Dear Reader
I realize it has been nearly forever since I’ve updated my blog, for that I’m eternally sorry. I promised at the beginning of the blog that I would do my best to keep it up and I think the last blog I put up was saying I wouldn’t be able to post as often. Well now I’m looking at the middle of February and I haven’t posted since the beginning of January. I really don’t have much of a good excuse and it’s certainly not because I haven’t done anything in the past 6 weeks. So I’ll try to start from the beginning.
Just after Christmas some friends and I decided to go island hopping. This is a very fun sport and you do it when the tide is out. You see how many islands you can walk out to without getting caught by the tide and have to swim back in. We were on our first island and one of the other teachers, April, decided to chase a gecko around a tree and slipped on the coral rock and sliced her knee open. She was bleeding pretty good and decided to forgo her trip, she went promptly to the hospital and got 4 stitches in it and stayed off her leg for quite some time.
New Years was ok, I felt that it was more of a milestone than really a holiday. I did however do what I normally do, sleep the New Year in. That has been my tradition for many years, why let a good thing like that go? The next big thing to happen was school starting.
School starting was a big excitement and some anxiety on my part. I had asked the administration to be able to keep my senior Calculus class, I really loved working with them and I just didn’t want to loose them. They told me that I would probably loose them because I needed to open up another section of biology. I told them to do what they thought was necessary. They decided that I could keep my calculus class, give up my free period and give me biology too. What it really boils down to is I have a lot of classes to keep up with. I go for 7 straight periods on Friday’s without a break and go for almost 5 without a break on weekdays.
The next thing of excitement was announced in our staff worship. A Pilipino lady was deathly in need of some blood, she is anemic. Unlike the states, you have to find your own donors for blood here. It isn’t too hard for Marshallese people, they all have the same blood, but this lady was B+. I have B+ blood, so I went down and had my blood typed and within 13 hours of hearing about the need I was giving blood to a very thankful lady and her family. At the time I didn’t get to meet the lady, she was in intensive care, but later about a month later to be exact, she came around the school to thank me personally. That is one thing you don’t get in the states when you donate blood, you usually don’t know who it goes too.
A few days after that another very special day came. Our Chaplin from UC decided to do the island hopper and come and visit all of us in the islands. Our island was the last one, but I was super excited, he brought with him my new computer and just a familiar old face. The 2.5 days that he was here was busy with teaching, talking, and transferring data from the computer he was taking back with him. It seemed like sooner than I wanted, he was heading back toward
Another very exciting day came just the next week. I figured that I needed to think about booking my tickets home, so I talked to the principle and he said ya, go for it. I went down to the ticket place and told them what I wanted and they started to work on it. I wanted to leave on 1 June and get to Denver ASAP. They said ya, you are on the flight at 8:00 PM evening of the 1st. But then the bad news came, they couldn’t get me out of
The weeks of January seemed to fly bye and stand still at the same time, there were 5 weeks in January, so it seemed like it would never end, but February is going really fast. It is exactly 4 weeks start to finish.
This month has gone pretty well so far. There was only one major hiccup; I got a virus on my computer that ended up being a boot sector virus, so my computer wouldn’t even start up. With reformatting my computer I lost some very valuable information, but I guess what is done is done and I now know to keep more backups. My computer is now back up totally and working fine again.
Teaching as those of you who have been teachers is sometimes really cool and sometimes very frustrating. I had a really cool experience today however. I was working with a new student; she came in really late and totally in mid stride. We are working on Organic Chemistry in the class that she is in. She didn’t know anything about it, but now with some help is doing quite well. It’s amazing to see student learning and excelling in things that they didn’t think they could do. Well, I guess I’m done for now, my bell just rang and I need to go teach my 2nd class of biology.
Well an unexpected turn of events allowed me to write during a class period that I wouldn’t normally have off. Our seniors are taking some sort of entrance test for the local “college” so much as it is, I don’t even know if they are a full 2 year college.
It’s amazing how much we do here. Now that I’m no the tail side of the school year, I can see so much that we as teachers have done, sometimes if you just look at the here and now you don’t see anything that you are doing, but on the other hand when you look at the past 7 months nearly, you see a great work that we as teachers have done. Since we are on the tail end you get to see a lot of different things that you don’t normally see. I wish I had time to talk about what all was happening here, but alas I don’t.
I’ll tell one more funny story before I save this and get it ready to be posted on my blog. Sabbath afternoon we were all just kind of relaxing when we see two police officers. They were running off across the “lawn.” Police don’t usually come on campus, but this time they did. We all kind of just watched them. We were very curious as to what was going on. (so was half the island so it seemed) It turned out that there was a kid that had gotten drunk that they were going after. He decided that they probably wouldn’t chase him into the ocean so that’s where he headed. A few of us were waiting for him to pass out and drown, but he never did, he just worked his way down the coast walking in the ocean, the police, as far as we know, never set foot in the water, it was just kind of funny. This is the first time that I’ve seen a police chase really be a spectator sport.
Well this update takes me up to the 3 month mark. I’m not exactly sure what’s going to happen in the last 3 months, but as you’ve been reading, I’ve had some pretty cool adventures. I have no doubt that the last 3 months will be just as fun filled and action packed as the first 7 months have been.
Well, this is long and I should probably get this ready to post. I hope all you are having good years. I know I am. Take care.
In His Service,
Stephen Baker
