Well, I'm going to be completely honest, I've been so busy lately that I haven't been able to really blog or even journal (I know of some CRAZY peepz that are attempting to do both) so perhaps instead of writing down what I did in days, I thought it might be faster and much more interesting to write down interesting events/my thoughts starting with our first day in Pohnpei.
So where I last left off was our arrival at Pohnpei SDA School (it's elementary and highschool so it's just "school"). Just so you all have an idea of how long we had been up, we had to leave the school around 3 AM in order to get the airport so that we could get everyone aboard the "island hopper" even if we only had like 2 hours of sleep 3 AM Hawaii time is around 12 AM Pohnpei time. If memory serves me correctly (I'm writing this more than a week after it happened) we arrived at the school at around 1 PM. We were given some time to unload our stuff and get settled in. Since the event times got a bit fuzzy, I'll just write about what we did that day and add in times if I remember. Franky took us to Palm Terrace so that we could get our groceries
Palm Terrace is a fairly small market by our usual standards. It kind of reminded me of something like Woo-Sung market in Orlando in size and it had a kind of oriental market feel to it. It didn’t help that a LOT of stuff was way past its expiration date. They had some stuff from home like Pringles ($2.50 US a can), poptarts (5.50 a box of 4), peanut butter (6.60 for a small jar) and cereal (7.00 for a box) but as you can see, its very expensive. I can already see it being a challenge to live on a monthly stipend of ~$150 a month.
So after we got all the groceries we would need at Palm Terrace, we went to a fruit market on the way back. There we got our first glimpse at what the most common fruits and vegetables on the island would be. The people here grow mangoes and bananas the most. However, their mangoes and bananas are much smaller than what we're used to. This doesn’t speak for their taste though. The mangoes, if given enough time are sure to be super sweet and the bananas are actually SWEET here in Pohnpei instead of being just kind of tasting like a filler like we have in the states.
When we got back to school, we ate at the school cafeteria (there we got our first taste of tuna - DELICIOUS). We also cut into some fresh young coconut which was fizzy and good too. We were given some time after that and then we were asked to go to a meeting at church. At this time, it was around 6 or 7 and we had to sit thru probably one of the most boring lectures I had ever attended because the speaker pretty much just read off the slides and talked in the same tone. The meeting was about small groups. A bit about our speakers - they are a married couple from Australia and they both have crazy accents. The woman had a fairly bouncy personality while the guy was much more quiet. Since we had now been up for about 20 hours at this point with only 3 hours of sleep the night before, it became an interesting contest to see how long each of the SM's could stay awake. Most of the girls seemed to be doing ok from where we were standing because occasionally, they would all be asked to exercise. The guys, on the other hand, did not have such luck.
First to fall asleep was David. It was fairly to see how each of us would fall asleep because, at least for me, sometimes it felt like sleep and reality would melt into one and we would just kick ourselves awake after about 5 minutes of sleep. David fell asleep with his mouth wide open. Then was Brandon, Marcus, and Carl. Last it was me and Michael. Mike had moved up to the front of the meeting so he could interact better with the speaker and stay awake better. I tried to do the same but ended up sleeping with my head tilted to the side like Stephen Hawkings. Mike finally fell asleep just sitting. The speaker was completely clueless it seemed because even though we were all dropping like flies after the hour and a half, when he got finished with his presentation, he looked over at his wife still going on with her meeting and said to us , "Mah wife is going to go till nein, what do you say we go for anotha thirty minutes" Finally after what seemed like an eternity, everyone got finished. We all piled back into the bus, went home, and slept after our LONG day.
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