Saturday, May 9, 2009

Only a bit more

There are exactly 2 weeks of school now.  The past week has been very interesting.  Have you ever got the idea that you were “holding back the tide”?  Well I can say without any reservation that trying to teach High School students for the last 3 weeks is nearly as hard as trying to hold back the tide.  Living on the ocean, that image is very engrained in my mind right now.  Everyone, the students, the teachers, and the faculty, are all ready to be done.  Last week we had another teacher leave to go back and get married, this next week we have one leaving to go to work, both had made arrangements to do so before they signed their contracts.  The only problem with those two teachers leaving is the fact that we are already shorthanded for teachers and this will only make us more so. 

There is one very interesting thing about being this close to being home.  It doesn’t seem like anyone can do anything to make someone else mad.  Everyone is just so happy to be this close to going home that they just don’t care about getting mad at people.  From experience, I’ve seen it the other way around, people getting more edgy being this close to being home, but I’m very glad that it is this way now, I hope that it stays this way until we all leave. 

Today was a very special Sabbath.  One of the church members, the president of the College of the Marshall Islands, invited us over to his house for lunch.  I went along for two reasons, first it's a meal that I don’t have to make for myself and secondly he is Filipino, they always have good food.  To all of our surprises, the food they served us was good old fashioned hay stacks.  That was something that none of us have had in nearly 10 months and all of us were very happy to see it and then to go ahead and eat them too.  Being full is something that doesn’t happen very often here, food is expensive and we don’t make very much money, so being full from lunch and it lasting a few hours is a wonderful feeling. 

When I was talking to my parents this last week, mom said something that seemed really sad at the time, but as I thought about it, it was very exciting.  Mom said that she had just sent my last box.  We live on stuff from home over here, so hearing that my last one was in the mail was kind of sad, but then I realized, that there isn’t much time left here.  After this posting I’ll have 2 more probably, maybe not even that.  With how slow the mail is here, I’ll get the box just before school ends. 

I don’t know what they call it for a person my age, but the term for the actual medical disorder is Alzheimer’s.  I know that I don’t have Alzheimer’s, but I had a very forgetful moment a few weeks ago.  Union made some new rules pertaining to living on campus and being older.  The rule states that anyone over 22 can live in a room by themselves and pay for there being 2 people in the room, among other things.  I was thinking about it and was kind of sad, I didn’t know if the administration would let me, my birthday is in October.  I then realized that I don’t turn 22 in October, I turn 23 in October.  I was slightly frustrated that I didn’t remember how old I am, but there isn’t anything here to remind me of my age, other than the students not remembering anything from the 80’s-early 90’s.  Thankfully I remembered and it's not such a big deal.  

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