I'm Back! (online that is)

Ok in my last post I some how forgot to put the most popular song in the Marshall Islands. The students absolutely love Beautiful Girl by Sean Kingston. You can not go more than 10 minutes without hearing that song.

ok back to my regular post.....

Time is flying in the Marshall Islands and I apologize for not updating my blog or responding to emails or letters as quickly as I should. Everyone who has written me a letter or a postcard thanks for being awesome. I am in the process of responding to everyone so please be patient, I have not forgotten about you at all.

Recently all of the Majuro volunteers met their host families. I will have to say that I have the coolest host family out of all of the volunteers. I’m sure the other host families are nice people, but it is just a fact that they are not as cool as mine. I guess that is just too bad for the other volunteers. My family is a young family, probably the youngest host family. My parents are in their mid-twenties and my host brother is 5 years old and my host sister will soon be 2 years old. I look forward to hanging out with them in the future.

In other news I have become involved in many different after school activities. I am the boy’s basketball coach, co-director of the school choir and I will probably help out with the girl’s volleyball team.

Other things…

Pogs:
Man oh man, kids play pogs here like it is 1994. You probably remember pogs as the circular cardboard discs about the size of a half-dollar and were popular about the same time as the Tomagachi toys. Here in the Marshall Islands all kids who are not in high school (and even some of the high school ones) play pogs at every waking moment in 2007. They play them on the sidewalk, on benches, and in the street. The funny thing is that none of them have slammers. So if for some reason you still have pogs and slammers sitting around, you can send them here and I am sure they will make some kids very happy.

They call me demon (part 3):
So the students here are always interested in who are the teachers’ girlfriends or boyfriends and want to see the teachers become couples. However, some of the 11th grade girls recent told a fellow teacher that I was ‘enana’ (meaning bad) and that she should not go after me because I have bad hair, I am a demon and I am a woman. HA! The funny thing was that the word that they used for woman was not one that the other teacher knew and they had to explain it to her. The students told her this information in confidence, in front of me, but in Marshallese so that I would not understand them. But of course, she immediately told me what they said as soon as the kids were gone. At first we didn’t know why they would call me a woman, except maybe because my hair is long. Then we decided that they might think I am gay and since the teacher didn’t know the word for gay and the students told her that it meant like a woman. Who knows, the kids here are crazy.

Nicknames:
Every so often some volunteers and I play football, basketball or baseball with the elementary school students in my neighborhood. One of the first times we were playing together the kids were asking me my name. Just to be a pain I would answer with “What’s your name?” And we would banter back and forth with the endless questions for a couple minutes, until—with the help of the other volunteer—I would find out the kids name and tease them because I knew their names and they didn’t know my name. The kids were persistent in wanting to find out my name and as a result the other volunteers told them to call me “Mr. Bushy Hair.” And boy do they love that name. For the last three or four weeks I have had kids yelling and screaming “Mr. Bushy Hair” at me across playing fields, at the school gym, or while I am walking down the street and they are riding in the back of a truck. The funny thing is that with their accents they have a hard time enunciating “Mr. Bushy Hair” and it sounds like they are screaming and yelling “Mr. Pussy Hair” at me. This creates for an amusing site for anyone who is walking around town with me.

I guess my new name is Mr. Pussy Hair the Gay Demon.