"But Mister, I'm Honduran": Stories from the Pila

This is a pila. It is a large deep tub that is a staple in every Honduran home. It stores water and is a place where many a Honduran woman spends a great deal of her day, scrubbing clothing, washing dishes and occasionally dunking a child for a dip. It has many purposes. Like a spork.

Our pila at school is gross. Our children wash their grubby hands in it everyday and when I have been using it to clean my beakers and testtubes for science class I have often noticed that there are some sort of unidentified crustaceous- phytoplankton like organisms swimming in it.

Last week, I was sitting next to the pila, holding post for my recess duty of ensuring that a child doesn’t do something that would overtly endanger himself or others (in reality my main job is to serve as a mediator of disputes between children over whose turn it is to use a ball or a soccer field…. Really fun stuff). So I was sitting next to the pila, when one of my 7^th grade girls came to use the pila. She is one of the stylistas of the class and is generally a sassy girly girl. While we were talking, she scouped up some of the pila water and filled her mouth with it, swished it around a bit and spit it out on the ground.

A chill went down my spine and I almost threw up a bit in the back of my mouth. My head was filled with the image of what I had seen in that water and also the image of Astrid, the 5 yr old daughter of our lunchlady who peed her pants and was dunked in the pila just one months prior. I asked Francis, are you SURE you want to clean your mouth with that water, there is some nasty stuff in there…

Francis looked at the stuck up gringo in front of her, shrugged her shoulders and said, “Mister, you don’t understand. I’m Honduran.” BOMBA! She got me. In a massive role reversal, I was left feeling like the prissy 7^th grade girl. But let's get real, I will take stomach health over pride any day. 

Radioactive Fear Grips SJBS

School Director, Miss Amarylus is known for her strong words during Monday Actos Civicos (flag salute). In a voice slightly louder than it needs to be, she imparts weekly threats upon the students for their misbehavior: threats that could send a chill down a 1st grader's spine. 

One of her go-to threats, for example is the threat that if the students continue to treat the bathroom poorly (writing mean things about students, smearing their feces on the wall etc..), then the school administration will place surveillance cameras in the bathroom. Mind you, we don't even have enough money at my school to buy fans for my room (more on that later). I don't know where we would acquire these funds for the cameras or the outcry that would come from the Honduran ACLU (if one existed). Clearly these threats are empty... a fact of which students and teachers alike are aware.

This week brought us an entirely new and tenfold more outlandish threat than the old camera in the bathrooms go-to. Whenever it rains, the students turn into banchees, splashing in puddles, sliding on their knees and creating all sorts of sheninanigans (See past post here for a description of one of such events). This week, Miss Amarylus, tapped into a current event and  preyed on the fears of these young children (and the fear that has gripped an uninformed Honduras populus at large) regarding radioactive exposure. She told our students that they must stay out of the rain, because the news in Costa Rica says that there is a radioactive cloud traveling toward Central America and if they are exposed to the rain, it could burn their skin and cause cancer.

When this new threat was posed, the Gringo teachers' jaws dropped in unison. I couldn't refrain myself from letting out an audible guffaw of disbelief. The students turned around. Oops. I don't mean to undermine the school authority but, SERIOUSLY?! A radioactive cloud?!!!!

I told all of my students in my science class that Miss Amarylus had been misinformed and they were relieved. I left from this experience feeling a bit confused, though. I am not sure if Miss Amarylus made this statement as an intense  "boogeyman" method of maintaining order, or if she actually believes that the rain is radioactive. I'm not sure which concept is more frightening.

Stay Classy Cofradia

This crowd is assembled to watch a parade. 

or a funeral. or a fight. The distinction is subtle.

Last night I heard a raucous crowd of Hondurans cheering from the park. Hondurans aren't known for their vivaciousness and it is common knowledge that only two events could elicit this volume of  Honduran emotional expression: futbol or a fight. Not really caring to find out which of the two it was, I closed the window.

This morning I asked Andrea, our administrator what was going on yesterday. Trying to give my neighbors the benefit of the doubt, I asked, "Was it a celebration of Dia del Padre?" (it was Honduran Father's Day this weekend). Andrea told me that she drove right through it and that it was a fight between two women that were goaded by 50 of my countrymen's cheers. It was weird that there were so many people in the park in the first place at 9pm on a Sunday night and I asked just that question. It turns out that they were all there for a wake. Honoring the dead.  And cheering on a fight between women. Apparently these two events are not mutually exclusive

Stay classy Cofradia...

Montuca, Marley and Middle-school Oh My

Portraits from Margarita, 9th grade... completely unrelated, but cool nonetheless.

The  SJBS middle school integrado class has been gearing up for their big debut with Honduran reggae/ska/world legends, "Montuca Sound System."Montuca Soundsystem will be playing a benefit concert at EIS (the large private school in San Pedro) and will donate all of the proceeds to BECA!

The best part of this deal though (to the middle schoolers at least...) is that they invited the middle school to sing "No Woman, No Cry" with them. Most students are pumped, a few are terrified, and a small enclave could care less (but lets be honest, some of them don't experience true forms of excitement that don't involve fire or soccer).

Here is a little  video preview into rehearsal with the 7th graders:

7th grade rehearsal


Here are the 7th graders singing "Home" by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros if you haven't seen it yet:

Home- 7th Grade

Jungle In the Jungle

This week, we had our first rehearsal for the SJBS’s first (annual?) spring musical, “The Jungle Book”.  I already know that this 90 minute production  put on by twenty 4^th-6^th grade kids whose second language is English will be the most challenging massive beast that I have brought upon myself to date. I am fearful. And also incredibly pumped. But not quite as pumped as the kids. Okay, maybe as pumped.

I have been working with these kids once a week on Tuesday afternoons teaching them physical work, voice work, concentration, listening, and storytelling. And of course, we play games, lots of games. As a little trial run, I taught them a little choreographed number to “I Just Can’t Wait to Be King” from the Lion King and they drank it like KoolAid (see the clip below for some cuteness).

There are so many questions I have in taking this on. Will I be able to put up a full production meeting with elementary schools for an hour and a half per week? I don’t think I could do that with a group of my friends. Are all of my kids going to drop out before we get to May? And also how will I be able to fund this? It is going to be low budget, but I do have to pay for the scripts that I  had copied, fabric to make masks and  some minimal costumes and materials to build a few set pieces.

Some parents mobilized already on the fundraising front… in Honduran fashion. They made choco-bananos to sell at school, which pissed off Grace, the lunchlady, because she can’t sell sweets. Two moms made 80 choco-bananos  and sold them at lunch. I was really grateful and it got me really excited about fundraising. Until they tallied up the money. In selling choco-bananos, we made the equivalent of $5.75 for the drama club. The moms told me that bananas are really expensive right now. But the truth is that fundraisers cannot function here in the same way that they do in the states. In the states, in a fundraiser, people pay more than they would pay normally pay for something because it is, well, a fundraiser. Children at our school really can’t pay more than 35 cents for a chocobanano, though.

Which brings me to my next point. If you would like to donate any sort of funds toward the SJBS production of the Jungle Book, let me know.  A little goes so far here. If I could raise $150 even, to get materials, we could do so much. Just think, if you donate $6, you would double what we have fundraised making and selling 80 chocobananos. Okay, I’m done. I promise I won’t pressure anymore. It is going to be a special thing regardless of funds. We might perform it on the grass in our school uniforms and it will be one of the most special event to these kids and parents to date.

I leave you with our little preview (click on the link) and a few pics from drama club! Stay tuned.

Nice mirror.

Brushing hair.

My Love is Complex, Mister.

"Confusion" by Margarita Isidora 

During integrado class (the integrated art class that I teach with the middle schoolers), we are now in the visual art quarter. This has proven to be the most challenging quarter for me to plan (the other two being drama and music). I don't know a whole lot about art. It might have helped if I had taken an art class at some point in my life.  I have been managing ok with the class.  I think I have them fooled into believing that I actually know something about art, when the truth is that everything I know has been learned from watching youtube clips over the past 3 weeks. 

We started doing continuous line portraits. Many of them sucked (because the kids didn’t take the project seriously or didn’t follow the rules to continuous line drawing, not because they don’t have talent). Some of them ended up really coming out great though. In continuous line drawing, the artist cannot lift the hand from the page from start to finish in the drawing.  It is a great exercise for the brain and causes an interesting abstraction of a portrait when you have to figure out how to get frm the eye to the ear without adding lines that will make your picture look like crap.

This past week we started color theory. We made some  nice color wheels, talked about primary, secondary, tertiary  and complementary colors. We also talked about the emotions that we associate with color and the ways in which we can use color in our paintings to our advantage. We looked at pictures from Picasso’s blue period and then I asked them to choose an emotion and try to paint a representation of that emotion using strictly warm or strictly cool colors.

 When I was circulating around the room, I noticed that one of my students was crying. I went over and checked out her painting and it was of raindrops falling on a dark, stormy sea. At the top was painted in black ink “sad.” I wanted to comfort her. I really wanted to give her a hug, but am always aware of my limitations as a male middle school teacher. I put my hand on her shoulder, got down to her level and told her that I really loved her painting, asked her if she was alright and if she wanted to step out to get some air. She nodded implying that she was fine and wanted to stay.  This student lives a very modest life in a very small house with her grandmother and has no parents. I have gotten the feeling that her home-life is not the best. I felt bad for her, wondering what the depth of the sadness was that she was experiencing in that moment. At the same time though, I felt filled with a feeling of happiness, with this being one of the few instances that a class lesson so clearly had actually reached and affected one of my students. I told her I was around if she decided she wanted to talk and told her that sometimes when we express ourselves through art, it can stir up some emotion and that this release is so important. Then I let her be.

I walked around the class to some other students and came across one of my sassy 8^th grade girls. She was painting a red-orange heart with green trim. I asked her what emotion she was expressing, while I already had a bit of an idea (despite the cryptic symbolism). I said that it looked great, but explained that for the assignment, I wanted them to use explore using either only warm colors or only cool colors. She rolled her eyes at me, gave a middle school girl huff, and said, “Mister, my love is incredibly complex.” I’m sure. Lots of feelings today. It must be art class.

"Calm" by Moises, 8th grade

Continuous line drawing by Keneth, 7th grade

Continuous Line Drawing by Edgar, 7th

Continuous Line drawing by Henry Salomon, 9th

Continous line drawing by Andres, 8th

Public Enemy #1

The perpetrator, hiding in the ruins of Copan.

My sister and dad came down to visit me last week. I was so excited to have them come and experience firsthand my funny life here. Char barely made it out of New York due to an impending snowstorm and arrived in San Pedro at 10pm on a Tuesday night. I hired Don Will, the father of one of our students and a man with a good heart who talks more trash about the people of Cofradia than anyone I know. After a 45 minute ride of listening to Don Will’s griping and giving the customary nods, trying to diffuse the shit-talking fest, Don Will and I arrived at the airport in his 25 year-old pickup truck of questionable functionality (one that he starts by hotwiring and he insists that he must keep it because new cars get stolen).

We arrived at 10pm and waited and waited as the rest of the passengers on her flight came through immigration. Finally Char came through, escorted by an immigration official, and I could tell by the look on her face that something was not right. I gave her a hug and said “what’s happening?” She explained  that her passport is due to expire in February and that Honduras has a law that doesn’t allow people to enter the country if their passport expires within 6 months. They told her that she couldn’t legally be here and they were going to send her on the first flight back (at 7am the next day).

We were furious! Why wasn’t this something that the airline told her in the states, or why didn’t American Airlines even catch this when she booked her flight online and put in her passport information? We pulled out all of the stops with immigration, I repeated “this is ridiculous” a bunch of times to the woman from American airlines.

This tactic was unsuccessful.

We wanted to talk to the American consulate to see if they could give her some sort of extension to her passport. The woman behind the desk was not very sympathetic and said she would have to leave on the first flight out. We pleaded with her to put her on a later flight so we could at least talk to the consulate and she said there was nothing that she could do, but to come to talk to the boss-man at 5am the next morning.

Frustrated, we realized that there was nothing that we could do at this point. I hugged Char, not knowing if I would see her again in Honduras and she went off with an immigration guard to a hotel that the airline was paying for. The female guard slept in her room while I went home and scrambled, emailing our program directors, my dad who I hoped would have some consulate and I called the American Consulate’s “Emergency Line”.  A US Marine Corps Sargeant answered the line and I stalled and said, “uh…. I am not sure if this is an appropriate emergency, but my sister is in San Pedro Sula, and is having problems with her passport etc...” The sergeant said, “Oh, bummer, we might be able to help, but can you do me a favor and call me right back. I picked up a phone in the other room and I can’t transfer you from here.” Um, ok, sure, I’ll call you right back. So I called him and he said, “Oh, ya, I remember now  let me transfer you”, and then he hung up on me. SHIT! I called him back, “hi, it’s me again.” “Oh, sorry sir, let me try again.” This time the call went through, rang twice and a tired old man cleared his throat and answered the phone, “Hello.” This was clearly his home phone. I apologized for waking him up and explained the situation. He was very reassuring and said, “I think we can help you, but I can’t do anything at this moment. Call us at 8am tomorrow.” A glimmer of hope.

Meanwhile, my dad called his embassy contacts and I got a list of peeps from our BECA program director. Then I went to bed. It was 1 am. While this was going on, Char was shuttled to a hotel near the airport and accompanied by a female Immigration guard who slept at the hotel with her… in the bed next to her. Char then woke up at 4:30am and went back to the airport. She pleaded with the “Jefe”

to move her flight back to 1pm so she could have an opportunity to speak with the embassy. He finally gave in at 8am she called the embassy.

Fast forward to fourteen hours later, 10 hours of riding buses to and back from the capital city of Tegucigalpa, a purchase of a Honduran cellphone, a fire-drill in the embassy that almost made getting a new passport impossible, a frantic state of running around Teguce in attempts to find an ATM because their credit card machine was down and a teller that would only accept exact change and Char made it to my doorstep with a new passport.

While this was the most ridiculous day for sis, (one filled with stress, little sleep, and reeking with bureaucracy) when all was said and done, Char got into Honduras, my dad joined her  and we had a really fun couple of days together. Plus, Char became really close with the immigration guard that slept in her room (I hear they had great pillow talk) and the guard actually ended up helping her out a lot to make this whole thing work out. She let her use her cell phone, pleaded with her boss, and helped Char buy a Honduran phone for herself. Char won her over, no doubt. This was clear when I went to the airport to pick up Char’s bag for her,  and I needed to get into a secure area and I shouldn’t have been able to do so being that I wasn’t a passenger. But Char’s guard, gave me her security badge, gave a wink to her friend in security and shuffled me on through the employee entrance. This surely would not have happened if TSA were in control of the situation.

At the end of all of this, though, I am left thinking…. Really, Honduras? Really? Why would a small, blonde, Jewish girl from New York City want to be sneaking into your country? Or why would anyone for that matter. Give us a goddamned break.

Enjoy some pictures of my dad and sister’s stay with me…

A free woman, enjoying coffee in Copan.

Dad taught a seminar for the teachers.

And he did a little magic.

Char and I with some friends at snacktime.

Drama workshop!

Drama workshop  #2!

Fam.

Copan Ruinas.

Mom paid a visit.