Rain in Ajeltaki

So unfortunately I bought a Wifi card and the log out pop up didn't come up so I can't log out and I have to spend the remaining 50 minutes so I might as well type up my blogs instead of copying and pasting....

News from Ajeltaki! We went into town today to have our language lesson and meet the principal of the Majuro Coop School. Both were awesome, I'm trying really hard to learn Marshallese and I can remember vocabulary but when it comes to sentences, my brain shuts down. I'm sure when I'm on my own little island, it'll stick a lot better.

So as I've tried to show through descriptions, the place I'm stayin is a little run down. This is what happens to the building on the island because the weather and sun is so much harsher and the landlords/government/tenants don't have the money to fix up their buildings. In addition, the way that land works here is that someone will own a huge chunk of land and build some houses on it and lease those buildings to the people of the RMI. There are VERY FEW people who ever own a house. Basically only the landlords of these properties will own their house and the rest of the people rent. Even the government, even the airlines lease the land for the airport. This as I think we all know, doesn't motivate the tenants to do any repairs or renovations on their houses because when their lease is up, they may not even live there anymore.

Okay, so this all ties in to what happpened today. First off, at around 4 am, the entire room was woken up by a huge rainstorm. I'm talking monsoon-style rain. Eventually we got back to sleep only to wake up in the morning to see that our kitchen area had been flooded. Water was leaking through the roof and the wires were sparking. After speaking with our directors, they told us that someone was going out to fix it while we're in town. The problem with this is that Marshallese-time is not the same as American-time. That person, for whatever reason decided not ot show up, so when we returned to the school, we had to hurry and clear out the food and utensils from the kitchen and we're no longer allowed to use that area. Because the man didn't com to fix the problem, the roof was in danger of collapsing. Luckily, the kitchen section is a ways away from the sleeping section. So I'm fine everyone! We just have to eat PB and J's for a night and cross your fingers, someone will be by to hook up the stove in the other area.

Love you all!