Week 41 in Tarawa

One of the things we do as part of our ITEP work is to observe teachers who are in the student teaching phase of their certification.  Right now we are working with 4 different teachers.  Each teacher has to have 5 lessons observed and evaluated.  Last Friday we visited Temokua's class, where he was teaching a lesson on different types of banks as part of his accounting curriculum.  This picture shows a team of 6 girls preparing a role play activity to portray the 3 different types of banks.

Here the girls are doing their role play while Temokua observes and grades them.  They had to do everything in English, of course, which is very difficult for some of them.  Notice the open windows on both sides of the classroom.  When it rains, the noise is so loud it makes it very hard to hear anything the teacher or students say.  As ambulances or police cars go by with their sirens blaring, they make quite a distraction while instruction comes to a halt for half a minute.







Temokua is giving direct instruction to the class on the three kinds of banks.

We have had several good storms roll through recently, which has messed up the road but really helped the water situation.

The rain reflects some sad things that have happened recently in our mission.  One of our young elders learned two weeks ago that both his parents and two younger siblings were killed in a private plane accident in Missouri.  Amazingly, he has decided to stay on his mission.  Tomorrow we say goodbye to the self-reliance senior couple who are returning to the U.S. temporarily, we hope, for a medical procedure.  Their health problem, they believe, may stem from the mosquito bourne disease, Chikagunya, which she had last February. 
Next Tuesday we begin teaching a new ITEP class, EDU 312 called Effective Pedagogy.  Time is flying by!

Weeks 39 and 40 in Tarawa

Besides being an uneventful week, the internet was down for most of the weekend last week, so we never got our blog sent out.  Sorry about that.  This week, on the other hand was very busy and full of fun events.  On June 13th, we were invited to tour the USS Millenocket, a humanitarian hospital ship going around the south Pacific islands.  The ship is only two months old, and is a very new and strange design.  As you can see, it is a twin hull vessel.  What you can't see is that it's made almost entirely of aluminum.  As a result, is has a top speed of around 40 knots.

Here are some of our group on the helicopter flight deck.  From right to left you see Sister Sumner, Sister Alldredge, and Elder and Sister Bogh.

This is the lounge area of the ship.  It is a place for the ship's crew and the ship's mission personnel to relax.  The mission personnel consist of doctors, dentists, optometrists, psychologists, and even musicians.  Foreground left to right are Sister Bogh, Sister Alldredge, and Elder Bogh.  The ship's crew is fairly small, only about 26 people.  The mission includes about 240 people, however.

This is one of the fanciest life rafts I've ever seen

On Wednesday, June 17th, the ship's brass band came to Moroni High School for a 45 minute concert.  The kids were thrilled, and the band members told us ours was the best audience they had played for.  Sister Sumner and I even got to dance a little.

One of the reasons this past week has been so busy is that we've had many visitors.  Jon Shute and a group of 15 BYUH students from Kiribati arrived on the 15th, along with auditors and TVET people from New Zealand.  Ameet Khumar and Bruce Andreasen joined us for a post devotional breakfast Tuesday morning.

We've been having lots of problems with the generators that provide us electricity when the daily road construction turns off our power every morning around 7 a.m.  If we're lucky, we can collect buckets of rain water to use to flush our toilet.  If it's not raining, the bathroom smells kind of gross until the power comes back on around 5 or 6 in the afternoon.

Sunday after church the Relief Society and Primary prepared a wonderful surprise treat for Father's Day.  With our church getting out at 3 p.m., it was 4 p.m.by the time we finished.  The senior missionaries had planned a welcome back meal for President and Sister Weir at 5:30.  Needless to say, we weren't very hungry for the second meal.  The senior dinner was also
a farewell for Elder and Sister Waldron who are returning to the U.S. for medical treatment.  We hope they'll be able to return in a month or two.

Here's my Father's Day present from Sister Sumner.  She baked me a cherry and an apple pie for our senior dinner on Father's Day.  Boy, were they yummy.  These are the first pies she's made since coming to Kiribati.  We were really lucky to find a jar of sour pie cherries several months ago, and had been saving them for this occasion.

Here's all that was left after the senior's dinner.  Oh well, I didn't really need the extra calories.  Besides, it was fun to share with the other senior couples.

This has also been a busy week because we were asked to help with several church programs.  Friday, June 19th, the Eita 1st ward asked us to give our "Equally Yoked" husband and wife presentation to their ward.  This is the same program we gave to the Husband and Wife retreat for the Moroni High School faculty and spouses last month.  On Saturday, Janet was the main speaker at the Tarawa East Stake Relief Society Conference.  She did a marvelous job.  I organized a musical number and accompanied the opening and closing hymns.  In this picture, the sisters are learning how to make flowers out of Pandanus leaves. Sunday (today) She also presented the Relief Society lesson.  Whew.  No wonder time is flying by so fast.

Week 38 in Tarawa

We didn't take all the pictures we wanted to, but we hope this blog conveys a better idea of what a typical work day and a typical P-day are like.  Unless it's actually raining, Sister Sumner and Sister Alldredge go for a 30 minute walk every weekday morning at 6:15 a.m.  This was one of the rare mornings I happened to be with them.  Sister Weir, our mission president's wife also happened to be there to take the picture.  This picture doesn't show the road construction or the doggy do that makes morning walks hazardous.
We always carry a small rock to scare away the growling dogs.

After a shower and breakfast, we head over to the school for either a faculty meeting, shown here, or an administration devotional.  Since this was Monday, we had a faculty meeting, which starts with a hymn, a prayer, and a spiritual thought.  I usually play the piano.  We always have to sit in front with the administrators, even though we're really only advisors.  After our devotional, we help Lita, our principal, by walking by all the classrooms to see which teachers need substitutes.  The lack of phones and email, together with bad roads and overcrowded buses, makes communication difficult for teachers who are sick or just late.

 

 

Most mornings we begin work together in our office.  We check and answer email, grade papers, and prepare lessons.  We try to get as much done over the internet as early as possible because once school starts, the internet is impossibly slow.  When we work together, I sit just to Sister Sumner's left, which makes things rather cozy.  We have learned to divide up our tasks so that I can go back to the apartment and work on our own laptop.  Any downloads for teaching materials are done at the apartment because the ITEP Wi-Fi connection there is much faster.

Here I am working on our personal laptop at the office in our apartment.  In addition to working on our ITEP class material, I often help returned missionaries with their BYUH applications by scanning and sending documents required by BYUH.  I also often call BYUH to resolve problems or get answers to questions raised by the student applicants.                                       We also do classroom observations for student teachers and prepare professional development lessons for the faculty.

Wednesday starts with an assembly in the chapel and cultural hall.  This is our view from the front looking out over the student body.  On Wednesdays, the students wear their Sunday best clothes instead of the blue and white school uniform.



Here I am at the driver's license bureau in Betio. Last Wednesday I was asked to get my Kiribati driver's license.  I need it for another form of identification to be able to cash checks for the missionaries at the local ANZ bank.  This is one of the responsibilities I'll be taking over from Elder Bogh when he leaves, which he took over from the Wall's when they left.  We hope more senior couples will be called to serve here, but so far none are in the pipeline.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays we teach ITEP classes from 4 to 6 p.m. We're sorry we didn't take a picture of this week's class.  At 6 p.m. we go immediately to the TALL (Technology Assisted Language Learning) computer lab where we help students with their BYUH applications, administer SLEP (Second Language English Proficiency) tests, and help students with their English learning.  This is why I'm eating a sandwich for supper in the computer lab, since we're there until 9 p.m.   We are always super busy in the weeks before BYUH application deadlines.  At other times, we can do work on our own lesson preparations.

This past Friday morning, as we left for devotional, we were amazed at the continuing three-a-day training of our student athletic team.  They have been training hard for the Interschool Competition which takes place during the Kiribati July Independence Week celebration.  Moroni High School has won this event 4 years in a row and the students have been training for over a month to make it five in a row.

This past Friday afternoon was the annual church employee fitness activity.  This picture shows the sisters playing basketball.  While there wasn't a lot of scoring, there was plenty of action, which sometimes more resembled rugby than basketball.  We were divided into four teams which competed in basketball, and tennis court ping pong using a volleyball.  Before the competitions everyone did jazzercise to warm up.

The four men's teams also competed in basketball.  Needless to say, the blue team I was on won.  If you look carefully, you can see me with a blue hat standing right under the basketball hoop.  I did OK for an old man playing with people half my age. Right after the competitions, we had a wonderful meal served right out on the tennis court.

Saturday is our Preparation day (P-day).  Yesterday I grated 3 coconuts for Sister Sumner's wonderful granola cereal.  Sister Sumner baked three loaves of bread and made a batch of granola cereal.

When Sister Sumner bakes, I get dishwashing duty.  Actually, she nearly always cooks, and I nearly always do dishes.  I think it's a pretty fair arrangement since she cooks up such wonderful things to eat.  After cleaning up the cooking messes, I started the laundry and vacuumed the apartment, just like missionaries on P-days all over the world.

We love the way freshly dried clothing smells after hanging out under the eave of our back porch.  The ocean breeze helps them dry quickly.  We don't mind doing laundry in full view of the ocean and the sound of the breakers crashing on the coral reef.  As we begin the second half of our mission, we marvel at the wonderful experiences we've had and how we've grown to love the Kiribati people.  The Savior taught us that the only way to serve Him is by serving our fellow beings.  In the process, we come to love both Him and the people we serve.