More on Palau

My day starts about 6:30 every morning. Around 7:45 I take the short walk up the hill from the dorm room in which I live to my classroom. My classroom is part of a concrete building and opens up to the out side. We have slit glass window (not sure how else to describe them), which is good because it gets warm during the day and we don’t have air-conditioning in the classroom (we do have fans though). At 8:15, we have family groups, this is where we have our devotional with the kids. At 8:30, classes begin. This semester I have one less class (Am. Government was only one semester), which means that my load is a little lighter, which is nice. I have however taken on tutoring a couple ESL students, which adds time to the end of school. I am at school usually until 3:40 sometimes later, although classes are done at 3:00.

The academy is located in the state of Airai on the island of Babeldaob, so it is out in the country. The commute between town and PMA is half an hour. When we first came the road was a dirt road and not nice at all, but this year they laid a concrete road and now it is much nicer and easier to travel into town. Still, we don’t get off campus much which makes us restless sometimes (yes, boredom is a common thing here). We do have internet, but it is slow and not always reliable (this is why I have been having trouble getting pictures up on my blog).

We have about 120 students here at PMA, most of them are bussed in from Koror everyday. We have about 30 dorm students who have come here from China to learn English. Although my students drive me to my wits end sometimes, I really do care about them. I was very proud of the Junior class last quarter, because not one of them had an F in history. This is the first time so, I told them that I want to see C or higher this quarter. They all seemed really happy about that.

Like I said, Koror is about a 20 minute drive from PMA. This is where we do all our shopping, and go to church. It’s also where the elementary school is. Koror is a small town although it contains most of the population of people. It is very crowded and kind of dirty. But, it all seems normal to us now. There are two main stores: Surangles and WCTC shopping center. Surangles is owned by an SDA church member and that is where we do most of our grocery shopping although WCTC has more of a variety, it tends to be a little more expensive.

The SDA church is very influential here on the island. Many of the church members tend to be wealthy business people and influential in politics. Two of the candidates for the presidency are SDA’s and go to the Koror church. The high chief of Palau is also SDA. The SDA schools are known as some of the best schools on the island and are also the most pricey, because of that most of our students parents are business men and women or in politics. Palau is actually a fairly wealthy island. If people don’t have monetary wealth, many of them have lots of ancestral land that has been passed down in their families for generations. Many of these people own land and farms out on Babeldaob but live in Koror, which contributes to the low population in Babeldaob. Don’t get me wrong, there are poor people here too, we just don’t seem to have much contact with them.

One of the things I’ve observed about the Palauan culture is that they don’t seem to nurture their kids past a certain point, that point being somewhere around 5 years old. It is also not uncommon for parents to leave on a trip for a week or so and leave their kids to fend for themselves while they are gone. Because of this, the kids feed into the media. They see things on TV and want to be just like it. It is often their only view of what other places are like, especially the U.S. I think the kids tend to act up in school to get attention because they are used to only getting negative attention. So, we try to give them positive reinforcement as often as we can. Because they spend so much time feeding into the entertainment industry, they think that things like sex and drugs are cool. We have had some problems along those lines. Betelnut is a special problem here too, as I talked about a little in my last post. The kids feel that it’s ok because all the adults they know chew it too. They justify it because they are Palauan and it’s cultural. But, they know that it isn’t allowed at school and they try to push the boundaries as far as they can. So as you can imagine, we have had our work cut out for us this year.