I am happy to announce that I am back in the happy land
of wifi and I can finally post something! I feel like I’ve been back for so
long now and quite a lot has happened so I will try to summarize the past few
weeks briefly…
I flew from Houston back to Gran Canaria (which is the island
where the ship does dry dock in the summers and is part of the Canary Islands)
on July 20th and proceeded to carry my 40 pound bag up the “tower of
terror” which is the ladder we use to get onto the ship during dry dock! It’s
72 steps tall!
My first week back was Academy Leadership Week which involved
our Principal, our Assistant Director, the lead high school teacher and myself
(the lead elementary teacher). We spent the week playing “musical rooms”
(instead of musical chairs) as we took all the textbooks from certain
classrooms out and into other classrooms because some of the subjects are
switching classrooms this year. We basically have one week to prepare
everything for Teacher Orientation Week and to get the Academy back to looking
like an academy instead of like crazy storage units for all other departments,
which is essentially what it had turned into during the summer. The AC doesn’t
work during shipyard and, while the weather outside was cool and gorgeous, the
temperature inside our metal box was hot! I took a shower every night just
before I went to bed so that I could have wet hair as I fell asleep, which kept
me a little cooler. On Thursday of that week the ship went back into the water,
so we all had to get off and go into town because the ship has no power or
water or vacuum system (toilets) while it’s being moved back into the water.
The Academy team walked to the Boardwalk in Las Palmas and continued prepping
in a little café on the beach while drinking our “café leche y leche!” Not a
bad way to work!
On Friday all the new onboarders (including the new
teachers) arrived, which was very exciting! On Saturday I got to be the one to
go pick up one of our new families, the Newquists, who also happen to be great
friends of mine from back home, who will be living onboard for the next two
years! It felt soooooo good to finally have them onboard after praying for them
to get here for the past year! On Sunday we all went to the International
Lounge for our usual church service onboard only to find that since we were
still in ship yard, nothing had been planned for a service like we had
expected. Roger Newquist stepped up and started the impromptu service with
prayer and then I started leading worship. Little by little people came up and
got on guitar and drums and piano, and another friend asked us all to get into
small groups to pray for the coming field service. Even though nothing had been
planned, it turned into one of my favorite moments onboard so far as so many
people in the community, some who had been here for years and some who had been
onboard less than 24 hours, stepped up and came together as a community to
worship!
The following week was Teacher Orientation week, which is
really fun, but also involves so much information being aimed at our new
teachers, kind of like a firehose of teaching info. We do our very best to not
overwhelm them, but it’s really hard to not feel overwhelmed when teaching in
a new place with new people who have new
ways of doing things, especially when that new place is a ship and the internet
isn’t working so you can actually get the work done that you need to do for the
coming school week!
Things that most teacher at new schools probably don’t
have to deal with:
- In port muster drills interrupting
your work time
- At sea muster drills interrupting your
work time
- Pirate drills interrupting your work
time
- PA tests which include blaring music for
an hour while we’re attempting to have teacher meetings
- Unsecuring your classroom to see what
you actually have only to have to secure everything again for the sail at the
end of the week.
- No internet because we’re in ship
yard, which also means no printing
On Friday of
that week we finally sailed out of Gran Canaria and on to Tenerife, another one
of the Canary Islands, where we spent a week for our technical crew who have
been working so hard all summer to have a relaxing break.
Relaxation was not on
the agenda for teachers though because we started school this past week! We did
get one weekend in Tenerife before school started during which I got to ride a
cable car with the Newquists up a volcano, which had smoke coming out the top
of it!
I have five kindergartners this year who are just as
precious as they come! I have two from England, two from the USA and one from
Congo/USA. We spent this week learning about each other, about Senegal, and how
to behave in our classroom. We also walked into the town of Santa Cruz to just
get off ship for a bit, which was lovely!
We had a lovely last morning in Tenerife on Saturday.
Some friends and I went out for churros and chocolate and then slowly walked
back to the ship because our shore leave expired at noon. On to Senegal!
