The Adventures of Yapman: School, and Volleyball, and Diving

The past couple of weeks seemed to have flown by with an overwhelming slew of emotions and contemplations. The second quarter has kicked off swimmingly as I have started to mix up my teaching strategies in order to liven things up not just for the students but for me as well. In Geometry, I have found great pride in the small victories - as we grappled through proofs, there were about 20 urgggggggghghghghhghg moments to every 1 AHA! moment, but those AHA!'s made every frustrating challenge completely worthwhile. My freshmen religion class just finished Part I of their Parable projects, where each group acted out a parable from the Gospels - they absolutely blew me away with how creative, hilarious, and comprehensive they were. I cannot wait for Part II of the project where they will adapt their parables to modern day stories about their lives on Yap (Thanks, Cathy!). In Chemistry, we are learning about the quantum mechanic model of the atomic structure and the juniors are dominating it as we head into electron configurations. Who knew balloons could be so fun, practical, and educational all at once when teaching about sublevels and orbitals?! My juniors are working so hard to understand these complicated concepts and I could not be more proud.

My volleyball season on the Maap team came to an end on Halloween. I played for the "Little Boys" team consisting of everyone under 25. My teammates spoke rapid fire Yapese and a few are students at the public high school. It was fantastic not just to get to play some competitve volleyball (despite my body losing about 3 quarts of water in sweat each game due to the humidity causing my hands to become incapable of setting a ball), but also to get to meet so many incredible people. I became a self-proclaimed expert at riding the bus to Gagil - which is actually quite a challenge since it seems that every day the bus number changes and the "5:00 PM Bus" could show up anywhere between 4:35 and 5:10 PM. Everyone I was able to interact with through this experience was absolutely straight up Jesus. My one friend, Marbey, even has offered to take me spearfishing one weekend.

Finally, today I officially became a certified open water scuba diver. Caitlin, Rosemary, and I have been taking the course for the past 3 weeks with the epitome of perfection instructor, Jan. We did a few days of pool exercises with the equipment and now have gone on four dives in the ocean. The whole experience is so surreal. At one point when I was 40 feet underwater I just looked up and watched my air bubbles slowly rise to the surface where I could just barely make out the sun through the turbulent surface. The coral reef here is breath taking and I have seen more fish than I could possibly describe, touched an octopus, saw a shark (more a shadow because it was so far away), was about 15 feet away from a whole school of barracuda, and about 928 other unbelievable things. It is like seeing a completely different world that takes up a majority of the life on Earth. Indescribable.