6°57' N, 158°12' E

Manila Update

2008-12-17T04:48:00.000-08:00

Tagalog Word of the Day: Magkano? = “How much?”

When I first came to the Phillipines, the one thing I had my heart set on doing was going to a water park called Splash Island – I read online that the entrance fee was only 250 pesos, which is a bit more than $5, and I figured it was just the kind of break I needed. Unfortunately, when I landed, JB and JC set me straight – Splash Island is a good 90 minutes out of Manila, too far to travel by anything but bus.

I realized as soon as I mentioned it I had made a bit of a cultural (or at least regional) faux-pas. It was like flying in to Miami and asking to go to Wild Waters – they just kept suggesting various historical places and museums, and I felt stupid for wanting to go on a water slide. I realized my half hour of research on the internet hadn’t really prepared me for all the possibilities Manila had to offer, let alone the rest of the Phillipines.

Still, there was one other place I had on my list, and tourist-haven or not, I had to check out – the Mall of Asia. It's the third-largest mall in the world by square footage, and I felt it would be a welcome respite from shopping in Palm Terrace every day.

On Friday morning I set off with JB, walking down Arlegui street to the corner where we could catch me a taxi. As I walked down this street, I could barely take it all in – there were places where the poverty absolutely takes your breath away. There was a burned down husk of a building, now just a forest of unstable pillars with the floor piled high with trash, and yet people walking through it, shoveling piles from place to place – why I don’t know. People were living on the street, sometimes in the small shops they ran there. It was a kind of squalor I have never seen in Pohnpei

On the other hand, there is color everywhere. Not merely the anthemic colors of our big chains – the Target red, the Chick-Fil-A white, the Wal-Mart blue on every corner – but whatever wild and mismatching colors the owners of this pedicab, or that soda stand, decided to brighten up the street with. Everything is hand-painted and no one takes themselves too seriously. In a way, its incredibly beautiful.

The streets are crammed with pedicabs (sidecars attached to small motorbikes or bicycles) and jeepneys (converted WWII-era jeeps, painted wild colors and carrying a dozen or two people in each). They jostle past each other, moving in and out of lanes and driving at seemingly insane speeds, but the drivers someone avoid each other, as though communicating telepathically – riding in a cab here will take ten years off of your life.

Eventually, JB managed to hail a cab for me, and I sped off for the MOA. When I got out of the cab and paid the driver his 100 pesos ($2), I was confronted with the most incredibly beautiful sign I have ever seen: “Hypermarket”. Imagine a Super Wal-Mart on steroids, only so colorful that it is actually pleasant to walk around it – then imagine how it must feel to do that after five months of shopping in the same poorly stocked, tiny supermarket and you’ll get the idea.

The mall itself is absolutely insane – several hundred stores, the hypermarket, an IMAX theatre along with a regular eight-screen cinema, a science discovery center, and a giant ice-skating rink. I spent the whole day there, playing in the arcades, eating in the food courts, watching The Day the Earth Stood Still in the largest movie theatre I have ever been in – honestly, I did very little shopping. Most of my Christmas presents were bought in Pohnpei, but I did manage to walk away from the MOA with a package of cigars that the salesperson said were the best in the Philippines.

The next day, I decided to visit the Intramuros, a historical district in Manila. The word means literally “between the walls” – the walls in question were constructed by the Spanish during the colonial period, at the site of an old Muslim trading post. The same walls housed MacArthur’s administration building, and the region inside them was designated a historical district and restorations were begun under Ferdinand Marcos.

Fortunately, the Intramuros is not far from the apartment I am staying at, so I decided to walk there. The walk took me over a canal, brimming with garbage (mostly old bleach bottles) and lined with tiny slum tenements… I could see children swimming in the fetid water, less than a kilometer from Malacañang palace, the residence of the president of the Philippines.

After I crossed the Ayala bridge and hung a right on Natividad Almeda-Lopez, I found myself once again in the other Manila as I passed yet another SM mega-mall. After passing the Bonifacio memorial, I found myself near the entrance to the Intramuros district. I grabbed a passing pedicab and had the driver take me around the perimeter until we came to Fort Santiago.

From there, I shared a tour of the historical district with a couple from Canada – we split the cost of a thousand pesos. Our tour guide, George, was hilarious and very thorough. The tour wound through the Intramuros on a horse-drawn carriage, and eventually ended back at Fort Santiago, where we walked through a museum dedicated to one of the heroes of Phillipine independence, Dr. Jose Rizal.

After my tour, I headed south through the Intramuros to the adjacent park named after Dr. Rizal. I found a free concert set up there, with thousands of people standing about watching. All of sudden, two Phillipino women walked up and began asking me questions about my tattoos. Soon we were all heading down to the Baywalk, where I captured the amazing picture of the sunset above.

While we waited on the Baywalk, these women were soon joined by a group of their friends. It was one of their birthdays, and they were planning to celebrate with some karaoke and disco. We all piled into a Jeepney (my first ride) and headed to the karaoke place, but it was closed, and so we headed to the birthday-girl's house for a traditional Phillipino dinner her mom had prepared. At some point, a 40-oz bottle of San Miguel was brought out and shared, and then another.

Afterwards, we went out to the disco, but I don't really remember much about it. I was so exhausted at this point that I kept nodding off mid-conversation. Finally, one of the guys carried me out of the club and hailed me a taxi. I would think they had drugged me, but none of my cash was missing... it was probably just delayed jet-lag.

The next day I took it easy - the biggest event was my breakfast with JC and JR's girlfriend, at this place called Heaven n' Eggs. I stayed around the apartment most of the day watching my House DVDs. At some point I hit the bootleg DVD market down the street – I got two seasons of Prison Break on a single disc, for 50 pesos (about $1), along with a lot of other similar bargains. Did you know Quantum of Solace is already out on DVD? ;)

On Monday I returned to the Mall of Asia to mail my christmas presents home – the process ended up taking me forever! I got them wrapped in one shop, bought cardboard boxes to mail them in, then I had to go online to get some addresses and finally hit an ATM for the cash to send them. It ended up taking a few hours, and by the time I was done I just headed home to watch more bootleg DVDs.

The next day, I visited the Manila Ocean Park – it definitely wasn't worth the 500 pesos I paid to get in, but it was still pretty cool. The most interesting part was the Fish Spa, where you put your feet in a pool with little reef fish that come and eat the dead skin off them – it tickles like you wouldn't believe. At the end, I got a "glass bottom boat" ride across the giant tank I had walked through earlier in a tunnel. I went through the whole place in an hour and a half.

After the Ocean Park, I hailed a taxi to the Manila Zoo. This was way cheaper - only 40 pesos to get in, and considerably more worth the price. They didn't have many animals, but it is just a tiny urban zoo, and they did have a tiger. Check out the video.

The next day, I chilled out at the apartment again to watch some bootleg DVDs - I'm bringing home like a dozen. Right now I'm staying in the Hyatt downtown - I checked in last night to give myself a little break from the tiny apartment in Quiapo. I'm leaving for the provinces soon, so I'll probably be out of touch until after Christmas. Anyway, that's all for now – enjoy this video of my last Jeepney ride about town, and have a happy holidays if I don't post before then! :)

Welcome to Manila!!!

2008-12-11T19:12:00.000-08:00

Tagalog Word of the Day: Malagayang Pasko! = "Merry Christmas!"

Well, my first semester is finally over!

The last few weeks have been completely insane – I taught all day during the week and graded all weekend. I didn’t visit the Doses at all, or see any new Pohnpei sights… I need this break more than I’ve ever needed a break in my life! Three whole weeks without any responsibilities at all – I need a vacation from my vacation. :)

My classes ended fairly well – I ended up failing about a third of my students, but I can confidently say that everyone who got an F worked very hard to earn it. I collected some 70 grades for every student, so nobody can complain that a bad score on one or two tests drove their average down. Most of those Fs are students who only came to class two or three days a week (we meet for five), and when they did come to class they spent most of it chatting with their friends or sleeping.

On the other hand, I did give four or five students in every class an A, and I can confidently say that these were equally well deserved. Although some of these students were obviously very skilled in math, and may have been taking a course below their level, there were also a bunch who obviously worked very hard and spent a lot of time studying and improving themselves. They will definitely succeed in their next class.

I have already begun putting together my schedule and syllabus for MS 95 next semester – one of the mistakes I made last semester was not doing enough long-term planning, so that I was only really aware of what I planned to talk about the next week. I want to do a lot more activities and fewer lectures with my COM students, like I’ve been doing with my TSP students. Also, I’m giving fewer assignments so I won’t be swamped with grading – I only plan to give my MS 100 section four monthly tests, and maybe a short quiz once a week.

As for TSP, that has been going very well, although it has been completely draining me of energy. The timing of the class really sucks – most of the time, I have just enough time after teaching my COM classes to rest and recuperate, and then I have to rush off to TSP, after which I’m too exhausted to do anything else. If it were right after my regular classes (like it is for Tanja) I would probably be able to do more work during the week, and spend my weekends having fun.

I have made a real connection with my TSP students that has evaded me at COM… because I don’t feel under any pressure to cover a set amount of material, I take as much time as they need and make myself more open to questions. The students really like me, and we usually spend some time before class chatting, so I’ve gotten to know them better on a personal level. On my birthday, they sang to me, and everyone was disappointed when I told them last night that I was leaving for Christmas in Manila.

So, besides classes, what else has been going on? Let me see… it’s been a while since I posted anything here.

I was the Joker, à la Heath Ledger, for Halloween. I died my hair green with Kool-Aid and food coloring – it worked better than you might think (my hair is still a little green actually), although I had to spend a night with my head burning and wrapped in Saran Wrap, wondering if all my hair was going to fall out in the morning. I also got a makeup kit from Yoshie, and I made sure to put it all on before my first class that day. My students got a kick out of it (although most of them didn’t know who I was supposed to be), and fortunately I was just proctoring a test that day – I never could have taught in that get-up.

(By the way, The Dark Knight is officially my favorite movie this year, although there were some parts I didn’t like – namely, those with Christian Bale in them. What was that guy doing in a movie about the Joker anyway? Two words, Christopher Nolan… “more Joker”! Oh, and make a sequel to Memento… or would that be a prequel?)

Pohnpeians do Halloween in style – they’re not exactly big on elaborate costumes (I saw a few kids with just a towel on their head), but the kids love the free candy aspect. As soon as it got dark, they come out in groups of a dozen or so – strolling along the main road without adults (except for the really little ones), gleefully oblivious to the threat of oncoming cars, neighborhood pedophiles and satanists who put razor blades in Hershey’s bars. It’s the kind of trick or treating nobody does in America anymore, and it ran on late – I still saw big groups knocking on doors at ten o’clock.

A few days later, I had my 22nd birthday. Mom got me a giftcard from Amazon, and I bought a bunch of the DVDs on my wishlist. Dad got me the iPod speakers I wanted, much to the annoyance of my poor roommate – now I can watch shoot-em-ups and really feel the walls explode. The day of, I wanted to go to Joy and have myself a Pohnpei Pepper Steak (which is, yes, as good as it sounds) – but I slipped and fell in some mud walking home from TSP, and so I opted against it and went the next day.

Because of the international date line, my birthday here was actually the same day as the election back home. They announced the results in the afternoon (for us), and a group of volunteers met up at Oceanview Café to watch the news coverage. When I walked in, they were already there, beaming from ear to ear. Erin told me she had two great birthday presents for me – Obama won, and Florida went blue. I wonder what the return policy is on those gifts, in case I don’t like them…?

Despite the fact that I think his election is to politics what the Atkins diet is to nutrition (a sexy, celebrity-endorsed quick fix with no real evidence of its efficacy), I wish Barry the best of luck – I hope he is everything the American people hope he will be. All of the other volunteers (raving liberals to a man) seemed excited and relieved, but I told them the results were never really in doubt for me, and shouldn’t have been in doubt for anyone remotely familiar with our love affair with tall, dark and handsome politicians – for me, the interesting part will be the cabinet picks and the first hundred days. I hear he’s thinking about Hillary for state… if he really goes with her, I take back everything I just said.

Personally, I predict that Michele Obama turns out to be an inspiring first lady, the true moral and intellectual center of her husband’s efforts. She will take an active role in the administration, and be constantly derided for it with accusations of her being “co-president” and not spending enough time baking cookies for her children. Barack will have a series of unimportant affairs which will be blown way out of proportion by the opposition, but his charm will still be impossible to overcome, and Obama-Biden will defeat Palin-Keyes to earn their second term in 2012. After they leave office in 2016, Michele will enjoy a successful career as the junior senator from her home state of Nevada.

Meanwhile, the tremendous success of the Obama administration will have left the world a more peaceful and prosperous place, so Americans will naturally stop giving a hoot about politics and elect a Bush again – let’s say Jeb this time, but I’m not ruling out the possibility of Neil. Terrorists will attack us again, and Michele will naturally bow to the political reality of the public’s irrational fears and vote to invade Iran. The war will turn out to be a great disaster, and she will soon begin to speak out against it. Eventually, she will run for president in 2024, when her previous sixteen years of moral but practical opposition will be spun to make her look like a “beltway insider”. She will put up a good fight, but eventually be defeated in the primaries by… Chelsea Clinton.

Which will make my 38th birthday rock.

A few weeks later, the Pohnpei rotary club held a trivia night at the PCR Hotel. I have never seen so many people at a trivia night – there were at least a hundred or so, broken into six-person teams. Unfortunately, I didn’t hear about it until the actual night, so I got stuck with people who didn’t care much about the trivia, and were more interested in buying raffle tickets. We came in around tenth place, but we still won a bottle of wine each. The ambassador from Australia was sitting behind us, and her team won first place – a hundred bucks each, but they donated it back.

Nic (from Kitti) and I have started an unofficial Friday movie night. We usually watch action movies (like Max Payne and Hitman) or nerdy movies (The Neverending Story and Zombie Strippers), because we’re probably the only two people in the group who would enjoy them. Often, this is the only socializing I do during the week, and I’ve come to really look forward to hanging out.

So, that was the last couple of weeks… yesterday, I was finally finished with all of my grading, and just in time to jet off to Manila. I arrived at the Pohnpei airport early, so I only had to wait half an hour or so to have my bags inspected – they do that to every checked back, by hand. Of course, PNI only has one gate… there is an “Arrivals” area, which I’ve been to a couple of times, and a “Departures” area, which I had never seen. Fortunately, it was air-conditioned.

When we flew into Hawaii on our way here in July, I was seated in the exact middle of a 747, so I didn’t get to see any of the island from the air. On all of the other island landings or takeoffs, it was already too dark. So you can imagine how excited I was to get a window seat on all my flights to Manila, since the flight left on a sunny day in the afternoon.

The first leg was a 40-minute island-hop to Chuuk – I got some beautiful footage of Pohnpei from the air on takeoff, and more footage of Chuuk when we landed. Chuuk itself is just a couple of small islands scattered through a gigantic lagoon, and you really got a sense for the size of the island that must once have been there when we flew over the reef that originally grew up along its shore. In a few million years, all of its remnants will have eroded away, and only an atoll will remain.

After that came a 90-minute flight to Guam, which didn’t have nearly as spectacular a view from the air, despite being a positively gigantic island. Partly, this was because it was cloudly, but mostly Guam itself is just kind of ugly. There’s a lot of deforestation that is evident from the air, and most of the land area is urbanized. They have the world’s largest K-Mart there.

When we landed, I had the surreal experience of being back on American soil again. After getting off the plane, we all had to go through immigration… I handed my passport to the Chamorro there, and I was home! Then we had to go through TSA screening again – apparently they didn’t trust the thoroughness of the Pohnpei screeners, who neither made me take off my shoes, nor randomly searched my backpack to swipe my external hard-drive and camcorder for bomb chemicals. God bless America.

When I turned the bend after TSA, I was greeted by the most awesome sight known to man, or at least to a man who has been on Pohnpei for four months... a real, honest to god, Burger King. I made a quick decision on that for dinner (beating the close second of Domino’s) and ordered the largest size of value meal that I could get. I swear I started humming The Star-Spangled Banner while they were nuking my nuggets. As the grease and salt and sugar sunk to the bottom of my stomach like a rock, I began to cry… partly from the indigestion, but mostly from the patriotism.

Then it was time for the flight to Manila, which was about 3.5 hours. We landed at 9:40 local time, on schedule, and I deplaned to find myself in the largest and best-designed airport I have ever seen. The walk from immigration, to baggage claim, to customs, to the money changer, was a straight shot of maybe 200 hundred yards. Then I headed down to the area where people come to meet you, and Evelyn’s sons immediately found me.

We piled into a taxi, and I was soon looking out on the most urban place I have been in a long time. There are neon lights everywhere, which remind me a lot of Miami. Parts of the city are extremely up-scale, with big buildings and casinos and fancy restaurants. But, unlike Miami, there are also the poorer neighborhoods with corrugated tin siding on tiny tenements and people sleeping the street.

I am staying in one of these, with Evelyn’s three sons: John Rieman (JR, 26), John Bernoulli (JB, 23) and Jose Carlo (JC, 16). The apartment itself is the smallest I have ever seen – a sort of townhouse crossed with a dorm room. There is a downstairs and upstairs, each of which is a single room with a bed on the floor filling up half of it. Not much space for four people – I am sharing a bed with two of them. But, it’s free, and I am definitely getting the real Manila experience.

The apartment is on the seventh and top floor of the building, and the hallway is actually open to the air because it has no roof… All of the apartments have windows that open out on the city and in on the building, and when it rains it actually rains right outside the front door. It has the effect of making you feel like you are on a city street, seven stories up.

This morning JB and I grabbed some breakfast at the place right outside the lobby downstairs. I got two meat dishes, neither one of which I can remember the name of, as well as a sausage for JB, each of which came with fried rice and an egg. This whole meal, along with my orange drink, cost me 101 pesos, which is about two dollars and change. Granted, it wasn’t much fancier than a microwave 7-11 burrito, but even those cost more than two bucks if you get a soda. I’m going to like it here. ☺

Anwyay, that’s the time zone I’m in now – three hours behind Pohnpei, thirteen ahead of Florida. Stay tuned!

As If I Wasn't Busy Enough Already....

2008-10-18T17:59:00.000-07:00

Pohnpeian Word of the Month: doadoahk = “work”

I suppose I should start with the usual mea culpa about not posting in forever, although my excuse has changed. It’s not so much that nothing has been happening recently, but more the opposite – I’ve been so ridiculously busy I haven’t had time to breathe, let alone post. The main reason for this is that I’ve just taken on two extra jobs which take up every available second of my time.

First, I’ve been tutoring a high school calculus student, a menwai from Massachusetts. She goes to a very progressive performing arts school, and her teacher essentially agreed to let her learn the material on her own – they signed a “contract”. Originally, her parents (one of whom teaches at COM national campus) ordered a video series to help her, but it is on the slow boat and won’t get here until after they leave. The company gave them a rebate, and now that money goes to me. :)

We meet three hours a week for $15 an hour – a lot less than I usually charge, but way above average out here. Fortunately, she’s very intelligent and easy to tutor, and they’re leaving in two weeks anyway. By then, I should have gotten her through the equivalent of a one-semester college calculus course.

The second job is the really tough one – I began my tutoring with the Talent Search Program last week. I work every night, Monday through Thursday from 6:00 to 8:00 PM. Since I have my masters, they are paying me $10 an hour, and apparently I can bill an hour of prep time for every hour of teaching as well, so I should make about $160 a week before taxes. That effectively triples my income here from $300 a month to $900 a month – so I should have a little more to chose from than ramen or hot dogs every night.

I wasn’t really looking to take on so much – when I first applied for TSP I thought I might be sharing the load with a few other tutors, but I soon realized I was committing to a regular 8-hour week between now and June… also, “tutoring” isn’t really the best word for it, seeing as I have 41 high school seniors divided into two groups. Basically, it’s an extra class (actually two extra classes). I’m still not 100% sure this is a reasonable choice, but I’m going to give it my best shot.

Frankly, the extra money will be really nice – I should be able to put away quite a bit before my trip to the Philippines for the holidays, and I might even be able to take another trip somewhere else later. I can take hot showers, and order a pizza now and then, and that definitely will make the next few months a lot easier.

More importantly, the work for TSP feels a lot more like what I signed up to come here and do in the first place. I’ve begun to wonder how much I can really help people at COM – with a certain set of objectives for each course, I have a lot less flexibility to adjust my curriculum to my student’s abilities, and by the time they get to me they have either been well prepared by their high school experience (in which case they don’t need my help) or they haven’t (in which case there is little I can do but watch them struggle).
However, with TSP I can take as much time as my kids need to discuss whatever we need to discuss, without a syllabus hanging over my head. The atmosphere is a lot more informal and personal, and it is a lot more conducive to real teaching, as opposed to just lecturing. We can (and will) focus more on application and strategy and less on concepts and theory.

The students are a lot of fun too. High school students, especially those in college prep programs like Upward Bound and TSP, still have that spark in their eyes, that deep down desire to accomplish their goal of getting into college. College students, by contrast, feel as though they’ve already accomplished that goal, and now they’re only coasting through the next step. Apathy sets in quickly after graduation – I experienced the same thing back home.

The first day, I told the group that my main goal was to improve their scores on the College of Micronesia Entrance Test, or COMET. I later discovered that math is not actually on the COMET itself, but there is a separate math test given at the same time for placement purposes, so same difference. At any rate, they seemed very enthusiastic about my stated desire to get them “out of Kolonia and into Palikir”, where the national COM campus is located.

After introducing myself and giving them an idea of our mission, we spent the rest of the first day playing a game I borrowed from Tanja – you put a 7x7 grid of random numbers between 1 and 9 on the board, and challenge the students to make some target number using a line of three numbers from the grid and addition, subtraction, multiplication or division. She told me this was a big hit with her kids, and mine really enjoyed it too. I even upped the ante by putting up a new grid halfway through the game with negative numbers.

The next day we talked about test strategy – I gave them a 10-question multiple choice test, and then we discussed how to triage questions, find answers by the process of elimination, work backward, etc… I plan to use my experience teaching test prep at Kaplan as much as possible.

The two days after that we spent on critical thinking. This is a big problem for Micronesian students – it just isn’t cultivated by the culture. If you think about it, critical thinking is essentially the ability to think through new and unfamiliar situations using past experience and patterns of reasoning… but people who live on a small island where the day length never changes and the weather is more or less constant don’t encounter new and unfamiliar situations often.

It isn’t a matter of intelligence – that is distributed here the same as it is everywhere, with a few people at each extreme and the vast majority in the middle. It has more to do with their mode of thinking, which is predominantly concerned with social matters. Again, this makes sense in an island culture where even small conflicts can be a big problem if allowed to develop. When I ask my students a question which is supposed to make them think about a concept, I sometimes get the impression they are really only trying to figure out what I want to hear by judging my body language and the emphasis I put on various words.

My first crack at developing this skill in my TSP students was probably too ambitious. I broke them into pairs, and gave everyone a list of “brain teasers”, with each pair assigned to a specific one. For example, one of these puzzles read:

“An Arab sheikh tells his two sons to race their camels to a distant city to see who will inherit his fortune. The one whose camel is slower will win. The brothers, after wandering aimlessly for days, ask a wise man for advice. After hearing the advice they jump on the camels and race as fast as they can to the city. What does the wise man say?”

Of course, I didn’t actually expect any of them to figure these out – the answer to this one, for example, is that the wise man told the sons to switch camels (since the son with the slowest camel wins). What I was hoping was that the puzzles would spark a lively debate in each pair, and I wanted to see how they would try to think them through.

What actually happened was that more than half of them didn’t understand the questions in the first place, and even once they did they had no clue how to begin (assuming they were motivated enough to do so). For example, some of the problems clearly suggested drawing a picture, but I don’t think I saw any of them do this. I had hoped we could reconvene the group to discuss the problems after a few minutes, but it soon became clear they would need the whole hour to really contemplate them.

The next day, I went through some of the answers, focusing on what factors made each difficult, and what strategies could be used to make them easier. For example, since English is a second language for all of my students, unfamiliar words like “sheikh” can give them more pause than native speakers. Also, some real-world problems are beyond their real-world experiences, such as a brain teaser which referenced a ten-story building with an elevator – a show of hands showed that only two of them had ever been in an elevator, as there isn’t one on Pohnpei.

I have to send status report e-mails to my boss at TSP each day, and she was very pleased with this initial focus on strategy and critical thinking, which made me feel better considering I wasn’t really sure how best to approach the tutoring when I began. When the first week was over, I decided it was time to get down to business and start discussing specific math problems. I asked them each to bring in one that had been giving them trouble.

This week, I had them work these problems on the board in front of the group. I am trying to break them of their unfortunate habit of simply telling each other the answer, and so I made a rule that the students watching could help, but only without saying any numbers at all. I have tried this approach before, although never with such a large group, and it usually takes a while for the students to warm up to it – they would rather just give me problems and watch me do them, but I know that won’t really help them, and besides which they do that all day at school anyway. Put the marker in a student’s hand and sit far from the board, let them make mistakes and then fix their mistakes, insure that they write no faster than they can think, and you will soon see them truly improve.

In one of the sessions, no one volunteered to do any problems, so I was forced to pick a victim at a random and make her do a problem of my own invention. I have emphasized to them that everyone will have to do it at some point, in hopes that they will be less timid if they are not alone in being embarrassed. The poor girl was up at the board for the whole hour working one problem, and I am sure she was mortified – it can be pretty intimidating working a problem you don’t understand in front of a group of people shouting suggestions left and right.

I was, at one point, trying to find a convenient way to get her out of there, but then I noticed she was actually getting more confident and doing certain things more easily than before. It was just the sort of thing I was hoping to see, and it was reassuring to see that my intuition was once again correct.

Last night, I decided to take a break from doing problems and have a little more fun again. I put together a game of bingo – their cards (which, by a little computer wizardry, were all random and distinct) had phrases like “x subtracted from five”, and I put up pieces of paper with the corresponding expressions, i.e. “5 – x”. First price was a bag of Skittles, and after that Chick-o-Sticks. They loved it, and it was also a really good lesson. I promised them we would do this every week – work Monday through Wednesday, and have a more fun activity on Thursday.

So, that’s TSP… I think I’m going to have a lot of fun doing it, as long as I can manage my time effectively and not get overwhelmed.

As for my regular classes at COM, they’ve been pretty tough recently. As I said last time, we’ve been discussing polynomials in MS95, and we just finished that chapter off with the test yesterday. I just don’t think we needed to discuss all that, since they won’t even be solving quadratic equations – basically, I just taught them a whole lot of things they can’t or won’t use to do anything very useful.

I found out that, as I requested, they are going to give me all the sections of MS95 next semester, and I intend to change things up a lot in the Spring. Polynomials, if we talk about them, will come at the end, and I’ll introduce decimals and negatives a lot earlier. I also want to talk about logic at some point – nothing symbolic, just sentences with “and”, “or” and “if…then” and basic syllogisms. We’ll be doing some fun labs, too.

There are only two sections of MS95, so I have to teach one section of MS100 in the Spring as well. That’s the College Algebra course, and it's the highest level we offer at Pohnpei campus. George said he told the Instructional Coordinator, Maria, that I could teach anything – I am very proud to instill such confidence. The higher level course will be a nice counter balance to the basics I’ll be teaching in Prealgebra, but it does mean having to plan two different lectures every day. Of course, the syllabi I write next semester will not have nearly as much grading as I’m doing now. :)

As for my current higher-level course, MS 96, we just finished the most unpleasant few weeks of the whole semester – a whole chapter of nothing but word problems, including the infamous “a train leaves Cincinatti at 9 AM traveling 50 miles per hour”-type problems. I tried my best not to rush through these examples, but I had only so much time to discuss them.

Of course, nobody ever seems to like word problems, but they are particularly difficult for these students because of the language barrier and the critical thinking problem. I made detailed handouts, and kept the test questions almost identical to the homework, but they still did pretty bad on the last few exams. Even the concept of using a variable to solve for an unknown is still not connecting … a lot of them just add or multiply numbers in the problem at random.

Really, the only bright spot came this week when we discussed mixture problems, like “how much 30% alcohol should you add to 120 milliliters of 20% alcohol to get a 25% solution?” To illustrate the concept, I brought in 1-liter soda bottles (which I somehow managed to find ten of lying around my bedroom floor) filled with various mixtures of water and green food coloring, which I called “substance X”. It was a fun little demonstration, even though the math involved was just way to complicated – I could tell on the last day I lectured on them that I was the only person in the room with the faintest clue what I was talking about. Still, I just grinned and bore it, and now all that is over and we can start with graphing, thank heavens.

Aside from COM, all I have time to do is the cross-stitch that mom sent me. I didn’t ask for one, but I guess she sensed I needed it. Of course, it does have dragonflies on it, so I have a feeling she already has a spot picked out for it on a wall somewhere ;)

I haven’t been able to go to Japanese class as much lately – that time of day is the only real break I have on Tuesday and Thursday, since I finish teaching at 5:30 those days (only half an hour before TSP starts). This is not good, since we have started to really step up the grammar by learning verbs and their conjugations. I need to make an effort to go back and start taking better notes.

Takuya loaned me a first-grade math book in Japanese, which is an absolutely precious treasure. It is full of colorful pictures, and all of the writing is in hiragana (since they don’t learn katakana or kanji until later), so I use it often to practice sight-reading. Once I get my hands on a good dictionary (see below) I want to start translating it, since all of the sentences have really simple vocabulary and grammar. He says he has other grade levels when I’m done with it.

Sadly, the extra load has taken away from my time with Floid. The last time I saw him was two weeks ago, when I gave him a comic book on the Odyssey that mom sent me (a reward for going to school all week). He absolutely loved it – once I gave it to him, it was like nothing else was in the world except that book. It was the first time I had seen him not be super-talkative. He flipped through and looked at all the pictures, and then apparently unsatisfied with the incomplete story they gave him, he began reading the words – they are not at a low reading level, but he was determined and I think it will really help him with his English. Way to go mom!

The weather here is starting to change, albeit subtly. We are entering the rainier season, and though it hasn’t been pouring every day, it has been considerably stronger when it does rain. On Wednesday, it was coming down so hard that they cancelled TSP – Sandy told me that some of the students have to cross a river to get here, and the water had risen too high. Of course, I’m sure the weather back home is changing even more – I can hardly believe it will be Halloween in two weeks, without that crispness to the air that usually declares the beginning of Fall weather.

Of course, there is another big event coming up – I turn 22 on November 5th. I have a wish list on Amazon, in case anyone wants to get me something :D. To be honest, the things I will get the most use out of are the DVDs, but I know they are kind of expensive... Once again, I don’t expect anything, and I will be extremely thankful for anything I should get, even if it’s just a card – or better yet, a postcard. The drawings from Ms. Lyon’s class are now nicely balancing out the photos of Ljubljana, but there is always room for more.

Anyway, that’s life in the tropics for now – busy, busy, busy. Stay tuned.

The Prodigal Blogger Returns

2008-09-26T18:42:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-09T21:54:00.001-07:00

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

2008-09-02T19:41:00.000-07:00

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.

I'm a Daddy (Well, Not Really)

2008-08-30T02:55:00.000-07:00

Pohnpeian Word of the Day: seripwelel = “newborn baby”

I am officially not sick anymore – hurrah! Apparently all of this sunshine is agreeing with me. It’s been a busy week, as it appears all of my weeks are going to be from now on. I thought it would be a good idea to give all of my three classes the same basic syllabus, so that I won’t get lost switching between them, but I am now realizing this means I will routinely have to grade about a hundred exams all at once every weekend. I am slowly diminishing the pile of grading I built up while I was under the weather, but not quite as fast as I am having to add things to it.

I am definitely starting to feel like I am boring my students, but I’m not sure what to do about it. I have a lot of material to get through in the next fifteen weeks or so, and I can’t afford to do many “fun days”. I also feel like the only way I can speed up is by giving them the sort of math education they’ve already had – that is, telling them how to do things without the why. Then again, its very hard to teach them anything abstract when the only questions they will answer are of the “what’s six times nine?” variety, and even then at most half of them will speak up. The learning process continues for both of us.

To get a little variety and a different perspective in my life, I have started auditing the Basic Japanese class at COM which meets twice a week. The scene is pretty interesting – our teacher is an excitable, wafer-thin Japanese woman who addresses a classroom full of dark-skinned Micronesians (with the women in flowery skirts and bearing quarters stuck in their earlobes – no clue why – and the men, sporting the all-pervasive rat-tail, decked out in their version of hip-hop regalia) and, finally, me. In addition to my desire to learn the language, I also wanted to see how another teacher manages her classroom, and what it feels like to be amongst the students.

The first class I went to was on Niare (Tuesday). I felt a bit out of place because I missed the first three meetings, during which time they had apparently learned all of those useful little phrases like “good evening” and “thank you very much”. I didn’t help that I had to grade papers during class, and when it came time to work with a partner I was placed with an obviously disinterested girl with the thickest upper-lip hair I have ever seen on a woman, who spent most of the time we were supposed to be conversing lazily flipping through her notebook.

That day, we learned how to count to ten and how to ask questions like “How many people are there?”. We also learned a Japanese version of “ten little indians”:

   hitori, futari, sannin imasu
   yonnin, gonin, rokunin imasu
   shichinin, hachinin, kyunin imasu
   juunin no-indian boys

I was startled when the other students managed to sing this little ditty in near-perfect harmony. Micronesians love to sing, and their highly musical church services can often be heard for several blocks around.

A word on the format of this class – the Basic Japanese course at COM Pohnpei campus is part of the HTM program, or Hospitality and Tourism Management. Although the national campus in Palikir offers Associate’s degrees, our campus only offers certificate programs in various trades like accounting, cabinet making, air conditioning repair, and of course tourism – we pass the students seeking an AS, AA or AAS on to Palikir.

Because the Japanese course is run under the auspices of HTM, it is geared towards students with interests in the service industry who may encounter Japanese-speaking tourists. Accordingly, much of the speech we are learning is highly formalized and respectful – Japanese has many distinctions between honorific and non-honorific vocabulary, a legacy of Japan’s long-enduring class structure. For example, we learned to ask someone’s name with the lengthy phrase “Osore iri masu ga, o-namae o o’negai shimasu?” which translates roughly as “I’m afraid to do so, but may I humbly ask for your most honored name?” Of course, in a less formal setting, the phrase “O-namae nan desu ka?” is perfectly acceptable.

The second day, Niepeng (Thursday – do I have to keep translating those?), was a little more fun. We spent most of the time working on demonstratives (“this”, “that” and so on) – like Pohnpeian, Japanese distinguishes between locations near the listener (so-) and locations far from both speaker and listener (a-), while English uses the single word “that” for both. This time, I was paired with an energetic man who was an absolute delight as a partner. When we were given cards for word substitution exercises (“Where is the ____?” with the blank filled in by the words on the cards) we would always blow through our entire stack in no time and be forced to recycle the cards.

I am also studying Japanese from some books I ordered on Amazon (which only took a week to get here) – one is on basic Japanese grammar, while the other two cover hiragana and katakana respectively. The language has a fairly simple, though not always intuitive, structure – it is far closer to Pohnpeian than English is. The hardest part for me is that the verb always comes at the end, so that a simple sentence like “Denwa wa kore desu.” translates word-for-word as “telephone (topic marker) here is” and means “The telephone is here.”

There has been another really exciting development this week – I would have talked about it first, but then you never would have read through that linguistic polemic. On Niepeng, Meghan came in to tell me that she had called our host family, and our sister Tanya had given birth. She wasn’t supposed to be due until September 11th, so this was a little unexpected and we were both really excited to see the baby, so Meghan and I decided to meet up at the Spanish wall that night and head over to the old house in Ohmine.

I am pleased to announce that Leonard Brian Doses entered the world on August 26th at around nine in the morning, weighing seven pounds and three ounces. That middle name is not a coincidence – I had joked with Tanya before that she should name the baby after me if it was a boy, and I guess she decided it was a good idea at least for a middle name. I’m going to call him “Li’l B” since that was the nickname my old friend Ben gave me, and it matches his initials :)

Poor Tanya, who is only sixteen, had to undergo twenty-four hours of labor, and she is still not walking straight, but after watching this video I think you will definitely agree it was worth it. By the way, peren means happy.

After visiting with little Leonard for a while, we all stayed for a bit and colored with the kids before heading home. Before we left, Floid made me promise to come visit him the next day and help with some math homework. I was beaming from ear to ear all the way back – I’ve never been a namesake before, and I kept thinking about how this means I will, at least symbolically, be staying on Pohnpei much longer after my year is up.

The next day, I kept my promise to Floid and went back to Ohmine. As I said last time, I’ve been meaning to spend more time there anyway. When I came down the street, Floid spotted me and shouted in excitement, at which point all the other kids (who were playing in the yard after school) came tearing around the corner to say hi. It was a heart-warming sight, and a little hilarious since two of the boys were as usual naked. Floid and I reviewed a math test he had done poorly on, and I was happy with the half-hour or so of good focus I got out of him considering we were in a highly-distracting environment. In the end, Kathy handed me a little Tupperware container of yams (which taste like buttery mashed potatoes). It was a very fun evening.

Today is Rahnkaulop, and I am sitting in my office typing this after a boring and unproductive day, spent making Japanese flash cards and listening to books on tape. Old habits die hard. To break up the monotony, I am going down to Kitti with the family tomorrow – they’re going to church, and I’m going to visit Beth and Nick. I haven’t seen their place since it was made ready for them to move in – the last time I saw it, it was mostly spider webs. Look for the pictures.

I am also starting to plan for a trip to the Phillipines for Christmas – Evelyn invited me to stay with her family at an apartment in Manila or their house in one of the outer provinces. I am really excited about the idea of staying in a city with 14 million people after living in a country with a hundredth as many. They also have a mall, the Mall of Asia, which is the fifth largest in the world. Apparently, Phillipinos love to shop and they have a massive number of cheap Chinese imports flooding the market.

To help pay for the plane ticket or any expenses I’ll have there, I’m going to start tutoring at night for the Talent Search Program here at COM. They pay something like $10 an hour, and it could be as many as two hours every weeknight – best case scenario, that could double my income, and even if not it will still help out a lot. Wish me luck!

Life Goes On

2008-08-25T03:00:00.000-07:00

Pohnpeian Word of the Day: keteu = “rain”

Well, it seems that once again I have let far too much time pass since posting anything here. I hope mom hasn’t begun calling the National Guard – though I’m still getting over my cold, I am otherwise doing fine. Mostly, I’ve just been too drained to write, and I haven’t had much to write about. Anyway, here goes…

I hear that everyone had a bit of a touchy time last week with Hurricane Fay, and I hope you’re all alright. I realize I haven’t said much about the weather here – they say that the island has only two seasons: the rainy season, and the rainier season. We haven’t entered the latter yet, although I believe it starts soon, and I’ve heard horror stories about nonstop rain for days at a time. At the moment, the rain is frequent but always light – you might say that it rains kittens and puppies. Sometimes it will shower for only a few minutes at a time, sometimes it will fall on only one side of a street … but eventually, it falls everywhere at some time or another. Considering that the alternative is a sweltering heat, you quickly learn to love it when the sky goes grey.

Last week, the USNS Mercy, a former oil tanker converted into a hospital ship, docked at Chuuk and sent a fly-away team here to Pohnpei. This is the last leg of their four-month tour, known as Pacific Partnership 2008, which has already taken them to the Phillipines, Vietnam, Timor-Leste and Papua New Guinea. On Niare (Tuesday), they had set up shop in Kolonia Elementary School, which is next to COM. I remember walking past it on the way to the grocery store around ten in the morning, and seeing a couple hundred people waiting in line to get their teeth pulled or be treated for scabies, all for free without any medical insurance. Obviously, these guys are providing a much needed service and demonstrating the often unreported positive side of a well-funded military.

My classes are marching along – I finally introduced the idea of a variable to my MS96 classes, although MS95 has yet to get to negative numbers (grrroooaaan). I gave them their first test, and one of the classes (Prealgebra) had an 87% average, so I’m either doing something right or just going way too slow. I have still yet to figure these kids out, and not feeling like I know what I’m doing is at alternate times frustrating and enjoyable.

Some of my kids listen intently, never taking their eyes off me and taking careful notes, while others have begun to goof off incessantly. Today, for example, I had somebody leaving or entering the class every two or three minutes, and they kept switching seats for some reason. They also move the chairs around, disrupting the nice little grid by pushing the back row all the way to the wall and grouping together in isolated little groups.

Of course, they almost never answer my questions – Micronesian culture is very collectivist, and people are reluctant to do anything seen as standing out from the group. In general, they will only speak up for simple queries (like “three times seven”) where they can be sure that a large number of their fellows will arrive at the same answer. Questions which require a more phrased answer or some kind of critical thinking receive little more than crickets.

Of course, losing my voice last week didn’t help much. I had to cancel one class on Niepeng (Thursday), but I forced myself to make it through the others, and this has slowed my recovery. When I’m not teaching, I’m often too tired to do any of my grading, so it has built up a bit. Nonetheless, I am keeping in good spirits despite these setbacks, and I am looking forward to getting out of the learning phase.

When I haven’t been teaching in the last few days, I’ve begun pouring myself into the study of Japanese. I ordered a couple books from Amazon, and while I wait for them to arrive I’ve been researching the language on Wikipedia and making flashcards. I want to learn to read and write the language as well, and this is going to prove very difficult.

For one, written Japanese incorporates a composite of two syllabaries (hiragana and katakana), borrowed Chinese ideograms known as kanji, and letters and numbers taken from the Latin alphabet – there are complex rules governing which to use in any situation. The syllabaries contain a distinct symbol for each of the hundred or so syllables in Japanese, and are used to spell out words phonetically. There are, on the other hand, more than 50,000 kanji symbols, with each typically standing for a single word.

The Japanese Ministry of Education has helpfully organized these kanji into several nested lists, with the smallest being the set of 1006 kyōiku kanji which are taught to Japanese students in the first eight grades – it is said that you can read most Japanese text if you know this small set. I have made flashcards beginning with these, having a computer printout of the glyph on one side and the English and Japanese translations on the other. Using them, I have already learned the 80 kanji typically taught in the first grade.

Yesterday, as I went to grab a towel from my closet, I spotted a wolf spider that had to be three or four inches across in it, which I promptly sprayed into oblivion with Raid. This is the second time this has happened – I also saw a slightly smaller one in the sink when I was shaving. Liz says she doesn't kill them because they eat mosquitos, but I haven't had any mosquito bites at home yet, and personally I'd prefer they bite me to that thing. I’ve already lost track of the cockroaches we’ve killed … nature is invading us as best it can.

Today, I sat in Namiki restaurant eating bacon and eggs and watched us win the silver in water polo. Now that is a weird sport – it’s like soccer for people that don’t want to overheat. I guess everything is coming to a close now, and I’ve barely seen any of the Olympics, but in a way I’m somewhat proud of the isolation that demonstrates. It reminds me that I am somewhere really far away, and this can be easy to forget sometimes.

Cough Cough, Hack Hack

2008-08-18T23:01:00.000-07:00

Pohnpeian Word of the Day: soumwahu = "sick", literally "not good"

Well, I'm soumwahu - my throat started hurting on Sunday and I've been achy and tired ever since. I hope the sun and fresh air out here will help me get over quicker, because I have a lot to do this week - lessons to plan, tests to write, daily problems to grade.

On Monday, I started my new section of MS96. I now teach at 8:30, 12:30 and 2:30 on MWF and 8:30, 11:30 and 4:00 on TTh, all with two office hours a day. It's not a bad schedule, since I have plenty of time between classes to prepare, but it has cut my lunch breaks a little short.

My classes are getting in to swing ... I'm starting to remember why I love doing this so much, how great it feels to get up in front of a group of people and walk them through some big ideas. I'm still trying to get a sense of where my student's levels are at - they seem to be a bit bored by some of the review we've been doing, but one class didn't do very well on their first daily problem so who knows. I'll figure them out eventually.

Mostly, I'm just posting because I wanted to share this picture of Katie that she sent me, since it really gave me a lift today. I bought that necklace at Joy Hotel - it's carved out of an ivory nut, which grows on a local palm tree (Metroxylon amicarum, or oahs in Pohnpeian). The nuts are about the size of a softball, and you hack the outer shell off with a machete to get something that looks like a cue ball, which is suitable for carving. They had a lot of local crafts in Joy, but after looking through all of them I decided the octopus was the only thing that would do. I'm glad you like "him", sweetie.

Trip to Madolenihmw

2008-08-16T20:35:00.000-07:00

Pohnpeian Word of the Day: tenihr = “waterfall”

Nick and Beth came up from Kitti pwong en Nialim (Friday night). Although we had planned on going out to the Karaoke bar, we ended up only going to the movies. They saw The Dark Knight … I thought about watching it again, but I made the mistake of seeing Wanted, whose only redeeming quality was some rather risqué shots of Angelina Jolie. Afterwards, we were too tired to do anything else.

The next morning, Tanja made us all raspberry pancakes … from scratch. After a couple meals of simple spaghetti, I was beginning to doubt her claims of culinary prowess, but this little feat definitely proved it. It was a good way to wake up, and considering that it would be the last meal I would have until five o’clock, I was quite glad for the treat.

Afterwards, I set out for my trip to Madolenihmw – which was easier said than done. The drive is at least an hour, and every cab company I called wanted at least $20 to take me there alone. So, I decided to try hitchhiking – I made a sign that read “Keh pahn kohla PATS men Madolenihmw?” (Are you going to PATS in Madolenihmw?) and started walking down the road waving it. Eventually, I was picked up by a taxi that was already headed out that direction, so I knew the fare would be less - he ended up charging me only $8.

The ride was pretty interesting – I was the only menwai in the car, so I knew they were talking to me whenever they used English. There were two other passengers – we dropped one off about halfway there, and for the other we had to take a half-hour diversion up and down a badly beaten-up dirt road. When I was alone with the cab driver, we started talking about where I was from and why I was here in Pohnpei. At one point, he suggested I find a Pohnpeian wife and stick around… I told him I’d think about it. :)

Eventually, we arrived at Lucas and Matt’s place – they live in a tiny house with a single bedroom and no stove, next to Ponape Agricultural & Trade School (PATS, which my driver said used to be “the best high school in the FSM”, before it was closed down). Unfortunately, due to the unexpectedly long cab ride, the four of them (Andy and Erin had arrived the night before) had already left when I got there … so, I told the cabbie to take me to Kepirohi falls to meet them.

Although Kepirohi is the most impressive of Pohnpei’s many waterfalls, you’d be hard-pressed to tell that from the decidedly understated entrance. The land it sits on, like all land in Pohnpei, is privately owned by a local family. You pass by their house (which is the usual corrugated tin affair) on the way up there, and someone steps out to accept the $3 fee for entry and points you to the narrow but well-maintained foot path.

I walked up this path for a few minutes, and soon I could hear the roar of the falls, long before I actually saw it. The path hit the river, and turned to parallel it. Soon I was stepping through more slippery river rocks, and then there it was. I had seen pictures, but I had imagined something about half as large, and was duly quite overwhelmed.

The waterfall is some 70 feet high, and almost as wide, with the raging waters tumbling over countless basalt boulders on the way down – one the left side these boulders are dry and Matt climbed up to the top on them at one point. At the bottom is a small pool which is home to some of the freshwater eels which Pohnpeians consider sacred, one of which apparently bit Matt while he was swimming. Sitting on the rocks at the edge of this pool, you are bathed in a spray of cool water from the falls and everything is drowned out by the roar – it was extremely relaxing.

After the waterfall, we walked back to Lucas and Matt’s to gather our stuff for our next outing to Nan Madol, then we started walking to Temwen (pronounced “chemwen”) island. After passing over the causeway, we came to a fork in the road and chose the path on the right. This turned out to be a mistake, as the paved road turned to dirt road, then to dirt wheel ruts and finally to thick weeds and mud. We turned back and took the other path, which was paved for most of the way.

After taking yet another wrong turn and doubling back, we finally found the road leading down to the ruins. Just as at Kepirohi, this path is owned by a family and we were required to pay one dollar each to use it. At the end of the path, we encountered the family that owns Nan Madol itself, and they charged us three more dollars. I was struck by how simply they lived, considering that they own one of Micronesia’s most important cultural treasures – although the complex of structures were large, so was the family that occupied them, and everything was very simply built and reflected their isolation from the rest of the island.

After paying, we walked through their backyard and began down the narrow path leading back to the ruins. We stepped down a walkway paved with bits of broken, dead coral, and crossed several makeshift bridges constructed from logs and plywood. Finally, we arrived on an island from which we could see the first truly identifiable structure, which was separated from us by a shallow channel of water.

The buildings of Nan Madol are constructed from basalt rocks which are cut so as to resemble logs – these are stacked in alternating directions on artificial islets to yield stone fortresses some twenty feet high in places. Once again, the pictures I had seen before had not prepared me for the size of the place, and I was also struck by another thought – these were the oldest structures I had ever seen. The area was occupied by people in the first or second century AD, the islets were constructed in the 8th or 9th century, and the buildings themselves were begun in the 12th or early 13th century. In other words, Columbus had yet to land in the Americas when they were already in use.

The complex originally covered some 170 acres and housed about a thousand people, with more than a hundred of the artificial islets spread out over the reef on the southern side of Temwen island. Today, more than half of this original area has been overtaken with jungle. The first building we saw was actually the royal mortuary of Nan Douwas, which sits at the very edge of the complex … we had walked right over most of the site without even noticing it.

Nan Madol Originally

Nan Madol Today

As we were about to wade across, we were joined by Liz, Saiyuri and Helen, who had coincidentally decided to tour the ruins as well. We knew Liz and Saiyuri from the hike in Salapwuk – Liz was a WorldTeach volunteer here four years ago, and has stayed on to work with CSP (Conservation Society of Pohnpei). Helen is a new arrival that we happened to have met the previous day on our way to the movies. We said hello, and then followed them across to the first island.

Nan Douwas itself consists of a series of nested courtyards, the innermost of which contains a royal tomb chamber. After exploring the islet thoroughly, we waded out to the reef. Some basalt walls marked the boundaries of shallow pools which were perfect for soaking in the warm Pacific waters. Off to our right was another islet in the complex, known as Kariahn, which marks the boundary of the city. To our left, we could see the reef island of Nahkapw about half a mile out – covered in palm trees and lined with sandy beaches, it was the sort of thing that would immediately come to mind when you hear “desert island”.

When we had seen enough, we all walked back to the entrance and Liz gave us a lift back to the house in Madolenihmw, where we left Matt and Lucas, and eventually all the way back to Kolonia. It was nice not to have to wait for a taxi, or to have to pay an arm and a leg. When we got back, we slipped Liz a little cash to buy coconut oil biodiesel for her car – yes, they can make a car run on coconuts.

At the apartment, the courtyard had been decked out with tables, chairs and balloons for a kid’s birthday party, to which we were immediately invited by our neighbors. The food was incredible – there was more pancit, along with a whole pig and some fish. After helping myself to some of the feast, I dashed upstairs to get bubbles and bouncy balls for the kids from the care package dad sent, which I quickly got rid of.

The party was also attended by a few of the Scottish medical students who have been doing internships here for the last few weeks. We drank a few San Miguels (a Phillipino beer) together, and I soon headed off to bed … only to discover that the power had again run out. As a result, Tanja and I had to trek down to a convenience store in Ohmine to buy CashPower cards. We have to start watching that more carefully.

As we were leaving to go run this errand, I finally got a chance to see a centipede when Tanja nearly stepped on it. There are no bees or snakes on the island, but this thing is something you really want to avoid – the bite is supposed to be incredibly painful (though not lethal) and they move very fast. The one we saw was about five inches long, but some of the kids at the party told us he had seen them two or three times bigger. Watch this awesome video or this one for an idea of how bad-ass these creatures can be.

Anyway, that was my busy day in Madolenihmw. Enjoy these videos:

Kepirohi Falls

Nan Madol

My Second Day of Teaching

2008-08-14T21:38:00.000-07:00

Pohnpeian Word of the Day: net (pronounced like "netch") = "to buy, sell, trade or shop"

I came home last night to find Matt and Lucas sitting with Tanja in our living room. They had come into town to stock up on CashPower, and had decided to stay the night - it was good to see them, and I had a chance to discuss plans for this weekend. It looks like I will be going down to Madolenihmw tomorrow morning (Nick and Beth are coming in from Kitti tonight, and we're all going to Karaoke), and staying Saturday night in their little house. They claim to have enough bedding for everybody, but I'll believe it when I see it.

Today I gave my first real lectures, and I was even more nervous than yesterday. For my Prealgebra class, we discussed place value, rounding, addition with carrying and subtraction with borrowing. I couldn't tell if I was boring them or confusing them - I've never had to teach anything that basic before. About half of them kept jumping ahead, and the rest seemed tuned out. It's like pulling teeth to get them to talk, but I knew it would take me a while to figure them out anyway. At least it wasn't a total disaster. :)

At lunch, George told me that they need me to take another MS96 class. I had mixed feelings about it - I all but begged them to give me more sections if they needed to add them, but they didn't want to do that because I'm just a volunteer. Either they bought my reasoning (I don't have a family here, or anything else to do, so why not), they've developed more faith in me since I showed them my syllabi, or they were just pushed up against the wall and had no choice. At any rate, I've lost my cushy two hour lunch breaks, but at least I feel a lot more useful. Plus, teaching two sections of the same course will help me get better at it faster.

In Elementary Algebra, we discussed the real number system. It's the usual lecture I've given at the beginning of each MAC1105 class I taught at UF, so I was on a lot more familiar ground. I even came up with a cool analogy, relating the integers to Pohnpei and the rationals to the FSM, so that I could explain how "every Pohnpeian (integer) is a Micronesian (rational), but not every Micronesian is a Pohnpeian". When it came time to talk about the reals, I drew a big map of the world and talked about how the irrational numbers like pi live in places like South America outside the FSM. I saw most of them taking notes, and a lot of people have started chiming in with answers, so I think the ship is on the right course there.

I was confirmed in this suspicion when one of my students came to talk to me in my office after class. He asked if I taught any earlier sections, since all his other classes are in the morning and he doesn't like staying so late into the afternoon. I told him about the new section they just assigned me, and also suggested he could find another MS96 instructor at an earlier time if it was a big problem... but he assured me that he liked my class and wanted to stay with me. I felt very put at ease.

My First Day of Teaching

2008-08-14T02:14:00.000-07:00

Pohnpeian Word of the Day: sounpadahk = “teacher”

*A note on today’s PWOTD… the prefix soun- means “expert at”, while the verb padahk means “to preach”. Thus, sounpadahk translates literally as “expert at preaching” but takes on the meaning of “teacher”.

My Office at COM

Last night (pwong aio) we had Takuya over for dinner. I prepared a nice little dinner of corn, cucumbers, leftover spicy tuna rolls and farfalle with spaghetti sauce… I had some fun fancying myself an entertainer. When the appointed hour arrived, Takuya showed up with a six-pack of Bud Light. Normally, I wouldn’t touch the stuff, but in deference to our guest I drank one. Then, for some reason having nothing to do with politeness, I drank another three.

The evening was very pleasant, although the conversation was a bit limited – JICA volunteers receive only three months of English training before heading off to their two-year assignments, and Takuya still has a lot to learn. We talked about where we’d traveled, and what our plans were for teaching. Oh, and I learned a little Japanese – I now know how to count to ten (ichi, ni, san, shi or yon, go, roku, nana, hachi, kyu, ju) and how to give a toast when drinking (kampai). Takuya seems amenable to my Japanese-for-English tutoring trade, so hopefully I’ll be learning more soon.

After awhile, Tanja headed off to bed and Takuya and I began discussing the math we’d studied in graduate school – it turns out his emphasis is in topology as well. Eventually, I got tired myself, and had to kick him out. Talking across a language barrier can be pretty exhausting - you have to avoid complex vocabulary, idioms, and convoluted sentences with multiple clauses, all while enunciating carefully and stressing important words - and those Bud Lights were beginning to settle in.

Despite being tired, however, I didn’t find it easy to go to sleep that night. Mostly this was due to being nervous about teaching the next day, although it also may have had something to do with an autistic rooster that decided to start crowing at one o’clock in the morning. I am adding roosters to my list of animals the world no longer needs, right under those worms that always ate my cucumbers. On a curious side note, did you know that every language has a different version of the sound a rooster makes? English roosters say cock-a-doodle-doo, while Pohnpeian roosters say cock-a-roooaaach and Japanese roosters say kokekokko.

At some point in the night, I had a strange dream… in it, I was talking to someone in Japanese and inadvertently used the Pohnpeian word for two, riau, instead of ni. I guess I should take it slow with the languages – I’ve already got my heart set on being quadrilingual when I leave here. I want Takuya to teach me Japanese and the Phillipinos in my office to teach me Tagalog, along with the Pohnpeian I’m getting from everybody on the street.

Mensengo (This morning), I had to teach my first class (Prealgebra) at 8:30. I woke up early for my daily cold shower – I still hate them, but at least they’re free. Intent on looking my best, I put on my wrinkle-free slacks and a collared shirt, and shaved my upper lip with a razor. This was my first time without an electric, and I’m proud to say I didn’t require any little squares of toilet paper.

I got into the office about an hour before I had to start, just in time to print out my syllabus and make copies. When I walked into class, I greeted my students with “Kaselehlie maingko! Ia irohmwail?”, or “Hello everyone! How are you?”. I then informed them that this is about all the Pohnpeian I know, and I would be conducting the rest of the class in English.

I went through the usual first day stuff, introducing myself and the course format. I have settled on a combination of weekly homework (assigned every Monday and due the next), weekly exams (every Thursday) and daily problems (put on the board at the beginning of each lecture period, that is Monday, Wednesday and Friday). I also discussed the difference between just getting the right answer, and doing the right work, with a heavier emphasis on the latter. Then I passed out an assessment test, and while they were taking it I took pictures of everyone holding up cards with their names on them. I’m going to print the pictures out and study them, so I can avoid the awkward “hey you” phase that usually lasts a couple of weeks.

I walked home for a lunch of leftover pasta – now that I’ve figured out how to cut through the south side of campus to Daini, the trip is less than ten minutes each way. Afterwards, I walked back to COM, hung out in my office for a few hours, and then repeated the performance with my second class (Elementary Algebra) at four. They have virtually identical syllabi, to make things a little easier on me – I just have to be careful not to mix up my lectures. :)

When I finished up, the sky was beginning to darken – the sun sets here between 6:30 and 6:45 all year long. I walked home to drop off a few things, and decided it was time to go play Santa Claus with the package from dad that arrived a few days ago. In addition to coloring books, colored pencils, crayons, watercolors, CDs, stuffed animals and other things, it also had item #1 from my wish list of July 28th: Sousol’s Thing action figure.

After the twenty minute walk down to Ohmine, I was greeted by the sight of the house I called home for my first three weeks here. I gave the girls one of the coloring books and all the CDs, and then distributed bubbles and bouncing balls all around (I’ve been using these to bribe every neighborhood kid I see). Sousol wasn’t home, but he was in town… after a quick phone call, someone went to pick him up. When I took the toy out of my bag, he was utterly speechless – he doesn’t talk much anyway, and these kids aren’t used to getting presents so he wasn’t sure what to make of it at first. I can tell it will probably never leave his side. Way to go dad!

(By the way, the MagicJack can’t connect with the server it needs, so I’m sending it back to you – I think Skype might be able to work, but I haven’t tried it. I’ll try to be on AIM more often. I’ll also include the Truth project DVDs in the package – I’ve ripped the interesting ones to my computer.)

I also had the chance to see Floid, and I gave him the Speed Racer coloring book. He loves the movie, and I also had the chance to draw him a map to my apartment and office in the front cover. We made plans to meet up next Friday, so I can figure out how we should arrange the tutoring. The family is going to prepare a dinner, and they hinted that they might even serve dog, which I’ve been dying to try – Takuya said it tastes like chicken.

After this little reunion, I walked to Joy and treated myself to a bacon cheeseburger in celebration of my first day. It was, as usual, delicious … and I still had the grin on my face from seeing all the kids again. I just sat there, reading Tolstoy (122 pages down, 1236 to go) and feeling very contented.

Tomorrow marks the end of my fourth week here in the tropics, and I’m happy to report that I have thus far escaped the scourges of traveler’s diarrhea, culture shock and homesickness. Here’s hoping the next eleven months go as well as the first one has.

By the way, Katie, your last comment really touched me … I’m glad to hear that I’m still in your thoughts, and I hope I haven’t disappointed in my report of my first day.

Sushi Night at 4-TY

2008-08-12T15:14:00.000-07:00

Pohnpeian Word of the Day: mwahmw (pronounced like "mom") = "fish"

Before anyone complains that I’ve neglected you all for the last few days, I should tell you that I’ve been spending them lounging about in my office, reacquainting myself with Minesweeper and Space Cadet Pinball, so there hasn’t been much to report. Nonetheless, here’s the highlights.

Menseng en Rahnsarawi - that is, Sunday morning – the power went out around ten in the morning. This is my second time experiencing what happens when the little numbers on the CashPower box run down to zero point zero. Unfortunately, CashPower itself doesn’t open until one on Sundays - which would have been less unfortunate had I known that. Instead, I believed the random guy in a pickup truck who told me they usually open at ten, and as a result I sat around waiting for an hour in the tropical heat, cursing the “Pohnpeian style” of punctuality. Eventually, I decided to run some errands, and when I came back they were open. Confident the $50 I spent would last a while, I rebelliously blasted my AC for an hour once I got home.

We began checking the meter regularly and writing down the balance on a list stuck to the refrigerator. On Niehd, I was shocked to see we had used some 38 kilowatt-hours (about $19 worth of power) throughout the night, while running only our fans. It soon became clear that some other culprit was at fault, and the only reasonable suspect was the blasted water heater – the fridge barely costs $2 a day to run. I will never figure out how, when the temperature is a constant 85 degrees, it can cost an arm and a leg to heat something, and be virtually free to freeze something … but that’s how it is. So much for the tantalizing dream that was hot showers. Fortunately, since making this discovery and turning the heater off at the breaker, we have been using about $4 a day – at that rate, our power bills will be 20% of our monthly income, which is doable.

In a further attempt to conserve power, I have been going in to my office at COM just to sit in the air conditioning and charge my laptop. This has resulted in some marathon sessions of Solitaire, interrupted from time to time with real work (like typing my syllabi or glancing through my textbooks) when I get really bored.

I’ve also been getting to know my coworkers. Next to me sits Evelyn Tadena, who as I’ve mentioned before is the reason I was chosen for COM. The other day she showed me a picture on her computer of her brother, the one who works at ICBR… I’ve given up attempting to explain how big of a place UF is, and now I just nod and say, “I think he looks a little familiar.” It seems to make her happy.

Across from me is my department head, George Mangonon. He’s an awesome boss, and his only flaw may be that he’s a little too nice – I’m getting tired of being asked how I’m doing or if I need something every time I walk in the door. There’s also Emma, who teaches science and brings in her little girl a lot. Oh, and I finally met Takuya Sunohara, the JICA volunteer who will be teaching math as well – I was excited to see that his English is pretty poor, which means I can trade with him for some Japanese lessons. I invited him over for dinner tonight, and I think I’ll bring it up then.

Pwong en Niehd(Monday night), I finally finished Me Talk Pretty One Day, and I accordingly began looking for my next book to tackle. I tried to start Cormac McCarthy’s The Road again, but I just can’t take a writer seriously when he can’t seem to find either the comma or quotation marks keys on his computer. I finally settled on Tanja’s brand new copy of War and Peace - after all, if I can’t read it when I don’t have cable, when will I ever? At present, I’ve got 65 pages down and only 1493 to go.

On Niare, I realized I’ve been slipping into too much of a routine lately. I had chalked it up to moving, but now that excuse is fading fast and it’s time to start forcing myself to do new and different things. Hence, I set myself to the task of learning to make sushi. I figured that if I’m going to live in the land of cheap sashimi, I ought to be able to get my hands on a decent spicy tuna roll one way or another, and nobody around here seems up to it.

After looking up some instructions on the internet, I began pounding the pavement all over Kolonia looking for the various ingredients I would need. I started at Yoshie, which had just about everything except the bamboo mat you need for the actual rolling. The cheapest bag of sushi rice they had was twenty pounds, so I guess I’ll be doing this plenty of times.

I finally found the mat at INS, near where we used to live – it was good to be back in the old neighborhood, and one kid even recognized me and stopped for a high five and fist bump. Afterwards, I headed over to the fish market near the airport causeway. I found out later there’s one closer to home, but what the hell – I needed the exercise.

I should note here that “fish market” is maybe not the best word to apply to a couple of plastic tables laden with a few yellow fin carcasses and a plastic cooler full of reef fish. Still, at $1.80 a pound for tuna so fresh it practically has a pulse, I’m not complaining. The only problem is that they won’t actually sell you a pound, but rather whatever manageable chunk they can manage to hack the beast into. Thus, I ended up walking home with a four pound plastic shopping bag containing half the tail, including the signature yellow fin.

Now, anyone who’s known me long enough will tell you that I’m not afraid to try insane things when I cook, though my abilities usually fall far short of my aspirations. However, I have to say that this little experiment went off quite well. I started by cooking and seasoning the rice, a process which real sushi chefs in training spend up to three years perfecting. I think I used either too much vinegar or too much sugar, but at least it was sticky and that’s the important part.

Then I started hacking up the tuna, which fortunately cuts like butter and has large meaty sections which are easily identifiable, even to those not versed in ichthyian anatomy. I put some of the pieces in a bowl and mashed them up with mayonnaise, kimchi base, and wasabi. The prep work done, it was now time to get rolling.

My first attempt at it was a pretty dismal failure – I only used half a sheet of nori, and I overstuffed the rolls so they burst open when I tried to cut them. On the second try, I used a whole sheet and let the finished roll sit in the fridge a bit to stiffen up before cutting it, and this definitely did the trick. Before long, I had made two spicy tuna rolls and two with plain tuna and cucumber sticks.

Knowing that this was way too much to eat with just the two of us, Tanja and I invited Andy and Erin to join us for dinner. I was pleased to see that my ad hoc creations were in fact edible; despite the fact that the tangy rice clearly overpowered the fish, the plate I had piled high with bite-sized pieces was soon emptied and compliments were given all around. I was quite pleased with myself, so much so that I did all of the dishes right then and there with a huge smile on my face. I also made another three rolls with the spicy tuna I had left, which will be lunch (and probably also dinner) today.

Today, I’m in for another marathon session of minefield clearing and War and Peace reading, but tomorrow I finally get to start what I came all this way to do. This weekend, I’m going to try breaking up the monotony with a visit to Matt and Lucas down in Madolenihmw, where I will hopefully get to see Nan Madol and Kepirohi Falls. Look for the pictures and videos. :)

Video Backlog

2008-08-09T18:03:00.000-07:00

Since I have finally managed to get on a reliable internet connection at the college, I've decided to post a few large movies that I've shot since arriving. Enjoy!

A Tour of (Some of) Pohnpei

The Six Waterfall Hike in Salapwuk

The Sokehs Ridge Hike

A New Home

2008-08-08T21:21:00.000-07:00

Pohnpeian Word of the Day: ihmw = “home”

I’m sorry I haven’t posted anything in the last few days, but I’ve been pretty busy, as I’m sure you can imagine.

On Niare, our last night in the Doses house, our next-door neighbor and host brother-in-law Leto took everyone to his new bar for a sneak peak before it opened. The place is pretty nice, despite having a somewhat gaudy yellow-and-red paint job. More importantly, it has Karaoke. After my stunning but severely under-appreciated rendition of The Cure’s Boys Don’t Cry, Meghan and Erin took the mic for Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline. Thankfully, Leto had installed egg-cartons on the ceiling and padding on the doors, so we should still be welcome in that neighborhood.

The next day, Niesil, was moving day – and, of course, I hadn’t packed a thing. Not that it mattered, since we weren’t even able to pick up our keys until eleven o’clock. Then again, I hadn’t packed by then either. Fortunately, when Michaela called around two to say she would be there in fifteen minutes to pick us up, I was able to jam everything I own in the world into four bags and a laundry hamper, just in time. I guess I’ll never learn.

The apartment itself (4-TY Apartments, Room 203) is not bad, at least by local standards. We have a large balcony where we can hang our clothes to dry, a brand new electric oven and range, more cabinets than I can count, a beat-up leather sofa, a water heater, and air conditioners in both our rooms. There is a laundry downstairs, and the dumpster is right across the street – a regular Ritz Carlton.

Judging by the papers still taped to the refrigerator, we have assumed that the previous tenants were Mormon missionaries. There is, for example, a list of emergency supplies in the event of a 72-hour power outage or other catastrophe, and the fourth item on this list is "scriptures" - it is listed before "clean water" and "candles". You can't say they don't take it seriously.

A word about my new roommate, Tanja Manners. Her mother is Slovenian and her father is American – she was born in the UK, and grew up in the former Yugoslavia and Austria. Although she has lived in London most recently, her English is flawlessly American – she also speaks Slovenian, French, German and Italian. We are thus far getting along much better than I had expected, mostly due to our recently discovered joint love of gossip and Digiorno frozen pizza.

After I lugged my 150 pounds of luggage up the flight of stairs, Michaela took us to the old WorldTeach house to pick up little necessities that previous volunteers had left behind. We found a living room floor scattered with pots and pans, dishes, utensils, books, appliances and various other knick-knacks … I scooped up whatever I could carry and brought it back home.

The next order of business was electricity. In a way, the system is a little simpler than the one I’m used to - I didn’t have to fill out any applications or set up online bill pay – but that didn’t make it easy. Here, you prepay for electricity, like a cell phone … the problem is, you have to actually walk down to the CashPower building to get it. You tell them your meter number and give them your money, and they give you a receipt with a sixteen-digit code on it. You then punch this into the keypad next to your meter (ours is downstairs) and the display shows how many kilowatt-hours you have left. When you hit zero, the lights go out – it’s just that simple. I bought $30 worth, and I hope it lasts at least a couple of days.

We spent the rest of the night watching The Office, and retired early. I had a good night’s sleep on the 400-count sheets I had earlier bought at Yoshie, the Japanese grocery store. In fact, due to my over-eagerness with the air conditioner, I actually became too cold at several points throughout the night, and this was quite a new and unusual feeling. I won’t run the damn thing so much anymore, but just for one night it felt really good.

The next day, Niepeng, Tanja and I trudged down to Ace Hardware (the only American chain I have managed to locate here) to buy more supplies for the place. We got everything from Pyrex baking pans to pillows and, most importantly, two electric fans for each of our rooms. After catching a cab home, we spent some time unpacking and putting away our purchases, and then began decorating.

We found some tourist magazines, and I proceeded to cut the pictures out of these and tape them up – I am quite proud of my “Pohnpei Bananas” fan-shaped collage. Tanja, meanwhile, wrote the Pohnpeian words for various household items on little pieces of paper and taped these up in the appropriate places. We also started a wall for postcards, but this is pretty bare… by the way, my address is still:

Brian Boucher, c/o WorldTeach
P.O. Box 2378
Kolonia, Pohnpei
Federated States of Micronesia
96941

We spent the rest of the day eating yet another frozen pizza and playing cards. For dinner, Tanja cooked us a rather simple spaghetti which was nonetheless delicious (despite her having mistaken shallots for garlic). She seems to enjoy cooking, and I imagine I’ll be doing quite a bit of dishwashing in exchange for my meals, which suits me just fine.

On Nialem, the three-week anniversary of our arrival, I had to wake up early to attend COM’s general assembly. Most of the faculty and students had gathered in the gym for a boring series of speeches during which the entire staff was introduced. When it came my turn, my department head mispronounced my last name – then again, I sincerely doubt I will ever correctly pronounce his, so I’m not sore about it.

Afterwards, I returned home to take over the watch from Tanja, who was waiting for the maintenance man to arrive and hook up our water heater. Soon afterwards, we were joined by the volunteers from Madolenihmw and Kitti, who had moved the same day we did and were now returning to Kolonia to shop for unforeseen needs. We spent some time catching up with them, and then it was time to hit the movies - The Dark Knight finally opened here, and we were there for the first showing. Of course, this being Micronesia, the projector was broken and we had to wait half an hour while the reels were moved to another screen. The movie was nonetheless worth the $3.50 and the wait.

Following the movie, we all ate out at Island Café, where I wisely ordered the sashimi this time. We then walked to Leto’s bar for its grand opening, where we served more sashimi and corn nuts, while drinking our Budweiser and belting out everything from Girls Just Wanna Have Fun to Bohemian Rhapsody. Despite our tone-deafness, a good time was had by all – we won’t get to see the volunteers in the outer municipalities much, although they are only a $3 hour-long cab ride away, so it was nice to have a last hoorah.

Today is Rahnkaulop, and I am sitting in the air-conditioned Telecom watching the Olympics and generally doing my best to avoid any heavy lifting before the busy week ahead. I didn't get a chance to watch the opening ceremonies, so if anyone has a tape I'd appreciate it if you mailed me a copy - that's generally the only part of the games I actually enjoy watching, except maybe all the freak sports like Synchronized Kayaking.

I begin teaching on the 14th, and Tanja starts on Monday… it seems that the vacation is over, and the hard work is about to start. Wish us luck. :)

Orientation at COM Begins

2008-08-05T00:47:00.000-07:00

Pohnpeian Word of the Day: menwai = "white person"

On Niehd, we officially began our two-week orientation period at the College of Micronesia Pohnpei State Campus, where Erin, Meghan and I will be teaching for the next year. After attending the first half of our daily Pohnpeian language lesson, we left to attend what would prove to be the usual start-of-the-year faculty meeting. It was mostly pretty boring, with the exception of the fact that I had the opportunity to meet some of the people I will be teaching with.

When the meeting let out around noon, my department head (a nice and refreshingly nerdy Phillipino named George Mangonon) showed me what will be our shared office, let me know my course schedule, and gave me my books. I am teaching MS 095 (Prealgebra) and MS 096 (Beginning Algebra) - both classes meet every day for one hour, with one in the morning and the other in the afternoon. Its a light load, but that will give me plenty of time to devote myself to other projects. I want to try to put together a Pohnpeian language CD for incoming volunteers, and I'd like to get involved in the Upward Bound program here since I did it back at UF.

The group soon reassembled for a pot-luck lunch with a downright shocking amount of food, which had disappeared in an equally brief period. As usual, there was plenty of white rice (the only constant in any Pohpeian meal), chicken, pork ribs, and an amazing Phillipino noodle dish called pancit. I piled a plate high, and had an enjoyable lunch discussing the 2008 American election with one of the local faculty.

I also discovered why I had been selected for the college - apparently, several of the volunteers on this trip have the masters degree required. However, when the list was presented to then-department head Evelyn Tadena, she noticed that I went to UF; since her brother heads the ICBR genetics lab there (which I have ironically used for sequencing in the past), I was a shoe-in.

After the meal, we headed back to PICS for the rest of our WorldTeach orientation day. Since we are nearing the end of this period, we have now begun practicing all we have learned by presenting 45-minute sample lessons. The remainder of the group does its best during these practice sessions to give the teacher-to-be a sense of all the problems we are likely to encounter with classroom discipline, including students staring off into space and shouting out random or inappropriate comments. My coworkers, Erin and Meghan, each did theirs during the afternoon session.

Later that night, we had our end-of-orientation dinner at the Village. We all met at Daini Street for the usual pickup truck ride to the resort, which was thankfully open this time. When we pulled once more into the gravel driveway of the place, we were treated to the most incredible sunset I have ever seen in my entire life.

The sun was just sinking into the ocean, and it had lit the sky in various hues of purple, orange and gold. From our vantage point high on the hill, we looked out over a verdant tropical valley which tumbled into the sea hundreds of feet below. Sokehs ridge stretched out like a finger of land straining to touch the light itself. Palm trees swayed and birds quietly chirped - it was the sort of thing people spend untold sums of money just to see a tiny part of.

The dinner itself was as fantastically decadent as the view. After quesadilla appetizers, I ordered the steak and crab dinner - after all, the DoE was picking up the bill. Mangrove crabs are insanely large, and even the small half of one I was given was way too much for me to ever get through. We finished the meal with a feeling of contentment in our progress thusfar, along with soursap ice cream. Considering that the place also has hot showers and we can get rooms for the local rate of 50% off, I'm sure this will not be the last I see of the Village.

I spent the rest of the evening preparing for my practicum the next day, and slept quite well with that steak in my stomach. Today was our last language lesson with Johnny Rudolph, and we will all be sad not to be spending time with him anymore. However, we should be picking up the Peace Corps language instruction job this August (I wrote him a letter of recommendation) and I will probably sit in on some of those courses if I can.

After Johnny left, I presented my lesson. I had prepared a generic activity on graphing involving a city map and a story about free pizza delivery, and I think it went over fairly well. I had enjoyed being the "disruptive student" the day before, so I anticipated getting hit pretty hard in retaliation and managed to hold my composure. The feedback I received was generally positive, and I am definitely feeling confident to begin teaching.

Later in the day we had to return to COM for more orientation. We were given our course catalogs and shown around the campus, including the eight lecture rooms, three computer labs, and multiple machine and electronics shops. It is a small campus with few courses, but I am looking forward to the tight integration amongst the staff.

I also had the chance to decide where my cubicle would be in the office. George gave me the choice of being against a wall with no windows, or being right next to the air conditioner. That one didn't take much thought.

Tonight I have to pack because tomorrow we move into our apartments.

Sokehs Ridge Hike

2008-08-03T14:05:00.000-07:00

Pohnpeian Word of the Day: pwehda = "Why?"

Sokehs rock is the first thing you notice when you come to Pohnpei. As we stepped onto the tarmac some two-and-a-half weeks ago, the only thing I could make out in the pitch blackness was the slowly climbing ridge which abruptly terminates in its signature 600-foot drop-off. To actually attain the summit of the rock itself requires rock-climbing skills, but you can get pretty far down the ridge on a regular hike, and that's what we did yesterday.

Once again, I seem to have gotten myself into a hike I was never physically prepared for, and survived anyway. When we arrived on Daini Street to meet Michaela and the others, I was surprised that a couple in our group decided to stay back - looking at the mostly athletic ones remaining, my stomach dropped a little, but I toughed it out.

The hike itself began with the two-mile walk to Sokehs island, after which the road abruptly turned upward and resolutely stayed that way for the rest of the trek. The first incline had me puffing, but after we turned into the switchback I new I hadn't seen anything yet. I swear the slope had to be some 40 degrees, and the "road" was mostly just loose gravel so it was hard to find purchase at times. I had to stop at least once so that my heart wouldn't explode, but fortunately made it up the rest of the way without incident.

When we arrived at the top, we were rewarded to the sight of the old WWII Japanese gun emplacements. These massive hunks of metal were supposedly dragged up that awful incline by a team of 20 Pohnpeians over the course of a year, because they kept sliding back down whenever it rained. It was well worth the climb to see this piece of history, and take pictures of ourselves climbing all over it like jackasses.

After another short incline, we were finally treated to the best view on the whole island. Atop Sokehs sits a small outpost with a cell-phone tower, and when we climbed to the roof of one of the buildings we could see everything from Kolonia to Palikir. It was humbling to observe the tiny airport runway stretching from end-to-end of one of the islands in the lagoon, where we had landed earlier this month. Off in the distance, you could just make out the thin white outline of the reef. The sight was incredibly beautiful, and we stayed up there for some time just admiring the view and our accomplishment in getting there.

And I slept like a baby when we got back. Today we will begin our orientation at COM...

Return to Nahlap

2008-08-02T01:50:00.000-07:00

Pohnpeian Word of the Day: mwahu (pronounced like Mao) = "good"

Our farewell get-together with the Kosrae volunteers turned out to be a pretty hilarious night. Around nine o'clock that night, the four of us (Meghan, Andy, Erin and I) crammed into a taxi for the half-hour ride to the Village. This was my first time riding in a cab here, and our driver certainly gave little thought to either the speed limit or my recent dinner as he careened around the slick circle road (after stopping for some Betel nut, of course) - I noted the speedometer hitting 60 at several points. Nonetheless, we eventually turned onto a rougher gravel road, where he was forced to edge the little sedan forward at a snail's pace.

The Village itself is an absolutely beautiful, tiki-themed resort buried in the jungle near Nett (pronounced "Netch") - and that's about all I can say about it, because it was closed when we got there. Silently cursing whoever had made these plans, we got back in the cab and instructed the driver to head to the Rusty Anchor. Somebody owes me six bucks for the two rides.

Fortunately, the rest of the group eventually wound up at the Anchor as well. I spent the rest of the night drinking shots of cheap tequila and Crown, along with Heineken and some Australian beer, and learning how to play darts. A few hours later, I stumbled home for a very restful sleep, from which I would fortunately awake without too bad of a hangover.

On Nialem, we attended our language lesson as usual, and then got out early. I walked to the Joy, which I have discovered serves an amazing cheeseburger. Unfortunately, I discovered this by watching a bunch of island-hopping Mormon youths devour theirs, while picking through my rather unappetizing Oyako Donburi (chicken-and-egg bowl). Oh well, live and learn.

Afterwards, I walked to the airport to see the Kosraeans off. Watching them, laden with flower crowns and shell necklaces, hug their host families for the last time gave me a taste of a dreaded moment soon to come in my future, when I will have to leave the nest and venture out on my own. Once they left I walked home and spent the rest of the day sleeping in my room.

Today, Rahnkaulop, we returned to Nahlap resort, this time with the rest of the WorldTeach volunteers (although our host family was also there for a youth retreat, and I spent most of the day with them). Michaela picked us up in a four-seater pickup, which forced the remainder of us to pile in its tiny cab for the bumpy ride. I have included this little video to give you an idea of what its like to travel here, although I was unable to include the incredible smell of the moist, rich jungle as the wind blasts it into your nostrils. All apologies.

Unfortunately, when we got to the boat dock the tide was low, and a couple of the men had to get out of the boat and walk it through the mangrove silt at a few points. This lengthened the usually quick trip, which wouldn't have been so bad had it not been raining. In fact, the sky was an awful grey hue and our prospects for a decent day at the beach seemed poor.

Nahlap itself was double its usual size in the low tide... but portions of the reef were still deep enough to swim on, and I dove right in. Before long, the tide moved back in and the clouds moved out, and it turned out to be a very relaxing day indeed. I swam for a bit, but I spent most of the day reading Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris next to our host family's boombox, which was blasting Alvin-and-the-Chipmunks versions of popular songs. They love the Chipmunks, don't ask me why.

I also met a JICA volunteer there by the name of Nobu. JICA stands for Japan International Cooperation Agency, and is essentially the Japanese equivalent to the Peace Corps. Nobu has already spent a year in the Marshalls, and was visiting Pohnpei for vacation before finishing his final year. There will be another JICA volunteer teaching math with me at COM, and I am hoping he will be able to teach me some Japanese before I leave.

Tomorrow they plan to take us another crazy hike up Sokehs ridge, so I had better get home and grab some sleep. Enjoy this photo of the Dolan Pwisel Malek, which literally translates as "Chickenshit Mountain" - it is one of my favorite sites on the route between here and Kitti. The Pohnpeians have a legend about a chicken that killed a king, and then was unable to fly, so it shat out this mountain. I don't really get that one myself, but its a cute name.

This Week in Review

2008-07-30T23:52:00.000-07:00

Pohnpeian Word of the Day: uluhl = "pillow"

Micronesian time is finally starting to creep its way into my consciousness… the days are blurring together, one into the next, and I seem to have forgotten to update everyone back home on recent events. Here’s my attempt to rectify that.

First, a quick note on the Pohnpeian names for days. There are several different counting systems in the language, though the standard one begins ehu, riau, siluh, pahieu, limau… a slight modification of these yields the system used for counting days: ehd, are, esil, epeng, alem and so on. The weekdays are then named by appending the prefix ni- to these, to yield:

Niehd(Monday)
Niare(Tuesday)
Niesil(Wednesday)
Niepeng(Thursday)
Nialem(Friday)

The days of the weekend are named by combining the word rahn(day) with the words kaulop(to prepare) and sarahwi(church/sacred). Thus, Saturday is Rahnkaulop(literally, “day of preparation”) and Sunday is Rahnsarahwi(literally, “day for church”). Obviously, all of these names were invented after the island was Christianized – before that, I doubt anyone tried to keep track of what day or even what month it was. That should give you an idea of what its like to live in the seasonless tropics.

So, on Niehd, we met with Nora Esigrah, an American ex-pat attorney who has lived and worked in the FSM for more than a decade – she has a Kosraean husband. Her talk was a good opportunity for the Kosrae volunteers to get a better sense of the island they will soon call home (and have yet to see), but what I most enjoyed was her discussion of the Micronesian legal system, which is similar to ours in most respects.

Later that day, we walked down to the Micronesian Seminar, an organization dedicated to research on everything pertaining to the region (including not only the FSM, but also Palau and the Marshalls). They have a library with almost 20,000 volumes on everything from Palauan tuna fishing to Yapese politics, and have produced 48 in-house documentaries which you can order from their website.

The purpose of our visit was to meet with “Mr. Micronesia”, father Francis Hezel. He is a Jesuit priest who has lived in the region since the 1960’s and is widely regarded as its foremost expert (hence the nickname). Having been well-informed about this reputation, I was a bit surprised when a man with a vague New York accent wearing a T-shirt and shorts walked up to greet us – then again, everything here is just a little more casual.

He did, however, live up to expectations and proceeded to spend about an hour filling us in on various aspects of Micronesian culture and history, from the unusually high suicide rate (two to five times that of the US) to the practice of adoption within a single family. One of the big issues confronting the country today is the break-down of the traditional extended family into the nuclear units more familiar to Americans, and the resulting effects on conflict resolution and so on. Father Hezel also gave us great reassurances that we are in fact needed in our roles as educators, and he emphasized that we should do our best to insure the best and most competent people are given opportunities to excel.

Niare was most notable for the fact that orientation let out early and we had the chance to try out one of the local restaurants for lunch. A few of us decided to try out the Joy restaurant, which I can attest serves delicious sashimi – no nasty cheeseburge this time. I still can’t get over how cheap the fish is here… the same meal in American would cost maybe two or three times as much.

After eating, the Pohnpei volunteers walked to the college, where a van was waiting to take us to the airport. The last two members of our group (the married couple I discussed earlier) were arriving, and we went to greet them. Planes only land once a day or so here, and a lot of people show up to stand by the chain-link fence and watch their loved ones deplane onto the tarmac. In the post-9/11 world, where you have to say your last good-bye or get your first hug next to the security checkpoint, it was refreshing to see the way things used to be.

We spent most of the rest of the day showing Andy and Erin around town, and doing our best to bring them up to speed on the Pohnpeian they’ve missed these last few weeks. I’m afraid we may have overloaded them with information, but they seem to be adapting well. At least they have plenty of teaching experience, so missing the rest of orientation shouldn’t affect them.

That night, a few of the volunteers met up at the Rusty Anchor, which has to be by far the most beautiful bar I have ever seen in my entire drinking life. It’s located in the basement of a hotel which has sat abandoned for some 20 years – the only thing marking the outside is a small neon Budweiser sign, but once you head down the stairs and follow the ropes you wind up in a large room with an open-air balcony overlooking the jungle and the lagoon beyond that. I can tell I will spend quite some time there.

When I arrived, only Scott was there already, and he was drinking with a couple of surly ex-pats. One of them was an Aussie with the darkest tan I’ve ever seen, whose wife apparently owns the place. He gave us a good ribbing about being “do-gooders”, but then to make up for it he bought us both shots of tequila, as he did with every volunteer who showed up that night. The only good beer in the whole place (in fact, the whole island from what I’ve seen) was Heineken, which I hate, but I managed to knock back five anyway. It was just the kind of stress relief we all needed.

Niesil was pretty boring… the only notable event was my trip to the video store, where I procured a membership and rented some movies. You can get DVDs for three days for $2.50 each (or two for $4), and apparently they’re not all copied. There are no copyright laws here, so proprietors basically buy one movie and copy it several times, but you can still get the original if you’re the only one renting that title. They have a decent selection for being in the middle of nowhere, and the little slice of home was nice.

Today, Niepeng, was our last day of orientation with the Kosrae volunteers – they will get on a plane tomorrow. Later tonight, we plan to take a taxi to a resort called the Village to celebrate with beer and quesadillas. I hope it will be as much fun as the Rusty was, though some of the good-byes will be hard to say. We’ve gotten quite close these last two weeks.

Last night I had a strange dream that I had gone back to visit JU, my alma mater, and everything was different. Like, crazy different... they had a shopping mall and twice as many parking lots, all the buildings were made of glass, stuff like that. I think my greatest fear is that when I get home, everything will be so different I won't be able to recognize it. Of course, I guess I'll be different too.

Wish List

2008-07-28T23:15:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I've been here for a week and I have a pretty good idea of things I need/want that I can't get here... Here's my list:

1) An action figure of the Thing from the Fantastic 4, for Sousol (Age 5)

2) A comic book of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, for Floid (Age 12)

3) Diapers, for AJ (14 months)... they have to buy them individually for 25 cents apiece!

4) A Shania Twain CD for the girls... they love dancing to christian/country music, so anything along those lines

5) A bottle of black tattoo ink, for me... I found someone who will do a traditional tattoo, but he doesn't have any ink and I'm not keen on the homemade battery-acid variety.

6) A six-pack of Stella Artois, again for me... you might want to wrap those very carefully :)

7) Tapes/DVDs of recent Daily Shows/Colbert Reports... I don't have a VCR, though I'm sure I can find one, but if anyone has the techy know-how to do a DVD that would be sweet

8) Letters, pictures, news, updates and all-around love from home

If you should happen to get any of the above, you may ship them to:

Brian Boucher, c/o WorldTeach

P.O. Box 2378

Kolonia, Pohnpei, Federated States of Micronesia

Zip Code 96941

Also, please post a comment indicating what you got to avoid two people getting the same thing... except the Stellas - keep those coming. Seriously, I don't expect any of you to buy anything, but some people have asked so here's a list. I know nothing above is a necessity, but I can get most of the necessities here anyway. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for whatever I should get.

The married couple arrived today, and it turns out they are taking the last of the three bedrooms in our house. Our host mother, Tirecher, has sent some of the family back to Kitti to make space, since the rest will only be able to sleep on the floor in the living room. I guess it will be a packed house until we move out next Wednesday.

An Amazing Weekend in Salapwuk and Nahlap

2008-07-27T13:44:00.000-07:00

Pohnpeian Word of the Day: pampap = “to swim”

Sorry that I haven’t posted anything in a few days – this weekend has been a bit intense, as you’ll soon read.

On Nialim (Friday), all of the volunteers – save the married couple which has yet to arrive – met for dinner at the Island Café near the airport causeway. About half of our number will be leaving for Kosrae on Friday, so this will probably be the last chance we have to socialize with them for a year.

The restaurant itself is completely open-air with an ocean view, and everyone was in high spirits for the meal. Sashimi turned out to be the best ordering choice (you can get it here for ridiculously cheap), but I just couldn’t resist the cheeseburger and fries. It had to have been the worst one I’ve ever eaten in my life - including Rally’s – and I couldn’t have enjoyed it more.

On Rahnkaulop (Saturday), we all woke up bright and early and walked down to PICS for the big hike in Salapwuk, near Kitti. After making and packing peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches, we piled into the bus/van for the half-hour drive. Our destination was closer to the interior of the island, so at some point we turned off the circular road running around the rim and onto a pretty intense incline – the old vehicle strained to pull its full load up the hill.

Eventually, the paved road ended and it was time to start walking… and thus began what would turn out to be a ten-plus mile hike lasting some six or seven hours. At first, the going was smooth and level, and the hardest part was simply keeping your shoes out of the mud – but that didn’t last.

Before long, we were on a trail carved out of dense jungle by a machete, which at some points was so narrow you had to put one foot in front of the other. The ground was a combination of slippery, sticky mud and slimy moss-covered roots or rocks, which resulted in dozens of hilarious falls throughout the hike. We were almost always climbing up or down a steep mountain ridge, and it was often necessary to use your hands as well just to hold on. That’s the thing about rainforests – they are awful damn wet.

After an hour or so of this, we finally reached our destination – a deep river valley. From the rim of this valley, six waterfalls tumble into the river below, and it was these that we had come all this way to see. Unfortunately, this part of the hike was also the hardest and most dangerous – for a few miles, we followed the course of the river, slipping and sliding along the rocks which lined either shore. More times than I can count, we were forced to cross it, and I am amazed I managed to keep my backpack (and the expensive video camera inside it) safe and dry.

The waterfalls were, however, well worth all this effort. The sound is penetrating in the almost silent jungle, so we could always tell when we were near one. Some had large pools at the bottom, and at these we stopped for a few minutes to swim – the cold water was amazingly refreshing in the tropical heat, and we always hated having to leave.

We finally crawled out of the jungle two hours after we had told the bus driver to pick us up, but he was fortunately still there. We were soaking wet and covered in mud, and a few of us (including me) had managed to pick up a few cuts and scrapes, but the sense of accomplishment was overwhelming. Everyone congratulated me on doing so well for my first real hike, to which I quipped, “Anything you can do, I can do slower.”

When we returned to the house, I was ready to pass out but we had other plans – our family was gathering for a little holiday on the island of Nahlap, and we were soon swept into the back of a pickup trudge barreling down the roads to Kitti. We made several stops, dropping off or picking up food and/or people, until finally we arrived at the boat dock. About a half-hour later, a boat arrived and picked us up for the ten-minute trip.

Nahlap is one of the barrier reef islands encircling the main volcanic one – as such, it is basically little more than an overgrown sandbar. In most places it is maybe a hundred or so feet wide, though it is a few miles in length. There is a sort of resort on one end of it, and this is where everyone would be spending the following day.

When we arrived, we were quickly led to a very large and well-built nahs that the family had rented for the night. True to Pohnpeian form, mats were already set up for us to sleep on, and I quickly made use of mine. I soon dozed off to the sound of the ocean crashing on either shore, and the laughter of the children as they danced to Shania Twain (don’t ask).

On Rahnsarahwi (Sunday), I woke up excited to explore the place I had been transported to in the dark of night, much as I had the day I arrived on Pohnpei. Indigo walked me to the other end of the resort, where a small white chapel stood empty, overlooking the first sandy beach I have seen since being here.

Soon after everyone was awake, the swimming began in earnest. The waters of the Pacific are warm and crystal-clear here, as I had always been told, and through them I could see the giant clams and blue starfish on the reef beneath. I could tell this day would be as relaxing as the day before was arduous.

We were offered a bottle of unmarked “sunscreen” which looked more like baby oil to me. I took one look at our host’s dark brown skin and decided to stick with my SPF 50, but Meghan took them up on it. Guess who got burned?

There were two piers where people congregated to swim. On one, a simple water slide had been constructed from a large piece of PVC pipe. If you had a friend with you, you could haul a bucket of water up from the ocean on a long cord, and have them dump it down the slide after you for the full effect. Unfortunately, on one of my many trips down this slide, I banged my hand on one of the wooden supports and now I can’t flex my middle finger – don’t worry mom, it’s just a sprain; they won’t have to airlift me to Guam. :)

The other pier ended in a platform which was ideal for jumping in – or pushing other people in. I spent at least a half-hour playing with some dozen kids on it. They would all try to push me in and I would try to push them in one at a time; it doesn’t seem all that fair, but I was the oldest and tallest so I held my own pretty well. I also taught some of the boys the cannonball, which I renamed the “coconut” in the interests of cultural sensitivity.

When I wasn’t swimming, I was napping in one of the few hammocks – it left marks on my back, of which I was quite proud. There was also barbecue… with such a large family, they essentially fill up a basin with chicken parts and marinade, then roast them a few dozen at a time on a grate over a barrel. It’s unbelievably delicious – I have to get the recipe.

Oh, and at some point I broke a light bulb on my head. I am taller than just about every Pohnpeian I know, and our nahs was definitely not built for six-foot Americans. None of the lights here have covers, so… well, you get the picture.

All in all, it was a full and amazing weekend – I got to know two different faces of the island I will be calling home, and I pushed myself to try all sorts of things I have never done or at least never enjoyed doing. I hope I will still be able to do stuff like this when orientation ends and I move out of the host family’s house...

Reflections on a Week in Paradise

2008-07-24T01:09:00.000-07:00

Pohnpeian Word of the Day: duhdu = "shower"

I thought I’d take a break from the normal format today… rather than bore you with the details of my orientation sessions at PICS, I’ll give you some snippets of what life is like here.

Although I miss my mom, Brenda, Taydy, and especially Katie, I have to admit I don’t think about home as much as I should. The days out here are long and they keep me very busy, so that sometimes I barely have the energy even to write something here. I wake up every day to the sound of roosters, or kihng as I have learned to call them, and I am asleep not long after the sun sets. In between, I spend at least an hour walking with a backpack in the tropical heat and consequently chug at least one or two Gatorades.

There are no snakes here, nor any bees or wasps – in fact, no pollinating insects of any kind. You can go trudging through the jungle (nanwel) without fear of being attacked by something hostile, excepting perhaps the occasional thorny plant – this goes against all of my intuitions about nature from growing up in Florida. The biggest threats are microscopic – Leptospirosis from the water, Siguatera poisoning from the fish, and so on.

I’ve been showering every other day with a bucket – actually, two buckets. You fill up the bigger one from the tap, then you scoop cold water out of it with the smaller one and dump it over your head. Believe it or not, after the initial shock of the first bucketful, it is really the most refreshing feeling. I relish being cool and clean for that few minutes before I start to sweat all over again.

The stores here are plentiful, and though they lack the selection I am used to, there are few things you can’t get here. Nonetheless, some of the prices will shock you – $5.98 for a box of Cocoa Puffs, $1.20 for a package of Jello, $4.25 a pound for grapes. Oh, and gas is $6.22 a gallon.

I have been lucky in avoiding both sunburn and mosquito bites, given that I have applied neither sunscreen nor bug spray on a regular basis. Even deodorant seems a moot point – I imagine it washes away after my first half-hour walk of the day. I brush my teeth with bottled water, and my electric toothbrush always amazes the kids.

More than anything, I am shocked at how easily I have adjusted to all of these changes. My definition of “clean” has, in particular, been radically altered – both by the ever-present sweaty grunge that coats my body, and by the soda cans and junk cars that litter the street – but I am still alive, and happier than I can remember in a long time.

Please know that I read each and every comment that is made on this blog, and these little glimpses of home mean a great deal to me. I love you all, and I am happy to see that I am still in your memories, even as you are in mine. Anyway, that’s my life now… stay tuned

Fifth/Sixth Days on Pohnpei

2008-07-23T03:30:00.000-07:00

Pohnpeian Word of the Day: lairom = “How are you?”

Yesterday, we met with Miriam Hughes, the American ambassador to the FSM, and Vic Hobson from the Department of the Interior. Our meeting lasted about an hour and a half, and provided many insights into the relationship between our countries and our specific roles here as volunteers.

When I returned home I was greeted by one of the neighborhood boys, also named Brian. We met a few days ago, and now we shout “Brians unite!” everytime we see each other. He invited me to go play volleyball, and though I’m not the – er – athletic type, I agreed to join on the condition he would teach me how. He then led me on a winding path through backyards to a volleyball net randomly set up between houses next to some abandoned junk cars.

The “game”, such as it was, went well – at least so long as I kept my hands off the ball. At any rate, it was good exercise and better fun, and I was soon soaked in sweat. After losing our side of the court to two newcomers, we sat on a nearby truck to continue watching. I was ready to leave, and was attempting to think of a polite way to excuse myself, when Brian turned and offered to take me home.

Funny thing about Pohnpeians – I swear they can read your mind. From a young age, they are taught to pick up on miniscule social cues, and as a result they can almost always tell whether you are tired, hungry or sad long before even you know. On a personal level, its an amazing skill – it will however create problems for me as a teacher, since this constant social attentiveness often diverts their attention and makes it difficult to focus.

Today was mostly uneventful – these orientation sessions are long, and they take a lot out of me. When I returned home, Sousol ran up to greet me and proudly displayed his arm and back, on which “tattoos” of flowers had been drawn in pen by one of his sisters/cousins. Other than that, I can’t think of much to tell, and I’m exhausted… so I’ll call it a night for now. Stay tuned….

Fourth Day in Pohnpei

2008-07-21T13:47:00.000-07:00

Pohnpeian Word of the Day: nohno = "mother"

As usual, I have risen with the sun (and the roosters) and trudged down to Telecom to report yesterday's events... unfortunately, there isn't too much to say as we spent most of the day down at PICS for orientation. Anyway, here's the highlights:

I now have a Pohnpeian driver's license - and though I didn't have to take a test to obtain it, that does not mean it was easy. First, we had to get photos taken at the public library. Then we walked to the license office (about 15-20 minutes away) to fill out a form and have an instructor sign off on it, after showing him our American licenses. The license fee had to be paid at the finance building, another 10-15 minute walk away. After paying the $6.50, we walked back to the license office, where we were eventually handed simple paper cards with our basic information typed on them and our pictures affixed. Of course, like anything paper in this humidity, they will fall apart soon - so I had to walk all the way to the NIHCO store (across from the library) to have it laminated. From there, the walk home was at least 25 minutes. I have been told this is pretty much standard for the way things are done around here.

At least I'll get plenty of exercise. :)

Upon my return home, I was greeted by Floid (11) and Sousol (5), both of whom are very enamored of me at this point. I don't know if Sousol realizes how poor my Pohnpeian is, but he rattled away at me for quite some time, and I took this as a sign of being accepted into the family given these people's culturally ingrained shyness. I tried to return the affection by flipping through a volume of an old encyclopedia with him, explaining space travel and the Apollo missions with a scattering of Pohnpeian words like usu(star), maram(moon), aramas(people) and sampihl(airplane).

The three of us watched "300" on bootleg DVD for a little while, before I decided it was time for some downtime with the drum. The irony of this island is that it is actually somewhat difficult to get close to the ocean, though you can see it from just about anywhere, but the one good place is the airport causeway so I decided to head there - it's also the only place I could think of where I could practice alone and not disturb anyone. I played through the sunset (hidden from my view behind Sokehs ridge), and when I was tired I laid down on one of the benches with the sea breeze blowing over me. It was peaceful beyond any words I have to describe it. I was afraid I would fall asleep out there, but I soon trudged home and passed out.

Third Day in Pohnpei

2008-07-20T01:54:00.001-07:00

Pohnpeian Word of the Day: malek = "chicken"

Well, my slovenly day in the Telecom building fell through - by the time I walked back to the house to get some paper, my lack of sleep caught up with me and I passed out. The next thing I knew, a knock at my door awakened me. It was time for the family barbecue in Kitti.

We all piled into vans for the half-hour drive. I rode with Leto and his wife Kathy, along with one of (their?) little girls named Emma. The route took us by the national government buildings in Palikir - like most modern construction around here, they stand out like a sore thumb in this place, where the humidity devours anything metal and most houses are slapped together from whatever materials are available.

Eventually, we arrived at the large nahs where the get-together was to be held. Everyone was busy with some duty or another - the men were gathered around a barrel in which a fire was lit and over which was placed a steel mesh laden with marinated chicken, while others were scraping coconuts, pounding taro and grating bananas.

While we waited, Meghan and I entertained ourselves by playing with the children. I learned yesterday that my drum is apparently quite the novelty, so we brought it out and tried to get the children to play - they were extremely shy at first, but eventually it was impossible to hold them back. I would play a rhythm, then pass the drum around the circle and have each of them attempt to copy it.

At some point, we were also lead through the jungle to a nearby river. As we walked, our guides pointed out various plants, including sakau. When we arrived, we found a group of a dozen or so people swimming and playing in a deep part of the river. I wish I had brought my swimsuit.

The meal itself was amazing, as every meal I have had here has been. My favorite dish was the cucumbers in kimchi sauce, and I also had the opportunity to try taro for the first time. After cleaning two chicken legs down to the bone, I was stuffed to the rafters.

I am very thankful for my adopted family - they have embraced us as one of their own, and this is definitely helping with the homesickness. A few of the boys have really taken to me - in particular, they love the drum, so I'm glad I brought it. Anyway, I'm exhausted so I think I'll head home now.... Enjoy this video of our music-making day. I really suck at ukulele.

Second Day in Pohnpei

2008-07-19T15:31:00.000-07:00

Pohnpeian Word of the Day: karakal = "hot"

Meghan and I woke up early Saturday morning to get picked up by Mikayla for a tour of the entire island. Around 8:00, we took off for what would turn out to be my first experience with motion sickness. Our driver, Tatsuo, took little note of the 25-30 mph speed limit sign as our retro-fitted school bus van tore around the winding island roads like a roller coaster from hell.

We circled the whole island in about three hours, stopping at Kitti and Madolenihmw to visit the houses those volunteers will stay at and the schools they will teach at. After seeing them, I can definitely say I'm glad to be teaching in Kolonia - one of the houses had no walls, just wood lattice work. The breeze will be nice - the bugs, not so much. I'll take my two-bedroom apartment in town, thank you very much.

When we finally got back into town, we ate lunch at PICS and finally headed back to our host families. When we arrived, we met a new cousin by the name of Floid - I have all but given up on figuring out which kid belongs to which parent, opting instead to simply identify which generation they belong in. Floid immediately took to me, and we spent the next few hours watching bootleg chinese DVDs, including the second Fantastic Four movie.

Floid is in special-ed classes at Ohmine Elementary School in Kolonia, and I believe this is because he has ADD - he's quite intelligent, but very unfocused. I told him I would tutor him in Math once the school year begins on the 14th, and I hope he takes me up on it. I want to make him my own personal project.

Our field director Mikayla was running a half-marathon at this time, and the finish line was just down the street from us, so Meghan and I walked down to meet her. On the way, I noticed a dozen people or so gathered in an apartment courtyard for a barbecue, with a strange pounding sound emanating from them. At first, I thought they were playing drums but I soon saw that they were instead pounding sakau.

Sakau is a local drink and mild narcotic sedative made from the roots of the Piper Methysticum plant. It is prepared by pounding the roots of the plant for over an hour and then straining the juice through freshly cut hibiscus bark. This is always a community production - it took four men at any time to pound the roots, and another prepared the bark.

After prodding Meghan a little bit, we walked up and asked if we could observe. We struck up a conversation with a man named Marvin, who told us he was a state senator representing the district of Kolonia - he then introduced us to his cousin, the governor of Pohnpei himself. Marvin explained how the Pohnpeian legislature works, and we ended up sampling some sakau as well - it tastes like slimy dirt and makes your tongue numb. All in all, a very productive encounter.

Anyway, my plan today is to sit around the air-conditioned Telecom building and drink soda, watch cable and write some letters home. Enjoy the attached video of AJ and his sister Trini (pronounced charini) - she has the cutest smile you have ever seen, and I rarely see her without him on her hip.

First Day in Pohnpei

2008-07-18T15:27:00.000-07:00

Pohnpeian Word of the Day: Kaselehlie (CAS-uh-lay-lee-uh) = “Hello/Goodbye”

It’s hard to believe I’m finally here… and even harder to believe it’s only been a day or so. I can barely process all that I’ve seen, but I’ll try to record some of it here.

The flight from Honolulu was the longest and most horrible experience I believe I’ve ever had on a plane. The entire thing took some 10 or 11 hours, but it wasn’t a direct hop as I’d thought. Instead, we island-hopped for the last half of it. First Majuro and Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands, then Kosrae and finally Pohnpei in the FSM. At every stop, we took on and dropped off passengers, and the crew had to perform what they called a “security check” of the plane – which meant a lot of jostling about of some very exhausted people and their bulky bags.

Across from us on the plane, they had cleared a space for a stretcher and surrounded it with a curtain. Apparently, a man from Chuuk (another island in the FSM and second-to-last stop for our flight) was dying and wished to see his last days at home… his family sat behind him, occasionally breaking the curtain to feed him ice chips or otherwise tend to him. It was a touching scene.

We finally arrived in Pohnpei at around 2:30 in the morning, where we were picked up by our field directors Mikayla and Matt and taken to our host families (who we will live with for the next two weeks). I was assigned to the home of Tirecher Doses, who I have been instructed to simply call “mom”, along with another volunteer named Meghan. By the time we arrived, all we had the energy to do was introduce ourselves and ask where our beds were.

The small three-bedroom house was (by American standards) full of people – a few adults and a ton of children – but we were each given our own bedrooms. This is apparently stipulated in our contract with WorldTeach, but I couldn’t help but feel incredibly guilty at the sight of so many people sleeping on the tile floor while I enjoyed a comfortable bed. I found out later that most Micronesian families actually prefer to sleep on the floor together, as a family, and that our rooms would most likely be used for storage if we weren’t here. There is no air conditioning in our house, only electric fans which wax and wane in effectiveness with changes in the unreliable electricity, so sleeping on cold tile may not be such a bad deal.

I was awoken by the sun and the crowing of our neighbor’s rooster. I found Tirecher sitting on the floor in front of a griddle making pancakes – we were eventually served a heaping pile of these, along with some scrambled eggs. While I waited, I took some time to figure out who all of these people were. Apparently, “mom” is originally from the village of Kitti (pronounced like “kitschy”) on the island’s southwestern shore. She has six daughters and two sons, with the latter both living in the states. The adults I had met were some of her daughters (the others still live in Kitti) and the children, mostly female, were all theirs.

I had once read that asking a Micronesian how many people live in their house is like asking someone how many teeth they have, or how many holes are in their head. I have yet to ascertain exactly which of the sisters actually live with “mom”, and the roster appears to be rather fluid. The only consistency is the lack of men – aside from myself and an infant named A.J.

After introducing myself to the children, I decided to take a stroll and get the lay of the land. We had landed in the dead of night, and I had no clue what sort of place I would find myself in. The sight I beheld was unlike anything I have ever seen – the most surreal mix of paradise and third-world squalor.

The houses are mostly simple affairs, constructed of cinderblocks and corrugated tin roofing (which is not always used on the roof). Some houses have a nahs, basically a semicircle of benches beneath a crude roof but otherwise open to the air – these structures are where barbeques are held and sakau is drunk. The fancier houses have a second floor and stucco walls. Some of the houses I passed have collapsed completely, or burned down to their foundations.

The streets ¬- which are a mixture of paved roads, concrete slabs, and gravel - are littered with trash (sometimes collected in small piles) and roamed by wild chickens and dogs. There are mostly no sidewalks, and where they do exist they are little more than concrete slabs laid over open storm drains. Nevertheless, there are always people to be seen strolling along their edges, and little children play in groups as large as ten or twenty on some of the less-used neighborhood streets. Hibiscus and jasmine flower everywhere, and in front of our house grows a water apple tree. Basically, a water apple is like a regular apple but pear-shaped and without a core so you can eat the whole thing – and damn are they good.

Around lunch time, Mikayla came to pick us up for orientation. The three of us walked down to the main street in town (Kaselehlie Street) and it quickly became apparent why Kolonia is the place to be. It boasts innumerable supermarkets, a bank, the Telecom building (where phone cards can be purchased and you can use the internet for $4 an hour) as well as a movie theatre and video rental.

Oh, and did I mention it is hot as hell here? I mean really freakin’ hot. We must have walked two or three miles in the equatorial heat and constantly saturated humidity – I drank maybe six bottles of water without going to the bathroom once. Every time we entered an air conditioned building (which only means a wall unit cranking out 75 degree air anyway) I secretly prayed we’d stay there all day.

Orientation was interesting – we walked all the way to the Pacific Island Central School, or PICS, where some of us will be teaching, and met in one of their classrooms for about an hour or so to discuss our expectations and our reasons for being here. Then we ate lunch (half-frozen peanut butter and jelly sandwiches) in the school cafeteria. The most exciting part of this trip for me was the school’s freezer, which I was disappointed to find would not close completely with me in it.

We then walked back in to town to open our accounts with the Bank of Guam, and finally I broke off from the group to return home and take what turned out to be a five-hour nap. This heat will do that to you. Unfortunately, this meant I failed to show up to a church service which I had been invited to by a very precocious neighborhood boy named Daniel. I have to remember to apologize to him.

When I woke up, I was greated by a traditional Pohnpeian dinner spread, which included breadfruit, plantains, rice and parrotfish. Some of the parrotfish were cooked and others were simply served raw – at the expense of my already rumbling gut, I decided to go for the latter. This turned out to be a wise decision given my love of sushi – you just rip the flesh off the fish with your fingers and dip it in soy. If this is what the food here is like, I’m going to be just fine.

It’s about 5:30 in the morning here now – I can’t sleep due to the combination of jet lag and the long nap I took earlier. Plus it starts getting hot as soon as the sun comes up. I just want my family and friends to know that I got here OK and that I think I’m going to like this place, though I still miss you all.

En Route, Part 2

2008-07-16T18:07:00.000-07:00

In the LA airport, I met the other members of the Pohnpei group. There are 13 of us traveling together, some of whom introduce themselves in the video above. We met in the Daily Grill and shared a small lunch (i.e. water) with a returned volunteer from the Marshall Islands.

The flight to Hawaii was uneventful - I took some more sleeping pills and passed out for the whole trip. I remember the meal they served me only as a warm thing occupying my tray table which forced me to sleep sitting up. I think they gave me an apple juice at some point, and half of it ended up spilled on my jeans.

Fortunately, the flight out of Hawaii was delayed 10.5 hours, so we all had time to stroll around Honolulu and Waikiki beach today. A very pleasant surprise, except that now we won't get into Pohnpei until after midnight their time. Anyway, the trek continues....

En Route, Part 1

2008-07-15T13:22:00.000-07:00

Well, the day has finally come. Last night was my last in Jacksonville - I had a wonderful "bon voyage" dinner with both my parents, my girlfriend Katie and my best friend Brenda. It was so nice to have the most important people in my life together in one place to say good-bye, and I will miss them all terribly. After everyone except Katie left, I finished packing my 150 pounds of luggage and watched my last Daily Show for a while.

This morning we all got up early and left the house at 4:30. I said my final farewells to everyone at the security checkpoint... when I turned the first corner, the tears I had been choking back for two days finally burst out. I must have looked stupid bawling like that while TSA checked my shoes for WMDs, but I couldn't help it. This will be a lot harder than I thought.

When I boarded my first flight to Atlanta at 6:00, I quietly thanked Delta for wedging me between a window and a 250+ pound man, because every bone in my body was screaming to fly out of that seat and go tearing down the aisle back to the gate. That first flight was miserable, but by the time we landed I had managed to calm down a bit.

I bought some sleeping pills and a magazine in the Atlanta airport, and fortunately the former worked so well that I barely touched the latter throughout the 5-hour flight to Los Angeles. When I first booked the flight to LA, I planned on being here several hours before our group meeting at 3:00, and this turned out not to be such a bad idea... by the time I had retrieved my backs, re-checked them and gone through security it was already 1:00.

Of course, that's 4:00 EST and I hadn't eaten all day, so the first order of business was food. And that brings me to here, sitting in El Cholo Cantina in LAX. I need to go now and find my group... hopefully I'll be able to post again in Honolulu, but I'm not sure. I miss you all already.

Introduction

2008-07-09T06:57:00.000-07:00

"I wish that... I was born a thousand years ago.

I wish that... I'd sailed the darkened seas,

on a great big clipper ship,

sailing from this land here to that,

put on a sailer suit and cap..."

- Lou Reed, Heroin

The island of Pohnpei is located in the western Pacific ocean, less than 500 miles from the equator. At 130 square miles in area with volcanic peaks reaching 2500 feet, it is the largest and highest island in the Federated States of Micronesia and comprises almost half of that tiny nation's total land area (the rest being found on six hundred islands scattered over more than a million square miles of open ocean). The island boasts the FSM's only urban area (Kolonia) and its national capital (Palikir) - together with six nearby inhabited atolls, it forms the country's second-most populous state. The other three states (also named after large islands) are Yap, Chuuk and Kosrae.

Pohnpei is one of the wettest places on the surface of the earth, with parts of the island receiving an average daily rainfall of almost an inch. All that rain feeds a network of rivers originating in the island's mountainous interior and terminating in more than forty waterfalls around its rim. The main island is covered in thick rainforest and ringed by mangrove swamps, with eight coral atolls (between one and three miles offshore) forming a protected lagoon.

As part of the WorldTeach program, which is run out of the Center for International Development at Harvard, I will be teaching mathematics for a full year at the Pohnpei State Campus of the College of Micronesia, located in Kolonia (whose geographic coordinates I have used as the title of this blog). I will arrive on July 16th, and will not return until April 29th of next year - my hope is that this space will allow me to keep all of my friends and relatives updated on my journey.

Although the FSM is now a sovereign nation, from 1947 to 1986 it was a part of the United Nations Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands and was administered by the United States Department of the Interior beginning in 1951. In 1986, the newly-created FSM government (along with the Republic of the Marshall Islands and the Republic of Palau) signed a Compact of Free Association with the US, under which it receives financial assistance in exchange for certain basing rights.

My program in particular is funded by these aid dollars - WorldTeach provides my airfare and lodging, as well as a small stipend of some $120 a month. Also, under the Compact, each Micronesian state has its own US postal zip code (Pohnpei's is 96941), and all FSM citizens may freely enter the US or apply for federal programs such as the Pell grant.

Although I am only 21 years old, I have been in college and graduate school for ten of those years and I am very ready to experience something different. I decided more than a year and a half ago to try volunteering overseas - at first I considered the Peace Corps, but since they require a 27-month commitment I decided to look for alternatives. I soon found WorldTeach and settled on the Pohnpei program, which was attractive at first because it was fully funded and lasted only a year. After doing some more research on the island, I decided to apply. I was wait-listed for the 2007 program, and finally accepted for 2008.

I should note here that, aside from trips to Canada, Mexico and the Bahamas, I have never actually left the country of my birth - the furthest I have lived from my parents is a mere 70 miles, while this trip will take me more than 7500 miles away. I don't doubt for a second my competence at teaching (which I have been doing in one form or another for seven years) but I am obviously quite worried about adapting to a new culture, with the core of the earth between me and everyone I have ever known. I will try to chronicle my experiences here, in hopes of keeping some kind of connection to home. Stay tuned!