Finally, another post

Hey, this is Alex. Sterling and I are finally posting on our blog.

Answering the school's prayers, a new family has come to live with us in our five-star apartments! From India, a family of four has come to help us out. The father will be our much-needed accountant, the mother (might be) running our as-of-now never-opened cafeteria, and one of the children will be enrolled in Kindergarten! This is a blessing, as everyone, especially Principal Fonseka and his wife are overworked. To top it all off, another family and an individual have arrived this morning (I believe. Much of the time we don't know exactly what's going on). We haven't seen them yet, as they arrived in the wee hours of our pre-dawn slumber and are most likely sleeping right now, but we are blessed and joyed to have them on the team! Forget what I said about not meeting the new staff. I just met them. They seem pretty cool, and I was greeted with an invitation to spearfishing this Thursday ...

Taking advantage of the three week H1N1-preventative respite from school, Kirsten, Kristen, and I have been working towards our SCUBA certifications. At the local's discount rate--quite a deal-- we have been going into town after work to lolligag in the pool at the Manta Ray Bay Hotel. After three of those training sessions, we loaded our 'action hero' gear onto a boat and headed out to a body of water in which we couldn't stand up in. Our first dives! They were pretty sweet. We didn't go to any spectacular sites, since we were only supposed to 'get the feel' of it, but I still saw plenty of life. Our last two dives were supposed to take place today (Sunday), but they were cancelled due to an overbooking of dives at the hotel. It's just as well, though, since I'm sick and need to rest up for school tomorrow.

Yes, that's right. School resumes tomorrow! All of us are excited to see our kids again. None of us can wait to wake up super early, stand up for six hours, and then grade papers and prepare the next day's lessons until darkness falls! I kid. We really are super stoked. The last three weeks have been alright, with manual labor in the morning and free time to cool off and shower in the evening, but I want to teach! At the time of writing, I have almost finished my lesson planning for the week. Although we are set back due to the three week mandatory closing of school, I have some fun projects and lessons planned! We can't wait.

Let me tell you of the productive things we HAVE done this break. As I alluded to in the last paragraph, we have been working in the mornings during break. Most of our work has been in campus aesthetics. Living on an island in which the jungle thrives, this means cutting down the jungle. Entrusted with a weedeater each, Sterling and I are the youngest SM's with the heaviest tools. Our engines coughing up black air, we were assigned to go ahead of everyone else and everything head height and below. Sterling even switched out his plastic line and attached a saw blade to his weedwacker. I'm sure Tim 'The Tool Man' Taylor would smile if he heard that. Our other big assignment involved big rusting barrels full of tar. You know something is messy when you have to wash your hands and feet with gasoline to get it off.

Other, smaller things, we accomplished were homely. We bought a container to keep our food safe from them rodents. We killed three of them rodents (big suckers they were, too!) with all-metal, razor toothed, rat traps from hell. We did some other things, but I don't want to bore you.

The rat traps remind me of something else! When we first bought them, my hand got sticky for some reason. The stupid rat traps had cut my finger without me even knowing it! Later, when I first set them, they got my other hand! Now I have a half-inch mar through my left thumbprint. It took over a week for that gash to close up. Yes, there is a point to all of this banter. It has something to do with first aid kits, but I don't quite know how to phrase it. I guess what I want to say is 'Thank you' to my mom for ensuring that a first aid kit arrived in Yap with me. I have already used a bunch of band-aids-- excuse me, bandages to cover up those cuts that stay open for a while. Dirt gets everywhere here. I had this one infected cut in my knee that was packed full of dirt. I was, like, 'What the heck, man? Why are you so full of dirt?' Later, I saw that the black dirt was joined by some whitish liquid, and that the cut and the area around it were hard ... Luckily, it's better now. Or so I hope. Now all that's left is a nifty three-dimensional monument to remind me of the pain that a boiling-water compress can give to an infected knee cut. As I was writing this paragraph, I couldn't help but glance at my sad little toe. Right now, it's bleeding through my bandage through a dime-sized absence of skin. What was the point of all of this, again? Oh, right! My first aid kit has been very useful this last month.

Which is a semi-decent segue into our next topic. Sterling and I have been here for over a month now. I'm pretty decently confidently mostly sure that we could not have done this without all of you. We want to thank you, profusely (that's a vocab word), for all of your support and emails and packages. You all have been stellar. It's not always easy here, and contact--difficult as it is sometimes-- with people back home has lifted us and carried us through this month. As school starts, and we tumble into the pants of Mr. Alex and Captain Spence, we will need your love and care all the more. We appreciate you support and we love you all! Thanks so much!

Every Saturday night, at the end of AY, the SM's and church youth all stand in a circle and hold hands. In this ritual, we sing a song together before praying and heading out. I want to leave you with the song, as I enjoy every time that we do this.

I don't remember all of it, but I think I remember the chorus:

Meet me in heaven

we'll sing songs together

Meet me at the savior's side

I'll meet you in heaven

We'll join hands together

Brothers and sisters I'll be there

Pray that we all will be there

We miss you and are praying for you. God bless you all!