The Power of Silence

Silence is something that I have seldom experienced in Cofradia. Living  with four roommates and next to the town square makes for a constant barrage of noise, be it from trucks rolling through the square, Reggeaton blaring from the billiards hall of ill-repute that catty-corners our apartment or the shrill “Yoooo hooo!” that comes from a  man who walks by with a cart of novelties goods that no one wants. (This yoohoo is less like a hello from a creepy man and more like a cry from a  16^th century courtesan soliciting services. “Yooooo hoooo!”

On Friday morning, however, we all reached a breaking point with the noise. At 5 am  we were awoken by a man ‘s voice booming from two large speakers in the park advertising $1 toothbrushes and $3 cell phone chargers. 5 in the morning!!!!! He kept at it for 15 minute stretches, until his voice got tired, I presume, and then they played some obnoxious reggaeton at a level that was worthy of making my bedroom a club.  Then the ads started again.

After an hour and a half of our tossing and turning,  cursing this man into the pillows over our heads, our alarms went off. We peeled ourselves off our mattresses  and with stinging eyes,  planned our sabatoge for this man’es operations. Our scheming wasn’t quite as productive as we hoped, though, and the final product ended with my trouncing over and telling the man behind the mic. “This is absolutely ridiculous. There is a community that lives here and you think it’s okay to blast this bullshit about toothbrushes at 5 in the morning?” To which he replied, “Public property.” Somehow it didn’t make me feel better.

I got to school and prepped my room for my 8^th and 9^th grade music class, which was to start at 7:10.  I waited and waited, and 7:18 rolled around and my students were still not lined up at my door. I looked over the balcony and they were all standing beneath me chatting away. I caught one of their eyes with the piercing teacher stare and he queued the others to rush up to the classroom.  Very calmly, I asked, “what were you all doing?” One of my students sneered at me and said, “Mister, we thought you were going to come get us.” I reamed  into them about my expectations for them  to be lined up after the first bell, expectations that have never changed from day one and told them to sit down, get out their materials and turn this day around.

 Frustrated, and feeling let down, I started my lesson on transferring what we knew about the keys of a piano over to the notes of a musical score. I asked them all to raise a hand and help me fill out the piano chart that I put on the board (something that they all knew and had a quiz on the day before). Silence. In the morning in which I was barraged by noise, I now had silence in the only moment that I had asked for noise. I waited, and waited… still no hands.  Boiling inside, I then sat down in my chair, crossed my hands in my lap and stared back at them for what must have been a minute. They all started looking at one another in confusion, and I said, “Oh I’m sorry, were you all expecting something to happen? That must be really frustrating  to be sitting around waiting for something to happen.” Embarrassed at myself for resorting to such intense passive aggressiveness, I tried to spin it, and looked them in the eye and said, “lets change this right now.”

I got through that painful lesson with mild improvement from the students ending it thinking, “I never want to teach again.” I then went out to the pouring rainy lunchyard for my recess duty, sitting with my raincoat over my head and hoping that no kids would come over and bother me.

A group of 5^th graders came running out onto the blacktop with hands raised in the air and mouth gaping open to catch raindrops. Squealing with delight, they stomped in puddles and sang, “Who let the dogs out!” Omar ran over to me, drenched and covered with mud, and with a wide grin he cried, “Mister, this is glorious.”  Zabdi, an elven creature who is the ringleader of the 5^th grade dumped a puddle out of her shoes, ringed out her socks and said “Mister, I am going to have to tirar these calcetines in the basura!” Bessie then came over and put her hand on my shoulder and said “Mister Greene, you need to stomp in puddles, be kid again!”

The bell rang, these creatures ran to class and I was left sitting on a chair by the blacktop, sopping wet. Silence for the second time today. I smiled, had a chuckle and felt a ping of ouch. This was the first time in my life that someone has told me to be child again. I never knew I had stopped being one. I would like to be more child. And a little more silence would be nice. Most of the time.

Math Songs in 4th Grade

To this day, whenever I need to divide by 3, 4, or 6, I run through times table songs that my dad taught me in 4th grade. He came into my 4th grade class in 1994 and taught my friends these songs and many of them still use them as well.

Since coming to Honduras, I pretend I am many-a-things. I pretend to be a science expert, a yoga teacher, a  drama teacher, an expert musician, and now I can add to the list: elementary-school songwriter. Ok, I didn't write the songs, but like Puff Daddy (ehem P Diddy) did in the 90's, I adapted these little babies coined by the papa Greene and they are way better than the originals. Sorry dad, but you can't deny I have better rythm.

Right after I finished these songs, a student raised his hand and said, "Mister, why don't you have one for 7's?" Another girl raised her hand and said, "8's mister?" implying that I have been lazy in my songwriting.... Back to the drawing board. Sevens and eights are in production.

Sit back and enjoy. My favorite part is clearly my right hand man in the front:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8ms6TE6GKM

Movin' on Up: The Saga of my New Classroom

A blank canvas. The globe was the first thing to go up.

For the past 3 months I have been sharing a classroom with my fellow math teacher, Mr. Brian. We are both very laid back about the space, are respectful roommates and we have made a fine pair. I can’t think of an easier class “roommate” to have. We help each other out and use one another to bitch to at the end of every day, kind of like a married couple.

We got word at the beginning of this year that they were going to build a new classroom and one of us was going to get to have our own room. Although a new classroom is not in our eyes a top priority for the school ,we were excited about the prospects of having our own space and having our room free during our prep periods to legitimately prep (we trade off teaching in the room in a sort of chaotic tag-team teaching frenzy).

From its conception,  the evolution of this classroom project has been the perfect microcosm for how things work in Honduras. In order to understand this, first I must explain that there are two parts to our school. There is the nonprofit organization (BECA) who is based in the states and handles a huge portion of the funding from donors in the states, as well as  the hiring and coordinating of the gringo teachers and millions of other things. They work side by side with the “junta”, a parent organization  of Honduras who collaborated with BECA to make the school. The junta has its separate funds and is responsible for a lot of the financial decisions.

It is a really special model in which the community that we work within has a lot of control in the decision-making process: this is great, in theory. There is no denying, however, that anything that comes through BECA is extremely organized, timely, and well thought out and the projects that come from the “junta” are, well, Honduran.

My new classroom project was the perfect example. This summer, the junta decided that building a new classroom was a top priority. Brian and I function just fine sharing the classroom, but they chose this project instead of paying for textbooks, more training for the teachers or technology upgrades that our school desperately needs. It is so representative of a larger problem in Honduras in that Hondurans seem to conceptualize “progress” only in terms of building physical infrastructure.

Building a new classroom is something tangible and provides instant gratification. They fail to see the larger picture of what the students really need. Just to drive this point home, the last project that they proposed was to build a covered walkway from one wing of the school to the other wing so kids wouldn’t have to walk in the rain on the 10 days of the year when it rains during school hours. Absurd.

So anyway, we got word at the beginning of the year that this project might happen and, like most things here, you never know if something is actually going to happen until the day that it does. In September on one Friday, our principle told us that they were going to go ahead with the project starting on Monday. We were still doubtful. To our surprise though, the trucks started rolling through on Monday and for the next month, four men worked from sun up to sundown, hoisting bricks with a primitive pully system, sawing metal, and laying concrete. They worked all day.  Trying to teach through the construction was like hell on earth. It was impossible to teach over the noise and sparks from a soldering   (yes this is how you spell it… weird, right? I had to look it up) were literally flying through my classroom window. For a full account, of the chaos see a past post: here.

These men worked nonstop for a month and bam, there was a new classroom upstairs, with a roof and glassless windows and everything. Our principle came to me and said, “Mister, the room is done, you can move in now.” Excited, I went upstairs to find an empty classroom with open sockets for electricity without the accompanying wires, no desks and no whiteboard. I said, “Miss, there is no electricity, and no, whiteboard, and no desks, it will be difficult for me to teach here.”

My new classroom! It's.... blue!

She looked to one side, a little confused, and said, “la cosa es que…. (the thing is)” the junta only has enough money to finish the construction and now the money is gone. Are you sure you don’t want to move in anyway?” I gave the perfunctory pause, pretending to consider it, and judiciously said, “I would prefer to wait until the room is really ready.”

After men blitzed to get the room finished working all throughout the schoolday disturbing classes for a month, the room  just sat there empty, waiting for funds for another month. Well finally that day came. The junta somehow wrangled up the funds just in time to get it ready for “Intrega de Notas,” a day when all of the parents come to school to collect their students grades.

I just had my first class in the room today and it is awesome! It is upstairs away from the rest of the school, it’s quiet and well ventilated and is bright blue (awkwardly so, in fact). I asked them to paint it blue because the rest of the classes are of a sort of puke yellow. I was originally requesting to have them paint the inside of the building as blue, but instead, they painted the whole top story blue… lost in translation somehow. It is like teaching in heaven, on a cloud. I have a beautiful view of the mountains of Cusuco out my window, it gets an awesome breeze and the best part is that I have my own water cooler, a prized possession reserved only for principles and “Don’s” in these parts.

So, true to Honduran form, it was built a bit haphazardly. At many points I had my doubts that it would actually go to completion, but, alas,  Honduras has surprised me yet again with the delivery of this beautiful classroom that from its inception only really took 2 months. And I don’t even need to get up from my desk to fill my nalgene with cold water. Awesome.

The view of the mountains of Cusuco from my window.

Candy? How About Alligator Eggs, Kid.

Halloween is my favorite holiday. If any of you out there have experienced an Oak St Halloween, you can understand why. If you haven’t experienced it, close your eyes for a moment and imagine a world (oh wait, you have your eyes closed…. These two tasks are mutually exclusive). Okay, open your eyes, soften your focus and imagine a world where an entire street is closed down due to the sheer number of babies in winnie the poo costumes hobbling down the streets. Imagine a warm house where families, friends an neighbours (spelled the British way because it is magical) all come together in ridiculous getups, a night in which we are all actors, and we eat chicken tortilla soup (a Corinne specialty), drink spiced cider and mulled wine, and all of the action is over by 9pm.

Unfortunately I didn’t get to experience that marvel this year. Halloween here is seen by most members of Cofradian society as a celebration of the devil, and our kids did not come to school in costume, and no candy was flowing. In fact, I just heard today from one of our students that they don’t trick or treat because there is an old woman in town who somehow implants alligator eggs in the stomachs of kids who go trick-or-treating and rumor has it you can be fine for years and years, without knowledge of any danger, until one day the eggs hatch and alligators claw their way out of your stomach! I guess for the kids, the candy doesn’t really justify all of that hassle. I had a bout of malaria (another story for another day), and multiple experiences with “#4”, the other pottie term (like the term we use with little kids when they have to go to the bathroom and we ask “#1 or #2?” ). Having weathered these trying experiences, I can say that I understand why these students would want to avoid the trick-or-treating.

Once again, I digress. Back to Halloween… We knew that there would be no Halloween celebration in town, but the thought of letting Halloween just pass on by seemed depressing to us teachers and for the past couple of weeks we were trying to figure out how we could honor this American holiday. Finally we figured it out. There is a very nice private American school in San Pedro Sula (the big city about 45 min from us) called EIS. They have 50 international teachers and we have a good relationship with their school because one of our program directors used to be a teacher there. One of their teachers called one of our teachers and invited us to come out and play ultimate Frisbee on Saturday, and then stick around for their Halloween bash.

We jump at any opportunity to leave Cofradia, and excited about our new plans we whipped up some great costumes in a few hours. We took a bus into San Pedro and then a taxi up to their school, which was tucked away in this beautiful mountainous region of San Pedro with a massive wall that surrounded the school like a presidential palace. The armed guard flagged us in and the massive school stood in front of us, with beautifully kept grounds  and new buildings (with windows!.... something we don’t have at our school). This place is the nicest set of buildings I have seen in Honduras and it looked more like a private university than a K-12 Honduran school.

We played Ultimate Frisbee all afternoon on their beautifully trimmed field (I had to take frequent breaks because my lungs aren’t quite up to snuff from the malaria recovery). Afterward, we went back to an apartment complex where 25 of the teachers live. This complex had a 20 foot wall around it, an armed guard, and an electric fence. The apartments were immaculate and had A/C marble countertops, cable and internet and showers with hot water… and it is all paid for by their school! The cofradian volunteers walked into this other world that felt like Disneyland and  wide-eyed like pauper children, we eyed their nice refrigerators and microwaves with a mixture of envy for what we didn’t have and gratitude that we could call these teachers our new friends.. Then we all took nice long hot showers and put on our costumes.

Magical

We had some great costumes. 6 ft 6 Profe Matt found this really incredible unicorn costume that was about 7 sizes too small, but accentuated his nipple ring nicely… a piece of jewelry that all of us have yet to become comfortable with. We also had a nice group of ninja turtles, a Chiquita Banana,  a group of Chilean miners, and I was “Hurricane Mitch,” the hurricane that devastated Honduras 11 years ago. My costume was mildly offensive, but the Hondurans there seemed to enjoy it and nobody punched me in the face. We partied with a group of Gringos and Catrachos (Hondurans) on the patio of this apartment complex to the wee hours and got to pretend for a day that we were not in Honduras.

The teachers that we hung out from the other school were very welcoming and fun people. It was amazing to meet other teachers living in Honduras with such drastically different experiences. They all have cars, live in this beautiful modern place and they complain about their students and their families being spoiled rich and stuck up. We don’t have that. Any of that. And I don’t judge them for it. They are just two really unique experiences. It  did make me start to think about teaching at a nice international school next year. The money is great, you can teach without a credential, you still get to be living in another country, and the life is pretty cushy. This has been a great unique experience for me, but its financially unfeasible to volunteer for more than one year.

Hurricane Mitch

Ok, last blog I wrote about the other side of the river and how I was moved to action. I just want to write a disclaimer that I haven’t forgotten about that experience. But I do think that there is a middle ground that one can meet, making a difference and still acquiring a level of comfort. My godparents, Steve and Lisa are educators in a really nice international school the Democratic Republic of the Congo and just last week they told me of an opening at their school and I am starting to look into it for next year.

So, all in all I had a pretty great Halloween. No babies in costumes, no chicken tortilla soup, no jack-lanterns, but a fun night nonetheless. Luckily, the alligators haven’t started crawling out of my stomach. Yet. But I’ll keep you posted.

Is that a unicorn with a nipple ring over there?