Construction and a Coati Bring Terror to Earth Science

Monday was tough.  I arrived at school at school at 6:45 to print out all of my worksheets for my day and the school printer wasn't working (note- this is a common occurrence here. Technology has a very short life due to the heat, humidity and dust). I had 3 lesson plans to print and two worksheets. Panic… a bit of anger. I worked all weekend on these plans!

I ran across the street to the Zelaya’s house (the wealthy and very generous family who built the school) to print in their office. Their 35-year old son Andres helped me with the printing. In the process of helping me told me he is having an oral test for his English class tomorrow and asked me to help him after school.  I am very behind on lesson planning, I feel super-overwhelmed, and I have a list of things to get done after school. The last thing I want to do is go over to his house after 7 hours of school and teach him English… I said yes.  I then cursed under my breath, and marched over to school to make the necessary copies.

I got my copies made and rushed to teach my earth science class. They are  sawing metal 5 feet away from my class. They are welding a stairway for my new classroom that they are building (more on that later) and there are sparks flying in through my open window into the classroom.The noise is racking on my brain,  and no-one can hear me. I do my daily homework check and half of my ninth graders didn't do their homework!!  Not only did they not do it, but one of my ninth graders excuses was “I was in San Pedro (the big city) all weekend.” This was the last straw, I yelled “Digna, if you think that going to a big city and enjoying yourself for a weekend is an acceptable excuse for not doing your work, you are sorely mistaken! You are a 9^th grader and you need to take responsibility for your actions.” Deep breath.

 I walk to the board write out the warm up and suddenly get a whiff of a really awful smell. I lookdown and there is  a disgusting pile of unidentified excrement. Is it vomit? Is it poop? Is it the entrails from an animal. The only possible culprit could be a coati (a Honduran rodent that looks like a raccoon). It must have come in through my window (there is no glass on our windows…. Allows for better air flow in rooms without A/C). Whoever left it, whatever this pile is  it is right where I am supposed to be teaching. I get a broom and shuffle it out of my class. Maybe I should start teaching something today, I think to myself.

Enemy of the State #1. The likely culprit.

This is a little window into the challenges  that we face as a volunteer teachers in a bilingual school in Honduras. The littlest thing (like a non-functioning printer, your kids not doing their work, a construction site 5 feet away from your whiteboard, or an animal shitting on your floor) can throw you over the edge. Add a bit of heat, no A/C, and waking up at 5:45am, and you have the perfect recipe for a crappy Monday pie.

We have a phrase among the group of volunteers that is a sort of mantra when we are faced with challenge and adversity. And that is "Embrace it or it will crush you!". 


There is only so much one  can embrace in the period of an hour on a Monday morning... before you start crushing children.


*Disclaimer- There were neither children, nor coaties harmed in the preceding events presented in this blog.

5th Grader With a Crush

On Friday, we celebrated "Teacher's Day" in Honduras. It was pretty special that the first "Teacher's Day" that I have experienced in my life is as a teacher. It is a holiday that we must adopt in the states and the  fact that we don't have it is a reflection of a larger issue: the teaching profession is neither respected nor compensated sufficiently in the states.

But enough about the states. You want to hear about Honduras. I ended up getting a few cards from some kids on Teacher's Day and it really made my week. It's amazing how when you are having a shit week something so small can really lift the spirits. I teach middle school and while they may like you as a teacher and think you're pretty cool, they would never tell you. They don't idolize you, smile, and give you hugs in the same way that the elementary kids do. 

I didn't get anything from my own middle school students for "Teacher's Day" but I
did get a card from Johny, a 5th grader who is one of my favorites. Johny has a lot of energy and likes to learn. He is very active, loves speaking English and is intense. I taught him science in our 2 wk summer academy and one of my favorite parts of teaching of my day was watching the wheels turn in Johnny's head when he thinks. He thinks really hard.  Johnny is pretty popular with the teachers and plays soccer with all of us every Friday afternoon. He also makes some pretty sweet cards...

Johny deep in thought

I also received a nice note from 5th grader, "Naomi". She is a little fashionista who is a stellar student and loves science. I taught her as well in summer academy. She gives me cards on a semi-weekly basis. She might have a little crush and with every note that she delivers she becomes more emboldened. This was the most recent card that she gave me:

The part that confuses me is the bit about my walk. The only thing that I can imagine she would be referring to my awkward swagger that I have adopted because I am so sweaty  due to wearing pants in 95 degree weather. I never want my legs touching one another.

The Leg Cramp

Things have improved vastly since my last post. On Friday, after Dia Del Nino, I left with a group of teachers on a bus to Tegucigalpa, the capital city, to see a group of guys that we have befriended who are part of a band called "Montuca Sound System." This group of guys is very special. They are very politically minded and worldly and really fun to be around. Their frontrunner, Carlos, looks like a young Francis Ford Coppola is one of the most generous, and easygoing guys I know. Carlos has brought music to the school and has started a drumming class after school on Fridays. The kids are enthralled with him. They think he is a god. Wait a second, he might just be.

SIDENOTE: I had no idea Carlos's band, "Montuca" was such a big deal until we went to see "El Origen" (Inception), at the movie theater and there was an ad for "Claro", the biggest cell phone company in Honduras with Montuca Soundsystem playing in it).

I digress.... So anyway, we packed our bags, excited to get out of the heat and dust... and crime for a weekend. We stood in line to put our bags under the bus, when we noticed that the guy in front of us was checking a silver 45 mm handgun! And then another man, separate from the first, checked a black 45mm. In these situations one is not sure whether to be relieved that the weapons are being checked, or terrified that two of the men on our bus are strapped in the first place.

Six hours later, I had long forgotten the ordeal with the guns and we arrived in Tegucigalpa. "Teguce", as the locals call it, is in the mountains where the air is much crisper (well, as crisp as the air of a city that houses 4 million people can in fact be), and the temperature is cooler. The streets are serpentine. They rise and fall, and made me ache for San Francisco. The city has a great deal of history as well and it shows in the  architecture varies from the standard cinder-block structures that we have been used to seeing.

On Saturday, we went to the free outdoor concert  for the  Festival Orgullo Catracho (Honduran Pride Festival) in central park and enjoyed some sunshine. We spent the afternoon in the oldest bar in Teguce where the back porch may just be your neighbor's garage,  had a clothesline  with old rags drying on it and a tree growing through the middle of its ribbed metal roof. Their signature drink is an unidentified pink beverage called "el calambre,"  which roughly translates to "the leg cramp." Two "calambres" later and the origin of its namesake was clear.

That night, I ate one of the best meals of my life at a little restaurant called, "Habia Una Vez"  (There Was a Time). It was a real restaurant and I felt like I was in Manhattan. The restaurant also serves as a gallery for local artists and had incredible paintings and drawings. One of the owners is Peruvian and one is French and they feature a contemporary international cuisine that blew our minds after having spent months eating refried beans and baleadas. Highlights included: smoke salmon wrapped around cream cheese and a slice of peach, a spicy ceviche, and bacon wrapped shrimp with apple glaze. Delish.

The weekend was a much-needed break from Cofradia and left me feeling really recharged. Plus, we got to stay in a hotel with, just wait, HOT WATER! Taking my first hot shower in months made me feel reborn....like, in the way that the Christians talk about it. Plus, I got my money's worth from that hotel. I took 5 showers in a period of 2 days. Wasting water.... maybe. Feeling of entitlement... for sure. I  do believe, however, that  I have paid back the universe enough in free labor for the benefit of Honduran children. Ya, I deserve five showers.

A Hard Week

A visual representation of my insides.

This started off as a very difficult week. I received my second bout of “Honduran Fury,” leaving me hugging the pot at 3 am on Monday night with violent fits of vomiting and diarrhea. I ended up unable to leave the 10 yard radius my bed and the toiled and had to miss school on Tuesday.

Missing school is a big strain on the staff here. We don’t exactly have a list of substitutes that we can call up when we are in a bind. Thankfully though, I am surrounded by an awesome group of roommates in “manpartment” and before I could even ask for help on Tuesday morning, they came into my room and told me they already had my whole schedule covered between the 3 of them. Good guys.

I started to feel a bit more functional on Wednesday and tried out going to school. At 6:25 am, while I was en route to school, I saw a group of gringo teachers from the other bilingual school in our town about 100 yards ahead. This is the same route that we take every day. I saw a  black SUV pull up to them and three men jumped out and robbed them at gunpoint. They came away safely, but the thieves got away with a good portion of their funds for the school.

This robbery has been among a series of sketchy experiences that we have had in the last week (including my 3 yr old running shoes being stolen from the balcony as well as some of the teachers’ food money stolen out of their house).  When a gun is involved, though, it really hits you hard. This experience really freaked us out and made us re-think the way that we travel to school. I have been taking my laptop every day to and from school. That has now stopped. More than anything though, it just made us really angry and fed up. It’s hard not to want to say “screw this place” after something like that happens. We have been able to accept the lack of hot water, the “different” cuisine, and the intermittent diarrhea, but being robbed at gunpoint is something that none of us can wrap our head around.

My week then got worse with my sickness coming back and causing me to miss school again on Thursday. I finally went to the doctor’s house across the street (who is also our landlord and one of the originators of the school) and I got antibiotics. This is my third time taking cipro in 3 months…. Can’t be healthy

The good news is that the Cipro got me back up and running just in time for “Dia del Nino” (Kid’s Day). It’s like Mother’s Day… for kids. We had parties at school, broke open piñatas and the teachers performed, which included the male teachers doing a choreographed dance in skirts to “Put a Ring On It” by Beyonce.  And I got some pictures of some ridic cute kids. Enjoy the photos. The next post is more positive, however, I feel that as an active member of “manpartment” I must follow our cardinal rule every once in a while and “keep it real.”

"Welcome to my day...."

Really proud of her headband.

Matt with Josue, his pet monkey.

Wrangler's ad.

Twilight and Wild Boars: My First Home-visit

The view from my balcony. Completely unrelated, but nice, nonetheless.

Last week, I had my first introduction to a ritual that I will complete fourty-two times in this upcoming year: the home visit. Home-visits are something incredibly unique to our school and one of the aspects of the program that drew me to the school.

BECA tries as much as it can to integrate itself into the community that we serve and at the foundation of that is the relationships that are developed between the students, parents and teachers. This relationship is fostered by each teacher visiting every one of their students in their home.  By doing so we get to have a better idea of the conditions in which our students are living and have a better understanding of the dynamics of their families.

The middle school team is composed of Mr. Brian (a math teacher who taught with BECA last year) Profe Matt  (the 6 foot 6 congenial English teacher who doesn’t speak much Spanish) and I. We decided that being that Matt doesn’t speak Spanish and that Brian already knows the parents from last year, it would be best if we travel in a  small gringo herd to visit our students.

I didn’t really know what to expect from our home-visits (except for the presence of refried beans, tortillas and mantequilla, which was later confirmed). The Hondurans that I have encountered so far in Cofradia have seemed grateful that we are here helping out their community, but on the whole are not particularly warm people. We are seen clearly as “others” and the stares that we receive whenever we walk past a group of people is a bit, well, uncomfortable. The lack of warmth was really surprising to me, after having spent so much time in Colombia and Argentina, where I have found people to be almost overwhelming in their warmth and hospitality.

The three of us sat in a small living room at our first home visit, two couches facing one another, with the student next to me and her grandfather sitting in a chair watching the news, which was showing gruesome images of twelve Hondurans that were killed in Mexico en route to the states. Terrifying images and awkward silence. Our student was texting on her phone and showed me an image of her dad that she had taken when he left to the states a year ago, on the same route that the twelve Hondurans took and met their death. My own discomfort with the images on the television at that moment seemed trivial.

We tried to make small talk with our student while her mother and aunt were preparing dinner. We talked about her one true love, Twilight, the vampire series that has enthralled teenie-boppers worldwide. Then dinner was served. Refried beans, plantains, mantequillla, scrambled egg and meat adorned the table. Her mother sat down and joined us and we started talking about her daughter, and we praised her as one of our best students (which was entirely true).

As we were eating we noticed that the grandfather was still sitting in the chair watching us intently with a grin. Kind of weird, we thought. After about a minute of that, he asked us if we were enjoying the meat. Yes, it is quite good, we replied. Then he asked if we knew what it was. Um, beef? I asked, with a bit of trepidation. He beamed with pride and said, “It is wild boar. I shot it on Friday. Here is a picture.” He handed us his cell phone with a pixilated picture of, sure enough, a fat wild boar laying on its back, tongue hanging out of his mouth, with his feet in the air. We all started laughing and the conversation lightened up from there. One home visit down, forty one to go.

5 Lessons I Learned from Week One

* Our freshly painted "Glorieta" (cafeteria) *

1.)  Whatever you plan to accomplish in one lesson, divide in half and you probably still have unrealistic expectations for what is possible.

2.)  Wool pants + 96 degrees + drama class outside = slow death

3.) Transitions are the enemy. Avoid them at all cost.

4.) Say what you mean and mean what you say.

5.) Children are like mountain lions.  Don’t let them smell fear or they will eat you alive.

Note the temperature. This isn't even the "feels like" temperature.

* Bonus Lesson - The meaning of the question, "This is for the fathers?" 

(There are parents who bring their children their lunch at 12:00 everyday and sit with them while they eat lunch. It is a sort of sweet ritual that I couldn't see parents in the states taking off time from work to do. At 12:30 the barely audible bell rings to to tell the parents to leave the school, but the real lunch doesn't end until 12:45. Small children never know the time (most Hondurans don't have a concept of it either... but that is another topic). When the first bell rings, children will approach you from all angles and ask  "This is for the fathers?!"  meaning... this bell means that parents go home, not that recess is over, right?)