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