Look at all those chickens!

Anyone remember this vine (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsLKQTh-Bqo)? This is the reality I live in. Chickens are everywhere. And they crow at all hours of the day/night. If you’ve called or FaceTimed me since I’ve been here, I guarantee you’ve heard at least forty.

This post has been ready for several days now, but the wifi has been horrific this week. We lost our connection both at the volunteer house and at the apartment I live in, so we were down to just the wifi at school, which is extremely slow during the daytime while everyone is using it at work. But after several attempts at fixing the wifi on my own, I was successful. So here we are, together again at last. 

Last Sunday, we had a clearing day on campus, where students can choose to volunteer their afternoon to come to school with their machetes and cut back all of the overgrown trees and plants. Sweet, right?

It was so much fun. I supervised as a few of my students climbed high into the trees and hacked off giant branches. Then other students on the ground would chop them into smaller pieces and drag them deeper into the jungle surrounding the school. It was a great opportunity to spend some time with my students outside of the classroom. They really are cool kids.

some of our students climbed trees and cut open coconuts for us after our afternoon of work.

One of my students handed me his machete and told me to go after a fallen banana tree. You have to cut them down and chop up the trunks after they produce fruit. So I gave it a go. You can watch the video below to see what happened, I promise it won’t disappoint, especially if you expected me to acquire some sick skills while I was gone.

Does this remind anyone of the scene in Titanic where Rose has to cut the handcuffs off of Jack so they can escape the rapid flooding of the ship? Rose goes for help and comes back with a hatchet of some sort, and Jack asks her to “do a couple of practice swings over there.”

So she swings once, and hits the cabinet of a desk floating in the water. He asks her to swing again, pleading her to “hit that same mark again, Rose.” Swing. Direct miss. She hits a spot several inches above and away from the first mark. 

That is me with a machete. That will always be me with a machete. No aim, no game. Good thing I don’t own my own machete, right? WRONG. I’m going to buy one soon, I’m saving up, baby. Getchaselves ready.

weirdo caterpillar.

After the clearing, we had a Mass outside under the big, shady tree on campus for the students and their families. They brought TONS of food for us to feast on afterwards. So we got to meet many parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, siblings, and cousins of our students as well as eat some really delicious local food and pizza and cookies — all things we really cherish equally out here.

It was fun to meet some of the parents. They meet that perfect, almost impossible to attain balance of being concerned about their child’s success while remaining confident in their teacher’s abilities. That’s even more rare than having students who are as kind-hearted and well-behaved as these.

Monday brought a real treat. We got a day off from school so I FaceTimed home to catch up with my parents and my brother. Well whaddayaknow, I called during the fourth quarter of the Cowboys game. Couldn’t have asked for better if I tried. 

not from the same FaceTime experience, but these two wanted a shout out.

It was strangely comforting to see my mom answer the call in the back of the house, hiding in the playroom with Riley because dad and Gregory were inevitably screaming at the TV.

So for the last 5 minutes of the game, the phone was brought into the den where I got to witness the classic Sunday afternoon ritual of hearing the men in my family express their anger and disappointment of our “unexpected” loss.

It made me miss home, but not as much as I would have if Sports Jeff had been there to join in on the rage.

That afternoon, we did one of our most favorite island activities — we went to Oasis, a local restaurant, to get one of the lunch specials that they only offer on weekdays. Since school started, we haven’t been able to get one. But they serve the BEST food and the specials are a real deal, so that was definitely a highlight of my week here. 

Oooooh something exciting happened! Well. Depends on who you are/how you look at it. I went to the hospital this week!

Before you freak (mom), I just accompanied my roommate Abby to the hospital. She was making dinner one night and she cut up these little teeny peppers that we have growing in our backyard, and the palms of her hands were burning viciously for a couple of hours.

Around 9:30 PM, I drove her to the hospital after trying a few things (like shoving her hands into our gallon bucket of ice cream because we didn’t have milk in the house) to see if they could offer any advice.

Before anyone freaks out about how that was a waste of ice cream, we didn’t suffer much of a loss. In order to meet the needs of each member of my living community, we bought neapolitan ice cream, and all that was left for over a week was the dregs of the strawberry section that everyone was actively avoiding. Unfortunately, this reject flavor couldn’t heal Abby’s burns.

When we first got to the hospital, a nurse checked her vitals (is that what they call it when they take your blood pressure and stuff? I feel like I just made that up) and then called in the doctor. 

The following conversation did not explicitly take place*…but here’s the gist:

“yo, my hands are on fire.”

“why?”

“from cutting peppers. those really little ones. what can I do?”

“just wait it out.”

“…srsly?”

“well, you can also put your hands in coconut milk, or just milk.”

“okay, so if I don’t have milk I just need to wait it out?”

“yeah, just don’t use water.”

“kcoolthx.”

(she had used lots of water, not only perpetuating the burn but amplifying it)

*disclaimer: this is not a slam against the hospital here, it was actually very impressive. It was just funny how there’s one very specific solution to this problem but it was the middle of the night and all the stores were closed and of course we didn’t have milk sooooooo

As we pulled back up to our house, our neighbor Tracy was outside waiting for us. She and Mary, her mother, had shaved some coconut for Abby and told her that if she squeezed the shavings, her hands would be healed.

And what do you know, I was right last week. Coconuts have legitimate magical powers.

view from the dinner table, where I grade papers, plan lessons, and write letters.

Thursday night was my turn to cook dinner for all of us. I’ve made some decent meals since I’ve been here, I’d say. But this time I decided to do something totally zeast. Pad Thai. 

Ryan: “I never went to Thailand.”

Pam: “Really?”

Ryan: “I went to Fort Lauderdale.”

Michael: “Was it nice?”

Ryan: “Yeah, it was amazing. There was a great pad thai place though.”

Michael: “I love pad thai.”

Ryan: “You’ve never had pad thai.”

Michael: “No. There’s a lot I haven’t done.”

This dish was a beast that needed to be tamed. A culinary mountain I needed to conquer. This was my Everest. (anyone remember that Thanksgiving episode of Friends when Joey says he’ll eat a whole turkey and halfway through he looks at it with an expression of near-defeat and says, “you are my Everest” ??? @Margot?)

I was ready. I was feeling it. I spent all of my planning periods at school looking at recipes. I had selected a winner and I was feeling pretty good.

I went to the store to get the ingredients. I needed rice noodles. We’d cooked with rice noodles a million times before, but they’re so dang thin. So I was like “oh yeah there will definitely be some thicker ones, those’ll be better.” 

As I scoured the aisles at my favorite grocery store, Blue Lagoon, I found these good lookin’, fat, white rice noodles. OR SO I THOUGHT. The label was 100% in Japanese but I was like, “oh, yeah that’s a good sign, these are legit.” I’ll get back to this later.

The only chicken you can buy here is on the bone. So I spent the better part of an hour de-boning chicken legs to put in the pad thai. I had this really delicious combination of ginger and garlic crackling on the stove top, and I added the chicken. The rice noodles needed to soak for half an hour, and when they were finished, I added them to the pan. 

And that’s when it all started to go downhill faster than me on my bike coming down the impossibly steep slope by the Mormon church (which, if you lived here, you would know that’s like the single most identifiable landmark on the island. That hill is the worst).

I noticed immediately that there was something wrong with these noodles, but I went against my better judgement and tried to start mixing them in with the chicken. 

BAD IDEA. Edit, undo. Ctrl + Z. CTRL + Z!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Apparently I bought noodles that are made especially for soups. Which I was not making, in case you forgot.

As I started mixing them (or attempting to mix them) around, they just started turning into this weird goo. It was sick, and not in a good way. All of my chicken, ALL OF MY HARD WORK, was being destroyed.

I had a legitimate break down. I didn’t know what to do. SO I CRIED. “Lyyyke a beehby” - Avatar**. It was the worst.

Anyway, it was Sarah to the rescue. She’s the sweetest. She had some other noodles left over from a Philippino dish she made for us the other night so we rescued as much of the chicken (which involved a very tedious process of digging through the goo to rescue small pieces of meat) as we could and finished the pad thai.

It turned out to be pretty good, I think. But I wasn’t satisfied with the experience, so I made a second attempt just two days later. It was super good, so now I’m the queen of homemade pad thai and no one can take that away from me.

side note: I watched several movies this week. Parent Trap, Titanic, Avatar (**note my obscure reference), and Les Mis. Talk about movies that get to your soul and just demolish it, right? 

I had never seen Les Mis before, and WOW. I’ll need to watch it again because a lot of things kind of went over my head and also I was very tired/kind of dozing off but I will take this opportunity to make a note of the fact that I only cried ONE TIME and it was very brief, and I really think that counts for something.

Last thing! There was a giant lizard on the veranda of the senior classroom today during last period. We obviously got a bit distracted when one typically disruptive student yelled, “MISS! LOOK OUTSIDE!” I assumed this was another ploy to derail our class discussion, but it turned out to be super exciting. Please excuse my scolding at the end of the video, haha.

My promises to “be funnier next week” are empty, and I apologize for that. I’m pretty confident people will stop reading this when the jokes stop coming, but I’m trying to be better about taking pictures/videos to compensate. Hope you made it to the end of this one, tune in next week.

finally decorated my room! send me more pictures :)

bye, bye, bye.

When you hear those three words together, you picture an iconc boyband, fronted by JT in his ramen noodle hair days, strung up as marionettes, waving their hands around.

When I hear those three words together, it’s because three students are walking past me on campus, and instead of saying, “Hi, Ms. Ackels!” they’re saying goodbye.

This is something that my brain just cannot get used to. 

Here on Yap, it is customary to say “bye” when you walk past someone, the same way we’d say “hey” at home. As I drive past my neighbors or walk past my students, I still find myself surprised each time they shout, “bye!” instead of “hey, what’s up, hello,” though they definitely know who Fetty Wap is, even though my own brother doesn’t. 

I’m trying to think about things that have happened since the last time I wrote, but the days are all blending together. Here are some points of interest:

You know what’s the best? Having a bike. I love biking around the lagoon near our house and singing (screaming) the words to every song on the new Grouplove album and waving at all the people I pass. It’s seriously so much fun, and it’s the best way to clear my head. 

My bed is covered in ant carcasses. They’re literally (yeah, Jeff. Literally.) everywhere. On my computer, on my body, on my books, flying out of my fan. Everywhere. I just pinch them between my fingers and fling their dead ant bodies, not caring where they land. I’m a monster. A menace. I’ve become a total, heartless maniac. You all should’ve seen the grizzly scene on the kitchen counter last night. 

Picture this: a lone grain of rice, somehow overlooked near the stovetop for twenty minutes as we ate. Later, as we moved to do the dishes, we spotted them. Dozens of ants. Hundreds. Attacking this single piece of rice as if it were the last opportunity to feed for a million years. BOOM. Raid. All is quiet on the western front. The ants that once moved so rapidly and with such purpose immediately frozen for all eternity. One woman reigns supreme over them all. It was the exact same as that scene in “Antz” (don’t get me started on that movie…total rip off of “A Bug’s Life”) where the ants fight the termites and just get annihilated. 

Last weekend we drove north to Maap, where the good beaches are. We hadn’t been yet, mostly because the land is private so we weren’t totally sure we’d be allowed to stick around, but we decided to check it out anyway. 

Driving north to the beach in Maap.

Right as we pulled up to the ocean, we saw Sana, one of our Peace Corps friends that lives with a host family up north. She said her family owned beach front property, and we were welcome to hang on the beach on their land! We got so lucky. So we spent the day, the four of us volunteers and Mike, our Jesuit bud, at the beach. In that particular spot, the water is about knee deep for a couple hundred yards. We walked all the way out until it got a little deeper and sat on some big rocks near the reef. We saw some little fish and sponges and about a hundred thousand sea cucumbers which feel DISGUSTING when you step on them. Talk about soggy.

pretending I don't have lessons to plan.

Oh, also! We found this rope swing and it was SO DIFFICULT to climb onto it! Please enjoy this video of my successes and failures. I’m learning a lot about how to be humble, obviously… 

I’ve been out here for a full month now, which is absolutely wild. Can you even believe it? I don’t know how quickly time seems to be moving for you all, but it is FLYING here. The days are fast and the weeks even faster. I’m settling in just fine, and that feels good. It was rough for a while, but each day is better than the last.

I keep singing “Getting Better” by The Beatles. “I’ve got to admit it’s getting better, a little better all the time.” But really, it is. I know that the biggest reason I am enjoying life here now is because of my students and the general environment of the school. These people are so unbelievably wonderful. They are entirely lovely. I am having such a positive experience. I am learning how to love better, how to graciously acknowledge my faults, and how to be present. 

But that has been the most challenging thing for me - being present. 

but how could you have trouble being present in a place like this?

There are so many people back home that I miss greatly. I can’t honestly say I’ve experienced homesickness before coming here. In all of my other travels, including going to college, I never missed home or my family or anything else to the point of great sadness or any other intense feelings. Especially in traveling, I always knew these experiences were temporary. I would only have to be in these places for a short time, so there was no room for anything but excitement. 

Things are different here. Although this is still extremely temporary, I know that I am living here for a longer, more consistent period of time than I have ever lived anywhere other than Dallas, and because of that, I am experiencing real homesickness. 

I want to lay on the couch and watch “Friends” with my family. I want to jump in my black CR-V and go for a night drive and a trip to Sonic with Maggie to spill out all of my recent thoughts and feelings about the good and the bad and the exciting and the worrisome. I want to sleep through the night without ants and mosquitos using my back and arms as their personal playground. I want to remember what it is like to feel comfortable.

But I have not tried hard enough to feel comfortable here. I am too caught up in my own discomfort to try to adjust to it. I don’t spend time with my neighbors or other locals like I should. I spend hours trying to load emails and instagrams and Facebook posts and snapchat videos people are sending me so I can fight to stay relevant in your lives. I don’t want to be forgotten or left behind as you continue your lives without me. It’s a paralyzing fear, thinking that I might lose any of you because of this distance. It terrifies me in a way that it shouldn’t. But this fear is keeping me from being here. 

I’m pushing myself to be more focused on life here. I spent last Saturday afternoon with my next-door neighbor, Angie, and her mother. They are originally from one of the outer islands. They taught us how to make coconut oil and then they made us some local food for dinner. They made taro, which is a staple food here, and cooked it in this kind of sauce they made from copra, which is dried coconut meat. IT WAS SO DANG GOOD. I really loved it. And all throughout that afternoon, I found myself feeling happy, like legitimately happy, for the first time since arriving here. 

I am realizing that it is in people that I find love - not in experiences, not in things, not in social media - but in relationships with people who are capable of giving me love, no matter what form it comes in. It’s been really beautiful to realize that. To realize how much I just love people. I love being with them, learning from them, laughing with them, crying with them, loving them, being loved by them. What gifts. 

Side note about coconuts (because this post is getting too serious) I LOVE THEM. And also, I am highly dependent on them. I’m pretty confident they have healing powers. For real. Every time I feel a little sick or something, I’ll either use the machete we found in our house to cut open a coconut or I’ll ask Dafrad to help me, our 10-year-old neighbor who is a total BEAST. He comes home from school, changes into his thuw (traditional dress for a male islander, essentially a loin cloth), and just dominates. It doesn’t even matter if he’s working or playing, he’s a total boss in everything he does. I want to be Dafrad when I grow up. 

I’m trying to think of things that I can tell y’all about school. 

Ugh, I just love my students. In my Sacred Scriptures class on Friday, I took half of the class period to just have a life talk with the seniors. They’re knee-deep in the college application process and they asked me why I chose to go to Spring Hill. I began to tell them the story of my decision, and they kept firing off questions.

What did you study? Why did you choose that?

(Looking back, they were probably totally playing me…the way you do a substitute teacher, you know? “Oh, if we ask her questions she’ll just keep answering them and we won’t do things for class” …………………………)

I took the opportunity to teach them about choosing happiness. The difference between bailing on things that are hard versus pursuing something you love and dealing with the horrors that may come with it. The way they don’t need to be afraid to change their minds or take risks. You know - the things you learn in college.

I didn’t always choose happiness. I chose fear, more often than I’d like to admit. I’ve chosen the simple, the comfortable, the unimposing. I’ve made decisions out of foolishness, naivety, and cowardice. 

I looked into the faces of my sixteen students and started to tear up. They are precious. Not the way we talk about puppies or gemstones. I felt this sudden innate need to protect these students. From what? I don’t fully know. The pressures of the world outside of this island, people and situations and choices that can (and will) hurt them. It breaks me to think that some of them might struggle with choosing happiness. My friend Zach told me once that we can choose to be anything we want to be, and that includes happy. I fully believe that.

I know that I am choosing happiness here. I made a decision to come here - I answered a very real calling. I don’t always love being away, but I love where I’m headed. I love where this is going. I am already so in love with the person I know that I will be when I am on the other side of this. 

I won’t bail as this thing continues to challenge me. I will pursue that happiness, that knowledge that I’ve done well. But in order to know that I’ve done well, I have to actually do. I have to put in the hours, do the work, make the effort. Be present.

A whole month in. Gosh, it’s just too wild. It’s crazy to look back and see how far I’ve already come since arriving here.

So anyway, today we checked out another beach spot. The swimming was way better, and we met the pastor, his wife, and one of their volunteers from a Christian elementary school in the area. They shared their snorkel masks with us and we saw some cool corals and fish. It was a great afternoon! 

how beautiful is this?!

We were anticipating the arrival of Devi, the fifth and final volunteer to join our crew. She was here last year and went home for the summer, so we’d heard lots of good things about her. We spent all day talking about how excited we were to finally meet her.

And then, the worst thing happened.

We missed her arrival.

That’s right. We thought her flight got in at 10:30 but it really landed at 10:00. So we got to the airport and one of our students was there and she notified us that the Jesuits had just left with Devi. I immediately yelled, “YOU’RE LYING” at her and she was definitely surprised (it was only after this happened that I realized how rude this was of me …) but she actually wasn’t lying. We had missed her completely.

So we jumped back in the car and raced home to find Devi settling back into the room she lived in last year. We were so embarrassed - what a horrible first impression, right? We’ll have to do a lot to make that up to her. But she’s super cool so hopefully we’ll be able to move past it pretty quickly, haha

Anyway, this is beyond long enough for now. Next week I’ll be funnier (and hopefully more concise), promise!

Much love to all my people back home. I love you and miss you dearly. Don’t forget about me while I’m out here :)