March Begins!

We go to a private school, so therefore, there is a fee all students have to pay to get in. All payments were supposed to be due in January. However, there are some students who have not paid that fee. This means that there has not been money to pay the teachers. Last week, the teachers went on strike. Usually one or two would come to school, but most teachers weren't there. So, for most of the day there wasn't really anything to do. Then, on Thursday and Friday the teachers all came and had meetings. Yesterday seemed better. There was only one teacher who didn't come I think, but then today there were a bunch gone again. Not as many as last week, but still a number of them weren't there. I'm hoping that this situation will resolve soon, but we'll just have to see. It's very frustrating, though.
The other day a student handed out a survey for a project he was working on, and it was the first time I've ever filled out a survey and had to put 'other' for my ethnicity! I thought that was kind of interesting.
~Olivia

We are eagerly anticipating and preparing for the visit of several people from our home congregation in Kansas! Even before we came to Trinidad, there was interest in sending the youth group to visit us and do service during their spring break. In the months since then, plans changed somewhat as some of the youth who were hoping to come decided that it simply wasn't financially feasible for them. However, the group was opened up to the adults in the congregation, and several of them took advantage of the opportunity. The result is that, in just three days, we will be welcoming five of our old friends to Trinidad for a week.
We've been busy making arrangements for their stay here--planning outings, setting up service projects and working on various logistics. We are excited to renew these relationships, and to give them a taste of what our life in Trinidad is like. We hope that their presence and service will also be a blessing to the churches and other institutions to which we relate here. Perhaps next week we will have several of our visitors sign on as guest bloggers.
~Richard

We realized last week that we had been here 7 months. We do not see the weather or seasons change and it is amazing to realize how much of our time here is done. We have only a little more than 4 months remaining with a departure sometime in mid July. We are also beginning to hear from a couple of family members who may come and visit, which we are excited about. I think these last months will go by quickly.
~Barb

Last Saturday we went to the beach! It was a beach that we had not gone to, but had heard of. The most known beach here in Trinidad is Maracas beach, and Las Cuevas (the beach we went to on Saturday) is just beyond it. You actually have to drive right through the parking lot of Maracas to get to Las Cuevas. Anyways, we went in the morning when it was nearly lunchtime. There were a few things about this beach that we noticed made it very different from its neighbour. For one, the waves were much calmer. Also, the water is very clear, which sort of surprised us. It reminded us of the water in Tobago! And the land at Las Cuevas is very flat, so we could go pretty far out, like behind where the waves broke, and it was only up to my waist! Being flat is part of why the waves are calmer, probably. We spent a while there, playing in the sand and the waves. It was really fun, because you usually don't get to swim in the ocean because the waves are too rough. But if we got to a place past where the waves broke at Las Cuevas, we could just swim like fish! I definitely enjoyed my birthday on the beach!
On a different note, I had a class assignment to draw my house and label it in Spanish. The floor of our house (as well as many, many buildings in Trinidad) is made of large tiles. I assumed that all the tiles were square, and all the same size. I was wrong on both counts. First, I drew the house so that each line was a tile, but the rooms seemed kind of off, and the house very narrow. So I measured tiles in different rooms, and some of them were even 5 inches different from each other! Very few were square. I thought that was very strange.
~Roxy