Part III - Bring it on

Sharlyn, Sterah

If there’s one thing that these kids are passionate about, it’s sports. Basketball, volleyball, even table tennis, if it's happening they'll live and breathe it. Which brings me to the last part of the ‘Busiest week of the year thus far’: Sport’s Day! Now, this day was crazy. We had three to four things going on at once – ranging from basketball to flour-blowing, from eating contests to chess.

All the students were divided into four different groups: red, yellow, green, and blue. The older grades did more of the major games like volleyball and basketball, and the younger grades had the minor games covered. One of the minor games was a paper blowing game; now at first this didn’t sound too complicated to me, but blowing a flower along a rough string is harder when your mouth is filled with chocolate wafer crumbs… it was hilarious watching the little kids stuff their faces and then try to blow, little crumbs were flying all over!

I feel like I just said this, but the great morning weather didn’t last long, and soon it was raining. The field they were playing volleyball in was soaked, but of course that didn’t stop the games. Janet played the part of the DJ while Jules stood on the ladder in the rain, blowing the whistle and calling points. The field was quickly muddy and the students were slipping and sliding like crazy all over. Praise ran went up for a spike, slipped, and landed in a puddle. Motoky almost did the splits. There was so much laughter and screaming.

Another of the minor games was a ‘Eat what you get’ game, in which 10 kids from each of the teams lined up and picked something out of a bag and had to eat it – we had everything from Chuukese snack bags to dehydrated blueberries. I really wanted to put in a thing of garlic, but that would have been too cruel… and so the worse thing for these kids to eat was the healthy stuff. You should have seen the kid’s faces when they got the carrots. Because of the rain I had to have the game in the 2^nd grade classroom, and that was an unfortunate change of events. They got in there and the noise volume was equivalent to a plane taking off. Kiana took a textbook and slammed it against a desk, and that finally got everybody quiet – for ten seconds, and then they were screaming again. When I finally gave the instructions, made sure there were ten kids in each row and yelled “GO!” the noise was even more incredible. And so were the manners (which is to be expected for an eating contest, anything else would be pathetic). Popcorn flew through the air, pieces of ripped paper were everywhere, and blueberries fell and left streaks of purple on the tile floor. When one of the teams finished, I couldn’t have heard myself yell even if I had the desire to. I walked out of that room with my ears ringing. Another game was the flour blowing, and I wasn’t in the room for that one, but all the kids came out with very white faces at the end of it, so it must have been entertaining.

We had a few track and field events, and the locals gathered around to watch the kids as they sprinted barefoot down the road. But the best part by far was when we got everybody together to play tug-of-war. That was chaos! It was a struggle to get the red marker in the middle of the field, and then when one team won the kids kept slipping all over, and pushing each other and kicking water up. But even through all the craziness it will remain oddly as one of my fondest memories. I guess I like mud.

But anyways, that was kind of what my last few days have been like. I’d love to say I've been able to relax for an extended period of time, but who am I kidding?

I’m a teacher.