Yesterday we spent the day in Ebeye using the internet, grocery shopping & trying out some new restaurants. Tonita hooked things up for us again; she not only gave us a place to hang out all day, but she got us the password for free wireless internet at the elementary school! She’s amazing.
On Friday we found $1 brownie mix at some random store, so once we got back to the Gug we decided to whip them up. We noticed that the mix expired a year ago, but we were craving brownies so bad we didn’t even care. They turned out terrible. Fail 1. Afterwards, we decided to do a power hour. Anna, not being from the Midwest, had never done one before/didn’t even know what it was, so this was a necessity (weaksauce). We went to the little shop on island and asked the girl to kindly double bag the beers to conceal them for us. She ended up putting them in a huge black garbage bag and then into a box…this will do. A small island is a small island and word is sure to travel quickly, especially when a little boy climbs up into the window right as we are checking out. We could not stop laughing about this. The worst part of this all was that there was a church service going on right next door—we had NO idea that church was held here on not only Sundays but Tuesday and Friday nights too.
We continued with our fine plan, being as discreet as possible. Anna had rented a movie, “Deadwood Trails,” from the shop which doubles as Sunset Rental so we decided to start it. Considering all of us had fallen asleep somewhere around 15 minutes in, this movie was also terrible. Fail 2. We all woke up around a really gruesome part in the movie (a guy was bashing another guy’s head in with a rock…sick). This was at the same time we all noticed that there was a continuous banging noise outside of the house. We immediately thought someone was trying to break in, as at the back of our house there is a piece of plywood that houses our A/C unit in one half of what would otherwise be a sliding door. I, being paranoid to begin with, peer out the back window and am unable to see anything. The windows are nearly impossible to see out of because the outside is full of green and black mold. There are also NO street lights of any sort here, so it was pitch black out except for the small light on the back of our neighbor’s house. We move to my bedroom, closer to the light, and are only able to see a hand and part of the 3 water catchments out back. All that’s being spoken is a bunch of Marshallese with some “ribelles” thrown in the mix. They’re talking about us (maybe) but we have no clue what it is they are saying. Our next assumption is that they are trying to break the water catchments. This is NOT OKAY-- Anna and I make the only rational decision to go outside to see what is going on, armed with a head lamp & 2 cans of pepper spray, leaving Liz behind to guard the door with a stick in case someone tried to come in. We get outside and hear commotion coming from our neighbor’s house. We knock and a child answers the door (not one that lives there) and we notice about 15 people sitting in the living room. We talk to my neighbor who kindly tells us that the men out back are just cutting up chicken quarter legs for a barbecue tomorrow. While we were somewhat relieved, we shared with him our obvious concern that this was a) going on at midnight and b) that it sounded like someone was bashing in our plywood door. I mean, we were both holding pepper spray with terrified looks on our faces. He told us he would tell them to stop. We headed back inside to let Liz know that this is apparently just another normal thing that happens here.
Note to self: next time there is loud banging outside your house, it’s probably just a huge machete hitting the concrete, in an effort to cut up chicken & bones. Regardless….why it took like 10 Marshallese men to cut up chicken at midnight of all times, I will never know.
No comments:
Post a Comment