Battling Bugs and Coconuts?

This is an early post that I saved on my computer & now I'm going to share it with you!

Not to sound cliché, but the little moments have been meaning a lot to me. There are the really tough moments when I question what I’m really doing here. Some evenings I wake up from painful, itching mosquito bites. It’s frustrating, because before I go to bed I spray my body with deet repellant (my skin is probably going to start turning green) and I keep a small fan blowing. It really is a luxury that I have mosquito repellant and electricity to run a fan. But some nights (most nights) I feel like I can’t take it. There are weekends that drone on and every minute feels like an hour. Sometimes I don’t think I can eat any more rice or canned makrel (actually, I’ve stopped eating the makrel). Walking home in the rain from school and falling and spraining my ankle was my least favorite. There are ‘millimoments,’ I know if there were a plane in front of me waiting to take me home-I would jump on it. But then there are positive millimoments as well. When I’m laughing and joking around with my host family, when a student understands a grammar rule I have been drilling about for days, finding a tree that looks like it has Christmas lights decorated around it… Once, when we only had taro and copra (coconut) to eat I spent an hour trying to husk a coconut. It was getting dark and the spike we use to husk the outside layer was dull so naturally it was challenging. I finally got the nut out of the shell & I did a little dance. I felt like Tom Hanks in “Castaway” when I stared at the face in the coconut (it became my Wilson for a split second). These moments are amazing!

Note: I haven’t heard from the outer island Volunteers (I don’t think the Woleians at cite yet). However, I did hear that Catherine made it to Ulithi.