The Hard Staff Life

It's been a little while since I last blogged, but then again, it's been pretty busy since I last blogged. We moved out into our staff girls house last Saturday. It's a 3 bedroom, 1 bathroom cabin-like house on the edge of the property for 10 of us. I'm in a room with 4 other girls, but they're all pretty entertaining, so it should be fun. It's nice being more removed from everyone else, plus we're closer now to the cow paddock and pig pen. One of the new guy staff from Hawaii gave us girls a house warming gift with chocolate and a fancy little air freshener, and two other staff made us breakfast one morning, which was pretty awesome. On Wednesday, all staff left the students to fend for themselves on campus while we had a staff BBQ at one of the older staff member and his wife's house. They have 3 young kids, so they have a trampoline and all kinds of toys and sports equipment including a tennis-tetherball type game. So while most of the older staff were sitting inside talking, us younger people were having a blast playing outside with all their kids' stuff. The students had a nice night of playing sardines, red rover, and other games in our absence.

While on outreach, my outreach leader learned I had all three of the Mighty Ducks movies and she said that I should bring them to New Zealand and we would have a Mighty Ducks marathon. That dream became reality this past week. She recently got married and moved into her house, so she hosted it there and invited our Middle East outreach team and other random staff members that liked hockey or the Mighty Ducks. We started at 4 and didn't leave until 10:30. We had pizza and other small snacks that we had brought and they gave us chocolate fondue for dessert. The movies are pretty cheesy, especially the first one, but it was still a lot of fun, and it was nice to get away from Faith Bible College and all the students for a day.

As far as my duties as a staff member goes, I don't have a whole lot, but I I don't mind it. Other than helping out in small groups and during class, I take care of the morning tea during our morning class break, as is the custom in NZ and something America should adopt, so I go in early and make and set out the tea and coffee and then clean it up after. The cook at the college is a big Maori lady. I don't really know how to describe her personality other than forward, and at first she can seem a little harsh, but she likes me and we get along fine. The food here is good, as I've probably mentioned, but not the healthiest, so me and about four other girl staff members are adopting a workout plan to do every other day for the rest of lecture phase. One of the girls did some personal training prerequisites because she wanted to be a personal trainer at one point, so she lead our first workout. My legs are still sore.

So things are pretty sweet as here, and I think we learn our outreach locations soon! 

Piggies!

Students started arriving about a week ago. They've been trickling in all week, some even arriving a couple days after the official start of the school. Its a lot less overwhelming that way, 65 students is a lot of people after all. The first students to arrive was a Kiwi family, and to be hospitable and all, a staff member made a welcome team schedule so that it would be guaranteed that there would be staff to greet students and show them to their rooms. I was on that first shift along with another girl my age, we have decently similar personalities. They had no idea when the family was supposed to arrive so they told us to just hang out somewhere where we could see the road, so we grabbed a couple guitars and sat on the trampoline and she taught me to play a couple Juno songs, and we just chilled. We were joking about how we were put on the shift least likely to interact with new students. I mean, let's be real I don't make awesome first impressions (8 dead Siamese cats, right Leah?). The first couple days were a lot of meeting people and ice breaker type games. I met one girl who's from Charleston, Illinois of all places, and one guy is from Chicago, so we got some Illinoisians. Represent.

It's been kind of hectic managing all the students, because every one of them has a work duty now, and if they don't get it done then the college complains and the staff looks bad, so we have to constantly remind them and crack the whip a bit. I worked on the kitchen for the first week until the students got the hang of it and it was absolutely ridiculous washing a hundred people's dishes. It took like an hour each night to get everything cleaned. Luckily, now I don't have to help with meals until a new batch of students come in when they switch work duties. One lucky dog gets the work duty of feeding the pigs. The college just got piglets yesterday and they're so cute. They're probably half the size Bacon was when we got her (so about 20 lbs) and there's 4 of them, one black one and three pink/black ones. They wouldn't really come near me when I tried to pet them, but I still like them. I plan on bringing some apple cores next time to lure them in.

Interacting with students has been mostly pretty good. Us staff will go out and play games, talk with them, and get to know them, and then retreat in our rooms and hang out with each other. And then go back out again.  We're still having girls nights/afternoon tea or something, where we can hang out as just staff which is really nice. Beach day today so lataaasss. 

Electric Fences and Other Adventures

Time is really starting to tick down until students start to arrive. We moved a week ago out to our base for this school, which is Faith Bible College, a very small, rural, campground-esqe campus. The day before we left, a couple guys and girls wanted to go to the river nearby the house and swim. I didn't even realize there was a river, but swimming sounded fun so I was down.  We had to trek through several cow paddocks (which I learned is another word for field) and unfortunately they had electric fences around them, so we had to use towels and foam flip flops to pull and push the fence wires out of the way to be able to slip through without getting shocked. The guy who was holding the fence for everyone else just jumped over the fence, but his ankle hit the fence on the way down and he had this red burn looking mark and he said his ankle felt a little numb. We then trudged down through thick grass to the rivers edge and plunged in. It was a refreshing swim, and and I'm glad I went, but it  was probably one of the more intense adventures I've been on.

The day of the move involved a whole house clean, which was expected, before we all piled into vans and drove out to Faith Bible College. There's a lot of flowers and trees out at Faith, so it's a pretty campus, plus there's some cow/sheep fields around the campus. I tried approaching the cows but they just kind of stared at me then all walked away. It went down a lot like in Emperor's New Groove when Kuzco approaches the herd of normal llamas. Hurtful. Word is there's also a pig pen somewhere on the back of the campus, but I haven't gotten a chance to visit it yet because we aren't supposed to wander all around the fields until we have orientation with the grounds keeper because there are sink holes in the fields, and they've lost two cows and almost one of their staff to them. Most of us staff are staying on Faith Bible College campus, though some are staying at the house we stayed at before. The guy staff that are on campus are staying in these small individual dorm rooms, while the girls are starting out staying in mini-condo setups, which sounds a lot fancier than it is. Basically a main room, a small bedroom, and a sink and stovetop. The girls are moving out to a house later, but there's a family living there now. Consequently, I'm not even bothering to unpack or organize my room since we'll just have to pack it all up and move again, so right now everything is just piled up in a corner. Luckily, there's no room checks either.

We have class at least once a day and we go over expectations for the small groups and one-on-ones, and the things we need to do to prepare for the students. One day me and several other staff spent all morning organizing sheets and pillows and making beds. I'm also on dinner prep/clean for this week and me and two other staff help the cook put the food out and clean the dishes. We don't actually do much making food, but we get to use those cool dishwashers that you pull down and it cleans the dishes in like two minutes. The food here is mostly really good though. We even had pork chops one night. From pigs they keep on the farm I hear. Delicious. Other than those obligations, we pretty much have free time. We do a lot of game nights and girls nights, and we went to the beach three days in a row. Just making the best of the short time we have until people will actually refer to us as "staff" instead of the irresponsible and spontaneous children we actually are.