Now I'm updating!

Hi! I'm at the Village, too, which is an amazing hotel made out of...huts? On stilts. But they're hut-mansions, and they're on a hillside with a view of the lagoon. It's a lagoon and not the ocean because the giant coral reef surrounding the island makes it that way. It's much saltier and darker-colored than the regular ocean. It's good for infections and cooling off.

We have the most amazing host family and we love them. I'll miss them when we move to our apartment. It's a strange thing, living with another family like this. We spend many evenings just staring at them while they chatter and go about being Pohnpeian. It's funny, the things that you can understand, even when you don't speak the language--one kid taunting another (that "nyah, nyah, nyah-nyah nyah" voice is universal), a mom telling a kid to knock it the hell off or she'll knock him around (not that our family would EVER be mean to a kid. Parenting here is so huggy and kissy and every mom has a dozen kids and every kid has a dozen moms--we all look like mean parents back in the states.); there's also universal language for "don't touch that!" and "time to eat."

I am excited to move into our place, though. It's not the hut that I envisioned (and hoped for, despite my being told from the beginning that we'd be given an apartment), but an apartment that's actually nicer than my last one. Although, if you've ever seen our Portland apartment you know that my standards are depressingly low. Our new apartment has shelf space and isn't a free-standing fire hazard, so we feel like royalty. We may have to think creatively to keep from roasting to death in there, but we're up for it.

My new challenge is making it out of here with all my toes! On my first full day in Pohnpei some staph AND strep set up shop in my toe. Jonathan and I got to play around with home remedies (think: a sewing needle, a lighter, and hydrogen peroxide) before we finally broke down and went to a doctor. Who was silly, and prescribed passe amoxicillin and...arthritis medicine. Which didn't help, naturally, so we tried another doctor a few days later. Who gave me powerful medicine and good advice--spend the day in bed, don't wash too often with soap, spend more time in the sun, eat more fruit. He also laughed a lot and I liked him tons. Between the two of us I fully expect to leave FSM with all my digits. Not that a wooden toe wouldn't be super cool. Plus I've been spending some downtime imagining all the prosthetic-toe-accessories I could build (like "Swiss Army Knife Toe," "Machine Gun Toe," "Calculator Toe" and ooo! "Spear-fishing Toe!").

I gave a practice lesson in Algebra to the other volunteers, who were pretending to be students to set the proper tone. They essentially spent 45 minutes falling asleep in class and cowering under my death glare. I discovered that teaching math bores me to death, so I'm currently, desperately, trying to think of ways to make it more interesting and less pointless. All I can think of is that if you study math a lot, science gets more powerful. Hee, and I keep thinking of what one advisor said, at my defense, when a committee member asked me something about math. Essentially: "Trieste is great working with genetic statistics, but hopeless at regular math." I guess one good reason to work on math is so that no one has to say that about you! Mitch, if you're reading this, I promise I'll be better at civilian math by the end of the year.

We still don't have photos up because we forget a camera every time we go anywhere. Even if we remember a camera, we forget to use it. Eventually, we'll get it together.

Love,
Trieste