St. Kat is back (Written 6/30/07)

Yesterday (Friday) was another unique day at Chanel College – we once again welcomed a school from New Zealand into our community for the next couple of weeks. St. Katherine's Girl school in Wellington is going to be staying at the school for the next couple of weeks on a history of Samoa field trip. The night before (Thursday), a few students stayed until the evening making sure all the beds were ready for the girls' arrival. They arrived from New Zealand at around 5am on Friday morning. I knew Kevin was going to the airport in order to make sure everything went alright with the girls, but I later found out that some of our senior students went with him as well – which explained why I had quite a few students falling asleep in class. You try to tell them to get enough sleep, but they never listen. Anyway, the majority of the day was unchanged until we got to the seventh period (the last period of the day). Instead of having electives, which we usually have on Fridays at 7^th period, we had a welcome ava ceremony for the St. Katherine's girls.

Last year when the St. Katherine girls came up, it was mostly a Polynesian group. This time the students were primarily Caucasian and only 2 of them were Polynesian – which made the ava ceremony that much more interesting…because most of them had no idea what was being said or what was going on! Ahhhh, I remember those days. After the ava ceremony, we had a few pieces of entertainment from our students – primarily singing and a taupu dance. The funniest part of the "entertainment" was when the boys came up and tried dancing with the St. Katherine's girls – I'm pretty sure they didn't expect to be dancing on their first day in the country. But they seemed to take it all in stride and had a good time.

So it was a good ending to the week that was. Kevin is off to New Caledonia for 2 weeks so hopefully the place doesn't fall apart while he's away. But I did want to mention one strange incident that occurred during the night – I was cold! Now we're not talking light cold, I'm talking "Put on a long sleeve shirt and some thermal underwear" cold. One of the blessings and curses of living on a mountain is that sometimes you get these really chilled cold spells at night – and last night was one of the most intense cold spells I ever felt here. In fact, the coldness lasted well into the morning…till about 9am and then it finally started to warm up. According to Kevin, it has been really cold in Wellington over the past few weeks – so maybe the St. Katherine girls brought the cold weather over with them. L8r!