The thoughts and opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not represent those of the WorldTeach organization.
December 5th (part two)
On Sunday, November 28th I decided to skip church and head to the airport with Josh and Holly. I am still not sure if it was the best decision. I ended up staying there for three hours!!!!! Since it was Holly, we couldn’t just drop her off and leave! The only reason I went was to make a reservation to go to Tutuila during winter break. I actually called one of the WorldTeach volunteers and I think I will stay with them for a week and then they will come back to Manu’a with me for the second week of vacation. That would be nice as Josh is going to Tutuila on the same date as me to go hang out with Holly and then coming back to Manu’a the day before me.
Saunoa left on Monday, November 29th for an extended trip. He was planning on going to Hawaii and California to see his wife and kids. He wanted me to come up on Sunday for a bit. He is lending me some chisels to do some carving and wanted to give them to me before he left. Josh arrived around 6 after he finished with his lesson plans up at the school and then we stayed for another two hours before Saunoa drove us home. At 8 PM, we arrived home and I went right to bed. I needed my beauty sleep for the first full week back to school in a long time.
After school on Monday I had a tutorial with a group of five students. This tutorial program is called Upward Bound. It is through the local community college for aspiring high school students. For three hours a week, I tutor in English or math. For this specific week, I chose to talk about child abuse. The kids out here don’t know anything. I have heard that child abuse is prevalent in many Samoan households so I thought it would be a good topic to introduce. Some interesting things came out of this tutorial. As we were reading the article, we came across some statistics on STD’s among abused children. 14% of victims of child abuse are infected with a STD. I asked what STD stood for…no response so I said, “sexually transmitted disease, can you give me an example of a sexually transmitted disease?” Their answers were: a bruise, a cold, and the flu. I decided to say how about AIDS/HIV, anyone hear of that before? Some said yes but then couldn’t tell me what it was. We moved on from there. Later it got on to the topic of pregnancy and one girl said, “Don’t babies come out of your mom’s butt?” She was completely serious. She is a senior at Manu’a High School.
The rest of the day drug on like the first week back from a holiday does. On Thursday, I woke up a little ill. Something just wasn’t right. I went to bed early the night before and when I arrived up to school, I was feeling nauseous, had an upset stomach, and kept sweating profusely. Our principal, vice principal, and English teacher were all absent on this day so I mentioned something to Donna, the social studies teacher, who was in charge that I wasn’t feeling well. Ten minutes into my first class, Donna came by and said, “We have teachers watching over your class for the remainder of the day and we have someone bringing you home after this period.” I was a little surprised and didn’t really know what to think of the situation. I wanted to stay home and rest, but didn’t feel like it was life threatening that I had to leave school. I ended up going home and it sounds like I missed a good day at school.
Josh came home later that night to share with me the festivities of the day. The agriculture teacher had a hard day with his students (very typical). During one of his periods, a boy Matt was yelling into Doug’s classroom, “Hey Roseman, why don’t you come suck my c***!” Doug told the students not to let him into the classroom and to try to ignore him. One of the students decided it would be funny to let him in. When Doug turned around, the student ran and opened the door. Matt came into the room, grabbed Doug by the face and punched him in the gut. Doug pushed him out of the room and locked the door. Donna had to come by and take care of the situation. In a completely unrelated incident, Crystal had one of her students absent during her last period class. The kids in her class told her he was in the JROTC room and that she should go get him. For some reason she played into this and went over to find him. He wasn’t there so she went back to her room. One student left to go to the bathroom and check on Frances. He arrived back and let Crystal know that he really is in JROTC. So Crystal goes back with Donna and finds the boy in the back office on top of the rafters sleeping! Donna gets him down and brings him into the office. In general, the kids were rowdy and out of control all day so I am glad I was home sick!
On Friday, I woke up feeling better so I decided to go to school. The day was long; I had a headache the entire time and was just ready to go home. My headache eventually got better as the day progressed. After school, I had another Upward Bound tutorial, but with a new group of five students. This group actually said HIV/AIDS as their first response to name a STD, but then I quickly lost hope with them when WD-40 was their next answer.
Since I missed Thursday my SAT Prep after school class was cancelled and so they didn’t take their quiz. On Friday, I went to the teacher that teaches SAT Prep English and asked if they could take the quiz during class time. Since Trish was absent, the librarian didn’t have anything planned and accepted. After my Upward Bound tutorial I ran to find the quizzes to start grading them. Astonishingly the grades were amazing. Almost all the grades were 100% or just one question off from them. What was even more amazing if that the last time these students took a quiz the highest grade was a 73%. Also, my best student scored the lowest grade. Let’s just say I was pretty livid about this. These are the National Honors Society students and they think cheating is completely acceptable. After complaining and discussing the matter with Josh, I think I have a great way to approach…stay tuned to the next post!
Yesterday, I spent the morning cleaning. I washed the dishes, the kitchen, swept the house, did my laundry, and picked up trash in my yard. After lunch, I went into our front fale (house) and carved out one of the coral rocks for my sea glass design. I broke the first one and was a little upset, but then realized my mistake and started work on the second one. It took me until 5:30 that night, but I was happy with what I accomplished. That night, I put the rock in some bleach water to make it a little whiter and to get rid of the fish smell. Later that night, Josh and I decided to go for a swim along with Doug. We went out around 7:30 and stayed out for about an hour. I was the first to come out as I wasn’t feeling quite right. That night, my eye started swelling and itching. Oh how I love pink eye. No one shares my mask with me, so it is possible that something in the water irritated my eye.
Today, I have been staying up at school working on my lesson plans for the week. On Wednesday, Tautua is sitting in on my Geometry class so I wanted to figure out what I was going to do in there. Hopefully my eye will be better tomorrow!
Love,
Gretchen
Monday, December 13, 2010
Turkey Week
The thoughts and opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not represent those of the WorldTeach organization.
December 5th (part one)
I need to take it back to Thanksgiving time. A long time ago, but I have been very slow at updating you on my life. The weekend prior to Thanksgiving was pretty uneventful. Saturday, November 20th was supposed to be filled with basketball. The tournament between the three villages was postponed due to excessive rain. At 7 AM I was up and at the pastor’s house waiting for a truck to bring me to Ta’u. An hour later, I was still sitting there when I was informed that the games were cancelled and we were now waiting for brunch. On Friday night, after basketball, we were told to buy a 5 pound bag of chicken for brunch after the games on Saturday. Since I paid for part of the food I thought I should stay at the pastor’s house until it arrived. I ended up staying for another half an hour with no one to talk to…not too exciting. After I received the food, I brought it home and went right to bed. The rest of the day was pretty sluggish. The rain finally stopped around noon and the sun was shining. I ended up playing basketball around 2 with some of the guys from the village. On Sunday, I went to church and then came home with nothing to do. I decided to go walk down by the beach in the middle of the afternoon and got a great idea. I thought about making some collages with sea glass. I went back home, grabbed a bag and walked the beach. I got quite a lot of sea glass on the little stretch of beach. For the rest of the week the glass just kept sitting in the bag until I got another good idea.
The school week went by pretty fast. We only had two days of actual instruction. Monday was pretty uneventful except for the massive amount of rain that came down. Oh wait, that is every day so not very eventful indeed. On Tuesday morning I walked to school (just like every other day) when I was attacked by some dogs. Right when you enter Ta’u there are always a couple dogs that live off to the left. On this day, there was no one outside to yell at them to leave me alone. I walked past them when I realized they got up and were walking towards me. I didn’t think much of it until the one white dog was covered in blood and growling at me. Three dogs circled around me trying to bite me. I yelled, “Halu! (Go away!)” but they weren’t listening. At one point I attempted to pick up a rock, but I didn’t leave my eyes off the dogs and came up empty handed. The white dog lunged at me a few times and so I took my rain jacket and just kept swinging it in his face. Eventually a gentleman came out and helped me. He threw a rock in their direction and they ran off. Most of the village just stared though. The kids in the village even laughed at me! Now I carry a rock and a stick every time I walk by. When I finally got up to school I was pretty shaken up. One of my students, Tanya, actually owns the dog and I had her first period that day. I let her know what happened and she laughed! She said she heard someone this morning yelling and thought it was just a kid. I don’t understand why she wouldn’t come out to help if a little kid was being attacked by her stupid dog! Dumb. My voice ended up being raspy all day from the morning screaming. Eventually, we had after school tutorial and someone asked me if I was sick. Tanya was in my after school tutorial and laughed when I said I was attacked by her dogs. On my way home that day, I stopped and spoke with her mother. I let her know I would like her dogs tied up if they are going to act like that. The next day the white dog was walking around just like any other day. Since then I have yet to see him. My theory is that early that day he was involved in a fight and that is why he had a big gash on his side. He was still angry about it and decided to take it out on me! Hopefully it doesn’t happen again.
On Wednesday, November 24th we had no instruction at school. The day was filled with Thanksgiving activities. The morning started out with a turkey run. It was a pretty sad run. The boys started from the clinic in Ta’u while the girls started at the end of Ta’u. Basically it is a straight up the hill run for the girls. It is only about a half a mile but is pretty grueling. Since there are no sports and no physical education at the school, all the students are extremely unfit. So unfit that I believe 75% of the students couldn’t run a straightaway that is a quarter of the mile. Josh, Crystal, and I walked down the steepest part of the run to cheer on the students. Most of them were walking. We were very confused by the girls sprinting up the mountain, but realized they had no idea what they were doing. The male and female winner received a turkey as their prize. They were the only people that ran the entire length so they definitely deserved it! After the turkey run there was a balloon toss, egg toss, and bobbing for apples. Each class was in competition with each other and received points if they won. I am a sophomore class advisor and helped by participating in bobbing for apples. I lost quite badly but received a nice apple to eat! After all the games, the students prepared food for lunch. Each class was in charge of making food. I sat with the sophomores and enjoyed turkey, breadfruit, papaya, and banana. The students brought food cooked at home and the class officers prepared the dishes for each of the students in the class. The day was over at noon, but I stayed to finish up some grading and planning for the following week. On Thursday there was another basketball tournament and I wanted my grades complete to give to Tautua. Tautua made an announcement that if any students had a D or F in any one of their classes, they could not play basketball. I made sure to give him the list of the students receiving those grades in my classes. I wanted to see if he followed through with his word. For the first time ever, we had a real basketball practice on Wednesday. This Nazi teacher up at the high school decided she wanted to be a part of our team since we won our first game. She knows absolutely nothing about basketball, but thinks she is a genius. She made up run laps throughout the village, do jumping jacks, stretch as a group, etc. The only problem is, it was the day before a game and no one on the team runs! So I ran backwards trying to motivate the slugs and they still had to walk. Even worse, they couldn’t even walk the entire way! After staying at basketball I ran home to eat and get my laundry together. Since there was no school on Thursday, I stayed up pretty late. While doing laundry, I assisted Crystal and Doug with baking a chocolate cake. The cake didn’t actually finish until 10:30 so I had to stick around for a long time.
On Wednesday, I thought my camera was seeing its last day. The camera I have had since freshman year in college decided to make all my photos white. I played around with it for a while and could only get my video to work. Fortunately, I tried it indoors on the following Saturday and it worked! It just doesn’t like the sun out here!
Thursday = Thanksgiving Day! I woke up very early to start the day. I promised to make an apple pie for our Thanksgiving feast and couldn’t let anyone down. At 6:30 AM, I woke up and started right on the pie. After an hour, I had just finished cutting the last apple, threw it in the refrigerator and ran off to church. The service started at 7:30 so I entered about ten minutes late. No one really cares if I am late because they know I don’t understand anything that is going on anyway. After the 45 minute service, I ran home to finish up the pie. Josh helped me so that I could get back to the pastor’s house for basketball. Josh was in charge of making the pork chops and a few side dishes for our meal. I let him know when the pie needed to go into the oven, and then I ran off! At 8:45, I jumped into a truck and headed over to Ta’u. We sat around for a long time before any basketball began. The sun started coming out and I knew it was going to be a long day. At 10 AM, the games started with the younger boys being the first game. The only team that played from our village was the boys “B” team which consisted of middle school and early high school students. My team was supposed to play. We were told to get ready, so I went on a short jog to warm up and stretched with the group. We were sitting on the sideline to find out there was no women’s “A” team from Fitiuta so we won by default…everyone but me cheered. Everyone was so excited that we won, but that’s a pretty crap way to win. I was disappointed. After 5 games were played, the pastors from all three villages called the games for the rest of the day. They also announced that there will be no more games until the last weekend in December. Everyone is busy with the holidays coming up and they want to wait for Ofu and Olesega to come over to play. Now, all the kids switched back to playing volleyball every day. After the games, we were brought back to the pastor’s house for a Thanksgiving feast. It wasn’t as big as a typical Samoan feast, but it was a nice afternoon meal. I ate some turkey and then headed home to help Josh with dinner.
Josh pretty much had the meal together so I assisted in cleaning up the house. Doug, Crystal, Saunoa, and Leafa came over for the meal. We had ribs, turkey, pork chops, stuffing, carrot/sweet potato salad, and potato salad. After a nice, long Thanksgiving dinner we had some delicious dessert: apple-blueberry pie (added in the blueberries at the last minute), meringue pie (with egg in it…yuk!), and chocolate cake. Since it was such a full meal, Crystal and I decided to walk it off after. Even though it was Black Friday, the teacher’s still had to report up to school. We arrived at 8 AM and were told there was a 9:30 meeting and then we could go home if we want. Josh’s girlfriend, Holly, was arriving on the plane that day so I decided to stay up at school and get some work done. I actually stayed up longer than I planned and got a lot accomplished. After swimming and playing basketball that afternoon, I went home to eat and get ready for the siva. This siva wasn’t as much fun as the first one. It only lasted about two hours and most of the time it was raining.
Saturday, November 27th was probably one of the best days I have had out here. At 7 AM, Saunoa came to pick us up for a hike. He drove us over to Fitiuta where we hiked up the mountain. After a 2 hour hike, we started hearing screeching noises. Finally, we arrived at the bat cave! Hundreds of bats were flying around! Some were carrying their babies on their bellies. It was a pretty cool experience. That morning, I tested out my camera before we headed out and it was working, when we arrived at the bat cave it decided to produce white photos again. :( I do have some cool videos to share though! We relaxed at the top for about a half an hour. As we were heading home, we stopped along the beach and picked up coral rock. Josh designed a garden in the side of the house and wanted to make a path between the different beds using the rock. I collected some small rocks to carve into and had the idea of placing some of the sea glass into it. After arriving home and eating lunch, I walked the beach to find more glass. Right when I got home, I got to work designing a turtle out of the sea glass. I placed in on top of the rock to see how it would look. Once I was finished, I was so happy with myself, but nobody was around to show. I ended up calling Crystal and telling her she had to come over. She eventually made it over and I showed her what I had been working on. I continued working the rest of the day and made a butterfly and a moon. The next step probably should have been carving out the rock, but I ended up bleaching the rocks beforehand.
Now I need to catch you up on the next week so read the next blog post!!
Love,
Gretchen
December 5th (part one)
I need to take it back to Thanksgiving time. A long time ago, but I have been very slow at updating you on my life. The weekend prior to Thanksgiving was pretty uneventful. Saturday, November 20th was supposed to be filled with basketball. The tournament between the three villages was postponed due to excessive rain. At 7 AM I was up and at the pastor’s house waiting for a truck to bring me to Ta’u. An hour later, I was still sitting there when I was informed that the games were cancelled and we were now waiting for brunch. On Friday night, after basketball, we were told to buy a 5 pound bag of chicken for brunch after the games on Saturday. Since I paid for part of the food I thought I should stay at the pastor’s house until it arrived. I ended up staying for another half an hour with no one to talk to…not too exciting. After I received the food, I brought it home and went right to bed. The rest of the day was pretty sluggish. The rain finally stopped around noon and the sun was shining. I ended up playing basketball around 2 with some of the guys from the village. On Sunday, I went to church and then came home with nothing to do. I decided to go walk down by the beach in the middle of the afternoon and got a great idea. I thought about making some collages with sea glass. I went back home, grabbed a bag and walked the beach. I got quite a lot of sea glass on the little stretch of beach. For the rest of the week the glass just kept sitting in the bag until I got another good idea.
The school week went by pretty fast. We only had two days of actual instruction. Monday was pretty uneventful except for the massive amount of rain that came down. Oh wait, that is every day so not very eventful indeed. On Tuesday morning I walked to school (just like every other day) when I was attacked by some dogs. Right when you enter Ta’u there are always a couple dogs that live off to the left. On this day, there was no one outside to yell at them to leave me alone. I walked past them when I realized they got up and were walking towards me. I didn’t think much of it until the one white dog was covered in blood and growling at me. Three dogs circled around me trying to bite me. I yelled, “Halu! (Go away!)” but they weren’t listening. At one point I attempted to pick up a rock, but I didn’t leave my eyes off the dogs and came up empty handed. The white dog lunged at me a few times and so I took my rain jacket and just kept swinging it in his face. Eventually a gentleman came out and helped me. He threw a rock in their direction and they ran off. Most of the village just stared though. The kids in the village even laughed at me! Now I carry a rock and a stick every time I walk by. When I finally got up to school I was pretty shaken up. One of my students, Tanya, actually owns the dog and I had her first period that day. I let her know what happened and she laughed! She said she heard someone this morning yelling and thought it was just a kid. I don’t understand why she wouldn’t come out to help if a little kid was being attacked by her stupid dog! Dumb. My voice ended up being raspy all day from the morning screaming. Eventually, we had after school tutorial and someone asked me if I was sick. Tanya was in my after school tutorial and laughed when I said I was attacked by her dogs. On my way home that day, I stopped and spoke with her mother. I let her know I would like her dogs tied up if they are going to act like that. The next day the white dog was walking around just like any other day. Since then I have yet to see him. My theory is that early that day he was involved in a fight and that is why he had a big gash on his side. He was still angry about it and decided to take it out on me! Hopefully it doesn’t happen again.
On Wednesday, November 24th we had no instruction at school. The day was filled with Thanksgiving activities. The morning started out with a turkey run. It was a pretty sad run. The boys started from the clinic in Ta’u while the girls started at the end of Ta’u. Basically it is a straight up the hill run for the girls. It is only about a half a mile but is pretty grueling. Since there are no sports and no physical education at the school, all the students are extremely unfit. So unfit that I believe 75% of the students couldn’t run a straightaway that is a quarter of the mile. Josh, Crystal, and I walked down the steepest part of the run to cheer on the students. Most of them were walking. We were very confused by the girls sprinting up the mountain, but realized they had no idea what they were doing. The male and female winner received a turkey as their prize. They were the only people that ran the entire length so they definitely deserved it! After the turkey run there was a balloon toss, egg toss, and bobbing for apples. Each class was in competition with each other and received points if they won. I am a sophomore class advisor and helped by participating in bobbing for apples. I lost quite badly but received a nice apple to eat! After all the games, the students prepared food for lunch. Each class was in charge of making food. I sat with the sophomores and enjoyed turkey, breadfruit, papaya, and banana. The students brought food cooked at home and the class officers prepared the dishes for each of the students in the class. The day was over at noon, but I stayed to finish up some grading and planning for the following week. On Thursday there was another basketball tournament and I wanted my grades complete to give to Tautua. Tautua made an announcement that if any students had a D or F in any one of their classes, they could not play basketball. I made sure to give him the list of the students receiving those grades in my classes. I wanted to see if he followed through with his word. For the first time ever, we had a real basketball practice on Wednesday. This Nazi teacher up at the high school decided she wanted to be a part of our team since we won our first game. She knows absolutely nothing about basketball, but thinks she is a genius. She made up run laps throughout the village, do jumping jacks, stretch as a group, etc. The only problem is, it was the day before a game and no one on the team runs! So I ran backwards trying to motivate the slugs and they still had to walk. Even worse, they couldn’t even walk the entire way! After staying at basketball I ran home to eat and get my laundry together. Since there was no school on Thursday, I stayed up pretty late. While doing laundry, I assisted Crystal and Doug with baking a chocolate cake. The cake didn’t actually finish until 10:30 so I had to stick around for a long time.
On Wednesday, I thought my camera was seeing its last day. The camera I have had since freshman year in college decided to make all my photos white. I played around with it for a while and could only get my video to work. Fortunately, I tried it indoors on the following Saturday and it worked! It just doesn’t like the sun out here!
Thursday = Thanksgiving Day! I woke up very early to start the day. I promised to make an apple pie for our Thanksgiving feast and couldn’t let anyone down. At 6:30 AM, I woke up and started right on the pie. After an hour, I had just finished cutting the last apple, threw it in the refrigerator and ran off to church. The service started at 7:30 so I entered about ten minutes late. No one really cares if I am late because they know I don’t understand anything that is going on anyway. After the 45 minute service, I ran home to finish up the pie. Josh helped me so that I could get back to the pastor’s house for basketball. Josh was in charge of making the pork chops and a few side dishes for our meal. I let him know when the pie needed to go into the oven, and then I ran off! At 8:45, I jumped into a truck and headed over to Ta’u. We sat around for a long time before any basketball began. The sun started coming out and I knew it was going to be a long day. At 10 AM, the games started with the younger boys being the first game. The only team that played from our village was the boys “B” team which consisted of middle school and early high school students. My team was supposed to play. We were told to get ready, so I went on a short jog to warm up and stretched with the group. We were sitting on the sideline to find out there was no women’s “A” team from Fitiuta so we won by default…everyone but me cheered. Everyone was so excited that we won, but that’s a pretty crap way to win. I was disappointed. After 5 games were played, the pastors from all three villages called the games for the rest of the day. They also announced that there will be no more games until the last weekend in December. Everyone is busy with the holidays coming up and they want to wait for Ofu and Olesega to come over to play. Now, all the kids switched back to playing volleyball every day. After the games, we were brought back to the pastor’s house for a Thanksgiving feast. It wasn’t as big as a typical Samoan feast, but it was a nice afternoon meal. I ate some turkey and then headed home to help Josh with dinner.
Josh pretty much had the meal together so I assisted in cleaning up the house. Doug, Crystal, Saunoa, and Leafa came over for the meal. We had ribs, turkey, pork chops, stuffing, carrot/sweet potato salad, and potato salad. After a nice, long Thanksgiving dinner we had some delicious dessert: apple-blueberry pie (added in the blueberries at the last minute), meringue pie (with egg in it…yuk!), and chocolate cake. Since it was such a full meal, Crystal and I decided to walk it off after. Even though it was Black Friday, the teacher’s still had to report up to school. We arrived at 8 AM and were told there was a 9:30 meeting and then we could go home if we want. Josh’s girlfriend, Holly, was arriving on the plane that day so I decided to stay up at school and get some work done. I actually stayed up longer than I planned and got a lot accomplished. After swimming and playing basketball that afternoon, I went home to eat and get ready for the siva. This siva wasn’t as much fun as the first one. It only lasted about two hours and most of the time it was raining.
Saturday, November 27th was probably one of the best days I have had out here. At 7 AM, Saunoa came to pick us up for a hike. He drove us over to Fitiuta where we hiked up the mountain. After a 2 hour hike, we started hearing screeching noises. Finally, we arrived at the bat cave! Hundreds of bats were flying around! Some were carrying their babies on their bellies. It was a pretty cool experience. That morning, I tested out my camera before we headed out and it was working, when we arrived at the bat cave it decided to produce white photos again. :( I do have some cool videos to share though! We relaxed at the top for about a half an hour. As we were heading home, we stopped along the beach and picked up coral rock. Josh designed a garden in the side of the house and wanted to make a path between the different beds using the rock. I collected some small rocks to carve into and had the idea of placing some of the sea glass into it. After arriving home and eating lunch, I walked the beach to find more glass. Right when I got home, I got to work designing a turtle out of the sea glass. I placed in on top of the rock to see how it would look. Once I was finished, I was so happy with myself, but nobody was around to show. I ended up calling Crystal and telling her she had to come over. She eventually made it over and I showed her what I had been working on. I continued working the rest of the day and made a butterfly and a moon. The next step probably should have been carving out the rock, but I ended up bleaching the rocks beforehand.
Now I need to catch you up on the next week so read the next blog post!!
Love,
Gretchen
Monday, November 15, 2010
basketball
The thoughts and opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not represent those of the WorldTeach organization.
November 14th
Part two
On Tuesday, November 9th I was invited to join the women’s A team in basketball. I was out running and one of my students stopped me and asked if I would join the team. I said if they need me I would join. I am still very nervous playing on the women’s team. No one knows how to play and I feel I may be overcompensating for their lack of skill and get injured. I joined nonetheless and scrimmaged with them that afternoon. We scrimmaged against the B team and lost quite badly. There is one girl, Osana, who knows how to play but she is extremely unfit so that makes it hard to depend on her. They have me playing center for the first time in my life which is interesting. Samoan women are pretty short so I am actually one of the taller ones and since I know how to rebound I am stuck playing center. For how bad they are, I am getting a great workout at each scrimmage due to the ball getting turned over ten times in 20 seconds. After twenty minutes, we were done our “practice” for the day and watched the next group play. I figure, our team will be awful, but maybe I will make some Samoan friends out of this. On Wednesday, we had another scrimmage. This time, Osana was playing down on the “B” team. She is playing for both teams so she is splitting her practice time between the two. My team scored zero points in the twenty minutes. It was chaos and having a coach that is highly uneducated and doesn’t know how to coach doesn’t help matters.
On Thursday, we did not have school due to it being Veteran’s Day. As such, we had a lot of basketball practice. I was told that we had practice at 5 AM that morning. I asked four different people to clarify since I thought that was way too early in the morning. Everyone said 5 AM, but I forgot I was in American Samoa and that actually means 6 AM. I set my alarm for 4:40 AM, woke up to the first noise and then went right back to sleep. At 5:30, I woke up “oh no, oh no, oh no,” dressed and ran out the door. I didn’t eat or drink anything which was a huge mistake. When I arrived at the court, there were about five people shooting around. Crystal decided to show up to see if they would let her play. She watched our last game and felt bad for me and wanted to help. She doesn’t necessarily know how to play basketball, but she is at least fit and can defend. We didn’t have enough for a team so we definitely let her join. I was quite tired by the time we played. I was shooting around for a good hour and a half before I actually played in the scrimmage. At 8, the sun started coming out so we stopped until the afternoon session. When I arrived home, I took an hour nap and relaxed for a few hours before the next adventure.
Around 11:30 I mentioned to Josh about going swimming. A half an hour later, we were dressed and ready to go. We decided to go swimming over by the boating docks. The dock is a nice place to go swimming since it is deeper than any other part of the beach and there is still a lot of coral around that you can look at. Josh and I realized we haven’t gone swimming for probably a month and we are missing out on so much. We have taken a sort of oath to go out at least once a week from now on. The fish around the docks are pretty large. They tend to hang out by the two rock walls that were set up. Josh and I did two big circles around the area watching all the different fish swimming by us. We saw a few clams that we pretended to poke to watch them shut, lots of parrotfish (look up images on google because they are gorgeous!), and lots of different butterfly fish. After an hour, we decided we were done for the day. The ocean takes a lot out of us and we were pretty tired and dehydrated by that hour. I also seem to get a headache every time I go out snorkeling. I think it may be the pressure from my mask, but am not sure what it is. It could also be my seasickness issue as I start feeling as though I am on a boat after a while.
I went home, showered, and ran over to play BINGO. The game had a twenty dollar buy in, but I wasn’t planning on spending that much. I fortunately ran into Doug who wanted to donate (the money went to Tautua and Trish’s family), but had no inclination to play. I told him I would play for him so he gave me the $20. I sat with Leafa and she helped me translate. I know the Samoan numbers but it takes me a little bit to do the translation. They call the numbers so fast that I couldn’t think fast enough. Once Leafa translated they would start calling the next number. I felt like I was playing catch-up for the entire two hours, it wasn’t fun. After the games, it was time for another basketball practice.
I took my good old time to arrive to practice since they told me it would start at 4, but I know it would be a lot later. We actually played around 5 PM and this time Crystal played with the entire team. While I was shooting around, I met our coach for the day. Nai is from the main island, but he was out visiting his family for a couple of days. He was a very structured guy, probably from his time in the military. It was good to have an actually coach, though, and he started putting everyone else in positions and telling them how to play the game. We started playing more structured which was a nice change, but it still wasn’t like playing with the guys. During the game, I went in for the rebound and made a quick lay up. As I was making the lay up, one of the players, June, starts yelling at me about passing the ball. I was a little confused since I was just playing my position and just brushed it off. We played the twenty minutes and as I was walking off June yelled something out. All I heard was Gretchen and Crystal out of her mouth. I truly had no idea what she was saying so I asked but received no reply from anyone. I figured it was something to do about ball hogging so I asked a few other players and they said it was but they were mostly talking about Crystal. I was pretty upset with the comment nonetheless. From all my years of playing sports, this is the first time I have been called a ball hog. Typically I am told to hold onto the ball more than I do. While we sat around after practice I went over and spoke with June and apologized. I told her I would be more aware of it and try to pass more. She said it was okay and we ended at that.
After each practice, the pastor talks to everyone for about twenty minutes and we sit around and listen. I don’t typically listen since it is in Samoan. After the talk on Thursday, I walked home with my coach and we discussed June’s comment. He told me I was playing fine and that she just doesn’t know how to play basketball so she doesn’t know what she is talking about. I told him that I know she doesn’t know how to play but I don’t want to play if I am just being a foreigner keeping the game from being fun. He just kept telling me not to worry about it.
Friday was supposed to be our first game, starting at 6 PM. All day at school students kept coming up asking me if I was playing in the game. I told them to wait and see. As the Samoan life is, the game was rescheduled for Saturday morning. I was quite relieved that the game was rescheduled though. On Friday, I gave out four quizzes so had a lot of grading to do after school. I actually lost track of time and didn’t leave until 4:30. Even though practice doesn’t start until 5 PM, I don’t like to be late to things. I decided it would be a good idea to run down the short cut. The short cut is a straight up the mountain incline to the high school. As I was running down, the dirt gave out from under my right foot and I started sliding down the mountain. My leg twisted outward and I realized I busted my left ankle pretty bad. I walked the rest of the way home, got dressed, and went to practice nonetheless. I could tell my foot was very stiff but I played in the scrimmage and then went home to check it out. My ankle isn’t hurting too bad, but my big toe is very badly bruised. I tried staying off it Friday night, but that proved to be challenging.
The games started at 8 AM on Saturday. I woke up at 6:40 AM and waited for the bell to sound to tell me to go to the church to meet everyone. The plan was to meet at the church around 7 AM and then head over to Ta’u together. The bell didn’t ring. I decided around 7:30 just to walk over and see why there was a hold up. I ran into my coach on the way over and he said they weren’t going to ring a bell. I’m glad I received that update. I arrived over in the last truck and saw the groups of people as I approached. There were about 200 people surrounding the court. Each village had their own section. I ran over to my village and just waited until someone told me to go on. The first game was the girl’s C team. Since our village is the smallest, we don’t have enough to make a C team so we just watched. Next, the girl’s B team played. We played versus Fitiuta. The final score was us 16, them 6. Next, the women’s A team took court. I was excited to play. We played the neighboring village of Ta’u and I was up against a lot of my students. Being a white person, I got a lot of scrutiny. I was called palogi more than once. (Just means white person, but I find it offensive even though it is not) Even when I committed a foul the ref said it was on the palogi. I let me know that I actually had a name and I don’t appreciate him calling me palogi, he ignored me. The game was a lot of fun, but turned very aggressive. I was punched in the face by one of my students on accident. One of my students went up against me to get a ball, missed the ball, and hit me in the face. Luckily, she isn’t very strong and I was more shocked than hurt. After the incident, a girl from their team said “ah ha” and stuck her tongue out at me. I let her know that she needed to relax and that was the end of it. There was a lot of uproar from my side of the bench though because we lost possession of the ball for some reason. If they counted points like they do in actually basketball we won 28-6 but I think they just counted every basket as one point and so the score was 14-5. The other team mostly scored on free throws.
After our game, the boys’ C teams from Fitiuta and Ta’u played. Midway through their game, it started to rain. For five minutes it poured, but they played on. After the rain, the boys were falling all over the court so the refs called the games for the day. I thought the tournament was just a one weekend thing. I quickly found out that we play every weekend up to Christmas time. So much for resting my foot!
I finished the day yesterday going swimming with Josh for an hour and a half in the late afternoon. It was an amazing swim: we saw a reef shark, a flounder, a lot of fish. We took the channel out this time and went out further than we ever have before. It was a lot of fun, but I quickly got nauseous when we got really far out. We decided it was time to head home so we swam in through the docking area. As I was swimming along the rock wall I saw a sea turtle!! I swam down to see what he was eating and scared him to death. He was way too fast to catch up with and I desperately needed to get out of the water by this point.
The water helped heal my foot and I felt a lot better after. Today = national park trip!
Love,
Gretchen
November 14th
Part two
On Tuesday, November 9th I was invited to join the women’s A team in basketball. I was out running and one of my students stopped me and asked if I would join the team. I said if they need me I would join. I am still very nervous playing on the women’s team. No one knows how to play and I feel I may be overcompensating for their lack of skill and get injured. I joined nonetheless and scrimmaged with them that afternoon. We scrimmaged against the B team and lost quite badly. There is one girl, Osana, who knows how to play but she is extremely unfit so that makes it hard to depend on her. They have me playing center for the first time in my life which is interesting. Samoan women are pretty short so I am actually one of the taller ones and since I know how to rebound I am stuck playing center. For how bad they are, I am getting a great workout at each scrimmage due to the ball getting turned over ten times in 20 seconds. After twenty minutes, we were done our “practice” for the day and watched the next group play. I figure, our team will be awful, but maybe I will make some Samoan friends out of this. On Wednesday, we had another scrimmage. This time, Osana was playing down on the “B” team. She is playing for both teams so she is splitting her practice time between the two. My team scored zero points in the twenty minutes. It was chaos and having a coach that is highly uneducated and doesn’t know how to coach doesn’t help matters.
On Thursday, we did not have school due to it being Veteran’s Day. As such, we had a lot of basketball practice. I was told that we had practice at 5 AM that morning. I asked four different people to clarify since I thought that was way too early in the morning. Everyone said 5 AM, but I forgot I was in American Samoa and that actually means 6 AM. I set my alarm for 4:40 AM, woke up to the first noise and then went right back to sleep. At 5:30, I woke up “oh no, oh no, oh no,” dressed and ran out the door. I didn’t eat or drink anything which was a huge mistake. When I arrived at the court, there were about five people shooting around. Crystal decided to show up to see if they would let her play. She watched our last game and felt bad for me and wanted to help. She doesn’t necessarily know how to play basketball, but she is at least fit and can defend. We didn’t have enough for a team so we definitely let her join. I was quite tired by the time we played. I was shooting around for a good hour and a half before I actually played in the scrimmage. At 8, the sun started coming out so we stopped until the afternoon session. When I arrived home, I took an hour nap and relaxed for a few hours before the next adventure.
Around 11:30 I mentioned to Josh about going swimming. A half an hour later, we were dressed and ready to go. We decided to go swimming over by the boating docks. The dock is a nice place to go swimming since it is deeper than any other part of the beach and there is still a lot of coral around that you can look at. Josh and I realized we haven’t gone swimming for probably a month and we are missing out on so much. We have taken a sort of oath to go out at least once a week from now on. The fish around the docks are pretty large. They tend to hang out by the two rock walls that were set up. Josh and I did two big circles around the area watching all the different fish swimming by us. We saw a few clams that we pretended to poke to watch them shut, lots of parrotfish (look up images on google because they are gorgeous!), and lots of different butterfly fish. After an hour, we decided we were done for the day. The ocean takes a lot out of us and we were pretty tired and dehydrated by that hour. I also seem to get a headache every time I go out snorkeling. I think it may be the pressure from my mask, but am not sure what it is. It could also be my seasickness issue as I start feeling as though I am on a boat after a while.
I went home, showered, and ran over to play BINGO. The game had a twenty dollar buy in, but I wasn’t planning on spending that much. I fortunately ran into Doug who wanted to donate (the money went to Tautua and Trish’s family), but had no inclination to play. I told him I would play for him so he gave me the $20. I sat with Leafa and she helped me translate. I know the Samoan numbers but it takes me a little bit to do the translation. They call the numbers so fast that I couldn’t think fast enough. Once Leafa translated they would start calling the next number. I felt like I was playing catch-up for the entire two hours, it wasn’t fun. After the games, it was time for another basketball practice.
I took my good old time to arrive to practice since they told me it would start at 4, but I know it would be a lot later. We actually played around 5 PM and this time Crystal played with the entire team. While I was shooting around, I met our coach for the day. Nai is from the main island, but he was out visiting his family for a couple of days. He was a very structured guy, probably from his time in the military. It was good to have an actually coach, though, and he started putting everyone else in positions and telling them how to play the game. We started playing more structured which was a nice change, but it still wasn’t like playing with the guys. During the game, I went in for the rebound and made a quick lay up. As I was making the lay up, one of the players, June, starts yelling at me about passing the ball. I was a little confused since I was just playing my position and just brushed it off. We played the twenty minutes and as I was walking off June yelled something out. All I heard was Gretchen and Crystal out of her mouth. I truly had no idea what she was saying so I asked but received no reply from anyone. I figured it was something to do about ball hogging so I asked a few other players and they said it was but they were mostly talking about Crystal. I was pretty upset with the comment nonetheless. From all my years of playing sports, this is the first time I have been called a ball hog. Typically I am told to hold onto the ball more than I do. While we sat around after practice I went over and spoke with June and apologized. I told her I would be more aware of it and try to pass more. She said it was okay and we ended at that.
After each practice, the pastor talks to everyone for about twenty minutes and we sit around and listen. I don’t typically listen since it is in Samoan. After the talk on Thursday, I walked home with my coach and we discussed June’s comment. He told me I was playing fine and that she just doesn’t know how to play basketball so she doesn’t know what she is talking about. I told him that I know she doesn’t know how to play but I don’t want to play if I am just being a foreigner keeping the game from being fun. He just kept telling me not to worry about it.
Friday was supposed to be our first game, starting at 6 PM. All day at school students kept coming up asking me if I was playing in the game. I told them to wait and see. As the Samoan life is, the game was rescheduled for Saturday morning. I was quite relieved that the game was rescheduled though. On Friday, I gave out four quizzes so had a lot of grading to do after school. I actually lost track of time and didn’t leave until 4:30. Even though practice doesn’t start until 5 PM, I don’t like to be late to things. I decided it would be a good idea to run down the short cut. The short cut is a straight up the mountain incline to the high school. As I was running down, the dirt gave out from under my right foot and I started sliding down the mountain. My leg twisted outward and I realized I busted my left ankle pretty bad. I walked the rest of the way home, got dressed, and went to practice nonetheless. I could tell my foot was very stiff but I played in the scrimmage and then went home to check it out. My ankle isn’t hurting too bad, but my big toe is very badly bruised. I tried staying off it Friday night, but that proved to be challenging.
The games started at 8 AM on Saturday. I woke up at 6:40 AM and waited for the bell to sound to tell me to go to the church to meet everyone. The plan was to meet at the church around 7 AM and then head over to Ta’u together. The bell didn’t ring. I decided around 7:30 just to walk over and see why there was a hold up. I ran into my coach on the way over and he said they weren’t going to ring a bell. I’m glad I received that update. I arrived over in the last truck and saw the groups of people as I approached. There were about 200 people surrounding the court. Each village had their own section. I ran over to my village and just waited until someone told me to go on. The first game was the girl’s C team. Since our village is the smallest, we don’t have enough to make a C team so we just watched. Next, the girl’s B team played. We played versus Fitiuta. The final score was us 16, them 6. Next, the women’s A team took court. I was excited to play. We played the neighboring village of Ta’u and I was up against a lot of my students. Being a white person, I got a lot of scrutiny. I was called palogi more than once. (Just means white person, but I find it offensive even though it is not) Even when I committed a foul the ref said it was on the palogi. I let me know that I actually had a name and I don’t appreciate him calling me palogi, he ignored me. The game was a lot of fun, but turned very aggressive. I was punched in the face by one of my students on accident. One of my students went up against me to get a ball, missed the ball, and hit me in the face. Luckily, she isn’t very strong and I was more shocked than hurt. After the incident, a girl from their team said “ah ha” and stuck her tongue out at me. I let her know that she needed to relax and that was the end of it. There was a lot of uproar from my side of the bench though because we lost possession of the ball for some reason. If they counted points like they do in actually basketball we won 28-6 but I think they just counted every basket as one point and so the score was 14-5. The other team mostly scored on free throws.
After our game, the boys’ C teams from Fitiuta and Ta’u played. Midway through their game, it started to rain. For five minutes it poured, but they played on. After the rain, the boys were falling all over the court so the refs called the games for the day. I thought the tournament was just a one weekend thing. I quickly found out that we play every weekend up to Christmas time. So much for resting my foot!
I finished the day yesterday going swimming with Josh for an hour and a half in the late afternoon. It was an amazing swim: we saw a reef shark, a flounder, a lot of fish. We took the channel out this time and went out further than we ever have before. It was a lot of fun, but I quickly got nauseous when we got really far out. We decided it was time to head home so we swam in through the docking area. As I was swimming along the rock wall I saw a sea turtle!! I swam down to see what he was eating and scared him to death. He was way too fast to catch up with and I desperately needed to get out of the water by this point.
The water helped heal my foot and I felt a lot better after. Today = national park trip!
Love,
Gretchen
humping bus driver
The thoughts and opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not represent those of the WorldTeach organization.
November 14, 2010
Again, let’s break this into two blogs. This first part will be all about last week since I was unable to get around to writing about it.
Tuesday, November 2nd proved to be a pretty awful day for me. The day started out well and then it hit lunch hour. The cafeteria staff typically makes enough food for each student to consume approximately five servings worth of food. Sometimes, the students eat all five of those servings. Every day I go in after the students to see what food is left. On this particular day I was told there was no food left. I said, “Okay, thanks” and left the cafeteria. I had walked in with Crystal and Aso. Crystal and I left, but Aso stayed to search around. I didn’t think more about it until later that evening.
I heard rumors about a basketball league being played in two weekends and that people were starting to practice for it. Since I was really busy with school work, I hadn’t gotten the chance to make it home in time to play any basketball in a week. I decided to head home at the normal end of workday, 4 o’clock, to play. I arrived on the court around 4:30 and shot around for quite some time. Eventually a game started up behind me so I left to go join. When I went over a boy on the sideline said I couldn’t play because it was guys only. Of course I was real annoyed by this since I play with all the guys every day. I decided to ask one of the players and he told me to go play with the girls. This angered me even more since the girls that were playing were in sixth grade and younger! I decided to just go home because the whole situation was just making me more upset.
I went home, ate dinner with Josh, and then we sat around talking for a bit. The discussion somehow turned to lunch. I asked him what he ate for lunch that day. He said he ate the chicken nuggets in the cafeteria. I thought that was interesting so I asked him around what time he went over to the cafeteria. He said, “I don’t know, but Aso and Donna were in there eating.” I told him what happened when Crystal, Aso, and I walked in a little earlier and how Aso stayed behind…obviously food was saved for the Samoan teachers. He even said there was food enough for ten people when he went in. By this point I am really pissed off. First, the guys tell me I can’t play basketball and then I find out I am being alienated from the lunch room. I decided to call Crystal and tell her what Josh informed me. I met Crystal at her house and we decided to go over and talk to our principal, Tautua, about the incident. In the past, we have walked in with a Samoan teacher trailing behind us and the Samoan teacher had been fed over us. We didn’t make a big fuss about that, but I was tired of all the lies. When we first arrived we were preached that the food is for the kids so if we don’t get anything we can’t complain. But when the cafeteria workers are smuggling food home every night, they aren’t giving it to the kids either. It doesn’t help that every time a new shipment of food comes in, they steal a bunch before it reaches the cafeteria. They say it is for the people who helped take the food off the boat. What they are doing is stealing from the US government who is paying for all the school food. The corruption is unbearable at times. Now, back to Tautua’s place. Crystal and I walked over and talked to him for a while about it. We explained how we feel we are being alienated at the school. I never once was rude to the staff so I don’t understand why I am being treated the way I am. He lectured us on the food is for the kids over and over again. I kind of just sat there, but Crystal went off about how she sees them hide food in the back for themselves all the time. She told Tautua if it was for the kids, then it should actually be fed to the kids. The only thing I expressed to Tautua is that I don’t care if I never get fed from the cafeteria, but I am tired of being lied to. The students lie almost every day looking me square in the face and I am now realizing where it all comes from. Tautua said he had the day off on Wednesday, but he would stop by to talk with them. He held his promise and in the morning went and spoke with the staff.
On Wednesday, I stayed away from the cafeteria. I feel like his talking to them is just going to make them hate me and I couldn’t deal with their negative comments. On Thursday, we woke to lots of rain. At 3 AM I woke up because I thought the rain was leaking through the roof it was coming down so hard. All morning the rain came down. At around 6:45, Josh and I went in our raincoats to the church to wait for the bus. I was smart enough to wear different shorts for the walk over, but Josh wasn’t so smart. He had to wring out his shorts from our two minute walk through the village. As we sat to wait, no one walked by. We figured others were sitting in the elementary school next door since we were all alone at the church. At 8:15, Tautua finally came by to say school was cancelled, go home. There was a lot of flooding on the road between the high school and Fitiuta and the bus couldn’t get through. Josh and I went back home and slept. We found out later that the other teachers had to still go up to school since they were paid for the day, but Josh and I were allowed to go home since we were volunteers. :-)
Thursday ended up being a gorgeous day once the rain finally stopped around 11. The sun came out and everyone started coming out of their houses and enjoying the day. Around one, I decided to go for a run. I picked the absolute worst time to go for a run, as soon as I stretched and left the house I noticed the boat was about to dock. I promised Leafa I would help her unload the packages for the store, so my run became short lived. I only managed a ten minute run up the mountain and then turned around. When I arrived at the dock, I just stood there. I was of no use whatsoever. I did run into Spanky, whom I play basketball with. He is dating Crystal, the WorldTeach volunteer, and she told him how angry I was about basketball. He told me I should play after we finish unloading the boat. I told him maybe. I ended up doing work in the yard and by the time I finished, it was sa.
On Friday we had an elementary and high school staff picnic of sorts so school was cut short. I don’t really understand why school is cut short for these things, but once a month you can always count on it. At noon, school was over so I stayed in my room working for an hour and a half before I went out the fale on the side of campus. I arrived at the wrong time. Everyone was in the middle of playing a game. The announcer would call out “Seven ears!” in which you would need to find six other people and have each of your ears touching. When I arrived, the bus driver decided to make it a game of humping all the females. I stayed away. This is also the gentleman who offered me a joint one day when I took the bus to school. The rest of the day was filled with more games which turned out to be a great bonding experience.
Saturday turned out to be a busy day. My 50 minute morning run kept me energized all day and I couldn’t sit still. After my run, I went over to Leafa’s to do some laundry. I hadn’t done laundry in two weeks so I had a lot to do: 4 loads! While my first load was in, I went home to sweep the house. We don’t have a broom at home so whenever I get a chance to borrow one I take advantage. I decided to make it a heavy cleaning day and moved all the furniture around to sweep out the rooms. I decided to change my room around in the process. After 40 minutes, I ran over to check on my laundry and then carried it home to put out on the line. When I put my fourth and final load in, Leafa surprised me with brunch. She made me an omelet and toast. Everything was quite delicious, but didn’t seem to settle well in my stomach. Since that meal for the past week I have had a very upset stomach to deal with.
After brunch, I went back home to help Josh with the yard. We did some more weeding and setting up the garden bed. Josh got the idea to make a raised bed with the sides being trunks of banana trees. He borrowed a shovel from Leafa and trekked into the woods to find some good soil to work with. Our yard is pretty much sand and broken coral which isn’t ideal for a garden. I stayed out working in the yard until around 4 and then went and got Crystal and Doug to go for a walk to Ta’u. We explored some of the stores over there and then came back right before the sa bell. I finally settled down a bit after sa and was pretty tired from the days events.
Sunday wasn’t very eventful: went to church, ate brunch over at Tautua’s, and relaxed around the house most of the afternoon. I did have plans to walk up to Saunoa’s at some point in the day. I waited for Josh and then we walked up to the high school together. I kept walking to reach Saunoa’s. Saunoa was a little ill when I arrived. He had a bit of a cough and said he had been lying around for the past two days. We sat around for a little while talking and then he had me go and find some tools he is letting me borrow for wood carving. He had a couple of chisels, some gouges, and sand paper. After collecting the tools, we went out to check out the garden. He collected a few veggies for me. That night, I had a fresh ear of corn, some eggplant, and cucumber for dinner!
Now on to part two.
Love,
Gretchen
November 14, 2010
Again, let’s break this into two blogs. This first part will be all about last week since I was unable to get around to writing about it.
Tuesday, November 2nd proved to be a pretty awful day for me. The day started out well and then it hit lunch hour. The cafeteria staff typically makes enough food for each student to consume approximately five servings worth of food. Sometimes, the students eat all five of those servings. Every day I go in after the students to see what food is left. On this particular day I was told there was no food left. I said, “Okay, thanks” and left the cafeteria. I had walked in with Crystal and Aso. Crystal and I left, but Aso stayed to search around. I didn’t think more about it until later that evening.
I heard rumors about a basketball league being played in two weekends and that people were starting to practice for it. Since I was really busy with school work, I hadn’t gotten the chance to make it home in time to play any basketball in a week. I decided to head home at the normal end of workday, 4 o’clock, to play. I arrived on the court around 4:30 and shot around for quite some time. Eventually a game started up behind me so I left to go join. When I went over a boy on the sideline said I couldn’t play because it was guys only. Of course I was real annoyed by this since I play with all the guys every day. I decided to ask one of the players and he told me to go play with the girls. This angered me even more since the girls that were playing were in sixth grade and younger! I decided to just go home because the whole situation was just making me more upset.
I went home, ate dinner with Josh, and then we sat around talking for a bit. The discussion somehow turned to lunch. I asked him what he ate for lunch that day. He said he ate the chicken nuggets in the cafeteria. I thought that was interesting so I asked him around what time he went over to the cafeteria. He said, “I don’t know, but Aso and Donna were in there eating.” I told him what happened when Crystal, Aso, and I walked in a little earlier and how Aso stayed behind…obviously food was saved for the Samoan teachers. He even said there was food enough for ten people when he went in. By this point I am really pissed off. First, the guys tell me I can’t play basketball and then I find out I am being alienated from the lunch room. I decided to call Crystal and tell her what Josh informed me. I met Crystal at her house and we decided to go over and talk to our principal, Tautua, about the incident. In the past, we have walked in with a Samoan teacher trailing behind us and the Samoan teacher had been fed over us. We didn’t make a big fuss about that, but I was tired of all the lies. When we first arrived we were preached that the food is for the kids so if we don’t get anything we can’t complain. But when the cafeteria workers are smuggling food home every night, they aren’t giving it to the kids either. It doesn’t help that every time a new shipment of food comes in, they steal a bunch before it reaches the cafeteria. They say it is for the people who helped take the food off the boat. What they are doing is stealing from the US government who is paying for all the school food. The corruption is unbearable at times. Now, back to Tautua’s place. Crystal and I walked over and talked to him for a while about it. We explained how we feel we are being alienated at the school. I never once was rude to the staff so I don’t understand why I am being treated the way I am. He lectured us on the food is for the kids over and over again. I kind of just sat there, but Crystal went off about how she sees them hide food in the back for themselves all the time. She told Tautua if it was for the kids, then it should actually be fed to the kids. The only thing I expressed to Tautua is that I don’t care if I never get fed from the cafeteria, but I am tired of being lied to. The students lie almost every day looking me square in the face and I am now realizing where it all comes from. Tautua said he had the day off on Wednesday, but he would stop by to talk with them. He held his promise and in the morning went and spoke with the staff.
On Wednesday, I stayed away from the cafeteria. I feel like his talking to them is just going to make them hate me and I couldn’t deal with their negative comments. On Thursday, we woke to lots of rain. At 3 AM I woke up because I thought the rain was leaking through the roof it was coming down so hard. All morning the rain came down. At around 6:45, Josh and I went in our raincoats to the church to wait for the bus. I was smart enough to wear different shorts for the walk over, but Josh wasn’t so smart. He had to wring out his shorts from our two minute walk through the village. As we sat to wait, no one walked by. We figured others were sitting in the elementary school next door since we were all alone at the church. At 8:15, Tautua finally came by to say school was cancelled, go home. There was a lot of flooding on the road between the high school and Fitiuta and the bus couldn’t get through. Josh and I went back home and slept. We found out later that the other teachers had to still go up to school since they were paid for the day, but Josh and I were allowed to go home since we were volunteers. :-)
Thursday ended up being a gorgeous day once the rain finally stopped around 11. The sun came out and everyone started coming out of their houses and enjoying the day. Around one, I decided to go for a run. I picked the absolute worst time to go for a run, as soon as I stretched and left the house I noticed the boat was about to dock. I promised Leafa I would help her unload the packages for the store, so my run became short lived. I only managed a ten minute run up the mountain and then turned around. When I arrived at the dock, I just stood there. I was of no use whatsoever. I did run into Spanky, whom I play basketball with. He is dating Crystal, the WorldTeach volunteer, and she told him how angry I was about basketball. He told me I should play after we finish unloading the boat. I told him maybe. I ended up doing work in the yard and by the time I finished, it was sa.
On Friday we had an elementary and high school staff picnic of sorts so school was cut short. I don’t really understand why school is cut short for these things, but once a month you can always count on it. At noon, school was over so I stayed in my room working for an hour and a half before I went out the fale on the side of campus. I arrived at the wrong time. Everyone was in the middle of playing a game. The announcer would call out “Seven ears!” in which you would need to find six other people and have each of your ears touching. When I arrived, the bus driver decided to make it a game of humping all the females. I stayed away. This is also the gentleman who offered me a joint one day when I took the bus to school. The rest of the day was filled with more games which turned out to be a great bonding experience.
Saturday turned out to be a busy day. My 50 minute morning run kept me energized all day and I couldn’t sit still. After my run, I went over to Leafa’s to do some laundry. I hadn’t done laundry in two weeks so I had a lot to do: 4 loads! While my first load was in, I went home to sweep the house. We don’t have a broom at home so whenever I get a chance to borrow one I take advantage. I decided to make it a heavy cleaning day and moved all the furniture around to sweep out the rooms. I decided to change my room around in the process. After 40 minutes, I ran over to check on my laundry and then carried it home to put out on the line. When I put my fourth and final load in, Leafa surprised me with brunch. She made me an omelet and toast. Everything was quite delicious, but didn’t seem to settle well in my stomach. Since that meal for the past week I have had a very upset stomach to deal with.
After brunch, I went back home to help Josh with the yard. We did some more weeding and setting up the garden bed. Josh got the idea to make a raised bed with the sides being trunks of banana trees. He borrowed a shovel from Leafa and trekked into the woods to find some good soil to work with. Our yard is pretty much sand and broken coral which isn’t ideal for a garden. I stayed out working in the yard until around 4 and then went and got Crystal and Doug to go for a walk to Ta’u. We explored some of the stores over there and then came back right before the sa bell. I finally settled down a bit after sa and was pretty tired from the days events.
Sunday wasn’t very eventful: went to church, ate brunch over at Tautua’s, and relaxed around the house most of the afternoon. I did have plans to walk up to Saunoa’s at some point in the day. I waited for Josh and then we walked up to the high school together. I kept walking to reach Saunoa’s. Saunoa was a little ill when I arrived. He had a bit of a cough and said he had been lying around for the past two days. We sat around for a little while talking and then he had me go and find some tools he is letting me borrow for wood carving. He had a couple of chisels, some gouges, and sand paper. After collecting the tools, we went out to check out the garden. He collected a few veggies for me. That night, I had a fresh ear of corn, some eggplant, and cucumber for dinner!
Now on to part two.
Love,
Gretchen
Monday, November 8, 2010
Palolo
The thoughts and opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not represent those of the WorldTeach organization.
October 31st
Part 2: eating worms!
This past Friday night was palolo night. Palolo night happens once a year on the night in September or October right after the full moon. It is also very common to have excessive amounts of rain leading up to the night. This year, we definitely got the rain portion of it. It rained all of Thursday and all of Friday. On the night of palolo at about midnight, one or two people from the village go out to check the water to see if the palolo has come. If it has, they signal to people on the shore and everyone jumps in. Palolo are blue and yellow worms (one is female and one is male, but no one could tell me which was which). They measure from 2 inches to about 2 feet long and about 1 millimeter in diameter. I wasn’t really looking forward to palolo night. I thought it sounded pretty miserable: there were worms in the ocean you are supposed to catch and eat. I actually proved to be quite wrong and had a tremendous amount of fun.
I thought I would be freezing in the water and complaining to go home the entire night. It turned out that the water was the warmest it has ever been and you become so entranced in catching these worms that you don’t realize it is 2 AM and you are out in the ocean. I ended up staying out there until a little over 3 AM. Josh said something about leaving and I decided it was a good idea. For two and a half hours a group of six of us worked on catching these palolo. I switched with Leafa catching them in a net you just sway back and forth in the water. Josh and Leafa’s sister worked the 6 foot long net catching whatever came by. Doug and Crystal were in charge of finding the good spots and holding the flashlights. The palolo swim towards the light, so the more flashlights you have the better. Our group had four flashlights with us. When Leafa and I would switch, we would also switch who held the bucket. When the bucket got filled, I would run to the back of Leafa’s house to empty it in a pot and run back down. It got dangerous running in the dark with no flashlight, but I only managed to get scraped up once. Josh and Crystal both ate one of the worms straight out of the ocean; they said it tasted like salt. I, on the other hand, decided to wait until they were cooked.
Since our water only runs from 6 AM until 9 PM we had no way to wash off from the ocean. After going out to take some photos, we dried up the best we could and went to sleep. I felt like there were worms crawling on me the entire night and I kept smelling fish. I decided to change my sheets the next morning. The next day, I had the awesome opportunity to try some of the crawly things. Leafa’s sisters, niece, and nephew were visiting for the funeral and had a big dinner on Saturday night. At close to noon, they started cooking in the umu. As previously mentioned, an umu is an outdoor oven heated by rocks. It takes a long time to prepare and cook food in an umu, but since there is nothing better to do with your time, a lot of people cook with one. It is typical in a Samoan family to cook with your umu once a week. This happened to be my first umu since coming out to Manu’a, I did previously have one on Tutuila though. At dinner, Leafa’s family informed me that they had eaten palolo all morning. You fry it with butter, wait until it all turns a bluish color, and then eat it. I didn’t volunteer to try any, but they threw a scoop on my plate any way. I had one bite of it and decided I was done. It was a little slimy and tasted like bad seafood. Josh later told me he thought it tasted like lobster shit. :) For some reason, Samoans love this stuff! We even found out later that you can sell palolo for a lot of money. You can sell a quart of it for at least $20! Josh thinks we should come back next year and start a little business for palolo. This year we managed 20 lbs., next year we will go for 50 lbs!
After dinner, I helped Leafa’s family prepare the flowers for church today. We spent about three hours arranging the flowers and then delivering them to the church. After the service today I was asked to help Trish and Tautua with their flowers next week, maybe I have found my calling!
Love,
Gretchen
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Funeral
The thoughts and opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not represent those of the WorldTeach organization.
October 31st
Part 1
HAPPY HALLOWEEN! I am celebrating my Halloween by pigging out on chocolate all day :-) I’ve decided to make today’s post in two parts because it is going to be a long one. In this first one I would like to discuss about funerals in American Samoa.
My neighbor passed away on the 2nd of October. The funeral was held on October 28th. On October 29th the burial took place. For four weeks she stayed in a refrigerator on the main island waiting for the ceremony. The old woman went over to Tutuila (the main island) about a week after I arrived out here in Manu’a. Her knee was really swollen and no one knew what was wrong with it so they brought her to the hospital to get it checked out. She happened to only spend a day in the hospital; they ran an MRI and the results were negative for any type of tear. The doctor said she was just suffering from old age and that she needed to rest her knee. About two weeks later, she decided to stop eating. Three days later, she passed away in her sleep. At 3 AM on the 2nd, she passed away in her sleep. That was the Friday night I was out looking for palolo and didn’t understand until the morning why the bell was ringing at 3 am.
My neighbors aren’t the cleanest people in the world. They tend to drag their uncleanliness over to our yard. Over these past four weeks, they have been preparing for all their family coming for the funeral. So they cleaned. Cleaning to them meant: hacking down every single bush in their yard (even the ones with flowers growing on them), repainting their house, redoing the aluminum roof, putting more sand and dead coral in their front yard, throwing all their trash in the back of the house and setting it on fire, throwing trash in the back of my house, throwing the tires they had in their front yard into my yard (which I graciously threw back after two days), and pulling weeds out from the hill in front of my house to help with the erosion of it! Highly uneducated people can be extremely challenging to work with. First, it began with my neighbors throwing those stupid tires in my yard a week ago. Since I figured they had a plan for the tires, I left them there for a couple of days. When I saw they would never leave my property, I took action and moved them myself. One night, Josh was washing dishes and called me over to look at something. Our neighbor took her trash can outside and dumped the contents in our backyard and lit it on fire…currently we have a mattress waiting that same ending. I spent all of last Saturday cleaning our yard: I weeded it and raked up all the leaves. As I cleaned, I found a bag of trash sitting in our fale (our outside hut that my neighbors decided to use for their personal clothes line). They had the decency to put majority of the trash in a bag. After I cooled down a bit, I decided the best action plan would be to take the trash back to them. I went up the woman, Vivoa, and said, “I don’t mind if you use our fale for drying your clothes, but please don’t leave your trash in there.” At that she laughed and said, “Oh, it is just the kids.” I politely said well then make sure they don’t leave trash either and walked down and threw the trash away. Her and her family kept watching me saying it was the kids. Later on that evening, I experienced more fun with them. First, a truck drives up to our house and unloads two cars full of wood and dumps it next to the tree in our front yard. No one asks or says anything to me or Josh about it (I am still outside working at this point). The one man did tell me I should stop working because it is too hot though! Leafa told me they are using the wood for the umu they are preparing and so it will all be gone by the end of the funeral…a quarter of it is still there! The umu is basically an outdoor oven the Samoans like to cook with.
While the family was preparing for the big day, Saunoa was doing something else to prepare. Saunoa is my 60 year old friend who is a retired vet that lives up the mountain. It was Saunoa’s mother that passed away. Saunoa was digging the grave for his mother for four weeks. Every morning I would run into him driving over while I was walking to school. He would typically work until I came home at night. Every day I came home, I went and took photos of his work so that he can look back on the progress later.
After I finished working on the yard on Saturday, I went over to Leafa’s to do some laundry. As previously mentioned, my fale was being used by my neighbors. Before I went to Leafa’s, I politely asked them to remove their dry things so I would have a place to put my laundry. When I came back an hour later it was all still hanging up. I asked again and they removed about half of it, still not enough space for even half of my clothes! When the gentleman removed the clothes, he left up clothes pins so I figured I should use them since it is on my property and they left them there. Later that evening, I was in the house reading and Stephanie knocked on my door. Stephanie is one of Vivoa’s daughter-in-laws that just flew in for the funeral. She asks if I can remove the clothes pins from my clothes because they need them. I said sure, not a problem. Since there was no where to place the clothes pins, I just threw them on the ground and planned on picking them up when I was done. While three fourths of the way done, Stephanie says, “Why are you just throwing them on the ground?” I told her that there was no where to put them and that I was going to pick them up when I was done. She rudely tells me I could have handed them to her. I explained that it would be challenging since she didn’t have either hand open. To top it off, she was smoking under the fale making my clean clothes reek of cigarettes. Once I picked them up and left, she said something to my back in Samoa. As you can imagine I was really angry at the point and decided not to stick around my house that night. I went for a walk and stayed away until bed time. I had to just keep telling myself that after this funeral week, things would get better. Yesterday, Josh and I spent the morning cleaning up all the trees they cut down in our yard this week. On Thursday morning, I was woken up to them hacking down a banana tree!
Thursday became a rather crazy day. First, only 2 out of 19 total staff at the high school do not belong to Faleasao so pretty much everyone was expected to be at this funeral. The period before lunch was my prep period, I am sitting there working and then fifteen minutes early the bell rings for lunch. I went and asks Ben, the secretary, what was going on and he said Tautua said he is shortening the rest of the day. I ran to talk to Tautua about it since I had a quiz I really wanted to give out during last period. He told me that he would run the period until my quiz was complete (unfortunately, the quiz took the entire 50 minutes). The school day was still cut an hour. I just missed the bus down to the village and had to wait until Tautua left ten minutes later. By this point, the rain was coming down almost like a monsoon and Tautua drives a truck…Angrily I rode home in the back of the truck and got completely drenched. Josh and I ran home, got changed, and headed to the church. We drove to the church just in time and witnessed the two and a half hour long funeral service. There were about ten family members that spoke, three different sermons, and random groups singing. There were two family members who spoke in English and that was all I understood from the service. There were four people videotaping the service and many people taking photos. The family also had matching attire for the service; each outfit was made out of yellow and black fabric. Everything seemed pretty organized. Once the service completed, everyone headed home.
When we arrived home, we had a front row seat to the festivities. First, found out that the coffin stayed in the house overnight for people to say their final goodbyes. From 5 until 9:30 that night, Josh, Crystal, and I sat in our yard and watched the entire island show up to this house. Car and after car arrived, bringing fine mats and money. Fine mats are just mats made from the bark of a certain tree, for each special event they are passed around from the high chief to the family and then back to the high chief. It was a very interesting process to watch. A high chief and his clan would arrive with their fine mats, drop them off, and give money. In response, the family will return about half the fine mats, a little over half of the money, and give them food. What is the point of giving everything back?!! For four and a half hours we witnessed this same thing over and over again. Finally, the families stopped coming and then it became time for the choir to come sing. The choir took their good old time arriving and so I decided to just go to bed; I barely slept the night before as is. Josh stayed up to do some grading and told me they just sang inside the house and he couldn’t hear anything. The woman’s group from church stayed the whole night singing. When we woke up Friday morning, the rain was pouring down. We decided just to wait for the bus to take us to school it was pouring so badly. While we sat and ate breakfast we watched the same fine mats ceremony being performed in the rain. When the family goes to give back mats, they must show off the mats. They unroll them, hold them out. and walk them to the high chief. Watching all of this while the rain poured down was ridiculous. You had the presenters running with the mats to have the process go by quicker. By the time we left for school, the rain subsided, and the fine mats continued to be presented.
School actually ran normally on Friday even though the burial was happening at 9 AM that morning. There was a huge amount of absent students from school which made my largest class drop by five students… awesome! The last school day of the week ran smoothly. My geometry students were the only ones semi-challenging to deal with…when they average a 4/10 on the quiz they took on Thursday, you can’t expect much less!
Friday night was the much anticipated palolo night which I will discuss in part two!!
Love,
Gretchen
October 31st
Part 1
HAPPY HALLOWEEN! I am celebrating my Halloween by pigging out on chocolate all day :-) I’ve decided to make today’s post in two parts because it is going to be a long one. In this first one I would like to discuss about funerals in American Samoa.
My neighbor passed away on the 2nd of October. The funeral was held on October 28th. On October 29th the burial took place. For four weeks she stayed in a refrigerator on the main island waiting for the ceremony. The old woman went over to Tutuila (the main island) about a week after I arrived out here in Manu’a. Her knee was really swollen and no one knew what was wrong with it so they brought her to the hospital to get it checked out. She happened to only spend a day in the hospital; they ran an MRI and the results were negative for any type of tear. The doctor said she was just suffering from old age and that she needed to rest her knee. About two weeks later, she decided to stop eating. Three days later, she passed away in her sleep. At 3 AM on the 2nd, she passed away in her sleep. That was the Friday night I was out looking for palolo and didn’t understand until the morning why the bell was ringing at 3 am.
My neighbors aren’t the cleanest people in the world. They tend to drag their uncleanliness over to our yard. Over these past four weeks, they have been preparing for all their family coming for the funeral. So they cleaned. Cleaning to them meant: hacking down every single bush in their yard (even the ones with flowers growing on them), repainting their house, redoing the aluminum roof, putting more sand and dead coral in their front yard, throwing all their trash in the back of the house and setting it on fire, throwing trash in the back of my house, throwing the tires they had in their front yard into my yard (which I graciously threw back after two days), and pulling weeds out from the hill in front of my house to help with the erosion of it! Highly uneducated people can be extremely challenging to work with. First, it began with my neighbors throwing those stupid tires in my yard a week ago. Since I figured they had a plan for the tires, I left them there for a couple of days. When I saw they would never leave my property, I took action and moved them myself. One night, Josh was washing dishes and called me over to look at something. Our neighbor took her trash can outside and dumped the contents in our backyard and lit it on fire…currently we have a mattress waiting that same ending. I spent all of last Saturday cleaning our yard: I weeded it and raked up all the leaves. As I cleaned, I found a bag of trash sitting in our fale (our outside hut that my neighbors decided to use for their personal clothes line). They had the decency to put majority of the trash in a bag. After I cooled down a bit, I decided the best action plan would be to take the trash back to them. I went up the woman, Vivoa, and said, “I don’t mind if you use our fale for drying your clothes, but please don’t leave your trash in there.” At that she laughed and said, “Oh, it is just the kids.” I politely said well then make sure they don’t leave trash either and walked down and threw the trash away. Her and her family kept watching me saying it was the kids. Later on that evening, I experienced more fun with them. First, a truck drives up to our house and unloads two cars full of wood and dumps it next to the tree in our front yard. No one asks or says anything to me or Josh about it (I am still outside working at this point). The one man did tell me I should stop working because it is too hot though! Leafa told me they are using the wood for the umu they are preparing and so it will all be gone by the end of the funeral…a quarter of it is still there! The umu is basically an outdoor oven the Samoans like to cook with.
While the family was preparing for the big day, Saunoa was doing something else to prepare. Saunoa is my 60 year old friend who is a retired vet that lives up the mountain. It was Saunoa’s mother that passed away. Saunoa was digging the grave for his mother for four weeks. Every morning I would run into him driving over while I was walking to school. He would typically work until I came home at night. Every day I came home, I went and took photos of his work so that he can look back on the progress later.
After I finished working on the yard on Saturday, I went over to Leafa’s to do some laundry. As previously mentioned, my fale was being used by my neighbors. Before I went to Leafa’s, I politely asked them to remove their dry things so I would have a place to put my laundry. When I came back an hour later it was all still hanging up. I asked again and they removed about half of it, still not enough space for even half of my clothes! When the gentleman removed the clothes, he left up clothes pins so I figured I should use them since it is on my property and they left them there. Later that evening, I was in the house reading and Stephanie knocked on my door. Stephanie is one of Vivoa’s daughter-in-laws that just flew in for the funeral. She asks if I can remove the clothes pins from my clothes because they need them. I said sure, not a problem. Since there was no where to place the clothes pins, I just threw them on the ground and planned on picking them up when I was done. While three fourths of the way done, Stephanie says, “Why are you just throwing them on the ground?” I told her that there was no where to put them and that I was going to pick them up when I was done. She rudely tells me I could have handed them to her. I explained that it would be challenging since she didn’t have either hand open. To top it off, she was smoking under the fale making my clean clothes reek of cigarettes. Once I picked them up and left, she said something to my back in Samoa. As you can imagine I was really angry at the point and decided not to stick around my house that night. I went for a walk and stayed away until bed time. I had to just keep telling myself that after this funeral week, things would get better. Yesterday, Josh and I spent the morning cleaning up all the trees they cut down in our yard this week. On Thursday morning, I was woken up to them hacking down a banana tree!
Thursday became a rather crazy day. First, only 2 out of 19 total staff at the high school do not belong to Faleasao so pretty much everyone was expected to be at this funeral. The period before lunch was my prep period, I am sitting there working and then fifteen minutes early the bell rings for lunch. I went and asks Ben, the secretary, what was going on and he said Tautua said he is shortening the rest of the day. I ran to talk to Tautua about it since I had a quiz I really wanted to give out during last period. He told me that he would run the period until my quiz was complete (unfortunately, the quiz took the entire 50 minutes). The school day was still cut an hour. I just missed the bus down to the village and had to wait until Tautua left ten minutes later. By this point, the rain was coming down almost like a monsoon and Tautua drives a truck…Angrily I rode home in the back of the truck and got completely drenched. Josh and I ran home, got changed, and headed to the church. We drove to the church just in time and witnessed the two and a half hour long funeral service. There were about ten family members that spoke, three different sermons, and random groups singing. There were two family members who spoke in English and that was all I understood from the service. There were four people videotaping the service and many people taking photos. The family also had matching attire for the service; each outfit was made out of yellow and black fabric. Everything seemed pretty organized. Once the service completed, everyone headed home.
When we arrived home, we had a front row seat to the festivities. First, found out that the coffin stayed in the house overnight for people to say their final goodbyes. From 5 until 9:30 that night, Josh, Crystal, and I sat in our yard and watched the entire island show up to this house. Car and after car arrived, bringing fine mats and money. Fine mats are just mats made from the bark of a certain tree, for each special event they are passed around from the high chief to the family and then back to the high chief. It was a very interesting process to watch. A high chief and his clan would arrive with their fine mats, drop them off, and give money. In response, the family will return about half the fine mats, a little over half of the money, and give them food. What is the point of giving everything back?!! For four and a half hours we witnessed this same thing over and over again. Finally, the families stopped coming and then it became time for the choir to come sing. The choir took their good old time arriving and so I decided to just go to bed; I barely slept the night before as is. Josh stayed up to do some grading and told me they just sang inside the house and he couldn’t hear anything. The woman’s group from church stayed the whole night singing. When we woke up Friday morning, the rain was pouring down. We decided just to wait for the bus to take us to school it was pouring so badly. While we sat and ate breakfast we watched the same fine mats ceremony being performed in the rain. When the family goes to give back mats, they must show off the mats. They unroll them, hold them out. and walk them to the high chief. Watching all of this while the rain poured down was ridiculous. You had the presenters running with the mats to have the process go by quicker. By the time we left for school, the rain subsided, and the fine mats continued to be presented.
School actually ran normally on Friday even though the burial was happening at 9 AM that morning. There was a huge amount of absent students from school which made my largest class drop by five students… awesome! The last school day of the week ran smoothly. My geometry students were the only ones semi-challenging to deal with…when they average a 4/10 on the quiz they took on Thursday, you can’t expect much less!
Friday night was the much anticipated palolo night which I will discuss in part two!!
Love,
Gretchen
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Midterm Exams
The thoughts and opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not represent those of the WorldTeach organization.
October 24th
This past week was midterm week at school. All last weekend I was up at school preparing my exams for the week. This weekend I decided to stay away from school and school work as much as possible. On Monday and Tuesday we had class as usual. Class became more of review an entire two months worth of material in 50 minutes. Tuesday was very draining for me and I was very glad for it to be done. Wednesday and Thursday were quite nice. We had three midterms each day for an hour a piece, lunch, and then the students left for the day. I had a good four hours after the students left to finish grading the exams. I was able to finish grading my exams before I left each day which made it a mostly stress free week. On Friday, we had “Field Day.” We started off the day with an assembly and then each class was in charge of cleaning a section of campus. The remainder of the afternoon was dedicated to rehearsal. At 11 AM everyone met in the cafeteria for the big production. Each class is in charge of making up some short 5 minute musical type production to perform in front of the school. My class, the sophomore class, did a few scenes from the Lion King. The grand finale was Hakuna Matata which was pretty funny. We were probably the least prepared class, but everyone thought we performed the best. I think it was due to this one kid we have. I don’t have the boy as a student, but he is hilarious. He was in the back kind of acting like a sumo wrestler as he danced, I don’t think I stopped laughing the entire performance. After the performances, there was lunch, and then the students left for the day.
I wasn’t quite sure what to do with myself on Friday. Everyone was off campus by 12:30, the Internet was down, my lessons for Monday and Tuesday were pretty much complete: review midterm exam, and I didn’t feel like doing any school work! To my delight Ben, the secretary, took a couple of us on a ride to Fitiuta to the post office! I haven’t received any birthday presents yet so was hoping something would arrive. Luckily, the two packages my parents sent were in the post office!!!! When we arrived back at school I was able to open my boxes and marvel at my presents! By this time, it is 2 PM and I still don’t want to be up at school. I go and speak with Ula, the vice-principal, and she tells me I can leave for the day if I want. Josh and I put our things together and took the short cut home (straight down a muddy mountain incline). I was glad to just relax and read my book for the afternoon. At 5, I headed over to the elementary school to play basketball. For the past two weeks basketball hasn’t been that great. All the young kids in the village have been playing and so you can’t get a real game together. This Friday was different, all the 20 and 30 year old men were out and we played for a good 40 minutes. The games are played to 7 points, which allows for quick games with rest in between if you lose. If you don’t lose, you are in for a long time. Luckily, my team was on a role so I got to play a long time.
Saturday became a jam packed day of exercise. I decided to go for a run when I woke up that morning. I ran over to the next village and back. When I arrived back to our village I decided to walk home to cool down. As I walked home I stopped to see if Leafa needed help unpacking her things from the boat. As mentioned previously, Leafa is my friend who owns a store a few houses down from me. She did need some help, so I went home, drank some water, and went back to help her. We unloaded soda, chips, and flour from their boxes. Once we completed, she made me brunch for helping. As we unloaded, my clothes were getting washed in her laundry machine. After brunch, I went to change loads and ran back home to put everything on my clothes line. I swept the house and then returned to Leafa’s to get my second load of laundry. Around 2 o'clock I heard that I received another package so I ran over to Tautua and Trish's to pick it up. Ms. Kristen Walker's package arrived with plenty of goodies!! Around 5, I went to go check out the basketball courts. There were some three on three games starting up so I got in the next line up. Without a warm-up and the sun in my eyes, I played like crap. We lost and sat out the next game. I was supposed to go back in with the same people in the next round, but they dropped me from their team since I played so poorly the first game. Luckily, more people showed up and we ended up playing full court four on four. I was in on the first game and our team won so we continued playing. I ended up playing for about 25 minutes straight. At 6, I walked back home to shower and hydrate myself. Josh and I laid low for the night, made some pasta and just talked for a while.
This morning we had church and then you can’t really do anything else since it is a Sunday so I am relaxing at home reading. I am excited to walk over to the next village around 4 to buy some of their cinnamon bread though!!
Love,
Gretchen
October 24th
This past week was midterm week at school. All last weekend I was up at school preparing my exams for the week. This weekend I decided to stay away from school and school work as much as possible. On Monday and Tuesday we had class as usual. Class became more of review an entire two months worth of material in 50 minutes. Tuesday was very draining for me and I was very glad for it to be done. Wednesday and Thursday were quite nice. We had three midterms each day for an hour a piece, lunch, and then the students left for the day. I had a good four hours after the students left to finish grading the exams. I was able to finish grading my exams before I left each day which made it a mostly stress free week. On Friday, we had “Field Day.” We started off the day with an assembly and then each class was in charge of cleaning a section of campus. The remainder of the afternoon was dedicated to rehearsal. At 11 AM everyone met in the cafeteria for the big production. Each class is in charge of making up some short 5 minute musical type production to perform in front of the school. My class, the sophomore class, did a few scenes from the Lion King. The grand finale was Hakuna Matata which was pretty funny. We were probably the least prepared class, but everyone thought we performed the best. I think it was due to this one kid we have. I don’t have the boy as a student, but he is hilarious. He was in the back kind of acting like a sumo wrestler as he danced, I don’t think I stopped laughing the entire performance. After the performances, there was lunch, and then the students left for the day.
I wasn’t quite sure what to do with myself on Friday. Everyone was off campus by 12:30, the Internet was down, my lessons for Monday and Tuesday were pretty much complete: review midterm exam, and I didn’t feel like doing any school work! To my delight Ben, the secretary, took a couple of us on a ride to Fitiuta to the post office! I haven’t received any birthday presents yet so was hoping something would arrive. Luckily, the two packages my parents sent were in the post office!!!! When we arrived back at school I was able to open my boxes and marvel at my presents! By this time, it is 2 PM and I still don’t want to be up at school. I go and speak with Ula, the vice-principal, and she tells me I can leave for the day if I want. Josh and I put our things together and took the short cut home (straight down a muddy mountain incline). I was glad to just relax and read my book for the afternoon. At 5, I headed over to the elementary school to play basketball. For the past two weeks basketball hasn’t been that great. All the young kids in the village have been playing and so you can’t get a real game together. This Friday was different, all the 20 and 30 year old men were out and we played for a good 40 minutes. The games are played to 7 points, which allows for quick games with rest in between if you lose. If you don’t lose, you are in for a long time. Luckily, my team was on a role so I got to play a long time.
Saturday became a jam packed day of exercise. I decided to go for a run when I woke up that morning. I ran over to the next village and back. When I arrived back to our village I decided to walk home to cool down. As I walked home I stopped to see if Leafa needed help unpacking her things from the boat. As mentioned previously, Leafa is my friend who owns a store a few houses down from me. She did need some help, so I went home, drank some water, and went back to help her. We unloaded soda, chips, and flour from their boxes. Once we completed, she made me brunch for helping. As we unloaded, my clothes were getting washed in her laundry machine. After brunch, I went to change loads and ran back home to put everything on my clothes line. I swept the house and then returned to Leafa’s to get my second load of laundry. Around 2 o'clock I heard that I received another package so I ran over to Tautua and Trish's to pick it up. Ms. Kristen Walker's package arrived with plenty of goodies!! Around 5, I went to go check out the basketball courts. There were some three on three games starting up so I got in the next line up. Without a warm-up and the sun in my eyes, I played like crap. We lost and sat out the next game. I was supposed to go back in with the same people in the next round, but they dropped me from their team since I played so poorly the first game. Luckily, more people showed up and we ended up playing full court four on four. I was in on the first game and our team won so we continued playing. I ended up playing for about 25 minutes straight. At 6, I walked back home to shower and hydrate myself. Josh and I laid low for the night, made some pasta and just talked for a while.
This morning we had church and then you can’t really do anything else since it is a Sunday so I am relaxing at home reading. I am excited to walk over to the next village around 4 to buy some of their cinnamon bread though!!
Love,
Gretchen
Saturday, October 16, 2010
Ofu
The thoughts and opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not represent those of the WorldTeach organization.
October 11th
Instead of boring you with more negativity about the school I will share about my wonderful weekend.
On Friday, school finished at noon and I waited anxiously for the call that the boat was ready. Around 1:30, I was tired of waiting up at the school and decided to start walking home. While halfway through the village, Tautua drove by in his truck and picked me up. The boat was ready! We grabbed my luggage and drove to the docks. The boat ride lasted about an hour and a half. In about 20 minutes I realized that even in American Samoa I get sea sick! I think the men on the boat felt sorry for me, they just kept staring and smiling. About two to three weeks ago I was over visiting Tautua and Trish talking about my birthday. Tautua offered that I should go to Ofu and Olosega during the three day weekend to celebrate. Since that time I kept thinking about it and slowly realized that I might actually be going. Trevor, the JROTC instructor from school, is from Olosega so I stayed with him at his hotel throughout the weekend. For the first time since I have been in Manu’a, I slept with air conditioning!
The hotel is perfectly located next to the bridge connecting Ofu and Olosega. Trevor’s house is located in Ofu, but he considers himself in Olosega because the village is a lot closer. It was nice to get away from village life where everyone is watching you for the weekend. Matt and Felicia, two WorldTeach volunteers, live in Ofu so I did get a little village life when I visited them. They are about a 25 minute drive away, so it proved to be a little difficult to visit them the entire time. Trevor’s daughter, Celesty, became a good friend over the weekend and she brought me all over the place. On Friday night, she gave me an island tour. We even stopped to talk to Felicia and Matt for a bit before they had White Sunday practice. Celesty is the 8th grade teacher at the elementary school so she happened to know Matt and Felicia and didn’t mind driving over to see them on the tour. I believe Tautua was paying for me to stay at the hotel and I came over with Trevor so I felt bad leaving him to stay at Matt and Felicia’s. After the tour, Celesty went back to make some dinner for us and I just laid low for the night enjoying my air-conditioned room with my king sized bed.
On Saturday, I woke up a little late and waited around for breakfast. Felicia and Matt had White Sunday practice in the morning, so Celesty and I waited for them to jump off the bridge. After our short hike, we jumped in the van to go pick them up. When we arrived, we found out that their practice time was changed to 4 PM. I was pretty disappointed since we didn’t get to their place until noon. Celesty had to run over to the community center for a bit so sat around for an hour until she came back. In that time, we found out that practice was switched to 2 PM. By this point I began to think I would just be hanging out with Celesty for the weekend. When Celesty arrived back at Matt and Felicia’s at 1 PM, Matt ran over to speak with the pastor. The pastor gave them the okay to miss practice, so we had the afternoon to ourselves! Arriving back at the hotel, we were all eager to jump in the water. By this point, it started to heat up and we desperately wanted to cool down. I was the first to make the 20 foot jump! I was too excited to even worry and just jumped. Felicia and Matt slowly followed about twenty minutes later. In the mean time, I swam around looking at all the fish. This happened to be the first sand beach I have swam in since arriving in American Samoa. It wasn’t just coral, but there was actual sand on the beach!!! I have only been on the dry coral beaches thus far. This beach was awesome to swim in, the drag wasn’t too strong, it was deep enough to swim in, and it wasn’t too cold. For the rest of the afternoon, we just swam and hung out.
I wanted to go to church with Matt and Felicia on Sunday so I spent Saturday night at their house. We were up for a while but sleep got the better of me and I was the first to go to bed. At 7:30 AM, I was awake and ready for church. I previously mentioned Matt and Felicia were going to practice for White Sunday. This past Sunday was White Sunday. Every Sunday it is typical to see the kids wait on the parents. The kids help prepare the food, eat after their parents eat brunch, and don’t get involved with the Sunday church service. On White Sunday, (which happens only once a year) the kids are in charge. And by kid I mean anyone not married. For two weeks or more there is practice every night for White Sunday. The kids have speaking roles, dance routines, and songs that they need to prepare for. I have been watching the kids in my village and they are endlessly practicing. Felicia and Matt were asked to be a part of White Sunday and I had the privilege of watching them and being their photographer. It was a long service to sit through. After 2.5 hours I realized it would be a better experience to see my students performing and not these kids from Ofu that I don’t know. Since Ofu is a much younger village, I got to see all the young kids perform.
After church, we were invited to the pastor’s house for brunch. Since it was White Sunday, the students were served first and there was a massive feast. The parent’s provided the food and cleaned up at the end. The community is in charge of feeding the pastor each Sunday, and they provided a whole lot of food! We had pig, coconut crab, chicken, duck, potato salad, bread fruit, and taro. I thought I was eating chicken until I was told later to try the duck…tastes just like chicken though! After we stuffed our faces with food, it was time for dessert! The pastor’s wife brought out some cones and started serving the strawberry ice cream! It is the first time I had a Samoan meal with dessert! While eating ice cream, cake and jello arrived. It was way too much to eat.
After dessert Felicia, Matt, and I went to their house to rest. Unfortunately, it is Sunday, the day of rest, and you are not allowed to do anything in the village. In Ofu you aren’t even allowed to walk around the village! In Faleasao I am allowed to walk around on a Sunday, so decided I was going to walk in Ofu as well. I really needed to walk off the mounds of food I consumed. I walked along their beach, picked up a few shells, and got chased by the dogs. The dogs in Ta’u are a lot nicer!!! After being followed by a few of Felicia’s students for a while I headed home to read and rest. While reading, I fell asleep for a half an hour to wake up and read some more. Around 6 PM, Celesty arrived to bring me back to the hotel for the night. After making some dinner, Celesty and I walked on the beach in front of her house and then spent the night watching the stars. It was a great night, not too many mosquitoes.
I decided since we were leaving early this morning, 10 AM, that I should wake up extra early to go swimming. At 6 AM, I woke up and Celesty and I went hiking to the most gorgeous beach. We walked to one of the top ten beaches in the world. As Celesty laid on the beach, I snorkeled in the water all by myself. It was amazing. There was beautiful coral, lively fish, and nice warm water! The coral was more amazing then the millions of fish, I have yet to see blue or yellow coral so I was definitely excited. We stayed for about two hours and then we headed back to the hotel to eat breakfast. Around 9 AM, we arrived back to find Trevor yelling that the boat was waiting for us. I took a quick shower and we jumped in the car. Matt and Felicia escorted us to the boat and we made the 1.5 hour trip back to Ta’u. Fabulous and much needed weekend. Now for the big birthday tomorrow!!!!
Love,
Gretchen
Friday, October 8, 2010
past due
October 2nd
The thoughts and opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not represent those of the WorldTeach organization.
Okay so for the most exciting news: I just saw a whale! I didn’t think I would be so excited when I saw one, but this one was about a football field length away! I was just sitting out on one of the rocks in the ocean and all of a sudden the whale jumps out of the water…I screamed! Luckily, I had my camera with me and quickly took it out to snap some photos. The whale didn’t come nearly as high out of water after that, but I did capture him!!
It has reached the point where I have been here long enough that I am ready to have a weekend away. Next weekend I am planning on going over to Ofu and Olesega. Due to Columbus Day we have a three day weekend, so I think it would be perfect to getaway. The JROTC lieutenant, Trevor, has family in Olesega and invited me to ride over with him kind of as a birthday present. For a while I was debating on whether or not I should go, but at the end of the school day yesterday I decided I need to get away for the weekend. To keep any hope of sanity left, I should get away.
Let’s rewind back to my last blog post about me finding out Tala cut herself and all my bad luck that followed. On Saturday night there was choir practice in the village. During the choir practice, there was an announcement about Tala cutting herself. There was also an announcement about my late night intruder the previous night. What came out of the meeting was that after 9 PM no student, grades K-12, are allowed outside their homes or they will be fined $100. At the same time, if a visitor is found outside of any white person’s house, then they are fined $100 by the high chief. And that’s how the village deals with a problem. :-) As you can probably imagine, I was pretty upset with how this girl was being treated and knew the only thing I could do is apologize to her for all the crap she had to go through. The rest of the weekend I didn’t see her around so I waited until school began. Monday morning there was an assembly. Towards the end the principal spoke about girls’ cutting themselves and that it is bad because “When you get older and have grandchildren you are still going to have those scars on your arms and you will have to tell them why you have them.” And thus began the week. I sat down with Tala and let her know that I was available if she ever needed to talk. She has yet to come seek me out but I hope she does if she needs it.
Last weekend I received some troubling news and it made for the beginning of a bad week. Fortunately, the week wasn’t as awful as I was expecting. On Sunday night, I was walking around the village and ran into one of my students, Jedi. Jedi is the kind of kid who thinks he is a genius and likes to rub it into everyone’s face. At first I didn’t care for him much, but he actually has common sense which everyone else out here is lacking so it is nice to have that in a student. Jedi and I talked for about a half an hour about the village and specifically about the students in the village. The girl, Tala, that I found cutting herself the week prior is one of Jedi’s good friends. I thought he would be a good person to talk to because he seems to be trusted by a lot of people. There are five females that attend the high school from my village. Jedi is 100% positive that four of them are cutting themselves. The other girl is a sister to a girl cutting herself so she might also be doing it. There are also two eighth graders in the village who have been cutting themselves. This is obviously much larger a problem then I initially thought. My first thought was that these girls are doing this together, sort of like a cult or something. It seems like they don’t all know each other are doing it. Jedi said that a lot of people come to him when they have problems. The worse part is that I found out one of my students from a separate village tried killing herself this summer by drinking two bottles of shampoo. Obviously, there are major issues with the way people are living their lives out here! Right now, I am trying my best just to be someone that people can come talk to if they have problems. This week I have had a lot of conversations with students so hopefully I am being a good listener.
On Wednesday, September 29th we had no school due to the one year anniversary of the tsunami. On Tuesday, we had a service after lunch where all the grades performed a song or two and we prayed. I felt like the service was just one big joke. I really don’t understand why they were laughing though because they do have a lot of family over on the main island where the tsunami hit. Just one more thing that I will never understand about Samoans. On Wednesday, Josh and I went to the 6 AM church service for the tsunami victims. It was a nice one hour church service in which we had a moment of silence at 6:49, the time the tsunami hit last year. After church we went home and went right to bed. At 9 AM, I woke up for the second time and made myself some breakfast. Josh woke up shortly after to tell me that an earthquake hit on the main island at around 7:15 that morning. Fortunately, there was not a tsunami following this earthquake and we didn’t feel a thing. Josh’s girlfriend from WorldTeach, Holly, is living off the main island on a little island called Aunu’u. She called him and told him she was running up the hill to higher ground. As the day wore on she kept calling and updating him. Basically not a single Samoan reacted to the earthquake. You would think a magnitude 5 earthquake would be something to take seriously, especially if it happened on the year anniversary of a tsunami! Another reason why I will never understand the people of American Samoa.
Thursday began what felt like a Monday all over again. Thursday was actually a decent day but Friday was so annoying that it didn’t matter if I had one decent day out of two. On Friday, we received a bulletin in the morning that during the second half of lunch we will have a meeting in the cafeteria. The lunch period is 45 minutes and the students only eat for about ten or fifteen of those minutes so it really isn’t hard to have a meeting there. As I was finishing up grading, the principal walked by to tell me the meeting was about to start. I left my room a few minutes later to find a group of students standing around the office area. I stopped a student to find out two girls had just been in a fight. The computer teacher, Lofi, had one of the girls and so I went to find the other who had disappeared. I brought Jasmine to the office where I thought Lofi brought Trina. I reached the office door to find that it was locked. Instead, we all met at the back of the building. I began saying, “Okay, what is going on? Let’s talk this out.” After no one spoke, Lofi proceeded to talk to them in Samoan. I have no idea what was being said, but at the end she had Jasmine apologize. I did have a problem with her apology though as it wasn’t very sincere and neither of them would even look at each other.
While this was going on, Crystal went to go get the principal from the cafeteria. Crystal came back with no principal. She told me later that she went and told him and he said, “Oh, ok.” As we continue to stand out there, we keep getting students come up and tell us that we need to go to the meeting. We were getting yelled at for trying to remedy the situation. And so we leave the girls to do whatever they want and go to this damn meeting. We got there and the entire thing was in Samoan. Obviously I was quite angry, and still am, about everything that came about in that half an hour. For the first half of the meeting it was the entire staff and then it became just the instructors. For about half the time he spoke to just the instructors he spoke in English. Luckily he asked if there were any comments or questions in English in which I raised my hand. I explained that I was disgusted that two girls were fighting prior to this meeting and Lofi and I were trying to take care of it and were yelled at because we weren’t in the meeting. Now the girls are just running free around campus and can pick another fight at any moment. The principal responded that this meeting was scheduled since the morning and a fight wasn’t going to change that. He also told me to let them fight, it is good for them. When he leaves here he can go pick them up and drive them to the hospital. I didn’t speak the rest of the meeting. Once we were leaving he grabbed me and said, “Oh Gretchen, I didn’t mean what I said. Of course I don’t want them fighting.” I kind of chuckled and walked away. I am glad he cared so much about saving his ass.
Finishing out the last class of the day helped me relax and calm down a bit. At the end of the day, every staff member jetted off campus when the bell rang. That means that the keys to JROTC where my laundry was was also taken. As I walked home, I ran into Tautua and he told me we could go back up to school later as he didn’t have his keys on him. At 8 PM, after not hearing from him, I walked over to him and Trish’s house to see if we could go get my things. Tautua didn’t really feel like going so I ran around trying to find the secretary, Ben, to drive me up there. Really not making me like the principal any better. Once I finally got my laundry and went home, I realized I left all my whites in the washing machine.
Another week done, another week to go. Hopefully I will update you before I leave for Olesega next weekend!
Love,
Gretchen
The thoughts and opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not represent those of the WorldTeach organization.
Okay so for the most exciting news: I just saw a whale! I didn’t think I would be so excited when I saw one, but this one was about a football field length away! I was just sitting out on one of the rocks in the ocean and all of a sudden the whale jumps out of the water…I screamed! Luckily, I had my camera with me and quickly took it out to snap some photos. The whale didn’t come nearly as high out of water after that, but I did capture him!!
It has reached the point where I have been here long enough that I am ready to have a weekend away. Next weekend I am planning on going over to Ofu and Olesega. Due to Columbus Day we have a three day weekend, so I think it would be perfect to getaway. The JROTC lieutenant, Trevor, has family in Olesega and invited me to ride over with him kind of as a birthday present. For a while I was debating on whether or not I should go, but at the end of the school day yesterday I decided I need to get away for the weekend. To keep any hope of sanity left, I should get away.
Let’s rewind back to my last blog post about me finding out Tala cut herself and all my bad luck that followed. On Saturday night there was choir practice in the village. During the choir practice, there was an announcement about Tala cutting herself. There was also an announcement about my late night intruder the previous night. What came out of the meeting was that after 9 PM no student, grades K-12, are allowed outside their homes or they will be fined $100. At the same time, if a visitor is found outside of any white person’s house, then they are fined $100 by the high chief. And that’s how the village deals with a problem. :-) As you can probably imagine, I was pretty upset with how this girl was being treated and knew the only thing I could do is apologize to her for all the crap she had to go through. The rest of the weekend I didn’t see her around so I waited until school began. Monday morning there was an assembly. Towards the end the principal spoke about girls’ cutting themselves and that it is bad because “When you get older and have grandchildren you are still going to have those scars on your arms and you will have to tell them why you have them.” And thus began the week. I sat down with Tala and let her know that I was available if she ever needed to talk. She has yet to come seek me out but I hope she does if she needs it.
Last weekend I received some troubling news and it made for the beginning of a bad week. Fortunately, the week wasn’t as awful as I was expecting. On Sunday night, I was walking around the village and ran into one of my students, Jedi. Jedi is the kind of kid who thinks he is a genius and likes to rub it into everyone’s face. At first I didn’t care for him much, but he actually has common sense which everyone else out here is lacking so it is nice to have that in a student. Jedi and I talked for about a half an hour about the village and specifically about the students in the village. The girl, Tala, that I found cutting herself the week prior is one of Jedi’s good friends. I thought he would be a good person to talk to because he seems to be trusted by a lot of people. There are five females that attend the high school from my village. Jedi is 100% positive that four of them are cutting themselves. The other girl is a sister to a girl cutting herself so she might also be doing it. There are also two eighth graders in the village who have been cutting themselves. This is obviously much larger a problem then I initially thought. My first thought was that these girls are doing this together, sort of like a cult or something. It seems like they don’t all know each other are doing it. Jedi said that a lot of people come to him when they have problems. The worse part is that I found out one of my students from a separate village tried killing herself this summer by drinking two bottles of shampoo. Obviously, there are major issues with the way people are living their lives out here! Right now, I am trying my best just to be someone that people can come talk to if they have problems. This week I have had a lot of conversations with students so hopefully I am being a good listener.
On Wednesday, September 29th we had no school due to the one year anniversary of the tsunami. On Tuesday, we had a service after lunch where all the grades performed a song or two and we prayed. I felt like the service was just one big joke. I really don’t understand why they were laughing though because they do have a lot of family over on the main island where the tsunami hit. Just one more thing that I will never understand about Samoans. On Wednesday, Josh and I went to the 6 AM church service for the tsunami victims. It was a nice one hour church service in which we had a moment of silence at 6:49, the time the tsunami hit last year. After church we went home and went right to bed. At 9 AM, I woke up for the second time and made myself some breakfast. Josh woke up shortly after to tell me that an earthquake hit on the main island at around 7:15 that morning. Fortunately, there was not a tsunami following this earthquake and we didn’t feel a thing. Josh’s girlfriend from WorldTeach, Holly, is living off the main island on a little island called Aunu’u. She called him and told him she was running up the hill to higher ground. As the day wore on she kept calling and updating him. Basically not a single Samoan reacted to the earthquake. You would think a magnitude 5 earthquake would be something to take seriously, especially if it happened on the year anniversary of a tsunami! Another reason why I will never understand the people of American Samoa.
Thursday began what felt like a Monday all over again. Thursday was actually a decent day but Friday was so annoying that it didn’t matter if I had one decent day out of two. On Friday, we received a bulletin in the morning that during the second half of lunch we will have a meeting in the cafeteria. The lunch period is 45 minutes and the students only eat for about ten or fifteen of those minutes so it really isn’t hard to have a meeting there. As I was finishing up grading, the principal walked by to tell me the meeting was about to start. I left my room a few minutes later to find a group of students standing around the office area. I stopped a student to find out two girls had just been in a fight. The computer teacher, Lofi, had one of the girls and so I went to find the other who had disappeared. I brought Jasmine to the office where I thought Lofi brought Trina. I reached the office door to find that it was locked. Instead, we all met at the back of the building. I began saying, “Okay, what is going on? Let’s talk this out.” After no one spoke, Lofi proceeded to talk to them in Samoan. I have no idea what was being said, but at the end she had Jasmine apologize. I did have a problem with her apology though as it wasn’t very sincere and neither of them would even look at each other.
While this was going on, Crystal went to go get the principal from the cafeteria. Crystal came back with no principal. She told me later that she went and told him and he said, “Oh, ok.” As we continue to stand out there, we keep getting students come up and tell us that we need to go to the meeting. We were getting yelled at for trying to remedy the situation. And so we leave the girls to do whatever they want and go to this damn meeting. We got there and the entire thing was in Samoan. Obviously I was quite angry, and still am, about everything that came about in that half an hour. For the first half of the meeting it was the entire staff and then it became just the instructors. For about half the time he spoke to just the instructors he spoke in English. Luckily he asked if there were any comments or questions in English in which I raised my hand. I explained that I was disgusted that two girls were fighting prior to this meeting and Lofi and I were trying to take care of it and were yelled at because we weren’t in the meeting. Now the girls are just running free around campus and can pick another fight at any moment. The principal responded that this meeting was scheduled since the morning and a fight wasn’t going to change that. He also told me to let them fight, it is good for them. When he leaves here he can go pick them up and drive them to the hospital. I didn’t speak the rest of the meeting. Once we were leaving he grabbed me and said, “Oh Gretchen, I didn’t mean what I said. Of course I don’t want them fighting.” I kind of chuckled and walked away. I am glad he cared so much about saving his ass.
Finishing out the last class of the day helped me relax and calm down a bit. At the end of the day, every staff member jetted off campus when the bell rang. That means that the keys to JROTC where my laundry was was also taken. As I walked home, I ran into Tautua and he told me we could go back up to school later as he didn’t have his keys on him. At 8 PM, after not hearing from him, I walked over to him and Trish’s house to see if we could go get my things. Tautua didn’t really feel like going so I ran around trying to find the secretary, Ben, to drive me up there. Really not making me like the principal any better. Once I finally got my laundry and went home, I realized I left all my whites in the washing machine.
Another week done, another week to go. Hopefully I will update you before I leave for Olesega next weekend!
Love,
Gretchen
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
awful week
The thoughts and opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not represent those of the WorldTeach organization.
September 18th
It has been a long week. Fortunately, I am able to relax now and update you on my life. Last Friday was the pep rally as I mentioned in my previous post. The pep rally was a nice way to end the school day. The two principals from the elementary schools, the PTA president, and our principal were the judges for the event. Each class had their own cheers to present. As an advisor for the sophomore class, I was asked to dress up as our mascot, the Segaula! Throughout the cheer I was running around “acting” like a bird making a complete full of myself. At the end of the day students were coming up telling me I was a really cool mascot haha
Last weekend was quite uneventful as no one is ready to go on an adventure yet. We have had a ton of rain which has halted any plans I try to make. I would say we have been averaging four inches of rain a day over these past two weeks. And this is the dry season. On Thursday, we actually had a land slide in between our village and Ta’u. It hit the first few houses in the village and they now have a nice muddy front yard. I greatly enjoyed my walk to work that morning.
Each week it seems like there is one student who decides that they just don’t want to cooperate with me. Last week was Jonathon and this week was Lotu. Lotu is a girl in my Algebra 2 class who has a lot of attitude and just doesn’t know when to keep her mouth shut. On Tuesday in class, we broke up into small groups to work on word problems. When everyone went to their new seats and started on the problems I walked around to help. Lotu decided to go through another students’ belongings and I didn’t think that was appropriate. I told her that was ignorant and she put it away. I turned to go to the next group to see that she took the binder out again and continued to go through it. I told her I will see her in detention after school. She decided not to show up. I was happy she didn’t though as Tuesday was my first day of after school SAT prep.
On Wednesday, Lotu walked into class and I told her since she decided not to come after school I would be contacting her parents. Whoever was standing with her informed me that she had to go home yet she didn’t tell me anything. Later in the day, she walks into my room with Lofi, the computer teacher, and Lofi tells me that it is her niece and she told her to go home on Tuesday. Lofi also told me that next time Lotu talks back to let me know. I informed her that the detention was served because she was going through another students’ belongings after I told her not to do so. Lofi took her into her room and I am guessing hit her (not too sure what happened, they just left!). At lunch time, I went to the office to call Lotu’s parents and the vice principal said that she would talk with her instead. The punishment was Lotu was to spend two detentions with me on Thursday and Friday. I let her stay only on Thursday since Lofi made her leave after school on Tuesday.
On Thursday, Lotu came and was just a pain. She cleaned my room half-assed and just kept talking to everyone that walked by. I kept adding on more minutes to her detention but it did not seem to faze her much. The librarian decided to walk by and talk with her twice. The second time she even opened my door and laughed at me when I informed her that Lotu was in detention and is to not to be spoken to. After Lotu left, I spoke with the librarian and told her that I did not appreciate her undermining my authority. She apologized and said she didn’t understand why Lotu was just sitting in my room.
As mentioned previously, this week was the beginning of afterschool SAT prep. On Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s for the remainder of the semester I will be tutoring 18 students in math questions that come up in the SATs. On Tuesday, I just said hello to the students and kept them for about ten minutes. The principal forgot to mention to the bus driver about the after school tutorial and so they had no way to get home at 3:30. On Wednesday, we had our first day of actual tutoring. I went over two sample problems and then for the rest of the hour the students did individual problems. Luckily, Josh came by to help and we ran around answering questions the entire time. After school, Josh went into a meeting with the principal and three other teachers to be informed that he will be teaching a tutorial for students starting next week on Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s as well. Basically the principal thinks the students asked me so many questions due to the fact that no other students had to stay after school. It wasn’t that they didn’t know the material at all…Now every student at the high school will be in a tutorial after school those two days. This past Wednesday I was running around answering questions without a break and now I will be in that same situation without Josh or any other teacher to assist me. When the principal has no higher education in actual education his way of thinking isn’t always the best.
Wednesday and Thursday’s are my quiz days each week. On Thursday during first period I had the Algebra 1 quiz. There are only ten students in the classroom so it is easy to keep them separated from each other. Two students decided to cheat off of each other on this particular day. The one boy, Iosefo, completely turns around in his chair to give Tuimoana an answer. I took Iosefo’s quiz, crumbled it up, and tossed it in the trash. He seemed pretty upset the rest of class. At the end of class, he stayed after to talk to me. He informed me that Tuimoana asked him for an answer and he was just giving him one. I let him know that that was still cheating and next time he needs to just ignore Tuimoana. I also told him that Tuimoana would also receive a 0. Iosefo looked about ready to cry when he was leaving the classroom so I let him know that his two lowest quiz grades will be dropped at the end of the semester. Hopefully this won’t happen again and he won’t have to worry. I spoke with the principal about what happened later in the day and he wanted to talk to them himself. On Friday, he put the students’ names in the bulletin to come visit him in the morning. Basically word got around fast about what happened. Last period of the day Friday I had Algebra 1 again. Tuimoana was quiet in class for the first time ever. At the end of class, Tuimoana comes up to me with a note folded up. The note read: Dear Ms. Melvin, Please let my friend Iosefo and I retake the test. We are both sorry. Tuimoana. I let him down easy and said I can’t do that, you knew my rule from week 1: no cheating. With that he left for the weekend.
Friday was by far the worst day I have had since being in American Samoa. My second class for the day was Algebra 2. For the last twenty minutes I decided it would be a good idea to break into three groups and have the student’s race to the board and answer questions. We did about three questions when I stopped the game, and warned the students to stop acting like animals. I also told them that I am only giving them one more chance. The next question came, there was yelling, screaming, a few students arguing with me that their team answered first, and the game was quickly finished. The students were to sit and do individual work for the remaining ten minutes. While I wrote fifteen problems on the board the students decided to keep carrying on so I informed them this work will be turned in on Monday for a quiz grade. They decided to keep talking so I started writing up homework problems. Each time they spoke they received more problems. About fifty problems later I was at the end of the section and didn’t know what else I could make them do. At that point I turned around and asked, “Who else would like to talk?” My best friend Lotu was the first to speak and was told to go to the office followed by Francis and AJ. Lotu spoke again as she was leaving and I told her she was also coming back for a second dose of detention. Francis decided to go to the bathroom when he was sent out and Lotu decided to go into the computer room and play a game. With the assistance of Lofi they were rounded up and sent to the office. Luckily, I had a ten minute break until the next class and went to the office to see what punishment they received. I went in to find out that there was no punishment for going to the office. Ula spoke with them and they told her another student was the real problem and they didn’t know why they were in the office. Ula informed me that I can write them up and it will go on their permanent record. My response: “Gladly.” Going back to my room I sat down and started filling out the forms.
My pre-calculus class started filing in and realized how upset I was. Once they were in the room I closed the door and went to tell them that it has just been a long day and just started crying. These students are great though and were volunteering to help write the work on the board and not tell any other students about me being so upset. Out of all my classes, they are the only ones I believe truly wouldn’t tell anyone else. Thankfully, I had prep period after that and composed myself and got ready to complete the rest of the day thinking the worse is over. Unfortunately, I was wrong with that assumption.
My next class was my biggest class: geometry. By this point, word had spread about Algebra 2 and everyone knew to be on their best behavior in my class. Everyone took notes and worked on problems as I asked and the class ran smoothly. As I was walking around the room looking at the various students’ work I noticed one of my students, Tala, with cuts all along her forearm. I became very concerned, obviously, and kept going back and looking at her. She seemed to have two deep gashes and about twenty small, fresh cuts across her arm. Tala has two classes with me and in the first class today she was crying towards the end and was comforted by another student. Unfortunately, that was the class that gave me all the trouble so I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to go talk with her. I thought it would be best to go speak with Ula, the vice principal, about what I noticed. There isn’t a guidance counselor of any kind out here but I would consider Ula the closest thing to one. When I arrived in the office there were three other teachers in the office who overheard. The one teacher, Donna, told me I should have quote: “Slapped the stupid girl.” As I stood in disbelief at what she said, she decided to continue. She said Tala did this last year over some boy and it is probably the same reason she cut herself this time. I decided it was time for me to take my lunch break and I left the office.
After lunch I decided to go speak with Ula about what happened. She basically spoke with Tala for about five minutes in which Tala told her she was having boy problems and Ula sent her on her way. I asked what the next step is and was informed that they are now going to have the principal talk to her dad since they are best friends. Tala lives in my village and I have seen her dad before. He is a drunk who I am sure is oh so nice to Tala. Last year when she cut herself she was beat up for doing so because that solves all problems. Even though this was a recurrent incident, there is nothing out here to help. I further was disgusted when talking to Trish, the English teacher. Trish told me that you don’t really get involved in any family issues and that she has seen multiple female students with cuts on their wrists. You just don’t do anything about it. Since Friday, I have spoken with a couple of people about what happened and hopefully I get a chance to talk with Tala and be some kind of outlet for her.
Now on to my bad luck (if you don’t consider what has happened thus far bad luck). On Friday night, Josh and I stayed up until 10 PM talking about everything that went on throughout the day. Mostly talking about how a girl wanting attention like Tala isn’t getting what she deserves. I was about half into sleep mode when I hear footsteps in the back of the house. I figured that the nasty dog was back there looking for something to eat so I ignored it. All the sudden the footsteps stopped right outside my bedroom window. I opened my eyes to see this guy looking into my window. I freeze, clearly freaked out and trying to figure out what he is trying to do. Josh has told me numerous times that at night no one can see through our windows, but I wasn’t completely sure that was true. At first, I got close to the window to see what was going on and then completely ducked out of the way. I decided the best approach was to turn on my light and get Josh. As I ran to turn on my light I didn’t look back and have no idea where the man went. Josh went out and did a perimeter check. He didn’t see anything but I was pretty spooked none the less. We decided the best plan of action was to leave the kitchen light on for the night. This way I could see outside my window and see who the gentleman was if he decided to come back. We double checked that all the doors were locked and went back to bed. It took me a little while but I eventually fell right to sleep. We decided it would be good to invest in some new bulbs for our outdoor lights.
My bad luck continued into the day today. I decided I really needed to go for a run and so around 8:30 I headed out running towards Ta’u. While on my way back from the other village I was running next to the cliff when a chicken slides down and hits me in my legs. I of course scream and run away. I thought it was extremely funny that all these random instances keep occurring. Once I made it to my village, I walked off my run. I decided to stop and see Tautua, my landlord and the principal, and inform him of the previous night’s events. He was upset with what happened and told me he would bring by some new light bulbs today. :-) I left to go home and ran into Leafa and told her I would grab water and join her for some bingo. Once I returned to bingo, I realized I forgot my money to play. As I was walking back home, a coconut fell out of the tree in front of me. When I arrived back at bingo I told Leafa that I am just having a very unlucky day and I don’t think I should play. I played any way.
Bingo is very competitive out here. I believe it is because there are money prizes and people are greedy. Not quite sure. I would rather just play and not pay nor receive money but when I say that I get laughed at. You pay $10 to play the ten games of bingo with chances of paying extra for the bonus rounds. There are about six early bird games that are $1 each if you are interested as well. I typically just pay the $10. Half way through the ten games there is one bonus game and at the end you have your big winner. If you get a black out in 53 calls then you win the jack pot. I haven’t seen anyone win the jackpot yet. Today my card was doing well. We reached the 53 calls and no one had won yet so we kept going. The grand prize was $1,000 but the consolation prize was still huge at $500 so I still was excited to win. I ended up losing by one number. Lucky number 13!!! From there I decided it was time to relax and go read.
Hopefully my luck will return soon but I foresee it being another long week.
Love,
Gretchen
labor day weekend
The thoughts and opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not represent those of the WorldTeach organization.
September 9th
The Swains Atoll trip was a no go. Saunoa was confused about where exactly the boat was going and I ended up just staying home in Ta’u. My roommate, Josh, had his girlfriend, Holly, over for the weekend so I stayed away exploring. If it wasn’t for all the rain we received, I probably would have only seen Holly once or twice. Unfortunately, the rain was never-ending all weekend.
Friday night I went over to Doug’s house for dinner so that I could give Holly and Josh alone time. On Saturday I went over to Leafa’s house to help her with the boat shipment. Leafa is a mid-40’s woman who owns one of the three stores in the village. A big shipment came in on Friday so I told her I would help her sort it out. When I went over on Saturday she surprised me with breakfast: eggs, sausage, and toast. Even though I already ate it was a nice surprise and filled me up until dinner time. Around 1 o’clock I left Leafa’s and decided I wanted to walk over to Fitiuta. Fitiuta is the village on the east coast of Ta’u. The walk is about two hours when there isn’t any rain. Crystal and I spent three and a half hours walking to Fitiuta! We received a few rain showers, a couple of cars stopping to ask us if we were lost (on the only road in Ta’u!), and a couple of unwanted dog followers. I believe I picked a perfect day for the walk. Due to all the rain the temperature was a bit cooler than normal which made for a pleasant stroll. Since we arrived so late in the day we decided to catch a ride back to Faleasao. For the remainder of the night the rain decided to not let up so I stayed inside.
Sunday was a huge island wide church service. The whole island met in the village of Ta’u for church. I felt as though the entire service was a competition between which church choir was better. There are three villages but since the other two villages are so large, they have two choirs each. All five choirs were present to bring their best performance. Again, I couldn’t hear a single thing the pastor said since the sound technicians never think to turn the speakers up! I did get a chance to read through the Samoan bible which was interesting but that was probably the highlight of the service. After church, I huddled into the van to head back over the mountain. Right in the beginning of the village the van stopped and I was told to get out. I didn’t really know what was going on but I followed everyone under a fale. The village of Ta’u gave us goodies to share so one by one the bags of chips, soda, and cookies were handed out among us. It was a nice way to end a long church service.
I didn’t have plans for the rest of Sunday, but knew I wanted to stay out of the house. I decided to go explore the village of Ta’u and invited Crystal and Doug along to join me. We got right in the beginning of the village when the rain came. And came. And continued for probably twenty minutes. But it wasn’t a light drizzle, it was a downpour! The three of us hid under the roof of the health clinic hoping to get invited inside, but we weren’t. Once the rain concluded we continued the walk around the village. During the course of the walk we ran into Husky. Husky is a black and white dog that follows me on my walks to school every morning. I named him Husky because he looks like a Husky. Pretty straightforward stuff here. Husky followed us back to Faleasao, followed me home, followed me to dinner at Doug’s, and then followed me home again around midnight. During the night I ran into a friend, Lionel, who informed me of Husky’s true name: Blacky. I was a little upset with this name change, but decided it was for the best since he actually listens to that name. Monday morning I woke up and Blacky was gone. The neighbor’s old, decrepit dog was mad that Blacky was coming around so I was worried for him. I found out from Blacky’s owner that he actually made it home for breakfast that morning, so all is well!
Monday morning I started out with a quick run before my fishing date with Leafa and Crystal. At 10 AM I went over to Leafa’s for our planned departure. We ended up leaving around 11 AM with one of the locals, Spanky. Spanky brought us on a hike behind my house out to the beach to go fishing. Low tide made the water much easier to deal with. The trip was a lot of fun and I was able to act like a monkey and climb all over rocks along the shore. Around 2 PM we headed back for some much needed water and food. I decided I wasn’t tired enough for the day and left after a half an hour to go play volleyball with the kids in the village. I am getting better at volleyball now and every time I go out to play they allow me to play more and more, it is very exciting! On Monday, we played with the rain pouring down on us. No one was really into playing though so we finished a little early and all ran down to the beach and jumped in! I was a little hesitant, wearing a white shirt and all, but after five minutes didn’t care and jumped in as well. For about twenty minutes we swam around until we were all called out due to sa (6 PM prayer). I was a little bummed to get out, but thought it was a great ending to the day.
It has been a great week due to it being a short school week. All the students are really pumped for our pep rally tomorrow and have been practicing all week. Hopefully I will have some cool pictures to show after tomorrow!
Love,
Gretchen
September 9th
The Swains Atoll trip was a no go. Saunoa was confused about where exactly the boat was going and I ended up just staying home in Ta’u. My roommate, Josh, had his girlfriend, Holly, over for the weekend so I stayed away exploring. If it wasn’t for all the rain we received, I probably would have only seen Holly once or twice. Unfortunately, the rain was never-ending all weekend.
Friday night I went over to Doug’s house for dinner so that I could give Holly and Josh alone time. On Saturday I went over to Leafa’s house to help her with the boat shipment. Leafa is a mid-40’s woman who owns one of the three stores in the village. A big shipment came in on Friday so I told her I would help her sort it out. When I went over on Saturday she surprised me with breakfast: eggs, sausage, and toast. Even though I already ate it was a nice surprise and filled me up until dinner time. Around 1 o’clock I left Leafa’s and decided I wanted to walk over to Fitiuta. Fitiuta is the village on the east coast of Ta’u. The walk is about two hours when there isn’t any rain. Crystal and I spent three and a half hours walking to Fitiuta! We received a few rain showers, a couple of cars stopping to ask us if we were lost (on the only road in Ta’u!), and a couple of unwanted dog followers. I believe I picked a perfect day for the walk. Due to all the rain the temperature was a bit cooler than normal which made for a pleasant stroll. Since we arrived so late in the day we decided to catch a ride back to Faleasao. For the remainder of the night the rain decided to not let up so I stayed inside.
Sunday was a huge island wide church service. The whole island met in the village of Ta’u for church. I felt as though the entire service was a competition between which church choir was better. There are three villages but since the other two villages are so large, they have two choirs each. All five choirs were present to bring their best performance. Again, I couldn’t hear a single thing the pastor said since the sound technicians never think to turn the speakers up! I did get a chance to read through the Samoan bible which was interesting but that was probably the highlight of the service. After church, I huddled into the van to head back over the mountain. Right in the beginning of the village the van stopped and I was told to get out. I didn’t really know what was going on but I followed everyone under a fale. The village of Ta’u gave us goodies to share so one by one the bags of chips, soda, and cookies were handed out among us. It was a nice way to end a long church service.
I didn’t have plans for the rest of Sunday, but knew I wanted to stay out of the house. I decided to go explore the village of Ta’u and invited Crystal and Doug along to join me. We got right in the beginning of the village when the rain came. And came. And continued for probably twenty minutes. But it wasn’t a light drizzle, it was a downpour! The three of us hid under the roof of the health clinic hoping to get invited inside, but we weren’t. Once the rain concluded we continued the walk around the village. During the course of the walk we ran into Husky. Husky is a black and white dog that follows me on my walks to school every morning. I named him Husky because he looks like a Husky. Pretty straightforward stuff here. Husky followed us back to Faleasao, followed me home, followed me to dinner at Doug’s, and then followed me home again around midnight. During the night I ran into a friend, Lionel, who informed me of Husky’s true name: Blacky. I was a little upset with this name change, but decided it was for the best since he actually listens to that name. Monday morning I woke up and Blacky was gone. The neighbor’s old, decrepit dog was mad that Blacky was coming around so I was worried for him. I found out from Blacky’s owner that he actually made it home for breakfast that morning, so all is well!
Monday morning I started out with a quick run before my fishing date with Leafa and Crystal. At 10 AM I went over to Leafa’s for our planned departure. We ended up leaving around 11 AM with one of the locals, Spanky. Spanky brought us on a hike behind my house out to the beach to go fishing. Low tide made the water much easier to deal with. The trip was a lot of fun and I was able to act like a monkey and climb all over rocks along the shore. Around 2 PM we headed back for some much needed water and food. I decided I wasn’t tired enough for the day and left after a half an hour to go play volleyball with the kids in the village. I am getting better at volleyball now and every time I go out to play they allow me to play more and more, it is very exciting! On Monday, we played with the rain pouring down on us. No one was really into playing though so we finished a little early and all ran down to the beach and jumped in! I was a little hesitant, wearing a white shirt and all, but after five minutes didn’t care and jumped in as well. For about twenty minutes we swam around until we were all called out due to sa (6 PM prayer). I was a little bummed to get out, but thought it was a great ending to the day.
It has been a great week due to it being a short school week. All the students are really pumped for our pep rally tomorrow and have been practicing all week. Hopefully I will have some cool pictures to show after tomorrow!
Love,
Gretchen
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)