Slideshow

 I have put up some pictures and short blurbs beside very picture. Enjoy. This will be part of a new category that I am making.

Moldy Pot

This is what happens when you cook food and do not wash the pot for about a week. Randomly colored stuff starts growing inside the pot. I bet if I had left it for about a month, all the colors of the rainbow would have eventually been represented. I washed this pot and I soaked it in bleach, then I boiled water in it. Then I washed it again! You cannot be too careful you know. I did not mean to have the pot turn out like this though, but sometimes life happens and you just forget about unwashed pots that are lying around; especially if you survive on a diet of bread.

A tresspassing cow met its fate

Sometimes I love my school. When I first arrived at Rensarie, at times I would hear loud creepy noises at night that would scare me deeply. Not wanting to look like a coward, I told no one about the noises and my fear. I later found out that those noises were roaming cows that broke into the school compound on the hunt for some grass. Cows look mild-mannered, but when they start their mooing right outside your window at around 1 or 2 AM, they sound like what I imagine ghosts would sound like when they are coming for you. Imagine..MoooMooooMoooooooo, right outside your window!!! Anyways, Rensarie had a tradition of killing these cows whenever they were caught tresspassing. In Bislama, they would say "oli ronnem buluk", Some men would tie their bush knife (cutlass) to a stick and chase the cow while stabbing it. After the cow was killed, they would share out the meat to all the families that lived on campus. If it was the students that killed the cow, they would share it out among themselves. Any animal that tresspasses on Rensarie Secondary School territory is fair game, pigs, horses, cows..I bet even chicken.

ME before the locks

Man, the day before I left my site to go back to the states, I was so happy! I could not stop cheesing all day.

Me about to pull off the Adeyemi offensive

 Last year, I lived in the same apartment complex as another teacher, Abel Chalet. Our relationship got off to a somewhat rocky start, but towards the end of the year, we became really good friends. Chess brought us together more than anything. I got a chessboard from a volunteer in Vila and brought it back to site and the rest as they say is history. We would play every single day, sometimes four or five times a day. We talked a lot of smack while playing and just had a great time. I won a lot of the time if I managed to capture his queen at the beginning of the game. Everytime I captured it, he would scream "yakanel". I have no idea what that word means, But I would crack up whenever he said it. For a while I thought it was a french word because the guy is a french speaker, but I doubt it now. However, if I did not capture his queen, he would win. Man, this guy was surgical with his missus (thats what he called his queen). The day I left my site to go back to the States for my month long visit, we started a game, but could not finish it before my truck came. No kidding, for the entire month I was home, I was itching to go back and finish this game, thats how addicted we became to playing every day.

Transportation problems

This is real. This is how the roads on my island are during the rainy season. Trucks routinely get stuck and soemtimes you have to get out and push them. Let me tell you, stepping in mud is not fun, especially this kind of mud which is several inches deep.

Garden

"My mother was a florist, now my garden is enormous" - Drake.
That line just got into my head when I looked at this picture. This is the beginning of my Garden. Enough said. The people in the students are some of my students who helped me to finish it off.

Ponder this

A mother fowl and her chicks hiding from the rain.  I saw this mother fowl when it started raining. She started running towards the overhang and she spread out her wings and her chicks ran with her, but under the wings. I saw this and I thought to myself that it was an amazing sight. I mean chickens are agreed to be some of the dumbest creatures. At least they have extremely small brains. But here you have one protecting her young. Amazing!

Poor Cat

Some female peace corp volunteers emasculate their animals. For exhibit A, I will give the example of the poor cat in the picture. It is a male cat, but the volunteer that owns it refers to it with a female pronoun. She calls the cat "she". To add insult to injury, she did not give the cat a name and she just calls it cat. Can you believe that? she complained to me about the cat and I told her the poor cat probably had identity crisis. It probably thought it was a female dog with the name of cat. Of course it would not kill any rats. Some male volunteers emasculate their animals also, but that is a topic for another post. if I had a cat, I would call it Rambo or Commando or He That Devours Rats, I bet it would live up to its name and demolish every Rat it came across.