Nothing Exciting

Even though nothing very exciting has happened, I wanted to give you an update. It is still raining here almost everyday but luckily the water has been not been shut off again. The electricity went out one night so we had to cook and eat by candlelight. In the middle of my candlelit "shower", the electricity came back on.

One day I rode my bike around exploring new parts of our barrio. Only the main road here is paved and all side streets are dirt. I rode down a side street until the road turned into a lake and then I turned around and headed down another street. I repeated this until finally a young man stopped me and asked if I was lost. I explained that I was just out exploring. We began chatting and he seemed to be very friendly and harmless. Since he only speaks Spanish, I decided hanging out with him would be a great way for Christina and I to practice more. I showed him where we lived and he has come by a few times to chat with us. Christina and I are both happy to get more time to practice conversational Spanish. Hopefully we will meet more people to practice with also. Here are some houses and building along the way.This one always make me think of pirates. Now that I have been able to teach for a string of days in a row, my students are making some real progress. They have been finishing up their letters to their pen pals in San Diego. It has really motivated them to improve their English writing skills so their pen pal can understand them. We also are just finishing a math unit on subtraction which everyone seemed successful at. In science we have been learning about animals needs, adaptations, and classifications. Even with limited resources, I have been able to create a few games for math and science that they enjoyed. Reading is progressing but slower. It is hard to have small group reading time when I only have one copy of each book. I just set it on the floor and have the reading group crowd around it. We don't even have a rug or carpet. I did bring a box with a series of books that starts very basic (on, in, the, a, etc.) and each successive book scaffolds on the previous, reviewing previous words and adding new ones. It is great with my really low ones.

Since next week is Thanksgiving, Christina and I were asked to have our classes perform a song. We found some song about giving thanks and have been teaching it to our students. Next week the students need to make a costume for it which will be a headband with colored, paper feathers going round. I am still unsure as to why our school is celebrating an American holiday. I had to teach a really cheesy, generic lesson as the kids didn't even know what Thanksgiving was about.Our school also had some more frustrating teaching news. When our week-long roommate, James, left in September, the school had to settle for two 17 year olds to take over his 7th - 11th grade literature and grammar classes. Granted they are fluent in English but they know nothing about teaching. One of the girl-teachers hates to read and is teaching literature. How motivating. Well... one of these girls is quitting Monday and the other in December. Now the only other volunteer, Kim, who has been teaching here 3 years has decided to quit and take a non-teaching job at a hotel. She had been teaching science, philosophy, and psychology to the junior high and high schoolers. The school is very desperate for teachers. The school now has no one to teach 7th - 11th grade literature, grammar, science, philosophy, or psychology. The founder and principal are trying to convince Christina and I to do some of it but we don't want to. It would be way too much work and we would have no time to run errands or just to enjoy our time here. The school posted job opportunities on the internet (same way I found out about it) but no one has been responding. It is really sad. Even with the frustrating situations the school puts us in sometimes, they are deep-down trying to do a good thing for these kids. If you know anyone looking for an adventure, send them down here.

The school's founder, Graciela, and some other teachers and staff have invited Christina and I to a soccer game this weekend. Apparently they are all huge fans of a big Honduran team, Olympia. So on Saturday we are all going to get on the bus, bright and early at 6:00am, and go to Copan. It is about a 6 hour bus ride away. The city, Copan, is supposedly very cute with cobblestone streets. They said the soccer games get really crazy. It should be fun. As usual, I will write all about it next week.

Oh, and some men came and fixed our leaky, moldy ceiling. As they were working I realized the white slabs on the ceiling are only pressboard. When he took down the moldy ones to replace them, I could see above them is only a big space and then a corrugated aluminum roof. We were surprised to learn we don't have a real roof. Only corrugated aluminum above pressboard. The men climbed on the roof and replaced the leaking aluminum pieces with new ones.