3/19/08
I’m back from a week long spring break in Pohnpei, one of the Federated States of Micronesia. No, it’s not a fictional place – it’s real and it’s pretty awesome. The trip was great, mostly thanks to my friend Michaela, who is a WorldTeacher there. I tried to jam as much in as possible, and it worked out really well.
I arrived on Saturday, met up with Michaela at the airport, and was immediately dumbfounded by the mountains. I knew that it had mountains, but I could not get over how geologically different it was from the RMI, only a 2 hour plane trip away. There were also mangroves, streams, rivers, waterfalls, and did I mention FRESH WATER?! Everywhere. The capital of Pohnpei is Kolonia, a small city comparable to Majuro in everything except its elevation, which is more than Majuro’s maximum 5 feet above sea level.
On Sunday, Michaela and I had brunch with some expats at the world famous “Village,” an ecotourist’s dream come true. The Village is about a 15 minute car ride from Kolonia, on a paved (wow!) road. It’s a bunch of grass huts built into the side of a mountain, each with two water beds, electricity, and mahogany floors. Their restaurant is completely open and overlooks the water and the famous Sokehs Rock, and probably has the best food on the island. The view was unreal, and when combined with some mouth-watering macadamia nut banana pancakes and bacon… well… life was good.
After brunch, we hit up Lididuniap Falls, one of the many waterfalls on the island. I’ve heard that Pohnpei is second only to Kauai in terms of annual rainfall, but we were lucky enough to get hit by the rain while we were swimming in the waterfall, which made it more enjoyable.
On Tuesday, I hiked Sokehs Ridge by myself, which is a huge rock formation often compared to diamond head. It overlooks Kolonia. After the hike, I met up with Ken and Debbie, the American couple that lives on Gugeegue, for dinner at the Village. They also decided to spring break in Pohnpei.
Wednesday was scuba day number 1. Diving turned out to be much harder to arrange than expected. When you get off the plane in Pohnpei, you can get a free travel pamphlet that has a directory of about 10 dive shops on the island. After going through all of them and getting nothing but disconnects and confused wrong numbers, I realized they were not real dive shops, but dive shop ideas that existed at some point in ambitious Micronesian’s mind but were never followed through with. I went to the Village to ask if they could help me out – since I would be going alone, they offered to take me on a two tank dive for $200. Ouch. That is over $100 an hour. Sorry, can’t do it. Michaela to the rescue – she knew someone who had been diving here with someone who might work at more than just a dive shop idea. Well, it was much more. Tony, a half Pohnpeian half American ex-marine ran a small business that ran out of a shack with 3 old, empty-hulled boats propped up on trailors in the front yard. We made arrangements to meet Tuesday morning and he never showed up. On Wednesday, he was more than an hour late, and we weren’t in the water until eleven. He never asked to see my certification card and he never made me sign anything. Very unusual. We were about to get in the water at our first dive site when he asks me how long I’ve been diving. Then he asks what the deepest I’d been to was. I told my certification was only to a maximum of 60 feet, but that in Majuro they’d taken me to 75. He sad okay, and flung himself over the side of the boat. I had only just managed to catch up with him under water when I started to realize something was very wrong. We were very deep. I looked at my depth gauge: 105 feet. Hmm, I thought, that’s very deep,

…… but look at that really cool sea anemone. Wow, this is soooo coooooollll…. I’m under the OOOOcean… look, you can’t even see the top!!! I wonder if I can do a back flip down here with my gear on? What a neat fishy …….

I was narc’d. The technical term is nitrogen narcosis. Basically, when you go too deep too fast and your brain doesn’t get enough oxygen. It happens often, but usually you’re expecting it and they train you for it when you get advanced diving certifications. It didn’t even register with me until we were on our way back up that I had been diving under the influence of nitrogen. Yikes. Thankfully, nothing too exciting happened on the first dive anyway – the place we went to had been largely wiped out by the invasive coral-eating crown-of-thorns starfish, which has been known to destroy entire reefs. The second dive of the day was at Manta road, a place with two underwater cliffs on either side of the diver that manta rays often swim through. Our boat ride there was treacherous. The boat, which was not a dive boat but just an empty fiberglass shell with tanks sliding around inside, was slamming up against the waves at high speed. At one point a life jacket flew out of the back and Tony never even noticed. When we got to manta road, I hurried into the water, worried that if I hesitated that my conscience wouldn’t let me do another dive with him. I had my gear on, floating in the water, when I noticed a black mass with a 7 foot wingspan soaring by about 40 feet below me. I told Tony to hurry please, we’re missing the show, but he couldn’t find his mask. Apparently it had blown off the boat with the jacket. He looked over the side at me and said, “well… why don’t you just go ahead.” Uh…. What? “…I’m… I’m not doing the dive alone.” He said “What are you scared? Ha ha ha ha.” I didn’t say anything. Instead I sat there floating, angrily imagining driving back in his boat at breakneck speed without diving while the mantas laughed at me from below. I waited. He finally found a spare. We descended. At a 7 foot wingspan, the midsized manta did a flyby from about 5 feet away from me. I was humbled. It is now my goal to see a full sized adult before I leave the RMI.
Thursday, my Gugeegue friends and I took a tour with the Village to see the Nan Madol ruins. It is a man-made archipelago built on a coral reef from about 500-1500AD. Each island served a difference purpose, and all of them were connect by canoe-accessible canals, making it the “Venice of the Pacific.” The coolest island was, of course, the king’s, where huge boulders of basalt had been cut out of a nearby mountain and piled on top of each other to create walls, tombs, and a meditation chamber. No one knows how the boulders were transported to the islands… some weigh over a ton, and there’s no evidence of any kind of tool being used. Island legend tells of levitation powers. At the end of the tour, I went back to the Village. My friends and I played scrabble on the outermost deck of the restaurant while watching the sunset on Sokehs Rock before ordering dinner.
Friday was scuba day number 2. This time Tony was two hours late, but he gave me a free polo to make up for it. While I knew that I was lucky to be alive after a first day of diving, he was my only connection, and I had conceded that scubadiving in Micronesia might not be such a bad way to go. He took me to a site called Black Coral, which during March is a Grouper sanctuary. When we got in, at about 70 feet you could see all of the 2-3 feet long groupers fighting over spawning territory at the bottom. It was like Planet Earth. The highlight of the trip, however, was seeing 3 rather large Gray Reef Sharks cruise by us in formation. Seeing a small white tip or black tip is pretty much guaranteed on every dive, but these Grays were a special treat. While Tony estimated them to be at about 9 feet, I guessed somewhere from 6 – 8 feet. They were not interested in us, and simply continued cruising in formation. Sharks are not aggressive. Unless you are chumming or carrying around a bloody fish in your hand, you are not likely to get noticed unless it’s a tiger shark, whom I would not be opposed to eradicating from the worlds’ oceans.
Saturday was Sokehs Rock climbing time. Sokehs Ridge is a fairly easy climb that can actually be driven most of the way, providing a good view of a massive rock between it and the ocean. The Sokehs Rock hike puts you on top of that massive rock, and is perilously dangerous. At one point in the hike I used a hanging vine to traverse a gully. At another point I was clinging to a rusting metal electrical pipe (that was once used to bring power to an antennae at the top of the rock) while trying to find a foothold on a 75 degree rock face. When we got to the top, two weary endemic owls flew off the edge. If you google pictures of Sokehs, imagine me standing on top of the huge rock.
On Sunday, a few WorldTeachers went to the south end of the island (about 45 minutes in the car) to try hiking the legendary six waterfalls. Our guide (one of the teacher’s students) wasn’t there, but we wandered around the tiny rural area until we ran into his brother and a friend, who took us. I didn’t know that places like that actually existed. All of the waterfalls looked fake, like they were CGI’d into fantasy movies. For the last one, the grand finale, we swam through an 8 foot wide and 30 yard long canal of unknown depth, with towering sheets of flat rock rising up on either side of us, in the middle of the jungle, and finally ended up in a pool fed by water coming down 20 feet from a huge heart shaped hole in a rock. It was a great way to end the trip.

2/24/08
The sense of relief brought to me by looking out my back window to see two giant catchments full to brim with clear, beautiful, freshwater is hard to explain. I feel like I won something. Dry season isn’t technically over, but we got hit by a relentless storm that has put most of Gugeegue under water. I was explaining how weird it was to turn on the faucet and wonder if water would come out (the catchments were down to about 6 inches before the storm) to my dad – “yeah, but when you get back, you’ll be shopping at Ralph Lauren and wondering if you should swap out your kitchen counters for granite.” While I don’t plan on owning a kitchen any time soon, I am curious about how I will reintegrate into other parts of American life. I think it will be pretty hard to spend $50 on polo after living on $300 a month for a year.
I am a softball coach. We are playing in the intramural league on Kwaj. It’s fun, and when there aren’t enough kids I play too. There’s no place to practice on Ebeye or Gugeegue though (there isn’t enough space) so we just go to the games and do our best – sometimes we have about 5 minutes for warm up before the game, and on the boat over I make them review their positions and batting order.
Times on the base are stressful. The commander is “reducing the footprint” because of budget cuts, and the axe is falling on about 30% of jobs this summer, and people are starting to find out who’s getting the boot. While it’s stressful enough for the Kwajalites, it’s also going to have a huge impact on the Marshallese in Ebeye. Everyone household employs a Marshallese maid, and most departments getting cut are serviced by Marshallese employees. In the long run, it’s probably good for the RMI not to be dependent on this unreliable service economy, but the structural adjustment is going to be harsh, as if unemployment issues weren’t bad enough already.
In other news, I’m meeting with all of the seniors at KAHS individually to discuss their plans for next year. For better or for worse (and it’s certainly arguable), almost all of them have the option to slide in to classes at the College of the Marshall Islands (CMI) in Majuro next year. I say “slide” because it doesn’t require any prerequisites – they take a placement test which determines if they can take credit classes or remedial pre-credit courses. No one is denied admission. The college has nursing, education, business administration, computer, and “liberal arts” programs, but their accreditation was just reinstated after being revoked a couple of years ago, and the quality and efficacy of the school is questionable, especially given its role as a one-stop-shop for all higher education in the country. There are very few other viable options for these kids. One is the University of the South Pacific (USP), which has a Majuro satellite campus and is based in Fiji. I’m not too familiar with it yet. About 40 kids start there every year, while 600 start at CMI (only about 9% of which will receive their AA degree in 2 years). Another 20 or so kids head out to Palau Community College (PCC), in the Micronesian island nation of Palau. PCC is more vocationally oriented, and the standards of education are generally higher in Palau than any other Micronesian country. Because this is our first year with a graduating class, most schools aren’t aware we exist. PCC responded to my request to send out a recruiter by promising to mail out admissions and financial aid info, which is a start.
What about the states? Well, there are a few problems with that. The first is – they are not academically prepared. They haven’t taken the TOEFL, or the SATs, or the ACTs, and don’t have the resources (financially or even physically) to take them. If they were prepared for a 2-year community or junior college or vocational school, which wouldn’t require those tests, there are other problems. The money is the first one. They can use American federal financial aid (like Pell Grants), but anyone who has gone through the college admissions process lately knows that compared to the costs of education those grants are a joke, especially if you can’t even scrounge up $50 for an application fee. Scholarships are available from their own government, but like everything else here, they are unreliable, inefficient, and you have to tear through a mess of beauro-web just to get any information about them. One important piece of information about RMI scholarships, however, is that students who have performed well at CMI already are given preference. Finally, even if they have the money, the cultural transition is often insurmountable. Responsibility, accountability, and motivation are not words used to characterize much in schools here, and expecting an 18-year-old to become a student over night in the midst of new temptations like broadband internet, cable tv, cheap drugs and alcohol, and seven elevens is as ridiculous as thinking the student is likely to come back to the RMI if he or she succeeds in the states.
For now, it seems like the most responsible thing for me to do is direct them into any college and encourage them to have a plan, and ask them to talk to their parents about it. The only concrete objective of the meetings is to make sure they all have an email address.

2/14/08
This last weekend was a 4-day weekend because of Liberation Day in Kwajalein Atoll, the day when the Americans came and killed all the Japanese occupying it during World War II. It was supposed to be a fun weekend. It did not go as expected.
The projector in my house broke. The lamp burnt out, and a replacement costs $500. The dvd-rom drive on my computer stopped recognizing discs. I now have no way to watch movies in my house. Very sad.
On Saturday morning, someone came to the door at 800am trying to use the minibus they gave Conor and Alex for the commute since they are now homeless and are sleeping on the furniture in our living rooms. It was the same guy who is a teacher at the elementary school and brings his budweisers with him to class and tried to fight the principal. I answered the door and told him to go away and then shut the door in his face.
On Sunday morning, my principal knocked on the door at 615am, wearing dress pants, a tank top, and a winter jacket, and wanted to know if he could borrow our projector. I told him it was broken but the other one was in Laura’s house. I guess he decided it would be better not to wake Laura, because he drove all the way back to Ebeye without a projector.
On Sunday, I cleaned my entire house. I did this because our WorldTeach assistant field director invited the Senator of Kwajalein, the Ambassador to the RMI from USA, and our whatever-of-education from Ebeye schools guy to my house for breakfast on Monday. The primary purpose was to discuss the future of the program with the Senator, since we haven’t been receiving much outreach from the community in terms of helping Conor and Alex do their jobs in Ebeye. Anyways, we were ready with coffee, tea, muffins, and sliced apples, and an immaculate house. No one showed. They completely blew us off. It was just as well – I have met all 3 of these people before, and no meeting involving any of them could ever be productive.
The rest of Monday was also disappointing because we were unable to get into Ebeye to see the festivities. Our school was involved in athletic events, and there were all kinds of races, tournaments, and an outrigger sailing competition that we missed because no one bothered to provide us with transportation even though we had all expressed interest.
One part of the festivities on Monday was a 7-mile run from the far end of Gugeegue to the far end of Ebeye along the causeway. I had been excited to run in it for months. Word on the street was that it would start at 3, but when I went out at 3 no one was on the causeway, so I went inside. Mr. Ken came over at 4 to say that he just saw about 30 people leaving on the run. I quickly changed clothes, put on my shoes, and grabbed my ipod after just having eaten a pb&j sandwich, and started sprinting down the causeway. I caught up with the last place person (who had already begun walking) after about 1 mile. I found out later that I started about 6 or 7 minutes after everyone else did. I finished the 7-mile race in 6th place in 50 minutes. It was fun, but I was a little disappointed because I’m certain I would have been in the top 3 if I had been able to start with everyone else. There was serious prize money involved – first place was around $100, and I received $15 for 6th. The race was mostly Marshallese men, but there were some Filipinos that ran and one enterprising American high schooler from Kwaj that came in second. I got to run parts of the race with a few students of mine who were brave enough to run, and tried to keep up in their bare feet. We offered them shoes but they are apparently more comfortable running without them. About 1/3 of the men ran without shoes. I almost broke my ankles 5 times with shoes – I wouldn’t have made it a quarter of a mile without them. About 2,000 people lined the streets of Ebeye to watch the race. They were very encouraging, which was great. My hope is that maybe some of them will now know my name, and call me Matt instead of just ripelle (American, or literally “person who wears clothes”) next time I’m in town.

1/28/08
Detention is working. Attendance is better. The best part about it is that the kids never know which experience they’re going to get – Staci teaches, Laura lets them do homework, Debbie makes them clean, Altred makes them write lines…. I make them sit there and do NOTHING. Absolutely nothing. With their eyes open and their heads up. It’s torturous. I just bring a book and occasionally glance up at them.
Alex and Boomer had their first basketball game playing in the community league on Friday night. The community basketball league is the most important thing that happens in Ebeye all year. Since Boomer and Alex live in here, they play for Gugeegue. All of Ebeye is divided up into rival neighborhoods that also have teams. The game was against Mon-ku-bok, a neighborhood that is usually the clear favorite every year. Ashley was the only woman at the game. There were hundreds, however, HUNDREDS, of little kids. And lots of men. It was the scrappiest game of basketball I have ever seen. Every time Alex rebounded, he was repeatedly slapped and jabbed and tomahawked without any calls. He described the court as “treacherous,” since it is uneven concrete and poorly lit in places, lined with little kids that usually are not paying any attention to what is going on. It was also extremely fast paced. They went for the fast break every time. Despite these challenges, Alex and Boomer led Gugeegue to do something never done before – they beat Mon-ku-bok. They may or may not have ignited a neighborhood gang war. Oh well. I said to a colleague during the game, “this is the hardest I have ever seen a Marshallese person work at anything,” which, sadly, is true (although their handicrafts are clearly very work-intensive). The colleague replied, “except getting drunk.” While cynical, it sometimes seems that basketball and getting drunk are the only talents the unemployed men on Ebeye have. Of course, there aren’t many other options for most of them.
Laura got ciguatera. Microsoft word is not yelling at me, so I hope that is how you spell it. She was poisoned by an eel she ate. Her fingers and toes became numb, and her tongue felt strange. She was admitted to the hospital in Ebeye and prescribed steroids. She seems better now, but I will not be trying eel any time soon.
One bus stopped working. The schedule is sustainable, but the bus driver whose bus still works sometimes refuses to make 6 trips a day (which is what the schedule requires), so, for example, on Friday kids were here until 6:30pm waiting for a bus that never came. They may have had to walk home.
I am making an effort to go to Pohnpei, one of the Federated States of Micronesia, for my spring break in March. The ticket is $500. It is a 1 and a half hour flight. Continental Airlines is clearly enjoying its Micronesian monopoly. Online, the ticket is $780 but I am told that it will be cheaper at the Continental counter on Kwaj. More news on that as it develops.

1/17/08
When it rains in New York, or Los Angeles, or Hawaii (where some readers of this blog apparently live), it is generally thought of negatively. Rain is usually gloomy, cold, and sometimes depressing. Today it rained here in Gugeegue, and I was the opposite of depressed. It poured. It rained so much that a third of our students decided for themselves that school was cancelled (“Mr., we’re made of chocolate, we’ll melt”). Rain usually is not that important to me, but today it is. We are almost 1/3 of the way through with the dry season (from what I am told) and the two huge tanks of water in my backyard (think 8 foot diameter, 7 feet tall) that provide my drinking, showering, and flushing water are full. This is very good.
Unfortunately, this rainy day of truancy coincided with our new attempt to control absences – we are experimenting with a new detention system. For all of the students who missed 2 classes without an excuse (note) on Wednesday and Thursday of this week, there will be detention tomorrow afternoon with yours truly. As of tonight, I will have 99 detainees. That is literally a third of our school. Hopefully, it will get their attention, but I’m going to have to get some more people to help out or it’s going to be “fun after school party time with mr. matt.” That would not be good.
Our veteran married American teacher gave me a thermometer the other day. She left in my house, where it sat for two days. It was stuck on 90 degrees the whole time it was in there, so I brought it back and told her it was broken. She said, “Matt, it’s not broken, it really is 90 degrees in your house.” She put it in the freezer for five minutes, took it out, and it read 28 degrees. She was right. It’s so hot in my house that I thought the thermometer was broken. The funny thing is, I’m not really hot anymore. When it rains I wear a jacket and wish I’d brought PJs. Can I ever go back? (speaking of, if you do have any suggestions for future employment when I come back, I am all ears.)
Alex just asked me to guess how old this Marshallese guy we know is. I guessed, 60, but then I guessed 45 – the truth is, it’s impossible to tell. The life expectancy is in the low 60s, and they don’t really have any semblance of health-consciousness, so you really have no idea how old people are. Alex said, “Yeah, well they’re taking me down with them. I’m in the worst shape of my life.” Alex has no kitchen and lives in Ebeye, so he eats most of his meals at the fried chicken-parts-that-aren’t-breasts-but-might-be-wings-or-drumsticks-on-a-good-day vendor in the tiny little grocery store. We signed up for a one year here, but really it’s a five year commitment. What they don’t tell you is that you lose the other four years at the end… when you’re dead.

1/16/08

We have a new government. The new President made a visit to Ebeye last week. I am already skeptical, however, because one of my students was giving me a report (informally) on his speech, and he promised there would be 3 planes and 2 new boats by the end of the month, and that the “American money will pour down like rain on Ebeye.” Those are hard, if not impossible promises to keep. Oh yeah, and he said he’s really excited and happy to be President… great.
A friend of mine, an Australian who works at the Marshallese EPA in Majuro, came out to Gugeegue yesterday. He’s in town because there is a boat that is half sunk that is blocking the port at Ebeye, and the Matson stevedore company has refused to deliver some things because of it. He’s going to do a dive and recommend strategies for removing it. He is also presenting a proposal for fisheries protection, since our reef fish have been utterly depleted in this atoll by individual spearfishing – I don’t feel too guilty though, I’ve only caught about 10 fish since I’ve been here. He was telling me how the fecal chloroform levels in the ocean and lagoon around Ebeye are off the charts – basically, there’s poop in the water everywhere, and it’s not safe. I asked if while he was out here he might do the same tests at Gugeegue.
Alex and Connor will most likely be moving back in with us at Gugeegue. They discovered over Christmas break that the Ministry of Education had never paid their landlord for their apartment once over the last 3 months. They are a little dismayed with the whole situation, including WorldTeach’s lack of oversight to ensure something like this didn’t happen. Alex has already moved back in and is sleeping on our couch because he had an allergic reaction to the toxic mold that is growing there.

1/9/08

Happy New Year. Mine is.
I got to spend Christmas in Honolulu with my family. While I was there, a couple of RMI related things happened. One was sad, one was uplifting. A waitress at the hotel restaurant was also a teacher at the local Waianae homeless shelter. Apparently half of the homeless kids are Marshallese, and the other half are Chuukese (sp?), another Micronesian place (Chuuk). That was sad. Many of them save enough money to buy the plane ticket, but arrive with no skills and no connections – hence the homeless shelters. The other thing that was unexpected was finding a wall of Marshallese handicrafts for sale in the Turtle Bay Resort Gift Shop on the North Shore, all labeled “Polynesian Handicrafts,” an assaulting inaccuracy. The bags that I bought my mother and sister for $30-something were only $175…. If anyone is in the market for starting a non-profit, setting up connections between American retailers and Marshallese handicraft makers might be fruitful. The handicrafts are awesome – Oprah has purportedly listed the “Kili bag” as one of her 100 favorite things ever. Google it. Shockingly, the Marshall Islands were not able to provide 100 bags within a week for her audience as requested. Zeut.
One would think that my return to the United States would have been shocking and culturally stimulating. Alas, returning from international sojourns has become a bit old hat. Much more startling was my return to Majuro, the capital city of the Marshalls where I spent my first month here orienting. When I arrived in Majuro the first time in August, I noticed poverty, was overwhelmed by the lack of modern conveniences, and felt very uncomfortable. After having spent five months in Ebeye, Majuro is a thriving metropolis. There are stores, small businesses, hotels, restaurants, a jewelry store, handicraft shops, car dealerships, dive shops, a “college”, a conference center, and, well… it’s almost a real city.
My time in Majuro, however, was not all that exciting. In Gugeegue, I have my own bed, my own kitchen, and running water. When I got to Majuro, WorldTeach put us into an apartment that had barely enough floor space for everyone to have their own mat and no water. Not entirely their fault – we were supposed to have water – who knows what happened – the owner said it ran out. But, for the outer islanders who sleep on concrete because it’s too hot to sleep on a mat and haven’t eaten anything but rice for the last 4 weeks because of food shortages, it was awesome. For me… I wanted to go home. Thankfully, that was only for two nights. We were then relocated to the Marshall Islands Resort (formerly the Outrigger), infamous for its brief mention in The Sex Lives of Cannibals (I only had to kill one cockroach though), for the WorldTeach mid-service conference. The conference was mostly for the benefit of the outer islanders’ sanity. We got to see New Years in Majuro, though, which was … interesting. They close down the main strip and sell shots of liquor on the street while children run around throwing firecrackers up in the air and waving glow sticks in your face. After the countdown (which was 6 minutes early) all of the white people on island started dancing in front of the band, followed by eager Marshallese children on sugar highs, and observed by a distinctly non-participatory somber semicircle of Marshallese adults. The division was only broken by the occasional hammered Marshallese 30-something man attempting to sexually harass an American woman.
I just want to clarify something before continuing – while all this was going on, the nation is in the middle of a crisis. The election in November had not been sorted out yet (it made Bush/Gore in 2000 look good), so the country had no government, and the planes have been grounded since septemeber, leaving the outer islands reliant on completely unreliable shipping boats for food supplies, which (surprise) have not been reliable. On top of that, the US military has announced plans to drastically pull out of Kwajalein within the next few years, leaving GAPING holes in the Marshallese service economy on Ebeye, which is second only to the government in terms of number of Marshallese employed. But great, let’s celebrate!..
Now I’m back in Gugeegue. The buses are apparently working… although I am very skeptical. Our head-teacher has devised a bus schedule that will allow us to have school at the same time every day even if there is only one bus working, so hopefully this quarter will be more productive than the last – it wouldn’t be hard.
I’m optimistic though. Something weird happened yesterday, our first day of class - I was really happy to see the little hooligans when they got off the bus. I guess I missed them.