The Price is Right (Written 6/28/07)

Yesterday (Wednesday) was a bit of an exciting day here at Chanel College. For the past few months a woman named Carol Morgan has been helping organize raffle to raise money to help fix the college's teachers residence. Now don't worry, it's not my house that needs fixing – its another house located on the school premises that was crushed by a tree last year. While Kevin (my principal) would like to fix it up, he didn't have the money to put towards the project – that's what this raffle was for. So Carol has been the real driving force behind the raffle project – making sure that everything is in order and on the up and up. The strange thing is that until about Monday, no tickets were sold at the school itself – all the raffle tickets were sold outside of the school grounds and Carol was still able to sale over 3,000 tickets at $2 a ticket. Now the drawing was always going to take place on the school grounds, so Kevin had the bright idea to finally let teachers and students buy tickets (since they would be the only audience at the drawing). So over the course of Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday a lot of the students bought tickets for the raffle. There were 50 prizes up for the grabs and if someone at the school won, it would make it more interesting to the audience (the students). Now the catch was that all the tickets sold to the students and staff were pink – so that was the only color that got people excited.

So instead of having a 4^th period, everyone went up to the Falesamoa for the drawing. There was some singing provided by some of our current and ex-students and after that was the official drawing. Now the police were there as well to make sure that everything was done legitimately (since the winner did not have to be there in order to actually win their prize) – so this marked the second time that the police have been up to Chanel College this month…one would think I moved to the bad part of town all of a sudden! So Kevin called up various students to come draw names from the box and the only time the audience got excited was when the ticket that was drawn was pink. Any other color just drew silence – it was pretty strange and funny at the same time. Fortunately, we did have a few people from the school actually win – a student, Sister Lavalea and Father Mika – all won various prizes. Mika's prize was the funniest because he won a warm blanket…what in the world would you do with a warm blanket in a tropical environment? A person I know from Peace Chapel won as well, so it was a good time had by all in this raffle. In all the raffle raised about $7000 tala to go towards the renovation of the teachers residence. Will it be enough? Probably not but it's a good start. It was definitely something different and it was (and probably will be) the only raffle done during Kevin's tenure – so it was truly a rare event.

But another rare event happened tonight – we had a bunch of students at the school this evening preparing beds for some New Zealand students who are coming in tomorrow morning (Friday). Somehow – in the course of like the 3 hours I was gone in town – they were able to get about 20 beds in the Marist Fathers house for this group that is showing up. One of the students providing beds is a Year 12 student named Hugh who is one of my better computer studies students. When he came to the school to drop off the bed, I saw that he had white earbuds so I was like "Oh, he has an Ipod" and thought nothing of it. But then I got a better look at the mp3 player he had in his hand…it wasn't an ipod – it was a PSP (Playstation Portable for the uninitiated)! An ipod is way more common in Samoa then a PSP, so that was truly a rare sight. Welcome to the 3^rd world folks!