Wow, it's been awhile

October 6, 2007 – 1:17 PM – Wow, it’s been awhile

I have my second Guitar Hero controller. More excitingly, I’ve figured out how to customize my guitar hero games. That means I can load songs from my computer into my Guitar Hero game and play them on Guitar Hero. It’s pretty much the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me. Basically my life has condensed itself into school, fantasy football, and Guitar Hero. And you know what, I can’t complain.

In mid-November I will take the TOEFL. Having taught it for two years, I figured it was about time I actually see a real one to gauge whether or not what I’ve been teaching is similar to what is being tested. There will be two months in between when I take the TOEFL and my students do. That should be enough time for me to readjust my teaching plans as necessary based upon what I see on my test day.

Oh, for one of the few times in my life, college admissions probably being the only other instance, being from Idaho came in handy. Allow me to explain.

Over the past two years, I’ve noticed that students from the Marshall Islands (and all other Freely Associated States by corollary) have a hard time negotiating the financial aid process, largely due to their unique immigration status vis-à-vis the United States. They don’t have US passports or SSNs, but are eligible for Federal Pell Grants. Unfortunately, given the extreme international security extant today, when a US college receives a financial aid application from a student without a SSN or immigration documentation, their natural reaction is that a mistake was probably made but to err on the side of caution. Thus, they request from the applicant the information that they assume is simply missing. However, due to the fact that the missing information really isn’t missing, and due to the extreme difficulty in communicating anything from here, students are left in a position in which they can’t explain why their financial aid application looks the way it does. The result is that they don’t receive any financial aid, which means they aren’t able to go to college. Needless to say, that’s bad.

I’ve been trying to correct this but haven’t had much success. The US Embassy misunderstood the problem and thus gave me an irrelevant solution. Given the nature of the problem, I wasn’t really sure who else could help me if not the US Embassy. Then, in May, fortune smiled upon me in the form of former Idaho governor and senator, Dirk Kempthorne, now Secretary of the Interior. He visited the Marshall Islands on a tour of the Pacific and briefly stopped by a Chamber of Commerce meeting at which I was present. I dropped the state name and got his ear for enough time to explain the situation I was facing. He put me in touch with some people at the Department of the Interior and, after a few months of persistent e-mail correspondence, I got a call earlier this week from someone at the DOI asking me for details regarding the problem so she would be well informed before meeting with the Department of Education about it next week. With any luck this will all be resolved before my students start applying for college this year.

My oldest host sister, whom I taught the first year I was here and who went to college in Washington, is now pregnant. She follows my middle host sister who had her baby last August. I have one more host sister left. She’s 16 and a junior. My instincts tell me that my host dad is going to lock her in the deepest darkest dungeon in Majuro and throw away the key.