Zen wisdom from the South Pacific

~There are days when the best thing that will happen to you is not getting hit on the head by a falling coconut.

~Let sleepings dogs lie. Otherwise, they will bite you.

~"If you were an animal, what kind of animal would you be?"
"A hermit crab," my family decided last weekend. They then explained that they are easy to catch in the morning because "they like to sleep in, just like you."

~When it rains, it pours...if I've just put my clean laundry outside to dry.

Also, randomly, guess who is faster than me on my bicycle?
1) A small child sprinting.
2) A twelve year-old kid carrying another twelve year-old on the handlebars of his bike.
Awesome. I will continue to update this category as necessary.

Lastly, in lieu of doing a cliched "things I'm thankful for..." post, here are a few things I've seen here in the FSM that have already made my journey more than worth it.

I'm sitting on the floor in church in Pohnpei. All is relatively calm and still, but there's a little kid running up and down the side aisle nearest me. As he runs by a woman (presumedly not his mother), she reaches out and pats him on the head. He keeps running for what must have been 15 seconds, then walks back to the woman, slaps her (really hard!) on the thigh, and walks back to his seat. WHAT?

So I live on what is (no joke) one of the rainiest islands on earth. One gray morning, I woke up to the sound of POUNDING rain over my head. I walk out to have breakfast, and my mom laughingly tells me to go look outside.
"Your soris floated away," she says.
Now my family likes to joke around, so I assume this to be a lie. When I then open the door in order to humor her, I see that all of our shoes have literally been carried all the way down the side of the house on a torrent of water. This is not something you can see in Denver.

Before I officially started teaching at my site, I was visiting for a practicum day. Now, our school is situated such that all of the doors face the outside; they are padlocked shut. I was supposed to be teaching a first period class of 9th graders, but their teacher, I soon learned was out sick. I approached another teacher, asking him if he had the key. He smiled and said:
"Hold on. I'll go get the master key."
Now it was early, mind you, otherwise I might have wondered how you could have a "master key" to a bunch of padlocks. But I didn't. Then he returned, brandishing a hammer. He pulled the entire contraption, lock, hinges, and all, off of my door and proudly said, "There you go."