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 :)