October 21, 2007 (Day 9)

We woke up and went over to Ebeye at about 8 am so that we could go to a church service. Julian met us at the dock and showed us around a little bit and took us to a place where we could get some breakfast. After that we walked down towards the church. As we were walking down, Shelby and I made friends with two little dogs who were very cute, but seemed to be homeless. It was sad. We got to the church and before the service; Julian introduced us to the minister. While we were there, a little puppy came up and he was very very cute, but Jacqueline wouldn’t let us pet him because we had already sanitized our hands. The dogs on Ebeye were very dirty and not many of them were very well taken care of. Then we went into the church and the dogs tried to follow us in, we didn’t mean to, they just really liked us ☺. The little puppy ran inside and almost went to the bathroom, which would have been very bad, but someone came and took him out. The service began and the minister welcomed us. The entire thing was in Marshallese though and Julian tried to translate when he could, but we didn’t understand nearly any of it. After the actual service was over, several different singing groups came up and performed and through out bubble gum and money, which was very generous of them. The church service was really wonderful and so lively. After it was over, Julian took us around town. One of his students, Dano, had come to the church service with Julian and walked around town with us for a little while. They took us over to Julian's house and introduced us to his wife, who was very nice. However she had a cold and couldn't come out with us. We left Julian's house and went out to lunch. We found out that Julian had been part of Operation Homecoming at Kwajelein years before. After lunch, we had to get going to catch the boat back to Kwajelein. Once we returned, we went over to Ona's to use her phone and she let us all call home. I told my mom about the evil little Picasso fish and she laughed at me. After we were done calling home, Shelby and I had decided to go and buy some lettuce to feed the turtles at the pond. Mr. Fielding showed us again how to get to the turtle pond and we assured him that we would find our way back home easily enough, considering we were on an island. We hung out at the turtle pond for a while and fed them, we figured out that there were three turtles in there, we had previously only seen two. They were so huge, it was amazing. We competed a little on who could get the turtle to come over to us, it was fun. By now, the sun had set and it was dark out. We both had little head lamps to help us see in the dark. We started heading back, and of course, we got lost, on an island, impossible right? Not so much. We ended up riding our bikes pretty much entirely around the island and almost went into a restriced area before we finally made it home. Once we got back we told Jacqueline and Fielding that we had in fact gotten lost and they laughed at us. We got ready for bed and went to sleep, and that was the end of that day.