Herro!!!!

So Alex got to write the last little blog… I guess that means it’s MY TURN!!!

Well, as he told you, we’re about to start up school again. Everyone here is super excited… For the last few weeks we haven’t had any teaching to do! It’s driving us crazy! Alex started having withdrawal seizures. I had to stuff a sock in his mouth so that he didn’t bite off his own tongue. I kept trying to tell him he couldn’t teach without a tongue but he never listens.

Since not teaching was starting to cause so much trouble here, Alex, Seth and I decided it was time to take action. (DISCLAIMER: the following is not true… I’m not sure why we decided to write it.)Donning bandanas and machetes, we smeared our faces in mud and in the middle of the night crept to the hospital. Easily evading the robot guards we hopped the barb wire fence. As soon as we got inside, Alex activated our invisibility cloaks and we snuck around until we came to a room full of evil doctor/scientists! It was terrifying! They were all singing and laughing about how their evil plot to ruin education had succeeded. About this time I’d had enough! We rushed them and at machete point forced them to publically admit that the swine flu scare is only a super secret conspiracy to ruin world education so that aliens from Mars can come and invade. As soon as this announcement was made, President Obama appeared and congratulated us. He even gave us medals. He’s a sweet guy. He then declared all the schools open!!! YAY!!! WE CAN TEACH!

In other news, we killed three rats! Oh and the cat killed another. I think the cat was having a bad day because the night before the rat killings we brought her in to be fixed. The island was having an animal cruelty day and to celebrate they decided to fix all the cats and dogs…FOR FREE!! We jumped at the chance to get revenge on the cat for all the times she scratches us. Alex and I drove down and deposited our cat Sigmund; yes she is a girl with a boy’s name, at the vets. She’s called Sigmund because she’s nuts. It was pretty sad because I saw my student Leah at the vet. She was having all four of her dogs fixed and had a few tears in her eyes… Anyway, our cat made it out ok and the next day to work out all her frustration she caught a nice big baby rat. We caught three in traps. They were in our kitchen! The night before, we were watching a movie and the rats started running in a kitchen right in front of us! We chased them out with machetes and butter knives. Haha. They decided to come back but we were prepared! We had traps!

Yesterday was Sabbath here. Whenever we go to church, the SMs are in charge of a large part of the program. This varies from taking up offering to special music to scripture reading. Anything they need, we’re the go to people. After church we thought it would be awesome to visit some of the nearby villages. There are a few villages by our school which are for people from outer islands. There’s a certain amount of prejudice against them because they’re not “native Yapese.” We decided to go up there and play some songs for the kids and pray with people. When we got to the village it wasn’t much, just shacks made of tin and lots of dogs. We talked to one of the leaders in the village to ask if we could go door to door. The culture is a bit different here and you need to have permission to do almost anything. He said that recently things had changed a bit and he would have to ask the newly assembled community board if it was alright. So we didn’t get to go yesterday. We did play one song for them and prayed. Their special prayer request was for Steve who’s in the hospital with cancer. They told us here on Yap cancer is dangerous. I know it’s dangerous everywhere but there’s not much treatment for it here. So if you’d keep Steve in your prayers it would be greatly appreciated.

Other than that, the only other really amazing thing we did was go spear fishing! We caught like a hundred fish!... no that’s a lie we only got 5… and they were smaller than a dollar bill… Stupid fish look huge when you’re swimming next to them. But it really was a lot of fun. We went at night on a raft. We had a big bamboo pole to push us out. The night was beautiful. All the stars were out and there were no lights on land. We pushed out about a mile. The whole time we could hear fish jumping around us. They have these big flying fish here that are attracted to light. They’ve been known to jump right into a fisherman and spear him right through. We could hear them jumping all around our boat. When we slipped into the water we couldn’t see a thing. Everything other than our flashlight beams was just black. It was pretty scary. About two hours later we only had the four fish and we could see lightning flashes in the distance so we decided to call it a night. Still it was pretty amazing.

Oh I forgot to tell you. Perhaps some of you were at the Pleasant Hill chapel when Alex and I got to call in on skype and talk for a bit. Well we wanted to share out little miracle story about that. To make the 9:00 worship we woke up at two in the morning here and when we went to get online, nothing was working. All our calls to the school immediately dropped. We decided the only thing we could do was say a little prayer. We prayed and our next call went though without a flaw!! We had an awesome time talking to the school and to Pastor Chris about what we get to do out here. As soon as the call was over, I tried to quickly check my email but the internet immediately stopped working! Like I said we’re very glad that God helped us get to talk with the school and we miss you all.

Thank you again for everything all of you are doing for us. Your prayers and support mean a ton. Take care and we’ll try to post some new stuff as soon as we have teaching stories!