Drunken Spanish Rice

Hey everyone. Thank God it's the weekend.
Last week was a typical week of teaching, nothing big going on, except that I was completely exhausted by the end of every school day. I'm in bed by 10...earlier if I'm lucky. I think I talk too much in class. I need to foster more group discussion out of these kids, or at least get them to participate more. That will take a lot of planning from this experienced educator...

So what else? Friday was very low key. It was the weekend, so that's all we really cared about. Every Friday after school there is choir practice for the entire school. I don't know how that came about, but it seems that every student here is very musically talented. They all have great voices. So we hear groups of students singing here and there. Especially when there are the black outs, and students are still in the main building, their beautiful voices echo through the halls while we wait in the dark for the power to come back on. Anyway, listening to the first choir practice was really great, since the gym they practiced in is close to my office window, so it gave me something nice to listen to as I was grading papers.

Now, once a month a group of faculty and staff will cook for the rest of the faculty and staff on the first Saturday of that month. Yesterday was the first time a group had to go, and my JV community picked to go first. We named ourselves the Tin Sweedish Chefs, which spawned from my original idea "The Food Network" which bacame "The Iron Chefs" which became "The Tin Chefs" and then we had to add "Sweedish" in the title because the Sweedish Chef from the muppets is really, really funny.
Anyway, we all left the campus early in the morning to go food shopping. We had a budget of $100 that the director gave us. It was absolutely pouring cats and dogs yesterday, so by the time I got to the store, despite being covered by my rain jacket, I was soaked. Oh well, at least it was warm out.
Quick side note....Joe had to meet this guy named Clark while we were downtown to discuss sports programs in Chuuk and other sports related things. Nice guy. We all talked for an hour or so. However, I heard him quickly mention his son's name, which sounded very familiar to me. After the meeting, Joe and Jaclyn decided to run up back to campus for a workout, and Adrienne, Chris and I drove back to one more shopping center to buy some final ingredients. We bumped into Clark again, thankfully, because I approached him and asked him if his son went to Holy Cross. It turns out that both of his sons did. They are the two HC grads I am supposed to be looking for because as soon as people found out I was coming here, some HC friends said that they actually know some kids from Chuuk. Anyway, I thought that was interesting. Small world. I'll meet up with them soon.

Anyway, we get back to campus and at 3:00 we all start cooking for the 6:00 dinner. It was Mexican night. We made burrito meat, Spanish Rice, Chris' mango salsa and other assortments. However, the Spanish Rice took a while to bake, and we just threw in a lot of spices, and instead of using a lot of water to cook the rice, we threw in a lot of Japanese beer. It was ... interesting, but still good. Chris was unable to find any Mangos for his salsa, and unfortunately the black beans we bought were drentched in soy sauce, which did not help the salsa. It was also very interesting. We finally decided to pour in the little Mango Rum we had to give it a kick. All in all, cooking was very enjoyable, and the feast was a huge success. We all ate soo much that none of us wanted to move afterwards.

It was a nice weekend, especially to get off campus and not think of school work for a while. The school week is very stressful. The whole notion of "island time" gets thrown out the window if you're a teacher here at Xavier. But it's a challenge and it is exciting. Tomorrow I'm having final tryouts for Romeo and Juliet. Which reminds me, I need to go through the script the students wrote today and "correct" anything that needs correcting. I'll be spending all day lesson planning today. I appreciate the emails and letters I've been getting. Keep sending love. Peace