. They keep your feet from sliding in the slipper and they give you great traction when walking around on wet cement or rocks for that matter. My tevas were covered in mud in a matter of minutes, which made things rather interesting, since my feet were sliding in my tevas and I was sliding down muddy jungle trails and no water was available to wash off my tevas I opted to go barefoot. Next time I am wearing slippers.
Mr. B walked along the path in his bear feet, the rest of us followed alone behind him. There were broken water pipes along the trial that were spraying water six feet in the air…what a waste of perfectly good river water I thought to myself as we walked by, it isn’t like they need to water the jungle, it is already wet enough. Someone up in the front finally got up enough guts to ask Mr. B how long it would take to get to the first waterfall…Mr. B just laughed and said “Depends on how fast you walk, maybe two hours.” Well after two hours of slipping and sliding we came to our first waterfall. It was very pretty, it started out narrow at the top and then came down, and it looked rather like a stream of water coming out of garden hose…It didn’t take long to find waterfall number two. It was so beautiful; out of all six this one was my favorite. We had to walk over a small waterfall to get to the “bridge” which was actually a great big dead tree…we all had to climb up on it and then balance and walk across, on the other side we sat down and watched the water pour down the volcanic rocks and then flow over the baby waterfall and then into the river. We sat there for a time and then Mr. B said it was time to go and find waterfall #3. So everyone filed back onto the log…it was the cutest thing to see…the girls of apartment 6 were holding hands as they walked across the bridge…I was already on the other side so I snapped a picture.
Waterfall #3 was a lot like waterfall #1, it started out small at first and then fell into a pool of water. But it was still beautiful and I loved just looking at it, I seriously started to wonder how there could possibly be six gorgeous waterfalls all flowing into the same river. After taking pictures and resting a bit, we headed off to find waterfall #4. By this point we had to walk in the river, forming a human chain in order to get people from one side to the other…slipping and sliding to get around to each of the waterfalls and generally just having a good time. Waterfall #4 was like waterfall #2 in the sense that it was wider, but I didn’t find it all that pretty…a little farther up Mr. B showed us a deep pool where we could swim, by then all of us were hot and muddy and there was nothing like falling into deep ice cold mountain water. We stayed there for quite some time, splashing in the water and then climbing up the bank of rocks and eating lunch.
By this point all of us were getting a little tired, the waterfalls were starting to look very much the same. And well it was close to 1:00 by then and we were while tired. Waterfall #5 looked suspiciously like waterfalls one and three. It gave me the sense of walking in circles…were we really going anywhere or were we just walking in a big circle? None of us felt like just sitting around waterfall #5, we just wanted to get to the last waterfall. It took some time to walk to and soon we were wading in a great deal of water…Mr. B told us to leave out bags on a little rocky island and then continue on. He said that we were going to have to swim. I got excited cause I had remembered this part from Kelli’s pictures. Eagerly Ashley and Emily and I plunged into the stream. The current wasn’t all that strong, Mark was already climbing up the rocks ahead of us and looking for something to climb…that boy cracks me up…he is like a little mountain goat. Anyway I climbed up the volcanic rock and looked at the waterfall…it was so beautiful, the water was pouring out of an opening of a cave and if you looked at it in just the right angle, the cave opening made the shape of a heart. The best was certainly saved for last. Gene finally caught up and we splashed through the streams of water and he pushed me up this big flat rock with a crack down the middle…there was a different route…but I like challenging myself. I have never been pushed up a rock in that way before…I kinda felt like a kitten being shoved up the wall onto a shelf…really all I need was a good foot hold, but Gene just picked me up and pushed me up the rock…once up the rock I helped Gene up and then we splashed through the stream to where we had front row seats in watching mark climb up the rock and into the mouth of the cave. This made our guide rather nerves…apparently two years ago one of the guides was up in the cave, slipped on a rock and fell to his death…not the nicest story to hear. Mark leaped off the top of the waterfall, and landed safely into the water. I wished that I had a camera and Gene went off to join Mark as he climbed yet another part of the natural wall surrounding the waterfall…I reasoned that someone had to stick around in case they fell and got hurt.
Soon Mr. B told us that it was time to move out and start the long walk back. This was when I was very glad to have a guide. Since all of the waterfalls looked the same to me I wouldn’t know what direction to go in. We walked along the riverbed for a while and then started to climb up some mossy rocks…the climb was steep, but somehow we made it to the trail at the top. At each turn I was like “haven’t I seen that stump somewhere?” Or “I think that tree looks mighty familiar.” Soon nothing looked familiar I had no idea where we were…our guide was chopping his way through the jungle with his machete and we were all following him…Soon all I was noticing was the fact that my feet hurt…I could feel the blisters and with each step my tevas opened them bigger and bigger. Every time we found mud or came to a creek I would plunge my feet into the coolness of it and then continue on. We climbed up one steep climb and then had to slide down the other side…only to be greeted by yet another hill, followed by another slippery slope. Mr. B. kept trying to keep me from falling into the mud, but I always seemed to slide right into it…it was so funny to hear him “Ahhh…noo! Over here…that’s right.” I just love Mr. B he is so cool. To make a long story shorter…we finally emerged from the jungle…all of us were so tired and so sore and all we really wanted to do was take a shower, eat, and then sleep for 12 hours. It had taken us 7 ½ hours to do the entire hike and see all six of the waterfalls…I was so sore and tired, but that was such an awesome experience. True my feet were very torn up, and putting alcohol on my blisters wasn’t very fun at all…but it was quite an experience…and now I will have battle scars to go with it.

Pictures :)

2006-11-08T21:02:00.000+11:00

Pictures from Ant, November 3-5

Classic Calendar shot

Pretty blue water

Sunset Friday night

Sunset with coconut trees

Becky (my roommate) and I

Sunset

Bright colors

A rather out of focus picture of me

Early Morning, that is the Pohnpei

Morning sunrise

The Sun is just peeping over the horizon

And there it is

Good Morning! Happy Sabbath!

I have been told that there is always a cloud over Pohnpei
And that held true until...

Sunday Morning, there was not a cloud touching Pohnpei

This is still from Sabbath Morning

The water was so beautiful

The tide was out

The sky was blue

And this is me sleeping away my morning :)

Camping at Ant

2006-11-08T20:59:00.000+11:00

Camping, a time to experience the great outdoors, well I have experienced it, and now that it is over, shall we move on? Why exactly do we do this to ourselves? We want to rough it, see how far we can really push ourselves. I’m sure that you all have been on a camping trip before, perhaps you aren’t much of a camper, which is fine…you don’t have to be. But for those that like to read, sit back and relax while I entertain you with this weekends events.

Friday morning I awoke earlier than usual. I had gone to bed late, but I knew that in order to be ready to go, I had to be up at 5:55 a.m. My list was long, but I slowly checked everything off. I was done with 30 minutes to spare and I was rather proud of that fact. I lugged my gear down to the little thatched hut to wait for the yellow truck to come back. I talked to Raymond and we both waited. About 30 minutes later the truck bounced into view. Rusty suddenly appeared out of no where, he and Raymond took charge…Rusty is funny in that way…he is a great guy, always taking charge…which is probably a good thing, cause usually most of us don’t have any idea what is really going on. Once the truck was loaded, all of us piled in, actually we kinda had to squeeze in…there were so many bags, buckets, water jugs, and snorkel stuff packed into the back of the truck…made me wonder what the rest of the trip was going to be like.

Whenever we go anywhere in the boats there is always a decision to be made. Which boat to ride in and who do I want to drive the boat? Actually I don’t really care…the small boat is really fun, but harder to handle and more dangerous then the big boat when in deep and choppy water. But as usual the choice was made for me…I would be riding on the smaller boat. I sat down on the bottom of the boat, I had to smile…I was sitting on top of a yellow and a white boogie board…see my parents weren’t thrilled that I was going camping on an island roughly five miles from the main island of Pohnpei…I mean I could totally see their point…it was a crazy idea…I told my dad that I would keep a boogie board next to me just in case…and what do you know, my seat was made up of boogie boards.
Our driver was Mikey (Mr. B’s son), he usually drives the small boat, Mr. B is always looking out for the little boat, you can always see him looking back to see how the smaller boat is doing. Maggie and I were seated on the boogie boards (I was telling Maggie scary stories about how big the waves were going to be outside the reef and how the small boat was going to act out in the big waves) Amy and Becky were perched on the sides of the boat…they were facing each other, Joan was front and center sitting on a bucket, Mark was sitting next to Mikey and he spent the entire trip staring at the floor, his baseball cap was pulled way down over his eyes…as salt water drenched him at every bounce of the boat. As we neared the open water we began to situate ourselves…Joan called Raz and told him a few things…then Becky, Amy, and Joan joined Maggie and I on the floor. We tried to situate the luggage in the front, but then we made the front to heavy and had to move things back farther. When we hit the waves our little boat bucked and bounced about. Joan yelled out to us “This is when you start praying!” the wind caught her words and swirled away into the open sea. We saw Mr. B way ahead….he was waiting for us…when we slid up next to his boat Mr. B climbed on and Mikey clambered over to the bigger boat. Joan informed us that the smaller boat was more likely to bounce around wildly or even flip in choppy water; Maggie whimpered slightly from the salt stinging her eyes and curled up next to Joan on the floor. I looked over at Amy who was turning positively green…it didn’t take too long before she was curled up in a ball…throwing up into a plastic bag. Mr. B continued to steer our little boat through the waves; the waves really weren’t that bad, yes we bounced and slammed down a wave or two, but the waves were rather small considering how big they were when we went to black coral. But as we rounded Ant, the water changed and became a lot smoother and less bumpy. We enjoyed looking at the amazing blue water and the pretty island.
Once inside the channel we were able to take a good look at the brilliant blue water and the coral underneath…There are many islands that make up Ant, their width is small, but their length is long, the islands are in a circle and where there is no island to continue the circle there is coral…it seems that an underwater volcano made these little chain of islands. The island that we camped on was small, but very nice. The sand wasn’t soft, but it was sand…and certainly something that we don’t see a lot of on the main island. Becky and I wandered with are gear to find a nice place to camp, we found a little clearing in the trees that besides the abundance of coconuts and sharp coral would make a great place to set up camp. Becky and I don’t have much knowledge in setting up tarps, we both had different ideas, my idea was to make it tent shaped so that the water (when it rained) would just run off. Becky wanted to lace the two tarps together, but something about that idea just didn’t seem to quite work in my mind. We tried a lot of different things, then I spied Gene and called him over to help us, he had set up his tarp and we definitely needed the help of someone who knew what he was doing. With the help of Gene and Raymond’s machete our camp site was set up.
Gene and I were talking in front of my campsite when I noticed something about a foot long swimming around in the water. It took about 10 seconds to register what it was, a reef shark! It was a baby black tip reef shark and it was so cute and little. We watched it swim in the shallow water and when Becky came we took our cameras and took pictures of it swimming around in the water. It was just so cute, just swimming around…getting flipped over in the small surf. I had to do a few things back at camp and Becky decided that she would go and swim with the little shark…I knew that I would have enough time to put my camera away and not miss anything because it had disappeared from site. About five minutes later I heard a lot of shouting out on the beach, I walked out and to my horror found Rusty in the middle of all the girls showing off the little reef shark to the boys (they had been talking about spearing a reef shark…and Rusty apparently saw the little shark and thought it would be great fun to spear it)…The cute little shark that the girls had already named Lester, had three holes going through its’ body, and it was wiggling around wildly and trying to bite the hand of its’ captor. Rusty took the little shark away saying that he was going to use it as bait, but later he told us that he let it go…and said that is was fine (sure until something bigger smelled the blood and ate poor little Lester) None of the girls were very happy with Rusty.
After that Gene and I decided to go snorkeling, there really wasn’t much to see…you had to go really far out if you wanted to see anything…the water was really choppy and my snorkel kept filling with water. Finally Gene and I swam back to the beach. We decided to take a walk. We walked all the way to the other end of the island, we were going to walk around the entire island, but Gene’s slippers broke and going barefoot across coral isn’t the smartest thing to do. So we went back and that is when I spied a whole bunch of baby black tip reef sharks. They were just playing in the surf…I walked out into the water and watched them swim around my feet. “Why aren’t you the cutest little things ever…I just want to pick you up!” It is amazing how cute sharks look when you are not swimming with them, when I am snorkeling and I am a great distance from shore…the last thing I want to see is a shark…especially if it is a big shark. But these sharks were just so cute and little that I just liked looking at them and watching them swim…I mean if they did bite me it wouldn’t hurt much…they were only a foot long.
When we got back to the main camp site it was supper time, after we ate Becky and I went to take pictures of the sunset, it was rather cloudy and so the pictures won’t be as beautiful as they could have been. Once the sun was down we saw that Mark was making a fire, so we all migrated over there. We watched him make spaghetti and battle with the fire (for it had rained that afternoon so everything was wet) and then eat his dinner…soon his fire died down and he left his camp site and started making another fire out on the beach. So after a little while we left his campsite and went to the other fire…Mark informed us that he would be leaving the fire in our hands, he was going to go back to his own camp site, rebuild his fire and read his book in front of the fire. Well Gene, Eric, Becky, Allie and I decided that the fire wasn’t going to go out anytime soon…we walked around and found dead palm branches and dead tree branches…true the wood was wet but soon we had a big fire going. Gene and Eric found this huge log
and they carried it all the way to the fire. After awhile we all collapsed on the ground and looked up at the stars and moon that were just starting to peep through the clouds. We talked about different things…until there were only three of us left. Then Becky and I decided that we should go to bed.
Becky and I both don’t get a lot of sleep when camping, so we decided to make sure we got at least 8 hours of sleep…Nyquil is great…I slept until 6:30 in the morning…I woke up and looked out at the sky…I knew that I had to get pictures of the sunrise…I mean how can you go out to an island and not get pictures of the sun rising. Once it was up I said good-bye to Maggie (who was also up to see the sunrise) and we headed back to our own camp sites again to get some sleep…for it was way too early to be up. I enjoyed a very lazy morning…actually I didn’t leave my hammock until somewhere around 12:30 or 1:00. The sky had clouded over and Becky and I went to see what other people were doing.
It didn’t take long for me to decide that I wanted to be in the water, so around two I joined Maggie, Carrie, and Jennifer in the ocean…but soon I knew that I just didn’t want to sit in the water…I wanted to swim…so I got my snorkel gear and followed Raymond and Eric out into the water. I decided that Raymond would be a good one to follow…he was looking for shells and I was looking for interesting fish…I stayed a pretty good distance from him but kept him in sight just the same. I dislike swimming alone when I am in the ocean…it kinda scares me. Soon Raymond and I ran into Raz, Cabel, and Mikey…they were looking for claims and then trying to pry them off the rocks…I surfaced and looked over in their direction and then continued swimming around the reef. For some reason I kept swimming in the wrong direction…instead of going towards the island I would swim out to sea…mainly because the coral was a lot prettier the farther out you went. I would lift my head out of the water and suddenly notice that I was going the wrong direction…so I would quickly swim back towards where Raymond was, I knew that I had to stop trying to follow the pretty fish that I found…so I started looking for shells…I saw this totally beautiful shell…I knew that I would have to dive down to get it, but that wasn’t the thing that was stopping me…no it was the fact that the shell was right in the middle of fire coral and I dislike pain…and fire coral isn’t something that you actually want to stick your hand into…and although I knew that I could probably pull it off without getting stung by the coral…I didn’t particularly feel like risking it. I circled around it several times…I kinda felt like the squirrel in Over the Hedge where it is so excited when he smells the cookie that the Raccoon shoves into his face and then becomes disappointed when the cookie is thrown over the hedge… “But me wanted the cookie” But in my case I really wanted the shell…but it was just out of my reach…so I swam off half heartedly to find Raymond. As I was swimming along I looked hard at the sand and coral trying to find something interesting…I was like “hmmm….coral, sand, fish, oh pretty blue fish, coral, shell, coral, Raz…wait a minute RAZ?” Raz had come out of no where…actually he snuck up on me and then swam under me and then flipped over on his back and was able to enjoy my surprise. I shoved at him and surfaced…he was laughing and I was laughing. Raz said that I should have seen my face…it was full of surprise and puzzlement…I was like… “I can only imagine.” After that I couldn’t decide who to follow…there were so many places to be at once…at one point I lost Raz and Cabel and almost ran straight into Raymond and Mikey. I couldn’t figure out what they were looking at…then I noticed it. A Sting Ray…we watched it quickly glide across the reef and we followed it at a safe distance…it didn’t seem to like us being around and increased its’ speed…all at once it nearly collided with another Ray…this Sting Ray looked a little different…but it was still round with light colored spots on it…I looked around for Raz, I think Cabel saw the second one…but Raz was off somewhere trying to pry a claim off a rock. The second Ray silently glided out of sight. I asked Raz if he had seen the rays…and since he hadn’t I told him about it…we all went back under and started looking for claims
Periodically we would surface and look up at the sky, which was turning a dark gray…the dark clouds were threatening to dump gallons of water on us at any given moment. Suddenly the heavens opened and the rain came down…people often say that it is raining cats and dogs to describe heavy rain fall…but I think a fire hose would be a better way to describe it, because rain here in Pohnpei comes down in torrents. I personally think that it is fun to swim in the rain, watching the rain drops hit the surface and then bead up or just bounce right back up into your face, and looking up when swimming in water and seeing the rain hitting the surface of the water is just amazing and I love it. The five of us surfaced, removed our masks and snorkels and looked up…the cold rain pelted against our faces…after a few minutes we all decided that submerging ourselves in warm ocean water would be much better then returning to the island to stand cold and miserable under some tarps. The water wasn’t all that deep…sometimes it was up to our necks other times it was only to our waists. Mikey said that we would be safe as long as there was no lightening…at that point in time he was standing on a rock and Raz pointed out that he was now the highest object, but then again if lightening hit the rock we would get electrocuted (standing in water and all). Now the funniest part of our whole expedition in the reef was the fact that Raz and Cabel were hunting for pearls…now I don't know much about clams...but I am pretty sure that clams don't produce pearls, in fact I think that oysters make pearls. so if you were going hunting for pearls…wouldn't you want to find oysters instead of claims? And if you were looking for oysters wouldn't you want to find the Pearl Oyster or the Black-lip Oyster? (By the way if you are curious about oysters that make pearls, go to Wikipedia.com and you will learn all about them...that is probably a site that I should direct the boys to)...because the boys were pearl hunting, and what they were digging up looked suspiciously like clams. Mikey could have told them that…but since they never asked he never told them…until Raz broke Mikey’s pocket knife…there was an awkward silence and then we all had a good laugh. Raz and I decided to swim back to the island, he was freezing and I was just cold. When we got back…none of us wanted to get out of the water cause it was cold on land…but after 20 minutes we all crawled out of the ocean and prepared to meet the night that was quickly approaching.
I changed out of my wet cloths and surveyed the damage left by the rain storm. As Becky and I found out tarps don’t do much good when rain comes in sideways. Then I wandered back out on the beach. Some people were trying to make a fire and others were just watching them try. There were a few huddled under their tarps and still others were out fishing. When a fire was started we all gathered around it and tired to warm up, while rain soaked us. This is the part of camping that I hate, I hate being wet and cold, I hate the sticky feeling that salt water leaves on your skin when it dries. I hate being miserable when camping…seriously why do we put ourselves into these situations?
Now that night was very unpleasant, and I would really like to forget it. So I will just tell you that I slept very little and was cold the entire night and probably until 9a.m. Sunday morning. Actually Sunday was a very hot day, far cry from the previous day where it rained all afternoon and night.
In the morning one boat was going back early and then it would come back and the rest of us would leave. There is always a fight to see who will be apart of the lucky seven that will go back early. I decided not to fight for it and stayed, I figured that going in the second wave wouldn’t be a horrible thing. I hung out with Gene for awhile and then I found Raz and then Jennifer and Joan joined us. We went out to the beach and lay on a tarp in the shade until Mr. B came back. Then we loaded everything up and climbed into the boats. The ride back wasn’t all that enjoyable, it was a little rocky and I got really wet. We did some fishing and then Mr. B dropped most of us off near a little school, because he said the waves were too big for a boat loaded as much as ours was…that might have been true, but I think he and the boys wanted to do some fishing, they didn’t get back to the school until like a half an hour before sundown.
The camping trip was really fun, but I was really glad to get back. I am really sorry that this was so long, but a lot of stuff happened so I had to write a lot.

Lines, chairs, the pencil sharpener and candy

2006-11-01T23:32:00.000+11:00

Halloween…a time for children to dress up in costumes that are both cute and scary at the same time, where they come and demand candy from you…and if you don’t give them candy they will steal your shoes and once they have the candy they will eat it until they are so hyper that the next morning they can’t listen what so ever in class. And to think that in reality it is the devil’s holiday…so nice of us to celebrate it.

Today: As luck would have it, today was the first of the month…so “Rabbit Rabbit everyone,” and I think that my “luck” so to speak has run out. When I got to my classroom all of my students were outside stuffing as much candy as they could into their mouths. It was as if the candy was some how going to disappear and they would be left with nothing, I think they knew that teacher was going to take the candy away. I didn’t take it away…I just made them throw out whatever was in their mouths whenever I caught them eating or chewing on candy. I did not want little hyper children in my classroom, but now I really wonder why I wasted so much energy on trying to stop them from eating the candy in the first place…oh yeah I remember…the no food in class (except during lunch) policy. The following are the troubles that I had today.

Lines: It would be a dream come true to see all eighteen of my little students walking in a straight and quiet line…they used to, but now they don’t see the need to…My requests are actually rather simple…walk in a straight line, do not talk, do not push or shove, keep your hands behind you back. Now what is so hard about that? Plenty, my class has to shove each other as they run to the gym, they have to yell at each other as we are passing other classrooms, they must run onto the grass to get around each other and be first. It is very important for my students to always be first. They must be first there is no two ways about it, whether it is going to recess or coming back…there is a head long race to be first. Which believe it or not gets them into quite a lot of trouble.
Now yesterday I warned my kids that if they couldn’t figure out how to walk correctly in line that I would make them walk in a line until they got it right. Well recess was as close to a disaster as it could get. My students wanted to do their own thing during math, so half of the class had to stay in the classroom with Evangeline until their math was done, which I have a sneaky suspicion they didn’t do correctly. Anyway I only had six kids to take down to the gym and they couldn’t even walk in line correctly and those that were left in the classroom (I was on duty that recess so I couldn’t stay in the classroom) ran around the school yard once they finished their math and I had to chase them down, so by the end they had one extremely grumpy teacher and after I counted to ten, got them to drink water and use the bathroom, I calmly told them that their behavior was unacceptable and they were going to learn how to walk in a line correctly during their afternoon recess while everyone else (meaning grades 1-3) were playing. They were not happy about that, but I didn’t care…these kids need to learn discipline, their parents don’t teach it to them, so I will.

The pencil sharpener: Now I know that my kids like to be out of their seats, I spend most of my time telling my kids to sit down and generally I ask them to quietly work. Now since they must move around I am always getting asked, “Teacher can I drink?” “Teacher can I pee?” “Teacher can I draw?” but my favorite is “Teacher can I sharpen my pencil?” My kids love the pencil sharpener…if they could they would probably sharpen their pencil all day long or until their pencil was just an eraser. Sometime this afternoon Evangeline snapped…she is so mild mannered that you wouldn’t think it of her to snap so, but she took possession of the pencil sharpener. She told each and everyone of the students that she was now in charge of the pencil sharpener, she would decide if their pencil needed sharpening or not, I have never seen her lecture them so, I was kinda enjoying it…teacher was getting a well earned break from the yelling. The long and short of it is, if one of them comes to school without a pencil they will not be able to do any work, which means they will stand/sit in a corner all day long...Anyway right after she was done talking I heard “SNAP!” and a little voice piped up “Teacher my pencil broke! I need to sharpen it!” But since Evangeline was in charge of the pencil sharpener I let her deal with it, and she did…

Chairs: My students sit about as well as they stand in line. They must squirm, which is understandable considering my oldest child is 8 and the youngest just turned 5. I find this a problem with my boys…they will kneel on their chairs, stand on their chairs…they can find the weirdest positions to sit…but they won’t sit correctly…so whenever I catch them sitting wrong I take away their chair informing them that there is another first grade classroom that is in need of chairs…and I am sure that some student would love to have this chair and sit in it correctly. It is a work in progress, today I took Trumaine’s chair away three times in like 30 minutes….THREE! instead of standing behind his desk he sat on his desk…when he got his chair back, the cycle started all over again…take away chair, sit on desk, be told to stand, get chair back….

So those are the trials so far…tomorrow is Thursday, we don’t have school on Friday…which is wonderful. And next week we have school on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday…Holidays are great…but I am beginning to wonder when my students will actually learn something. This weekend we are going to Ant…it is rather far from the main island of Pohnpei, but well that is where the adventure is….so by Monday you should know all about that camping trip, I hope that it is better then the last one was.

Four day weekend :)

2006-10-26T16:44:00.000+11:00

So we had a long weekend, like a really long weekend. When school got out on Friday I knew that I didn’t have to teach until Wednesday. Now those are the types of weekends I like. Saturday we didn’t do much of anything, I mean we rested and rested some more. Saturday night we watched movies…Marla was feeling sick so we stayed up in the apartment while everyone else watched over the hedge…and we watched Terminal and then when they were done with over the hedge we watched that. So we were up until like 2. On Sunday I was totally in the mood to do nothing, skype was acting up so I wasn’t able to talk to my parents, so we typed messages to each other on instant messenger. The rest of the day Marla and I watched hours of the first season of LOST. I actually didn’t start out watching that show with Marla and Becky at the beginning of the school year…but as most TV shows do…it just sucked me in. I don’t like everything that happens in that show…but then again it was just a lazy Sunday and yeah it was something to do.
Monday was parent teacher conferences…and as it always happens that parents that I needed to see didn’t come. But those that I didn’t really need to see came. Which really makes me upset…most of these parents don’t seem to care a hoot about their kids until the grades come out and then they are all up in arms about the smallest little thing…I had one parent (she does actually care about the grades…a little too much in my opinion) who got at me cause her daughter had an A- in reading and oh my goodness we can’t have that…now can we? I wish they used the system of E = excellent, S = satisfactory….and so on, but no we actually have to have REAL grades…even though it so doesn’t matter. On Monday afternoon we watched LOST again and finished the 1st season that evening…after our evening parent teacher conferences.
Tuesday: I thought that we were in for another boring day. Breaks are nice…but sometimes they get long when you aren’t doing anything. After I took a shower Rusty dropped by to tell us that they were going out to an island that was near the ruins (that we went to like 2 months ago) to go fishing, surfing, and snorkeling and wanted to know if any of us felt like going. I decided that it sounded pretty fun, more fun then sitting around the apartment for another day. So I talked Marla into going and then we got ready to go…and then waited for the boys to get back from taking the first boat down to the boat ramp 10 minutes away. Now most of the girls that were going (actually all but Marla, Allie, and I) wanted to go and sunbathe because there was a beach on that island and I guess that they want skin cancer later in life. But I wasn’t going to sunbathe…cause I can’t stand the thought of it…I really dislike lying out on hot sand in the hot sun for several hours just so I can get evenly burned…I would rather get burned doing something active like snorkeling…which was why I was there….to explore the water and look for interesting things and perhaps meet up with another reef shark.
So it takes about an hour by boat to get out there, and we had a lot of fun bouncing around in the boats. Mikey was our boat driver and we raced the waves…and as we got closer to our destination the boys started commenting on the surf that looked really big…I was wondering how many of them would be wearing battle scares by the end of the day…but I pushed that out of my mind and continued just watching the sea and the sky…there was rain up ahead and I was hoping that it would go away by the time we got there. Well when we got there all the guys started to laugh…and I couldn’t help laughing too. The beach was gone, cause it was high tide and well it simply disappeared…oh it would reappear in several hours just to hide again in the surf…but I mean I didn’t really mind…I like being in the water more then sitting on a hot beach…so I really didn’t care…besides with the tide coming in…that meant I wouldn’t get swept out to sea…I would just get pushed into the island…more exercise for me. Mr. B decided to drop all of us off at the next island…the waves were closer and he would be able to keep an eye on us better…so that was a good thing I guess. Marla and I first adventured into the choppy waves and I discovered that the water was very murky…that made Marla not want to go in any further…there were other reasons too. I wanted to explore, but wanted a swimming buddy. So I found Gene and we found a nicer spot to climb in and went out…first we went out without fins and realized that fins were definitely needed if you didn’t want to slam back into the shore. Everything looked very dead and not so nice when we swam out a second time…where was the stupid reef…that is what I wanted to know…Pushing against the current and the waves and giving Gene a few swimming tips…we battled our way out to the three large rocks that were just out of reach most of the time…like when a wave came our way. But that was when the transformation hit…we had been swimming over sand, which then turned into fire coral…which then turned into the most beautiful looking reef that I had seen in a while…bright colors were jumping up at you and there were more fish then you could count just everywhere…and then it dropped off into pretty sand and deep murky looking water. I was so happy to see the coral and how beautiful it looked that I decided that we had to tell the others on the shore…who had just given up and weren’t going to come out any further…that meant that I had to get Gene’s attention. He had climbed up on a rock and I had to shout to him from the other side. For some reason he thought that something happened to my mask and snorkel and wanted to give me his…but once I made him understand what I wanted to do…he said that we should go back and see what if anyone else wanted to come back out with us…I lead…since well I swim pretty fast sometimes and I just rode the waves back to the shore…I told the others and then decided to eat a protein bar…they really weren’t all that bad…kinda chalky but this one had chocolate and peanut butter on it…so really how can they go wrong. Well while we ate I noticed that I had a cut on my leg…I decided that I would wait for that to stop bleeding before we went back in. While we waited Gene and I talked about different things and stood in the water while waves crashed in carrying with it broken hunks of coral and shells. Not the smartest thing to do…stand where there are hundreds of pieces of carol being thrown at you every minute…Now it wasn’t long before a large hunk of coral found my foot and sliced it up pretty good. I was not happy...I wanted to go back out and I was still on the shore because I was waiting for the other cut to stop bleeding, now I had more cuts, which meant we had to wait longer…Gene and I moved to another location on the beach and waited for my foot to stop bleeding. I almost felt like yelling “What is the matter with you? Did you not beat me up enough in the surf the first time I went out? Did ya really have to dump all that coral on my foot while I was just standing on this coral covered beach? Huh? Did ya?” But the ocean will be…well the ocean…you can’t tame it and it definitely will not listen to you. No matter how much you scream at it. So once my foot stopped bleeding we headed back out…this time it took a really long time to get even close to the rocks cause we were tired of battling the waves and when we did get close to it, we had to turn back cause it was time to go. Which was a real shame…but I knew that we didn’t want to get stuck out in the ocean in the dark without a flashlight…it is interesting enough with a flashlight…it was going to be extremely frightening without one if we didn’t get back to the shore in time. But we did get back in time, which was a good thing…
All in all I enjoyed my day, today I am very very sore…I feel like I just swam in a triathlon…(I do know what that feels like…done it before)…my class wasn’t really all that awful…we still have problems with listening…but then what group of kids doesn’t? If you have ever worked at camp then you know what I am talking about. During recess I love catching my kids and holding them tight and telling them that I have caught a big one…and if they are ticklish I will tickle them until they are really laughing and then I will let them run off and play some more. Today McRon was chasing after Danielle and he thought that he could get by me without me noticing…But I just leaned forward and scooped him up…I was like “Oh I caught a McRon…and he can’t get away…were you chasing Danielle? Were you?” between giggles he told me that he wasn’t and asked if he could be let go…I told him that he could if he said the magic word…there was a pause and he squeaked out, “Please!” That boy is just adorable…
My friends at southern have been trying to get me to draw cartoons for the school accent…cause the cartoons there are um…well not that great…and it doesn’t take an art major to see that. My friends have been telling me to do this for like the last two years…but well I didn’t actually consider it until last year…when the really good cartoonists graduated. But since I am a teacher and teachers are supposed to juggle many things…I have decided to give it a try. So I have been sketching a lot and I have created a little character and he is really cute…right now he is having several misfortunes with snorkeling…I find it easier to draw about things that I know about or have experienced…I find it funnier then reading a cartoon that is about the lines at KR’s or the lines at the café…yes they may be long…but 52 comic strips about lines is a little much.

Keys, tears, and broken hearts

2006-10-19T21:17:00.000+11:00

Keys…isn’t amazing how important keys are? Like here I have a key to my apartment, a key to my classroom, a key to the gate that is in front of the office, two keys to the teacher’s workroom (one key that works and one key that doesn’t) and I have a little yellow tag that says my name on it, just incase my keys sprout legs and walk off. Now you are all probably wondering why I bring up the fact of why keys are so important. Well today was Thursday and I was so tired, I had slept late and was rushing around trying to get ready for my day…and at one point in that rush I discovered that my keys were not on the cord that I wear around my neck. I was so puzzled. I knew that I had put my keys into my back pack the night before when I was climbing into bed (because I knew that it would be very foolish to misplace my keys in my room, cause it is a wreck), but now in the morning I could see quite clearly that my keys were no where in sight. I wandered out of my room and asked Marla if she had seen my keys…she said no, but maybe Becky borrowed them to go down the workroom. I settled down to eat a breakfast of eggs and toast while I thought about where on earth I could have left my keys. Soon Becky came back and I asked her if she had seen my keys…she hadn’t, then the search took place. I was literally looking everywhere for my keys…on my bed, behind my bed, under the stacks of boxes around our beds, out in the living room, but I couldn’t find them. I silently prayed, asking for a clue…instantly I got a little response…”in your classroom” I was like “No, they would not be in my classroom…remember I opened the apartment door with my keys…no they are in here.” So I went back to my room and went through the same search I had done a few minutes before…it was now past staff worship time, but I didn’t care I wanted to find my keys…the little voice persisted, but I resisted…finally I knew that I would have to go and tell Nollie that I needed him to open my classroom door when he was done with gate duty. I trudged down to the office, talked to Nollie and then made my way to my classroom. Once I got there all my kids pestered me with questions, “Teacher why aren’t you opening the door?”
“Because teacher misplaced her keys.”
“But why would you do that?”
“Well sometimes teachers are forgetful and misplace things that are important.”
“But teacher are we going to be outside all day long?”
“No, Nollie will come and open the door and if he doesn’t come Evangeline will come with her key.”
“But teacher what are we going to do?”
“Be patient.”
I really can’t write down all that they said…I spent the waiting time calling back students and telling others not to climb on that railing or to come back up the stairs…or not to look in the windows of the different classrooms and well to stay put. Soon I saw Nollie coming with his rings of keys and a hammer and a screw driver. When he got to my room all my kids crowded around trying to get a better look as he patiently tried one key after another. But for some reason he didn’t have the key to my classroom door…so he prepared to break open the back door and all of the boys rushed over to watch and ask questions…soon the door was open and all of my students piled in and ran around the classroom…choosing their seat for the day…because at that point I hadn’t assigned seats yet.
I cut out and put up their sticker chart, got the lunch orders and sent McRon off with the basket to go to the café and the money that went to the office. Then Evangeline came in and I got ready to read the worship story…I had looked in my room for my keys and I didn’t see them anywhere…then I suddenly I decided to look up on top of my filing cabinet…and under the box of crayons that was on top of a book, which was on top of a trash bag…I found my keys…all safe and sound…too bad, I thought to myself, too bad I didn’t listen to God the first time.

Wednesday was one of those days when I almost wanted to crawl on my hands and knees begging my students not to get hurt in recess…The entire recess I spent my time comforting the hurting and reassuring those that didn’t want to play because they were afraid they would get hurt. When Maggie and I blew our whistles to end recess I saw Wolfgang and TM leading a crying Chad towards me, of course the rest of the class had to go and see. “Oh no!” I thought, “What has happened to him this time?” I shoved my way through my class and yelled at them to get back in line. I knelt down by Chad and sweetly asked what happened. (A teacher can change their voice from loud to soft or harsh to gentle in a blink of an eye) Ever noticed how hard it is for young children to tell you what is wrong when they are in full cry? Through his sobs this is the story that I understood.
“I was running and TM took his foot like this (here he shows me, tears still flowing down his face) and I fell…and when I tried to get up Wolfgang hit me in the side with his head and I fell down again.”
He started to cry all over again…and I bent over him and hugged him telling him that it would be alright, at the same time I looked straight at Wolfgang and informed him that he was in big trouble…TM had slipped away…but as many of my students have discovered they can run, but they can’t hide from me or Mr. B…and the principal’s office was where my three boys were headed…Chad wasn’t in trouble…but TM and Wolfgang have this bad habit of after clobbering someone looking at me and saying “Teacher it wasn’t me!” So I wanted Chad to tell Mr. B what he had told me…Once Wolfgang realized where he was headed he started to cry…actually sob would probably be a better term for it…I found Mr. B…told him briefly what had happened and handed over the three of them, then I went to my classroom and got to deal with the 14 other students who were generally running around the classroom like a bunch of little Indians.

Tuesday was a really fun day, it was long but fun too. Reading is our first subject of the day on Tuesdays and Thursdays…remembering something important I had learned from teacher in-service day on how to teach kids to read…I decided to try it out on my students. I would teach them the sound of /a/ like in cat. You should have seen it…I wrote “a” on the board…pointed at it, said /a/ and asked them to repeat it. We did that four or five times. Then I wrote c-a-t on the board and asked the class to say the sound of each letter in order to sound out the word…when that went well I wrote other words on the board and then started picking on people and asking them to sound out the word and then to say it. They seemed to really in joy that…especially when I told them that they were beginning to read.

Later that day as I was working at my desk and my students were drawing I hear a wail come from somewhere in the back of the room. “Teacher! McRon broke my heart!” At this I started laughing, because it sounded so funny…what happened was this…TM had cut out a paper hear and I guess written in it (most of the girls in my class have been cutting out hearts writing in them and then giving them to me…inside I read “I love Denzel, I love teacher, I miss you I love you” rather funny to read the first time…but by the 20th time…it is getting rather old) now at some point the heart fell on the ground and McRon picked it up, now I don’t know if he crumpled it because he knew what it was or for the fact that he wanted to make a basket by throwing it into the trashcan (something that I really hate them to do…because I am always finding paper everywhere)…but either way he crumpled it in front of TM and somehow TM recognized it and wanted it back…hence the screaming…I didn’t do anything about because I was laughing and Evangeline was laughing so hard that she had to put her head down on the table…the boys knew we were laughing at them…but I don’t think they knew why.

Anyway that is all the interesting news at the moment

Camping

2006-10-15T14:03:00.000+11:00

Friday the 13th, it is a good thing that I am not superstitious, because if I was…well this weekend would have been really interesting. We went camping this weekend…not to Ant like we were going to, but to some tiny island that was closer to shore…I don’t know the true name and I can’t decide if it should be named Crab Island or Mosquito Island. There were tons of Mosquitoes on that island...like Friday night I got bitten so many times…and I was using that bug repellant that the travel health people say is really good and that the military uses it (although it didn’t do much good, they were hungry little buggers and didn’t seem to care that we had poison on us…I didn’t count my mosquito bites but I think I have over 50 bites.) I think that those travel health people should try out that bug repellant sometime and go sit on a bug infested island and see how they like it. There were also tons of crabs that were climbing around, on the trees, on the hut we were sleeping under, all over the ground…in the water…big crabs, little crabs, hermit crabs, red crabs, green crabs, black crabs…yep they were everywhere…and their holes were dotted everywhere…and those holes were huge!
Now on Friday it was the high school picnic…and they took 7th and 8th grade to one island and the high school to a smaller island. The plan was that the staff would stay on the islands that they were assigned to and then we would come and pick them up and take them to the island where the 7th and 8th graders were. Now those elementary teachers were to pack our stuff and then leave the campus no later then 5pm…because then we would be going to the island in the dark (not good) So we were all ready by like 3:30 and we went out to wait for the trucks to come back…which was fun and all, soon Nolie I actually don’t know how to spell his name) was back with the piece of junk dump truck and the other yellow truck was in tow…now the yellow truck had a flat tire and they needed to change it. Which was the funny part…they have a whole bunch of used tires in a pile by the garage door…and Nolie and Cabel were picking each one up and looking it over and discussing which one to use and what was wrong with the others…Marla and I were sitting on the red truck and watching this with great interest, all of those tires were balled, they all looked just as bad. Cabel was holding a tire and Nolie showed him another one and was like “This one is good…except for this” and showed something that was a matter with the tire…Cabel took one look at it and decided “this tire will do…” ‘This tire’ referring to the tire he had in his hand. So Nolie left the other tire in the stack and they went to change the flat tire. Now in a island that has lots of rain you would think that having traction would be a good thing…but to tell ya the truth I have yet to see where they can get new tires…there are plenty of used tires to go around…and I don’t even want to think of how much it must cost to get tires shipped to them.
So since we had to wait for the tire to be changed…we didn’t leave at the correct time, actually we didn’t leave until like 5:30 which is a big problem since we had a 45 minute drive ahead of us and well the sun sets at 6:30. We loaded all of our stuff into the yellow truck…and most of us got to ride in the little blue dump truck…which is like rusted through in many places and with Nolie driving and trying to make up time (he is a very fast driver…and if you are not holding on you will probably fly off the truck on turns or over bumps) But needless to say I think we got there in like 35 minutes. So once there we had to unload and reload things into the boats and then pile in…by that time it was dark and it is very interesting to find ones way in the dark over dark ocean in a little fishing boat that has no lights…Well that was until Mark brought out his heavy duty flash light that he uses for spear fishing. Then Mikey used the light to try and find the little green and red markers…which happen to tell you were the coral is and where it is safe to be going so that you do not crash your boat. Now Mikey would flash the flash light around looking for those markers, since by now it was quite dark trying to find where on earth those markers were…he located the red marker…but couldn’t find the green one…because instead of being sensible and putting little green and red lights on top of these markers…they just put little reflective panels on the signs and well they are hard to find. I don’t know much about boats or driving them, but hearing Mikey saying over and over “where are they?” or “where is it?” and flashing the light about over the water in search for them and then having Cabel yelling out every once in the while “Coral” just didn’t give that safe feeling…when you know that you are basically floating in a tub and that it would only take a medium size piece of coral or a rather nice wave…to do some damage to the boat. And then thinking about what might be under the dark waves…that might like to eat you…well you try not to think about it…and joke about other things as we all look for the markers…and we did find the markers...and as Mikey suspected we were on the wrong side…in fact we were smack dab in the middle of the coral reef…which was o.k. cause it was high tide, but not ideal. Actually all the way to the first island to pick up the high school teachers we were on the wrong side of the markers.
Once we got the high school teachers we headed off to the island where Becky and Rusty had been left to wait for us. We bounced around looking for the markers…some we found and others we missed…we would locate Mr. B in his boat and then search around for the markers…I think that we only found one set to go through that was correct…the rest of the time we were bouncing over Coral. But the sky was beautiful, the stars here are amazing, we all just sat on the boat and looked up at the sky and watched the stars and got really excited when we say an airplane…cause there is only like one plane that comes through here per day and just too see a plane flying through the night sky is just awesome. Cause you are kinda like “People!” which is an exciting thought…people that are probably heading to like Hawaii where there are stores and fast food and other good things like that…
When we got to the island, the first thing we saw was how flat and long it was and that Becky and Rusty were just waiting for us and so happy to see us. They thought that we weren’t coming and that we were just going to leave them there…The next thing was when we were out of the boat, was that there were lots of crabs…actually Maggie discovered that…a crab crawled onto her foot. There was really only one good place to set up hammocks…it was under the shack like thing…In the end we had six hammocks strung up and two people sleeping on the floor. Marla and I ate our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and then ate some popcorn…drank some water and then sat in our hammocks…cause we couldn’t sleep and well since we couldn’t we sat and talked and ask each other questions…in all I think I got about 3 hours of sleep…I just lay in my hammock listening to crabs walk around underneath me or fall out of the trees and land on the ground or the top of the shack like thing we slept under. Very entertaining.
When Saturday morning finally came, Marla and decided that we should go exploring…there was a path and we wanted to find out where it went. I should mention that the island that we camped on had been used during WWII, now I don’t know which side had the island of Pohnpei and it’s outer islands, but there were old bunkers, and a water tower thing, and even some old and very rusted gun mount things…they were circular…and I would have said that it looked like part of a submarine if it wasn’t for the fact that there was a cement block (very broken mind you) a few feet away…with the circular imprint on it…so that is where that circular thing came from…I told Marla…well it is obvious that this thing got hit…(considering the first half of the circle was about 15 feet from the concrete structure…which now had a coconut tree growing out of it…and 10 feet from that were some random rings…and about 25 feet from that was the hatch to the circular gun thing) and that totally had to suck for the guys stuck in that bunker…that is if there was anyone inside of it. There were smashed and broken bunker type structures all over the island…either the war or the ocean hasn’t been very nice to it over the years.
Anyway on our first excursion we found a lot of mangrove trees and swamps (hence the presence of mosquitoes) and crab holes and crabs. We found this weird plant that looked like a pineapple bush, except in tree form, but we were told that it wasn’t by someone else…so who knows. We found this little beach and wandered around on it…we found sand dollars and really cool shells…the sand dollars were everywhere…very cool. Then we walked back to our camp site and dumped off our shells ate another sandwich and headed off in the other direction. Which was slower going cause we had to walk in really wet sand and that is where we found the wrecked gun thing or whatever it really was…kinda hard to tell after all of these years. We walked around the island until we could go no farther and then we looked at a island not too far away, I wanted to jump on the sandbar rounds to get to the other side…Marla didn’t want to, but when we found Becky she said that she would…and so we went exploring…we hopped across the little channel in between the two islands and explored that small island…we found sand that was like quick sand…it sucked our feet in and we were feeling like we would never get out. After that adventure we walked around the island until the mangrove forest kept us from going on…then we trudged through the forest and Becky had me lead…I don’t think that she liked the all the spider webs…I got them all…but the forest was really cool. The entire time we were out there I had forgotten to put on sunscreen and I was so I am now a tiny bit on the red side…oh well…I haven’t really been in the sun for the last 3 weeks…so this isn’t bad.
After our adventure Becky and I were really hot and we wanted to swim, the tide hadn’t come in all the way yet and we were really wanted to just jump in. But when we got there we found out that the water was rather on the murky side…and that you couldn’t see more then like 6 inches at a time…and I had see a lot of shark fins just a cruising around and knowing that they are there when you looking out of the water, but are unable to see them underwater is rather unnerving don’t you think? So I voted on not getting in the water…Becky did, but she was out of the water just as quick…not really in the mood to be eaten. I went back to the hut and slept for about 2 hours…I was rather tired, after I awoke I found out that a group had gone back to the school…we had wanted to go back cause we had a lot to get done Sunday, with grades being due and all. But the feeling that you are going to be stuck on an island for another night is actually not a very nice one. Then Marla started to get really sick, she has a weird disease of the intestines and she didn’t have enough medicine with her…and she was in a lot of pain…we knew that as soon as Mr. B got back he was going to have to go out again and take us back to the shore. I hate waiting and we waited all afternoon, and Marla got worse and worse…no one can really understand the pain, I mean unless you have the disease. But around like 6:30 they came…and by then it was really dark and Mr. B said that it was alright that we had to go back; Raymond was going to drive us back from the drop off (he had punctured his foot with a rather sharp piece of dead coral, so he needed to go back too).
I still don’t know how Mr. B does it…he knows the water like the back of his hand…he was going at full throttle the entire time and we can’t see a thing! Except a great amount of blackness, that didn’t change much on the trip back. But when we got back to campus we were all able to take hot showers, Marla was able to get medicine (she didn’t have to go to the hospital), we got to eat salad, spaghetti, and this fruit called sour sop. Sounds gross, but is very good in a very messy way. So we were very happy SM’s, we were warm, full of good food, away from mosquitoes and crabs and content to just sit. So really that part of the weekend was good…it is now Sunday afternoon and I need to get busy.

pictures from crab island

2006-10-15T11:51:00.000+11:00

mangrove swamp

a coconut tree growing out of a coconut
the "jungle"

from the little sandy beach

more of the view

pretty sky and water

a mangrove tree

pretty cloud

rain and sunlight

the rain is coming!

The island is pretty...but the bugs aren't all that fun

Thursday, how could anything get worse?

2006-10-12T21:17:00.000+11:00

School....

That is where my classroom is

view from my apartment

School, from our apartment

It is Thursday night…and my week is drawing to a close, I don’t have much to tell…because I just want to forget all about this week and last week too…but I can’t cause I have to be CHEERFUL cause I am a missionary and I should tell about how everything is going great and about how wonderful things are and how great everything went this week and how much I LOVE teaching and that I just want to do this the rest of my life. Isn’t that what missionaries are suppose to say when they are telling people about their week? Well I’ve got news for you, I HATE teaching…and I really dislike small children…which I should have known before I got out here…but no…I loved my campers and the kids that I worked with at Mt. Aetna…but it is very different when you are their teacher…
I want them to be able to do small but simple things…like being quiet in line or shutting up long enough for teacher to get her patience back or to learn how to sit correctly in their chairs and why I want them to keep their slippers on at all times and how big of a deal it is to keep the classroom trash free…I mean is that so much to ask? I spent my entire week yelling at my kids…telling them not to do this or that…to listen to me and to stay seated when I am talking…but that doesn’t work any more. They do not respect me, not even my aid. We can both scream at them, but they are not scared of us anymore…I wanted to cry so many times today in class…but teachers don’t cry…now do they? We aren’t suppose to let our students see that they are getting to us…when we are angry we need to count to ten and then address the issue…if we must cry, we need to do so behind closed doors…but to be honest, I have fallen and I can’t get up, my kids rule the class at the moment…and I don’t know how to fix it. I am just too tired and weak to get back up, they know that I have nothing to throw at them, they know that they will not go to the principal’s office…or go and stand in the corner anymore…because their teacher…their once strong teacher has taken one too many knocks these last two weeks and can’t get up from the ground…her knees are skinned, her elbows are raw, there are tears in her eyes…and all she can see written in the dirt is FAILURE.
O.k. maybe saying “failure” is taking it too far…but to be honest that is how I feel at the moment…I have hit rock bottom…I have slid down that slippery slope and now I am on my knees looking up and wondering how on earth I am going to get back up to the top…how am I going to fix what has fallen to pieces? How am I going to restore order? What am I going to have to do? I mean I have this like way crazy idea…that could work…but I would have to start from square one…kinda like the painting I was doing in painting I…I was doing something totally different and then I just went wild with it and changed things and well wasn’t scared of the change…I suppose I should do what JR once told me when I was working on the ropes course…to stare my fear in the face and laugh at it…Because I don’t really think that my kids have learned anything these last nine weeks…they might have learned how to get yelled at by teacher…or how to upset their teacher…but what of meaning have they learned? Anything? I am ashamed to say that I think I have failed them as a teacher…I haven’t held up (ohhh big gecko on the wall, nice and fat) to what I came to do…I have gotten tired…tired of teaching the same thing over and over again…bored with the letters and the sounds that those letters make…
Today the father of little Kota told me that his son couldn’t tell or understand the sound “th” like in “they” or “that” which was one of their spelling words…or the rather silent “e” at the end of “have” or “cave” and I said something to the extent of “we will work on that” but will we? I mean that is like the most boring thing ever…I hate working on sounds and that sort of stuff…but is something that I hate…keeping my kids from learning? And is that something really important in the big picture? If they don’t know the sounds how are they going to learn how to read? And reading is very important…I can’t read everything to them for the rest of the school year…I will go crazy. I know that there are things that I hate…things that totally bore me…things that make me so restless…let me tell ya I would so rather be teaching kids how to swim for four hours and then life guarding (which can be really boring) for the rest of the day…then to teach in a classroom…the walls often feel like they are closing in on me…and oh I hate that! I really just love the outdoors too much…
O.k. so I have this really crazy idea…but to make it work I am going to need like 5 packets of construction paper, mats to sit on, a lot of packing tape…and time…of which I don’t have much of…I really wonder if this would really work…I guess only time will tell…right…
We are going camping this weekend…and it suppose to rain (surprise, surprise) so I am sure that I will have something to tell…sorry that this entry wasn’t that uplifting…but this week has been awful…I do not want it to repeat…like EVER!

Cards, created by and from....

2006-10-05T23:27:00.000+11:00

I make birthday cards and I make get well cards...for I have to do something when an SM is sick. This is the card that I made Eric, one of the 5th grade teachers...his foot was infected and he was unable to teach.
The front of the card
inside
close up (isn't he cute?)
End

Well what do you think? Should I still be an art major?

What was created in Art on Sept. 29

2006-10-05T23:08:00.000+11:00

Flowers! Shall we look at all of them?
Flower number 1, created by McRon
Flower number 2, created by A.J.
Flower number 3, created by Danielle
Flower number 4, created by Denzel
Flower number 5, created by Evon
Flower number 6,created by Wolfgang
Flower number 7, created by TM
Flower number 8, created by Angelu
Flower number 9, created by Arianne
Flower number 10, created by Marson
Flower number 11, created by Veronica
Flower number 12, created by Lorianne
Flower number 13, created by Triston
Flower number 14, created by Shawna
Flower number 15, created by Kota
Flower number 16, created by Aiyumi
Flower number 17, created by Chad
And now a few pictures of their lovely teacher!
Miss Ford (me) ready to teach Friday morning
The look I sometimes give when slightly on the frustrated side
Miss, Teacher, Miss Ford, yes Sir (Marson calls me that)...these are the names that my students call me.

Introducing My Students

2006-10-05T21:42:00.000+11:00

Danielle, A really cute girl who has a beautiful smile. She also happens to be one of the trouble makers in my class, really hates to listen, and has tones of attitude. I first met Danielle at the airport she was the adorable little girl who ran up and greated us as we walked out of customs.
Evon, my aid's daughter, a very shy and sweet little girl; I love having her in my class and she is usually on her best behaviour throughout the day, but sometimes I do have to change her name. She has beautiful handwriting and like to color pictures and hang out with Danielle and Aiyumi, those three when together are quite funny to see in action.
Denzel, I just adore this little boy...he is very sweet and will always come over to my desk and start talking to me...but he usually is chewing on his fingers and is rather hard to understand. When he smiles I find that I just want to catch him and give him a kiss attack like my grandparents used to do to me. He will always come up to me at recess and rub his sweaty little face and head on my shirt and look up at me with his big eyes and tell me that he is tired...I will usually tickle him and send him back out to play.
McRon, a very smart little boy who is just too cute to watch...he will usually get himself into trouble throughout the day. He hates to share the ball and will hit back if someone touches him. He is usually the first done with any of his assignments and everyone in our class love being around him. When it is time to clean up he always wants to clean out the pencil sharpener and take out the trash...if there is sweeping to be done he will want to do that too...Denzel and McRon are the two that will usually fight to take out the trash...I make them do it together...cause I can never decide who it should be.
A.J. A rather chubby kid that likes to eat and laugh. He is always cracking a joke in class. He is one of the oldest in my first grade class...8 years old. He kinda knows how to read...at least he is always first done with phonics...usually a race between him and McRon. He likes to help out in class...always raises his hand to answer a question...don't usually have much trouble with him.
Angelu, she wants to be teacher's pet...but she annoys me more then anything. She already knows how to read and is always looking for a good book to read. She usually gets bored in class...always has really far out stories to tell me when she forgets to bring in a permission slip...stories that make me shake my head and wonder what really happened...She is always drawing me pictures and will constantly tell me something that has happened in the last 2.6 minutes of class that I might have missed. As very sweet girl.
Arianne is one of the youngest in the class, she is just too cute and so quiet...I have to really listen hard to understand what she is saying. A very polite little girl who will always ask if she can go use the restroom instead of saying can I go pee...she will always have me fix her lunch box when it breaks and open her water thermus. When I am having a bad day she will ask for sissors and make me a little heart that says "Teacher I love you" inside...such a sweet little girl.
Aiyumi, a very sweet little girl, she and A.J are both 8, she really likes to do her work neatly...probably has the best handwriting out of the class. She hangs out with Danielle and at the beginning of this year I had a huge problem with her and her attitude, but we now get along a lot better...she likes the color pink and is usually laughing about something.
TM, a cute little boy who is always getting into trouble...he will usually hit to get his way...and then cry out to me "Teacher I didn't do it!" Never has paper or pencil with him, always is underfoot and wants the ball at recess time.
Wolfgang, a sensitive little boy who is always talking about something in class...he just has to be active...always wants to be included in games...cries easily and I will usually have to come to his rescue before he hits TM back. Has the most adorable smile and is so excited when he is first...does really well in school when he puts his mind to it. Oh and last Friday he got new slippers (flip flops) cool new black ones...he is very proud of them.
Lorianne doesn't know much english but she has an adorable smile. She never has a pencil and is usually not paying attention. She doesn't like to listen, but when she does she is a bright little thing, she would rather color then do language and draw during worship.
Marson a tough little kid on the outside, but on the inside one sensitive little boy...will cry if he got introuble or punched and none of it was his fault, loves to tell me who is doing what in class...already knows what a sentence is. He always needs to pee...likes to be the center of attention...and I always mix call him McRon and McRon Marson when one of them is misbehaving.
Veronica, she isn't known in our class for paying attention...she is usually off in her own little world most of the day...has a cute smile...loves to play ball with the boys and generally do the exact opposite of what I tell her to do.
Kota, a very cute little boy (not like you can see his face or anything) has an attention span of 3 seconds. Has to be active...very smart, knows a lot of english...but like I said before gets distracted. Best friends with Denzel, McRon & Marson...never sit those boys next to each other. He is very sweet and sometimes shy...but he will usually end up standing in the corner at some point during the day.
A very sweet girl who tries very hard in school and really wants to learn...letters are backwards for her so things are generally harder to teach her. Always has something new to tell me...is very truthful and is never in trouble...if I let her she would get student of the week every single week.
Triston, a rather quiet kid that does the eyebrow raise to indicate yes and even no sometimes. He is loud at recess...but usually knows to stay quiet in class. He is always the first done in his math group and likes to stay out of trouble. Everyone loves to hang out around his desk.
ChadisonAlso known as Chad (or in my blogs as little Chad), he got student of the week two weeks ago...which was a huge deal..cause he is usually always in trouble...but that week he kept his name card green...The first picture is usually the look he gives me when he doesn't want to do something...I always want to hug this little kid, he is very smart, but craves attention, he will fall asleep in the afternoons a lot...he will find me at recess when I am on duty, he loves to help me out with things after school (sweeping, taking out the trash...or just talking) Very sweet kid that comes from a world of pain...if only you knew his family life...it would make you cry....there is a reason why he craves attention so very much.
*No Picture* Trumaine...don't know him that well yet...but he is a very cute and adorable kid who has a beautiful smile...he is always trying to help me out with something or telling me what time it is in case I forgot. Best friends with TM...where one is most likely the other will be also

Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday

2006-10-05T21:37:00.000+11:00

Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday

I am putting all three of those days together, because honestly I can’t really remember the difference between each day…the fact of it is that my week was horrid…even Monday was bad…but I will try to highlight on the more interesting things.

Forgetting: You can ask anyone in my family and they will tell you that I have this amazing memory…and I still can’t understand why they say that…because I don’t. But they will still ask me to remember things and I will forget and then remind them two hours or even days later. So on Wednesday (which was a particularly bad day) around 2:35 I marched one of my kids down to Miss Cramer’s room to go and stand in the corner. And went back into my classroom where my kids were talking and screaming and had to lecture them about what I expected and how disappointed I was of them and how I did not want them to act this way on Thursday. By then it was 3 o’clock and one of my kids ran up and said “Teacher it is three!” At which point I told the kid…”Well you all aren’t doing what I asked you to do…so you are staying in the classroom until you do it.” So after a few minutes of me shouting and them shushing each other I had prayer and they were able to go home…I looked around the classroom to make sure that all of them took their stuff and then wondered why Kota left his back pack. But still I had no clue…that is until Robert one of the 3rd graders came into my classroom and said “Miss Ford!” That was when it hit me. “Kota!” I had forgotten Kota. I pushed my way through all of the kids that were on the porch and entered Miss Cramer’s classroom…and there was Kota who had been standing for 30 minutes waiting for his teacher to come back…faithful little Kota just staring at the corner of the wall…hoping to be remembered…and I his teacher who had sent him to be punished had forgotten him. As I walked him back I told him to look on the bright side…he missed the lecture that I had given his classmates…but he was silent and when he got to the classroom he picked up his backpack and asked if he could go...

What did I just tell you: Now there are simple things that I will ask my kids to do, like quietly standing in line or please work on this worksheet quietly…but that concept my kids just can’t understand…my kids are never quiet unless their heads are down and I am standing over them telling them that I don’t want to see their eyes…that I want them to be intensely studying their desks. Even then some of the kids don’t understand what I mean when I say “heads down” they are sitting up or looking around or drinking water or coming up to me and asking if they can go pee. Then those that have their heads down will rock back and forth in their chairs or tap their pencils on their desks or make these really annoying hiccupping noises…so even then they aren’t truly quiet, but sometimes that is all the time that I need.
And when my kids step out of line and are talking and yelling I will have to scream over them and ask “What did I just tell you!” and I am usually greeted by a classroom full of little blank faces as my kids just give me the look of sheer stupidity. As if to say “Why teacher we are perfect little angels…does it really matter that we weren’t listening? We always do what we want in the classroom…even if you take away our recesses and send us to Miss Cramer’s classroom or even to the principal’s office. What a silly question to ask.” But after a few seconds of me giving them “the look”…one of my kids will stutter and then say “Teacher, you…you told us to stand quietly in…in line while…you…you checked our spelling” Bingo…nice to know that teachers still have the power to give “the look” and instill fear into the hearts of their children…that is like the only thing that will make my students stop whatever they are doing without me having to even raise my voice…

New Student: On Wednesday Mrs. McGuire came into my classroom and told me that outside I had a new student. Oh joy, thought I…I now have 18 little children to follow me around. So I walked out the door and looked around…and found my new student clinging to the wall. The poor little kid was “shy” as his mother said…but the problem was I couldn’t get him to let go of the wall…All too soon TM came out and started talking to Trumaine (my new student) and finding that they knew each other I was hoping that TM could get him inside…but that certainly didn’t work. Although I could totally understand…new school, new teacher, seventeen kids that he had never seen…well actually he knew two so only 15 kids that he didn’t know. But still new things can be scary…I felt so bad that I had this little kid outside my room that was too scared to come in to the classroom…I couldn’t continue teaching knowing that I had this scared little child outside my door…so I stopped and looked out the door…I walked over and got down to his level and asked him if he would live to join our class…he nodded his head, but wouldn’t let got of the wall…I took his hand and told him that he would have to let go of the wall if he wanted to join our class…I called TM over and he tried to force his friend into the classroom…that was when I saw his father coming up the stairs…”Oh no…Please tell me that you aren’t going to beat him right in front of my students” (apparently that is what they do here on the island if their kids misbehave…they beat them) Mother and Father stooped down and just calmly started talking to their son. I went in and started teaching my students because they were more interested in what was going on outside then I wanted them to be. As I was reading the worship story in came the mother holding a squirming Trumaine…she apparently took matters into her own hands. He squirmed and tried to run until she plopped him into his seat next to TM…that was when he stopped crying and looked calmly around the classroom…totally content in his new surroundings. I found it rather amusing that he really did want to come in…but oh the effort his parents had to put in to get him through that door.

A Bad Day: Now how my housemates can tell that I have had a bad day…is that as soon as I come into the apartment after four I immediately change into my Pajamas, find a book to read…make some food and sit on the sofa and remain silent until asked a question…then I tell them about my day and go into my room and sleep for one or two hours…when I wake up I am usually more chipper and ready to look at things in a more positive light. This week was horrible and today being Thursday that is just what I did…when Becky came in the apartment as I was walking out of our bedroom she remarked “Already in your pajamas? Was today really that bad?” I told her that my week had been horrid and I didn’t know what to do with my class…I have tried just about everything that I can think of to make them excited about learning and to make them listen…and so far I have failed at every attempt…just makes the end of your week wonderful…but tomorrow is Friday and the class picnic…and I am determined to have fun with my kids…no matter what…besides water balloon fights are always fun. Not to mention children high on candy.

Monday, Sunday, and Sabbath

2006-10-05T21:07:00.000+11:00

October 2, 2006

It is amazing how little work you have to do here in order to sweat. I just did 40 sit-ups, 20 push-ups, and 20 jumping jacks…and I had to go and take a shower because I was sweaty, weird how island weather does that to ya. I suppose that I should update you a bit on what has been happening, since it is Monday and the last I wrote was um Thursday.

Monday

Every Monday morning comes before I really want it to, and today was no exception; I started off my day with a big healthy breakfast of toast, oatmeal complete with dried fruit & brown sugar, and tea. Then I had God time…well really I had it while I was eating cause I woke up late again…probably cause I went to bed late.

Worship: Now today I decided to teach my kids new songs, cause I am sick of the old ones. I took out the “He is our Song” book and taught my kids like three new songs, and they really enjoyed it. They really like “Give me oil in my lamp” which is fine with me cause that is a fun song. For some reason the worship topic for today was about birds…now that is all well and good except the book I am reading from is published in the states and Mockingbirds do not exist here in Pohnpei. But somehow my kids made it through the story without falling asleep. (There is a termite running across the floor…I suppose that I should squish it) Anyway worship went well…sometimes that is like the best part of the day.

Tattle Tale: Now I am rather sick of my kids telling on each other about the stupidest things. Like for example: “Teacher look Lorianne is sleeping.” Or “Teacher Wolfgang is coloring.” But my favorite is when I tell them not to talk in line and one of them is bound to say “Teacher Kota is talking to me!” and that is when I want to ask them…What did I tell you to do? “Be Quiet!” and what are you doing? Most of them get the hint and will stop talking…but a few of them will say “Talking!”
So yesterday I got this brilliant beyond brilliant idea…why not put them into groups? They will have to work as a group to get the “money” at the end of the day (Twice a month we have a store where the kids can “buy” with the paper money I give them at the end of the day, candy, pencils, silly sun glasses, and stickers.) So I put their desks into groups and they now have to work together in order to get the prize at the end of the day. Now working together is hard for any seven year old to do. And I really don’t think that my kids have gotten the hang of it yet…This is how it works…I still have the same discipline chart of Green=good, Yellow=five minutes off recess, blue=write sentences during recess, orange=stand in the corner, and red=principal’s office. So that really hasn’t changed…but now I have groups also…the group name has all the colors but orange…and whenever I have to turn a name of a student in that group, the group color changes…and so the amount of money that they get at the end of the day drops as well…So today only one group got money…and it was the five cent fish (that is so blue). This was the problem…my students would tell on each other in their group so that would draw my attention to the fact and then I would change that student’s name and then change the group’s color…I would tell them throughout the day to work together…if they saw someone in their group doing what they weren’t suppose to do, to stop them before I saw them…not tell on them. But apparently that didn’t work…cause they just had to tell me…and as a result…three out of the four groups didn’t get anything to go towards the store.
Yeah so that was basically my day…it was actually a good day. Which was a total surprise…for a Monday.

Sunday

Today was a totally wonderful day, well at least the morning was. Gene was able to download Skype on my computer and I was able to talk to Beth-Anne and my parents (who actually haven’t heard my voice since I got out here on the island). So I didn’t do much of anything the entire morning, except surf the internet and talk to people on Skype and instant messenger (we were having problems with skype…they could hear me perfectly fine…but I couldn’t understand what they were saying…so they typed out their questions and I answered them). At 12:00 I went to the guys apartment to each brunch and then I came back and talked to Joel and Kristin and for about two minutes Jon on instant messenger…After like a half an hour I had to go down to the gym and help with the huge project they are doing down there…they are re-painting the lines in the gym…and Cabel gave me the job of scraping the gum off the gym floor…now if they hadn’t pointed this small fact out to me in the first place I would never have noticed that there was gum stuck to the gym floor…I did it for about 15 minutes when I decided that this was pointless and that I was going to go work on my classroom…which I hadn’t touched since Friday. So I left and went to work on my classroom…I have never swept that much dirt and trash up from the floor of my room since I got here, I scrubbed the desks and chairs, rearranged the desks (into the four groups that I have now), cleaned out my filing cabinet, moved my filing cabinet (and played tag with a gecko…kinda like how when you are chasing someone around a tree or something you never really catch them…well that is how it was with the gecko…he would always move to where I wanted to put the cabinet…and I didn’t want to squish it. But in we agreed that the cabinet wouldn’t go against the wall and he could stay on that side for all I cared.), then I moved book cases and extra desks around the classroom and was generally busy (running back and forth from my apartment to my classroom…cause I had to do laundry…and a few other things in the apartment) until 6:30 when I dragged myself back to my apartment to prepare for Monday…yeah it was a long day.

Saturday

Saturday was actually a good day…a very lazy day…it rained all day long…and then the power went out around 7 o’clock…cause I woke up not long before…there was a slight storm blowing through and Raz got itchy feet and a hungry stomach and wanted to go somewhere to eat. So after he scared the living day lights out of Becky (since it was dark and when she opened the door to look for him he was just standing next to it…smiling and all…she screamed so loud…it was actually funny) he went to get the red truck. He had told us that he would honk the horn when he was ready. When we finally got down the and got onto the back of the truck…mind you it was still raining and I was very glad that I had on a rain coat…but in the end it really didn’t do much I was cold all the way through…So twelve girls and Raz were stuffed into the truck… it was still raining and the cab of the truck was full (seven people were crammed in there) so six of us had to stand in the back of the truck and four of those six were Becky, Joan, Marla, and myself. So by the time we got to The Village we were soaked and were really ready to be where it was dry. And you know it was really fun, all the girls were there…and you can’t go anywhere with Raz and not laugh. We had so much fun walking into the dinning hall of The Village, six of us dripping water, and being greeted by American and Austrian tourists. We all sat at this big long table and were excited about the fact that we could have hot fudge Sundays and ice cream and hot chocolate and for people that liked meat…chicken and fish and all of that. Yummy…Raz ate the most…where he gets the money to eat out all the time is beyond me…but we still had fun, Marla and I got hot fudge Sundays and she had hot tea and I had homemade hot chocolate and you know it was just so much easier to go back to campus after that…and I was so thankful when we got back…because a small detail that I forgot to mention is that the tires on the red truck are balled…so there is no traction and we were driving on wet road in a very wet rain, on very twisty mountain roads…yeah perhaps not the smartest thing to do…but we sure had fun.

If I was the only teacher

2006-09-27T22:04:00.000+11:00

Wednesday

This morning I woke up at 6:30 and was like “Please God don’t let it be morning already.” But it was, and I had to get up…teaching is like having an 8 o’clock class that lasts for 6 ½ hours…only you are the teacher and you get to grade and keep the peace between your students and teach. And no matter what time you go to bed the night before you have to get up and be chipper in the morning and be all energized and ready for the day…and there are just times when you generally think that things really can’t get worse…but when you think that something worse does happen….
Today I stumbled into worship wishing that I could still be asleep. In worship it was announced that Eric one of the fifth grade teachers needed a sub for his class, because his foot was infected and he couldn’t walk on it…or something like that…I didn’t understand all of the details…As I left for my classroom I was like “Please God, don’t let them take Evangeline…I need her…we are teaching math today and I can’t do it all by myself again!” So once in my classroom I talked with my students and cleaned up my desk and got ready for my day…all of the sudden Mr. B popped in…and started to talk to Evangeline…and then he turned to me and asked “Will you be alright without her today?” Inside I was screaming “NOOO! No! No! NO!” But I looked at him and said “I think so, I mean I suppose I could, just for today.” I felt like someone had unplugged me…I knew what I was facing today, I knew that I was going to get annoyed and yell at my students, I knew that math class was going to be a nightmare…I started song service with my kids and I could just feel my energy level drop…like how my computer must feel when I unplug the battery cord and just let it drain out until finally it shuts down… As soon as worship was over math started…and you know teaching two classes at the same time, and having to get one class going and then to go to the other class and work with them, trying desperately to keep them on task and away from their own little world while at the same time telling the first class to work quietly and not to come and ask me questions until I could get over to them. Happens to be really hard... But as usual my students wouldn’t listen, I had to yell to be heard…I had to scream out “Hey!” for them to even notice me, their teacher…and point to the board where I had written the answer to the problem (the math lesson for the younger kids was really weird and hard and there was no way that they were even going to understand it, so I just gave them the answer and even then…a lot of them got it wrong) Just in the nick of time it was 10 o’clock which meant recess, which meant teacher got 30 minutes alone without any kids just to sit and relax.
I wish that I could say that the afternoon was better, but it wasn’t…today it rained and was cold, o.k. o.k. in the 70’s but that is cold to me. And my students were loud and I had to turn a lot of names and I wished ever so often that Evangeline was around so that I could have support…really how do teacher’s in the states handle it? But I guess maybe kids in the states are a little different. I really don’t know…but do they really allow five year olds in first grade?

It is Tuesday night, and I am just chilling in my apartment, I should be grading, but there are times when even a teacher needs a break. Today it rained and when it rains my kids don’t listen…I don’t really know what causes them to not listen whether they think that if they talk loud enough to match the sound of the rain, their voices might drown out my voice or they just want to color in their notebooks the entire day. Whatever the reason is by the end of the day my head hurt and all I really wanted to do was sleep for a very long time…but oh that was not to be.
After lunch my aid left and didn’t come back. At first I thought that she was just taking her boys home (for they are in like preschool and kindergarten) but she never returned and her daughter who is in my class didn’t know where her mom had gone…I could have really used her this afternoon, things were just so hectic…another person around would have been wonderful! But that couldn’t be helped.
I find it funny that I have to ask my kids when we line up at the gym if they are ready to go in…and they always scream “READY!” when in truth they are anything but ready…as we walked back from the gym today little Chad (he is the youngest in my class) kept stepping on the back of my flip flops…I would turn around and look at him…and he would be like “but teacher he is doing it to me” the he referring to the boy walking behind him…I didn’t mind it the first four times that I lost my slipper (that is what they call flip flops here), but around time 5&6 I knew that it had to stop. Of course it is awfully hard to get mad at someone so adorable…but I did let him know that I was tired of it…after turning around and stepping on his slipper…and watching him giggle with delight as he scampered after me…(this is when being tall and having long legs comes in handy).

Monday

Well today was Monday and I was on pins and needles because today my class was getting evaluated…well really I was and I was so nerves…I had heard stories about past evaluations that different SM’s had to go through and I was so worried. I got into my class a little late cause staff worship ran late and I hurried to get ready and I stacked on my desk all the things that Mr. Rodman wanted, all three little blue books, my schedule, and of course have a place for him to sit. He was suppose to come in at 9:30 which would be right in the middle of my math lesson and I was totally fine with that. But at 8:55 in walked Mr. Rodman and I was suddenly all flustered because I was running behind and I knew that worship would go into math time and I stumbled through the rest of “I’m going to sing, sing, sing” and then I read the worship story which was about snails of all things…and then we had to have prayer requests and anyone knows that takes a long time when dealing with little kids…because what starts out with ”Teacher I want to pray for my mom” about seven seconds later the same kid will raise his/her hand and say “oh and my sister is sick” and then two seconds later “and I want to pray for my grandpa cause he died” at which point I try to turned their attention to praying…I will usually lead out and they will repeat what I say. Which I have found is a good system.
Once worship was over I split my kids into their two groups for math…Evangeline took the younger math group of 8 kids and I took the older math group of 9 kids. And things went smoothly and at 9:25 Mr. Rodman left and I breathed a sigh of relief and went back to teaching….actually when I got a copy of my evaluation I found that I did fine and there was nothing that he wanted me to change…that was a surprise to me…oh yes it was. But at least I know that I am not being a awful teacher…some good is coming from my being here.

The Ruins

2006-09-24T12:11:00.000+11:00

I am sorry that this isn't going with the actual blog, but at least you get to see the pictures!
A wall from the ruins...I am told that those rocks continue
down for another 50 or 60 feet
Doesn't this bridge just make you want to walk on it?
A wall...rather cool don't you think?
The channel in between one ruin and the other

Looking in
A window in the wall
A rock house like thing
nice shadows
How these people stacked those giant rocks is just so cool
Water and ruins...makes you wonder what is was like when
They first built it.
Some of the walls didn't look so cool anymore....

Pictures of the island :)

2006-09-24T11:54:00.000+11:00

A Yellow Truck Load of SM's
We are at this dock (a really old one) this is where we found the dead shark...gross I know....but since that time I have gotten to swim with sharks...so really fun!
The view from the dock
The dock itself...
Oh look at the pretty water!
Soka's Rock (I really am not sure of the spelling)
Yeah I climbed that!

More pictures

2006-09-24T11:42:00.000+11:00

Here are some more pictures from Pali...
I thought that these pictures were just great
This is at the Punch Bowl Memorial
A Map, Pohnpei is on it somewhere The flags in the wind

The walls of names
The pole upclose and the statue far away
What was written under the statue
Little white tomb stones...they were literally everywhere

Hawaii...a very pretty place to visit

2006-09-24T11:32:00.000+11:00

These are pictures of Hawaii...if you have never been to Hawaii...you need to go!

I love this picture, it is so beautiful
This is another shot...on the way to the look out
It was too bright for my camera...
but there is a cloud ontop of this mountain
Another amazing shot
And here is another...
This is looking down...so that the valley can be seen
The funny shaped mountain top
This is a view that we could see from Pali,
they wanted us to see the island at it's best...and this was just beautiful

The first half of the 6th week of school

2006-09-20T23:00:00.000+11:00

Yep, Miss Cramer and Miss Ford...having a good time at a waterfall....this picture was taken like the second week we were here.

Monday started out like most Mondays, tired teacher and rather tired kids. The teacher needs to appear happy and chipper…but really doesn’t want to at first…but some things were different about this Monday morning. First off we had a new student. TM was just booted out of Kindergarten because he was too smart for it. His dad came with him on his “first day” in 1st grade…granted I was rather tired, but for some reason seeing that really happy little boy, just made me happy. I greeted him with a smile and talked to his dad briefly. His dad asked permission to stay outside the window and watch my class for a little while. And I didn’t see any problem in that.
TM is actually a really funny little kid, I was told by Ashley the kindergarten teacher that TM was going to make me laugh…and my kids make me laugh in general…especially in social studies class…our class discussions are just made all the more hilarious when they are still stuck on the first question I asked them 10 minutes before. But out of no where after lunch on Monday TM piped up… “Teacher you…you are boss…and we…we are the kids…your students…we listen to you!” oh if only the last part was true…my kids do not listen to me…or to Evangeline…or really to anyone.
Monday was actually my best day this week…I was so happy for it to. It is nice to have one’s week start out so nicely. I mean it is bad to have a week that starts our horrid and stays horrid all week long. When I got back to my apartment I collapsed on my bed and slept for a whole hour…when I woke up I thought that it was morning…but it was only 7pm…so let us just say going to bed was totally out of the question.

Tuesday would probably have been better if I had gotten some sleep the night before…going to bed at midnight is probably not the smartest thing to do. Because teacher doesn’t always want to deal with her kids…cause they don’t listen…But somehow I made it through the day…I turned a lot of cards (I did on Monday too…but I didn’t have to use my voice quite as much as I did on Tuesday) and raise my voice quite a lot…but we still got through all of the subjects and I did get some books for my students…they had extra from the library that we were aloud to have for our classrooms…which is really nice.
I went shopping (even though I am broke…yeah just got paid…but put that in the safe) with Joan, Marla, and Raz…we had a lot of fun driving around in Joan’s parent’s car…laughing with and at each other…and generally enjoying our time off campus…away from our classrooms. Very nice.

Today was Library day, today was day from hell, and today was also known as Wednesday…ah beautiful Wednesday, the middle of the week…the day to sigh deeply and wonder where the first half of the week has gone. But today did not start out great. First off Emily turned off her alarm clock when it went off at 5:45 this morning. I did not wake up again until 7:30a.m. staff worship is at 8a.m. so I was feeling just a little bit on the stressed side.
Worship was well like worship…nothing all that different…it wasn’t until I was waiting for my teacher’s aid to come back with the photo copies for the math quiz that I always have at the beginning of math… she didn’t come…I have two different math groups that are going at the same time…and she teaches on of them. My group had a test and the other group had three pages of math work to do. I now found myself in a problem…somehow I had to go over the directions for the math test at the same time that I kept the other group quiet and worked with them on their math. Let me just say at every moment I got more and more angry…as I worked with my kids I started to think about what I would say to my teacher’s Aid when I finally found her…What was she thinking? Leaving the classroom when she had a class to teach? Making me teach both math classes at the same time? My anger was boiling…which I must say is never a good thing for a teacher…especially when she is teaching young children math or helping others with a test to get really angry and I can say that I was…Like I said before I had a whole list of things that I was going to tell my aid when I saw her… it was recess time and I finally got my class down to the gym and bumped into Mrs. McGuire along the way and asked her if she had seen my aid. She told me that she was in the office…I dropped my kids off at the gym and marched to the office…ready to blow up at her. But when I got there everything drained out of me…the copy machine had been acting up so she was flustered to get the copying done…and then as we were walking out of the office together she told me why she didn’t come back…she had to take a really sick little girl (a student of Miss Maggie’s) to the hospital…the little girl was shaking and had a high fever and purple lips and ice cold hands and feet…and when I heard that…I was like…well why was I so mad anyway…if the little girl didn’t go to the hospital she could have died…what was a little trial to me anyway…life was going to go on…whether or not if my students listened to me…or did well in their math.
The rest of the day was rather hard to deal with…I enjoyed social studies…cause my kids just make me laugh and it is really fun. Bible was all right…I just read to them out of the forever stories books…we are now on book 2 and are enjoying it greatly. The kids like to see the pretty pictures…they go “Oooo” and “Ahhhh” and “Teacher is that Satan or Jesus?” or “Is he crying?” so we have fun in those subjects.
At 5pm after I had completed my lesson plans for next week and changed out of my school attire into something a little more comfy…I trotted over to Gene and Peter’s apartment to study the bible with Gene and prepare for this weeks Sabbath school lesson. Now Gene is smart…a real genius of sorts and we got off into this discussion about the last three chapters of Daniel…o.k. maybe it wasn’t we…maybe it was Gene started telling me all about the theories of Daniel 11&12 and I just tried to keep up with him…I’m not sure if I remember anything that he said…but he had some great thoughts and points…I ate rice and homemade bread while we talked about movies and things we did when we were kids…then I noticed that it was late and that I really needed to get a few things done like grading…so I went on my way and told Gene that it was really fun to visit and study the bible.
So even though my day was really rocky I have had a nice evening.

Week 5, don't ask how many more to go

2006-09-20T22:00:00.000+11:00

For some reason these type of pictures are really fun to take....I don't know what that reason is

This week was a power struggle…Who is going to rule the class? Will teacher be able to tame this wild herd of children that for the past 6 or 7 years have been doing exactly as they pleased? I will tell you that it is a battle, but I do not quit, I do not get tired of turning name cards or taking away recess, I just don’t. They give me attitude I turn their name card to yellow…they hit someone in the class or say a bad word or draw and talk while I am talking then their name card gets turned. Like I said before green = good, yellow = warning, blue = 5 minutes at the next recess, red = principal’s office. By the end of the day there are usually only three names that haven’t been turned yet, and by then I am so ticked at my class that I just want to ring their little necks…just for once I would love for them to just listen long enough for me to finish explaining something.
There were times this week when I wondered what had gotten into my students. Monday was a holiday…Pohnpei’s Liberation Day…rather odd when you think about it…considering it was September 11…but that shouldn’t have suddenly turned my students into little horrors? Why couldn’t they be the little angels I know is hidden somewhere down in each one of them? By the time Friday came I swore to myself if the next week was this bad I was never going to ever consider teaching ever again after this year. I laid down the law all day long…which meant no lunch recess, no student of the week, and more time outs in the classroom then I can honestly remember. And then my day ended…as Raz is so good at reminding us elementary teachers…it is Friday…no more teaching until Monday…Praise God!

Black Coral

2006-09-11T22:44:00.000+11:00

Left to right: Purple/blue starfish in reef at low tied; sunset second night, our hut looking out at the ocean at low tide.
September 10, 2006

Our first camping experience

There are some people who like to camp, there are others that positively hate it. I am one of the ones that love to camp, the more you have to rough it the better. But I have to say that island camping is the best, no two ways about it. Now picture a beautiful island out in the deep blue sea, with a reef around it and cute little huts and trees and lizards and hermit crabs. The island that we went to was Black Coral Island, 14 of us took the boats the long way and the other 11 piled onto the yellow and red trucks and headed out to the drop off point about an hour away. Mr. B was driving our boat (the bigger of the two boats) while his son drove the smaller boat. In our boat along with our gear we had Rusty, Eric, Mark, Marla, Mr. B and me. The waves inside the coral reef boundary were smallish and our boat bounced happily along. After a good half an hour we bounced out of the protection of the coral reef and into the big blue ocean. Our little boat would ride the first wave up and then skidder down the other side and another large wave would swell up in front of us and the boat would bounce up and then smash down into the trough in between just in time to ride yet another wave. As Marla and I shrieked with delight and glee, Eric shouted above the roar of the engine that it was like riding a roller coaster, and we all agreed between shrieks of laughter and surprise when the boat pitched and rolled…thankful to be in the larger and lighter of the two boats.
Marla and I were cheerfully talking about sharks, the difference between cold water sharks and warm water sharks, how the only sharks that we were going to see were small reef sharks…I now know a great deal about sharks, more then I ever wanted to know before…but hey sharks are cool…especially close up, but more on that later. We were also trying to figure out which island we were heading too, we would see the different islands out there when we were on the crest of each swell and then they would disappear for a few seconds and reappear slightly farther away (that was because we had guessed wrong, the islands we were looking at happened to be a group of islands called Ant), but some were closer and one of the closer ones was where we were heading.
The cute little island of Black Coral showed itself to be a sturdy island that was continually beaten by the waves. Our boat bucked and threw itself into the channel, riding wave after wave…and there we were starring at the most beautifully clear water and a little island that was going to be our home for the next two days. Once on the island Marla and I scouted out the little huts and decided that one facing the calm water would be nicer. After we set up our hammocks and grabbed our snorkel gear we trotted down to the reef. Two girls, Carry and Jennifer, were floating around on a buggy board. I cheerfully asked them how the water was and if they were going to go out any farther…they promptly shouted back that they weren’t going to leave the comfort of the shore because someone had spotted a reef shark cruising around. I was like “Cool, Come on Marla let’s go!” and I put my fins on and stepped into the nice cool water…slipping on my mask and snorkel I submerged and found myself looking at the cutest little fish and big fish that anyone ever saw. Both of us swam out to the where Peter was enjoying the sights…but before we got there he shouted out “Shark!” I responded “Where” he was like “Over here! Hurry!” but when we got there it was gone, so I swam around the coral looking for any signs of life…I saw lots of fish and all…but my highlight was when I looked up and there in front of me was a white tip reef shark, about 3 ½ feet long and just cruising along, not really caring that I was there. I just swam closer and watched it, you know sharks are really beautiful and graceful creatures…never thought of it before, but you have to see them swim. I surfaced and screamed shark, but the others didn’t get to see it. I was like “Oh man that was so cool, I just got to see and swim next to a white tip reef shark!”
Now most people when they go snorkeling out in the ocean want to see and swim with dolphins…now I have seen the dolphins here in Pohnpei, and they are real cute and all and it would have been cool to swim with them, but I have gotten to see and swim with sharks…it was so cool, I wouldn’t exchange that experience for the world.
Anyway back to what I was saying, I had so far seen one shark and I excitedly told Marla all about it. I then went back under and continued to look at fish and tried to keep an eye out for sharks…the sun was starting to set and I knew that there had to be more. I eyed the large fish and soon out of the fog of the water (remember I told you that the sun was setting) I saw this huge shark swimming towards me…I was like “Oh my goodness! That thing is Huge!” I did the not so sensible thing, I took my eyes off the shark and shot up and shouted “Marla, SHARK!” Then I went back under and tried to locate the shark again, I never found it, but Marla said that it was a good five feet long…The biggest one that we had seen so far…I took a good look around me and then surfaced and looked up at the sky…the sun was setting, and I knew that the feeding time for the sharks was about to start and honestly I didn’t want to be apart of it. Marla and I called to Peter and told him that we found the Mama of the smaller shark that I had seen earlier and we thought that it would be a good thing to go in now, seeing that it was sunset. He agreed and we all clambered up the coral and back to our huts to get our cameras, just in time to see the truck crew coming up in the boats…and once they arrived things became like a small campus, only we were all stuck on this tiny little island. But it was nice to see everyone, including Joan…who when she saw which hut we had chosen whined and complained about how she liked it better on the other side of the island…at which time Marla and I had to tell her that the one hut that she liked best being reserved for the U.S. Marines (Joan perked up at that, but they were all girls, so it was a big disappointment for Joan, who had wanted to see hot boys).
That night after vespers and a chance to look at the stars and the moon we all went to bed, well at least our hut tried to, it took me until 3a.m. to figure out how to sleep in my hammock. Like you can sleep in it like people normally relax in it, but I am here to tell you that you will wake up with all the blood gone from your feet and unable to move them. You can try to sleep curled up in a ball, but your neck will start to hurt. The way to sleep is at an angle, it is so comfy, but I didn’t figure that out for quite some time…and when I did I was like “this is more like it” but once I was comfy I noticed that there was movement in our hut and outside…there was a storm that came up and the waves were hitting the floor boards of our hut and the wind was tearing at the roof and the windows…so the rest of the night I swung back and forth in my hammock, not sleeping the best but wishing that it would all stop so I could sleep…

Sabbath
I awoke in the early morning to hear Marla and Raz talking outside our hut…at first I was like “I’m so tired I just want to sleep” but then I was like…”Wait! Raz is outside, he might try to scare us and then oh I will be so mad at him…” but then it occurred to me, once I got up that Marla was outside, he wouldn’t try anything now. But by then I had already opened the door and stepped out. And it was a beautiful Sabbath morning, no rain just a beautiful day. I couldn’t wait to go out and snorkel, but the tide was out and there was a lot of exploring to do. Becky and I decided that walking on the dead coral would be very exciting; I mean who knows what we were going to see. So we recruited Raymond and Gene to come exploring with us. And then we started out, unfortunately Gene didn’t have the right type of shoes for this expedition so he turned back (walking barefoot on coral is asking for it) so the three of us continued on. We wanted to get to this ship wreck that had to be at least four miles away, and walking on coral takes time, you can’t go too fast because you will cut yourself and you want to go fast enough that nothing will bite you. But as we walked we saw the brilliant blue star fish and the live coral that was with the dead coral and the little fish and the eels. Yes I did say eels. There were tons of them, all hiding under rocks and when we walked past the fish would flee and the eels would come out and eat the fish and scare us as they darted past our feet. Lots of fun there, but as we walked we would keep looking back at the island and then at our destination and then at our feet as we saw that the tide was indeed coming back in.
Now those of you who have read Narnia might remember the book called The Horse and His Boy and in that book there is a description of them crossing the dessert and how after a certain point the mountains never seemed to get closer and Tashban (or whatever that city was called) never seemed to get smaller. Well that is how it was for us, after a certain point in our travels our little island wouldn’t get smaller and the boat that we were trying to reach was still just as far away and just as small as it had been when we started out. So I commented on this fact through out our walk, actually almost every time I turned around to see how far we had gone. Soon Raymond told us that we needed to turn back, because if we didn’t do so soon we would be swimming back to the island instead of wading or even walking for that matter. And we did wade in water that came up to the middle of our shins, back the way we came, it took some time and it was almost slower going, but the water was now cooler and soon we were back on our little island…and we were ready to swim around and see the sights to be seen. But first we had to eat lunch and then wait a little bit after we ate, and then we needed to put on sunscreen and that took some time, then that had to soak in…Then Becky and I were tired so we took a nap, then we sat around, I talked to Marla and then looked out our window in our hut and saw a little shark about two feet long swimming around in the water…Marla and I tried to get a picture of it, but alas we weren’t so lucky…but it was just the cutest littlest black tip shark you ever saw…that was when we decided that the sights of the ocean needed to be seen.
The sights to be seen were fish, coral, a shark or two, and more fish. Marla, Becky and I splashed into the now much cooler water. (it is amazing how hot the water can get when the tide is out) we swam around and enjoyed the sights, Becky tried to feed the fish with some rice crispy cereal she had brought with her…the only problem was that it didn’t sink and the fish weren’t stupid enough to go that close to the surface. So that really didn’t work all that well, but we had fun. Now something we all learned that weekend was that the rip tide was very strong, it always felt like the tide was going out, pulling you into the ocean, out to sea so to speak…but many of the times that we were out there, the tide was actually coming in, not out. Anyway there were these two poles at the entrance to the channel (the poles were there to keep you from crashing into the coral that was on either side of that small entrance when you came in on the boat) but the two poles were great to hold on to so that you weren’t swept out to sea. So as I clung to one of the poles I surveyed the things around me. There were really cool fish swimming around and I enjoyed watching them swim around me. Then I looked up and there in front of me swam a black tip reef shark, it was so beautiful…just gliding along…like it took no effort at all. I slapped the girl next to me and pointed then I swam closer and caught Marla’s attention, we followed the shark for a ways, looking at how beautiful it really was and wanting to reach out and touch it…but I have quite a lot of respect for creature that have a lot of sharp teeth and besides it was swimming into a dead end and we didn’t want to make it nerves.
Marla and I surfaced and then talked about how beautiful it was and then we swam against the current and bumped into Gene and told him about the shark and when Becky showed up we told her. She was disappointed, but the tide had sucked her out so I couldn’t see her when I saw the shark. We all decided to follow Gene to the other side of the island and look at the fish there and look for sharks. I saw one of those flat fish that have eyes on one side of their body…what is that a flounder? Anyway we also saw a long skinny fish with a long nose that looked like a trumpet…perhaps a kind of trumpet fish or something. We saw fish with stripes and spots and dark color fish and clear fish and then we saw no fish at all…then we ran into Raz and talked to him for awhile. Then I was like since we are just standing here in the water we might as well explore some more…so we swam back the way that we came and looked for more fish…we wanted to see another shark, but you know when you really want to see something it never just comes around…it happens when you are not looking for it.
But we got really tired and cold and decided that it was time to go back on to the island and take a “shower” also know as taking a bucket of cold “fresh” water that had drained off the tin roof of the biggest hut, and had mosquito larva living in it cause it just stands in a big red tub day in and day out…makes you want to shower in it now doesn’t it? So that was fun to an extent, because salt water isn’t very fun to have on you all the time…like it makes your hair feel gross and you feel sticky and everything sticks to your skin. So Becky and I took a big bucket of that “fresh” water and went to the shack that was the “shower” Becky told me to go first and so I did…I took a nice cold, but refreshing shower…after the shower I had to put on bug spray cause every insect wanted to bite me.
After supper the boys ran off to go spear fishing, we watched them go and told them to be careful, Micky came a short time later with Cable and told him that they could go in the same direction as the other boys or go to the left where the fishing was good, but there was a shark that chased people (it wasn’t a reef shark, but a different kind…there were three at one time, but there was only one now) Cable decided that fishing with the others wasn’t so bad after all. The rest of us watched the moon rise…it was so beautiful and we watched the stars that were so bright and saw a satellite pass above us twice (very cool) and then Marla and I talked and watched the moon and soon others joined us under the coconut tree and we all talked and laughed. We actually decided to go to bed early, which was nice.
The next morning, Sunday morning to be exact I enjoyed being lazy, I was unable to go out into the ocean, I mean I could have if I had wanted to attract every shark in the ocean, but since I didn’t, I decided that sitting around and doing nothing was a great idea…girls there are some things that you never forget on a camping trip, always be prepared, no matter what. So I was very relaxed the rest of the morning, did some sleeping, talked to Marla, swung in my hammock, talked to others around us…and well it was just nice. I didn’t feel good anyway cause I was getting sick, but I enjoyed just sitting around, but I was so ready to go when two o’clock came around.
But really it was a lot of fun, but I was glad to know that Monday was actually a holiday and that I didn’t have to teach the next day…and that I had a day to recuperate from my weekend. So you know all and all it was a great weekend, and even though I am sick doesn’t mean that I am going to stop teaching or anything, I will just teach the best I can, even if I do sound like a little frog. Anyway this teacher has to be going now, so long!

My Apartment, complete with doorbell

2006-09-04T23:13:00.000+11:00

This is my room, well really my side of the room, I have pictures us of Hawaii and the cards that people have sent me are also up. One my night stand are books and a picture of Tim and one of my sister and I. Yep this is where I live.

First off our doorbell, doesn't it look lovely? It sounds great too...Ding-Dong, Ding-Dong! Really annoying actually.

But it is a good way to tell when people come, and that is all that matters right? The door says manager, cause Joan is the one who has been here the longest...

One Fish, Two fish...Red Fish, Yellow Flower

2006-09-03T22:50:00.000+11:00

My room door...Rm 23, upstairs....one of the newer rooms....and doesn't it look nice?
My classroom from the front door...the desks were prettier before my students peeled the paint off of them....

This is my classroom, isn't it pretty? Primary and secondary colors...So in the front we have the world map, the calendar, Rules, and the How was your day chart...

Mud, flowers, and Tevas

2006-09-03T22:38:00.000+11:00

Can you tell that I was wearing Tevas today?

September 2, 2006

When in the jungle it is very important to stay on the right trail, because if you don’t most likely you will end up next to a creek in the middle of the thick jungle with no where to go but back, that is if you can find which trail you came down on. And probably along the way you will fall into the thick and sticky mud and then you will have to dig your shoe out of the mud and when you succeed you will have to talk over the plan of action with those that are with you. Becky thought that we should go up stream or just stand in the water and see if anyone else comes. Gene decided that we should splash through the creek and see what was on the other side, I didn’t know what to do and thought that this was terribly exciting..."Lost in the Jungle”…Becky was busy getting her foot out of the sinking mud and Pema was trying to get across the creek without falling in. We decided that Gene’s idea sounded the best. So across the creek we went…then we decided that there was no way that anyone could have come this way, there were no footprints, no broken branches…we decided to find the trail that we came down and look for other trails that we might have missed…We did end up finding the right trail and then after awhile we caught up with the others in our group…Now I like cliff jumping to an extent…but something that is 30ft high just doesn’t make me want to throw myself off the cliff and into the water below…it gives me the opposite effect…I want to run the other way…the lifeguard side of me kicks in and it talked me out of jumping…instead I slid down the bank and fell into the river water. Which was rather refreshing and cold, Becky and I swam around in the water looking through Cable’s goggles at the fish…we were like “Fish…Fish…ohhh look a Raz, those are rather rare in these parts” and we started laughing about it and when Raz came up for air we started laughing and then told him why we were laughing.
And yet again the guys tried to find something higher to throw themselves off of. The cliff just wasn’t high enough, but the tree that hung over the cliff was…so they would climb the tree and then they would jump off the tree and into the water below…Mark did back flips off the cliff and they were perfect, Raz would dive in (how he can do perfect dives off like 25 ft is beyond me), Rusty took a bunch of leaves and flapped his arms like a bird when he jumped, very funny to see.
It was really fun, and not that long of a walk to the waterfall…even with having a flower war on the way up…no really it was so cool…there are like these cone shaped flowers that hold water so they are like natural water balloons and when you throw them at people they burst. So the guys found them thanks to Mr. B…I decided to nail Raz with one before he got me…he never got me back…but I did slip in a lot of mud because I was laughing so hard, which made Raz laugh and then Becky and I would laugh at him when he lost his flip flops in the mud…which usually meant we weren’t paying attention, so we would fall into the mud…so by the time we got to the River we were very muddy, but we had just had so much fun that we didn’t care, at least I didn’t.

September 1: Rabbit Rabbit

2006-09-03T21:48:00.000+11:00

The inside of the church...it is actually very nice...

September 1, 2006

I don’t really remember much about Friday. Because Fridays are always a blur, you don’t really remember much about it by the time bedtime comes and you are slowing down from your really long day.
Class was a nightmare once again, I had students falling asleep in class, I was loosing my voice, and I had to do chapel…I love being told that I have to do something the morning of…I was like “you know a schedule would have been really nice…thanks for skipping my classroom.” But it did turn out good in the end with Jenny helping me with song service and Sam doing the talk, all worked out…except my students were all loud and wouldn’t stop talking…I kid you not, we only went to one recess…my kids were so awful that I took away their lunch recess of 30 minutes and their afternoon recess of 15 minutes…when the day (school day) was over I collapsed into my chair and let out a sigh. It was only 2 o’clock and I was so tired. But I had so much left to do…but I decided that grading and planning could wait until Sunday, I was sick of school. So I went back to my apartment and cleaned the apartment with Marla, we were going to go to the store (cause we were left on Thursday) but the trucks were gone again…we had to wait until like 4:00 before we could go and when we left we had Joan driving, Raz, Marla, Alex, Mark, Mikie, and myself…First they wanted ice cream and everyone got some except me…being lactose intolerant isn’t all that fun sometimes. Then we went to the next store and wandered around in it for awhile…Raz, Joan, and I made fun of each other for awhile…well actually we made fun of Raz…but I can’t remember who won those arguments at the end of our shopping trip.
When we got back to our apartment we enjoy just sitting and relaxing, Joan made supper while Marla and I did something…I can’t remember what Marla and I did…probably just sitting on the couch doing nothing while Joan slaved in the kitchen. Becky was sleeping and by the time vespers came we were very tired, but to vespers we went.
Vespers wasn’t bad, but being tired and having someone talk to you like you were six can get very old after awhile…I was glad when it was over. But Sabbath was here and we were all very thankful…Sleep said I!

The last day of August

2006-08-31T20:31:00.000+11:00

August 31, 2006

Today was definitely one of those days that when it is over all that you seriously wonder what else could have gone wrong. Now I don’t mind rain, but I do not like is pouring into my classroom. There is a direct flow of water that comes into my room from the porch outside…so under the door pours the water…and my students become totally distracted. They can see the water coming in under the door and must announce it to me while I am teaching. I was reading them the bible lesson at the time…did I ever mention that I hate tin roofs? You can’t hear anything when it rains really hard…you are straining your voice to be heard over the rain and then your kids start yelling and laughing because of the water coming in under the door so you have to yell to be heard over them and by then you are shouting really loud, but it only sounds like a whisper…do that for an hour and see what you feel like in the end. So between the consistent announcements of “teacher look at the water!” and moving the students who’s desks were in the back and the drowning downpour of water…my kids learned about Lucifer’s jealousy of God the Son…and they completed their worksheets, and then they cleaned up the room…so that I could give them coins for good behavior. And then I sent them home…that was when I got to clean up the water still on the floor…we had a small river of water…and I had to sweep it out of the room, and then I had to pack up my stuff and then Marla came into my room and we walked down to the office to get our pay, all $90.00 worth…We get paid $200.00 per month…so $100 at the beginning and $85 to $90 at the end of the month (for internet charges)
Once back at our apartment, we waited for the trucks to take us shopping, we didn’t know when they were going to leave…while we waited I collapsed on the couch and promptly fell asleep. At 4:15 I was informed that the truck left without telling us. So I was like…well I felt like sleeping anyway and then fell back to sleep and slept for the next two hours…what can I say? My kids drained me of all energy that I might have had at the beginning of the day.
So hear I am, down in the teacher’s workroom with at least seven other teachers…they are all working and I am surfing the web and generally enjoying myself…cause I finished all of that a long time ago…like during the time my students had to write sentences for being too loud during lunch and leaving the classroom without asking teacher (that’s me!) I am waiting for my friends in the US to wake up…so that I can talk to them…yep another late night, but I am getting used to it. Tomorrow is the first day of September…so to all of you “Rabbit Rabbit”

Monday, Tuesday, & Wednesday

2006-08-31T20:06:00.000+11:00

This is Ack, the friendly gecko who scared me last night, I was not expecting to see him on our bathroom wall.

August 28, 2006

There are days that start out good and there are days when you wonder why on earth you didn’t take the time to rest the weekend before or why you had the bright idea of being a teacher. But thankfully those days only happen like once or twice a week…but today I wanted to just scream really loudly at my students…When I ask them to be quiet when walking to the gym, I am not asking them to cut off their right arm or left leg…I just want them to be quiet…I want them to respect me, to respect my wishes and just to listen. But they couldn’t listen this morning…
A typical Monday morning, tired teacher and tired students, teacher that is short on patience, but trying to be cheerful. Students that don’t really want to listen to teacher and would rather do what THEY want to do. Which meant running down to the gym and back, being really loud in class, talking during lunch (a big no, no when you only have 15 minutes to eat), sleeping during important classes like social studies and bible…and generally doing the opposite of what teacher wants.
So by the time my day was over, I was in one of those moods again. The mood that means in your mind the last thing that you want to do for the next three hours is grading an entire stack of assignments. But first we had staff meeting and then the elementary teachers had to stay behind and work on their opening report (the fun of that). After that Joan, Marla and I sat down and watched around 2 ½ hours of Sex and the City which actually sunk me into a worse mood…so when I went down to the work room with Becky I told her that if anyone in the workroom asked me to smile I was going to throw something at them (something heavier then my grading pen) Once I got into the work room I sat down next to Gene, I took out my grading and my CD player…told him not to ask and entered my own little world. Two hours later I exited my small world that I had been living in for the past few hours and connected my computer to the internet and talked to friends back in the states for the next two hours…or more. I worked on my blog and chatted with friends, sent e-mails and was starting to get happy…I stayed up until 1 a.m. Perhaps not the smartest thing to do, but I was happy when I climbed the stairs to my apartment…which for me was a big thing.

August 29, 2006

You know when you are away from home there are things that you start eating because they remind you of home. At home I am not a fan of peanuts, but for some reason I have been having this huge craving for peanuts, not any type of peanuts, but Honey Roasted Peanuts…As Becky and I often said, it is like being pregnant (although we aren’t), we are craving the weirdest things, things that in the states we would never eat.
Today was better then yesterday. Which was really all that mattered, we had worship and sang songs and did Father Abraham (yet again, the new “favorite” of my class, that and who’s the King of the Jungle) Then Mrs. McGuire stopped in to take a look at my class. And my class were little angels…I was shocked. They are NEVER that good. All too soon it was recess time, I told my class that if they walked quietly down to the gym and back I would give them back their afternoon recess…it worked like a charm and they got their afternoon recess.
Now I don’t know what happens at 11:00, but it appears that around that time my students turn off the listening switch in their brains and go crazy. I spent most of my lunch trying to tell them to sit down or stop talking or turn around and eat their lunch that it took me some time to eat my own lunch, but since I am on duty for afternoon recess I have to be done quickly so I can watch the field during lunch recess. The afternoon went down hill after that, and I would rather not talk about it.
When I got back to my apartment in the afternoon I told Marla that I was going to take a quick cat nap…and it felt so good to sleep. Then I dragged myself out of bed and told myself to grade my student’s work and enter the grades…and eat…but once I started working Marla and I decided to go and take a walk around the track. We have both noticed that there are some really “hot” American and Austrian guys that go running on the track, so while we walk around the track we would look for them. But they are usually not around while we are on the track. But it is incentive to get us out of our apartment and exercise.
So I have stayed up sorta late again, but not too late…I got to talk to one of my friends and well that was fun. But only wireless has been us up of late (grrr…) so yeah writing people hasn’t been the easiest, hence why I have a blog. Well anyway that was Tuesday.

August 30, 2006

You know that you have read too much Dr. Suess when you find yourself talking and thinking in rhymes. Now in our school library we have a great abundance of Dr. Suess books…and I find myself reading them to my kids. Because well the books are fun to read and the kids like to see the pictures and well they are just the best. But this afternoon when I went back to my apartment to get my CD’s and drop off my backpack before heading back to my classroom (rather Marla’s classroom) to work on lesson plans for next week. I found myself thinking and talking in rhymes. I was like “Oh no! it is happening again” Kristin when you read this you will understand, for I know that this has certainly happened before…when we read that huge Dr. Suess book…oh and I read them “And to think I saw it on Mulberry Street” As I recall that is one of your favorites.
Now about today, it is amazing how much you can stuff into your student’s brains before 11:00, and how good you can make them by telling them that they will get coins in the jar if they do what teacher says. Now the coins in the jar is how I tell who has been good and who has been bad. If they have been bad, there are a precious few coins in the jar, but if they have been good, the bottom of the jar is filled with coins. The point? Well if they fill the rather large jar they get a surprise the week that they do. It makes them be good if I tell them that they are going to get a surprise. But after 11:00 I really have to try to keep them good. By 11:00 they are hungry, after lunch and lunch recess they are then tired and want to sleep…after afternoon recess they have no thought in paying attention anymore…but as I told one friend I can’t push more into their little brains by lunch time…it is just impossible after you have taught reading, spelling, phonics, and math…they can’t keep it all in. So the afternoons are usually challenging. Which is usually why I have zero patience left for my students by the time I write this blog, but each day usually gets better.
Today was going great until I drank ice tea, now it was hot out and I was thirsty and my roommate offered me some and I was like “that sounds nice” you see the problem that I have when I drink things with large amounts of caffeine is that my system is not used to it so I will get a splitting headache in no time flat and usually with those headaches I get extremely hyper. But this time I just got the splitting headache, I felt like if I stood to long I was going to fall over and crash to the floor (which happens to be concrete, not the best thing to land on) so I tried to do things with my kids that didn’t involve too much work on my part. So this afternoon was called “let’s do a bible worksheet for the next hour and thirty minutes!” and somehow it worked…maybe it was because I had to repeat the directions about 40 times, but it took just the right amount of time.
After school I walked past Mark’s room down to Marla’s room. We were going to do lesson plans for next week. This is now a tradition that we have, every Wednesday afternoon we head to each other’s classroom with our books and filled out lesson plans…mine are always more detailed so it takes me longer to finish…Once we finished that we headed back to the apartment. Once I entered in my grades into my computer I realized that I was done with all that I needed to do. “My goodness!” thought I “What am I going to do with all of this free time?” Marla and I decided to watch a movie…(even though we aren’t suppose to) we watched Mr. and Mrs. Smith…a good movie…after the movie we ate some of Joan’s good cooking and talked with Alex who had been invited over for supper by Joan. (Alex is the youngest out of all the SM’s…only 19 years old)
Then after supper I went down with Becky to her classroom, I was going to work on my blog, but there were too many people in the workroom so I joined Becky and offered to sweep her classroom…when I did that I noticed that she was under a pile of homework papers, not yet graded. SO I offered to help her, she was rather surprised, but I insisted on helping. We finished at 12a.m. and then headed back to our apartment.
Now people in the states have cats to keep away mice and rodents, here we have geckos to keep away random annoying bugs. Now the geckos rang from tiny to small to big in our apartments. We have Tiny, JJ, Junior, Oscar, Killer, Big boy (who actually isn’t a gecko, but a normal lizard), Baby girl (who is huge), and Ack…Now Ack got his name by scaring the living day lights out of me last night when I walked into the bathroom to brush my teeth. He is a rather large gecko, about three to four inches long and thicker then someone’s thumb. And I do not like sharing the bathroom with a gecko that big, no matter how much I like geckos, that was certainly pushing it. But then again it was midnight...I shouldn't have been up in the first place.

Sunday, the day that never ended

2006-08-31T18:57:00.000+11:00

A wall of the ruins, very nice don't you think? The pretty ocean, complete with reef

August 27, 2006

Now it isn’t that I start out my Sunday mornings with the decision to get as tired as possible, it just kinda happens. Today we were going to the ruins, now to get to the ruins (which happened to be like on the other side of the island) we had to take the boats and one truck…see after our last experience out on the ocean it was decided that only 6 to 8 people should be on the boats at a time. So nine of us plus Raymond got to go on the yellow truck, I was one of the nine. So Gene, Peter, Allie, Eric, Mark, Marla, Sam, Joanne, and I piled into the yellow truck and Raymond headed off in the direction of the ruins. I told Gene that I thought that next time the really pushy people (the “pushy people” were the ones that HAD to be on the boat, so they could get a tan…they got more than that by the end of the day) should swim…but actually the really pushy people got really bad sunburn and voted for riding back in the truck later that afternoon, which was fine with me, cause that meant that I could go back on the boat and take pretty pictures.
Now the ride to where the boats would pick us up was not all that far away, like 45 minutes if that, and we had a lot of fun, until we hit a certain bump in the road (rather close to where we were going to wait for the boats) Raymond didn’t see it, it was more like a ditch instead of a bump, so he didn’t slow down. It was a good thing that I happened to be holding onto the truck because when we hit that bump I flew up into the air and then smashed back onto the bench that I was sitting on. All of us groaned in pain and Raymond slowed the truck and stopped, asking if all of us were o.k. Sure I thought, I’m fine…I just won’t be able sit for the next month…I think my tailbone just broke…thanks a lot. But all of us said that we were fine and we continued on and Raymond took it slow after that. (According to those that road back on the truck…he took it really slow on that section of the road)
Once we got to where we were going to meet the boats or rather boat…we all climbed out of the truck…I was like “kiss the sweet ground! I’m alive…for now that is” The younger boys (Mark and Eric) saw fish fins in the water break the surface of the water. Mark saw them first and yelled out “Fish!” and ran towards the water…when he got Eric’s attention they grabbed their snorkel gear and dove right in. Apparently they were certain that the fish would just come to them as if to say “catch me! And Eat Me!” Those two are really big into spear fishing…so they splashed around in the rather murky water until they were really bored or really freaked out from the random big fish in the water. From there the boys (Gene, Eric, Mark, and Peter) had rock throwing contests. There first target was Joanne who was sitting under a shade tree…she screamed at them and ran down the road, after chucking a few rocks at them. Then they spied a small coral island and fought over who was going to be “king of the island” it was decided that who ever was able to hit the island with a rock first would get the island…it was interesting to watch…because for five minutes they were all so close…coming within a foot from the island. But right when Mr. B. came with the boat Eric hit the island with a rock and became “King” from that point on whenever the guys saw an island they would claim it as “theirs” until one of them said “I’ll fight you for it”
Now while this was going on, between pauses in their so called “conversation” the girls, Raymond, Sam, and Mr. B took in the sights and saw birds flying and dolphins jumping out of the water. Mr. B drove the boat around in a big circle so that we could see the entire pod…there were so many of them and I got video of them jumping out of the water and they are not scared of the boats so they swam really close. And it was just so cool, we wanted to get out and swim with them…but Mr. B wouldn’t let us. Then we got to the drop off point…we had to walk on the reef…I thought that it was bad to do that…but apparently everyone does that here. So we did and we stepped on crunchy coral and squishy sea slugs, we tripped over pointy coral and waded through stringy grass, we scared salt water eels out of hiding and screamed when we saw them dart around out feet. Basically you were screaming “Oh gross, don’t bite my feet…oh…oh…help!” And those around you just laughed. Mark and Eric were like already at the island we were going to, they took off running across the island…they are like 19 years old…just finished their freshmen year of college…Anyway one of the boats floated through the little channel and Rusty offered us a ride and told us to go where the other girls were and they would pick us up. I was like hmm he is actually acting like a gentleman…but when we got over there he took the other girls and left us…I was like “Your gentleman badge has just been deleted from my book” But Mr. B and his boat came next and picked us up. Once at the island we all dove into the water…for some reason a lot of the girls can’t stand having to wear board shorts and t-shirts over their bikinis so off went the shorts and shirts and while snorkeling I was started by many a girl in rather revealing bikinis…not what I want to see when I am happily looking at pretty fish and not so pretty eels. I was like “Well hi, was what you wearing before to constricting or something?” I don’t get it we have guidelines that we agreed to follow, but apparently these girls wanted a tan…I don’t think that they realize that we are here for another 9 months…a lot can happen during that time.
So I swam away from those girls and found a hunk of rock with different types of coral and that random animal plant looking thing that clownfish live in…complete with three of the cutest most curious clownfish. (Sorry I can’t figure out how to spell it). And they had friend too, little black fish with two white spots, bright blue fish, clear fish, big fish…and lots of grass. I just watched the clown fish and they watched me…looking at all that they could see…and wondering if I my fingers were something good to eat. Cable told us that there were bigger fish at another part of the reef so we swam off in that direction to look. And there were bigger and prettier fish. Which was cool, just soon enough Mr. B came back to take us to the ruins…but on the way there our boat had to drop off some of the guys at the breakers where they were going to go surfing…the swells were so big for our little boat…and we were so crammed in there. The boys jumped out with their boards and paddled toward the surf…excited at the fact that they got to surf and hoping that they wouldn’t make contact with the sharp coral. The rest of us went to the ruins…which was cool and we got a lot of pictures and all but I was getting really tired and I was hungry and starting to wonder if I had gotten sunburned (I had of course) So all 20 of us piled into the small boat and Mr. B told us not to move at all…cause if we moved the boat might flip over (remember only 6 to 8 people should be on these boats, but there were 20 of us and we were on the smaller boat) And we were all perfectly still…it was a long ride back…we had to push the boat back through the coral and while Mr. B pushed we had to sit really still as to not upset the balance of the boat. But we made it through and made it back to where the yellow truck sat.
Now like I said before the really pushy girls had gotten their sun…in fact they got a lot of sun. So they wanted to ride back on the truck. So they all climbed out of the boat and onto dry land…the rest of us got comfy in the boat and headed on our way. It was nice except I could feel my legs burning and my feet burning and I was really tired. Then it started to rain and the rain hurt and the water started to get bumpy, so we bounced around and people tried to sleep and some of us tried to get comfy and keep the sun off of us. It was really hard to work that night on lesson plans when we got back…we were all really tired and didn’t want to grade papers or work on anything…we just wanted to sleep…but then again we had an awesome day…what better Sunday could we of had?

Pictures!

2006-08-29T00:05:00.000+11:00

More pictures...this island is so beautiful, it rains here alot so everything is very nice and lush and green. Anyway this and me looking out at the beautiful sunset. Then we have a truck load of SM's that is by the way how we get around, by little yellow and red fire trucks from Japan. I'm sitting, you should beable to find me.

2006-08-28T23:14:00.000+11:00

Well this is another view of the waterfall that we jumped off of on Sabbath.

It is a slightly different look when you peer over and try to decide whether or not you are going to jump.

The guys would dive off this rock...really dumb thing to do, but then again....they jump off anything...

Week 2 of teaching and the adventures continue

2006-08-28T22:45:00.000+11:00

So yeah, this is at the top of Twin Falls, and I jumped off of it...got video of it too...20 t0 25 foot drop, very exciting.

August 21, 2006

Hey all, I successfully finished school today. I mean it went so well I was amazed. I decided to do something a little different in my classroom. First off yesterday (Sunday) I reorganized my room, rearranging the desks and shelves and the one lone bench. I put every student in the boy girl format and separated the girls that always would talk. I put the bad students in the front and the well behaved ones in the back. Then I put two long desks in the back of the classroom where I decided that I would split up my class into three groups and work with each group for 15 minutes during the longer classes (like Reading and Math) And you know it worked really well, I was surprised. The ones that weren’t working with me were busy working on Busy Books (who ever came up with the idea of busy books was a total genius) anyway my teacher’s aid helped those students while I worked with the other students and things worked out great in the morning.
Now when morning recess came along I made it clear to my students that I wanted it to be quiet as we walked down to the gym, no pushing or shoving, no looking into the windows of other classrooms as we walked by and to stay to the far left (towards the field and away from the windows). And I told them that if they did they would loose their afternoon recess, you know how much kids love recess. So that was the plan. Now you would think that it wouldn’t be all that hard to do, but I seem to have been mistaken. As usual half of my students were quiet and the other half did everything that I told them not to. So I took away the recess for the entire class. When 1:15 rolled around all my students had their heads down on their desks and were quiet for the most part. (That 15 minutes was the longest time ever) For some reason one of my kids decided to make animal noises while they had their heads down, since I didn’t know who it was I kept giving out warnings and when it wouldn’t stop I took five minutes away from my classes P.E. time in the morning…they wouldn’t stop so what else could I do?
Lunch was good except for some reason my students can not get ready in time and since they only have 15 minutes to eat it makes things harder. This week I have lunch off (which is very nice, I can usually get a few things done during that time, like finish eating) so my class usually doesn’t get done with lunch until late and then they are really loud and I can’t get them to calm down enough to line up before they go outside for the half an hour lunch recess (we are always the last class out). After lunch recess is story time and after story time is Language, Spelling, and Handwriting (each of those are 15 minute segments) and during that time I work with the class as a whole. I practically give them the answers, but as usual there will be at least two students that seem to go to their happy place when I am going over the worksheet with them. And when that happens I will usually hear as soon as I finish explaining “Teacher I don’t know what to do.” At which point I tell them “I just explained it, you were suppose to be following along.” And although I should be very strict and say “Too bad for you, you should have been listening, I usually will call those lost students over and work with them and help them understand…let’s just say that my patience gets stretched quickly.
Bible is just coloring worksheets; all the books that they have here are way over my student’s heads…I wish that I had some of the books that Mrs. Mason used when we were in grade school or even now for that matter. So yeah mom if you could get a hold of her in some way that would be great. J So while they are coloring I am reading to them and my voice is usually about gone after the 30 minutes. And then we have social studies. We are working on a project called “all by myself and with my friends” and we started working on it last week and we are still working on the same project, I don’t know how I am ever going to get them caught up to this weeks lesson plans. We are getting far behind.
Social Studies is the last subject of the day, but it always takes some time to get the students to clean up their desks and pack up their backpacks and then get them to sit back down and wait for the clock to say 3:00. And when that happens I am so happy to be free as my kids walk (well really run) out the door.
Today was shopping day, the ship came in yesterday and that is like a big thing here. Because that means fresh produce and more choices and that is great cause like the boat only comes like every month or so…I don’t really know (Kelli how often does the boat come?) Anyway it is a big deal, you would only understand if you were stuck on an island and all of your food comes by boat, so mail comes by plan and food comes by boat. Fascinating isn’t it. Shopping was the same as normal, I enjoyed it but I was thinking of all the stuff that I needed to be doing instead of shopping, but I am done now and so I can write you and eat, I haven’t eaten supper yet…cause I wanted to get my grading done and I am done, but now I am rather hungry. So maybe I should go and eat. This week will be better then last week, cause I am more in the groove for teaching, so I don’t hate it anymore, I just dislike it at times…hate is a very strong word, so I shouldn’t say it much. Well it is 8pm and I am going to go so that I can eat and go to bed at 9:30 so that I can get up at 5a.m. so that I can have a long God time. I need that time so that I will survive the day and have the patience to get through my day. So all of you I love you and miss you…and snail mail would be great! The internet is down five days out of seven, so snail mail is important to me J Please write!

August 22, 2006

Well today was one of those days when Emily lost her patience right early on in the morning. Now it would be easier to teach these kids if they listened to what I told them. But they don’t, instead they do what they want and wonder why on earth I got upset at them and had to yell at them to get my voice heard. Now you would think that if one takes away enough recesses that it might sink in that they are doing something wrong. Obviously I was wrong; now what I ask for them to do when we are walking to recess is to 1. Walk quietly (no talking) 2. No pushing 3. Hold hands (they hold hands in a line and walk down the hall) 4. Do not walk next to other classroom windows (they have this bad habit of looking into other classroom windows and yell or talk to those inside…other teachers don’t like it, really distracting). Now that is all that I ask. Four little things, only four, you would think this wouldn’t be hard…but they talk loudly as they walk towards the gym, they push and shove, they will unlink and run to the windows and look in…talking to those that are inside. Which is exactly what I told them not to do like 80 times before we go out and before we go back in. so when they disobey me they get time taken away (5 minutes per thing they do wrong) so usually by the time we get to the gym or get back to the classroom their afternoon recess has been taken away. Which is exactly what happened today, I couldn’t believe that it would happen again, but then again with my class it is totally possible.
This afternoon it was like the listening switch was turned off and the not listening switch was turned on. By the time school was out I was sick of hearing “teacher! Teacher! I don’t get it!” “Teacher what are you doing?” “T-E-A-C-H-E-R! C-A-N I GO P-E-E?!” we hear that line so much that the teachers once in their own apartments will just randomly say “I have to pee really bad” our kid’s speech is starting to rub off on us. It is suppose to be the other way around, the things we tell our kids will rub off on them, but I think that is yet another thing that we underestimated.
After school it was decided that we (the girls) should go out to eat. But for once I didn’t want to do, honestly my day had been really long and the last thing that I wanted to do was be in a group of people, and more importantly I just wanted me time. I wanted to be able to write Tim and to write you all. I just wanted some alone time. And honestly it was really nice, I was able to write three pages on Tim’s letter and I have been writing you all, and I got to have a nice quiet supper and I didn’t have to pay for it and it was just nice. Also it is like 9:00p.m. and I can go to bed because I finished all of my work around 6:30 p.m. and going to bed early is like finding gold in Maryland. So I am off to bed J

August 23, 2006

Hey all,
Today was a slightly better day, I decided to try something a little different in class, like for reading I added spelling and phonics, so that with each group I did three different things with them…so I taught each subject three times…so by the time I was done with “reading” I had already taught something (well lets see spelling 3 times, phonics 3 times, reading 3 times) nine times…and yeah by the time I get done I’m like no more neigh I say neigh! Yeah it does get to you after a while. Math went really quick because all they had to do was count the objects and write down the answer on the blank, but they still missed a lot of work, I really don’t know why…we did it together and well you would think that they would get a one hundred percent, but that is just wishful thinking.
So yeah the most common questions that I get during the morning is “When is recess?” “Can we go play?” “What are we doing?” “What are you doing now?” Once lunch is over, the next question I get is “When do we go home?” at that point there is still like 2 hours left until school is out and their brains have shut off and they are working on battery power and most likely most of them will fall asleep while I am talking to them.
Today was library day, so we went to the library and looked at books, I started looking for books that I would be able to read to my students. After I found them I found a book called “Life among the Samurai” and something about the name clicked in my mind. I remembered Tim telling me once that if he could have picked a time period to have lived in he would have wanted to live in ancient Japan during the time of the Samurai. Now I didn’t know what was so great about it except that Tim has studied martial arts, and well likes it and all. So I decided to check out the book and read some of it for myself…I would just like to say that there is nothing about that time period that is awesome. I mean it was a gross and horrible time period and the group of people were um not really that nice, the stuff that they did (gross!) and I haven’t even read the book yet, I just looked at the pictures. But they were good at fighting (since that appears to be the class that it was) but I hope that martial arts is the only thing that he likes about that time period.
Anyway after the library things went rather slow and when school got out I got to make lesson plans (the most funniest thing to do ever) it took about two hours to complete and after that Marla and I went back to the apartment and I started grading papers (oh boy) but I am done now, finished about 45 minutes ago it is about 9:00 and I am going to bed! I like going to bed early and getting up early, so I am going to say bye to you all right now, talk to you later. J

August 24, 2006

Well right now Raz and Cable are in our apartment, Joan gave them a cooking lesson (well Raz got the lesson, Cable cleaned the fish). It was actually very funny, 1st off our apartment “play fights” we argue and laugh and yell at each other and then start cracking up…so Raz and Joan were “fighting” and he asked us how on earth we could stand it ever day, I piped up and said “We’re used to it” (I was meaning that we do it all the time) he was like “Oh that was mean, that is it! You are off the ‘good’ list” by then I was dying of laughter and trying to hide my face behind the papers that I was grading (I had quite a stack). I wondered “was I ever on the good list?” From there we just started to joke and “fight” and laugh. I feel very much more on the healthy side, laughter is good for you right? When it was time to eat Marla and I declined the offer to eat the orange fish (complete with head and tail). Both of us like fish, but we had A) eaten already and B) Fish makes us both sick when we eat it. Besides I didn’t want to eat something that was looking at me while I ate it. Cable was in charge of saying grace and near the end of his prayer he said “and please help us not to get sick or be poisoned by Joan’s cooking” (Raz, Joan, Marla, and myself were snickering during the prayer and burst out laughing as soon as he said amen.) He was very confused at why we were all laughing, but once we told him he claimed that he had said something totally different. Which made all of us laugh all the more. As Joan, Raz and Cable ate I continued to grade my papers and enter the grades into the grade book and then into my computer. But it took quite some time to do, I was laughing so much that my stomach started to hurt.
Well Raz asked me if I liked it here, like if it was all that I imagined. I told him yes and he said that he predicted that there were lots of SM’s that weren’t going to make it. So we have just been talking and laughing and talking some more. It has been really nice, I mean there are times when you are so ready to come home, but yet you do like it here, and having people over makes it like 20 times easier to go on another 9 months.
Cable and Raz bicker quite a lot…and as they got ready to go, Joan insisted that they take the curry and the fish back to their apartment, Cable wanted to put the left-over fish on a plate…Raz told him to put the fish in the tinfoil that he had, but Cable said the plate would be better…and so they argued about that fact for three minutes until Raz handed Cable the fish rapped in tinfoil. Then the task of putting the curry into containers, now Raz new that the curry would fit into a medium size container and a very small container, on the other hand Cable thought that they needed a very large container. So then that argument started and I just sat there and laughed. Raz won again, but then someone had to take the food back to their apartment…Raz wanted Cable to and Cable wanted Raz to. Both of them had all of their stuff in the teacher’s work room, but in the end Cable won the fight and Raz was on his way back to his apartment with his food…then us girls cleaned up the kitchen and enjoyed our evening.
Now about today, it went well to an extent. I mean worship was a lot of fun and I got my kids to laugh. I sang to them Halalala-a-la-lu-ya and they all laughed and we had a lot of fun. And a lot of things went well, but my first graders aren’t used to being in school until 3pm, in kindergarten they got out of school at 12:00. So in the afternoon they are usually very tired and it is hard to teach them anything. But they were pretty good today, I can’t say anything bad about them, there were some kids that missed 12 minutes of recess for the entire day. I mean you would think that they would learn not to act up and all when they see check marks getting put next to their names. But they don’t seem to notice, must help that they don’t know how to read. But well I am going to go because I have been laughing too much. But I all miss ya. Bye.

August 25, 2006

It is Friday! Hallelujah! But today was one of those days, you know where the kids are really, really good during worship, like we had a lot of fun we sang Who’s the King of the Jungle, Father Abraham, Jesus Love is a Bubbling Over, My God Loves Me, The Clapping Version of Jesus Loves Me…and others that I can’t remember…I told them the story of Copper and Buffy wanting into the house and how my parents would squirt her with the spray bottle and how persistent she was…I told them God is that persistent with us, he will not give up no matter how we try to push him away…I have to come up with worship talks for my kids and I am starting to run out of ideas. But half way through worship I could see that my students were going to be a handful that day…and they were…they wouldn’t listen even when I started writing names on the board…I didn’t shout at them all morning long…not until the afternoon when I surprised myself and screamed at them…well I didn’t scream out more then one word…like you couldn’t even hear yourself think…I yelled out “Quiet!” and the room was dead silent. I lectured them on what I expected of them and told them that they were in the 1st grade now and that they shouldn’t act this way. So basically if you really want to tell how bad that they were…on Monday the entire class will miss 20 minutes of their first recess (which is only 30 minutes long) and then between 8 other students they have 34 minutes between them. So yeah listening on Friday was not something that they were able to do easily. Which made my day rather long…but no matter how awful my class was in the classroom recess was something to behold.
Now the favorite thing to do during recess is to take empty water bottles and stomp on them…then you stand on them and your friends pull you around the gym and to be honest you get going pretty fast and sometimes the one getting pulled might lose his or her balance and wipe out on the gym floor…now when that happens some other student comes running up to me or some other teacher and says “Teacher, Teacher! Someone is crying! Over there!” now they say over there and don’t usually point so you are left to look through this mass of running and screaming students until you find the injured one. So the first student that I had to go and pick up from the floor…had been sliding around on those plastic bottles, lost his balance and hit the floor with the back of his head. I took him over to sit by me, I check the back of his head to make sure that he wasn’t bleeding, then I wiped away his tears, then I talked to him and made sure that he was o.k. Soon he went on his way…running back to those that had made him fall in the first place. About five minutes later, one of my students by the name of Denzel ran up to me and said “teacher, teacher, come quick _______ is crying” So he pointed yet again into the crowd of children grabbed my hand and pulled me to the student. Now I recognized the kid holding the back of his head and sobbing (he is usually running around the gym hitting his buddies with his slippers…side note: slippers are flip flops)…anyway I knew that he was a tough kid and it had to be something really big to make him cry. Now once I got an idea of what happened (sobbing children are hard to understand, so it thow they got hurt out of). Denzel grabbed my hand again and started dragging me over towards the stairs to show me “who did it” and the little boy who had been hurt hung onto my other hand. At the stairs Denzel pointed out “who had done it” and I looked straight at a little girl who was swinging on the stairs looking very innocent…(I was like this little girl made this tough boy cry) so I asked her “Did you hit him?” she said “Yes” I asked “Why?” She stated “Because he wouldn’t share.” With that I took the little boy to sit by Maggie (One of the 2nd grade teachers) while I took the naughty little girl to Mr. B…she came back crying. But what did she expect; she hit a little boy as hard as she could on the back of his neck to make him share with her, did she really think that she would get away without seeing Mr. B? Apparently.

August 26, 2006

Happy Sabbath! Today was a wonderful day (until we had to go to the funeral that is…but more on that later) After Church, actually around the time we were finishing lunch a small piece of gravel came flying through our door…skipping across the floor. I walked out the door and peered over the railing of the porch. There I found Mark grinning up at me…I asked “You rang?” The younger boys (also known jokingly as the hot boys) were going to walk to Twin Falls…a good 45 min to an hour walk from the school. Becky and I decided that it would be fun, Marla was sick, and Joan decided that she also wanted to go. 15 minutes later we were making our way down the road and into the jungle. The boys all ran ahead and the girls were left behind (well Gene was with the girls…and he is definitely not a girl) Now the walk to Twin Falls took a long time, we had to walk threw this grass that was past my waist and grabbed at your shoes and had these ants that crawled along the ground that would bite you as hard as they could on your toe…how do I know this? Experienced it…it hurt so bad…it was like the ant took revenge on my foot for all those who had just stepped on his home…I have a nice little red mark on my foot from that stupid ant. Have you ever sweated so much that you had droplets of sweat dripping off your nose and your chin? Just running down your face? But the funny thing is that I really don’t notice how hot it is anymore…I mean we are always out in it and so I just don’t find it so hot anymore and besides that fact that we were sweating a lot it wasn’t all that bad of a hike…even though it was really long. Now twin falls is wonderful…it is really pretty…now there are two waterfalls and we jump off the upper one (the first one that you come to) Now the boys had beaten us to the falls and when we climbed down to it we could hear them jumping in…the water there is deep, like there is no way that you can touch the bottom from any height that you jump. The part that you jump off of is anywhere between 20 to 25 ft high. I was the second to last girl to jump, we waited until there was only 15 minutes left (Jon does that sound familiar?) Anyway I jumped and I have video of me jumping…the fall was so long (actually I hit the water in less than 2 seconds) I was starting to wonder, as I dropped, if I would ever hit the water…but I did…and felt the impact of hitting the water in a more or less sitting position (the fall was so long that I wasn’t as straight as I should have been when I hit the water) because of that by the time I started to swim up to the surface I had done a complete flip underwater. The current tried to pull me off the next drop off (which is the second waterfall) but I am a lifeguard after all and I didn’t have any problem swimming to the rocks where I could sit with the other girls and watch the boys jump in. The boys were crazy…they were jumping off and doing front flips and back flips and diving in and all of that stuff…surprised that no one got hurt. But it was so much fun, Mr. B. came and picked us up and that saved a lot of walking time (which was a good thing) cause we had to get ready to go to a funeral…it was so boring…I mean everything was in Pohnpeian (Kelli how do you spell that?) So we sat there from 7 till 9:30 trying to stay awake…and it was so boring…like I said before…my little mind wandered and I was so tired, I still am…I’m just up writing you all, It was a good experience, but I hope that we don’t have to stay out late for every Saturday night, cause it is so getting old.
Anyway tomorrow Mr. B. is taking us to the ruins, which will be fun and I can’t wait. But I really think that I should get and sleep a few hours…we leave at 9 o’clock tomorrow morning and I would like to be in a good mood. Talk to you all later

week 2, the getting ready to teach process

2006-08-28T22:19:00.000+11:00

Really silly picture of me, I'm looking at a waterfall...

We are at the top of that rather large rock, can't remember the name of it at the moment, but it was an insane climb, so fun...

August 13, 2006

Sunday, I got to sleep in, oh and it was wonderful I felt so rested when I got up. I was lazy and enjoyed reading my bible and talking to God. Around 10:30 Marla and I went down to the teacher’s room to get onto the internet. I was on the internet until 2:00 in the afternoon. I got to talk to Matt and Beth-Anne on instant messenger, along with Matt Lucio. It was really nice to talk to them even if it was only for a little bit. And I got to write people and e-mail them stuff and that was so fun. I also got to work on my webpage (sorry everyone it is not up and running yet). Then I had to go and do lesson plans…oh joy…I was so not looking forward to it, but thankfully Mrs. McGuier helped me with my lesson plans for the week and we got it done in like two hours and I was so happy to have them done. I just went back to my apartment, ate supper, and read a book (Deborah and Barak) a really good book by the way, until late in the evening. Like I thought that I would be alright going to bed at 10:30, but I was certainly wrong.

August 14, 2006

My alarm went off at 5:45 in the morning, I could not move, resetting my alarm for 6:30 I once again fell asleep. Even with getting up at 6:30 to take a shower I thought that I was going to fall asleep in the shower, but thankfully I didn’t. After my shower I had to go through the decision process of deciding what skirt to wear, and when I decided I had to pick a shirt and then I trotted out to the kitchen with my bible and prayer journal to have breakfast and God time. I popped two slices of bread into the toaster and settled myself onto one of the bar stools and waited for my toast. As I ate my peanut butter toast with honey and cherry preserves I finished reading the book of judges. Then I wrote in my prayer journal, I was very unsure about my first day of teaching.
At staff worship I sat there wondering what I had gotten myself into. I mean teaching for a whole ten months? I wasn’t sure that I would be able to do that. But at 8:15 I was heading to my classroom where a whole bunch of students and their parents were sitting waiting for me to arrive. I was so nerves when I saw them, but I smiled and opened the classroom. At 8:30 I butchered my way through my student’s names, and then we sang songs for worship (and that could have gone worse honestly) and then I read them a worship thought and wished that it was more at their level. Then I went over the rules of class, which were suppose to take 30 minutes, but it took about 10 minutes, by then I was starting to panic I hadn’t planned enough, so I took out my laptop computer and showed them pictures of my family, including a picture of my dad on his birthday, (dad one of the kids thought that you were 24 years old). Then I had them take out their crayons and had them color until recess. After recess we took a campus tour and from there we went back to our classroom and worked on a bible coloring sheet and I read to them, and then we worked on something called “my family” where the students would draw out their house and their family members and my teacher aid and myself would go around and label all the family members and we had them take it home for their parents to see. After that I had them color freely and listen to me read them small stories, many of them fell asleep and then it was time for them to leave, since it was only a half day and all. (thank goodness, I was so tired and I wanted to sleep) But I couldn’t, at 1:00 we had staff meeting and after that I went and made lunch for myself, Rice and Ramen… at 2:30 Becky and I decided to take a short nap before our shopping trip at 3:00, we were out in a matter of minutes, at 2:55 my alarm went off, but I was so tired that I couldn’t tell whether or not it was my alarm so I put it up next to my ear and suddenly realized that indeed it was my alarm and that it was time to get up. I turned off my alarm and called over to Becky who was still sleeping, it took three tries, but she finally woke up. We changed into long shorts (skirts are annoying to shop in, having to climb into the back of the trucks and all) and tumbled out of the apartment and then down to the shelter where we always waited for the yellow trucks to appear. Becky and I were like sleep walking and we were like, this is only a half day, think of what tomorrow will be like…
Shopping was fun, like normal. We first stopped at the post office to drop off and pick up mail. Since they were taking an incredibly long time Becky and I trotted across the street to look at skirts and a few other things (I found Christmas gifts for my family) I got a really pretty brown skirt and then we walked out of the store and found that the yellow fire truck had left us. Well that was really nothing new, we knew where they were going to be going (to Wall Mart) so we walked out and then joined two other girls who had been left as well and headed to a t-shirt shop and then we walked back down the street past the skirt shop to Wall Mart (it is called wall mart because it is next to a wall) When we were just 25 ft from the entrance the yellow fire truck rumbled by and Raz yelled “Hey!” and pointed at Becky and I. We smiled and then piled into the lovely air conditioned building. We really didn’t buy much of anything, I bought a tin can of honey peanuts and a cold Arizona Ice Tea (it was lemon flavor, and I was so thirsty) Once in the truck I opened the Ice Tea and totally enjoyed how cold it was. Raz had gotten the Raspberry flavor and wanted to try mine…I let him of course (it isn’t anything new to me to eat or drink water, juice, or tea after my friends) and then I tried his and I have to say I liked the raspberry flavor better. But once I downed the Ice Tea my stomach had a small talk with me…it doesn’t like caffeine all that much, because I don’t drink stuff with caffeine in it much. But it was so good, so I didn’t mind at all. We shopped around more and soon we were at our last stop and it hadn’t rained yet (that is amazing, the clouds normally get stuck on the mountains and it will rain) we ran into Palm Terres (Kelli how do you spell that?) In there I just needed two notebooks, another jar of peanut butter and a jar of jam. I wandered around and found Raz looking at flip flops (they have the best flip flops there, I will certainly have to get more of them before I leave in May) I told him which ones were comfy and which ones weren’t (although he already knew which ones weren’t cause he had bought them the week before) but in the end he found a nice pair and then we wandered around looking for things that we might need but really didn’t. Then we checked out and left the store. We were not far from campus when it started to rain, once back in my apartment I went down to the office to pick up my package (mom it came, so it takes two weeks to get here) and then I unpacked it and read more of my book, ate some supper, read some more, finished making my lesson plans better and now I am writing this. And really bed sounds wonderful, so I think that I might just go and crash. Love you all. Bye.

August 15, 2006

Well ya’ll today was certainly a day to go down in the record books as one awful, horrible, terrible day. I mean it didn’t start out bad, but I think that my students are used to me now and well they do not listen not even a little bit. I was so glad that I had God time this morning, cause I was starting to loose it. Worship went well, reading could have gone better, but then again these kids can’t read so anything will be bad. Recess was nice except remember the listening factor? Well these kids are like little devils. If any of you have worked at camp and thought those kids were bad, well I don’t think that you would last a day with 20 of these in your classroom from 8:30 to 3:00. Anyway Math was like a nightmare, I mean most of them can count up to like 10, but they will not follow directions and we did this in class together so that they would get them all right, and students still got them wrong. But these first graders do not know their numbers, they do not know how to read, they can’t remember their ABC’s, they are pretty good with copying #’s and letters off the board. They also like to peal the paint off their desks, I shouldn’t complain that much, I really shouldn’t but it is only day two and I can’t believe that I will be doing this for the next ten months, but I have been told that it gets easier…I sure hope so. I am sick of the persistent “Teacher! Teacher I’m done!” or “teacher I need help” and if I don’t come running right them I can hear “teacher, Teacher, TEACHER!” or “Teacher I was done FIRST!” Usually around this point teacher is getting rather annoyed and wants the little voices to stop, but they don’t stop they never do, but since I now know where they are all sitting and I know most of their names I can write their names on the board when they are naughty instead of loosing my voice trying to make them listen. I read to the students all the time, in all of the free time, trying to get them used to English words, but mostly I get unruly children and all of that. So don’t let people tell you that being a teacher is like the most wonderful thing ever because you get the summers off, well it might be rewarding once your students start to learning, but right now it is nothing but hard work with little reward (I’ve been grading their papers and um well we have a long way to go until they can understand even simple English) But don’t get me wrong, I do like it here and all, but I’m not sure that I am totally keen on teaching anymore, but I will not quit, hopefully tomorrow will go better then today, because other wise I am going to be one extremely frustrated and depressed teacher, and that is really not good.
But on the bright side we got our uniform shirts today. The girl’s are red, white, and blue…while the guys are blue, white, and grey. And I got paid today, and that was really nice, I put it into the school safe along with my passport, tickets, and travelers checks. That way I knew that it would always be safe and I wouldn’t have worry about where it was all the time. Basically if we loose the paper tickets we are up a creek…basically do not loose those. Very important to keep, anyway tickets for going anywhere have shot up, I mean on Sunday a round trip ticket to Hawaii was $1700.00 and well other places are also expensive and well they don’t allow carry on luggage anymore of something, I don’t know for sure but that is what we have been hearing, talk about a boring flight home…23 hours home with nothing to do, oh I am not looking forward to that. Well I still have other letters to write, mainly to Tim cause well, I ran out of time yesterday. Talk to all of you fun people later, Bye

August 16, 2006

Well I thought that Wednesday would go better then Monday and Tuesday, but that was just wishful thinking. Now if I was in the states and still working on my education degree I would give up on the whole idea of being a teacher once and for all. But since I’m not and I still believe that God put me on this island for a reason, besides the fact that he needed to teach me a few things during my stay here, and if he is trying to get my attention by giving me trials galore, I am getting to the breaking point. The problem is that I work really hard all day, like I got up at 5:55 this morning and it is um well 1 am at the moment and I really should go to bed. But things went wrong when I was entering the grades into my computer, and then I noticed that things were wrong in my blue grade book, so I had to fix that. And then I had to do lesson plans and that took about an hour and a half to complete. And before that I had to grade all of the homework cause I won’t let my teacher’s aid do it cause I want to see what kind of progress (if any) my students are making. I know many excuses about things like this, but every morning I wake up and I am excited that things are going to be different and that I will have a good class for once, but everyday my hopes are dashed, these kids just don’t listen, you can take away as much recess as you want, but they will still misbehave, and to be perfectly honest I don’t know how much more of this I can take…..on that note I am going to bed, cause I don’t feel like remembering this day.

August 17, 2006

Sleep was totally a welcome sight early this morning, but as my alarm went off at 6:20 I wished that the darkness would continue on and I wouldn’t have to see my students. I know that it sounds mean, but I hate my students…yes there are a few that I really like, but on a whole, I hate my entire class. They do not listen, they do not take me seriously, they do not understand when I tell them no or write their names up on the board. I feel like I am constantly yelling at them, until I have no voice left in order to talk to my friends when school is out. The thing is that my class is usually good until right after lunch. Around the time lunch recess begins they become little terrors and they are not fun to be around, today I almost lost it completely in the afternoon, they don’t listen and they do what they please, their parents don’t stop them at home so they don’t expect me to stop them. I honestly feel like I have been teaching for at least four months, but really it has only been four days. It isn’t that fun of a feeling, and I even told my class that I don’t like yelling at them, but that they needed to listen to me and stop their talking…they are like high schools students in little bodies, they know exactly what to do in order to get their way, that is all that they want, they want to get their way, but what they normally run into is that I am not interested in letting them get their way. But I am planning on changing a few things by the time next week comes, I mean I have never taught before and I am going to want to change how I am doing some things and other things well I will probably change them every week until I find a system that works.
I’m actually in the teacher’s workroom; I did my grading and entered the grades in both the blue grade book and my computer. Then I looked through books and found the pages that I need for next week (lots of copies to be made, I am going to keep those kids so busy next week…they will not have time to be bad) Then I checked my e-mail and after that well I am writing you! And my battery is about to die…so I will have to write more later.

August 18, 2006
Well Friday was certainly a challenge. Things would have been better if I wasn’t feeling like I was going to throw-up during class. And my students, well they were as wild as ever, but I couldn’t yell at them, my voice hurt and it so wasn’t happening. But I did get through the day, which was a good thing, cause it was an hour shorter then most of the school days and I was so sick of my kids and wanted to go and sit in my apartment. Which I did as soon as I could…and Marla who had been sick the last two days was there and we watched a movie and then did a deep clean of the three rooms of our house…after finding 4 cockroaches on different days…we decided the time had come, to clean the house really good.

August 19, 2006

Sabbath, I was so glad that it was here and the rest was great. Sabbath school and church were fun, I mean it always is, but what I want to tell you about is what we did after church. By the airport there is this huge rock that is like 600 ft tall and we climbed it. Now to climb that rock we had to start out at the bottom on the trial and work our way up. Then after a 45 minute hike we had to start climbing, but it was so fun. I followed Kat because her husband John told me to…he said that I was small and I could take the route that she took…it was safer too. So after being told to always have a hold on something I scrambled up after Kat. There were roots, tree branches, a blue rope, and a metal pipe that helped us up the first part. And then I looked up and saw the giant rock we were about to climb. Now most people would look at the metal pipe that was suppose to help us climb up the rock and say…No way…but noticing that Kat didn’t pause I scrambled up after her. The pipe that had old wiring in it must have been left over from WWII. But it certainly helped as we climbed up. Now I live rock climbing and I was certainly glad that I had taken off my Tevas for this part of the climb…more traction. I was not going to be like the other girls on this outing…they were somewhere down the mountain complaining about how hard it was and how much they hated it…no I was going to climb this rock if it was the last thing I did. Now perhaps it was the adrenaline rush or the fact that I was just toying with death (if you fell you would drop until you hit either a tree or the ground 600ft below) but whatever it was I was so excited about the climb and the fact that we were doing something this high without ropes was totally an exciting thought. But since I am writing to you, I survived and saw the beautiful scenery from the top. The ocean stretched out before us and the reefs looked awesome, you could see the tiny airport and its runway and the fishing boats and the island down below. It was so cool. I took lots of pictures and videos with my camera. I got to eat the best pineapple that I have ever had and it was so good and then we took more pictures and talked and rested and waited for the rest of the group to get up. (Which took some time…I hope those girls don’t come again with us cause they made the trip less enjoyable for those of us that had to listen to them the entire time) While we waited we explored the top of the big rock and found that the pineapple bushes will cut you…so besides the bruises that I already have I also have cuts on my feet and legs…Once the girls got up it was time to go back down…and going down was easy…like you would think that it wouldn’t be because you are going backwards down what you already climbed up…but I just felt around with my toes and held onto the pipe and all was good…even at the very end of the climb down. I left my shoes off as we made our way down, cause I had more traction, people thought it odd, but I wasn’t slipping around like they were. One girl Carrie past out on the trial, she was dehydrated and couldn’t keep the water we gave her down. She threw up along side the trail and felt better…then after 45 min. a bunch of us helped her down the trail…it took a long time but we got her down and into one of the trucks…she is right as rain today…but we were very glad that she didn’t pass out on the steep climb of the rock face…that would have been really bad…
Once we got back on campus Marla and I rushed off to the shower, she let me go first cause I was certainly the muddiest. Once I was done she got in and suddenly there was a new Marla…for some reason because of the fact that she has ADD and ADHD, when she has a lot of exercise her ADHD kicks in really hard and she gets extremely hyper and starts talking like an 8 year old or as Raz put it, she was acting drunk. It was funny but annoying too. We went out to eat and I tried fish for the first time ever and the fish burger wasn’t bad, I liked it, but I don’t know if it was the fish burger or the cigarette smoke that made me sick to my stomach, but either way I felt sick and left early with one of the other groups…but I a fine today…but for those of you who have never tried fish it isn’t all that bad and I liked it…I hopefully will be able to try more someday.

Well that was yesterday, and today I have a ton to do in my classroom and such. I am in great need of children’s books, like ones for little kids (6 or 7) and if any of you would like to send some books that would be great…flash cards for letters and numbers would be great too…I have to make my own for the kids right now…really time consuming.

Anyway I miss all of you! Talk to you later

Emily

The adventure begins, July 30th

2006-08-28T22:02:00.000+11:00

This is a sunset, the first one that I saw on Pohnpei. Sadly almost 3 weeks after coming to the island. But it was beautiful anyway.

July 30, 2006

I awoke at 2:30 a.m. when my mom came up to my room; considering I had gone to bed at midnight I was in no mood to be awake and functioning. Kristin was still asleep so I didn’t want to wake her up. I tip toed out of my room and started getting ready for my extremely long day. My flight was to leave at 6:00 that morning from BWI. Kristin had stayed the night and I was really glad, cause we are like best friends and well we aren’t going to see each other for 10 long months…we did everything together at southern and the thought of not being around each other for the next ten months was a really hard, same with a lot of my friends, when I saw them on Saturday I couldn’t really believe that I wasn’t going to be seeing any of them for several months. Anyway around 3:30 we hit the road, it was way too early to be out and about. Felicia, Kristin, and I were in the back seat, my dad and mom were up front. The drive took a little more than an hour to get to BWI from my house. Once we got there we got to stand in line and I looked around not wanting to say good-bye. Once I was checked in I got ready to go through security and to say good-bye to my family and Kristin. I really dislike good-byes and everyone was crying, I hugged everyone twice and clung to Kristin…we were just crying not really wanting to admit that it was time for me to go. All too soon I had to go, as I walked through security I looked back once and waved at my family then I turned and continued on my way. I talked to a lady in line who was on her way to Detroit; I brushed the tears from my eyes and was determined not to cry. Once through security I got to my gate just in time for the first boarding call. I was in the last row next to two little black boys, they lived in Houston and we chatted for a little bit, right before the plane took off, I was nerves cause I don’t really like to fly, but I knew that I would by the time I got to Pohnpei. The flight to Houston didn’t take too long…it was a 3 hr. 40 min flight; we made great time, and arrived at Houston early. I love the Airport in Houston not because of the size, that is a little annoying, but because the runway goes on a bridge right over a road and it is so cool to look out the window at the cars below and the thought of the drivers that get to see a plane go right over you would be so amazingly cool. At least that is my opinion.
Once at the Houston airport I found my gate and started to look for other SM’s which took some time but the first person I saw was Charisa, she is from Ohio and she was going to Palau. I waved her over to where I was sitting and we sat down and started talking. Soon we started seeing more SM’s and we called to them and started talking and laughing and having a great time. All too soon it was time to board the plane for Hawaii, now I was very excited cause I had never been to Hawaii before and even though the flight to Hawaii was 8 hours long, I was so ready to be there.
I got to sit next to this guy and his family; how the seating was in this jet was two seats, four seats, and then two seats. So it was me and then this really cool guy, across the aisle was his wife and their adorable baby (this baby was so cute) his wife’s parents and then in the next two seats were some random people that I have never seen before. But they were on their way to Hawaii…totally an awesome place to go. The flight was very, very long, I slept a little bit and watched a movie called bench warmers, it was funny, but I don’t think that I would want to see it again. I played video games and slept and watched more TV and played more games and tried to read, but wasn’t in the mood, I wrote Tim, but soon decided that it was too bumpy to write anything. Every few minutes the screens in the middle of the plane would flash up how far we had gone, how much farther we had to go and how long it was going to take, it started to get very depressing. We got to eat wonderful air plane food which made me feel sick and I’d look out the window and see blue water and sky for countless number of hours, ever hopeful that I would see an island somewhere in the great expanse of blue ocean, but I didn’t until we came to the first of the Hawaiian islands. The first island was big and green looking, the second we flew over was slightly smaller and was brown and not all that pretty looking. The guy next to me pointed different things out to me as we flew over them; he had been to Hawaii before when he was in the military. We saw big gray-blue navy boats and planes too, the landscape looked a lot California from above, rather brown in the city areas, but green on the mountains, the beaches looked wonderful and all of us wanted to jump into the water…our landing was rather bumpy, but at least we were safely on the ground.
Once out of the air plane I found Gene and we started walking to the baggage claim, the Hawaiian air port is indoor and outdoor, really cool. My computer bag started to hurt my arm, cause it was so heavy, Gene decided to carry it, I protested only a little bit, giving up I told him that pink was such a great color on him…he just smiled and said that it wasn’t a problem. Joy Brown was waiting for us at the baggage claim she gave us Leigh’s (by the way how on earth do you spell that?) and we started looking for other SM’s and our luggage. I started seeing random southern people and the guys were being such gentlemen, I started to enjoy the help (coming from a stubborn person that is totally a compliment to all the guys that were such great help in the air port) I was so happy to see my luggage come, I was standing next to a guy from southern and he was a little shocked that I was able to lift it off the belt…both bags weighed 50 pounds. I started meeting the other SM’s from the different schools. I met a guy named Travis and his friend they were going to Majuro…I knew that I had seen Travis somewhere so finally I asked if he had ever been on a mission trip with the Chesapeake Conference to El Salvador. I was correct on how he looked familiar to me, four years ago we had been on a mission trip together, as I recall he had a major crush on Ansley Howe. He hasn’t grown since that time, but he is very sweet, I hope that he enjoys his time in Majuro.
Once all the SM’s were found we all piled our luggage and ourselves into the bus and headed for the Adventist school in Honolulu. The school was about a 30 minute walk from the beach and all of us were eager to get there, but first we had to go through registration and that was more or less fun, it took a really longtime and it wasn’t as enjoyable as one might think. There were about 90 SM’s all together and we were all packed into the cafeteria and we were all tired and ready to be out of there and at the beach. Once we were done with registration all of us grabbed or luggage and headed for our rooms. Missy (a girl I met while registering) and I dragged our bags up the stairs to room # 36, once we set up camp we got into our bikinis and board shorts and tank tops and headed out the door to meet up with the guys. We were totally ready to go to the beach. Once all of us were together we made our way to the beach, certainly took some time, I mean stop lights and all of that and it was so hot outside…it took us about 45 minutes to walk to the beach…but by the time we got there we were so ready to get in the water. All the girls stripped down to just our bikinis and Larry (a guy from SAU) asked WWEWD? (What would Ellen White Do?) Our response was laughter as we ran into the ocean. The guys complained that the water was too cold, but it was just right, I totally loved it. Larry, Abner, Missy, and I swam out to a border of rocks that protected us from the rough water; it also made the water really salty. Once out at the “rocks” we found that the rocks weren’t rocks at all but dead coral. Knowing how stupid it is to walk on coral we swam back to the shore and decided to explore…that was fun, around 5 we decided that it was time to walk back to the school. That took some energy; I was starting to notice how tired I really was, I hadn’t really eaten all day, not since Saturday night, and that was a long time ago. Once back at the school we quickly changed and got ready for supper, which also made me feel really sick so I didn’t eat really anything, Gene asked if I was alright and I told him that I was fine, but didn’t really feel the best. The girls that I had gone swimming with left to take showers in the gym, I went with them cause I felt rather salty from the water. Now the showers in the gym had to be made for girls that were like 5’2” I mean the shower head was nine inches too short, it was playing limbo, trying to lean all the way back to get one’s head wet, oh and the water was cold too…only four out of the nine showers had hot water, and the shower that I had, didn’t have such a luxury as hot water. After our showers we had worship and it was just about all that many of us could do to stay awake during worship, I mean by then it was like 1:30 a.m. back home, I would look around at the other SM’s and many of them were asleep or close to it. After worship we got together with our principles, by then it was 9 o’clock at night or 3 o’clock in the morning depending on what clock your body was on, mine was on the 3 o’clock time. We all sat there looking at our principle and really not understanding anything that he was saying, we were so tired and jetlagged, so our principle decided that we would talk more the next night. All of us totally agreed. I got to bed at 10pm by then I had been up 25 ½ hours, I was so tired I thought that I was going to be sick. Apparently I was out in little less then 5 minutes. I was so thankful for sleep.

July 31, 2006

Breakfast was wonderful, I hadn’t eaten a real meal since Saturday night and the fruit and pancakes and links tasted so wonderful. After breakfast was worship and southern was doing song service, so I went down to the chapel early and practiced with everyone and then we started song service, we started out with making melodies, not my favorite camp song in the world, in fact I hate that song, but it was a good ice breaker song, and well it was something that needed to be done. The rest of song service went well, then when we were done the guy who was doing worship got up. I got bored pretty quick so I started to doodle on my folder that they had given me, I like to doodle it helps me keep my mind on what they are talking about instead of drifting off into space.
So the meetings were rather fun in a totally boring way. Really it is called how to become a teacher in all of two days, got to love that. After the morning meetings we went out to see the sights of Hawaii. We saw the Punch Bowl Memorial and some other place with this awesome view, but I really can’t remember the name to it. But the view was beautiful, and I really enjoyed it. The Punch Bowl Memorial was very interesting, but we only had 20 minutes there, I would have liked to have stayed longer so that I could find out a little bit more about it. But at least we got to see some of the island, even though it was very quick and we weren’t able to see much. But when we got back we got to sit through more meetings and another supper and worship (well actually before worship they made us get into our island groups and we then had to work as a team to go something. Those groups that were too big had to split in half, Pohnpei became girls against guys…the point of the game was to balance this long white piece of pipe, like the kind used in plumbing, on your two index finger and raise it as a team over the shortest persons head. So to make a long story short it is actually harder then it looks and the boys wanted to challenge the Pohnpei girls and they one…but only by 30 sec. We were close behind them…but they won so they got big heads from the whole thing…) So after worship we got to go to bed. Sleep was a very welcomed thing.

August 1, 2006

We awoke early yet again, but most of us felt rested. Tuesday was going to be long and packed, but we did get from 3 to 7pm off to do whatever we wanted, which helped us get through the long morning of meetings. In the morning we spent time learning how to teach lessons and to do that we were put into four groups, from there we chose a teacher and subject and then the rest of us were the students. Our group chose Abner to be our teacher and the subject was spelling. His class was all girls and we were learning the words “sit, hop, and run” we decided that we should act them out and then write them out on the board, we were first graders and it was rather fun to be silly and just act up and be very annoying.
After lunch we got to sit through more meetings and pictures too. They had to take pictures of all the different schools, islands, and then one group picture (that honestly took too long) When three o’clock came around people were literally out of there. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, personally I was getting tired, but then I was like…”I’m in Hawaii, I can’t just sleep” so a bunch of girls decided that we should go to the beach and I was like “why not?” so after I talked to my mom on the phone I went on my way with the other girls…it was a coldish day, it had rained all morning and was rather overcast, but we decided to get into the water anyway. A short time later two guys from Walla Walla joined us and we enjoyed swimming and talking in the water, it was too cold to sit outside of the water, so we sat in the water so that only our heads showed. Very refreshing and cold, you aren’t suppose to get goose bumps in Hawaii. After supper they had this communion thing. Southern was doing the music, so I helped out with that. And you know I didn’t have a problem with being up front and singing, I mean I was actually enjoying it. After we sang they had us get a partner so that we could wash each other’s feet. The other person had to be from a different island then us. Missy and I were partners; we washed each other’s feet with cups of water and dried them with paper towels. It was just great. We talked for awhile and then prayed and told each other that we would stay in touch, although I really wish that I had her e-mail address, cause suddenly it is really hard to stay in touch with her, cause I don’t know her address or anything. Anyway then we all came back in and broke the bread, actually we tore it, all of us at the table put one hand on the bread and then at the count of three (once a picture was taken) we pulled and ate whatever was in our hand. Then we talked about time that God had opened our eyes to his power, and there were some amazing stories. From there we poured the grape juice and then while we drank that more stories were told. It was just a really nice evening. They took all 90 of us outside and we prayed for this school year, it was totally awesome.
All too soon it was time to get moving, those of us that were leaving at 4:30 in the morning had to go and pack our suit cases and get them on the truck, I had to totally re-pack the smaller of my two bags. I packed everything except the cloths and toiletries that I would need in the morning. Then I dragged my two bags down the stairs (all three flights) and got them weighed, they were underweight according to those scales, but those scales were slightly off…in reality one bag weighed 50 pounds and the other 51.1 pounds. Yeah I did one amazing packing job. Once I loaded my gear and walked around the campus until I was tired, then I went to Room #36 and lay down on my green egg crate. I had packed all of my bedding so I was in for a cold night.

August 2-3, 2006

I awoke freezing at 3 a.m. I was so tired, yet I couldn’t sleep because I was cold. Only one hour left until I had to really get up and get ready for the day. I flipped over on my stomach and tried to get a few more winks in before 4 a.m. I was unsuccessful. At four the other girls that were leaving early started to wake up. We packed up and got on the bus. Joy came to me and asked me if I had seen Raz, I had to think back and then I told her that he was on the phone and on his computer on the back stairs. She hurried off to find him. As I watched her go I thought of what Brian had said a few months before, something about keeping Raz out of trouble, so if our stay in Hawaii is anything to go by, these next few months should be rather interesting. At the airport Raz and I were among the first few to get checked in, it honestly took forever for the people to check us in, I mean I have never really seen it take that long to get a mission group through line, but then again things work differently in Hawaii. Well we went through security and Raz got searched so I took his cell phone and of all things his tweezers and sat on the other side of security and waited like 10 minutes until he was released from the search of his bags.
At the gate we sat and waited for quite sometime, once on the plane I found out that Raz was sitting next to me on our 10 hour flight (the girl next to me wanted to sit next to her friend who was behind us, so Raz just switched, what a gentleman). We really weren’t all that talkative on that flight, reason? Rusty, Raz and I slept during the four hour flight to Majuro…Raz hadn’t slept the night before, and Rusty and I were just tired…but it certainly made the flight to Majuro a lot quicker. Once in Majuro it was Thursday morning, shocking isn’t it…leave at 6:55 Wednesday morning, travel all of 4 hours and find yourself face to face with early Thursday morning. Anyway Island hopping was kinda fun, the landings got worse and worse as the islands got smaller and smaller. Our landing onto Pohnpei was something to behold, we hit so very hard, a double bounce (the other landings just gave us whiplash, but this one…well it made you think that you were about to die), but we did survive that landing, although we were wondering if the plane was going to stay in one piece much longer. Those runways are so short that it is really hard for those planes to stop, we almost ended up in the ocean in more than one occasion, island hopping isn’t always the greatest thing.
Once on the Island of Pohnpei we got to go to through customs and the baggage claim (I’ve got Pohnpei’s stamp in my pass port now!) the baggage claim made us all laugh, it was so little and pick up trucks brought us the luggage and then they threw it onto the slanted metal thing so that we could find our luggage. No one was missing luggage, which was a good thing and soon we got through the second part of customs and were greeted by the locals that were waiting for us. Almost the entire church was there to great us and they gave us these welcome wreaths called Mar Mars (they are very pretty flowers that are tied together on this paper band that you put on your head and they are so pretty. I have so far gotten two of them. Once we were all out of customs we headed out of the air port and put our luggage onto these little red and yellow fire trucks from Japan (they are so cute and fun to ride in) most of us piled into the little Van like bus (also from Japan) and we were on our way to the school, I was wondering what it was going to look like there and I just couldn’t wait to stop, I was so tired of traveling. I wanted to be there and honestly I was thankful that I wasn’t going to have to travel on an air plane for the next 5 months or more (totally depends on where I go for Christmas).
Once there we found what apartment we wanted to be in and all we had an hour to unpack before we needed to go to town and get food for our apartments. Watching the guys shop was the funniest thing ever, I mean they are going to be eating nothing but rice and Ramen for the next 10 months…that is all that they know how to cook or are willing to buy. It is so funny to shop with them and listen to them argue about the things they need to buy and what they should or shouldn’t get while waiting in line. These are certainly memories.
Supper was a Mr. B’s house (he is our principle) and it was pizza and Asian type food, it was good and we got to sit around and talk and have fun and it was really fun.

August 5, 2006
(What we did on August 4 and 5 are combined into one entry)

Hey all,
I am safely in Pohnpei, in fact I am writing to you from my apartment. There are five of us in all in our apartment, two in one room and three in another. We all get a long great, Nadine is from Germany and she is terribly homesick, Marla from PUC, Becky is from Walla Walla (she just graduated), and Joan (Joanne is how you say it) our wonderful cook (she cooks for us 4 evenings a week, talk about being spoiled) is actually a native…she teaches at the school and well you would just have to meet her, you’d really like her no two ways about it.

Every morning we are awakened by the pigs and the roosters next door…they start squawking, grunting, and screaming around 3:00 in the morning. Most of the apartments have rats and cockroaches in them, we don’t have either cause Joan has this chalky stuff that kills the cockroaches and the rats well we don’t keep any of our food in their original containers, everything is put either into the fridge or we have plastic containers, zip lock bags, or big buckets to put the food in so they are out of luck.

We have a school pet that lives in a random ditch that is usually overflowing with water and oddly enough shrimp; it likes to eat PB+J sandwiches, but hates frogs. It would love to eat your fingers and toes if you are dumb enough to put them into the water. The kids love to feed it and as a result it is about three feet long…now girls don’t scream when I tell you what it is. The school pet is a fresh water Eel. Pretty cool don’t yeah think? Also gives you pause for thought, cause where there is one Eel there is prob. More somewhere on this island, of course we discovered it right before we went swimming in the river (by the way, the river is so refreshing and it was really fun) it rained while we were swimming, but it was still really fun, the girls were all screaming and shrieking cause the water was cold and we couldn’t touch and the current was really swift, but once you found a rock, all was good, well if you could keep your balance. The boys were trying to find some way to kill themselves; they found this wire/rope swinging bridge and decided that it would be fun to jump off of into the water. They would climb up the support and then walk across the bridge to about the middle, from there they would shout down to their friends who were diving under the water trying to find out how deep it was, they would come up and shout up to those waiting on the wire…then they guys would swing down and just hold onto the wire with both hands and drop into the water. It was very interesting to watch, all the girls were standing on rocks and just watched the guys fall into the water, Becky and I (both lifeguards) would cringe every time that they dropped into the water, hoping that we wouldn’t have to go and save them from certain death. But all went well and no one got hurt. It rained the entire time that we were in the water, one guy wouldn’t get in because it was raining…so he got soaked just standing there on the bank…all the girls but two were in the water, and it took three of the guys about 15 minutes to get into the water…Raz (the oldest of our group…he’s 26) jumped off the bridge about 5 minutes before we had to leave to get ready for vespers…we decided that he couldn’t let the younger guys out-do him, but later he said that it wasn’t all that exciting, but the younger guys were really enjoying themselves. Friday was a totally awesome day. Now back to today. At the moment we don’t have any water. I mean we could, but we don’t cause it has rained a lot and well now the water is muddy and not all that great for drinking (not like we drink the water here) or using it for cooking either, so the water lines have been shut off. So for our Sabbath activity we went out to the ocean to swim. Now I like to swim it is a lot of fun, and the water looked kind of clear, I mean it was in places, but in other places it wasn’t…people started jumping off the big cement dock and after a little bit I jumped too…the dock was about 10 feet high…and so it made some SM’s not want to jump. But I finally was like “now or never” so in I jumped. The water was of course very salty and kind of cold. But I was enjoying myself until Rusty came to the surface and said “Hey I think that there is a dead SHARK down there!” shall we say that the water cleared as Rusty went back under to get a closer look and bring up the shark. We were all on the shore looking down as Rusty wrestled the dead shark to the surface and held it over his head. (Must be a guy thing) It was only a little shark, about 3 ½ feet long…but that was big enough for me…I wasn’t going to get back in. If a shark couldn’t even survive in that water, I knew that I didn’t want to be in it. Most everyone was ready to leave after the discovery of the shark, the water wasn’t all that beautiful or anything anyway and I for one was not about to jump back in.
That evening Raymond and his roommate Sam came over and we played board games and had a wonderful time, then after the boys left (leaving us with the invitation to come over for breakfast) us girls watched a movie, it was alright I guess but not all that great…they said bad words, like in every sentence and sometimes every other word. I mean it wasn’t the best movie, anyway we were hoping for something to keep us awake…instead we were like put to sleep.

August 6, 2006

Sunday, meeting at 9:00 and work assignments after that, I got the pleasure to clean out my classroom and of course Sunday was on the warm side. It took most of the morning and part of the afternoon to get everything done that I needed to get done. I had to clean out and move my desk, the very rusty filing cabinet, the book shelf, the cubby whole stack shelves; I had to clean the wooden desks, benches, and square block shelves (eww not all that fun) from there I had to move everything and then I had to sweep the very bumpy and very dirty cement floor…there was so much dirt and grim there…so very gross…I can’t believe that I am going to be teaching there for the next few months…anyway it looks better now. It took quite some time to clean; I would stop and talk to other teachers when I took a small breather between lifting furniture and cleaning. Around 12:30 I stopped my intense cleaning to head back to my apartment to change for our afternoon activity just in time to get drenched by a passing rain shower. But I so didn’t mind, I was just so excited to get wet; I had been so hot while cleaning. Once back in the apartment I got ready for our afternoon activity, we were taking a boat out into the ocean and going snorkeling, I was so ready to go, I mean I love snorkeling it is so fun…besides this time I would be wearing rash guard so my back, shoulder, and arms wouldn’t change shade and turn a lovely red color…which isn’t all that attractive on this island, no one wants to look like a cooking lobster.
Now for some reason only four of us thought that wearing or for that matter even bringing a rash guard with us to Pohnpei would be a smart idea. I was the only one that had a long sleeve rash guard, and Kelli you are so right, long sleeve ones are certainly the way to go…so comfortable, I did not get cold on the boat ride back or even sun burned yesterday on my arms (except for this 2 inch spot between my hand and the edge of my rash guard…oops), my knees got a little burnt, but that is because I put sun block up to my board shorts…so when I sat down there was a slightly bigger gap between my knees and my shorts…so um while on the boat I got a little burned…but I will know better next time. But the rash guard totally did its job.
The boat ride was totally amazing, first off there were two boats and we were segregated by sex (girls on one boat and boys on the other…sorta reminded me of HVA…wonder why!) the sky was cloudy, the water was a deep blue, the island popped out a lot more and there were big fishing boats anchored here and there…we just skipped by, laughing and waving at those that we saw on deck. It was a good 30 minute boat ride to where the breakers were and where one of the good snorkeling spots was. Once there all of us started putting on our fins, masks, and snorkels…those that were going to try and catch some waves headed off across the slightly rough water towards the breakers…the rest of us fell into the ocean and headed off towards the reef to see what there was to see. The fish were beautiful there were red, green, blue, yellow, black, brown, blue-green, orange, silver, purple, and then all of those colors combined. There were starfish big ones, small ones, some with six arms others with the typical five. The coral was beautiful and I really enjoyed paddling around and looking through my mask at the things below me, and sometimes wondering if I was going to see a shark cruising along the bottom…safely out of reach, but close enough to see. (Thankfully I did not see one) While I was snorkeling I found Gene and we explored the reef until both of us were tired of battling the current that was pulling us out to sea (the tide was going out) so we headed back to the boat. From there we just watched people swimming around and trying to surf and got some sun…The boat ride back was very nice, we were not segregated time so we had a little more fun then we had before. Once back on campus we hosed off our stuff and headed back to our apartments. That night we just all collapsed, we were all very tired and ready for sleep.

August 7 through 11
(Working on classrooms)

This entire week I have been working on my classrooms…it is Friday afternoon and I am so tired, ready to stop painting or organizing, or making lesson plans (I still have more to make) but I don’t want to. Tuesday I started painting my room…it is very pretty and fun and exciting. I have yellow flowers with green stems painted on two of the walls…then I have red, green, yellow, orange, and blue fish swimming among the flowers and on the other two walls. The desks are painted green and the chairs are yellow, the cubbies are green and the reading bench is green and yellow. My desk isn’t that pretty; it is grey and likes to fall apart if you move it. But the classroom has certainly brightened up. On Wednesday I painted my desks, without the help of my aid…she left and didn’t come back…it took a long time and I wished that someone else was there. Thursday in worship Raz asked me “have you been painting?” I was like “no, how could you tell?” in a joking manner of course…but he was like “you have yellow paint on your arm.” So I told him that I had been painting since Tuesday and that the paint wasn’t coming off my arm because it was oil base paint. After worship I went back to my room and my aid was there (surprise, surprise). We finished working on my room. Friday I got to do lesson plans, not really all that fun. They took me forever to do and most likely I will have to redo most of them. Try simplifying an American first grade lesson to a preschool level. It is tons of fun.
Nadine left today for Hawaii and then on to Germany, she was so homesick that she decided to go home. We all tried to cheer her up and ask her to do things with us, but she wouldn’t. So today we went to the airport to see her off. Our apartment really misses her. I hope that she will be happy in Germany, we all are going to miss her.
But that is what I have been working on as of late, I am really tired and it is almost time for vespers…so I should go and get ready.
August 12, 2006

Happy Sabbath all! Today was a very nice day. Sabbath school was nice and church was good too, although song service could have been better, I really wish that people knew how to sing on key. A lot of the youth can sing, but the adults, they are all off key, but at least they are praising God, right?
After church the SM’s had a potluck, we all cooked a lot of food and then ate and talked in the teacher’s room. We also found out that we don’t have just one eel living on campus, but three. Totally makes you want to wade in streams and rivers doesn’t it? Our afternoon activity was driving 40 minutes to this waterfall, we had to pay $3 to get in, but it was worth it. The water was cold and my lips turned blue pretty quick. The guys decided that it would be totally fun to climb the rocks of the waterfall and jumped off them into the really shallow water. Not really the smartest thing to do, and even some of the guys said as much later that day. There were tons of little fish swimming around in the water and biting our feet and legs…at different points and time a scream from one of the girls could be heard. The guys seeing this would swim underwater and grab at our feet getting a satisfying scream from the girls, but they would also get a kick more often than not. All too soon for the guys, but not soon enough for a lot of the girls it was time to go. On the way back the girls decided that we wanted to stand up in the truck and hold onto the cab of the truck. The guys always want to stand and so the girls always have to sit on the hardness of the truck bed. And since us four girls out numbered the three guys on our truck load at least, we decided that they could enjoy the comforts of the truck bed while we stood. And that is what we did, and as we drove a long we would always scream when it looked like we were going to hit another car, or a chicken, or a dog, or a person. We would talk to each other and tell stories, laugh and then scream. They drive crazy on this island and so there are times when you are sure that you are going to die, but yet hoping that you will not die and the other car or animal will move off the road
Once back on campus we had all of 20 minutes to get ready to go to a concert the youth of the church was putting on. Three girls had to get through the shower and eat in 20 minutes. And we just made it, I was surprised. And we were only 10 minutes late, not too bad for us honestly. It was a nice concert and the youth had worked so hard to put it together. Once back at the apartment we all went our different ways. Becky was on the internet, Joan was watching Sex and the City (I joined her later), Marla was working in her room, and I was writing Tim. But because I joined Joan later in Watching Sex and the City I didn’t go to bed until midnight. But I also knew that we were going to sleep in Sunday morning, so I wasn’t worried about getting enough sleep.