Holidays are finally over!

So it's the new year and what a crazy month it has been since the last posting. Where to begin?

The Christmas season was a good one. We had a lot of birthdays to celebrate and we ended up missing most of the holiday parties, but that's okay because there's always a Pohnpeian celebrating something somewhere. Christmas Eve we went further down to Kipar, Kitti to witness the celebration of our friends Tony, his visiting brother Tito, and Celeste signing a traditional carol about being far away from home on Christmas Eve. Fitting. The afterparty at the church was pretty much as amazing as it gets. Three Santas showed up to give candy to the kids. I say give candy but it was more like throw candy as hard as they can into a crowd of 50 screaming kids and watch the insanity ensue. My cuts and bruises from the sugar shrapnel are healing nicely.

Christmas day we had a party at our house which was pretty fun too. We had a Christmas Crab Extravaganza with lots of food, a random guy from the Marshall Islands and more friends than you could shake a stick at.

A couple of days after that I had the good fortune to find myself on the Caroline Voyager, the so-called field trip ship that took a few fellow volunteers and a few Peace Corps members to the outer islands of Mwokiloa and Pingelap. Although our destination was the latter, four of us could not tear ourselves away from the unbelievable Mwokiloa atoll, so we stayed there three days sunning, swimming, and snorkeling. We saw perhaps forty turtles, schools of snapper, sharks, and more fish in one place than I have ever seen. It's pretty amazing to witness a well managed reef. Pohnpei's reef is in pretty bad shape considering that most of it is fair game for fishing. Mwokil has only 127 people so the necessity for preserving it's resources is paramount.

The field trip ship itself was an adventure. I'll just say that pigs squealing, chickens squawking, and people heaving is not a sure fire way to get good sleep. The ocean this time of year is really rough. I don't think that I have a good way of describing this being from the flattest part of Texas.

I got back to Pohnpei on New Year's Eve and spent it with some friends and some crazy surfers...have I said how much I hate surfers. And that is all I'll say about New Years.

Now it's back to school. I'm fresh and my style looks good so I'm confident that this semester will be a success.

Yours
jp