The Prodigal Blogger Returns

Pohnpeian Word of the Day: ansou = “time”

Another few weeks have passed here in the tropics, and I haven’t put anything here at all. Mostly, that’s because there hasn’t been much to tell, but here we go anyway…

The last time I posted was just before September 11th, which is Pohnpei Liberation Day. The night before the holiday, Beth came up from Kitti – her roommate, Nic, was in Kosrae for the long weekend and she was beginning to get pestered by the neighbors without him. We drank some Red Horse and discussed philosophy until she eventually crashed on our couch.

The next morning, we got up and went to Namiki for breakfast, where I discovered I could eat relatively cheaply by ordering everything individually. I’ve really been pinching pennies lately, so even the $5 tab for some bacon and an egg hit pretty hard, but it was nice to eat a real breakfast with company. While we ate, we worked on Meghan’s birthday cards – she turned 22 the day before. Mine was one of those tacky cards where you make a word starting with each letter of the person’s name:

Mini soooda (she’s from Minnesota)
Eco-friendly
Goofy grin
Hippy
Athlete
Natural diplomat

When we finished eating, we walked to PICS to see the Liberation Day track meet. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many Pohnpeians in one place – half of Kolonia must have been there, and I’ll bet Madolenihmw was completely abandoned (I hope somebody remembered to turn off the lights). All the high schools on the island fielded teams, and Kitti apparently won most of the events.

Meghan and Michaela were officiating at the long jump, and when everyone took a break for lunch, I had a chance to give Meghan our cards. After that, I left… I’m not much for watching sporting events, and did I mention how hot it is here? Like, really hot. I don’t think it would have been soooo hard for PICS to put a fan or a couple of misters by the stands – or maybe hold the whole thing at night.

That was the last major event to report, judging by the tape in my camcorder. The only other thing worth noting was the time they cut the power on the whole island for a Saturday. They were having all sorts of problems with the generator – the power kept going off several times a day, for up to an hour at a time. For some reason, they managed to time it so that this was always right in the middle of one of my lectures – if Pohnpeian students weren’t already restless enough, having all the lights and fans off will definitely do the trick.

The worst part about a power outage is that all the computers in our office are hooked up to Uninterruptible Power Supplies (or UPS’s for short). Don’t ask me why, but even though we all have five-year-old computers and no one can ever get toner for the copiers or markers for the transparencies, every single computer at COM is hooked into a UPS. When the power goes off, these little buggers all start wailing simultaneously, as if to say “I’m here, it’s dark, and I can only keep this thing running for a minute or two!” It makes quite a little racket.

Last weekend they announced that they were going to shut down the whole grid at nine in the morning on Saturday, to do some diagnostic stuff I guess. Of course, in true Pohnpeian style, it didn’t actually shut off until ten, but it was thankfully back up at three. Then off again at five, and back at six. Since then, the lights have flickered now and then but they stay on. Here’s hoping it stays that way – or I’ll have to chuck my UPS out the window.

As for my classes… my morning class, Prealgebra, is going pretty well. More than a third of my students have legitimate A’s (that is, going my the grade scale in the syllabus, without any curving). This is despite the incredibly odd order that the book goes in – after we finished our discussion of negative numbers, we launched right in to polynomials! For those of you that don’t know much math, that’s a pretty big leap. Usually, you talk about solving linear equations and such before you get into that kind of thing, but they seem to be taking it in stride.

I don’t know if I just have more energy in the morning or something, but this class always seems the friendliest, which is odd considering how simple the material is and how slowly I teach it. I haven’t had too many discipline problems – which is nice, since I’ve never really had many discipline solutions – but maybe the real troublemakers haven’t really woken up yet at 8:30. There are even a couple of high-performing students in this class that come to my office hours, and I have started to become friendly with them.

My later classes, two sections of Elementary Algebra, are another story. Both of these classes have more B’s than any other letter grade, with only 15% of the students having A’s. I have a lot of discipline problems in these classes, ranging from students talking and giggling loudly, to yelling out answers before I ask for or want them (in hopes that this will somehow make class end sooner), to one student who always announces loudly that time is up (usually five minutes before it really is).

My biggest pet peeve is the chairs. Half of them show up late to class – I’ve tried my best to curb this by giving the daily problem the very minute class begins, and collecting it no more than five minutes after – but the fact that I have clearly begun my lecture doesn’t stop them from noisily picking up chairs and moving them all the way to the other side of the room to sit by their friends. The problem is that both of the rooms I teach in are significantly larger than the space required for an orderly grid of chairs, so we end up with them backed up all the way against the back wall, and then grouped in little clusters all around the rest of the room, with a huge empty space in the middle.

A lot of the time, when I’m teaching these Algebra classes, the brighter students try to give me the impression that this is all really boring and trivial, which makes me feel like I should move faster – but then they do miserably on the daily problems and exams, so they don’t understand as well as they pretend. Of course, I’ve experienced this before as a teacher, but usually I can tell from the facial expressions of the other students whether or not the majority really does “get it”. The problem for me is that these kids are impossible to read – I’ve never seen anything I would call “confusion” on their faces, just a totally blank stoic stare that could mean anything. Of course, that’s the ones that are awake.

The biggest problem with the MS 96 Algebra course, for me, is that my stopping point is set in stone because the class is the first part of a two-semester series. If my students are going to have a chance of succeeding in MS 99, I absolutely have to finish all of Chapter 6 before the semester ends. That will be hard, considering I just started Chapter 3 last week (and I spent a whole week on one section, 3.1) and the semester is nearly halfway over, but I can do it as long as I keep up the pace.

I’m starting to regret having given them so many graded assignments in the original syllabus. Every week, I give each class a test and three daily problems, as well as collecting a homework – and I have 94 total students. My stack of grading to be done never goes away… as soon as I finish one major assignment, another one rolls in. At least I do stay ahead of it now – I usually get the homework assignments and tests back within a day or two.

I finally set up my grade book in Excel to automatically calculate all the pertinent totals and percentages, and with a little tinkering I figured out how to export these to Word. Now, every time I grade a major assignment and put the grades in the computer, I can easily print out a series of slips, one for each student, already filled out with all the data straight from my grade book. I cut these apart and staple them to the assignment, so that each student knows exactly what grade they have at that moment.

All of this is basically just for good old-fashioned CYA. None of my students will be able to come to me, as they usually do, at the end of the semester to complain about their low grades – they will have seen them coming from a long way off. CYA is also the main reason I have so much grading in the first place – I like the idea that each student’s final letter grade is based on so many individual assignments that it is impossible for a bad score on just a couple to severely impact it. When I finally turn in my grade book to my superiors at COM, I will have a lot of data to point to in case any disputes arise, especially if I end up failing half of my class – which I, of course, hope not to do.

I spoke with my immediate boss, George Mangonon, about the possibility of teaching all Prealgebra sections next semester. I like the lower-level course better, mostly because there is no pre-set ending point… everyone I have spoken with says you have to put all nine chapters in your official syllabus, but that you can really teach it at whatever pace is appropriate to the students, and how much you actually cover depends on them.

If I had the opportunity to focus on a single course like that one, I would rearrange the topics (polynomials before fractions?) and add more fun activities. The Tuesday and Thursday extended periods are supposed to be for “lab”, but most teachers use them to have the students do seat work – I use mine for lecture and exams. I can think of tons of fun things I would do to reinforce various concepts … but I need the time to prepare for them, and I need to be free of this crazy grading cycle, so they will have to wait for next semester.

Aside from COM… well, I have stalled on War and Peace. I rarely have time to type out a blog, let alone pick up a book, but if I do find time it’s hard to get back into the dry Napoleonic Wars. I keep staring at Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, which I got in a trade with Jim for The Road (take that, Cormac McCarthy), but I feel like I should finish what I start. Then again, I have managed to listen to every last one of the couple dozen audiobooks I ripped to my computer before leaving (they are great when you’re grading), and I’ve got to have something new to think about.

I’ve been trying to visit Floid more regularly, with little success. Usually, I’m so wiped out by the end of the day that I can’t even think of walking down to Ohmine (20 minutes away), where I will invariably stay at least a few hours in the un-air-conditioned house. I don’t feel terribly selfish in opting not to go, but I still regret it a bit.

However, when I do make it down there, I always find him to be an inspiration. The kid somehow manages to put a good amount of honest effort into his schoolwork, despite the half-dozen toddlers screaming and running around him at all times, and the adults who occasionally interject with answers he can get himself or snap at him for making a mistake. Spending time with him feels like the sort of thing I came here to do, a feeling I don’t frankly get as much at the college.

I’ve been trying to motivate him to work hard in between the times I can make it there. Two weeks ago, I told him I would bring him a surprise present – a bootleg copy of The Dark Knight, which I must have watched two dozen times by now – if he went to school for a whole week, Monday through Friday (he skips a lot). He didn’t make it, but I made him the same offer for this last week. I’m going over to the house today to follow up, and hopefully he’ll get the DVD and we can do some math together.

Floid’s biggest interest is in mythology – he is always asking me questions I can’t answer about Zeus, Pan, the Minotaur, etc. – and my next plan is to try and use this to improve his English. I’m going to make up “Myth Investigation” sheets, and part of his “assignment” for next week, in addition to going to school every day, will be to fill one out. The idea is for him to pick a local Pohnpeian myth, and find out everything he can about it (who? where? why? etc.) by talking to people.

After he fills out the sheet, I’m going to have him write the story down (in English) using all the details he collected. Then we do a second draft, and finally he can type it on my computer. It’s an elaborate plan, but I’m hoping it will be something that interests him – he says he wants to be a mythologist, after all, but he thinks he can do it without going to high school. I hope to give him some practice with writing this way.

I feel like I need to get more involved with this individual tutoring – it breaks down many of the walls that go up around Pohnpeians when they are in large groups. Fortunately, I got the TSP tutoring job (as if there was any doubt ☺) so that should help. It will also help to get paid $10 an hour – all that cheap Chinese merchandise in Manila isn’t going to buy itself.

To get the TSP job, I had to get an FSM social security number – all I had to do was bring my passport and $3 to the social security branch office. When I was there, a man on his way out greeted me and asked who I was with. After I explained that I was with WorldTeach, he said I was here to help his country. I said I hoped so, and he assured me that I will and shook my hand. I have one of these brief perfunctory interactions every once and a while, and they can be amazingly uplifting given the sort of reaction I get from my students.

As for Japanese, class is going well… the other day, we had finally learned enough phrases to have a somewhat unscripted conversation – unfortunately, it was as usual a conversation between a diner and a waiter:

W: O’kimari desu ka? 

       (Are you ready to order?)
D: Hai. Suteeki ni shimasu. 

       (Yes. I’ll have the steak.)
W: Suteeki wa ikaga nasai masu ka? 

       (How would you like your steak cooked?)
D: Midiamu de. 

       (Medium.)
W: O’nomimono wa ikaga nasai masu ka? 

       (What would you like to drink?)
D: Juusu wa nani ga arimasu ka? 

       (What kinds of juice do you have?)
W: Painappuru, orenji, sutoroberii ga arimasu ga… 

       (We have pineapple, orange and strawberry…)
D: Orenji juusu o kudasai. 

       (Bring me an orange juice.)
W: Kashiko marimashita. Shooshoo o’machi kudasai. 

       (Certainly, sir. Just a moment, please)

I took great pleasure in transcribing these conversations into hiragana, in which I am now pretty fluent, and katakana, which I am starting to learn – my teacher even complimented my handwriting at one point. The katakana characters are used for words of foreign origin, such as suteeki (ステ—キ) and midiamu (ミディアム). Frankly, I think katakana is a bit ugly compared to its sister, which is more cursive and intricate, but you need both. Just for fun, here’s how I would write the above conversation (the katakana is underlined):

W: おきまりですか｡
D: はい｡ ステ—キにします｡
W: ステ—キはいかがなさいますか｡
D: ミディアムで｡
W: おにものはいかがなさいますか｡
D: ジュ—スはなにがありますか｡
W: パイナップル､オレンジ､ストロベリ—がありますが｡
D: オレンジジュ—スをください｡
W: かしこまりました｡ しょうしょうおまちください｡

Note that there are no spaces between words – once you put in kanji and use the kanas less, it becomes clearer where one word stops and the next begins. Also, there is no equivalent to the English question mark “?” because the particle ka (か) always indicates a question at the end of a sentence. Oh, and the commas are backwards – what’s up with that?

So my birthday is November 5th, and I will soon be putting up another “wish list” on the blog in case anyone wants to send me something – Ms. Lyons’ 4th grade class, I’m looking in your direction ;). Mostly, it’ll be books – I want some Japanese children’s books (anything for the first grade won’t have any complicated kanji in it), some dictionaries and maybe a couple of English novels and such. Anyway, stay tuned … I’ll put up a full list probably in my next post.

Signs have been posted all over COM reminding everyone to “Speak English”. On these signs two people, who are either albino Pohnpeians or just not Pohnpeian at all, communicate in speech bubbles – one says “What’s the skinny?” and the other replies “I’m cool.” I have never heard anyone younger than my mom’s generation use the word “skinny” as a noun, but I guess it’s coming back in the third world – so consider this post to be the skinny on me lately, and accept my apologies that it took so long to write it.

The People You Meet in the Middle of Nowhere

Pohnpeian Word of the Day: aramas = “people”

I seem to have let another week go by without posting anything – I wish I could tell you I’ve just been lazy, but the truth is that there hasn’t really been much to say. My life these days mostly consists of teaching and grading, teaching and grading, teaching and grading… it’s good to be busy, since it keeps me from being homesick, but it doesn’t leave much time for anything else.

Also, Pohnpei is a very small place and I’ve already seen a lot of the tourist-y sights (Sokehs, Kepirohi, Salapwuk, Nahlap, Nan Madol etc…). There’s still a couple major waterfalls I’ve missed, and the Pohnpaip petroglyphs near Madolenihmw, but I guess I have to save those for a rainy day – well, a less rainy day anyway. :)

My classes are chugging along well enough – I put in a couple of late nights this week and managed to catch up on all my grading, so maybe if I just stay on top of it I can start relaxing in the evenings. We just finished talking about negative numbers in Prealgebra, and we started solving linear equations in Elementary Algebra. The lower-level class is actually testing much better than the higher-level one, and they honestly seem to be putting a little more effort into it as a whole.

Of course, they roll their eyes at me a lot when we talk about basic things. The way they see it, they already know how to do this stuff – what I keep trying to impress on them is the importance of knowing why, but it's a hard sell. For example, on the last MS96 test, I had a fill-in-the-blank section for important vocabulary like “solution” and “identity”. Everybody did very poorly on this part, mixing up terms left and right (even putting adjectives or verbs in blanks where a noun was clearly required, and so on) – even if they did fine on the calculation part of the exam.

They try their best to push me forward during class, but I can’t assume this means they understand. I did half a dozen problems on distributing with them, but a good quarter of them still didn't realize that you have to multiply the factor by both terms. At least I can start giving them more immediate feedback, now that I’m on top of my grading – that’s really the point of the daily problem (besides making sure they show up on time).

On Nialim (Friday), I cancelled one of my MS96 classes. I’m teaching two sections, and since one of them started on the third day of the semester it has always been a bit behind. By canceling the other one, I finally have them lined up, which makes lesson planning a lot easier for me. Now I give the same lecture twice every day, and I only change the daily problem a little bit.

On Rahnkaulop (Saturday), I treated myself to dinner at Joy for the first time in weeks – I’ve been watching my funds a lot more closely, eating hot dogs at lunch and so on. While I was there, I was approached by an older (middle-aged?) menwai named Jim Fenton who noticed I was reading War and Peace (288 pages down, xxx to go). We struck up a conversation, and I found out that he is on a ten-island tour of the Pacific. His last stop was Kosrae, and he actually met a couple of the WorldTeach volunteers there. Within ten minutes of meeting, he proposed that we go on a hike or something the next day.

At first, I was a little weirded out – after all, I barely knew this guy, and I couldn’t tell if he was trying to scam me or hit on me or something. Plus, he’s got quite an eccentric personality (30% insane, as he puts it) … during the dinner, he asked me everything from how to hitchhike around the island to whether I had any advice on robbing banks. However, it turned out that he had just landed on Pohnpei a few hours earlier, he was only staying a few days, and he figured I knew the lay of the land well enough. I decided to take him up on the hike, and I suggested Sokehs ridge since it has a view of practically the whole island.

That night, Matt and Lucas were up visiting from Madolenihmw – they don’t come up as much as Beth and Nic, who seem to be here every three or four days, but then again Kitti is a lot closer. Erin cooked some sort of vegetable noodles, and Meghan and Michaela brought over sashimi. I wish they had told me they were going to have a meal, or I wouldn’t have gone to Joy and paid $6.50 for the same thing, but I guess I should have asked. At any rate, it was a nice visit.

The next day, I walked down to the Palm Terrace grocery store to meet Jim at the appointed time. When I saw that hey had brought only a half-empty water bottle, I suggested he buy another one – I had brought four of my own. Physical exercise plus saturated humidity plus tropical heat equals rapid dehydration.

We headed off to Sokehs for a pleasant little hike. I had suggested we start at ten, figuring it would be cooler in the morning, but then again “ten” isn’t really the morning. The sun comes up at 6:30 or so, and the temperature hits daytime levels within an hour, so it was already hot when we left. Also, it was noon by the time we got to the top, and there wasn’t much cloud cover, so I got a moderate sunburn. Normally, I don’t bother with sunscreen on hikes because the trees offer a lot of shade, but not on the Sokehs hike.

This time around it was a lot easier, partly because I had done it before and partly because Jim is apparently in worse shape than I am and had to take a lot of breaks. Along the way, I learned more about this odd man. He works as a substitute ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher in Los Angeles, which I’m guessing must be a good business, because the FSM is the 147th country he has visited. At first I didn’t believe him when he told me that number (he also said he was a former police interrogator and championship water polo player) but I started to believe it when he described various places.

There are, by the way, 192 countries in the UN. I would have thought that if you wrote them all out and scratched out all the ones too unsafe for westerners to travel in, you would have a lot fewer than 147 left, but I guess Jim is proof that the world is a much safer place than the TV news would have us believe. He says there are only about ten countries that he would never go to – Iraq, for example.

At some point on the hike, I talked about my little sushi experiment a month or so ago, and he asked me to show him how it’s done. I said we could have dinner Tuesday (Niare) night, if he promised to buy me lunch at Sei in exchange. With that, we parted company and I returned to my grading.

Come Niare, I trudged down to the fish market only to find it difficult to obtain tuna. There was one table with a lot of smaller yellowfins and skipjacks, but that guy was only selling the whole fish – I definitely didn’t need (and couldn’t afford) thirty pounds. I decided to try using the smaller reef fish that they sell in plastic ice-filled coolers – these sell for about $.75 each, and I’ve eaten them raw before. I bought two blue parrotfish, and four other fish that I think were wrasse, but I’m not sure. This turned out to be a bit of a mistake.

I bought the fish at lunchtime, and tossed them in the freezer for a few hours to kill off the surface bacteria. When I got home after work, I put them out to thaw and started on the rice. It wasn’t as sticky as I would have liked – the bag has been sitting out and the grains have gotten a bit stale – but at least I flavored it right this time. Jim said he wanted to make the rolls himself, so I left all the fish and vegetable-cutting up to him.

Of course, neither one of us had ever cut up a little fish like that. Following Sandy’s suggestion, I scraped off the scales with a fork, and then did my best to cut a filet off the ribs. This turned out to be a very thin filet, and skinning it would have been impossible, so I just left the skin on ¬– I’ve eaten it like that before, but sushi demands that the fish not be so chewy. The first fish I tried this with, I ended up with two pieces of meat each about the size of a quarter, but I kept at it and did a bit better with the next one.

I had invited Takuya over for dinner, and he arrived while we were cutting the fish. We asked if he had any clue how to do it, and he said he didn’t, but it soon became apparent that he definitely knew more than we did. While Jim and I had hacked away at the fish randomly, hoping to get some meat where we could see it, Takuya had a definite plan of attack, and managed to produce some much larger filets than either of us had. Eventually, Takuya cut up three fish like this, which was enough for a couple of rolls.




I had never had too much trouble actually rolling the sushi, but when I tried to teach it to Jim I realized how hard it really must be. He kept squeezing too hard in one place or too soft in another, getting the mat caught in the middle of the roll, or failing to get the nori to stick on the another end. At any rate, the rolls still came out okay, if a bit lop-sided. We made some with cucumber and carrot, and others with mango.

By the time we had figured all this out, we had man-handled the fish quite a lot, and they had been sitting out for too long and were beginning to smell, so everybody was a bit apprehensive about trying the rolls. They were definitely too chewy for my liking, and I had to be pretty liberal with the soy sauce to get them down. Overall, it wasn’t that impressive as a dinner, but it was a good learning experience for all.

Jim left around ten o’clock, and Takuya and I chatted for another hour or so, mostly about our respective native tongues. I had to miss my Japanese class that day to buy fish and catch up with the grading, so I was jonesing for a nihongo fix. These conversations are always a lot of fun – at one point, I was trying to explain what a “trial” was, and I drew pictures of a man in handcuffs and a courtroom with a judge and jury. Takuya talked about how the police in Japan don’t make suspects put up their hands when they arrest them, because guns are illegal there.

The most fun part of the chat was getting to use the hiragana symbols, which I managed to memorize last week - I've hardly mastered them, but I can in theory read or write any Japanese word this way. Hiragana is one of the two syllabaries of written Japanese, with each symbol representing a single spoken syllable. There are 46 basic symbols, and these can be modified with dakuten( ﾞ) and handakuten( ﾟ), or combined to yield the remaining 55 syllables. For example, the symbol ひ is pronounced “hi” while ぴ is “pi”, び is “bi” and ひゃ is “hya”. Takuya’s name in Hiragana is:

す  の  は  ら    た  く  や
Su-no-ha-ra   Ta-ku-ya

We took turns teaching each other words and discussing the history and grammars of our languages. Mom asked me in a recent letter if Japanese is anything like Chinese ... at first, that seemed like a silly question, but I've been finding out just how closely they are related. Basically, Chinese is to Japanese what Latin and Greek are to English. The Chinese gave the Japanese their writing system, much as the Romans gave us ours. Also, some Japanese words are composites of (Japanese translations of) Chinese words that have no inherent meaning in Japanese, just like we derive words like "anthropomorphic" from Greek words ("anthropos" and "morphos") that don't mean anything by themselves in English. 

In other words, a Japanese person can no more speak Chinese than an English speaker can automatically speak Latin. The languages are connected but have divergently evolved, partly through the way that one language adapts the other to fill its needs and partly through historical accident. For example, the Greek word isosceles and the Latin word equilateral have essentially the same meaning (equal sides) but have been adopted into English with two different meanings. Also, the English word "decimation" derives from the Latin word decem meaning "ten", but its meaning of "slaughter" comes from the historical Roman practice of killing every tenth man in a disobedient legion. I explained both of these examples to Takuya, and he shared similar ones (to the best of his ability, considering the main language we spoke was still English).

Today (rahnwet), I met Jim as promised for lunch at Sei restaurant, across the street from my apartment. They have a lunch buffet for only $6.50, which includes salad, pancit, chicken, fish and sashimi. Jim was not too impressed with the food, but I loved it, and the place has really nice hardwood decor. While we ate, he talked some more about his travels and his involvement with "hospitality clubs" like Servas and CouchSurfing.com which connect travelers with people willing to offer them a place to stay for free, in the interests of furthering person-to-person contacts between people from different cultures. He said that he had personally hosted over a hundred people at his place in LA through these clubs.

When lunch was over, we exchanged e-mails, posed for this photo and said good-bye. Although I wasn't sure what to make of him at first, Jim turned out to be yet another interesting and inspiring menwai that I've met here on the island, and I'm glad I had the chance to get to know him. Who knows, maybe I'll extend my stopover in LA on the way home and crash at his place for a while - the only other time I was there I hated it, but maybe he can show me the good side of the city. The side that doesn't look like an overcrowded strip mall with a fascistic police force. I think they call it San Diego.

Tomorrow (aio) is September 11th, which is a holiday (Liberation Day) here – it marks the anniversary of the day in 1945 that the Japanese occupation ended. We (the US) were not in fact the liberators, at least not directly ... although we shelled and bombed the island during the war, it was not until the fighting ended elsewhere that the Japanese were forced to leave. COM was supposed to take us on a faculty retreat to Ant atoll (which is normally a $75 boat ride), but they just postponed the trip not ten minutes ago. Pohnpei style, man. Hopefully they'll take us out before too long - the reef out there is alive, unlike the one at Nahlap, and it would be a new thing to see. Oh well ... stay tuned.

One other piece of good news - hot showers are back (sort of)! We discovered that if you turn the heater on for only about 15-20 minutes, its enough for a piping hot shower of about the same length. As long as you turn it off before you take that shower, you only use about a buck's worth of power. So, we set up a "hot shower jar" - if either one of us wants to take one, we put a dollar in the jar. When we go to refill the CashPower, we'll take that money in and split the rest of the bill evenly. Thank heavens - I never really feel clean after a cold shower, since all I can manage to do is stick my head under the water for a few minutes.

I Visit Kitti and Find Out Things Could Be So Much Worse

Pohnpeian Word of the Day: likan = “spider”

As promised, I went down to Kitti with the Doses family on Rahnsarahwi (Sunday). They go every week for church, and I’d been meaning to visit Beth and Nick.

When I arrived at the house in Ohmine at the appointed time, I was greeted by the usual entourage of kids, now dressed in their finest church clothes. The women were all wearing brightly colored muumuus, including Naki (who I don’t think I’ve ever seen in a dress) – in the Kosraean church, married women wear muumuus while the single women wear skirts to signify their status, but this rule apparently doesn’t apply to Pohnpeian churches.

Sousol had recently gotten a haircut – like a lot of the boys here, he has most of his hair cropped short except for a rat-tail in the back, and they had recently buzzed down the sides quite a bit, giving his head the distinct impression of a coon-skin cap. He began holding my hand as soon as I showed up – this was very affectionate, even for him. Normally he just does his best never to be more than three feet from me, but we don’t get to spend as much time with each other as we used to. When it was time to go, I heaved him into the back of the pickup and jumped in after him.

As we rode, I did my best to catch the interesting sights with my camera. The problem is that the road is hemmed in closely by palm trees, and you usually can’t see much beyond these. From time to time, you’ll pass a break in them and the landscape will open out into some lush valley or mountain ridge, but these picture-perfect views only last for an instant – by the time I would get the camera started, they were gone. Eventually I gave up and sat back for the ride, enjoying the wind roaring all around us, except for those moments when the truck would stop and the sweltering heat would close in again.

When we passed the house, I hollered for the driver to stop, only to realize that the church the family was headed to is right next door. It turns out that Beth and Nick usually attend the ten o’clock service there, mostly because everyone will know if they don’t – I might start coming down regularly and joining them. I haven’t been in a church (except for weddings or funerals) in at least five years, and while I swore never to step in one again, it can’t possibly be as bad when the whole service is in a language I barely speak.

Beth and Nick’s place definitely has one thing going for it – it’s huge. Two stories, and a spacious yard with their own nahs and a sort of greenhouse structure. There is, however, one thing it could really use – walls. Most of it is a woodwork lattice, so that essentially the whole house is open-air except the bathroom. Don’t get me wrong, I love being out in mother nature, but (as with any mother) from time to time we need some space from each other.

Although I had mentioned I might be coming down, they were pretty surprised to see me. Beth immediately proceeded to show me around, despite feeling a bit under the weather. The downstairs has a large kitchen (though they have to store all the food in ziplock bags to keep it away from the humidity and the local fauna), a nice little living room with some couches, a workspace with a desk, the bathroom, and areas they describe as the “changing room” and “cleaning room”. When you climb the stairs, you find the tiny little bedroom they share, with two beds draped under mosquito netting. It’s pretty close quarters, but they seem to be getting along just fine. Outside the bedroom, there is a balcony where they’ve hung a parachute-style hammock which I can attest is extremely comfortable.

**(This is the point at which I would have the little video I shot of the house, except that the stupid COM internet keeps breaking the connection while I’m uploading it. Check back here later, and I might get it to work.)

After we chatted for a while (mostly about my encounter with the Jesuits), Nick headed off to church, while Beth decided to skip it since she wasn’t feeling well. I stayed home with her, and we visited some more. While we were eating cookies and talking about Obama’s chances in the general election, the hymns from next door began to float over to us, and we could hear the sermon through some sort of loudspeaker or megaphone.

At some point, Beth told me she needed to wash clothes, so we headed to the “cleaning room”. As soon as we walked in, I immediately noticed that there was no washing machine. The floor is basically just an empty concrete slab with a hole in the wall that drains to the outside, next to a faucet. In the corners, a few large spiders sit in their webs awaiting their next unlucky mosquitoes.

They take bucket showers in this room, behind a set of sheets they’ve hung up to separate it from the dressing room for privacy. They also use the same faucet, and for all I know the same buckets, to wash their clothes by hand. I’d never actually seen anyone do this. I’ve gotten used to not having a cell phone, or cable TV, or a microwave… but this one threw me for quite a loop. Nobody ever taught Beth how to do it either – she just kept squeezing the clothes in the wash water, but I suggested she might need some kind of washboard, something to scrub them up against. Eventually, she tried using an ice cube tray, despite it being a little dirty and not quite the right size.

After I had been there a couple hours, church was over and the truck pulled up to take me home. This time, I kept the camera on for most of the trip, and despite getting some twenty minutes of jungle drive-by footage, I still managed to miss most of the good shots. Oh well, at this rate I should have enough driving video for a halfway decent montage by the end of the year. When we passed my apartment, they stopped and let me out. I felt a bit bad for using the family as my own free taxi service, but I’ll find a way to make it up to them.

On Rahnkaulop (Saturday), there had been a poster attached to our door with Pooh stickers, obviously made by some of the neighborhood kids, advertising a “Talent Show Tomorrow 2:30-3:00” – there was one on every door in the building, along with the stairway and some random walls just in case. When I returned from Kitti, these signs had all been taken down and replaced with similar ones announcing “Talent Show Today 2:30-3:00”. The one on our door had also been addressed – it named the kids it was “from” and added “to: Americans” :)

At this point, I was pretty excited about this little show, so I stepped inside to take a nap before it began. Sadly, when I walked out of the apartment a few minutes before 2:30, all of the signs had mysteriously disappeared and there were only a couple of kids in the courtyard – obviously, the “Talent Show” had been cancelled. Maybe Tanja and I will try to help them do a real one – kids often make plans that are a little over their heads, but maybe with a little grown-up help…

On Niehd (Monday), I decided it was time to try something a little different with my last group of kids. We have started discussing equations and solutions, and once again I’ve noticed that they feel reasonably confident doing the arithmetic, but have no real understanding of the concept. I made a bunch of cards, half of them with equations and the other half with corresponding solutions. The task was for each “equation person” to find their “solution person”.

I made the equations too difficult to actually solve, so that they only way they could do it was by going from person to person, checking each number to see if it worked or not. The idea was that they would work in ever-changing pairs, so that if one of them understood the task better they could explain it to the other. It seems to have gone over well – I shook things up a bit, and it will be a good example to refer back to whenever we review the concept. I graded the exercise by starting them all at five points and taking one point off for every time they brought an incorrect pair up to me to check, and all but a handful got the full five points.

I also collected my first homework assignment from all my classes on Niehd, and was pleased to see that most of them seem to have done it. I’ve already graded one of the classes, and I can tell some of them are definitely putting in the time like I wanted them to. The good thing about the homework is that it has brought a couple of them into my office hours finally. As frustrating as I find them in a class, they’re a lot of fun one-on-one… many “a-ha” moments, which are like crack to a teacher.

The other good thing about Niehd was that we all got paid – I get $300 on the first of every month. Tanja and I each bought $50 worth of CashPower, which should hopefully last us about three weeks. I also spent about $40 on groceries, mostly on lunch foods and cheap dinners that should last a while. Money is tight, but at least it’s coming in again. Now if only I could afford a new pair of headphones…

On Niare (Tuesday), I brought in a big box of chik-o-stick candies, in hopes of getting my kids to speak up a little in class. The results were mixed – they did venture a few more explanations, but every time I gave out a treat the class would erupt in disruptive laughter. I’ll try it a few more times, hoping the novelty will wear off, but this wasn't exactly the sort of energy I was looking for. The reason they don't want to talk is because no one wants to stand out from the crowd or be seen as a suck-up, and giving them treats when they do talk only seems to exacerbate this embarrassment.

As usual, I devoted at least a half hour of class time on Niare to letting/making them start working on the assignment, with me there to answer questions. The theory is that doing the homework is like cleaning your room – the hardest part is beginning, and after that it goes on its own momentum. It sounded like a good idea, but I’ve already started to regret this, since it quickly becomes a classroom discipline nightmare. Half of them don’t bring their books (so that they huddle together to ostensibly copy problems but more likely copy answers), and they’d rather spend the time chatting with their friends or trying to sneak out when I’m not looking, but some of them really do buckle down and get started.

During my lunch, I walked over to Telecom to pay the installation fee for our new phone. It was only $24, split two ways, and the monthly is supposed to be $8 – not bad. The number (if you’re calling from the states) is 011-691-320-7940. If you feel like dropping us a line, the best way to do it is get some kind of international calling card. Oh, and don’t forget about the time difference – I leave for work around 7:30 AM, which is 4:30 PM the previous day in Florida, and I don’t usually get back until 4:00 PM (1:00 AM) on MWF and 6:00 PM (3:00 AM) on TTh. The best time to call is probably early morning your time.

Also, I’m going to try and start using my COM e-mail more: bboucher@comfsm.fm. The server is here on the island, and I can access it a lot more quickly than the g-mail web server. The only thing is that I can’t accept or send out attachments bigger than 2 MB – not that I’d want to, since even a file that small would take at least a minute to transfer.

Of course, don’t let all this “fancy new technology” dissuade you from sending postcards - we still have a lot of wall to fill up. My two (one of which I brought with me) are quickly becoming swamped by various photos of Ljubljana from Tanja’s parents. “Stand up for America! Be American!” as the F-150s I am so glad to be missing would say. My address, once again, is:
Brian Boucher, c/o WorldTeach
P.O. Box 2378
Kolonia, Pohnpei
Federated States of Micronesia
96941

Today (Niesil) has been somewhat hectic, but there was one good pick-me-up. Belinda and one of the other MS 95 students came to my office hours today after a particularly difficult daily problem, which I must confess I wrote in a slightly sadistic mood. We spent a half hour or so going over the problem in detail, and I kept reassuring them that I was more interested in their thought process and planning than the actual answer, and that I would grade them very gently.

At the end, Belinda made a comment about how she used to hate math in high school (which she graduated from about a decade ago) but that now she’s trying to start liking it. I can tell that she takes the course very seriously, devoting time to making her homework neat, listening intently during my lectures, and always explaining her work fully. It’s students like these that can make a whole class seem more worthwhile, although I have to work hard to get the others to follow her example. At least I know one person I can have an impact on here.