Refueling

Sundays are my day to “refuel” myself for the week. I spend my days catching up on schoolwork, homework, and housework. I also make sure to set time aside to actually relax. Some weeks it seems that the work can just pile up but in order to keep my sanity I have to let myself take a break. As I was reflecting over my week and the upcoming week the one thing that kept coming back to my mind was my car.

            I am not sure I have mentioned this in my blog yet but way back in November my car overheated. Not real surprising in the extreme heat and salt conditions we have here. We brought the car in thinking it would be a nice quick fix. Man was I wrong. At first frustration was flowing from. I was so mad that it just wouldn’t be fixed. I was upset about how much money ended up getting put into this car. I also missed the convenience of being able to go to town whenever I wanted. As time started to pass I kept praying for this car to be fixed. Still no answer. As I was sharing with Lusi I told him about how sometimes I think God gives us blessings in disguise. At first we don’t really understand why something may be happening in our life and we may become very frustrated. As the bible says many times we need to be patient and God will do things in his own timing. I believe that this was one of these moments. The car was becoming a major stress in our lives. No need to get into the details. It was causing us to get into disagreements and added stress. Once the car was broken we noticed quite a change. Both of us were a lot less stressed. We spent more Saturdays enjoying the island life instead of trying to do American things and eat American food. We ended up finding nice little marts to shop at a lot closer to home and a lot cheaper. We also became very appreciative of the bus system and still being able to get around the island when needed. Not having a car reminded me a lot of my first year here and reminded me of why I fell in love with this place. So even though I didn’t see it at first I believe it was truly a blessing.

            Sometimes we don’t understand why things are happening in our lives we just have to trust the process. Everything always has a strange way of working out. 

With Love,

Abby

Better Late Than Never

I am apologizing for the lack of blogs for the last two months. I can honestly say I have no idea where these last two months went. The month of January was spent compiling all my students’ grades since it was the end of first semester. Since our Internet is very unreliable we cannot depend on it to do our work. Which means we have to hand write all of our report cards and comments. This is a very time consuming task and I dread it every time we have to do. After the reports and parent teacher conferences finished the beginning of the semester meetings began. I think there was a two-week span where I had to go across 4 or 5 days. Which is a lot of traveling and me scrambling to get my online classes submitted on time. After all that craziness died down. February rolled around and one of my favorite months of the year because that means my parents are coming!!

            I spent time making plans and preparing for their arrival. I always love that week because we can just spend time together and we are not busy with all of our work. We also had great weather this year. Sunshine, sunshine, and a little more sunshine. Lucky for them because before they came it was raining and cool and right after they left it was rainy and cool. We spent our days eating lots of food and enjoying the warm weather. We also played quite a few games of non-competitive, friendly games of cards ;).

            Now that the events of my last two months have died down I can finally enjoy a nice Saturday at home. I love to just sit at the house and put on my music. I think after being around kids all week long the peace and quiet is quite enjoyable. Hope all is going well back home! If your getting sick of the snow visitors are always welcome J

With Love,

Abby 

Power Outage/ Late Post

On Sunday evening I was walking to the bathroom at Lusi’s house when all of the sudden the power went out. Now they have multiple little ones at the house and I was trying to navigate back to my room without tripping over any toys. I finally made it back to the room safely. Now if the power doesn’t come on within the first hour is safe to say they have to call the main island and we have to wait for someone to come over and fix the problem. We hit the half hour mark and were soon making our way outside for a breeze because the temperature in the house was very warm.

            We brought Samoan mats and sleeping mats outside and placed them on the ground. We were all lying outside under the stars patiently waiting for the power to come on. Luckily it was a full moon so it was very light outside and we had a slight breeze. Since the main island still had power I was able to use the cell phone towers to get internet on my phone. We downloaded the app called Skyview Lite. I highly, highly recommend it. It’s an app that you hold your phone up to the sky and you can see different constellations and the planets. Now the stars shine a lot brighter here. So it was easy to identify some of the different constellations. We also think we were able to see Mars. When we held the phone up to that particular star it stated that it was Mars. It also had an orange-ish tint to it.  This app kept us all entertained for a very long time. I am interested to see what it looks like when I get home this summer.

            At about eleven we decided it might be a night without power and our best bet was to go try and sleep. Around three in the morning the lights finally came back on and I was never so thankful to feel the breeze from the fan come back.

With Love,

Abby

Beauty

This week has been a week of abnormally warm temperatures for us.  These are the weeks I am constantly reminding myself of the very cold, harsh winters I was so used of a couple of years ago. I remember always dreaming of moving somewhere warm to avoid the cold.  On the hot weeks it can make it hard for a person to be thankful for everything around them. I find myself constantly complaining of being hot. Dreaming of what it would be like to actually feel cold. Sometimes it seems that we can never be pleased and the grass and is always greener somewhere else.

Today I spent my day making cookies with Lusi. We had the fan blowing on the cookies full blast to try and get the chocolate chips from melting. The weather app was telling us it felt like 110 today. Now put into the mix sitting in a kitchen with an oven constantly being opened and closed. I now think that if I ever make cookies and don’t break a sweat it may be weird. After making the cookies I was patiently waiting for it to get dark out so I could shower. The best time to take a shower is right after the sunsets because it finally cools off.

I was reading my devotions shortly before taking my shower and it was talking about the beauty of the earth. We often take the beauty for granted. The bible passage was from Job. Talking about how God had created everything and controls everything that is happening around the world. The most interesting part for me is it talked about how God decided when to make the waves stop and not to cover land. Now if you truly think about the fact that he just stops the waves on shore and controls all of that it’s pretty amazing.

As I was jumping into my shower the sun was just setting beneath the mountains. I was at Lusi’s house and they have an outdoor shower. I absolutely love the outdoor showers. It’s more or less a steel post attached to a pipe but it does the job. When showering you can see the stars glowing and the moon was a full.  Along with wherever you look you can see palm trees. It is one of the things I will miss the most when leaving this island. I love just taking in the beauty of it all.

With Love,

Abby

Back at it!

Well, Christmas break is officially over and school is back in session. This Christmas break was perfect I get to spend a week on the island and then traveled to another island called Western Samoa (WS). WS was a lot of fun I didn’t really plan out the trip I had a more lets just do it day by day plan. The hotel that I stayed at was really nice it would compare to a holiday inn in the states. A few of the highlights were:

1.                The To Sua Trench if you have never heard of it google it. It’s a one of the only ones you can find in the world. Its like a cave that you have to take small wooden ladder down to get too. The water is a mixture of freshwater and saltwater. So the water was actually pretty cold. You had to pay a small fee to enter the area but it was a beautiful garden filled with Samoan fales where we also ate our dinner overlooking the ocean!

2.     The market is very popular if you ask anyone they will all say go to the market. The market has so many cool things you can buy that are Samoan. I got lots of stuff there because it is cheaper there than it is in American Samoa.

3.     The island is a lot bigger. Like wow I felt like I was in the Dominican it was so big. It was filled with cows and horses. I get a little excited when I see farm animals because I have yet to see any here. So I really enjoyed driving through the mountains and looking at all the different animals and scenery. 

4.     The food was off the charts. They had so many restaurants to choose from. My favorite was the pizza but overall it was really good. We actually found another couple that the guy was Samoan and the girl was white. So for most of our meals we traveled around town to new restaurants. We found some really good places.

Today was our second day back to school. I was so excited to see all the kids again and they all said they missed school. Being home is boring they all told me. So we are half way through the school year already. I can’t believe. My students keep reminding me that June is not too far off. They also are quite excited to see my parents in February. They were counting how many days until they are here.

With Love,

Abby