Sunday, October 5, 2008

Home sweet Yap!!

I Love Yap!!! 3 minutes from my house walking

The spider that hangs out with my toothbrush...as big as my hand fingers to wrist
MarMar Crowns as a Yapese Welcome
Mogethin!! (Yapese Greeting)

I made it, safe and sound to my beautiful new home in Gagil, Yap. I'm a short walk to the beach, in another simple home with a host mom who seems awesome so far. She's a nutritionist for an early child hood education program, and her children are already grown and out of the house so it is just her and I here in the home. We have an outdoor kitchen, but an indoor bathroom, that I'm so excited about. I did however come face to face with the biggest spider I've ever seen as I went to brush my teath... I'll upload a picture soon. I felt silly, but I had to go get her to kill the spider... I was scared... and she laughed... I don't mind the geckos and lizards and ants and dogs and cats and roosters and cockroaches... but a spider that big..eeekk! I'm gonna have to get used to this. I guess I can't live in paradise without having some obstacles, like giant spiders, once and a while.

My host niece spent most of the day with us, she's five years old, and she was absolutely fascinated with my nose. She kept laughing and pointing at mine, then hers, then back at mine. She kept saying, wow, it's pointy. And I just had to laugh, Yapese people in general have pretty flat broad noses, and here I come with my pointy german american nose, and a little girl thinks it's amazing. Of all the things I expect to be different, I guess I just can't predict all of them, like hours of entertainment for a five year old child seeing an American nose.

On another note, because my host mom is a nutritionist, she only eats local food. This mean, no more rice. Nope, taro and yams for me everyday from now on. I'm happy about this, even if taro isn't the most exciting food in the world, at least I'll be eating healthy. We'll also have fish and banana, and she grows a garden with potato top (greens) and other local vegetables. Tonight we had a stirfry of greens and tuna with taro. This is going to be good, especially since some volunteers in larger families here end up eating rice and spam literally every single night. I'm happy my days will be filled with local foods!

Tommorow we'll begin our last 6 weeks of training, and language training! My host mom speaks english, but she said tommorow we will start Yapese... no more English... so goodbye English... hello Yapese... and hopefully I don't mix up the Pohnpeian words I learned while living in Madolenihm as I start speaking Yapese.

Kefel (Yapese Goodbye)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Verina ...

Glad that you are settling in there. I am loving your blog ... keep the posts coming. Getting colder here now but I am still sailing. It was 4 degrees celcius yesterday when I sailed the Laser :-)

Anonymous said...

Hey Verina,
Sounds like you'll be having a great time there! Was the spider as big as the infamous "clock spider"? Kat and I give you our best!