Visitors!!!!!

We are very excited to post about the visit from Matt's Parents!!!! It was an awesome week and we were so thankful to have them out here.  We had so much fun and were so happy for the time we had with them.  We got to do quite a bit of fun stuff while they were here.  We took a sailboat up to a secluded island up the atoll, we swam with sharks and turtles, we got a little sunburned laying on the beach and played some golf!  It was a great time with them.  We celebrated Christmas together and visited Ebeye.  We truly could not have had a better time than we did and it was very sad to see them go.  The day after they left we were both pretty sad and down.  

This was our view for the first meal with ate with Mom and Dad.  We were able to yell at them as they walked off the plane and into the strong winds and that was fun.  We rented a golf cart and took them on a tour of the island.  This is the view from the deck at the golf course, where we took subway.  

Our tour led us to the highest point on the island, a man-made hill about 40 feet tall.  The view from up here gives you a look at the entire island.  A guy gave us a quick tour of the facility here and we snapped some pictures of the island and the ocean!

Dad loved it when we made him pose for pictures!  haha!  Here is mom and dad from the top of the hill looking west up the atoll and over the Pacific.  

We were able to take a sailboat up the atoll to Bigi.  Bigi is about the most picturesque place on Earth, I think, so it was very fun to sail up there and snorkel around.  Sailing was very fun as it is relaxing and enjoyable...unless you have to go under and fall asleep to avoid getting sick.  Guess that is where Matt inherited it from!  Once we got to bigi the motion sickness passed and we enjoyed a really fun time snorkeling and taking in the views.  We tried to take Mom and Dad out snorkeling the day before, but we took them to a place with really big waves and the snorkeling was very difficult.  Here we were in the leeward side of the island and it was very calm!  

We checked out a sunset one night and enjoyed the view as the sun set over the lagoon.  The sailboat we took up to Bigi is pictured on the right and we enjoyed the view this evening! 

There are lots of benches scattered around the island and we took a minute to enjoy the views!  Mom and Dad don't get a view like this everyday in Nebraska!  The waves were very, very big while they were out here since the winds were the strongest they have been.  The waves were in between 10 and 15 feet tall!  It was cool to watch them crash.

This spot is called Shark pit.  We came out here on the last day and were so lucky because as we were leaving Mindi spotted a dolphin jumping into the air and we were able to see 5 or 6 dolphins leap out of the water and spin around!  It was pretty awesome to be able to see this!

Here is Mom putting in for par at the golf course.  A couple of nice shots and a long put and she pared it!  golfing was fun, but as you can see from the flag the wind was blowing hard, which didn't help my slice much!  

Here we are by the green from the previous picture.  We thought this was a neat little spot and wanted to get a picture of the waves crashing.  

Mom and Dad gave us sunglasses for Christmas and here we are showing them off.  We were so glad to be able to open gifts with them and celebrate Christmas.  It definitely made everything very special and we were so thankful to have them here for this.  It was just awesome to celebrate with them!

Here is mom and dad on Emon beach.  This is where we did a lot of snorkeling and "beach lounging"  we ate lunch here a couple of times and really enjoyed the water and the beach.

Here is a picture of Dad out snorkeling above the reef.  We had some fun out there snorkeling.  The first time we went, I swam up from behind and pinched his foot and watched him jump thinking it was a shark or eel biting him!  haha i still laugh thinking about that!  

Here is mom out in the water counting all of the different colored fish she could find!  She even saw an octopus, a turtle, and a big shark!!!! it was pretty fun out there in the water and we spend some good time out enjoying it!

All in all it was such a great time with Mom and Dad that it is hard to convey on a blog.  We were so thankful they came out and that we just got to spend time with them.  There is so much more i could talk about, including the time we spent on Ebeye and the great times we had together, but hopefully this gives everyone a little picture into the week we had.  We are so thankful for the families we have and couldn't feel more blessed.  

We are flying up to Roi-Namure for a few days, so we will be gone for a bit, but will post another blog soon about The Christmas Dancers on Ebeye and going to Roi.  Hope everyone is doing great and had a wonderful Christmas back home! 

Welcome to Our Home!

We thought that some of our family and friends might want to see what we call our home! We are still in need of making it more homey, but we will continue to add as the year goes on. Our hope would be that all of you could come see it with your own eyes, but since that might not be possible we will utilize this blog :)

This is what you see when you walk into our bedroom. We just got new furniture from the warehouse...Lets just say it is a huge improvement from the light bamboo furniture and army bedding that we had when we first got here. We love the dark wood and it actually reminds us of what our bedroom looked like back in Nebraska!!!

This is from the other corner of our bedroom. Just to give you an idea of where the bathroom, closets, and kitchenette are located. 

Since we were not able to get a house on island we have two BQ rooms. So this is our second room that we have made into our living room, dinning room, and kitchen. 

These are the two love-seats that furniture warehouse provided. You can see the bamboo that I was talking about, but what you don't see is the hideous palm printed fabric! I decided to cover the love-seats with brown sheets which I feel like has worked out pretty well.  Also, note our nice dinning room table (haha card table) in the back....it is actually really nice to have a place to sit down and have dinner or even have a few people over. Hosting is not what it use to be which really makes Mindi sad sometimes. But she cheers up when she opens the blinds and sees palm trees and the ocean. 

Here is our KITCHEN!!! Yes, it is very small but we make do. Mindi actually has to use the floor as counter space sometimes :) The doors led to two walk in closets, which has made it very easy to store everything that we brought out with us. 

 We just put up our tree and other Christmas decorations. It is really nice to have the lit tree...all that we are missing now is the snow!

Winter is here!

Hello!  Hard to believe it is December already.  Wow how fast time goes.  It is strange how time feels out here since there aren't any seasons.  Back home it would be getting nice and cool right about now, which would let us know when it is.  Matt misses the colder weather sometimes...Mindi does too, she just won't admit it!  She misses it being cold outside, as long as she is nice and warm inside with a fire and hot chocolate!  However it just doesn't feel like December sometimes and we talked today about how that is a weird thing to get used to.

We had a great Thanksgiving break!  We watched football and ate all day on Thanksgiving, which is celebrated out here on Friday to correlate with Thanksgiving back home.  And we hosted a glow in the dark golf outing and dinner for a group we are a part of, which was fun!  We have been playing and coaching a lot of volleyball and Matt is finding that his joints don't warm up or cool down as fast as they did when he was in college!!!

Matt's parents will be here in barely over 2 weeks!!!!!!!  We get excited about that every time we think about it! We are just so pumped to share everything with them and enjoy some time with them!

We got a driver's licence for the island golf carts, so we rented a cart and took a little spin around the island.  We stopped at different places and took some pictures.  Here is us standing on the highest point on the island, which is on a man-made hill 40 feet high.  Driving the golf cart was the first driving we had done since we left the states, so it was fun.  Mindi told Matt that he isn't any more careful of a driver here than he was when we left!

Here is a panoramic shot from the top of the tallest hill.  Kind of hard to get much perspective, but it gives you some idea of the views!

We have entered the windy season!  the rainy season is over.  It still rains, though, but the rain showers last a short amount of time because the wind is blowing so hard it blows the storms through quickly.  Everyday the wind has been averaging 20-30 mph for the last 2 weeks or so.  It makes it feel cooler, which is nice, but it is awefully hard to bike into the wind!  We need sails on our bikes sometimes!

Here is a picture ocean side.  The picture above of the palm tree is pointing into the lagoon.  You can see how different the water looks.  It is pretty interesting in that where the waves are crashing (about 100 feet offshore) is the drop off.  Where the waves crash it is about 5 foot deep at high tide.  Go another 100 feet and it is literally 1000 feet deep.  The drop off is pretty steep down to the depths!  You can see the different colors before and after the waves showing the drop off.

Scuba Diving and Fishing

Hello! we haven't been updating this thing as often as we did at the beginning of the year; we are finding ourselves much more busy now!  We have been enjoying Youth Group, Coaching and playing volleyball, NHS, working and playing the last few weeks.  Below are some pictures from our most recent dive!  Some friends took us out and showed us a sunken German Warship (The Prinz Eugen), which was really interesting because we got to see the live torpedoes still in the ship.  Torpedoes are huge!  it was to dark, so the pictures of them didn't turn out but they were cool to see.  

Also, Matt caught a fish yesterday when we went to the beach!  Mindi was sun tanning and Matt through out his bass lures to see if anything would bite and he caught a goat fish!  We didn't have our camera, but we will be trying that again sometime!

We are very excited for a short week of school and Thanksgiving coming up.  We hope that everyone back home is doing well and looking forward to Thanksgiving, too!  Love you all and we will update you again soon.

Major Update on Life

Hello!  We have lots of fun things to blog about this time including spear fishing, youth fellowship, nearly burning down the school, dolphins, sharks, volleyball and rainbows.  We have had a good but busy last few days as the 1st quarter at school ended on Saturday.  Hard to believe 1/4 of the school year is done already.  Still feels like we just got here sometimes and time is going by fast!

We started leading the high school youth fellowship at the church here and have really enjoyed that.  We have enjoyed the kids and we feel like it is going really well.  We do it on Monday nights, with 3 weeks on and then 1 week off.    We are glad to be able to be a part of it!  

This week there was some extra excitement in Matt's 1st period class.  His room smelled bad when he got there in the morning because he had forgotten to clean up a lab that involved eggs.  So he put a candle on a burner to melt the candle and mask the smell.  Well the burner was up to hot and broke the candle and the wax spilled out and started on fire.  Before he got the burner out of the room and vented out the smoke the fire alarms were going off and the entire school had to be evacuated. The fire department came and it was very embarrassing, but students and people around the island like calling him fire chief when they see him around now.  

Also, volleyball season is starting up which will keep us busy.  Mindi is coaching the 9th grade team (Matt is helping) and we are playing on our own team in the rec league as well.  This will be a lot of fun with our first game tomorrow, but we are learning how out of shape we are!  

We went out spearfishing again this weekend and had a lot of fun.  A couple things were pretty awesome, the first happened just after we started fishing.  We heard some high pitched squeals in the water and found ourselves swimming right alongside a pod of dolphins.  There were probably 50-100 of them just swimming and jumping in and out of the water about 50 feet from us.  We had been hoping to see some dolphins since we got here, but to see them for the first time swimming around us was awesome!!!!  We were pretty shocked and we just sat there in awe for a while as they swam past us.  

Then after we had been fishing for awhile Matt shot and actually hit a fish for the first time!  He was pretty excited about that!  The picture above shows him trying to take aim at one of the fish.  I don't know who was more surprised, the fish or Matt for actually hitting it!!  Either way we are going to grill it up today or tomorrow sometime!

 Here is Matt proudly displaying his surgeon fish.  It was all black until it turned this striped pattern in the picture when he hit it with the spear.  During the spear fishing trip we also had a giant manta ray swim right up next to us and we saw a lot of sharks!!!  Sometimes we thought there were more sharks than anything else, and we had to move spots once because there were to many sharks and at the end we had to get out because the sharks were starting to become to "ornery," as the more experienced fishermen call them when they won't swim away.  These are the sharks that are actually dangerous..... Mindi was so frightened since you know they could have eaten her! Matt didn't think there was anything to be afraid of....But that is a man speaking! As we were boating home from the spearfishing it was raining really hard in the distance, which created one of the best rainbows we have ever seen.  It literally looked like it was coming out of the water just a little ways away.  It was pretty awesome! It seriously seemed like that was the closest we have ever been to a rainbow!

We got another fun scuba dive in that was highlighted by this sleeping blacktip reef shark.  It just kind of sat there on the bottom of the sand and let us swim around it and look at it.  

We went and ate out by the sunset one night and took a few pictures on the end of the island.  So here we are after getting takeout from one of the island's finest restaurants (subway).

A few other things:  Happy Birthday to Lynn Gerber!  Way to go dad!  Remember, age is just a number!

Sandy and Cal booked flights out here, Matt's uncle and aunt are going to come  visit and Lynn and Sue are going to be here in about 6 weeks!  We couldn't be more excited for all of them to come!!!!

We love and miss you all so very much!

Matt and Mindi

Scuba Diving

Here are few pictures from our most recent scuba dive.  This was a walk in dive off the Northpoint of the island into the lagoon.  When we were walking in there were some clouds building up and while we were under water it poured very hard and we could see all the drops coming down on the surface of the water.  Luckily we didn't get soaked by the rain while we were diving!  When we came back up, the storm had passed and we had a great time diving.

Here is Mindi in about 40 feet of water

This is looking up the reef after we went over the first drop off, which drops from 10 feet to about 40 feet 

Here is Matt posing in front of a coral head

This little puffer fish wanted its picture taken!  These things are pretty common and they swim around like a fish pushing around a baseball.  We haven't seen any puff up yet, but they are weird fish to watch swim around because they are slow and clumsy.  

School and Spearfishing

Here are some pictures of our classrooms (where we spend most of our time), and a picture from Matt's spearfishing trip.

Here is what students see when they walk into Mindi's room.  

This is what the class looks like from Mindi's podium.  From here she has a great vantage point to keep an eye on all 10 of the students in her biggest class!

Once a week one of her students has to select a place in the world to present a short "travel guide" about the location.  They usually make some food that would be traditional to the place and the class spends a few minutes learning about different places in the world. They map where they have been on this bulletin board.  Also, Mindi keeps track of birthdays on the calenders and they celebrate them! (thanks, Carla)  The students really like it. 

On this bulletin board students have to present a world or U.S. news story to the class.  On the red board her students get see pictures of their teacher when she was in school and growing up.  

 This is my classroom from the front door.  The walls are all painted like the ocean with dolphins and turtles and marlin and fish everywhere.  The tables don't move around, so this is the way it must stay.  I like it for the most part.  The huskers have one of the bulletin boards up front and we have a pick the score contest every week.  There is no football here, so often the score predictions are something like 89-58 or 19-4 or something like that.  Might have been well served to avoid a pick the score game this last weekend.

This is a picture I took when spearfishing last weekend.  Spearfishing was a ton of fun and something we hope to do again.  What you do is you snorkel around until you see the type of fish you are hunting, like grouper.  Then you have dive down about 30 feet to where they are hiding in the coral below.  You have to have enough breath to steady yourself, wait for it to stop moving, shoot it and then pull it in.  That is where it gets tricky.  Because the moment the fish is hit by the spear it starts bleeding and vibrating like crazy, which attracts the sharks.  And the sharks will literally take the fish from you.  So you have to get the fish pulled in against your body because the sharks don't want anything to do with you, they just want the fish.  When this guy, another teacher, shot the black fish at the top of the picture i was suppose to watch for sharks and drive them off if they were getting too close.  When he got to the surface one followed him up and was about 6 feet away from me.  I kicked my fins at it and it swam off, but that was pretty exciting.  I had 4 shots at groupers, and missed every single time.  It didn't do me much good to scream in anger 30 feet under water though. 

Traveled to Ebeye

This weekend we went to Ebeye, which is the island 6 miles to the North of Kwajalein up the reef.  Ebeye is an island about half the size of Kwaj, but home to nearly 12,000 people.  Ebeye is considered a third world nation and has no American presence on the island.  It really opened our eyes to what life is like for the Marshallese.  We walked the island and observed the living conditions of the residents of the island.  From a teaching perspective, it was very good to see where some of our students live.  The people were incredibly friendly and all of the little kids wanted to give us "high fives" when we would walk past them.  We were also able to enjoy a restaurant on the island, our first sit down restaurant since we left Nebraska!  Check out the pictures below for a glimpse of the island.

A young girl was washing her clothes in the ocean.  The water supply is not always available to the Marshallese.

Housing consists of piecing together wood scraps and tin pieces that people can find.  

Only half of the kids have the option of going to school due to limited availability of space.  Therefore, at all hours of the day you will see young children out and about with out any adult supervision.  

Here is a graveyard and a house in the background.

Basketball is one of the most popular sports on the island.  This picture was taken during school hours, so we assumed these were some of the kids with out the opportunity to attend school.  

Fishing...sort of.

We are now fully into the swing of school and work and haven't had as much time to post on here as we would like, but are thankful for a day off today to post a few things.  School is going well and we are enjoying our classes and the students.  We are working hard, but liking it.  In the last week we started our scuba certification classes and had fun watching the huskers play early Sunday morning.  Here are a few pictures and some stories to go with them.

This weekend we were able to go out with some people who have a boat and they took us to a few awesome places around the lagoon.  This is called the Prinz Eugen and it is a German tanker that was captured during WWII.  It was taken to Bikini Atoll where it was used to test the effects of the first Nuclear Bomb.  After the test it was dragged to our island, and it had enough damage that some high winds came up and it was turned over.  It is well over 100 yards long and was pretty fun to snorkel around.  Many people have carved their names into the boat over time and it is now mostly covered in rust and coral.

Last Sunday I had the chance to go fishing with a few guys, so Mindi and I boarded a boat and went out.  We only caught one fish and i got to reel it in.  Our fishing trip was cut pretty short though.

Our fishing trip was cut short because I got so incredibly sea sick that we had to come back.  This is me finally back on the dock trying to stop throwing up.  It was pretty miserable.  I got sick on the way to the fishing spot, and couldn't quit "chumming the water" as they call it when someone throws up over the side of the boat.  After letting my breakfast go a few times we got the first bite and the guys on the boat started yelling at me to go to the back and reel it in.  I went back there and started to reel it in, but it was about 200 yards out and they didn't slow down the boat to make it easier.  After 10 minutes of them screaming at me to reel faster and being called an assortment of names for how slow i was going we finally got the fish into the boat and i headed straight for the railing so i could dry heave some more.  I found out that the first time someone goes fishing they make them reel the fish in by themself, instead of taking turns at it, and they scream at them the whole time to speed up.  After that my stomach and my arms hurt.  Anyways, i was leaning over the edge of the boat after the fish was in, just trying to stop throwing up, when one of the big waves (They were about 10 feet that day) crashed over the side of the boat and completely took me out.  It was at that point that I thought we had better go back or I may leave my stomach out to sea.  Oh, and i better add who didn't get sick, my wonderful wife who is much tougher than I!  The other guys who were fishing like to remind me of that fact when i see them.  I will try some dramimine or something next time we go out.

We saw our first turtle while snorkeling on Monday!  I tried to swim after it, but this is the closest I got.

Some other fish we saw while snorkeling.

Anyways, that is a small update from the last week, and it was nice to have a long weekend with labor day.