Word update

January 16, 2006 – 10:07 PM – Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

Werd. When was the last time it was so hot on Christmas that you went snorkeling to cool off? Well, for me it was this Christmas. We had some Christmasy food at our field director’s house, sang some Christmas carols, then decided it was too hot to be enclosed indoors anymore so we went snorkeling. FYI, you honestly forget that Christmas is approaching when the upcoming weeks are sunny, humid, and you’re working. My last day of school was December 23^rd and when I woke up on Christmas Eve I was like, “Whoa, tomorrow is Christmas.”

Christmas is a rather hectic time in the Marshall Islands because this country has become so religious. All the businesses hung up Christmas lights and the local ACE Hardware (yup, we have one of these) even boasted a gigantic snow globe in its front entrance. But by far the most out of place Christmas item was the largeish Christmas tree located in the middle of a hotel parking lot. It was kind of like Rockefeller Plaza except it was so hot that even the pine tree was sweating.

As rowdy as Christmas is, by far the most celebrated holiday in the Marshall Islands is the New Year. An entire section of the road (i.e. the one major road) is cordoned off and that area is deemed the “block party.” Local establishments setup tents and booths along the length of the block party and sell various consumable goods. There are two stages which each boast a few unique musical acts including the Marshallese drag troupe, “Gurl Powah.” How many paradoxes does a drag troupe in a heavily religious Pacific Island nation embody? Four? Five? Whatever, I lost count.

For about four days after the New Year I boasted in various correspondences that I was among the first people on Earth to encounter the New Year. However, I was mistaken. Those damn kiwis in New Zealand actually find themselves celebrating first because, unlike us, they do observe daylight savings time and thus are one hour ahead of us during their spring season, i.e. now. Still, I hit 2006 seventeen hours ahead of any of you. Eat it.

The last bit of significant news that I have is that my college prep students took the TOEFL this past Saturday. There is a fair amount of coming full circle/ironic completeness in this. Roughly twenty years ago my mom studied for and took the TOEFL in China so that I could subsequently be educated in the United States. With that education I then went abroad and have now taught nineteen students how to perform well on that very same test. I even went so far to meet them at the test site at 7:45 AM with a bread and hard boiled egg breakfast. And for those of you from Idaho, yeah, I also gave them pencils with all the answers in them.

Oh! I have one more heartwarming story. A few months back I mentioned that my school’s newspaper was given a biweekly spot in the national newspaper, the Marshall Islands Journal. I consequently introduced the Journal’s editor-in-chief to the school newspaper’s editor-in-chief and for the past couple of months the school newspaper’s editor-in-chief has been going to the Journal’s office every two weeks to deliver our articles. Last Friday, she was offered a job as a reporter by the Marshall Islands Journal.