I survived my first week!

Kia Orana!

Last night our host Debi took us all to the Coral Club for a GREAT dinner. It overlooked the ocean and there was a pool on the deck. I had the chicken and it was lightly breaded and baked with a sweet onion gravy, served over some really great fries and a salad. Mmmmm...

Then a few of us headed toward the Staircase Restaurant for a bargain of $5.00 we got an island show with dancers and all. Luckily none of us were chosen when they go out and grab volunteers from the audience. The MC said that if they do even if you shake your head "no," it means "yes," and if you nod your head, that also means "yes," so you have to dance either way.

I really didn't want to show off the lack of skills I learned at the dance lesson on Tuesday. That stuff is hard to do.

Here another volunteer Gevinie, who ended up renting a car and has been driving me and Rei to to and from the school everyday. But she is only here for 2 weeks, so the last week, Rei and I are back to the bus again. Gevinie is from Piedmont and is retired from Levi Strauss.

What a cute car, huh? it's a Cabriolet. The only bad thing is that because of the humidity and the past few days of rain, it's quite musty and moldy smelling, quite like the library and the reading room we are working in. It's pretty bad. I hope I don't develop some respiratory problems because of it.

Here are Rei and Megan. Rei is a retired nurse originally from Norway with a great accent and a good sense of humor and she makes me laugh every day. Megan just graduated College and is from St. Louis. We were exploring the beach near our motel yesterday and I took this shot.

I've been playing with Shelley's camera and took some pictures with the "cloudy" setting and the black and white setting and the sepia one too. I was having too much fun. Those pictures you'll have to wait for, I took way too many trying to figure out the camera.

So, here are some of the kids I work with. There is Tiki, Melissa and Tyrone.

Tiki is reading from a Pokemon book, Melissa is proudly showing one of the books she finished and Tyrone is playing Sight word Bingo with me. They not only like to win a "regular" bingo, but then proceed to "blackout" the entire board before we can end the game.

Today, we had an athletic competition, they split up the school into 4 teams, red, blue, green and yellow.

Here they are marching onto the field.

they even dressed up one of their pets to support the Blue team.

I was measuring the "ball throw." Just throwing a tennis ball as far as you can.

Then, here is the awards ceremony. All the teams are grouped together and the awards for both junior and intermediate boys and girls were given along with the team with the most points.

Funny, when they come up to receive their awards, they have to dance to some random music they play over the speakers. They really liked it when this one boy, Reese, danced like they do in music videos, I guess that's what you would call it. Then all the younger kids would join in too.

It was a fun, but exhausting day. I am spent, but wanted to share with you what has been going on.
We have the weekend free, so I think a few of us are going to go on an island tour tomorrow and maybe a movie later on. There is only one theater and by coincidence the owners of the motel also own the theater. I think HellBoy is premiering tonight, but I think we will see either Tropic Thunder or request another movie. Debi says that sometimes Harry will just pop a movie in for you as a special request. Another funny thing, they break after an hour of the movie, no matter what part of the movie you are in and everyone goes out and buys ice cream before heading back into the theater to finish the movie.

I think I also will have to do laundry soon. I have a choice of using the motel to wash my clothes, but they don't have dryers so you get your clothes when they dry after hanging on the line in this climate. Otherwise, walk a bit down the road and pay a little more to have your clothes wash, dried and folded. i think it'll be worth it to pay more to have dry clothes.

Well, thanks for checking in, I'll try and blog again soon.

I've been coming to the internet place every other day for an hour instead of every day for half an hour.

Mei taki,

Sharon