Christmas

I hope that you all had a very Merry Christmas this year. As Christmas was approaching our church was preparing for the island wide Christmas event. All three of the churches on island come together for a community church service on the Sunday before Christmas. Each church prepares either songs or dances and some do both. Our church does both. So for the week before this service we had practice every evening to prepare for this.  Our performance was on Sunday. The church service usually last about 1-2 hours and takes place later in the afternoon. Which is about the hottest time of day. Since I was participating I had to sit with the choir. The choir squishes into the front rows of the church. Lusi always used to complain to me about it being so hot up there and I thought he was just exaggerating a little. Jokes on me. I was dripping sweat about five minutes into the service. It is very very hot sitting with the choir. I felt so gross by the end of the service. After the service was complete we all got cake, cinnamon rolls, and koko rice.

            On Christmas Eve the church service does not begin until around 10 p.m. interesting for me I have never been to service so late in the night. I was actually surprised by how many people were in the church for this service. Now for me this is really late for me to stay up. Since moving here it is a miracle if I stay up past 10:00 p.m. Granted I get up really early but I think it does with the fact it gets dark early here and I think that its way later than it actually is. The Christmas Eve service was nice and I went straight to bed afterwards.

            On Christmas Day our church held a BBQ for the youth. The day was filled with Christmas music, volleyball, tetherball, and a dance competition. My favorite part of the day was being able to see my students since I don’t see them because of school. A lot of them would come and sit and talk to me about the presents they got. One boy came running up to me Miss Abby, Miss Abby, I got a swimming pool from my mom. He had the biggest smile on his face. He was so excited. He still is talking to me about it when I see him. After eating our meal we all headed to the ocean to go swimming for the afternoon. Not often do Samoans want to go swimming in the middle of the day. I was pretty excited about it. After spending the day swimming and eating I went home and watched movies to end the Christmas!

With Love,

Abby  

Books

Books are one of my favorite things about teaching. If you would give me the chance to just sit down and read a book all day I would love it. I love learning about new things. My favorite is when you are reading a book and your are so into the book you forget about everything else around you. I wish I could remember the first time I fell in love with reading. I remember in high school I would read like a book a day. Unfortunately, life has gotten a little more busy since then and I don’t get the opportunity to read as much.

            As a teacher I want my students to fall in love with reading. I want them to find a book they really like and tell me all about what happens. At our school we do not have a library. Instead each classroom is supposed to have their own classroom library. My first two years of teaching my classroom library maybe had thirty books and half of them had all the pages in them. Over the summer I got a large donation of books. I was sooooo excited for my kids. I had about 150 books on my bookshelf at the beginning of the year. My kids were so excited at the beginning of the year to have nice books. I was really nervous that they were going to ruin the books by the end of the year. So I left a stack of my favorite books at my house. Long story short I completely forgot about this stack of books until I cleaned my house last weekend.

            My students have been reading the books I had donated to me over the summer from cover to cover. It’s so fun watching them enjoy reading telling their classmates about these books. I have one student who I have been working on English very hard. This student read their very first book in English all by themselves last week. The student went up to the front of the classroom all excited and goes, “Everyone be quiet.” He proceeded to open up his book and read the whole book in front of the class. By some miracle the whole class sat quietly and listened to the student read the whole story. When the student finished they all started cheering. These are the moments that I love love love teaching because I like seeing them accomplish something and be so proud of themselves.

            This week I decided to bring in the books that I had found while cleaning the house. It almost seemed like Christmas morning with all my students reading these new books. They were all so excited to have new books to read. I have never seen them all sit down and read a book at the same time. I guess when I have good books they will happily sit down and read them.

With Love,

Abby

Weekend Vibes

On Friday I came home from school with quite the stomachache, which eventually came to be the flu. Yes, we still get the flu around here. So I spent most of my week in bed watching endless amounts of T.V. shows to kill the time. On Sunday I was finally feeling better so I went to our Christmas dance practice. After practice for three hours in the middle of the day I was wiped. I went home and ran to turn the air conditioning on. To try and cool off from being inside the church in the peak heat of the day. After making a quick supper I was laying down to begin a Christmas movie for the night. My room was the perfect temperature it was cold enough were I could lay under a fleece blanket and not be hot.

            As the movie was rolling along the sound of a dying air conditioner filled the room. This is not the sound we like to here in Samoa. This means the power is going out. The power goes out about once month my first year is seemed to happen more frequently but not as much anymore. Luckily, I had turned the air on earlier so my game plan was to stay in the room as long as possible and not let the cold air out. After about 20 minutes all cold air that was once filling the room was gone. It was time to open up the windows and hope for a breeze. No such luck. There was not a breeze to be found. In Minnesota at night the temperature seems to drop drastically at night. In Samoa the temperature doesn’t really change from night to do, which means it can get pretty toasty at night with out a fan or A.C. After about an hour of no power my computer was on the verge of dying and my phone was near dead.

            Our generation depends a lot of their life on the phone and mine was about to be dead for the night. It was only 8:30 but with no technology or anything else to do in the dark I was about to sleep except for the slight problem that I was very hot. I thought it looked so cool outside because it was pitch black and no lights. Lusi not so much he said he had never seen it so dark before. Wait till he comes to Minnesota at night. After digging around the house I finally found two hand fans. The problem with hand fanning is your arm gets rather tired. We were now pushing around two hours with no power. I finally took a melatonin to put me to sleep for the night. Then slow sound of the air conditioning coming back to life filled the room. I almost jumped out of bed in excitement. It took me about an hour after that to actually fall asleep. Oops. Sometimes I take things for granted in life. Living here sometimes shows me that we don’t need material possessions to be happy. Sometimes we care too much about having the latest and greatest. We need to be thinking about what we actually need instead of what we want.

With Love,

Abby  

Welcome December

I can’t believe it is already December. This time of year always seems to fly by for me. It also never feels like Christmas around here one because it never gets cold and snows. The only thing they do somewhat like Christmas here is put up Christmas lights all over the main island. Sadly, we can’t see the lights because we are not going to be on the main island at night. Next Christmas is going to be so weird actually seeing snow and Christmas trees.

            This time in the school year is always rough on a teacher. The kids have about an ounce of motivation to actually do school work. They know that they are getting a break from school in a couple of weeks and they just don’t want to do any work. We are currently working on our times table. They are having a really hard time with those. Let me tell you I am getting really really really fast at my times table.

            This Monday was one for the books. Since Saturday morning we have pretty much had a constant down pour since Saturday. When it rains a lot the village really start to flood. When I woke up on Monday morning it was rainy cats and dogs. I was completely dreading my walk to school. It always makes me super nervous walking to school when it’s raining and I have to take my laptop. I usually wrap it in a plastic bag inside of my backpack. When I got to school around 6:30 usually half my class is waiting outside the door for me to get there. On Monday there was not a single kid at school. Around 7:00 students started walking to school in the downpour. I was the only teacher who got school and so all the kids were trying to come in my room to avoid the rain. By 7:30 when our first bell is supposed to ring I had 15 students out of the usual 101 in my classroom. No teachers, no principal, and no one telling me what is going on. Around 8:00 teachers finally start coming to school. By 8:45 they finally decided to ring the first bell. What a way to start your Monday. About half the school showed up that day due to the rain. Turns out kids don’t like coming to school when it’s raining.

            This week we have a big teacher carnival on the main island. Its for teachers only I am interested to see what it is like. Apparently for every teacher who just attends the carnival they get a stipend of 30 dollars. This is the only way that they can motivate teachers to show up to these events.

            This week is also my finals week for my online class. I am currently typing out lots of papers. Can’t wait for my Christmas break from online classes! I feel like I am always doing homework.

            With Love,

Abby

Ofu & Olosega & Ta’u

The first island that I visited over my Thanksgiving break was Ofu and Olosega. A small bridge in the middle that maybe takes 1 or 2 minutes to walk across connects the two islands. These two islands are known to be the most beautiful islands in American Samoa. Let me tell you they did not disappoint one bit. One of the things I loved most about the islands is how remote they are. During my two days that I spend there we only saw ten people. It was amazing.

            When we arrived on island we stayed at a small inn. The people who were hosting us picked us up from the airport and gave us a complete tour of both islands. Which was wonderful. We were the only people at the inn so we got quite spoiled. On Thanksgiving we spent our day sitting on the beach. Since the beach is a part of the National Park they had picnic benches scattered around along with hammocks in the shade. We made sandwiched in the morning and then spent the whole day reading our books and snorkeling. The snorkeling was unlike any I have ever seen. There were so many fish swimming around. When we returned to our inn at night they provided us with thanksgiving meal. I really could have cried tears of joy since I have not really had a Thanksgiving meal since I was stateside. After out meal we watched a Christmas movie in the nice cold room. Almost felt like Christmas because I was cold.

            The next morning we tackled the hike of Mount Tumu. Before heading on this hike. We could not find accurate information of how far this hike was. In the back of my mind I was a little bit nervous since I can honestly say I am in terrible shape. Luckily our people at the inn dropped us off at the trailhead. Otherwise we would have had a four-mile walk before we started. About ten minutes into the hike, I literally thought I was going to die. Thankfully Taylor one of the girls with me was equally having a hard time. It was straight up for an hour and a half. When we got close to the top we had to use ropes to guide us up the mountain that’s how steep it was. By the end Taylor and I were literally crawling up because we were so tired. While Kate was telling us she wasn’t even tired…..

            Once on top it made it worth the walk up. I was lucky enough to have cell service at the top so I could share the view with my family. The walk down was much easier. After we made it to the bottom we went to spend the rest of the day at the beach. Unfortunately it was a mile and half hike to the beach. I was so exhausted by the end. Once I got to the beach I didn’t really move. I read my book and swam to cool off. By the time we made it back to the inn we had walked a total of ten miles.

            After getting back we quick went to the bridge to jump off it. It is a tradition for World Teachers to jump of the bridge. So of course we had to get that in quick before we left the following day. After jumping in one of the locals informed us that sometimes you can see sharks swimming under the bridge. Not real comforting but at least I had finished the jump by that point.

            The following day we headed to Ta’u the last island. It was about an hour and a half boat ride to get there. The boats are a little different then what I am used to. For one they have a twin engine, which is two motors. So the boats move at a faster pace. Also the sea was a lot rougher then I was used to. There were a few times I am pretty sure are whole boat was out of the water. When we got to about the half way point of the boat ride. I boat just died. Both engines just turned off. This was a moment I wish I didn’t know as much Samoan as I did. They were saying well there is gas in both tanks. I have no idea why they are not turning on… As we are sitting waiting for them to figure out what is going on Kate begins to tell me this story. About World Teachers who lived in the Marshall Islands and were on a boat and the boat went missing and they were never found. Not the most comforting story to be told while your boat is dead in the middle of the ocean with rather large waves. Luckily, the boat came back to life and we safely made it to the island. We can now laugh about it but we were not necessarily laughing at first.

            Once arriving in Ta’u we didn’t do a lot. We just stayed at a friend’s house and had a good time talking to her and learning about her life on the outer island. It was interesting to see what her life was like along with see the school she was teaching at.

            One last interesting fact is when flying to the outer island these planes are tiny. They maybe fit 13-20 people depending on the plane. Very small. When checking they hand write your boarding pass. They also have you step on a scale similar to the one you have at your house and weigh you. Depending on your weight is where you get seated on the plane. Luckily I am very light compared to Samoans and get the privilege of sitting behind the pilot. Meaning I could hold a conversation with them if I wanted or if I reached my hand out I could touch them. The planes are very small. I cannot even stand straight up inside and all of the seats fold down. 

With Love,

Abby