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I don’t have too much to say about Saturday. It was a normal Saturday. I spent the morning cleaning my apartment, doing laundry, and going to the grocery store. In the afternoon, I decided to go snorkeling since I didn’t go running. I had planned to go to the same tide pools that I usually go to, but I ran into an American guy who works here as we were both waiting for the rain to stop, and he told me about a couple of other places to try. One was at the end of Rita, a few miles from where I was; the other was on the lagoon side of the bridge. So I decided to try the lagoon.

Snorkeling there was good in terms of the number of fish swimming around, but the water was a little murky and there was some trash here and there. It actually made me pretty sad to see the things that had been thrown into the ocean. It was bad out of the water as well: beer cans, water bottle, trash bags, etc. I took a video and will try and post it. The Marshallese government is making a real push to stop people from littering, but I think will just take time for people to change their attitudes.

After I got out of the water, I walked under the bridge a bit and sat for a while. But I soon discovered that I was not alone. There were lots of little crabs walking here and there along the concrete, and there was also a rat. Luckily, the rat was on the other side of the bridge. Marshallese people find my reaction to rats very funny. They can’t figure out why I am afraid of them, as most Marshallese people are used to rats running around. A friend of mine, Mary Swain, was teasing me. She told me that there were rats in my apartment, but now I think that she might have been kidding. As I was leaving her house, she yelled “Say hello to your rat friend in your apartment.”

That night I decided to have an early dinner at Tide Table. I’m really glad I did. I had a nice talk with a few Marshallese friends-Neisay and Judy-who work there, and I found out that Neisay’s son is on a mission in the Tempe, AZ mission. So if any of you live in AZ, be on the lookout for a Marshallese Elder.