Dana

Last Thursday my old roommate from my first year of living here came to visit. I was so excited for her to come visit and see how much the kids have changed over the last couple of years. She flew all the way from Washington, D.C. for only four days on the island. That’s a lot of flying about 26 hours one way. It was interesting hosting someone who has already lived on the island and all the locals know. Not as much planning on my part.

            We spent our first night across since riding a boat late at night comes with a high fee. We stayed up until like one in the morning reminiscing of our time on the island along with catching up with all the news things that has been happening in our lives. We got a chance to visit our church’s camp. All the kids of our church and family sleep at the center it’s a building next to the church. It is very similar to our fellowship hall. They spend four days staying their making meals, playing games, and sleeping. You are not allowed to go home. You need to shower and do everything else at the church. It was interesting to see it. Since Dana was here I did not stay over night. We did come down and play in the games and hang out for a while.

            On Dana’s last day island we ran into another World Teacher from our year. She lives on the way outer islands but came back for flag day is was waiting for her boat to leave to go back to the island. Her boat is more like a small ship that they have to ride for 12 hours. I visited her back in November but we took the airplane instead of the boat. Anyway we were eating and she came into the same place and joined us for lunch. We were planning on driving around the island that day and asked her to join us. We had our chauffer Lusi driving us three girls around the island. We had so many laughs reminiscing all the things that happened to us over the last three years on island. After a day of fun we had to drop Dana off at the airport and bring Anna to the wharf to catch her boat and back to Aunu’u we went.

            It was so fun to catch up with the other teachers but it was also a sad moment. As that was the last time we would all be together. We are going different ways at the end of the year. We realized this might be our last time of seeing each other. A few tears were shed as some great friends were made along this journey. This also scares me very much for what its going to be like when I actually leave.

With Love,

Abby