Every day, Ben wakes up at 6:00 AM to study before classes. I prepare breakfast while he studies the Bible and then sets up his laptop to read about anatomy.
Bible reading in the morning
A little after 7:00, Ben kisses me goodbye and heads to the auditorium at school to get a good seat and study more. The auditorium is a silent zone when not in use for classes.
At 8:00, classes begin. First is Molecular and Cellular Biology with Dr. van Oost. At 9:30 is Anatomy and at 10:30 Histology begins with Dr. Beveridge.
Class with Dr. Nwosu
At 11:20, Ben comes home for lunch. After lunch, Ben studies at home for a while and returns to school by 1:00 for lab.
The Auditorium
Lab alternates every day between wet lab and dry lab. Wet lab is cadaver lab. Ben is part of a group of nine students who work together on the same body all semester. There are a couple dozen different groups of students. Dry lab is in another room, where students study bones and other things that do not include body juices and formaldehyde.
Ben in his lab coat
After lab, Ben usually stays at school to study with friends.
Ben comes home around 6:00 for dinner. After dinner is–you guessed it!– more studying. Usually, Ben goes back to the auditorium for quiet study.
Late in the evening, after a loud and exciting game of ping-pong, Ben comes home again. We have a little time to talk and then we do devotions together–worship songs, prayer, and reading a Christian marriage book.
Ping Pong
Ben does the last of his studying and then turns of the light around 10:30 or 11:00.
Today is the day! We’ve been dreaming of this day, planning for it, and praying for it for many months. No, it’s not our wedding. We already did that. Today is Ben’s first day of medical school!
Like the dorky picture-snapping wife I am, I took a “first day of school” photo and posted it on Facebook.
This is technically the first day of classes, but Ben has actually been on campus all week. We first stepped onto campus for our campus tour last weekend. Our first impression of the school was that it is spacious, clean, secure, tastefully decorated, and has a great view. We also thought that the campus is pretty big, but anything looks big compared to our undergrad university. Our campus tour showed us the “welcome center,” or guard shack, as it is commonly known, where security checks in and out every single person who enters campus. The next stop was the rotunda, a large, circular room in the center of the main building. Here, there are stairs that go to a second floor, which contains a few lecture halls, the library, and other rooms. On the same level as the rotunda is a nice recreational building with a ping-pong room, a room with couches for chilling and studying, a yoga room, and the gym. I was most excited about the gym. I’ll be spending a lot of time there. It has several treadmills and ellipticals in addition to other workout machines that looked like they are in great condition.
Pumpin’ iron
There is also a cafeteria near this area, and the prices aren’t bad. Ben got a chicken wrap, an apple, and a bag of chips yesterday as a free new student gift, and he liked it. I think it would usually cost $5, which isn’t bad at all, considering the price of food on this island.
If you walk straight from the front door into the rotunda and then out the back door, you will arrive at note services, more lecture halls, and study rooms for rent. There is also a basketball court and the smoking area. I have no idea why anyone would be going into medicine and also be a smoker, but to each his own.
Basketball Court. Too bad I took this at night– the lagoon is in the background.
Through a patio garden area, down the steps, and across the street is The New Building and the dormitories. The New Building has many lecture rooms, offices, a smaller cafeteria area, a study zone, anatomy lab, the auditorium, etc. Ben will be spending most of his time here. His class is the biggest at the school so far (about 280, I think), so they will be living in the auditorium for most of their classes. During anatomy lab, they will be upstairs working in small groups. Thankfully, each person gets their own anatomy lab locker, so nothing that smells like cadavers and formaldehyde will come into our apartment!
The auditorium
Behind The New Building is a stunning view of Simpson Bay and the mountains that make up this island. Beautiful.
Mural outside Ben’s classroom. It represents giving a bright future to the island’s children.
Besides a tour, the school has hosted many other fun and/or required pre-class events. There were several shuttle runs to the grocery store over the weekend. Saturday was a beach volleyball game and Ben got his ID badge that same morning. Sunday was registration in the morning and a welcome meeting in the evening. Happily for us, the evening event was catered with a delicious meal! Nothing says “happy students” like free food. After the welcome meeting, everyone was invited to compete in a scavenger hunt (this provided the lovely photos for this post) and an ice cream mixer.
Boats in Simpson Bay Lagoon
Monday included seminars on wellness and professionalism. If I had named them, I would have called the sessions How Not to Die and How Not to Lose Your License. Most of it seemed like common sense to me as I flipped through the booklet, but it’s always good to hear good advice, especially during times of transition and stress. Besides, there are a lot of ways to be stupid and get in trouble on this island. Hopefully people will take the warnings seriously, because coming to class with a massive hangover is not a good way to pass one’s Step Ones. There was also an assessment and a reading quiz on Monday over the book Short White Coat.
Island Bus Tour
Yesterday (Tuesday) contained more and longer workshops, as well as an island tour. We stopped in Marigot and visited a French Patisserie. It was actually a pretty good price– four delicious pastries for about six bucks. We also stopped in Orient Bay to see Saint-Martin’s best beach. I have to say that I like Mullet Bay much better. Orient is pretty seaweedy this year, and the beach was pretty busy. It does have a good view of Anguilla and some small islands, though. We didn’t stop anywhere else, but it was nice to drive the perimeter of the island and see the less touristy areas where local people live. I was delighted to finally see some fresh fruit stands! After the island tour, the students went back to school for complementary subs and a meeting with their orientation advisers.
French Pastries
The week is not over yet! After today’s classes, there is a student mixer. Tomorrow is the Spouse Organization’s first get-together. Friday is the white coat ceremony. And from there, it’s all about studying, studying, studying.
We are officially set to move to St. Maarten! We have plane tickets for August 18, Ben’s medical tests are done, our letters of good standing are filed away with the school, and all the little checklist items have been completed. Our move itself is relatively inexpensive. Our total cost for two one-way tickets is under $500. Since we can’t take a moving van with us, we won’t have that expense, and we decided to leave our car here rather than take it with us. We get to bring two 50-lb suitcases each, so anything we want will have to fit in those and in our carry-ons and personal items.
The last two or three weeks have been filled with sorting, planning, purchasing and preparing. We only owned one large suitcase, so we went to Goodwill (actually, four Goodwills) and bought three more. Our total was about $45 for all three, and they are strong and in good shape. I love second-hand stores.
Our first course of action in preparing to leave our apartment was to declutter it entirely. Don’t you hate moving and sorting through unused junk at the same time? I thought I had decluttered my stuff when we got married and moved in to this apartment a year ago. Turns out I was wrong. Apparently, I have saved every single bank receipt since I was seven–and categorized them by month in envelopes. Same with pay stubs since I started a regular job as a college freshman. I also saved and organized all my college notes, assignments, and syllabuses by class and semester. By the time I went through all of that and all the random papers stuffed in between books on the bookshelf, our trash and shred piles were enormous. We managed to condense our giant accordion folder into one and a half tiny ones. Fortunately, we also found some long-lost important paperwork that we needed.
After we went through our papers, we went through the rest of our random stuff- you know, the kind of stuff that ends up being shifted from the bookshelf to the table to under the bed to the closet and back to the bookshelf? That stuff you can’t do anything with but can’t get rid of? As it turns out, we actually could get rid of most of it. It’s amazing how much stuff I thought I needed until I started planning to move overseas. We also wrote down everything that was left and decided what we would do with it– sell it, give it or donate it, store it at my parents’ house, or take it with us. The list of what we’ll actually need to take is quite short. It mostly consists of books and clothing. The stuff we’re storing is the stuff we can’t take, but will use to set up house again when we return to the States, such as our dishes, bedding, and that kind of thing, as well as things we got as wedding gifts that are too big or too heavy to take with us.
Books! These some of the ones we’re keeping.So many piles of books.
Speaking of books, we also went through those. My books are my friends, so it was hard to say goodbye to so many of them (but not nearly as hard as it will be to say goodbye to our human friends). We packed up about half our books to sell or give away (I kid you not- half of our books). I think I also still have a nice collection of Bible commentaries at my parents’ house, but I don’t count that because it hasn’t been in our apartment. Besides, Ben has Logos software, which contains most of the best scholarly Bible study materials anyway, so print books aren’t really necessary. They’re too heavy to move, and an iPad isn’t (I hate to write that– I’m still a supporter of pages. I love pages far more than screens). Perhaps there also comes a point when a book may be good, but if I’m really not going to read it again, and probably won’t loan it to anyone because it’s not quite that good, then I really don’t need it anymore. Share the love; sell it and let someone else enjoy it. Maybe that’s my attitude because I know I really don’t have a choice at this point; maybe I’ll be a book hoarder again when (if) we settle down and stay somewhere for a long while someday.
I had already gone through my clothing once, so I had (for the first time ever!) fewer clothes than Ben did. I had already sold or donated about 1/3 of my clothes, and I think that yesterday we probably got rid of half of what was left between his clothes and mine. We stuffed them all in a giant laundry bag, which Ben says weighs more than I do. According to minimalist websites and my own findings, all you really need for clothing is seven T-shirts, five nice shirts, a handful of dresses (unless you’re a guy… switch this for button-ups), a blazer and business skirt/dress pants, a sets of workout shorts, a pair of denim shorts, a pair of denim capris (or your favorite substitute), two pairs of jeans (one dark pair for dressing nice and one work pair), a few skirts if you’re a girl, one or two jackets, some warm things for cold climates (not sure what that entails, because I live in Phoenix) and enough socks and underwear to last a week or two. I actually kept a few more skirts and dresses than I need because I like them and they fit in the suitcase. In reality, what one REALLY needs for clothing looks nothing like this. You can survive on a lot less clothing, and most people in the world do.
If you are not interested in cutting down your wardrobe, come to our garage sale in July and take some of those clothes off our hands at a great price…
We packed our clothing suitcases yesterday, just to see what we could fit. All our clothes, plus shoes, cosmetics, and nail polish, fit into two suitcases weighing exactly 49 pounds each. Now we have two remaining suitcases, two carry-on bags, and two personal items to fill. We’re taking about 20-25 books, including some of Ben’s science textbooks, and I suppose we’ll decide later what things are most important to fill the last the space in our luggage.
Thanks for reading this long post! Maybe I’ve inspired some of you to take a weekend or two and declutter a bit. It’s amazing what we keep in our closets, bookshelves, and bedrooms that we really don’t need. Cleaning out the clutter is making our home more peaceful and our lives more simple. That is a great reward. Oh, and did I mention that we found almost $100 in the process? Now, if that doesn’t motivate you…
