Froever Friends

This week I came down with the flu on Thursday night. Yep, sick again. I take all the precautions that I can—exercise, eat healthy food, take vitamins, sleep, stay hydrated, only drink boiled or bottled water, use hand sanitizer—but it still doesn’t really surprise me. At school I always have sick kids in my classes and soap, not to mention toilet paper, in the bathrooms is a rare surprise. I also don’t think most of my kids understand how sicknesses are spread. Anyway, today’s blog post is going to be short and sweet.

One of my classes of freshman is driving me crazy. It’s like babysitting 23 5-year-olds. They talk all the time, yell at each, hit each other, don’t do their work, etc. It’s very energy draining. On Wednesday I finally just lost it with them. It takes a lot for me to outwardly lose my cool but as I watched students hitting each other with already falling apart physical science text books, it was the last straw. I screamed at them as loudly as I could (my throat hurt for the rest of the day). That shocked some of them and seemed to do the trick for the next 10 min of class. Kids in my later class periods asked me what had happened because apparently they had heard me yelling from whatever classrooms they were in at the time. So yelling probably isn’t the way to go, but haven’t quite figured out the right approach for them yet. On the bright side, my chemistry class thoroughly enjoyed making electron dot diagrams out of mini marshmallows this week. So much so that none of them fell asleep. Victory.

As I mentioned before, despite the copious amounts of vegetation here, fresh vegetables are hard to come by
and often very expensive. I decided to start a garden and last week planted some seeds in an egg carton and set them buy the kitchen window. I currently have some little lettuce, basil, and tomato seedlings. Maybe next week I’ll transplant them outside. I guess the only worry is they might get trampled by the dogs. But there aren’t any pests like rabbits or deer here. In three months maybe I’ll have some delicious vegetables!

 

Our cute little 7-year-old neighbor has taken to drawing pictures of us doing various activities. His most recent piece of art is a picture of our house with all our names listed on the side. Notice “Cat” one of the volunteers who stayed with us for a week before she moved to the outer islands is listed, as well. And I am listed as “Appy.” It is proudly being displayed on our bulletin board.




 
I received an interesting gift from my housemate Amber a couple days ago. All the students here are obsessed with slap bracelets. I remember them being popular when I was in elementary school. They are thick bracelets that are cool colors and say things on them and coil around your wrist when you slap them on. Given their propensity for hitting, their love for things you slap isn’t all that surprising. Since we all try to fit in as much as we can with the Samoan culture, Amber got me a slap bracelet. But not just any slap bracelet. This one says “Froever Friends.” Knowing Samoans, this could easily be a typo. It could also not be a typo. Either way it is hilarious. A lot of Samoan boys have fantastic fros. They are really incredibly and I need to put a picture up of one. All in all it’s an excellent gift.