Palau

Palau is amazing. I really love it here. I have been here for almost three months and it has gone by so fast! I left Toronto very early Monday morning on August 1st. It was a long flight to Hawaii, but I slept most of the way so it wasn't too bad. I spent two days in Hawaii going to orientation with all the other student missionaries. On Wednesday we all went to the airport and had another LONG flight to Palau. When we arrived in Palau there were lots of people waiting for us at the airport. The Adventist church here assigned a Palauan family to each SM, so my Palauan mother found me and gave me a beautiful lei. Pastor Martin brought us to a bus and we all packed our stuff in it. Pastor Martin is the pastor here and Jeri is his wife. They are American missionaries. Before this year they were missionaries in China for I think five years. So, we packed our stuff in the van and then they took us to Palau Mission Academy, where we live. It was night time so we couldn't see too much, but we all got settled in where we were going to be living for the next 10 months, and soon went to bed. Seven of the girls went into one appartment. Meagan, Brittany, and Jessica all went in one room, Nicole and Mechelle went in another room, and Rochelle and Tania went in another room. AJ, the only guy at the time, went to one of the dorm rooms upstairs. Beckah and I went to another small appartment. Since then we got two more guys, Tony and Matt, and one more girl, Rebecca. Now I live upstairs in a dorm room with Beckah and Rebecca. Tony and AJ live in the small appartment that Beckah and I first had, and Matt lives in a room in the boys dorm. The setup here is pretty nice. I think the dorm rooms are nicer than the ones at Kingsway. They all have AC, so that's a plus since it's pretty hot here.
We spent most of our first week here setting up our classrooms and getting everything ready for teaching. It was pretty scary walking into my classroom. It was full of dusty desks and shairs. It didn't seem real that it was MY classroom, and in only a few days it would be full of students that I would be teaching for the next 10 months. I've come a long way since that week. The first few weeks of teaching were really challenging. My class has 11 boys and 6 girls, who all love to talk. I couldn't get them to keep quiet or do what I told them to do. It was so frustrating. I considered changing my major from Elementary Education to ANYTHING. I couldn't control the kids and I had no idea how to teach them. But with LOTS of prayer and a bit of trial and error, I have learned to love teaching. God has given me the gift of teaching. Now I know this is my calling and I want to do this for the rest of my life. Now I have people walk in my classroom and they comment on how well behaved my kids are. It's pretty exciting. They're not always little angels, but I love them all so much.