Friday 28 November 2014

October and November

I've gotten really bad at updating the blog, so I'll do a quick little bit about the most exciting and funny things that have been happening. I've just been living the normal life of a teacher here in Kosrae and everything is normal to me now, so I haven't felt like anything was worthy of me taking the time to sit down and write a blog about. However, looking back on the past couple months, there have definitely been some blog-worthy moments, so I'll just write a little about everything that has been happening.

First of all, we had a crazy week of power outages in October. The way it was explained to me was there are a few generators for the island (maybe 5 or 6), and over the years most of them have broken down. It is expensive to fix them, so naturally, they just wait until they all break and then they will put in the money to fix them. For the past year or so, the island has been running on one or two, and if those broke down, we would be in serious trouble. We lost power for a while one night, which isn't unusual, except that it never came back on. Usually when the power goes out, it comes back on anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours later. But to have it go out for many hours was unusual. It turns out, one of the generators blew, so we were in big trouble. While they were working on fixing it, we could run on the small generator that generally only powers two of the smaller villages. So for about a week, the generator would run for one village for two hours at a time, then switch to another for two hours, and so on, so we were all sharing power. It was a crazy time to say the least. I'm still unclear on the details, but apparently it's fixed (for now), but I still worry that it won't come back every time it goes off.

After that, the next exciting thing I can think of is Halloween. My wonderful parents sent a ton of candy for me to give out, so at school that day, I gave all my students candy and showed them pictures of my parents and I. They loved it! With my juniors, who I have for chemistry, we did glow sticks and talked about the chemical reaction inside that causes them to glow. It was a fun day. That night, all the asets (white people) got together for a party at Bully's, one of the restaurants here.

The past few weeks, I have been doing a lot of fun things in my free time. Brandi and I have gotten really good at paddle boarding, and we can catch some pretty big waves on our boards. We have even been able to catch waves and then stand up on the boards, so we are basically professional surfers :) A bunch of us played wiffle ball on the beach last weekend and it was so much fun! It was the first time I picked up a bat and a ball and actually played any sort of softball since my last game. It was a really fun day. I can't believe that I'm still doing things like paddle boarding and playing wiffle ball on the beach at the end of November.

I did a feedback survey asking my classes how things are going and what they would like to see happen in the future. Unfortunately, in one of my classes I received some very inappropriate responses. This is not the first time something like this has happened, and it is unfortunate that students feel comfortable saying these things to their teacher just because she is a young female. In general, I have not encountered this often, and I feel like I have handled it well when it has come up, but this was one example of students being blatantly disrespectful. I don't want to simply go off on a rant, but it is definitely something that needs to be addressed, and something that if any future volunteer reads this, they should be aware of. It is something I have not heard of any of the male volunteers encountering. It is not a daily, or even monthly occurrence, but I have had a select few students say or write inappropriate things. The day after this survey, we had a very serious talk about sexual harassment in my classroom. I made it clear that this will not be tolerated and that I deserve to be treated with respect. I can only hope I got through to these students and that it will not come up again. It is something that comes from a culture where it is okay to disrespect women and think of them as the lesser sex. This is a society where domestic violence has only very recently become against the law, and multiple people are still fighting against it, arguing that they have the right to beat their wives (though not in those words, I'm sure). The disrespect of a teacher is only a symptom of the engrained belief that women do not deserve respect, regardless of their role. I realize that Kosrae is far ahead of many other places in the world, and I am thankful to be here instead of somewhere worse, but this island still has a long way to go. I hope to be a guiding force by strongly opposing any disrespect in my classroom. It is a small thing, but a small thing is better than none at all. The respectful students far outnumber the disrespectful ones, and set a great example for their siblings and other students. Hopefully they will pave the way for a brighter future for the women of Kosrae.

I didn't intend to go into a serious discussion of gender roles when I began this post, but I feel like it is something that needed to be said. Back to a more light-hearted recount of my time here.

A couple weeks ago we climbed Mt. Finkol, which we learned afterwards is not only the tallest mountain in Kosrae, but also the tallest in all four states of the FSM. It was a long, difficult hike, and I was struggling a lot by the end, when my legs felt like they were going to collapse with ever step I took. I like to think I kept a good attitude even when I was clearly the one holding everyone back. I just made jokes the whole time and tried to keep everyone laughing. It definitely kept my spirits up and my mind off the multiple hours left when I was already more tired than I could have imagined I would be. At one point when we paused for a break in the stream, I literally laid down completely in the cold water and put my head on a rock as if I was going to fall asleep. I needed to save my energy for the last couple hours of the hike; I couldn't waste it on sitting up. I was quite possibly the sorest I have ever been in my life. That is including the many difficult first heavy squat days in college, which is really saying something. I was sore for about 5 days I would say. For the first two I dreaded getting out of bed because I was in crazy amounts of pain just walking anywhere. My arms were really sore too, because of all the steep parts where you had to pull yourself up, and then crab crawl on those parts on the way down. Many of you know I am not, nor have I ever been, an endurance athlete. I'll run my 60ft to first base and take a break, thank you very much. God forbid it's a foul ball and I have to run that distance twice. I can stay out there all day, running short sprints with breaks, but climb for 7 hours straight? What was I thinking when I agreed to that? My teammates will enjoy imagining me doing this, I'm sure. I'm still mentally recovering from it, and we'll see if I climb any more mountains while I'm here. My guess is I'll get talked into it, but right now, I can't even imagine doing another one. I was barely able to teach on Monday and Tuesday (2 and 3 days after the hike), and my knees gave out on me a few times those days, in front of entire classes of students. Not my best days teaching, to say the least. I do have some incredible pictures of the view that I guess made it all worth it. How many of you reading this can say you climbed the highest mountain in the FSM? Probably nobody, so take that.

November has flown by. It has mostly just been a lot of school. I've had to change up my lessons a little bit, and the students seem to be doing better with it. As with any job, you have good days and bad days, but lately it seems like a lot of bad days because the students are getting crazier and less willing to work the closer it gets to Christmas. With Thanksgiving, we only had Thanksgiving Day off and had to go back on Friday. It was a tough day for everyone, and a lot of the teachers were grumpy and still feeling full from the day before. The students clearly didn't want to be in school, and were just a bunch of crazies not wanting to do any work.

Thanksgiving Day was awesome though! Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays, only second to Christmas because of all the family I get to see then. Thanksgiving at home is so relaxed; I always enjoy cooking with my mom and watching football with dad. Although I missed out on those this year, getting together with everyone at Bully's was great. We had a potluck with a turkey and everything. I took the initiative for the WorldTeach crew and made all my favorite dishes from home: scalloped corn, green bean casserole, homemade noodles, and Grandma Julie's butterscotch pie (the most delicious old family recipe), and even added a couple new things, like chocolate pie and pumpkin bars. Everything was a hit, and I was so happy to have the comforts of home cooking, even though it wasn't quite as good without mom's love baked in. However, no holiday comes without it's share of challenges. Here in Kosrae, our challenge was the lack of power. Yes, again. And yes, on Thanksgiving. We were laughing about how big of a deal it would be in the US. Here we just went with the flow, tried to wait it out, and when it didn't come back on, we all gathered at Sandy's to cook because she was the only one who had power. I think it was a blessing in disguise, because we spent the day just like a family should, cooking together and enjoying each other's company. After all, we are our own little sort of family of teachers away from home. I love cooking, so I was more than happy to spend the day preparing my favorites and then getting to share them with everyone at Bully's. The worst part was knowing we had to go back to school the next day.

The latest excitement has been the threat of black magic. Yes, you read that correctly. It is possible that my classroom has been infested with black magic. I don't want to go into details because of the privacy of the student, but one student has been having some medical issues, and seems to be having a stress response, but when it happens at school, it is always in my classroom. The explanation for this is black magic, so we were brainstorming solutions and my students think we should get air conditioning (yes, please!), or take a field trip every day to get out of the doomed classroom. The principal even said in a staff meeting that anyone who wants to change rooms for greater comfort should just let him know (obviously in reference to my tainted room because by now everyone on the island has heard about it).

I'll end with a few funny things that my students have said or written the past few weeks:

-One student offered to set me up with a local boyfriend, saying he was "just trying to help me out"
-The same student told me that he was Snoop Dogg and to start calling him D-O-double G
-In response to a question asking, "Is there anything outside of school affecting your grades?" a different student wrote that "yes there is something outside affecting my grades, it's the wind."