Quick Week, 11/13

Well, Friday the 13th is suppose to be unlucky, but it went alright. All week we've been having Week of Prayer. Every morning we had songs and special music and then one of the SMs would share a message. At the end we would get in a circle and say a prayer with our class. The boys and girls wouldn't hold each other's hands, so the circle was usually broken in one or two places. Crazy kids. I got a blessing from the meetings. The SMs put some good thought into the messages and singing with the kids is fun because they get so into and sing really LOUD. I also liked it because I didn't have to teach for the first period. Can't argue with that. Next week I'm back to teach again. But I don't mind.

This week we were studying verbs in English class. I assigned some stuff out of the book about tenses of verbs. The kids did great on it. The next day I told them to write a fake diary or journal using the four tenses we studied. One kid completed the assignment correctly. They wrote stuff, but it only had two tenses. Marshallese is a very simple language and they only have three tenses. They don't change the verb in tenses either. They just put a word in front that means past, future or present. I went back the next day and told them all to do the assignment over and gave them some extra instruction. They complained a lot about it, but they really need this. When we started out with verbs I told them this was really important for them. They wanted to know why and I said, "I see your writing, you do this wrong all the time." They can pick it out of a book and tell you what the right tense is, but they can't use it correctly in a written sentence, or a spoken one for that matter. I've gotta figure out how to teach them this. Obviously the standard stuff hasn't worked. They can do the book work but it hasn't helped them write better.

I found out recently that a large percentage of the students in our school can't pay for school. This is a problem because the school is going deeper and deeper into debt to the whole island because the budget isn't balancing. Basically, if these kids had been paying the last several years, we wouldn't be so far into debt. Lots of things are really expensive out here, power being one of them. This doesn't make it easy to balance a budget. Some of the kid's parents can pay, but don't because they haven't been made to pay the last few years. The principal is going to get on their cases. On the other hand, their are some kids who want a Christian education and just can't afford it. I really believe the quality of education here is much better than the public schools. The kids in the public schools tend to be low class, troubled, and come from broken homes, or no homes at all. Even in my class so many of my kids live with their grandparents, aunts, uncles, or are just straight up adopted. Many kids are had out of wedlock here and the parents have no money to raise them because they are kids themselves. One of my students dropped out of school because she is pregnant. She's 14 years old in 8th grade.

We are all looking for financial support for worthy poor students who want a Christian education and take their classes seriously. We are carefully going over the students to find ones that people from the US could sponsor. If you are reading this and want to help sponsor someone, you can let me know at icemanvr6@gmail.com . I don't know the details yet, I don't even think the principal has fleshed everything out. I do know that tuition is $75 a month for elementary and $90 for high school. Any help is appreciated. On the outer islands we're having the same issue, but tuition is much cheaper. A year's tuition is $250 on Jeh or Woja. A donation goes a long ways out there. I'll post a blog sometime about how they are doing on Jeh and Woja. There are some really exciting stories coming to us from there, but I'm out of space so I'll save it for another blog.