MJ Live

Friday, September 21, 2007

Nothing New (Written 9/21/07)

Well as most of you have probably noticed, there haven't been to many blog entries since the end of the South Pacific Games. All that means is that things are returning to a sense of normalcy – we're back into the swing of school and all the traffic that magically appeared during the SPG has vanished. We started school a week earlier then the government schools because we weren't involved in hosting any of the athletes at our school. Even though we announced the fact that we would be open a week early, we still had kids who skipped a whole week of school because they "forgot". Now the third term of the school year goes by extremely fast – from the start of the term, we had only 3 weeks until the senior final exams (now 2 weeks); then it's a week dedicated to the senior exams; 3.5 more weeks of regular school and then the junior final exams (Years 9-11) and the Senior national exams (School C and PSSC). So in all we only have about 6 and a half weeks of actual teaching.

When the students who missed the first week of school came back, I grilled them to find out why they skipped school. Now they could have been honest with me, but almost all of them said that they were mysteriously sick with either a head or stomach illness last week. Now if someone were really sick for a week, they would remember the details of that sickness pretty well only a week later – but when I asked what day their illness cleared up they literally had to pause for a second to think about it. And while some kids said they got well again on Wednesday of the previous week (which happened to be the last day of a festival going on in town) they said their parents kept them home for 2 days to make sure they were okay. So this has taught me that there are no original skipping school excuses under the sun – after about the 3rd or 4th time I had heard the same excuse it was just getting silly.

Anyway, after dealing with the closing shenanigans of school it's nice to go to ClickNet just to hang out for a bit. I'm still helping out there on Monday and Tuesday nights, which is how I have been able to start the newest addition to the blog – MJTV. It has been a great experience seeing a business start from scratch and all the finances and hard work that go into being your own boss. It's not as easy as one would think – and you throw in the whole 'Third-World' scenario and it's a whole new ball game. A lot of the problems that reared their ugly head during the SPG (such as connection losses, downgrading of the speed, etc) have seemingly been resolved now and for the past 2 weeks things have been going pretty well. Now that the SPG is over, the customers we are seeing now are potential regulars which is good for business and the word of mouth about the place has been great…almost every time I go in there, there are at least 5 or more people at the computers. Again, 2 years ago I would have never predicted I would be a part of something like this. And the best part is that for the first time in my 2 year tenure here I didn't go to the Peace Corps office for a week. Previously, the only reason I went to the office was to take advantage of the high speed internet but with ClickNet that's no longer needed – so it was pretty interesting to not have to go there at all for a week. When I went to the office yesterday it felt like I had not been there forever.

Speaking of the Peace Corps, I am now at that point in my Volunteer life cycle where I don't spend a lot of time with other volunteers (outside of the one's in my group). It's kind of like a strange version of 'Senior-itis' in which you don't make the kind of bonds with the newer volunteers that you made with the ones that came in a year or so ago. With only a few months left, I think I'm at the point where I'm like 'It's not that I don't like you – it's that I won't have enough time to get to know you' and of course with the net and email and stuff, it's much easier to keep in touch with each other. But there's just something about leaving this bubble known as Samoa (or maybe Peace Corps in general) where a few months pass before you realize that you haven't talk to any of the volunteers still at post. I think it's also a matter of shifting priorities – during the first stage of being a volunteer, you're all about getting to know the volunteer community and bonding with them. But (hopefully) over a period of time, you spend more time in your host community then you do in the volunteer community and towards the end of the journey (which I am at, amazingly enough) you spend more time with the host community then you do with the volunteer community. It's a gradual change really – one I didn't catch until a few weeks ago. I like the community I have made here and I'm really going to miss it when I leave. As more folks realize that I only have a few months left, they all ask the same question 'Can't you extend?' (to which the answer is 'I could' but like Michael Jordan, I'm going out on top) and 'Are you going to miss this place?' My response is always the same, I won't miss the place – I'll miss the people. If I could take the folks I know here and transport them to the states, leaving would be incredibly easy. But that's not possible, so it's just the fact that I could either never see these folks again or it could be a a few years before I'm able to come back which makes these last few months the most difficult.

But I will enjoy my last few months and I have a big gap of time between when school ends and when I will be heading home, so I will have more then enough time to do the whole g-thing. But for now, I've got to successfully make it to the end of this third term. While nothing in life is 'new' here anymore, this whole ending deal sucks. L8r.

 

 

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