We’re Volunteers!
**Disclaimer**
The point of this is not to be a good or artistic retelling of my highs and lows of the famed “Peace Corps experience.” But simply a single place to put my thoughts other than my chicken scratch diary and brain of doom. Never once have I claimed to be a writer. In fact, writing is my weakness. Grammar, spelling, quippy-ness, the whole shebang. Concise explanation in general is one of my frequent pitfalls. You will realize that soon if not already. Give me grace. If you’re interested, you’ll read, if not, look at the pretty pictures when included ;)
Despite being in the Peace Corps, these thoughts, opinions, experiences do not reflect those directly of the greater Peace Corps Organization. It’s all me and these are just my personal thoughts and experiences. Don’t come for my fellow pisikoa (“peace corps volunteer” in Sāmoan).
First Things First
The big news is WE’RE OFFICIALLY PEACE CORPS VOLUNTEERS! After our 11-week training, we had a swearing in ceremony that recognized our hard work and success as Peace Corps Trainees (PCTs) and officially marked the start of our 24-month service as volunteers (PCVs). The ceremony included speeches galore, a poorly-sung hymn, and a chaotic “siva Sāmoa” dance that ended with dollar bills being thrown around the stage. The VIP list included the Minister of Education, the Minister of Women, the Chargé d'Affaires from the U.S. Embassy, PC staff, all of our permanent supervisors, and training site host friends and families. During the live broadcast, one could see me sitting in the second row scarfing down peanut m&ms, recovering from the previous late night where we all stayed up hanging out, cherishing our last moments all together in the same place. We had all passed our health, security, and language tests so it was time to celebrate (I passed the oral language test by testing at intermediate-mid when all I needed was intermediate-low and I cried tears of joy and relief). We also were mourning. Leaving our training site communities we had just built lifelong relationships in was not easy to say the least. Safe to say the last 48 hours of training was a whirlwind of activities and emotions.
In between every little session and lesson leading up to swearing in, I documented the little things — funny, surprising and just straight-up outrageous. This blog post will be a very long, scattered assortment of those short anecdotes and stories, so bear with me.
Finished with swearing in ceremony! And nobody forgot the dance or fell on stage or passed out from how tight their puletasis were! Success all around.
Permanent Site Updates
Last I left off, I mentioned I was about to find out my permanent site. And boy, that process has been a wild one.
Quick refresher: For the first three months, the cohort is in one training village where staff trains us on Peace Corps rules or language (think Peace Corps school). Out of the 11 weeks of training, two are designated periods to visit our individual permanent host sites, where we’ll live for two full years. But we don’t know anything about our village, family or job until the day before we leave for the first site visit.
When it came time to find out about our sites, it wasn’t a simple text message or piece of paper. It was a whole event. The entire office came to our training hub, where we had taped an outline of both Upolu and Savai’i islands on the floor. Staff laid out stars where our villages were, then read our names and villages out loud. We each stood on the star representing our site.
When they called my name, they pointed to the far end of the room. I walked to the star at the farthest possible point from our training village. I was OUT THERE. I told myself, “Ya, you can do it Liz. It’ll be fun and a new challenge,” to push down my looming panic attack.
I asked the staff, “So why me? Why did I get placed so far away?”
The response: “We knew out of everyone, you could handle it the best. You’re strong and good at setting boundaries while still balancing a great open mind.”
Where this was meant as a compliment — and my verbal response was “Oh, okay, thank you” — my internal response was more like: Uhhh okay but what if I don’t WANNA be strong and handle being so far from my friends and stores and the bus and the ferry and the airport and and and???
Whatever. I was strong, and I did it.
There were two other people kind of close to me (reachable only by a bus that came at like 4 a.m.), and our regional WhatsApp chat became “The Banished Ones.”
One of my fellow teachers I would be working with picked me up to take me to my site. Once I met her I knew it would be fine. She was the nicest, funniest, smiliest woman I had ever met. I was immediately at ease despite the million-hour ferry-and-car ride it took to get to my new house.
My family had so many people in it, and they lived on a huge compound. I had my own room that was bright yellow, not one but TWO toilets, and running water! Plus little to no mosquitoes. Wins all around. Sure, I went to bed to the sounds of dog fights and woke up to the sounds of cockfights, but I’m quickly realizing that’s just the norm here.
I spent the weekend going to the beach with my family and trying to get to know them despite my extremely subpar language skills. I also visited the school one day and hung out with the four teachers while they graded papers students brought in. It was a great way to start meeting families. (All students were at home for seven weeks due to a dengue fever outbreak but still receiving and turning in homework. More on that later). The best part though was joking around with the teachers all day and surveying their beautiful library.
After a week, it was time to go back to training. The reunion with my Peace Corps cohort was much needed and rejuvenated my spirits. I gave everyone bear hugs. (For anyone who remembers my elementary-school “power hugs,” you get the idea.) Then we all swam and played frisbee in the ocean, and everyone was so happy. We were one step away from holding hands and singing Kumbaya.
During the debrief the day after coming back, one of the biggest things I talked about was my realization of the locals’ relationship with English. My host nieces and nephews couldn’t read the homework instructions because it’s all in English. That’s when I really realized that a lot of people here can’t read. Can’t read English. Can’t read Samoan. Can’t do homework. Even when they can read, they don’t know what they’re reading. It’s hard to help them when the language barrier isn’t even the main barrier anymore, but rather the general lack of comprehension skills.
The 8th grade teacher at my school leaves all the paper used from every lesson on the wall, so that when students are looking around the room, they are forced to try and read what the poster says. Not a single piece of wall is visible in that room, and it still doesn’t help. But hey, that’s where we enter the picture, I guess.
The biggest update for this section, though, is the fact that I’m not actually returning to this permanent site I visited in week four. Due to some medical reasoning, I have moved closer to the wharf to a new permanent site.
Instead of being a three-hour bus ride from the wharf to my mountainous site, I am now a 20-minute bus ride from the wharf to my new beachy site — and within a 20-minute walking distance to three other volunteer friends.
My whole village is sand. The entire kitchen? Sand. The dining room? Sand. The grand foyer? Sand. The ballroom? Sand. The bowling alley? Sand. I kid, I kid. Not about the kitchen and dining area though. That’s real.
Anyways, the main house has a large living room with couches and a TV, where we have already frequently been exchanging cultural dances — them siva Samoa and me the Cotton-Eye Joe. That’s also where the family all sleeps, on blankets and pillows on the floor. I have my own room, though. It’s a bright teal that took me all the way back to 2016, as well as a beautiful red and white woven mat. I have a nice twin mattress, two tables, and two large windows that overlook the water. There’s also an ensuite bathroom under construction, which I’ll be using as my personal temporary kitchen while I get used to the “one pot, one open flame on firewood” situation in the main family kitchen.
The mom and dad are young and very nice, and they understand some English, which is great. But the 12-year-old daughter — ranked third overall smartest in her entire school — really helps with daily translations. I have six siblings at the house: a 15-year-old brother and 13-year-old brother, who are both very shy but warming up to me as I help them with homework; a 12-year-old sister, who is very smart and funny and eats my leftover food; an 11-year-old sister, who talks almost more than I do and loves translating words with me; a 10-year-old brother, who is absolutely wild but cute; and an 8-year-old brother, who is always just around, doing his own thing and playing with random objects as toys but gives me hugs every night before bed. All except the oldest boy go to the same school where I’ll be teaching, which is fun, since they’ll walk with me most days to and from school.
The best part of my new site, though, is my principal. The best guy I’ve met here. So kind, such a good leader, talks a lot, is very patient, and stands up for me. He’s also already giving me very clear expectations, instructions and timelines. Did someone say Posh Corps??? Because that’s what I feel like at my school.
I hope I’m not jinxing it, but the kids are so well-behaved, self-disciplined, helpful and kind. They had a big welcoming ceremony for me on my first day, where they sang songs for me and taught me dances — all 250 students and nine teachers. It was really overwhelming, so much that I cried ugly tears on stage, but I didn’t care. When I left the ceremony to go to one of the classrooms, I looked into the courtyard and saw a huge double rainbow over the school, and I knew I was in the right place.
I just observed teachers in English lessons and also surveyed the conditions of the library and its books. Considering my PC boss said there weren’t any shelves in my library and that books were just lying on the floor only two weeks ago when he toured the school prior to my arrival — and then I walked into a beautiful, put-together, functioning library with shelves and a schedule — I’d say they were doing pretty good without me. But they do still need my help teaching struggling kids basic literacy skills, and creating a functioning library/classroom is a good way to start figuring out how to do that.
So yes, I really love my new site, and I can’t wait to meet more people and learn more about my job at the school. After everything with having to get moved, I finally am in the right place, at the right time, doing the right thing. And I could not be more excited.
My Job
So, my job that I am training to do for the next two years is an “English Literacy Educator.” Each of the education volunteers gets placed in a village anywhere around the country with a primary school that has requested the help of a PCV to support their students with English literacy.
There are three main components to this position. One is to build, improve or maintain a library that will serve as our classroom. Another is to test students in the school and evaluate their English literacy level. Based on those results, we then pull out 45 low-scoring students — from any grade level — and teach them basic English literacy lessons weekly for a whole school year (February through December). The third component is to do a secondary project in the second year of service, like teaching another subject, creating an extracurricular activity such as a sports team or club, or writing grant proposals for resources like a computer lab.
There’s one small problem: I don’t know how to teach. I thank my sweet stars we have Corina, though, as a fellow volunteer. She was born to be a primary school teacher. She went to college for it and was a teacher for the last two years, so she’s been helping us understand what to teach, when to teach it, and how to teach it.
We were supposed to have practice teaching kids in schools, but there was a dengue fever outbreak that closed schools for seven weeks. Funny — we survived both a tsunami and a national disease outbreak in just a month and a half! During the shutdown, we met a lot of teachers, but it was hard to understand the real pacing of students’ learning abilities during our mock lessons, since we were just teaching other Peace Corps friends pretending to be Sāmoan students. It was a challenge, but it helped me shift my mindset in hard times out here. Instead of using those lessons to engage and learn about students, I still ultimately valued that time, because practicing with my friends taught me what kinds of lessons I can teach and what fun ways I can teach them.
I have hope, because I’m realizing my strength in connecting with the kids I have interacted with. One of our head staff members brought her young daughter to our sessions one day. She was super quiet, hugging her mom’s leg most of the day. Apparently, she didn’t really respond to anyone’s questions or want to talk or hang out. She sat next to another staff member, who was having her draw. I sat down next to her and asked questions about her drawings, and she started answering me and even taking advice from me about what to add. We had fun, played little games, and eventually, she wanted me to walk her back to her mom.
One of the other staff members came up to me and literally congratulated me for getting her to open up and trust me. That’s when I realized: I can learn how to teach kids, but PC can’t teach us how to connect with kids. And I have that part down. So it might be alright.
Transportation
On my permanent site’s island, there’s one long road that goes around the whole island. Most people just take the bus that runs along that road. It’s a very unreliable form of transportation since there is no real accessible bus schedule or fare pricing. “You just have to know it,” according to my host family. And when your family doesn’t have a car, you especially don’t have much of a choice other than to “just know it.”
Buses here are long and wooden, occasionally have windows that kind of work, and benches that are vacant only in your dreams. Usually they roll up an hour late looking like a San Francisco cable car with people dangling out of every open space. The radio only works if it’s tilted at exactly 12°, tapped twice, spun like a frisbee, and blessed by the bus gods. Otherwise the island mashup version of the greatest hits from my 8th grade dance cuts out the second you hit a pothole.
Oh, and also: your butt gets numb after the first 30 minutes — then you realize you still have two hours left. A child is sitting on you. Your feet are broiling in an oven because, for some reason, the exhaust is under the front passenger seat. Meanwhile, you’re making sure your bag on the floor doesn’t fall out of the doorless vehicle moving 50 mph on a bumpy, winding dirt road.
But you make the most of it. You grab your neck pillow, lean against the window, and stare out at the views of the insanely high horizon line and massive waves chasing your bus. Honestly, I should make a show about the Sisterhood of the Traveling Neck Pillow. That thing has more miles than the suitcases I brought.
The other forms of transportation are, obviously, walking along the side of a road hugging a cliff drop-off or mountain face that looks days away from being a mudslide; taking the ferry with limited seating when traveling between the two islands; and riding in cars (with AC if you’re lucky).
The Peace Corps also has a few vehicles that help transport all 23 of us around. We have a massive sprinter van that fits 12 of us, one regular SUV, and my favorite: the Jurassic Park jeep. I like to sit in the back of the jeep and feel like I’m Jeff Goldblum outrunning a T-Rex.
Training Site Updates
Now this section is where I decided I needed to just do more short anecdotal things or else I’d be here for months trying to make them all relate to each other in a cute quippy way. So here are just the things I’ve jotted down in my notes app and chosen at random which to expand upon. So here ya go.
I was so excited to come back from the first site-based training week and see my training site host mom, dad, and sisters. Even more exciting was seeing that while I was gone my family got two new two-month-old puppies named Benda and Bone, as well as three roosters (sounds like 100,000), one new chicken, and four chicks (her favorite chick is named Ken in honor of the late great Barbie)! My younger host sister chased the dogs around with a broom and caught the chicks and ran with them clenched in her fist, their heads bobbing around like car dealership inflatable tube men. When she caught them, she would put them in an old shopping bag, and one time she tied a chicken’s foot to a cinder block. I told her that’s not nice, and after telling her about 20 times, she finally stopped harassing the animals. Now she’s gentle and talks to them. Changing the world one pet owner at a time.
I forgot to write about surviving a tsunami in my last post. It was nothing major for Sāmoa — just some higher water levels for a night. We had to spend the night on the floor of a Mormon church at the top of a mountain.
Group pic with some staff and community members after planting mangroves in the mud for a project with my environment sector friends. Went STRAIGHT into the water after this.
The bugs are just something you get used to. I killed a spider the size of a golf ball with my bare palm. Hand to the wall. No hesitation. I’ve also accepted the occasional ant crawling in bed with me, wandering through my sugar, showing up in my Tums bottle, or hanging out in my clean laundry. They’re everywhere. I can’t really do anything about it other than get used to it.
Having a real sister in Izzy makes things easier. I seriously could not be more grateful for someone who makes me feel safe, normal, and heard in a place that can be hard to navigate.
One of my training site host sisters finds the weirdest things in church and brings them to me during service to play with her or cries until I do. These items range from paper clips, thumb tacks, and marbles to half-dead butterflies and broken chair legs.
Both of my training site host sisters’ favorite thing to say to me is, “Pela, look!” They say it constantly, even when I’m already looking. It makes me laugh because it reminds me of when my younger sister and I would scream, “Mam mam mam mam” at my mom when we were kids.
There aren’t many mirrors around. I brought a small travel one, but there aren’t mirrors in bathrooms, nor are there full-length ones in bedrooms like back in the States. Honestly, my sense of self-image has been so much better — basically nonexistent. I just haven’t been thinking about what I look like here. If my skin is breaking out, if I’m gaining or losing weight, if my hair is lighter or darker, if my outfit matches or not — it doesn’t matter. It’s been freeing. And it made me realize how much the abundance of mirrors in the States can help feed daily self-image issues. Why do we feel the need to look at ourselves every moment of every day?
The pianist at my training site church has a four-year-old son, and he’s the wildest child I have ever met. He scared me at first, but over the past few weeks we’ve become friends. Now he runs to me the second I walk into church, curls up on my shoulder during service, and rotates only between me, his mom, and his two aunts for who gets to hold him.
One night, after dinner, I was sitting at the table in silence with my parents when my host dad decided his conversation starter would be, “So, how are the guys who killed Osama doing today?” I almost spit out my drink. I was laughing so hard. I don’t even remember that day, let alone the guys who did it.
The speakers at my training site church are so loud that if a freight train passed by outside carrying a zoo, I’d still hear the hymns clearly. Yet when I play a video on my phone at volume level four, my sister covers her ears, saying it’s too loud. I’m like, “Girl, if you can sit through worship just fine, you can sit through my two-minute video.”
I started going to the youth group’s song and dance practice on Saturdays, and it was such a fun way to get to know the people my age in the village. I actually started remembering some of the words, songs, and dance moves during Sunday service, and it made me feel better about my struggling memory retention.
My last night with the youth group. They threw me a party with gifts, cake, and pizza. We all had so much fun cleaning up after and took many, many photos on the church’s camera.
My training site host sister fell one day, and I ran to her asking if she was okay. She stood up, laughed, and said, “I’m fine, Pela, don’t worry.” Keep in mind this is the same four-year-old who cries over any minor inconvenience and doesn’t speak a lick of English. BUT SHE WHIPPED THAT OUT ON ME. I’m now convinced she’s secretly understood everything I’ve ever said to her and is just a tiny baby english-speaking spy or something.
Every village and religion has different curfews. My training village’s curfew is around 6:30, when we do evening prayer with our families. When it’s enforced, there are literal conch shell horns blown to let everyone in the village know to go inside.
My two training site host sisters use a lot of aloe vera lotion — hair gel, regular lotion, and practically food. They use it like I use Windex: for everything.
I sat in a car for an hour with my family while everyone chewed gum and slurped drinks. If you know me (or are my immediate family), you know this scenario would normally cause me to scream and possibly hit someone — it’s my biggest pet peeve. But I remained calm. Not one hair on my neck stood up. Everyone exited the car peacefully, gum intact. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what I call growth.
I’ve actually had a pretty easy time adjusting my mindset and accepting most little differences as “normal.” That’s part of traveling and immersing yourself in a new culture: following local routines, religion, practices, foods, clothes, etc. Doing so much so fast during training made it feel like daily life almost immediately. This is how 200,000 people live here — so I can too. It’s not “underdeveloped” or bad, it’s simply different from America. But it’s their livelihood and their normal world.
Another win: kids have stopped staring at me as much. I’m taking that as a sign people are getting used to me and I’m integrating successfully.
At my new permanent site, I help one of my sisters and one of my brothers with their English homework. One night, my sister had a packet of papers clipped together. She pointed to the thing holding them and asked, “Pela, what is this?” After I picked my jaw up off the floor at the fact that my smarty-pants 12-year-old sister didn’t know, I gently explained, “That’s a paper clip.” I showed her how it works, and the next day I saw her teaching all her friends how to use it.
For my last weekend with my training site host family, we drove to my mom’s childhood village, right next to a beach resort, and went swimming at sunset. I thought the views couldn’t get any better — then we drove home. Driving through mountains on a remote island in the Pacific means almost no light pollution, which means many, many, many stars. So many stars that the Milky Way is actually a daily sight. The windows were down, my sisters were asleep, I had my headphones in, and I leaned my head out the window staring at the stars, pretending I was in a dramatic music video the whole ride home.
Only place that has come close to live up to the Florida sunsets.
My real mom sent me a package for my birthday, and instead of asking for gifts for myself, I asked her to send things for my host family: Barbies, Barbie accessories, and plush tigers. My host mom said she had never seen the girls so excited in their lives. Ever since, they take their tigers everywhere and sleep with their Moana Barbies every night. So frikin cute.
For my birthday, some of my sweet angel Peace Corps friends made or bought me gifts. Some wrote me cards, bought me cookies, got me a small whiteboard for school, or made me an ula (like a lei necklace). But the best gift — borderline one of the best I’ve ever received — was a traditionally woven Sāmoan fan with a hand-drawn, colored picture of the University of Oregon Duck mascot. They said, “We feel bad you’re missing this season for the Ducks, so we made you this to show you’re Oregon’s number one fan.” I cried. I love these people.
Izzy, Nyah, Jeremiah, and Gus all hung out and stayed up talking about how to make this. I did cry. I was so happy. SCO DUCKS BABY.
The Food
I will admit, I gagged on my dinner the first night at our training site. I can’t even tell you what it was, because I can’t remember and it’s never been made for me again! I was polite and didn’t make a scene, but I think my family very quickly picked up on what I liked and didn’t like. I’ve also been trying more as I get used to things. So far, the hot and spicy bowl of noodles, panipopo, sapasui, palusami ma ‘ulu, supo ma moa, and my host dad’s fried chicken are all top contenders for favorite food.
But the best thing that’s happened so far was the day I noticed a bag of spaghetti sitting out on the table. If you know me, you know spaghetti is actually my least favorite pasta shape. But here, beggars can’t be choosers. I had been begging — silently — for any pasta that wasn’t rice noodles floating in sapasui. Then I spotted a can that said “meat,” and it wasn’t corned beef. I looked closer. It also said pasta sauce. I squealed. “Mom, are we having pasta?!”
Before I knew it, I was served the biggest bowl of spaghetti bolognese I’ve ever seen — it was practically a wok. I ate half of it. My host mom said, “Wow, you’re eating a lot.” YA GIRL, I’M SAVORING EVERY LAST MOMENT OF THIS MEAL AND STORING SOME AS LEFTOVERS FOR THE NEXT WEEK! PLEASE, NO MORE RAMEN OR FRIED CHICKEN OR SAPASUI OR SOUP OR OATMEAL! …That’s what I would have said, but instead I just smiled and went, “Hehe, more pasta from now on please.”
And GET THIS: in the same week I had spaghetti, I went to Apia for some paperwork at the office and got McDonald’s! And then the next week, my family bought me Froot Loops and Apple Jacks. This, my friends, is what the people call Posh Corps.
The Government
We had a session about the government structure here, and I’m still not sure I fully understand it. “Currently hanging on by a thread” is the best way I know how to summarize it. There’s a Prime Minister, a Head of State, and a Parliament with 51 members. There are four main parties, and whichever party has the majority in Parliament gets to vote in their Prime Minister as well.
Apparently, there was a problem with the last Prime Minister, so he got a vote of no confidence and the country had to hold a “snap election” — which was wild. One night, a group of six guys literally just walked into my family’s house, sat on our couches, and paid my host dad to vote for their party. Of course, he took their money and then voted for the party he actually liked. That was crazy.
Despite that, the election itself was very peaceful. So many people were running, so many helped with the voting sites, and the entire country shut down for two days. No one was really out except to vote. Every citizen is required to vote, too, or else they get fined.
When results were being counted, my family huddled around the TV. The broadcast sounded like a staticky radio, and the only thing on the screen was a chalkboard. One person stood there adding tally marks next to each party to show who had won which Parliament seats. I was losing it, because in the States I’m used to watching Steve Kornacki sprint around an interactive map like a madman for three days straight.
More Lessons
The key to everything here is balance.
The time of service is fleeting. But so is our group’s time all together. I need to be wise and find a balance between focusing on the job and also taking time for myself and my friends. It’s okay to dedicate time to sit and talk to friends and family back home, even if my host family is hanging out or my Peace Corps friends are doing something together. So I remind myself: sit, listen, immerse, try everything, but also stay true to myself and do things for me. Don’t try to become Sāmoan.
Connection starts with small, intentional choices.
“When you enter your community, take time to learn about yourself and those around you. Attend community events, get to know your neighbors and shopkeepers, and make friends with the people around you. It makes a world of difference, and eventually it can make a difference in the world.” This was advice from a girl named Kirsten from PC Malawi in her blog, and it’s stuck with me.
Celebrate small wins — they add up.
Lately, my biggest “small win” is language. Sometimes I feel like I’m not learning fast enough, or that I’m not using Sāmoan like everyone else. But then I think back to those first two weeks, when I cried over language lessons, convinced I’d never get it. Now, I can at least form sentences and understand questions. I can greet people, give short commands, and ask simple questions to my host sisters or people at church. Even though my host dad wishes I spoke more Sāmoan, I’ve learned to take every little win as a victory. Every time my ears perk up and I start understanding what’s going on, that’s progress.
Unity doesn’t mean agreement, it means listening.
Living in a different culture has reminded me that “normal” and “acceptable” look very different depending on where you are. Back home, I’ve noticed we often respond to differences by canceling, cutting people off, or shutting down conversations. But real unity isn’t about always agreeing. It’s about continuing to listen, even when it’s uncomfortable. It means being curious, patient, and willing to understand someone else’s perspective without immediately jumping to harsh judgment. I think the States and the world needs more of that: people who push themselves to truly listen to others. That doesn’t mean abandoning your values or condoning what you disagree with. It just means creating space for dialogue.
For example, in Sāmoa, there are certain practices I don’t personally agree with, but I’ve realized the importance of understanding before rushing to judgment. We don’t have to accept everything to learn something. In the end, this experience is teaching me that unity grows not from erasing differences, but from our willingness to listen through them.
Some friends and family came to swearing in and gave me so many ulas! Traditional easy “congrats” gift. Some made out of flowers, some candy, some savory snacks. Best day ever!
Rose Bud Thorn
Thorn: Leaving my training site, family, and church. I can’t imagine my days without seeing my fellow pisikoa or staff every day either.
Bud: Getting to know a new family, along with all the kids and teachers at my school. And being better at posting more updates so I’m not recapping two months in one blog…
Rose: Other pisikoa have said they’ve shared this with their families. So to them I say hello! Your child is doing great, and you should be so proud of them. We’re all making the hard parts easier by leaning on each other. So far, so good! Onward!