School Has Started

While the Marshall Islands school year officially began on August 18th, Ejit started on Wednesday. We had a half day, then a full day. Today (It's Friday here) we cancelled school for the PTA meeting. More on that fiasco later.

All outer island volunteers are at their sites right now. Wotje got out without any trouble but Kili needed to try 3 times. The first time there was a bad storm in Kili and the second time they couldn't land because the runway had too much vegetation on it and the landing gear might have broken. The silver lining to this story is that we actually have a working plane. God willing it will stay up.

I've been spending a good amount of time in the MIR trading food purchases for wireless internet. Normally the cost is 10 cents a minute, but you can sit in the restaurant all day and pay nothing. All you have to do is buy something. My current post is from there.

We had our first PTA meeting and it was just as (even more?) painful as last year. There were drawn out speeches, there was drama, and I left in the middle to go to the bathroom and have a snack at my house. I don't really feel like writing everything that happened so if you're interested you can send me an e-mail and I'll answer. Or if you're my mom I'll tell you about it the next time we talk on the phone. (Hi mom)

On a fun note I've gone swimming with the kids a lot lately, and it's been a ton of fun. I feel a little bad for Kiersten because its her first year and she doesn't have the time to swim like I do. I'm helping her out when I can but the first quarter is always a mess.

I'll post again soon. (maybe)

Orientation

I've been helping Anna out a bit with orientation and workshops and after today we'll be all finished. We're having our end of orientation dinner at Monica's again this year, and I got to order all of the food. It should be a good time. The highlight would have to be when I had the volunteers over for dinner on Ejit. They all crossed the reef for the first time, and the dogs left them alone. I shared some culinary tricks with them with vegetable fried rice and yellow fin tuna served three ways- Sashimi, Poke, and Jacob's lemon/coconut milk serviche thing from Tocalou.

Tomorrow, the three Kili volunteers head out and then on Saturday all of the Dartmouth volunteers will be off island. A few World Teach volunteers will be staying in downtown Majuro until they ship out. I'm sure I'll have more to post about that later. It looks like I'll be better at posting this year because the MIR started giving out free wireless internet. All you need to do is buy some food and you make your money back on what you would have spent on internet at NTA or the RRE.

Hawaii and Majuro

I'm safe in Majuro now and I'm currently cleaning our house. It's not as messy as I feared but I still have a lot of work to do. I'm splitting my time between orientation and Ejit, helping Anna out and preparing for school. I'm really excited about the year and hopefully other people will post to the blog soon.

Just an item on people watching while I was in Hawaii. I saw two weird pet experiences while I was there. A woman on vacation had her parrot or parakeet with her, but the bird wasn't in a cage. It was just sitting in her cleavage. The next one isn't as weird but shortly after that I saw a grown man walking his dog around in a baby stroller.

I'll post again soon but I have a lot of work to do.

First Post of the Year

I'm currently packing for my flight tomorrow and I'm pretty excited. It turns out that I'm going to be flying in with Kiersten because her plane was delayed so we'll be able to show up in the RMI just in time for everyone's practicum.

Highlights for this year include my new external hard drive with tons of tv shows, movies and music (plus room for more from Entertainment Center), dry bags so that I can take my laptop and hard drive over the reef, and my waterproof, shockproof, crushproof camera.

The next post will happen either in Hawaii or the RMI.