First Quarter Over!

Sorry for the big break in posts- I’m way behind because the internet has been so bad the last few times I’ve been in town. So the quarter actually ended two weeks ago- we had finals on the 15th and 16th. Then yesterday was Report Card Day, when the parents come in to pick up the grades from their students’ homeroom teachers and have mini parent-teacher conferences. I don’t have a homeroom, so I only got to speak to the parents who were concerned about their kids’ grade in Reading class…I spent the whole day explaining to mothers and sisters and fathers and grandmothers why the kid in question was failing my class. Fun!
But I had a lot of downtime, so I also got to explore our sad excuse for a library, which doesn’t lend out any books and is currently used as a computer lab. Most of the books are random adult novels that we should sell to a used bookstore (one particularly intense teacher thinks the books are pornographic and should therefore be burned, but I feel book-burning creates somewhat of a bad precedent), but I found a few treasures that will be great for my students to read. As soon as I can convince the principal to let the kids actually borrow the books.
I really can't believe the first quarter is over, by the way. I’ve heard criticism that this program is too long, but I don’t know how anyone could feel that way- it feels to me like things are going incredibly fast. Despite all the waiting we do--waiting for the bus to town, waiting ON the bus to town, waiting for the internet to load, waiting for events to start (on “Marshallese time”)-- the weeks tend to fly by. Each day is only 5 periods of teaching, and in no time at all it's Wednesday...and when it's Wednesday the week is practically over! We look forward to the weekends, which pass pretty quickly despite all the lazing around, and we look forward to picnics and parties and cultural events and new things we're teaching, so before we know it another month is gone. So while 10 months seems like forever, suddenly we're more than a quarter of the way done with our time here.
Now, of course, I can’t help taking stock of everything: am I accomplishing anything? Will I have time for all the things I want to do? Unfortunately I'm a bit of a disappointment to myself. I don't have a host family yet, I haven't become at all involved in the Marshallese community, I haven't learned any more Marshallese since the language lessons during orientation, I haven't accomplished as much as I wanted in the classroom, I haven't started any after-school activities yet, and I haven't learned to fish or make Marshallese handicrafts or cook Marshallese food.
So I have my work cut out for me. We're trying to find host families, which hopefully will help us get more involved in the community. We wrote proposals for an Art Club (Heather and I) and a Film Club (Eric and I) that will hopefully get approved at Monday’s staff meeting. I’ve started practicing my Marshallese again. And as for the teaching, I know that everything takes forever and I've just got to go at a slow and steady pace. When class regularly starts 5-10 minutes late, students take two minutes or more to get out their notebooks, and I frequently have to stop class to lend out pens and pencils and yell at students who are talking in class, sleeping, or making noise outside the open door...teaching has to proceed rather slowly.

And there's one accomplishment I can be proud of: with the help of some students who were lugging away armfuls of the fruit, I found a guava tree near my house. Yum!