Aly, Devon, and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Leaf

            Once upon a time, Aly, Devon and Rebecca were walking home from training when it started to rain. Devon had an umbrella, Rebecca had a raincoat, but Aly had nothing. Poor Aly. Aly decided to make a leaf umbrella but wasn’t able to tear the leaf off, so Devon decided to help. Devon was able to tear the leaf off to make Aly an umbrella so Aly was protected from the rain. Unbeknownst to Aly and Devon, the sap in the leaf’s stem was harmful and soon Aly’s hand started to burn. Not too long after, Devon’s hand started to burn as well. When Aly and Devon finally got home, both of them had burning and itchy hands. Luckily, their moms knew what to do and rescued our poor heroines by rubbing coconut oil (the magic elixir) on their hands and low and behold, the burning and itching stopped.

            This happened to us yesterday and was incredibly painful. For those of you who have ever brushed past sting weed, imagine that pain magnified by about twenty and lasting for at least two hours. The leaf is used as an umbrella by the Pohnpeians but they cut the stem really long and with a machete, which keeps the sap from getting on their hands. Aly and I have definitely learned our lesson and will not be making leaf umbrellas again anytime soon.

Coconut oil and coconuts in general are as close to a magic elixir I think we’ll ever get. The coconut water is referred to as mother’s milk because of how many nutrients it has. Coconut oil is used to help sunburns, acne, itchy and burning hands and on hair. Coconut meat is delicious and nutritious and coconut milk has numerous uses as well. My mom spent the entire time she was rubbing the oil into my hands, telling me everything the coconut is used for, it’s truly amazing. I never liked the coconut shavings we get at home, like those in Mounds Bars, but I love coconut milk and coconut meat, which surprised me.

On a totally unrelated note, we had our Water Safety Training this weekend, as those who saw my pictures on Facebook figured out. We took a twenty minute boat ride into the Pohnpei lagoon and ended up near one of the channels that cuts through the reef. Our training consisted of having our personal flotation device (PFD) thrown into the water and then we had to jump in and put it on in the water. The PFDs are not like normal life jackets; they’re the highest classification of life jacket and prevent you from tipping forward or backward if you fall asleep so you can’t drown. Anytime we’re in a boat, we have to wear our PFD, carry our personal locator beacon (PLB) and a satellite phone. The volunteers going to outer islands all get their own, which includes me since PC classifies Walung as outer island, and the main island volunteers can sign them out from the various PC offices.

Once we proved that we could put the life jackets on, we got to take them off and then had about two hours to swim, snorkel and jump off the boats. The snorkeling was incredible; the water is amazingly clear and I got the chance to try out my waterproof camera.  Again, I’ll let the pictures do the talking here. 

We started our technical teacher training this week and met our counterparts for model school, who will be training and teaching with us for model school. We have three weeks of training and then three weeks of model school, then we’ll have a few more weeks of final medical, safety and security training, and mock secondary project presentations before Swearing In.  The mock secondary projects are a new aspect of training this year. The intention is to get us used to the secondary project process, including talking to our community, the grant application and then the execution. Aly and I have already figured out what our project for our community is going to be, so we just have the logistics to figure out and the execution. We start language training on Monday and will have at least three hours of language every day for the next six to seven weeks. I’m really excited to start learning Kosraean and luckily my host dad speaks Kosraean so he’s started teaching me some words already. Aly is also going to Kosrae and since she lives really close by, we’ve already agreed to have study parties and practice speaking on our walks home. 

The next few weeks are going to be pretty busy between training, preparing for model school, and language work so I might not update for a while. There will be a celebration next weekend in Kolonia for July 4^th, so I’ll try and post an update after that.