Hello readers! My name is Lauren, and I am the current WorldTeach volunteer at Woja Elementary School in Woja on Majuro in the Republic of the Marshall Islands (a mouthful, no?). My 8th grade class is participating in The Unbound Bookmaker Project with the topic of the 3Rs: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. I know many people might wonder how I'm finding time to complete this project while working within the school curriculum and making sure the students are learning what they need to learn. Luckily, their English language school books have specific sections on the environment, which in the first quarter of school I happily made use of to introduce the concepts of the environment, environmental problems, and environmental solutions. Our grammar and writing practice also surrounded these topics. We give special thanks to the Majuro Atoll Waste Company (MAWC) for coming to Woja Elementary to speak to our 8th graders, as well as giving us a tour of the Majuro dump site -- both of which have given my 8th grade class incredible insight into how the 3 Rs work in the RMI. Having spent another couple weeks focused primarily on grammar, writing, and how to organize information, I'm excited for my students to finally begin the writing process. This experience is one that they will surely not forget!

When my students were asked to write in their journals about the project, here were some of their responses:

As we prepare for the major endeavor of typesetting 23 books for The Unbound Bookmaker Project, I have been able to finish a very sweet project. Melba Kaye Smith, my grandmother, wrote up her experiences and I had the privilege of making it into a book. It took over a year and I had the help of my grandmother, my father, my aunt and uncle, and perhaps a little help from above as well in creating this 135-paged history. My Grandma Kaye had what I would call a tough life: she worked hard on a farm in Hooper, Utah; she had her little finger cut off by a farm machine; she experienced appendicitis and the mumps; she was involved a terrible car accident that nearly decapitated her and left her on the edge of death for many months; her father died after getting caught in a hay baler; she had a sad divorce that left her with four little children; she worked herself to the ground to support her family by herself; she had the awkward experience of a second marriage and being compared to her new husband's first wife.

And yet . . .