Ri-Jerbal Day

First of all, I’m sure you’re wondering how I got back to Laura last Sunday with no bus. We took a cab to the bridge, which is the farthest you can go out of town on just $2 a person, and then walked for a bit with our thumbs out. Pretty soon this ribelle who works at the airport stopped, and he took us a little ways. Then we walked for a while longer (I was getting a little worried we’d be walking all the way to Laura) and finally a pickup stopped and we got in the back. The driver turned out to be the Minister of Finance, heading to Woja (the town before Laura) to go fishing. He and his wife and sister-in-law were coming back from town where they’d gone to the same dinner we had the night before, a party for WUTMI (Women United Together in the Marshall Islands, a great grassroots organization). Small island! They stopped in Woja but then the guy’s wife drove us all the way to Laura. So nice!

As for Ri-Jerbal Day, that’s Labor Day, which was today. Three-day weekend! Or, more importantly for us, only 4 days of teaching. Not that I don't LIKE teaching, but it's exhausting, especially with 150 students, no passing periods, moving every period to a different room, all of which have no AC. I think this week went pretty well though. We're starting a Public Speaking unit (which the kids REALLY need), and we’ve done some fun things like tongue twisters, brainstorming about “when do we use public speaking?”, and pronunciation games.

Unfortunately, school is always a mixture of highlights and failures. I'm 99% sure one of my students (a 9th grader!) came to class drunk. And yesterday his friend and fellow troublemaker "accidentally" put his hand on my derriere when my back was turned. Lesson learned: my students don't respect me as much as i thought they did, and I shouldn't walk around between the desks in that particular class. But I know that’s just how things go here, ups and downs, and I think things are generally going well.

Because there was no school today, we went to a picnic for Laura Elementary School and Rita Elementary School (Rita is the name of the downtown area). We were told yesterday to get to the high school at 9 to get driven to the picnic, but of course we knew there was no way it’d be that early. Everything here operates on Marshallese time, which could be anywhere from 10 minutes to 3 hours late. This can be frustrating, but the good thing is that despite the chaotic approach to scheduling everyone always seems to get rounded up to go where they need to go. So around noon we got the call that we could get picked up, went to the high school, and got a ride in the van with the food over to the airport where we were having the picnic. The food (huge storage bins full of rice, a giant cooler of meat, pasta and potato salad and taro and banana spring-roll things and breadfruit and coconuts and pumpkin…) wasn’t actually ready until about 3:30, but we weren’t too starving because we’d been munching on coconuts and little bags of pumpkin stuff. There’s always tons of food at these things, and none of it goes to waste because everyone takes leftovers home in take-out boxes or the trays the food was brought in. It’s great.

We also played volleyball, which I haven’t played since summer camp in 7th grade. It’s really popular here, especially for girls. I’m appallingly bad, but I guess I’ll have to learn! After the meal Laura and Rita elementary competed in tug-of-war and two other contests: in one, the principals of the two schools raced to suck down coke from baby bottles (hilarious) and in the other the teachers ran to some chairs, blew up a balloon, then sat on it until it popped. The first to pop three was the winner. Awesome.

Today was a lot of fun, and hopefully this weekend we’ll get to do more things with the Laura community. Part of it is just exploring the town. I went for a run on Wednesday and some little kids started running with me. Their older sister, a middle-schooler with very good English (turns out she goes to private school) joined us and I got to know a bit more about the community. We’ve also been going to games at the basketball court, basketball and volleyball. Everybody comes to watch as students and community members play, it’s a lot of fun. Heather wants to join a community volleyball team, which would be really fun.

That’s all for now, I think I might try to post some pictures soon though. Laura is beautiful!