The Grocery Store Incident:
Last month their was a small sale in front of the grocery store on canned Chicken Noodle, and Past & Bean soup for .75 cents! It was only about a month past the due date so Jake and I decided to buy “all” of the cans instead of letting a deal like that go to waste.
Well 1 month later, we happened to come back to the store after getting our stipend and saw the cans out front again, without the .75 cent sign though. This time Jodi decided to get some as well and bought 2 cans at .75 cents again. After realizing me and Jake were about to take “all” the cans again, she opted to buy 3 more before Jake and I were done getting the rest of our stuff.
After the store clerks realized we were about to buy “all” of the cans, and knowing their wasn’t a legitimate sign out front for the deal, she charged Jodi 1$ a can the 2nd time around. Now after hearing this, Jake and I immediately decided that an extra .25 cents was not worth an old can of soup, and immediately started re-stacking all the cans back on table out front.
Almost immediately a different clerk realized what was going on and asked us what our problem with the cans were. We told him we thought the cans were .75 cents instead of a $1 and he told us they were .75 cents and walked back to talk with the cashiers. After getting all the cans “back” in our grocery basket we went and checked out. Jodi happened to be near by and I immediately told the cashier she had over charged the embarassed looking women next to me for her soup cans, and the cashier begrudgingly pulled out .75 cents from the cash register and gave it to Jodi. Jake and I happened to be quite pleased with ourselves over the whole episode, but again Jodi was quite embarrassed on the way back.
The moral of the story being, “don’t mess with America”.

Now that I’ve covered some of the major areas I’ll try to give a couple of interesting anecdotes about our stay here.

The Bird Cave Incident:
Kosrae happens to have a large “bird” cave on the island. Thousands of birds make their “bird-spit” nests on the ceilings and apparently people gather the droppings to sell as fertilizer. It gets pretty gross if you walk to far in so the first time me and Jake just ran up unhindered, took a quick video of the entrance and then left.
The 2nd time we took Jodi (the other SM) with us and their happen to be a couple guys sitting about 50 yards from the entrance to the cave. We politely asked if it was alright if we went and took a gander at the cave, and they said it wasn’t a problem so we went up for a couple minutes and came back down.
After coming down from the cave the guys demanded we each pay them a 2$ admission fee for our 5 minutes stay. Now you’ll have to understand that Jake and I had been there before and had never heard or seen anything about an admission fee, so we were very skeptical of who these random people were. We immediately asked them why we should give them money and who they were. One of the guys replied that he lived in a little house near the entrance of the cave, and that this was his property. We then asked if their was any signs saying anything about an admission fee and they pointed out to a little sign near the main road about 150 yards away. Now, knowing we had a girl with us and didn’t want to make too much of a deal quite yet we tactfully asked if we could go take a look at this “sign” of theirs. After walking all the way out to the sign and looking high and low for any type of admission fee we had Jodi stay with the car and me and Jake walked back over to finish our conversation with the guys.
Now some of you are probably reading this and saying 2$ really isn’t that much, and you guys as missionaries should have done the Christian thing and just payed up and walked away, which is what Jodi was thinking… But when your income is $200 a month for food and supplies, we weren’t about to lose 1% of it on some 5 minute sightseeing.
Since these guys were a bit smaller then me, I wasn’t feeling very threatened, so Jake and I strolled over and ever so politely told them their sign said nothing of the sort. We also happily asked them if they could show us any deed they had to the property we would happily pay them the admission. After realizing we weren’t the kind of Americans to be trifled with they immediately blamed us for their troubles and said, “we should have known” and to “just go”, at which we happily turned around and walked away triumphantly. Jodi was quite embarrassed about the whole event but she mellowed out after we got a couple miles down the road.
The moral of the story being, “Don’t mess with America”.

Hey Guys!

You’ll have to forgive me for not updating my blog for the past couple months, but we (my roomate Jacob Giem and I) have just recently acquired internet in our apartment. Before now, we had been forced to drive to a hotel part way around the island, and were hard at work just keeping up with the emails from friends and family, let alone write a good blog entry. So here it is.

About the Island:
Let me start off with saying Kosrae (Kosher-eye) has got to be one of the most beautiful islands I have ever seen. I had been warned that some islands down in the South Pacific were not much more then a couple miles of sand and building. Kosrae is nothing like that. It’s mountains and thick jungles remind me of the island of Kauaii in the Hawaiian Islands. Looking down upon it’s large bay in Tofol is a mountain range called “The Sleeping Lady” which gives the resemblance of a woman laying down looking face upward. The island is completely surrounded by reefs and rocks up to 200 yards off shore, and the snorkeling and diving is supposed to be spectacular. Eel grass grows between the coral in places and bright blue starfish can be found hiding here and there. If you go out just beyond the waves where it starts to get a little deeper, black sea urchins giving off a fluorescent blue color in the sunlight hide under rocks and in holes. Angel fish and small bright turquoise fish, along with plenty of others, swim to and fro under the waves, above brain coral the size of large boulders.

The island is given freedom of religion but supposedly there is a Sunday Law that applies to anybody non-SDA. Everyone is “supposed” to go to the protestant/congregational churches around the island and all stores/business’s (except for one SDA owned one) are closed. The ocean is supposed to be off limits as well on Sunday, so out of respect for the people we try to stay out of it over the weekend.

The people & food:
The people on the island seem to be very sociable and nice as well. There are 2 SDA churches on the island, one across from our apartment here in Tafunsak, and another on the other side of the island near the town of Malem. The church members have taken it upon themselves to try and help us SM’s best they can. They have assigned church members to try and bring us some sort of exotic or interesting food at least once on their week. Last week the Malem church happily gave us a “bunch” of bananas, along with 2 heads of lettuce, and a bag of small island eggplant and peppers which we gratefully appreciated. Along with the precious care packages from home we seem to be doing not bad at all. Although ice-cream costs an arm and a leg here the last “bunch” of bananas we were given decided to ripen in a single day. This forced us to peel over 100 bananas and freeze them before they went bad. Now I’m not sure how many of you have ever tasted or seen an apple banana, but they are 10x sweeter and 2x smaller than the ones at home, and when frozen make an excellent snack tasting like a sort of banana gelato. So even though we don’t have ice-cream the bananas definitely make up for it.

The Society:
The people here seem to definitely go by “island” time as well. Here in Tafunsak nothing seems to really happen except for canoe races during the holiday’s. You would be amazed at how many holiday’s they have here as well. If I remember correctly, their is only going to be 1 “full” week of school this next month. The rest are dotted with random holiday’s from “Self Government day” to “United Nations day” and beyond. Being new teachers, they are greatly appreciated and give us some nice breaks when we seem to need them them the most though, so we can’t complain.

The Kids & Teaching:
The kids and teaching are definitely a lot of work. Whether it’s working hours after school to try and get everything graded and in the book, or preparing for next day’s lectures it’s definitely not a task taken lightly. I have just recently taken to only teaching Freshmen Biology and the computer classes, but soon I believe I will be tackling the accounting of the school as well. Jacob Giem (my roommate) is currently teaching the rest of the Freshmen classes, and Jodi (the other SM) is teaching the 3rd, 4th, and 5th grades.

I would have to say one of the biggest challenges some of these kids face is the lack of motivation. Not all of them are that way, but almost half of the kids here just seem to not really care about how they do in school. Being from America and actually seeing what people can become and do is hard to explain to kids who have never even been off this island. Some of them don’t seem to really have any aspirations to become much, and it really makes a teacher think hard about what they can possibly say to show them the bigger picture. We do the best we can though.