What an experience we’ve had so far =)

What an experience we’ve had so far =)

We have spent the whole day with Emi and Rosita. Rosita had said they would stop by at 10am so we woke up at 8am, ate breakfast (a bowl of noodles), and cleaned up the hotel room. At 9:30 exactly, the phone rang! We went down to the lobby to pick them up and we’ve basically spent the rest of the day here in the room. We left for about an hour to go eat at the hotel restaurant and then we came right back. It is now 8:30pm and they’re still here =)

Rosita has been sleeping most of the day and we are happy to let her rest. I actually think she’s going to spend the night. Again, I remind you that she speaks NO English and we speak NO Marshallese, so it has been a very quiet day but I’m learning so much about Emi and her signals by how Rosita plays and interacts with her.

It’s been very difficult with the communication barrier. We had planned to go to church today, then to the Tourist Trap (souvenir shop) and pick up a Marshallese-English dictionary but we never knew when they were planning on leaving so we never went! Even two word sentences with hand signals conjured up nothing but a smile. And it goes both ways! She’s tried telling me things but I have NO clue what she means. So far I’ve picked up that “meme” or “mene” or “nene”, it means milk or eat. She says it then feeds Emi or points to the bottle. I’ve repeated it in the form of a question and say “milk?” but she just smiles. I’ve said “Milk, meme? Aet (yes) Jaab (no)?” but again just a smile…. Either way I know she means it’s time for Emi to eat.

So we spent the whole day watching movies =) We’ve watched UP, The Aviator, Bangkok Dangerous, and now we’re watching Ali. Thank God we get a movie channel. It doesn’t have a name but they show movies all day long. In between, we’ve watched the Discovery channel, Spongebob, Tom and Jerry, the news, and countless other snippets of whatever happened to be on the 30 channels or so we get.

On bug news, Bob has not moved and I hope he never does! We have now discovered tiny itsy bitsy ants in the bathroom. They seem to be harmless yet annoying. We’re not sure what we’re going to do about them yet. We were planning on spraying down the room today with bug spray (just in case) but couldn’t because Rosita and Emi are here.

Tomorrow we’re supposed to go to the Embassy clinic and get Emi’s passports pictures taken. We have no clue what time or where. Tomorrow will be it’s own adventure!

Tips for Future Families:

-Establish with Maddy what time all the appointments are. We did not and now we have no clue what’s happening since we also don’t have her number or the CAA office number.

-Restaurants run on “island time”. They will eventually check in on you or bring you the check, just not when you expect it =)

-Buy the dictionary! Or try to find out before you get here the level of English the BM speaks. I think it would definitely help to be prepared on how much interaction there will honestly be.