In March, my small town here in
Parents come on down. My parents came the last week in February and brought with them a cornucopia of food, including batches of homemade chocolate chip cookies for the families we’re closest to, a case of instant oatmeal, tea bags, and granola bars. It was really great to have them here visiting me—now they know what it’s really like for me to be down here. It reminded me that even though I’m used to everything at this point, it is a strange and more difficult existence that we lead down here...I felt like a superhero, speaking more Spanish than them, plus being used to nonflushing toilets and sporadic power outages. My dad brought a whole bunch of 3-D pictures of the moon, Mars, and some of the other planets, as well as some 3-D glasses, so we hung up the pictures in the library and gave some ‘tours.’ The little kids loved it—were totally entranced by the 3-D moon pictures in general, since they can recognize it—and were incredibly adorable sporting the glasses. My mom brought down a heart model and gave a bit of an explanation of it to the older kids and talked about heart transplants, which they found really interesting.
We went on a weekend trip together to Copan Ruinas, where we saw the Mayan ruins—amazing, even though I’d seen them once before—and visited a bird park full of toucans and parrots and other really cool birds that are native to Honduras and other parts of Central America. We had an especially authentic experience because the water and the electricity went out while we were out eating dinner on Saturday night, and did not return until the next day. I asked at the beautiful bed-and-breakfast where we stayed if I could have a bucket of water to flush the toilet, and the guy offered to do it for me, but I explained to him that it was quite all right, that actually I have a lot of experience with this. My mom and dad also went on a mini-trip while I was in school to a forest called Pico Bonito, where they ended up fording a river and doing a rather strenuous sounding hike. But they were very proud of themselves for navigating around alone with their limited Spanish, and seem to have enjoyed the adventure.
School successes. In the combined 7th/8th grade, we just finished a unit on poetry and had great success writing haikus and other short poems and coming up with some great similes and metaphors. The ninth graders have been practicing how to write outlines in preparation for a research project that will enable them to start writing historical fiction stories. We’ve also been focusing on both grades on prepositions, since they are especially troublesome for nonnative speakers, and reading some great novels. Raven’s Gate, a mysterious story about an orphaned boy, has been a particular hit—I’m so excited to have reluctant readers coming to me at recess to discuss what might happen next in the book. I’ve arranged for an organization called Junior Achievement to come give personal finance classes to the middle school students, and we start next week. I think it’ll be great to give the kids a solid practical background in how to save, using a checkbook, and navigate the Honduran bank system.
Overall my students have been relatively rowdy in the past few weeks, although the ninth graders had an impressively calm and engaged discussion of Raven’s Gate on one of the days that my parents were visiting, which made me proud. Recently, though, I did really enjoy watching the seventh and eighth graders rocking out to Hey-Ya as they worked on their book projects, including a magazine devoted to Abby Hayes and a short play based on Sideways Stories from Wayside School in which students are turned into apples.
College visitors show their strength. We had an awesome group visit from Claremont McKenna who were a great help in the classrooms and also nearly finished building bathrooms for the kinder and prep students. The sun has been fuerte recently, as we enter spring, so they’re to be admired for continuing to work away at mixing cement, hauling blocks around, and digging ditches. We have another volunteer group coming next week. Our nonprofit’s director also visited this past week and it was great to have her here. She even convinced some of her SIPA friends to vacation in Roatan and stop over in CofradÃa to check out our school. Hanging out with them felt like when you’re in high school hanging out with college kids—you really want to be as cool as them. They were kind enough to talk about their experiences at SIPA and even critique our resumes for us.
Public Policy Jobs? The search for new teachers for the 2007-2008 school year has already begun, and that means I’ve begun to feel the pressure of looking for a job myself. I plan to head back to the states—as much as I love the new friends I’ve made here, I’d like to be closer to my family and friends from back home. School ends around the last week in June, and I hope to stick around until July sometime to do some traveling around the area. If you have leads on jobs in public policy, let me know.
525,000 moments so dear. On a concluding note, one of our close Honduran friends had a frightening experience this week, and while everything turned out all right, it has definitely reminded the volunteer teaching team that all that we must be aware of our vulnerability, even as we enjoy the embrace of a community that is so welcoming and supportive. “Life does not count by years. Some suffer a lifetime in a day, and so grow old by the rising and the setting of the sun.” Augusta Jane Evans.
