Day 28

January 27, 2010

 

Day 28:

 

 

We moved in!!! Finally, four weeks after we’re supposed to have moved in, we’re finally in the trailers. Most of my day was consumed with getting moved in and getting situated. We  woke up and packed up our sheets and pillows and such. Principal Lenja picked up Ben and I for school as we were waiting for a taxi.

            Class went well. Today we actually wrote out the conflict itself. So yesterday we worked on setting the scene and today we wrote the conflict in as detailed fashion as possible. Like I said, some of the kids are really getting the hang of it and letting their creative juices flow. I’m excited to work with them more individually and fine tune each person’s story.

            After class I went to Payless where I picked up some roach and rat killer for the trailers and the cottage. While there I saw a swarm of people running to one of the refrigerators. I was in the vicinity and I looked to see what the commotion was. They had placed about ten dozen eggs on the rack. I saw this as quite the commodity so I ran, pushed over three old ladies and snagged the last dozen before they leaned on their canes to get off the floor. HAHA I’m kidding. I did rush to get a pack of eggs  though. There were three remaining when I left. They had a sign that said limit one dozen per purchase so I couldn’t snag all of them.

            I left Payless and went to the apartment where I met Robyn. She had been there packing up the end of her things. I took a nap on the couch while she finished up and I waited for Eric and Derek. When they got there it was time to move out. We loaded up Anna Z’s truck with all the luggage and food and she drove us across town to the trailers. By 3:30 we had pretty much everything out of the apartment. Tomorrow’s mission is to go back and clean out the apartment for the next tenants.

            So once everything was put away and everyone was fairly situated we started dinner. Anna was doing breakfast for dinner: pancakes, hash browns, sausage and fried peppers and onions. I had a suspicion that the Bisquick we had was a bit sketchy and I was right. Ben had never made pancakes before and so I was showing him how to do so. When I opened he Bisquick the flour had larvae crawling all in it. The Bisquick we had was in the apartment when we got there. And although the use by date said May 2010, I still wasn’t too comfortable eating it. So we scratched the pancakes. Somewhere in there, the power of our trailer went out twice. So we played with the circuit breaker once and it came back on. The second time, one of the workers just happened to be around and he helped us. Also, the trailer doesn’t have a hot water tank yet so we can’t take showers here. That’s quite the inconvenience! Please Don’t judge. Anyway the dinner turned out fine.

            I found two copies of the World Teach Marshallese Language Manual in the cottage where Professor Garrod and Derek are living. By the way, those two are in the cottage; the remainder of the boys are in one trailer, and the girls are in the other. But I found this book and I’ve been dying to learn the language. This book is exactly what I’ve been looking for. It requires a tad bit of a linguistics background – which I have (QDS!) – and it’s got English pronunciations as well for each letter which is perfect. It’s such a weird language for me because it’s not Latin based. I speak Spanish and English which both come from Latin and have similar spellings and sounds. In Marshallese it’s a completely different language family. In this alphabet h is the English m sound; v is the English L sound; x, s and c are vowels; and all stops are unvoiced unless they appear in specific situations (for my linguists out there, all others don’t worry about it). So I’ve been studying this book hard the last two days. I’m through lesson 7 of 102. I now know how to ask basic questions about how someone’s doing or where they’re going. Today, my last lesson taught me how to talk in the present. Tomorrow I’ll get into the past and the future. Anyway, I did a few lessons of that after dinner. Read some more of The Purpose Driven Life, found some great quotes that really resonated with me. There was a part about how closeness is so crucial in a relationship with people and with God, but it’s the distance that truly measures the bond of a friendship. I thought that was so pertinent to Elani and I. We’ve always enjoyed our time together, but now that we’re thousands of miles away from each other, we’ve come to realize our reciprocal values in each other’s lives. Distance makes the heart grow fonder. After reading a few more chapters, I decided to write this blog and now I’m off to sleep in MY bed for the first time since December 28, 2009 in my own room (and Eric’s). I’m really excited for this, so without further delay, Good night from Majuro.