Things that keep you up in Pohnpei

So like the title says, this is a small list of things that keep most sm's and/or - JUST - me up at night…

The Animals
Dogs - Of course, even in America, occasionally you get the noisy neighbor's dog that keeps you up but here in Pohnpei, all the dogs here have something to say to one another. A lot of times, it seems like 101 Dalmations when all the dogs are trying to carry a message from one side of London to the other (in this case, one side of the island to the other) but with the frequency that it happens here, I'm pretty sure there arent that many cases of 100 baby pooches gone missing. The islanders do have a way of keeping it from getting out of hand though, they eat dogs here… :T

Pigs - The first time I heard pigs squealing bloody murder, I almost turned to Michael Cain and joked, "Sounds like they're being murdered." then I realized, it's probably true.

Roosters - So you know all the movies you watched as a kid that had roosters? I used to think that they were so useful and that if you had one, you would never need another alarm clock since it would wake you up at dawn. WRONG. These roosters are terrible at telling when the sun is coming over the horizon and like the dogs, they start talking to each other. I'm pretty convinced that instead of the engaging and intelligent conversations that I'm sure the dog's are having (HEY! HEY! HEY! HEY!) they just want to be louder than the rooster that crowed before they did. Fortunately, roosters are being eaten as well :)

Geckos - I kid you not. I have been woken/kept up by these small lizards. They have this funny chirp that probably warns bugs, "Imma eatcha." This however is NOT the worst that they can do. While sound asleep, I had a gecko divebomb my chest. I woke up thinking I was being attacked by a moist towelette but just heard the gecko giggle (chirp) as he ran away. Another time, I was awoken by another moist plop in my armpit. Not the gecko this time though. Lets just say, this gecko was very much like a pigeon and my armpit - a bald man. Goody

Another time geckos startled me was in-class. While I was sitting at my desk, 2 geckos dropped out of nowhere onto my pants. It's like they knew that alone, they wouldn’t have the weight to scare the heck out of me.

The Frogs/Toads - SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!! Lots of frogs, lots of noise.

Bugs- They eat you alive here. There are actually a whole lot more of them here in Pohnpei than in America (at least in Florida). However, the motto for them here is more along the lines of quantity, not quality. With the exception of the cockroach, these bugs are DUMB. I can't tell you how many I've killed by slowly coming up on them and squishing them.

Inside the Apartment

The Room-mate - So of course I have a room-mate here in Pohnpei. His name is Brandon. Funny thing - he doesn’t snore but he DOES sleep-talk. I kid you not, tonight, he brought me out of falling asleep by saying excitedly, "DUDE! DUDE! DUDE! DUDE! DUDE! DUDE! ALL DAY! ALL DAY!!!"

Being sick - So I've been sick for the past 2 days and I slept all day yesterday and today which means that I'm not tired… now.. Yippee

The humidity - humidity means you sweat, your bedsheets hold your sweat, it becomes hard to sleep in something that feels so dirty even though you JUST washed it :T

So all in all, a fun little taste of what Pohnpei has to offer those of you who don’t like going to sleep. For me, I'm going to try again now...

A Bit About My Life in Pohnpei (so far)

Just so that you, my faithful 1.5 readers can get an idea of how it is here in Pohnpei, I thought I'd blog a bit about that. So far, the foliage is super vibrant. This is most definitely due to it being one of the wettest places on earth (I think its in the top 3) since it rains (almost) every single day. This also makes it so that the humidity is almost unbearable when you first get off the plane. It was so bad that for the first week that I was in Pohnpei, I had to change shirts at least twice a day. It did, however get much better with time.

The people here are amazing. At times, it reminds me of the states and other times it reminds me how truly lucky we are in the states.

I always feel kind of at home when I'm talking with parents because just like in the states, parents want their children not just succeed, but to thrive in school. When I was thinking about coming here and teaching, I was actually worried that parents wouldn’t really care about their child learning anything or not so this was a huge relief to me. I also get reminded of America when my I get to see my Island family. Pictures to come later when I can steal someone's camera to take pictures of them.

Raime - She is my Island mother. Unfortunately she was diagnosed with breast cancer some time ago and has lost a significant amount of weight. Although I only get to see her on weekends, her positive attitude and courage is always a source of strength for me.

Yosuko - My island sister. I have to say that I love seeing Yosuko around school. On occasion, she's brought me various fruit that she's picked from the tree's in front of her house (which by the way are absolutely delicious). She has such a great smile.

Shawanna and Sharisa - Probably 2 of the cutest girls on the island and I get to be their American "uncle". They both have the cutest smiles even if Sharisa's comes with some rashes because even though she has a mango allergy, she loves them so much that she just keeps eating them anyways.

Sean - My island nephew. This kid is by far one of the coolest kids his age on the island. It's always easy to spot where he's ducked off to because he's sporting a short mohawk (PICTURES TO COME LATER WHEN I STEAL SOMEONE's CAMERA I PROMISE!!!!).

However, despite all the ups, Pohnpei does remind me that I really do have it good in the states. When we were told about how much our stipends were going to be, I really didn’t quite believe that it when they said that we were going to be upper middle or even high-class here on the island (I really have a hard time believing it when I'm shopping for groceries and it costs some exorbitant amount for waffle mix >:[ ). However, once every other trip or even more some times, at least one of us gets approached by someone who either wants to sell us something or asks for money. (By the way, funny story - we got approached by a slightly crazy looking woman the other day who kept asking us for money and she was wearing a mad hatter hat [from Alice in Wonderland]. That has to take the "Random" award of the month)

I must say though, some of the experiences here are just amazing. The fruit markets have some of the best fruit (I'm eating around 5 bananas a day to keep up with them yellowing and going bad). The fish in the fish markets here rival some of the most colorful fish I've ever seen (sorry Tom - RIP). There's parrot-fish, grouper, snapper, skipjack, tuna, jack, and mahi mahi just to name a few. Here's a list of stories/blogs to come though -
Run-in's with the law - I got stopped by the local cops… twice

We are now 1 full week into school - I've made 3 kids cry already and for 1, I wasn’t even there

Hanging out in hammocks - STOP… Hammock time

Food in Pohnpei - Chicken hotdogs...

Nalap - Our snorkel trip

Sufficool's house - Awesome peeps: Tia Tanya and Uncle Ron

My students - 11 boys 2 girls - 3 of the boys were supposed to be separated as much as possible… guess who got all 3? :)

My fellow SM's - Gotta tell you about my hi-5 buddy… 14 for 14!

Our 22+Hr First Day

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.

On the way to Pohnpei (Hey that rhymes!)

After spending 4 days (more or less) in Hawaii, we had to leave at 3 AM Hawaii time which meant that we were gonna be even more messed up with the time changes. It was kind of sad because we got to meet some really great people (unfortunately, this is where my short-term memory with people's names and faces kicks me in the butt since I can't seem to remember names for most all of them) like the Reals and other pastors and SM's.

We got to the airport only to find that the ticketing area didn’t open until 4 AM. So we broke out some lunches and I joked around telling Michael Cain that one of us was probably going to get a pat down since there were so many of us and chances were, it was going to be a minority. The ticketing people got us thru fairly efficiently and even waived our $30 2nd checked bag fee. We said goodbye to Mrs. Moore (our SM coordinator) and got in the line for security. While going thru, I got to go thru the special x-ray machine that basically  gives an outline of your body underneath your clothes.

While going thru, they stopped me for about 5 minutes while letting other people behind me go. During this time, they pulled a can of Off out of my carryon. Strike 1. They then pulled me over to a private 7x7 foot room because they couldn’t see something. Strike 2. When we were there, the TA officer told me that he was gonna basically going to touch me, well, everywhere. Not really having any choice, I let him (even held my tongue from saying anything stupid like, "aren't you supposed to buy me dinner first") do his job even with a Hawaiian gorilla of a man watch (security officer or cop). After he was done, he wiped his gloves on a cloth and then ran it thru some chromatography machine to get a quick reading of the chemical bonds (didn’t say anything there either) and then surprise surprise, since nothing weird showed up, I was let go. I said Mahalo to the cop and went on my way to the gate.

While there, I finally got to see Stitch in Hawaii. I wish I could take a photo but some girl had a life-sized stitch at the airport. Some of us got some coffee and then we boarded the plane to go off to the Eastern Islands. Lucky for me, I got to choose an aisle seat and even better, I got to sit in a group of SM's. I got to sit next to Sophie Anderson, Michael Cain, and Kelsie Keller. When we weren't sleeping (I drifted in and out) we talked and joked about this and that or watched the movie (I forget what they played (sorry, I've been playing catch-up with writing these blog entries). I really began to enjoy the group of people that I'm going with because they all laugh at my lame jokes haha.

We first arrived at Majuro. I remember my apartment-mate Scott Young telling me about his mission experience in Majuro, I think it must have been interesting living on an island that's only 4 square miles (or so I've heard) and shaped like a rib. Half of the plane had to get off (for whatever reason) so that they could inspect that side - of course, it would be the side that I'm on. We got back on in like 30 or so minutes and took off again, this time for Kosrae. We weren't allowed to take pictures or even get off if Kosrae was not our destination but some SM's got off there (they had to take a boat ride to wherever they still had to go to). We stayed on and touched down in Pohnpei an hour or so later (but since we crossed some time zones (including the international date line) we arrived around 1pm (I think) on Thursday (we left Wednesday at 7 in the morning). Pohnpei decided that it wanted to give us the traditional greeting of rain so that we would get accustomed to it better. When we got thru customs (I did everything to look away from the "quarantine room" and didn’t crack any jokes. In fact, I just kept my hand over my mouth for the better part of the wait in line. After we got our baggage, we met some customs officers. My officer had a pretty cool eye mutation where there was a chunk of his iris missing on both sides.

When we got thru that, we came out into the pickup area of the airport where (of course) there were people from the Pohnpei school waiting for us with flower halo's. (I believe I should be able to snag a picture from someone later). This is when I realized that I was the only one in t-shirt + shorts so I quickly went to the bathroom to change so I wouldn’t be the only one that was out of "uniform". We got on small bus (driver's side is on the right side) and left to go to the school. We got to see some interesting stuff on our way in like a Wall-mart (not a typo, subtle isn't it?), fruit stands and other various stands.

After a quick 10 minute drive, we finally got to the Pohnpei SDA School and unloaded our bags into an apartment called the Mosquito Lagoon (or something like that, I'll change it if I'm wrong). Hopefully it's just one of those names that doesn’t necessarily reflect the type of living arrangement that it is haha. Since David and Marcus decided that they wanted the bottom, Michael, Carl, Brandon and I took the upstairs. It's a separate apartment with its own fridge, sink, bathroom and 2 bedrooms with 2 beds in one room and 3 in the other. It also has linoleum floors with some furniture (pictures to probably come later). It may not be much, but it'll be home for the next 10 months :)

*Funny Story(not really, just another one of those - of course this would happen to me - stories)* So besides getting that pat-down and taking the longest to get thru customs, I forgot to wear appropriate first impression clothes. I rushed into the non-air-conditioned bathroom and frantically tried to find a collared shirt with long pants - i took the wrong suitcase the first time so I had to put EVERYTHING back in. I popped back out and got the right suitcase the second time. By this time, I'm sweating buckets and I look like a mess when I come back out wearing khaki pants and a button up shirt. Unfortunately, by this time, the only people still at the airport were just the SM's. Yay for first impressions!

Hawaii

Well it's Day 1 in Hawaii. I'm staying at Hawaii Mission Academy with about 40 other SM's going to the same place. They all seem like pretty fun people, at least so far haha. I feel like I should give some type of disclaimer right about now so here goes. If you know me, I crack cheesy jokes and I've never written a blog. Therefore, the contents of this blog will probably be hard to follow or just plain… cheesy. Also, until I get my camera or steal photos from other people, there really won't be any photos either. Anyways!

It’s kind of difficult to really pinpoint where my day "started" because I took almost all night to pack my bags so I really didn’t have a "wake-up" point. After finally getting everything squared away for the mission trip around 4 AM, I showered and rushed out of the house with my mom and dad. After an all-too short car-ride, we arrived at the airport where we got checked in. Saying good-bye was pretty hard because I wouldn’t be able to see them for the next 10 months which will be the most time I've spent away from home in my 22 years of life.

On the way in, I met up with Michael Cain and Brittany Webster who were also going on mission trips as well this coming year. I found it kind of comforting that there would be people that I would already know when going on my mission trip. The first flight from Orlando to San Diego was pretty uneventful except for them playing an episode of Hawaii 5-0 which I found pretty funny considering that I was going to Hawaii first (I know I'm easily amused). Unfortunately, the elderly woman sitting beside me did not want to relinquish the armrest and kept her arm over on my side of the seat.

When we got to San Diego, the three of us searched for food. Since I didn’t want to pay for a $17 steak and cheese dish, I opted to walk down the terminal (Later, I joked about the irony of the word choice for "terminal") for a $9 cheeseburger. When we got to the connecting flight's terminal, we met up with some more SM's who had flown in from Washington. We all boarded without a hitch and flew to Honolulu.

When we got there, I was actually kind of disappointed that there weren't Hawaiian people there to give me a lei as I got off the plane but I was surprised when Gale Moore (our SM coordinator from Southern) found us and gave us real leis made from real flowers! Pictures to probably come later! The weather there in Hawaii is every bit as awesome as other people make it out to be. Whenever it felt like it was just a tad bit too hot, there would always be a little breeze to kind of balance things out. We quickly loaded up on a yellow school-bus and arrived at Hawaii Mission Academy a short while afterwards.

While at HMA, I was given a crash course on how to be an effective teacher, missionary, and also what to expect when going to the islands. I realized that in order to really understand someone, you really must understand why their culture makes them who they are which wont only help me as a missionary reach people out in other countries but even the USA as well.

There were a lot of  meetings but we did get some time to hang out on the island. During the 2 full days that we were on the island, we had the opportunity to go to either the beach or on a mountain-ish hike up a man-made trail that gave a beautiful view of the sunrise or even just hang out in a hammock. (Again! Pictures to probably come later!) We also had some time to go shopping at the market. While there, I got to see a Hawaiian hula dance.  Those hula dancers really knew how to shake haha. One of them managed to dance on 1 leg and even squatted down a bit too. I wanted to get some souvenirs but didn’t because I wouldn’t be able to get them to the people I wanted to give them to for about a year. I don't think they'll mind given that some of them were postcards of well, we'll say less than attractive people in minimal clothing smiling with what's left of their teeth.

The time in Hawaii seemed a bit too short but since we couldn't all just stay we had to leave to our own individual islands...

*fun story* I met a guy named Carl Dupper (he's pretty amazing at playing the accordian - video to come later). He also brought a hammock and wanted to sleep outside so he set it up between these 2 palm trees and went to bed. In the morning, I found his hammock strung right outside our room. Apparently, the lights are kept on all night and even worse, the sprinklers came on at 3 am and gave him a nasty wake up call!