happy students

Tour…happy students

 In the past 2 months I have noticed a huge change in my students and teachers.

Our new building was finished, and now we are working on getting new supplies and materials to complete our classrooms.

New chairs arrived by ship! (the students had been sitting on the floor...at least it was new clean tile floor).

(in case you wanted to know, the ship I took to the Mortlocks was this size-I know it was hard to tell in the posts I wrote about my ship adventures...just imagine being on the open ocean in that!)

In my first few months teaching was an adventure, learning how to teach with less. Using whatever I had on hand.

Having a new building, and chairs has boosted the morale of everyone at UFO Elementary. Materials are still few and far between but hopefully that will change in the near future (stay tuned…books should be arriving soon and I am working on a lesson plan project with DOE and the other PCVs in Chuuk)

Timing is never certain in Chuuk…so while waiting for the ship the students took me around and we had a photo shoot (lead by the students of course) and drank coconut and ate óót (this is the stage when an old coconut starts to sprout leaves to eventually turn into a new tree. If you open it up the inside has a soft center (like the consistency of a dry crunchy marshmallow) and it is very sweet and delicious).

Then the chairs arrived!

We had to carry the chairs from the dock to the school (I am not good on estimating distance but I would say it is at least ½ a mile possibly longer). It took us two days to carry all 100+ chairs.

We now have complete classrooms, and the students are excited to learn!

Random thoughts…

-8^th grade students can take entrance exams to test into private high schools on the main island…all of my 8^th graders passed! (I cannot take all the credit (I was their teacher for only 6 months) there were 2 PCVs before me Johnny and Ben-thanks for all your hard work!)

-If you donated to the solar lamp project, they arrived last month and the community loves them! Thank you to everyone who supported this project.
-My American family sent me an Easter egg hunt in a box! My siblings loved it! Richen was the winner, she found the most eggs.

-We got a new puppy! His name was first Pancake, then Tabasco, and finally Azunto (a popular song/dance in Chuuk right now)