JVI Retreat - Camping and Island Walk, and Halloween

Hey everyone. First of all, I'd like you to note that there is a new link on the side of this website, called My New Pictures. All it is is a continuation of the same website I was using to show pictures, only the first account ran out of room for free uploads. So I started another one. There are pictures of the camping trip, which I will now explain:
So we have two retreats during the year that involve only our JVI community: Joe, Adrienne, Jackie, Chris Dwyer, and myself. We do all the planning and make the decisions of how it is going to run. For instance, should we go to a remote island and relax or camp out, should there be a priest with us, is there a theme, is one JV organizing everything or all of us? For this one, we decided that, even though a trip to another island would be very relaxing, we wanted something different and we wanted an experience that would be good for community building. What better way than to go camping. We'll go to an island in the Spring. Also, each of us would lead in prayer and reflection at different points along the retreat and there would be no priest with us this time. We just didn't know who to ask, everyone was pretty busy, and it would have been better if it was just the 5 of us for camping.
After leaving campus after the honors assembly, with our backpacks and machetes ready to go, we followed Rutan, a worker here at Xavier and a good friend of ours, to his house through the village of Sapuk. By village I mean there are a few scattered houses made out of wood and tin that you can get to by following narrow trails in the jungle. There aren’t any main roads you follow to get to some of these houses. After walking through some properties and jungle, the bush became thicker and we stopped passing by houses. We started ascending and the trail consisted of a path where the plants were less than 3 feet tall. It was very beautiful, and on this particular afternoon it was very humid, so we were all soaking. We had to navigate through the jungle, all uphill, for about 45 minutes. If we were on a road it probably would have been a 15 minute walk. Even though the sun was setting, there was enough light for us 6 to walk through the jungle. At one point, the canopy was so thick that it was like night time.
We stepped out of the bush into a clearing and we saw the top of this hill about 300 yards away from us, and there was nothing but very tall grass that we had to machete through. Rutan left us, and we continued making our way up the steep hill, cutting through grass.
As we reached the top (not the tip top, but it was flat enough) it was pretty dark. We found a good rocky yet flat part to put our bags down. In front of us was a beautiful view of the eastern part of the island (check out the pictures of the sunrise.) Xavier was right in front of us. About a mile or two away, of course. There was a pretty steep drop at this part too, but we were safely away from it, and it wasn’t a complete drop, just a very steep rocky slope. Behind this view was a huge plain of this tall grass, with a few coconut trees. We didn’t know how far back it went because it was dark. So we found a flat spot on some soft ground in the grass, and made a small fire on this rocky part overlooking the island.
We had tuna and two cans of Chef BoyarDee, which was pretty awesome. We had some water, but not much, because we didn’t want to carry so much. We were only going to camp out for one night.
Each community member had a turn to lead reflections. After dinner I went, and after my prayers, I handed out thank you notes and letters to the other JVs that were written by their students. The two days before the retreat I collected as many letters from students as possible, asking them to thank their teachers and say nice things to them. We divided up the letters and read them, and they were really nice and heart warming. After that we all fell asleep on the nice hard rocks, with a gentle breeze blowing over us. Halfway through the night I left to go into the tent to try and get more sleep. I was the only one to sleep in the tent that night.
At 5:30 Jaclyn woke me up to tell me that the sun was rising. We all silently watched the sunset rise (check out the pictures). There were some clouds, but it was still very beautiful. We also got a good look of what was actually around us. We saw how far back the grassy hills/plains went. After a quick breakfast of leftover cookies and a morning prayer, we walked into the plain, drank some coconuts that Joe got for us by climbing a tree, then we headed up the hill even more to check out the Japanese guns (check pictures). It was about a 30 minute walk through the tall grass to these guns. There were about 5 of them spread out across the top of this hill, all of them rusted and covered with grass and moss. But we got some good pictures of one.
After packing up, we left the hill at around 8:30. Hiking back was interesting, since we got lost and we were literally making out own path through the thick jungle. We got so lost that we ended up finding ourselves on the complete opposite side of the hill we originally started from. We met up with some very kind locals. Joe speaks a little bit of Chuukese. Whenever you bump into someone, they offer you cocounuts by climbing the nearest tree and throwing some down. We each drank about 2, and another stranger came and handed us a freshly picked watermelon. We were kind of late for returning to school (we needed to start on our walk around the island) but it would be impolite to not accept their hospitality. After sitting with the locals for a while and drinking coconuts, we headed off to Xavier, but not the way we came the day before. We ended up being on the wrong side of the hill Xavier is on, and we bumped into another nice family (by bump into I mean we stumbled across their house). We managed to tell them that we were looking for Xavier, and they understood. We had to keep saying we were “Sensei Xavier”, sensei meaning teacher in Japanese (remember teenage mutant ninja turtles? Good.) or else they thought we were tourists. A mother, her son and her daughter stopped what they were doing and we followed them through some trails back to Xavier. The son, who was probably 9 years old, climbed a 30 foot tree for us to give us more coconuts. We got to Xavier around 11:30. After a quick change of clothing (I was smelly and sweaty, but there was no way I was showering) and a quick lunch, we packed some water and some snacks, and headed off for our walk around the entire island.
The way we did the walk was that we were doing a live Stations of the Cross. We would stop at certain points and talk about the station and have a little reflection on it. All in all, the walk was about 12-15 miles long, and we started at 12:30 and returned to Xavier around 8:30, completely exhausted, soaked from sweat and the occasional rain storms, and our legs and feet were killing us. But the walk was amazing, since we got to see all the different parts of the island, from the really poor areas deep in the jungle to the nicer communities closer to the downtown area. People were very friendly, and they loved seeing a bunch of white people walking around the island. When we told them what we were doing, they were shocked, and offered us rides. We stopped a few times to eat and rest, but the stops were not that long. Unfortunately, it got dark around 6 and we still had a little less than 3 hours to go. We had to get out of the downtown area before dark because apparently it isn’t safe. It isn’t necessarily safe to walk in the dark on the main road at certain areas. The problem here in Chuuk is how people get drunk more often than not. We only bumped into two drunk people who wanted my sunglasses and Joe’s hat, but nothing happened, and that was earlier in the day. We were very lucky not to bump into any belligerent people in the dark. But we safely returned at 8:30, we showered, and I cooked some of the pasta I received in a package. Walking around the island was a great cultural experience, and it was a great way to spend a day away from the beautiful and safe hill Xavier is on. We always passed little children, and every single kid on this island is beautiful and extremely cute. Every one. They are always so playful and curious and really sweet, even if you can’t speak their language. I could play with them all day.
So that was the retreat. Physically exhausting, but it was challenging and a good type of exhausting that I found very refreshing.

Halloween

Just a quick description of Halloween here. The students take the haunted house very seriously. It was the Junior’s year to turn the Xavier building into a haunted house. They spent the whole afternoon working on it. Without a doubt, one of the best haunted houses every. They dressed up, had spooky lights, jumped out of every corner, made many detailed props like coffins, an exorcism table, scary things. You had to crawl through on place and the kids grabbed you and it was pitch black. The JVs and I got really into it, almost like a giddy type of scared. It was a lot of fun, except for some reason they had some red paint on the floor at the place where I had to crawl. I hope it can come out of my shorts.
We also went down to the video store to get a scary movie. On the way, we saw many groups of kids and teenagers walking in their costumes. They weren’t elaborate, mostly just face paint and a few masks. But it was really cool to see everyone out after night. They all yelled Happy Halloween to us, and we yelled it back. The video store was crawling with kids and other people. Chris and I pretended to be scared of the kids’ costumes, and I think they thought that was funny. Then we saw Ju-on, the Japanese version of the movie “The Grudge”. It is a FACT that it is the scariest movie ever made, ever. Don’t see it if you have heart problems or want to sleep for the next few days. Dwyer had to move his mattress into my room cause he was scared, and I’m glad he did, cause I was freaking out. Creepy!! Ok, enjoy the pictures. Take care.