8/12/07

The practicum is over. It went fine… we started to lose more and more kids each day. I taught an entire unit on coral. What is coral, how an atoll is formed by coral (on top of a sinking volcano), the importance of coral… anyways, I’m coral’ed out for a while.
We are all very ready to leave this living situation. Living out of a suitcase for a month is not fun. Most people only use half of their beds because the other half is covered in stuff, and all of our sheets have sand and dirt on them even though they’ve been washed recently. I promised I wouldn’t talk about roaches anymore, but I have to share this one… I woke up and went digging through my suitcase for some immodium (a very useful drug in this country), but when I grabbed the plastic container it was in a roach crawled around from the other side of the bag and onto my arm. I swatted it down and it fell into the suitcase. I zipped the suitcase shut, had breakfast, took a shower, and then unloaded every item in my suitcase until I found it hiding in the very bottom. I will never “get used to” cockroaches. Never.
We finally met our Ebeye principals! They are really funny. We went out to dinner with them at the same place we were supposed to originally – they claimed they were there the time before, but we all know that’s not true because if they had been they would have known the 5 white people were us. But they were cool. I asked mine how much it would cost to buy a dingy boat and he said, “why don’t we make a canoe?” Sounds good to me. What isn’t so good is that Connor and Alex, the two guys working at the elementary school on Ebeye (the feeder for my high school), have no housing yet. Each of the principals thought it was the others’ responsibility to get it. No volunteers have ever lived on Ebeye, which is a slum, so the elementary principal just assumed they would live on Gugeegue with us. Turns out there is no room for them. Until they find permanent housing they will be living with Boomer and Ashley, who have their own two bedroom house. I’ll be living in a two bedroom house with Staci, a girl who was a volunteer last year but hopefully will sign a contract this year. In reality, we have no idea how this will all work out – but that is the tentative plan.
Today we drove out to Laura, pretty much the most beautiful beach on the Majuro Atoll. It’s way outside of the city, and as far away as you can drive. It took 45 minutes in a HUGE flatbed truck (think a scaled down version of a semi, with 12 wheels) that I drove with 29 people in the back and all of their snorkeling equipment. Somehow, this morning, I was elected to drive the truck by the people organizing the trip (only 5 people can drive stick out of the 45 of us, apparently). It was not an enviable position. When we went to pick the car up, my shirt was literally soaked through with sweat by the time we got from the dealer to the diesel gas station. This was because of several reasons.
1. This was the largest thing I have ever driven – maybe 3 normal cars long, wider than an excursion.
2. I had no idea what to do if anything were to go wrong. I didn’t even have a Marshallese drivers license (which didn’t seem to be a problem for the dealer), let alone insurance.
3. Have you ever driven in a developing country? Holy shit.

So, when we added 29 people to the back it was even more stressful, but once I got comfortable it was fine. Laura was amazing. If I were living on Majuro I would find a way to get out there at least once a month.