Camping!

Friday, September 10, 2010
8:53 AM in Kolonia, 1:53 PM at home


Life is feeling pretty sweet right now! I finally got the package that my grandparents sent with the Canvasback doctors, and I am sitting back in my chair, NOT is school right now, and eating one of Grandpa’s delicious brownies for breakfast. That’s right breakfast. So good!

So I apologize for the lack of updates since Sunday… this week has been more than a little crazy. Monday we were all still getting over the shock of the accident, scrambling to get our classes together (two teachers hurt, two sick), and feeling exhausted after one day. I think this week I was even less prepared than I was the second week of school, but somehow I’m learning to make it up as I go along. Not that that’s a good thing, but I didn’t really have any other options. I had to sub for Senior Lit the first two days this week and this week was my turn on lunch duty. Whew! So glad it was only a four day week! I don’t think we could have handled one more day.

Carly is back with us now! She came home Wednesday, and her mother arrived yesterday, which makes everything seem right. She is looking sooooo much better! Those doctors did such an amazing job; you can’t even tell how bad it really was. Erica’s on the mend, too. Courtney left yesterday, which is making us sad, because even though she was only here for two weeks, it feels like she’s been with us the whole time.

All in all, it’s been a pretty good week. I’ve had some amusing moments in the classroom. Tuesday I lucked out on having to sub with only 16 lines of Egyptian love poetry to fill an entire period. So we had an interesting discussion on love… oh boy!

I handed out early warnings for all my classes. Only 10 in my ES class aren’t failing. I keep getting the “Is it them or me?” question, but every time I look at the grade book and see all their missing assignments, I’m pretty sure it’s not me. Actually, for some of my chemistry classes, I really don’t know how I could spell it out plainer. (Avagrado’s Number: 6.022x10^23, or the number of times “Miss” must explain a concept for someone to retain it.)

Haha, and Karsten and I have a little prayer joke going back and forth. We have a lot of the same seniors in his calculus and my physics class, including one very dramatic student, who shall remain nameless for now. This student walked into my class right before the last physics quiz and declared, “Miss! Your class is so hard! I get As in all my classes except yours! Even calculus!” Then on Wednesday, this student came into class and informed me that they prayed for me in calculus that morning. So I suggested we pray for Karsten and calculus, because they were having a quiz on Thursday just like physics was. Thursday morning the calc students marched in, begging me not to give them their quiz (as that is what I believe Karsten had prayed for), so I prayed that Karsten would go light on the red ink as he graded the quiz they just took… I’m wondering how long this is going to go on. I make it a point to pray before every class. It’s one thing that all the professors who left an impact on me did without fail. I try to include whatever the students want to pray about, but I take the liberty of changing “help us to do good on the test” to “help them to remember what they studied…”

We’re going camping on Ant Island this weekend, so happy Liberation Day!

Sunday, September 12, 2010
1:57 PM in Kolonia, 7:57 PM at home

Camping on Ant Atoll was awesome! Tiring, but so much fun. Totally just lived the cliché vacation picture (it might be overrated, but mine was not).

We headed out around 11:00 Friday morning (right on island time!) and spent 30 minutes just trying to get out of the bay. Almost drifted into one of the huge fishing vessels. That was fun. But then we got on our way and had a pretty good trip. I experienced my first taste of real waves. I have a new appreciation for all the stories of the fishermen on the seas in the Bible now… it’s really weird to see a wave swell higher than you and to just keep going right on forward. I spent most of the trip standing and hanging on (I can’t really describe it without a picture – unfortunately, my camera was stowed for the whole trip, so I didn’t get any snapshots.) I saw my first dolphin! Only got a glimpse of the dorsal fin, but it was pretty cool! Turn out the school mascot is the dolphin… I didn’t even realize we had a mascot, but that would explain why there are dolphins on our uniforms.

We went by Black Coral, another outer island, to pick up some locals who had a smaller boat, then headed in to Ant. We got in around 3:00 and swam in to shore. The first thing we noticed was that the beach (this island had one!) was crawling with hermit crabs of all shapes and sizes! If you looked at the sand for more than two seconds, it started moving.

The locals brought our stuff in the smaller boat later. We had just finished getting our large tarp up when it started pouring. It was nice to get the sea spray and salt water rinsed off. Once the rain subsided, we cleaned up the campsite, which needed some attention, then a group of us ventured out to look for good hammock sites.

We found a baby sea turtle along our way. He was immediately named “Timmy the Turtle” by the group, convincing me that Timmy is now the new Bob. Everyone passed him around, and we watched him swim off into the big, wide ocean. So cute! We went around our little island, walked back around in the lagoon side, collected a bunch of coconuts, and returned to base camp. We all ended up just hanging our hammocks up there.

We ate so many coconuts this weekend. They were all over the place, and there were so many different kinds. You never know what you’ll get until you crack it open. I definitely like the hard coconut versus the soft stuff. But I’m learning to like it all, even though I was never big into coconuts before. The locals caught a couple reef fish, some bright shiny ones, and a plainer one called a grouper. Franky cleaned and cooked up the grouper, and I decided to give in and try it, since he’s been trying to convince me that most SMs give up being vegetarians while they’re here. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great. I can at least say that I tried it. Tasted like boiled egg white to me.

I was very glad we brought tarps – it rained several times in the night. All the returned SMs are right when they say you need a hammock while you’re here. I was able to borrow someone’s, and while it was probably the most uncomfortable hammock I’ve ever slept it, it was still better than being on the ground. And I’m glad I took my queen sheet with me, because as funny as my mother thinks it is, it gets cold at night when the temperature drops down to 70°F…

We woke up around dawn and most of us sat of the beach and watched the sunrise. I didn’t sleep well at all during the night, but I loved just being there. We had breakfast, then worship on the beach. Once low tide came, we crossed the channel and explored the next island over. We hiked for about an hour to the next channel, checked out the ocean side, went back and snorkeled in the lagoon for a bit, then headed back. I collected several shells, which was so much fun for me, because we don’t really have a lot off the Oregon coast. Most of the cool ones were taken by hermits, but I was able to find some nice ones. Mostly cowry shells and such. The Canvasback doctors came out for the day, and had just arrived when we got back. We had lunch, and then I took to napping and sitting in my cliché hammock, eating cliché coconut and some granola just for kicks.

We were supposed to leave around 4:00, but we didn’t end up leaving until 6:00 because the boat was having problems getting pressure in one of the engines. We finally made it out of the lagoon, after leaving the surfers behind (there were about five of us who came back early so we could work on school stuff today). It was dark by the time we were halfway to Black Coral, but the moon was out and bright, even though it was a tiny sliver. The boat that was supposed to take us in from Black Coral wasn’t there, so we had to go to the next island over, Nahlap to try and get a ferry there. The Canvasback doctors went in on the first ferry, but four of us SMs had to stay behind and wait. Good bonding times though, and we were only halfway through our night’s adventures. The stars were gorgeous all night, and on the way in we could see lots of bioluminescent plankton as we zipped past them in the dark. That was cool!

We made it back to the main island, and I don’t think I’ve ever been so glad to step on Pohnpei. About 20 minutes later, Brian showed up with a truck, and we headed back to the school. We were still learning to feel the effects of Murphy’s Law. Shortly after passing the Kitti church, we got a flat tire. And the truck didn’t have a spare on it, so we ended up having to wait until 11:00 for Johnson to come with a spare. Unfortunately, we were on a corner, so we had the lights on every time a car came by, and our battery was dead by the time we got our spare tire. So then we tried to clutch start it several times, but that never worked, so we eventually parked it and all rode back in the garbage truck that Johnson had brought. We were lying down in the back of it, but everyone was too tired to care. We got back to school around 1:00 in the morning, but I think it was 2:00 by the time I got to bed this morning.

But today has been productive, and I am having fun. I didn’t sleep as long as I thought I would this morning, thanks to the unavoidable sunburn I got yesterday, and I was wondering if the lack of sleep was getting to me… I had set the shells I collected yesterday on the counter to wash them off, and I went over to turn on my computer and check my e-mail. All of a sudden, I heard a thump! and looked over to see that one of my shells had walked off the edge of the counter. Within a few minutes later, three more had as well. So now I am feeling responsible to be the caretaker of the four poor hermits I accidentally brought back with me from Ant. I feel bad. I had one in my pocket all day and it never came out. I was sure they were empty. Wrong. Well, now I have unexpected pets. I am trying to figure out how to keep them. What makes a happy hermit? Who knows… They shall need names. I’m working on that. As soon as I figure out where to keep them.