Less Than 3 Weeks Left

With less than 3 weeks left, it is hard to believe that my time on Tanna is really coming to a close. Every conversation with folks here usually starts with a “oh sorry…yu stap go now” or the equivalent in local language. Talk about drawing out the goodbye. Yesterday, two sixth grade girls brought me something I thought I wasn’t going to get to enjoy this year: a ripe mango. In fact it was the first ripe mango they had seen. They said they were walking along and talking about how they wished they could bring me mangoes when the first mango of the year fell from a tree beside them. They rushed to bring it to me (and also I’m sure to overcome the temptation to eat it themselves, being typical mango-obsessed children). It was a delicious mango. Hopefully there will be more to come in these last few weeks, but judging from the small size of the fruits growing now, I think that one was a special prize and also a reminder of the change that’s coming. We also just had the first major rainfall (nearly 48 hours of nonstop heavy rain) after a long, relatively colder, and incredibly dusty few months. Everyone is glad that their gardens have been “washed,” and that the yams can grow now. Kids were glad to have the rain cancel afternoon classes, even though there were already 2 scheduled holidays this week. The weather is changing, the mangoes are growing, and I know I am so close to leaving.

In terms of the work I have been doing at the school, it is great to see teachers starting to take on responsibilities of the library. It has been my main concern that once I leave this place the library will “break down.” It turns out that a year (which is about as long as the library has been functioning, having taken a good six months to be assembled) is not nearly enough time to fully develop, from scratch, the concepts of book exchange, book care, and regular use of the library among students, teachers and community members. The students continue their enthusiasm for exchanging books, regularly coming to my door at 7:00 in the morning wanting to go to the library. And thankfully there is one super-enthusiastic teacher who has agreed to be the “open-hours librarian.” And all teachers are now coming once a week with their classes, and facilitating regular book exchange. And thankfully, there should also be a replacement Peace Corps Volunteer coming to take my place here at the school in December, which gives the school here a good month to try and manage the library on their own, without leaving it alone entirely. It also gives the community at least another 2 years to have reading and the library play a more significant role. Aside from the library, I have had an amazing time teaching reading, phonics, and English this year. A lot of kids who knew less than half of their ABCs in February are now actually reading, albeit pretty easy books. I love learning how to teach. And I love teaching these kids.

For every thing that is hard to see and hear about here on Tanna, especially in terms of violence against women, there are so many more things that are truly wonderful. There is so much I will always love about this community. And for the next two and a half weeks, I will continue to enjoy every day. I will continue to make my rounds and visit different kitchens, the very best place to “storyon” and enjoy island food. I will even savor every piece of laplap!

I will enjoy every moment with little baby Sam, whose family has finally been reunited after so much trouble.

And I will definitely enjoy all the wonderful things the kids do. Every coconut tree that gets climbed.

And of course the way that the pikininis are in some ways more comfortable with a knife than with their own clothes onJ

So I wrote that last blog post two days ago, and thought there was a good chance it would be my last. But THEN yesterday morning I learned that my host brother’s wife, my “tawi” Selina, had gone to the hospital to have her baby. I have been hoping I would get to see the little baby before I left and so I was thrilled yesterday to venture up to see what action was happening at Lenakel Hospital. When I got there Selina was still having contractions. And so for the first time in my life, I watched this amazing birthing process. Selina's mother and her mother-in-law (my mama) were beside her the whole time, massaging her lower back with every contraction. I could tell Selina was in an incredible amount of pain, but the only sounds that ever escaped her mouth throughout the whole 14 hours were small little moans. I have heard it said that Ni-Vanuatu women have babies in almost near silence, but I was still pretty blown away to witness it. I know if it had been me I would have been screaming my lungs out. I could see the pain on her face. The midwife was a great guy who came barging into the birthing room when Selina had just started to push. I was startled by what seemed a gruff demeanor, but could see the relief on the mamas’ faces when he showed up. They call this guy “frend blong all mama,” and of the 4 midwives on Tanna, he is the one all the mamas want present to “born” their babies. And less than 20 minutes after he showed up, sure enough the little baby boy was born. I was completely in awe. I still am. And afterwards, when he and his mama Selina were taken back to the maternity ward, and my mama and I bathed him (because apparently there is a whole lot of blood and other fluids involved in child birthJ) the family all turned to me and said that the next day everyone would be asking what his name was… and while I had joked with them in past months about naming him “Fernando” if he was a boy, after the Spanish soccer player Fernando Torres (who last year everyone here thought was my boyfriend), once I saw the little guy I wanted him to be my namesake. So I named him Lauren, which I thought was less girly than my own name. One of my PCV friends here assured me that was fine, since she even knew a little girl in her community with the name David. Little Lauren weighed in at 3.1 kilos and is just a beautiful little Man Tanna. And I am so grateful for this week, which started with this awesome mango and ended with the incredible birth of my nephew Lauren.

Celebrate this Day!

A Little Bit of Louse

Ever since the 5^th grade when my teacher supposedly found lice in my hair I have had this ridiculous fear and paranoia around it. But like a lot of things that have changed in my life since moving out to this itty bitty world of Tanna, so has my reaction to this pervasive little parasite. First of all, it is the most wonderful thing to watch women affectionately wrap their hands around a child’s head in search for lice. It is so obviously a sign of endearment. A sign of love. And the kids in turn learn this skill so early. Even 2-year-old Gabriella knows how to look for lice. So a week ago when I felt extra itchy on my scalp, I knew just who to turn to. I corralled a small group of kids who proceeded to systematically search my head. Quite a nice head massage on top of their finding 5 louse and perhaps a dozen eggs. Then my impulse got the better of me and, much to the horror of the kids, I hacked off my ponytail. They insisted I was ruining my long hair. But once again, my young friends knew how to make the most of the situation. They immediately started claiming sections of my dispatched hair to make small “rostas” (= small braids attached to their own hair). They wisely instructed me not to leave any bits of my hair around on the ground, lest someone take it and put “nakaimas” (= black magic) on it. And then I proceeded to make the first weave in my village with my very own hair:

I was lucky enough to have a bottle of lice shampoo on hand, which I also put to good use throughout this week. But more than that, I am lucky to be surrounded by people who could daily (or multiple times a day) search through my hair. I’ll admit that I even went so far as to on one occasion, after being handed the louse, properly dispose of it by eating it…. May sound gross until you’ve seen it done a thousand times over and bother to try it on your own louse. The bottom line is, just like any problem a person can face here, lice may be annoying, but Tanna has taught me well to manage it with the sensibility of those around me in addition to my own sense of reasoning. And I’m happy to say that a week later my head lice is gone. However, I will probably continue the daily head massages for some time just to be safe J

Service not Slavework

Today (Wednesday June 21st) as part of the 3^rd and 4^th grade “agriculture” lesson, the teacher asked the students to all bring stems/branches of food plants to school. After lunch they gathered in front of my house and proceeded to create a garden. To call it a lesson isn’t really fair… These kids already know everything there is to know about gardening on Tanna. They went straight to business. I figured they might as well make it how they wanted, since they know more about this stuff than I do. I took pictures. They cleared the grass with their “big knives” (machetes) and dug up bigger weeds and unwanted plants with the school’s spade. The kids without knives disposed of the “dirty” (the English word that gets overused thanks to the Bislama language). Then they took their cassava branches, island cabbage stalks, and pineapple tops, and put them properly into the ground like the very good gardeners that they are, all with a fair amount of ordering each other around. They put some logs around the whole thing to hopefully keep the pigs out of it. (We’ll see how that goes tomorrow morning…pigs can do so much damage to gardens around here). The whole process took about an hour. They did great work and were so proud of themselves.

My little garden, or rather the work these kids did creating the garden, had nothing at all to do with learning how to garden. It was more about the collective service the kids were doing together…for me-ha! The fact is, these kids have the concept of service engrained in them. It’s so strong in their culture, where family and community absolutely comes first and foremost. You take care of each other here. You share. If you have 2 oranges in your basket, you give one away. And If you only have 1 orange, you give half of it away. If you’re a kid, you contribute to the meal. Maybe you go to the garden and get some island cabbage. Or maybe you gather the firewood. Or grate the coconut, or cook the rice, or do the whole thing all by yourself. You help your family. And if you don’t, well, you’re probably gonna get a whipping… But these kids learn fast how to take care of themselves and each other. Sometimes it may look like slave labor when every Friday the students participate in “working parties” in which they weed the school grounds, collect firewood and coconuts for the teachers, sweep the classrooms and clean the windows. But the students are helping to serve the school community. That’s the point of working parties, that the kids help the school. They do a great job of it too. They don’t complain. If anything, they hide, or forget their knives at home as a way of avoiding certain kinds of work. But they will get singled out later. What matters is the community, and the service they provide for and with each other. I think back home kids and everyone else could really benefit from a culture more rich in service. In the meantime, every day I hope to have a nice reminder of the easy community service potential of an 8-year-old right outside my door, in the form of a beautiful little vegetable garden.

Gabriella, Talap, and a Happy Mama's Day

(2-year-old Gabriella has taken over my wash, with a lollipop to sweeten things up)

I have seen time and again the wonderful opportunities that children have here, to grow up in a place not only free of all the electronics western kids are so accustomed to, but a place rich in physical and mental stimulation. It’s a tropical playground afterall. One of my most entertaining young friends is Gabriella, the 2-year-old daughter of a fellow teacher at the school. She is quite the precocious little lady, and in addition to showing me that at the age of 2 she is quite capable of washing clothes, sweeping, cutting vegetables with a knife, and even looking for lice in my hair, I think she has decided that I am perhaps a little on the slow side. She yells at me when she catches me wearing shorts rather than a skirt. When she tries to order me around, and I don’t understand all of her mother-tongue language, she swears at me in her language and scowls. She walks around her mother’s classroom with a broom and threatens to hit kids who are off task. And when students answer incorrectly she yells at them. In short, she is the smallest little mama around. But of course she is still a precious little girl, one who notably likes to control her mother’s breasts, demanding to have them both popped out of her mom’s dress for her to breastfeed on(“titi” in the Bislama pigeon) while her mother teaches lessons before the 4^th grade class. Gabriella’s command of the world on this small island at her young age is not only a daily source of entertainment for me, but a reminder of what young kids are capable of when really immersed in their natural environment. And of course Gabriella is also blessed to have the most loving mama one could hope for, and a whole family that looks out for her well-being. While Gabriella stands out with her charm, it is true that most of the children here get the same early start on sweeping, washing, cutting, and manipulating the world around them in general. Just like Gabriella, most kids here have a whole slew of mamas keeping track of them, feeding them, loving them, and also “talking strong” to them as the expression here goes. And perhaps it is because most of these kids have all of these things going for them that it makes it all the more disheartening to hear of the kids who don’t. Like Talap.

(Talap in the first photo; Talap and her sister Jenny join the Easter Camp games)

Talap is a sweet 2nd grade student who started the year knowing only 2 letters of the alphabet. Because this year I take all the 2^nd grade students in small reading groups, I noticed right away how frequently she is absent. She walks over an hour each way to school, and any time I ask her why she was absent she will tell me “kakai ino gat,” which means she had no food at home. I was puzzled by this. Why did she have no food? This is Tanna. There is not a food shortage here. If there’s no food in her home, why doesn’t she get food from another mama? No one goes hungry here. So what was the deal with Talap? Over Easter weekend, when she followed a distant relative down to my village to join a 4-day church Easter Camp, I found out more of Talap’s story. It turns out that not only did her real mother leave her and her 3 siblings behind when she ran away to Port Vila (in fact trying to find her own escape), but there is no one in their community that looks after them, aside from their father. Their grandmother lives with them, but because she is so old, she is unable to take care of her grandkids. And just to be clear, fathers here do not raise children; that role is left entirely to the mamas and grandmothers. So Talap and her older sister Jenny (a 6^th grader) do all the cooking, washing, and naturally have to see themselves off to school in the morning. When they have no food, they really have no food, and Talap and Jenny have to go look for food in the garden. To earn a few dollars, sometimes Jenny even has to take food to sell at the market (on school days). The thought of being a kid on this island with no mama is actually heartbreaking. Especially when there seem to be so many mamas around. I just want some other mama to take these kids in, something that often happens, but for some reason never happened with Talap and her siblings. So in the meantime, I’m trying to do my small part to help Talap (letting go of my impulse to take her in myself). I’m trying to teach her the letters of the alphabet in her small reading group (she’s up to 15, a significant jump in 2 months considering all her absences). And I now give her a peanut butter sandwich for lunch every day, since the only food she eats at lunch is what the other kids happen to give her, and obviously no one at home is cooking for her. (Today she showed up at school with 6 mandarins for me! Even the little kids here have the concept of giving back so engrained in them.) But at the end of the day, I know that what Talap needs more than anything is a mama at home to take care of her. It’s what all kids need. Back home maybe a daddy will do, but here it definitely has to be a mama. And I wish Talap was as lucky as Gabriella. I wish she was as lucky as me. I wish she had a mama. And as mother’s day comes this weekend, I am reminded again of how important our mamas are. Especially here, in what feels like the kingdom of mamas. If you are a mama reading this, I hope you find your realm in the kingdom of mamahood this mother’s day weekend. And if you are my mother reading this, I want you to know that right now I feel like the luckiest person alive, to have had and still have you as my mama and I wish you the happiest of Mother’s Days J

****Update on Meriam… Meriam, who at the lure of a banana cake was finally convinced to go to school, started 1^st grade in February knowing just 6 letters of the alphabet and is now the ONLY 1^st grader to know all 26! To say she is enthusiastic about learning would be an understatement. The girl is amazing.

****I just heard today that there is a Baby Dodd on it's way today! So a special HAPPY MAMA'S DAY goes to my sister-in-law Kristy!!! Can't wait to see photos!

From Sea to Sea, and Sam to Sam

I have just named my first baby. He may not be my own genetic child, but here in the village I am technically his mama, as his “straight” mama is one of my many sisters. This beautiful little boy was born before dawn on Sunday, April 3^rd at the island’s Hospital that incidentally had temporarily run out of water. People speculated that the little boy came out extra clean; he obviously must have known about the water situation. His mother was not thrilled at his coming out a boy, as she already has 3 boys and no girls to speak of, but after screaming it out (as she reminisces to me 5 days later) she decided he was still a blessing. Even his grandmother, a nurse, who attended the mom and baby boy at birth, expressed her regret at him being born a boy. I just found out about his birth Wednesday, and followed his big brother home from school today to visit the baby and mom and give a small present. The custom here for women who have just given birth is to remain inside the home with the newborn for the first month of the baby’s life. Sure keeps lots of germs away. The mamas also get visited by all the other women in the village at one point or another, with gifts of baby items or meals, throughout that first month. So today I made my visit. This particular mama, who I call sister, has a very special place in my heart. To say that she has faced challenges in her life and in particular, her home, would be an understatement. I have literally been brought to tears by some things she has told me. In spite of everything, the details of which I won’t write here, she has remained one of the most fantastic mothers to her children. She is one of only 3 mothers I know of in my community (the other 2 being certified teachers at the school I work at) who asks her children regularly about their school work, who reads to her kids, and who I have witnessed even to guide her children with words rather than with the whip of a coconut broom. (This latter one I no longer take for granted!) While so many women here can at times seem so intensely jealous, she has never once seemed that way. She is just one of the sweetest, most gentle women I have met in my life. And even when the culture she lives in appears to have ostracized her and limited her opportunities, she maintains an admirable respect for that very culture. And thankfully there are finally some of her extended family members who are treating her well enough to help her with food (as circumstances have left her with no ground of her own), and she even has her own small custom home. And so I went to go visit her and her baby. And because the baby still had no name after 5 days, I “put a name” for the baby, as the expression goes. And because the best sort of name you can give is the name of someone important to you (giving your own name and having a “namesake” is one of the most affectionate gestures), I “put the name” of my recently born nephew, Samuel. So now my nephew in Scotland has a namesake on Tanna Island! So cheers to the 2 little Sams, 2 oceans apart J

(Little Samuel and his Mama, from Tanna Island)

(and little Samuel in Scotland)

Changing lives, one banana cake at a time...

My happiest moment of February 14^th, the first day of the new school year in Vanuatu was when I saw 9-year-old Meriam show up for 1^st grade. It was my reminder of a Happy Valentine, since the holiday is not actually celebrated here. I had been talking to Meriam’s family every time I saw any one of them, which was basically every day since this village is so small, for the 2 weeks leading up to school. Meriam is the only kid in the village who hadn’t been going to school simply because she didn’t want to. (There are some areas, some even close to here, where tons of kids are running around free on school days.) Meriam would cry and cry, her family told me again and again, when they tried bringing her to school in years past. So that was it. Meriam didn’t want to go to school, so she didn’t have to go. Why would anyone force her? Anyway, I tried the best trick I know of on this island to get someone to do something. I bribed her with a banana cake. I told her that if she came to school every day for the first week, that first weekend afterward I would make a whole banana cake just for her. At first she just stared at me and didn’t say a thing. I can’t say she looked convinced. In fact, she looked like she wanted to cry. But I KNOW she wanted a banana cake, because EVERYONE here wants my banana cakes. So I kept bringing up the banana cake to her family, mixed with small “toktok” about why I thought this was so important, whenever I passed them during the 2 weeks before school started. And as discouraged as I was by the impression I was getting (Meriam still wasn’t agreeing to come, they would tell me), I kept at them with this banana cake temptation. And to my pleasant surprise, come Monday February 14^th, there was little Meriam sitting with her mom inside the school grounds, waiting for the school bell to ring. And every day that week she came to school! I was so happy. And of course I made her a delicious banana cake that weekend. Which naturally meant I got something as well in return—delicious fish and sweet potato soup, 2 cucumbers, and some fabric. Her family was so thrilled, with the cake of course, but mostly with Meriam. Meriam’s father wanted me to give Meriam another name, because, he said, I had changed her life. And after another 2 weeks, Meriam is still coming to school every day. I’ve promised her another cake if she’s still coming to school when I leave Tanna at the end of October. And I hope I have to make it for her. Amazing what a banana cake can do here. Amazing that a banana cake is sometimes all it takes to change someone’s entire life.

A fish and a fowl

There are some things about living on an island in Vanuatu that are as surprising as they are simple. The small things are the things that never fail to catch me off guard and remind me of what my life actually is here, on Tanna Island. For example, recently I started my morning off in the same way I have been starting many of my mornings off for the past year and a half that I have been living in Vanuatu. I went for a run. It was a very regular run, with lots of people calling out to me as I ran along, as they do every time they see me running. They especially love to call me fatfat (bislama for fat), which makes me feel just wonderful, but I have learned to smile and return the favor, calling them fatfat too. Nothing seems to bring more joy to a conversation than a little roundtable fatfat talk. Anyway, I was in the final stretch of my run, along the beach, about a mile or so from my village when a guy called out to me from the sea, greeting me in local language as most people do. The next thing I knew he was yelling “Becky” over and over again, which I’m assuming comes from my given custom name “Nasweyu Becky,” even though most people either call me “Nasweyu” or Laura. I’m still not sure who this guy is. He then proceeded to run out of the sea waving a dead fish over his head. So I stopped running and stared at him, since staring is the natural response to any sort of situation here. He then came up to me and told me to take the dead fish. It was a foot long “flying fish” with a good amount of meat on it. I had to accept it, as it is extremely rude to deny something someone gives you, and also because it was a fine looking fish. So I thanked him and then ran the rest of the way home with a dead fish in my hand. There was just one little string attached. In taking the fish I was accepting something from a youngfala man, which means I might as well call him my boyfriend now. It is customary that when a guy gives a girl something, or takes out her trash, or carries something for her (my host family still jokes about the time my tawi/cousin named Jeff carried my taro about 20 yeards from the road to their house my very first week on Tanna), that the two could one day soon be married. Just like that. One day you get a fish, and the next you find yourself married. A pretty simple process that I won’t be adopting into my own lifestyle anytime soon. And I won’t be calling the fish guy my boyfriend. I’ll just think of the fish as a great reward for an 8 mile run! And after scaling and gutting the fish, a fellow peace corps volunteer and I made a great, high-protein meal out of it.

The other animal I was given this week was a live chicken. I went to visit 2 teenage sisters who had babies a month apart last year. I never gave presents to the moms or the babies during the babies’ first month, as is the custom here, and so was a little behind by giving gifts to the babies at 5 and 6 months old. But of course the family was more than enthusiastic and grateful, as they handed me one of their chickens in return. (If you receive a gift here, the custom is to give something back.) Then we agreed that they would look after the chicken, which they insisted belonged to me, until I wanted to come and roast it. We then planned to eat the chicken together when it was coming close to my time to leave, which sounded like a pretty good deal to me. And so, I’ve been living here a year and a half and yet the simple things like swapping baby clothes for a fowl, and getting a fish handed to me during my sweaty run, are still surprising me and reminding me that this place is truly a special place. And I am reminded of how often there are strings attached to our actions. And how the basic actions of giving and receiving are so important in any place. But especially in this place, this special little world in Vanuatu.

Black and White

The islands of Vanuatu accentuate skin color like no place I've ever been. Everywhere I go, I am the "White Misses" before I am Laura, Naswayu (my custom name), the "Pis Kop long Loukatai," the volunteer, the teacher, or the crazy running woman. I am all of these things, but the thing that prevails in all of my interactions, is my whiteness. The distinction of white and black is made so readily on Tanna, and it used to startle my American-cultivated sensitivity to skin color distinctions reflecting underlying racism. But on an island where the commonly used name for the main town is "Black Man Town," I have gotten used to these simple distinctions that are never meant to be offensive. I find it endearing when people smile and laugh at me and say I am becoming a black woman, as they are appreciating my integration into their community. And at the end of the day, I will always be the one white girl in the village of black people.

I am not, however, the only white person on Tanna. There are now a total of 6 Peace Corps Volunteers scattered over the island. And for the past 6 months, there has been an awesome Canadian family living here. The dad has been serving as the one and only doctor, and the mom has been notorious for driving her 3 boys around in the blue truck. The only woman driving a truck on Tanna! The 3 boys have been heralded as Lion King stars, and have become favorites among the kids of my village. When the truck shows up at the school, kids appear from the bushes to gather around, and especially to swoon over the youngest of the trio. The girls love him. The 3-year-old gets smothered with kisses everywhere he goes. I don't know what he makes of it, and what he's going to think when he goes back to Canada and he no longer has girlfriends appearing every time he gets out of a vehicle. But I do think they will be legends in my village. And every time we see the Doctor's truck in the future, without 3 boys in tow, the local kids will come crying out the boys' names to me. And I will always be grateful for the times I got to go across the island with them to the best surf and sand beaches on Tanna, in a truck filled with kids from my village. The local kids struggle with English, but their friendships with this trio of white boys, shows that kids speak a common language with each other that surpasses English words, that embraces blackness and whiteness, and that finds joy in playing together, in exploring, and in laying smooches on the little ones. The blackness and whiteness of it all just makes it more beautiful.

The farewell cake was a big hit. Most of the kids ate 3 pieces of frosted chocolate cake made up on "hospital hill." The kids will all surely remember each other. They will remember their black and white friends, and they will remember their black and white cake.

Cyclone Vania

My return to Tanna Island has been a momentous one. I was welcomed back to the school by a wonderful group of 4 girls who had adorned my house, from door to roof to clothesline, with pink flowers. I was presented with my “first nawanagen” of 2011, my favorite local dish of greens rolled around grated cassava. It was all quite adorable and a pleasant afternoon. And after quietly going to sleep my very first night back, I was woken by a 6.6 earthquake. Startling for sure, and being in a coastal village where a tsunami threat is a significant one, I immediately tried to figure out if we had a tsunami warning or not. It was my lucky night- I had phone service! So straight away I did two things: get in touch with volunteers in Port Vila (to hear about any immediate warning) and send a message to Emily’s phone (to hopefully get some actual info on the earthquake, all the way from New York). The night continued on with a series of 8 aftershocks all over 5.0 and I think a few smaller ones. It was a shaky night to say the least. I always find it entertaining to hear more information coming from the US than locally from here, in the form of text message from Emily, which is how I now know the magnitudes of all the Tanna quakes of January 9^th. Fortunately there was no tsunami warning that I heard about that night, which meant I didn’t have to take off up the hills my first restless night back.

The 9^th of January was followed by two peaceful days of intense humidity, nonstop sweating, delicious pineapple, and the smell of bleach and pine sol as I tried to rid my little house of its layers of dust and volcanic ash. And then on Tuesday the 11^th I was informed of a “tropical depression” between the main island of Efate and the island of Tanna. The locals assured me a cyclone couldn’t happen. There is a “cyclone stone” in the village, and as long as they keep it clean and respect it, we won’t have any cyclones. Indeed, last time a cyclone struck the island two local men were fined for having “dirtied” the stone and causing the cyclone. Well I guess someone toyed with the stone. Sure enough on Wednesday morning, the winds and rains picked up like I’ve never seen before. Local men came at my house with cement bricks to secure my roof, and boarded up all my windows with sheets of metal.

The tropical depression developed into a Category 2 Cyclone Vania and passed from the northeast to the northwest waters around Tanna over a period of about 48 hours. The first day and night I had 2 small friends over at my house to keep me company and keep me sane. We played a lot of Uno. When a chunk of the boarding of my house flew off, it was 11-year-old Nerry’s idea to secure it back on with some logs. The winds and rains were so intense. At one point I was using an outdoor toilet that literally almost fell down on top of me. (After that I stopped drinking water for the rest of the day.) But luckily my house survived Vania. My outdoor “small house” (bathroom) and “swim house” (bucket bath stall) blew down. But perhaps the worst damage done by Cyclone Vania was to the crops. All the ripe and unripe fruits fell from the trees (including hundreds of avocados from the tree outside my house), banana trees fell down everywhere, and worst of all I hear there was significant damage to the cassava and yam gardens, which will ultimately affect the daily food for families and the custom ceremonies of later this year. But now that Cyclone Vania has passed on, I am just glad that for all it did, it was a mere Category 2. If it had been stronger, especially a 4 or 5, the damage to this island would have been devastating, as there wouldn’t have been a single safe place to hide out, the homes all would have been destroyed and probably lots of people would have been killed. I hope that Cyclone Vania is the only cyclone we see on Tanna this year, as the cyclone season continues until March/April.

As Cyclone Vania came to a close Thursday night, we experienced yet another earthquake, this time a 7.3 located 87 miles southwest of Tanna, followed by a couple of small aftershocks. And with that, I am now hoping to go back to the pineapples, the strong heat, the rebuilding of my small house, and the things I considered normal for small island life on Tanna.

(This house was strong enough to support itself against the fallen tree, but not all houses were. And SO MANY trees hit the ground during the cyclone.)

Holidays at Home

I am sitting in the Portland airport, finally headed back to Vanuatu after a wonderful month home for the holidays. I saw so much in my short time back. I felt like I was on vacation from my life of what at times feels like tropical paradise and at other times feels like the smallest, most isolated speck in the universe. And being home in the USA has been the biggest breath of fresh air and chance to reflect on my experience that I've had since setting foot in Vanuatu over a year ago. It is crazy how accustomed I have become to the life of living off the earth, pumping and carrying every drop of my water, squatting over a hole in a slab of cement, living and breathing the every day life of a small village where everyone's business is your own, especially if you're the white woman carrying a basket on your back or a mango in your hand. It has actually become my life so quickly and there was nothing like that first 24 hours in New York City to make me realize that. Or to realize how under-appreciated running water is, especially in the form of a nice, long, hot shower. I have really enjoyed just being my white-woman self without the spectacle aspect that necessarily comes with it in a place like small-village Vanuatu. That being said, I am really looking forward to being that very spectacle self once again back on Tanna Island. I am so grateful for the opportunity to be there with so many wonderful Ni-Vanuatu family who look out for me and welcome me into their lives with the utmost enthusiasm. And it turns out they have as much to benefit from another perspective as I do. So I will go back with a rejuvenated enthusiasm and readiness to tackle projects at my small school on Tanna. Perhaps one of the best things I did back home was to spend a number of days in some fabulous classrooms (thanks to the "other" Ms. Dodd), where teachers think it's unacceptable for low-achieving kids to be low-achieving; that a good education can actually change a person's life. I wish I could just bring that mentality to Tanna! And hey, it wouldn't be too bad if ALL classrooms in America had that mentality too!

There are so many friends and family I didn't see while I was home that I wish I could have. I will have considerable catching up to do with a lot of folks when I come home for good later this year. And for anyone wondering, there is zero chance of me running off (or staying put, rather) with Man Tanna. No chance in hell, to be more precise. Did I mention how much I love the women and children :)

In Times Square, on our way to see The Lion King on Broadway, after having directed a version of the very same show on an outdoor coconut-leaf stage at a primary school on Tanna. This Broadway show was incredible!

And this is what I'm going back to: my tiny volcanic, beautiful island...except Emily won't be there...Well I guess we can't have everything in the South Seas. Dammit.

The Never Ending WAKA WAKA

Just a quick look at my daily life at Loukatai... At the moment I am directing the first-ever school play of the Lion King Musical at Loukatai School. After a small group rehearsal yesterday, these awesome 5th and 6th grade girls begged me for a chance to practice "Waka Waka," which if you don't know already, is only the most important song in the world, at least if you're in Vanuatu. It's Shakira's song from the World Cup, and here on Tanna, it just can't get old. The song is like the best thing of the year for these kids. This choreography is from when Emily came to visit in August and we performed it with some 4th grade girls at the school's Talent Night. I have since performed it impromptu while running (when kids start singing it at me), after church one Sunday (when the whole community made me stand up in front and dance it with all the kids, again impromptu), at the beach with kids, and at other various locations. And I am resurrecting it for the finale to the Lion King performance, because it really only gets better and better (rather than older and older...). And these kids can sure shake it just like Shakira.

A Library in Loukatai

A small view of the small Library at Loukatai:

This weekend the one and only Doctor on Tanna (who is here on behalf of VIVA, a Canadian NGO that provides a doctor every 6 months to Tanna) stopped by Loukatai with his family, and asked if I wanted to join them on a ride across the island to a black sand beach. Of course I jumped on the opportunity, as transport here can be really expensive if you want to go to a remote spot and even after a year I had never been there. And honestly, it’s refreshing to hang out with some westerners every once in awhile. So we ended up going to see a great waterfall and then we spent the afternoon at the most incredible beach I’ve been to so far in this country. A great surf beach with sand rather than coral, and a river running right into it, and, aside from a few local boys on horseback, we had the whole place to ourselves all afternoon. A fabulous day.

(My little friend Nerry got to come along and try out the boogie board. She was so excited she even sprayed herself with perfume before heading out in the truck. And below, an awesome waterfall tucked into the jungle of Middlebush, Tanna)

On the ride back, I sat in the back of the truck with the Doctor’s 7-year-old son, Nelson. Nelson was telling me about his Magic Tree House books that he only likes reading by himself, and the “Pippi In the South Seas” book his mom had just read to all three of the boys, and on and on and on about reading. And it occurred to me that this kid was in fact a better reader than every single one of my 14 and 15-year-old students in Class 7 at Loukatai School. But of course it’s easy to understand that this has everything to do with all the exposure Nelson has had to reading, and the total lack of exposure all my students have had (none of them have had the experience of being read to by a parent; none of them have ever taken a book to bed at night; most of their teachers never did genuine read-alouds or gave them level-appropriate books to read). Which leads me to the library…

By far the biggest project I’ve been working on as a Peace Corps Volunteer at Loukatai School is the Loukatai Library. When I first arrived, the library looked more or less like a big rubbish room. A few books on the shelves, more books on the floor, a handful of books in the hands of children… Maybe we had about 30 reading books. We had a ton of “School Journals,” a New-Zealand-made reading magazine for kids, most of which were dated from at least a decade or two ago. We also had a number of copies of some small red books distributed by the Vanuatu government that tell stories written by local people. All of the books were battered and no one seemed to see any correlation between this and the fact that they were also thrown about, left on the floor, left on shelves frequented by the volcanic ash that flies through the air and settles on absolutely everything.

I knew the only way to really address the literacy issue at this small school would be to figure out how to get the kids stuff to read and more importantly, to get them and their teachers to look after whatever it is they’re reading, so maybe we could keep whatever books we had around for awhile. Library project: the kids needed books to read and a place to keep them and the skills to take care of them. The Principal cleared out a space and gave me the go-ahead to do whatever I wanted with it. Every step of the way he has been completely supportive, from getting fabric to line the shelves front and back; from getting mats for the kids to sit and read on; from allowing me to remove the Organic Chemistry and 18^th Century Australian Field Guide books from the collection. This last one may seem trivial, but I know another volunteer whose school council refused to let these books go and so they now fill the few shelves at a school where the kids can hardly read the sentence “I am from Vanuatu, not Australia.” More than 700 books have come from the US from so many amazing people. Another few hundred have come from Australian donors like Kiwanis. The students have gotten to open box after box and have written numerous thank-you letters. Every book has been labeled and then stamped with our official Loukatai Library stamp. The library has actual sections in it. There are reading folders that all books will go home inside to protect them from weather, dogs, dust, ash, and all those other tropical goodies. We have a check-out system in place. Fabric covers on the shelves will keep the dust and ash off the books when kids aren’t in the library. I even got a handful of walkmans and tapes to make a “Listen-to-Reading” section of the Library (my Class 7 kids have already tried this out and LOVE it). The Teachers’ Library Workshop took place just this week, and that officially began the use of the library. The kids are so excited! It has taken the better part of my whole first year here to get this going. Slow-slow, but I guess that’s why we sign on for two years. In 2 years this library should be running straight, and I’ll probably be the lead librarian for the better part of it. And so I still have the job of making it sustainable. And again I am so so so grateful to everyone that has helped by sending books or helping to have books sent. It has definitely made all the difference!

(checking out their first library books in their reading folders)

The general attitude toward education here is interesting. There seems to be some interest in change and progress, but it’s not a very prominent attitude at all. I have met only one person who I would say is really passionate about education change, and she’s now working for the Tourism Office, which on Tanna has nothing at all to do with education (before she was working with Unicef and did all sorts of work for education change). There are many villages on Tanna where the custom is so strong that people will not send their kids to school at all. And in a place where everyone has food to eat and a bed to sleep on, where there are no real drug problems, where crime and violence is rarely spoken of, where the life is pretty good pretty much all the time, change is a tricky thing to tackle. No one is really begging for change. And sometimes change isn’t such a good thing, which is why some villages hold so tightly to their custom and learn their children in it rather than in traditional schools. That being said, the value of an education here, just like anywhere, is so important. Everyone sees life here changing, as more land is leased by expatriates, and more people have money to spend from their government jobs, and more tourists are coming, and more goods from China are around (you want a pack of MSG? only 50 cents!), and there are starting to be some areas where the local population has grown such that the ground they own is no longer enough to sustain themselves as subsistence farmers. And to be honest, although you seldom hear of it, there is violence here, there are children who are neglected, and there are many, especially women and children, who could really benefit from having some options that only an education can provide. So the fact that no one is begging for change in education maybe means we just have to try and get the ball rolling as volunteers. And besides, everyone who has seen the change in the library is thrilled with it. Everyone is so excited to start really using it, kids and teachers alike.

(teachers and a baby waiting for the Library Workshop)

(reading some good ol' Mo Willems on Tanna)

(listening to books on tape and reading a pop culture magazine)

Ji-ho!

**I wrote the following blog in May, but had trouble uploading the video on YouTube. I was finally able to upload this 4 minute video (it took nearly 24 hours to do it!), so here it is in July.

One of the global initiatives Peace Corps has going is something called Camp G.L.O.W., which stands for Girls Leading Our World. It is an initiative to promote leadership among women and awareness of gender issues. Peace Corps volunteers typically organize week-long "camps," but on Tanna Island I have been co-leading a different sort of Camp GLOW. Every Thursday after school I gather with the class 7 and 8 girls from Loukatai and we wait for Hali, a fellow volunteer at a school about 2 miles away, to arrive with her class 6 girls. And to be fair, it is often Hali and her girls waiting for my girls, who are often held in-calss after the 3pm "school's out" bell, because, well, because that bell doesn't always mean what it is supposed to mean. And it doesn't always ring when it is supposed to ring. It appears that teachers are welcome to teach until they feel finished, and whether or not that correlates to the 3pm bell is just a question of luck. But on Thursdays, we like it when the bell rings and the students get dismissed simultaneously at the scheduled time of 3pm, so that we can then get our Camp GLOW's 30 girls started on the activity of the day. So far we've gotten together a number of times, to do art activities, drama games, and most recently, learn the moves to the "Ji-ho" dance. I proudly copied most of the moves from the modified choreography done last summer at Camp Jabberwocky on Martha's Vineyard, the greatest summer camp in the USA, where the dis-abled and the able-bodied get together for all sorts of wonderful madness and mayhem. So thank you Camp Jabberwocky, for the original inspiration to teach the girls on Tanna this spectacular dance. We worked on the dance for only a few weeks, just in time to perform it at a neighboring school's Talent Night. Both my school and Hali's schools had originally planned their own talent nights, which was why we had started working on the dance in the first place, but at the last minute both schools decided to postpone the event until further notice... But thankfully there was a Talent Night at the nearby Loanatom French Mission School. Not only that, but word was starting to spread about this little dance and we had been formally invited to attend and share our group's talent. It was a fun night to say the least, even if the girls were half-embarrassed and half-scared-to-death to perform in front of people. The group dynamic was great, as was the night's net effect of forming a great bond amongst all of us. I love these girls. And in a male-dominated culture, where the girls have already silenced their own voices by the time they are in classes 6,7, and 8, I love that maybe these girls' voices will grow. In fact I am sure that the strength of their voices will grow. They have already said a lot by Ji-ho-ing it in front of a crowd, especially because of how reluctant they were to stand up and shake it in the first place. So I hope this video uploads and I hope that it says more than my few words can about this awesome group of young women on Tanna. This is the dress rehearsal, so know that the girls were even more shy to dance during the real thing just 30 minutes later. Ji-ho! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7oWJJGkks8

A Birthday and an Ocean of Love

My nephew Carlos

I had the very best nephew in the world. His name was Carlos. And at the moment, to know he is here might seem tricky at first because he passed away in 2006. Just before his 5^th birthday. He graced this small world with his wonderful presence for just 4 years. He worked a lot of magic in those few years. He inspired so many people with his smiles, his contagious laugh, his playful personality, his peaceful grace and his charm. Carlos was a boy of few words, but he was also a boy of the ocean. He was known to celebrate the sight of the sea with his enormous, expressive eyes and the perfect words of gratitude to whoever took him by telling them “thank you” in the most meaningful voice. His gentle energy was inspiring. And I can still call to mind the delightful sound of him giggling; especially from those times he played a game that involved some great surprise or scare. He loved a good scare. He loved the ocean. He loved Cheerios. He loved his family. For such a small little guy, he had a whole lot of love inside of him. And there was something about him that made everyone around him, and even people who never knew him, give a whole lot of love to him. And that love is still here, growing, all around, every-present in the universe we feel. That is why it’s really not that tricky to know that Carlos is still here.

If I could point to one thing and say this is the thing that has been the single most influential thing in my life, it would be that I got to be Carlos’ auntie for almost 5 years. I would say that’s a pretty big deal, that I was Carlos’ auntie. One could say that I’m pretty proud of it. It is the reason that I found this passion for all children, and especially for special children, for those with special needs. It is the reason I love teaching, especially that one child who challenges me to see him or her in a new way that ends up giving me the opportunity to change and learn something that only a child can teach. It is the reason that every time I get to see the ocean, which is almost every day in Vanuatu, I feel a simple and full sense of gratitude. I want to thank someone. I want to thank Carlos.

I wrote my last post on this blog about birthdays, and how important I think it is to celebrate them. And this week is Carlos’ birthday. He would be 9, but in my mind he is forever-4. A timeless reminder of love and peace and gratitude. And a continual source of inspiration. Happy Birthday Carlos. I will celebrate your love and your memory today and every day. I will celebrate that I am still an auntie, and that I now have the best niece in the entire world named Sophia Moon, whose large eyes and expressive 4-year-old face bear a striking resemblance to her brother Carlos. And I will celebrate the way that you, Carlos, never let autism or epilepsy define you; these things were not you, even if you knew them to be an important part of you. But you were something so much bigger than them. And like your big spirit, and your big love, there is still a big love for you all around this world. And I love you Carlos.

“Love for a specific person is radiant when it arises in emptiness. It is still love, it is still intensely personal, it is still very specific; but it is a wave that arises from an ocean of infinity. It is as if a great sea of love brings forth a wave, and that wave carries the force and thrill of the entire sea in its every breaking crest. The sensation is like watching an early morning sunrise in the desert: a vast open clear blue spaciousness within which there arises, on the horizon, an intense red-yellow fire. You are the infinite sky of Love, in which a particular fire-ball of personal love arises. One thing is certain: infinite love and personal love are not mutually exclusive- the latter is just an individual wave of an infinite ocean.” --Ken Wilbur

A Day of Birthdays

On the morning of May 11^th, during the last full week of Term 1, some representatives from the hospital on Tanna came to Loukatai School to give H1N1 vaccines to students who were at least 14 years old. Susan, one of my class 7 students, was talking with me at my house at the time. I should probably mention that during the last full week of school, in terms of academics, there isn’t much going on as this week is reserved for giving way too much time to the teachers so that they can fill out end-of-term reports. And yet the students are still expected to come to school…. I guess you could say Susan was making the most of her time, as she had come over to engage in conversation, in English, something every one of the students at Loukatai needs more practice in. After the crew from the hospital arrived on the school grounds, I asked Susan how old she was. She gave me the all too familiar blank expression, the most frequent response to this particular question. The next thing I asked her was when her birthday was. And after some thought, she told me “number 11 May.” I was shocked because she actually knew her birthday. But then I realized that not only was that very day the 11^th of May, but that Susan hadn’t yet realized this fact. I also had to double check this date with the Class 7 enrollment, and sure enough, there was Susan Iolu, birthday May 11. So it goes with birthdays among children here in Vanuatu. They generally don’t know their age (or they tell you the wrong age) and they also don’t generally know their birthday. On the morning of May 11^th, Susan knew only the day of her birthday, but clearly not in a way that was meaningful, since she almost missed the day entirely. Now she can tell you how old she is- she’s 15 (so lucky her, she got an H1N1 vaccine!). And she tells you her birthday with a confident smile on her face. But the simple fact is, knowing your age and birthday here in Vanuatu doesn’t have an inherent value like it does back home. In the US, a little kid, a big kid, an adult, everyone, knows when his or her birthday is. Because usually a birthday means at least something as simple as candles on a cake or at least a Happy Birthday card. But here? It usually doesn’t mean anything special at all. No cards. No cakes. No Happy Birthday wishes or songs. Why would a kid remember a day that doesn’t bring anything special with it? But I still think birthdays are important. Moreover, I think they are important in this place, on Tanna Island, in Loukatai. So I had to do something about the fact that Susan’s birthday almost went by without being acknowledged, and that 6 more of my students from class 7 had had wholly uneventful birthdays pass by this term. So I decided I’d give the kids what every kid needs to celebrate a birthday on Tanna. Birthday banana cake. That very next day all my class 7 students gathered at my house to make banana cakes. The boys made one and the girls made another, and we cooked them over a fire in the “local oven” inside my custom kitchen. While the cakes were cooking, some students played my guitar, some listened to my ipod, some copied lyrics off my computer, some learned how to play UNO, some looked at my photos, some read books. When the cakes were finished, we brought them inside my house and closed the door, so the other students at the school wouldn’t see us and envy our cake celebration. And for each of the 7 students whose birthdays had passed that term, we lit a candle, put it in the cake, and sang happy birthday to him or her. As we went from student to student, each one told the class their birthday and their age, and got a round of applause from everyone else in the class. And at the end, each student got a nice big piece of banana cake. And I’m confident that now they know their birthdays and their ages with confidence. It may seem something so small, but it’s something I think everyone has a right to claim as their own, something that makes everyone special, something that gives everyone a right to one day every year, have a fabulous excuse to celebrate themselves and be celebrated by others. And my Loukatai Class 7 students are definitely worth celebrating. They are also all now vaccinated against H1N1!

Teaching on Tanna

A typical moment during the lunch hour: students gathered on my little porch, checking each other for lice. Making a nice little pile of lice on Raio's skirt, to be eaten after. Because if you eat the lice, then I guess you can be sure they won't end up back in your hair.

Now I am approaching week 8 of the 2010 school year at Loukatai School. Week 8 already. That’s halfway to the end of term 1. One could say that things have changed from my days of free hours all day every day, days when I could read and run and relax and swim at the beach and play my guitar and sit and “story” the time away from sun-up to sun-down… Those were the days before school started on February 15^th. But oh, those were the days… On February 12^th the headmaster at Loukatai had the good idea to pull the teachers together to assign classes to each one. Good to have 3 days to plan ahead for the coming school year, right? With early literacy being the primary point of work among my group of Peace Corps teacher trainers here, I thought I might ask to teach the reading portion of the day to the youngest classes at the school. But it became apparent that not only were we still waiting on one more teacher (who never did arrive from her island; she was eventually replaced by a different teacher from south Tanna), but there was no one qualified to teach English to the year 7 and 8 students. No one except for me, that is. So I agreed to do it. So much for teaching literacy to the early grades, I thought. But I’m always in for pleasant surprises. And this island and this lifestyle have surprises as a customary part of each and every day it seems. Plus it actually sounded like fun. And besides, I had 3 whole days to plan…

So I started making my lesson plans, my goals, and I started planning ways to build literacy skills across the school, not just in classes 7 and 8. But I knew I had to do some waiting and seeing to really figure out what work lay ahead of me. Wait and see what surprises were in store in the classrooms of Loukatai School. And then the students came. And then, sure enough, there were the surprises. Even with all the stories I had already heard about Vanuatu classrooms, there were still so many surprises. There are still surprises every day. But I guess that is simply one of the wonders of teaching: the unexpected arrival of a special situation inside or outside of the classroom. So is it with teaching anywhere I suppose. Nevertheless, I’d like to share some of my little Loukatai surprises.

I was prepared to deal with low standards, as we had been informed already that the standards, which vary widely from the remote areas to the really remote areas, to the really, really remote areas (since here the question is how remote are you?), are generally not as high as what we as Peace Corps Volunteers from the US have been accustomed to in our home country. I was prepared for that. Isn’t that part of why I came here, after all? So I found that the reading and writing and listening skills in year 7 and 8 needed some work. Not terribly surprising. And I set off to help my students build up these skills. Charlotte’s Web was too challenging a book to listen to and comprehend… But Blueberries for Sal? Stellaluna? The Little Island? Make Way for Duckilings? I found out not only were these books perfect books for my 13 to 17-year-old students to listen to (glad too that I had my own copies of them), but they loved when I read these books aloud to them. Now that was a surprise. I couldn’t imagine reading these picture books to a silently captivated class of teenagers in America…I have many a time read these books to a captivated audience of 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 year olds in the US, but teenagers? Please. And since I had to get these kids reading and reading and reading, as we know volume of pages read does correlate with improved reading, I thought I’d get them reading 30 minutes a day. Sounded simple enough. So one afternoon, we set off to start our daily 30 minutes of reading, using what few books were available at the school. I asked the students what time it was. Blank stares. Even with the clock in the room. Surprise: they couldn’t tell time. But then again, time here revolves around two things: the sun and the bell, if someone decides to go and ring it. So we started learning how to tell time on a clock. And they are getting good, I am proud to say. (Almost to the point they could do the 30 minutes independently. Almost.) I am trying with everything I know to get these kids to care about reading. To help them find that reading is something they can enjoy. To help them see that reading can inform them about the world. The tsunami warning happened because of this earthquake in Chile—we can read about it kids! A novel concept. And no, I tell them, I am not from Chile, and no my family in the US did not feel the earthquake. Chile is in South America, which is different than North America. (By the way, I got an article on the earthquake online, as naturally information on the Chile earthquake was not available locally. And you wonder why so many people didn’t bother running up the hill, why they think these tsunami warnings are nonsense…) My students loved the real newspaper article I showed them on the Haiti earthquake, from a US newspaper. We had to break down the text, but they sure liked looking at the photos and learning about Haiti. I am also teaching them to read silently, instead of out loud, the default way to read here. We are working on building stamina as readers. I am trying to get them to care about even the broken books they have…

(Here are some class 8 boys building their stamina for reading silently)

And on the early literacy side of things, I also had a nice share of surprises. I did an assessment on Class 1 through 4 students, starting with Class 3. These are kids who are 8 to 12 years old. The first part of the phonics assessment: capital and lowercase letter identification. Not one of the 17 Class 3 students could name every one. Not one. There were 6 students, out of 20, in class 4 that could do it. And with this pattern, as you might guess, none of the class 1 or 2 students could name every letter. Actually, the class 1 students couldn’t identify a single one (but some could sing their abc’s!). But not to worry, I am far from discouraged. These are kids I’m talking about. These kids can learn and they WILL learn to read! I’ve got two years to see to that. And I’ve got two years to make something of the Loukatai School Library. Two years to see it filled with beautiful books with pictures and words that these kids won’t be able to get enough of. And I’ve got two years to work with these local teachers, so that they themselves can do things like master the phonetic sounds of the English alphabet (they were nicely surprised to learn that the English “R” isn’t rolled, that the letter Q makes a different sound than the letter K, as do the letters B and P…)

And then one of my favorite surprises yet came just over a week ago. It came in the form of an enormous box waiting for me at the post office, return address from the Bronx, NY. A box sent by one of my sister Emily’s amazing young students at MS 223 in the South Bronx. A box carefully filled and sent to my students by this one NYC student, Michael, and his whole family. 25 new reading books inside. 20 copies of Times for Kids magazines. Several NYC newspapers. Even a newspaper in Spanish! An American flag, a small globe, a US dollar and coins, a Spanish-English dictionary, a photo album filled with photos of his family and postcards of NYC, and TONS of wonderful, new school supplies. I was overwhelmed by the generosity of this most beautiful surprise that came from a place so very different than the place my students live in. From one strong culture to another, bridged by the importance of learning and sharing and compassion. My year 7 students were so excited to open a box of things from Michael and his family. (Although I still have most of it saved to share with more of the students at the school later on.) And what was the most interesting thing to them by far? Hands down to the advertisements in the Sunday issue of the newspaper, as they tried to wrap their minds around a store where you could see or buy any one of the cameras on this page, or any one of the DVDs on that page… And do they really have that giant Spiderman in the US? Then I tell them what a parade is, and what a float is, and what Macy’s is. I live for these spontaneous, organic moments of surprise, both inside and outside the classroom. And how about the time when I went to show a group of class 8 boys, hanging around the classroom after school, the Times article on the Chile earthquake I had just received in the mail that day from my mom, an article with all these incredible photos of the devastation there. Was I surprised to find that these teenage boys were more interested in the swimsuit model ad for Macy’s on the back? No, not terribly surprised by that one.

Teaching at Loukatai is sure an interesting experience, to say the least. And I will continue to enjoy every one of my moments of surprise, and try to make the most of them. So often they turn out to be great teaching moments. And I will continue to enjoy and make the most of this process of getting every one of the students of Loukatai School to be a great reader and writer and independent thinker. And if you haven’t already, please see my Loukatai Library page on facebook, with photos of the school library, and requests for ideas on how to stock this library with books!

The Loukatai School Library, March 2010: